But, shooting is common. It's a hobby. A killing machine is normalized and it becomes a culture. So, those mentally ill men feels completely normal to shoot people when they go crazy.
Consider this: ramming car into objects becomes a hobby and people starts to do that and take pride in it. They practice it every week. Then, those mentally ills will start using those methods. And then government will ban riding a car. But, this is not happening, just a hypothesis. You can replace car with other objects you can think of here.
That's why countries where gun are banned for general population, does not have mass murder by "common people" like USA. There are mentally ill people everywhere, not just in USA. This is the point gun lovers don't understand.
I want to understand why we're taking another attempt at the sisyphean task of banning guns when less controversial mental healthcare reform is ripe for discussion. In the case of the Parkland shooter, everyone knew the killer was dangerous, but there was no reasonable mechanism for getting an appropriate combination of judges, law enforcement officers, and mental health care officials empowered to do anything about it.
Current U.S. law says mental health is only a problem after violence already happens. We need other mechanisms. And we need funding and accountability to make sure people are actually cared for and not just locked up in the prison system. Police officers are not psychiatrists and jails are not hospitals.
First I beg to differ- compare the EU to the U.S. or the U.S. to India, or to China for that matter or the U.S. to Brazil. Not just "countries". The US is one of the largest countries on Earth (by population and landmass), with one of the most diverse sets of population... It's really hard to even find a comparison.
And I can tell you've never used a gun, it's not really something you go - "yeah let's kill people for fun today". Most of the cases (literally all the ones I know of) do it for revenge, or how they feel about themselves, don't really think a hobby is playing into it - more likely it's that when guns are used we plaster their names all over every media outlet.
The comparison isn't favorable to the US.
Often this makes people feel isolated or ostracized, because they don't fit in or are being out down. Then you get mass murder or murder in general, because I you don't relate. Basically, you have no incentive to care for one another.
Lot of those groups hate each other. Many of them have lower status in society. And millions of people there have mental issues. People don't give shit about mental health there. If guns become normal there, it would be catastrophic.
I never said people kill for fun. When mass shooting happens, using gun feels normal. Because they have been using that weapon (gun) like it's supposed to (shooting practices and hunting) for a long time.
Sorry, but this is completely false.
I am not going to link to it for reasons of taste, but you can google "encyclopedia dramatica high score" for a very thorough run down on mass shootings. They occur globally and are by no means a phenomenon isolated to the US.
Compare the USA situation to countries at war or with armed insurgencies and, of course, it might seem even tame. If you aspire only to give your citizens the security of a corrupt developing world dictatorship then this comparison is probably useful.
I read the parent comment again and I don't see the phrase "at all" in there, so the clear implication (at least to me) is that they meant mass murders by gun happen far less often.
Next, I'm assuming that by "mass shootings" you mean the FPS, Single Player category on there (since the only other FPS aka shootings category is Co-op Mode which seems to be almost exclusively terrorism and gangs, not "common people").
Here is the raw data: https://pastebin.com/rfHy5KUu
Here is the aggregate by country: https://pastebin.com/NPi3kELY
USA has 'only' 4.3% of global population but 17 out of 50 top ED loner shootings and one third of deaths and almost half of injuries.
If that's not a phenomenon then I guess nothing is.
Perhaps I should just publish some results. Seriously, every time I debate a data scientist I just send them to the data. Heat correlates more with mass murder than anything... Like I don't really get it.
While of course no country can ever be mass shootings free and immune to them since a determined person (ISIS, Breivik, etc.) can always get a gun eventually I was just pointing out that based on the cited stats USA is standing out with regards to frequency (even compared to much more populous China, India, EU+UK+Norway, etc.) so there is some US specific phenomenon related to mass shootings (for whatever reason, gun availability, society, heat, magic, that's beside the point I was making).
Not sure what you mean by mentally ill, but they have definitely been used for that in Europe.
So, demolition derbys? Is there a higher rate of murder by car among people that participate in them?
