[caconym_]

Trucks and guns have a free pass to cause thousands of deaths yearly. It's that simple. Anybody else doing anything that might be viewed by certain hand wringing hysterical persons as dangerous will be smothered in onerous regulation, despite statistics showing relative (or absolute) harmlessness, but trucks and guns will keep on killing.

[Recurecur]

Neither trucks nor guns cause a single death. The people using them may cause deaths.

It also should be pointed out that in many cases, both large vehicles and guns save lives.

There is absolutely no denying that larger vehicles are safer in an accident. Anything to the contrary that you have read is propaganda.

In the case of guns, defensive gun uses have actually stopped a tremendous number of crimes. Those statistics were altered by the FBI to make gun ownership less appealing. Note that many of those uses did not involve firing the firearm.

Please educate yourself before you spread more propaganda.

This has been a public service announcement.

[caconym_]

Trucks and guns pose outsized risks to bystanders, and if you don't agree with that, you are either being grossly disingenuous or you're just extremely stupid. In the case of trucks, you can literally just go read OP's article if you want to learn more about the risks they pose, but I suspect you have no interest in doing so.

However, to help you understand this complex issue more broadly (since you're already here), let me present an analogy. A framing saw is a dangerous tool. It has legitimate uses (e.g. cutting lumber) that may outweigh the risks of having it in your garage, but, critically, that ceases to be true if you don't make an effort to mitigate the risks. If your 5 year old kid gets into the garage and manages to cut his foot off with your framing saw because you left the door unlocked with the saw plugged in, you have fucked up bigtime. That's a risk you could have mitigated, and would have mitigated if you weren't a negligent fuckup, but you are, now your kid has a lifelong disability.

And in this situation, maybe you would say nuh uh, the saw didn't cause the injury, and I'd reply that if you want to frame it that way then no, the saw didn't cause the injury. You caused the injury by failing to recognize and effectively respond to the risk the saw presented.

Similarly, trucks and guns are tools. They obviously have certain legitimate applications whose utility outweighs the risks they pose to bystanders with appropriate mitigations in place. But if society makes no effort to mitigate even the basic obvious risks, innocent bystanders end up being needlessly harmed as a result, via the frivolity, negligence, and sometimes downright malice of others.

This is the situation with trucks and guns in America. We demonstrate no will or capacity to place reasonable restrictions on their availability to and usage by people who really have no legitimate need for them, nor the skill and temperament to use them safely, and as a result people are needlessly hurt and killed by them every day. Some people think this is fine, I guess, but I don't.

[Recurecur]

>Trucks and guns pose outsized risks to bystanders, and if you don't agree with that, you are either being grossly disingenuous or you're just extremely stupid. In the case of trucks, you can literally just go read OP's article if you want to learn more about the risks they pose, but I suspect you have no interest in doing so.

I did read the entire article. One point you may have missed is the same increase in frontal height happened in other countries, but didn’t result in the same increases in pedestrian fatalities. It’s likely that other factors are in play in the USA.

Various tools represent varying levels of risk to bystanders. Every auto or truck is a potentially lethal weapon.

Guns and large vehicles are similar in that both increase the safety of the owner. There’s no downside as long as the owner is responsible. One flaw in the NYT analysis was around the “A column” blind spot. No competent driver will look for pedestrians without moving his head enough to eliminate that blind spot.

There is no denying that large vehicles are safer for their occupants, the statistics are clear. Regardless of whether large trucks and SUVs are in play, the major offenders will remain…those being delivery trucks, busses, and semis.

On a final note, everyone in the USA has the legal right to own firearms for self defense, as it should be. Many in Europe are wishing for the same thing about now…

[caconym_]

> I did read the entire article. One point you may have missed is the same increase in frontal height happened in other countries, but didn’t result in the same increases in pedestrian fatalities. It’s likely that other factors are in play in the USA.

I am not sure where you are getting this in the article, but yes, obviously other factors are in play. Transit engineering, driving culture, and other demographic factors affect the likelihood of a pedestrian collision happening in the first place, as well as vehicle design factors. But once the collision occurs, vehicle speed and vehicle design are the primary factors determining the outcome for the pedestrian. Competent regulators will attack the problem from all sides, and improving vehicle design standards (or at the very least not incentivizing larger vehicles) is low hanging fruit.

> Guns and large vehicles are similar in that both increase the safety of the owner. There’s no downside as long as the owner is responsible.

You could say this about literally anything. I would have no problem with personal nuclear weapons for self defense as long as the owner(s) were responsible.

In practice, we know that the owners of guns and large vehicles have (to a first approximation) the same capacity for irresponsibility as anyone else.

> One flaw in the NYT analysis was around the “A column” blind spot. No competent driver will look for pedestrians without moving his head enough to eliminate that blind spot.

Makes me think you've never tried to negotiate e.g. a busy unsignaled four way stop with protected cycle tracks on three of the four incoming roads, and no raised sidewalks, at night and/or in the rain.

When a driver's attention is split 5+ ways, there is only so much they can do. As above, intersection design takes a lot of the blame in these situations, but making blind spots smaller will always improve safety. As somebody who has been walking, riding, and driving in a mid sized American city for 20+ years, the most frequent type of near-death experience I've had has been crossing the street with the signal and almost getting hit by left-turning cars who didn't see me, in precisely the same kind of situation highlighted in the article.

> There is no denying that large vehicles are safer for their occupants, the statistics are clear.

Nobody is debating this, because it's totally irrelevant here except insofar as it's insane for us to encourage people to insulate themselves from the consequences of collisions while reciprocally increasing the risk for others involved.

I seriously don't understand the mindset that focuses on the safety of occupants of the largest vehicles involved in a collision, especially when the context is pedestrian safety. It's even more frustrating that our regulators seem to have adopted the same mindset.

edit: And the current mix of vehicles we have on the road distorts the safety statistics even more. Is it really surprising that when a Yukon XL collides with a Corolla, the people in the Yukon walk away while the Corolla's occupants get closed casket funerals? Since the protection larger vehicles afford their occupants is dependent on their size and weight, it's not independent of the outcomes for others involved in a collision.