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Owning a car increases your chance of dying in a car accident too. Owning a table saw increases your chance of losing a finger. Owning a boat increases your chance of drowning. Etc.
Do I think people should be walking around with military-grade weapons? No. Do I think people should be allowed a shotgun to hunt with or whatever? Sure. Do I think there should be background checks and all that to help make sure they're used in a responsible manner? Hell yes. Do I wish guns had never been invented? Yes.
But come on. This guy apparently went room to room in his house and systematically murdered everyone in it. It wasn't an accident, which is what generally drives the statistic you mentioned. Who knows what was going through his mind at the time. But I'm guessing that, while the gun probably made the act easier, the gun wasn't the enabler nor catalyst here. Given what happened, I'm guessing he would have found another tool to use if he had no gun on hand. I'm not going to be morbid and name all the things within reach at the average house you could use to murder a 9 year old, but it's a lot of things.
You’ve made a sound argument against owning cars and table saws and boats, not one in favor of owning guns or that they’re safe to have in the home, especially in the face of overwhelming evidence.
And what you think is irrelevant; the facts speak for themselves. All you’re saying is that you’re choosing to ignore the facts, ignore reality, because you think you somehow know better. And regardless of your attempts at rationalization, it doesn’t take much to figure out that, without a gun in the home, this person would have found it far more difficult to so quickly and instantly murder his whole family and then himself, and family members would have had a much higher chance of survival and/or escape.
Even faced with the prospect of the much more difficult task of killing his whole family by other means would have greatly reduced the likelihood of him following through with his plan at all. With a gun, it’s all so easy. Using some other means makes it more difficult a task and is enough to give a person pause— often just enough to change a mind, to create an opportunity to seek help, etc.
But you’re not even willing to consider any of that. Because of boats and cars and table saws…
BTW, getting a license to drive a car/boat is much more difficult in most states than getting a gun license. And I don’t know of any stories of families being mass-murdered or schools or nightclubs having everyone inside them being slaughtered by table saws.
Let's also not forget that cars and boats and table saws, while they can certainly be dangerous, have intended purposes which are not harmful, and are actually beneficial.
The only purpose for a firearm is to put a destructive and deadly hole in the thing you point it at. Hunting, sure, is beneficial to the hunter. Handguns are not used for hunting. Absent the odd "defending yourself from a bear or moose with a large caliber handgun," handguns are for killing people. Essentially all handgun usage is harmful by definition.
Agreed. Handguns are basically for killing people. I don't know why you brought them up though since we have no idea what kind of gun this guy used.