Because it's not relevant. What is relevant is the number of people dying needlessly every single year just because people think it's their right to own a gun. Maybe if you were directly affected by a gun death in your family, you wouldn't hold such flaccid and insipid views on the subject.
Everything is relevant when you approach an issue from the middle instead of one of two extremes. I said you were less than complimentary - you're also less than capable of responding without deriding contrary views to your own.
Better you crusade about the number of people who needlessly die from poverty and starvation every year.
It really doesn't change the picture if you scale the deaths: is 30,000 vs 250 painting a different picture to 30,000 vs 65?
Well, that's why I said he had a point, and that the statistics were not directly scalable. Break the numbers of firearm related deaths down - accidental / murder / suicide and we'd have a more accurate picture to examine.
I mentioned firearms and archery in the same sentence, not because they are comparable, but because there's plenty of people who would like to legislate one based on the other as if they were so, and a possible reasoning behind this - Silver's post is another example of the kind of emotional argument I mean, and not a very well articulated one at that.
111 deaths/million vs 1 death/million, it's still a vastly significant difference
I'm not disputing that at all, just making the point that comparing a leisure activity to one which is a necessity to some, and a huge convenience to most, is utterly irrelevant.
Well, surely if there was an age limit or total ban on certain weapons, then that 9 year old girl would never have gotten her hands on an uzi, and the instructor would still be alive... (other than in the most extreme cases where the parents decide "sure, lets take our under-age 9 year old to fire an illegal firearm at a dodgy firing range, what could possibly go wrong?"
)
The older I get the more I come to the conclusion that people just don't want to take responsibility for their decisions, particularly when they make a bad one. This case is a perfect example of this trait in action.
I would not have chosen to allow a 9 year old girl to fire that kind of weapon, certainly not without knowing her prior experience with firearms first - that would have given me a clue as to the probable dangers of such a course of action in letting her have a go. Supervised or not.
Plinking some tin cans with a .22 rimfire is more the level of shooting I would have considered appropriate, but some people choose differently. Complacently even. The parents for thinking that kind of weapon handling for a 9 year old girl (who in the video clip did not look like she was familiar with holding any type of gun) was ok. The instructor for not overruling them and relying on his experience, or lack of, to dictate his actions when he should have known better.
I don't doubt that reducing the number of firearms would have an impact on reducing gun deaths of a certain type*, but I'm sure if you compared the number of legally held firearms to the attributable deaths because of firearms we would be looking at some much less headline grabbing statistics. Examine that further with legally held firearms involved in a murder, or a suicide - then compare these figures to illegally held guns in the same areas, then I think we'd have a better idea as to what is really going on.
All in all what happened could have been prevented, not by making laws, or banning things, but by people thinking about their actions and their consequences.
* We banned handguns and other types of firearm here because 'won't somebody please think of the children' reactions to nutters who shouldn't have been allowed within a country mile of a pointy stick, let alone guns. But until then, we didn't have a 'problem' any more than we have now, as the vast majority of gun owners in this country then, same as now, are law abiding people. We have more of a problem with stabbings than we've ever had with firearms. In fact taking those legally held firearms away has not stopped criminals from using guns in crime - which was the point of the ban in the first place.
