Quote:
Originally Posted by Raev
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Statistics before emotions, Paul.
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I agree. What you're doing, however, is reducing the statement "people like Adam Lanza and Elliot Rodgers are a threat to public safety" to emotion. There are a couple problems with this. One; if 20 grade-school age children lying dead in a pool of their own blood doesn't evoke an emotional response from you, there's something wrong with you. And two; it's simply a factual statement.
Again, how many people have to die or get shot before you accept that this is a real problem? What about the 70 victims of James Holmes? What about the 56 victims of Seung-Hui Choi? What about the 43 victims of Nidal Malik? What about the 34 victims of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold? What about the 27 victims of Steven Kazmierczak? What about the 25 victims of Mark Barton? What about the 17 victims of Jiverly Wong? What about the 14 victims of Larry Ashbrook? What about the 13 victims of Robert Hawkins? What about the 12 victims of Eduardo Sencion? What about the nine victims of Terry Ratzmann? What about the nine victims of Jeffrey Weise? What about the nine victims of Omar Thornton? What about the eight victims of Charles Thornton? What about the eight victims of Robert Stewart? What about the eight victims of Scott Dekraai? What about the seven victims of Michael McDermott? What about the seven victims of Doug Williams? What about the seven victims of Kyle Huff? What about the seven victims of Jared Loughner? What about the seven victims of One Goh? What about the five victims of Charles Roberts? What about the five victims of Sulejman Talovic? What about the five victims of Jake England? What about the five victims of Ian Stawicki? What about the five victims of Andrew Engeldinger? What about the three victims of Thomas Lane? What about the two victims of Jacob Roberts?
What you're doing is akin to saying there were merely 3,000 victims from the attack on the World Trade Center, a number that amounted to roughly one 95,000th of the United States population at the time, therefore this attack shouldn't have been taken seriously - therefore ideas like jihad and martyrdom that pervade the Muslim world aren't actually real problems. After all, the chance you would've died from an attack the likes of which we saw on 9/11 are only one in 95,000, right?
What you're saying is psychopathy isn't actually a real problem, and guns being readily available to psychopaths isn't actually a real problem because they don't kill
enough people yet. Oh, but once they take a sizable chunk out of our population,
then we ought to do something about it. Never mind these marginal numbers of casualties and people injured we currently have to deal with, the odds that it'll happen to
you is less than the odds of other things killing you, therefore they're not worth being concerned about at all.