[geeks] [rescue] Guns - what are they good for? - was Re: TME and Apple II and other Drive emulator questions.

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On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 09:31:40AM -0400, sammy ominsky wrote:
> Someone wrote:
> 
> >> a lot of dead kids and toddlers for no particularly good reason.
> 
> Can you define "a lot"?  I know it happens, but I believe it's less often than
> you might think.

There's no way to answer that. All the statistics are based on numbers that
are not reliable or verifiable, or are totally fabricated and in the best
case also not granular enough.

If one kid gets shot it's already too much. But if one kid drowns in the
bathtub, or gets hit by a car, or falls off a porch, or eats some household
cleaner or batteries it's also too much. And all of those things happen many
times more often, possibly magnitudes more often than accidental shootings
happen.

And very seldom do we ever hear about the amount of lives saved, since most
of those events go unreported. And nobody really cares about that anyway.

Unfortunately, probably based on fear and intellectual dishonesty, it's
often easier for people to get excited about wiping out stuff that they
don't understand, have no experience with, and are in fact afraid of- as
opposed to things that people consider useful and harmless despite the
reality that the accidental misuse of those things constitutes a very great
hazard in fact. It's easier to take away something from somebody else than
give up something you own. Leftism gone amok.

Bottom line, the actual numbers are meaningless when you're talking about
ignorance, prejudice, and fear, and do-goodism. Political correctness
uberalles, let reality be damned.