Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

Comment by petsfed | Hacker News Reader

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I believe you're committing the no-true-scotsman rhetorical fallacy.

Proper firearm practices don't protect you from deliberate self-harm, nor does it protect the other people living in the space from a resident motivated to do them harm. Following proper safe firearm practices protects you and your family from negligent discharge and from someone turning your firearms against you. But it does absolutely nothing to protect you from yourself, nor protect your friends/family from you. You know who doesn't shoot their friends/family/self whilst in the grip of a severe, acute mental health episode? A person who doesn't have easy access to guns.

About 42% of adults in the US live in a household with guns[0]. If your claim is that the statistics [that show living in a household with guns is more dangerous than not] are easily mitigated via good practices, then a HUGE number of people must not be following those practices. Why else would the statistics be so clear on that point? Either a large proportion of people are not following those practices, in which case some other mitigation is necessary, or those practices are not as effective as you claim, in which case some other mitigation is necessary.

I bring this up because my wife and I have discussed at length whether or not to conveniently locate our firearms for self-defense, and concluded that, for now at least, adequately keeping our kids safe from using the guns without supervision basically precludes using the firearm for self-defense (that old "when seconds count..." saw), to the extent that we don't keep our firearms in our home.

0. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/09/13/key-facts...

No it is not a no-true-scotsman fallacy.

Here is another example. On average, retail investors lose money. However, a highly intelligent, highly motivated, skilled retail investor will make money. In fact there is always some subset of retail investors that will always make money. But on average, retail loses money.

Because on average retail loses money does not imply that any given retail investor is more likely to lose money than to make money.

Also it is very obvious that a huge portion of people that own guns do not adhere to strict gun safety principles, so not sure what argument you are trying to make there.

So, no true highly intelligent, highly motivated, skilled retail investor will lose money?

The point I'm making is that good, safe gun ownership and gun storage practices only mitigate very specific parts (and not even the largest parts) of the statistical observation that people who live in a home with guns are considerably more likely to be killed or injured by gun violence. A person can very carefully follow the basic rules of gun safety (treat every gun as if it's loaded, don't point it at something you're not prepared to shoot, etc) and still use it on themself. Or their kids. Or their spouse. Or their roommate. These are not mutually exclusive. That person can very conscientiously store their (unloaded) firearm in an appropriate locked cabinet, with trigger locks, away from their ammunition, and still do any of those things. So I reject completely your initial claim that being a "safe" gun owner makes you somehow an exception to the observed phenomenon.

> So, no true highly intelligent, highly motivated, skilled retail investor will lose money?

> The point I'm making is that good, safe gun ownership and gun storage practices only mitigate very specific parts (and not even the largest parts) of the statistical observation that people who live in a home with guns are considerably more likely to be killed or injured by gun violence. A person can very carefully follow the basic rules of gun safety (treat every gun as if it's loaded, don't point it at something you're not prepared to shoot, etc) and still use it on themself. Or their kids. Or their spouse. Or their roommate. These are not mutually exclusive. That person can very conscientiously store their (unloaded) firearm in an appropriate locked cabinet, with trigger locks, away from their ammunition, and still do any of those things. So I reject completely your initial claim that being a "safe" gun owner makes you somehow an exception to the observed phenomenon.

The point being made is simply one of statistics. "On average," retail investors will lose money. This "average" is taken across the entire population of investors. There are subpopulations of investors, however, who tend to be better educated, motivated and so on, and who do not lose money "on average." It isn't a no true Scotsman fallacy.

In order to avoid the No True Scotsman, you need to identify a priori a group that will make money. "Intelligent" and "motivated" don't cut it, because they are going to be identified a-posteriori, from the stock market winners, and that's circular reasoning. I know many smart people who lost money on the market, that's not a good characteristic.

Do you understand how ridiculous it is to say that guns aren't safe because I might intentionally murder my family with it? I can tell you now, that risk for me is 0. I would never do that.

You are missing the point of my post which is basically people have such a hard on for arbitrary statistics that they will completely ignore that likely outcomes are very easy to identify in many cases. Because I know myself, I know I am not part of the population of the average which contributes to the "self/family harm" side of the statistic. And its ridiculous for you to suggest that I am somehow just as likely as the average to murder my family or kill myself or have an accident.

And you're missing the point that the things that drive people to deliberately cause harm with firearms (which is AGAIN, the reason why the statistics are what they are) are completely unaffected by the best practices taught today.

Congratulations that you and your spouse are completely immune from ever experiencing brain tumors or traumatic brain injuries that cause wild behavioral changes. You should really let us all know how you know, a priori, that you'll never experience such a psychologically traumatizing event that it would push you into such an action. That would save millions of veterans' lives.

I am not saying that people shouldn't own or keep firearms in light of these statistics. I'm saying that "I observe safe practices with my firearms, so those statistics don't describe me" is along the same lines as "I know I'm a good driver, so all the statistics about most dangerous days/times/situations to drive are irrelevant to me". It's a failure of imagination on your part. You can still mitigate the how's and why's of those statistics, but it takes a lot more than a gun safe and a trigger lock, and it's stuff that is never actually characterized as "gun safety".

No it isnt. You are obsessi g over this particular example. My point is this :

If you have 100 coins and 1 of them has heads on both sides, on average the likelihood that flipping a rabdom coin will give heads is about 50, and approaches 50 as your number of them increases. For the 1 coin with 2 heads though, the probability is always 100 percent.

