🚀 go-pugleaf

Allison Scott MacEachern (maceache@acs.ucalgary.ca) wrote:
: 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! 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. 

Hmm.. sounds like that "someone" forgot a fair bit of their firearm
training course...  And pointing a gun at your stomach has little to
do with range "procedure", but EVERYTHING to do with basic firearm
safety.  I would also be quite worried in the same situation, and for
good reason...

: Nice to know guns only go off when they're pointed at targets today.

So the word "requires" might be a little ambigious in William's
post. The point he is making, however, (and which he makes again a
later in his post) is that the bullet is going to travel to a target
which is in front of the guns muzzle (excluding, of course, changes in
direction due to ricochets).  Explosives tend to go off in all
directions: in theory (I suppose) the target would be some sort of
sphere of a given radius for a given amount of explosive.  Unless you
can control the effects of the explosive (e.g. as in firing a bullet)
the "target" is a much larger area than that defined by a single
bullet path...

: explosives, how  often do people kill themselves/others
: accidentally in Canada wwith explosives every year, compared with
: the gun numbers?

In raw numbers I suspect the deaths due to explosives would be much
less.  Ok.  Now tell me how many explosions there are per year,
compared with the number of shots fired per year (and no, you can't
count firing a bullet in your "explosion" count).  How many times are
guns used compared to how many times explosives are used?  I have
absolutely no idea what these numbers would be, but I strongly suspect
that guns are used a lot more than explosives, and that the ratio of
deaths caused by guns to gun usage would be much less than the ratio
of deaths caused by explosions (excluding gun shots) to the number of
explosives used.  Someone with the actual numbers (and proper
references to those numbers) could prove/refute my point (and is quite
welcome to do so).

: Scott MacEachern

Later...

Greg Oster

oster@cs.usask.ca
Department of Computational Science
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, CANADA