What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture

Re:What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture by adamrezich on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @01:00AM (#16481023)

>The point, instead, is that in a world full of assault rifles and high capacity magazines and bump stocks, more of these types of things will happen and they will be worse when they do.

We can presumably agree that there's more legal civilian-owned firearms in the US than ever before, yet the national homicide rate has steadily decreased since the 90s https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-07-30/chicago Bump stocks were first sold in 2010, yet the homicide rate has still slowly declined since then. How does any of this match up with your belief that more firearms owned by civilians, higher capacity magazines available for civilian use, and even the invention and sale of lesser-known (until recently) novelty firearm accessories such as bump stocks lead to increased violent firearm crime?

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Re:What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture by solipsism on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @01:18AM (#16481087)

Again with the simplistic views. To claim that the mere quantity of guns (or anything else) alone directly predicts gun deaths (or anything else) would be ridiculous. There are many theories for the reduction in homicide rate. Longer (and mandatory) prison terms, stricter gun laws, more police, etc.

Your argument is equivalent to the guy holding a snowball and arguing that global warming obviously can't be real.

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Re:What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture by adamrezich on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @02:02AM (#16481256)

I'm not arguing that anything directly proves anything, I was arguing the opposite: that increased legal firearm ownership, including legal ownership of bump stocks, high capacity magazines and what have you, seems to have had nothing to do with overall homicide rate of the country, nor the firearm-related homicide rate of the country. The number of "mass shootings" has increased in recent years though (despite still being an incredibly statistically small cause of death, even when compared to other "preventable" causes of death like drunk driving)… so maybe this indicates that it's not the firearms themselves that are the problem, but other factors not being accounted for in mass media analyses of these events, for one reason or another. For example, SSRIs will never be blamed for anything on television news, as long as pharmaceutical companies advertising on their stations are a core part of their business.

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Re:What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture by Turing_Machine on Thursday March 01, 2018 @10:45PM (#16498825)

> The number of "mass shootings" has increased in recent years though

Actually, it hasn't (at least for school shootings) despite the impression you'd get from the media. See the link I posted before:

http://news.northeastern.edu/2018/02/schools-are-still-one-o...

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Re:What Critics Don't Understand About Gun Culture by solipsism on Wednesday February 28, 2018 @06:25AM (#16482234)

There's an incredibly clear correlation between firearm deaths and gun ownership: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/

And if you don't think high muzzle speed and high capacity magazines increase effectiveness (read: ability to kill more school children faster) then you'd better let our military know.

It really takes willful ignorance to pretend that having higher numbers of more effective killing tools has nothing to do with deaths.

maybe this indicates that it's not the firearms themselves that are the problem

And again. The incredibly simplistic way of thinking. The problem? There are many problems! Properly addressing this would take many solutions. Mental health problems are fundamental to our species and may never be completely be eradicated, but we can do better.

One problem that is not fundamental to our species is the easy access to weapons of war. But we do like our toys, don't we.

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