Funny. I live in a country where gun ownership is common-ish. Curiously, per your theory, though - no mass shootings.
Gun ownership is not the root of all evil.
Yeah but guns are "cool" while ramming a car into a crowd it's not that cool.
I believe people should be allowed to bear arms but that doesn't mean the guns should be sold and advertised as lollipops.
The problem is you're right, they are being advertised. Although, what I will say is I don't know a single person who treats them as toys (I live in a pretty rural area, so pretty much everyone has one). Every gun is taken care of and very well managed.
It always amazes me, because I'm one of the few people who refuse to have a gun in my house (might change). People in the bay area (where I lived for two years, before leaving) have absolutely no idea how common and really safe guns are. I think it leads to a lot of fear mongering.
(About 60% of gun deaths are suicides, 30% are homicides, and only 10% are accidental. Unlike with car deaths, where almost 100% are accidental.)
Here, however, guns have been severely restricted for several years, to the point where I believe it has been counter productive. We did see a decrease in accidental gun deaths, but violent crime and murder rates have increased significantly. Unfortunately, from my observation, the potential threat of deadly force is still a necessary deterrent sometimes.
If you compare it to other nations, the statistics are also worrisome:
"Compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related murder rate is 25 times higher. Although it has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, the U.S. had 82 percent of all gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
Guns are an immediate force multiplier that can cause a lot of injury with little planning. Guns make it easy for someone who has a brief thought of suicide, anger, or stupidity to act on that thought with irreversible consequences. While in high school, one friend committed suicide with their family's gun. Another person I know was shot because their friend was playing around with a gun.
I think only when both sides can agree that a) guns will likely never be banned and b) yes, guns are dangerous and require more regulation that we currently have, will we get anywhere. Until then people will just talk past each other.
[1] This is based on older studies at this point because the NRA has made it impossible to get funding to study gun violence.
Correlation does not equal causation. Wet streets do not cause rain. Until you provide a study that shows a baseline population and another who are given a treatment (say "here's a free gun that you weren't going to buy on your own") and compare the results, the null hypothesis is not broken.
Plus giving people guns who do not want them is bordering on unethical since if the study shows as is already implied it means that person may be hurt or killed.
How is the NRA stopping anyone from funding studies?
>study shows as is already implied it means that person may be hurt or killed
Your arguments are epistemologically broken. Would giving, low-blood-pressure people, blood-pressure regulating medication suddenly make them have high blood pressure? No. Wet streets do not cause rain
My arguments are not broken at all. To do the type of control you suggested above would mean putting guns in homes of people who would otherwise not have one. Previous studies have showed that owning a gun increases the odds of injury by gun. Putting subjects at that sort of risk for a perfect control study absolutely has ethical implications.
>Previous studies have showed that owning a gun increases the odds of injury by gun
No they haven't. The studies show that people who own guns have higher likelihood of being injured. It does not show that owning a gun /increases/ odds of injury.
Places that have wet streets have a higher likelihood of it raining recently. Does that mean that wet streets cause rain?
You are assuming that the non-gun-owning population and the gun-owning population are the same. This is illogical. Perhaps it's the case that people who buy guys are just generally risk takers/more reckless than the general population (which is reasonable given that they're purchasing a gun in the first place). The problem with your logic is that its vulnerable to Simpson's Paradox[1]
How is the NRA stopping anyone other than the government from funding studies?
Okay, I don't support the restrictions YouTube and Reddit are putting on free speech, but I think we need to keep things rational here:
> We need guns. Legally, in the U.S. it's our right - one of the first and most protected rights. The ability to defend yourself and country in the face of tyrany. Look at what happened in Ukraine, Syria, etc. A government doesn't fuck with a populace that has guns, so it increases stability. When you don't have the ability to defend your rights, you don't have rights anymore.
