It could have. It was not equally likely to. Again, the fact that only real world example you can come up with produced GOOD results speaks volumes. If this were a real problem, there would be countless stories of cops or others being unable to discharge their weapons.
You are ignoring prominent trainers having observed manipulation failures with their students. If those students fail in training, you think they'll somehow fare better in real life?
Also, process failure is not a problem if an incident just happened to produce good result?
That is some weird logic.
You are conveniently ignoring that LEO also have “astronomically higher likelihood of needing to draw, holster, and do other handling of gun during operations without firing and also administrative handling in non-firing situation.Wow. You really have your thinking all confused on this issue. There are so many things logically wrong with the above it's hard to know where to begin. I'll just try to take them in order.
First, your source is NYPD statistics. Since we're dealing with LEOs, they have astronomically higher likelihoods of needing to actually discharge a firearm than civilians. Are you LE? Are you talking just to LEOs? I thought your comments were for the general gun-owning/gun-carrying community.
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If anything, if equally trained, LEO's chance of accidental discharge is actually higher than average citizen. Because they handle guns more.
The NYPD numbers is to show that even for people who handle guns for a living, it is more prudent to give more weight to fighting efficiency than preventing accident.
Since you are concerned with AD/ND during gun handling, LEO and regular citizen should not only be compared in terms of number of shootings, but in terms of incidents of loaded gun handling and shooting. LEO may get involved in shootings much, but they also handle loaded guns in non-range situations overwhelmingly more also. Regular citizens have less probability of getting in shootings, but they also have very less probability of loaded gun handling out side of range situations.
I never said it was.....
Second, 72 is not the number of times that a NYPD officer would have failed to discharge his weapon if it had a safety.
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No. My contention is that it is flawed to cite some vague statistics to support an over-generalization that gun design choice should be based more on accident than fighting with it....
Your contention is that, some number of those 72 times, the discharge of the weapon would have been delayed/impeded in some way by a safety.
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In other words, you have a problem with my population sample being an active gun users....
Your contention is surely not that the rate of such instances is 100%. So 72 versus 15 is not the comparison.
The comparison for the NYPD is (72 * likelihood of failure/delay to discharge * likelihood of failure/delay having adverse consequence) versus 15.
Now, translate that to a civilian population of similar size (or equivalent number of carry hours or weapon manipulations). The 72 number will be much closer to zero (see below re: defensive gun use rates). And then get reduced from there. There is no way the math is even close.
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It was intentional. Why should I look for data about gun use and draw a conclusion about effectiveness based on people who rarely use it? Your sample population would include, although there would be some enthusiasts, a whole bunch of people who just sticks a gun in the drawer and forget about it. What meaningful conclusion about a manual of arms can be drawn from that sample?
Basing decisions on the basis of the majority who does not ever have to fire, we might as well be carrying starter pistols.
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As for your "million defensive gun use" instances, as I said before, the huge majority of those do not involve discharging the weapon. (That's why defensive gun use is so under-reported and under-counted by the anti-gunners... they don't generally count the times when someone shows a gun and the criminal goes away. Which is, far and away, the most common use.) The actual rate of defensive discharges is far, far, far below that.
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That is what is interesting about the whole basis of your argument.
You seem to be making an argument in support of the thumb lever device, but at the same time, you keep mentioning “majority of those do not involve discharging the weapon” as a support.
If the device is not a problem or a hindrance when it does involve discharging a weapon, then why would the percentage of discharging a weapon per number of incidents even matter?
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