It's time we start legislating based on empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals. Yes, if everyone was responsible perhaps it would be OK for all of us to own firearms. But so many people are utterly irresponsible, and guns make that irresponsibility lethal.
People should safely store their fire-arms, but they don't and guns get stolen and sold illegally, or used by their teenage child.
People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.
Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.
And when everyone is armed everyone wants to be armed. Cops pull their guns quickly out of fear of armed criminals. Regular people want to own a gun because they feel like everyone else does, and they're now less safe unless they also get one.
Growing up outside the US I never saw any guns. I don't know of anyone who had a gun. I don't know of anyone who knew anyone who had a gun. I remember seeing military members in parades carrying guns because it was one of the few times I'd actually seen one. Cops didn't walk around armed. There are other ways to kill people but guns are an especially effective, intuitive, and easy way to do so.
The problem with a lot of anti-gun measures is that the proponents readily admit that they would not have stopped any particular shooter. For instance, people talk about background checks, but this shooter and many others did not have a history and were not known to police. They would have passes a background check.
Often times the person acquiring the gun already broke a number of gun laws. Either straw purchase, borrowed someones gun, carrying across state lines, etc. So throwing more laws at it won't necessarily help. Enforcement of existing laws could help but is obviously difficult. Not to mention that gun violence is much higher in cities/counties/states with the most gun control measures. You can say that they just get the guns from elsewhere and national restrictions need to be imposed, but we should see SOME effect. Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan.
So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
But note that there were always guns in America. In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet.
Legislation won’t change anything. <the war on drugs has entered the chat> Proponents of stricter gun control are being idealistic.
Having kids in school right now, we are both quite concerned about the current state of affairs when it comes to school shootings. Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. To think otherwise is ignorance.
Most other countries have social media. Few other countries have a mass shooting problems. Restricting access to guns absolutely will lower school shootings. A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun.
I fully believe it will help minimize most school shootings, but I don’t think it would deter the more meticulous disturbed shooters like Columbine or perhaps even this most recent Texas shooter. If you are planning it out in detail, figuring out how to print a gun or buy one on the black market probably isn’t much of a deterrent.
I would “only” expect gun control regulation to deter impulsive killings (including a lot of suicide). But it won’t deter criminals who are savvy to the black market, and it’s plausible that they might be more emboldened to victimize more people from the “civilian” population (as opposed to police or rival criminals) if they have more assurance that they’re unarmed. That effect is probably exacerbated in an era of de-policing (if criminals can rely on a hamstrung police force and a disarmed civilian population, they’re probably going to be even bolder).
> A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun.
Apparently you've never been to Baltimore and/or forget what it was like to be 18. Show me a law prohibiting or vastly restricting something and I'll show you a very healthy black market for said thing.
Yeah an 18 year old including even Salvador could have easily 3d printed an FGC-9 without any connections and that would have done everything he sought out to do at the close quarters he was operating in.
This guy clearly had spent months saving up for a fucking Daniel Defense (gucci) AR on fast food wages, he absolutely had the time and dedication to have found another equally lethal method. If ARs didn't exist he'd have undoubtable used something else equally lethal.
That's not consistent with the reality of the rest of the world. Australia banned guns in 1996 and has had one mass shooting since, compared to 66 in the US in April of this year.
I never found this argument convincing. There are many differences between Australia and the US. It's like saying "American does X and is wealthy and relatively not corrupt, Mexico should just do X". This is the whole "bring democracy to the Middle East" argument repackaged.
US is 59th in murder rate. A lot of these countries have all those things + restrictive gun laws. You can't have a theory and just arbitrarily section off over 50% of countries and test your theory on that subset
The other 58 are either extremely poor or in an actual war/insurgency. I don't deny that poverty and war cause violence but the US does not have those variables
Both those countries require everyone to experience military service, where such a gun is used as a tool to kill. There's much less of a "gun culture" in those countries because guns aren't cool, everyone has used one, everyone is familiar, everyone understands what they are for, namely protection of the country as a whole.
If the alternative to making guns much harder to access is to conscript everyone in the country for a few years to try and beat the gun culture out of them, good freakin luck
I have no doubt that Australia has fewer mass shootings than the US by pretty much any reasonable metric, but we should be careful in our comparisons. First of all, definitions vary widely on what constitutes a “mass shooting”, so we should always give our definition and make sure we’re applying the same definition to both operands (notably, by most common definitions, Australia has had several mass shootings and quite a few more mass murders since 1996).
We should also adjust for known dependent variables, like population, population density, crime rates, number of guns in circulation (i.e., we would intuitively expect fewer mass shootings from a small, sparse, low-abiding country with few guns in circulation irrespective of gun laws)—Australia has only 8% of the US population and only 10% of the density—not sure about crime rates. I also suspect there were fewer guns in circulation prior to 1996, so even if officials could get the same share removed from the US market, it would likely leave more guns in circulation than in America (even adjusting for population, etc)—I also doubt Americans would be as willing to give up their guns as Australians were in ‘96, so the odds that America could get the same share of guns off the market as Australia did seems unlikely.
That said, I’ve read that Australia’s gun count has crept back up to pre-96 levels (not sure if that is per capita or not), which is interesting—potentially it suggests there’s something else going on: either it matters what type of guns are banned (e.g., semi-automatic handguns), or perhaps there’s an altogether different reason or hidden factor behind the decline in Australian mass shootings.
In any case, mass shootings is probably the wrong metric, but rather we probably want to look at number of mass murder deaths overall (presumably some people switch to stabbings or arson, but both of these are probably result in fewer fatalities). It’s also not clear to me why we fixate on mass murders/shootings rather than homicides overall—is it really worse when 10 people are killed all at once rather than 10000 people killed individually?
It was the first fatal mass shooting in the UK since the Cumbria shootings of 2010. In response, the Home Office announced that it would issue updated guidelines for firearms licence applications.
Mass shootings are rare in the UK, with the most recent previous being a spree shooting in Cumbria in 2010, and the one before a school shooting in Dunblane in 1996.
Along with the 1987 Hungerford massacre and the 1996 Dunblane school massacre, it is one of the worst criminal acts involving firearms in British history.
First off, you didn't say "school" originally, you just said mass shooting and there have been several in the UK since the gun ban; also it doesn't matter if innocent people are killed at a school or elsewhere, what matters is that they were killed. Secondly, the "zero deaths" shooting had 12 wounded; the lack of deaths wasn't for a lack of trying and I'm sure those people would have preferred not to have been shot. Thirdly, most of those American mass shootings in the Wikipedia article aren't mass shootings in that they aren't some crazy killing random strangers, they are gang violence; you may as well include all of the UK's gang homicides then. Many of the school "mass shootings" also had no deaths. For example, Wikipedia counts this as a school shooting: "An individual who was not a student accidentally shot himself in the leg in the parking lot of Glades Central High School". No reasonable person can say that is the same as what happened in Texas, and dozens of the "school shootings" in the list are similar to the parking lot accident.
The deadliest mass shooting of all time happened in France in 2015 and the second deadliest happened in Norway in 2011 (yes, deadlier than any American mass shooting). Europe has had a large number of mass killings. Here's a PARTIAL list (since there are no activist groups compiling lists of "mass" "shootings" in Europe like there are in the US, it's difficult to find them without scanning old news articles) of SCHOOL shootings in Europe over the last twenty years (and yes it is fair to compare the US to all of Europe due to population and size; European countries are equivalent to American states (which have varying degrees of gun control)): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31515008. Additionally, there have been a lot of European mass killings that weren't targeted at schools like the Manchester Arena Bombing, Charlie Hebdo, the aforementioned Bataclan and Oslo massacres, the Nice truck attack, the various vehicle ramming attacks in London and elsewhere in Europe, and more. Your gun bans haven't prevented crazies from killing massive amounts of innocents, neither with guns nor with other methods.
Not a single one of those was a mass shooting by the common definition. They were all just random murders/attempted murders, which your continent has quite a lot of as well. The only difference is you don't have lobbyists who compile lists on Wikipedia.
Social media as we know it today didn't exist in 1999 when the Columbine high school shooting happened. That's the first mass school shooting in my memory, though Wikipedia lists several before that, as far back as the late 80s.
The first of that kind of shooting that I know of was in the 60s in the University of Texas. Before that there was a school massacre in the 20s but they used a bomb.
> I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet.
Also cable TV news. The need to drive viewers to consume a surfeit of airtime probably lead to a lot of socially damaging choices. I'd say it's a qualitatively different thing than the nightly news.
Another important question is what things did exist in 1969 that don't exist now (or are far, far weaker).
Yes they will find a way .. it is always like that .. and so should we. It is not a perfect solution to ban AR-15s and like guns but it is an incremental solution. Opinions may vary to its effectiveness but it is 1000 percent worth a try. I don't care about someone's right to own guns like that. F** it.
>> Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it.
Somehow in my country (Poland) and in most of Europe they do not find a way to get the guns. Most of incidents of this class is done with knife or with some kind of vehicle (car or truck). I think that throughout history we had like literally one or two shootings in schools and I don't think in any one instance there was automatic weapon involved.
To think that this kind of prohibition of gun possession does not work You have to be really ignorant of what really is happening in other countries.
That's an interesting point though. In Poland, you can own certain guns, right? A Polish friend of mine told me he owned various guns, including semi auto pistols.I know you can own these in other central European countries too, like the Czech Republic, Switzerland and probably others. These guns can generally fire at least 15 rounds as fast as you can pull the trigger, and you can reload in seconds. The Virginia Tech killer used 2 of these to kill 32 people.
Now I'm sure my friend had to go through more extensive vetting than they have in the US. But here's the strange part: many US mass shooters would pass these checks anyway. Not all, certainly. But many would. So when you say "they do not find a way to get the guns", you're suggesting that the potential mass murderers are out there, looking for a way, but failing to get the guns. But clearly they should be succeeding occasionally, the legal way. And yet we don't see it. Why not?
We need to know what else is different about the US. But why complicate things by comparing the US to vastly different countries? Why not compare it to a mostly similar country: itself from the recent past. The US has had essentially the same gun laws forever. There have been 2 major overhauls to US gun ownership: one in the 30s and one in the 60s. Other than that, basically no changes. But these mass killings are fairly new, having started in earnest in the late 90s. Why? It's not surprising that the body count has increased, since AR-15s are more deadly than the kind of guns Americans used to commonly own 30 years ago. They have become incredibly popular in recent years and are very cheap and accessible now. But as I pointed out earlier, there's nothing stopping anyone from racking up a huge number of victims using the kind of semi automatic pistol that has been around for over 100 years, and we do see this in the US.
This question weighs on my mind all the time. What is different about the US? I feel as though I know the answer, but it's ephemeral, hard to put words on it. Everything is more extreme here. Success, failure, happiness, misery, love, hate. So in a sense it's not that surprising that the crimes are more extreme too. But I know that's not a very useful observation. I just know that it's 100% possible for people to be able to own guns, and for this stuff to not happen. Hopefully it's possible in America too.
>> That's an interesting point though. In Poland, you can own certain guns, right? A Polish friend of mine told me he owned various guns, including semi auto pistols.I know you can own these in other central European countries too, like the Czech Republic, Switzerland and probably others.
You are heavily underestimating how comparatively hard is to get any kind of gun here. Literally no one in my family and not one of my close friends and event my neighbors in my apartment block have access to ANY kind of gun.
Sure there is possibility if You have lots of time and money and if you are relatively stable person to get a gun (I used to know a guy who was a member of shooting club and thus was able to buy himself a gun), but this process has so many hoops that it is actively discouraging from obtaining one just because you fancy one (as an impulse buy). And thus I believe that it makes it a lot harder for unstable people to get hands on them when they got the impuls to do some damage (I believe that planning and persistence required to get gun here is antithesis to what makes those people go on killing spree).
>> So when you say "they do not find a way to get the guns", you're suggesting that the potential mass murderers are out there, looking for a way, but failing to get the guns. But clearly they should be succeeding occasionally, the legal way. And yet we don't see it. Why not?]
I think that's because they are a lot persistent that You believe them to be. Emotions and planning do not go together well. And there is also social element here - You have to be in a sport club and be vouched by others to get to the guns. This two things put together seems to eliminate almost all individuals that would otherwise blow out tunneling their anger through guns.
Thanks for the response. I'm from a European country that is even more restrictive than Poland and I used to shoot there before I moved to the US, so I have some idea of what it's probably like. I might be conflating a broad range of US mass shootings - for instance I'm thinking of the Las Vegas shooter, who planned meticulously for a very long time. Now, granted he could not have amassed a dozen AR-15s in any other country in any amount of time, but I believe he could have done something. Could a guy like that get a gun in Poland? I don't think it's out of the question. I know the Columbine shooters probably could not have. But then, they made home made bombs too, which they could probably have done anywhere. We just don't see evidence of this kind of motivation showing up in other countries.
>You are heavily underestimating how comparatively hard is to get any kind of gun here
>Sure there is possibility if You have lots of time and money
You seem to be unaware of Polish gun laws. Black powder traditional firearms are virtually unregulated in Poland. A replica black powder revolver is a fully competent self defense revolver. Watch paul harrell or a number of videos about these weapons and you'll understand a Polish person can get a damn good lethal revolver with basically no barriers. It's my understanding you may even be able to conceal carry them completely legally as well, without any license whatsoever.
As far as I know this kind of weapon is not freely available in shops and even if they have it for sale You need to have speciall european gun card.
And this kind of guns requires skills to use - I do not believe that mass shooting is even possible with it.
As I said the main barrier is that there is no possibility to impulse buy. There is also culture apect (here in Poland guns are not popular and almost no one knows how to use them).
>As far as I know this kind of weapon is not freely available in shops and even if they have it for sale You need to have speciall european gun card.
You do not need the european gun card to buy these in Poland. You can have shipped (like from https://saguaro-arms.com/) or just from a private transaction. You do not need the gun card to buy the powder in a private (or "gifted") transaction either.
>And this kind of guns requires skills to use
A percussion black powder revolver takes a little more skill than a cartridge one, but not much. It's also quite deadly.
>I do not believe that mass shooting is even possible with it
Yes if you ignore the entire 18th and most of the 19th century, during which masses of people were killed with these weapons.
>As I said the main barrier is that there is no possibility to impulse buy.
Private sale is unregulated [0]. Conceal carry appears to be legal without permit [0]. Just as here in US I can get a pistol legally in 5 minutes with no checks or registration or permit, same can be done for a black powder revolver in Poland.
Watch Paul Harrell explain these firearms, they're no joke and I recommend every Polish resident consider one for self defense.
I do not think you understand the difference between being able to buy the gun in Walmart (or rather Biedronka in hypothetical nightmare land) and the ability to procure one by looking for dealer on the internet or accessing foreign internet shop. The former one allows impuls buys and the later one has a barrier of entry. And proper layered barrier of entry (no guns around to take or buy, peer pressure to not have gun, illegality of possession of most types without licence) is in my opinion a key to understand why I'm not afraid to send children to school here.
>> they're no joke and I recommend every Polish resident consider one for self defense
Defense from what? Poland is rather safe country at this point and most of what's going on here is simple robberies which when combined with easy access to guns would quite easily change to manslaughter galore.
And I like our gun statistics and would love them stay this way (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...)
To buy a gun in a walmart requires a background check and more thorough vetting than to buy this revolver in Poland.
Also the Texas shooter bought his gun online, which is more of a hassle than buying a black powder revolver online in Poland. Buying that shooter's rifle requires shipping to a dealer and then a background check. Buying the blackpowder weapons requires neither.
> my opinion a key to understand why I'm not afraid to send children to school here.
The homicide rate of elementary school students in the US is 0.7 per ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND per year. The rate of unintentional injury resulting in death is roughly at least double for all age groups. If you are terrified of a one in a hundred thousand chance, but not a double or better chance of unintentional injury resulting in death then you are simply an irrational actor. If you feel safe with a ~2 per 100,000 unintentional injury then you should feel only slightly less safe adding in homicides (which Poland isn't free of either). If the thought of school shooting death would terrify you from sending your kid to school then you should be cowering in fear at the chance your child will sustain some unintentional injury on the play ground or in transit to school.
And this is all ignoring the fact that if you're a Pole moving to America and you don't get involved in drugs or gangs then your odds of suffering from violent crime absolutely plummets.
>Defense from what? Poland is rather safe country
Poland is not free from violence and cities near your border are being bombed by a murderous dictator. If you want to be defenseless that's your prerogative.
>easy access to guns
Which Poland already has. I could fly to Poland tomorrow as a tourist and have a revolver the next day and a reliable semi-auto pistol or carbine a couple weeks later (3d printed, durable for 1000+ rounds). All from buying unregulated components within EU and without any sort of permit card.
>> To buy a gun in a walmart requires a background check and more thorough vetting than to buy this revolver in Poland.
Oh wow I did not know that they require this now - this is somehow amazing because You are actually providing arguments for my side of debate (according to this https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/2018/02/28/walmart-st... walmart self regulated itself despite moderate law).
In all You have few good arguments for You thing (which is I assume gun in every household?). I just do not get why anyone would want that. The idea that You can somehow defend yourself without any additional risk is pure fantasy (as they say if you take out gun better be ready to use it) - I believe that one of the greatest inventions of human kind is state/government monopoly on violence. This of course can and actually was abused many times but no implementation of idea is perfect but this does not mean that the idea itself is invalid.
And just to finish I think I must comment on this:
>> Poland is not free from violence and cities near your border are being bombed by a murderous dictator. If you want to be defenseless that's your prerogative
What kind of fantasy land are You living that You think that You can actually defend from bombardment, or tanks, or organized military units with gun? You might have seen too many action movies.
If by accident You are part of any kind of paramilitary organization that by all means - sure you can try to stop some military man coming Your way but You do not need to posses private guns for that - one armory per district is more than enough to hand out whatever You may need (as it actually was done in Ukraine - the guns were handed out after the war started).
>What kind of fantasy land are You living that You think that You can actually defend from bombardment, or tanks, or organized military units with gun?
Perhaps in the same 'fantasy' land where the Chechens actually did that exact thing against the same army I'm referring to, and in fact established an independent nation that was at one point even recognized by Russia?
Also I'm referring to defense against common criminals, which even Poland has, who might want violence. Of course the common criminal can easily get a gun, it's only the law abiding innocent who may have reservation about getting a gun in Poland.
> I believe that one of the greatest inventions of human kind is state/government monopoly on violence.
The state has the monopoly on 'legitimate' violence according to these theories, but the state never has a monopoly on all violence. I'd like to note the many Jews in Poland who were genocided after being disarmed. And to note during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, smuggled and captured arms were used by common citizens to at least kill off a few Nazis so there would be one less Nazi to oppress the citizens.
You ask really good questions in your comment. Some of them I've pondered myself, and it is hard to put into words. Everything being more extreme here in the US is actually a decent way to put it.
You can simply take a quick drive just about anywhere and notice it. There is some kind of sickness that has taken hold. I couldn't even begin to list all the reasons why I think this has happened, but American society to me seems so far past the point of no return. One example I have is that I commuted a good bit before the pandemic - anecdotally I noticed an uptick in road rage in that politically charged circa 2015/16' + year range. I'm not sure if the data would back it up, but things seemed to be spilling over into real life to me.
Going off on a tangent here, but I am prior military and also a gun owner with permit to carry concealed. I do armed security once a month and some extra days for special events here and there. I was raised around weapons and I vividly remember going out by myself at 12 years old with a rifle and plinking, hunting and whatnot. At this point I own mostly sporting rifles and do some occasional reloading. Everything is locked away and if something happens to me they will have to grind the safe open. It is safe to say that I respect guns and their capabilities a lot, but I don't feel that's true with a large amount of the gun population. I personally know several.
If there was some kind of miracle opportunity presented to me that all this violence would magically stop if Americans got rid of their firearms, I would take that offer no questions asked. I have small children myself and have had tears in my eyes several times this week thinking about the horrific act in Texas.
I've racked my brain several times over the years about this and have no clue what the solution could be on a grand scale. I don't think our politicians are capable of realistic debate to any kind of solution either - everything is so politically charged anymore and that tribal stuff defeats the whole purpose. I agree with certain points from both sides of the spectrum, but either way seems hopeless. I don't want to see anymore senseless killings, but I also need to have the ability to protect myself and my family in this increasingly sick country.
I'm not sure why you think I'm "poo-pooing" on anyone etc, or what that comment is supposed to add to the discussion, but in any case you haven't written anything that contradicts anything that I said.
I still insist that this seems like lack of political will rather than means. I'm sure that there are a lot of ways that this can be done.
It's like with this old saying about how You eat an elephant (a piece at a time).
Same here - this can be done slowly and gradually. It does not have to be done out right.
They could start with limiting current sale of guns (by bringing some control over to who can buy what and when). Introduce some sort licences (but maybe for guns bought after the law was introduced). And than taxing the shit out of bullets (for personal use). Prohibit trade of guns between people (only b2c, this could be quite hard and unpopular but could address the problem of existing guns). And then start to buy guns of people with sufficient premium on price.
This could be costly but I believe that over the time would eliminate this strange culture of mass gun possession.
> "I still insist that this seems like lack of political will rather than means."
Lack of political will = the voting public doesn't want it, literally. If the public wanted it, federal and state legislatures would be in session right now to pass such laws.
Why doesn't the public want it? All the things you suggest hassle legitimate firearms owners, which is a significant voting bloc, driving them right into the arms of the extremist 2nd A. groups and spiking firearms sales drastically every time new harsh legislation is proposed, making the problem even worse.
So why insist on following the same losing strategy that has been followed by gun control advocates in the past? It is culture and public perception that needs to change and addressing that is not something that can be fixed by legislation.
>> Lack of political will = the voting public doesn't want it, literally
Since when this stopped the politician from serving their own intrests (and intrests of the money behind them)?
But You are right it would be better to change the culture but the problem is that there is not a lot of money in taking away guns and at the same time there is a lack of ideological front that could influence people (for example churches somehow do not have problem with guns)
There is evidence that some antidepressants cause "violent suicidal preoccupation". But it's unclear whether that is a significant factor behind the increase in mass shootings.
What if it just stops one in ten. What if only 20 kids are saved and 100 families are not changed forever.
Pro-tip: you're wrong, it would take time, but it would help. I think handguns should be highly regulated, along with magazines over 10 rounds. If you are licensed to own them, you need to have them in a secure location with some way to ascertain they have been tampered with and you are responsible if they are mis-used.
There is plenty of low hanging fruit, but we go after stuff like silencers or "assault style" weapons instead of good common sense rules like limiting ammunition that can be purchased without being consumed at a range.
> So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
And even if we could wrangle the hundreds of millions in circulation, 3D printing democratizes gun manufacture and seems prohibitively hard to regulate.
> Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan. … In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
I haven’t heard these observations before; I would be really interested to hear potential explanations debated.
> I would be really interested to hear potential explanations debated.
You'll never hear it though. It goes into differences in regional culture and socialization. Anyone that isn't laughably wrong on the topic knows damn well to keep their mouth shut.
Oh, that's what dogleash was saying: only the people who are laughably wrong are willing to talk about it. The people who do understand are the ones who are staying quiet.
The anti-gun rebuttal is that having that many guns around makes breaking the existing laws. I don't care how you do it (buybacks + making it much more cumbersome to get one seem like a good start), the end result that I'm after is that the US goes from 120 guns per capita to 30.
The school shooting club thing is an example of how regulation works.
Just as you don’t see soldiers on military bases walking around with guns on their hips for fun, there were strict rules around high school shooting ranges - kids didn’t take guns home and had strict protocols around handling, etc.
The big difference now is you have a fetishization of guns combined with a low intensity insurgency. If you ask a more prolific gun person about why they are collecting weapons, the answer in 1965 was likely to be about antique or other technical factors. In 1995 they were worried about Clinton taking the guns away, so buy before it’s too late. In 2015, many are talking about fighting the government.
Marginal personalities are attracted to the power of weapons and attention.
A few decades ago it was actually somewhat common for students at rural high schools to bring guns from home so that they could go hunting after school. That didn't seem to cause any problems.
Most recent mass shooters have acted for personal reasons. They were not insurgents fighting the government.
I grew up in the midwest, where pheasant hunting was (and still is) popular. Many people had gun racks in their cars, and often parked with the guns in plain sight.
We had little crime and very few incidents of gun violence.
Quite a quick read and sounds somewhat better than knee-jerk reactions people might have
The 3 policy changes in the paper :
```
Evidence suggests that three priority policies
would have the greatest impact in reducing overall firearm homicide rates:
• Universal background checks;
• Prohibition of gun possession by people
with a history of any violent misdemeanor,
threatened violence, or serious alcohol-related crime or subject to a domestic violence restraining order. This must be accompanied by:
(1) a requirement that firearms already in their possession be surrendered;
(2) a procedure for confiscating guns if they are not relinquished voluntarily;
and
(3) procedures for confiscating guns in situations where a person becomes
prohibited from owning firearms after having passed an earlier background
check;
• Extreme risk protection order laws that allow removal of firearms from an individual who, after due process, is deemed to represent a threat to
themselves or others
Universal for everyone, or just those who want to buy a gun? If I buy a gun because I pass the background check, and then snap and shoot up my place of employ 4 years later, what good was the background check? Who pays for the background check? Who does the background check? What do they check? HIPPA laws would eliminate anything health/medical related. Do they comb all the discoverable social media accounts? Are we just checking criminal history? Should a background check be re-done every 2, 3, 5, n years?
I like the idea, but I've been chewing on this problem for the past few days and I don't think background checks would be as simple or effective as we would all like them to be. This is not an argument against background checks in that I think they're a bad idea. I don't think they would do much.
This is a solved problem, other countries do good background checks by requiring a reason for gun ownership. Collecting (maybe you can't buy as much ammo), range club (they need to vouch for you and you buy ammo at the range), hunting (you have a subset of hunting rifles allowed), self-defense (again, how much ammo do you need for self defense).
I'd like to see the Feds designate all schools crime as federal crimes since they interfere with the civil rights of students. Then make school shootings automatic death penalty, unauthorized guns would have a hefty sentence like they did with drug dealers.
15x more people are killed each year in Baltimore than Uvalde. What happened was tragic there is no question, but the fact that the rest of the country is numb to the murder rates of Baltimore, Chicago, etc, makes me quite sad.
Understand that you don't think they'll do much, but states that have that, along with the two other items, have witnessed roughly 30% fewer gun homicides.
If we test this out in more places, we can have better evidence than, say, what you or myself think are a good or bad idea. :)
As someone who supports the elimination of virtually all firearms restrictions, this is a gun control position that I think deserves to be taken seriously by gun rights advocates.
> It's time we start legislating based on empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals.
I would take anti-gun people more seriously if they actually paid attention to what this entails. For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.
Sometimes you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time. If guns weren't such a charged issue then more of us would advocate to directly outlaw private gun ownership. Guns add little value to people's lives and are likely to amplify poor decisions into death and serious injury.
This is a facially absurd claim to make based on the extremely motivated behavior of tens of millions of Americans.
> are likely to amplify poor decisions into death and serious injury
For a very questionable definition of "likely". As someone who actually performs explicit risk calculations, I am vastly more worried about hundreds of other risk sources to which I have daily exposure.
People should pursue risk mitigation strategies which are efficient at the margins, if at all.
I would capture marginal utility by making life more risky and less fearful, so I'm certainly not going to accept the piss-poor risk reduction returns of going after assault rifles.
Do some research on who is actually dying, who is killing, and with what weapons. I think no honest and well-adjusted person who does that can agree with popular gun control initiatives.
Spoken like someone who lives in a city where you can't use a gun. There is a reason why guns laws are unpopular in rural areas: guns are very useful in rural areas. There is no way to safely shoot a gun in a urban area (except a few gun ranges), so any possible use is dwarfed by the danger.
For a more concrete example. My father in law lives in Michigan. His house is seated next to 40 acres of forest. There are often coyotes and other wild animals that will approach his house when they're hungry. If you're unaware, coyotes will hunt, stalk, and kill cats, dogs, and small children.
To protect my children (3-5 years old) and his dogs, he shoots them.
In my beautiful 3rd world country (yeah we remained non-aligned during the cold war), Tigers and Leopards have a tendency to come near human settlements and attack domesticated animals.
Over here, killing animals (apart from chicken, fish, duck etc, which people regularly eat) is illegal. That means your can't kill snakes, deers, wild pigs, crocodiles and you certainly cannot kill Tiger, Leopards etc (because they're kind of endangered...).
If you do and they find out, you're going to jail. It doesn't matter whether the aforementioned wild animals killed your animals or humans.
So what do you do if presence of wild animals have been detected? You tell the authorities; they'll set traps, capture the animal, and release it to the forests.
By the way, recently, there was an appeal to the government to declare wild boar as pests, so that it can be killed because wild boars destroy crops and stuff. Government declined, because if the boars are killed, the big cats would starve.
This might all seem strange, but over here tiger/lion/leopard population was dwindling in the last century. But their population is now at a healthy level.
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About the gun situation here: nobody really has guns. Except very few maybe. There's plenty of crimes, but those don't involve a gun. Guns definitely would not be a solution to minimize the crime situation here.
Over here coyotes are not endangered, and deer have an overpopulation problems such that without hunters they will eat all their food by the middle of winter and then starve to death.
Snakes protected though, as are wolves. There is a problem with people killing them anyway. They are not the major animals rural people target - because they are endangered there are not many.
> You tell the authorities; they'll set traps, capture the animal, and release it to the forests.
This is something that they used to do over here. Then we discovered that when you release wild animals far from home they don't know their way around, and so they have trouble finding enough to eat, where to drink, a place to live. They are thus not in great physical shape when they encounter whatever lived there already and so are easy kill. Predators are either lone or pack animals - either way a stranger is something to kill. As such releasing a trapped animal is cruel. Unless you find a place where there is nothing else of the type, but even then we have to ask about if they have the correct genes, turns out animals of the same species get natural selection for DNA that helps in their location.
Professional hunters can cull over populated animals, and for deer that meat can be sold or donated to shelters. Still not a compelling reason to keep saturating the country with guns, IMO.
Quite a narrow case, and it still requires careful attention in order to shoot the animals. Perhaps there are more practical alternatives with fewer externalities like fences, traps, scents, motion detecting lights, noise deterants, etc.
None of your suggestions work, animals are smart enough to figure them out in time. They work for a month at best.
Traps are the best bet of your list and are a lot harder to use. And then you still need to kill the animal, release is cruel to the animal and harmful to whatever is naturally where you release it
Tiered gun ownership. You can own revolvers, non-semi automatic rifles at the base tier. You also need to file a reason for gun ownership and accept liability for misuse of your firearms. Your teenage kid kills himself with your revolver, you're on the hook for manslaughter.
Uvalde police confronted the shooter outside but feared being outgunned by the AR-15 : they eventually let him in and took an hour before entering the classroom just for that reason.
So yes, it did make a difference (and also shows that "let's arm teachers" is a ridiculous solution)
I am not convinced actually. The shooter was in the classroom for an hour with ammunition. If assault weapons weren't available, he'd have bought multiple revolvers. Hell, I'd argue that the gun related deaths in 1920's were much higher with revolvers than today with assault weapons.
Assault rifles account for only 3% [1] of total gun related deaths. But it is what anti-gun folks focus on as a scape goat. Foolish, emotional, knee-jerk thinking because it is a "Big scary looking weapon". We all lose because the focus is on something mostly ineffective. Perhaps, we can focus our energy on other aspects than "Big scary" weapons.
Have you taken a look at CA AR-15/long-gun laws? It is the most useless regulations one can conceive (finger guard, 10 round magazine, breaking-gun to reload). All it takes is 2 mins to reverse the CA-compliant changes. The lawmakers are fooling us with ineffective policies that don't do anything to prevent these shootings.
Perhaps we can argue about number of children killed in this incident, but the sample size is 1 and standard deviation is infinite.
The shooter would not have been barricaded in the room for so long if he wasn't able to spray high-velocity rounds at the police. You know those penetrate body armor without ceramic plates and police do not wear ceramic plates.
Revolver rounds would not penetrate, and a carbine would allow him to be flanked much more easily.
EDIT: laws keep honest people in line, but they also give us the ability to punish the dishonest.
Maybe we have a common ground: Police going “Jee man, dude’s got a big scary weapon” and affecting the hopes of conjuring any bit of courage left in them to bust in and eliminate the threat.
> For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.
Yeah, for some reason people keep going on about the ability for any 18 yo nutcase to go into a shop and buy a military-grade weapon designed to shred organs beyond all repair*, enabling them to efficiently slaughter as many school children as possible before terrorized and outgunned LEOs finally have the guts to take them out.
These pesky humans and their dislike of living in fear of violent death for their children... Can't they just think about this in spreadsheet terms and look at the totally negligible numbers, like the rest of us psychos ? C'mon...
What's "reasonable" from an informed perspective vs. an uniformed perspective are vastly different. There are already limits on ammunition and they don't work.
Well, first I should clarify that I mean some states have various limits on ammunition and magazine capacity, and that does not help those states with regard to homicide statistics.
Secondly, do you think that is unreasonable amount of ammunition? What kinds of legal limitations would you propose?
For reference, that's about enough ammo for one person for less than an hour of time at a gun range. Any responsible gun owner is going to be at the range with some regularity, and would go through at least that much in one day.
1. People don't just practice at formal ranges. Some have personal property where they practice. There are also competitions and events of all sorts in which copious ammo is needed.
2. You can actually make your own ammo (usually by using used casings from previous ammo)
3. In times of civil unrest (like the riots of 2020) 50 may be nowhere near enough. In high pressure situations it may take a full clip/magazine to take down a single opponent.
4. I am not a hunter, but I somewhat doubt 50 rounds of ammo would be enough for hunting.
5. The vast majority of people with copious ammunition are law abiding citizens, and so this would involve a confiscation and restriction on the behavior of citizens who have not and will never commit such crimes.
6. Considering how poorly we've done and restricting access to weed and other drugs, I see no reason that any such legislation would actually be effective.
1. Register to buy more ammo, or buy it over the year. I said monthly.
2. Good, I'm totally aware of this and aware of the limitations.
3. Show me where people were forced to defend their property by filling someone with bullets in the 2020 (riots, your word). No standard magazine holds 50, so your argument is not in good faith.
4. It's plenty, Hunters worry about noise from shooting, cost (if they are hunting for food), and the environment. They don't fill the forest with lead.
5. Nobody said confiscation, build your stockpiles. This is about selling/reselling.
6. Sure, people feel the same about those; they have a similar risk. (sarcasm)
random mass shootings are so horrific that we should do something to make them less lethal. Even if focusing on hand guns instead would statistically save more lives.
>People should safely store their fire-arms, but they don't and guns get stolen and sold illegally, or used by their teenage child.
This is extraordinarily rare.
>People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.
Brandishing weapons is illegal in every state and not pointing the muzzle of a gun at anything you don't intend to destroy is basic gun safety.
>Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.
There's no evidence to suggest that gun ownership causes higher levels of suicide. Additionally, suicide isn't a crime.
> men who owned handguns were eight times more likely to die of self-inflicted gunshot wounds, and women who owned handguns were more than 35 times more likely to kill themselves with a gun
Emphasis mine. This says nothing about suicide rates, just suicide by gun rates.
Yes, people who own guns are more likely to kill themselves with a gun. This is obvious.
People who own stairs are more likely to fall down the stairs. People who have a dog are more likely to be bitten by a dog. Etc, etc.
You can't compare suicide rates between countries. Too many confounding factors.
But you can compare suicide rates between people in the same state who are gun owners and not. They did and it turned out that gun owners have 4 times higher risk of suicide (by any method) than others.
> You can't compare suicide rates between countries. Too many confounding factors.
You can just as easily compare suicide rates as you can compare murder rates (which gun control advocates are inclined to do). Of course, you are right about confounding factors, which is why we should be careful about the conclusions we draw. However, I think we can safely conclude that the presence or absence of guns may not be the only factor in determining the suicide rate.
> But you can compare suicide rates between people in the same state who are gun owners and not. They did and it turned out that gun owners have 4 times higher risk of suicide (by any method) than others.
Not really much better than comparing across countries. There is more in common between these two groups, but it still isn't some randomized control trial.
CCW holders have a much lower crime rate than those without. Does that mean that if we take away their permits (and their guns) those same individuals will commit more crime? Probably not.
Likewise, while taking away guns probably will have some influence on the suicide rate, I doubt very much (or not as much as people think).
Not a scientific study, but having known gun owners who were either suicidal or successfully committed suicide, they tend to be the kind of people (men, typically) who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. The suicidal tendencies come on strong when they feel either like they have failed the people who depend upon them, or that people don't need them anymore. Taking away their guns might keep them from committing suicide long enough for them to get help (or for the feeling to pass) but that is by no means a guarantee. We also cannot ignore the consequences of taking the guns: a psychological loss of agency, and potentially physical loss of security, etc. It's not a simple problem to solve.
> You can just as easily compare suicide rates as you can compare murder rates (which gun control advocates are inclined to do).
You can just as easily compare mass of the moon to temperature of the Sun or any two numbers really. By "can't" I meant that there's barely any reason to do it especially when pondering the influence of a single factor.
> However, I think we can safely conclude that the presence or absence of guns may not be the only factor in determining the suicide rate.
Yes. I hope nobody thinks it's the only factor determining suicide rates difference between the countries. Because I don't think there's a single observation that could indicate that it's the only factor.
> Not really much better than comparing across countries. There is more in common between these two groups, but it still isn't some randomized control trial.
Vastly better than comparing across countries. Especially if one of those countries is USA that is very different from other countries.
And it's randomized in a sense that there was no additional criterion other than gun ownership to separate two groups. The only other factors worth looking at would be the ones that correlate with gun ownership. Like being conservative for example. It might be that being conservative makes you more prone to suicide even if you don't own a gun. Further research is needed.
> Likewise, while taking away guns probably will have some influence on the suicide rate, I doubt very much (or not as much as people think).
If there's a 4 fold increase of the probability of suicide for people owning a gun then if you take the guns away, number of suicides in this group will drop by some significant amount (depending on how much of this increase comes from guns, and how much comes from factors that correlate with gun ownership). To keep the suicide rates roughly the same overall people who currently don't own a gun would have to start suicinding more because now there's nobody owning a gun and I can't imagine any possible mechanism that might cause it.
> We also cannot ignore the consequences of taking the guns: a psychological loss of agency, and potentially physical loss of security, etc. It's not a simple problem to solve.
I agree it's a thing that needs to be considered. However part of this sense of agency is agency to take their own lives in quick and simple fashion.
I think that in some cases stripping someone of sense of agency might be beneficial.
For the suicide to be attempted you don't only need to be depressed but also you need to feel enough agency to take your life.
Part of the problem with some of antidepressants is that they don't change your outlook on life but they give you energy. So the world still looks horrible but now you feel empowered to finally do something about it and you kill yourself.
But the argument about guns is not really about, let's ban guns to lower suicide rates. It's way more about, let's ban guns to prevent people who broke down from slaugtering dozen other people each.
> But the argument about guns is not really about, let's ban guns to lower suicide rates. It's way more about, let's ban guns to prevent people who broke down from slaugtering dozen other people each.
True enough. So while I could carry on with the debate about suicide, I think it would be more productive to respond to this argument.
By virtually every measure banning guns to prevent mass shootings is a terrible idea.
There are (conservatively) 80 million gun owners, and hundreds of millions of guns in the US. It would be completely impossible to take all of those guns, or to ban the sale of new ones, and even if you could that would still be depriving tens of millions of citizens a right guaranteed to them by the constitution for no fault of their own.
You might argue it is worth depriving citizens of this right if it improves public safety. The evidence is not in favor of this position. This right is not simply some mere hypothetical right to overthrow tyrants, but the right to self defense (including the effective means of that defense). Reasonable estimates (produced by the CDC) put the number of defensive gun uses per year in the hundreds of thousands. If you look at the rates of homicide by state, and compare that with the rates of gun ownership in that state, you find that the correlations are (weakly) negative. The places in this country that have the worst homicide rates also have the strictest gun laws.
Mass shootings, while horrific, are a tiny fraction of the total number of homicides in this country. We definitely must address mass shootings, but our plans must be both realistic and not compromise the safety of many thousands more.
There are no doubt many factors that contribute to the occurrence of mass shootings. However, one of the biggest factors that contributes to the deadliness of mass shootings is the presence of gun free zones. The vast majority of mass shootings happen in gun free zones, and the evidence suggests that the average number of deaths in mass shootings is arguably much lower if there is an armed citizen putting up a defense.
If you want an evidence-based piece of legislation that would curb mass shootings, the elimination of gun free zones should be at the top of your list. It would certainly reduce the average body count of these events. It also stands to reason that if you don't have as many people dying from such events, the appeal of committing a mass shooting (to someone who is seeking fame and a sense of control by killing lots of people) is going to go down considerably.
> By virtually every measure banning guns to prevent mass shootings is a terrible idea.
Except the single most important one. That it worked in every country that did this in response to mass shootings.
> depriving tens of millions of citizens a right guaranteed to them by the constitution for no fault of their own
If you actually cared about the constitution itself not the fairly modern interpretation reinforced by lobbying group paid with money from gun manufacturing industry, you'd be strongly advocating for the state governents to have right to equip and maintain armed forces independent of federal goverment. Bacause that was the letter and the intention of the second amendment while it was written.
It was not about citizens owning guns. It was about states owning sufficient army to counter federal governemnt if it descended into tyranny.
> Mass shootings, while horrific, are a tiny fraction of the total number of homicides in this country. We definitely must address mass shootings, but our plans must be both realistic and not compromise the safety of many thousands more.
However mass shooting are a thing that very large percentage of people is not willing to accept as the cost of increased security. Especially since any security benefits of having country drowning in guns and ammo are very hard to prove conclusively.
> The places in this country that have the worst homicide rates also have the strictest gun laws.
It doesn't really matter if a person can cross state border with a gun that is easily and cheaply available with zero hassle on the other side of the border.
> Except the single most important one. That it worked in every country that did this in response to mass shootings.
Specify what you mean by "worked". There is little evidence that these regulations had any appreciable impact on homicides or other crimes.[1]
> If you actually cared about the constitution itself not the fairly modern interpretation reinforced by lobbying group paid with money from gun manufacturing industry, you'd be strongly advocating for the state governents to have right to equip and maintain armed forces independent of federal goverment. Bacause that was the letter and the intention of the second amendment while it was written.
The large majority of funding for gun rights activism comes from grass roots donors[2]
Your interpretation of the constitution has no basis. Let's go over the top 3 reasons why:
1. The text specifically says "the right of the people" (emphasis mine). The Bill of Rights is pretty explicit about specifying rights which apply to the people and those which specifically deal with the rights of states.
2. Militia has historically included every able-bodied male of fighting age, not just state militias, and this definition is even encoded in the federal law in United States Code Title 10 section 246
3. There is no evidence to suggest that disarming the American population was even conceivable in the early republic, and the kinds of arms that were privately owned at the time of the revolution included warships with canons.
I really must ask: what (in your opinion) would have to change about the text of the 2nd amendment for it to mean what I think it means?
> However mass shooting are a thing that very large percentage of people is not willing to accept as the cost of increased security. Especially since any security benefits of having country drowning in guns and ammo are very hard to prove conclusively.
I didn't say we had to accept mass shootings, just that our response should not be a knee-jerk reaction to media firestorms that fail to achieve their objective or even result in more overall deaths (not to mention a more authoritarian state). We've already accepted a stupid amount of security theater due to media-driven panics - let's not continue the trend.
> It doesn't really matter if a person can cross state border with a gun that is easily and cheaply available with zero hassle on the other side of the border.
Why aren't there more murders in the state the gun was purchased?
Did you hear that NRA convention was a gun-free zone?
Apparently they were banned because vice president was there and that was the requirement of his security entourage.
So representative of the federal government forbade law abiding citizens from carrying a gun within the premises. Somehow there was no opposition to that.
Even if this convention was a "gun-free" zone in the normal sense (i.e. a lightly guarded school or shopping mall) gun owners are fairly orderly and law-abiding folk. They generally don't rebel against authority and carry guns into gun-free zones, even it objectively puts them at greater physical risk.
But this does not sound like normal circumstances. The whole problem with gun-free zones is that there is often no one close enough to provide an armed response to a mass shooter. As the saying goes "when seconds count, the cops are minutes away". An event with actual security (presumably Secret Service) there is an entirely different tradeoff.
I don't know the security details for that event, but presumably there are security plans that would assure most gun owners of their safety. Is your plan to provide that level of security to all gun-free zones?
As is mass shootings, when considering the population…what’s different is that all murder/suicides are now perfectly announced to everyone, almost instantly.
This problem needs several factors to resolve, and perfectly doing all of them (hardening soft targets, mental health response, reduction in the availability of guns, intervention in situations of parental abuse and neglect) will still not, 100%, make the problem go away. It’s a factor of a large population, people with a moral/ethical gap - possibly due to external factors, with ready access to very effective tools, broadcast to a passive population instantly - which brings revenue to the media.
Interesting that you would call it freedom of assisted movement -- don't you think that the arms the founding fathers had in mind weren't mass-produced in the state they are in now?
Maybe that’s a problem? Sure, it’d be easy for the conversation to devolve into ‘you can say what the government trains you to say’, but everyone knows you can’t yell ‘fire’ in a theatre.
Are you required to know basic knife safety to buy a knife? Fire safety to buy a lighter?
The age gate means that society at one point thought that basic gun safety would be learned before a certain age or maturity would set in or something like that. Society is what has changed.
Great news from Canada. Freeze put in place for handguns and mandatory buy back of assault rifles.
(Also as a side note to Moderators - some people in this thread are unnecessarily flagging comments that supports gun control. Lot of people speak about free speech , hope that is practiced here.)
Guns are built with a purpose. The purpose is to kill someone.
So it is not difficult to comprehend why Government needs to make it difficult to buy a gun more than it is difficult to buy medicine.
But there are people who propose to remove all restrictions instead to acquire guns. To take it to its logical conclusion that is how wild Wild West used to be. No police no governance no authority.
Now question is this. Which option seems more sane to you? You decide.
The point of a gun is that it's a simple machine that works when you need it. Geofenced microcontroller safeties somewhat compete with this and would not be a popular idea.
I’ve seen plenty of sci-fi that leads me to believe that the future of this is some sort of finger print reader on the trigger that only allows the designated shooter to shoot.
That’s already the reality. By definition the ruling class rules, this of course includes armed forces. All the privately owned weapons in the united states are a joke compared to the weaponry possessed by state.
If private weapons were a threat to the state, they would not be allowed.
This is exactly what happened during the civil war. Union army was reluctant and refused to engage in combat, letting Confederate forces withdraw instead. Some yahoo ambushed a well known Union Officer and killed him to support the confederacy and the gloves came off.
Imagine how quickly knowledge of this sort of incident would spread in todays world vs 1861.
No, you should just dig a large hole in the ground and toss your guns in there and burry them. That's what other countries did and it worked for every single one.
Don't be scared about tyrrany. You already have it in the form of two party system ruled by the homogeneous clique of oligarchs.
Sure, create an environment for black market cartridges. Turn every hunter into a criminal. Forget standards on these black market cartridges so they are blowing up in people's guns.
All those things you listed are very bad and it's actually super scary how they are all together still less bad than whole country drowning in abundant, cheap and safe ammunition.
Is it? What empirical evidence do we have that mandatory veganism or outright banning of cars would be a net positive, let alone feasible? To me those two ideas sound like perfect examples of the non-empirical lofty ideals that the previous comment was rejecting in the very first sentence.
Not empirical because there's no money to fund such studies, but: Mandatory veganism would almost certainly significantly reduce the healthcare (and food) costs for a society by a large fraction. Banning cars would make the air cleaner, remove a bunch of health problems, and facilitate more social forms of travel which would help form a more cohesive society and probably would reduce a lot of problems which arise from modern urban isolation.
I'd personally like to live in a society where people were mostly vegan, there were no cars, and there were no firearms.
Whether or not we should force that is another question, but it sure sounds nice.
Yes, as I pointed out in an answer to a sibling comment, the effects of global veganism and car-lessness could indeed be positive—that's why they are lofty ideals. My answer was challenging the suggestion that “the same argument” from the original commenter could be used to argue for mandatory veganism or the banning of cars. In other words, the forced bit.
Not advocating for it but _eventual_ transition to veganism would definitely be a net positive (lower carbon emissions, land and water use, horrors of factory farming, mental health of the factory workers, exploitation of immigrant labor, etc.). Most of the arguments I've seen from the Veganism movement seem to have sufficient scientific backing.
Yes, that is surely the case. Likewise, a great reduction in the need for cars and their usage would also be a net positive for society and the environment. However, what I was challenging was the assertion that mandatory veganism or banning cars were comparable to effective gun regulation as policies based on empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals.
Veganism to reduce carbon emissions and animal suffering, a car-less society to improve communities and public health, and the right to bear arms for the security of a free state are all lofty ideals. However, we have no examples or reasons to believe that enforcing the first two by decree is even feasible, nor can we imagine the unpredictable side effects. On the other hand, there are many examples of states where gun ownership is heavily regulated, restricted, or virtually banned which however remain secure and free and with no obvious downside.
Before fire arms being invented people took other's lives with knives, swords or clubs. Or poison. Or bare hands. What makes you think that not owning a gun will make people less murderous?
The problem is that USA is already full of unlicensed guns and very specific gun ownership culture. In countries with relatively easy access to guns and low number of similar (Czech Republic comes to mind), gun ownership and it's culture were build on diffrent foundation, so you can't just copy this solutions to USA.
In Czech Republic you need an exception to buy something like AR-15, however the exception is quite easy to get. Long weapons magazines are limited to 10 rounds.
But most importantly, in order to buy a gun you need to get a license. This means medical check, passing a theory test, passing a psychological test and passing a practical test at the shooting range. It's not trivial at all.
The culture is completely different to US. Everyone is keeping their weapons in a safe. No bedside tables, car glove boxes or other nonsense. I've never heard of a child taking their parents' gun.
Granted, but culture changes, and in fact even if you were to focus exclusively on the mental health angle, you would have to leverage changing culture to make an impact grand enough.
Qua guns, teenagers in other countries don't have easy access to concealable firearms. Dad doesn't have one, and you can't waltz into a store around the block to get one.
Their argument is gonna be that people will find other ways to kill. Maybe invest in a system that makes people less likely to murder an innocent croud? Wonder what could do that... Better education? Better mental health facilities? Lesser access to the easy people kill machine?
Cars are not intended to kill people, it's an unintended side effect of an otherwise useful machine without which it's pretty hard to imagine modern life.
Guns are exclusively designed to take lives. Would be useless without their ability to effectively kill things, and most humans outside of America don't think it's important for civilians to be armed.
And guns aren't intended to kill children in the halls of an elementary school, but here we are. Intended use isn't a relevant part of the conversation, it's cost/benefit. We pay a cost, we get a benefit. Cars cost lives. Legal guns cost lives. Vending machines cost lives. If 10,000 people a year died from vending machines, we'd be having the same conversation as we are with guns, even if their intended use is handing out snacks
We as a society need to decide where our line is with all of these things. Just because someone has a different line than you doesn't mean they are devaluing the cost, they may just place greater value on the benefit.
> most humans outside of America don't think it's important for civilians to be armed
Most people outside of America think strict religious laws are a good idea. So what?
They may not be meant to kill, but they are clearly designed to kill.
They have the same essential design as most low-caliber rifles that are explicitly designed for hunting - i.e., designed for killing.
That design came from centuries of seeking more efficient, efficacious ways to kill with guns.
Sure, they're tweaked to be optimal for very formalized, competitive shooting, not military combat, but they'd still serve very well for executions, sniping, and the like.
-60 percent or more US states have no gun registration, I know as I live in Indiana which changed to a no gun registration state despite objections from their own citizens and cops.
-Among religious right guns are seen as a male status symbols
-Can we cure this economically by requiring liability insurance in addition to gun registration? It work by, if you have a past history of danger signs then you would be accessed via insurance companies the largest liability insurance price of owning a gun. Similar to vehicle registration and liability insurance
Liability insurance just means rich people have guns. the people who would most benefit from guns for self defense, low income people in high crime areas, would be excluded from gun ownership due to excessive costs. The police also aren't the answer as they have no duty to actually protect you, and have shown repeatedly that they will simply wait for overwhelming force while a shooter is killing people.
Gun registrations just tell the government, or anyone who can access the registration where to get guns. Registrations don't stop anything and only serve to create more criminals from otherwise innocent people if they don't file paperwork on time. Also, in the U.S. any form of government list of people is heavily suspect regardless of guns, a vast majority of people simply don't want anything that can let the government easily track them. Social Security is barely tolerated for keeping massive amounts of seniors from starving to death, even then the creation of the SSN was hugely controversial.
I am deeply supportive of the second amendment but liability insurance for guns seems like a fantastic idea to me. Love in rural Montana and own a long rifle for hunting? You insurance is quite cheap. Live in Brooklyn, are 17 years old, and own a handgun? Quite expensive.
Unfortunately like automobiles all this would due is punish the honest people. The people who most should have this insurance just wouldn't buy it.
I know plenty of people driving around in CA without insurance.
People may have issues with the NRA, but their basic stance - enforcing existing gun laws - seems like a reasonable start. We haven’t even met that threshold yet.
Never, he means "constitutional carry" which is also a (tm) term from the NRA that really means, no permit needed to carry guns around. The police love this by the way (not).
> It's clear that this is the way Americans wish to live
That’s not clear at all. The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
There is some amount of friction, different in each country but not zero anywhere, between “what people want” and “what is the law”. Do you think North Koreans prefer living under a corrupt dictatorship? Why don’t they just make the dictatorship illegal?
That’s an extreme example of course: the US political system is closer to European-style proportional parliamentary systems than it is to North Korea, but it’s still very different from them, and in many meaningful ways is not actually a democracy.
The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
Because other people don't have this problem. And when you get right down to it, they have megaphones and placards, while their opponents have guns. Amazingly, the gun owners have more political power.
