I have a slight amount of pity for responsible owners of assault firearms. Most do the right thing, and they enjoy shooting them at the range.
So what would you do if (hypothetically) your audio hobby could cause this level of potential harm?
Would you be like that guy who’s sawed his AR15 in half?
Thoughts?
Why would you pity that many gun owners for the actions of such a small number of deranged people?
49 people died from dog attacks last year. More than 520 people have died in auto racing in the past 25 years. One air show crash killed 77 and injured more than 500, in 2002.
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/air-show-disasters-5-deadliest-in-history-1.3201822
Here's a link with some stats- it's not hobbyists who are killing in great numbers/gun owner, it's a lot of cumulative injuries and deaths, caused by access to firearms that shouldn't have been accessible.
https://www.thetrace.org/rounds/gun-deaths-increase-2017/
How many people die because of carjacking and the ensuing chases? How many die because of gang activity? How many die when they pulled a gun or fired on Police officers? From the following link, "As reported by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, 106,727 fatal crashes – 55.7 percent of the total – during a recent four-year period involved drivers who committed one or more aggressive driving actions."
https://www.kraftlaw.com/accidents-lawyer/car-accidents/causes-car-accidents/car-accidents-caused-aggressive-driving/
Adam Lanz's mother bought guns for him and didn't make them unavailable most of the time, leading to her death and the deaths at Sandy Hook. Nikolas Cruz had guns and when the people who housed him a the end found out about them, the husband stopped on the way home to buy a gun safe, but didn't make sure he was the one with the keys (even said he didn't know Cruz had a key).
Stephen Paddock had been out of touch with family members and was described as disliking interactions with people.
Then, there are the ones who are shot while "cleaning their gun". You can't clean a loaded weapon- some disassembly is required. If they do accidentally shoot themselves, it's either not an accident, careless handling or they don't know enough about guns to be the responsible party.
I saw a news story from Phoenix, about a program for handing out clean needles and supplies to addicts- the reporter was there as this "pop up" event occurred and said that out of 93 people who showed up, only two were homeless- the rest drove up, many in expensive cars and most were young-ish, well-dressed women whose common mode of becoming addicted was through prescription pain meds. More than 65K people died last year from Opiates but people aren't as outraged by that. My neighborhood lost two young adults in about 1-1/2 years and I know the father of one and the other lived two houses from me.
People are very unhappy, for many reasons. If they weren't, they wouldn't need to medicate themselves or do something drastic.