Baths kill more Japanese then guns kill Americans

[DanTex]

113. In my "rarefied intellectual circles", people actually back their accusations with reason.

If they were to call something "bizarre and ridiculous", they would explain why.

In this case, there's nothing bizarre and ridiculous about the fact that some people who drive drunk don't pose as much of a risk as others. Not all people become terrible drivers as soon as their BAC crosses 0.08. This doesn't make drunk driving responsible in the conventional sense, but such drivers play a role analogous to the "responsible" gun owners -- those gun owners who also don't pose as much risk as others and thus don't contribute very much to gun violence.

Now, this isn't a terribly complicated idea. It is a little abstract, and it does make use of a certain linguistic construction using quotations marks, a construction that I tend to assume most people are familiar with (and the ones who don't could just ask "why the quotation marks" rather than just ignore them like you did).

Anyway, what happened next is that, instead of responding to my actual point (which I think you did understand), instead you decided to play dumb, ignore the quotations, and pretend that I was suggesting that drunk driving was responsible. And you did this because it's a lot easier to misrepresent what I said than it is to come up with an intelligent response.

So after that, I figured I'd have a little fun. But if you want to have an intelligent and honest discussion, all you need to do is start being intelligent and honest.