My views on gun ownership are complex and don't fit neatly into existing pigeonholes - I'm very much in favor of the right to own weapons, but also in additional social responsibilities that ought to accompany that. I have a lot of sympathy with the gun control crowd even though I disagree with many of their arguments, but the fact is their tactics are simply not working. Unfortunately they don't want to change their approach because they're so locked into the moral dimension of their argument that they're unwilling to consider any other approach. Likewise the 2nd amendment absolutists are so intransigent that they keep retreating to a hardline position of 'shall not be infringed! shall not be infringed!' and then complaining about how unreasonable their opponents are.
The US anti-gun movement seems to be more a part of the culture war than something founded in reality or that could ever lead to a healthy culture around guns, unfortunately. They seem to particularly like pointing to the country where I live (the UK) as proof that their measures work whilst misleading people about what the UK's strict gun laws actually restrict and then pushing for almost the exact opposite. They insist that pooor rural conservatives are deluded if they think guns help with self-defense, but that the powerful, wealthy Hollywood celebrities with the correct political views using their power and wealth to push for gun controls should absolutely get to keep their armed security using utterly nonsensical arguments that are treated as obviously right by the media. (This doubly wouldn't fly in the UK - it's not a legal reason to own or carry a gun and the kinds of guns they use are basically completely outlawed for private individuals.) They're proud of their ignorance of even the most basic aspects of what they want to regulate, and the media supports them in that worldview and spins caring about the actual facts as a sneaky pro-gun trick.
It basically boils down to everything, but for example the post-Dunblaine total gun ban that US gun control advocates point to was actually a total ban on handgun ownership - when they've been pushing heavily on the idea that rifles are obviously more dangerous than handguns and that it's nuts for them to be less heavily restricted. It's basically only the pro-gun side who seems to argue handguns are more of a problem, even though they do seem to be overall in the US too. (It'd also mean no more private armed security for left-wing Hollywood celebrities, an idea prominent gun control supporters dislike.) They get close sometimes for a moment, for instance the UK does have stricter gun licensing than the US - but we also let 14 year olds get gun licenses to create a culture where guns are seen as tools which can be used by those who show they can be trusted with them, something which would be unthinkable to US gun control supporters. (Until quite recently I don't think there even was a lower age limit.) They also like to point to scary-looking black small-calibre bolt action rifles as examples of guns too dangerous even to be sold to 18 year olds; as far as I can tell that's typically what a 14 year old would use as their first gun both here and in the US. It's outside my and most UK resident's area of personal experience of course, which is one big difference from the US.
Honestly, a lot of the UK stuff seems to almost have more in common with US gun owner culture than their anti-gun campaigners, though obviously organisations like the NRA would not be happy at all with UK levels of gun ownership restrictions. The fact that self-defence is not a valid reason to have a gun or any other weapon here would also be unacceptable to pretty much everyone in the US from what I can tell, not to mention unconstitutional. (This includes stuff like pepper spray.)
Interesting, thank you! I'm confused about the lisence for 14 year olds though. If it's a total gun ban how do they obtain rifles? Are they just licensed to shoot at a range that owns the guns? Also, when you say small caliber, do you mean .22s? I think the most lambasted rifle here is far and away the AR-15 which is (correct me if I'm wrong) .762 or .556.
> I think the most lambasted rifle here is far and away the AR-15 which is (correct me if I'm wrong) .762 or .556.
You're pretty close. Those rounds are measured in millimeters instead of caliber, so they should be 7.62mm (really 7.62x39mm or 7.62x51mm) and 5.56mm. The equivalent in calibers is .30 and .223. Notably, .223 is also an actual round and some rifles can fire either .223 or 5.56 (iirc, the cartridges are the same dimensions, but the pressure ratings are different).
AR-15's are typically chambered in 5.56mm. An AR style rifle chambered in 7.62x51mm would be an AR-10. Although you can get AR platform rifles chambered in pretty much whatever you want, going all the way up to .50 BMG. It's pretty uncommon to see anything like that, though.
It's not actually a total gun ban even though American campaigners like to call it that - rifles are still legal to own and keep at home, with restrictions, and although under-18s can't buy them it's perfectly legal for them to be gifted or lent one so long as they have the appropriate license. (Unlike in the US I think you generally have to be licensed just to own or use a gun, which is why giving licenses to 14 year olds is necessary. Currently, gun-owing adults in the US don't need to get gun licenses for their 14 year olds to take this approach to teaching their kids to respect guns because it's purchasing that's restricted, but if the US introduced UK-style licensing with the existing age limit of 18 or even 21 they wouldn't be able to - and I just don't think there's the political will to give gun licenses to under-18s.) The UK does have a really strict handgun ban though, with even shooting ranges not allowed to own them for use within the range anymore. Also, I really do mean that US gun control campaigners have been fearmongering about bolt-action .22 LR rifles because some of them are black and scary-looking, and as far as I can tell thinking that this is stupid is outside the range of acceptable pro-gun-control viewpoints.
> It'd also mean no more private armed security for left-wing Hollywood celebrities
Where does this strawman come from? Can you imagine the negative publicity if celebrity's bodyguard shot and killed someone? How often do you think celebrities are assaulted by attackers armed with guns?
Celebrities who choose to be in the public eye should not be allowed to be protected by people with firearms that the same celebrities campaign against.
As another outsider, I can remember seeing reports of mass shootings in the US every year or two for the last 30 years or so. Each time I thought "this time they have to do something" and yet the pattern continues. So to me it also seems "clear" that there isn't _enough_ will in the US to act on this.
Yes. There is even precedent in other western countries. Australia radically restricted its gun ownership laws after a single high profile massacre. This was done by a conservative government no less! The same one that followed the USA into Afghanistan and Iraq.
If you look at rates of violence over time, the gun laws you're talking about had no effect. Violence continued to decrease at the same rate it did before.
It is extremely challenging to look at gun violence/firearm homicides in Australia, because the numbers are already so low that drawing statistical correlations is difficult if you're being responsible.
That being said. America, 300M people. 19,000 firearm homicides last year. Australia, 20M people, 27.
> This was done by a conservative government no less!
It is entirely consistent. Law and order is something conservatives claim to support, so it is logical to want to remove instruments of crime and disorder. The fact that we can find it surprising now tells more about the intellectual trajectory of conservatives over the years. To the point that modern mainstream “conservatives” would have been seen as quasi-fascist rabid nationalists just 20 years ago.
They have and they do. If you recall, there were marches and protests across the US after the Parkland school shooting.
However, there are 50+ Senators, disproportionally representing low population, rural states, that are beholden to the NRA and its illegal funding and mis/dis-information campaigns.
There are Senators today suggesting that schools be turned into prison-like places (Cruz with his "one door in and out" nonsense), that others are suggesting arming teachers, while ignoring the fact that the school protection officer and local law enforcement engaged the murderer in this school shooting but failed to apprehend or stop him and the SWAT team took 40 minutes to engage the murderer and eliminate the threat.
People have been marching and protesting and demonstrating continuously and yet there is a specific party, the Republicans, and specific lobby groups, that have stopped any change.
> However, there are 50+ Senators, disproportionally representing low population, rural states, that are beholden to the NRA and its illegal funding and mis/dis-information campaigns.
Well, there's the political interpretation (NRA lobbying) and the factual interpretation as well: "low population rural states" i.e. where guns are used for hunting & self-defence (low population but also huge, so low density, so the nearest police/neighbours are so far away you can't always rely on their help)
> If enough people actually cared about this, then you’d have people marching on the capitol, like after a certain president was not re-elected.
THANK YOU! Say what you will about those supporters but the fact they went that far to support something they believed in (albeit dumb honestly) is admirable.
Meanwhile the people with actual good values are just sharing senators' edgy tweets thinking that makes a difference.
There's nothing admirable about the January 6th attackers. Do you also admire the 9/11 hijackers? How about the gunman in this most recent school shooting? These are all "true believers".
Most people exist in the expansive middle ground between regurgitating Tweets and insurrection.
> If enough people actually cared about this, then you’d have people marching on the capitol, like after a certain president was not re-elected.
People do care, and they do protest and march, and like most protests anywhere it does not change anything. Sorry but you seem to have a very naive view of the effectiveness of protests.
By the way, the pro-Trump protests didn’t achieve anything either (other than furthering the US’s slide into bitter ultra-partisan division and total erosion of trust in institutions). Notably, they did not successfully enable Trump to remain president. So what is your point?
That amendment was written back when a gun was more powerful than words or information, and when gun ownership was more prevalent and necessary.
In our modern day information, speech, and and privacy are the guns that ensure rights are not stomped on. It’s no longer the wild wild west.
To think that rules written hundreds of years ago never need to be changed is spitting in the face of our founders who realized that the process of amendments are necessary because things change. The irony is that people are defending the second amendment by claiming it cannot be amended.
By the time the KGB come knocking at your door it’s already over.
What we need is an amendment guaranteeing our right to encryption and privacy, so that the KGB won’t even know which door to knock on.
Back then your arms were pretty well matched against the government. Today, not so much. Civilians and their small arms are no match for the KGB or modern US military. If we really wanted a way to check the physical power of the US military we’d need a bit more than some semi automatic rifles. They are literally in their current form just play things for the wealthy who don’t want to give up their gun hobby, and liabilities for the rest of civilian society due to the criminally insane.
January 6th is somewhere in the neighbourhood of the kind of scenario your referencing.
Ubiquitous guns change the equation for all kinds of theoretical events. They may be a boon in the "armed populous saves country from corrupt gov't" case, and a curse in another case.
Were a more extreme version of Jan 6th to occur in the future, adding civilian firearms into the mix may not be a good thing.
The only person shot was an unarmed terrorist that, after repeated warnings not to proceed, while attempting to break through a barrier that was keeping a mob away from elected representatives, broke through that barrier.
I think it shows remarkable restraint by the security and protection officers that more people weren't shot on January 6th.
And it is untrue that "civilians" "chose" not to bring guns. There were numerous people that had preparations to be armed and were actively working to that end.
Untrue, there was no warning. Crowd was let in (there is security footage of this), funneled to a location, and a killzone was setup without their knowledge. The antifa person filming the death was the only person hurling threats in that specific interaction. Both hands of the civilian shot were visible when climbing through the window. Officer could have arrested when she made it through. I guess we're for shooting on sight now.
> I think it shows remarkable restraint by the security and protection officers that more people weren't shot on January 6th.
Yes let's praise cops for not killing more unarmed civilians than they did, very high bar!
> there were numerous people that had preparations to be armed and were actively working to that end.
What a long way to say they didn't bring guns to the event. Any CCW holder has preparations to be armed.
> sedition
Point to a case, noone is being tried for sedition, only trespassing.
The parent post pointed out that an armed population could prevent a dictator from taking power.
I'm saying it's also possible that a portion of an armed population could be manipulated by a dictator to seize power.
And there are lots of other ways this ubiquity of guns change things. Some positive, some negative. If we're talking about a theoretical rebellion then we should also talk about different types of rebellions.
The point I'm trying to get across is that there are many different theoretical scenarios for revolutions and rebellions, beyond the one scenario the parent comment theorized, or events similar in spirit to the American Revolution.
For example, the degraded ability for society to agree on what is true may be an avenue for a hostile state to cause civil unrest. That scenario may play out better for the targeted society if the population is not widely armed.
Nothing that said dictator would need support from the military (which has demonstrated it is not necessarily keen to go that route), how well will your "well armed" people fare against well trained soldiers with, um, "tanks" (using tanks here as a catchall for all their weapons.)?
Ah yes, the "the gov. is too powerful so what's the point of fighting tyranny" talking point.
The tank premise is almost as stupid as Biden's nukes / jets threat against the American people.
A country is not going to carpet bomb, send tanks in, or nuke its own people / land.
It takes a lot of brainwashing to get your soldiers to do that to their own people and direct force like that will lead to instant revolts.
What is much more likely is a KGB like secret police that goes around black bagging people, etc. You're much less likely to be able to do that when you know the civilian population has more guns than your secret police.
We only have more anti-gun-violence activists because we have more gun violence. I forget where we are on the murders per capita scene, but I think we rank somewhere around Uruguay and Cameroon.
Great company while pretending to be "the leader of the free world."
I never claimed we are the leader of anything, and in fact I explicitly said that the US is not a democracy by many meaningful definitions of that word.
I am the furthest thing from a US ultra-patriot who thinks we’re the greatest country in the world, so please don’t ascribe other people’s opinions to me.
Tangent: other than their moderately elevated murder rate, what’s wrong with Uruguay? Is that supposed to be an example of some kind of uniquely shitty country by global standards? (It’s a bad one, if so — Uruguay is a wealthy and highly developed liberal democracy.)
What specifically makes you assume that the US should be doing substantially better than Uruguay or be held to a higher standard?
I never specifically mentioned you, and I was referencing the rhetoric from our hyper-partisan anti-American "patriots" who fervently believe that the US is #1 in virtually everything.
> That’s not clear at all. The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
Well, you don’t really need activists if you don’t really have a problem. So it is not really surprising that countries with saner gun control policies have fewer activists.
Also, the number of activists does not correlate with the opinion of the people overall. Even though the US is not perfectly democratic, the situation does seem to reflect how a majority of states and a large fraction of the people want to live. This is utterly terrifying to us watching from the other side of the pond, but that’s the way it is.
I don't want gun violence, but I 100% want the 1986 National Firearm Act repealed.
I believe fully automatic assault weapons and machine guns should be available for purchase, new, just like any other weapon. (Fully automatic weapons are legal to buy and own right now in the US, if you pay a $200 stamp tax and wait 9 months for the ATF to process the paperwork, but you can only buy "NFA" regulated machine guns that were registered in 1986 or before ... which means they're all collectors items now, and the cheapest machine guns are $15-20k and up).
Most people I know would like to see the existing laws enforced, and don't want anything new passed or put in place.
I know you’re being facetious, but
It’s fun to point out that you can purchase an Apache if you can find a government to tell you one.
The missiles are separately regulated, and likely not legal for private ownership. Missiles and high explosives are licensed and legislated for separately.
Any weapon that’s part of a standard infantry soldiers load out should be available, new from the manufacturer. I don’t have a problem with the background checks that are required for a class 3 weapon, like an m16 or a Thompson sub machine gun (https://dealernfa.com/product-category/machine-guns/all-tran...), but as it stands only wealthy people can still afford to purchase them.
> The missiles are separately regulated, and likely not legal for private ownership. Missiles and high explosives are licensed and legislated for separately.
So we -can- put limits on the ownership of weaponry, then?
I would also like to see my children grown up. I’m aware that insane/evil people will do awful things, but that you don’t suppress the rights of everyone to stop one or two bad apples.
In my local community groups I see people demanding metal detectors be installed in our schools.
This is in response to: An attempted murderer being chased by police, going into a school he doesn’t belong in, barricading himself inside and murdering children.
It’s feel good security theater. If you’re in the middle of a killing spree you’re not going to stop because of a metal detector. If you’re dealing with kids bringing weapons to school, that’s different — but the responses to this event from people local to me are about 90% make-believe security.
To use a real world example: Columbine was a failed school bombing because their detonators didn’t work because the product they used for the detonator’s changed between their testing and when they purchased the final “real” devices.
The guns were intended to keep everyone terrified and in place until the bombs could kill everyone.
A fluke manufacturing change to the product (I think a clock) between their detonator tests and their actual attack is the only thing that stopped nearly everyone in the school from being killed that day. They even set a bomb outside of the school to kill the first responders when they arrived — again, it was a horrible tragedy, but what happened was so much less than what was intended.
As a foreigner, I have an impression that americans can buy a gun at 18, but cun buy a cigarette at 21. Maybe I’m wrong, but still... Call me an “old-timer” but I do think you could use better psychological tests before letting them buy a gun.
I've noticed your eight comments in this thread to date are fairly declarative but aren't well founded or sourced, simply assertions and often appear to be incorrect as responding comments have shown.
Clearly, you and I both support the second amendment. However, we should recognize when our support of certain associate claims aren't well founded. Bearing arms and being part of a well-regulated militia are American civil rights granted by the Bill of Rights. Purchasing those arms isn't a civil right.[0]
A ban on the purchasing of arms would definitely infringe on people's individual right to keep and bear them. Yes, an individual right, which is how 18th-19th century courts and political commentators viewed the 2nd before the 20th century "militia only" narrative.
This is the problem. When it comes to abortion, there's a notable portion of the populace (including Supreme Court Justices) that say "well it doesn't literally and explicitly call that out in the Consitution so no, it's not a guaranteed right".
... then when it comes to guns... "Well, of course it includes _purchasing_ those arms, even if it doesn't explicitly and literally say so, because it'd be hard to bear them otherwise, so it somehow _must_ guarantee that, too!"
As far as I can tell the author is just making the tired militia argument while pretending to support an individual right. "Americans have a right to defend their homes". Defend their homes with what exactly? He immediately moves on to hunting weapons and the right to hunt. So according to the author, we have the right to own fudd guns, and the right to self defense (but not with guns, and not outside our home). Yawn!
>Bearing arms and being part of a well-regulated militia are American civil rights granted by the Bill of Rights. Purchasing those arms isn't a civil right.
"Voting in elections is a civil right granted by the Bill of Rights. Access to a polling station isn't a civil right."
That's effectively what you're saying. Rights enshrine access. Things like poll taxes, voter ID, etc. have all been declared unconstitutional because they infringe upon your right. Banning purchasing arms falls in the exact same category.
Words change in meaning over time. The second amendment has been hit hard by that. In the time period: "Regulated" means up to a particular standard of strength. This is why British regulars were called "regulars," because they had a particular set of equipment. "Militia" referred to the pool of people who could be called to defend the country. In 1776, that meant men of fighting age (14-60). This is different than the voting population, who were specifically landed men, or the population of citizens. In other words, the second amendment called for a fighting-age male population that was as well-armed as the military.
This is why DC vs Heller was decided in the way it was. The "well-regulated militia" before the comma meant something totally different than its current meaning.
As an aside, I think that most modern military weapons should be banned, but that is actually not what the 2nd amendment calls for. The right solution to the problem is to amend the constitution, not try to pass gun control laws and see what a court will approve.
This has been discussed at great length many many times and courts nor anyone serious about this topic agrees with you. The right is not predicated on being part of a militia in any way. Anyone who says this is pretty much immediately ignored by gun owners because they are clearly not serious at all about the topic.
The Bill of Rights didn't "grant" any rights. It merely recognized some of the natural rights held by all free people, and prevented the government from infringing on those rights.
Got dozens of countries already light years ahead on this and they are operating perfectly fine without loads of gun violence despite similar rates of mental health issues.
Those other countries do not have similar rates of mental health issues, or similar social situations at all.
If you ignore guns entirely, the US still stands out from other countries with an extraordinarily high rate of non-gun violence. It's more accurate to say that the US has a violence problem in general.
If you're truly interested in solving the violence problem, perhaps examine why the US is such a statistical outlier. And also, perhaps, why other countries like Switzerland have such different outcomes while still having extremely high rates of private gun ownership.
Switzerland rules for firearms ownership are a lot more restrictive than the US (background check for everyone, no automatic weapons, etc), and although the percentage of guns per 100 people is higher than other countries, still is about 1/4 of the US where there are roughly 5 firearms every 4 people.
What limits, if any, does the 2nd amendment or the rest of the constitution place on the type of arms?
Eg should you be allowed to use
- pistols?
- rifles?
- machine guns?
- explosive / armour piercing bullets?
- grenades?
- nuclear bombs?
- chemical weapons?
- biological weapons?
Basically I’m asking where is the line drawn.
Because I don’t think the constitution sets such limits, no distinction for weapons of mass destruction, etc yet the country has found ways to limit people holding chemical weapons and more serious ordinance.
My thoughts on this... Considering the purpose and context of the 2nd, it essentially protects a contemporary citizen-soldier's "kit". The stuff he/she needs to join up in common defense with their community, which includes survival gear, protective gear, and of course, a weapon.
Today's citizen-soldier would carry an AR-15 or variant. If there's one modern gun protected by the 2nd, that's the one.
Still very fuzzy. Javelin missiles? Claymores? C4? Anti-personnel mines? Armored infantry transport vehicles with mounted machine gun? Armored infantry transport vehicles with small diameter turreted cannon? Counter-measures for their personal aircraft?
I mean, I feel like you're being purposefully obtuse in trying to make some kind of "see! There's limits to all rights" point. I gave you what I believe is a reasonable and straightforward philosophical approach to the 2nd amendment.
What does a typical modern day infantryman carry as part of a standard kit?
Not Javelins and anti-personnel mines, those are application- and mission-specific. A soldier doesn't just show up at the armory and load up with whatever high explosives they want; they have a standard issued set of gear, and then mission specific gear divided up among the squad.
Armored infantry transport with mounted machine gun and or cannon turret? Anti-air counter measures? I have no idea how that fits in an individual soldier's kit. At a minimum, they're not bearable arms.
It doesn't mean all those other specific items aren't protected, but if you want an answer on an item-by-item basis, I don't know what to tell you.
Yeah, there's some gray area there and grenades are probably the best example.
Separated from philosophical side of things, they are legal to own Federally at least, at $200 a tax stamp. I don't know anything about the jurisprudence wrt to destructive devices.
edit: Another example might be DU ammunition, but I don't know if that's something carried by your typical soldier. I think it's more often in large caliber crew-served and vehicle mounted weapons, but have no actual basis for that.
For what it’s worth I was really just trying to explore the concept and knead it in my mind a bit.
My actual opinion on the matter is that we need a national conversation and some sort of constitutional convention to decide more definitively what the purpose(s) of gun rights should be.
Note that I said “what purpose” rather than “what rights”. I think a lot of people (not everyone, but most) skip this part and go straight to “I want to own select-fire rifles” or “large capacity magazines should be banned” before answering what the allowable purposes of private gun ownership should be.
I think if we enshrine in the constitution the right to own/bear arms for enumerated purposes, that the details will naturally just fall out from that choice.
Some examples of what we could choose from (mix and match to your liking):
1) There is no purpose for private gun ownership of any kind.
2) People should be allowed to own guns for private museums/galleries; historical/scientific/artistic collections.
3) People should be able to own guns for sport target shooting (Olympic shooting, IDPA, etc)
4) People should be able to own guns for hunting.
5) people should be able to own guns to defend their homes.
6) People should be able to own guns to defend themselves when they are out and about.
7) People should be able to own guns to bolster national armory against foreign invasion.
8) People should be able to own guns to attempt to overthrow their own government if they deem it necessary.
For example, if someone picked only something akin to #2, then likely guns would have to have firing pins and/or parts of the trigger mechanism removed.
If the people chose to allow guns for sport, perhaps the government would store your privately owned guns for you at sporting facilities.
If the purpose of private gun ownership is to empower citizens to overthrow a tyrannical government, then no registration process should be warranted for destructive devices like javelins or SAM batteries.
It sounds like your limitations match most closely with #7. In which case it seems like if that was the ONLY purpose for private gun ownership it would be reasonable for the government to store your guns in their own local armories and allow you to pick them up in they declare a national defense event.
If purpose of private gun ownership is to allow me to defend myself when I’m out and about, perhaps I should be allowed to carry a pistol when I’m at the bar. While I’ve never personally been in a situation where I’ve said “You know what would have made that go better? If I had a gun.” … I’ve only gotten in situations close to that when I’ve been out drinking late at night. Not allowing me to defend myself at my workplace, school, or bar kind of defeats most of any personal protection objectives.
If the goal is to only allow home defense, perhaps we only need to allow long guns (rifles, shotguns) and can still ban handguns. Perhaps every casing could be serialized and every transaction recorded and annual inspections done for storage conditions and safety adherence.
> If the purpose of private gun ownership is to empower citizens to overthrow a tyrannical government, then no registration process should be warranted for destructive devices like javelins or SAM batteries.
This is non-sequitur to me. You're describing having the ability to immediately and effectively go to war with the US military and the entirety of the federal government. That's an absolute extreme. In reality, there would be A LOT of steps before that.
I'm in the #8 camp, but rephrased more generally to something I'm sure you've heard- People should be able to own guns to fight back against tyranny. At the absolute extreme, yeah, I'll admit that that includes potentially overthrowing the government, but in reality the scale is much much smaller.
Meaning, people should be able to own guns to bolster their community's defense from both foreign AND domestic threats. The few times that the 2nd Amendment has successfully been put in practice (wrt to fighting the govt), it was against corrupt local governments completely disconnected from any kind of heavy military hardware or active personnel.
I think stepping back and thinking about what "community defense" looks like, structurally, is a good exercise. You'll find that spread out in towns throughout the country, we have caches of equipment and weapons in local armories. In a "defense" emergency, that becomes the local "military gear co-op". A person provides what they can in the form of equipment, supplies, and weapons, and fills in the gaps with the armory. Other community members who are uh... overstocked... on guns and ammo give to the armory for others to use. Again, not at all limited to weapons and ammo, but that's what I'm focusing on here for the sake of simplicity.
--
Back to the extreme end- what does overthrowing a tyrannical federal government look like in reality? It doesn't just start out of nowhere with large scale conflict with the US military. It starts with balkanization, communities isolating, picking sides, pooling resources.... over time increasing violent attacks turning into gun fights, spread throughout the country. By the time a direct open conflict starts with a state or federal government, there is no single State or US military, there is no rule of law, and heavy military hardware is spread out among factions.
So while the 2nd Amendment might not be interpreted to mean "Your right to a SAM battery is constitutionally protected", if the extreme purpose of it becomes reality... you'll get your private SAM battery.
One last edit:
A non-exhaustive list of Things I think the 2nd Amendment (or the philosophy behind it) specifically protects:
- An infantryman's personal weapon (infantryperson? community defense is everyone's responsibility) and all equipment/accessories needed to maintain and operate it.
- Typical survival gear: backpacks, boots, mess kit, knives (bayonets! not just for stabbing; they're often multi-function tools), tents, etc
Taken from my nowhere-near-complete understanding of contemporary gear. In 200 years, replace "rifle" with "phased pulse blaster" and "body armor" with "personal energy shield" if we're still stupid enough to be going to war with each other then.
> What limits, if any, does the 2nd amendment or the rest of the constitution place on the type of arms?
“The constitution”, as a written document, doesn’t put any limits on anything, because it’s irrelevant in practice, and constitutional law is pure kayfabe.
The real constitution, in practice, is the rulings of the Supreme Court, which has absolutely unlimited latitude for “interpreting” the written document however it wants.
> Nothing in the constitution grants the supreme court this power.
Doesn’t matter. They have this power, in actually existing reality.
> Theoretically, congress could act to limit the purview of the supreme court at any time.
Sure, they could try. And the Supreme Court would strike down the law they pass. Then we’re in full-blown Venezuela-level constitutional crisis territory where nobody agrees who legitimately holds power, and it’s impossible to predict what would happen.
The idea seems mainly that the average person could be armed to the same degree as a standard infantryman. I think that setting that as an upper-bound could be reasonable. However, during the period of the American revolution, private citizens also owned warships with canons, so it's hard to say where the actual constitutional limit actually is.
Given the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and how they have been deciding cases recently, no one is exactly sure how to answer this question anymore. It will likely depend on how John Roberts and Amy Barrett are feeling when they hear upcoming 2a cases.
Prior to 2008, case law was pretty clear that all of these could be heavily restricted or regulated at the discretion of the state or the federal government, if they ever chose to. Prior decisions effectively gave states enough power to ban all guns if they chose to; DC's near-total gun ban was in effect from 1976-2008.
Yeah, this is the point of insanity; so long as people continue to believe this, there will be a school shooting in the US every few weeks. That's what people mean by "the US has chosen this".
The 2nd amendment does not actually say anything about purchasing. It could be 100 % satisfied with all sorts of kooky schemes that meet the letter of the law.
A 16 year old can be licenced to drive a car which is a potentially deadly killing machine.
A 17 year old can join the US Military today, use firearms, fight and die for their country and if needed; kill their own countrymen if politicians deem some citizens are a threat.
An 18 year old can vote and determine who should run the country then they go back to watching TickTok 24/7.
A 17 year old cannot have a beer.
There is something wrong with all of that, today driving a car, voting and entering the military should all be the age that is required to legally buy a beer.
24 is 6 extra years of maturing. That will save a lot of lives (not just mass shootings, but gang violence and suicides). And 24 better reflects reality in terms of adulthood.
Not only that, but it's palatable politically. As long as it goes with voting age and other rights, then gun owners are more likely to go along with it. Make some exceptions that work for young hunters, and people won't feel left out.
If anything, it's likely to see pushback from the left because they want lots of people voting from a young age. But I don't think the overall electoral decisions will be any worse by making people wait 6 more years. The left will just adapt and move on (e.g. more focus on struggling families and less on cultural/identity issues).
I have learned that some Americans consider it crucial to arm themselves in case there is a tyrannical government in the future. This seems nuts to almost everyone else in a first world country, and probably many other Americans. But these people, who are not in fact nuts or cretinous, actually believe this and consider it of paramount importance. In one sense, the point can't be argued.
My view: If the US population really wants to do something school shootings in the near term, then the physical layout of schools should be changed so that someone can't just walk in and shoot children. Does this make school look and feel like a dystopian prison? Yes. But that's the price of freedom, which probably shouldn't be born by dead primary school children. This strikes me as the only politically feasible solution right now.
Gun regulation seems likely to help and is a fairly logical solution, but too many people seem allergic to it, and there are already so many unregistered firearms out there. While we are dreaming, reshaping society so everyone is kinder and less likely to shoot each other is also likely to help.
Schools are already pretty buttoned up. But you would be hard pressed to secure them to the point where a shooter couldn't just blow away the first guard and walk right in. Similar to the grocery store shooting.
Even prisons need huge sally ports and clear zones to prevent stuff like ram raids and car bombs. Securing EVERY school this way would be nearly impossible. Especially since we can barely staff them in the first place.
The terrorist always has the advantage of picking the least fortified target. In addition they have the drop on the defenders. So unless we have teams of armed and armored QRF guards in ready rooms and a single entry gate at EVERY school we're still going to be vulnerable.
Then, even after we secure every school, the terrorist just waits at the first bus stop, walks on the opening doors, and then kills a busload of kids.
If we couldn't stop it in Iraq and Afghanistan with trillions of dollars of military hardware and surveillance, I don't seeing domestic terrorism being much easier. Especially with the prevalence of firearms and explosives in the United States.
You make good points, it would be difficult and expensive. An armed single entry gate was what I had in mind. But it wouldn't be completely useless or even harmful, like arming teachers would be.
It's also true that the shooter could just go the mall or a cinema and get a similar result. Attacking the school does seem to have a particular significance however.
> I have learned that some Americans consider it crucial to arm themselves in case there is a tyrannical government in the future. This seems nuts to almost everyone else in a first world country
Yet they continue to absolutely dominate the world, culturally and economically. Can't rule out the possibility entirely that we are nuts and they are not.
Please note that a lot of that dominance comes from a privileged position of being the only developed country in the world that wasn't devastated by endless strategic bombing during World War II. This led to the dollar becoming the reserve currency for the world, turbocharging its industry, and securing advantageous trade deals. In addition it is surrounded by allies, allowing it to safely engage in wars abroad to project economic power.
The US is struggling to keep this lead and will probably have difficulty maintaining it for another 10-20 years. That is, unless Asia and Europe decide to have another stupid war for some awfully stupid reason. Even then, it is unlikely the US would remain unscathed in such a case.
The culture of the US is often touted as its primary reason for success, but there is a great deal of doubt about this.
> I have learned that some Americans consider it crucial to arm themselves in case there is a tyrannical government in the future.
OK but you realize that some in this case is a small percentage. Most people just want to defend their homes from intruders, defend their property from animals, hunt a few days a year, plink on the weekends, or just don't want to turn in the cherished firearm that was passed down in the family.
I really don't know what most people want, but the armed civilian militia reason is espoused by multiple commenters on HN, so I assume it isn't that much of a fringe opinion. None of the reasons you list require automatic or semi-automatic rifles or eg. the arsenal the Las Vegas hotel shooter was carrying.
I guess it is possible that the reasons people actually want guns, and the reasons people say they must have guns may be different.
Gun registration wouldn’t have done anything to stop this shooting. A legal adult with no criminal record purchased the guns in advance of his rampage. A waiting period wouldn’t have worked, and his registration would have gone through because he hadn’t done anything yet.
A cursory glance at incarceration rates, deficit in access to healthcare, education, etc. enforced by supposedly colorblind legislation, the whole defended by a police that has roots in labor repression and racial policing does not help your position.
If the USofA really are one of the least racist countries on earth, it is more a damning condemnation of the world than a glowing review of this country.
I don't think the opinion of someone with no skin in the game, who only gets their information from the news, and doesn't know much about firearms to be worth all that much.
As an American I care about this. As a human I care about this. I'm surprised I have to say that.
I'm not asking you to care about anything. I don't actually care what you think or care about to be honest. But I would hope that jonp888 or you or anyone aren't told their tragedy doesn't matter or that it happens because they don't care themselves.
America and Americans have demonstrably done absolutely nothing for decades about what an outsider sees as a severe problem that must be fixed at all costs.
If America and Americans are not doing anything to fix the problem, they clearly can't think it's much of a problem.
This is an incredibly ignorant and dismissive comment that is demonstrably false.
My city has passed laws in direct response to local school shootings. The state of Idaho has enacted gun control laws that address specific shootings there. There are anti-gun demonstrations. The surviving Sandy Hook parents have made groundbreaking progress toward holding gunmakers liable for deaths caused by their products.
The examples are not hard to find.
This is a complex issue. We are trying. It is hard. Your dismissive comment isn't fair and it certainly isn't constructive or necessary.
No, but, your response is exactly what I think is wrong with the whole response.
> My city has passed laws in direct response to local school shootings.
School shootings, plural. In your city?
> The state of Idaho has enacted gun control laws that address specific shootings there.
Plural again.
> There are anti-gun demonstrations.
Plural. And apparently demonstrations are necessary to convince some people it’s a good idea.
> The surviving Sandy Hook parents have made groundbreaking progress toward holding gunmakers liable for deaths caused by their products.
You can’t hold gunmakers liable for deaths caused by their product, that’s literally what they’re made for.
I think it took only a single incident like this in any civilized country to have the entire national/federal government to go “you know what, lets ban/severely restrict this shit”. The US is the only country I know of that has literally hundreds of these incidents, and still hasn’t done anything significant.
Hell, maybe it won’t work, I’m open to that possibility, but doing anything is better than doing nothing. By doing nothing you implicitly indicate that this state of affairs is fine.
It’s just incredibly frustrating to see half of the responses to these kinds of threads always being “oh no, muh guns”, instead of “lets fix something”.
> No, but, your response is exactly what I think is wrong with the whole response.
I do not speak for any other commenter and I stand by my own comments in this subthread.
> School shootings, plural. In your city?
In this case I think it was one incident specifically. The tax on ammo and gun sales to fund gun violence research was as I recall a direct response to the Seattle Pacific University shooting. I may be drawing more of a connection there than lawmakers would claim. But the timing was consistent and the event helped push it through.
> Plural again.
Yes, there have been multiple mass shootings in Moscow, Idaho alone. The state board of education passed specific gun control laws to attempt to limit harm within their jurisdiction.
> Plural. And apparently demonstrations are necessary to convince some people it’s a good idea.
Yes, that's typically how democracy works and one of the reasons we have free expression.
> You can’t hold gunmakers liable for deaths caused by their product, that’s literally what they’re made for.
Actually we can hold any manufacturer liable for the harm caused by their products, even if that harm is the stated purpose. Also, that's not the only purpose of these weapons. They do have viable uses for both hunting and recreation. Also, I'm not sure that Remington did claim that their guns are intended to kill people. In any case the manufacturers can be held liable.
> I think it took only a single incident like this in any civilized country to have the entire national/federal government to go “you know what, lets ban/severely restrict this shit”.
This is a very specific definition of civilized that suits your opinion. No true Scotsman, etc.
The US Federal Government does not have absolute authority to enact its will on Americans. This is very deliberate and fundamental to our society. This does not make us powerless. Quite the opposite. California is able to be more progressive in their gun laws than they could be in a system with absolute federal power.
> The US is the only country I know of that has literally hundreds of these incidents, and still hasn’t done anything significant.
As I mentioned previously there are examples of significant action that has been taken, even recently. While our gun laws are not the most strict in the world they do exist and they are strengthening.
> Hell, maybe it won’t work, I’m open to that possibility, but doing anything is better than doing nothing. By doing nothing you implicitly indicate that this state of affairs is fine.
Well as I have now said repeatedly, we are doing something. Many somethings in fact. So your assertion that Americans are fine with this state of affairs is clearly false. This gets to the heart of what I have said here. I would hope nobody is told they don't care about the tragedy they are facing.
> It’s just incredibly frustrating to see half of the responses to these kinds of threads always being “oh no, muh guns”, instead of “lets fix something”.
I don't see how this line is relevant to anything I have said here. Nor how it justifies your replies.
> This is a very specific definition of civilized that suits your opinion.
Well certainly. I have to use what I consider civilized. It’s quite possible that our opinions on what constitutes that differ.
> The US Federal Government does not have absolute authority to enact its will on Americans. This is very deliberate and fundamental to our society.
> As I mentioned previously there are examples of significant action that has been taken, even recently.
> Well as I have now said repeatedly, we are doing something.
I think what it comes down to, for me, is that I just fundamentally cannot consider anything that doesn’t happen on the federal level significant.
Strict regulations on guns in one state/city are pointless if you can just drive over to the next and fill up. It also makes things needlessly complicated for gun owners.
My point is that while americans in a specific location may care, I cannot consider Americans (capital) to be doing something unless the federal government acts.
If you consider the fact that they cannot as ‘deliberate and fundamental’ to your society, and you’d rather have these shootings than infringe on that, then by all means. But I will never be able to understand that.
In my opinion the whole reason for the federal government to exist is that they can act in situations like these.
> Well certainly. I have to use what I consider civilized. It’s quite possible that our opinions on what constitutes that differ.
Is it your assertion then that the United States is not a civilized country?
> I think what it comes down to, for me, is that I just fundamentally cannot consider anything that doesn’t happen on the federal level significant.
Please do not attribute your ignorance to indifference on the part of Americans.
> Strict regulations on guns in one state/city are pointless if you can just drive over to the next and fill up. It also makes things needlessly complicated for gun owners.
Perhaps. It’s still a barrier. This is how the laboratory of democracy makes progress.
> My point is that while americans in a specific location may care, I cannot consider Americans (capital) to be doing something unless the federal government acts.
Semantics, moving the goal posts.
> If you consider the fact that they cannot as ‘deliberate and fundamental’ to your society, and you’d rather have these shootings than infringe on that, then by all means. But I will never be able to understand that.
Please don’t put words in my mouth. This is such a gross mischaracterization of my words that I can only assume it is deliberate.
> In my opinion the whole reason for the federal government to exist is that they can act in situations like these.
The US Federal Government operates on the rule of law. Not on your opinion.
> It's a simple problem that every other developed country has solved and they did it basically overnight decades ago.
If you read the rest of this thread you would know this isn't true.
You are posting disgusting, ignorant comments about a real problem that people (Americans included, we are people too) are working hard every day to solve. And those people are making real progress.
I'm confident and hopeful that in my lifetime I will see the Second Amendment repealed.
I think a good first step everyone can agree on to stop gun violence is: stop it's gamification.
Almost every mass shooting in the last decade was someone looking for media attention and high score. And yet, every shooting is followed by detailed biography and a tally of bodies.
Something as simple as a one month moratorium on information for anyone outside the community would probably work wonders, as the public eye will have moved on by then.
Only 10% of the domestic news reports on the mosque shootings in Christchurch, NZ in 2019 even mentioned the shooter by name[0]. News reports in other countires didn't follow suit, but there's at least one example where an effort was made to deny the shooter a platform.
Imagine the chaos of multiple people with guns trying to take down an assailant with the police involved. Who are the good guys here? Friendly fire happens with cops accidentally shooting hostage victims occasionally and they are well trained.
Do civilians really know how to deal with hostage scenarios?
Do teachers want to carry firearms to protect elementary school students?
Are the school districts going to pay for training and armament?
What if a teacher attacks the children in their class? What if a student carries a weapon to the school and creates a hostage situation? (You eliminated a gun free zone).
Assailants can be better armed than teachers and they can wear armor, which teachers/security personnel will not be equipped with. (See Buffalo massacre)
These are just off the top of my head. I would like to hear a security analyst take on it.
I'm not just making assumptions. This is the conclusion I come to from reading firearms experts like the one I just linked, sociological analysis of gun ownership, use of force law, etc.
I'm not saying a chaotic situation like that couldn't happen, but that can be prepared for, and the result would still be a significant net positive.
A firearms expert is not the same as a physical security specialist who can do a full threat model on the pros/cons of arming teachers. The assumptions are “bad” primarily because they are overly optimistic. I have yet to read an pro gun analysis that states any downsides to this method proposed. They do not state any downsides at all. That gives me pause, it demonstrates lack of real physical security expertise.
Do these schools even have basic security reviews, district level security practices, crisis training, surveillance, lock down procedures, egress planning?
That all requires funding from tax payers. Is Gov. Abott going to fund that across Texas?
The strategy seems to be arm teachers (conceal carry)and shooter will either get killed or avoid the situation entirely. It is hard to know what a enraged psycho will do. You have to plan for it.
Read the play by play for the Ulvade shooting. The shooter entered from an unsecured backdoor and barricaded himself in the classroom. It was a surprise attack in an enclosed space with tens of children. Total chaos. The teacher(s) most likely would not have time to respond even with training. Even safety officers (with training and arms) have been known to flee (see Parkland shooting). This has to factor into the analysis.
Once you are in a hostage situation the stakes are extreme and school teachers are not really prepared to deal with that. Two trained police officers were shot in the situation, there is no real hope for a teacher with a few hours on the shooting range. What are the ages of these random teachers, capabilities, fitness, etc? It is a total tossup. The assailant was just one 18 year old, what if there are two or more (see Columbine).
These simplistic solutions fall apart on quick review.
He spends quite a bit of time laying out his qualifications with regards to tactical and legal complexities of using a gun on another human being.
> He is not very articulate.
What exactly is your objection here? That he is plain spoken, or that he uses jargon you're unfamiliar with?
If you are merely critiquing his style that's rather superficial.
> The assumptions are “bad” primarily because they are overly optimistic.
I don't know what to tell you. It could go poorly. Physical security planning is a great idea, whether the teachers are armed or not. Training is also important, which CCW permits generally require, but even then the teachers aren't going to be highly trained. People often miss when are firing under pressure, or lose their courage and run. The teachers might merely be speed bumps to the shooter.
These are all true for any mass shooter scenario. The fact of the matter is, despite no central planning for any of that stuff, the presence of CCW permit holders putting up a fight reduces the the average number of people who die in a mass shooting. It is also clear that the potential presence of CCW holders deters mass shooters given that the vast majority of such shooting happen in gun free zones.
> These simplistic solutions fall apart on quick review
The right to self defense is a simple but robust solution to sporadic, unpredictable violence. It works despite all the possible ways it could fail because most violent crime is predicated on the expectation of little to no resistance.
> This is the conclusion I come to from reading firearms experts
To what extent have you studied criminology? How many relevant research papers have you read that have been published in the journals of the American Society of Criminology, which is the largest criminological organization in the US?
I respect his professional opinion (he was a former military contractor, correct?) I think his arguments would probably someone with more training and experience than myself to properly assess.
But the following facts I think make a good case to believe his is mistaken about this scenario:
- statistics on the utility of CCW in mass shooter scenarios
- the preference of mass shooters to target gun-free zones.
- the precedent of Utah allowing teachers with CCW for roughly 10 years without real incident.
It's certainly not the only step that should be taken to curb mass shootings in schools, but I think there's good evidence it will help.
And even though this is a sensible opinion from someone who knows , do not be surprised for some "bullet" points narrative from guns-everywhere advocates that will try to refute this ..
Laugh all you want. The gun control side is losing the political fight. Gun proliferation (by which I mean the arming and training of more and more average civilians) is making any debate moot.
Any solution to the problem of mass shooting in schools will have to work within that constraint.
I looked up something quickly, to see if it was still true.
In the UK, where you're not allowed to use firearms to defend yourself, home invasions where someone is home is 64%. In the US, where it is permissible, home invasions where someone is home is 27.6%.
You're over twice as likely to be robbed while you're home in the UK as you are in the US. I'm sure the factors are complex, but knowing that you're actually risking your life when you break into a home in the US has to be one of the factors.
An AR-15 is not a shield of invulnerability. A CCW holder with a handgun and the element of surprise can get the drop on someone with an AR-15.[1]
I know Betty the lunch lady is supposed to be a strawman of sorts, but women are actually pretty good shots. It's amazing how quickly criminals, even when they are armed and outnumber you, will fold once you present armed resistance[2].
> It will not deter the person who is hell bent on killing others and have no regards for life including his own self.
It absolutely will. The vast majority of mass shooters target gun free zones, for obvious reasons. Just because they expect to die eventually doesn't mean they want to die right away. They want to be famous and feel powerful by killing as many people as possible. That is denied them if they are killed or wounded straight away.
> The best thing is to stop EASY PEASY access to guns that shoot more than one round at a time. The only guns licensed folks should be able to carry are ones that shoot one round and need to be reloaded again manually. Other guns should be simply banned for the GENERAL public.
- There is virtually zero chance of this happening
- There is zero evidence that policies which constrain the ammo capacities of guns used by law-abiding citizens has any effect on homicide rates
- Enacting such a policy would make guns significantly less effective for self-defense.
> This solution that has been proposed for years i.e for teachers and volunteers to carry concealed firearms is THE M0ST stupid solution that humanity has ever come up with.
If you could demonstrate some actual knowledge of the subject at hand, your opinion of whether some policy is "stupid" might actually matter to me.
There are gun control advocates in this discussion who have demonstrated some knowledge of this issue, and I respect their opinions more for it.
> It seems that some sections of our humanity aspire to live in a world where your right to LIVE depends upon how quick you are with your reflexes or how BIG of a gun you have.
It's really quite comical what you think is going on in the heads of other people.
I have given plenty of reasons for why that is a good idea. To another commentor I even cited a firearms and use-of-force expert to explain why this is a good idea. You have done nothing to respond to those arguments but sling insults.
If you continue to insult rather than argue then expect to get flagged.
There are norms the media choose to follow on their own accord.
Think for example how suicides are generally covered. Reputable organisations don't publish the details of the precise method, and they include a link/phone number to a help line for those who struggle themselves.
> What is the punishment if you break it?
The same as with most norms: Professional embarrassment, and loss of reputation among your peers.
Someone responsible for a news organization can choose to set the policy. Maybe everyone can stop retweeting this stuff and engaging in a flame war online. Or stop consuming articles and videos about this incident. Not every problem can be solved by the state.
> Enforced by whom? What is the punishment if you break it?
The government. We need a comprehensive set of media safety laws that prevent publication of these dangerous reports so they won't fall into the wrong hands.
In the United States, I highly doubt this would hold up in court. Forcing media to not publish about mass casualty events is antithetical to the First Amendment protection of free speech and press
You realize the government fines people for cursing on television right? That it also limits access to pornography? There is plenty of room for doing similar things with shooters.
Legally those things are not similar at all. The government (FCC) can only fine broadcasters for cursing and pornography because RF broadcast spectrum is a limited public resource. The government generally has no legal authority to restrict content in other media delivered through other channels such as print, cable TV, and Internet. (There are some limited exceptions for obscenity and commercial content targeted toward children.) Any media restrictions would have to take the form of a voluntary code of conduct.
There are centuries worth of Supreme Court rulings on this topic. You should read them before making such suggestions.
I don't remember suggesting a law be passed. The government can do a lot without outright banning information, which I'm certainly against. As you point out, codes of conduct have formed without such, and a little pressure would probably go a long way to doing similar things here.
We don't need information to be unobtainable, just not plastered on every possible medium.
You mentioned "fines", which implies a law. Voluntary codes of conduct can't be enforced with fines.
I do agree that media organizations should be more responsible about not glorifying violence or publicizing the identities of violent criminals. A desire for notoriety seems to have been one of the motives in some mass shootings.
I mentioned fines that exist to refute the implication that the first amendment is all powerful and without government limit. The government limits all kinds of speech based on various tests (threats, yelling fire in a crowded room, art vs. pornography, etc.) that have been applied in the supreme court.
> If you want to argue for constitutional amendments, fine. Just ignoring it is not on the table.
Of course it is on the table. Just pass a media safety law, and if the Supreme Court dares to get in the way, pack it with supporters of the law. Or just ignore the court, too. Didn't it basically grant itself the power to veto laws?
> The investigators applied a mathematical model and found that shootings that resulted in at least four deaths launched a period of contagion, marked by a heightened likelihood of more bloodshed, lasting an average of 13 days....
> Previous studies have shown that suicide can be similarly contagious. In one recent example, researchers found a correlation between celebrity suicides, like that of Robin Williams, and an increase in suicidal thoughts in an online Reddit suicide watch group for people battling depression.
> “People are susceptible to information about these events, but the mechanism is less clear,” says Andres Gomez-Lievano, a co-author of the mass-shooting study, published in July in PLOS ONE. Where and when the news reports were published could have an effect on incidence, says Dan Romer, director of the Adolescent Communication Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved with the study. It is important to note, he says, that “suicides will trigger others, so it makes sense that people who want to commit suicide while killing others could be influenced in the same way.”
Unless you get the causes and triggers under control, the attacks will just happen with whatever tools are available (e.g. guns, bladed weapons, bombs, or fire).
In some countries, criminals faces are blurred when shown on TV. American media’s obsession with tragedy and its wider reach is culprit number one in my book.
How would you contain the spread of information? Maybe you could do so 30 years ago, but I think that ship has sailed. It is very difficult to contain information these days.
It's not about stopping it so much as not promoting it. Most people aren't going to spend time digging up information about rumored mas shootings. That alone would kill the fame and name recognition component.
I've had to dismiss and block more than one news organization from my feeds to avoid knowing the name of the most recent shooter. I'd settle for their information just not being shoved down my throat.
The same as the inventor of Pacman feels for teenagers popping little white pills while listening to repeatitive computer music.
The fact that first person shooters are played by hundreds of millions all over the world, but mass shootings are 99% a US thing (which much predated first person shooters, e.g. "I don't like Mondays") should answer the question...
Sure, one can try this - but I suspect that 4chan will only get more powerful as a place to "get information that is being surpressed". Qanon started on pol, and making pol the best place to go to find the sweet details on the shooter is going to blow up in your face.
Yeah you can go and read what was in the buffalo shooters head though which is a thing. He's pretty much a schizo christchurch copy cat. Amusingly he seems mostly in favor of shootings since it intensifies the gun control debate and accelerate the schism in the united states.
Gun control is not going to fix this kind of radicalism or its impact. The dude was a straight up terrorist and IMO he made the correct observation that this sort of terrorism will be successful in driving the divide and creating more extremism.
How about having a mandatory committee that seriously investigates {physical, social, cyber, etc.}-bullying more instead of just ignoring it? We can both work on stringent gun laws and take the mental health of children/teenagers more seriously. There is a clear pattern of which demographic of people consistently commit such crimes. Using this subset of gun owners to dictate gun ownership policies is going to be a hotly contested political issue and it is going to take a while to make progress on that. I personally would hope for a future where gun ownership is very very strictly controlled. However, to claim that gun ownership is the root cause of such incidents occurring doesn't sit right with me. Sure it amplifies the amount of damage that can be done but I don't think that most of these individuals randomly woke up and decided to cause mayhem.
How would that work? lol. There are thousands of weirdos and anti-social kids for every one school shooter. Plus if a disproportionate number of black kids are investigated it would be legally challenged.
You basically described the adult world. While our justice system isn’t perfect, it helps to curtail the chaos caused by the “thousands of weirdos and anti-social” adults.
I don’t claim to know the intricacies of this problem but it seems directionally correct to have such a thing rather than not.
The goal shouldn’t be to necessarily punish kids but to better identify issues and rehabilitate kids. The school systems are currently turning a blind eye and letting problems fester and compound. That is not the way to go.
From what I understand, there are legal implications for teachers who intervene and this prevents them from doing anything even if they wanted to. We can definitely do better.
> How about having a mandatory committee that seriously investigates {physical, social, cyber, etc.}-bullying more instead of just ignoring it?
Because that's actually hard, and requires a culture change. Much easier to simply add extra regulations (that criminals will ignore) for the average law abiding citizen and get reelected claiming you "did something".
Anything that violates the tight seal that the nuclear family has relative to society in the United States is universally hated. All the problems start in the family but you are not allowed to go there here, probably because of religion. It's just the way we are, unfortunately.
While most of the comments here centre on the 2nd amendment, this small thread is the only one that touches what matters.
Why are kids plotting mass shootings? It's not because they have access to weapons. It's because something is VERY broken in their family nucleus and values.
I understand your point that there's no way the government can police family education. But what I would suggest is to make parents and legal guardians directly and fully responsible for their kids crimes.
Your children killed? You are charged with accessory murder or manslaughter. Your daughter stole? YOU are charged as well.
It is YOUR choice what you decide to teach or not to your kids. But on the flipside, it also becomes your responsibility.
This would also work with the problems the UK had (I lived there several years ago) of delinquent kids. You had 10 year olds doing crime who just got ASBOs (collectable paper for them,) and the parents were nowhere to be seen. Charge the parents for their children crimes, as adults.
I honestly think precedent and copy-cat syndrome are hugely to blame. "Shooting up a school" has just become synonymous with going on a shooting rampage. How do we go back from this? Even if we ban guns, how do we stop the determined from getting their hands on a gun so that they can shot up a school? It think it's incredibly tragic that we have gotten to the point where killing multiple primsry school aged children is the go to outlet for mentally ill people who want to go on a killing spree in the United States.
We have to start by giving less attention to these events.
We have to start by being kind to the people who need it most and are often the most difficult to be kind to.
You can’t just create a way to think of people who do things as some sort of “other”, we are all human and capable of similar things given the wrong circumstances.
Unfortunately, that would be also great ground for misinformation about those shootings. Which is already large factor - both with regards to concrete incidents and general culture.
A third of the country thinks those protesters probably deserve it (regardless of what they're protesting). I'm not sure the analogy holds for 8 year olds.
