People, please. Nameless is concern trolling. Learn to recognize the signs.

It goes both ways. Nameless has done a whole lot of typing – much more than I have – in the service of boneheaded arguments like this:

Once this all is done, we can talk about the relative risk of semi-automatic guns.

Indeed, no city installs a yield sign before they install a crucial stop sign.

If anyone knows of a similar time series for homicides specifically, let me know.

Wonder contains that information in it’s database – select the injury intent and mechanism, instead of ICD-10 codes.

-the deaths due to smoking and drinking are mostly people doing things to themselves. There is a significant difference in principle between being allowed to do something to oneself and being allowed to do it to other people. Where damage is directly caused to other people, that does tend to be disallowed, does it not? Eg recent bans on smoking in public places.

- relative utility to risk. Yes, deaths due to over-the-counter opiates may be higher than deaths due to guns (although again, the issue of damage to oneself rather than others comes into play), but the general utility of being able to get effective pain relief quickly is, I would venture to suggest, greater than the general utility of owning an AK47.

- damage proportional to numbers. How do the deaths caused by something stack up against the number of people using/abusing that thing? Yes, perhaps there are ten times the number of deaths caused by X than by Y, but if X is used a hundred times more than Y, then Y carries a higher risk of death, yes? How would, say, the risk presenting by a compound bow stack up against the risk presenting by a handgun, by this measure?

- driving faster than Z miles per hour is already banned. Enforcement of a ban is a different issue to the existence of it.

We weigh the number of dead people vs. the intrusion on individual freedom that would be involved in preventing these deaths, and try to err on the side of freedom. By that measure, assault weapons would rank quite low on the list. I already mentioned breathalyzers. Off the top of my head, I can suggest a ban on tobacco (close to 200,000 deaths/year due to lung cancer); a ban on distilled alcohol (1000 deaths/year just because of acute alcohol poisoning, not counting DUI, cirrhosis, etc); speed limiters that prevent passenger cars from going faster than 65 mph; a ban on sales of opioid analgesics direct to customers via pharmacies (12,000 deaths annually due to unintentional overdoses of opioid analgesics; we can mandate that those are manufactured in slow-release formulations and administered directly by a qualified nurse once a day); the list goes on and on. Once this all is done, we can talk about the relative risk of semi-automatic guns. In 2010, 358 homicides nationwide were committed with rifles (this includes assault weapons such as AR-15 / M-16 as well as hunting rifles.)

Since we’re talking about things that produce dead people, let’s take the argument to the extreme. It is uncommon, but sometimes people are murdered with compound bows. A 70# compound bow and a broadhead arrow will kill you quite effectively from 30 yards or more (personally, I’d be more worried about being shot with that than about a handgun.) Using the same logic that is applied to assault rifles, one could say that there’s no convincing reason why people should be allowed to own heavy compound bows (just like with assault rifles, the idea that one could use them for hunting and target practice is not convincing enough), and there were at least two dead bodies attributed to them in the US in the last few years, ergo they should be banned too?

Not enough. There are numerous things in the world which can result in dead people, and we don’t and can’t ban them all.

But we do try to ban an awful lot of them for the very good reason that they produce dead people. So again: this thing produces dead people, why not ban it?