Late last year in response to IMO misleading charts showing a clear correlation between "gun deaths" vs gun freedoms, I charted murder vs gun rights from a city and state perspective, which illustrate some of the points made in the article. Helpful to visualize, e.g. the point made about Louisiana as an outlier:
I think it is interesting that, with the exception of Hawaii, all of the lowest murder-rate states are northern, mostly rural, and overwhelmingly white. I don't know what conclusions to draw from that, aside from the general trend that these aren't states where there is a lot of ethnic gang violence.
Murder is highly correlated with urban and minority populations - the murder rate for blacks is about 8x that of whites.[1] The root of this is clearly socioeconomic, and I believe rooted in the drug war[2], which drives black market violence both by creating a lucrative ungoverned market and by removing constructive inter-generational alternatives through mass incarceration - i.e. if your father is in prison for a non-violent drug crime, you as a child lose both a role model and a bread-winner, which makes you more likely to fall into gangs for social and economic reasons.
If that's accurate, it's a vicious, massively destructive cycle.
On the other hand, The National Gang Center says (based on survey data): "These estimates suggest that gang-related homicides typically accounted for around 13 percent of all homicides annually." https://www.nationalgangcenter.gov/survey-analysis/measuring...
It's hardly clear that the root is socioeconomic. I don't have data on crime, but in education race remains predictive even after you include socioeconomic status in the estimator.
I haven't looked into this deeply, more of a productive assumption[1], but here are some related studies:
"the majority of the black-white gap (over 60%) [in violence] and the entire Latino-white gap are explained by a small set of factors, especially marital status of parents,
immigrant generation, and neighborhood characteristics associated with racial segregation."
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/www/external/labor/sem...
"Despite a large difference in mean levels of family disruption between black and white communities, the percentage of white families headed by a female also had a significant effect on white juvenile and white adult violence."
"The combination of urban poverty and family disruption concentrated by race is particularly severe. Whereas the majority of poor blacks live in communities characterized by high rates of family disruption, most poor whites, even those from "broken homes," live in areas of relative family stability"
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/3226952/Sampson_...
"Multivariate regression results for ninety-one cities showed that while total inequality and intraracial inequality had no significant association with offending rates, interracial inequality was a strong predictor of the overall violent crime rate and the Black-on-Black crime rate."
http://egov.ufsc.br/portal/sites/default/files/anexos/33027-...
[1] I have a hard time imagining a productive line of thought that leads from saying that high black murder rates result from something inherent to blackness
When reading studies like this, it's very helpful to look at the tables of regression coefficients rather than just reading text. Unfortunately, it can often be a career limiting move for study text to accurately reflect the contents of the data tables/regression coefficients.
The first source you cited (the rand study) shows that being African American is a strong predictor of engaging in violence, even after accounting for other factors. See table 2.
The second study doesn't address the question.
The third study (see table 2) shows that, among other factors, percentage of a city that is black is a strong predictor of violent crime even after accounting for other factors.
One productive line of thought which leads from "something inherent to blackness causes crime" is "since this problem is intractible with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things."
I don't disagree with your analysis of the studies, but the fact that a difference remains after accounting for known socioeconomic factors does not indicate that other factors do not exist.
Personally, I wouldn't call this[1] a productive thought, rather a fatalistic one.
[1] "since this problem is intractable with current levels of biotechnology/social engineering/etc, we should stop wasting resources trying to solve it and focus on other things"
Agreed. I've looked into the data in the past and this is not at all clear. You don't see anywhere near the same incidence for murder or violent crime among impoverished whites or Hispanics in America. These sorts of things are much more correlated with IQ than to poverty or nearly anything else.
This fairy tale about "non-violent drug crime" is interesting because it tries to get us to forget how many violent criminals are locked up THANKFULLY due to the only charge that stuck to them, e.g. their 9th felony possession charge while armed with a loaded gun. People would have us all believe that these peaceful minorities are locked up because the cops stopped them on their way to church, found a little "medicine" on them and put them away for 20 years and left his kids orphaned. It's just nonsense. So many people get leniency in the cases of repeated drug offenses. Honestly, what is a society supposed to do with people who repeatedly break laws?
