Applying Gun Control Logic to Stairs
Recently I authored an article at Brink of Freedom. I also did a pretty cool 19 minute video based on it. Here is the beginning of the article…
You hear it all the time from those who want gun control laws added to the more than 25,000 plus existing regulations, “if it only saves one life, it is worth it.” Many of us who actually value simple small things like the right of self determination, the constitution of the nation, and individual liberty will often point to automotive deaths as a counter argument, but I have a better one – deaths and injuries due to staircases. Let’s examine some classic gun grabber logic and apply it to staircases. I think you will be shocked at the results.
First some statistics, falling down stairs on average
- Kills over 1,300 people per year – (source)
- Over 1 million people are injured per year in stairway falls – (source)
- Nearly 100,000 children a year are injured enough by stairway falls to require hospitalization – (source)
- Young children and the elderly are the most victimized by falls – (source)
Let’s take those numbers over a decade we get…
- 13,000 deaths that never had to happen
- 10,000,000 plus hospital visits that never had to happen
- 1,000,000 children hospitalized for serious injury that never had to happen
- An unfair and disproportionate group of victims who are small kids or older adults that need protection
Very well put Jack. I’m outraged that my representatives in congress aren’t passing laws to protect us from the perils of staircases. Why oh why won’t they THINK OF THE CHILDREN!!
at the very least we need to get stairs out of the schools!!!
That couldn’t be more true! At least ban high capacity staircases. And what about assault escalators?
I’m very concerned about the lack of restrictions on high capacity stairs. You simply don’t need more than 10 steps in a staircase! If you ever need to go higher/lower, just call a firetruck.
Equally disconcerting is how these stairlovers are trying to expose our CHILDREN to stairs… even going so far as to put them in our schools! No thanks, MY kids won’t ever be allowed to touch a staircase! Again, what’s so horrible about calling the fire department or just walking away?
Unfortunately, I don’t work on a stair-free campus. I can’t get any work done because I’m constantly fretting about whether my coworkers might have concealed stairs in their pockets!!!
I go back and forth on gun issues, and its arguments like this that push me towards stricter gun laws.
The truth is gun deaths outnumber stair falls by 10 to 1, and both cars and stairs are important tools that most Americans use every single day.
Using these as arguments of why guns should be unrestricted is a fallacy.
Jack I love your show and love that you believe in the freedom of Americans, but please leave your arguments in the fields of liberty and constitutional right, not in the realm of poor logic, like so many other individuals do. I expect much more from you.
I do not mean to offend, rather to bring truth to what I feel to be an illogical conclusion.
@Adam, if you think this was an actual logical argument about stairs being as dangerous as guns, no wonder you fall for the lies that pull you toward tyranny. Do you really think I am serious in banning stairs? This video if you will open your mind and watch the entire thing isn’t really about guns, it is about government run a muck. Seriously did you pay attention to the part about the ATF? Gun free zones in schools, kids suspended for a gun shaped pop tart? Climate change legislation? Arrests leading to greater penalties because of proximity to a building? The fact that if you watch it from the beginning it does actually emotionally pull you at times even though the entire premise is ridiculous? Can you not see beyond the black and white illusions of one issue into the shades of gray used to grow government and tyranny at every level? Is America truly becoming this blind?
Did lines like, “Hell, all any government agency needs is guns and the power to tax and we can have more money than we know what to do with, but that is a story for another day.” just fly right over your head?
How about, “Heck, in the end the program will pay for itself! Consider the size of this workforce and what it will mean to the economy.” Did you get that?
Try it again, open your mind, see the full picture.
Wow. Jack himself commenting on my comment. This is why I love listening to your show, you truly are concerned about the thoughts and communications of your listeners.
Please don’t misunderstand me. I believe strongly in our freedoms, how they are used, and how they are daily being stepped on.
However, I used to come from an anarchists type of mind set, and as far as weapons went I believed any person should be allowed any type of weapon they may desire to protect themselves and their country. I would have gone so far as to ok to say nuclear weapons should be allowed among civilians as well.
I think we can almost all agree that civilians should not have nuclear arms, but at what level do we ban things?
I am always torn at where to draw this line, but I use my own thoughts and statistics to do so. I am never swayed by the emotion and fear that is brought forth by both sides of the argument.
I know and understand you point that there are many people who are passing all kinds of insane anti-gun laws based on fear of the guns themselves.
