What if we viewed guns the same way as cars?

Gun control vs. “car” control. We don’t try to ban all cars because of drunk, distracted, and irresponsible drivers.

Every time there’s a school shooting, where some lunatic (who’s almost always on psychotropic medication) goes off on a rampage and kills a bunch of kids, there’s always the same tired media charade of pundits and politicians pretending to care about kids dying - even as they support bombing children abroad in all the numerous wars the U.S. is involved in.

Yet, when some drunk or distracted driver crashes into another car and kills the occupants, you don’t see a parade of corporate and government know-it-alls tell you cars should be banned.

What exactly is the difference?

With car accidents (or even malicious, deliberate attempts to murder), people recognize that the problem is in the driver. The solution is clearly to stop that particular driver from driving, not to ban cars across the board.

The driver gets behind a 2-3 ton vehicle, under the influence of drugs or over-confident in their ability to text and drive, and kills people.

How many people? Over 13,000 people are killed every year in the U.S. by drunk drivers. About 3,500 die every year due to distracted drivers. That’s a whopping 16,500 people.

Depending on how you count, the number of deaths from mass shootings is either as low as 100 a year, or as high as 700 a year if you include gang-related shootings like drive-by’s.

That’s still a lot of people, but it pales in comparison to deaths from negligent drivers. Depending on how you count, that’s 23.5x - 165x more deaths than mass shootings!

(If you count total number of people killed by guns it’s about 21,000, but that statistic includes legal self-defense shootings, which the CDC is in no hurry to split out from the overall number, so we can’t really work with that number.)

There’s so many people dying every year in the U.S. because of drunk drivers, if the corporate media actually reported on all the incidents like it does with school shooting, they wouldn’t have time to cover any other news.

Cars are obviously FAR more dangerous than guns. They kill more people every year, and yet… we let 16 year-olds get licenses and drive. In many states, you have to be 21 or older to get a gun. Many states don’t let you carry a gun (e.g. NY and California, which are “may” issue states where getting a license is almost impossible). The car equivalent of that would be to limit use of a car to your own property. So… up and down your drive-way unless you live on a farm.

Just like politicians talking about banning “assault weapons” while they literally arm criminals with actual assault weapons, bombs, and tanks in foreign wars are absolute hypocrites, so are people who are anti-gun. They’re not really anti-gun - ask them what their plan is if someone breaks into their home. “Call the cops”, they’ll say - and what do the cops bring to the table exactly? Guns!

Oh and by the way, cops kill about 1,340 people every year, most of that with guns. Some of those might be justified shootings, but many are not. Yet so-called “liberals” want to disarm people (including black people) even as there are more cops killing people with guns than mass shootings in this country.

The fact is, guns are useful. They save 1.6 million people every year when used in self-defense, a number far exceeding the number of people killed with guns. They’re also used for hunting by millions of Americans every year, and are used recreationally by millions more.

Nobody tries to ban cars because their utility is obvious. The same should be true for guns, if people were being honest.

Banning guns would not save the 100-700 people dying of mass shootings, nor the 20,000 or so people killed by guns (since criminals don’t ask permission), but they would disarm the people using guns to protect themselves from criminals 1.6 million times a year. You do the math on the tradeoff.

What was that about anti-gun activists trying to save lives again?