In major cities a frightening number of homicides go unsolved. Though I can't say I'm a fan of the drug war, there is value in locking up criminals that just haven't been caught doing their most violent acts. Any time somebody brings up the non-violent drug imprisonment, and the socio-econmic downward spiral, yes it's true there are a small number of people who have been railroaded who could be raising their sons and daughters, but we also need the clear image of the killer who lucky for us got pinched because he made a different mistake. All the cops in the room know he killed his cousin but everyone in the project last year was too scared to rat him out. The prosecutor is going to push the longest sentence they can get for the laws broken just so that guy can't victimize somebody else's kid.
NO. I'm saying lock up somebody for one crime you have proof on, might not have been that criminal at their worst but you got them on the proof of another. They are paying the price and they can't do their worst crimes to innocent people when they are locked up for the moment. That's value to peaceful society.
I'm typically skeptical of conclusions like that, to be honest. If we look at the gun deaths graph, many of the highest rates are in much whiter, much more rural states, and the south is very well-represented.
I'll probably draw criticism from what I'm about to say, but perhaps part of this is due to cultural differences in what constitutes murder between different states. An obvious example would be the case of George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin. I would classify that as a murder, but I don't think it would be counted as such in this data.
I think about these things a lot, as a minority who grew up in the most urban part of the country. It's very common for statistics to be misleading in what actually goes on in these areas for a number of reasons. I'm not saying that there is no such thing as a dangerous area with high murder rates, just that it's not always as simple as looking at some numbers.
I should also point out that while many high-crime areas have a high minority population, I would consider most of them rural or suburban. Milwaukee and Detroit for example, are not exactly "urban" cities.
I don't think justifiable homicide such as self-defense should count if you're wanting to answer a question of "should we keep guns or get rid of them"
Obviously having more justifiable homicides with guns is better than gun murders, because it's good people protecting themselves from violent people. I don't think a criminal who died from trying to kill me deserves to be added to a statistic to further an idea that "less guns are better"
Speaking of Trayvon Martin, we'll never really know what went down because we can't get in those two's heads, but I can tell you if I was armed and found myself getting my face beaten into the concrete, not knowing what the person would do next, I think I'd certainly feel justified in using a projectile weapon. If somebody is beating you senseless on a dark night, I don't know about you, but I wouldn't assume they'll just leave you after you black out. They may curb stomp you to death, they may take your gun and kill you, they may take your gun and kill somebody else.
I don't think it's a cultural difference between states, I think it's a legal line drawn between homicide vs justifiable homicide.
I'd like to see charting of both, because justifiable homicide is an indicator of danger in an area too. Unsuccessful attempts at violent crime resulting in justifiable homicide by firearm.
That's one obvious problem is you know that any partisan journalist can take justifiable homicides, lump them into the same bucket under gun deaths by murder and use it to reinforce a message of guns = violence. It's disingenuous.
Same thing with other crime. An area could say rapes decreased, even if attempted rapes went up. So it seems successful self-defense literally and figuratively means you won't become a statistic. Which is bad when you want an accurate picture of the safeness of an area.
No buyers agent can say, "Oh yeah this area is really safe, hardly any crime happens to people here, so long as you're open carrying a glock 19 and are an expert in Krav Maga."
The conclusion I think one can draw from your charts is that increased gun control does not correlate with reduced murder-rates.
So, anybody who claims to support data-driven decision making--you know, the A/B testing so in vogue right now--should find themselves having to say "Yeah, well, okay, this is really a non-issue".
Instead, we see continued political sniping and popular manipulation and twisting of the very idea of certain inalienable rights, all done for political and not numerically-proven policy reasons.
None of this data includes accidents, or other effects like a more armed populace means a more armed police force and the every escalation of violence that entails.
The real comparison is not among states with pours borders, but from the US to other western nations with outright bans. Chicago for example is in a strict gun law state but is right next to Indian with lax laws. There is no border enforcement at the state level so it seams dubious that the Illinois laws have any effect. Our rate is about 3.8 times the rate of the UK and its hard to see at a macro level what other than the ubiquity of firearms is the difference.
Statisticians have frequently noted the difficulty in making such comparisons. Many European countries are much more homogeneous than the U.S. Also, you mentioned the porous borders between states reducing the effectiveness of said gun legislation. We have a fairly porous border with Mexico. Mexico currently has more drugs and people than firearms, but there's no reason we couldn't see a marked increase of arms smuggling into the U.S. in the event of stricter gun laws. In many ways it is more straightforward to manufacture firearms than meth, for example.
Accidents are not the same as intentional homicides, and should not be treated as such.
