[manicdee]

The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge. This is where people have firearms, are trained in using them, but some circumstance led to the firearm being discharged without intent and injuring or killing someone.

There’s every reason to believe that a country attempting to develop bio weapons may accidentally release that bio weapon against its own people for the same reason: mistakes were made.

It may also be the case that the bio weapon was successfully deployed in the USA months before some unsuspecting American went on their tour of China thinking they will get over that mild flu in the clean air of Wuhan.

The USA health care system is basically designed to ensure that a pandemic will spread as quickly as possible, since the expense of medical care means people will actively avoid seeing a doctor unless they are literally dying.

So engineer a virus that affects wet membranes, limit its symptoms to “mild flu” and you will get maximal transmission even without propaganda suggesting that no action needs to be taken to control the disease because it’s not really that bad.

So in this hypothetical scenario it is not “360 dumb of the CCP” at all. They know how dangerous it is and how to contain it when it inevitably arrives on their shores. They have a vaccine but they won’t use it until a believable amount of time has passed. The future of warfare isn’t drones circling in the skies with guns pointed at the people on the ground.

[wbl]

COVID is a terrible bioweapon. It's fragile, with an outer lipid membrane that has to be preserved. It's not very lethal to people of military age, and spreads readily between people making collateral damage inevitable.

[tremon]

Still, it appears to be very good at disrupting the enemy's economy.

Not that I think it was engineered as a bioweapon, but it does show that bioweapons don't have to be deadly to be effective.

[aerostable_slug]

One of the best bioweapons is Tularemia, and part of that reason is its general lack of lethality. It temporarily renders the exposed population incapable of putting up a good fight, but it kills relatively few. Escape isn't that big a deal (because again, it's not very lethal), and it's easy enough to inoculate one's own troops against the particular flavor being used.

[Lammy]

It was great at making everyone forget about Hong Kong though.

[gavrif]

> The third most common death from firearms in the USA is accidental discharge.

What is the fourth most common death from firearms in the USA?

[kbelder]

I'm not sure what the second would be. The first is presumably "deliberate discharge," and then...?

[gavrif]

Yeah, I just found that statement so weird that I had to reply.

If I had to guess first and second are deliberate suicide and deliberate homicide. But I suspect there's a huge fall from those numbers to what is the third and presumably last rank.

[nradov]

Many of the "accidental discharge" deaths are actually intentional suicides or homicides but the investigators just couldn't prove what happened. And unfortunately it's common for people with no real training to possess firearms.