However the stair argument that you used to begin your article has turned me off to it. Please forgive me for not watching it, but due to your introduction I want no part.
Don’t worry, I’m the last person coming for anyone’s guns. I feel strongly for the second amendment, I just have a hard time deciding exactly how it used in our society.
I feel those speaking for the 2nd amendment need to be sure they are making sound, logical arguments, not arguments based on fear or misguided logic.
Jack, if you are reading this, I want you to know how much I appreciate all that you do. I just didn’t agree with how you were presenting your argument. I am not trying to make anybody angry or hurt any feelings of any who may be reading this.
Adam, when someone says stuff about “well we don’t let people have nuclear weapons”, they really are reaching and really don’t get it. Fortunately I made a video about that
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RaxSkGFVnIo
Oh and how do we use the second amendment? We follow it, SHALL NOT is about a clear as you can make legal language.
I never understand the “important tools” argument. They seem pretty important tools for security guards and government agents. In fact, without them I don’t see how government would even function 🙂 If someone wants to buy them and some one wants to make them then they have importance. My view is stop trying to take things away from people. If someone commits a murder than the problem is the person not the tool.
The bigger question that needs to be asked is why the person would harm another. This is the problem that we lose focus on when we try solve effects instead of causes. Once we solve that, this really becomes a non-issue.
Really we know the answer, we just don’t want to focus on it. It’s parenting. We know that the vast majority of criminals come from single parent homes and abusive homes. Fix that problem and you solve 80-90% of the crime in this country. We know that the majority of gun deaths are from suicides, yet another mental health issue. Yet its more important for people to rail against guns in a forum, instead of going out and helping a troubled kid.
As a farmer, we use guns literally all year to fight back rabbits and other vermin that cost us tens of thousands of dollars in crop damage each year, eating bottoms out of hay stacks, eating the outsides of fields etc. The higher capacity, and more deadly the gun the better. They are just as much of a valid work tool to me as a grease gun or wrench.
I realize we are in the very tiny minority who need guns for this purpose, but I definitely take offense to some big city lawyer-turned-politician threatening to take away valid work tool from me when they don’t have the slightest idea on how I live. If they spent a day with me on the farm I think it would radically change their viewpoint on things like guns.
@Adam, I am going to ask two things of you.
1. Get over your problem and watch the entire video and just take it in.
2. Listen to the end of today’s show you are going to love it.
I say this because you said this
“The bigger question that needs to be asked is why the person would harm another.”
Without knowing it you just stepped into the actual point!
With all due respect if you got turned off by the very beginning and didn’t actually watch the video of it, your opinion is pretty myopic. Take my challenge and look deeper, you know not everything needs to be spoon fed to people in a “palatable way”, I learned long ago in martial arts that teaching is a careful balance of both pleasure and pain.
LOL Funny, two different Adam’s. I don’t have a problem with the video, I wrote a response to the other Adam 🙂 I’ll change my screen name to Adam R to separate 🙂
Staircases and Gravity don’t mix.
I have lived through the experience, twice.
They must be stopped.
But I am only asking for sensible controls on stairs.
Maybe we should only ban “scary” looking stairs.
I agree with you. This isn’t about preserving life, it’s about taking away our right under the constitution…
Lol.
Just wait till you find out about the dangers of DiHydrogen Monoxide!!
http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html
Spoken well, my friend. Sounds just like the gobbly gook government talk. So…how long did you work in the government? I”M JOKING!!!
I read this earlier on Brink of Freedom during my lunch today. I thought it was great and forwarded it off to my friends. It’s humorous yet gets the point across. Thanks, Jack!
Just read section 1009 of the international building code.
http://www2.iccsafe.org/states/newjersey/nj_building/PDFs/NJ_Bldg_Chapter10.pdf
We already have tons of regulations on stairs. Maybe just one more law. If it could save one. Why not. Right??
I’m one of those children that was injured by stairs! I fell down one stair and broke my arm before I could even talk, and my parents waited two days before taking me to the doctor! I DEMAND that the government take action to ensure that this never happens to a single child ever again!
I get where you’re going with this, and I agree with the sentiment, but this isn’t a great analogy. Stairs are used by pretty much every one every single day. 1300 deaths per year is a small number compared to the 11,078 firearm homicides per year, and this doesn’t include firearm related accidental deaths. Also someone can’t weild stairs against you and use stairs to kill a bunch of people in a short amount of time. A 3 year old can’t accidentally get a hold of a flight of stairs and kill their sibling.