You do have a point re: arms races between the police and the rest of the country, but I'd argue that letting the police up the ante is a mistake. It's better for both sides to be armed equally, as this discourages officers from abusing their power (and vice versa).
As for lumping states together, there's a reason you don't do that, and it's codified in something called the Scientific Method. If you want to measure the effects of a certain well on iklness, you must count the users of that well separately from users of other wells, even if the wells are right next to each other. If you lump two wells together, then you don't know which well actually caused the illness.
Well only one kid was murdered in my high school but 3 died from accidents. We worry and track automobile accidents so why not gun accidents its all part of the picture.
My point is that the measure should be how far a city is from a state with lax laws not just which state it is in.
I would argue that banning firearms is a highly inefficient way to deal with firearms accidents. Accidents are a direct result of ignorance. You tell newly-licemsed firearms owners that 3 times as many kids die in firearms accidents as thdy do in shootings, and they will (hopefully) keep an eye on their kids.
As for how far a city is from a state with lax laws: Wouldn't the laws in the city itself have an effect as well? Some citizens follow the law, after all. One of the major arguments for free access to weaponry in general is that those who rob and kill and rape are usually willing to risk extended jail time in exchange for being able to use a gun to keep others from fighting back. The thing about threatening someone with a weapon is this: if they have a weapon, or a random bystander has a weapon and decides to interfere, then instead of forcing someone to cooperate, you've made the situation more dangerous for yourself (and everyone else).
Or because (1) the mechanisms for enforcement are weak at the state level, (2) because you're not controlling for other factors that increase crime and (3) the fact that massive gun violence has a direct causal link to more gun laws, you could reject the idea of state stats based on their "gun laws" being very meaningful and look at national stats, for example:
The correlation disappears (when comparing the 50 states, or all countries, or all OECD countries) when you look at all homicides, not just homicides by shooting. In other words, there is no correlation between guns per capita and overall homicide rate.
I support strict gun control, however I feel it's wrong for the politicians to be meddling in gun control how they are. The US constitution is fairly clear (I accept people will always argue specific) that citizens to have access to firearms.
From this I find it dangerous that any politician would seek to override or 'reinterpret' the constitution without the peoples mandate to do so. This seems ot be happening at an increasingly accelerated rate e.g. government eavesdropping and civil forfeiture.
Firearm ownership should be taken to the vote. If the nations decides to leave firearm availability as a citizen right that's democracy and the inevitable shooting are the price. Potentially more dangerous is a government that feels they can bend a nations constitution away from its spirit to their personal agenda.
Should freedom of unpopular speech and the right to be free of unreasonable searches be decided by popular vote? Or is it understood that constitutional rights all have the risk of making us less safe and making the government's job harder, and that removing them is hard for a reason?
I believe he means that constitutional issues should be decided by a "constitutional convention" which is kind of a "majority" vote in such cases. And of course why wouldn't constitutional convention be able to decide on freedom of unpopular speech?
The process to amend the Constitution requires 3/4 of the states to agree on the amendment. It is not a majority vote situation, for the very good reason that the Constitution protects the basic freedoms of US citizens, including free speech (and yes, that means hate or unpopular speech as well) and right to bear arms.
The founders anticipated future generations that would attempt to take away rights, and thus made it extremely difficult for any such process to be done.
Just wanted to say the United States of America is not a democracy, it is a republic. In fact many framers of the constitution warned of democracy and spoke strongly against it.
Not trying to be petty but I do think details like that are important. There is a massive difference between the two forms of government.
Agree, it's a democratic republic which is unique. It blends and contrasts the best and worst of the two, historically acceptable methods of governing and keeps the two locked in a permanent struggle; with the inevitable hope that it strengthens the country over the longest tests of time.
I would again disagree and the facts in the constitution would agree with me. The word democracy never appears in the constitution, only Republic.
The framers were strongly against democracy and the term "constitutional republic" has only recently been wrongly attributed as the form of government.
The representatives and president are chosen by votes, but that does not make it a democracy or a democratic republic.The actual legal founding document is clear, it is only a republic.
The constitution is a document that was written well over 200 years ago. And while the document has held up extremely well there's part of it that didn't. For we got rid of things like having slaves be counted as 3/5 of a person of representation.
I think the gun provisions have not. For starters it's crazy to think that a militia equipped with a stock pile of firearms can overtake a intrusive government with tanks, choppers etc. It's just not realistic.
