The trouble with those policies (aside from 100-round barrels... I have no idea what that means, and I don’t think you do either) is that they’re often-mentioned, but people forget to ask the question, “Have these policies actually improved anything where they’ve been implemented?” Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California, which has some of the most strict firearms laws in the nation.
> We can reduce gun ownership
Do we actually want that, though? There are murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually, whilst there are around 7k non-suicide-related deaths by firearm annually (1) (significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture).
Compare firearms deaths with other causes:
* 70,000+ die from a drug overdose (2)
* 49,000 people die per year from the flu (3)
* 37,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (4)
* 250,000+ people die each year from preventable medical errors. (5)
* 610,000 people die per year from heart disease (6)
There are a lot of things that might sound reasonable on the surface that the media likes to tout in the firearms debate, but many of them don’t hold muster. Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I think somebody has an agenda.
>Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California
Many everything occurs in California. It has 12% of the US population. To be representative, one in eight US things should occur here.
>Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too. A huge amount of resources are already spent on things like preventing flu deaths. We just all agree it's the smart thing to do, for reasons you cited.
It's not evidence to not ignore gun violence, it's evidence to put as much effort into prevention as we do for e.g. flu and disease.
I think the point still stands: the three states with the most mass shootings are the three most populous, in order [0]. Texas and Florida have some of the loosest gun laws; California the strongest.
There's also the problem about gun violence vs. mass shootings, and how regularly the two are conflated. D.C has the highest percentage of gun violence deaths, but only one mass shooting [0] [1].
Of course, two-thirds of gun violence deaths are suicide [2] and about 80% of the one-third that are homicides are gang-related [3].
The war on drugs didn't work; we couldn't keep gangs from smuggling in drugs. What makes any one think we'll do any better with guns?
Next, arguments about high-capacity magazines. It takes three seconds to change an AK magazine [4]; you don't really need high-capacity. Yes, it takes some practice, but not a ton and many of these people start planning a month in advance (see El Paso guy's manifesto). Add to this that you can 3-d print your own [5], and likely manufacture one of reasonable quality. They're really not that complicated.
Finally, remember it really is the "tactical" or "scary" guns after which they go [6]. I'm convinced it's so they can win the white suburban mom demographic with pictures of black plastic pistol grips. Remember that most AR-15s are .223 cal. They would ban those, but let you keep your 30-aut-6. Lord knows how many M1s and Garands are out there, and I've never once heard them mentioned. At this point, I wonder if mass shooters go for an AR-15 because that's what all the others used and every one is just terrified of that one particular gun.
Now let's take President Trump's solution, "red flag" laws. Alan Dershowitz wrote an excellent editorial against these in the WSJ [7]. Such laws are wrong for the same reason "stop-and-frisk" is wrong and for the same reason I object to today's airport "security"; Americans are not to be treated like common criminals without comitting a crime. And if you don't think it will have a disparate impact on blacks and browns, then I've got a bridge to sell you. This also sounds like another brick in the road to a technocratic dystopia, a la China's "social credit score".
As mentioned by others, the opioid crisis is a much bigger deal, as are suicides. This is terrorism, which is designed to cause maximum fear and discord with minimum action. We could be discussing how to allocate resources to the problems which kill the most, rather than being driven by rampant alarmism. I wish we didn't have a twenty-four-hour news cycle going on about it, or politicians trying to make it a number-one issue. Fly the flag at half-staff, say a prayer, do what we can for the families of the dead, and move on. Some time, the cost of the "solution" is greater than that of the problem. Tragedies happen; there is not always something politicians can do. Good policy rarely comes from a place of fear.
> If someone went out one saturday and gave 20 random people (or immigrants) a heart attack, it would be too.
I'd love to see where people have proposed banning gas cans or truck rentals. (I wish I could also say 'knives', but Britain actually seems to be that retarded)
I can't tell whether you're being ironic or not. If you're suggesting hypocrisy for not proposing to ban those, consider their legitimate use. In restricting use of a potential weapon, you have to weigh the cost of the restriction. Restricting or banning truck rentals has a different effect on society than restricting or banning assault weapons, for example, so you approach them differently.
> Restricting or banning truck rentals has a different effect on society than restricting or banning assault weapons, for example, so you approach them differently.
Yep! You can ban truck rentals with little to no side effects, while banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide. Or is that not the comparison you'd make?
> Or for the really facetious answer, here's a nice post detailing not quite the truck ban you asked about
I'm not quite sure what comparison you're trying to make here. Yes, most vehicle rentals require you to show a driver's license, but that's a technical competency requirement, not a intentions requirement.
>banning gun ownership has a history of leading to genocide
Basically every other developed country has stricter laws than the US (which is what we're talking about, not full bans). It's ridiculous to suggest those lead to genocides.
> Many of the recently-publicized shootings in the US have occurred in California, which has some of the most strict firearms laws in the nation
If California's laws prevented some but not all of the shootings then it still should be considered a success.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I
I don't think this is honest. If your mother and father died in a mass shooting you would not feel the same as if they had died of heart disease. To treat the trauma of violent deaths differently from illness/disease is very natural.
