Ok, handguns are designed to kill people. Some rifles are designed for hunting. But generally most guns are designed to kill people.
OP's idea that 'guns aren't dangerous' is just bad statistics. Here is why:
About 3.3 million people die a year. About 200k from non-medical related deaths (accidents, suicide, homicide, etc). About 50k of that is gun deaths (mostly suicide, ~26k vs homicide ~20k). In other words, outside of being sick, if you die, you have about a 25% chance of dying from a gun!
They are more dangerous than cars and all sorts of other things. And they are most dangerous to their owners (suicides and accidents). No amount of gun control (making sure guns are legal) will change that.
The way they did their analysis was terrible. It seems if you want to increase your life span you need to do several things.
1. Good diet and exercise for health.
2. Don't own a gun, and stay away from people who have guns.
> we decided to have a highly unequal society and then arm them with the means for violence.
"we" did no such thing. It always interests me that certain topically defined discussions happen without any notion of class.
the US was defined by a group of people wanting to get away from the oppression of their own class, but who were in another country. they used among other things, guns to do it, and expected that the cycle would continue.
the guns are there because underlying even our modern, advance systems of government lies the primeval bedrock of force. who has it and whos willing to use it, which group vs which group. the encoded right of all people to the backstop of force for their beliefs is an acknowledgement of that fact.
I'd love to see more of a requirement of training and social interaction to own any semi-automatic weapon as a means to dampen the unfortunate side effects of gun ownership in America today, but let's not pretend the 2nd amendment comes out of a unified (vs adversarial) view of how to run a society.
Remember though, the 2nd amendment was pushed by James Madison who represented a slave owning state. During that time, the south had 'well regulated militias' which served as slave patrols, capturing runaway slaves and stamping down slave revolts which were common in that time. The southern states feared a strong federal government because they feared they will lose their slave holding powers, including losing the ability to have these militias controlling the slave population.
You always have to read content in it's historical context. In other words, the kind of 'oppression' the wealthy class feared was the ability to lose their primary business of owning slaves.
I don't think you should count suicides. Just have a precommitment (don't write it down anywhere, obviously) that you would never use it on yourself in a situation where it would more than slightly reduce your QALYs, so not terminal illness or a high certainty of being irreparably incapacitated.
OP's idea that 'guns aren't dangerous' is just bad statistics. Here is why:
About 3.3 million people die a year. About 200k from non-medical related deaths (accidents, suicide, homicide, etc). About 50k of that is gun deaths (mostly suicide, ~26k vs homicide ~20k). In other words, outside of being sick, if you die, you have about a 25% chance of dying from a gun!
They are more dangerous than cars and all sorts of other things. And they are most dangerous to their owners (suicides and accidents). No amount of gun control (making sure guns are legal) will change that.
The way they did their analysis was terrible. It seems if you want to increase your life span you need to do several things.
1. Good diet and exercise for health.
2. Don't own a gun, and stay away from people who have guns.
3. Ride public transportation.