Guns were much more important for protection back then. There were parts of the country that were the frontier with no policing ability. Nowadays places around the world when gun ownership is substantially restricted are generally safer places. Just google Australasia before and after.
Gun ownership as touted by constitutional nuts is an idea that had it's time come. Sadly, I think give the political climate a amendment that could fix this (put in wording that lets the government legislate gun ownership) is untenable.
That is precisely why the Constitution includes a specific means to change it. If that's what is deemed necessary, then there's a process to accomplish it.
Sidestepping the Constitution, or ignoring its enumerated rights and restrictions, however, is unacceptable, and should not be tolerated by We the People.
From what I understand, the right to bear arms was inclusive of nearly any weapon. There were interesting discussions (at the time) with regards to whether the 2nd Amendment included the right to bear warship, cannon, or repeating rifles. They concluded that it did.
Furthermore, I don't understand why the ease (or lack thereof) of a militia (the present day equivalent for which may be a State Guard) to overtake or resist the (exponentially larger) Federal government has any bearing on our rights. You wouldn't use this sort of argument anywhere else.
"For we got rid of things like having slaves be counted as 3/5 of a person of representation."
Just in case you didn't know, the "a slave is 3/5 of a person" that is so oft-decried today was an anti-slavery measure. For the purposes of Congressional representation, if a slave was counted as a full person, then the slave-owning states would get expanded numbers in Congress for all the non-voters being kept in slavery. Three-fifths, as opposed to full representation, at least kept them from gaining as much power as they would have otherwise. These things generally aren't as simple as one is often told.
I wouldn't call it an anti-slavery measure but one of a long series of compromises on the issue of slavery. Considering 3/5 > ((0 + 1)/2) it seems to be a compromise tilted towards the pro slavery side.
>For starters it's crazy to think that a militia equipped with a stock pile of firearms can overtake a intrusive government with tanks, choppers etc. It's just not realistic.
You mean like every single insurgent force in the middle east in the past few decades?
"I think the gun provisions have not. For starters it's crazy to think that a militia equipped with a stock pile of firearms can overtake a intrusive government with tanks, choppers etc. It's just not realistic."
I disagree. As Tolstoy pointed out, the winner of a war is usually who wants to win more.
Look no further than Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan. They humiliated us. Granted, Iraq has no winner yet, but the country with choppers lost badly to a bunch of irregulars with AKs
It's sad to see the level of discussion and civility of hacker news be reduced to "constitution nuts" that adds nothing to your argument and detracts from the overall quality of the discussion.
I grew up in a county with 1 police officer on duty at night that was 50 miles by 30 miles having a gun felt like a necessity. I now live in NYC and it does not.
3. Requiring additional insurance from gun owners.
4. Local control over the remaining aspects (can cancel out above mandates).
I don't think you entirely get rid of guns even if all of them are illegal. And the US is a big country that encompasses many diverse areas with competing interests. This scenario accounts for the country / NYC divide. It admin that it does require more from the folks in the country (licensing / training). But that's always a bit of tit-for-tat like the folks in NYC where a big chunk of their tax dollars goes out of state / upstate NY, or utility bills in the city that have taxes for building out access out in further to reach places.
I support strict gun control as well. I believe we should re-open the NFA registry (closed in 1986 for basically no reason at all), and add most or all handguns to it and probably semi-automatic rifles as well. The NFA proved very effective at reducing (eliminating, actually) murders committed with automatic weapons on the registry, and there is every reason to think it would enjoy the same considerable success at reducing gun violence with handguns and semi-automatic rifles. The SCOTUS has ruled already that such a registry is constitutional and I agree.
However, doing this would also re-open the production and importation of new automatic weapons for civilian use, and so is a non-starter for the gun-control crowd - in spite of the fact that that legal regime actually worked very well for around 50 years. Instead, it appears we will stick to the same ineffective bullshit we've been doing for the past twenty years, restricting ownership based on meaningless distinctions like magazine capacity, forward pistol grips, etc. etc., which accomplish little else than to piss off gun owners (which I suspect, for much of the gun control crowd, is considered a feature rather than a bug).
"The NFA proved very effective at reducing (eliminating, actually) murders committed with automatic weapons on the registry"
That might be a bit too optimistic about the NFA. The NFA likely did reduce the possession and use of machine guns, but one reason for that is that people could just buy semi-automatics instead without dealing with the NFA-related headache, which suited most people just fine. Also, a lot of the crimes committed with NFA-regulated weapons prior to passage of the NFA were related to Prohibition, weren't they?