The reason I’m leveling this critisism isn’t because I want to be some smarmy jerk. It’s because before prepping I was pro gun control. I’m not now, of course! (Thank god for Edward Snowden…) And during the debates I had with my pro-gun friends I never got what I considered a good answer to my questions. I’d ask, “Why do you need a semi automatic with a 100 round capacity?” to which they’d respond, “Because it’s my constitutional right to own a gun!” Okay, but that didn’t answer my question…why that specific gun? My point here is that they never changed my view. And I think that’s INCREDIBLY important. We don’t need to talk down to people, we need to change their view.
Instead of bad analogies we need open discourse with common sense responses. We need to express our viewpoints in such a way to get these people to consider alternatives. We need to change the debate from the black and white “GUNS R BAD” vs “DERE COMIN TO TAKE MAH GUNZ!” to the reality of what this debate is really about. This is incredibly important because we shouldn’t be divided on this issue. We’re fighting the powers that be and we need all the help we can get.
Again, I get the sentiment. But I feel that stories like this just fuel to the fire of divisivness and reinforce the notion that Pro-Gun people are nothing but nutters who should be disregarded.
Shak,
I think you mostly missed the point of the article. My interpretation is that Jack is trying to point out how silly it is to make another law for gun control that “if it saves just one life” then it would be a good law. I don’t think Jack was trying to say guns are less dangerous.
Frankly this isn’t really about guns or stairs, it is about government run a muck, the two are just used to make the point.
I was close! 🙂 Thanks Jack!
Totally ignoring the purpose of Jack’s video.. 😉
@Shak –
Why do you need a semi-automatic with a 100 round capacity?
Practical answer:
During a violent confrontation, you will be pumped full of adrenaline, and operating a significantly diminished level of firearm skill (lowest level of mastery). This will often result in a large number of misses. Combine this with the possibility of multiple shots being needed to incapacitate your target (due to non-critical hits, will of target, target drugged up, etc.), and the possibility of multiple targets (2 to 3 assailants.. 5?). And you have a rationale for more than 10 rounds.
(Math.. ignore it if you like: For every 5 shots, 2 hit your target. It takes 4 rounds to incapacitate your target. There are 3 targets. How many rounds do you need? Answer: 30)
The other answer:
Large capacity magazines are fun. Why are you being the fun police?
😉
Additional agreement, because it is my property and I have a right to my property whether I need it or not, just like you have a right to your DVD collection of House Wives, whether you need it or not.
This is only round one in what is coming by the way. The next video will address school shootings, it will not be satire, it will neither be anti nor pro gun, it will ask the questions neither side seems interested in.
I appreciate Shak’s open-mindedness toward guns when he’s coming from a pro gun-control background. And we definitely need more practical talk than what both sides like to shout about when they get emotionally charged.
As far as 100-round capacity weapons go, I just don’t understand the fear. 100 round capacity magazines/drums are so incredibly rare to the point that even mentioning them is silly. Having anything over 30 rounds usually requires a drum which makes a gun heavy, awkward and hard to shoot. I had a 60 round drum and couldn’t wait to get rid of the thing after I first used it. There’s a reason why you don’t see giant drum magazines dangling from guns that our military uses. Fearing them is just silly and even bringing them up for a consideration of a ban just shows that someone is uneducated in the subject matter.
If you really break down deaths involving guns it’s primarily suicide, (which laws won’t help either way), and inner city deaths using handguns (which are never up for a gun control debate anyway). The actual instances of “high capacity” “assault weapons” being used in random mass murders are so incredibly rare that your chance dying to a lightning strike or shark attack, or winning the lottery is probably greater.
And when you point out how ridiculously rare random gun deaths are, that is when people bring up the ludicrous argument that “if it even saves one life”, which is where the staircase argument comes in.
I’ve also brought up to my gun-fearing friends how the same thing can be applied to pit-bulls. There are countless stories how kids having been attacked and killed by pit-bull dogs… and no one needs a pit-bull, so why not ban those as well? When the threat of a ban is applied to something that they love, it really changes their viewpoint on government running around banning things that are “dangerous”. Everyone wants someone ELSE’S thing banned, but never their OWN thing. When in reality, we should stop with ALL of the knee-jerk calls for bans whenever tragedy strikes.
The bottom line is that people are horrible at assessing risk, and they see gun deaths as a problem only because the media hypes up stories involving guns. If every story about a staircase death was sensationalized, people would honestly start believing that staircases were a problem.
