All Lives Matter

I read an article today titled When simply existing is dangerous, everything is a risk. In it, the author talks about her experience helping create a game that puts people in the shoes of a transgender person and shows them all the challenges this entails.

In the article, the author also mentions she is depressed because 81 transgender people were murdered in 2015 across the world.

Well, I have good news! Data collected by the UNDOC places the worldwide number of homicides at 437,000. It is difficult to give a precise total count of transgender people but estimates vary from 0.3% to 0.5% of the total population, that would mean that worldwide the expected murder count for transgender people should be somewhere between 1,311 and 2,185 people killed by year; so transgenders are beating the odds (by a lot!).

With a world population of 7 billion, we can estimate there to be about 21 million transgenders, which, if we go by the number of 81 murders puts the murder rate for transgender people at 0.00038% which we've already shown is lower than the world average. Blacks in the US, on the other hand, have a murder rate of 0.0055% or 14 times higher than transgender people!

Now, if only somebody made a game to put us in the shoes of a black person and all the challenges they have to face.

Oh, that's right. Thanks GTA 5!

The Hateful Gun Control

Last year the United States had almost as many mass shootings as it had days. President Obama has decided he cannot ignore this problem any longer and has called on congress to take our guns.

Fortunately I had a lot of time to think about a solution for this problem while watching The Hateful Eight, since the run-time for the movie feels like 17 hours. In the movie, a couple of bounty hunters and the sheriff of a Wyoming town take shelter from a blizzard in a cabin which is currently inhabited by four other men.

After getting inside the cabin, the group asks the current inhabitants to surrender their guns in the name of safety. This should be our first warning that something is about to go terribly wrong. And true enough, five hours into the movie (about halfway through) somebody poisons the coffee and kills several characters.

At this point I started thinking that obviously the solution would have been to hide some more guns around the cabin and for everyone to open carry their revolvers.

Unfortunately, later on the movie we learn the characters had thought about this already and they had half a dozen guns hidden around the cabin. We also learn they used these guns to kill the previous owners of the cabin. From there things escalate pretty quickly, every single character is killed in rapid succession, mostly by gunshots.

This seems like a powerful blow to the more guns equal more safety; however, people are missing the obvious point: if only one of them had an assault rifle they would have all lived happily ever after. Unless they killed each other with the assault rifle in which case the only solution would have been a tank.

Double-wield for twice the safety