I agree. I'm in favor of the second amendment for a variety of reasons, but since it is clear that firearms are amplifying the casualties inflicted by crazy people and the US has a lot of crazy people, I'm open to restrictions that I think can have a tangible effect.
That said, it is treating the symptom instead of the cause. Our society is fundamentally rotten. We are growing increasingly irrational and violent, we are hating each other more and more, we believe in wild nonsense because we want to believe in it. People are lashing out, but where is all that anger coming from?
I think this single-minded focus on firearms any time these events happen is a distraction, a furthering of the divide between people who don't understand each other and increasingly have no desire to. The real issue is that people feel trapped, oppressed, caged, and helpless, and because they feel like that they act rashly. People do not shoot up schools, run over protesters, and storm government buildings because they feel like things are mostly ok. As long as we continue to pretend that our society as it is today is fundamentally sound we'll continue down this path.
The country is fascinated with crime. Fascination of the masses and breathless media coverage keep reinforcing each other. The worst criminals are almost treated with awe — referred to with their full names, including fucking middle names, like FDR or JFK; when do you see Bill Gates referred to as William Henry Gates? Right now, if you’re a failure in life, the easiest way to make a name for yourself and have a loud exit is to shoot up as many people as possible. I wonder what would happen if these idiots are given as little attention as possible and just referred to as John Doe.
I blame the media. Everything is just another storyline for reactions. Don't romanticise it. In any way. Because you dont know what glory looks like to a school shooter.
Mass shooters overwhelmingly prefer to target such locations for obvious reasons. If it becomes known that most attempted mass shooters will die an ignominious death before they achieve their goal, the incentive for copycat shooters will be gone.
OK, I'm hoping for a nuanced and civil discussion, but here goes... America (where I live and was raised) does not like to parse numbers, when it comes to these things. Both "mass shootings" and "mental illness" are dividable into smaller chunks than their current definitions and need to be handled in different ways than a "winner take all" approach.
"Mental Illness" is a broad spectrum and cannot be lumped into a giant bin, and should in no way be discussed a such. Of course there are mentally ill people who should not be near guns. I don't think that's a question... well, to most. Anyone who says different is using them as a lever to get things pushed through or has no experience. This, however is not all mentally ill people. The definition is so vague as to be almost meaningless, at times. Oh, do you have a sexual deviancy like being choked?... You might, technically, have a mental illness, but since it isn't very detrimental to your well being, so long as you set boundaries, you're probably OK. Probably.
"Mass shootings" are defined by any shooting that has 4 or more victims. This does get divided, once you dig down a little further in the database, but it's all lumped under the "Mass shooting" header. This is driveby's (sp?), party shootings, drug buys, etc... not that that is better, or should be taken with a cavalier attitude. Far from it. But, if you are looking at it from a preventative stand point, it's a completely different equation. These aren't going to be legally obtained, randomized violence, caused by mental illness. These are generally crimes of poverty, means and lack of opportunity. Gun laws and access to mental health facilities aren't going to stop these, but job programs, education, birth control, manufacturing facilities, infrastructure and treatment services might.
An even better number is the types of guns used in homicides. AR style weapons are used in less than 150 shootings a year on average out of 24,000 homicides. It's mostly handguns. Just because they are prevalent in particular tragedies do they get such attention. It's dumb.
>But, if you are looking at it from a preventative stand point, it's a completely different equation. These aren't going to be legally obtained, randomized violence, caused by mental illness. These are generally crimes of poverty, means and lack of opportunity.
So someone is killing people because he is poor and needs money? Why doesn't he work instead?
In the U.S. this is often because someone can't work. When you're stuck in a poor area, job opportunities are extremely limited. Public transport is very limited, so you often can't get out of the immediate area to find a job, and most jobs are very restrictive about criminal history.
You can get something minor on your record, and be stuck out of work until you can get enough money to move closer to a place which will hire someone with a crime on their background check, which is now near impossible to do legally.
This situation can make one desperate enough to attempt crimes which can lead to murder, such as armed robbery.
I apologize for being late to reply. @THjr responded very well to this, but there is one more point I would like to lay out. When everyone has talked about these numbers, they've been referring to deaths and that isn't how gun violence numbers work. I understand it sounds like semantics, but when we look at statistics semantics are important. In the modern news cycle, media outlets leave you with the term "shot" and of course we think killed... and in this latest tragedy, it is an unfortunate truth. Any wound suffered is an injustice, but it doesn't mean a death and murder... though, being shot does increase the chance, I understand. Modern weaponry is very efficient (though I'd have to look up the numbers).
It is not fair to place the blame for this epidemic of violence squarely on those suffering from mental health issues.
Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.
People who suffer from mental health issues are tremendously more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrators. These individuals already suffer from tremendous discrimination and hardships in their lives.
Those who would place the blame in this direction while deflecting from the ease of access to firearms are acting disingenuously.
We continue to do nothing, and I wish I could say that nothing continues to happen - but Americans continue to die from this senseless violence with shocking regularity.
> Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.
I'm not so sure that is true. I'd wager that Americans are suffering more than most right now due to institutional rot (or at least the perception and portrayals of it).
I suspect you're probably right, but I'm not sure it's to the point that it discounts their point. I think the "institutional rot" is a smaller factor than other elements impacting mental well-being.
A hormonal, bullied, enraged teenager where I live is less likely to do monstrous amounts of damage to others. They can get easy access to a knife and might own a car. Out of hundreds of people here, I think I know one person who has a gun, and they live on a farm with a rifle that I'd imagine emerges once a year to shoot foxes or kangaroos.
If we're going to talk numbers - most gun deaths involve gang/drug activities.
The real numbers once you remove suicide and gangs all point to mental illness and DV/Violent individuals.
That is a separate point to the first sentence. In the second sentence they also say to remove gangs which they claim in the first sentence is the leading cause of gun deaths so applying your logic doesn’t make any sense.
it's not like this changes the debate though even if it's accurate, if anything it broadens the argument. Cartel/gang grime is a huge issue and fueled by access to arms. Not only in the US, but also in Mexico and Latin America because a large supply of weapons goes illegally across the border.
In the UK, where the civilian population does not carry arms and even most cops don't, the police fires a few hundred shots per year(!) with a population of 60 million. In the entire post war era (The Troubles aside) less police has been killed than in the US in a year.
So if you care about the safety of law enforcement an arms race has bad consequences for everyone. And the militarization of police is another bad consequence.
You cant remove gangs, because half of what is called gang is a bunch of young guys living in low socioeconomic area. When then hang around together and some of them is suspect of crime, they are fairly often classified as gang. It does not take much to be classified as gang. And then, any shooting involving them is gang shooting. Similar with drug related shooting, if one of them shoots because he is jealous of girlfriend and there are drugs in his pocket, it is drug related shooting.
Gang membership as traced by law enforcement is not something super formal.
Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42
As a non-American I found Heather Cox-Richardson's recent substack newsletter post [1] to be useful in understanding how the US has got to this point. She's a history professor at Boston College and she does a good job of describing how gun ownership and control came to be (intentionally) politicised, and how the NRA's role has changed over time.
Honestly, I don't see how the US is ever going to dig itself out of this hole. The reward system that leads to the perpetuating the culture war that lies behind this problem (among many others) just seems too strong. It's deeply structural and embedded in US culture, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it. I wish there was.
It's difficult to take that article with more than a grain of salt when there's clear political bias and a lack of proper sourcing from the start. Of course political bias is inevitable, but to claim that our gun laws are the result of a takeover by "a minority of radical extermists" is ridiculous.
Then when referencing hard numbers and talking about the influence the NRA may have had, she doesn't back that up with anything. Her "notes" are mostly other highly opinionated articles. Had she followed any form of standard or proper notation[1] it'd be easier to believe her. But usually when people fail to make their sources easily available it's because they don't have them/they are low quality.
Just to add another comment to this. Typically when someone claims that something which is supported by a large percentage or even the majority of a given population is the result of "extremism", they themselves are like the extremists, for better or for worse.
The fact that the majority of Americans have voted time and time again to get our gun laws to where they are today is my source. It's not "extremism" if it wins by popular vote.
> The fact that the majority of Americans have voted time and time again to get our gun laws to where they are today is my source.
Your gun laws are made by politicians who are elected for a wide variety of reasons, not just their stance on firearms. So I think its rather a stretch to say that you have the gun laws that you have due to them being the will of the majority. In fact, according to Gallup, the majority in the US (over many decades) want stricter gun control [1, particularly the second chart].
(And I'm sure the $190 million [2] that gun-rights lobby groups have spent in over the last 24 years contributed to the laws being the way they are.)
> It's not "extremism" if it wins by popular vote.
That sounds worryingly like the usual justification for the Tyranny of the Majority to me. Not everything that is popular is unextreme or justified - and history is full of instances where societies have ended up in a hole due to this type of reasoning. Democracy isn't just about voting, its about to manage differences.
Nevertheless, a large number of US citizens committed to the defense of their right to keep and bear arms simply isn't "a minority of radical extremists", regardless of the vehemence of your disagreement.
There is not much political will for more gun control right now.
Indeed. Prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act, you could order pretty much any gun through the mail.
The political violence and radicalism of the 60’s drove the legislation. Only automatic weapons were controlled before that.
So seems silly to claim “radicals took over the NRA” when any type of gun control is a very recent phenomenon. Hell, even during the 80’s most of the US had incredibly lax gun control laws compared to what is being suggested today.
I don't understand why "any type of gun control is a very recent phenomenon" means that a claim that "radicals took over the NRA" is "silly". Whats the reasoning?
The claim is that the NRA was "radicalized". However, the same time the NRA was "radicalized", new more restrictive gun control law was pursued.
Why would anyone be surprised the NRA went from "all about recreational shooting" to "aggressive gun rights organization" at the same time restrictive guns laws were introduced? They had no reason to aggressively oppose gun control laws because none were being discussed.
It's like saying a homeowner "suddenly became violent" when someone tried to break into his home. There was nothing "sudden" about it, it was a response to an external trigger.
Regardless of the gun issue, there’s a glaring issue that seems more obvious to me: mental health. The solution seems to be a much better mental health system and safety net. If we got rid of all the guns in the world, psychopaths would make pipe bombs, etc. Getting rid of guns would help, no doubt. It would add friction to the process of pulling off massacres. But the real, root problem seems to me that we have completely gutted our mental healthcare system.
Gah! I can’t edit my comment, but evidently, this “mental health” thing is a Republican talking point. Let’s see if they put their money where their mouth is. (I doubt it.)
Mental health is a talking point, but it's a really good one. The U.S. dismantled their mental health systems in the 80s. It was well justified at the time as there were a number of human rights issues around torture and indefinite detention. Now the pendulum has swung too far the other way and problematic individuals are essentially impossible to hold anywhere. There is a definite need to have facilities that can hold people for potentially prolonged periods, but aren't prisons.
I don't know about you but I don't particularly care if my opinions happens to be talking points for one side or the other. This seems like a very [misguided] partisan concern.
The concern is that it's usually used as a deflection: "You shouldn't take our guns away because it's actually because of mental health" but then they take no steps to improve people's mental health.
As a foreigner I find this subject very complex since the right to bear arms in on the US constitution.
To change or "rewrite" the constitution trying to deal with this subject could dissolve the US.
Banning guns altogether (rather improbable) will only leave law abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals.
More protection in schools could be a starting point to address these awful events.
I'm still in favor of law abiding citizens having a way to defend themselves. My Dad and Mom were almost killed by a burglar with an illegal gun while they were at home!. A burglar got inside my house while my pregnant wife and me were sleeping. If she were to go to the bathroom or anything else, I couldn't possibly imagine what would happen.
For context, it's practically impossible to buy a gun in my country. I wouldn't recommend anyone to vote for laws restricting any law abiding citizen to defend themselves and their loved ones.
This really isn't the shape of the policy debate in the US. Nobody is seriously talking about rewriting the constitution or banning guns outright. The fundamental issue is that there's a politically powerful minority that is able to block essentially all meaningful attempts at any kind of gun regulation and they do. That's it and it's not likely to change in the short term.
I live in California, where it's illegal to have a magazine that can hold more than 10 bullets (a standard Glock 17 holds 15+1). It's also de-facto illegal to own an AR-15, since you have to neuter the gun in all sorts of crazy ways for it to be "California legal". You also can't buy any recent (recent meaning, in the last several YEARS) handguns due to the also-obviously-illegal-yet-still-a-thing CA handgun roster.
You're right that nobody is seriously talking about rewriting the constitution; rather, states and other actors are just outright passing laws that blatantly disregard the second amendment. So it's actually worse than that. It'd be better if they were honestly just trying to remove the second amendment from the constitution rather than just de-facto abolish it through ridiculous measures.
The qualifier was 'seriously'. As one of the sibling replies says, it's a fringe view. Retired (and sitting) Supreme Court justices can and do have fringe views.
> Nobody is seriously talking about rewriting the constitution or banning guns outright.
That's simply untrue.
> The fundamental issue is that there's a politically powerful minority that is able to block essentially all meaningful attempts at any kind of gun regulation and they do.
Such regulations are drafted in ignorance and have far more to do with making guns less scary to ignorant people than in actually affecting public safety.
> Nobody is seriously talking about rewriting the constitution or banning guns outright.
People are talking about both, but they are on the fringes. OTOH, they are convenient for the defenders of the status quo to elevate to the level of principal alternative, because it helps deflect from the real debate, which they don't want to have.
> Banning guns altogether (rather improbable) will only leave law abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals.
How do you imagine this works? I’ve been ‘at the mercy of criminals’ my entire life, but I’ve never had to fear getting randomly gunned down in my school, or on the street, or in a bar brawl.
I do not see how a sensible person would ever choose the alternative.
Your fear, or lack there of, may or may not reflect reality. It's not really a good basis for an argument.
The right to bear arms is based on the idea that a person has the right to defend themselves, their life, loved ones and property.
This basis is plenty sensible. Plenty of history is filled with violent criminals, governments, invaders, marauders, rioters, pirates. And it is sensible to suppose that, even if not present now, the future will have them too.
>Banning guns altogether (rather improbable) will only leave law abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals.
Is that statement true though? The only person I know who owns a gun is a farmer and he never shot a criminal but wild boars. In the countries I lived(2 Western Europe, 1 Eastern Europe, 1 Middle East) no one I know ever shot at any criminals, any criminals were dealt through the police, we actually never saw the criminals because they avoid the confrontation even if you don't have any arms. The only time I was a victim of a crime where I was confronted by the criminal, it was when a person really high on drugs tried to rob me on a train. I wouldn't be shooting that person anyway, I simply notified the security at the train station and professionals took care of it. The rest of the times the criminals I encountered are usually things like selling me fake SD cards, which is also something I wouldn't shoot people for(though I wouldn't oppose capital punishment for fake media storage).
Is this different in the US? Are people shooting at criminals all the time? Will a JavaScript programmer in Austin be defenceless in the face of the dangers in Texas if they made the guns illegal? What's the situation on the ground? What is the number of criminals shot per year by an average US citizen?
It's exceptionally rare to shoot at criminals or even to use a gun in self defense. When a person in the United States purchases a gun, the three most likely occurrences where that gun will be used to shoot a human are:
1. suicide
2. murdering a romantic partner
3. murdering a stranger after an argument or while the owner is committing a crime
Harvard has a good site that summarizes current research on how guns are used in the United States.
Per the CDC, defensive gun uses are estimated in the hundreds of thousands per year. It is not "exceptionally" rare to use a gun for self defense (even if actually killing someone with a gun in self-defense is relatively rare).
> More protection in schools could be a starting point to address these awful events.
The evidence in this area shows that increased police presence in schools does not reduce the amount of school shootings, but does increase the number of students arrested.
> Banning guns altogether (rather improbable) will only leave law abiding citizens at the mercy of criminals.
So, ah, what are the Police for?
Also, hundreds of millions of people in developed countries without guns around the globe live "at the mercy of criminals" but experience less crime, less violence, less homicides and less gun deaths than people living in America.
Well, I have first hand experience being at the mercy of criminals. Do you think the police is always available when crime happens? How many cops would any country, let alone a city, need to provide safety for every citizen?
> The Bill of Rights feels intense today, but try reading it in the mindset of someone in 1791. A few years removed from Louis XVI selling Divine Right of Kings. Then suddenly “Hell no, also we’re gonna say and print whatever we want, you can’t search us, and everyone gets guns.”
Okay. In practice, how do you plan on achieving this? What steps can we take to “rewrite the constitution” (other than an actual revolution overthrowing the current political system, which… would require guns and even then would probably be impossible)
There are literally very clear steps to amend the Constitution. It’s not like Steve grabs a pitchfork and YOLOs his way to no second amendment.
> An amendment may be proposed by a two-thirds vote of both Houses of Congress, or, if two-thirds of the States request one, by a convention called for that purpose.
You're not really following this through to it's logical conclusion.
If you want to get rid of the 2nd Amendment, yes there is a process for this. So let's fast forward and imagine that, somehow, you've gotten enough people and States on board with changing the Bill of Rights, and to keep it simple the 28th Amendment simply says "the 2nd Amendment is hereby REPEALED".
But then what? Pass laws that do, what, exactly? Confiscation?
>It’s not like Steve grabs a pitchfork and YOLOs his way to no second amendment.
Well ... the original founders of this country did, in fact, YOLO their way to a new one. They did it with guns though, not pitchforks.
Confiscation is one option, yes. Voluntary buy backs another. Making essentially everyone who owns a gun feel embarrassed and like a social pariah is another. Choosing to buy a gun should be thought of as one of the stupidest decisions the average person can make.
It’s called changing our culture and it doesn’t happen overnight.
Like I said in another comment, another good option is to just say, “Welp, this won’t work.” Then acted surprised when the next school gets shot up.
>>>It’s called changing our culture and it doesn’t happen overnight.
So why don't we dump our energy into figuring out why we have so many socially-maladjusted young men who are lashing out violently? Then we can reduce the number of murdered children AND still keep our guns.
I mean, even in developing countries that are awash in weapons you don't see lone-wolf teenagers gunning down schoolkids regularly; school attacks are usually due to organized terrorist movements. Something is seriously broken in our national psyche and we refuse to address it.
Can you explain how you think confiscation would work?
So let me get this straight. You think gun ownership is a major problem, and that to get people with guns to get rid of them your solution is to ... bully them?
How does this bullying work in places that have high levels of violent crime?
> Choosing to buy a gun should be thought of as one of the stupidest decisions the average person can make.
Yeah, we're not at that point. We aren't remotely close. Recently polling shows the country split almost 50/50 on support for stricter gun laws [0]. If we ever do reach the point where popular sentiment reflects your quote then you've _already_ won, and changing laws to ban guns isn't much more than an afterthought.
If somehow you managed to push through a gun ban before the country has changed, you're going to see a revolt. What do you do when police departments refuse to enforce the law? Probably entire state governments as well? Are you going to send in the army to go door to door confiscating guns? Assuming that the soldiers are willing to follow orders...
Barring a major flip in US culture - which doesn't appear to be remotely likely in the near future - the only possible outcome of a ban on guns is civil war. That isn't dramatic right wing propaganda. The right to bear arms is enshrined in the US constitution and upheld by the Supreme Court. You may not like the fact that it is, and you may not think that it should be _but it is_. If we reach the point where constitutional rights are meaningless then the entire US system of government has failed, and its demise won't be a pretty thing. I hope you're smart enough to realize that a US civil war in the modern era would be incredibly bad for everyone and would probably result in the deaths of millions.
I’m familiar with how the constitution is amended.
Given the structure of the political system in the US, it is impossible for a two-thirds majority of both houses of Congress to agree on any even mildly controversial topic. You’ll note that the 1992 amendment was about a boring and uncontroversial topic. The last one that had anything to do with a cultural hot-button issue was the repeal of alcohol prohibition, in 1933, when the political system operated completely different to how it does now.
So, yes there’s a mechanism. But getting together enough votes to activate that mechanism is impossible in the actually existing reality of the United States. So, now what?
> I’m familiar with how the constitution is amended.
It didn’t sound like you were.
Let’s start with one state or 1 member of congress saying they want to amend the constitution. Then get a 2nd and perhaps a 3rd. You can probably see where this is going.
It is absolutely not impossible for 2/3 of Congress to agree on a controversial topic. Believing that is very defeatist.
We can also just sit around and wait for the next school to get shot up and act confused again.
Yeah, I can. It will get to about 49 or 50 senators (at the absolute maximum) and then stall out. Many of those senators, especially in marginal states like Arizona, will then become subject to difficult primary and general election challenges, dissuading anyone from trying again anytime soon.
> It is absolutely not impossible for 2/3 of Congress to agree on a controversial topic.
Provide even one counterexample, then.
> Believing that is very defeatist.
Yes it is. I’m a defeatist on this subject. Things don’t magically become possible because you really wish they were. Sometimes defeatism is the factually correct position. But you’re making moral/emotional arguments, not factual/logical ones.
I’m also a defeatist on such subjects as whether I’ll live forever, or whether I can win the lottery and stop working, or whether Iran or Hong Kong will become a democracy anytime soon.
It's not necessarily rewriting the constitution, and could take decades, but ensuring liberal judges get a majority on the supreme court is all it really takes in order to reverse the 5-4 D.C. v. Heller (2008) decision that first affirmed the 2nd amendment grants individuals the right to handguns for private use outside a militia. It's congressional legislation from there. Roe v. Wade already showed it's possible to overturn an opinion that grants individual rights.
Indeed, you’re right. The Supreme Court is the only remotely plausible way policy on gun control, or any other cultural hot-button issue, can ever change in the US.
However, given the present composition of the Supreme Court, it’s reasonable to assume that they will not do anything meaningful on this subject for decades, at least.
You don’t have to actually rewrite it, amendments to the constitution don’t have the be consistent with those that come before it. Prohibition and repealing prohibition for example. If you somehow had enough political will you literally dissolve the US then you have enough to amend the constitution many times over.
What if guns were treated similarly to cars? Mandatory training, License w/ renewals, registration w/ renewals, insurance mandatory, yearly inspection mandatory, etc.
Personally I feel people should be able to defend themselves while at the same time deterred from stockpiling and accessing mass casualty capable arms.
So... You don't need a license to own or drive a car on your own property, I don't think. Or go through a background check to buy one.
It's just that we have public roads, upon which it's difficult to hide a car while in use. Yet routinely many people drive unregistered and uninsured vehicles.
Cops automatically scan plate info now. It's harder to get away with being unregistered in metropolitan areas. Source: was slow to switch out-of-State plates that were no longer registered, got stopped in the city.
Not to mention in many cases, you can carry a gun in public, and you do need a license that has to be renewed, just like a driver's license. So the original poster's point is moot.
Fundamentally, because unlike driving our right to bear arms is enshrined in the 2nd of our 10 foundational constitutional amendments, and licensing, registration, etc. are historically used to disenfranchise certain groups in favor of others. See: voter ID debate. We make IDs required and "all you have to do" is go to the DMV that's only open during hours you work, has absurdly long wait times, and we close down the ones near predominantly black neighborhoods. The same would certainly happen for the kinds of firearm regulation you propose.
Which isn't to say there isn't some reasonable compromise to be had there, just that there is a pretty reasonable argument why we don't do that.
Nobody was talking about reducing access to cars after that guy ran over a ton of old folks in Kenosha a couple months back. In fact no one is talking about it at all as he does not fit the correct political narrative
It's a little disappointing to see a whole thread of people who clearly haven't even seen a pro-gun perspective at all. The primary purpose of guns as they see it is self defense, as noble a purpose as any, especially compared to travelling really fast.
Why don't I ban you from browsing the internet, clearly the primary purpose of the internet is porn, which drives a lot of human trafficking and ruins lives every day.
I am a gun owner but the self-defense thing is a red herring IMO. You are far more likely to shoot yourself or be shot while owning a gun than you are successfully defending yourself. You can make the argument that they are fun to own and a constitutional right, but the self defense argument cant be taken seriously when the statistics show the exact opposite.
This "far more likely" is a form of pseudo-logic: you find a common trait (gun ownership, hair color, anything), discover a correlation and proudly declare that hair color has something to do with odds of being shot. If the US declared Somalia its 51st state today, our odds of getting shot by AK-47 would supposedly increase.
And the stats, if only you bothered to look it up without prejudice, would show that self defense cases are counted by millions, while murders are under 20 thousand (and hardly more than 5 if you subtract inter-gang disputes).
First off it's not "pseudo-logic" to state that gun owners are more likely to be killed or injured in gun-related deaths or injuries. How are you going to kill or injure yourself with a gun if you don't own one? 66% of gun deaths are suicides. There is a causal relationship between owning a gun and committing suicide with a gun.
As for the stats, the only source I can find on that "millions" comment is from a conservative think tank citing a single 1995 study. The actual number of reported cases in the article is 67,000-- of which, most are actually not true self-defense cases.
"4. Most purported self-defense gun uses are gun uses in escalating arguments, and are both socially undesirable and illegal
We analyzed data from two national random-digit-dial surveys conducted under the auspices of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. Criminal court judges who read the self-reported accounts of the purported self-defense gun use rated a majority as being illegal, even assuming that the respondent had a permit to own and to carry a gun, and that the respondent had described the event honestly from his own perspective." -- https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/gun-thr...
The 1995 study is such an insane outlier that it's safe to say that the methodology was likely flawed. If any news source is using that as a legitimate number it's not because they're actually interested in the truth. It's because they have an agenda to peddle to you.
Finally, to claim that the number of homicides is "hardly more than 5" is hyperbolic and dishonest. Especially considering the fact that just the MOST RECENT mass shooting event has left 18 dead. If you think guns are cool just say that, don't be intellectually dishonest.
Burglaries are not self-defense cases. According to that website about 12% of burglars are armed, and in states without "stand your ground laws" you're only going to be able to justify your self-defense case if they presented a clear threat, you attempted to flee first, and then you found yourself without an exit before firing. So of the 3.8m burglaries, one third of which have a person present, one eighth of those have an armed intruder. Which leaves 160,000 potential cases for self-defense. Which is certainly not the "millions" initially claimed.
Well, using your own words, 1/3 of the 3.8m burglaries happen with a homeowner present. It's a lot better to have a gun in such situations. Whether the intruder is armed is irrelevant: being sliced with a knife, beaten with a shovel or raped by a unarmed dude isn't a great outcome. As for those laws that protect the burglars from homeowners, they have to be changed. But even if you lived in such a state, first you defend yourself and your family with a gun, shooting the intruder if necessary, and then find a lawyer, in that order. Regardless of the laws, I find it appalling that some people embrace this submissive attitude to "burglar's rights in your house" and try to impose this attitude onto others.
People are talking about reducing cars’ access to pedestrians though. A lot.
Go to any organized large gathering since ramming into crowds became a popular terrorist move in the 2010’s and you’ll notice a preponderance of heavy barricades. Sand trucks blocking roads, cement barriers on sidewalks, marathon crowds physically separated from roads, etc. See also how every new-ish commercial building has bollards around the entrance or at least those large cement flower pots. Even if it isn’t a government building.
All to prevent ramming attacks. Because of how common they became.
Code for bollards was updated with intentional ramming in mind
> On 23 October 2014, the US National Institute of Building Sciences updated its Building Design Guideline on Crash- and Attack-Resistant Models of bollards, a guideline written to help professionals design bollards to protect facilities from vehicle operators, "who plan or carry out acts of property destruction, incite terrorism, or cause the deaths of civilian, industrial or military populations".[26] The American Bar Association recommends bollards as effective protection against car ramming attacks.
Various cities installed permanent protection
> In January 2018, it was announced by the then mayor of New York City, Bill de Blasio, that the city planned to install 1,500 steel street barriers to prevent vehicle attacks. This came after two vehicle-ramming attacks in 2017 in the city killed a total of nine people.[28]
> The city of Münster has been planning to install security bollards in public areas in response to vehicle-ramming attacks in European cities, including the Berlin attack.[29] While only selected locations can be protected this way, tight bends and restricted-width streets may also prevent a large vehicle getting speed before reaching a barrier.[30
Literally everyone was talking about it, making exactly the same point you are now. People parroting this take was basically all of social media for a week.
You’re not uncovering some logical inconsistency in liberal logic any more than “oh you’re pro-life, but you support the death penalty hmmmmmm” does for conservatives. This shit spreads like wildfire because it sounds like a gotcha but it relies on putting words in someone else’s mouth and then calling them a hypocrite for something they didn’t say.
If you can’t come up with a single good faith argument for why someone might want to restrict guns but not cars then you don’t really understand the opposing stance and you’re not equipped to actually have this debate. Being able to articulate the opposing stance in a way the other side would agree with then explaining why you believe it’s wrong is the only way to not talk past one another.
You are wrong!!! Liberals talk about reducing cars (esp. in cities): improving public transit, increasing biking, improving pedestrian safety, and walking all of the time.
Mufflers would be illegal. If you are driving between states, you need to check to see if your driver's license is accepted by each state you go through -- and some counties. Adjustable car seats are illegal. Automatic transmissions are illegal. Building your own car would be illegal. If your truck is too short, it's a felony. Unless you call your truck a car, and never put anything in the bed. If you have a criminal record for drug use, you cannot drive a car, or even ride a bus. Some states will only let you put 5 gallons of gas in your tank, claiming that large gas tanks are a risk for ramming attacks. California will only let you purchase cars they say are safe--and haven't updated the roster for years. Politicians keep insisting that your tires should be laser etched with microscopic serial numbers so you can track down criminals by the tire marks left behind, and that your car should have a kill switch controlled by the government. Movies like Fast and the Furious get blamed for causing drunk driving. If you buy a Tesla, people constantly demand that you explain why you NEED to own it, and that everyone should be perfectly fine with a Vespa scooter. Whenever a drunk driver hits someone, society blames you personally, and says that you just want your dumb hobbies and don't care about children.
That's not even all the rules. Car keys must be shorter than one inch to prevent masd stabbing. Purchasing gas needs a license, 3 hour wait time to deter impulsive arsonists, and suspicious looks when you buy too much gas (more than 10 gallons) per day. Gas purchases are limited to 50 gallons per month per person. Selling gas, oil or engine parts to strangers is a felony. Windshields are banned, and tinted windshields is a crime with a minimum of 10 years in prison punishment, because windhields let criminals conceal their activity. Black "assault style" trucks are banned. Oil isn't illegal, but its use is frowned upon and it can be bought only from the right people on the outskirts of the state. Every accident involving more than 4 cars makes the media start whining about aboloshing all "machines of death", politicians arrange an urgent consilium and propose a bill to ban 4-wheeled assault-style machines, but usually fail to get enough votes. When the do, the law remains in force, sort of, until some federal judge returns from a long vacation, finds out what this kindergarten did and overturns the law (and promptly departs to another multi-year vacation).
What the GP meant, clearly, was "what if gun users were regulated like car users", e.g. requiring training and a license. IMHO this fits the "part of a well-regulated militia" clause that people always ignore. If I had to guess, this clause was there specifically to prevent unstable people from getting firearms, since your fellow militia members are probably not going to want you if you seem unstable. Social proof is not a bad heuristic, even if it does have obvious failure modes.
Yes. And anyone who makes such a statement clearly doesn't have a grasp on the issue -- either of what a civil right is, or how guns and cars are regulated.
If guns were regulated like cars, there would be no background check to buy a gun. A felony would not disqualify you from gun ownership. Schools would teach marksmanship starting at age 15, and you could get a license to carry at sixteen, recognized by all states. Suppressors wouldn't just be legal, they'd be mandatory. No one would try to sue Smith and Wesson for shooting sprees, just like nobody tried to sue Ford for the Waekusha ramming attack. Etc, etc, etc.
But as to what the first response said, ultimately then, gun ownership would be a privilege, not a right. You don't license rights.
>A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
The right, as written, includes the phrase "A well regulated Militia". This is the only right that includes the word "regulated". Personally, I would be in favor of a highly distributed form of regulation, similar to the "jury of your peers" system: to own a gun, you must join a militia, and it's up to that militia to determine if you're the type of person to randomly murder children or not. (This is similar to the idea I proposed after 9/11 that passengers be required to socially mingle with each other, and then (privately) share concerns with the airline or TSA. That is, the people with the most to lose are the best defense against these kinds of threats).
Ok -- this is a common statement. I suspect you are arguing in good faith, but ignorant of DC v Heller, and don't understand the prefatory clause debate.
> ... the right of THE PEOPLE to keep and bear arms...
Clearly, this is a right that belongs to the people, regardless of militia membership. Please read DC v Heller.
Even grammatically, "well regulated" refers to function, not rules. A mechanical watch that keeps time is "well regulated".
Please understand that these points are extremely well settled, and that bringing them up is like bringing up "violent video games".
DC v Heller was decided in 2008, so "extremely well settled" is false. There was significant dissent leading up to that decision, including Circuit Judge Henderson who wrote:
>Under United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. at 178, the Second Amendment's declaration and guarantee that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" relates to the Militia of the States only.
Also of interest are the amicus briefs. At the time Texas Attorney General but now Governor Greg Abbott, submitted a brief authored by Abbott's solicitor general, Ted Cruz, advising that the case be affirmed. I wonder if they have any second thoughts now, and if they did, if they would admit it?
But you need multiple steps including the driver’s test to get a driver’s license, then you can drive. In this recent shooting, it’s obvious the shooter got his guns way too easily. I am pro-gun but I think you should be required to have a gun license first before you can buy a gun. And a mental health test and safety test should be passed to get the license.
Basically anyone with a pulse can get a driver's license, it's almost impossible to lose one permanently, and even people caught driving without one often only get a slap on the wrist.
I don’t think you can get a driver’s license in one step shop. It usually requires you bring documents and wait in long lines and schedule a test and take the test on a different day and go back wait in long lines. There’s no way you can get a driver’s license with a pulse.
Sounds good. I'll just be over here making my 1.5 caliber anti material machine gun in my backyard strictly for personal non-commercial usage on private property.
Why should it be a right that we are bound to as modern citizens? I didn't sign off on the 2nd amendment, it was signed off on 250 years ago by a small group of pre-modern colonial elites. It originally was considered useful because colonists and local militias needed to be able to defend themselves from the British, and to not lose their means to hunt or protect themselves before police.
These days, we have autonomy in our own country, no British will invade us now. What is the purpose of keeping the full right to any gun ownership, if it's not a good thing for the nation? We didn't keep slavery when we realized it was wrong, how bad must it become before we say guns be restricted to use by qualified and safe individuals?
And the idea of "arms" as only guns is silly, there are restrictions on many sorts of weaponry, including guns, so there is not an absolute right for any citizen to have guns at any time already. There are already restrictions and they're neither enforced nor strong enough.
> Why should it be a right that we are bound to as modern citizens? I didn't sign off on the 2nd amendment, it was signed off on 250 years ago by a small group of pre-modern colonial elites. It originally was considered useful because colonists and local militias needed to be able to defend themselves from the British, and to not lose their means to hunt or protect themselves before police.
Did you sign up for the 1st amendment? Maybe next time we're facing a crisis of "facts" (ie. during covid), we should be able to repeal free speech by simple majority? After all, with electronic communications and deep fakes, fake news is much more dangerous now than to the colonists 250 years ago.
> Maybe next time we're facing a crisis of "facts" (ie. during covid), we should be able to repeal free speech by simple majority?
> "in many places and in ordinary times, the defendants, in saying all that was said in the circular, would have been within their constitutional rights. But the character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done."
2A says militias were the reason for guns. Now we have the national guard. Private gun ownership is much less useful than it once was. England is doing reasonably well without them. Worth a try here IMO.
If you go back and read what the people who wrote that amendment said, they note repeatedly that it was an individual right unbounded to membership in a militia, which, bizarrely, has been conflated today with being in the National Guard - a state run organization.
Even if accurate for all the amendment signers consider the world they lived in compared to ours. I can see private gun ownership having more utility in 1800 than today. And considering the cost in lives, injuries, and distress guns don't appear to be with the externalities IMO.
This is part of why a sensible discussion cannot be had. "Shall not be infringed" has become axiomatic to many gun owners.
Disclaimer: I am a gun owner. I like guns very much.
Here's the 2A in full:
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
I am not a historian but I believe that this quote from James Madison in The Federalist Papers helps give some context to the second amendment:
"Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of."
The idea is that a federalist country needs a power equalizer between states who wish to self-govern, and a federal government that seeks to grow its power. The gun ownership is tied to the idea of a well-regulated state militia, which we have now called the National Guard-- which is a reserve force of the US Military because in the Civil War we basically decided that a federal system was kind of stupid.
All of this to say, the second amendment is not scripture from the hand of God. It is a law written with historical context from a different time, by men whose beliefs would disgust most people alive today. It's not Orwellian to discuss licenses or background checks, it's our modern society outgrowing laws from a bygone era.
Except the National Guard are actually part of the Army, Navy and Air Force.
"The National Guard is a state-based military force that becomes part of the reserve components of the United States Army and the United States Air Force when activated for federal missions."
It may be organized by state, but it's a federal force.
The 2A exists to give people tools to fight the government (or support it), it's not a gun fetish, it's literally a tool to empower citizens. If you doubt that people armed with rifles, shotguns, and semi-automatics can overcome the Worlds Biggest Armed Forces(tm), then look at the most recent example: Afghanistan (repelled the US -and- the USSR).
I addressed that the US National Guard is part of the US Military. I don't doubt that an armed civilian population can defeat the US Military, but most 2A advocates support the physical mechanisms of tyranny: militarized police, violation of privacy, unlawful detainment. They wait for a civil war that never comes, while supporting the growth of the police state. Is the annual number of gun casualties worth an absolutist 2A position when guns don't actually make us any freer?
Presumably in any situation where individually owned firearms were helpful in resisting the United States military, some significant portion of national guard members would also say “no thanks” when activated. After all, the United States military can already conscript individuals, so any hope of individual firearms being useful for resistance obvious assumes that individuals would say “no thanks” to conscription.
I wish I could find the video but there was a great video by this Army infantryman who explained why there wouldn't be a splintering of the US military and why they would 100% kill US insurgents. Basically before shit hits the fan the National Guard would be mobilized and no longer receiving news. So if the government committed some horrible atrocity, they wouldn't hear it. Second let's say there's a Waco-style siege of an insurrectionist group holed up in a compound with families. Their briefing would say that "the insurrectionists fired on US troops and are using civilians as human shields" not "some of your fellow citizens and their families have rebelled against the tyrannical US government". Our military performs countless atrocities every day with almost zero defectors and yet for some reason people think that if they ever fought on US soil, they would begin falling out of line.
I haven't seen this video, but would like to -- It sounds right to me, which instantly makes me question it, but it does fit the information coming out of Ukraine re: Russian military and local population.
This is exactly the scenario the 2A is designed to thwart.
It doesn't guarantee a win, but it gives civilians a chance to group together to protect themselves. I've got friends from Hong Kong, and what the government did there to a helpless (disarmed) population in order to crush any unapproved views absolutely blew my mind. People being murdered, rounded up and vanished, thrown from buildings, beaten in the streets on a wide scale. If the troops are given false information, and move in to attack, then they're going to be made to pay dearly for every mile they advance. There's a lot more people out of uniform then in it, and I mean a lot -- winning against a mostly disarmed population (in the middle east) is more than we can handle. Attacking a heavily armed population in its home area is suicide for the attacking forces.
That argument falls apart when you realize that the same people adopting the "shall not be infringed" stance also "back the blue" and vote in favor of the physical mechanisms of tyranny. You can't simultaneously argue that guns are necessary to fight against a tyrannical government and then turn around and approve of things like probable cause, qualified immunity, civil asset forfeiture, increased surveillance under the auspices of border security, and increased funding for police. The argument is intellectually dishonest coming from 90% of the people who make it. If they were really interested in "liberty" they would be in favor of ending the drug war and the laws associated with it, but they aren't. They just don't want to admit that dead kids is a price they're willing to pay to keep their fun toys.
The Natty Guard = "well regulated malitia" argument is not compelling at all to me. If it was, the fact the guard can be nationalized and that states don't appoint officers unilaterally would be in strict contravention of how the constitution says the militias should be run.
On top of that, the Bill of Rights is focused on rights of the people and states. IIRC there's nothing in it about protecting the "rights" of the federal government. Why would it need to explicitly give itself the right to arm its own standing army?
Yes the guard was nationalized in 1903 and runs counter to the idea of state militias. The Civil War was the end of the discussion about states needing a physical deterrent to keep the federal government out of their business.
"National Guard-- which is a reserve force of the US Military"
That is why anyone stating the National Guard is a standin for "well armed militia" is wrong..."a reserve force of the US Military" is not representative of the people; it is a protector of whomever is in power at any moment in the US.
The general assumption of politically active gun owners in the US is that any attempt to regulate guns is a back-door route to try and outlaw gun ownership. This seems like an accurate assessment of how US gun politics actually works. Even consumer safety law intended to protect against dangerously defective products was used to push gun control under the pretext that firing reliably when called upon to do so was a dangerous defect - and now consumer safety law no longer applies to guns in the US because gun owners no longer trust the government with that power.
Not sure I agree that that's what the Civil War decided, since it ended with the federal government asserting its power.
I am not a constitutional law expert, but the way the second amendment has been interpreted has become its meaning. At this point, I think what would have to happen is the 2nd amendment would need to be replaced with another amendment that better describes the limits on individuals rights to bear arms.
Until then, these events will continue indefinitely. I simply do not believe that any SCOTUS would make a different decision.
When I say federal system I mean a system of having semi-autonomous governing regions (states). A centralized government is not a federal system, but the naming conventions make it confusing.
I think it is possible to entertain the notion that these laws are not some inviolable physical property of the Universe, but something we made up and so are also something we can undo.
In this case in the US it requires a constitutional amendment.
Although in all honesty even if an amendment did occur the faith and trust in the government at this point is so low it would probably just encourage rather than convince gun owners.
Strictly, it doesn't. A supreme court decision that gave a new interpretation of arms would be needed. But, as stated elsewhere, many arms and guns are already regulated. Quite heavily.
I just don't think that after the way things have worked out in the past we'll suddenly see a supreme court decision that is wildly different from what we've seen. I don't think anything will change until congress decides to make an amendment which isn't going to happen unless attitudes broadly shift in this country.
Buckle in, this is just how it's going to be I think.
Dismissing that they did just signal a reversal on previous rulings, it is a matter of time until it happens. Long matter of time, but either the US falls to basically fascism, or the courts eventually see a makeup that is more liberal and change things.
I really don't think we should count on such an outcome and idk what it would even look like. A change like this should come from congress, which honestly feels a little more likely than shifting the court to be liberal enough to do whatever it is you're hoping for.
The conservatives I know believe everyone should know how to handle a firearm safely, and believe people have a right to defend themselves from criminals, as well as the government. It appears to be liberals trying to disarm fellow citizens and make sure the government has all encompassing powers.
To state that differently: one side appears to believe that if we pass law "A" or ban object "B" that everything will be better. The other side seems to believe "bad" or "evil" people/governments will always exist, and that everyone has the right to actively defend themselves and their families. Including the people that don't like "B".
The "true conservatives" conceit is... Sad. I think it is safe to say that nobody wants kids getting shot. Despite that, most of the conservative voting block has routinely pushed measures that lead us here.
So this, "bad people will find a way" is such a "let's ignore the evidence of literally every other nation" to give up and clutch pearls before swine.
Directly, though, my point is that most of these extreme conservative views are self consuming and on the way out. I thought it was Carlin that said it, but I can't find a direct quote. Basically the world gets more liberal as old views literally die off.
Right, I was just pointing out that we don't strictly need a new law. Reinterpretation of existing laws works just fine. Settled law is clearly not settled for good.
This feels silly. Explosives are general arms for an armed service. Good luck stockpiling c4. Or having a military vehicle. Cannons that can shoot depleted uranium? Surface to air missiles? All arms that would be needed to fend off a real threat.
So the idea that guns are special is idiotic. You can already get in trouble for using a gun with too many rounds when bird hunting. Is that actually illegal?
All the abortion bans are also currently unenforceable. But that can change with a simple precedent reversal from the supreme court. And note that the precedent to overturn for the guns is not as long standing.
Arm: a means (such as a weapon) of offense or defense.
Firearm: a weapon from which a shot is discharged by gunpowder.
Small arm: portable firearms, especially rifles, pistols, and light machine guns.
The second amendment as strictly read says only "arms" the definition which has not changed since it was written only the lethality of the arms has increased through technological advancement culminating in nuclear arms.
A "destructive device" is a type of arm as defined by the 1934 Firearms act nearly 150 years after the second amendment was written.
A machine gun is not considered a destructive device but is still regulated and obviously still a type of arm.
So clearly you are ok with adding restrictions on arms not specifically laid out in the constitution if you are ok with the regulation of "destructive devices" and "machine guns" semantic word games aside. Otherwise if you strictly adhere to the wording of the amendment then there should be no regulation on the type of arms a citizen may own up to including nuclear arms.
Unless the law is changed, which is what many are trying to do.
The constitution and bill of rights weren't handed down by God himself to the founding fathers. There's always room for improvement, e.g. allowing women to vote, or outlawing slavery.
I'm not saying that this is or isn't the right move -- merely that "it's in the constitution" isn't a very good argument any more than "this is the way it's always been done".
The other side is that the American culture has a toxic side which can drive lonely young men to perform despicable acts.
Imagine being a lonely young boy, growing up getting bullied all the time, being told you amount to nothing, and it's your fault, and at the same time, while everyone around you is deep into corruption and sin, they preach to you that you should be sinless and pure!
I am not American, but I can sense the contradiction from miles away. And if it goes on for too long, especially when one is young, it can turn a person into a mass murderer.
Sadly, mental health issues stemming from society's ills is not really discussed anywhere and in depth. The focus is only on gun laws, gun ownership and gun availability. I am not saying that it is not an important aspect of the problem, but it cannot really be solved by just stricter gun control...even if guns were not really available, the people with mental health issues would use bombs or use other means to kill. But then the focus would be on terrorism, and the mental health problem will still not be discussed, because it's such a difficult topic...
Most mass shooters come from single parent households or dysfunctional family homes. U.S families vary and many don't live near other family members where they can get help and American communities are not like other cultures or countries where they are involved in raising children.
So if a child's immediate family has issues, there isn't an alternative for that child to to go to to help or for a positive role model. And there are very few public positive role models.
The U.S. has the highest number of single parent households of any country. It also has some of the higher number of mental illnesses and lower numbers of mental health workers.
U.S. works longer hours, have less vacation and holidays, so children are left to their own devices more. Our food supply is laden with chemicals that are not allowed in other countries thanks to lobbying and the FDA. (I'd be interested to see how that impacts mental and physical health).
Our public schools are full of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The latter being higher than Catholic churches and not very well reported on by any media.
Couple that with media addiction (old,new, and social) and the phenomenon of media "contagion" where you get mass shootings in clusters due to media coverage and you have a recipe for disaster.
Given the failure of the war on drugs, prohibition and the context above, not sure how gun control or confiscation would work when Americans tend to work around those kind of things. Even without guns, we now have drones so its only a matter of time before someone uses those.
However, all that generally gets talked about is either gun control or more guns e.g. arming teachers rather than the underlying causes. Kids used to bring guns to schools without incidents for decades until the 90s when you started to have many latch key kids coming of age from homes where parents were never around.
For context: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott recently attributed all gun crime to mental illness, saying at a press conference that "anybody who shoots somebody else has a mental health problem, period."
This is a very popular statement on the twitter and all, but I think it comes from their need to support marginalized people, which ends up requiring mental illnesses to make you more virtuous and never less.
So then you have to go around saying that serial killers are the most healthy people there can be and 100% rational. Surely this is a mistake?
Of course we have mental illnesses that describe things like this, like "antisocial personality disorder". If anything, all we need to do is invent "wants to shoot people personality disorder".
"Semantics" Ueah the meaning of words is important becUse of the consequences. What we care about with mental illness is suffering because its good to reduce it. It's absolutely critical.
> It is clear that healthy well adjusted people don't fixate on slaughtering children
All the people who waged war and genocide throughout history have nothing to do with the suffering of the mentally ill due to their genetics , behavior and genrics.
I was the one offering alternative language here to not offend people with a specific definition of mental illness.
If you just want to argue the point I'm offering to concede, I'm happy to steal man it.
If you have you ever known someone that is mentally ill, you know that their illness does not preclude the ability to harm and make those around them suffer.
Many School shooters are capable of suffering themselves, and in fact their suffering often plays a large role in their motivations.
They can also suffer during a lifetime of incarceration or the anguish of being executed.
They often have major mental disabilities, like the inability to feel empathy.
There are a large number of neuropsychiatric disorders associated with persistent antisocial and criminal behavior, such as Psychopathy, Sadistic personality disorder, narcissism, depression, and paranoia. Are these not mental illnesses by your definition?
Nobody is claiming that the mentally ill are dangerous.
However, deadly mass shooters are often mentally ill.
For example, studies have found some indication of autistic spectrum disorder in ~30% of of school shooters[1]. This is but one neuropsychiatric disorder.
To ask the inverse question, Do you think that school shooters are mentally healthy?? If not, how would you fit their psychology and behavior into our scientific model of neuroscience?
Mentally ill means whatever we want it to mean, and there’s no reason not to make it include this.
If there was a "treatment" that worked, it'd be a good alternative to life in prison. (Although if that was some kind of future-lobotomy, it'd have a lot of its own ethical issues.)
>A disability is any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions).
Why would commission of a violent crime, which could lead to life imprisonment or the death penalty, be less of a mental health issue than sex or gambling addiction, alcoholism, etc which generally have less of an impact on one's life?
I don’t think the problem is it’s untreatable so much as it’s ego-syntonic (ie they don’t feel anything is wrong) and so they’re not going to ask for help. But most personality disorders are like that.
IIRC mass killers do have some prior behaviors in common, but it’s not that they like wearing trenchcoats and violent video games, more like they often start with domestic violence or hit women.
This is also in the article - does no one read past the first three paragraphs?
Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42
This may be a problem with our current categories of mental illness. It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer.
Perhaps the wrongness is that the murderer is simply evil. I don't have a framework for helping evil people nor positively identifying them before they commit evil acts. If someone does evil, they can be punished to dissuade further evil acts, caged to protect others from them, or killed. It is an injustice to do any of those things to a person before they commit an evil act.
If, however the wrongness is an illness, it might be possible to diagnose them before they do great harm to others and provide treatment. Of course there's a dangerous slippery slope possible here in which anyone who's at all atypical is given involuntary "corrective" treatment.
>> It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer.
This seems like wishful thinking - You are making some assumptions about the nature of human kind (that murderous behaviors are not part of it) and then you work backward to classify someone who has commited murder as not healthy.
The safer assumption would be to give some credit to social norms, and be grateful that murdering each other is mostly out of fashion (when did we last witnessed real duel to death?)
> This may be a problem with our current categories of mental illness. It is my opinion that if someone murders another person for most of the common reasons (robbery, relatively minor interpersonal disputes, nonsensical rage, etc...) something is wrong with the murderer.
Even if they do it because they'll die of starvation otherwise?
The context here: the media claimed the shooter has "no history of mental illness"; Abbott said anyone like that must inherently be mentally ill.
The media's position is untenable. If your definition of mental illness doesn't include adolescents who want to murder their peers, then it's defective by design.
Your first link doesn't address mass shooters.
The second one (written by an "enterprise reporter" and quoting from forensic psychiatrists) draws an astonishing distinction between "mental illness" and "sociopathy or antisocial disorders" (!), and defines most mass shooters as sociopathic and therefore not mentally ill. I don't know how anyone could read that article and be convinced by it. I should note that forensic psychiatrists are by far the most conservative (not in the political sense) practiciners in their field, a shocking number of them are quacks, they often have little experience treating patients, and they tend to believe in more black-and-white/"predictive" (and excessively confident) theories, suitable to their role in courtrooms.
Under the old-school DSM mindset, if you're not diagnosed with anything, you are defined as healthy. That type of thinking will never allow us to truly address society's emotional health. Emotional health is a spectrum; we're all at varying degrees of emotional health, and the average (i.e. "normal") person is significantly emotionally unhealthy.
Any reform that aims to genuinely improve society's emotional health has to move beyond the old model; and in any model of emotional health (where low self-esteem, social anxiety, low emotional self-awareness, attachment disorders become part of the picture), any shooter would be defined as severely emotionally ill; moreover, any reform that aims to detect attachment issues, low self-esteem and more, early on in life, in a systematic way, would prevent most (if not all) of these shootings from happening.
"These massacres are not natural disasters, acts of God, or random. They are totally predictable, direct consequences of the choices made by Greg Abbott and the majority of those in the Texas legislature," O'Rourke wrote to supporters in a Wednesday email.
> They are totally predictable, direct consequences of the choices made by Greg Abbott and the majority of those in the Texas legislature
I don't understand blaming Texas laws, California has much stricter laws and has technically more mass shootings per capita than Texas[0]. To me these are all such low numbers that it is hard to draw any conclusions based on policy, let alone specific legislation from a specific Governor. I'm all for practical solutions (hell I'd have them throw the second amendment out if it were even possible) but I don't know that there are many easy answers to the problem.
The psycho kid waited until he was 18 and then went and bought an AR because he could. He could not have done that in most other countries. And most other countries also have psycho kids. The only downside of this is that normal kids in other countries cannot buy an AR when they turn 18.
>There are over 350 million legal gun owners in the US, we're statistically safer than any other country.
You're using the fact that the Constitution defines a right to keep and bear arms for all Americans to imply that all Americans are legal gun owners, which is incorrect. It's actually impossible to know how many legal gun owners there are in the US, because collecting that data is prohibited by federal law, but it's certainly not every American.
However, the polls that I've seen estimate gun ownership at between 30% to 45%.
And no, US gun owners are not statistically safer than any other country. Other countries with high per capita gun ownership also statistically have a far lower percentage of gun violence than the US.
Texas had a plan in to spruce up school safety, they just didn't go forward with it, its pretty sad. I read through it, it looked like it would be very effective.
Luckily first responders neutralized the shooter otherwise more kids would've died.
