[ExI] pistols

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On Wed, 21 Apr 2021 at 05:33, spike jones via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

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> *From:* extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> *On Behalf
> Of *Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat
> *…*
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> >…You’re more likely to be killed if you have a gun at home than if you
> don’t.
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> People are more likely to die of heart failure if they take heart
> medication than if they don’t.  This statistic should not be cited in
> urging patients to not take the meds.
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> >…You are the victim of a cognitive bias - feeling safer rather than
> actually being safer - if you have a gun…
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> One might suppose the same argument would hold for heart medications.  I
> would ask my second cousin, were he still with us, but he ran out of heart
> medications last fall, then died a few weeks afterwards (in his case it was
> the mistaken belief that he no longer needed them (he did.))  I don’t know
> how that would count in the statistics.  He took the meds for about 15
> years, but wasn’t taking them at the time of his death (by heart failure.)
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> The gun statistics fail to account for how dangerous is the neighborhood
> to start with.  They also fail to subtract suicides (which shouldn’t count
> by my way of looking at things.)
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Deaths include suicides, accidents, homicide of family members by another
family member and homicide by a would be burglar. The argument for guns in
the home is that they decrease the chance of the last of these happening,
but even if they did (and arguably they might INCREASE the chance that the
burglar will shoot you), it might not outweigh the risk of death from the
other causes. I don’t see why you should leave out suicide; if you have an
argument with your spouse and then shoot yourself in the head, that is a
serious problem.

> --
Stathis Papaioannou
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