At 08:05 PM 6/6/99 EDT, QueeneMUSE@aol.com wrote:
>In a message dated 6/6/99 4:00:43 PM, EVMick wrote:
>
>>Something to the effect that the media only reports the unusual ...if it's
>>commonplace it isn't news so it's not reported..
>
>Nobody put that thing about my nephew killing a neighbor boy accidentally on
>the news..
Of course not. Thousands of fatal accidents happen every day, and most due to ignorance or carelessness. Accidentally shooting someone is a combination of the two and not worth reporting.
*Nothing* is safe as long as ignorance and carelessness abound; fix these and you've solved the problem. Deaths due to pathological individuals are negligible when compared to deaths caused by ignorance and carelessness. In this light, pretending that violent individuals are a major threat in the bigger picture is ridiculous, particularly if you discount state sponsored killing. Saying that violent people having guns is a major contributing factor is even more ridiculous, since only a small fraction of murders are commited with guns in the U.S. despite cheap availability on the black market.
Perhaps intentional gun killings are news because they are (statistically) an extremely unusual way to die for the average citizen. If you discount violent criminals killing each other (e.g. drug cartels), the odds of you being murdered with a gun are vanishingly small.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com