Gun Numbers and Online Comments

I like writing for the Chronicle for a lot of reasons--I like the publisher and editor as people, I like that they let me eat up 2k words to really lay out an argument, I like that they'll do the fiddly business of making a good looking pie chart--but one of the things I like most is that, in an age when newspapers basically insist on having open comment threads (something I generally don't support, especially when they are basically unmonitored), the Chron has *excellent* comments--*because* they carefully husband them, trashing the spam, hate, and stupid vitriol). The result: Meaningful discussions where readers bring different perspectives and new *factual* information into the conversation. So, that's one thing that's happening with my latest column: Some readers are showing up with links to legal précis that outline the current state of interpretation of the Second Amendment, and new data visualizations that can be meaningfully inform the discussion in my column.

But what's most telling, for me, is the response from pro-gun folk--and not the glancing ad hominem or the patently absurd notion that gun owners constitute a minority in the same protected-class sense that, say, African-Americans do. What interests me is that the act of laying out these numbers--even as I clearly state that I *am not taking a position on gun control,* because I don't *have* one (for reals!)--implicitly reads as an argument *for* gun control to many gun owners.

More than anything *I* might say about gun control, *that* says it all: Pro-gun folks see the numbers on gun casualties and intent in this country, and just those *numbers*--with no surrounding rhetoric--read like an argument for gun control.

I think we maybe found the place that this conversation *really* starts, America.

The Ann Arbor Chronicle | In it for the Money: Running Gun Numbers

Here’s a favorite Glib Gun Lover comparison: There are roughly as many cars in America as guns [9], and there were 2,771,497 motor vehicle occupant injuries in 2010, and 33,687 deaths for a total of 2,805,184 American motor vehicle casualties. Cars are 27 times more dangerous than guns!

But, the thing is, of those 2,771,497 automotive injuries, only 8,954 were acts of malice or sorrow, and only 1,789 were attempts at suicide.

Check the pie charts: Orange represents blameless accidents; red and blue (and green) represent active human efforts to inflict pain or suffering. We’d have included a pie chart of Automobile Deaths, but it would have just been an orange circle.

In other words, those 2.8 million car accidents were basically just that: accidents. Those 33,000 corpses on the highway were largely the result of bad decision-making and bad weather, bad maintenance and bad luck. Meanwhile, our 30,000 gun deaths weren’t accidents – sorry, 4% were accidents. The rest were acts. They were deliberate expressions of hate and sorrow and frustration and desperation. That should mean something to us as human beings.