"The wit makes fun of other persons; the satirist makes fun of the world; the humorist makes fun of himself." - James Thurber

***

From a Young Republic thread on gun control:


A: Your so-called "obvious" correlation is actually not so obvious. Where are these statistics, by the way? Here in the state of Maine, thousands of people - including children being taught by their parents - use firearms for hunting, practice and so forth daily, without any reports of casualties or school shootings. Seeing as prohibition creates a black market, with the result of state and criminals controlling all the firepower, I can see prohibitive regulation being responsible for a high crime rate. Would you consider pulling a robbery if you had the knowledge that many of the bystanders would be armed?

B: The NRA is fond of saying that only about 2% of fatal accidents are from firearms, and about 3% for children under 14. This sounds very low, but this translates into more than a thousand deaths across the US every year...

Anyway, to address your hypothetical: one might be deterred from breaking and entering a house if one thought the occupants were armed, but one would not be (additionally) deterred from robbery since bystanders are usually NOT armed (few sane people, even those who are in favour of gun ownership, carry guns with them everywhere they go). But even in the case of a break-in, the robbers might be counting on the fact that they are better armed and are more proficient in using their weapon. Also, most people have an instinctive aversion to killing/injuring other people (until the US military changed its firearm training to include psychological exercises to break down this instinctive inhibition, the shoot/kill ratio even in war -- cf. Vietnam -- was surprisingly low). Murderers and robbers are probably less inhibited in this respect than ordinary citizens.

Me: Or for example, take the case of a school or workplace shooting.

If one person brings guns to the school or workplace, no one else is
going to be armed (many [most?] workplaces have strict laws about
bringing in firearms).


Funny. Slaves in Singapore don't get these psychological exercises.