🚀 go-pugleaf

In <Nov17.043137.88015@acs.ucalgary.ca> maceache@acs.ucalgary.ca (Allison Scott MacEachern) writes:

>William Christie writes:

>>We are implying that guns require many more steps to be
>>dangerous.  An explosive by it's nature is (potentially)
>>dangerous just sitting there.  A
>>firearm requires loading as well as a target in front of it's
>>muzzle and an external force to release the firing mechanism 
>>iff the gun is loaded.

>Wow!! Guess now I know what they mean by 'smart weapons'; they
>have to have a target in front of the muzzle before they fire! 

Smartass.  :-)
What I mean is that for it to be truly dangerous not only does it have be 
loaded and then the trigger pulled _but_someone_has_to_be_in_the_bullet's_
_trajectory_.  I'm not implying that a firearm going off by itself is 
neccessarily safe, _however_ you need to satisfy all these criteria for 
it to injure someone.  An explosive on the other hand has an 
indiscriminate blast radius and at the least is as stable as ammunition 
if not even worse.

>I had no idea that small arms technology has advanced so far over
>the last 20 years. I remember once being really worried on a
>range when someone had a misfire with a .22, stood up and pointed
>the gun at my stomach, asking "What's wrong with this?" Almost
>had a coronary before indulging in a little talk on range
>procedure. Nice to know guns only go off when they're pointed at
>targets today.

Target was used in the general sense.  By the by, I'm appalled at whoever 
was the Range Officer or was teaching that guy firearm safety.  First 
thing you discuss with a person is muzzle control; always point it in a 
safe direction and consider a gun loaded.  Second thing is how to deal 
with a misfire (especially with .22 rimfire ammo).  Your story 
illustrates the lack of firearms knowledge the general public has or at 
least how lax on procedure the range is/was.

>Just out of curiousity, since guns are so much safer than
>explosives, how  often do people kill themselves/others
>accidentally in Canada wwith explosives every year, compared with
>the gun numbers?

I don't know about explosives.  Firearms result in roughly 1,600 Canadian 
deaths per year.  80% are suicides, 15% are homicides and 5% are 
accidents.  For 1992 (Stats Can) I think 60 people were killed with 
handguns.  Only 4 of those were with legal handguns.  I don't know if 
those four people were murdered, accidently shot fatally or committed 
suicide.  On a per firearm owner's basis (assuming 7,000,000 firearms 
owners in Canada) that works out to 0.02285% death rate amongst 
firearm owners by firearms.  Discouting suicide it drops to 0.00457%.  
Comparitively, assuming about two third's of Canadians drive (which may 
be high at 20,000,000) and a rate of 3,650 deaths amongst Canadians due 
to vehicals this works out to 0.01825%.  From this vantage point unless 
your suicidal it looks like car users have a better chance of expiring 
due to their tool than firearm users do.  Then again these are statistics 
and can be massaged sometimes to any result we desire.  Regardless there 
are many other factors than just "do explosives kill more people per 
year than firearms?"  The relative risk of firearms is such that we don't 
insist on a zero tolerance.  An explosive has a much higher risk factor 
and more serious consequences (anyone near the detonation blown to little 
bits rather than possibly one person who happened to be in the bullet's 
path with a hole in them (possibly non fatal)).  On this basis alone 
it is not valid to compare explosives with firearms on the same footing.
To illustrate with an analogy; when engineers design a bridge they 
estimate the maximum load and build the bridge with factor of safety 
incorporated (the bridge can hold more than the maximum load specifies).  
This is partly because they can't actually test the bridge until it's 
completed so they overbuild.  When an airplane is designed however there 
is no factor of safety per se; each part is tested to ensure that it will 
not fail since the potential for disaster is much higher.  Capiche?
-- 
"Never in the field of human | Will Christie | "He must be talking about our
 conflict has so much been   | #6382 Chinook |  liquor bills."  --Unknown
 owed by so many to so few." | 666th AW IHHD |  Canadian Spitfire pilot,
 --W. Churchill, Sept. 1940  | Ladder  Admin |  shortly thereafter