483
Wow, we really need to educate people on safety and strictly license usage based on examination and proven ability.
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
483 points (94.3% liked)
Mildly Infuriating
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Amazing.
The Chicago metropolitan area has about one and a half times the population of denmark and five times the traffic fatalities.
(And 150 times the gun murders, but it's kind of a given that the US is completely whack on that compared to the rest of the western world)
You should really look into both.
They don't have 50+ hours of mandatory training before hitting the roads like we do. In some states you can practically just go to an exam and luck out.
Their perception of freedom is messed up and literally causing huge amounts of unnecessary deaths.
If guns are so alike to cars, why not require a license that you get by passing a written test on gun safety and a practical test on basic competence and safe usage?
They are not alike. It’s a dumb comparison. Transport (albeit flawed) brings many more advantages than shooting people. That’s why people accept cars more than guns.
I agree it was a dumb comparison to start off with.
I wasn't the one who made it, but the license issue is the logical conclusion if OP insists on the comparison.
America has ~280M cars, and ~500M guns
Americans, at least, are very accepting of guns. There's a reason the fatality rate is so high
Sorry let me clear that up. I meant people are more accepting of the deaths that cars cause compared to guns
And yet a drivers license requires a lot more than a gun.
Driver's license requirements honestly should be much higher
I'm a European and in my country driving tests are really hard and it takes a lot of very motivated people 3 or more tries and the better part of a year of frequent training to get a license. When I hear Americans talking about their driving test, most of them didn't even get on the road and did the test on a separate test terrain. All they need is knowing what a traffic sign is and being nearly able to use their highly automated car. The difference in required knowledge and ability is staggering.
Add to that the tendency to drive huge and heavy SUV 's and trucks that are highly dangerous to other road users and you get an extremely deadly situation.
I agree. But a gun license should be harder too.
This is especially surprising to me because Chicago is one of the few US cities with decent public transportation, so there's a significant percentage of people that aren't driving.
Vehicle fatalities are generally far higher than gun fatalities in the US. For decades it was the #1 cause of death under 45, only recently being dethroned to poisonings thanks to fentanyl
For Chicago, this is brought down by very low car ownership rate (by US standards), and a high gun fatality rate (including suicides by gun)
Still surprising guns have kept up though
One of these things is purpose-built for the deliberate infliction of harm. The other is vastly more popular and merely causes harm through negligence.
Sort of like the American political parties, I guess
That is a pretty high number of shootings then. Practically everyone drives so that is a lot of miles/person. You have to drive, you don't have to be shot, that is why it draws media attention.
Chicago is pretty different to most of the US. There is actual reliable public transit. The average resident isn't doing nearly the driving of the average American
Traffic engineers use decades-old manuals that ignore safety in favour of driver convenience. This has to change. Streets built by them are a huge public safety issue.
We should never accept crashes that result in serious injuries or deaths as if they are an inevitable force of nature or something. They're merely a predictable outcome of a badly built system.
You need three prongs, infrastructure, training and enforcement. No one wants to spend the large amount of $ it would take to redesign thousands of miles of roads in each city. There is also the issue of how ridiculously low the bar is set for getting a license and how basic safety inspections are. In my state I can count on one hand how many times I've seen highway patrols enforcing traffic laws.
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I guess it's because one of these things is a widely used tool, a requirement for work / living in the USA and gives people freedom.
The other is just car.
Given the strong correlation between these two, I hypothesise that in Chicago, cars rather than bullets are shot from guns.
Car guns. Fully automatic.
This doesn’t super surprise me. Driving should be taken more seriously. You’re controlling a 2 ton death machine and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.
We should be retaking driver tests every seven to ten years to keep our license.
Poorly designed roads, signage, and intersections cause a lot of accidents. Think on ramps that throw you into traffic, and off-ramps that want you to get over three lanes after exiting in order to turn right at your cross street.
Lack of traffic enforcement drives up insurance costs and reduces city revenues. Some states have cheaped out on the reflective paint used to stripe roads, so you can’t see lane dividers in the rain. More of that wonderful “deregulation” and people not wanting to pay taxes I guess.
It also doesn’t help that many states are getting rid of car inspections for some bizarre reason. Not great to avoid shit falling off of the car in front of you when you’re going 70 mph.
The deregulation & lack of inspections is probably so that the people don’t have as many legitimate reasons to demand higher pay.
We need certified driving and accident avoidance systems and local vehicle to vehicle communication to facilitate lane changes, also certified. All systems independent, acting with consensus.
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In absolute numbers.
How many users? How many per people?
Why does the absolute number matter? Why does the rate matter?
The claim is that cars and guns are equally deadly in Chicago, with the observation that gun deaths are reported more.
If this is 3 people or 30 thousand people, the critique is the same.
If this is 1 in 10 million people or 1 in 10 people, the critique is the same.
Cars are not designed to inflict harm. This cheap false equivalence tells us a lot.
Right. I can't ride my gun to work or the grocery store. I get that there's a lot of negatives associated with car culture, but it's a tool in a way that firearms are not.
Common misconception. You actually can ride your gun to work, but you really have to shove it in here. My advice is use more lube
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Yeah, cars aren't even designed to kill people and they still do it just as much as guns. They're way too dangerous to be legal.
That doesnt make any sense. Since card have other purposes than killing they can be legal.
Since guns only exist to kill they should not be legal. But it is a fight against wind mills since americans love their ability to kill who they want more than they love their kids.
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Road deaths are typically viewed as a risk we take while going about our day, while firearm deaths are either an intentional act, or someone doing something very stupid.
How many people drive a car daily in this area?
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Driving is orders of magnitude more likely to kill you at any second you're in a car, than flying is at any second you're in a plane.
People who are terrified of flying will get in a car and drive like a monkey like it's no big deal.
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Neither of these topics should even be drawing media attention, considering how frequent and non-notable they are. They just report on this stuff every day because it's cheaper and easier than exclusively finding and reporting on real notable local news, and television news needs filler content for selling ad spots. Ever had a day where there was no news, and they ended early?
Craah = Probably unintended
Shootings = Probably very intended
Besides. There are loads of local crash/emergency reports in the local newspaper.
Dumb question: which one draws more media attention in Chicago?
In my own experience (not Chicago), the local news is dominated by where the rush-hour crash is today, while national news talks way more about gun deaths.
I'm going to go with the general vibe of Lemmy here and assume you mean that auto deaths need to get more attention in America. To that I would say there is a general cultural attitude that cars are a necessary evil (even among most people who don't outright love them, which is a huge demographic), and fixing the zoning and infrastructure would take decades and many tens of billions of dollars to restructure a large city around public transit. Besides bumper-sticker-slogan politics ("more public transit!") there are precious few real, concrete plans for getting from the current situation to the car-free utopia.
Even then, you'd not eliminate cars entirely. Among the more developed western European nations that are known for good public transit, Ireland seems (at a quick glance) to have the fewest cars per person at 536 per 1,000, while the car-happy US has 850/1,000. So best case, you reduce cars by ~35%.
Gun deaths, on the other hand, are easier to imagine as a problem that can be solved relatively quickly and with less disruption. From an advocacy point of view, it's the lower-hanging fruit.
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