But you know, if one was going to let statistical probabilities or improbabilities dictate one's daily actions, I submit most of us would rarely willingly get on our local arterial roadways and certainly would never get on our local interstate highways in our motor vehicles.
And this seems to be the fundamental disconnect.
We DO go out on our roadways. We DO run chainsaws, climb ladders, go swimming, ride horseback or motorcycles, we eat cheeseburgers, some of us even still smoke or dip. We do these things. We don't even give them, generally speaking, the worry that is rightfully due them -- don't take on the much heavier levels of precaution they almost certainly warrant -- because we innately believe that these problems won't happen to us, or that we'll probably survive if we do have a problem so wearing that driving helmet, or using fall-arrest gear, or whatever else we
could do to better our odds of survival just aren't worth the hassle.
And yet, when we're faced with a risk with odds that are thousands, or tens of thousands LESS likely than any of those things, we decide we really need to
do something, like putting a rifle and ammo in our cars and telling ourselves that this could be useful to stand against the (incredibly over-hyped) risk of mass shooters or terrorists.
It's NOT a proportionate reaction. We claim to be the logical ones. Claim to have the lock on rationality. Claim that the suburbanites who wander through their days unarmed and unaware are the idiots. But we're reacting in a way that makes less statistical sense.
Why? Because we WANT to. We enjoy guns, love rifles, love being near them. We love the thought of each of us as a rifleman. We rather openly enjoy the thrill of being the defender, always at the ready, always facing the danger that's ever present. It's a huge part of our self-identity. Without an enemy at the gates that we can stand up and defend against, we aren't quite so humbly heroic. Fortunately, that's just fine. No harm in it. Carry a rifle in your truck if you WANT to and especially if it's occasionally useful for keeping coyotes out of the pasture. But we should be careful not to breathe in our own fumes to the extent that we believe things that aren't actually true.
And even Sam noted in one post that one of his favorite sayings reflected that it's not the odds, but the stakes ... yet he continued to spout his beloved statistics.
"My" beloved statistics? Laff. They aren't "MY" statistics. They're YOURS, too. They're just the record of history. You can pretend they don't exist, but all they are is a tally of what
happened. You can decide to think about what happened and how it is proportionately represented in our society, or you can decide not to look and to make decisions about your life from a position of ignorance.
And you're misquoting me -- and several others in this thread. It's the odds AND the stakes that determine risk and response. Understanding the stakes alone aren't worth anything. Otherwise, you'd have to live in a bunker because, if a passing jetliner was to crash into your house, the stakes would be catastrophic. But you don't -- because the odds say those stakes aren't really realistically on the table. Possible, not zero chance, but very, very low odds.
Ha ha -- though I guess if I went on a fallout bunker enthusiasts forum and said that I'd probably be hounded for daring to say that being squashed by a falling airliner is not a serious risk, and reviled for not being true to the cause! LOL!
I really told myself I wasn't gonna revisit this thread (particularly after Sam1911 termed one of my posts "pathetic" and later implied I made a cowardly statement ...
I just feel that continually hammering on the concept that statistics render carrying a high-capacity handgun on person or a rifle in the trunk "useless" or statistically unsupportable goes a long way in supported the arguments that the anti-gun faction continues to put forth. Didn't think I'd ever see guys making these arguments in a "pro-gun" internet forum ...
One more time: We can be honest or we can lie. We can be informed, or we can
choose to remain ignorant. We can understand the mathematics of what has happened in our society or we can decide to believe unfounded things and tell ourselves tales that (now we know) really aren't true.
Your statement here is, bluntly put, LIE. Don't tell the truth. Don't say factual things out loud because (you think) they are politically inconvenient. Keep telling ourselves we NEED a rifle in the trunk. Keep telling people that we're under serious threat of attack and we must be heavily armed and ready to run to our cars to grab our rifles and engage the forces of evil in battle. Because (apparently) the 2nd Amendment needs lots of us to be dying in the streets in order to be valid and defensible. If we admit we're really living in a pretty peaceful time and place in the world, the 2nd Amendment will dry up and blow away.
That's just not in my nature to do. And I don't see it as necessary. The 2nd Amendment does not require us to be murdered in large numbers in order to prove its worth. It doesn't depend on high death or crime rates to be valid. It doesn't require us to obscure facts or mislead ourselves or each other.