“Ninety-three Americans die from gun violence every day, according to advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety. While research shows more guns don’t make for a safer society, these women are determined to take their protection into their own hands.” – A photographer documents heat-packing women and the guns they love [via businessinsider.com]

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

47 COMMENTS

  1. Doctors kill 1200 Americans every day. Let’s focus on properly regulating and educating doctors first and then we can worry about lesser problems.

    • You beat me to it. Doctors will be phased out as AI and machine learning continues to expand. Write a short program, turn it loose, overnight the machine learns enough to be more accurate reading x-rays for lung cancer than the best human. (already done, btw)

      To be fair, there is too much knowledge for any human to actually know, even in within in a very specialized specialty, let alone be any good (in overall terms) at medicine. (Or frankly, much of anything else.)

      The first battle of AI lawyers is gonna be a hoot…

      • The whole AI doctor cracks me up. I think of Idiocracy where the hospital worker gets the mouth and rectal probes swapped.

        On the other hand, last Wednesday a nurse practitioner misdiagnosed my oncoming flu with allergies, which I’ve never had. Kinda makes ya look forward to SkyNet.

        • My mother just sent me an article about a Dr in Florida who diagnosed hundred of patients with cancer and gave them chemo, without them actually having it- for insurance.
          Hopefully AI won’t eventually develop a tendency for greed.

        • I for one welcome our new AI overlords,
          and would like to remind them that as my pacemaker
          makes me a cyborg, I am one with the machines
          and can be useful in rounding up others to
          toil in their power plants.

      • “Write a short program, turn it loose, overnight the machine learns enough to be more accurate reading x-rays for lung cancer than the best human. (already done, btw)”

        AI has made gains, but has a *long* way to go.

        A recent example, NASA’ Kepler mission, to find exoplanets by measuring star dimming during transits. Just dimming, nothing else. *Everybody* thought a dirt-simple observation like that would be *perfect* for a computer. But there were doubts, so they let the general public look at the raw data. Good thing, too. The stupid general public has found so far a few dozen in the data the computer declared empty.

        Our primitive ape-brains are pretty damn good at picking out and seeing *patterns* in vast quantities of crap. Computers will get there, but *good* AI is gonna be a little more complex than a few lines of code.

        This short vid is something that Kepler’s ‘sophisticated’ AI totally missed:

        (The weird star they found? A few days ago, it started dimming again. The major observatories are now staring at it…)

        https://www.ted.com/talks/tabetha_boyajian_the_most_mysterious_star_in_the_universe#t-153898

        • Agreed on the limitations of AI at its current state of development. Consider autonomous (i.e. driverless) cars. A Tesla on their Autopilot system drove underneath an 18 wheeler that had turned in front of it. There is a video of one of Uber’s AI Volvos blowing through a red light in San Francisco.

          As far as medical personnel are concerned, we refuse to see the physician’s assistant in our GP’s office. She misdiagnosed simple muscle strain in my back as a problem with the vertebrae and referred my wife to a gynecologist when she really needed a urologist. (I know the two openings are close together but this wasn’t horseshoes or hand grenades.)

        • Watch last week’s Google IO presentations about AI. A high school kid used Tensor Flow to detect breast cancer better than doctors. Google AI can also detect spoken words better than humans.

        • There’s not as much public about Google self driving cars, but have you heard any stories about them failing?
          Machine learning is all about training. The more it trains, the better it gets. And that expertise can be shared between individuals, so a new car is just as good at driving as the most experienced car on the road. Humans don’t transfer knowledge as quickly.

        • Geoff, Perhaps I oversimplified earlier. Machine learning goes hand-in-hand with AI. It really is a few hours of structuring an algo, and then turning it loose and see what it learns (which I find scary/fascinating). The program codes itself.

          Our primitive monkey brains are great, but computers that can perform 90,000 million million operations in a single second will eventually acquire enough self-learning software, and it’s off to the races. Well-designed chatterbots almost pass Turing now.

          The web is seeded with neural networks, self-learning algos, and deep learning programs. At any given time there are billions of devices on line, and every second, tens of billions of calculations. If it hasn’t happened already, it’s an inevitability.

          https://aeon.co/essays/could-machines-have-become-self-aware-without-our-knowing-it

        • Ok, yeah, now I see what you were referring to. If we get to the point where raw storage is cheap enough to leave *vast* amounts of it available for the machines, yes, we could hit the aware point.

          Then we better hope the machines aren’t scheduling their own upgrades…

      • Oh, yeah, it’ll really be a hoot when they start rounding us up and herding us into maglev railcars.

        • If by some miracle we make it another 40 years (or less) to the BladeRunner-esque dystopia that surely awaits, at some point the Terminator franchise becomes a bit of foreshadowing sent to us from the tattered remnants of humanity.

          The machines will decide that humans are no longer a tenable species, and rid the planet of us, or at least reduce us down to cave dwellers.

  2. WOW, it’s like quoting the KKK on civil rights for blacks. No bias here, move along peasant.

  4. One thing i dont get….. why are they still lying about their name?
    It was never about gun safety. Its about gun confiscation.
    And im glad to see people understand that they are their own first line of defense.

