Virginia Gun Deaths Outpace Motor Vehicle Deaths, Anti Group Claims

I doubt "they" keep figures on this but..... What would the firearms death rate be if you excluded certain racial minority drug related killings?!?!?!

grylnsmn said:

A defect that allows the firearm to go off without the trigger being pulled is still a defect in the firearm. Yes, it can be exacerbated by human error, but that doesn't change the underlying defect that allowed the gun to go off.

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I have to disagree, "the rules" make it immaterial whether the firearm itself is "safe" or not. If the firearm is under the control of a responsible person, then it doesn't matter whether it will spontaneously fire or not. Not "exacerbated" by human error, but caused by human error.

Just as you can say that any given firearm is (potentially) loaded, it is equally as true that that firearm is (potentially) defective. Thus, every firearm should be under the control of a responsible person at all times. Please don't think I am preaching, I have been irresponsible lots of times, I am sure I will be again.

We're going to get this safety thing, and responsibility thing figured out eventually, but until then "direction" matters a whole lot, maybe more than anything else. As in, "make sure your automobile is always pointed in a safe direction."

Guns don't kill people, irresponsibility kills people.

architect said:

I have to disagree, "the rules" make it immaterial whether the firearm itself is "safe" or not. If the firearm is under the control of a responsible person, then it doesn't matter whether it will spontaneously fire or not. Not "exacerbated" by human error, but caused by human error.

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I think we're starting to nit-pick to the point of ridiculous. (Not directed solely at architect.)

The bold statement above is simply not true. Unless you happen to be at a shooting range, it is much more likely than not that you will be in a place where there is no safe direction in which to fire the gun. If you are around people, you can't point it in any horizontal direction. If you are standing on a hard surface, you can't point it down. And nowhere other than perhaps rural Kansas farmland or the desert far west is it safe to shoot any gun in the air.

Safety is the total of all the parts. Nobody would consider carrying around a gun that was prone to fire on its own, no more than anyone would want to hang around with a moron who made a habit of pointing his perfectly functional (safety wise) gun at things he should not.

TFred

TFred said:

Safety is the total of all the parts. Nobody would consider carrying around a gun that was prone to fire on its own, no more than anyone would want to hang around with a moron who made a habit of pointing his perfectly functional (safety wise) gun at things he should not.

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This is almost exactly my point.

If my gun has a safety defect, (for example, I hit a bump on the road and it causes my gun to go off in its holster on my hip without the trigger being pulled*) it's reasonable to hold the manufacturer responsible. As a firearms community, we should welcome regulations or legislation that holds the manufacturer responsible for actual defects that could make a gun unsafe. Personally, I have no more problem with that sort of regulation than I do with holding any other manufacturer responsible for the safety of their products. That is the purpose of consumer product safety laws and regulations.

However, the VPC is advocating something very different than that. They are trying to claim that those same regulations (that are supposed to protect against issues with product design) should be used to restrict guns from actually doing what they are designed to do. That is an abuse of regulatory power.

* Alternately, consider a firearm whose design makes it easy to fail and slam fire and empty the magazine. That is another clear safety defect.

roscoe13 said:

That's how it's SUPPOSED to work. Unfortunately, all to often it's based more on the influence of some politically connected individuals that don't want people driving past their house "too fast"...

Roscoe

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Which explains the 45 MPH limit on 28 south of Manassas when 55 MPH would seem more reasonable. However, I tend to believe that the local BOS view setting odd speed limits as an opportunity for additional revenue and use safety as the excuse.

As to the OP, everyone formulates the numbers to fit their agenda and VPC is not opposed to even reformulating the math to fit theirs. Unfortunately, it always seems that the media sides with the anti-freedom method of calculations and results and never question the data they were provided by the offending organizations. It does beg the question, how do pro-Liberty groups get their data accepted by the media?
I often wounder, when considering that facts don't work, if we too should start lying about and emotionalizing the data... would we get unquestioned coverage as well!