pop quiz

What is this?

Give up?

That would be me stealing borrowing a damned good idea and running with it.

It probably goes without saying, but I am a firm proponent of graphics making things easier for people to understand. In this particular case, Bob S. had an outstanding idea, but I just wanted to make it more-easily copy-paste-able for future use.

Given that the last solid datapoint indicates there were 44 million firearm owners in 1994, I, personally, find Bob S.’ estimate of 50,000,000 firearm owners today to be a little low (as he already admits), but it provides us a nice, round number to play with, so we will accept it and move on. Taking the square root of that number gives us approximately 7071 – as such, the large blue field is a square of 7071 pixels by 7071 pixels, with each pixel representing a single, solitary firearm owner (at full size, of course). See if you can find yourself.

Using a slightly different subset of data at Bob S.’ sources, we find that 385,178 violent crimes were committed in 2007 with the assistance of a firearm – a slightly larger number than he copy-pasted from he same exact source, but it gives the anti-rights nuts the benefit of the doubt, and I just love doing that, precisely because it exposes how ludicrous their arguments are. The square root of that particular number is approximately 621, creating the 621×621 pixel red box at the lower-right corner of the blue field. Again, every single pixel represents a single violent crime committed with the assistance of a firearm.

Just like him, we are going to assume that each violent crime was committed by a separate and distinct firearm owner (i.e. no one person committed more than one violent crime) – again, as he admits, this is flawed reasoning, but it continues to tilt the scales in the favor of the anti-rights nuts.

As such, examine the full-size version of the image. In the context of the “stopping crime” argument, the anti-rights nuts of America (and the world in general) are attempting to restrict, regulate, control, limit, abridge, infringe, and generally destroy the rights of all of the individuals represented by the blue field, based on the actions of the individuals represented by the red box. Does that make a lick of sense to you?

Moving on, what do you figure this is?

Same 7071×7071 blue field, but now with a small yellow box, and a smaller orange box. Hm. Said yellow box is 265×265 pixels, and said orange box is 177 pixels square. Give up again?

In short, that is me putting the “public safety” argument in perspective. The yellow box represents all firearm-related non-fatal injuries, and the orange box represents all firearm-related fatalities; in both cases, all intents are included, which means “unintentional”, “assault/homicide”, “legal intervention”, and “suicide/self-harm” all are counted amongst their pixels. Once again, we are going to assume that any single firearm-owner can only be involved in just one fatality or injury, just to give the anti-rights nuts the slight edge.

Once again, in the context of the “public safety” argument, the anti-rights nuts of America (and the world in general) are attempting to restrict, regulate, control, limit, abridge, infringe, and generally destroy the rights of all of the individuals represented by the blue field, based on the actions of the individuals represented by the yellow and orange boxes. Does that make a lick of sense to you?

To make things a little clearer, here are some text-bedecked versions of the above images (all are click-to-embiggenate):

In the end, all of this pretty-picture-making is somewhat pointless – my rights are not subject to anyone’s interpretations of any statistics or historical trends. However, the old rejoinder of, “49,999,915 firearm owners did not shoot anyone yesterday,” now has some impressively simple (or simply impressive) graphics to back it up.