All the details aren't in, but this case apparently involved a police chase that led to the school, a school resource officer was present and wasn't able to stop the shooter from entering the school (nor were the pursuing police officers).
The first responders called for help, and a Border Patrol agent came to the scene, ran in alone and killed the shooter.
> … and a Border Patrol agent came to the scene, ran in alone and killed the shooter.
Note that Border Patrol Tactical Unit (Bortac) agents were the ones who confronted and shot the shooter. They aren’t your run of the mill agents and they also ignored the others waiting for backup and went in before backup arrived.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they were former military with downrange exposure. Lots of people criticize police in these situations waiting for backup, but the reality is a real firefight your first time is fucking terrifying, even when you outnumber the shooter. Paralysis in these situations that are more similar to urban combat than daily police work is expected.
So the entire US military, who's training is heavily geared toward shooting people and many of who's members have done exactly that, are all mentally ill?
Don't get me wrong, I think there is a case to be made that they might be, but good luck being a conservative politician who says all veterans are mentally ill.
> Gun owners occasionally shoot in self defense. They are not mentally ill.
Then that's not a gun crime and definitely outside the realm of the 1 sentence context. This is why these discussions seem to go back and forth. Wild swings of intentional ignorance, as to what the discussion is about, after having already made up their minds.
That's not a gun crime (at least on the part of the kid) it's an accident. Kids die in accidents, it's a very sad reality. It might well be negligence on the part of the parents or whomever let the kid gain access to the gun though.
No, kids being able to access a gun and ammunition is in fact a crime. But nice try - we do the same thing with car crashes, the 2nd prominent killer of adolescents, and predictably we do nothing beyond calling them accidents.
Sure, people who are mentally stable don't usually tend to kill other people, but where else in the world (or modern world) can people with mental illnesses easily acquire guns? Ah, only in the Land of the Free!(TM)
Canada is the U.S.'s neighbour and is probably closer, culturally, than any other nation. Gun ownership is also high in Canada. In terms of guns per capita, the U.S. is #1 by a long shot, but Canada is #7 [1]. In Canada, guns owned per capita is one third of what it is in the U.S..
Canada also has mass shootings. The annual deaths from mass shootings per capita in Canada is 0.032, which is about one third that of the U.S. (0.089) [2].
As a Canadian, it's actually shocking to see that Canada's rate of mass shootings correspond well to the U.S.'s if you simply control for population and the number of guns owned by that population. I'd have expected us to be doing better. Where gun ownership laws vary wildly in different U.S. states, Canada's laws are under federal control and are, hence, consistent. Where some U.S. states have virtually no requirements of testing or training to own guns, Canada requires gun owners to have mental health checks and complete firearm safety training courses. Gun owners undergo regular background checks and will have their guns confiscated in short order if they ever commit a criminal offence. Where many U.S. states permit concealed carry of handguns, handguns are virtually illegal to carry in Canada. Transporting them from your home to the range is legal, but they must be unloaded, locked, and permits are required for the transport.
With all of these additional precautions, Canada really should be doing better. The harsh reality may be that the number of guns per capita floating around really is an important factor.
"Where many U.S. states permit concealed carry of handguns, handguns are virtually illegal to carry in Canada. Transporting them from your home to the range is legal, but they must be unloaded, locked, and permits are required for the transport."
I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them.
The other policies you mention may be more relevant, but it goes to show how easy it is to conflate various kinds of harm and what laws might prevent it.
I think gun owners would be much more receptive to regulation if they felt people were genuinely trying to separate narrow and effective laws from broad infringements that annoy many and accomplish little. But it's hard to get past the "more guns laws the better" mentality that is so wodespread.
>I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them.
On virtue of how many shootings have begun "without warning", the cultural context in canada versus the us is quite different. The expectation of actions when you see a firearm is very different in these two countries!
- in the US, someone with an openly carried firearm may be transporting it or any number of innocent use cases
- in Canada, someone with an openly carried firearm is already committing a crime. And, that crime is generally of no personal benefit to them^, which is a huge warning sign. They are likely not considering the law in their actions.
If I saw a person with a gun in the US, I would quickly walk away. If I saw a person with a gun in Canada, I would run.
>gun owners would be much more receptive to regulation if they felt people were genuinely trying to separate narrow and effective laws from broad infringements that annoy many and accomplish little
Gun owners consistently misrepresent and come up with inconsistent interpretations of any gun control. The bar is never high enough, the logic never sound enough. The "broad infringements" proposed are never, and will never be, good enough. I find your statement to be a bit disingenuous in that regard.
^ while protest is a valid case imo, protesting by (for example) carrying a gun onto a school campus, grocery store, or movie theater is quite different than in a park with other protestors. Context matters, even here!
> Gun owners consistently misrepresent and come up with inconsistent interpretations of any gun control.
Maybe sometimes, but there's also gun laws like in California that affect large populations of gun owners. I don't think they're making their dissatisfaction and confusion with the gun laws up. Owning a gun in the US isn't very simple; different states have wildly different laws you have to observe, and those are in effect at airports as well.
I don't think it's wise to say, "they just don't understand" to the people who actually have to live with the laws.
As a gun owner, I do think there's reasonable forms of gun control. I don't mind having my background checked or paying a tax stamp. I don't mind psychological evaluations or closing gun show loopholes. Restricting guns, ammo, attachments, magazine sizes etc are not effective forms of gun control imo.
> Restricting guns, ammo, attachments, magazine sizes etc are not effective forms of gun control imo.
Of course restricting magazines and accessories is not effective. They're only brought into the argument by people who don't want effective gun control.
But restricting guns and ammo is absolutely effective. The UK has a sixtieth of the rate of gun deaths compared to the US. And the UK is no paragon. Its rate is much higher than it should be, in my view, because a lot of gun crime is gang related so does not get the attention it deserves. A more reasonable rate would be closer to Japan's which is about a quarter of the UK's. Much lower and you likely start requiring genuinely authoritarian regimes such as Singapore or HK.
The US could absolutely get to saner gun crime and homicide levels if there was any real will to do so but there isn't. Of course it wouldn't happen overnight but it doesn't have to.
The real problem, in my opinion, is that the US is so de-sensitised to extreme violence that they can never have the equivalent of the collective traumatisation that the UK had after Dunblane. That was the spur we needed to put rational gun laws in place. The balance in the US is so far out of kilter that the seesaw is buried in concrete. Even biblical massacres of innocents can't shift it. So very very sad.
> Of course restricting magazines and accessories is not effective. They're only brought into the argument by people who don't want effective gun control.
If you're not very well educated on guns or the laws around them and you're contributing to a topic on guns, then you are not here in good faith. I would say that you and several other commenters on this thread are exactly the embodiment of that.
For the shining example of knife-crime that is the UK, there are also examples like Germany and Switzerland that have very low gun violence. I'd rather focus on what underpins gun crime in the US and get at the source rather than allowing it to be certain peoples pet topic that they vapidly spew misinformation on.
Knife crime in the UK unacceptably high. So high in fact that it's something 60% of the benchmark for unacceptable crime rates. The US's.
Being anywhere near as bad as the US in any violence categories is a genuine cause for shame and is the reason why knife crime is a big topic in the UK.
Obviously, it's not a big topic in the US because it pales into insignificance compared to gun crime. Not because the US has low knife crime; it doesn't it's terrible.
And I genuinely don't know why you'd bring up Germany and Switzerland. Their gun crime stats are bad. Switzerland particularly. Obviously they're not as bad as the US because no country outside central America, the Balkans or South Africa comes even vaguely close to the US. That doesn't make them good though.
And I lived in Switzerland long enough to understand pretty well why the gun crime is low compared to the volume of arms in circulation. I lived in Kandersteg for a bit so I saw the training first hand. But you can't reasonably argue that the US mess isn't because of gun ownership because Switzerland isn't as bad.
And as to your point re the senator from Arizona. I could have worded that better. They're not trying to pass a law for effective gun control. They're trying to make baby steps on the road to effective gun control that are sufficiently small to have a vague chance of succeeding. The intention is laudable. And it is likely that they do want effective gun control eventually. So I accept the rebuke.
On one hand you decry the actions of meaningless gun control by those acting in bad faith but then as soon as it's democrats doing the exact same thing it's "baby steps" and laudable. Can you explain why you're doing this?
I didn't say it is meaningless. I said it isn't effective. Because it isn't effective. We have plenty of examples of effective gun control and these aren't they.
And I couldn't care less what party they represent. Democrats can presumably be against gun control.
Right, but then you go on to pat the people doing it on the back, followed by an "acceptance of rebuke". This kind of doublespeak is what's disruptive in these conversations and makes people not trust each other or their intentions.
If we do end up in a place where we ban guns, the backlash of that will probably be to ban things that other interest groups like that "cause harm" with similar statistics. I find that expressly illiberal, and I'm not really a fan of what a small minority of vocal liberals really want, which is to ban them or make the system so frustrating that no one can enjoy them.
Guns murder a lot of people in the US. Having fewer and less potent guns is better. Not good but better. I applaud people who are trying to make things better because the status quo in the US is shockingly bad.
I'm not sure what you're getting at with your second paragraph. I'm not really that bothered if people stop being able to enjoy weaponry. I also don't particularly blush at being called illiberal. Or indeed liberal.
I do care that a country that was once admired and respected has become a thing of pity and disgust. I take no pleasure in that. That the beacon of democracy is also a beacon of wanton violence is something to be saddened by. And I am.
But there are more people involved than just those killed. Think of the effort, time and trauma involved in years and years of active shooter drills. We can’t just centre the tragedies and ignore the deeper effects of them.
If the government banned new and bought back every magazine over 10 rounds, would people stop having these drills?
I doubt they would. (If they make sense to have in a world with 20 round magazines, they make exactly as much sense in a world with 10 round magazines and a fantasy that no 20, 30, or 50 round magazines remain.)
I mean mostly because a hand gun will do just fine if you're shooting kids in a classroom who can't escape. An AR-15 is overkill unless you're wantong to kill many people in more open areas like Breivik did.
There isn’t? I don’t think you’re considering the mental impact of that sort of preparation and drilling. Particularly on young children. Particularly when it hits the more extreme simulation end of the spectrum with role played shooters and trying to trick classes into opening doors with screaming classmates outside.
I’d expect people to deflect, minimise or argue that the trade off is worthwhile but blanket denial is pretty odd given the circumstances. There are after all plenty of articles interviewing parents and kids who have been affected as well as research.
Unlike you I remember being in school. Almost any activity like that was thought of as a joke by kids and a waste of time. People endure actually hardships all over the world and come out fine. A couple hours of sitting in a corner won’t hurt anyone. But i doubt it works fwiw
Extrapolating from your own experience is a poor way to generalise particularly when the experiences of others are easily accessible and directly contradict you.
The majority of mass shootings take place in minority neighborhoods, not in schools. By the OP's logic we should just ban minorities from owning guns and we would reduce mass shootings and gun violence by over 50%. Perhaps you can see why that is a stupid way of going about things.
Because a criminal will just get illegal attachments or larger magazines anyways. I haven’t looked, but I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to find some online from overseas. Or criminals can steal them from legitimate places.
I'm sorry if I'm asking a stupid question, and I'm genuinely curious. I hear that line of reasoning often, "well criminals would do it anyway", but is that really true?
In the UK, guns are heavily restricted and we definitely have criminals but our gun crime is very low. There must be some reason these criminals are not using guns?
I'd wager that it's because most people do not have guns, so they're harder to access, less chance of criminals being able to access. Wouldn't that be the same in the US too?
US already has a lot of weapons, and getting them illegaly is a lot easier, than in UK, where they literally have to smuggle them from abroad, and being an island makes it even harder.
I live in the balkans, and getting a gun here is very hard, almost impossible. People still get shot, and during the "wild 90s" here, there were a lot of shootings, even mass ones (not during the war, but after, or in in-war areas).
The only difference is, that we have "different criminals" here, so when someone gets shot, both the shooter and the shot person usually know why they're shooting and why they're being shot, and it's rarely without a good reason.
>The only difference is, that we have "different criminals" here, so when someone gets shot, both the shooter and the shot person usually know why they're shooting and why they're being shot, and it's rarely without a good reason.
No, you don't.
The overwhelming majority of murders in the US follow the same pattern. Basically the drug industry DIYing the the kind of violent enforcement of business disputes that "real businesses" use courts and state violence for.
I do agree, that it is very possible to reduce the number of guns around and that then it is also harder for criminals to get one.
But as far as I know, now it is also pretty much illegal to carry a knive around in the UK, as the crime with knives were and are very high (but still lower than the US).
But in general I do not agree to the idea to reduce the problem to the number of guns.
Germany for example has a quite high number of guns per capita (higher than one would expect) and so has switzerland, but both have lower homicide rates than the UK.
I would rather focus on the reasons, why someone goes homicidal.
> a criminal will just get illegal attachments or larger magazines anyways
The point is to frustrate those efforts.
> I’d imagine it’s pretty easy to find some online from overseas.
Good! Now you've added new points of failure. It would just be terrible if that high-capacity magazine they bought from a sketchy vendor were to jam in the field.
> criminals can steal them from legitimate places.
...which increases the risk of getting caught before anything worse happens.
It is comically easy to modify or manufacture magazines. A lot of 10 round magazines are just standard mags with a spacer. I used to live in California. Every time I went shooting in Nevada, I'd remove the spacers, turning my 10 round magazines into 50 round mags, then change them back before I returned.
If you look at photos of confiscated guns in California, very few have 10 round magazines. Scrolling through SFPD's twitter, I can only find photos of illegal guns with illegal magazines.[1][2][3] The second photo is of a Polymer80, which is a pistol you can make at home using a dremel and a hand drill. They're compatible with Glock parts and quite reliable.
These laws do nothing to reduce violent crime. The main effect is to annoy law-abiding gun owners. When I moved out of California, it took me maybe 30 minutes to undo all the CA-specific modifications on my guns.
A criminal, in a gang, with access to the black market, might do that. It's still much more friction than simply going to a gun show or a state where there are no questions asked when you purchase a weapon.
A school-age kid very likely not.
Gun control isn't supposed to stop all criminals from getting guns, if there's a will, there's a way.
As Jim Jefferies puts pretty well: there's almost no reason to own a gun if you aren't a hunter except for that you like guns. That is ok on a personal freedom level but has pretty harsh consequences to a society when at scale...
> As Jim Jefferies puts pretty well: there's almost no reason to own a gun if you aren't a hunter except for that you like guns.
There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States, and evidence to suggest this actually lowers the rates of various types of violent crimes (including "hot robberies", where the home owner is still in the house when it is being burglarized).
The right to self-defense is a foundational human right, and logically entailed from that is the right to effective means of self-defense.
> There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States, and evidence to suggest this actually lowers the rates of various types of violent crimes (including "hot robberies", where the home owner is still in the house when it is being burglarized).
> Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2013. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/18319.
Why not? You are upstairs when an intruder with a statistical 30-40% chance of being armed on an unknown mission that is hopefully just robbing you with a 7% chance of causing your family harm. Police are 10-30 minutes away. Most people don't sleep in the same room as the entirety of their family so if you hunker down and hope they go away you are leaving for example your kids exposed and hoping the intruder doesn't hurt them. If you startle them they could open fire sending a stray bullet into your kids room or they could wander into your bedroom in search of more loot and end up in either a struggle or a hostage situation.
Worse than all of the above they will do it again and again with few opportunities to get busted because statistically few of these crimes actually solved.
Your families safety is the only thing that matters here. If playing Rambo will increase the risk to your family you shouldn't do it. If shooting the intruder will increase the safety of your family by even the smallest fraction of a percent at the cost of certainly killing a burglar you should absolutely do so.
Lets say the harsh truth. The only people prowling around invading other people's homes are awful people of negative value to humanity. From a purely utilitarian perspective you shooting them today would just mean that they stop hurting actual people of worth tomorrow.
For your own moral health you shouldn't hurt them if it is possible to avoid it and preserve your other goals but there is no situation in which you ought to prize any number of burglars over even 1% chance of your family members getting hurt.
Your outrage isn't moral its a plea for greater harm in service of a dysfunctional moral code where your children are less important than the meth addict who is terrorizing your neighborhood.
You're taking random numbers pulled out of your ass for a fully hypothetically situation which you've made up. Can I make my numbers up too, or can we have a productive discussion about some actual solutions rather than "he might shoot me I saw it in FBI reports"
Here's the reality of things:
- 3 out of 4 burglaries happen with no-one home
- 7% of that remaining 25% show "a form of violence". It doesn't mean shooting. Even a fistfight counts in there. So, 1.75% of burglaries happen with violence. This is even lower in countries which have already regulated guns.
- There are approximately ZERO burglars that want a confrontation when stealing from you. It is infinitely more trouble than it is worth to be caught. Even if they know they will win a fight. A fight means noise, it means being potentially seen, caught, etc. Burglars will abandon ship the moment anyone is up. Once again, gun ownership makes the likelihood of things getting violent much higher. If you know you can easily run away, you don't come armed. If you know you can get shot, you come in armed and ready to shoot
- The meth addict is deserving of treatment and help, not being shot. Do you think people fall into meth for the lulz?
- Utilitarian perspective on human lives is absolute dogshit and a show of a rotten society and mindset.
The meth addict is deserving of treatment and help, not being shot
Not to detract from the rest of your points, but this framing isn't helping. Even if we all were to agree that addicts deserve help, it does not fall to the victim of a burglary to extend that help, at that moment, at that time.
To add context the prior discussion the attack by the drug dealer/addict that I expressed concern about already happened a few hours ago. Because no lethal force was used in defense I now have to worry about the criminal coming back with a gun. If you see me stop posting in next week its probably because I got shot.
28% of the time someone was home during the burglary
7% ended in violence. Not 7% of the 28% 7% of the total or 1 in 4 people who found someone home victimized them. Let me quote the report for clarity.
> A household member was present in roughly 1 million burglaries
and became victims of violent crimes in 266,560 burglaries.
The most common crime is simple assault but rapes, shootings, and murders happen.
Lets rewind for a moment and re-center the discussion on what was said.
>> There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year in the United States
> In all civilized countries, these are called murders. Someone entering your home does not give you the right to shoot them.
We were never talking about what to do if someone burgled you while you were away. The entire sub discussion was whether shooting a burglar was a morally permissible response. The background facts are that you are going into the situation with a 1 in 4 not a 1.75% chance of being victimized.
Furthermore your burglar will keep doing what he is doing and he is going to crap out sooner rather than later and hurt someone else because he's going to keep putting himself in other people's houses with their kids.
At the population level helping addicts and shooting invading addicts aren't mutually exclusive. You offer all the help you can to people so you don't come into your house to steal your shit to sell for drugs. I'm absolutely on board with offering people help and I absolutely don't want to do harm to people.
While you are speculating I actually dealt with a fellow forcing his way into our home. He pushed his way in knocking my wife down in a position where she couldn't retreat. He didn't respond to a threat of imminent death in a rational way because he was on drugs. Nobody is dead nor even broke a bone because I opted for minimum violence and beat him him instead of trying to murder him. Furthermore we supported the prosecutors diverting him from prosecution into a drug treatment program because fucking his life after the fact wouldn't make us any safer.
Had it been the best choice to kill him I would have absolutely done it and I wouldn't have worried about his interests if they conflicted over much with me and mine. I certainly wouldn't render my family unsafe in order to preserve his life nor should I. Nor should you!
With that user's interactions with me hopefully in the rear view mirror. I'm looking at the drug dealers/users coming in and out of the building mostly en route to the schizophrenic chick who runs her apartment like a drug flophouse handing out electronic keys to the "secure" building like sticks of gum. Her druggies and dealers have started making trouble about getting in now that the door is keyed for one key per person so their "keys" don't work any longer.
Myself and my wife have both been threatened and they tried to burn our building twice in the last 6 months lighting a fire in the stairwell that threatened the life of everyone in all 56 units. Despite being obvious arson with the wall and floor of the stairwell lit by someone who lit then fled on camera twice in the same spot a month apart this was classified as a accidental warming fire set by homeless people and nothing was done.
I have already been told "snitches get stitches" by the druggies and I fully expect for someone to make an attempt at violence that ends in fatality one way or the other in the future.
Forgive me therefore if I don't have sympathy for bleeding hearts that want to extend the warmth of human sympathy and kindness to folks who are already inside their house robbing it while they are in it! My sympathy is so far past zero the counter has rolled over.
"an intruder with a statistical 30-40% chance of being armed"
add gun control into the mix and this chance goes WAY down.
"If you startle them they could open fire sending a stray bullet into your kids room"
As could you by opening fire in an attempt to stop the attacker. Noting the majority of gun owners never use them, they are far more likely to cause harm them prevent it.
The "protection" argument is best served by reducing the number of weapons in circulation, not by arguing your ability to use one to protect yourself.
You are certainly correct but one is usually in a stronger position to control your individual situation than your societies. Logically reducing weapons in circulation makes sense but if one cannot actually do that then it may make sense to arm yourself even if on net your society is less safe for the decision you are all collectively making.
"Defensive gun use" does not necessarily mean "killed someone". It could be merely brandishing the weapon.
And while a home invasion does not necessarily give the right to shoot someone per se, it makes it quite a bit easier to satisfy the conditions for self-defense that I have laid out elsewhere in this thread.
I believe the individual you responded to is stating that from a moral perspective it's murder, not from a legal perspective. I would agree with them as well.
That only removes the duty to retreat, in states where such a duty is imposed (which is very few). You still have to meet the other criteria for self-defense.
> It's still much more friction than simply going to a gun show or a state where there are no questions asked when you purchase a weapon.
I really wish people would stop repeating this falsehood. If you live in a state that allows private sales without a background check, and you sell a gun to a non-resident of that state, you have committed a felony. Non-resident sales must go through an FFL, which means background checks and whatnot.
Most criminals get their guns through theft, self-manufacture, or straw purchases (often via a spouse or close relative). They're not acquiring them through legal loopholes.
Self manufacture is a legal loophole because you only have to manufacture the receiver and even then you can get a properly sized blank and let a CNC machine do the finishing work.
Except most mass shootings are not done by criminals, they are done by people that walked down to the shops and bought them selves an assault rifle to commit these acts with.
Not to mention making these kind of things makes the criminals that are doing this stand out, and that is something they generally want to avoid.
But it’s not what one would typically class as “the criminal element” committing mass shootings in churches, schools, or other community spaces. It’s the whackjobs right?
Those gun people just knows because at this point they've fought and (lawfully) circumvented those restrictions for larger fraction of the last century. Notice how quick and comprehensively he listed them.
IMO a lot of them just wants the "real thing" and not necessarily wanting a lethal instrument, so leading majority to non-firing/less lethal subgenres makes sense. They don't need a real working three-stamp Stormtrooper AR9 for 9mm Monday, but that's just my opinion.
>but there's also gun laws like in California that affect large populations of gun owners.
Is your rebuttal that there are laws?
>"they just don't understand" to the people who actually have to live with the laws
No, I just don't care. Guns should be a utility.
>As a gun owner
So, I guess my question to you is: aside from home defense (which surely requires a limited amount of rounds) and practice (which can be done by a range selling and enforcing no carry out of rounds, like in many other countries), what is your daily use case for firearms?
1.) No sometimes, looking at those debate basically always.
2.) Gun owners defined as "people who own guns" have actually quite high support for regulations. There is strong lobby and minority that does not support them, but they dont represent all or even most people who own guns.
I don’t think this is that difficult. Don’t bring a gun to an airport. If you must for transport, arrange for a professional to do it for you. If you can’t afford that, you don’t have a good reason to travel with a firearm.
I somewhat disagree with it being straightforward. 99% of the time it can be, but there's some notable edge cases that are missing from that website. There's been a handful of cases where people have flights with connections through NY/NJ, miss their flight (or have to divert to NY/NJ for mechanical problems and transfer to a new aircraft), collect their luggage that has a firearm in a locked container, and then get arrested for possessing a firearm without the mandatory NY/NJ state permit (which IIRC are only available to residents)
Anyone carrying a gun in an airplane, or any public transportation method is either a security officer, or a criminal. There are no good reasons as a regular-ass Joe to carry your Glock in an airplace. Not a single one.
> Gun owners consistently misrepresent and come up with inconsistent interpretations of any gun control. The bar is never high enough, the logic never sound enough. The "broad infringements" proposed are never, and will never be, good enough. I find your statement to be a bit disingenuous in that regard.
Gun control advocates consistently fail to understand the things they are attempting to regulate, and fail to provide rational justifications for how their restrictions would actually promote public safety.
I could say the same about gun owners. If only there were a way for the two to come together to work out these problems and find something that works. Something like a conversation. With no yelling.
Could you? Most gun owners, especially gun rights advocates, have received some training in the mechanics of firearms as well as the tactical and legal realities of using a firearm on another person.
Gun control advocates are in general less likely to have any such training.
> If only there were a way for the two to come together to work out these problems and find something that works. Something like a conversation. With no yelling.
We can certainly have a discussion about guns and violence, but gun rights advocates are ultimately winning this conflict simply by training and empowering more people to own guns.
school and mass shooters often brandish weapons between their car and the place of the massacre, and more and more they are wearing body armor. not exactly concealing their intentions. and they often shoot people who challenge them on the way in.
If they are "not exactly concealing their intentions", then how do laws about concealed carry help?
Either (a) they are concealing illegally, in which case nobody will know; or (b) they are not concealing, in which case a law about concealed carry is irrelevant.
As a former gun rights advocate who is now in favor of basically eliminating guns except for hunting…
> I think gun owners would be much more receptive to regulation if they felt people were genuinely trying to separate narrow and effective laws from broad infringements that annoy many and accomplish little.
From both positions, I’d favor regulation that explicitly aims to limit gun possession as much as legally possible. The problem with “more gun laws the better” is everyone knows it’s bullshit that accomplishes nothing, no one benefits, and every terrible incentive is incentivized.
They should come for the guns and get as many as possible, with as much solid legal theory backing it as they can. They’re never going to convince the fringe, but they’ll convince the vast majority of people who agree with regulation that they mean it and intend to be effective. Anything short of that is political theater.
What leads you do believe "the institutions" in the USA are are failing children at a substantially higher rate than any other country? And what specifically are you even talking about?
We don’t need to control everything to be safe; if anything, that’s a major detriment to our capacity to raise emotionally resilient human beings, and ultimately, makes us all less safe.
This kind of institutional thinking is — in part — why we keep raising these broken children in the first place.
You came to believe that guns create mass murderers?
Either you never really held a belief in the right to self-defense and are arguing in bad faith (which, frankly, is most likely), or if you did change your mind due to such a ridiculous premise, you never had a coherent argument for gun rights in the first place.
> You came to believe that guns create mass murderers?
I came to believe that the institutions which continue to not just protect widespread proliferation of firearms, but to rally around it as a culture war battle, are the ones failing children. I’m not sure how to engage with the phrasing “create mass murderers”. But those institutions are certainly enabling those who would be.
> Either you never really held a belief in the right to self-defense and are arguing in bad faith (which, frankly, is most likely)
Oh I still believe in the right to self-defense. And in all honesty I haven’t moved much philosophically on the subject of firearms specifically. But in terms of the practical reality, I just don’t believe we’re going to solve the problem without addressing our gun culture and significantly reducing availability/access.
> or if you did change your mind due to such a ridiculous premise, you never had a coherent argument for gun rights in the first place.
Oh it was coherent. The shift came at the same time as I shifted away from anarchism towards communism. Can’t really get more coherent than a fundamental question of the role, if any, of the state in dictating what’s permissible. My attitude toward that question has shifted on a great deal of things. Not to serve the ideological shift, but causing it. It hasn’t shifted far, granted.
According to wikipedia, Mexico, Belgium, Czech Republic, Afghanistan and Somalia have basically the same amount of guns per person. Yet some of these are among the safest countries in the world and in some of these you are very likely to get shot basically any time.
Just looking at the number of guns is very shortsighted and makes it sound you're focusing on "punishing sinful people" instead of making reasoned policy decision.
Those are not like cases. The picture in Belgium and the Czech Republic does not seem inconsistent with the thesis that lax gun rights, and mass gun ownership, are heavily related to rates of mass shootings.
Belgium:
"Until 2006, Belgium had surprisingly lax gun control laws. After a man shot two innocent people, however, the nation become increasingly concerned with the illegal flow of firearms. The 2006 legislation requires gun permits to be renewed more frequently and sought to prevent the impulsive purchase of guns by requiring prospective gun owners to go through a three-month process which includes an extensive police screening. Six years later, in 2012, the European Union passed regulation aimed at interrupting the transportation of guns across borders by requiring exporters to obtain a special license.
Today in Belgium, it's not easy to own any type of gun, unless it's a rifle or shotgun. The nation prohibits the private possession of fully automatic weapons, and permits ownership of semi-automatic weapons only in certain case scenarios. Furthermore, the private possession of handguns is only allowed after obtaining special permission from the government. In the country, long guns, such as rifles and shot guns, are the only guns not prohibited by the state. According to GunPolicy.org, these regulations categorize Belgium as a country that has "restrictive" gun control laws."
"The most recent statistics show that on a per-capita basis Czechs own about one-tenth the number of guns Americans.... Still, owning a gun in the Czech Republic isn't so easy. Permits are for 10 years and are reviewed after five years. People have to pass a written and practical test, as well as a medical check that includes mental health, and a clean criminal record...
Mass shootings are rare in the Czech Republic, but not unknown. In 2019, seven people plus the gunman were killed in Ostrava, and in 2015, eight people plus the gunman were killed in Uherský Brod. There was also a case in 2009 with four victims plus the gunman."
The Czech rules don't sound that different from where I live (California). Permits are for 5 years, and require a written test. You have to take the hands-on safety test for every gun you buy. There are checks for mental health and criminal records, although IIRC the mental health check only covers involuntary commitments.
Sorry I meant to add this statistic (updated now):
"The most recent statistics show that on a per-capita basis Czechs own about one-tenth the number of guns Americans."
The Czech Republic has 10% the per capita gun ownership of the US, and some moderate controls on ownership, and suffers from occasional mass shootings. That seems to me consistent with the idea there's a relationship between gun ownership, and its lax regulation, and mass shootings.
The Czech Republic has less ownership, a bit more regulation, so has less mas shootings. But it still has them because those values are not 0.
Czech Republic requires you to pass knowledge exam and health examination. The "go to buy semi automatic and have it in an hour at 18" just does not exists there.
Also, use of gun in self-defense is way less permissive then in USA. The stuff that pass as self defense in USA simply would not in Czech - you truly have to have no other choice.
The requirements for self-defense in the U.S. are very simple and logical[1]:
1. You must be (or believe you are) in imminent danger of harm
2. Your response must be proportional to the threat
3. You must not be initial aggressor
4. Your decisions must be reasonable based on the information you had available to you
A few states also impose what they call a "duty to retreat", which basically means you must have exhausted all safe avenues of retreat before resorting to self-defense. Most states have removed such requirements because determining whether or not that criteria is met is really hard and doesn't really add much to the other four criteria.
Whether a gun was used doesn't really matter: dead is dead. Using a gun doesn't make them more dead. If you were justified to use deadly force, then the means shouldn't really matter.
[1] I am not a lawyer, but my knowledge of self-defense law comes from attorney Andrew Branca and his book Law of Self Defense
The rittenhouse(?) case (which is used over here now to show how crazy Americans really are unfortunately) shows that this is a rather broad concept in the US (maybe depending on the state?).
Rittenhouse was a classic example of justified self-defense. He used the minimal amount of force necessary at the last possible moment, all the while retreating and trying to peacefully disengage from his attackers.
In my experience people who argue it was unjustified usually are lacking some key facts (most of which were available the night of the riot).
Simple, logical and still more permissive. Especially interpretation of them can be quite permissive.
> Whether a gun was used doesn't really matter: dead is dead. Using a gun doesn't make them more dead. If you were justified to use deadly force, then the means shouldn't really matter.
First, gun heightens chance of someone dying. But yes, you can shoot to wound to stop attack. But second, there are special laws that say how and when you can use the gun itself - so legally the gun or not does matter.
A gun is considered deadly force in the US, and thus would only be justified when facing a deadly force threat.
> But yes, you can shoot to wound to stop attack.
That is not really a thing. Often people don't die when they are shot, but you can't realistically have a goal of only shooting to wound. You shoot to stop the attack.
> But second, there are special laws that say how and when you can use the gun itself - so legally the gun or not does matter.
Can you give some examples? It's not obvious to me what such laws would be or why they would be beneficial.
Good point. This is a problem with Anglo culture specifically (note the poster who pointed out that Canada’s gun crime per capita closely tracks the US). Anglo culture is not sufficiently developed to support widespread gun ownership and therefore access to guns here must be curtailed.
I do not think this is an argument you want to make. Following this logic to it's ultimate conclusion is that we should just ban black people in the United States from owning guns, and I suspect neither you nor I want to do something so racist.
"Anglo" culture can support it just fine. The U.K. actually had lower violent crime rates before they banned guns. The fact that they felt the need to ban knives in London has very little to do with "Anglo" behavior.
Likewise, most places in the U.S.have rates of gun violence comparable to Belgium or Switzerland.
> “I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them.”
And yet, there does seem to be a strong correlation between “countries with stricter gun control laws” and “countries that have low rates of gun-related deaths and homicides”.
Canada has between 6-8X fewer gun fatalities per capita compared to the United States - both homicides and unintentional/accidental gun death rates are much lower. [1]
Removing suicides from the stats, a large amount of gun violence is done around gang activity. Looking at the stats for Chicago should sadden anyone.
Finding and fixing the causes of these is a much harder problem. NYC did a lot under Giuliani in Bloomberg to lower their crime in murder rate, but those have started rising again. Chicago hasn't done anything to fix their crime problem in the last 30+ years.
Dealing with gangs and mental health should be topics we are looking at.
Btw: getting rid of guns doesn't stop mass casualty events. The number one mass casualty event in the United States was done with box cutters. The number three was a van full of fertilizer. (The number 2 was a collection of many different weapons and methods)
Box cutters for airplane hijacking was a once-off event that would simply never be repeated even if cockpit doors hadn't been hardened against hostile takeover. Now, passengers simply would fight. The expectation was, I believe, that they would be taken as hostages, not killed in a suicide attack.
Agreed, that vector won't happen again. The #2 hopefully will never happen again (Tulsa race massacre). But the #3 (Oklahoma City bombing) could happen again with a sufficiently dedicated person.
But people are creative, and some other method could be used in the future. The Boston Marathon bombing was only 3 deaths, but 264 injured, and that was just a pressure cooker. The Trollhättan school attack was 3 killed with a sword.
Guns are a tool, a very deadly tool, but a tool none the less. Removing them from the US would be near impossible at this point (with the 2nd and 4th amendments getting in the way). It's also not all that popular in this country. Stricter gun laws don't seem to help (see the Buffalo shooting, in a state with red-flag laws).
One interesting point I heard raised is that the phrase "going postal" was born from an era where workplace shootings became common, but have since near disappeared (with background checks being a large part of the reason). Figuring out why our younger population is doing down the route they have the last 25'ish years is something that has yet to be corrected.
I think the thing with guns is that they tip the power balance too far in favor of the shooter. They are hard to defend against. They can do damage at range. Not a lot of skill is required to cause a lot of damage. You don't need a lot of creativity or even the ability to think clearly enough to execute a plan. You just have a gun laying around, decide "today's the day", and go live stream the next national tragedy. Not great.
You're right that we'll never ban guns in the US, but if we did, I think we'd see a lot less mass casualty events. People will still kill each other, of course, but it moves that breakpoint farther away from the average person's means, and moving that breakpoint means less innocent dead people. Seems fair to me.
Basically, I agree that people are creative, and a person who wants to kill someone (or many people) will find a way to do it. But if you make it harder, people will give up. Doing stuff is hard! Let's make it harder.
I don't know how I sound saying this but I think airsoft is a great hobby. It's basically guns with every scary features, except it can't cause physical harm. I think it could be employed to create a gradient of lethality proportional to population density.
The weapons used in these shootings are inevitably AR15 variants. That's a rifle that is designed to put lethal rounds in targets as quickly as you can hit the trigger, with a 30 round magazine (and with a modicum of practice you can reload almost without interruption).
Even the the ubiquitous glock can sustain similar rates of fire, although the survivability may be greater.
If the average person is facing someone with any intent to do harm with a modern firearm then there is no power balance.
>>>The weapons used in these shootings are inevitably AR15 variants.
False. The Virginia Tech shooter killed 32 people with a pair of pistols. It remains the deadliest school shooting in the US, and surpassed as deadliest mass shooting only by Orlando (49 dead, 2016) and Las Vegas (60 dead, 2017).
2015's second-deadliest: pistols and a revolver. He had a rifle but didn't use it (Umpqua College)
2014's deadliest: knives, pistol, car (Isla Vista)
2013's deadliest: shotgun (DC Naval Yard)
Review the list for yourself below, sort by death toll, then go to each shooting's page, which lists the weapons used.
AR-15s are also effective for self-defense purposes.
You can also build an AR-15 with a block of metal, a CNC machine, and plans that are freely available on the Internet. There is no effective means by which you could prevent an AR-15 from ending up in peoples' hands.
>There is no effective means by which you could prevent an AR-15 from ending up in peoples' hands.
>a block of metal, a CNC machine
Try not to argue in bad faith as a gun owner challenge (IMPOSSIBLE)
Half of your arguments are "regular men need to defend their houses" and "but black people shoot eachother in the ghetto too". Hint: these are in complete opposition to "Having enough time, money and access to a CNC Machine to make a homemade shitty AR15". Making guns less accessible means less shootings, period.
They are not. Black people have a right to self-defense the same as everyone else. The point is that gun violence in the United States is not uniform or random, but rather connected with specific set of social conditions. Ameliorating those specific social problems would reduce violent crime rates without the need to disarm peaceful civilians.
I'm guessing you need a 4 or 5 axis machine to make a gun. These cost more than the buildings that you need to contain them. (OK, there's this guy, but probably not big enough: https://pocketnc.com/.)
I don't think it's unreasonable to say that if you need to own and know how to operate a CNC mill in order to do a mass shooting, mass shootings are going to decrease. CNC is not "hit print", it's a skill that requires training and development. (Looking at /r/3DPrinting, I can tell you that many people manage to screw that up. CNC is like 3D printing, but about 10x harder. Some may argue that you need some more zeroes on there, actually.)
A golf club is also effective for self defence purposes. In any case, those same tools are available globally and AR15s simply aren't ending up in people's hands, or the hands of school shooters.
Point me to any other country in the western world where the concept of self defence is predicated on the possession of an AR15 capable of discharging 30 high-velocity rifle rounds in fifteen seconds.
Presumably, as your idea of self defence is overwhelming firepower, you spend your days campaigning against the ban on automatic weapons?
> Point me to any other country in the western world where the concept of self defence is predicated on the possession of an AR15 capable of discharging 30 high-velocity rifle rounds in fifteen seconds.
Prohibitions on such weapons do not reduce the overall violent crime rate, so I don't see why it matters.
> Presumably, as your idea of self defence is overwhelming firepower, you spend your days campaigning against the ban on automatic weapons?
What you imagine I think or do has no bearing on the arguments at hand.
Most mass shootings reported in the past few years have been committed with guns that were legally purchased by either the shooter or a family member. Surely illegally manufacturing your own gun (or finding someone willing to illegally do it for you) is a barrier to most would be school shooters.
Guns are a tool, a very deadly tool, but a tool none the less.
Really tired of seeing this argument. They're made for killing, period. Fertilizer, box cutter, automobiles all have other uses. Killing is not one of them. For guns, it's in the top 3. And I say this as a gun owner.
> And yet, there does seem to be a strong correlation between “countries with stricter gun control laws” and “countries that have low rates of gun-related deaths and homicides”.
I don't like the argument that relies on separating out gun crime from other crime to show how you get more gun crime when you have more guns. That's like saying you get more drownings in places that have more residential pools.
It's perfectly correct but only serves to further an anti-gun (or anti-pool) argument.
What I, personally, care about and what matters to the voting population, is whether we are safer in a place where the citizens are legally armed (or not, as the case may be).
Separating the crime into different buckets just to show larger numbers is intellectually dishonest.
Mass shootings are much, much rarer than home invasion and resulting rape, murder or serious assault, and as such deserve a proportionate response.
Let's be honest, if burglars decide to break into your house while you are in it they are not doing so to simply take your stuff. If they wanted your stuff they'd break in when the house was empty.
This scenario is much more frequent than the mass shooting scenario.
the article you quoted says:
“Homicide figures may include justifiable homicides along with criminal homicides, depending upon jurisdiction and reporting standards”
Why don’t we talk separately about “murders” vs “suicide” vs “justifiable homicide”? Each of those terms is fairly clearly defined in most people’s minds (maybe the last one a little less so), and then we could focus on the different mitigation that might be needed for each. I feel conflating them doesn’t actually help move the discussion forward given how different they are.
On a moral basis, I think the situation where a law enforcement officer killed the recent texas school shooter is very different from that of that shooter who murdered innocents. So when people conflate such very different things by using terms like “gun deaths”, it makes many gun owners like myself suspicious that people are not arguing in good faith. Or am I missing something? Is there some benefit to doing so that isn’t just political?
Surely there are some laws that have greater effectiveness relative to the interference with peaceful gun owners.
If you care about working together with your fellow citizens who think differently than you do, you'll pursue such laws and push back on laws that have a bad relative effectiveness.
For instance, did you know that, in California, you cannot buy a new model of a pistol? The most recent model you can get, from a roster that diminishes every year, is from 2013. Why? By what mechanism is that effective? For the same level of annoyance to gun owners, surely there is something more effective? Therefore gun control activists should oppose and overturn that law.
But they don't, because either they are ignorant or because they are more interested in winning than working together.
>Surely there are some laws that have greater effectiveness relative to the interference with peaceful gun owners.
I'd like to point out that any Peaceful Gun Owner is capable of becoming violent in the future, for a multitude of reasons that can be undetectable at the time of purchase. This is why I find any policy that attempts to "weed out" certain people to be inherently pointless. The only thing that would work is to repeal the 2nd amendment, but that's never going to happen.
>For instance, did you know that, in California, you cannot buy a new model of a pistol? The most recent model you can get, from a roster that diminishes every year, is from 2013. Why? By what mechanism is that effective?
Hint: it causes, over time, gun ownership to decrease. People will not be tempted by that brand new Sig Sauer ad they saw to buy a gun at Walmart for the fun of it. Keeping only older guns accessible means that these guns break over time, and lowers the amount of freely accessible guns. Roster diminishing means that fewer people buy fewer guns.
Is there something more effective ? Sure, complete bans. Unfortunately, that would go against gun nuts like you that argue that having a .50 antimaterial rifle at home is important because MUH FREEDOMS.
I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them.
If the guns are illegal, they aren't as easy to get. They aren't in everyone's home. If you break in somewhere to steal a gun, you'll not get a handgun. You know, because most folks aren't willing to hold onto an illegal gun. You aren't going to go to a gun show and buy an illegal gun because those folks don't want the shows shut down.
Which does mean that you'll have to go to the black market. The thing about the black market: If something is harder to come by, you'll be charged more. Same if the penalty is higher. You could see this in the drug market: LSD was generally more expensive than weed. (Still probably is, but I really don't know how pot legalisation has affected black market prices).
If guns are harder to get, there is less chance that a mass shooter will be able to get one. Could it mean that they use other means?
Sure they could. But realistically, those options don't always have the same effect. You could build a bomb, maybe. If you can get the supplies and knowledge to do it. Most options available to the average person, though, aren't going to be as deadly as guns and in general, won't kill so many people in such a short span of time and so many simply aren't as lethal.
In this, it is much like suicides. When gun laws are more strict, fewer people choose guns for a suicide. They choose different methods, though, and most of these are less lethal - which overall means that death by suicide goes down.
For a decent comparison, check Australia, which used to have a similar gun culture.
I’m a little surprised the black market in highly regulated countries doesn’t adapt by way of 3D-printed guns. Obviously most criminals aren’t going to learn how to make their own, but rather there are specialists as there are with forgers and traffickers and so on (hence “black market”). I wonder if there’s some limitation to those guns that I’m not aware of?
Doesn't track for many places in the US. Chicago has some of the strictest gun control in the country, yet also has a mass shooting every other week in the summer.
Sure, in no small part because of the different policies between states and between cities. Chicago, in particular, has strict laws that are almost worthless because of lax gun laws in Indiana. Gary, Indiana might as well be included in part of the Chicago metro area - in other words, you barely need to leave the city to get to easy gun access. It is very much similar to Canada having issues with guns because despite laws, it is fairly easy to smuggle legally bought guns from the US into Canada.
In other words, it should be obvious that regulations in one city do not hamper interstate trade - or heck, they likely don't hamper intrastate trade either, but I don't have any examples in my head about that specifically.
While that possibly makes it harder to acquire a gun in the city, an individual purchaser or black market dealer could simply drive a couple of hours to get their hands on one, no?
Also while impossible to prove, I think the numbers would be even higher in the city without the control in place.
..an individual purchaser or black market dealer could simply drive a couple of hours to get their hands on one, no?
Gary, Indiana shares a fence with Chicago: The fence sits on the Indiana/Illinois state line. Indiana has fairly lax gun laws. Also of note: There are not border checks on that line, nor on the border of Chicago.
The mechanism is that guns are harder to get, both legally and illegally, if there are strong controls on their purchase and use. Yes, a mass shooter would ignore the legal implications of getting a gun, but they cannot ignore the fact that there are fewer guns to get.
School shooters are usually teenagers with easy access to a gun at home. They don't have a criminal history or ties to the underworld, they're loners. It's really a question of whether dad has a concealable firearm. In Canada, they do not.
Rifles with detachable magazines, or internal magazines with more than 5 rounds, should be as hard to purchase as machine guns. That's narrow enough for me.
Long guns (rifles and shotguns) account for something like 2% of gun-involved homicides.
People use them for mass shootings, but they also use pistols, and there's not a huge difference in the outcome.
Your proposed law would have very low effectiveness, but impact millions (maybe tens of millions) people who want to buy rifles.
Maybe you don't care about those people, but maybe that's part of the problem? They are fellow citizens, they can vote, and they have rights. And they know you don't care about them and they will resist your proposals because they don't trust you.
You can turn that around and say that they should care more about you, and maybe they should. But at some point, we have to communicate, because we (collectively) aren't making good policy any more.
The same reason that the FBI (and other policing administrations) did away with the service revolver. There's actual a distinct tragedy where some FBI agents died in a firefight that spurred this, apologies for lack of citation - it is late.
It is scarily easy to miss, even at physically close distances, when fighting for one's life.
I feel most people that haven't shot a gun, or have only shot a gun while sitting perfectly still and undistracted, underestimate the above fact.
If you do have access to guns and the ability to test this, do some sort of exercise to get yourself breathing heavily before shooting, you'll see the difference.
All of this presupposes that we agree the average citizen has the right to defend their life with adequate tools. Some may, with good statistical arguments at hand, determine that the likelihood of being a victim of violent crime does not meet the threshold for allowing this level of self defense.
> It is scarily easy to miss, even at physically close distances, when fighting for one's life.
In my state it's required to qualify at a gun range in order to obtained a concealed carry permit. When my turn came I experienced a huge adrenaline rush. I did hit the target adequately but was surprised at how difficult it was under pressure. I've never experienced this before when going to the range and casually shooting.
I expect in a real world scenario where the assailant is not a static paper target, you're more likely to miss than not.
Statistically, around 0.005 per year (note that there's a HUGE range of estimates for how common defensive gun use is, so there's definitely some error bars there). However that's still many orders of magnitude more than the average number of mass shootings that the average civilian gun owner is involved with.
I think part of the intention of the Second Amendment is to have a well-armed population that has the capability to push back against a government that has overstepped. Five or ten rounds isn’t going to help much there.
Why is it a foundational human right? Who decides that? It seems to me that a lot of people disagree.
Human rights only exist because enough people believe in them. All of them, including free speech are up for debate and constantly need to be defended.
Do you know how many shots on average it takes to take down a single assailant? I'll give you a hint: more than 5.
This includes the fact that, when you are firing under pressure, you will very likely miss or not hit critical areas. Most assailants don't stop because you've hit some vital organ, they stop because of blood loss. That takes time. Bullet wounds aren't typically huge (like knife wounds can be).
And let's be clear: the onus is on you to justify denying a law-abiding civilian the right to possess such a weapon. Given that we are talking about a constitutional right (one which the text clearly states "shall not be infringed") you would need to show a standard of strict scrutiny to justify denying those citizens their right.
Which, at the time and in context, meant "properly trained". The point of the text was that an armed and trained society was necessary to preserve freedom, which is why the right to bear arms shall not be infringed.
> Someone's not seen the mess a 5.56mm round makes.
Sure, it's not going to be pretty. Even a 9mm (or a .22) is not going to be fun. Let me put it a different way: I've heard multiple knowledgeable people say they would rather get shot than stabbed.
Modern guns are not designed to have that low capacity or non-removable magazines, so regulations like that force dead ends of (mal)compliance items that aren't necessarily safe. Authority personnel with domain knowledge also tends to sympathize with owners and could borderline sabotage regulations.
Trigger cranks, folding braces, "forced-reset" triggers, tac-sacs, CA compliant mag releases, featureless grips, they come up with lots of those stuffs.
This has a lot of good context, but one thing it misses is the cultural impact of being a country next to the US. The deadliest shooting in Canadian history occurred in Nova Scotia in 2020. The guns he used were not legal for him to possess, and crucially all but one of the guns he used in his rampage was acquired from America ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks#Acqui... )
Here is another from the conservative newspaper The National Post (aka I am not sourcing from a place likely to be incredibly biased against guns) reporting on the police chief of Toronto stating that a large majority of the guns used in violent crime in the city are illegally imported from US: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/guns-used-in-crimes-a...
We have other people in this thread using the example of Australia and asking what the difference is and I would state that a large portion of it is simply that Australia is surrounded by an ocean and Canada is right next to the US. As long as we have that anchor dragging us down its always going to be difficult to make major progress on gun crime.
Interesting. When compared to places like Australia, where guns are highly regulated and barely anyone owns a gun, such that there have been no mass shootings for 35 years, the solution really is obvious.
That is blatantly not true. There have been several mass shootings in Australia such as the 2002 Monash University shooting and the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis since Port Arthur, which inspired the modern Australian gun control system. Port Arthur was also 25 years ago, not 35. Australia also only had a handful of mass shootings before Port Arthur; mass shootings have never been a major issue in Australia.
A mass shooting in which, by the sound of it, a gunman killed one hostage? Then when "police...stormed the café ...[a hostage] was killed by a police bullet ricochet. ..[The gunman] was also killed. Three other hostages and a police officer were injured by police gunfire"
In the 2002 Monash shooting, 2 people died. Seems like there hasn't been a mass shooting of >5 people in Australia since Port Arthur (1996), except in 2018 when a grandfather in WA killed his whole family including himself (7 people).
Yep, my mistake its 25 years, not 35. Though the difference doesn't negate the point that its been decades since a gun related massacre.
That linked source is for all massacres, most of which are not gun related and have < 6 deaths. Even if you include the 2002 Monash University shootings, its still 20 years.
If you look at [1], when the Australian gun laws came into effect, a year later the per capita number of gun related deaths halved. 25 years later and its halved again and the trend continues downwards. For reference the US numbers are here [2]. What is interesting is that when comparing the number of firearm possession per capita between the US and Australia, the US has roughly 10 times more guns [3]. Based on [1] and [2] the US has roughly 10 times the number of gun related deaths per capita. The reason why Australia has historically had less problems than the US with gun violence is that even at Australia's peak, it had 5 times fewer guns [4] than the US [5] did per capita.
I'm Australian, and I don't even know about about the Monash University shooting, despite being in a University in the same city at the same time. I had to look it up, 2 people died.
The Sydney hostage crisis only one person was killed by the gunman, who was carrying a shotgun. If he had an automatic weapon it very likely would have been more.
> Interesting. When compared to places like Australia, where guns are highly regulated and barely anyone owns a gun, such that there have been no mass shootings for 35 years, the solution really is obvious.
I don't understand at all what you say about those graphs. Homicide has gone down from 750+ to about 400, which you describe as "little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people". No idea why you say that.
Sexual assault has gone up, according to the graph, about which you say "shows a slight negative correlation between stricter gun laws and sexual assault". Uh what? That graph is nothing to do with gun laws, is it?! Strange. Hmm I can only guess maybe that where you live, sexual assault is usually/often done by someone with a gun? I would guess that's very rare in Australia.
> I don't understand at all what you say about those graphs. Homicide has gone down from 750+ to about 400, which you describe as "little correlation between stricter gun laws and fewer number of dead people".
The decline in dead people is not correlated with fewer guns.
The decline is a trend going down over time that did not start when the guns were taken.
The argument of "fewer guns == safer society" needs to show that when the guns were taken, a decline in corpses resulted. That did not happen.
Ah ok thanks. Yes, from the graph seemed like it was always going up, then 5 years after Port Arthur peaked and has been going down ever since. I wouldn't call that "little correlation" but sure, who knows.
Anyway, this is a weird topic. It seems only in the USA that "fewer guns = safer society" is not extremely obvious to everyone.
> Anyway, this is a weird topic. It seems only in the USA that "fewer guns = safer society" is not extremely obvious to everyone and where people are straining hard not to see the obvious.
Well, that's because it isn't obvious. I limited my data lookups to Australia because OP presented Australia as an example of where it is obvious that fewer guns == safer society.
In the example that is provided as evidence (Australia), the data does not support the assertion. Maybe it will in other examples, but the OP presented this example and so I only checked the stats for this example.
As I mentioned in my other comment, the gun related deaths halved 2 years after the gun laws [1]. Furthermore, in 1996, the gun deaths per capita were 2.84, the homicides were ~650 per capita. So of course you will barely see a difference with the homicide graph. The real difference is that there have been no mass shootings for 20 years.
So yes, it really is that simple and completely obvious.
Your data doesn’t show what you think it shows. Homicides is not gun deaths, because in Australia the number of gun deaths is so small. There are other ways to Kill someone.