Tyler you said,
“If you really break down deaths involving guns it’s primarily suicide”
Interesting you should say that, perhaps people think I chose “How to Save a Life” by The Fray just because it fit, it does but there is a message. That song is actually about suicide and the singer is lamenting knowing a person that killed themselves and not being able to help. The story is of that person’s parents giving him an ultimatum, the pain that ensued, the people around that wanted to help him (other students at a performing arts school) but didn’t know what to do. In the end, he was lost.
The singer simply says,
“Where did I go wrong? I lost a friend
Somewhere along in the bitterness
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Had I known how to save a life”
The answer, is being there.
So you say, “”If you really break down deaths involving guns it’s primarily suicide” I say you are right but mass shootings are held up as the reason for gun control.
Yet with very few exceptions all mass shootings end up suicides and when they don’t I think 99% of the time that was the intent but something shifted. The shooter expected suicide by cop and it doesn’t happen. They planned to shoot themselves but couldn’t do it in the end.
So what causes suicide? People think there are many answers but even “logical suicide” such as “let me die, I am terminal with cancer and there is no hope” has one common link to a tragic 16 year old shooting himself or shooting others in a suicide by cop. There is one word that answers all three, it is
Pain.
What we should be asking to solve this real problem is why are our young people in pain? This is phase two of this series. Phase one shows that government can’t fix things but they can make the solution sound good, even if there isn’t a problem.
Phase two shows why no one wants to discuss the real problem, but that will come soon.
I totally agree, and this exact sentiment is why I went from being pro gun control to Government, please get out of my life now.
Because it’s all just a symptom. Laws are just painkillers that don’t address the disease. They’re the pharmaceuticals that make things worse, not better. Because it’s all totally futile until we address the problem, and the problem is our sick, unnatural society. The cure isn’t laws to protect us from ourselves, it’s fostering an environment that makes us better people.
Sorry for being so critical of the gun analogy. I did understand that you were trying to highlight the government overreach problem. My concern was that you used a bad analogy that could be easily discarded by someone who doesn’t already feel the same. Now that you’ve told us that there will be a part 2 that expands on this – the gun analogy makes perfect sense. You had to use something current, something people firmly believe will help, in order to show them firsthand how small, seemingly reasonable, steps like this are what take us down the wrong roads. I’m now really looking forward to part 2!
Pit Bulls! Now there’s a spot on analogy!
I can’t for part 2 as well!
Pit-bulls are a hot topic right now in Oregon (my home state) as there is a proposed pit-bull ban on the table in Medford.
We have got to stop the madness of government intrusion. Just because one person agrees with a particular ban doesn’t mean they are going to agree with the next proposed ban when it bans something that THEY enjoy.
I don’t want to live in a country like Singapore where chewing gum, public hugging, spitting or walking around your own house naked can all get you arrested.
We need a massive backlash against the nanny-state mentality which hopefully brings a lot of people into the libertarian, freedom-minded way of thinking.
After bob costas ran his mouth during the halftime show a couple years ago, my viewers and I sat down and did the world a frieking service.
We banned driving, sharp pencils, water, relationships and about 30 0ther things… you’re welcome everyone for keeping you safe.
http://thedailyprep.com/bob-costas-gun-control-bans/
Hi Jack,
I am late to the 1292 party. I am walking through the store before I go to work for the day, listening to the end of episode 1292. I can help it but I am blubbering like a baby. My youngest son shot and killed himself when he was just 20 years old. This song by the Frey speaks to me every time I hear it.
As much as my heart is truly broken, as much as I would give to have my son back, I absolutely can not blame the gun that ultimately took his life. There is a much deeper problem going on in our society. You are absolutely right! We need to stop suppressing and regulating and use those energies to find the real solution. Thank you for this show.
Toni
My heart aches for your loss. I have never lost a family member to suicide but I have lost in my life two very close friends. It is no secret that my family and I are not close, so my fiends until I met Dorothy were always the closest thing to a family I had. The loss is huge, the “what could I have dones” are overwhelming. Also one of my very best friends lost his son a few years back, he hung himself in his room. He left a note saying he did so, because he simply “never thought he would ever amount to anything”. Yes we have a deep problem in our nation today.
In 1955 a teen could order a gun from the Sears catalog delivered to his front door, there were almost no incidences of guns in schools. Blaming the gun is ignoring the real problems. I am working on the way to explain that next.