Talk:Gun safety

Obviously your incredible prejudice in favor of private citizens owning firearms for self protection has made you completely unable to present a balanced point of view.

The issue of firearms safety is not a political issue. It doesn't matter who is handling the firearm, be it a private citizen, a police officer, or a soldier. The fundamentals of safety apply equally to everyone.

Somewhere in the world, right this minute, there is a police firearms instructor teaching a group of new recruits the fundamentals of firearms safety. That instructor will teach these four rules.

Your claims that training makes no difference in safety are absurd

I have never claimed that training makes no difference. Training is extremely helpful, and I agree that the page should reflect that. I will not accept the biased and unfounded view, though, that the proper use of firearms is so complex or demanding that only highly trained professionals can do so correctly. I could teach you to enjoyable and safely target shoot with an hour of instruction.

You have deleted my reference to the fact that the initial set of rules in this article is representative of only those people who favor providing everyone with guns.

I deleted this because it is manifestly untrue. If you find any firearms expert, whether they are for or against private ownership of weapons is irrelevant, they will tell you that these are extremely widely accepted fundamental rules of gun safety, and that these rules are not in the least bit political or controversial.

Let's be specific:

1. My first change was to the introduction to qualify WHO was advocating this particular set of four rules:

[...]

How is this change inaccurate?

These rules are not opposed by even the most ardent anti-gunner. Do you imagine that the political lobbyists at Handgun Control, Inc., go around advocating that people who own guns ought to handle them in an unsafe manner?

Again, it must be emphasized that safe handling of weapons is not a political issue. It is a matter of simple common sense, and there is a strong consensus of the experts that the rules here are all extremely well-founded and important.

Why pretend it is a political issue, when it is not?

2. My second change is to make mention of the fact that children need to know the potential risks as opposed to just what to do:

Once again: How is this change inaccurate?

As I said, I have no particular objection to this change. I merely deleted everything that you wrote by restoring the previous version because it was easier than going through line by line to fix all the errors.

3. Finally I added a discussion of why training is an important element of gun safety. I made five points here, but obviously you deleted all of them:

A. This may be the most important element of gun safety since adequate training will cover all of the aforementioned cautions.

Training is important, and the page should be changed to reflect this. However, the information on training must not be false.

B. The risks of a fatality increases with each firearm introduced into a tense situation.

This is just false, and is additionally misleading.

C. Worse yet an insufficiently skilled wielder sometimes has a weapon taken away by an adversary.

This is just false. It could be converted to a truth if written as follows: "Even extremely unskilled wielders of firearms almost never never have weapons taken away by their adversary." I doubt if this suits your political agenda, but it does have the minimal benefit of at least being true.

D. This risk, however, can be lessened by extensive training along the lines of a police academy and state military training.

The aforementioned risk is hardly a risk at all. We might want to add some of the criminological statistics showing that women who use firearms in self-defense against criminal attack are significantly less likely to suffer serious injury than those who do not resist at all, or those who resist without a gun. This demonstrates that weapons are extremely useful even without training... while training can make one even more safe, of course.

E. This training also helps recognize the specific challenges of particular weapon models in a given situation. For example Vietnam era M16 rifles frequently jammed due to a combination of overheating and dirt in contrast to the less accurate, but less sensitive, AK47 rifles.

This is a rather odd specific point to make, but I have no objection to illustrating how training can help, with specific examples that are actually relevant to the kinds of situations that people will actually encounter.

I would love to here why you think that none of points A-E are true. Even more I would love to see research to back up your position on these denials from any source that could reasonably be trusted to be objective. (for example: Government or University public safety studies not sponsered by the NRA or like organizations ideally including both US and non-US research.)

I will be happy to provide you with specific references. Why don't we take this to email, so that we can discuss it without bothering the other wikipedians? You'll have to put in some effort, because real research demands close attention. If you aren't interested in putting in the time, I will understand. But please don't presume to write on this page until you have the facts.

---

Considering that all of the reading I have done on the subject is reflected in what I wrote and I find YOUR statements to be manifestly untrue pertaining about the lack of risk to oneself and bystanders in the use of firearms at home or when hunting. I never even said that these situations always have a bad outcome. I rather used the word "some". Your very disagreement is extremely politically by in its very nature by denying what a very large percentage of the population consider safety concerns about firearms. To quote you:

"You'll have to put in some effort, because real research demands close attention. If you aren't interested in putting in the time, I will understand. But please don't presume to write on this page until you have the facts." ... because I don't believe that you do.

--Jonathan--

Even if I had no reason to believe one of you or the other, it is still best to remove specific assertions of fact if either of you thinks them wrong until the one positing them backs them up. You're the one positing specific facts here, so it's up to you to demonstrate that they're true. That you've done "lots of reading" is meaningless if you've read only propaganda. I know Jimbo, and I'm inclined to believe him simply because of his reputation for knowledge and honesty. At least he has offered to cite sources; you haven't even done that, and you don't have a reputation, so I have no reason to believe the "facts" you've offered here. --LDC

---

You have seen my work; I wrote the bulk of the current Unix and Vim articles, and I have contributed to the Abortion article among others. Feel free to check out my research on anything I have written, and I believe that you will have a hard time proving me outright wrong on any of it.

In this case I will do more than assert the obvious; here are some sources:

Many safety risk statistics: <http://www.bradycampaign.org/facts/research/firefacts.asp>

References to specific safety studies: <http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc>

On safety risks to women: <http://www.gate.net/~liz/liz/guest3.htm>

Note how the US compares: <http://www.nisu.flinders.edu.au/data/phonebook/queries/guninjuries94.php>

---

Well, let me defend Jonathan here. He says he has done reading, and so I believe him. I'm sure that he believes me, too. So now we need to take a look at each other's facts, and work together to rewrite the article by citing specific sources. It seems that he's accepting some of my objections to his article, and the primary remaining issues have to do with "risk to oneself and bystanders in the use of firearms at home or when hunting". That's a legitimate concern, although I don't think that the fact will leave us where he wants to be.

I hope that we'll take this to email so we can compare notes and start working towards a consensus. The main thing is that a page on gun safety should not be political. Based on that, we shouldn't have too much trouble coming to a consensus.

(Of course, if he wants to cite the Brady Campaign, I can surely cite the NRA. But I won't, because both are highly politicized sources of information.)

--Jimbo Wales (jwales@bomis.com, please email me, Jonathan)