Gun enthusiasts and the rush to buy guns after a mass shooting: Please don't shift the blame.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

99. The amount of people who are actually killed *because of* bicycles is virtually nil.

Most people who die on bicycles are not killed by the bicycles themselves but as the result of collisions with cars. The cars kill them, not the bicycle. It just so happens that the person was riding a bike.

An actual death as the result of the bicycle would be if there was some sort of defect in the bike, the cyclist can't stop and it careens off a cliff. Or maybe if some frail 90 year old woman were crossing the street and gets slammed by an oncoming bike and her body can't take the impact. Those are freak occurrences though, far, far less than deaths because of guns, or even specifically because of rifles.

The poster was being deliberately obtuse.

Furthermore, any intentional killing (which the majority of gun related deaths are) is going to be far more straight forward than any accidental death (i.e. deaths from cars, bikes, swimming pools, etc.). There are going to be a lot more factors as to how an accidental death happens versus how an intentional killing happens.

So all you need to know how (not why, but how) an intentional shooting happens, is that the person takes out the gun, its either loaded or he loads it, aims and points the guns, pulls the trigger, the bullet shoots out and strikes and fatally wounds the victim. That's it in terms of how; there's no real variables involved, other than perhaps how well the person aimed.

On the other hand, with an accidental death--say, from a car--you have to consider the speed in which the car was going, whether the driver was under the influence of any alcohol or drugs, whether the driver was distracted by anything (such as a cellphone or radio), what were the road conditions, what was the visibility, any negligence coming on the own part of the person hit, and various other factors.

You know why that is? Because guns were designed for a specific purpose of striking and potentially killing a person. Cars weren't. You can't make a fair comparison between the two.