Facts matter. So, I’ll start by listing some:
- Auto accidents killed 37,461 in 2016, 90–95% were caused by human error.
- Deaths by firearm totaled 33,636 in 2013. But 21,175 were suicides. Typically, about 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides each year.
- Banning guns can’t stop someone from ending their own life. It also can’t stop a criminal from acquiring a gun, since criminals have a way of not caring about the laws. Which means, in an impossibly-best-case scenario, banning guns could save about 11,000 lives per year.
- Self-driving cars remove human error. If the robots have a 10% error rate, we would have 3700 deaths per year, thus saving over 33,000 lives per year from awful human drivers/murderers.
- This simple math means that banning humans from driving vehicles would save 3x as many lives as banning all guns.
I love math and statistics — They don’t care about opinions.
You don’t like guns? Doesn’t matter. You don’t like self-driving cars? Doesn’t matter.
Data shows truth.
(Yes, I’m aware that data can be, and often is, manipulated to manufacture fear or certain opinions. That happens by cherry-picking data pieces to tell a story, like using the 33,636 gun deaths to try to ban guns without mentioning that 2/3 are suicides — a shameful omission of data by the propaganda machine.)
Do you know what was most shocking to me? The suicides. We need humans to care for each other and our general mental wellbeing.
Many say “we don’t need guns.” That may or may not be true. But, we also don’t need humans poorly operating a 2000+ pound hunk of steel hurtling at 60 miles per hour. Then we start going down a path you may not want travel.
If we’re going to get in the business of having the government tell us which pieces of metal humans can and cannot have (I highly recommend we do not get in that habit), then it’s clear the government must ban human-operated vehicles.
It’s a scientific fact. End of “debate.”