Rationally, if heart disease suddenly killed tens of people in a single event you had better believe it would make headlines.
> Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7?
Heart disease does get public attention -- check your breakfast cereal, as a banal example: odds are it touts its "heart healthiness" -- and gun control isn't 24/7 either.
But there are a few components to consider. One is that gun deaths are traumatic beyond the impact of just the death. The murder of someone you love, where another human being willfully ended their life, is a whole different thing to process psychologically than their death after an illness or even in an accident. Can we reduce those ripples of harm by preventing these murders?
That "willful" bit is important too: a gun enables a person to kill a bunch of other people. Should our society make that enabling easy? Heart disease isn't perpetrated by one person on another. And, yes, you can kill a lot of people at once with a car, too. But a gun's entire purpose is killing; aside from that and sport shooting it's useless. A car is actually better for just visiting grandma or picking up groceries than being a murder weapon.
And the most important point is to rebut the relative privation that you've presented: of course the other causes of death are a problem. That doesn't preclude dealing with this one. Gun control advocates believe that there are obvious, straightforward measures that we're not taking advantage of that can reduce gun violence. Are there such measures for the flu?
It can be also out of country purchases: go to Canada, buy the gun, come back. The situation is not different in any way, especially because if you buy the gun in Vermont or Canada you are still not allowed to get it in California. Do you want to regulate guns in Canada?
And that's assuming that people don't just manufacture the guns themselves - automatic rifles with box magazines are literally 1940s tech, and while making a good one takes a ton of expertise, something able to kill a bunch of unarmed civilians is a lot easier. For that matter, how long will it be before home CNC mills will be able to make modern(ish) weapons?
Soooort of, but not really - at least for the ones I've seen. There's a difference between "finish an 80% lower" and "make a gun from blocks of metal", and I think we'll hit the latter relatively soon.
Barrel should have been drum. Like what the Dayton shooter used to hit 14 people in 30 seconds.
100% irrelevant. Just because there's a lot of heart disease doesn't mean we don't care about gun deaths. If we passed all this legislation and the net result is that the next mass shooters only kills 5 people instead of 10, then it's still worth it. You don't need 100 round clip to defend your home. You don't need a flash suppressors or 1000 yards of range and you don't need an arsenal.
The trouble with these kinds of disingenuous replies is that nobody can take them seriously.
* You know what a 100 round drum barrel is.
* You know as well as anyone that automobiles exist, and that local laws can easily be circumvented, and hence has little bearing on how well a similar national regulation might work.
* "Significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture". I'm sorry, but this is utterly irrelevant. Why would their regulations or lack thereof matter one bit in deciding whether the people killed by firearms in those areas "count"?
* "Murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually" doesn't even attempt to sound evidence-based.
Pretending like you don't understand basic facts does not help your credibility. Although I suspect these talking-point replies are not meant so much to be taken seriously or responded to, but to merely decrease the signal to noise ratio in any discussion so as to drown out legitimate debate.
To take the remainder of your comment seriously:
For both good and bad reasons, people tend to take acts of violence, particularly indiscriminate ones, more seriously than, say, drug overdoses, where people, rightly or wrongly, blame the victim. Of course not all gun deaths are blameless, but neither do we want to pretend like suicides are unimportant.
Finally, we do try to take many of those other causes of death seriously. I get the argument of proportionality (we should spend 10x the effort on drug overdoses as we do on non-suicide gun deaths, I guess?), but unfortunately these stats are usually used in an attempt to say "nothing can be done".
No, something CAN be done. We can and should do better to prevent easily-preventable deaths -- whether or not the victim shares some blame in the death.
If we can save a few hundred or a few thousand lives, is that not a worthy goal? We are on a perennial march to make automobiles incrementally safer, but we haven't insisted that everyone climb into bubble-wrapped cocoons. Our regulators walk a line that sometimes errs to far this way or that way, we fight about it online, we argue with our representatives about it, but overall, progress is being made and lives are being saved.
> We can reduce gun ownership Do we actually want that, though? There are murmurs of defensive firearms use instances in the millions annually, whilst there are around 7k non-suicide-related deaths by firearm annually (1) (significantly less if you remove big anti-gun cities from the picture).
Compare firearms deaths with other causes:
* 70,000+ die from a drug overdose (2) * 49,000 people die per year from the flu (3) * 37,000 people die per year in traffic fatalities (4) * 250,000+ people die each year from preventable medical errors. (5) * 610,000 people die per year from heart disease (6)
There are a lot of things that might sound reasonable on the surface that the media likes to tout in the firearms debate, but many of them don’t hold muster. Why guns are the hot-button issue and heart disease isn’t plastered over the media 24/7? I think somebody has an agenda.
[1] 30k deaths per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf, minus 23k suicides per https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhamcs/web_tables/2015_ed_web_... [2] https://www.drugabuse.gov/related-topics/trends-statistics/o... [3] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/faq.htm [4] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... [5] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2018/02/22/med... [6] https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/facts.htm