What you call "sophistry" others might consider "not misrepresenting what research says to fit an agenda." There's value in using precise language to communicate what the numbers actually show.

And I don't even understand how the fact that a gun isn't a guarantee in any way contradicts that it _can_ be used in self defense.

Second, you can just take it from the horse's mouth, since papers give you an abstract stating their findings. An even briefer snippet of what they say themselves there is:

> Those persons with guns in the home were at greater risk than those without guns

> in the home of dying from a homicide in the home. They were also at greater risk

> of dying from a firearm homicide, but risk varied by age and whether the person

> was living with others at the time of death. The risk of dying from a suicide in

> the home was greater for males in homes with guns than for males without guns in

> the home. Persons with guns in the home were also more likely to have died from

> suicide committed with a firearm than from one committed by using a different

> method.

The first half of that regarding homicide says nothing about being killed by your own gun, only about being a homicide victim in your own home. It _could_ and likely does include some of that, but it's not captured or quantified, all we see is total homicide numbers. Nor does it have any statistics about anyone else killed, either outside the home, or someone else killed in your home, so there's no basis for comparison there.

The second half only claims to be true for males in the first place, not everyone. It also explicitly acknowledges that it doesn't deal with the likely confounder of people who don't have a means of suicide in the home committing suicide _outside_ the home, and thus not being included in their numbers.

That article says no such thing, despite people often claiming it does.

I think it's fair to ask that a developer choosing to build a thing that requires that kind of access should be expected to err on the side of transparency.

Both, though I don't know the breakdown. I'm confident saying there's absolutely some people who seem to see onerous regulation as a path to a de facto ban, though.

I'd be more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to those pushing regulations if the regulations themselves seemed well thought out and drafted rather than leaning on kneejerk "guns bad, rules good" reactions from voters to get passed. Unfortunately the actual situation seems to be that left-leaning areas where it's easy to push anti-gun law lean farther and farther into restricting both first and second amendment rights without meaningful impact, while the right-leaning areas that actually could use some additional regulation over the perhaps overly lax federal level laws can't or won't do anything.

Because there is a significant part of the country that would love to ban guns completely but they currently don't, and perhaps won't ever, have quite enough support to make a change to the constitution to allow them to. In the absence of that, and given they do have plenty of support to create local law many places, the strategy seems to have become to create a regulatory regime that technically still allows guns while making it as impractical as possible for anyone to actually do so.

It certainly is, but one side doesn't seem to think so.

I'm really sad this one couldn't be "Slop Direct"

They can certainly be overdone or done poorly, but done well they give a really nice indicator that can account for some combination of context of what's under the pointer to be operated on, any modifiers active, and any ambient state.

https://brickipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Modulex

If I burn a billion tons of someone else's coal to make myself a paperclip (and don't have to breathe the outputs) it works out in my favor too.

I'm not sure anyone intentionally did this, but there were several poor decisions involved. It sounds like the upstream vendor shipped sample code without auth, assuming implementers would know they needed to secure a privileged device management interface, and said implementers just copied the sample and shipped it.