Without a clear correlation with better outcomes, I don't see why you would support strict gun control. It seems like you'd be adding complexity and technicality to the system, but admitting that it's pointless.
There has been a lot of debate over the second amendment to the constitution as it relates to gun ownership. Some say it clearly defines an individual's right to own firearms while other say it clearly refers to the rights of state militias to posses guns.
A "well regulated" militia. Many people do want strict gun control but there is presumably a fairly equal and opposite amount that do not. I think perhaps there could be some kind of universal federal background check at least required at a minimum.
I've never understood this argument. It strikes me (and, apparently, every court that's ever ruled on the matter) as legalistic sophistry of the worst kind.
If the First Amendment read "A well educated legislature, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and read books, shall not be infringed." you would argue, what... that only the legislature had the right to read books? That only well educated people had the right to read books?
No, you would not, and neither would anyone else, because that would be a nonsensical interpretation.
You are trying to make words mean what you want them to mean, rather than what they actually do mean.
I find it fascinating that people seriously argue that the Framers spent whole amendment on essentially saying "the state army must be able to have guns, and the state can not infringe this right!". What thought process could lead to an idea that the state would want to ban its own army from having guns and to prevent this, we need a constitutional amendment? The whole concept only makes sense if we're talking about right that can be - and potentially may be - infringed by the state, so treating it as it is concerning any state function literally makes no sense to me. How is it supposed to work?
That’s precisely how the 2nd Amendment was interpreted by the courts until the 2000s. Namely, that its purpose was to prevent the Federal government from disarming and disbanding state militias.
A personal right to own weapons is a very recent interpretation, originally advocated by a small group of activists a few decades ago, and then gaining momentum with the growing power of the pro-gun movement, who claimed it as a central justification for their agenda. It was finally settled as the law of the land by the US Supreme Court 5–4 (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, Roberts, and Kennedy in the majority) in the DC v. Heller case in 2008.
However, a shift in the Court (if e.g. Scalia or Kennedy resigned and was replaced by a Hillary Clinton appointee) could easily throw the details of this interpretation back into question.
I find it somehow hard to believe that it was universally believed to be personal right only by recent activists, as many state constitutions explicitly treat it as personal right[1].
If people writing those constitutions didn't believe such personal right exists and is important, why would they write so?
There are known examples of prominent lawyers supporting such understanding in 19th century. [2]
It is also hard to believe if you read historical reviews about various gun laws in 19th century [3], where while the public carry of guns was often restricted, nobody doubted the right of people to actually own them, and nobody referred to "collective right" as the reason.
I can appreciate the difference in approaches, but the claim that "individual rights" approach did not exist until recently - and not as a crazy idea in minds of a small bunch of "activists", but as widely recognized and adopted concept - seems to contradict all evidence.
NRA was founded in 1871, not exactly "a few decades ago", but "individual rights" interpretation existed and was widely accepted way before that.
AFAIK it is not a fairly equal and opposite amount that do not. Per the WP citing a recent CBS/NYT poll, it appears as if >=90% of the country is in favor of stricter gun control than we currently have, at least as far as background checks are concerned.
> Yet during that same period, per-capita gun murders have been cut almost in half.
So has all violent crime [1]. I don't want to see a chart of per-capita gun murders, but per-capita gun violence as a fraction of all violent crime. Even if crime is decreasing, if those who do commit violent crimes increasingly turn to guns in places where there is more access to guns, then this is evidence in favor of gun control. The hypothesis here (which would need further study) is that the decrease in violent crime would be sharper with gun control laws than without them.
Despite the politically-charged nature of the central topic, in a way this fits better into the HN gestalt's continued fascination with the inability to replicate science than the specific topic.
Anyone with an appropriate machine such as a (very expensive) DMLS or a (much less expensive) CNC can make gun parts. The price will continue to drop and the materials and designs will continue to improve. Are the places where defending yourself and others with effective tools is criminalized going to mandate DRM'ed machines? Will the criminals (conveniently equated with hackers) follow the law?
