Duke Researcher: Owning a Car ’80 Percent’ Riskier Than Owning a Gun
5th September 2015
In this sharply divided country, there surely is also strong disagreement about the extent to which government ought to be protecting citizens from self-harm. But I presume that a broad spectrum of the public on both sides of the aisle would agree there is an appropriate government role in protecting citizens from being harmed by one another. So if we leave aside self-inflicted deaths, the average car is 1.8 times as risky as the average gun. That is, my owning a car is 80 percent more likely to result in the death of another person my owning a gun.
Most of the gun deaths in this country are caused by young black males, yet there’s no call for ‘young black male’ control; on the contrary, the call is for letting them out of jail once they get locked up.