Re:A way to measure gun violence in America
by dsfyu404ed on Sunday April 24, 2016 @08:39PM
(#11561977)
The cynic in me says the DC police response is faster and more trigger happy. We all remember what happened when a bunch of cops went after two guys with a six-shooter outside of Boston a few years ago (spoiler: orders of magnitude more than six shots were fired, nobody died from the bullets).
> This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right.
Not necessarily, I'd imagine easy availability of fully-automatic weapons would lower your fatalities-per-gunshot ratio but not be a good thing.
Re:A way to measure gun violence in America
by AnthonyMouse on Tuesday April 26, 2016 @01:32PM
(#11573878)
This is kind of the point. The fatalities-per-gunshot ratio is quite irrelevant. What matters is the number of injuries or fatalities.
If hypothetically giving out automatic weapons caused there to be more gunshots because every time there was a gun battle many more shots were fired, but it reduced the total number of shooting victims because now dealers are much more wary about starting a gun battle, then you could make the argument for giving out automatic weapons. Because what matters is the actual harm.
But if all it did was increase the number of gunshots by a lot and the number of injuries by a little then it's clearly a bad thing. Because what matters is still the actual harm.
Re:A way to measure gun violence in America
by MichaelGG on Sunday April 24, 2016 @08:46PM
(#11561992)
What is bad about a firing mode that decreases accuracy and depletes ammo quicker?
This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right. The problematic thing is the implicit shifting of the question to "how to reduce gun violence" from "how to reduce harm" in the first place. Nobody is going to prefer the city that has half as many gunshots but twice as many fatalities.
The interesting thing about numbers like this is the unexplained difference. If you can explain it then maybe Oakland can do what Washington has been doing and fewer people will die -- even if that thing has nothing to do specifically with gun violence, like improving emergency response time.