Recap of a post in GD [View all]

I started this post in GD because Guns are a top issue in the news right now. I want to critique it and am posting this in both Gun groups to be fair and give all an opportunity to consider it without violating the GD rules.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100215274087#post40

There were just over 50 responses by about 21 respondents. Of those four from the positive gun point of view, 14 from the other and two mostly neutral.

I asked two questions: If a gun is good for self protection and the US has 325M people and 395M guns, why are more people shot in the US than in any other developed country?
and
If more cars on freeways means more car accidents and more swimming pools in a community mean more drownings, what exempts guns from the same correlation?

I got two answers to the first, gangs and a more thoughtful reply that took into account societal ills but it total explained that we really don't have a problem.

Another respondent, also thoughtful, simply said there are a lot of factors and it's too complicated to solve.

What struck me was the methodology of one of the gun supporters. The key to that argument was to break gun victims into sub groups and minimize each group; suicides don't count as violence, domestic violence is only 12% so it's too small a subset to worry about, gangs don't count, mass shootings are a tiny subset of shootings so not worthy of consideration etc. A second method was to simply deflect; this thread isn't about this or that so your post is off topic.

I got no answers whatsoever to the second.

So all in all a post with two simple questions that went unanswered in a satisfactory way, at least for me. YMMV