The Gun, The Religion and The Driver

I see the world as a set of vector arrows pointing at each other and at common places.  These are cause and effect couplets and isolated events that don't seem to have anything pointing at it to make it happen.  Some of the vectors we see and others we don't.

There are a lot of parallel arrows that point to different objects and by that parallel geometry creates a relationship between seemingly independent objects.  Such is the conditions among the firearms debate, radical religious factions and automobile accident fatalities.  Wow, what a wild and spurious connection?

Here is what I mean.  There are hundreds of millions of automobiles registered in this country, well almost two, at 196 million people.  Automobile fatalities is presently down from the 1972 high of 54, 589 deaths to the 2011 level of 32,367 deaths.  Between 1900 and 2012 there have been a recorded 3.5 million deaths from automobile accidents.  While many deaths occurred in the same collision perpetrated by the same driver that lowers the one to one ratio, for simplicity sake we will use the 1:1 ratio for further discussion.  And, yes, the 3.5 million deaths were over a period of 112 year.  Even so my point will be valid.  Somewhere less than 0.5% of drivers will cause the death of someone in their entire lifetime.  This means that 99.5% of drivers are innocent of anyone's death.  However, all states require training, testing and retesting, licensing and renewals.  And most states require sufficient automobile liability insurance on all drivers even though most will never be the cause of an accident or a claim.  Gun rights advocates just said, "I knew you were going there."

There are upwards of 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. They want to live a comfortable life, work, eat, stay warm and dry, raise a family and pray to their god.  There are some Muslims who are not satisfied with the way they are treated in this world and adopt radical ideas of how to make that change.  Some of the more radical ones adopt violence as their tool of choice.  Even if there were 1 million such violent persons who actually will ever do a massive violent act, this number is 0.0625% of the world population.  Muslims in general should not be held responsible for the actions of such a small part of their population. Someone just called me a "Muslin Apologist."  Most others are seeing my point.

In the USA the estimates of gun ownership widely vary from between 190m to 300m individual guns.  The better and more conservative estimate is that about 52 million households have about 260 million guns in them.  Even if you don't agree on those numbers the point that is being made here remains valid.

Gun deaths run around 40,000 per year.  Using a one perpetrator per dead person as the largest percentage of crimes or measures of self-defense we are talking about 40,000 perpetrators per year.  It is unlikely that perpetrators of gun deaths in the home, where most gun deaths occur, will be a repeat offender.  Yes, there will be a few but not many in the grand scheme of things.  Over ten years there will be 400,000 deaths and 400,000 perpetrators.  Running the ratios, that means that slightly more than ¾ of a percent of the gun owners will ever kill someone.

In all three of my examples it becomes acutely obvious that a very small number of people perpetrate all of the violent death and dismemberment in each example.  And that the vast majority of people on each category are innocent and guilty only by association, the associations that others assume.

Most people are not capable of distinguishing which driver of which vehicle is going to collide with them or anyone, now or ever.  But we force insurance and other regulations on them just in case.

Many Americans want to exclude Muslims from residency or entry in the US on the grounds that they cannot be trusted, even though the percentage of dangerous ones is the smallest of the three examples.  They want to hold all people in that group responsible.

The gun rights advocates want to segregate themselves into the law abiding and the lawless components in order to equate themselves with the virtuous and deny the dark side of their ideology.  To be fair, automobile drivers who do not drive intoxicated, distracted or fatigued, want to divorce themselves from the aggressive ones and those who are not fit to be behind the wheel for any reason.  And religious people of all faiths want to not be lumped together in to one group and labeled with the characteristics of the minority.

Gun rights advocates are indeed responsible for the actions of the lawless when they stand in the way of proposed solutions and do not champion solutions of their own to curtail the death and injury that their population inflicts on themselves and everyone else.