Sam1911, you have made some arguments that are spurious.
Excuse me? "Spurious" means I'm being deceitful, fake or false. I assume you do not actually mean to accuse me of that.
First of all, mathematically and statistically speaking, there is a huge difference between zero and a number approaching zero.
That depends on your definition of "huge." (Maybe you really simply meant "
important." Even the word, "
significant" would be inapt because the concept of statistical significance DOES say that these small, tiny, very low likelihood events become not informative.)
When you consider how, or whether, to react to a possibility, you look at how likely that thing is to happen. Very, very, very few things in life have a TRULY zero probability of happening. If you drive past a tower crane set up in a city, you may be killed when it falls on you. (It happens. The videos of it happening are alarming.) The chance is not zero. But it is close to zero. You may think about it. You probably don't. You drive right on by because the odds are so low that you treat them as zero. If you go for a drive you may drive on a bridge, crash, go over the rails, and end up in a deep, rushing river. It happens. You may have a very real need for a life preserver. But you don't put one in the car. Why? Because the odds, though real, are close enough to zero that you treat them AS zero. I could name hundreds more, as could you, I'm sure.
Also, there are other things that are so unlikely to die from, less than terrorist attacks or mass shooters, that we still do things to try to bring that number down even lower. For example, dying in a commercial airline crash (exclusive of terrorist attacks, since that's what we are comparing to) is much lower probability than almost anything else we do. Yet the FAA, airplane makers, airlines and passengers all continue to make it even lower. Commercial Nuclear power accidents have NEVER killed a single person in this country, and the best statistical analyses are that one won't happen in tens of thousands of years, yet the government, industry and workers continue to make them safer.
Of course they do. That doesn't counter my points here, at all. For several reasons. Exactly how and why those industries continue to work to make things safer has a variety of reasons, not simply based on whether human life has been lost, which would be irrelevant to a discussion of a citizen's preparations for a mass shooter.
Second, the fact that those industries "still do
things" to make their activities safe is not particularly similar to an argument that keeping a secondary handgun or a rifle in your vehicle DOES, or is likely to, make any person safer in the event of a mass shooting or terrorist attack. There are long lists of things those agencies and companies figure out to do which all contribute to the safety of their enterprises. They do the most important, useful, likely to be broadly effective ones first, and keep going down the list until they reach some point of diminishing returns where the money expended to do a thing isn't commensurate to the actual risk level they'd be countering. Member luzyfuerza posted a great example of just such a thing a couple pages back.
We can go back over the possible use cases for "truck gun/trunk gun" if you want, but I don't think this contention supports it.
Finally, have you heard the commercials for investments that have the disclaimer about past performance being no guarantee of future performance?
Of course. The biggest thing we have to go on is what has happened before. Statistics. We might predict -- or might
theorize-- what could happen in the future, but reacting to what MIGHT happen in the future -- if it is to be very different from what has happened in the past -- is a totally different discussion. One that wouldn't have much of a statistical or scientific element since it is based so heavily on guessing, fears, and imagination. Prediction is a flawed affair. More often wrong than right. Nevertheless, we aren't really discussing what to do if the picture vastly changes in the future, but instead, what are we going to do in light of how things ARE.
A simple doubling of frequency can make a very small number get very large very quickly.
Not exactly so. As I've pointed out in a number of my posts in this thread, a simple doubling of the frequency of mass shootings or terrorist attack would make no statistical difference at all. In fact, I've said that if I'm off on my math (or the evil actors increase their efforts) by a factor of 10x, 100x, or even 1,000x, the practical likelihood of any of us being a victim of their attacks really doesn't increase. The numbers are just SOooooo small that doubling them doesn't make a practical difference.
I don't know what number you'd consider to be "very large" but let's say the rate of homicide in the US is such a "very large" number. (It's about 15,500 per year.) To specifically answer your assertion here, the rate of mass shootings would have to double, then double, then double again, then again, then again ... and keep on doubling until
the rate had gone through ten doublings to hit that very large number.
I don't know what eventualities you're foreseeing, but there seems to be very little reason to expect the rate of any of these killings to double -- at all -- let alone for that doubled rate to double again, and then again...etc.
).