There are many firearms (i.e. receivers) that do not even require CNC machinery. A manually operated milling machine is more than enough. A small charcoal-fired furnace and drill press is enough to make an aluminum cast AR-15 or 1911. No need for the furnace if you're making stamped AK variant receivers. There are many places in the world where you see these sorts of garage workshops. I always wonder whether the anti-gun public is aware of the ease in which people are and will be able to acquire firearms "extra-legally" in the event of outright prohibition or further restrictions. I assume not, but I prefer not to enlighten them lest they attempt to make aluminum cans and hand files illegal as well.
Whenever I read this or similar, i end up wondering how many gun aficionados will have stumps for hands in the near future?
Unwanted opinion time: slap ammunition with a $250/ round tariff. Track sales more tightly than we currently do for sudafed. Let people load their own - and go back to my original point, but more likely blindness. (Of course there are competent home gunsmiths for whom neither would apply.
Track sales more tightly than we currently do for sudafed
Ammunition purchase registration was in fact the law of the land from 1968-1986, when it was repealed because it was useless in solving crime. To quote the BATF Director: "The Bureau [of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms] and the Department [of the Treasury] have recognized that the current recordkeeping requirements for ammunition have no substantial law enforcement value."
Main-line lefty here: I'm immensely frustrating to me to read articles that point out that there's no solid research on guns & gun violence when--to the best of my knowledge--congress has been blocking funding for this research for quite some time.
Should we tax people to fund studies to see if less free speech could reduce violence? You are talking about things that are not granted by government[1], that's why we call them inalienable (or natural[2]) rights.
Since when does someone need the permission of congress to do this type of research? There are MANY anti-gun lobbies out there with deep pockets who could easily commission such a study.
Most likely they have numerous times and buried the results as it would not aline well with their agenda.
I am biased and it is based in reality. The pro gun lobby does scream it from the roof tops but most major media outlets are not pro gun so they don't carry them or follow them. They in fact attempt to demonize and demean anyone who doesn't agree with them. The fact that this isn't know to you speaks volumes about how ill informed you on on this topic.
I'm just curious what the murder rates are relative to violent crime, relative to population in countries with stricter gun control.
Also, given the number of guns, how does that relate to say cars, and car deaths. Nobody is suggesting banning cars, or heavily restricting licensing.
What this comes down to is a fundamental, natural right... Yes, it means that people can do bad things, and can be dangerous... people are/were dangerous and did bad things before guns, and still do. In a free society bad things will happen. I find the entire discussion fairly irritating because most people seem to be in favor of some polar extremes... And though, I'd lean towards freedom, I can understand the idea of registration. For that matter, you were once supposed to register for and train with your local militia, and provide your own firearm as a matter of law in this country.
Isn't that lack of knowledge caused in part by the CDC funding ban [1]?
Studying gun control in the US also requires some care: because of the population configuration, you need to take into account the fact that people can bring guns from one jurisdiction to the next, especially in some Eastern cities, like Washington, DC (right next to Virginia) or Baltimore (~50 miles from Virginia).
Violent crime and homicides have been going down all over the richer countries, but the US rate is still much higher than that of say, Canada or the UK.
I feel like I know even less after reading this piece.
It has an obvious bias - it purports to talk about gun violence, but then only talks about murders.
When talking about the dangers of having a gun in the home it does not attempt to tally injuries - which would be a sentinel event indicating imminent risk of death.
> Public health scholars have continued to research from a place of hostility to firearms.
Public health scholars are also hostile to viruses and bacteria. Public health scholars are also interested in promoting health of prostitutes and prison inmates. Guns don't make people healthier
To be clear, I don't think guns can be outlawed in America, so I don't think working towards that is a good use of political capital.
"This simple point — that America is awash with more guns than ever before, yet we are killing each other with guns at a far lower rate than when we had far fewer guns — undermines the narrative that there is a straightforward, causal relationship between increased gun prevalence and gun homicide."
According to Table 1, firearm homicides dropped to 10,828 in 1999 and have actually gone up since. Which demonstrates that you can get statistics to say what ever you want. I have another simple point, that it is harder to kill someone with your bare hands that with a gun.
Australian here, we had a mass shooting in Australia some years ago. As a result of this Assault rifles were banned (Edit: without a demonstrable need), licenses were required for rifles and hand guns. Any guns could be traded in to the govt for money in the cut over period. We haven't had a mass shooting since as far as I can recall. The occasional knifing or someone with a hand gun argument occurs still. Guns are a lot harder to come by here, so if you're a loony who wants to kill everyone for looking at you funny then you're out of luck.
