DGDevin wrote:

When it comes to guns there are precious few accidents, but there is
plenty of negligence. Guns don't load and fire themselves, they
don't leave themselves where kids can find them, they don't fire
themselves without being certain of the background, they don't fire
themselves at unidentified targets, and so on. The number of cases
where a dog knocks over a lamp that tips a bowling trophy off a shelf
that falls and hits the trigger of a loaded gun causing it to put a
bullet into someone are vanishingly small; not so with people doing
stupid things with firearms, like not locking them up when kids are
around.

We may be talking past each other. I've never locked up my guns but, by the
same token, I took my son to the range when he was about five years old.

He learned at an early age the power and capacity of a firearm to inflict
great harm, just as he learned how to cross a street. As a consequence of
this training, he never got hit by a car in an intersection nor did he
unintentionally ever shoot anybody.


That said, children being killed by firearms is not morally and
intellectually repugnant - it is a fact. Facts are not subject to
moral judgements nor intellectual ones.

What a bizarre statement. Gun accidents happen because someone did
something stupid, their actions directly led to someone getting shot.
If you can't see either the moral or intellectual horror in a
needless loss of life due to negligence, well you must be living on a
different planet from most of us. Cops get killed on the job by
criminals, it's a fact, but I find if horrifying nonetheless.


I agree that negligence often leads to tragedy. The fact that gun is
involved in the negligence is, to my mind, irrelevant.


The fact that some children will die from a gunshot is no more a
reason to ban guns than children drowning is a sufficient reason to
ban swimming pools.

Can you quote me saying anything about banning guns? No? Then where
did this fly ball come from?

I apologize. The statement wasn't directed at you; it was more of a
universal truth that I blurt out from time to time (often to the
consternation of fellow passengers on the bus).