OK, as for the title, yeah, I'll take the "Duh" looks from everybody. When your eyes return from their little roll, maybe you'll find this interesting.
The discussion of background checks on immigrants in the Senate Judiciary Committee has given me some head-spinning at the blight-wing opinions on the utility of said checks.
With respect to gun control, or rather, death control measures, the blight insists that background don't work and confirmed that opinion by mustering up 42 votes to block a vote on the bill that would implement universal background checks. Keep in mind that the background checks would be in place to protect against incidents coming from a population of authorized foreign entries that consist of about 1,000,000 per year receiving permanent resident status, 6.6 million non-immigration visas and 480,000 immigration visas, for a total of about 8 million people per year coming from someplace else to the US for a variety of reasons. Blight-wingers wish to stiffen background checks in these cases to protect against episodes that have a probability of killing American that is comparable to that of lightning strikes.
Stay with me below the do-hickey.
Now on the death-by-firearm side, however, these same blight-wingers say that background checks don't work. Despite being counter-factual, the probabilities don't add up either. Astoundingly, there were something over 17 MILLION background checks actually performed in this country in pursuit of gun purchases. In this total, there were about 1 million applications denied. 1 in 17 is a pretty high number, but the incidence of death associated with the use of guns is around 30,000 per year, half self-inflicted, with a 7 times greater probability of killing someone you know than someone you don't.
So, after all these numbers, let me get this straight:
We need to do better background checks to prevent episodes that kill fewer Americans each year than lightning strikes, but we need to reduce background checks for episodes that kill 30,000 each year.
Play the to the mob, blight-wing, play to the mob.
Let's do this. When a blight-winger gets an infection of some sort, let's prohibit checking to see if there actually is an infection, because that they'd believe that check is probably ineffective to cure the disease. Let's prescribe, say, nothing to cure the disease.
What the heck. They can't recognize that gun deaths and injuries are a public health issue, anyway.