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Comment by leephillips | Hacker News Reader

That happened on Monday. Today is Thursday. Also, it wasn’t a “murder” (I’ll take a killing, but the victim did not die.)

EDIT: I can’t help be curious about what’s in the mind of someone who is so blatantly dishonest. Right at the top it says “Published 2 days ago”, and in the second paragraph it says “Monday”. Is the idea that you assume no one will actually take a look at the link?

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> I can’t help be curious about what’s in the mind of someone who is so blatantly dishonest.

Mostly lies. My mind is just swimming in them, it's hard to think about anything else tbh

Just because it happened slightly earlier doesn't diminish his point, which is that it's a common occurrence.

It isn't a common occurrence. There are 330,000,000 people in the U.S. There are more lightning deaths (not strikes) than toddler-firearms killings.

So your point is that it is not that bad because it really only happen once every couple days? I mean, let's say it happens once a month or once a year. Is it worth it? Are guns preventing more deaths than they are causing?

No, neither that nor any of the other countless things that I did not say are not my point.

My point is that the claim that a toddler kills someone with a gun every day is false.

What's the appropriate frequency for a child to accidentally kill or maim someone before it becomes "okay"?

When the marginal utility gained from investing somewhere else is better, of course.

You're getting all mixed up between normative ("should") claims, and descriptive ("is") claims. Is it good that people die by getting tangled in their bedsheets? No. Is it good that a toddler occasionally accidentally shoot someone? No. Should we spend time on either problem? No.

It can never be okay. What an astonishingly absurd and gruesome notion.

Yes, the original post was not trying to precisely inform the frequency, just that it's not a once in a generation occurrence, but rather something that happens regularly. By trying to refute the frequency, you're completely missing the argument. That's what me and other people are saying.

In order to have a rational and productive discussion about policy one needs to have some kind of handle on reality, as well as a minimum of truthfulness and respect for the people you’re talking to.

Overstating the incidence of an event by a factor of 20 means you don’t have a handle on reality. Deliberately lying about news events means you’re not truthful. Putting words in people’s mouths and imparting inhumane motivations to them means you lack respect. All of these things happened in just this handful of comments, and, no, I don‘t think I’m missing anything at all.

The phrase "everyday occurrence" does not mean that something literally happens every day, it means that it happens commonly enough that it's not broadly notable.

You derailed this comment thread by quibbling over the specific frequency of these tragic events, rather than focussing on the point - which was that these accidental killings do indeed happen frequently - perhaps more frequently than you realised.

Factor of 20? Who's exaggerating now? If the linked incident happened on Monday, we could perhaps extrapolate that this happens perhaps once every four days, so that's a factor of four.

Seriously, though, maybe this is just a local colloquialism or language barrier thing, but to me, the phrase "everyday occurrence" doesn't mean "something that literally happens every day", it means "something that is common and happens often".

In my comment below I liked to a WP article the gives a rate of 15 per year (almost all self-shootings) Once per day would be 24.33 times as frequent.

Your method of "extrapolating" is innumerate.

I personally don't need a car in my day to day life. We should just ban them. Do you see how many people get killed every year?

To be fair, cars are probably in their way out too. Their are indeed inefficient and dangerous tools. But yeah, being able to connect cities, people with the best society can offer is a benefit much greater than people using guns to threat one another.

I think it's a lot easier to make a non-destructive positive case for cars, despite the number of people killed in car crashes every day, than it is to make the case for guns, which are devices specifically designed to injure and kill.

I don't think it is. "Injure and kill" may be precisely what you want to do if you're in a self-defense situation.

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