> Your data doesn’t show what you think it shows. Homicides is not gun deaths, because in Australia the number of gun deaths is so small. There are other ways to Kill someone.
It shows exactly what I think it shows: just how much safer (or not) a place is after enacting stricter gun laws.
The whole point is that the parent tried to imply that stricter gun laws make the society safer. The data for his example shows no real correlation.
Well, from a different programmer's perspective, ideal scenarios ("ending" or "eliminating" bad things) are rarely a reality.
We can reduce car related deaths by regulating automotive vehicles and driving behavior. Speed limits, seatbelts, max BAC...
We can reduce sexual diseases by educating people on safe practice.
We can reduce homelessness through welfare systems.
And based on the experiences in virtually every other first world country, the US can probably reduce gun-related deaths with tighter regulations on gun ownership.
But why stop there? Why not ban cars completely? That will reduce car deaths even further.
We can reduce sexual diseases even further by regulating who you can have sex with. If you've ever had or transmitted an STI, you're on a permanent banlist. You can obtain a license by proving you have no history of reckless behavior and have a clean record of health.
We can also reduce homelessness even further by finding every homeless person and forcing them into a government house. Homelessness is a travesty that must be reduced as much as possible, isn't it?
Hey, there aren't any ideal scenarios but we can reduce it further, can't we?
This is not entirely true. You're arguing for prohibition, and in many cases prohibition will lead to black markets and other undesirable outcomes.
In a country like Spain or wherever in Europe where people haven't been owning and open carrying guns for dozens of years it is not unreasonable to think bans wouldn't have an effect on people. But if you try to ban something outright, something that people are used to, you're going to get problems.
Banning sex has, by the way, been tried. If you ask a religious person what's the best way to deal with teen pregnancy they are going to say abstention. It doesn't work.
This should led you to believe that there is, in fact, a sweetspot between regulation and prohibition and that's really how most competent politicans should look at these issues. I don't think a gun ban is reasonable in the USA; but I would argue you definitely need more and progressive regulation so that the population is slowly disarmed. But how can you do that when it is literally in your constitution?
So what's the sweet spot for regulating sex? Some people get permanently banned, others don't? You have to check in with the government on who you can have sex with, but they'll only enforce some checks? Some people get "STI PreCheck" conditional on good behavior, but others are subject to more scrutiny? What's the plan to progressively ramp up sex regulation so that the population is slowly de-sexed?
I appreciate your honesty about your motives: you want the population to eventually be disarmed. That's a non-starter for a lot of Americans who believe it to be a civil right, not something to be negotiated and progressively removed.
They had a literal civil war, and the fascist public won. I have to admit that I don't know much about 1930s Spanish gun law but I suspect they were available; certainly once the war started all sides were being armed from outside.
What's more "positive" than the ability to defend yourself? You're just preaching to the choir if you don't accept other sides' perspectives on the value of guns.
Which is why so many (mostly pro-2A) people are saying that the root cause is mental health in America, and addressing that should be the focus of our efforts rather than burning man-hours arguing over the symptoms (gun violence).
Broadly this is what the downthread "Americans have chosen this" means. An armed, radicalized populace is one that's forever carrying out acts of lethal violence against strangers.
Disarm the populace and you get less lethal violence. (The UK has quite a lot of nonlethal violence, mostly alcohol related. We don't need to re-litigate what happened when trying to ban alcohol.)
If you rule out disarming, how about de-radicalizing? Many mass shooters leave behind helpful manifestoes detailing their reasoning.
>If you rule out disarming, how about de-radicalizing? Many mass shooters leave behind helpful manifestoes detailing their reasoning.
That requires much tougher questions to be asked and a level of cultural self awareness that most people don't have.
Look up the history of prohibition. People thought that they could just ban booze and that would be the easy button that would greatly reduce all sorts of adjacent societal ills.
Guns are the same way. People don't want to ask themselves why some youth are so disaffected they go postal. People don't wanna accept that gangs and traffickers mediating business disputes with bullets are basically doing a sloppy version of what courts do for "real business" disputes with extra steps. People don't wanna ask why so many people are taking their own lives. So they bury their heads in the sand and advocate for various flavors of "ban the guns and everything will be happy." Would it have some marginal impact? Certainly. Will it have the impact that advocates say? Lol.
If I was a civilian in a large scale war between the United States government and its civilian population I’m pretty sure I would rather the civilians have access to cars than to guns if it was one or the other.
A conventional war between civilians armed with small arms against the full United States military is a completely unrealistic scenario for what armed resistance would actually look like.
More realistic scenarios, based on historical examples, include:
1. Armed resistance of local or federal authorities/law enforcement (e.g. Battle of Athens, Bundy Standoff)
2. Guerrilla warfare against a superior military force (e.g. Afghanistan)
3. Full civil war between the states (would probably look something like Russia-Ukraine war happening right now)
In the first two scenarios small arms are absolutely effective. In the third scenario, access to more advanced weapons and logistics would be split between the factions (and possibly supplemented by outside forces).
Law enforcement entities become much less willing to play fast and loose with their use of force when there is a good chance that kicking in a door at 4am will get you shot back at which could result in one of your guys being killed and then tough, potentially career limiting, questions being asked about why they chose to kick in that door under those circumstances.
You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
You displace guns primarily harming suicidal people and criminals into harms to innocent victims, via unchecked violence — potentially without reducing suicides.
You also see an increase in totalitarian behavior, eg, the Australian lockdowns compared to the US lockdowns.
And the argument for removing rifles ignores that they’re rarely used in crimes — more people are killed by hammers or fists than rifles.
> You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
So by your argument crime should be lower in states with less gun control. That is not reflected in reality, in fact according to [1 ], the states with the highest crime rates have actually amongst the laxest gun control laws.
Your first paragraph makes me realize how messed up reality appears to be. A mass shooting every now and then is the new normal. A worthy trade-off for being able to defend yourself and keep the government from issuing lockdowns.
If someone broke into my house the default assumption has to be that they're armed and I should fear for me an my family's lives. So I better be armed myself, and better armed then the burglars. Just don't accidentally shoot a family member that you mistake for the home invader in the heat of the moment. But that would never happen to you anyways, only to other, stupid and irresponsible people - who pretty much then deserve to live with the consequences. Compare that to any European country, where burglars always wait until nobody is home, and even if that goes wrong you at least don't have to fear for anyone's life as they'll either beat it immediately or you calmly hand over your cash and be happy you're alive and well.
This is an incredibly bad faith response which creates strawmen I never said.
You’re welcome not to own a gun if you feel like that would be a better choice for you and/or your family. Nobody is making you.
What I’m saying is that you don’t have a right to take guns away from other people because you find them scary — even if that is occasionally abused, leading to tragedy. People have a right to defend themselves.
> A worthy trade-off for being able to defend yourself and keep the government from issuing lockdowns.
Over 100,000,000 people died to democide in the past century — around 70 times the current US murder rate for 100 years. (That is, 7000 years of the current US murder-with-guns rate.)
Guns also protected Black Panthers, Afghani insurrectionists, and Ukrainian militias.
I’m sorry that the world isn’t as friendly and happy as you would prefer it — I find that disquieting too.
Yes you did, and you even repeat it in your reply.
> You’re welcome not to own a gun if you feel like that would be a better choice for you and/or your family. Nobody is making you.
Yes, they are pretty much making you in parts of the US, because things are so bad.
> What I’m saying is that you don’t have a right to take guns away from other people because you find them scary.
Not just because "I find them scary", but because they are literally dangerous. They are made to kill. That's their only purpose.
And yes, you absolutely have the right to take them away from people - just like you have the right to declare certain substances illegal to sell, consume or own, and limit people's freedom in a dozen other ways for the sake of society's well being as a whole.
> even if that is occasionally abused, leading to tragedy.
So where's the straw man again?
> People have a right to defend themselves.
And we arrived at the knee jerk reaction. Taking the arms race as a given. Don't even question why things are that fucked up in the first place. Might have to fear for my life any time of the day, so better have a semi-automatic rifle at hand. It's just so very sad.
> Over 100,000,000 people died to democide in the past century
In the US? Or Europe? Or might it have been in some really unstable chaotic parts of the world? Why you would even want to compare this to a civilized first world country is beyond me. A more reasonable approach would be comparisons with countries that are socially and structurally similar to the US but have different gun control laws, but that comparison wouldn't really fly with your views I guess.
> I’m sorry that the world isn’t as friendly and happy as you would prefer it — I find that disquieting too.
> Yes, they are pretty much making you in parts of the US, because things are so bad.
Where cause I live in that scary city called Chicago that people like to mention and have never felt the need to have a gun. We do have a lot of shootings but we also have a lot of people. If our metro area was a country, we'd be more populous than >50% of all countries (139/235).
> Not just because "I find them scary", but because they are literally dangerous. They are made to kill. That's their only purpose.
Or you know, sport. I find shooting clay pigeons or just general target practice to be fun.
Speaking of rights, what happened to "well regulated"? There seems a lot of interest in "Shall not be", but far less the further into the paragraph you go.
I can't see "totalitarian" used on that page. I'm confused what your point is. The story is about 3 people escaping from "one of Australia's main quarantine facilities for people returning to the country" and being arrested when they were caught. That sounds like very unremarkable news to this Australian, but it seems that to some people it sounds like totally unacceptable totalitarianism, no idea why. Not the first time I've seen people post similar unremarkable "news" items on HN accompanied by extravagant claims that Australia is suddenly like the USSR or something.
I feel like the key to you seeing great significance in these reports are your unspoken premises, the beliefs you have, how you are framing this, which you will have to say out loud for me to know why you're posting this stuff.
I feel like you’re intentionally avoiding the point by saying things like “I don’t see the word totalitarian” and then ignoring the obvious implication that the article describes camps which are forcibly quarantining people who never traveled, including taking measures like searching unrelated cars who happen to be nearby.
I think you’re responding in bad faith because it would challenge your view of yourself and your nation to admit that forcible imprisonment in camps for quarantine is what people mean when they say “totalitarian”.
On the other hand the US has the highest incarnation rate of any western country by a large margin. So I guess the guns don't help against the totalitarian tendencies of their government.
No I'm saying that your argument is that putting people into forced quarantine if the disobey requirements is totalitarian and that it would be prevented by higher gun ownership. I'm saying that the US is putting a much larger fraction of their population into jails (for disobeying requirements), which should be considered just as totalitarian and the armed populace is not preventing it.
You don’t see a difference between jailing people who commit crimes versus forcible quarantine of people because they caught a highly communicable disease?
Or why forcible internment in camps for a disease might remind people of other atrocities in history?
I clicked through to the news story because I assumed from your comment that the BBC story used "totalitarian", evidently I misunderstood. For doing that I'm intentionally missing the point, ignoring things and responding in bad faith?
> forcible imprisonment in camps for quarantine is what people mean when they say “totalitarian”
I think I understand that it's what you mean when you say "totalitarian". I'm not interested in communicating further, after your unfriendly accusations.
I don’t know which country you are talking about but I haven’t heard about prison sentences for not respecting lockdowns, only fines. At least in the EU.
And while those laws were pretty stupidly implemented they were just the outcome of improvisation from unprepared governments, not some totalitarian vision. Even citizens from countries with a strong culture of disobedience understood that.
> You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
Sorry but to my european ears, this "equalizing force" theory sounds plain stupid. I get that it is not that easy to ban them because we have different traditions and background, and I get that it is really hard to ban something when people is used to it and that it could lead to unexpected consequences (black market, etc).
But defending guns as an "equalizing force" is just stupid, given the stats.
Comedy gold. We shouldn’t base policy around outliers of outliers but we should have a policy of arming the populace in case they need to lead an insurrection which is itself an extreme outlier. Or the chance of needing a gun for self defence which is also quite the outlier particularly if you drill down into the actual risk factors rather than using broad statistics.
So far this year more school kids have died from being shot in the line of duty than cops who are routinely armed. So it doesn’t strike me as that much of an outlier. In particular kids should definitely be safer from gun violence than a police officer. That seems like a reasonable goal?
Or the fact that the incidence of school shootings means kids are more widely impacted than just those who end up on the wrong end of a gun.
So you’re saying it’s perfect reasonable for more kids to be violently shot to death than police? On the whole my expectation is that the officers should be protecting the kids but this attitude certainly explains the behaviour of the officers on the day.
You say guns can be used by weaker people to defend themselves (not sure if you consider children weak), and the argue that rifles kill less people than hammers. Yes rifles, handguns on the other hand kill >30 times more (and there is a large unspecified firearm category which kills ~10 times more than hammers). So are you suggesting weaker woman should take a rifle to their date in case they need to defend themselves.
The bigger issue is however that I'm very certain there are more events of a fun being used to attack a weaker person, than od a weaker person defendinf themselves with one.
The rifle point was that while most murders are by handgun, most gun laws restrict rifles — which was a specific, second thing I was calling out.
> The bigger issue is however that I'm very certain there are more events of a fun being used to attack a weaker person, than od a weaker person defendinf themselves with one.
My point is that is more equal than when violence relies on knives and bats and fists.
No, rapes would not go down if guns were removed. Guns don't prevent rapes and actual rape and domestic violence victims ended up in prison after trying to defend themselves with guns.
It is simply not true that women, and the elderly would defend themselves with lethal force all that often, besides aggressors are the ones who are quicker at obtaining guns and using them.
> You see an increase in crimes against people when the equalizing force of guns is removed: assaults, muggings, home invasions, rapes, etc. Guns can (and do) allow smaller men, women, and the elderly to defend themselves with lethal force — against stronger aggressors.
So show us the statistics that crime rates in states with high gun ownership are lower.
> And the argument for removing rifles ignores that they’re rarely used in crimes — more people are killed by hammers or fists than rifles.
Your own link shows that two thirds of homicides are committed using guns. That’s your only citation and hardly a compelling one to back up your claim that the US has a far lower crime rate thanks to all the guns
No, I pointed out that the quoted text made an irrelevant distinction between different kinds of guns while the entire rest of the comment (and the ones it is replying to) are about guns in general
I accept your apology for making a bad assumption that ignored the actual text of my post and which assumed bad faith on my part, since that link supported the nearby text which described data from that report.
No, I assumed you were engaging in good faith when you mentioned rifles. Instead you were responding to strawman argument no one made about how banning rifles (but not pistols) wouldn’t work.
Just having a gun in your home increases your risk of being shot - virtually always either by your angry spouse, or yourself - by 50%. The idea that having a gun make you safer has no sound basis.
> Just having a gun in your home increases your risk of being shot - virtually always either by your angry spouse, or yourself - by 50%. The idea that having a gun make you safer has no sound basis.
So? Just having a swimming pool in your home increases your risk of drowning, but people have them anyway.
Also, I think you pulled that 50% number out of the air.
Stanford published a study following handgun owners from 2004 to 2016 [1]. From the results: "Overall rates of homicide were more than twice as high among cohabitants of handgun owners than among cohabitants of nonowners. These elevated rates were driven largely by higher rates of homicide by firearm."
But we could also reduce that down to "if you're specifically in an assault". Surely you're safer right? If you're in an assault and in possession of a gun, you are over 400% (4 times) more likely to be shot then if you do not have a gun. [2]
While having a swimming pool in your home does in fact increase the risk of drowning - in fact, it increases the risk of all the kids of your neighbors drowning as well (this is why I don't, and never will in fact have a private swimming pool in my home)...nobody puts a swimming pool in and says "this will stop me from drowning". In fact they go to considerable lengths and there is considerable regulation surrounding preventing exactly that.
> But we could also reduce that down to "if you're specifically in an assault". Surely you're safer right? If you're in an assault and in possession of a gun, you are over 400% (4 times) more likely to be shot then if you do not have a gun. [2]
From the paper itself, the TLDR is that those numbers only apply if you're in a gang. The cohort that is 400% more likely to be shot is, according to the paper, 400% more likely compared to non-illicit activity individuals.
> "However, compared with control participants, shooting case participants were significantly more often Hispanic, more frequently working in high-risk occupations1,2, less educated, and had a greater frequency of prior arrest. At the time of shooting, case participants were also significantly more often involved with alcohol and drugs, outdoors, and closer to areas where more Blacks, Hispanics, and unemployed individuals resided. Case participants were also more likely to be located in areas with less income and more illicit drug trafficking (Table 1)."
It's a good argument for better social services, not for restricting non-gang individuals from owning firearms.
Surely there are confounding variables? For instance, if one does/does not have a criminal record, has/does not have a propensity for violence, or maybe most importantly does/does not have curious children in the house.
US reasoning is so weird. It's ALWAYS safer to have no gun than to have one? I'd even say that you have less chance to get shot unarmed than you do armed. Is there any data to back this up?
I was born in the US to Italian immigrants - so I don't particularly feel it's just "US reasoning". We didn't live in the greatest neighborhood growing up (about 2-3 miles from where the Buffalo Tops grocery store shooting occurred.) My father had a .22 caliber rifle. One late night (2-3 am) when we were asleep the doorbell rang. My father answered the door with his rifle in hand. Two people claiming to be Buffalo Police Officers were "looking for a missing child" and wanted to come in to ask questions. My father felt something was amiss and didn't let them in. He subsequently called the police and they had no such report of a missing child in the area, nor any police officers going door to door at that hour of the night. In this case I feel it was safer to have a gun than no gun. You can't plan for such events, the best you can do is being prepared for it. There are consequences to gun ownership and consequences to not owning a gun. Ultimately it's the law of the land that allows you to make that choice for yourself.
A defensive use of a firearm doesn't mean you actually need to fire the weapon. The mere presence of a gun can act as a deterrent.
How often do people use guns to defend themselves against violent crime, and how often do people kill themselves or others with guns (accidentally or intentionally)?
There are roughly a million violent crimes a year. It is not credible there are 3x as many defensive uses of firearms that are somehow being missed.
The page you reference indexes a few thousand over several years. Seems likely an undercount as the page claims but not by that much by probably a couple orders of magnitude.
Your first link shows 2400 documented cases since 2019 which is more than I’d have expected. But clicking through those examples… many honestly don’t seem that sympathetic. Stuff like “shootout between X and Y, but Y shot second so it was self defense”. Or “X fatally shot Y with no witnesses to contradict his self defense claim”.
Ohhhhh you must mean that military defeated by the Taliban using AK-47s, RPGs and tacticals, right? The same one defeated by the Viet Cong? Your argument is trash.
How's Saudi Arabia doing against those shoeless Houthis (i.e. 8 years later)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide
> Democide is the murder of any person or people by their government, including genocide, politicide, and mass murder.
Your examples are NOT US Military trying to kill citizens. And Viet Cong? Really? You are grasping, how about you throw in Civil war references too.
The point is technology has changed the battlefield. Personal firearms mean little - not nothing, but little - on a battlefield with tanks, drones, air superiority that the US has sooo much of compared to any other modern military, including Saudi Arabia.
How is Saudi Arabia doing? I don't know. How about you visit the region, do the tourist thing in complete safety while you might see in the media that the Houthis even exist. I think they're doing fine. Not that I agree with their approach...
But back to the Democide point: If the US Military went insane and wanted to eradicate every other US citizen then they could do so easily.
But the US Military wouldn't. Because a military is made up of humans, with a heart and a conscience and killing their own families and children is not even a thought to contemplate. While "pry my guns from my dead hands" types are happy to continue the status quo...
> Personal firearms mean little - not nothing, but little - on a battlefield with tanks, drones, air superiority that the US has sooo much of compared to any other modern military, including Saudi Arabia.
Nope, this is nonsense abd exactly the point that the examples refute. A poorly equipped army can defeat the US military.
> If we are optimizing against the #1 all time cause of non natural death in the world - Democide - an armed populace does wonders.
This sounds intuitively correct, but I wonder if we have seen any evidence of this. If I think of the Holocaust would have happened if the Jews in Germany had been armed I'm not convinced either way. I can see arguments that it might have prevented it but also that it might have accelerated it, especially if everyone in 1930s Germany had been heavily armed
Do you really think that the US has oppressed its population less than comparably well established European democracies? Given its history of slavery, Jim Crow and mass incarceration? Given the militarisation if its police, the war in drugs and it's all-watching surveillance state? Given
McCarthyism and the Patriot Act? And you're citing COVID?
I am frankly astonished by your claim. It's so obviously wrong.
Edit: I cant reply to your thread. If you compare the rates of two like-minded Australian cities. (To be fair melbourne people pretend to be more cultured)
Queensland was known for its "immediate knee jerk reactions", if you want i can find sources for this.
Melbourne was known for its "reactive stance" if you want i can find sources for this.
Melbournes infection rate and inability to 'follow lock down procedures' was the root cause for their infection rate going through the roof. This further compounded because not following lockdowns created more infections which furthered more lockdowns.
Anyways, you'll take what you want from it.. Most of the links with values that I had have been removed. If I can dig up more I'll relink them here.
It's entirely likely that Australia's Covid rates had nothing to do with any particular action they took. Every Covid success story had exactly one thing in common: they're all in the same area of the globe, on the other side of the planet from Europe (where all the major outbreaks after Wuhan seem to have come from). It's about the only thing they had in common; there were vast differences in culture, political system, measures taken, and so on. Also, the main thing which seemed to determine whether a country or region was known for their "immediate knee jerk reactions" or their "inability to follow lock down procedures" was whether Covid remained under control or not, rather than the actual specific actions they took...
"(To be fair melbourne people pretend to be more cultured)"
As a currently residing Melbournian - I totally agree...
During the statewide lockdowns it was also interesting to see how the infections spread. At one stage Melbourne had near nothing. Then a removalist from NSW comes travelling and you could see the trail of COVID in the following media reports.
Maybe lack of guns meant less resistance to the authoritarian lockdown. But for ALL the people I know, education meant there was noone even wanting to resist.
Everyone knew that one person could wander around and wreck the lives of many completely unintentionally. And lockdown was the only decent tool society had until vaccines happened.
It sucked. For some more than others as you'd expect. Maybe it was because I was less affected, but in the same scenario I'd do it again no question. I'd be grumpy about the situation, but not the response.
Thank you for reading my post at face value, This was not about the 'Melbourne people suck' angle (as clearly Melbourne people do not suck), but the topic of government handling.
It's not a catch all against government, but a tool that equalizes each man for each man. In fact, each individual, shown by these attacks on schools, show how one person can have an outsized effect.
But more to your point -- I'll steal this quote:
And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family?
Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?...
The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!
If we didn’t love freedom enough. And even more - we had no awareness of the real situation… We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.
You assume that 1/3 the per capita shootings for 1/3 of the guns means a difference in policy has no effect. I think you are seeing an irrelevant correlation. Mass shooters are carried out by individuals who seek out a gun to commit a crime. Difficulty to get a gun especially if you are a person of problematic character or history seems relevant. Sheer number of guns not so much. If it were merely as difficult for your problem child to get a gun as in the US and other factors were equal one would expect as many mass shootings per capita not some factor based on relative number of guns available to the total population.
That is to say that if evil bob can go by a rifle and go downtown to whack the neighborhood it is as irrelevant as it is possible to be if 2 or 20 of his neighbors are gun owners unless they are literally shooting back at him right now.
Essentially you are looking at a partial success story through a lens of faulty analysis and concluding that nothing is working.
Mass shootings are very different from mass _school_ shootings though. Outside of the obvious Polytechnique, for which Canadian engineering schools still mourn for every year, I don't think Canada's experienced anything close to what this article's referring to.
Correct. Gangland shootings of multiple individuals count as a mass shooting, and that constitutes most of them. If you control for those, Canada and the U.S. are very different. People don't flinch at the homicide rate, they care about innocent bystanders, especially children, being killed en masse.
Right now it is hard to look at our kids faces and not feel the impact of this tragedy. I don’t know about everyone but for most people their kids lives are way more important than their right to bear military grade guns. If there is no perfect solution we have to live with a less than perfect solution. If the solution is to legally make it harder for people to access such guns then so be it.
As tragic as these events may be, the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low, and a few orders of magnitude less than car accidents.
Doing some quick math, it seems like it's around 100 to 1000 times more likely that some kid dies to some accident than a mass shooting. But people don't seem to worry 1000 times more about these accidents than school shootings. And it would actually be much easier to reduce the accident number than the shooting number.
Perhaps this is approximately true if you focus exclusively on mass shootings at schools. But shootings overall are one of the leading causes of deaths for children in the US.
See for instance the CDC's visualizations on causes of death per age group [1]. In 2020, 476 children aged 10-14 died in traffic accidents involving motor vehicles. 218 children aged 10-14 were killed in homicides by firearms.
Those two numbers are very much in the same order of magnitude. This is also the case in prior, non-Covid years.
Any stats on legal vs illegal guns killing children?
Curious as to whether criminals being unable to purchase firearms legally has done anything to stop them from getting ahold of firearms and committing shootings.
> the probability of your kids dying to a school shooting is still incredibly low
It's only about 50000% higher than in any other place of the world. Is this what you say to you children? That they don't get to get unlucky????????
School should be one of the safest places of the world. People are discussing what COVID will do to the future of their kids. I wonder what living in fear will do instead, which has a much much much bigger impact than 2 years of missed school.
On that reasoning, all of the "lockdowns" and "active shooter drills" and all the other bullshit that the US makes its children undertake in school are a complete waste of time.
Are you seriously trying to argue that school shootings don't happen often enough to try to stop them? Or that society can't do two things (reduce accidental deaths and reduce mass murder) at the same time?
The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.
For 99.99% of the population, guns are dangerous to have, not because someone might attack you, but because guns are dangerous to have in the home. They are misused, mistakenly left unsecured, and accessed by people (children, those with mental illness) that shouldn't.
Hell, you can't even agree on background checks because of some stupidity regarding having a "register" in case the "government" comes after your weapons.
The US is an empire in decline, and your internal division around this "culture" is a large part of the dis/mis-information exercise that has infected the body politic.
The NRA is a lobby group for gun manufacturers that has bought numerous politicians, while lying to its members about its purpose. The fact that so many actually believe the bullshit is a prime example of dis/mis-information.
From what I can tell, Americans that are opposed to gun restrictions generally also think that "active shooter drills" are indeed a waste of time that just traumatize children for no real benefit other than the political gain of people that want to ban guns. So you're probably pushing against an open door with that argument.
The NRA are incredibly divisive, and it looks like help was offered to keep them doing that.
> The rationalization of an insane gun culture is incessant and foolish. Guns are a tool and the bullshit that somehow the civilian population would "defend" itself against military coups by the US military, or even more ridiculous, against invasion, is an excuse to allow the ongoing fetish of guns.
This - the politics of guns and political violence in the US - is arguably a bigger factor than the guns themselves. The gun does not carry out a mass shooting by itself. And very few mass shooters decide purely on their own to do it; there's a radicalization pipeline. That is why the US has a higher mass shooting rate than other countries with lots of guns.
There are (conservatively) hundreds of thousands of defensive gun uses per year. Many just involve presenting or brandishing the gun without having to use it.
Could you look someone in the face who has used a gun to protect themselves or their family and tell them they will need to give up that gun for "public safety"?
> Absolutely. Nowhere else in the civilized world do people rely on having a gun to "protect themselves or their family"
Of course you cannot rely on something you are not allowed to have in the first place. Those individuals are still vulnerable if they were presented with an imminent deadly force threat.
> Perhaps you need to look at why, in your society, there are so many "opportunities" for "defensive gun uses".
Of course! that's a very interesting subject in itself. The widespread ownership of guns is not itself the cause.
Indeed. Canada had a mass shooting in 2020 where 23 people were killed. The person had been in contact with the police on many occasions, but still had legal and illegal guns on hand. And this is with Canada's much more strict gun control laws.
There are regular shootings in public in Vancouver and Toronto due to gang activity. Hell, some random innocent person was killed in Calgary when shooting started during a traffic incident.
Handguns proliferate in the cities, trafficked from the U.S., quite easily in Canada. This is where the mass shooting rate comes from.
Your results will be starkly different if you search for school shooting rates, and not mass shooting rates. Gangland homicide of several individuals is still considered a mass shooting. It spooks the city-dwellers somewhat, but nationally no one cares. They care about school shootings, or more broadly, mass shootings of innocent bystanders. Canada fares way, way better than the U.S. in this fashion.
> gun owners would be much more receptive to regulation if they felt people were genuinely trying to separate narrow and effective laws from broad infringements that annoy many and accomplish little
Actually, there were polls based on which gun owners support gun regulation a lot more then one would say. There is subgroup of gun owners represented by NRA who dont - but they dont represent average gun owner.
The support for gun regulation is quite high in general public.
I think any restrictions on gun ownership are unconstitutional. Primarily because I don't think the founding fathers minced words about the purpose of the second amendment, but mostly I don't trust the government at all.
I have never met a gun owner who does trust the government, or supports regulation and I've spent a lot of time around them. So I'll have to disagree with your supposition.
Finland have similar number of weapons, Swiss is not that distant, the issue are not weapons but society: any ruling class in pseudo-democracies (i.e. our formal but not substantial democracies) need something to pasture people avoiding revolts, the USA have built a false-free and competing ideology that's essentially push people to blame themself for their suffering and that's easily push fragile people toward nihilism, Swiss is not that different, only it's able to test people (mandatory conscription between 18 and 28 years of age, one paid month per year) and to offer not so bad overall living conditions. Other dictatorships choose different ways to pasture people.
The actual crusade against weapons, and I say that as an European left-wing Citizen is just because unrest was predicted due to neoliberal ruling [1] and they dislike the idea of an armed population that a day might shoot against them. In Italy fascists have done the same erasing military conscription NOT because it produce bad results (it do, but that's another story) but because they choose to even remove such hyper-basic training to form generations who shoot every days in videogames and in reality they'll probably follow what they have seen in movies, like run to the root trying "to escape", lock themselves in bathrooms, protect themselves with sofa or fridge door etc and I'm pretty sure most movies have done such absurd choices exactly to mentally push people toward such absurd behaviors.
Consider a thing: if you are satisfied you do not want war nor violence. If you are not your dissatisfaction might be weaponized to push you do things you do not want (including hard work, war etc) for the sake of the élite of the moment, if you are pushed toward illegality is even better: they can let you go and if needed trap you with legit reasons. That's how our societies are ruled and our subjects, not Citizens, allow that.
Weapons are common in USA just because they support the infinite-war economic model of USA rulers, but people need to be kept in a sorry state to obey, that's is.
>Canada is the U.S.'s neighbour and is probably closer, culturally, than any other nation.
Your point about cultural similarity holds true mainly for descendants of European immigrants. The shared culture here isn't just Marvel movies but values passed down among families from the Old Country like a Christian moral framework, Anglo-American law, the Protestant work ethic, Puritan attidues towards sex, etc. If you break America's homicides down by ethnic category, non-Hispanic whites have a murder rate per 100k of around 2.6 per annum [0]. Canada's murder rate hovers around 1.7. These numbers are roughly comparable, despite the many differences in firearm availability.
America's overall homicide rate is something like 5.7 per 100k per annum. This number is propped up by one ethnic group in particular, Afro-Americans, with a murder rate of over 20 per 100k per annum. This is not just a function of poverty. The white poverty rate is half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of 10. The Asian-American poverty rate is similarly half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of closer to 100 (10x less than that of white Americans).
Telling hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans to disarm themselves because of social, cultural, and economic problems largely confined to a small & largely separate social group is a losing proposition. But asking why that group commits so many murders, even as the first step in bring that number down, is a political third rail too so here we are.
You are dodging the issue with white nationalist talking points. The issue at hand is not the black murder rate. The discussion is should we restrict assault weapons, limit access to who can purchase firearms (via licensing, safety training, etc.), limit ammo capacity, etc in order to reduce mass shootings.
Texas has a strong gun culture, Christian culture, NRA approved and funded government, extremely lax gun control, concealed carry, and children are still dying needlessly. Texas removed firearm permit requirements last year making it easier to obtain assault weapons.
Australia undertook strict gun control measures nationwide and essentially eliminated mass shooting deaths.
Australians also got forcefully corraled into Covid-19 camps as a result of having no means to protect themselves against a tyrannical government.
You seem to misunderstand the situation here. Guns are not and will not ever be going anywhere. Mass shootings can be prevented, and the solution has nothing to do with gun control.
Dismissing what people living in Oakland, southeast D.C., and the north side of Milwaukee know from frequent painful experience to be true as "white nationalist talking points" says more about your views than it does mine. Try following crime reporters on Twitter for a few weeks, like D.C. Realtime News. It's a constant march of death in these troubled communities, almost entirely bubbled up and separate from the rest of America. You won't get it until you really dive into it. Then you'll wonder why the people who purport to care for black lives never say a word about it. The victims of this violence wonder that too, out loud and on social media, but not in places most HN users or policymakers try to see.
Backing up, there are two issues here which you're conflating, and which I didn't do a good job of separating: total gun homicides and mass shootings. They intersect but also have differences. I already went deep on total gun homicides. The weird thing about mass shootings is that 70 years ago, gun ownership was more widespread than it is now, yet mass shootings were an extremely rare occurence... until Columbine. Semiautomatic and even fully-automatic weapons were commonly available beginning in the 1920s (remember Al Capone's mob and their Thompson submachine guns? Bonny and Clyde with their BARs?), yet we didn't see this rash of mass shootings until just the last few decades. What happened in the 90s, and how to we fix it?
Side note, and I'm sure it's been covered elsewhere, but 99% of gun deaths in the US do not involve AR-15s or "assault weapons." 97% of all gun deaths are from handguns. Many mass shootings were carried out with handguns; they are deadly, concealable, and potentially also very high-capacity. Personally I support much stricter controls on handgun sales and ownership. I think that would be a reasonable starting point to approach both total gun homicides and mass shootings.
Thank you for honestly stating the issue. Often times I see people get defensive or reactionary and jump to calling racism when simply stating these facts. How on Earth do you expect to solve an issue if you can't even admit it.
Thanks for the positive comment. I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be the parent of a child murdered in these communities, like the moms I see on Twitter occasionally doing anti-violence marches and rallies, and be told that your son or daughter's death is a "white supremacist talking point."
Lots of people in America, including black people, feel uncomfortable around poorer black communities because of the high rate of gun violence. Telling those people they're just uncomfortable because of "internalized white supremacy" or "white nationalist talking points" doesn't convince most and won't make them feel safe. This discomfort is the root of so-called white flight, social distance-keeping, school self-segregation, and other problems. If we fix the problem of gun violence in these communities, tackling other race-related issues gets easier. The first step is talking about it openly and honestly.
I'm skeptical of the data from your second link given that there is no actual data for Canada, do you have a different source that says the same thing?
I think it's pretty well established that high rates of gun ownership and proliferation of firearms produce mass shootings. Anyone who tries to argue otherwise has their head stuck in the sand.
> Gun Murder Rate is not correlated with firearm ownership rate in the United States, on a state by state basis. Firearm Homicide Rate is not correlated with guns per capita globally. It’s not correlated with guns per capita among peaceful countries, nor among violent countries, nor among European countries.
Naively, you’d expect an inverse correlation between gun ownership and gun murder rate, as (I assume) gun murders are more common in cities where gun ownership is lower (more regulations, faster police response and fewer legitimate use cases).
Sadly, the links you posted as a source for the annual deaths from mass shootings per capita make it clear the two numbers don't even measure the same things:
> For example, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) defines a mass shooting as a single attack that happens in a public place and in which three or more people are killed with a firearm. However, most other stat trackers require at least four fatalities. Similarly, some databases include events in which at least four people were wounded, but not necessarily killed. Others do not. Some databases include occurrences in which the shooter killed only family members (but still in a public place, such as a restaurant). Others do not. Some databases include organized terrorist attacks, armed robberies gone wrong, and gang-related shootings. Other databases discard some or all of these incidents. In fact, in a 2019 study that compared four different databases, the number of mass shooting events recorded in the U.S. for the year 2017 ranged from a low of 11 to a high of 346. Clearly, a significant error margin exists, particularly when creating country-to-country comparisons.
> Transporting them from your home to the range is legal, but they must be unloaded, locked, and permits are required for the transport.
Why not make transporting a firearm illegal if it's done with the intent of committing a crime? There's a well defined notion of intent in criminal law. Why are guns magically exempt from this and the assumption is immediately made that the owner is malicious?
> The harsh reality may be that the number of guns per capita floating around really is an important factor.
To me it points toward the opposite conclusion. People will just commit mass murders differently. Now, these won't get labelled as mass shooting so the stats will look better. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4].
If X & Y are correlated, it absolutely can be because X causes Y. And if X & Y are correlated, it's more likely X causes Y than if they were not correlated.
Parroting "correlation isn't causation" every time someone trots out an argument which isn't water tight is dumb.
Question for the pro-gun folks: where is the limit on what a civilian needs to defend themselves? Assuming you agree civilians shouldn’t have nukes. How about fighter jets. What about tanks. What about bazookas. How do you make that call. If, for example, greater than 5 round magazines isn’t the limit, where is the limit and why?
I think a good test is the risk an accident poses to others. An accident with a nuke, tank or fight jet can easily kill 10's, 100's or millions.
With guns, a bullet is a bullet for the most part (if we are talking about human fired calibers), an the risk any given undirected bullet poses is effectively the same. Larger magazines don't increase accident risk, while being automatic or explosive does.
I.E. if you're a responsible gun owner, an assault rifle with with a 100 round magazine carries the same risk to your neighbor as an old revolver (if not less since most old revolvers have no safety). The risk to others only diverges when you assume ill-intent, but then risks get whacky for tons of legal objects (plastic bags, cars, planes, pens, household chemicals).
One follow up question - does risk-with-ill-intent play into your calculus at all? EG if there was a gun that had same accident risk as a revolver but you could kill 1M people with it before being stopped, should that be legal? If not, where’s the limit of risk-with-Ill-intent.
A related, follow up question is your thoughts on requirements to get said items. Should background checks be required? Training?
> One follow up question - does risk-with-ill-intent play into your calculus at all?
Sure, but a couple other confounding factors enter the picture. If you assume ill-intent, then you have to also assume subversion of the law, and you then have to consider what lines not only make sense from a risk perspective, but what line make sense in feasibility and outcome as well. This is where
> A related, follow up question is your thoughts on requirements to get said items. Should background checks be required? Training?
Comes in. For the situations where ill intent was involved, and the weapons being discuss did then pose a substantially greater risk to other people, would these things make a difference? I Think the answer is yes, but not significantly. Most of these mass shooters would have passed the kinds of background checks proposed, and training would not have lessened the number killed.
Personally I like red-flag laws (provided there is a framework for recourse when someone is falsely accused to prevent them from being abused) for reducing casualties from people with ill intent. It's better from a second amendment point of view since the government isn't the entity creating barriers, and it'd better from an enforcement point of view because requirements can be fuzzier. It's much easier to substantiate "this person represents a risk to others and the community they live in feels they should not have access to guns" than it is to convict someone of a crime that would disqualify them from gun ownership broadly. I think on paper it works out better as well, as with most of these shooters, people were definitely weary of them and had reason to believe they posed a risk, but they hadn't committed any crimes, so what were they supposed to do about it?
Ty again for the thoughtful answers. What are your thoughts on something like “you need 2 sponsors not immediate family to buy a gun”. Would that let almost everyone buy loners access guns?
I just don't see something like that working. If child pornographers can find each other online I don't see why lonely men who want guns wouldn't be able to do the same. Then they could just sponsor each other no?
That, as well as the fact that in many of these cases, the guns came from friends and family, and weren't even owned by the shooter.
I agree that risk is a good measure, but I think the question still stands. Since there aren't any laws saying "you can't have x if it could kill y amount of people", you still have the interpretive aspect of "how many people is okay to kill?" It sounds established that a number greater than 0 is okay, so again, where is the line drawn?
The neighbour argument makes it sound like most people live in sparsely populated rural communities, where the danger is from the neighbouring accidently shooting you on the way back from a hunting accident.
In a town, city or school or
church the two guns would be completely different.
Not really. They have different penetrative properties, but the risk of a stray bullet hitting more than one person falls off exponentially over pretty short distances. The only real chance of a bullet hitting more than one person is if they are very close to each other in that moment, like a dense crowd.
I can't explain the math in great detail here, but, if we assume something like an urban residential complex, the risk of two people standing along the same line from a misfire at 30 ft is already so small that the extra risk a bullet capable of 60ft, or 120ft of travel poses (I'm using small distances because I'm assuming walls/furniture in the way) is only a fractional increase.
If you look at people being hit by strays, it actually doesn't correlate at all with caliber/magazine/etc., since most incidents are 9mm handguns being fired in urban environments.
If you consider dense crowds instead, then the extra risk can be a multiplier (say 2-5 if you're going from 9mm to .50), but I am totally fine with any gun just not being allowed at events like that assuming police are on site.
My serious and simple response would be, why are you turning against law abiding citizens instead of focusing on the psycho criminal that was known to police prior to the event?
It is a layered security approach. Like when a system is hacked, law abiding users have to go through hoops with crazy passwords, 2 factor auth, etc. to deal with the psycho hacker.
When people bring up this I don't think they realize that there are already very few limits on what you can own in the US... if you have the money. There's nothing inherently illegal about owning fighters or tanks, for example [0] [1]. If you browse through [2] you'll find plenty of examples of fully functional civilian owned large caliber cannon and artillery. So if you want your jet or tank to be fully functional that's totally doable. Cannons larger than .50 caliber and any kind of explosive (exploding rounds, bombs, missiles) are perfectly legal, but they're classified as destructive devices that require ATF approval and $200 tax to purchase (that's $200 per bomb or projectile). Of course if you're in a position like Mr. Private Air Force in the first link, you can get to buy these things pretty freely without the tax or oversight.
It’s not about liking or disliking what you said. You did not answer the question. I asked about Where limits should be and you responded with tangential facts about current lack of limits and a lynching meme.
I’d love to hear your answer if you have one to the question that was asked.
Tanks, warplanes, artillery, rockets, etc. are for the most part legal for civilians to have and it doesn't really bother me. The cost of most of these systems is prohibitively expensive and if you can afford them, you can have them regardless of legality.
If you're scared of criminals having these, I have something unfortunate to tell you; the law is not stopping these people. It's the exact same thing with small arms controls in the US. The controls people suggest are going to stop fuck all. Every time somebody brings up universal background checks or assault weapons bans in a discussion, they end having to admit that those things wouldn't have stopped the shooting that triggered that discussion. They MIGHT allow you to prosecute somebody after the fact, for whatever that's worth.
At the time of the founders, common citizens could legally own cannons.
Framers intended for individuals to be able to own weapons as powerful as what was available to the military at the time. I'd say framers wanted us to be able to legally buy tanks (with the gun still operational!).
Sure. Just make sure you can pay the tax stamp, the cost of the weapon, have property to put it on that is capable of storing an explosive according to local regulations, and can ship to that property which probably requires more permits.
1. My ratio in this manner is awful... I need to do better
How often do you:
a) discuss issues with someone from the other side of the political aisle in a calm and rational manner?
b) give in to the emotional urge to scream at those people?
2. Money is at the root of this, in so many ways
a) Lobbyists have captured the Federal Government, degrading our faith in Government, as they have stopped representing us, and allowed increasingly dangerous failures of society to occur. This degrades trust in society.
b) Advertising driven mass media, and social media, both maximize "engagement", which for the most part happens to be gut level emotional response.
c) The political parties use wedge issues and false choice to divide up the voters, and suppress actual reform, especially rational voices calling for reasonable compromises. They do this to remain in power, and keep getting that sweet sweet stream of money from their donors.
3) I think we have to start on a personal level to fix this.
None of the larger system issues can be fixed before we fix the base issue, broken trust. We need to call each other out when we notice our friends talking about "those people". We need to try to agree on reasonable compromises, instead of fear of slippery slopes forcing us to say insane things to defend our "position"
If you want to start on a personal level to fix this, yelling about politics is not the solution.
Be kind to people, especially people who don’t seem to fit in and are alienated by the world. Teach your children to be kind to people and encourage others to be too. A common thread in so many of these events seems to be someone breaking in an unkind world and lashing out violently.
I sincerely hope this does not descend into a flamewar.
We can't have discussion about this in an intellectually stimulating way in congress, we can't have this discussion in the media, we obviously can't have this discussion on social media so HN is the last bastion of hope.
It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity. The fact stands that USA has a school shooting problem [1] unlike any other country in the world. My main question is how did we get here? There must be an inflection point in the past - any historians out there who can tell us when did this began to be a thing and what was the root cause?
Also any argument like "mental illness" or "ease of access to firearms" needs to explain why the same does not apply to the rest of the world. There are mentally ill people everywhere and many countries have easily accessible weapons, yet no school shootings at this scale.
Can we investigate all the contributing factors? What can we do as individuals and as a society to move forward on this issue?
I see many comments already default to "guns are the problem". I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion.
Let's look at data. While US has most guns per capita, other countries are close, in the same order of magnitude [2].
For example Serbia has 40 civilian firearms per 100 people (!) and zero school shootings in its entire history. United States had 288 just this year. Why is that? Where does the urge to kill innocent children come from?
The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said
In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said. Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school.
“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people”. Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.
There's an amazing amount of "anti-bullying" education that goes on. I've got 4 kids and they all got many hours of anti-bullying.
The issue there is that the solution is (at least in Denver Public Schools) that the burden is put squarely on the students. The message is that only students can prevent bullying. My experience is that teachers and administrators absolutely will not intervene. One of those 4 kids was getting picked on/bullied, sometimes directly in front of a teacher. Who did nothing. The only times I got any help from schools was when an actual, observable injury, like broken skin, appeared. Other than that, my bullied kid just experienced "restorative justice" where the bully refused to show up, and therefore nothing changed.
I was mercilessly bullied in 2nd and 3rd grade. My tormentors would tease me, ambush me and manipulate things to get me in trouble. I wasn’t perfect, but I wasn’t violent.
I dreaded going to lunch, then school in general. At one point I didn’t want to leave my house.
You know what stopped it? Mr. Alexander, a NYC schools science teacher who let me eat lunch in his room, saved me the Tuesday Science NY Times section and gave me science teacher manuals with experiments to do. He was a wounded Korean War vet, I believe a master sergeant who presented a very stern appearance. I’d do random errands and do science stuff and eventually helped with a few things in class. He took the time as an adult to help me understand that I was something, was a mentor and worthy of friends. Looking back, he changed the course of my life. One of the only regrets that I have in life is the I was never able to find him and thank him, as he’s almost certainly passed by now.
Every kid needs a Mr. Alexander. Someone who gives a shit and takes a moment to do something. It makes me angry that these shooters are often kids struggling with emotional problems, and instead finding someone to help, end up on online forums grooming them to be bigots or monsters.
I studied to be a teacher. Every teacher knows that the kids we help will usually not reach out to us once they're adults, and that's a part of the job we're fine with.
Mr. Alexander knew he changed your life, and expected nothing in return. Teaching was his reward.
When I got bullied in junior high I immediately went to the vice principal. That was my understanding of what you were supposed to do. And she set up a meeting with me and the bully, and the bullying stopped after that. (Though I remember when I walked into the office the bully looked at me and realized what the meeting was about and he said, “oh give me a break.” He has definitely expected us to settle it ourselves.)
Yeah. You can teach kids that bullying is bad, but if there’s nobody to actually enforce anything and show that there are consequences for bullying, kids quickly learn that there’s really no reason not to mess with people. Bullying is often an easy way for kids to be funny and move up the social ladder, if just a little bit. Unfortunately, the “meme” that teachers only step in when the victim fights back is very true. I’ve witnessed it myself (thankfully I wasn’t a victim) and everyone I know did as well. Bullying victims are punished by every level of society—it’s not hard to imagine that some of them lash out and want revenge.
That’s not to justify shootings at all. But people who suffer years of abuse, especially during childhood, can’t imagine a better life because they’ve never experienced one. An irrational act of terrorism to us is a rational act of balancing the scales to them.
Denver Public Schools will discipline kids, just not for bullying. Apparently the victims are supposed to deal with it, which I think is logically inconsistent. If the victim could deal with it, they would. Victim is still getting bullied, therefore they can't do it.
My personal experience was that some teachers (Kirksville Jr High "Coach" Keith Jerome was one) actually let some bullying go on. Coach Jerome let some kids beat other kids that he didn't like. That would have been around 1974, so maybe in your Golden Age of individual justice and standing up for ourselves.
In general, I think that teachers do use bullies to extract revenge on students they wouldn't otherwise be able to punish. Same as we as a society let cops do extra-judicial killings and such.
I think you have a great point, yet something that I haven't seen anyone talk about is scale. The scale of the schools in the United States is enormous. I hear about 2000,3000, 5000-student schools.
Some family's studied in the U.S., and even their middle school and elementary is 2000 students ! That's enormous, gigantic!
Here in Mexico schools are small-scale. Education here is much, much smaller scale. I think that the bigger the student population is at the campus, the bigger the chances are of failing at important problems such as bullying, since extreme standardization of these processes creates more problems than genuine solutions. Plus.
As someone who studied high school in Mexico and the US and saw students get bullied in both, cultural issues at play make all the difference. Even the most vicious bullies had a sense of "oh crap, we've gone too far" in my Mexican high school. I saw the students defend the bullied kid at both schools, but in Mexico, both bullies and the rest of the students showed some compassion towards the bullied. And the bullied got to play soccer with the other students during recess. The bullied were never wholly ostracised. In contrast, when the other students defended the bullied in the US school, there was this feeling of "you should fend for yourself; nobody is going to help you. You're on your own." It's hard to explain, but that's what I felt being a spectator.
All this is just my n=1 experience, and I could be misreading things, but I'm convinced there's a cultural element that can explain the helplessness of bullied kids in the US school system.
I feel you are on to something. I think that on top of those other things, the last straw is that the U.S. society is much less integrated. My neighbors have said 3 words to me the last 10 years I lived here (moved from Europe). Where I come from the whole town would know the troubled kid, would either step in before the bullying got really bad, or sure as heck would not let the kid buy a machine gun.
Maybe the problem with the US is that the society is just too free. Or not enough churchgoing.
The big difference between UK and USA is the number of guns we have in our country compared to theirs. We probably can't stop bullying, but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
I was bullied and still am. I have used and owned guns since I was 4. I haven't once thought about killing another person, and I too suffered from a speech impediment and didn't have it easy in school. The difference between me and these mass shooters is that I was told to use that as strengths and to use it to make myself better. I have and successfully done so. The mass shooters as of late feel like this is the only way to settle their rage and anger. It's rather sad.
The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society. We humans are nothing but animals down to the core. If a person wants to kill they will find a way.
Another issue in the USA is the lacking mental Healthcare that other nations have. Many are afraid to seek mental health help because of the stigma of looking weak, much like men not reporting rape or sexual assault that they experience. Also couple that with covid19 lockdowns and that gives these at risk people lots of time to think, plan, and execute. At this time its far to late for them. As a result you get more mass shootings.
It doesn’t follow that just because _you_ have never thought to use guns, that nobody else will think to use guns and therefore guns are not the problem. Even if 0.01% of bullied people think to use guns that’s still many shootings. There will be disturbed people in any society, the question is how to limit the damage they cause.
In the UK we had one school shooting (conducted by an adult), and after that very strict restrictions were put on gun ownership. A similar case happened in Australia.
The fact that it is still controversial whether “guns are the issue” shows that the US has not yet begun to grapple with the issue.
- Decline of religion/spirituality is more pronounced in usa.
- More dual working parent homes (due to free labor markets). I also suspect that while real incomes have risen, actual disposable income has decreased, which pressures households into dual working arrangements. This means less time invested by parents in kids.
- institutional rot of public education . As some poster said, school bureaucracy is now defacto enabler of bullying - by doing nothing when observed... and punishing teachers that actually try.
- the internet has cracked the authority of social groups, with more time spent online and people more fractured among niche interests. This means less oversight and more activities happening without a concerted response by the group
I think you are gonna need to specify what countries you think are worth comparing, because there's not really a structured correlation between the lists you link (and among large countries, the US has relatively high religiosity and relatively low atheism, look above and below at your [1]).
Are drugs a serious factor in the US? In the case of this shooter, his mother was struggling with drugs, had a fraught relationship with the son and the grandmother was pushing them out. Growing up amongst that would build a lot of anger in someone.
Good call out on the mental healthcare I think this often gets overlooked, but you have to wonder if it was available in this instance would we be here today
I think the wording is kind of silly. Bragging about never even having a thought is a weird way to claim virtue.
If you read this bit of text:
“Imagine killing another human”
What happens in your head? Is it blank save for a triumphant “Not today, Satan!”?
If I were to write “Imagine pushing somebody off a cliff”, it would be common for people to just… not imagine that? And this refusal of imagination is a virtue that, if it were more common, would somehow be helpful to society?
I grew up in the UK, before I moved to the US. In the UK, I was taught that a solid punch was the solution to bullying. I fear the issue in the US is just a very disturbing take on a solid punch. You're relentlessly taught through film and media that a good guy with a gun, probably crawling through an air duct, is that solid punch. I was taught to just hit them. In the face. On the nose. Even if you lose, just hit them.
I fear this message has lost something in translation.
Yep, standing up on your own is one of the core American values I believe has been lost to the American Education System. Although I have not been to an American high school or Middle School, the school at which I was definitely had western values and taught that violence was and will never be the option. That you oughtta let the _system_ solve it. But the system has a ton of bureaucracy. I think that we let so many things go by because taking justice into your own hands is bad.
Anyways, I digress. But here are some of my thoughts: I just got from a three-day trip to Monterrey, a city in Mexico. This is where my mom and dad went to college. Yet there is this vibe, always, either inside or outside the school that just feels like _everyone_ is always hustling. Making their lives work. Going to big measures to achieve their dreams, whether legal or not. I met a wealthy guy, interesting acquaintance. We talked about life. One of the main things he said to me was that - emphasizing that although it's cliché it's just too true - "the universe is yours. take it."
And this just rings too true for me, I think that our education has decoupled from American values. Or maybe those values were already broken to begin with. My point is, bureaucracy has led us to do unimaginable things and not see "action -> result." Yet we were raised by our parents telling us that dreams will come true with hard work and effort. We are all socially forced to follow the rules, not skipping lines, etc. But it feels more and more like those lines are crossed everyday and goals are more important.