North Korea also has few gun deaths. But I don't see the relevance in either case.
Australia has no freedom of speech for instance, is bringing in (additional) internet censorship, personal data (like telephone records) is given out without warrants to non government departments.
This is often left out of this comparison about restricting one of the freedoms.
Americans believe in freedoms of individuals, under this belief how do some more restrictive gun laws apply, is what this article is asking.
What I have found amazing, is how rare mass shootings are in the United States. There are an overwhelming number of states where it would simply be the matter of $500 and a trip to Walmart/Craigslist for a disgruntled person or a potential terrorist to fully legally equip themselves to go on a murder-suicide spree.
There have been two mass murderers in Switzerland alone in the last 15 years, and it's basically the size of Dallas/Fortworth. Not to mention, y'know, recent events in Paris.
The comparison to Australia is an interesting one. Another interesting comparison is to Mexico, where federal law bans gun ownership for average citizens.
It doesn't seem like they've been able to keep a lid on them in that country though.
Personally, I'm not against new, strict gun control laws. As far as I'm concerned, they could require a twelve year waiting period to buy a water pistol. I don't care.
But, what surprises me is that people believe, after witnessing the US's long term attempt to control drugs, that it would actually be able to control guns.
It just does not seem plausible to me.
What am I missing here? How could stricter gun control laws be successfully enforced in the US? Wouldn't people defy the laws and obtain guns just like they do illegal drugs?
I'm Australian too, and it seems to work pretty well. One thing I hear a lot is that 'then only the bad guys will have guns', but I think our laws and enforcement must drive the black-market prices way up, because they do find illegal guns every now and then when they have a big drug bust and confiscate millions of dollars of drugs and cash, but your regular criminal on the street pretty much never has a gun. The drug gangs mostly only shoot each other, and pretty rarely too, so for the average Australian, the idea of ever witnessing gun violence (or being a victim to it) just feels really far fetched.
I wonder how much of it is cultural though - when the big gun buyback happened after Port Arthur, it was mostly taking guns from farmers - not people who think they could rise up against the Government or that they should be able to personally kill people in self-defense...
It's just not something you really ever hear about anyone doing here, and even when it is required, it's pretty far down the list of things to do. Pretty much the only time you hear about someone killing someone in self defense is a cop killing a knife-weilding person every now and then...
Whereas in the US every now and then you hear about people firing at what they think is an intruder, but it turns out to be a family member and stuff like that. It's just really strange to me that shooting would be the first thing you would do, but from the news we hear, it seems that's what a non-insignificant number of people in the US do.
"We haven't had a mass shooting since as far as I can recall"
Well, no, but there weren't many before Hobart, either. But do take a look at your other crimes' rates since the confiscations, especially home invasion.
Also worth pointing out is Australians still have access to firearms, to many peoples misconception.
Hunting type weapons (bolt actions and shotguns) only require a simple firearm safety test plus the requirement firearms must be kept in a safe. Handguns are available but you must be a regular shooter (6 times a year I believe), plus member of a club and you cant take a handgun home for the first year of your licence/club membership. Semi-autos are available if you have a professional need for them such as a farmer who has problems with feral animals, or a farmer hire you as someone that supports their pest eradication.
None of this difficult if you want a gun, but it seems to do the trick in keeping firearms out of the hands of crazies thus far.
yes, unfortunately that is one interpretation of events, even so I feel more comfortable knowing that people like Martin Bryant can't get guns. I guess we'll just have to wait for more data points
It's never going to work absolutely, though the 4 main factors I see are fairly significant;
1 & 2: Licencing and checks stops people with a violent history purchasing/owning guns legally. If that personality decides they need a firearm to hurt people there is a month+ between their desire to do harm and actually owning a firearm.
3: Compulsory safes (and the police check each owner has an appropriate one) reduce the likelihood of a person accessing anothers firearm.
4: More dangerous firearms like handguns and semi-auto are harder to get yet again thus less prevalent stopping what might be a small shooting from becoming significantly larger. A significant shooting becomes much harder with a double barrel shotgun than an AR-15.
Another benefit I imagine is restrictions would stop police feeling there is a potential firearm around every corner and may help calm down ongoing US cop shootings/mentality too.
Try to work against the stigma of people who seek mental health care.
It's a great way to risk your job, isolate yourself from friends/family who find out you've been seeking help, further depression, become addicted to antidepressants, or financially ruin yourself. Sometimes all of the above.
