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Popping the filter bubble and the sanctity of life.
This Tuesday I was presented with a piece of Trivia that brought me up short.
My initial reaction was to quite literally exclaim "bullshit!" but having looked into it, there does appear to be a case. According to the Sixth Annual Report on Medical Assistance in Dying in Canada (which is currently the most recent report available) Canadian doctors euthanized 16,499 individuals in 2024, an increase of 7.5% over the 15,343 euthanized in 2023. Meanwhile The Trace a website maintained by the Gun Control advocacy organization Everytown USA maintains that there were 14,651 instances of Homicide by Gunshot in 2025. While this number does not include self-inflicted gunshots (IE Suicides) it does include an estimated 1,200 cases where the shooting was likely justified (IE suspects being shot by police or by would-be victims) and at least 2 instances of execution by firing squad.
Upon review of those numbers and their associated trend-lines where instances of euthanasia in Canada have increased with each consecutive year since it was legalized, while homicide in the US has been trending downward for the last 5 years from it's Pandemic-era peak it actually seems likely to me that more people are killed by doctors in Canada than are killed by guns in the US. Not "per capita" but by raw quantity (16 thousand people and change versus 14 thousand and change).
Considering the above in the context of another story that came across my feed a couple weeks ago. A Ghoulish Proposal Gets a Prestige Endorsement, it seems to me that there is a concerted effort on the part of certain factions to commodify and devalue Human life. See this story from the New York Times last year Organ Donors are too Rare we Need a New Definition of Death. I expect the media to assure me that that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy announcing that the Network for Hope (an organ procurement non-profit serving Kentucky, Indiana, and Ohio) having had their certification revoked on the basis of credible claims that many donors were not legally dead at the time their organs were harvested is completely unrelated.
On a slightly different track, back when Harris was running for president there was this "ridiculous claim" that the Left wanted to legalize Abortion up to the moment of crowning, but just this Monday, Massachusetts became the 10th state in the union to do just that.
As in my prior "Popping filter bubbles" posts I don't feel like any of these things really warrant a post on their own, but when taken together they illustrate a trend, and I find myself lacking the vocabulary to describe my growing sense of unease with where this one seems to be going.
Disingenuous argument. So you are concerned about people killing themselves but only if they do it using a doctor?
It's not an argument it was a question at my local haunt's trivia night. What kills more people per year?
A) Gun violence in the US.
B) Doctors in Canada.
C) Traffic accidents in Germany.
And as i said, my initial reaction was to quite literally exclaim "bullshit!" when the presenter told us the answer was 'B'.
And the numbers on the card are all dubious.
A) Does "gun violence" count suicides or not? Gun suicides are the majority of fatal shootings in America. If suicides count as violent, the number on the card is about a factor of 3 too low.
B) Doctors in Canada (and everyone else) kill far more people through medical errors than they do through MAID, it is just that we don't have a reliable count. So the number on the card is an order of magnitude too low.
C) Most car crashes are not accidents, but result from someone making a deliberate decision to violate a traffic law, or at least culpable negligence. Assuming they used the headline number for fatal car crashes, the number on the card is an order of magnitude too high.
The number for "gun violence" does not include self inflicted shootings as i already explained in the OP. Additionally you do understand that Canadian doctors killing an unknown number of people by accident in addition to the number they kill on purpose would increase rather than decrease the total number of people killed don't you?
Point being that when i say i was surprised to find out that the number for 'B' was larger than the number for 'A', saying the number for 'B' might be even larger than reported is not a rebuttal.
I'm not challenging the claim that doctors kill more people than guns - I'm challenging whether this made sense as a trivia question.
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It's fantastic, isn't it? Medicine and car safety getting so far. I don't think I would have guessed correctly the order of magnitude of people who die in car accidents in germany.
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