Do you realize you're arguing that people need to stand up on their own in a thread about a mass shooting of children? In the twisted viewpoint of the killer, he stood up for himself, by attacking others. Instead, he should have let the system help him.
I think the way to interpret that comment is that if the killer had simply gotten into a fist fight after class, like many of us here (including me) did to resolve disputes, things probably would've gone differently.
I was viciously bullied from 3rd grade through 6th and eventually stopped it through physical violence. The guy who bullied me (we exchanged black eyes on multiple occasions) ended up being one of my best childhood friends and I attended his father's funeral last year after he was killed in a tragic accident. Fighting amongst boys is normal.
Read the parent of my comment. I was addressing bullying.
But yeah, it's true. One could argue that the school shooter was doing this for himself, which of course isn't something I'd wish on anyone. I think that these teenagers feel helpless, without any purpose in life. I'm not saying it's the worst time to be alive, but the mass appeal of no-religion, being agnostic is a real problem. I even doubt if I should continue being agnostic at times. Every once in a while I lose purpose and really haven't found a good way to cope with it.
Generally speaking, I think the cause of these shootings comes down to the feeling of helplessness and not feeling useful to society.
A lot of children (boys especially) in America aren't taught that rough play is OK, anymore. Wrestling and rough housing, as I did when I was a kid (GenXer) is actively frowned upon and stopped, I've noticed, more often than not. I have a 7 year old and I'm amazed at how many of his friends are shocked when they see my son and his cousin wrestling about and race to tell me they're "fighting". I feel bad laughing when I have to explain to them that they're just wrestling around (his cousin is a girl and man, I hope her high school gets a girl's wrestling division - her take dows are awesome). I think American kids are so unfamiliar with physical combat that, for a lot of them, their first step to fighting back is to reach for a gun because that's all they've been shown on TV. Physical combat sport in any form is just so foreign to them, using a gun is much more intuitive.
My daughter is younger and smaller than my son, but in any "fun sibling violence" situation she just doesn't stop hassling until she thinks she's "won" or us parents have to intervene. They never really come close to even danger of the spilling-blood-kind of physicality, but my daughter constantly surprises me with what punishment she's willing to risk just to try and "get the last one in". She's tougher than him.
The "gun as solution" psychology is definitely a large part of the problem.
Yeah, but (pardon my French) who the fuck cares? Straight-A valedictorian reporting in. I’d’ve advised middle school me that this (a punch to the nose) couldn’t be a worse resolution.
With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.
I agree. Yet part of the problem is that your future kinda depends on it. You could be cataloged as having 'mental issues' for punching a guy in the face, even if it was for self defense. But yeah, I guess your point still stands since we've lost our sense of what's right and standing up for ourselves. The "Fine, I'll do it myself" meme would definitely apply here.
My middle school grades and teacher recommendations got me into an elite high school. If I had thrown punches at bullies, got suspended, missed test, etc.. I wouldn't have had that opportunity. Most people's middle school grades are probably useless but I dunno maybe they get them into a higher track in 9th grade like AP courses and stuff vs remedial work.
Well, the people suffering from it who haven't figured out that it doesn't matter. And the school certainly won't tell you that because of moral hazard; suffering ensues.
>With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.
> we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country
Can we? AnimalMuppet already mentioned the legal barriers, but there's another issue: the US is currently suffering from extreme political polarization which has already led to an insurrection. How do you think that would interact with an attempt at mass confiscation[0] of guns?
I fear such a policy any time in the near future would spark a civil war, leading to many times more deaths than all the school shootings added together.
[0] I read your post as implying mass confiscation. Simply restricting the purchase of new guns would take many decades to significantly reduce the number of guns in circulation.
Restrictions and buybacks seem pretty reasonable to me. Supposedly support for the former is very high, and the latter is voluntary. I'm surprised training requirements aren't commonplace because there'd be a commercial interest from gun ranges and the like to lobby for that.
I'm sure there'd be pushback, but restrictions on gun advertising might be another option. Other countries have regulations around advertising pharmaceuticals, fast food, tobacco, gambling and so on.
The support for restrictions, as far as I can tell from polls, is mostly about expanding background checks. Even after a recent shooting support for additional gun control law beyond expanded background checks seems to be in decline (see article below).
Interestingly among those polled from the Democratic party, which is broadly considered the entirely pro-gun-control party, only 54% felt that gun control laws were the most effective way to prevent mass shootings. (31% of Independents and 17% of Republicans responded similarly.) The rest seem to mostly fall into the camps of either 'more effective policing' or 'preventing the spread of extremist ideologies.'
The insurrection was because of perceived voting fortification due to mail in ballots. Citizens fighting for the integrity of the democratic voting process still means they believe that US democracy is real. Wouldn't it be worse had they just resigned to thinking voting is fake, like most people under communism did. And never challanged obviously fake results.
We can't solve this problem because we're all talking about highly theoretical and utopian solutions that don't account for actually existing realities.
The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The US constitution says "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preface about a well regulated militia, and yes, people were using muskets when it was written, but the Supreme Court has ruled that this confers an individual right to possess modern firearms.
And the Supreme Court is even more right-wing now, and likely to force blue states to loosen their gun laws to look more like red states.
So maybe we'd have a more productive conversation if we talked about what's possible in the actually existing United States instead of dreaming about Australia's successes, because there's zero probability that we'll be able to learn from Australia.
Australia isn’t really a success at solving the underlying social issues. Except for managing to take away the guns. Which I personally believe was a massive overreaction to an event that provided convenient political capital that politicians wanted to spend so they were seen to be doing something about the tragedy. We also implemented insane gun control laws involving such bull shit as regulating gun shaped toys based on how scary they look… it’s absurd.
I doubt that even with our previous level of gun ownership we would have had the same outcome either. We have a social healthcare system that at least provides some level of mental health support and our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power. While this may have eventually changed with greater cultural homogenisation to American content via the internet, I’m unconvinced that it would have ever been the same as we see in America today.
The school shooting problem is very very American and i suspect it has a lot to do with cultural contagion brought on by the 24hr news media circus whipping everyone into obsession every time there’s a tragedy.
I think the way we regard guns in Australia is important. They are dangerous objects that are either used for work, or as a hobby by a small number. To a very large extent we don't worship or slobber over them.
I've fired a gun on three occasions (I was an Army Cadet, I quite enjoyed the experience) and have handled realistic replicas (backstage on set of a theater show). In both settings they're treated as risky objects. You are handed the gun, you use it, and then you hand it back to be locked up.
My grandfather is the only person in my family I know who ever owned a gun. He used to keep it in the cupboard under the stairs. He handed it in to police to be destroyed long ago - he felt that he didn't need it, and that the most likely outcome of keeping it was an accident that he would regret.
Personally, I'm very happy to live without guns around. If I do want to shoot, I would be able to comply with the regulations in my state fairly easily. It's a bit of paperwork but no worse than, e.g. acquiring powerful lasers, or being allowed to enter an aerodrome for flight training.
I didn't know this, but the Australia gun ban, just removed certain types of guns - about half the latest data I saw.
Australia still has plenty of legal guns around. And it's clearly still a problem with illegal guns. Not as big a problem as the US, but still a big problem.
"But the latest crackdown did little to shift attention from the body count: in the past 18 months, 13 men have been shot dead in a western Sydney turf war and there is no end to the bloodshed in sight."
>Australia isn’t really a success at solving the underlying social issues.
Definitely- the most recent mass shooting committed by an Australian national didn't even occur on Australian soil, but in Christchurch, NZ.
>our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power
As opposed to the US, whose cultural relationship with school shooters sees them made Person of the Year by a popular nationwide magazine. Their media reports stories of "Could [popular movie] result in mass shootings?" throughout the time it was in the theaters to the point you'd wonder if it was actually part of a marketing campaign.
Not actively promoting this particular kind of crime or the people who commit it would indeed be a good start to eliminating it but why do that when there's money and political hay to be made over it?
There’s 24hr news most places around the world now and there’s been 24hr “global” news channels for decades too…
But it’s not the same as American news. For one thing American news is weirdly musical… like why the hell does all American news come with a subtle soundtrack trying to obviously steer my emotional reaction to what I’m seeing? Other places add music too in plenty of places often for the same reasons but it’s not the same level… American news basically has a soundtrack going almost all the time, it’s excessive and blatantly an attempt to manipulate the viewers emotions.
Do you have some examples of that? I don't recall any broadcast or cable news having a backing track. Many use sounds and music to introduce a segment, but I don't think any are running music in the background of the regular broadcast.
I don’t have any clips off hand and really don’t want to subject myself to an unnecessary dose of US news media haha… You are right about it not normally being played behind the in studio talent, but you can pretty quickly notice the semi-permanent background track once you start using paying attention to how they construct a “packaged segment” that has been pre-recorded and pre-produced, ready to cut to from the in studio talent.
It’s way more obvious when it’s a wedge issue like gun rights, drug legalisation, abortion, or anything political.
"The left" is not a monolith. There are plenty of leftist gun owners. It's a practical thing rather than a weird obsession, so it doesn't get as much press.
> It's a practical thing rather than a weird obsession, so it doesn't get as much press.
I don't know about that. I know plenty of people on the left that have gun 'obsessions'. I think it's just culturally unacceptable for them to talk about it. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, pretty much everybody (who doesn't tout their minority right-wing victim status on the back window of their pickup truck) will tell you they are anti-gun; but if you feel them out carefully, a good number of them will quietly admit they own guns and enjoy shooting. There are many, many hidden gun collections here.
In response to the idea that muskets were less dangerous I share the following copypasta
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
> The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The left actually says "more background checks", though there are an unreasonable group that goes for absolutely no guns.
There's also the questions about what to do with aftermarket triggers that allow for burst-firing or even fully-automatic firing, which are legal right now (and were used in the Las Vegas mass shooting attack). Banning certain items (ex: large-capacity magazines, trigger-mods, bump-stocks and the like) would still be an improvement.
The important bit is that each item here is a legal issue.
* Bump-stocks, yes or no?
* Trigger-mods, yes or no? (Especially the ones with burst and/or automatic fire modes).
* Magazines, what size should we ban? Is 10 bullets enough? 30 bullets? 100 bullets?
* Should bullets be regulated in general? We regulate larger-capacity bullets (ex: 155mm artillery shells aren't exactly sold in the streets, nor are 30mm autocannons). So where do we draw the line there?
Its not like mortars and grenade launchers are commonly available at gun stores. We have drawn the line and cutoff many kinds of weapons from normal use within this country. If we draw the line a bit more towards background-checks and removing the "automatic-weapons" (bump-stocks and trigger mods) from legality, that probably will help our country out.
I think all of those should be legal. Fully automatic weapons are already legal, they’re just insanely expensive (~$15K for a full auto machine gun) and require a bunch of NFA paperwork to take legal possession.
There are legitimate uses for light trigger actions to minimize disturbance from the finger pull. It isn't hard to bump fire such a gun if you hold it loosely. It would be nice to see the full auto mods to handguns made illegal and manufacturers were forced to modify their designs to impede them. There isn't a legitimate use for mag dumping such a weapon.
Auto sears are illegal. Possessing one is a felony with a penalty of up to 10 years in prison and a fine of $250,000. No legal civilian-owned full-auto firearm has been made since the 1986 ban.[1]
There's really no way to make a semi-auto firearm that impedes full auto modification. Full auto is the default behavior. It's the trigger disconnector that makes a handgun semi-auto. That said, full auto isn't very useful. It's inaccurate and eats up ammo quickly, necessitating reloads.
>Full auto is the default behavior. It's the trigger disconnector that makes a handgun semi-auto.
This isn't true for any modern rifle or pistol design- the absence of the disconnector just means the gun stop working (hammer follow). You need additional parts to ensure that the gun works properly in full-auto; this is accomplished by a secondary trigger (the 'auto sear') that trips the hammer/striker after the bolt closes.
>There's really no way to make a semi-auto firearm that impedes full auto modification.
The only designs that work this way are all already classified as machine guns in the US, so they aren't made/sold there any more.
Hammer follow can easily cause a gun to go full auto.[1] Yes it's not as reliable as a sear designed for full auto, but it can work surprisingly well on blowback actions.
The original comment was about handguns specifically, and was likely a reference to auto sears on Glocks. The combination of striker-fired and reciprocating slide makes it very easy to trip the sear at the right time, giving you better reliability than simply disabling the disconnector. This tweet has a useful diagram showing how Glock auto sears work.[2]
The ATF did restrict the manufacture of new guns that fire from an open bolt (since they are trivially made full-auto), but old open bolt guns aren't classified as machine guns.
On the other hand, we should be so lucky if more mass-shooters try to use full auto. There are very few situations where that would result in more deaths rather than less.
The fully-automatic question comes up because of pragmatism and practicality. The guy used 1000+ bullets to fire upon a crowd. You physically cannot do that if you only had semiautomatic.
I wonder if this might have been more deadly if he had fired fewer shots but deliberately aimed each of them at a person. The percentage of wounded survivors in that shooting was atypical.
These aren't the choice you'd use for a planned mass shooting. The problem is gang bangers killing more innocent bystanders with the latest gun fashion.
After three such incidents involving children in Minneapolis in a short period last (?) year I mused on how it would maybe be a good idea for someone to start a nonprofit that brings gang members to gun ranges to train them. I think we'd all rather they kill each other than bystanders.
I wish you hadn’t made your quip about the left saying “no guns”, because it isn’t important at all to your central point, which is that structural issues in the US prevent meaningful progress on gun control regardless of whether it’s good policy or the majority of people want it.
But you have like five people responding to that “left no guns” thing specifically, instead of to your real point, which is absolutely correct and the heart of the issue.
Here in Canada the "left" liberal government made it much harder to get a gun license. Then proceeded to mandate the vaccine, fired unvaccinated employees, denied them their EI, and banned about 6 million Canadians from flying to this day. When some truckers protested, they suspended the charter.
I can see how many Americans would want to hold to their guns in light of the behaviour of governments over the last few years.
They didn’t “mandate the vaccines”, they required their employees to get vaccinated. If you didn’t want to receive a safe, effective vaccine that billions of people around the world have also received, you had the “freedom” to quit and find another employer.
Oh, also? Has anyone actually been fired by the federal government? A cursory search shows 1800 people are on unpaid leave, but they haven’t been terminated. 1800 people out of an estimated 320k employees.
Please spend 15 seconds looking up what "the left" is actually arguing for before speaking in public about it. Because you appear to not have any idea.
Hint: it's what 92-96% of the US public consistently agrees with. Background checks without loopholes, for instance.
I would think that percentage would change if people knew what they were agreeing to. “Remove loopholes to get around background checks? Absolutely! Force private owners to report to the government who they sell a gun to, leading to a registry all all gun owners? Maybe not…”
Just curious, but have you ever purchased a firearm?
Background checks are standard procedure. I'm not sure what "loopholes" you are referring to. Usually this refers to private party sales. Do you want private party sales banned?
People often describe the fact that there isn't a background check for private sales in most US states as a loophole. Attempts to add such a requirement in some states, such as Washington have been clumsy and burdensome but it does seem like a good idea in principle.
The Left is more than willing to take incremental harm-reduction approaches to manage America's gun addiction instead of going cold turkey, but even that is not an option thanks to the USA's anti-democratic Senate.
I'm pretty sure there are bullies in Serbia, too, and fraught home conditions. And there are the guns. What's missing? onesafari said:
> The root cause may be bullying combined with the media contagion effect.
You need the bullying (or other oppressive social condition) and the media contagion. And, as you say, you need the massive amounts of guns.
> but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
It is not clear to me that your statement is true. Given the Second Amendment, given the Supreme Court (and, in particular, the current makeup of the Supreme Court), I'm not sure what can be done.
If you see a path, we'd all love to see the plan...
Nobody ever talks about restricting the first amendment instead of the second, but it would be just as effective for mass shootings.
But we probably wouldn’t even need to restrict it. If the president and other politicians shamed every media company that named the shooter when this happens we could probably make some progress.
If the relationship were superlinear, then we'd expect to see much higher rates of mass shootings in places like Montana or Wyoming (where >60% of households have guns) and lower rates in California (where ~20% of households have guns). This does not seem to be the case.
That is gun deaths, not gun homicides or mass shootings. Around 2/3rds of gun deaths are suicides. A suicidal person will choose the most effective and painless method available to them, so if they have a gun around, they'll use it. This is a totally different problem than gun violence, but many activists will conflate the two.
I'm not sure how much of an effect they would have on suicides. This may just be my stereotypical mental image, but I suspect that a lot of gun suicide victims have owned the gun in question for a long time, in which case a waiting period wouldn't help any more than a waiting period to buy a car would stop people driving off bridges.
Are there any numbers on how many people commit suicide with guns they bought in the last 6 months of their life?
Upvoted and agreed, that's a reasonable complaint. Can you provide sources that illustrate the absence of correlation after dividing the dataset?
I haven't yet, although I did find this publication from Boston University positive correlation between increased gun ownership and increased non-stranger homicide rates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/
The post also questions how studies like the one you linked are measuring gun ownership rate. Every reliable study uses % of suicides with guns as a proxy for gun ownership rates. RAND notes the same thing: "A fundamental limitation for all of the studies is the lack of direct measures of gun prevalence. All of the authors use FS/S as a proxy for gun prevalence" https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...
Which ones? You can only buy guns in the state which you are a resident. You'd have to find a co-conspirator who is a resident of that state and who is willing to commit a felony to get you a gun. Or you'd have to live in one state and decide to drive to another state and murder people.
The Buffalo shooter bought his rifle legally in New York. Same goes for the most recent shooter in Texas. The San Bernardino shooters bought their firearms legally in California, then modified magazines to accept more than 10 rounds. The Orlando night club shooter bought his guns legally. He even had a valid security guard license.
The only example I know of is Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter. He lived in Nevada and bought a WASR-10 (an AK variant) there, then drove to California to massacre people. While the WASR-10 is illegal in California, very similar rifles are legal in the state. Had he lived in California, he could have purchased a Palmetto State Armory GF3 (or any other CA-legal AK clone), then removed the grip fin and modified the magazine to accept 30 rounds.
Yes I did slightly simplify. There is an exception for buying rifles and shotguns from a gun store, but that still requires passing a background check and everything. Also the rifle or shotgun must be legal in the state you reside. And it is illegal to privately sell a gun to a non-resident. If the buyer is from another state, you must go through an FFL.
The point I was trying to make is that people cannot take advantage of less restrictive gun laws in neighboring states. Almost every mass shooter either got their guns legally or stole them from a close relative (often by murdering that relative). There's no glaring legal loophole that these people are using.
I used to live in California. They have silly laws that require a "fin" on the grip (so you can't wrap your hand around it) and 10 round magazines. Once I moved, I fixed those annoyances.
There's a paper that was presented at an American Psychology Association conference on the media contagion effect. I think this might actually be the original study. It mentions "Profiles of shooters indicate that they are often socially isolated and suffer a pattern of ostracization or bullying, yet they tend toward narcissism."[1] It also mentions that these three traits - depression, social isolation and pathological narcissism are largely intertwined.
I'd say there are a number of angles from which to tackle the gun violence problem, but this would surely be one of them. Plus, worth dealing with independent of guns anyway. I wonder if there are links (including inverse relationships) between depression/isolation and classroom sizes or intensity of curriculum or single-sex schools. High school puts hormonal teenagers in a competitive environment every week day for hours; not everyone will cope well with that crucible.
Is there a stronger element of the individual and individual glory/success/achievement in the US than other countries that might explain the narcissism?
Bullying doesn't even describe half of it. There are many people who feel abandoned by everyone. It's extremely lonely for some people, especially in today's age where the default is NOT to go hang out in person with friends. The default is staring down at your phone and getting hooked on messaging and media tunnels.
I think this is the correct answer. Guns enable these incidents, but they're of course not the root cause. Bullying is a common motivation, but I don't think it's exactly the root cause either. It can be seen as a mental health issue, but I don't think that's the most instructive analytical lens.
The problem is our lack of social fabric. Kids don't have enough friends. They spend too much time looking at screens, and they can't imagine positive futures that they'd like to live out. They don't have enough guidance from parents and other adults to put them on a more positive path.
There was an article in recent months about the loss of communal spaces for adolescents. Put a group of teenagers in a park just hanging out, and a suspicious local will dob them in as loitering. Play a noisy game of football and someone reports it. Other places are pay-to-play. Or have alcohol and designed for adults.
It almost sounds like he's the victim in your mind...just consider that there are millions of people that are bullied, and people with mental illness that do not do anything close to this.
He targeted little kids. An obivious ego driven attempt at grandizing the scale of his revenge. This was all about him. A purely selfish act. Exaggerated to a scale to mock life itself.
Family members are rationalizing why he might have done this after the fact. Inferring a causal effect from bullying to murdering children from family member testimony seems very biased.
Well no one has said it yet and I don’t have a precious study to trot out, but:
My >80 year old friend has suggested to me that this kind of problem didn’t exist before we started handing out pharmaceutical drugs of the variety that ‘handle’ mental illness.
Sidebar semi-related story time: my wife got her Masters in childhood education and went directly to work for a public high school after. She was a.. I forget, counselor assistant or something like that at a very large school in Texas. She quit after just a few months because she could see that they were just using her position as a funnel to get kids on some kind of pharmaceutical drug. She was literally reprimanded more than once because she recommended against putting some of the students on drugs and pushed them toward professional counseling instead. The parents are often clamoring to get a diagnosis so they can get their kids on drugs to ‘fix’ their problems, so it’s not exclusively the fault of the government, but they’re damn sure doing their part.
They’re drugging our children, MOST often unnecessarily. Perhaps if we used other methods to help, we would see other outcomes.
Sorry, no. Precisely nobody employed by a school district is getting involved in medication nor diagnosis for children. Nobody. Not even in Texas, and especially not a new grad with “assistant” in their title. Nurses might dispense prescriptions as prescribed but that is a firm end to the involvement in a child’s medical situation. Your wife’s master’s degree does not permit diagnosis of mental health and suggestion of medication or diagnosis in a counseling setting would be criminal, prosecutable behavior. The alleged people pushing her to do so would both know this and be just as culpable. And cui bono? You realize for your story to be true there has to be a pharmaceutical rep/third party paying a school district to perpetuate trivially prosecutable behavior for everyone involved, right?
In the United States this has not been controversial for decades and is common knowledge among educators. I’m sorry, either you gravely misunderstood the situation, or your story is complete fiction. I’m concerned that you don’t know what her title was but you know they wanted the kids on drugs and maybe if we didn’t do that some kids would still be alive. I’m also concerned your story just happens to be in Texas, of all the places.
Source: Educator.
Edit: lol, six downvotes between HN cache misses kinda proves my subtle allegation, genius
I'd like to add another anecdata point. I have lived most of my life in Texas. A couple of my close relatives were born in the mid 80's and started school in the early 90's in the public school system in a medium-sized city in Texas.
At the time there was a lot of discussion about ADHD, the causes, treatments, etc and how to recognize it. Teachers had the authority to remove a child from the classroom if the teacher claimed the child was disruptive. The school would not allow the child to return to class until that kid was no longer disruptive. They used school nurses to make diagnoses of ADHD and to recommend on the official records in the school system that the child be medicated to help them deal with their "learning disability".
Parents needed to schedule appointments with pediatricians or child psychologists so that the kid could be evaluated and if that professional determined the child needed medication to be able to sit still in class, or to be able to sit quietly without talking out of turn then the child was required to take medication, typically Ritalin.
I don't know where you're from but a diagnosis of ADHD back then followed an individual through their entire public school career and teachers absolutely had the right to refuse to have a child labeled "hyperactive" in their classroom unless that child was medicated.
I have no idea how all that ended up as standard procedure. Texas began a decline in the quality of education in their public schools a long time ago and there is no opportunity to arrest that fall without removing most of those currently in office.
Your original poster may not have all his ducks in a row but he at least knows that he has a flock of something that quacks. I may also not have all my facts straight but I know I am pretty close. They are both ordinary adults now in spite of the things they had to go through as students in Texas public schools.
"According to America’s Centers for Disease Control, 11% of four- to 17-year-olds in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD, a label for those who are disruptive in class and unable to concentrate; just over 6% are taking medication."
"In the UK, meanwhile, about 3% of children are diagnosed with ADHD; just 1% are on medication. American children can go through six or seven different drugs quite early in their lives; in the UK, children are usually sent for cognitive behaviour therapy first, in line with guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence."
"It is now generally accepted, says David Healy, professor of psychiatry at Bangor University, that 20%-25% of students at most universities in the US are on medication, often on multiple prescriptions"
Mental illness, mental healthcare and pharmaceutical treatments are a thing in Europe too. The US is not a special outlier when it comes to bullying and mental health.
But you don't see children being gunned down every other week in Europe.
No, the problem is guns in the possession of people who can't use them responsibly. Guns aren't magic. They don't take over a person's mind and make them shoot other people. The people who misuse guns would misuse any other weapon you gave them. Or even things that you might not think of as weapons.
But the vast majority of gun owners are not such people; they are responsible law-abiding citizens. So any policy about guns, at least in the US where we have the Second Amendment as part of our Constitution, has to be based on letting responsible, law-abiding citizens have guns. Otherwise you are punishing responsible, law-abiding citizens for the misdeeds of a very small number of people who are not responsible or law-abiding. That's not a good idea.
> No, the problem is guns in the possession of people who can't use them responsibly.
The problem is that guns are so readily available that even those that cannot use them responsibly can still get their hands on them. Three of the four guns used in Columbine weren't even purchased by the killers but by a fellow school mate who had turned 18 and could buy them for the killers. Similarly, with the Sandyhook shooting -- it wasn't even the shooter's gun that was used.
Your examples are not arguments for restricting gun ownership per se. They are arguments for holding people responsible for giving guns to irresponsible people.
In the Columbine case, was the school mate prosecuted for, at the very least, negligently contributing to homicide?
With the Sandy Hook shooting, was the owner of the gun prosecuted for allowing the shooter to have it?
I don't see how holding the third parties responsible would prevent the acts themselves. That's a retroactive measure. Reducing the availability of guns is proactive.
>With the Sandy Hook shooting, was the owner of the gun prosecuted for allowing the shooter to have it?
No, because she was the first person killed by the very weapon.
> I don't see how holding the third parties responsible would prevent the acts themselves.
You don't see how, if people know they are legally responsible for what guns they own are used for if they give them to someone else, they would be more careful about who they give them to?
Obviously prosecuting someone after the fact is retroactive for that particular act. But that in no way means it does not send a signal to other people to proactively change their behavior. That is how most law enforcement has its effect. And it has the advantage of putting the responsibility where it belongs; whereas if you take away everyone's guns because a few people can't use them responsibly, or can't be bothered to be careful about who they give them to, you are punishing the wrong people.
But the U.S. accepts other things that are regulated, a couple of examples:
Speed limits: Speed doesn't cause accidents just people who go faster than their ability to control the vehicle. Many people are sensible and wouldn't do this.
Drugs: Many people can take drugs and enjoy them and not descend into anti-social and criminal behavior.
> Dont care. Its a small punishment for a greater good.
This sort of attitude is a big reason why US politics is polarized around this issue. So let me try to adjust your "small punishment for a greater good" attitude a bit.
Guns are self-defense weapons. They are particularly useful as equalizers: a little old lady who can shoot can defend herself against a mugger much larger than her in a way she couldn't possibly do by any other means. So any government that proposes to take away people's guns "for a greater good" has an absolute obligation to extirpate any kind of violent crime that might cause a person to need a gun for self-defense. I mean "extirpate" literally: zero violent crime. Or at least so close to it as to be rounding error. But of course no government on Earth ever has or ever can achieve that level of control over violent crime, at least not in a free country. Perhaps China could do it, though even there I doubt it: China has criminal gangs.
So given that the government can't possibly make it truly unnecessary for any law-abiding citizen to need a gun, if the government still insists on taking away people's guns "for a greater good", the government is taking the attitude that, as long as the politicians who live in gated communities and have personal protective details can have their bodyguards have guns so they aren't victims of violent crime, they don't care that the people they're supposed to be representing are victims of violent crime and can't defend themselves. And that is not an acceptable attitude for the government of a free country.
>Guns are self-defense weapons. They are particularly useful as equalizers: a little old lady who can shoot can defend herself against a mugger much larger than her in a way she couldn't possibly do by any other means.
Ah yes, the classic example of little old ladies defending themselves. This is pretty much a "think of the children" trope.
Guns in a home actually lead to greater dangers especially for women. Most people are actually murdered by someone they know, quite often a close relative of friend. It may not feel that way but you are actually safer not owning a gun.
No, you are actually safer not having an irresponsible person in your home. If everyone in your home is a responsible person, you might well be safer owning a gun. At worst it will be neutral as far as your safety goes (if you live in an area that is safe anyway). The fact that irresponsible people will use guns to do irresponsible things is not a valid reason to blame the guns. The blame lies with the irresponsible people.
> Gun violence solved: Just don't have an irresponsible person in your home.
Doing that doesn't just "solve" gun violence. Focusing on the guns as though they're the root problem when irresponsible people are involved is like painting over the rust on your car and thinking it "solves" the problem.
> once responsible, always responsible
I made no such claim. Obviously the responsible/irresponsible judgment is not one you just make one time and then it never changes. Any reasonable person will understand that making such judgments is an ongoing process.
>Focusing on the guns as though they're the root problem when irresponsible people are involved is like painting over the rust on your car and thinking it "solves" the problem.
Guns aren't the root problem but their accessibility is an enabler -- a multiplying force for opportunistic carnage.
>Any reasonable person will understand that making such judgments is an ongoing process.
This goes against what we've seen with mass killers and the third parties involved: Average, every-day people convince themselves that their loved one / friend will get over whatever they're dealing with. We also know that many of these mass killers are sociopaths and have no difficulties in acting normal and hiding their motives.
> Guns aren't the root problem but their accessibility is an enabler -- a multiplying force for opportunistic carnage.
That still doesn't justify taking away guns from people who aren't going to commit opportunistic carnage. The root problem is the people, not the guns.
> Average, every-day people convince themselves that their loved one / friend will get over whatever they're dealing with.
I get that this happens. But the average, every-day people still have to understand that, if there is a gun in the house, "convincing yourself" is not enough. Unless you are sure, i.e., sure enough to bet your own life on it (because you are) that the person is not going to misuse the gun, you cannot allow them access to it. That is perfectly compatible with still believing that they will get over it in time.
> We also know that many of these mass killers are sociopaths and have no difficulties in acting normal and hiding their motives.
If you are not sure that someone is not a sociopath, then don't allow them access to your gun.
I simply don't see any of these things as valid reasons to take away guns from people who are responsible adults. If your definition of "responsible adult" actually does not include making judgments like the above, and being able to separate your emotional desire for a loved one to "heal" from your rational, practical need to not give them access to guns until you're sure they are healed, then your definition of "responsible adult" is wrong. And if our society has deteriorated to the point where the definition of "responsible adult" I am giving--which to a person of, say, my parents' generation would have seemed so obvious as to not even be worth stating--is something "average, every-day people" do not think they can live up to, then we have a much, much bigger problem with our society than gun violence. Our society has adult problems that require adult solutions. That requires adult citizens. If we don't have adult citizens, our society is doomed.
When you advocate for punishing law-abiding citizens for the misdeeds of criminals, you should question whether you are really acting for the greater good.
>When you advocate for punishing law-abiding citizens for the misdeeds of criminals
I don't think you're arguing in good-faith here. The Misdeeds of criminals? It's not like mass shootings are carried out by felons. They're carried out by mentally ill people that have access to guns they should not have access to. They're not criminals until they take action.
> I don't think you're arguing in good-faith here.
I could say the same about you, but I'll just leave it that I don't think you have thought through your position.
> They're not criminals until they take action.
And nobody calls for banning guns until they take action either. At which point, as you say, they are criminals. So the calls for banning guns every time there's a mass shooting are exactly what I said: calls to punish law-abiding citizens for the misdeeds of criminals.
You don't have to go all the way to Europe. Canada exists. Canada is culturally very similar to the USA, has a similar incidence of mental health, has similar usage of drugs to treat mental health.
However, Canada has stricter gun laws. While bolt-action hunting rifles are legal and unregistered in Canada, owning one involves getting PAL, which is similar to earning a driver's license. It involves lessons and tests.
And more... murder-y weapons like pistols and "assault-style"[1] rifles are either banned or restricted. Restricted means the gun is registered, you take extra certifications, and you fill out paperwork just to transport it from your home to the firing range, which is basically the only place you can legally fire the thing.
Shootings still happen. There was a tragedy in Quebec City a few years back where a "great replacement" nut shot up a mosque (which illustrates how we have the same cultural problems as Americans). But the number, per capita, is tiny compared to Americans.
It's hard to escape the obvious conclusion that the reason there are so many gun deaths in America is because guns are so poorly controlled.
Most of the street crime guns here are smuggled over the border (America is to guns as Escobar's Colombia was to cocaine), so the lax gun laws don't just impact the USA.
[1] yes I know it's a vague term but you also know what I mean don't @ me.
> yes I know it's a vague term but you also know what I mean don't @ me.
Our world is filled to the brim with vague constructed terms to solve for a problem, not for a clean categorization. The assault-style category is a desire to lump all the guns that multiply too much the assailant's power. It's not about a certain bullet type, or a specific barrel length. If it's too good at doing a mass shooting, it's assault-style.
Canada had a mass shooting in 2020 in Nova Scotia where 23 people were murdered by a guy well known to the police.
The Wikipedia article only covers the major ones, but Canada has a mass shoot pretty regularly too. And if shooting scale by population, you'd expect the US to have 10x as many - all else being equal.
1000x more firearm deaths, but only 8x more firearm homicides but then 3x more murders.
I would definitely agree the US has a worse murder problem than Canada, but making is purely a gun problem misses the point. Do guns play a role? Sure.
I see the comments in this thread being downvoted that point out that Europe (for example) have the same societal issues as the U.S. but don't have the same gun availability.
People seem to be trying to argue Europe and the US are very similar culture wise but I don’t think that’s true at all.
IMO the biggest problem with the US over Europe is lack of social cohesion, lack of familial cohesion that includes extended families, focus on individualism over community, and lack of social safety nets. These factors have a huge impact on mental well being.
The idea that Europe and the US are very similar other than access to guns just because both are developed western nations is very naive…
I think we'd need to be honest about it and compare individual European countries to individual US states. New York and California are NOT like Alabama, Texas and Florida.
California, Illinois and New York have different populations and different issues than Ohio, Texas, and Alabama for example.
So guns are what caused this tragedy? The mere existing of them in the US causes people to lose their minds and go on rampages? We need to get to the root of the problem because people will find another way to enact their evil. Look at Boston Marathon incident
The person you are replying to did not say guns caused the tragedy. Rather the availability of guns in the U.S. is why we see school shootings every week in the U.S. and not in Europe.
4000 people were killed due to the threat of box cutters... over 100 people were killed by a fertilizer bomb. People die due to knives, hammers and fists. It's a people problem.
> On March 23, 2010, Zheng Minsheng (郑民生)[7] 41, murdered eight children with a knife in an elementary school in Nanping,[8] Fujian province...
> An attacker named Wu Huanming (吴环明), 48, killed seven children and two adults and injured 11 other persons with a cleaver at a kindergarten in Hanzhong, Shaanxi on May 12, 2010...
> On 4 August 2010, 26-year-old Fang Jiantang (方建堂) slashed more than 20 children and staff with a 60 cm knife, killing three children and a teacher at a kindergarten in Zibo, Shandong province....
> The death toll has risen to nine in Friday's stabbing attack outside a middle school in northwestern China allegedly carried out by a former pupil seeking revenge for having been bullied....
> ...The state media has also been keeping news of these attacks quiet by deleting forum entries on the internet and releasing few facts on the incident for fear of copycat crimes and mass panic...
> Following the Chenpeng school attack, the Chinese government began posting security guards in schools throughout the country. It was planned that all schools have a security guard by 2013.
Again, Europe has mental illness. But Europe does not have weekly school shootings. It really is not that complicated. Guns enable anyone who becomes mentally ill to kill magnitudes more people.
I don't think the Boston bombers or people using trucks to run people over are geniuses. Even the Batman killer was building bombs in his apartment. It's not rocket science. You may reduce the casualties with a ban and confiscation but you still have handguns to deal with. Good luck banning those. And you also have not solved the underlying problem causing these violent ideations in the first place. So I consider that a bandaid, not a solved problem by any definition.
I see many comments already default to "guns are the problem". I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion.
As a non US resident you can't help but think that is a massive part of the problem.
Many other countries have problems with bullying, mental health, radicalisation. We've also had mass shootings. But our tolerance is so much lower for that kind of BS. One shooting and it's over. The populace will support further gun control and stricter measures. This seems sensible to me since curing the underlying causes takes time. So why would you give firearms to people that aren't in the right state of mind to use them responsibly?
I think the real question is, why is the tolerance of Americans as a population, so high with regards to mass shootings? Are the lobby groups really that powerful they are changing the minds of regular people?
It's probably not really the lobbying, it's the way our government is structured (governments even). Because of the way the US population is distributed, the Senate ends up responding to viewpoints that are in the overall minority.
I consider myself the middle. My mother is right-leaning American and my father is left-leaning European. Long story, to say the least.
I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. It may even be, the issue is when someone thinks they're the good guy with a gun, and they're not. They think they're bruce willis, and they're not. They think they're righting wrongs, and they're not. Their narrative is out of sync with mine.
This is a cultural issue apart from firearms. I may not be sober enough to make this statement, so salt to taste - but firearms aren't the root cause, they're the lubricant in a wider issue where you're all bruce willis in your own story. This combination of firearms and individualism is what separates you from examples such as Switzerland, Czechia, etc. The guns are only the medium through which a deeper problem is expressed.
Some of us can tell the difference between fact and fiction, between make-believe and reality.
I mean, the majority of people everywhere are able to do this just fine, that's my point. US movie culture isn't particularly different than elsewhere.
Here's a popular French movie that celebrates impunity. A cop steals cocaine from some drug dealers and then makes war on them when they kidnap his son:
> A US Senator from Texas literally said yesterday that we should station "good guys with guns" (armed security guards) to prevent school shootings.
Yeah, except there was a police officer right outside the building already:
> The suspect was immediately engaged outside the building as he approached the school by a Uvalde Independent School District police officer, who was shot by the suspect, the sources said.
The solution is always to spend more money. It reminds me of eating and then going to the gym to lose weight, rather than just not eating as much to start with. But eating less makes fewer people rich, so we see fewer ads promoting it, less PR and so on.
If we look at the data we can see a significant increase in the last decade, and the mass school shootings are almost exclusively a modern concept from the last 30 years. A question one might ask is then what changed in the USA during those years to trigger this. In addition those factors should be compared to other nations.
We should also look at what prevent school shootings. What in society might protect against a kid going to school with the intention to harm staff or students? A fatal event only occur if there is enough risk factors and not enough protective factors.
My own thoughts go to increase stress in schools as one factor, social media/news focus, increasingly larger difference in social class among students (source for social tensions), a lack of trained psychologists at schools, a culture that focus on individualism. Out of those, tensions from social class would be my primary suspect when asking why say Serbia has less school shootings than the USA.
In the last 30 years or so, even before social media; the 'zero tolerance' issue others have spoken of started to happen. Bullies don't care, and then learn what they can to make the lives of anyone even a tiny bit different, like those who want to try hard to do well and answer questions, a living hell.
The bullies become experts in the system. They trip, push, flick ears, and these days probably far worse.
I believe the stories from my parents day, that the solutions for kids USED to be, as others have also said, to throw a punch, to fight back. That sort of behavior worked because it prevented the creation of something terrible.
Victims. Fighting back is how you prevent the creation of victims. It works in the realm of the savage.
dsizzle, elsewhere in the thread: "You can't buy automatic or semiautomatic weapons, and registration — including background checks and safety training — is required for all gun owners."
Gun ownership is probably quite high because of war in recent decades, but it would be much more difficult for someone to impulsively buy a gun because they were currently angry and looking for an outlet or revenge.
> mass school shootings are almost exclusively a modern concept from the last 30 years. A question one might ask is then what changed in the USA during those years to trigger this.
The invention of the first person shooter (aka: the mass shooting simulator.) 30 years almost to the day.
As the other commenter said: violent games are popular all over the world, but it's only the US with the gun problem. So I think they can be safely crossed off the list.
Also there's numerous studies that have come out over the past 20 years showing there's little to no connection between virtual violence and real violence. If anything, they help as an outlet. Google is your friend here.
Finally, Jack Thompson is a good cautionary tale of what happens when you let your tyrannical crusade overwhelm you to the point of destroying your career. Don't be a Jack Thompson. Violent games are very far down on the list of things to address regarding the US gun problem.
Have there been any studies specifically on the effects of violent video games on the mentally ill?
afaik the studies are all investigating whether video games make the average person violent or if they increase population-level violence and obviously they don't because until very recently violent crime has been at all-time lows.
> but it's only the US with the gun problem
Because we have guns. We all know this. But we've always had guns, and only recently have had mass shootings. So something else is at work here.
It's bizarre to me that so many tech people think we need to regulate speech, and news, and social media because it makes people do things they otherwise would not, but then they have this special carve-out for what are essentially mass shooting simulators, which they believe have absolutely no effect on anyone.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating for any policy here.
I think psychology is one of the issues. You go from being "particular" to ADHD, or chronically depressed, clinical anxious, ODD... And from those diagnostics most, I imagine, will typically end up on medications. It's the path of least resistance for the parent(s). Beyond that it can be used as an apparatus to excuse behaviors, or to broker certain exceptions. It can also become a narrative tool used to nucleate an identity, and that can be a hazard in some cases.
I don't think we do focus on individualism, either, and that's a problem. Proper individualism entails rigid personal accountability. Perhaps it's implied, and in effect what we've done is given a child a hammer without teaching them to swing it, no doubt many a sore thumb. In fact I really wonder if it's even probable that teachers can meaningfully interface with all but a few students.
I think workload has been increasing, and that's the anecdotal feedback I've gotten - harder work for younger kids. Less time for exploratory learning. Boys are perceived to have a significantly worse time than their female peers by their teachers. They also end up more disciplined. They're more likely to be "diagnosed" with ADHD than girls by a factor of two. Boys also experience higher dropout rates and juvenile detention. There's also an increasing rate of single mothers, and single parents just do not have it easy, women especially - and that puts more pressures onto the kids.
Support structures can be dogshit. Economy has moved. Families have been fractured and dispersed over long distances. And society doesn't really have the many support groups it once did. I can't speak statistically, but hearing about the dirt roads of the Denver Metro in the 70's and driving through it now, it's insanely packed. I grew up in rural areas, there were never any pretensions about danger or safety, and me and my friends wandered all over the town totally unsupervised as late as 2004. I don't know that such privileges are extended to these kids growing up in cities.
Expectations is another thing. Not only do the institutions make comparisons, they do it explicitly and loudly, but so do the kids. Yeah, the socioeconomic disparities I don't have any doubt play a role, but there's also kids watching these "perfect family" videos on youtube, watching super-human feats of every sort, egregious conspicuous consumption... And then they're just average, but the skew that such exposure introduces is, I can only imagine, pretty dangerous to some kids.
It's so multifaceted though. We've really got to look at the individuals holistically, track every step and kind of come to a real understanding of why they did it.
Wasn't sure if these were rhetorical questions (I didn't know so I just looked), but gun laws in Serbia are relatively restrictive. You can't buy automatic or semiautomatic weapons, and registration — including background checks and safety training — is required for all gun owners. https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/serbia
The problem is so obviously guns. It boggles my mind that people can ask questions like "what is the solution" and "we need a nuanced discussion" when the US is the only country in the world where schoolchildren get gunned down every other week.
It is plainly obvious to any US citizen that has spent a significant amount of time outside the US, that the problem is guns.
The issuance of legal carry permits for concealed weapons isn't really relevant to a discussion about illegal mass violence that is largely carried out with long rifles.
Of course overall gun violence is dominated by pistols (but I wouldn't expect the people using pistols to commit illegal violence to be overly worried with carry permits).
Carry regulations specifically have loosened. CHL holders are statistically model citizens. They commit significantly less violent crimes than the general public, and significantly less than even trained police officers.
Regulations on purchasing have increased drastically over the last 60 years. It's harder to buy a gun now than it ever has been in this country.
Guns in the US are fetishized, and the culture around guns is certainly something that can evolve over time even if guns stay largely the same (which they haven't really, but I will grant you this for the sake of argument).
I see this thrown around all the time, right before the term "ammosexual" comes out and right along with the allegations of compensating for dick size.
My counter-ancedote is that I haven't seen it, honestly. Guns are a hobby for some people, and I imagine that's been the same forever, right? Maybe a growing hobby, but to call it fetishization dismisses the vast vast majority of people who just like to peacefully enjoy their interests.
Also... what's changed with guns in that time frame? I wasn't trying to be dishonest in saying that. Modern ARs don't have any significant difference from the original Armalite model. Same with AK variants. Non-autoloaders haven't changed in well over 100 years.
I don't know your background, but for my part... I live in Canada, in a province that enjoys fishing and hunting (a great part of which is for leisure).
Notwithstanding, the fetishization of guns I observe from the US is deeply rooted: it's not so much a sexual thing (though I have no doubt that in some cases it could be) as it is an identity thing. (For an example of how the word "fetish" applies to guns in American culture, see [1] or [2].)
Enshrined in the very constitution, it defines what it is to live in America.
Politicians go on TV and passionately advance every argument, meritorious or malicious, that they can against gun regulation.
Civil discourse around guns lacks nuance and is extremely dogmatic.
The loud minority that worships their guns is particularly loud. "Regular people" are obviously more numerous and less noticeable, and my criticism of gun fetishization should not be confounded with denial of their existence or numerical superiority.
Still, the overton window in the US seems to be very accommodative to people with more guns than IQ points, and any proposed solutions to try and protect the vulnerable from violence, or ameliorate the situation, are met with outrage.
Generously speaking, the US (and the American sense of identity) has seriously struggled to transition from a society that broadly depends on guns to function, into a more specialized and developed society.
---
> What's changed with guns in that time frame?
Frankly, I don't know enough about gun design and technology to give your question the treatment it deserves or to give a good answer.
Enshrined in the Constitution are the founding principles of the world's first liberal democracy. The men who wrote it and the electorate that ratified it were just a couple years removed from a horrifically bloody struggle for self-determination. The framers were well aware from personal experience that Liberalism could not have won had that generation allowed themselves to be disarmed.
I don't think guns are an identity thing (in general). I think individualism and self-sufficiency are part of a particularly American identity though, and guns can be a symbol or reflection of that. The loud minority that worships guns (to the extent that it is their identity) might be particularly loud, but they're not the main drivers of policy. For every 1 of that loud minority, there's 10 "regular people" with more nuanced and well-thought-out opinions that do drive policy, which is why you haven't seen sweeping legislation involving either side's favorite wedge issues.
The 1:10 ratio is made up... point being that like you said, "regular people" are obviously more numerous BUT what we see legislatively is their noticeable effect, not that of a loud minority. It's a common trope on the internet, mass media, and politicians that there's somehow some small pocket of psychos holding us back from utopia.
Don't know how close you follow US politics, but a good example is the talk around West Virgina's Senator Manchin, who's become a very convenient scapegoat for why the party in power can't pass their more controversial pieces of legislation. In reality, there's just much less solidarity amongst Democrats than politicians want you to believe. And that's fine- all lack of solidarity means is that there's some room for compromise, an absolute necessity in a melting pot of 330 million people.
You're 100% correct on the politicians and the shitty, un-nuanced civil discourse. It makes extremists on either end just scream louder and louder past each other while the rest of us are just more and more stressed out every day, worrying for the future of our communities and country.
> any proposed solutions to try and protect the vulnerable from violence, or ameliorate the situation, are met with outrage
This is tough, and there are huge historical factors to take into account. The history of gun control legislation in the US is rife with racism, classism, ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty. Whenever the topic comes up, the outrage you see is a direct result of that history, whether those involved in the outrage are aware or not.
> Generously speaking, the US (and the American sense of identity) has seriously struggled to transition from a society that broadly depends on guns to function, into a more specialized and developed society.
I think this is part of a broader "crisis" on how individualism and self-sufficiency fits in modern, developed society.
I honestly hope we figure it out, because I enjoy individualism and being self-sufficient; on a personal level, it makes me feel good about myself, and I think (maybe counterintuitively?) that it makes for stronger communities where people feel better for doing their individual part.
> Kerri Raissian, a professor in public policy at the University of Connecticut, said: “The NRA has crafted a narrative for decades that guns are a part of American social identity.”
Regulations have not "increased across the board". Obviously.
We had an assault weapons ban in the US, for a while, under Clinton. It worked. We should still have it.
The solution is to ban assault weapons, outright, and then institute strict background checks, without any loopholes. The vast majority of the public supports this.
Was that clear enough? Yes, I do know the solution.
There's 0 evidence the 94 ban had any effect. Violent crime was already on a downward tend, and when the ban sunsetted 16 years ago, that downward trend continued until the last 2 years. There's several links just in this comment section that backs that up.
"Assault weapon" is a political term with no solid definition. If you mean banning semi-automatic guns, that's at least a meaningful proposal. Again though- this class of weapons have been around and readily accessible for over 100 years. Mass shootings are a modern problem. Why would banning them now be the answer?
Until the Orlando shooting, the VT shooting, committed with two handguns and 10 round magazines, was the deadliest in US history. Charles Whitman killed 14 people with a bolt action rifle from the UT bell tower. I'm not saying these disprove your assault weapons ban solution, but it's certainly not as straightforward as you're making it out to be.
It's not, though. Something has changed. My father literally used to bring his rifle to school for the target shooting club (not sure the exact name). If you can blame guns, then you can also blame the internet because that's where a lot of these young men spend their time in insolation, amplifying their violent fantasies. You saw that with the Sandy Hook shooter. He put garbage bags over his windows and didn't come out of his room for weeks at a time.
> My father literally used to bring his rifle to school for the target shooting club (not sure the exact name).
1. What kind of gun? Semi-auto or bolt action? 5.56, 30-30, .22LR?
2. How many guns did each person have? Each household?
3. What was the per capita ownership rate in the US when he was in school? (There are currently more guns than people in the US: 120.50 firearms per 100 people.)
I'm a US citizen that has spent a significant amount of time outside of the US. 35 years in the US, and 16 years now in New Zealand. And it's not plainly obvious to me. Bowling for Columbine movie pointed out that Canadians have just as many guns, but much less shootings.
I'm in New Zealand. New Zealand has guns. You need to take a class and be approved by the police who interview you and inspect your gun safe. Pistols are much harder to get. More than 10% of people have a gun license. There is almost no culture of using guns for self-defense against other humans. Farmers consider them necessary tools on the farm, hunters use them to hunt food, and DoC workers use them to cull pests (so do farmers). I also feed my dog about one-third of her diet by shooting rabbits and possum. Recently certain semi-automatic weapons were prohibited, but even before that we didn't have school shootings. Sometimes a family household would be slaughtered by a member of that household. Last night in Auckland seven houses were shot up in gang related violence.
I've lived all over Europe and Asia in countries where guns are illegal and there's plenty of violent crime in those countries. So, what's the problem when someone kills 19 and injures 25 using a backpack full of knives (Japan), drives a truck into a crowd of people celebrating New Year's (Japan), or drives through a parade of old ladies (US)? Do we need knife control? Do we need car control?
At what point are we going to start blaming the criminals and not the implement they chose to use to commit their crimes?
>There are stringent licensing requirements and heavy penalties for breaking the rules. That’s all most people are asking for.
Aren't there already heavy penalties? Have there been any mass shooters that haven't been "adequately" punished?
My whole thing is that I do believe that "gun control" would result in less gun related deaths... but it wouldn't stop psychos from killing people. It's been shown time and time again that you don't need a gun to kill 10+ people.
I also don't think that we're at the point where we trust our government to the point of surrendering our best/final line of defense. I feel any sort of "gun ban" or "gun control" would be irreversible, certainly irreversible at any point it's needed most.
>The military is going to win the war against tyranny
Not at all.
The idea of armed citizens serves as a deterrent for any tyrannical regime. In what scenario do you see the military successfully occupying or holding control of the country for any significant period of time while the citizens are armed?
We have gun laws, laws against shooting people, etc. We also have heavy penalties for breaking those laws, so I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. The issue isn’t a lack of laws, since those clearly exist.
I also find your argument disingenuous, since when Democrats talk about “gun control,” it is always in terms of banning/confiscation. I don’t recall any calls to ban SUVs because some dimwit ran over a bunch of old ladies in a parade a few months ago. Therefore, it seems to me that Democrats are standing on the graves of children to push their agenda, rather than trying to actually solve the issue of people wanting to mass-murder others.
Biden came out this week talking about banning “high capacity” 9mm guns and Jim Acosta has been pushing the “ban AR-15s” agenda pretty hard. I’ve been following this issue since the 90s and it is apparent that Democrats want gun bans and confiscation, and not other solutions that have proven to work.
We have car control. Operating a vehicle requires a licence, training, registry and regular checks. Unlike owning a gun, which is inconceivable to everybody in the rest of the world.
Obviously there is criminal intent under all this but guns unequivocally amplify the impact. It's very hard to kill 25 people with a backpack of knives - this isn't a weekly occurrence, like shootings. You can't drive a truck down the corridors of a school.
I honestly don't know why we argue about this. Is there anything anybody could say that would change your mind?
The problem is cowardice of those with guns to stop the threat. Instead of risking their lives to save those without protection, they hid and waited for backup. Cowards.
> The problem is cowardice of those with guns to stop the threat. Instead of risking their lives to save those without protection, they hid and waited for backup. Cowards.
Except there was a police officer right outside the building that engaged:
> The suspect was immediately engaged outside the building as he approached the school by a Uvalde Independent School District police officer, who was shot by the suspect, the sources said.
Not the first time even an immediate reaction still didn't prevent deaths and injuries:
> Police at the scene engaged him within a minute of the first shots being fired, firing 18 rounds and hitting the gunman several times.[5] The police chief credited the fast response to a heavy police presence with "many, many officers in the park".[18]
You can't seriously expect people to put their lives on the line for complete strangers. Far more effective to design a system in which this isn't required.
