alt Hacker News> guns and cars kill a lot of americans. we've equipped so many americans with so many guns, they are doing a great job at killing each other in peacetime, it will be a slaughterhouse at wartime.
From 2005 to 2025, 730,000-760,000 Americans died from firearms related injuries, including police shootings, gang violence, and accidents, however suicide alone is between 55-60% of those total deaths.
From 2005 to 2025, in Europe, around 1,400,000 Europeans died from heat related deaths. Between 70-80% of that number could have been prevent by having air condition based on data from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
Replies
Idk why this is relevant, is the air condition going to kill people in a civil war?
But I still get baited into a conversation! Note that if you instead of nr of deaths measured 'nr of life-years lost'(relative to average age of death) the magnitude would be flipped, as most of the heath-deaths were old people who died earlier than expected because of heath. These are still preventable deaths, and should not have their importance scoffed at. But at the same time, these stats does get a bit complicated at end-of-life. Its clear (to me at least) that if e.g. (philosophical thought-experiment incoming!) a single doctor is on duty, and has to choose between saving the life of an infant or prolonging the life of someone on palliative care with a day, the choice is clear. And if the doctor did the obvious choice, did she kill the old person? Should this death today be counted as a 'preventable death' which could be prevented if we just had more doctors?
There are many activities we as a society can do to lengthen life expectancy of old people, like creating social gathering spots, exercise groups, or installing more AC in their homes. In most cases you can't attribute any single death or extra day-of-life to any single cause, but you can see statistical differences in death-rate and attribute causes on a population level.
I have noticed that ACs has become part of some culturewar thingy. In reality it is one of many factors influencing life-expectancy, and in some cases it's the most effective solution to increase life-expectancy, but in many cases other things are far more efficient.
I still don't understand why you compare guns with air conditioning, but this might be a relevant point, depending on where you were going with it :P
i don't really know where this air conditioning meme comes from, but if your point is that man made global warming is a greater adversary than any foreign government, and completely impervious to the size of your munitions arsenal, i agree!