The point I am trying to make is that people take a generalized statistic and when you say "okay but that really isnt all that applicable in this specific case" they have an anuerysm and accuse you of exceptionalism instead of just listening to reason. The law of large numbers applies only to the aggregate. If you have any information whatsoever about a specific case it can dramatically change the math.

I'm "obsessing" over it, because its a bad example. If anything, this whole exchange is a good example of how people will ignore valid, relevant statistics because they find the implication of a given statistic inconvenient. Claiming to be an exception necessarily opens you up to greater scrutiny, so it behooves you to critically examine what, exactly, makes the affected group subject to the stated phenomenon, and honestly assess whether or not your circumstance is indeed an exception.

Here's an illustrative example from my realm of experience: between the fall of 2009 and spring of 2023, 363 people have died in avalanches in the US. Of those, 173 were skiers or snowboarders, and 17 of those were "inbounds" [0]. Somewhere on the order of 60 million people visit ski resorts each year[1]. A surface level understanding of those numbers might cause a ski-hill operator to conclude "the money I spend on avalanche mitigation is wasted, since deadly avalanches are significantly less likely at ski resorts".

Obviously this is a straw-man. But there are a number of ways to misinterpret the data to arrive at a conclusion you want (to whit, in that time period, 3 times as many skiers than snowboarders died in avalanches, and more than twice as many snowmobiler/snowbikers died in avalanches than snowboarders. But it takes really digging in to realize that a) there are also a lot fewer backcountry snowboarders vs backcountry skiers and b) snowmobiliers are consistently the least avalanche-educated of all backcountry users who actually play on avalanche prone slopes)

You're entirely correct that statistics don't dictate outcomes. But understanding what does dictate outcomes, without bias, can help you change those outcomes.

0. https://avalanche.org/avalanche-accidents/

1. https://coloradosun.com/2023/05/29/national-ski-areas-record...

I just don't understand how we are talking past each other. We seem to agree while disagreeing (basically just cause guns are a contentious issue. I said it was a bad example at the outset...) right : Statistics do not dictate outcomes. I am identifying something that does definitely without question change outcomes for gun ownership (that is safety practices) and you seem to be making the argument that this does not change my chance of injuring myself with my own firearm.

In fact, I currently have no bullets in my house at all, and have no plans to purchase any. So right now my chance of injury is 0. It is not possible for me to be in the same cohort as the people with average risk of injuring themselves.

Its because, as you say, guns are contentious, and its a distractingly bad example.

I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder when somebody says "oh, this doesn't apply to me, I'm just that good". Most of the time, in my experience, that's somebody who can't be bothered to follow the rule, and not somebody who is actually a valid exception to the rule. I tend to throw water on such people whenever I can, to try to counter that effect.

I used to teach people how to rock climb, and the sketchiest people I knew were my fellow instructors, because they always had some complicated reasoning why the rules we taught (which, as the saying goes, are written in blood) didn't actually apply to themselves. It's some weird Dunning-Kruger thing going on, where they somehow convince themselves that all of this time spent avoiding death or serious injury by shear luck is somehow evidence of their greater skill and capability to manage the risks.

I watched several of these people take bad falls, walk away from them, and just go right back to what they were doing, with no behavioral change whatsoever.

When I called one of them out for not following a some minor rule around equipment checkout, he said "I don't need to follow that rule, I'll just be responsible". He went on to do a series of dangerous things that probably caused his students to quit climbing afterwards, and was ultimately fired because of gross misconduct surrounding (you guessed it) irresponsible behavior.

Reading climbing and mountaineering accident reports, the accounts from those involved are stacked with "it had always been ok in the past" or "it looked solid to me" or "I had done 'x' (which was completely unrelated to the outcome of the incident), so I thought we'd be ok".

There is less daylight between "there's no scenario where I won't flip out and turn my gun on somebody else" and "I was the last to use that firearm, so I know its unloaded, I don't need to check" than I think either of us are entirely comfortable.

I'll also say that the standard "good" practice is to just store your weapons and ammo in separate lockers, not entirely separate locations. That's a mitigation above and beyond (and punters need to understand why that makes a difference in the statistics).

I'm not disagreeing, but we also must be aware of ideological tautolagies (not sure if the term is correct, but it's a kind of circular reasoning). Where an intelligent and skilled investor is only considered intelligent and skilled iff they make money. The moment you lose, you're not longer intelligent and skilled.

I would say that, yes, a HUGE number of gun owners fail basic gun safety. In my area, you do not have to demonstrate knowledge of firearms to own one. I've seen a lot of idiots on the range, and that's why I only go shooting with people I know and trust.

at my local range I have seen the following : - A man teaching his girlfriend to shoot a tech nine. She was holding it with her finger over the barrel and was moments away from firing before my dad notice and stopped her

- A roughly 12 year old jumping out of a van, pulling a pistol directly from his waistband, and firing downrange without ever taking a safety off.

Also most gun owners I know just keep their guns like, on a shelf somewhere, with the bullets either in the gun or nearby.

So yeah there are a lot of people that don't use any brain cells whatsoever when handling firearms. Get your youtube algorithm to start serving you shorts from the hip-hop enthusiast gun-modification community, you'll see some real idiocy in short order.

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