There's a psychological link between "freedom" and "guns" going back to US independence. Guns = independence from the yoke of UK rule, therefore guns = freedom from tyranny, therefore guns = good. It's ingrained.
A threat to gun ownership is equated to a threat to the freedoms fundamental to what makes the US 'the best country in the world'.
Any argument restricting gun ownership, no matter how logical or however great the weight of evidence, is up against this "the very DNA of the country" emotional position.
Gun availability has been said to be similar in the US to some other countries. Mental illness isn't limited to the US. The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. That's the differentiator. (this, my apologies, papers over the requested nuances of mental illness drugs, the cost and availability of medical care, the individual and societal effects of uber-capitalism at all costs, the equating of any level of socialism to be full-on communism, the widening ideological divide and/or the decreasing tolerance for the existence of differing ideologies to one's own).
My cynical take is: Why would this incident make any difference if none of the previous incidents have? It's a harsh observation, but this is "US normal", and has been for a long time.
> The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns.
A "war fought for freedom" is a long, long way from shooting innocent people at a school. Equating the two is a huge slap in the face to the vast majority of gun owners in the US who are responsible, law-abiding citizens and, while they would use their guns to defend themselves against tyranny, would never even think of using their guns to shoot an innocent person.
That's not the point I was trying to make. There's no link between the US' foundation and the shooting school children bar the (intended point) difficulty of restricting gun ownership and access due to the psychological link between gun ownership and country-defining freedom.
> There's no link between the US' foundation and the shooting school children bar the (intended point) difficulty of restricting gun ownership and access
Ok, but why is this even a point worth making? The "difficulty" you refer to is there precisely because being a law-abiding gun owner who would still use their gun to defend against tyranny is not the same as being a criminal who uses a gun to shoot innocent people. Since they're not the same, calling it a "difficulty" that you can't take away the law-abiding citizens' guns in order to keep criminals from getting them makes no sense.
If your intent was only to take away guns from the criminals, not the law-abiding citizens, then the "difficulty" is not that the law abiding citizens view gun ownership as part and parcel of freedom. The difficulty is that of judging who is a law-abiding citizen and who is a criminal in advance, before any gun is used for anything. But, as others have posted elsewhere in this thread, the law-abiding citizens who own guns are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring people to show some evidence of being responsible law-abiding citizens before they can buy a gun, just as we require people to show evidence of being responsible drivers before we let them drive cars on public roads.
They're talking about why guns are ingrained in American culture. A school shooting is quite separate to the points they were making. I think it was more explaining why any discussion with Americans about it is such a challenge, and why progress (on say background checks and so on) is difficult.
There are other countries where you don't really even know a gun owner and outside of video games or movies, entire social circles go months without even mentioning guns because they just aren't a big part of the localised zeitgeist. Completely different in the US where guns were a big part of the origin story of the nation.
Because it's a core component of the topic of this discussion thread. I think we're coming in at different angles to each other, but given what you've said here:
> law-abiding citizens who own guns are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring people to show some evidence of being responsible law-abiding citizens before they can buy a gun, just as we require people to show evidence of being responsible drivers before we let them drive cars on public roads.
I don't think we're in disagreement over some fundamental logical pathway to improvement. However, back to my original point: On this topic logic don't play, because history.
(and a powerful, entrenched lobby that leverages this emotional topic using slippery-slope, fear-of-loss-of-identity arguments).
In a country of 330,000,000, people who have shot up schools may be around 330 or 0.0001%.
It is impossible to assign any single causality to events that have such low occurrences unless you have billions of examples.
(Yes, the rest of the world data can provide counterfactual data, but it is still mathematically impossible because there are 100s of variables at play)
It is possible and airliner crashes show that. They happen even less often and almost every single one had a precisely defined cause that was discovered after rigourus investigation. The reason why we do this despite the events having small chance of occurance, is because the impact is enormous and we give it as much scrutiny as we possibly can to prevent it from happening again. The same level of scrutiny is not happening with school shootings.
I've yet to meet a human being that came with an operator's manual, a maintenance manual, schematics, engineering diagrams, a diagnostic and logging system designed to survive catastrophic system failure, or a multi-billion dollar megacorp full of thousands of people whose jobs depend on being able to perform root cause analysis after catastrophe. There's a whole dimension of failure analysis that is uniquely permitted by human-designed engineering systems, thanks to our comprehensive understanding of their construction and capabilities, which allows us to narrow down root causes for failures with great precision. We can do that to some extent with people, for their less complex and more common failure mechanisms (medicine)... but I don't think "deciding to go on a shooting spree at a school" is the kind of failure mode you can pinpoint to some specific hardware or software phenomenon (at least not today), let alone how to fix it. The level of scrutiny applied to human-designed engineering systems, when instead applied to interpreting tail-end-of-distribution human behavior, does not yield an improvement in root cause specificity, and likely wouldn't yield any actionable design improvements. Instead we can really only suggest process controls, based on inferences about which particular parts of the process have the most influence on the outcomes. There are so many inputs into the black box of human behavior, and so many functionally unverifiable assumptions about the mentality of the tail-end-of-distribution people who become mass shooters, that it's extremely challenging to identify process controls that would be both effective and feasible to implement. Harder still when many suggested process controls also contain embedded political goals that have little to do with controlling the process, but which can be speciously furthered under the guise of preventing high-impact system failures.
All this to say, this is a hard problem, composed of thousands of overlapping adjacent elements, we have very little insight (or reliable insight-gathering mechanisms) applicable to the system under investigation, and so throwing money or effort at the investigation is a gamble that a feasible solution exists at all, rather than a process of concrete deduction with a deterministic endpoint. Maybe the optimal amount of scrutiny should be different.
On the contrary: where humans are directly involved in the processes of aviation, we're stuck with process control most of the time, and it's clearly insufficient against motivated malfeasance.
When an airplane crashes due to a design failure, thorough investigation often yields a specific design element or combination of elements acting as a root cause; and we have a much broader range of corrective actions available, including modifications to the design for improved redundancy, fault tolerance, higher likelihood of correct manufacture, lower defect rate, easier cockpit control, etc. We can also make process changes, like modifying the maintenance schedule, updating the maintenance checklist, pre-screening critical components for correlated early signs of defect, updating pilot training manuals, etc.
There are also plenty of cases where aircraft crashes occurred due to malfeasance. In rare cases, there might be a design mechanism that can prevent malfeasance, but aircraft are overwhelmingly designed to be built, maintained, and operated by people who aren't trying to misuse them for mass violence (sort of like malls, or public schools). But there's legions of process controls implemented on the hiring and training of the people directly involved with aircraft manufacture, maintenance, and operation.
And yet, Boeing still made a plane that dropped out of the sky twice. And that wasn't even necessarily malfeasance - a good chunk of it can likely be chalked up to second or third order effects of cost saving measures and siloed design teams. I guess you could make an argument for malfeasance, but something something incompetence indistinguishable from malice... in any case, the technical analysis of the design problem is totally solved, but what about the process control by which the design came to be flawed in the first place? I genuinely don't know whether they've modified or added to their process controls to prevent the same design flaw, let alone others not directly related.
Scores of new process controls were put into place in the wake of 9/11 (which incidentally resulted in about the order of magnitude of casualties observed in all US mass shootings since (I think? There's a few different numbers floating around, depending on the threshold for which a mass shooting is recorded)). Many additional "process controls", if you'll allow the tortured reading of the concept, were implemented outside of aviation - a multi-trillion dollar double decade war campaign, passenger luggage and body scanning, and mass surveillance systems, to name a few. 20 years later, and none of this prevented a pilot from doing some unauthorized loops in the Seattle sky before crashing, and very likely nothing except for a lack of killing intent prevented him from flying his plane into a building downtown. Were the process controls implemented after 9/11 effective? I genuinely don't know the answer. Maybe aviation terrorism just has a low base rate to begin with. Maybe I'm uninformed, and our process controls have foiled numerous attempts at terrorism. It's hard to tell with rare events.
Unlike with engineering design work, where you can deduce real responsibility for failure and synthesize a test case to prove the soundness of a design, debugging complex and rare psychological or sociological phenomena is substantially more inexact. Mass shooters are a statistical anomaly against the population as a whole. People are aware of process controls and can deliberately plan subversion tactics. The snarled mess of genetic predispositions and environmental insults that drive someone to terrorism are not guaranteed to be the same across multiple people, especially at the long tail of the distribution. Preventative policy proposals can be misguided or undermined for numerous unrelated reasons, never achieving the desired effect.
None of this is to say we shouldn't try to find and implement effective process controls on mass violence... I just hope to offer an explanation why mass violence can't be approached with the same rigor as human-designed engineering systems with any predictable return on investment.
I'm sorry, I'm just really hesitant to believe that "the fact stands that the USA has a school shootings problem" with the statistics you linked. The website you linked to cites two sources for its data. One of the sources is CNN. The second source is something called everytownresearch. Their method for counting school shootings were:
> Everytown tracks every time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds
Which means they're counting individual fights, and or gang violence in with all these shootings. In addition it looks like the vast majority of their data points list no injuries or deaths. They also include things like this in their statistics:
> A car entered the east parking lot at a high speed and hit one student. The CCSD police officer ordered the car to stop, and when it didn't, fired their gun at the car. Two teenagers in the car-- one a 16-year-old boy and one a juvenile-- were struck and injured by the officer's gunfire.
So this is an injury sustained from an officer trying to stop two kids who injured somebody with their car, not a gun.
If you want to talk about how we can combat school shootings how about we agree to use honest statistics? It doesn't help anyone to quote shoddy studies like this. In addition I found this[1] research paper that claims the original paper people quote to show the US is the leader in school shootings does not show how they got their data. In addition they refuse to show how they calculated their statistics. This paper goes on to show that the US may be significantly lower than the number one spot.
The reason I even looked at this stuff is because in the link you posted it said there 288 school shootings in the US this year! That claim sounded very far fetched. I know there have been some nasty events so far this year, but if there had been 288 shootings this year alone, I feel like there would have been a lot more news about it. That averages to almost 2 shootings every day this year. And I'm expected to believe these statistics are a factual claim?
Edit: And yes I know that this paper is from 2018, but I'm posting it because there is clearly weird stuff going on with the statistics that were quoted in the original posters linked "research" website.
Serbia is smaller in population than NYC and has a fairly recent history of war. NYC hasn't had school mass shootings either. Mass shootings have happened in Serbia.
Also isnt there recent history of people going to different states to buy guns to shoot people in another state? Its not like there are border police checks
The argument was that Serbia - a tiny, war-traumatized country -tells you something about current or potential US gun regulation. My response is that even if you allow for that degree of cherrypicking, the comparison doesn't you get you anything that supports the GP's position, in fact, it gets you the opposite.
I think you're being disingenuous with what you surfaced from your Wikipedia link.
We are literally the only country on there that has more guns than people (the 2nd highest is literally half our amount per capita!). Now look at the ratio of unregistered to registered in the US. We clearly have a problem compared to other countries.
392 times more unregistered guns than registered, good god.
Doesn't sound like you want to talk in good faith about ways to improve the country, so I guess go back to listening to whatever wacko conservative rustles your jimmies about the "radical left" and "crt".
I have always maintained that children growing in this generation with social network and influencers is way harder than any generation before. For instance, growing up I knew that we weren't rich but never fully aware how much poorer I was than my classmates. Simply I have no access to the information of my classmate life after school is over. Sure I had TV and all that but almost everyone I knew growing up are more or less like me, from what I can see. Nowaday even for grownups, you have a hard time constantly comparing yourself to others with what you see on FB or IG, your "peers" who are better or whatnot. Can't imagine for kids without the maturity and fully developed brain can process that. All that is to say, the feeling of insecurity and being "not enough" is so much more amplified for kids than ever before. Nothing makes you feel even more lonely and miserable than seeing other kids having a seemingly great lives on their vacation with their loving parents or kids having so much fun at parties that you are not invited to. So glad that I didn't grow up with social network.
The worst part is that even if we addressed the myriad cultural issues that lead to so many socially broken young people who may want to do such a thing, we now have a "school shooting culture," propagated by the media, inspiring copycats.
The only way to break the positive feedback loop would be to significantly ban most reporting of these incidents, which violates the first amendment, while the other band-aid solution violates the second. And neither of these address the cultural problems creating a fearful culture with so many socially isolated people who may want to get attention by doing the things our culture teaches us to fear.
It certainly feels like someone alive for the last 40 odd years that Columbine was the inflection point at which media really started to cover this. Either that is just because 1999 happens to be my own graduation year and I was too young or not paying attention any earlier, or maybe media coverage really did pick up compared to prior incidents, for whatever the heck unknown and largely random reason. We were still early into the 24 hour cable news cycle and widespread availability of the world-wide web, but as we can see, this was not the first even in 1999.
Assuming this is an accurate list, I don't see how we can possibly identify a root cause. This was happening before there was a 2nd amendment. Before there was heavy metal. Before video games. Presumably not before mental illness, but that is hardly a uniquely American problem. Sometimes national culture just picks up a particular character for whatever quirk of history that may not even be fully known or knowable, some forgotten confluence of events that continue to influence us today without anyone knowing it is happening or why.
We were among the first countries to offer widespread public education, weren't we? This was even true in colonial times. Maybe the gathering of fairly vulnerable people just makes an enticing target. And sure, there are other public gatherings of vulnerable people, but this one has been around for a very long time, enough to have presented opportunity centuries ago and get woven into barely conscious national memes about where you go if you want to shoot a bunch of people. In other countries, churches and trains seem to fill that role.
Then my first question to you, regarding your "what can we do" issue, is simple: are you connected to your kids? Are you engaged in their lives? Do they feel like you care about them?
When I was a kid, my answer to all three of those questions about my parents was always an unqualified yes. And the idea of committing any kind of violence, let alone a school shooting, would never have occurred to me. You could have had me at the gun range practicing every day and it would never have crossed my mind to actually try to kill someone with a gun, unless it was absolutely necessary for self-defense.
When the background eventually comes out on mass shootings, one common factor I always see about the shooters is that they weren't connected to other people. So I think one obvious thing any of us can do for others to keep such things from happening is to give other people connections.
Maybe a hot take, but as others have identified, these violent outbreaks are at least in part due to social isolation, which may have something to do with lifestyle, city layout, and ease of access to public parks/things to do. Cities in the US have been set up to support cars, creating widely spread out and large landscapes, inconvenient for those who don't drive. Finding niche groups to fit in with on the internet has become easier, but irl in the US, much harder. This is independent of age group, but obviously impacts kids in a huge way. IMO, we need more places for people in communities to get together and just talk about things, engage in continued education, and have fun. Would be interesting to see if there's a correlation between after school programs, or proximity of public spaces and violence.
There's plenty of "intellectually stimulating" conversation about this and has been for decades. For the most part we value civility and compromise so highly that we'll accept the routine murder of children rather than pay the price of pissing a bunch of people off with gun reform.
The conversations aren't the problem, the guns are. There's not really a path to compromise here, I don't think. Either we stop having guns like we do now and a lot of people will be vocally upset, or we continue allowing the routine murder of children. Talk about it as carefully as you want, either way there's going to be conflict.
No, I'm not willing to get derailed and bogged down into specifics that can be argued or refuted right now. Sorry if that's not your intention but it's hard to judge and it's a very common one with this subject.
I am not an expert on public policy, violence, jurisprudence, or legislature. It's not my place or responsibility to design or implement the solution to this problem.
I'm a citizen who is not willing to accept that routine events like this are an acceptable cost to pay for any freedom. There are probably a wide range of policies that could prevent this, it's up to experts to figure it out. My role is to demand that they do.
we have constantly and consistently 'compromised' by adding more and more gun laws. Oddly none of them prevent this kind of issue as it is already illegal to kill someone
There certainly have been many new ones added since columbine - and a few have been taken away or expanded in the other direction sure.
Part of this depends on where you are in the US - but the gp statement is true - we have added more and more gun laws - and it's still illegal to murder people - and yet people still murder people.
two recent examples :
Trump pushes the ATF to 'redefine' bump stocks as machine guns - thus illegally creating a new law.
Biden bans ammo imports from Russian - the main source of 7.62x39 ammo - one of the most common rifle rounds in the US. This massively spikes the cost of ammunition.
Biden has also pushed the ATF recently to start more shenanigans with redefining things in relation to SBRs, Pistol Braces, and Supressor parts. It remains to be seen what effect this will have.
I can tell you aren't a gun owner of course but you might still find the ATF interesting. Basically they 'reinterpret' things as they see fit and thereby things that were legal become illegal (but almost never the other way around). Its a work around as they are basically creating new laws - however that is not legally a power assigned to them.
The causal model for gun violence is simple. Motivation, and access to guns. We can and should address motivations. Reducing access to guns has a strong effect too, evidenced by other countries people bring up "mass knife murders" of like 5 people in.
Arms get tired with knives. Cars can't drive everywhere. Bombs and explosive devices take special skills. Restricting access (even indirectly, through increasing cost of ownership via mandatory insurance purchases, required registration of last owner of record [and having that owner culpable when their weapons are used], and so forth) reduces gun death.
unfortunately in this digital age especially - I forsee that those who want to lash out in this mass murder way will continue to do so if we have twice as many guns or no guns at all.
Part of it is the notoriety and that comes with getting a large number - and if you can't do it will bullets - they will discover fire / carbon monixode, bleach and.. heck I'll bet there's a new fake ticktak challenge showing these things and more. how to recon to turn off AC and disable sprinklers and chain doors.. and the counts will be much higher.
I submit we need to focus on things like teaching conflict resolution, and have peer groups that can help the bullied and the slighted and things like that will likely have a better impact on changing these things.
(there's not enough counselors and they don't have enough reach when they are available)
I mean stressing the kids to learn geometry (and not conflict resolution) and just ignore the bullies is not working.
luckily locking doors and other methods can help with the bullets issue, that won't prevent mustard gas or a bus exhaust from penetrating and making someone famous.
> unfortunately in this digital age especially - I forsee that those who want to lash out in this mass murder way will continue to do so if we have twice as many guns or no guns at all.
To the extent that school shooting are, statistically, a "tail" event, you would expect that to change more sensitively than the "average" (guns per capita). So a tripling of the average gun measure (going from Serbia to US), might correspond to a much larger change in these extreme events. I doubt it's a simple statistical consequence, but it also doesn't follow that amount of guns would be (linearly) proportional to extreme events.
Memes are international. American cultural hegemony is global. Evidence: I'm a Canadian and can name all members of the US supreme Court from memory and zero members of the Canadian one.
Memes do not stop at borders, and yet the hot zone for the school shooting plague is localized within the USA.
It's the cheap plentiful, underregulated firearms.
>I'm a Canadian and can name all members of the US supreme Court from memory and zero members of the Canadian one.
To be fair, the Canadian Supreme Court rarely does anything of everyday relevance to Canadians, much like all aspects of the political system except for which party happens to be in power (the exact identity of the PM is similarly irrelevant, though everyone knows who that is).
What do you mean by take social media activity into account?
Should people who have unfashionable or unpopular opinions be not allowed to purchase a firearm? Or is it that they made a threat of violence at some point?
only rich democrats would be allowed to own guns - for evidence see how concealed carry permits are handed out in blue areas. The government is incapable of wielding that level of power without massive corruption.
A modest $90,000 in donations to a very specific charity in Santa Clara county, though in years before I've heard it can be had for a bit less if you're not in a rush.
Nope. When doing a background check for a clearance they do it just fine. I worked with all sorts of nutjobs in defense. They just weren't violent nutjobs.
That's not the Second Amendment. That's the NFA. The Second Amendment is very clear with its intent ("shall not be infringed"). It's the opinion of some folks that we have laws, like the NFA, that violate the Second Amendment.
Yes, actually, it does very clearly mean individuals. To quote the relevant amendments that cite "The People":
9th:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
10th:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
What meaning would the 4th have, if "The People" were state assemblies? "The right of the people to be secure in their persons"... Would that mean it was up to individual states to decide if you are secure in... What, exactly?
Or consider the 1st, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"... Why would a state need to petition "The Government", as it is "The Government".
There is no reasonable reading of the constitution that reads the second amendment as anything but an individual right.
> Checking your activity on social media during a firearms background check is not a violation of the 4th amendment.
If it was non-public activity, I could imagine a court finding that it is. I could also imagine courts finding using social media activity that doesn't unambiguously indicate intent to commit a crime as part of a firearms background check to be a violation of the 1st and 2nd amendments.
It's an explantory/reasoning clause. I saw this somewhere and think it's a good example: If there were an amendment that said "A well educated electorate being necessary to the functioning of the democracy, the right of the people to keep and read books shall not be infringed", you'd have a very hard time convincing me (or I think most people) that said amendment limits the right to keep and read books only to those that are either well educated already, or by only the electorate (and not say, children or felons).
Likewise, if the first amendment said something along the lines of "A personal connection with his creator being necessary for a upstanding and moral citizen, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." I think you'd also have a hard time arguing that athiests and agnostics don't have a right to free expression or to not have a religion forced upon them by the government.
Unfortunately the current definition of "well regulated militia" per the Supreme Court doesn't require either regulation (in the sense of laws, or even discipline and training) or a militia.
Just a thought: If the constitution prevents things that would work to prevent this problem form reoccuring, maybe the constitution needs fixing. After all it is rather old and contains a whole bunch of other bugs as well.
The constitution already has that in account however you need a constitutional amendment that would require 3/4 majority in both houses of Congress to approve that.
However right now trust in the government is so low that even if the constitution was amended many gun owners would probably be unlikely to accept the result.
You might get agreement on that point. You won't get agreement on what the bugs are, though, so fixing them by changing the Constitution is rather difficult.
> Take social media activity into account during background checks.
Besides the blatant first amendment violations, this would be incredibly subjective and abuse prone.
> Increase the age to purchase to 21.
We should take away 18 year olds right to vote as well. If they’re incapable of owning a firearm then they’re clearly incapable of having a voice in deciding the rules around them.
This is a great example of an actually productive, comparatively low-cost solution that we aren't willing to do as a society because of right-wing politics.
My personal view is that anyone can own a gun but should be required to take mandatory "militia" training courses twice a year (like 8 hours). This alone will probably limit the number of people wanting to go through the process. Another thought is that people could keep their guns in their locally ran armory that they could go and practice whenever they want and checkout guns for hunting purposes. Also no semi-auto for hunting (so no need to checkout a semi-auto from the armory), we already limit shotgun capacity to 3 for bird hunting so maybe this could happen.
Never said it was legal, just what I think it ought to be. If you could ever amend the constitution, it would never be a ban of all guns, or even semi-autos, but perhaps you could bring people along by allowing people to have any kind of weapon they want (even full auto) if kept in an armory. Being locally run and not by the state or feds would also make it a bit more appealing. Basically strengthening the idea and legitimacy of the militia rather than being an antiquated concept. Personally I wouldn't actually mind going to training like this a coupe times a year, but ya still not likely to happen.
So anyone who can vote should take 8 hours long courses twice a year, with a deep dive into history and civics, right? Because, let's be honest, if the clueless crowd votes in a chaotic autocrat, the damage will far exceed those few thousand deaths by guns.
Australia has had three mass shootings since 1996.
The USA has had 52 mass shootings in April of 2021 alone.
If it's such a "complicated issue", why did the frequency of mass shootings in Australia drop to negligible levels after they took the simple step of enacting a comprehensive gun ban?
Ah yes, get 2/3 of the states to agree to amend the constitution, so simple. I was just thinking how we could solve climate change by banning all cars and making everyone vegetarian, so simple!
Edit:
Okay I realize my comment was a bit flippant. It is a pet peeve of mine when solutions are proffered like this that don't take into account the many obvious difficulties in actually making it work (political, social economic etc.) as if nobody has thought of this. Sure, many people would love to ban and confiscate all the guns, but due to politics there is a 0% chance of that happening in the US, so it is not "simple".
>If it's such a "complicated issue", why did the frequency of mass shootings in Australia drop to negligible levels after they took the simple step of enacting a comprehensive gun ban?
It appears largely because the gun ban simply changed the method by which massacres occurred. Using the list from here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia), using the Port Arthur shootings as the pivot point for a 25 year look back and forward, we find before Port Arthur ('71 to '96) there were 123 people killed in some form of multi death incident and a total of 22 incidents. After ('96 to april '21) there were 146 people killed in 37 incidents.
There are some issues I take with that list as a whole, for example for this discussion familicide probably doesn't really enter into it, or a number of the incidents include the perpetrator (which I have tried to filter from the numbers above). If I try to cut the values down to just non-familicide incidents, it looks like 88 deaths in 16 incidents prior and 89 deaths in 23 incidents after.
Admittedly yes the raw number of shootings did go down. But at least to me, that would be a cold comfort to know a dead relative or friend was burned to death rather than shot. If the end goal is to stop people dying by firearm, then fair enough, Australia's laws appear to have done that. If the goal however is to stop people from being killed or attacked in senseless acts of violence, then I think these numbers make the argument that killers will kill with whatever tools they can get their hands on and the issue is indeed more "complicated" than just making one such tool illegal.
My take away from those numbers is the drop in deaths per incident: from about 5.5 to 3.9. A 30% drop in deaths per incident seems like a big win to me.
Sure there were more incidents, but the population also grew considerably from an average of 15.6m over the first period, to 22.1m over the second - a 41% increase. Applying that increase to the 16 incidents gives us 22.5, almost exactly the actual number (23). So even though the number of incidents per capita didn't drop, the deaths per incident fell 30%.
The US just went through 4 years during which it should have been quite clear to everyone that the stability and norms of our government and civilization are very fragile things. Imagine for a moment Jan 6 actually was a successful coup, especially given the supposed coziness of the various police forces to said coup initiators. There are quite a few groups of people who might have benefited from having a strong civilian ownership and knowledge of firearms in that event.
Likewise, there's an entire country currently undergoing an invasion being fought not only by their regular army but by civilian volunteers too. And sure, such an event happening in the US is unlikely given our particular neighbors, but then again even up to the day of the invasion various analysts were sure it would never happen so predicting the future can be a bit difficult.
We don't live in a post conflict world, and our country isn't immune to bad actors.
>What makes you think it is still a prominent threat that should be defended against?
The fact that many, many people have thought exactly as you do. That they had reached the pinnacle of governance to the point that they would never collapse or need to defend themselves. A significant portion of the population figured WW1 was the "war to end all wars" merely on the premise that the war was so great, like nothing they had ever seen before. We are seeing unprecedented peace but I see no reason to think that historical peace == future peace.
If you want a more "objective" answer... Conflicts arise far too often to suggest one of them won't turn into a scenario that allows for occupation or tyranny. How many people seriously predicted Ukraine would be invaded?
If you truly think "most countries are past that point" - which countries are you referring to and how long do you think they will last/remain stable? How would one come to this estimate?
> If the end goal is to stop people dying by firearm, then fair enough
we are not talking about 1 or 2 people dying here, these are dozens of helpless lives gone in a matter of minutes!!
Those maniacs (first Sandy hook and now Rob elementary) wouldn't be able to kill dozens of innocent kids so easily if they didn't have access to firearm.
>wouldn't be able to kill dozens of innocent kids so easily if they didn't have access to firearm
There are much more destructive and arguably easier ways to kill _more_ people. Someone that is more than willing to march into an elementary school and take the lives of innocent children wouldn't just stop their plan to do such a thing because they can't get access to a gun. They'll go down to their local uhaul or start a fire.
The deadliest arson attack on a nightclub in the US killed nearly 2x as many people vs the deadliest shooting at a nightclub. And again, more people than the deadliest shooting in the US _ever_.
Because most of these killers aren't trying to kill as many people as possible. They're trying to get attention and "revenge" on society. I'm convinced Columbine literally started this whole thing, due to the way society views it.
>The fact that this 18 year old kid was able to order so much ammunition online is so ridiculous
Sure... but I still don't believe this 18 year old kid would have just given up on his plan to seek revenge. What would stop him from ordering or acquiring a machete and doing essentially the same thing?
I honestly believe that tighter gun laws would reduce gun deaths... but I think its disingenuous to suggest they would prevent these mass killings or even meaningfully reduce the amount of deaths. Shown in my other comment, other and arguably even easier methods have proven to kill more people.
They are trying to kill as many people as possible. For the reasons you mentioned. "attention and revenge".
More kills, more attention and revenge.
An. But I agree with you that there may be some kind of media/ copy cat component. But what doesn't make since with that theory is that in today's global communications, why is it so much more in the US.
> but I still don't believe this 18 year old kid would have just given up on his plan to seek revenge. What would stop him from ordering or acquiring a machete and doing essentially the same thing?
Nothing stopped him from acquiring any of that but still he waited for his 18th birthday so that he could legally buy guns. If it was made difficult for him to buy guns then probably he would have just dreamt about it and over time given up on it. Most 18 year olds are technically adults but still very very stupid and have no control over their emotions.
> Because most of these killers aren't trying to kill as many people as possible.
I don’t understand, this kid just killed 21 4th grade kids!!
I agree that there are other affective methods of mass killing but then why don’t we see them happening more often all over the world. You keep pointing at these one off incidents.
If we give up a right every time someone commits a crime using this right, soon we'll be left without rights. The next obvious target is speech: it's often used to incite violence at scale, and strict speech control would prevent that. But I'd rather live in a free country and accept the risks.
but you can argue 'for the children' in order to take away any freedom. Politicians do it so often it has become a meme. They are doing it right now to try and ban encryption for example..
I also support freedom of thought. Does it mean I'm responsible for all nefarious crimes thought out in advance? If so, should I get credit for all discoveries made by others?
There are plenty of free countries without a First Amendment -- and saying something even vaguely Nazi-like in some of those countries risks criminal penalty. Furthermore, the absolutist interpretation of free speech we commonly associate with the First Amendment (virtually all speech protected, barring speech that causes immediate or imminent harm like threats, fighting words, and CSAM) has only really prevailed since 1969. I mean, immediately after the Bill of Rights was Ratified, Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts.
Anyway, I don't believe that owning a firearm without a license and strict government oversight is a right.
> There are plenty of free countries without a First Amendment -- and saying something even vaguely Nazi-like in some of those countries risks criminal penalty.
This sounds like an extreme exaggeration, do you have a source to back that up? I've heard similar said about Canada, for example, but I've familiarized myself with the legislation and some case law and there is a very high bar to getting somebody a slap on the wrist.
Unfortunately while that's an easy and vague statement to say, getting into the detailed implementations of what you're trying to say becomes difficult.
>the simple step of enacting a comprehensive gun ban?
Except that's not what they did. Meanwhile New Zealand went much longer than Australia without a mass shooting without restricting people's rights. Unfortunately, they cracked down after Christchurch, but you get the point.
To simplify. One side thinks "guns are the main problem". Another side thinks "guns are not the main problem". Did you think that the guns are the main problem people would just not show up to the thread?
>> Also any argument like "mental illness" or "ease of access to firearms" needs to explain why the same does not apply to the rest of the world
- Well Afghanistan people have access to lot of guns , lots of it and maybe even tanks. But they don't go to school that much. And in Serbia the population is thinly spread across vast swatches of ice. Not exactly LA.
Lets simply stop talking and just bring a bill to buy back all automatic guns and destroy them. This country needs it.
There aren’t really any automatic weapons in the US, unless they were manufactured before a certain date and you have a particular hard to acquire license. You may mean semi-automatic. I assume you don’t know many gun owners. I grew on a farm in the south and Incan assure you that when people there say “come and take them,” they mean it. At this point you’re talking about a lot of very armed veterans and hunters, it just doesn’t seem practical. If you could wave a magic wand, who knows it may work but that isn’t really an option.
I think there have to be other approaches here that can actually happen. The element of cultural memesis and role of the media in making anti-heros of these deranged young men is worth examining. It’s also pretty clear that the current approach to bullying in schools isn’t working at all. It also seems like it’s just too easy for some young men in their late teens to just fall through society’s cracks, I don’t know what the answer is there.
I'm also from a smaller city in the south. I can also confirm that when people say "come and take them," they are serious. No one is going to be interested in a buy-back program, and a lot of people will defend their household if they know authorities really are coming to take their guns. A lot of men in southern culture would feel comparatively helpless if they knew they couldn't defend their home with a gun. Not saying it's logical, but that's the mentality.
Ironically, my home town in TN is a lot safer than where I now live in the Bay Area, where legal gun ownership is restricted and frowned upon. I don't think that's _why_ it's less safe here, but it's interesting to see the opposing mentalities.
What I’m saying is that you very quickly need to enforce a law like that with the state’s monopoly on violence, which seems to run contrary to the problem you’re trying to solve.
People will make up all kinds of reasons why "this doesn't happen anywhere else", they'll completely ignore the actual cause of the violence (a person), they'll make excuses, bring up solutions that are illegal, entirely ignore cultural issues, ignore that psychopaths are looking to be famous, point at more laws which won't do anything because the existing ones didn't work/etc.
I mean, I overheard my coworkers discussing pretty awful talking points. Ex: saying that gun control won't work because we'll just be killing each other with swords.
Which ignores the fact that its a lot harder to kill 18-children + 1 teacher with a sword, than it is to kill the same number with a gun.
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There's also the discussion point where "background checks won't have any effect", except we know that this person legally purchased a gun just days before deciding to shoot his grandma (and continued the shooting-spree into this school).
Just giving that person maybe 2-weeks of break between buying the gun, and having the gun, could have been the time needed for that person to calm down internally and find himself. As long as people can walk into a gunstore, pickup a gun the same day, they can execute these power-fantasy moves.
I'm not sure if a background check would work in this case. But any kind of "innate delay" to the gun buying process, to give any would-be mass shooter some time to think it over, would almost certainly reduce the amount of gun violence. Almost all major mass shootings in the USA for the past decade seemed to be with a very, very, very recently bought gun (within a week or two).
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The "background-check" argument seems to point out the issues of spouse-abuse as a high correlation to mass gun shootings. It'd probably work in other cases, but not this most recent shooting.
The "background check" against racism might work, since just a few days ago there was a racially motivated mass shooting.
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In any case, there's a lot of bad talking points on this subject, pretty much espoused by everybody? I'm not entirely sure how to move forward with discussion.
There is already a federal background check process on every purchase from a store or gun dealer; both the Texas and Buffalo shooters passed their background check. To stop these guys you have to get working process to get them into the "can't purchase" list.
The question is "what should be on the background check". Spousal abuse seems like an easy one, since that is a crime and seems to correlate to these attackers. Adding it to the process seems easy enough, as long as we get enough people to agree it should be a background check option.
Racism unfortunately has free-speech / 1st amendment right issues. It'd be a harder discussion point in general. But there needs to be a discussion about the rise in hate-speech and racism, especially since a lot of these mass-shootings are racially motivated.
It is already illegal for anyone convicted of domestic violence (or subject to a restraining order) to possess firearms. The ATF form 4473[1] includes these questions about domestic violence:
> Are you subject to a court order, including a Military Protection Order issued by a military judge or magistrate, restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?
> Have you ever been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, or are you or have you ever been a member of the military and been convicted of a crime that included, as an element, the use of force against a person as identified in the instructions?
The information is verified by NICS[2], which will reject you if you've been convicted of domestic violence or are subject to a court order. Lying on this form is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison. The penalty applies even if the NICS check fails (meaning you never got possession of the firearm).
> Have you ever been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, or are you or have you ever been a member of the military and been convicted of a crime that included, as an element, the use of force against a person as identified in the instructions?
If have been convicted or under indictment for a felony, dishonorably discharged, have a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction or a restraining order, you will be denied.
How about, you're born on the "can't purchase" list and stay on the list until you've reached the age of 21, passed extensive background checks including having every single thing you've posted online carefully scrutinized by the BATFE, taken and passed a gun safety course and having completed the above, applied for and received a federal license to own a firearm or ammunition.
If this sounds expensive and cumbersome, that's the point. It should be expensive and cumbersome to get a gun. The fact that it's so easy to get a gun in the USA is the problem.
If I were Biden, I'd get Congress to pass a comprehensive gun ban. No guns or ammo of any type without a federal license. Assault weapons completely banned. Mags over seven rounds completely banned. Trafficking in ghost guns or information on the manufacture of ghost guns including CAD files for 3D printed guns -- banned. I would get the IRS and the BATFE to conduct enhanced audits and investigations of businesses who sold guns to ordinary schlubs including gun shops and gun and ammunition manufacturers. Yes, this will raise constitutional issues, but the lawsuits would take years to work their way through the courts, during which time I would binge-nominate Supreme Court justices who aligned with my views on the matter, bringing the total number of justices to 12 or 14 or so, and ensuring that effective defanging of the Second Amendment becomes national precedent when the cases do finally reach the Supremes.
There is no excuse for so many guns being on the streets of a civilized nation.
> How about, you're born on the "can't purchase" list and stay on the list until you've reached the age of 21, passed extensive background checks including having every single thing you've posted online carefully scrutinized
Excellent point. Everyone is born a potential mass murderer until proven otherwise by the totalitarian government surveillance apparatus whose reach must be expanded even further to investigate the dangerous thoughts and opinions of the citizens so that subversive ideas don't galvanize into armed revolt and insurrection, and if you were president of the USA you'd do everything in your power to further corrupt and erode yet another one of the very principles the nation was founded upon.
I'm not saying everyone is born a potential mass murderer, only that you should need a license to own a gun and that to get such a license, you need to subject yourself to deep government scrutiny, because guns falling into the wrong hands have massive implications for public safety. The fact that you inferred "everyone is born a mass murderer" from that says a lot about how sick America is compared to the rest of the world on the matter of guns.
Gun licensure will probably affect suicides more than it does mass murders. That's still an enormous improvement.
> I'm not saying everyone is born a potential mass murderer
That's exactly what you are saying.
> only that you should need a license to own a gun
> you need to subject yourself to deep government scrutiny
The USA was founded upon some very simple principles. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to bear arms. You won't be subjected to unwarranted government interference.
What you're advocating for violates all of those. You don't see free human beings whose innocence and right to be armed is presumed. You see suspects, potential mass shooters who have no business owning firearms until they prove to the government that they're innocent.
The right to bear arms is a symbol of a people's freedom and self-determination. You'd see them reduced to sheep in exchange for the illusion of safety.
> The fact that you inferred "everyone is born a mass murderer" from that says a lot about how sick America is compared to the rest of the world on the matter of guns.
I'm not american, I'm brazilian. I'm part of "the rest of the world".
Brazil is a country that actually held a referendum about gun control, discovered that over 60% of the population was against it and then effectively disarmed us all anyway. As a result, armed criminals invade our homes with the absolute certainty that we pose no threat to them. Even in formerly peaceful rural cities where some of my relatives live.
I suggest you think very carefully about what sort of future you want.
> If this sounds expensive and cumbersome, that's the point. It should be expensive and cumbersome to get a gun. The fact that it's so easy to get a gun in the USA is the problem.
Imagine saying this about blogging, another adjacent human right.
There have been a number of mass stabbings with swords in recent years. Japan appears to have quite a pattern of this and the body count is often higher. I am no expert with a sword but I have cleared a few acres of brush with a machete and the first thing that comes to mind is that it doesn't go bang thus giving the attacker a little more time before confrontation. The downside was that I got a nasty blister on my thumb due to using the wrong gloves but I can clear brush for hours on end.
I would never harm anyone unprovoked and attacking anyone in my state would be suicide as everyone here is packing. The ratio is something like 221:1 firearms to people, yet no mass shootings, yet. No idea why. There are virtually no ammo or suppressor restrictions. My state and a neighboring state have a 66% firearm ownership rate but I think that counts children.
The only thing that really comes to mind is that most folks here are religious, mostly Mormon. They are very family oriented and if a kid is getting picked on the parents will confront the other parents, likely in church. There is a bit of peer pressure to not be a bad person. But that could be entirely unrelated.
That's my neighbors to the south. They do have issues with firearms despite being heavily Mormon. My neighbors to the north are Montana. I am not sure what makes Wyoming and Montana unique from Utah in that regard.
Oh, in that case you are talking about a state with an even smaller population. Statistically, Wyoming is still in line with other states even if it has never had a school shooting.
In other words, there is not enough data to draw any conclusions about whether WY is better off in this regard.
There was a mass stabbing in Norway last week, so thats pretty accurate.
Waiting periods are never effective for anything aside from suicide, and they may technically be unconstitutional, that is being fought in the courts right now.
NICS checks are really only effective in dealing with criminal behavior. In this case we're talking about a psychopath who had been manifesting outwardly for a while. For the most part you can't legally background check someone's mental health. What would've worked in this case is "social surveillance" and having the people he interacted with every day report him.
Wikipedia gives me the Kongsberg Attack, which was only 5 people killed + 3 injured. This is much much smaller than the 18 people killed in this elementary school, + the grandmother of the suspect (who was probably shot before the whole event started).
It seems like dropping down to knife/sword fights would cut deaths significantly, unless you can show me some mass-stabbing numbers close to these 50-ish sized crowds.
If you look in countries where guns are banned but are with comparable size to USA you will see mass murders by other methods, even if they are more infrequent than in USA (for example mass stabbings, bombings, arson, or more than once in Brazillian schools: mass murder using axes, and at one time, a crossbow)
Then there are mass murders using vehicles, like it happened in Europe several times in the past 15 years, or mass destruction with vehicle, like the "Killdozer" in USA itself.
18 dead school kids say otherwise. 5 dead kids is a strictly superior result.
I agree. Mass killers will find a way. But if the way they find is a gun, we are looking at 20 to 50 deaths.
If they find a knife or sword instead, it will probably be less than 10 deaths.
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Now we have video camera showing that the guy shot the police officer at the school before going on a rampage. Do you think the guy would have been able to attack the police officer (who almost certainly had a handgun) with just a knife?
I think the argument is if they dont have a gun, they will ram a truck or have a bomb - will find ways.
The real question is that of motive - why innocent children in the first place? USA has more than an epidemic of mass shootings, it has an epidemic of school shootings. Where does the urge to do such an evil thing come from?
> I think the argument is if they dont have a gun, they will ram a truck or have a bomb - will find ways.
The literal argument, from 3 posts ago, was that they'd find a knife.
Now that I've destroyed the "knife" argument, people are making newer arguments... unironically moving goalposts back. In any case, cars and truck attacks can't kill people inside of elementary schools. The school would block the bulk of the damage. Or you put concrete barriers to protect the school from the road (which is needed for accidents / vehicles that lost control anyway)
> Were does the urge to do such an evil thing come from?
Why are you changing the argument? The evil is innate to us and worldwide.
Why should that evil be equipped with a gun in this country? Other countries, they're forced to make due with weaker weapons, such as cars, trucks, or knives.
If we cannot stop the evil, then we mitigate it.
My overall point: "They'll find a knife" is a bad counterargument. "They'll find a knife" is the very point of gun-restrictions, we cut back upon the worst damage they these mass killers can do.
It is OK to "destroy arguments" if that is what you wish to do, my goal is that of intellectual investigation.
> The evil is innate to us and worldwide.
Prevailance of school shootings in US show that this kind of evil is indeed not innate worldwide. It is strongly rooted in United States. Nowehere else in the world people with access to firearams choose to end innocent children's lives at such scale. This is what troubles me.
Availability of guns is not unique to USA but using those guns to kill innocent children at super-unproportional scale is. Why?
Ramming a truck into a school isn't terribly effective. Competent bomb-making is quite rare, especially without taking the care to test and refine one's skill; such tests are rather attention-getting. Compare to a gun; a few hundred bucks and you get a point&click kill device that doesn't require any training.
Motive is an interesting question, but I think it's worthwhile to consider means as well.
Suicide by gun is more "successful" than many other methodologies.
Cutting yourself with a knife results in your pain overriding your own brain. The innate will to live in our bodies causes us to back off of that kind of pain.
Pills / Poison take a significant amount of time, time that someone can find you and rush you to the hospital and save you.
Guns are often the most reliable suicide. Either shooting yourself, or death-by-cop (attacking a cop, and having them shoot you).
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Yes, suicidal people will find other ways. But we should cut and minimize the "reliable" suicide methodologies. Suicide-by-cop is more successful if you have a gun( without a gun, the cops are more likely to use non-lethal force and bring you in. With a gun, you're absolutely going to die on the street as they light you up).
Only a very small number of Americans can't have this discussion. Most Americans (and people living elsewhere) can have it easily and think the solutions are obvious.
> "Only a very small number of Americans can't have this discussion."
It's unclear why people keep claiming this. According to https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own... , in 2020 while rural firearms ownership was ~48%, urban and suburban firearms ownership was 23% and 25% respectively in the US. That's a minority, to be sure, but it's not by any means a "very small" minority.
I disagree with the premise that "people who can't have a discussion about gun rights" == "people who own guns".
In fact, gun owners (like the general population) are heavily in favor of increasing gun control, especially things like closing loopholes in background check laws[1].
The people who won't entertain a discussion about increasing gun control are a minority of extremists who just happen to be a large enough voting bloc to dictate the GOP's position on guns.
These polls assume that the public knows what our gun laws actually are. They have been fed lies about non-existent "loopholes" in gun laws, among other fantasies. I suspect most people would be satsified with the gun laws we actually have.
>In fact, gun owners (like the general population) are heavily in favor of increasing gun control, especially things like closing loopholes in background check laws[1].
The reason that gun owners are in practice against this, of course, is that implementation of these has consequences like "you have to waive HIPAA rights to pass your background check" (WA).
I'm unconvinced that being in favor of an idea, but against the bad-faith compromises that always seem to come with it, qualifies as "extreme".
Appreciate the adding of the link. I feel that saying they're heavily in favor of increasing gun control," - is a bit misleading - although I don't feel that is intentional.
While technically true, according to this poll of 5,000 people, I think many may read 'gun control' in different ways, and do not think it's fair to the average person who would believe what they read at face value.
For example, this poll suggests a majority of the dems and repubs are in favor of "preventing those with mental illnesses from purchasing guns " and what the article says is "subjecting private gun sales and gun show sales to background checks"
But if you look at the question they asked: "Making private gun sales and
sales at gun shows subject to background checks"
This is not exactly the same terminology.
I wish the question was broken up into three parts.. and I feel that a lot of repubs would go along with this answer in the poll for a few reasons, including that it's already understood that you go through background check when you buy at gun shows.. and the 'law and order' groups are likely to not give a fudge if people who could not pass a check do not get one.
Where it would be even more different is if they said 'all private transfers' (I think Wash State did something like this a while back or similar?) - I doubt most people are on board driving an hour to do a background check on uncle Bill to let him use a family shotgun for the weekend..
But anyhow - I find it a tough sell when I hear folks like Shumer say 'a majority are in favor of more gun control' - and to have many believe the words coming his mouth to mean something.. when more accurately he could say 'a majority of Americans are in favor of "Preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns" -
which sounds a bit different, and then it begs more questions about like - someone who has a mental breakdown this week.. or someone who's gotten X or Y drug for the last 10 years or what does that really mean, and what about starting a national DB of all people who have met with a counselor.. and what that path looks like.
I really think we all need to change the term gun control and get more accurate descriptors to use... preventing subsections of people from buying them? preventing certain types? confiscation?
I wish we would all be more specific, as this is leading a lot of people into believing that 'hope and change' is a thing when really, unless you confiscate, none of that other stuff is going to reduce the millions on the streets.. so you might not want to be restricted in what you can get in the future. For some folks maybe not - there are absolutists who think 1 less on the street makes everyone safer. I myself think it depends on the 1 and depends on the street.
I can't tell if you're joking, but the problem is not their guns. They're mostly peaceful people who have not demonstrated a willingness to commit mass murder to defend their interpretation of the Second Amendment.
I know we see some violent pro-gun extremism online, but it doesn't represent the vast majority of gun owners.
The solutions are not obvious. Disarming the civilian population gives rise to a different and much larger problem than school shootings, if that is what you were implying.
It is difficult for governments to commit large scale atrocities without the consent of the governed unless those so governed are first disarmed.
A more modern example was the prohibition of the free movement of the Australian population during covid. Australians were held prisoner by the state and were not permitted to leave.
The Holocaust was a result of populism in Germany. The oppressed people wouldn't have been able to protect themselves from the majority of Germans and the German military, even if they were armed.
I really doubt we are in for another Holocaust. Government restricting movement during a pandemic is not a valid reason to literally shoot someone dead, that is literally pure insanity.
What is happening right now isn't the Holocaust. What is happening right now - and has been happening for years - are weekly mass shootings.
This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. It only happens in the US. Guns are clearly the problem.
> It is difficult for governments to commit large scale atrocities without the consent of the governed unless those so governed are first disarmed.
Not when the government has tanks, attack helicopters and assorted hardware that IS prohibited for the public to own
> A more modern example was the prohibition of the free movement of the Australian population during covid. Australians were held prisoner by the state and were not permitted to leave.
Not true. You could leave and you could also enter - but would have to stay in mandatory quarantine.
I hate that argument about how gun owners would not pose a credible threat to the US military.
We've demonstrated time and time again what a determined populace in their home region is capable of doing to a technologically and numerically superior opponent.
Such as in Vietnam which isn't incredibly dissimilar from the deep South, or Afghanistan which is very similar to the environment you would find in Idaho and Wyoming.
I mean the wider discussion can still be had but if the federal government decided to start a fight over this it would be very similar to an Afghanistan or Vietnam situation but about 2-3x worse as the area to cover would be much larger and would likely have to deal with internal problems in the military as they tend to be very well represented in the pro-gun crowd.
Unless your suggesting the US military would start carrying out strategic bombing operations against its own citizens on its own soil.
Fine, it's the threat of your guns that is doing such a grand job of keeping you all so very free.
Almost 1% of US citizens are in prison. Your police forces routinely brutalise and oppress large parts of your population even though (or perhaps because) you are all armed to the teeth. The majority of your fellow citizens are a couple of paychecks or one health scare away from homelessness, your social security safety nets are in tatters and your collective Labour rights have been eroded away over the last 50 years. Thank goodness you've got your guns or your government might screw you over
Gun rights have been systematically (illegally) denied the demographics that comprise the majority of those so imprisoned, which furthers the argument that large cross-sections of the population being armed reduces violence.
> Your police forces routinely brutalise and oppress large parts of your population even though (or perhaps because) you are all armed to the teeth.
Those are the groups frequently denied weapons. The police generally actively avoid armed confrontation with those they know to be armed (such as we recently saw in Texas). This is one of the reasons it's so easy for them to shoot and kill (mostly unarmed) minorities.
"An Australian citizen or permanent resident (the person) must not leave Australian territory as a passenger on an outgoing aircraft or vessel on or after the time this instrument commences"
Lots of reasons. But I'd say the culture of glorifying gun ownership is a root cause combined with an institutionalized and deliberately flexible attitude to any form of gun control. It varies between states of course. But the net result is that people are assumed to be armed to the teeth. Which leads to shoot first and ask questions later situations. Which is actually something you can legally get away with under some circumstances and something that is glorified as well. And it's getting worse because it's getting worse. People respond to feeling insecure by getting more guns. And bigger guns. And this is big business in the US. Gun manufacturers advertise on TV, lobby the local authorities, and spend billions on marketing. There's more scrutiny on advertisements for cigarettes and alcohol in the US then there is on gun commercials. There are more rules around owning a drivers license or a car than there are on owning a gun.
That's why things have gotten much worse in the US in the past decades. The rules haven't changed but the number of guns has. And given the percentage of people with guns and the percentage of people with mental issues, the Venn diagram of those two groups intersecting produces a percentage of armed homicidal maniacs at a high enough frequencies that stuff happens. Simply put: when millions of assault rifles get sold, a few of them are going to end up being used by exactly the type of people you'd never want to own such a thing. Simple math. There's nothing mysterious about that.
I'd probably want to own a gun if I lived in the US. There are war zones that have less casualties per year than some cities and areas in the US. I think Kiiv probably has better statistics than Chicago in the last half year or so. That, or it's alarmingly close. Combat medics actually get trained in hospitals in in big cities in the US. If you work in the ER in Chicago, LA, etc., you are going to get plenty of practice. Every day. So, yes, I'd probably feel a need to defend myself in such a place. I'd be part of the problem.
However, I don't live in the US. I live in Berlin, Germany. I feel safe here and feel no need to own a gun and tough luck if that weren't the case because it's pretty hard to get one here. It's not a perfect city and there are occasional incidents involving gun violence just like everywhere else. Generally if you see a gun you are either in an armed robbery, looking at a person in uniform, or in the country side with people responsibly handling their legal guns while hunting. The first happens but not very often. Most crime does not involve guns. And when it does, the sentences are steep, the guns are typically small (easier to conceal), and highly illegal. Anything involving illegal guns is not cool with the authorities. People in uniform discharging their arms is generally involves lots of paper work and scrutiny. More so for civilians with permits and legally owned guns. Getting permits is not super easy and keeping your permit requires sticking to the rules. So, that narrows down the situations that can escalate considerably. It still happens but not very often. Same math, different variable values.
> It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity
It really is not.
There are too many guns available, too easily obtained, to too many citizens who have not been properly indoctrinated with a sense of civic responsibility, let alone trained in the proper ways to handle a gun.
The answer isn't to throw more guns at the problem or to blame inadequate mental health facilities. It is to reduce gun availability. And we aren't willing to do that because politicians on the right find it more valuable to demagogue on the subject as a wedge issue.
It's believed that the US has 120 guns per 100 people and there are 7 guns per 100 people in Israel[1]. Israel has 10% of the number of gun-related-deaths (reported) that the US has, with some VERY heavy gun control laws - which routinely gets more strict[2].
What's interesting is that the number of people who take a shot at certain political figures is very low in the US, despite politics being so deeply concerning to so many adults. This feels like an adolescent/young-adult problem that's come to light. If there was a force like the Secret Service/FBI that cracked down on a WHIFF of threatening schools and the media coverage was blacked out for a month, we might see progress without getting mired in a gun control debate that won't be solved in our lifetime.
Banning guns is clearly the answer. There will always be psychopaths, and these people will not care about "civic responsibility." The only thing that can be done is to restrict their access to guns.