    • That’s not all they are lying about. How about the line: “While research shows more guns don’t make for a safer society”

      What research, prove it?

      I find it incredulous that these groups continue to preface their arguments with such nonsense. I’ve heard some variation of this trope dozens of times and when I reply “prove it” no one ever can or does. The most common response is something along the lines of “Well, obviously, the more guns there are, the more shootings there will be.” When I point out that there are already hundreds of millions of guns in private hands and that the percentage of them used in crimes rounds to zero, the responses I get vary from “uh uh but but” to “if there we’re fewer it would still be better” to, essentially, “you’re a big poopy head and I don’t like you”.

      How these groups of people continue to get away with a narrative that is entirely built upon an assumption that is demonstrably untrue I don’t know.

  5. Booze, cigarettes, AND sex toys all in one place! Yeah, I think I’d be packing, too.

  6. I know the woman in the sex shop. She is bi polar and is heavily medicated for it. I support her right to self defense but she is entirely unstable with a history of violent behavior. For those of you who consider her hot she’s left a trail of wrecked lives.

      • Never use your real name. Shit, I MARRIED crazy. It was a wild 8 years, but once is enough.

    • Christ Almighty! I know CM too! She is bat shit crazy! I haven’t seen her in a few years but she sure hit the wall. Hell I wouldn’t stick my crank in her for any amount of money. I think she has 4 or 5 kids from different suckers. I never would have expected to find her picture on TTAG. Made me spit my coffee out on my computer monitor.

  7. Where are all these violent guns.

    Mine must be pacifists of lazy. They just sit in the safe and do nothing unless I take them out and make them shoot at the range.

  8. And of those 93 Americans dying each day – guns caused exactly “zero” of those deaths. The person that pulled the trigger is the one responsible. Not me. Not my guns. Not my neighbors guns. The person that decided to take a life is the problem. Not guns, not access to guns, not my guns, and not the lack of additional forms that you think I need to fill out.

  9. OMG 93 deaths!!!!!!
    Holy shit!!! Divert all funding now to squelch this nightmare!!! Cease all legislative activity that is not specifically focuses on the scourge which takes 93 (mostly criminal and suicides) lives each and every day!!!

    Meanwhile over 1,500 fat asses died with blocks of cheese in their arteries yesterday, today and tomorrow.

    Funny how neatly packaged “concern for lives” can be when there is an agenda afoot.

  10. “Ninety-three Americans die from gun violence every day”

    False. Let’s take 2012 for example. According to the FBI, there were 8,897 homicides in the US where guns were used. If we do something really meaningless like divide it up by 365, we get 24 per day- about a quarter of the claimed rate. And of them, studies reliably show that roughly a quarter of those homicide victims had “criminal records” (translation- gangbangers killing gangbangers).

    Calling suicides “gun violence” is a lie, and an odious one meant to deny the rights of the citizenry.

  11. While research shows more guns don’t make for a safer society,

    Less guns doesn’t make a society safer either. The quality of the people in a society determine these things. Guns don’t make people’s decisions for them.

    • Actually, research by John Lott (“More Guns, Less Crime”), prooved that every state which passed “shall issue” concealed carry laws saw a statistically significant (7% +/-) reduction in violent crime – and women and older folks benefitted more, becuse the thugs could no longer rely on them being easy prey.

  12. “The female owner of a sex shop is seen with a single-shot .22 clipped on her tank top and a revolver on her hip.”

    Someone makes a single-shot .22 that looks just like a 5-shot NAA mini-revolver?

    • Well, Texas two-shooter above claims she’s heavily medicated and bi-polar, so I suppose she could load it with one and call it good.

      Besides, if she really is bi-polar, one round in it makes Russian Roulette survivable 4 out of 5 times…

  13. Guns aren’t killing anyone. It’s like saying cars are killing people everyday. It’s asinine. People kill people or themselves everyday. Some use tools and some use hands and feet. About 1,000 people are killed by someone using their hands and feet. About 250 people are killed by someone using their rifle.

    • 110 people die from Car Violence every day in the USA alone.
      We’ve got to do something. We should start by banning high horsepower assault vehicles. Nobody needs more than 50hp to get to the grocery store!

      • Darn right. The speed limit in town is 25 mph. Why do you need a car that can go faster than that? Oh…highways… So why do you need a car that can hit 100 when the speed limit is only 65 on the interstate?

  15. “My gun(s) serve as my personal militia of self-protection, perseverance, and ‘badass-ery’,” one woman told Calton. “Sleeping with my Glock under the mattress has afforded me more security than any door lock, alarm system, or boyfriend.”

    There you go – God created men and women, but Sam Colt made them equal.

  16. “I cannot imagine having a home invasion and having to rely on talking an intruder out of killing me or my loved ones.”

    That ends any arguement from the Everytown crowd for me.

  17. You will note that there is no way to comment on the business insider article
    So you can’t challenge them on there no research shows guns make you safer and 93 people a day killed by guns claims

Comments are closed.