Voices Around Town
Asked in downtown Mountain View. Photos and interviews by Nisha Malley.

Ms. Malley did not work too hard if she couldn't even find one gun-owner.

Have you ever owned or considered buying a gun?

"I have never considered owning a gun, and the reason for that is I know the statistics."

Actually, you don't, what you know is carefully crafted and biased propaganda, not facts.

"Guns are more likely to be used against the members of the household than in their defense."

Even the Obama and Clinton Administrations discovered that not only was that old claim totally false, the truth is that civilian owned guns are used at least a dozen times more often for lawful self-defense than to be used criminally.

The old lie was created by making it very difficult for any case to be considered "good self-defense" and anything that did not meet the high barrier to be counted as "good case".

To become a "good case of self-defense you had to lawfully possess the gun used, you had to lawfully kill a total stranger with a gunshot during the commission of a violent felony crime.

If the attacker does not die from a gunshot, they don't count the case.
If the attacker does not die, they don't count the case.
If the attacker is not a total stranger to you and everyone in your household, they don't count the case.
If the defender was not legally in possession of the gun, but did everything else legally, they don't count the case.

Any case they wont count as "good" gets counted as "bad".

They also co-mingle the 2/3rds of gunshot deaths with the cases of self-defense which have no meaningful connection.

" So you're more likely to die in a household that owns a gun."
Laurel McClure, Mountain View"

NO law-enforcement statistics back that assertion up.

"Why, if you live in a functioning society,"

USA society has millions more cases where a gun was needed for lawful self-defense than the total cases of criminal mis-use of guns.

"Gun issues in the U.S. are a lack of self-reflection in our part ..."

Correct, the real problem is that most people have heard the same old propaganda lies spread around by the media that most people never do any self-reflection, nor do most people bother to investigate to find out that they are being lied to.

"I do not own one. I have considered (it) just because people are crazy — I don't know if that's the right way of saying it — but I have not because just the risk of having one at home seems too high with kids."
Tom McMahon, San Jose

That risk you fear is another creation of the propaganda machines of the gun-ban people. Any tool, any chemical, any object can be deadly to children. Plastic 5-gallon buckets kill more small children that guns and cars do. We don't see people calling for a ban on those buckets.

> guns are used at least a dozen times more often for lawful self-defense than to be used criminally

Yet you offer no evidence - where's the link to a study or research?
- - And you have the nerve to question others with: "NO law-enforcement statistics back that assertion up."

> USA society has millions more cases where a gun was needed for lawful self-defense than the total cases of criminal mis-use of guns.

Prove it.
- - You have "NO law-enforcement statistics back that assertion up."

> "...the risk of having one at home seems too high with kids."

Kids = children: "...below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority"

> Plastic 5-gallon buckets kill more small children that guns (attempted re-frame to deny fact that guns kill Kids)

Show us statistics that buckets kill more children (17 and under) than guns, anytime in the last 20 years. Give us the top three years that they have done so. With links. Not that 30 year old blog post/lie.

You said: "NO law-enforcement statistics back that assertion up." Yet you have no facts yourself, just self-perpetuating lies from gun nut blogs and falsehoods from the NRA. Your flagrant and absurd lies are ridiculous. Web Link

Buckets kill more children (17 and under) than guns? For shame. Also really stupid.

Geez, do you even *think* about the lies you repeat from the crazies?

@ go to https:

Of course you would prefer everyone got their gun-ban propaganda from those people.

They are the same people who claimed that the 1994 Assault Weapon Ban was about outlawing machine guns and that when the AW ban expired, they claimed that machine guns would now be openly available to ordinary citizens in any gun store across the USA.

They lie for a living.

On accidental deaths of small children caused by plastic 5 gallon buckets versus accidental firearms deaths of small children:

Quoted excerpts below:
Which are more dangerous for young children, five gallon buckets or guns?

Five gallon buckets result in a small number of fatal accidents for young children; about 27 a year. The accidents are not tracked as rigorously as those with firearms are. I found a study that tracked them for six years. From a pediatrics study:

Analysis of Consumer Product Safety Commission data revealed 160 bucket-related drownings for the years 1984 through 1989, representing a mortality rate of 0.367 per 100 000 persons (younger than 2 years old) per year in the United States.

The latest number of fatal firearms accidents per year for children under the age of five was 19, recorded in 2007.

for 2007, all fatal firearm accidents for children 0-14 totaled 65, and all drownings for children 0-14 totaled 739. Fatal firearm accidents for children 1-14 have been fairly flat since 2001, averaging 61 per year.

Again, you're either afraid, or unable to provide a link to a study about your silly claims against the reality:

"the risk of having one at home seems too high with kids."

So sad. So you filibuster with much nonsense about 1984 bucket drownings. That's not only weak, but pathetic to bring further tragedy into discussion of the tragedy of guns.



Nor were you able to support your other lies, even with a link to the lies on the gun nut blogs:

> guns are used at least a dozen times more often for lawful self-defense than to be used criminally

And you have the nerve to question other facts with: "NO law-enforcement statistics back that assertion up."

Put up, or go away and play with your guns elsewhere..

It takes a fragile (or worse) mind to try and defend guns as *ONLY* killing a couple kids a year and compare it to drowning in buckets.

"It is sobering that in 2017, there were 144 police officers who died in the line of duty and about 1,000 active-duty military throughout the world who died, whereas 2,462 school-age children were killed by firearms,"

said Charles Hennekens, the study's lead author from Florida Atlantic University's Schmidt College of Medicine.

Web Link

Tragic gun deaths in 2017:
144 police officers who died in the line of duty
about 1,000 active-duty military throughout the world who died
2,462 school-age children

Here come the deflections.

Really, you should talk to someone.

Anyone who gets their information from those people are not worth talking to because they never listen and can never learn. For them it's a religion.