Implying that school shootings don't happen in Europe. I then listed 20 school shootings that have occurred in Europe over the last 20 years and your response is to claim that there are "orders of magnitude more [school shootings] in the US".
"Orders" implies that there is at least 100 times more (as a single order is 10 times more) school shootings in the US than in Europe. That is also not true, even counting events such as "Two boys, aged 11 and 14-years-old were shot in the parking lot of the Searles Elementary School around 1 am" and "An individual who was not a student accidentally shot himself in the leg in the parking lot of Glades Central High School" as school shootings, which Wikipedia and most media do. Even with all the stat padding, there are have only been 365 "school shootings" in the US over the last 22 years (i.e. a single order of magnitude more than my partial list of European school shootings); the actual number of school shootings by the common definition is in the same ballpark as Europe.
Based on what previous school shooters have said over the years, the reasoning is somewhat simple and obvious. They experience trauma at a particular time in their life, and once they've mentally broke, the most personally "relevant" target for their anger is a group of people similar to those who either caused the original trauma or were present at the time but "did nothing to help." It doesn't matter that they're not the exact same people, because it's very rarely about revenge against specific individuals, but instead a way to exert control over a situation or space that they associate with their earlier trauma.
If one in every thousand Americans has a unique and unexplained mental illness that compels them to violence, that would provide more than enough explanation for motives. It's even true for some famous shooters. [1],[2],[3]
The urge may exist in some teenagers across the world. But they don't have the mean to. You can solve this problem either by fixing the urge to kill or make it impossible.
Indeed. The causal model is simple and two factor: motivation, and access to firearms.
If we reduced access to firearms, we can still work the motivation angle in a lot of ways, but have overall reduced gun violence. Other countries show that the offset increase in violence through other means would still be lower than current death rates.
That’s like saying food availability is a core component in the obesity epidemic. I suppose there is some truth in that, but the solution it suggests is wholly inadequate.
For example, it might make sense to restrict the availability of very high-calorie, low-nutrition foods like fast food, or tax them to raise their price and/or subsidize healthy food. It would make sense to educate people about nutrition and exercise and healthy eating.
This kind of thinking could easily hold for the gun control conversation. Let people buy guns if they want, but not the really unnecessarily dangerous ones, and only one at a time. An 18 year old walks into your gun shop and wants to buy two powerful rifles. Why? What do you want them for? Why do you need two? These are valid questions.
The availability of cheap, unhealthy junk food is very high, and that combined with the force multiplier that is poverty is a core component in the obesity epidemic. If you are to draw a parellel to the topic at hand, availability of cheap, easy to use (?) guns combined with the force multiplier of mental illness…
It's weird how the absolutely right answer is yours, as in, reduce the guns and take away the guns but almost all comments that talk about gun reduction is either downvoted to hell or flagged.
if the supposedly intelligent HN can't arrive at the conclusion that reducing guns is the right answer since it was already successfully done by Canada and Australia then what chance do the rest of the US have?
it's been instilled from their birth that will be born with and die with guns. No amount of persuasion will change their minds. It's absolutely 100% futile to argue with Americans that guns are the root of all evil.
It's a fucking straight forward issue. Gun violence is increasing so reduce gun. Even for this linear problem every American is blaming everything else from Saturn in retrograde to bullying /mental health (as if its not an issue across the world)
> if the supposedly intelligent HN can't arrive at the conclusion […] what chance do the rest of the US have?
Honestly, probably not much worse odds. HN may be knowledgeable about computers, but there’s a big contingent here that doesn’t want to be told what to do, and doesn’t care whether other people get hurt in the process. And once you adopt that ideology, it is all downhill from there
I suspect identity politics are too blame, since the rise of that correlates to the increase in shootings. A big part of identity politics is to demonize "the other" and if we're being honest, to shift the blame for all of societal ills onto males. Younger males may not be able to shrug those pressures of as easily as others.
I think this also helps explain why girls never shoot up schools, despite having the same access to guns as boys. All of our safety nets are designed around helping females, and letting males sink or swim.
When you look at government programs designed to help those in need, would you say there is an equitable gender distribution in those programs? Or really forget equitable, are there any programs designed specifically for helping males who find themselves suffering in any way? Because I suspect nobody could even count the number designed for females. And not just government programs, but scholarships, hiring initiatives etc. That ratio must be 100-1 at least.
So how is this reality supposed to be processed by males who find themselves stuck? Many, or perhaps most, will internalize it and just push forward. Others will lash out.
Females have a societal safety net designed to catch them when they fall, males do not. I don't think anybody would dispute that, the question is what effect does that have on the psyche of those who are left helpless?
An otherwise informative article, but using the term "military-grade" seems out of place.
The term has little meaning. You could call socks "military-grade" as well, and the only meaning that it really conveys is that it was cheap and barely functional enough to win a contract.
And AR15s are cheap. A lot of plastic and aluminum. You could say that's a problem, if you want. But that line of argument doesn't seem to lead anywhere.
In any case, "military-grade" seems like a talking point and nothing more. If anything, it gives the rifle more protection under the second amendment, which specifically references the militia.
It's not just out of place, it belies a fundamental ignorance as to gun related technology.
There is pretty much one single feature that we've decided should be reserved for military use: selective fire, aka automatic weapons. A "military-grade semi-automatic rifle" is a contradiction in terms. I believe all standard issue military rifles are selective fire, and no civilian rifles can be outside of extremely rare and tightly regulated situations.
The AR-15 is a counterpart to the M16. It is specifically not a military gun and the major difference is that it does not have selective fire.
That doesn't really make sense, though. The entire point of the 2nd amendment is to allow the rapid formation of a militia to protect against tyranny, oppression, foreign aggression, etc. So "military grade" is exactly what you want citizen weaponry to be... I.e., civilians don't need those functions until they really do.
Edit: I had to ask you about this just recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31389412. I'm not going to ban you right now because you've mostly been posting good comments, but please fix this or we'll end up having to.
Edit: since you've been breaking the site guidelines a lot lately and have ignored our many requests not to do that, I've banned the account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
>>>>You could call socks "military-grade" as well, and the only meaning that it really conveys is that it was cheap and barely functional enough to win a contract.
"Cheap and barely functional enough to win a contract" = "government issue"
My Fox River combat boot socks (my standard everyday sock even when not in uniform) are definitely not cheap and barely functional.
Although this article is full of false dichotomies ("far from posing threats to others, people diagnosed with schizophrenia have victimization rates 65% to 130% higher than those of the general public."), the message that we should not allow the damage done by mass shooters to extend to making us treat mentally ill people even more poorly than we already do is an important one and worth sharing.
The way fear makes us do things that increase the damage done to society by a violent attack is an old phenomenon that shows up again and again in our history. We should be careful to avoid it.
My hot take on the issue: Don't regulate the guns per-se; regulate the bullets. An adult (only adults should be shopping for ammunition?) must take end-to-end responsibility and ownership of each bullet the purchase, and subsequently fire. You own the bullet from the time you take it home to the store to the time it comes to rest after firing out of a gun.
The guns, other than as a mechanism for firing bullets, are not particularly harmful; certainly not more harmful than a baseball bat or a car. It's really the bullets coming out of the gun(s) we as a society are worried about.
If your bullet (out of your gun, or any other even) harms property, you as the bullet/gun owner have financial responsibility of that damage. Your bullet harms a person, intentionally or not, you are responsible. Doesn't matter if your kid took it to school, or someone stole your gun & bullets; you are responsible. Many these firearm "accidents" and negligent discharges, kids getting into the guns, etc would go away if the customer at the gun store was made very aware of exactly what liability they were taking on, complete with stories and anecdotes about how irresponsible gun owners have been (financially, or otherwise) ruined by their carelessness.
If we held gun owners to the responsibility they are supposedly taking on simplicity when choosing to own a firearm, this conversation would be much easier. Why are we not crucifying the parent(s) of this most recent shooter, who were the owner(s) of the gun and bullets used in the school in Texas?
The problem with this is how you identify the ammo used. If you print on the shell casing, it can be re-used after it is ejected from the rifle at the range leading to reasonable doubt about it's origin. There is also no way to tag the bullet itself. Tagging firearms and regulating them is much much easier. Can you imagine the police checking that each and every shell in a box of 300 is tagged?
With regards to the most recent shooter, as far as I can tell, their only parent was a grandparent who they shot and killed before attacking the school.
More guns equate to more deaths... it's pretty simple to understand. As a veteran not that it matters, most people I've interacted with in terms of guns see them as toys and they really like their toys. If you were to make people do a week of range training like the military, well, I don't think most people would be gun owners.
Leaving aside the gun logistics, there is a cultural baggage at work that seems to exacerbate cases of anti-social loner teenagers intent on punishing their world. Perhaps of grit, hostility to communal aid or social services, on the conceit that it exudes strength. Access to mental health services is nice but in and of itself may not even capture all the societal symptoms where it's needed. Ground-up grass-roots effort to change culture itself may be required. There is a generational cycle of negative experience and neglect among some youth. Existing structures are not enough. That may not be a satisfying, clear-cut avenue to explore but there is clearly room for improvement and it could garner bipartisan effort.
The alternative is to restrict access to concealable firearms, and going anywhere near this is politically unviable. Gun policy is used as a political football (so it doesn't even matter if more than 50% of Republican voters support better regulation), it leads us back here. That being said, as far as school shootings by teenagers are concerned, restriction of concealed arms probably works: it matters not that criminals don't acquire their guns legally, teenage shooters aren't career criminals, they just use their dad's gun, or in this case, buy it legally. And unless gun control translates to "asshole dad doesn't have a handgun", it won't mean anything. Gun advocates are leery that concessions would lead the conversation next to bans, probably correctly.
If you want change as soon as possible, take the first path. Otherwise, change the fabric of politics in America. Get rid of the PACs and SuperPACs.
When I was in high school, two classmates committed suicide through overdose and one shot themselves.
When are we going to address the elephant in the room: that the public school system systematically creates hopelessness in children by stripping them of their agency and reducing them into cattle to be managed by an authoritarian hierarchy in overcrowded conditions.
There are so many more people that died or have been psychologically maimed by their public school experience than have shot up schools.
Pre-2008 DC vs Heller, the standing law of the land was that the 2nd amendment did not provide an individual right to purchase or own firearms. So it is entirely possible that a future Supreme Court, given an adequate case, will overturn DC vs Heller and allow states and the federal government to go back to heavily restricting and licensing gun ownership outside of the context of state-sponsored militias and police forces.
Even if the amendment for past the supermajority requirement 37 or 38 state legislatures would have to ratify the amendment. At this point it's almost certainly impossible to amend the US constitution.
A solution narrowly focussed on school shootings (changes to how schools are constructed, changing policing in schools, etc.) is bad for that reason.
OTOH, school shootings as a vivid call for action on policy that address the drivers of firearms injuries (generally or among children specifically) — currently the leading cause of death in children in the US — do not become less valid because school shootings are themselves a small slice of that problem.
I'm having trouble parsing your second paragraph. Are you saying that the #1 cause of firearm related deaths for children in the US are school shootings? Can you share a source?
> Are you saying that the #1 cause of firearm related deaths for children in the US are school shootings?
No, I am saying that school shootings, which are themselves a small share of deaths of children, are the high visibility tip of the iceberg on deaths of children by firearms injuries, which is the leading cause of death of children.
It's not a terrible thing to craft policy around if you want to stop school shootings.
Looking at raw death numbers is dumb. Not all deaths are considered equal. At my grandfathers funeral people told nice stories and laughed at jokes. Despite it being sad for us no one thought it tragic - he died at 90, had lived a fun life, and was a respected and loved man. For all time the death of innocent children has been viewed as tragic. It is. It's worse than death of 40 yos, whose deaths are worse than a 90 yos(all else equal). Similarly, few were upset by Bernie Madoff's death, nor Epsein's (bad people).
The Gun Solution proposed here is one of the more measured and level-headed assessments I have come across. The proposals it puts forth make a lot of sense, but I think it is missing a few things:
1. It completely ignores non-fatal gun injuries. I cant find a source atm but I believe around 40% of non-fatal gun injuries are accidental. To me, this is an indication that SOME level of training is required. Even if it's a $20 online course. This is an incredibly moderate take but many of the 2A enthusiasts I know would be opposed to this because "shall not be infringed" has been pushed as an axiom from 2A special interest groups. Which brings me to point #2
2. The article places the burden of action on the "liberals". No matter how sane the laws, no matter how good the messaging from the American "left" it will not penetrate the right's sphere of influence. Why? Because we all exist in our own media echo chambers. Any proposal will be completely misrepresented in bad faith, no matter how much of a compromise it is.
3. In many instances the implementation of gun control has not been lefty loonies taking guns away from red-blooded conservative Americans. The laws had bipartisan support. The Mulford Act in California was motivated by Black Panthers open carrying, and was passed under Reagan's Governorship. Bush Sr. banned importation of assault weapons in an attempt to be "tough on crime" and Clinton passed gun control legislation while also passing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which turned us into a de facto police state.
The liberal media doesn't focus on data, it never has. Their analysis is flawed and their purpose is to drive traffic and manufacture consent. But even if CNN was repeating this article's proposals word for word, it would fall on deaf ears. The reason why we can't even have a discussion in the first place is because gun ownership has been fetishized and turned into an identity for people. It is now a facet of "identity" politics.
> Because we all exist in our own media echo chambers.
I disagree strongly. Some do, in the US it is typically right-wing though smaller left-wing media echo chambers exist. But mainstream US media is not an echo chamber.
I am not sure I would categorize them as echo chambers (Fox being the exception) but their agenda is certainly not to represent the truth. They sensationalize and craft narratives, usually by lying through omission, or not covering stories at all. A recent example, Google "Steven Donziger CNN" and you will notice that there isn't a single story about him from the network even though his case is one of the most newsworthy of the decade.
You can have multiple echo chambers. Just because they’re different doesn’t mean they’re not all echoing garbage from their biased view points.
Fox News is the echo chamber of the right, while everything else is either extremely left or mostly left echo chambers. CNN, NBC, NPR, ABC,CBS spew just as much trash, however it fits the politics of the left.
It’s all biased, it’s all garbage. The only different is the politics of that channel.
Surely then, we ought to ban pools, wall off access to the beaches and lakes, and generally prohibit human contact with water, as drowning is 100x more likely to kill than school shootings. And any parents of innocent children who have drowned are no doubt incensed by the outcome!
While we don't ban beaches and pools, we do require them to be monitored by trained lifeguards! I think we should have reasonable safeguards in place for guns as well.
Can I buy an extended magazine for my private, backyard pool? Or should we just admit this metaphor lost all meaning some time ago?
Like, really, that’s what you’ve got? But what about backyard pools? That’s your humdinger, parliamentary argument for why inaction is better when confronted with a logical comparison? To extrapolate the comparison further and a-ha! the degenerate cases like you’re arguing philosophy in Plato’s company?
What is it about topics like these that make a forum of otherwise intelligent people argue like they’re practicing bird law? In any other context someone making the point you’re making would be ridiculed for taking the argument here.
This does not address the argument. It merely also points out that beaches, etc are dangerous. Nobody is arguing the beach model is a _good_ model to follow.
if I accept the GP's statistics, it looks to me like by not arguing to close the beaches 100x more than arguing about guns, yes, people are comparatively arguing that they are ok with the beach model.
In my personal experience it certainly played a major role. I've had gun safety and respect drilled into me so deep since I was a small child the most powerful cringe reaction I can possibly experience can only be triggered by someone mishandling weapons. Unfortunately it also happens when I see it in movies. At least that is what I attribute it to, I have never stuck around anyone I've seen mishandling or even talking about mishandling weapons long enough to learn anything about them.
I've certainly met plenty of women that could teach their sons the same principles though so I don't think fatherhood is a hard requirement.
Edit: Not commenting about male violence just respect for and proper handling of firearms in general.
India has 4 times the population of US and I've never heard or read about a school shooting or a mass shooting. There is way worse poverty, mental illness, lawlessness, corruption at every level in India. The only difference is easy access to guns. Not sure why it's so difficult for gun worshippers in US to understand this.
The security guard with the gun at the school couldn't even stop the shooter in the recent shooting and got killed. Same with the security guard in the Buffalo shooting. Someone with multiple AR-15s is still going to murder your whole family.
Why would you claim India is almost identical to the USA except for this one variable (which seems like a laughable simplification anyway), and not, say, El Salvador or Serbia? Seems like a classic case of searching for data that confirms your opinion.
You clearly don't understand. Well, I hope you at least now understand how people can hold on to their biases that will make them not read and comprehend.
These things happen everywhere, aren’t necessarily reported in the same way.
One part of why they are so prevalent in America is how each event becomes such a cultural focus, half of what I’ve seen on social media has been people posting about this event. Perpetuating the idea by giving it such attention must be part of the cause that people go out and do these things.
How many mass shootings have taken place in the US this year?
10? 20?
Try 213.
243 deaths, 922 injuries.
This month? 44 mass shootings. 61 deaths, 219 injured.
These things don't happen everywhere. They happen here because guns make them easy. People hate facts and so they pretend that everyone has the same problems.
A disturbed person going into public and randomly killing strangers is a different problem than gang warfare, domestic violence, organized crime, or organized terrorism.
> Stabbings have never been worse or more brutal, police say, as Australian hospitals struggle to cope with an emerging 'knife culture' amongst young men.
There are certainly differences in rates, but these things happen everywhere.
If I tell you nuclear weapons should be eliminated from the world as they're dangerous and can wipe off cities, are you going to come back with statistics about how tanks kill people? Your arguments are exactly that.
the problem is easy access to guns. sure you can dance around the issue with mental health and gun ownership, but simply the high volume of guns means getting one is pretty damn easy for most people even without a license
For those interested in learning more about this topic, I recommend checking out the Violence Project by Jillian Peterson and James Densley [1]. This book opened my eyes to how complicated and multivariate this problem really is. It's much more complicated than simply guns and mental illness.
For me, the most surprising takeaway was how many shooters exhibit signs of trouble prior to the shooting and how difficult it is for teachers and law enforcement to do something about it.
There are certainly many people that show signs of trouble, but don’t become mass shooters. And yes, availability of firearms, specifically high capacity rifles, was found to be a significant factor to the rise in the number of victims.
The Violence Project makes the argument that it’s not just mental health and availability of firearms that causes mass shootings. It’s a confluence of many contributing factors that all need to be addressed.
This is why I found the book so enlightening given the typical mental health and gun control debate that is going on now. This is not a simple problem to solve in my opinion.
I think posting the excerpt you choose after reading the link you provided is rather disingenuous. Your source itself criticizes the way the data is presented and provides alternative ways to display the data.
Of course the problem is not uniquely US-American, but I believe the way the US deals with this problem largely is.
From the viewpoint of people outside the US, Americans probably believe that gun violence is just a mild condition, and decide to live with it. Just like the covid, sure it kills some people, like 10 in 100000, but for the rest 99990, at least half of them do not think something should be done.
There's never going to be useful progress here until America unsticks from the idea that the right to arm yourself belongs in the same category as the right to free speech or due process.
I don't see this happening for at least a handful of generations, if ever, even though it has happened once with the 21st amendment (repealed the 18th).
A supermajority in both houses is doable, but you need all but 12 states to vote in favor, too. There are comfortably 15+ states in the "ain't ever gonna budge" category on that front, and while attitudes could shift in future generations that make such change possible, there is no doubt in my mind that it would take literal generations to happen.
I agree with you, I don't say it because I think it's a useful thing to try to achieve right now; I say it only because I believe it's true, and I wish we'd start from the fundamental problem.
Totally, and it is a tough thing because it feels so intractable--the mountain to get over (38 states in favor of repealing) just seems nigh impossible. But, stranger things have happened.
There is a saying that god may have made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal. The right to use lethal force in defense of self is pretty widely accepted, but we should acknowledge that some of us have dramatic advantages in that regard. Being taller, having been in more fights, having a physically active job, being male... Firearms, more than literally any other weapon, level that disadvantage. So to acknowledge the right but deny it an equitable means seems unfair to me.
And on a less philosophical note, there will be no changes to the constitution until we have a complete party failure on one side or the other. The current polarization does not seem correctable as it self perpetuates. And in this climate even public agreement on normal legislation that both parties privately agree on is rare, because that is seen as conspiring with the enemy.
This is an appealing idea, with a great soundbite, that has literally no large-scale evidence in its favor. The epidemiological evidence is pretty clear on this; the prevalence of self-defense use of guns is minuscule.
Even where guns are used in self-defense, it's often in the context of an escalation of an argument rather than in the scenarios people imagine. People who do use guns to protect themselves in the course of crimes are no less likely to be injured than those who do not.
I would encourage you to revisit the research around firearms used in self defense. 500,000 to 3,000,000 encounters where a firearm was used in self defense in the US is what I was able to find. Doesn't sound minuscule.
Some popular firearm magazine a coworker used to keep on their desk always had references to news stories with summaries of encounters of legal self defense using firearms. Some months they had as few as 5, some as many as 20. If you assume they found as many as they could, that would be not much more than one hundred per year. They only used cases where the assailant was actually shot, and only cases that made the news. But it is still indicative that millions is probably a vast inflation just as your link indicates. Is the fact that excercising the right is rarely warranted or effective, and outweighed by the danger of doing so a valid reason to abolish it? My intuition is that it is not, but I'm not at all sure. I tend to gravitate towards fairness of a policy over its actual outcome. The notion that doing an injustice to accomplish a good is immoral is probably naive, but it is my instinct.
Because the US doesn't have a gun problem so much as a stochastic terrorism problem, blatantly sponsored and encouraged by a hostile foreign power which is known for encouraging extremely destructive cultural subversion.
OK then; if you don't like "assault weapon"; let's clear this up terminological issue. I'd like to ban all automatic, select-fire or semi-automatic firearms, except on the basis of a permit issued on evidence of demonstrable need. We can move on to consider other types of actions.
> I'd like to ban all automatic, select-fire or semi-automatic firearms
You're looking to ban at least 75% of all guns in the US. It might even be more like 80-90%, but I'm too lazy to look for a source. How do you intend to accomplish that?
The "well regulated militia" of the 2A is a prefatory clause. "... The right of THE PEOPLE to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed". The right belongs to the people. Any attempt to limit this civil right to a militia is an argument from ignorance.
This is VERY well established, both in law, in judicial review, and in debate. It's an argument that has died, like "violent video games". And yet, people earnestly continue to make it...
This. I know many gun owners personally and almost none of them object to regulation, similar to the level we have for operating a motor vehicle. Things like waiting periods, background checks, denying weapons to violent criminals, mandatory training and gun registries are common sense to most everyone - including gun owners. But the NRA is driving an extremist interpretation of the 2nd amendment that leads a small but very vocal subset of the population to take gun ownership as gospel (literally in some cases) without bothering to ever read the actual text of the Bill of Rights.
> There's never going to be useful progress here until America unsticks from the idea that the right to arm yourself belongs in the same category as the right to free speech or due process.
America also needs a comprehensive media safety law that bans dissemination of reports of things like school attacks outside of the affected communities. All the nationwide media coverage does is inspire copycat mayhem.
Talking about repeal of the 2nd amendment is equally useless when there are probably more guns than people in the US, and there's nowhere near enough support for that.
There are some ideas, such as increasing the age of ownership, and many others, which should be considered. You'll actually be able to achieve results. Banning guns completely in America is simply impossible now.
Here in the UK, we haven't had a school shooting in decades - despite the availability of affordable CNC machines and 3D printers.
After all, I have no gun and also no bullets, and also no gunpowder or primers, and also nobody I could show a DIY gun off to, and also nowhere I could shoot a DIY gun, and also if I use it to defend my home, the cops can put two and two together.
Criminals generally just use knives. Obviously people who can import illegal drugs can also import illegal guns, but they're keen to keep a low profile.
Of course, I doubt America could ever get to where the UK is today - too many people who are passionately pro-gun, and too many guns around out there.
Repealing the Second Amendment has nothing to do with enforcing anything; it just acknowledges that the modern American experience does not need armed militias for the security of the free state, and that where we do have militias they are seldom well-regulated nor do they tend to promote security, and that perhaps arms being what they are today, and America being what it is today, maybe we could decide that there isn't today a right to bear arms.
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
... is no longer either a true or useful statement?
I think I'm probably happy to toss the Third Amendment on a similar basis:
No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the Owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.
Does this speak to the problems that the republic faces today, any more so than does the Second?
It's #3 because of the Quartering Acts; relating to a very specific set of facts during the Revolutionary War. Consider for a moment that if General Gage hadn't persuaded the British Parliament of the need to amend the Mutiny Act to require American towns to provide food and shelter to British troops, then this amendment would never have been passed.
It was passed because of what was top-of-mind for the writers in the 1780s. It's dead letter. There has been one case on it in 200 years.
Four people getting shot? That seems to be an arbitrarily picked number. If two gangs are in a fight, and four people are shot, does that count? Because most people wouldn't consider that a "mass shooting".
Shooting spree? Spree killings? Those terms have concrete meaning, and can't be pushed around by disingenuous people who want to inflate statistics.
Until we can define the problem, we have no hope for a solution.
What are guns bringing to the table that makes them so precious? At the very least they don't seem to be capable of feeding people nor preventing attempted insurrections nor preventing innocent people being killed by the authorities. In the situations they are used for self-preservation they are only done so because the adversary has/may themselves have a gun. It defies logic; unless I'm missing something crucial is it purely a cultural thing?
The US is an independent country (as opposed to a British colony) purely due to the fact that we had lots of individuals with guns who could be organized into a rebel army. (And the help of foreign arms.) I think that is why guns are so precious in the US psyche.
It’s also why guns are enshrined in the constitution. There’s disagreement on why the constitution left the arming of militias up to “the people”, but I’m of the opinion that it was meant to facilitate another American revolution (against our own government should it turn tyrannical).
it was meant to facilitate another American revolution (against our own government should it turn tyrannical).
"Was" is the key word now. People have become so indoctrinated and addicted to 24/7 news cycle that they'll more readily use them against their own neighbor than the real source of the problem (government/corporation collusion).
That I guess is a big thing I can't fully understand at a deep level, not growing up in USA. Seems like hanging on to something that made sense 240 years ago. Times change. I mean, slavery was legal then... Hopefully people don't want to hang onto that too even though it was "useful" at the time?
Furthermore, how in the modern world can people stand up to a government on a military level? An untrained population of gun owners with limited ammo doesn't stand a chance against the biggest and most heavily armed army in the history of the world, right?
>Furthermore, how in the modern world can people stand up to a government on a military level? An untrained population of gun owners with limited ammo doesn't stand a chance against the biggest and most heavily armed army in the history of the world, right?
Worked well enough for the people in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc., didn't it?
There are in the UK too, but much much less with time now since mass production of food is vastly more efficient and accessible. And to that point I grew up extremely poor in the 80s (thanks inflation!) and hunting with guns was crucial if we wanted to get by. I would say 90%+ of my meat came from us shooting or trapping it when we couldn't afford the bullets. Additionally we used guns to protect livestock from foxes etc. BUT... we all had gun licenses and extensive security and background checks. And we were in the extreme minority.
My point being; surely the vast majority of Americans consume what they do via an industrial food system... Having more guns than people makes zero sense unless every citizen is using AR15s in their back yards to hunt rabbits for dinner.
Guns should be removed in its totality. After that if anybody wants they should allow to hold data based intellectual discussion about meaning of the constitution etc. If while we discuss all constitutional rights that were designed almost half millennia ago, people are getting killed, than drastic measures even if temporarily, are necessary.
It’d be great if guns didn’t exist, but since this would require totally abolishing the current political, legal, and cultural system of the US and replacing it with something new, it’s hard to see how to get there in practice.
To be clear: concretely, you’re advocating total revolutionary overthrow of the present US regime (which is almost guaranteed to lead to civil war) in order to solve the problem of school shootings? Or did I misunderstand you?
Interesting. So you can't reasonably turn mental health diagnosticians into detectives. Fair enough.
I buy it. The range of normal childhood behavior is quite wide and often only seems damning post-hoc.
When I was young, I made a CS map of my school (not very accurate) with one bomb site in the headmaster's office. Clearly mentally ill. Or maybe just having some fun.
Gun violence in the U.S. is a hobby interest of mine as a researcher. Skimming the discussion here, there are several things it would be good to keep in mind:
0) Gun murders in the U.S. are a very low percentage of deaths (0.39%) and preventable deaths (~1.1%, there's some disagreement about what's "preventable"). That's 0.0036% of the population per year gun-murdered. That this statistic is 3x some other country's is irrelevant because 3x a small number is still a small number. If your goal is to prevent untimely deaths, focus on boring things like falls, car accidents, and diabetes.
1) "Mass" shootings are a tiny fraction of all shootings. In the U.S., by firearm murders, it's about 3.5%. And that's using an extremely permissive definition of "mass shooting". Usually 3+ or 4+ people shot, not dead. When most people think about a mass shooting, a gangland shootout doesn't come to mind. The people coming up with these numbers do this on purpose ("advocacy numbers"), and you should be on guard. The distribution over # shot or # dead is telling.
2) Your kids are really safe, and worrying about a child getting shot, training for it, etc. does much more harm than good. We've managed to get child mortality from all causes to be very, very low. Worry about whether your kid is happy, has friends, is fat, has good mentors. This is pretty much exactly like "stranger danger" from the 1980s in the U.S. in a statistical sense, and I would say that contributed to the current regrettable situation where kids aren't allowed to roam free at all.
3) Stuff like the recent mass shootings in Buffalo and Texas makes it in to your minds because it's profitable for news media. Not because it's something you should actually think about or worry about, not because it's a real threat to you or anyone you know, but because it sells advertisements. Real risks to you as an adult reading this in the U.S.A. are traffic accidents, falls, and being too fat.
4) Ppl be like "We banned guns in Scotland and we haven't had a mass shooting since!". Great, but it's like saying I can't drown if I don't get in to the pool. Mostly true, but missing the point. The real number we're concerned with here is premature deaths, or perhaps an overall murder rate. Banning guns might result in a lower murder rate, but there's going to be some substitution (e.g. knives for guns, Glasgow being the "stab capital of Europe"...). Scotland is a very fat, very drunk country. Much more good would have been done for public health by banning Irn Bru and alcohol, but you haven't chosen to do that because people find them rewarding. People find owning guns rewarding too, it's just that the costs end up on the front page of the newspaper (mass shooting) rather than ignored because they're so quotidian (millions of years of life lost due to being comically unhealthy).
5) Don't focus on the type of gun. The fact that AR-15s are used in a lot of "mass" shootings reflects the fact that they're the Toyota Camry of guns. Good value for money, reliable, etc. If you saw a lot of a specific kind of traffic accident, and Toyota Camrys were frequently involved, would you start to scream "Ban the Camrys!"? It doesn't make any sense. The vast majority of gun murders in the U.S. are committed with cheap pistols. <2% are committed with "long arms" of any kind, including AR-15s.
A genuine question: isn't armed population one of the main obstacles of autocratic regimes?
If it is, then mass shootings is the lesser evil compared to, say, Russia, where a handful of armed psychopaths can commit war crimes on a global scale and quickly take down any internal opposition.
Maybe slightly off-topic, but I think this is a part of a larger trend of a declining empire - its inability to solve problems that have already become non-issues in other societies. From big issues like healthcare to small stuff like getting rid of pennies, I'm amazed at how the US is beholden to special interest groups under the guise of democracy and freedom, as well as its exceptionalism.
One can see this in dysfunctional companies, from its inability to acknowledge the root of the problem (e.g. trying to solve product problems with re-branding), bloated bureaucracy and rent-seeking behavours (e.g. we'll just raise the price!).
I really do hope things get better because the outcome is very scary but I also don't have much hope.
I honestly don't see this as a symptom of that. Economic and tax base problems, where our best knowledge can point to us doing the "wrong" thing, or at least not doing the "right" thing, sure. Those objective things that we mess up are indicative of systemic issues.
Some people just aren't scared of guns, or of a world where everyone has one, regardless of the real risk such a world would entail.
Differences within the populace with regard to risk tolerance and perception doesn't tell you anything about systemic issues. It just points to cultural differences. That is itself an issue, but certainly of a different flavor than "declining empire". It could still tear things down, but it would be more explosion than stagnation and collapse.
> Differences within the populace with regard to risk tolerance and perception doesn't tell you anything about systemic issues.
How we deal with it as a society does though - some people don't mind going fast but we as a society decided to impose speed limits on roads, especially around schools. Some people don't mind the smell of cigarettes but we as a society decided that indoor smoking shouldn't be allowed in general. No one likes paying taxes but as a society, we accept that we need it to function, however imperfect the process may be.
This is where US feels like a dysfunctional society when viewed from outside. If US views occasional mass-shootings as a non-issue, sure. But if it does see it as a problem and it's not able to deal with it because for whatever reason (culture, freedom, constitution etc.), I think that's a problem.
> This is where US feels like a dysfunctional society when viewed from outside. If US views occasional mass-shootings as a non-issue, sure. But if it does see it as a problem and it's not able to deal with it because for whatever reason (culture, freedom, constitution etc.), I think that's a problem.
My interpretation isn't that some people don't see a problem, its just that different people believe in different solutions because the 'cost' of proposed policies is different to them. The cost of new guns laws is huge for some, and non-existent to others.
Honestly I think the national gun debate is kind of a joke. Most of the farthest left states don't even enforce or do a good job implementing the laws they have already. What difference would it make if the policy in DC changed when the cops on the street and the capital at home don't care. Buying a gun in California is just as easy as it is in Florida, it's just a bad idea because you can be thrown in jail the rest of your life if you use it even in self defense, so people don't buy them as often.
You can burn a lot of words for sure. This culture also exists in other places and owning an automatic military grade gun in the society is perfectly acceptable. Want to know the name of this place? It is Afghanistan , Sudan and a host of places like that. They may be highly cultural but not exactly civilized society as per our norms and not something we ever aspire to be. We want to reach for the mars ? First let us learn to not empower people to kill each other.
It's not appropriate to compare the United States to Afghanistan or Sudan. Better to pick countries with similar GDP per capita.
Switzerland is a good point of comparison; they have about half as many guns per capita as the US which includes military-grade weapons, but no mass shootings.
Scared of guns or not, they seem to be willing to put "guns" before lives. children's lives. Unwilling to make even the smallest compromise to prevent mass shootings like so many other countries have.
This is my point - people are dying. Lots of people. Children. And your response is “we’ve made enough compromises NO MORE! Let them continue to die” because your gun is more important then 100s of children's lives each year.
We have many laws and regulation in place to lower children MV deaths. This includes things like seat belt, booster seat, child seat expiration and couple zones, and rollover protection.
The fact of the matter is that
“The previous analysis, which examined data through 2016, showed that firearm-related injuries were second only to motor vehicle crashes (both traffic-related and nontraffic-related) as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents, defined as persons 1 to 19 years of age. Since 2016, that gap has narrowed, and in 2020, firearm-related injuries became the leading cause of death in that age group. From 2019 to 2020, the relative increase in the rate of firearm-related deaths of all types (suicide, homicide, unintentional, and undetermined) among children and adolescents was 29.5% — more than twice as high as the relative increase in the general population.”
So outlawing vehicles is not proposed but laws, and regulation to control risk appears to be effective.
And with all of those laws and regulation, still 1000 kids a year die. So, again, why are we choosing cars over kids lives?
Well, we aren't. We are applying cost benefit analysis, which is subjective. Society agrees pretty uniformly that motor vehicles are worth the risk. It's the same with guns, there just isn't as much of a consensus. Some people thing the risk is worth it, others don't.
If you frame it as a binary right and wrong based on your own risk tolerance rather than making genuine arguments for certain trade offs you aren't having a good faith conversation, which is what I was satirizing.
I agree, further to this line of thinking I’m not really seeing how widespread adoption of arms by the general public has as many benefits as private vehicle ownership. Apart from environmental externalities, we know the cost for one is higher in terms of strict mortality… to that end shouldn’t the social utility of fire arms be higher? I can use my car to get my kids to school at least.
Perhaps we go in on a startup to modify the AR platform to distribute COVID tests or vaccines?
> I’m not really seeing how widespread adoption of arms by the general public has as many benefits as private vehicle ownership.
If you listen to gun fanatics, the benefits of widespread arms ownership is a government scared to overstep. How much that is worth to you depends on how much you worry about the government infringing on your rights, and how much you think guns being around prevent that.
I personally subscribe to that ideology to a degree (not full tilt, but somewhat). The US has the oldest constitution, and that's arguably only possible if the federal government hasn't pissed us all off too much :P
I never said outlaw, I said compromise. Are school speed zones not a thing in America? Child seats? Speed limits? Cross walks? School crossing guards? All the other steps taken to make cars and the roads around schools and playgrounds safer?
We all recognize cars are dangerous and there are laws and regulations to combat that.
So it's only bad if kids die in school? If the same number of kids were killed every year by gun violence, but there weren't any school shootings, then there wouldn't need to be any change?
No of course there still needs to be a change. Your comparison falls apart because there isn't a epidemic of targeted violence against children using cars, while there is with guns.
When I first visited the US, I was in a burger shop and complaining to my wife to the tune of: "Urgh, her come the pennies again. I'm so happy to be rid of them." The cashier was incredulous that Canada had gotten rid of pennies.
That something so mundane and annoying, pennies, is impossible to solve for the the US is eerily similar to Caligula playing music while his city burned.
I mostly don't use cash and throw small coin change into a drawer or whatever. In the last 10 years I've probably dealt with like 300 pennies. The horror!
Like it would be fine if they did just disappear, but it's also a pretty "meh" issue day to day.
I think Ray Dalio does a good job talking about the decline of the American empire, but I'm not sure his huge bets on the rise of China are well-placed. India also appears to have a good case for "next big empire" and it is often the case that when two world powers fight, they destroy each other. For example, the UK and Germany in WWII - the UK won the war, but ended up in huge financial trouble that caused its decline.
India and China had the highest GDP 250 years ago. So it is not surprising that they will grow back again.That necessarily does not mean USA people have to kill each other. There is enough room for global prosperity if only we have the patience and the right attitude. To start with - stop killing each other.
The problem is China's government supports just a monumental level of corruption and graft, and has been doing so by exploiting the "developing nation" growth boone.
But that only works once: its days of 7-8% GDP growth year over year[1] are behind it and not coming back. The CCP government seems somewhat aware of this - the social credit system, internet firewall and various other police state measures seem to be an effort to "pre-oppress" the population once the growth levels off (or flat lines entirely) since the implied social contract of China has always been "tomorrow is better then today" - and that's all going to stop once the graft and corruption eats the much lower GDP growth which a developed nation has.
With all due respect to you and Ray Dalio: Ray is examining patterns within a relative short timeframe and we can always expect a "this time is different" moment or we are in a radical shift in patterns, a black swan or whatever we like to call it. This is just an hypothesis: things follow a pattern until the pattern changes and we are living in an incredible moment when science and technology are accelerating and could solve many human problems that we see impossible now. US is in an incredible position if you compare it with other countries in the world.
US has a lot of issues but we can see it as a platform offering more chances to succeed than other (countries) platforms. You don't need the entire population to succeed, with only a few outliers (Google, Facebook, open Source, an NGO) you can structurally change US and the entire world. I don't want to sound positive about US but more negative about other countries in the world. You cannot take apart the military aspect (even after disastrous wars) the weapons are there in the US. A crisis is completely possible but the gap between the US and other countries is amazing AND US is a talent atractor.
This kind of comment screams of lack of perspective.
In the 1960's the US had multiple race riots where dozens died and cities were burnt down. It was bogged down in a war in SE Asia and had constant protests. Radical groups were killing policemen and sending bombs to politicians. Political leaders were being assassinated on a regular basis. The economy was in shambles.
Things are way better than then, but for some reason people think the end is near.
I remember coming back from Iraq wishing the American public should have to see what we were actually doing. America and it's allies export death and destruction, but we dont show or talk about a president bombing a wedding, or sending arms to the Saudis they use to blow up a school bus full of Yemeni kids. Keep quiet about the ~14,000 dead Russian speakers in the Donbass conflict since a CIA backed coup in 2014. Say nothing about all the various North African countries we've couped, or the South American Ones, or the SE Asia ones. Don't mention programs like Fast and Furious sending mexican cartels arms, or sending other cartels guns for drugs that get pumped into the inner cities and make our 3 letters have oodles of off-books black bag money.
I see pundits on Bloomberg cackle about Lockheed and Raytheon outperforming the market on national television and radio. News hosts talk about missles sent to Syria against our own Constitution as beautiful. Warmongers given platforms on supposedly left shows. Unnacountable bankers financing it all.
SV is so full of myopic hypocrites. Show the gore, sure, but be sure to show it all.
I understand the feeling, but I don't think it would work. People would get upset and get even angrier at whoever they already think is to blame, and after a while everyone would become desensitized to it.
They still aren't going to be as traumatized as the parents who had to get their cheeks swabbed because some of the kids were so violated by gunfire that they weren't capable of being identified visually.
If I show you gory pictures from a car accident, would you understand the magnitude of the horror of cars to the extent that you would want to ban cars?
I was at the DMV and the woman in front of me was describing how her shy child needed a renewed permit as he had been frightened of driving by these kinds of images and never shown interest in learning years since.
I appreciate the story, and I can understand that mindset personally because I have also been dissuaded from driving by my knowledge of the danger of cars.
But it has never persuaded me to support tough car restrictions or bans on cars for other people. It's a personal risk calculation that I do not impose on others. I don't know the shy child you mention at the DMV, but I doubt he was persuaded to outlaw cars for other people either. That's a mindset I do not understand.
Do you think drunk driving is the only cause of car deaths? The facts don't bear this out, even if you remove the fraction of car deaths that involve alcohol impairment, the magnitude of car deaths remains truly enormous.
Okay, let's take away 30% of fatal car accidents. There is still a truly enormous magnitude of car deaths. I can still show you a relentless barrage of gory car death scenes, are you now persuaded to ban cars?
I never said any of that. I wanted to know if you would be persuaded by seeing gory car deaths because you suggested that others would be persuaded by seeing gory gun deaths. If you aren't for cars, then I'd be surprised if it worked on the issue of guns which produces fewer mortalities. It would suggest that there's another factor at play than just how many gory deaths there are.
I didn't feel it was necessary to address licensing and registration because as you know, practically all drivers on the road are licensed and registered and it has yet to solve the truly enormous magnitude of gory car deaths. If one were easily swayed by gory scenes, they would want to go much further than license and registration.
That's fair, sometimes it can turn people off, I can believe that such graphic warnings could reduce gun ownership overall if applied to gun packaging.
Do you think that the Texas school shooter who inspired this HN post would have been deterred from purchasing and using his gun to kill children if he had seen graphic warning labels on the packaging of his gun?
Uh no, I'm just saying license and registration is irrelevant to the question of whether "We need gory pictures from the executed kids everywhere". We already have license and registration requirements for cars, but if stopping gory deaths is my motivation then license and registration requirements would not be enough to placate me, it would effectively be a call for tougher restrictions, so I decided to focus on the tougher restrictions on cars that was suggested (eg related to drunk driving).
Felt the same way about COVID and war. If cameras were allowed into ICUs, and into war-torn areas, and not just the carefully choreographed media tours the military sometimes allows these days, things would change.
Do we want policy decisions to be influenced by which side can produce the most emotive imagery, though?
This is just "think of the children" with more steps. For example, if you're going to highlight the scenes from inside ICUs, why not also show images of children crying when receiving their COVID jabs?
I think the public should be afforded the opportunity to see the real effects and results of the policies they enact. Propagandists are going to propagandize whether the truth is out there or not, and I think it is better to allow for the truth to prevail at all, than to have it shrouded and obfuscated because of fears that it might spook some.
No, it should instead be influenced by the side that shouts the loudest in a Fox opinion piece.
The propaganda you decry is already well-embedded in our discourse. It's people shouting about Obama hosting death panels that will kill grandma, or how Biden will somehow turn this country into a socialist paradise, or how the Dems are stealing the election.
The kind of censorship you are asking for does not enhance discourse. It diminishes it. If people are creating policies that produce horror, they need to be able to stand in front of that horror, and affirm that they are okay with it. Not whitewash it with euphemisms, and statistics and 'this is uncomfortable to talk about.'
The way I see it is this: if you're against gun control, you're either
A) Devoid of empathy
B) A lunatic
Because if one of your kids/loved ones is killed in a mass shooting like this, and you're still against gun control, then you're a lunatic. If not, then you're just an asshole with zero sympathy for the families that have lost loved ones.
I don't know about you, but regardless of the politics, I would not want any of my elected officials to fall into category A or B.
There can be no debate when people like you go and throw a wrench into it.
PS: I come from a certain european country, that has easier access to guns (including assault rifles) than large part of USA. Guess what - zero school shootings.
These A & B is a cheap rhetorical trick, called the false dichotomy, because there's also C which is "you understand that guns save many more people from criminals". On the one side there are 5 thousand of innocents shot every year. On the other side there are 500 thousand of would-be killed and would-be raped innocents who used guns to defend themselves. By banning guns you're playing a demi-god who is deciding which of the two groups of innocents are less worthy, a demi-god who doesn't even care to consider all the facts and instead submits to emotions.
See that's part of why we can't have a discussion on the issue as long as one side keeps believing that the other side is a members of the globohomo communist conspiracy and the other side views everyone else as morally impaired nut cases we won't get anywhere.
We'll keep having nothing happen and keeping getting madder and madder.
Even if this would work, it's never going to happen. So why even waste the energy even suggesting or debating it? The most it will do is help fundraising for pro-2A groups.
A problem with that logic is that it doesn't do anything to change the economics of gun sales.
If you kick them off the stock market, gun manufacturers can go private, or they move their headquarters and incorporation abroad.
If you prevent banks from making loans, they'll take their billions to Deutsch Bank, or HSBC, or some crypto bank that is happy to hide their money. Plus, if they're now private, there's likely no requirement to report their loans.
If we tax gun sales at 100%, you'll start to see more people renting out their guns or "gifting" them.
Are you buying a new mattress? We'll toss in his and hers handguns to keep under your pillow.
There are hundreds of millions of privately-held guns in this country. Without a cultural shift, and an active campaign to decommission those firearms, there's more than enough supply to fuel a black market for a long time.
It'd be like the war on drugs, you'd push everything underground, manufacturing would move abroad, and the lack of visibility would potentially make things worse.
We maybe have some hope of doing something about mental illness. Not so much for the condition of male-ness. If the demographic is the intersection of mentally ill and male, it's the illness dimension that's potentially treatable.
Environment isn't "nurture". If you were born in the 70s your parents weren't intentionally giving you lead poisoning and lowering your IQ and making you prone to violent crime; it just happened on its own.
In some countries in Europe is legal to own guns, but still, the number of shootings per capita doesn't equal that in US.
So, arguing that people die by being shot is because people can own guns is the same to arguing that people die in car accidents because people are allowed to won cars.
No one is arguing that the legality of gun ownership is the problem. It's irrelevant because it is a right in the US.
The argument is that the quantity, power, and saturation of guns are unusual.
The US has far, far more guns per capita than any other country[1].
We know from other, similar countries that changing laws works[2], and those changes do include reducing the ease of getting the most powerful weapons.
I wish it were possible to use git with government policy. I want to diff the gun laws and health service offerings between a countries a with low gun violence and the usa to look for commonality.
This is an American problem and I find it strange how closed off many Americans are to adopting “best practices” from other countries who have this issue solved.
People say that gun owning should be restricted. But are the mass shootings done by people who have a gun permit and legally bought the guns?
Also, forbidding guns, doesn't change people minds. If someone has a psychiatric condition he can drive a large truck into the crowd, light up a crowded building or event try to poison a water reservoir, destroy a dam, derail a train, make a bomb using gasoline, fertilizer and sugar.
I wonder how well the number of untreated mental health issues in US corelates with mass shootings and other mass killings.
Maybe the biggest factor of people dying in mass murders is not gun control, but the fact that there are some people who reach that deranged state of mind in which they think it's ok to kill others.
Trucks have truck licenses and are expensive to obtain, or require getting a job and passing screening.
Lighting up buildings, destroying a dam (how??) and other civil engineering misadventures require way more thought and planning than shooting someone with a gun in your cupboard.
Limiting gun purchases is way easier than tackling all of mental illness. We can't even define half of the reasons why people turn to the 'dark side', let alone be there for them in exactly the right capacity at exactly the right time to save their mind.
While you are not wrong that there are other ways to commit mass killings, in pretty much all countries with no guns, you don't see these alternate events.
So the outcomes you suggest are perhaps not the logical outcome of removing guns from society.
As an example if I take Europe as a whole (the bits not in an active conflict) there aren't 600 events a year of water poisoning or trucks in crowds etc.
Now true, they have different approaches to handling mental illness, so that's a factor, but even so.
But there are many countries in Europe that allow people to own guns. And, while we have less shootings per capita than in US, there were also attempts to do mass killings by other means:
For sure the psychiatric care in the US is far from sufficient, but that doesn't remove from the fact that guns make causing massive suffering accessible in a way that building a bomb and blowing up a dam doesn't. Guns shouldn't be allowed to be sold OTC, and mental health issues should be taken seriously. Both problems have to be adressed.
Mental illness surely is a factor, but I don't think it's what pushes people over the edge.
Remembering my teenage years, the times I acted badly were because of anger. Extreme frustration towards a society or people who I felt treated me unfairly.
The hardest to deal with was (perceived) hypocrisy from people who were in a position of power.
Looking at US media, politics and justice is infuriating as an outsider. Everything that's done under guise of "freedom" and "democracy". All the "morality" work from people who by their own standard would go straight to hell. Zero accountability for anything.
Trickling down might not work for money, it surely does for the poison that this system produces. At least in openly totalitarian countries, people get a chance to see their government for what it is.
As a foreigner, it's appalling to see every excuse imaginable trotted out every time this happens.
Don't think you're fooling anyone. You're just making things up on the spot for the sake of pretending to have a rational argument, like an intelligent adult would in your place.
But I will eat my shorts if you personally have spent even an hour doing the research before making statements about "what this would do", or "that wouldn't work", or whatever. I don't mean clicking "like" on a Facebook post by a fellow NRA member. Mean literally reading through scientific publications, or looking at statistics published by third parties that are unaffiliated with any United States organisation.
Or just Googling to see what the other 96% of the human race does with guns and laws.
Can you counter every single one of his points? Really? With facts? That you can link to in a scientific paper that wasn't paid for by a gun lobby in the states?
19 children just died. Please take this a tiny bit seriously and don't just click the reply link to blurt out something in a public forum that can be trivially shown to be false...
Until Americans realize that owning a gun is a dangerous thing, there will be no change.
Guns are a force multiplier, they allow someone that is armed to have much greater lethality than someone that is not.
No, I don't care if you go hunting or target shoot for "sport". Tough. Live with it. The world won't be worse off if you don't shoot deer or rabbits or ducks.
Weapons have specific uses in agriculture (removing pests, humane disposal of injured livestock), they have specific use in law enforcement, and they have obvious use in military activities.
All other uses are nonsense in 2022. There are occasional times where someone armed has been able to use those arms in self-defense, but the use of deadly weapons as opposed to self-defense or incapacitating weapons is not an adequate reason to outweigh the disadvantages of these weapons being generally available.
> Guns are a force multiplier, they allow someone that is armed to have much greater lethality than someone that is not.
So is a van, see Europe.
> Guns are a force multiplier, they allow someone that is armed to have much greater lethality than someone that is not.
Tell that to wild hogs. Population control is a thing, especially needed for invasive boar.
> and they have obvious use in military activities.
Exactly, 2A is for a well regulated militia. It's to protect the rest of your rights. We'd still be under the crown and possibly still in the slave trade if not for guns. (GB and other powers did not end it first, they simply outsourced it to America)
> There are occasional times where someone armed has been able to use those arms in self-defense, but the use of deadly weapons as opposed to self-defense or incapacitating weapons is not an adequate reason to outweigh the disadvantages of these weapons being generally available.
There are many instances where civilians are able to defend themselves or others. Guns are equalizers for weaker humans against stronger ones, they are also deterrents. Gun crimes usually happen in strict gun controlled areas because criminals know it's unlikely they will be met with force.
I carry every day just in case, both for animals and humans. Criminals will not respect your gun laws, you are only hurting law abiding citizens.
edit: to below, you'd have to look at it by city, not state. most gun violence is driven by gang/cartel violence, which exists largely in certain key cities of a certain political spectrum that happen to have strict gun laws.
Seems like the opposite is true. States with easier gun laws have far more gun deaths. It does not seem like guns prevent crime really. If that was the case, then states with the most guns would have the least gun deaths, no?
US Population growth of around 100-120 mil from the 60s/70s onward due to primarily immigration has never been done before. No ruler who cares about their people would attempt such a thing - cultures must be joined slowly and carefully.
American culture started dying right around then. Shootings like this are a side effect. Maybe things will get better, but current trends appear to signal the opposite. I’m genuinely curious if a new “global” culture will come out of all this turmoil or the US will end up like Brazil.
I dont have the power of down vote but I am glad I dont because I am required to call you out in text for being a disgusting white nationalist racist, and I realize you are no longer a fringe minority. I hope you change your opinion on these matters but the prevalence of such views has caused me to give up hope. All my ancestors who came here were immigrants and they did some terrible things to establish themselves. There is no good American culture, its a myth. More new people give us an advantage over countries that are very homogeneous.
In short, we should literally be recruiting whomever is willing to. come here - people are an asset, not a liablility. From the most basic economic point of view, a country with a string positive growth rate has an advantage. But I could go on.
People should safely store their fire-arms, but they don't and guns get stolen and sold illegally, or used by their teenage child.
People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.
Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.
And when everyone is armed everyone wants to be armed. Cops pull their guns quickly out of fear of armed criminals. Regular people want to own a gun because they feel like everyone else does, and they're now less safe unless they also get one.
Growing up outside the US I never saw any guns. I don't know of anyone who had a gun. I don't know of anyone who knew anyone who had a gun. I remember seeing military members in parades carrying guns because it was one of the few times I'd actually seen one. Cops didn't walk around armed. There are other ways to kill people but guns are an especially effective, intuitive, and easy way to do so.