Originally Posted by k71021
To be honest Cicadashell, I do think that using the
unintentional (see DoJ link below) firearm related deaths does decrease the random nature of the events and make them significantly less comparable to lighting strikes. They only represents 3-4 percent of firearm death and I am sure that they are more random than Homicides or Suicides. I do not really get the point of your argument about randomness and then talking about people being around. Depending on you definition of “around” we are almost always around other people; at least like to be. Could you elaborate a bit on your argument?
As you can see from the Department of Justice figures, unintentional deaths, which is what I was talking about do not include Suicides and Homicides. So I would interperet that to mean more random events, like if a child accidently shoots the person that lives upstairs through the floor because he/she was playing with dad’s rifle. Would you interpret the word in some other way?
I am surprised and happy to see the downward trend in firearm related deaths from 1991 to 2001. I wonder what has happened since then?
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance/tables/frmdth.htm
Unintentional has nothing at all do with random. The can occur when a wife pulls a gun on a husband during a heated argument with no intent of killing, but simply getting him to leave, a struggle insues and the gun goes off. This was an unintentional gun death, but anything but random. Also unintentional was the gun death example you gave of a gun mistakenly going off, be it by a child or some idiot cleaning a loaded weapon, and killing a neighbor upstairs. Neither of these have any relevance to biking and thus any stats on unintentional gun deaths have no relevance to this topic. Unless of course you can dig up a stat on how many people biking home from work have been killed by stray bullets.