Far too many stories of people who sought help and ended up losing their jobs, being placed on 51/50 holds, or worse.
I found out the hard way. If I ever regress, I'll never call the suicide hotline again. I wasn't yet set on acting upon it but called to have someone to talk to. Fucked myself for 2 years and for most of those 2 years my thoughts of suicide and level of depression were multitudes worse than before I had called.
It's the same with compulsive issues (substance, sexual, or otherwise). People would much rather not know about these things, professionals included. Bringing them up is a great way to alienate yourself.
Mainly it's that firearms suicides tend to be much more effective. It's a generally effective technique and can be done "privately" (unlike, say, jumping off a tall building or waiting for an inevitably-delayed Amtrak train)
I don't think it is always a bad decision, either -- if someone is 55 and finds out there's a solid diagnosis of a painful fatal illness, there might be a point where it's a reasonable choice (I'd personally Alcor, but...). And I'd certainly prefer if spree killers just killed themselves privately.
> The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents' access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a relatively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.
by adolescents I think they mean 18,19 (possibly 20,21) year olds in the Army.
Yeah, reluctantly I'd have to agree. I wouldn't be willing to sacrifice 2A for all to reduce suicide in some (since it's ultimately a personal choice), but I wonder if there are other solutions which could be voluntary to reduce it. Like, offsite storage being a cheap/subsidized/available default, or a "time lock" for non-self-defense firearms, or even something silly like posting "do not kill yourself" signs on safes.
Drugs/alcohol + depression + guns seem like a particularly bad combination, so one thing I've been thinking about is a gun safe which let the user voluntarily set a time-lock in the future before drinking or whatever.
Better social services? Suicide, mental health and poverty all go together I think. If you want to improve suicide rates I would probably start there, though I'm no expert so I could be wrong.
Funnily enough, there's definitely a correlation between the political ideologies that are heavily against firearm regulation and those who think that we spend too much, already on mental health and poverty.
And then they throw their arms up and say "what more could we do?!?"
Nevertheless, I don't think gun laws work unless you also confiscate and ban every single gun in the country at the same time, otherwise you'll end up with the law-abiding people having no guns, and the non-law-abiding people with all the guns, and that will increase violent crime, rather than decrease it. And since confiscating every gun is not a practical solution, the practical solution should be to enable the freedom for every woman, man and child to carry a gun at all times.
>Nevertheless, I don't think gun laws work unless you also confiscate and ban every single gun in the country at the same time.
You're setting up a false dichotomy. Outlawing guns, and complete unlimited rights to fire arms aren't the only choices available. To say their is a spectrum of possible choices is simplifying it, there is a high dimensional landscape of possible policies and they lead to many outcomes.
Besides the two choices that can work, my point was, one of the many outcomes of the remaining choices will lead to non-law-abiding people possessing guns, and law-abiding people following the gun laws, possessing no guns, and this situation will be a lot less desirable than either no one have guns, or every body have guns. It is precisely because doing something that's complicated is going to lead to a high dimensional landscape of possible policies and many unknown outcomes, I think it's wise to stick to more simple, predictable solutions, because otherwise you're doing something you don't know what the consequences are. And it is because politicians and the electorate have the tendency to be doing that in the U.S., why U.S. has mass shootings every other day, and why that isn't true for a country like Australia, which undertook option 1, because it was feasible for a relatively centralised, unified island country, as compared to the U.S.
Exactly! Look at my home state of Massachusetts where you need a license to own a gun and a permit to buy a gun...well, now that I look into it... actually you are 3X less likely to die from a gun in MA than the US average and 6X safer from gun violence than the worst states:
As a counter data point, the police chief of Detroit recently advised the city's residents to carry guns for their protection. The reaction on right-wing blogs which covered this was applause.
Why you doubt it? In fact, that is exactly what is done when one wants to make absolutely sure nothing bad happens - a lot of people with guns come and saturate the area. Look what was done in New York on New Year's even or what happens when the President or other VIP like that visits some place. Lots of people with guns are always around. So apparently if you look at evens through the lens of "how many guns are around", "more guns" is the common standard solution for "more security".
https://hackpad.com/Gun-Rights-Statistics-UBI1bkaNgG6#:h=No-...
Raw data and interactive charts here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1N5JsB-_kTxFSW-14f7Bv...