Guns as they are allowed now don't allow you to protect yourself from tyranny. Look at the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas. Whether or not you believe they had illegal guns, they had guns, and they died. Guns lose to tanks every time. When the second amendment was drafted, guns made sense as a way to defend your rights from the government, but in the modern day, it's been probably half a century since civilians lost the arms race. Civilian gun ownership has lost its relevance as a means of defending our rights in the face of increasingly militarized law enforcement.
> Further, violence isn't associated with guns - it's associated with people being suppressed or by mental issues. The weather is more associated with murder than guns...
There's a case to be made that the culture around guns increases violence, but that's ambiguous. What isn't ambiguous, is that a mentally ill person with a gun is more dangerous than a mentally ill person without a gun.
> I even understand trying to reduce ways to kill massive amounts of people easily. But again, I have a car, I know how to make chlorine gas, so on and so forth.
You can argue that a mentally ill person could build a fertilizer bomb or drive a car into a group of people, but I'll point out that we have laws restricting those things too--let's not assume that people who support restricting gun rights don't also support restricting fertilizer and car rights.
> Stop talking about mass murders and start talking about tragedies, do a black out on mass murders names. That'd probably fix the issue in time.
I think that this is part of the issue: that won't "fix" the issue. It might help, but people will still want more gun control, because the magnitude of the issue isn't relevant to how people feel about it.
More people die every year in car accidents than die from civilian-owned guns in 10. By all statistics, we should be much more worried about why we let drive than who we let own guns. But again, the magnitude of the problem isn't what people are reacting to. Guns are just much scarier to the average person than cars.
So people are always going to push for more and more gun control as long as gun violence exists at all, and gun violence will always exist, because it's impossible to control it completely. You aren't going to "fix" gun violence, so unfortunately we need to accept that that isn't an option on the table, even though everyone wants it to be. And once we accept that we can't "fix" gun violence, then it's easier to stomach that gun rights might have some validity worth weighing against restrictions of questionable efficacy.
> I'm telling you right now, by removing these videos you're arming people, and exhasborating the problem.
This is absolutely true, and I think it's one of the biggest problems with the left right now. Too many of us don't seem to understand that by restricting free speech we create martyrs.
Tanks exist for a very specific reason in modern militaries; they are effective in combatting deeply entrenched or armored enemies. When the modern tank was conceived in WWI, trench warfare brought the conflict to a grinding halt, and a tanks were the solution. WWI was a ground war fought by regular militaries. Many modern conflicts are guerilla wars fought against irregular militaries. Guerilla forces do not control battlefronts at strategic positions that require armor to penetrate. Guerilla forces do not have emplacements that cannot be defeated with small arms. Guerilla forces do not field any armor of their own.
Likewise, most features of modern militaries that were developed to fight other nation-states prove nearly useless against irregular combatants. Aircraft strike buildings and armor that guerrilas don't have, or combatants that are indistinguishable from the general populace. Navies fight ships that guerrillas don't sail. Modern EWAR disables communications and technologies that guerrillas don't use. Such capability is lost upon an insurgent force. This misunderstanding is (in some ways) a bizarre sort of American exceptionalism, where we seem to think that the more expensive military will always win, despite the overwhelming evidence to that not being true.
Sure, but if you think they were alive, do you think they would have looked back at what happened, they would have seen this as their failure or victory?
If Branch Dravidians didn't have guns, they would simply be arrested and forgotten in the history, whereas today they are folk heroes.
If anything, to all the gun rights supporters, Waco shows that fighting with guns works.
> Guns lose to tanks every time.
Then how do you explain US-Vietnam war, Second Iraq war, Afghanistan(first with USSR and then with US). The USSR's Afghanistan war is a great example, the only thing we supplied the Mujahiddins was guns.
Tanks only win centralized armies and we are very good with fighting centralized Armies (First Gulf war was a good example), however we SUCK at fighting decentralized forces. The only reason why we manage to defeat ISIS because ISIS got too centralized (and we got strong leadership), but keep in mind we have still not managed to win Iraq and a replacement of ISIS is in works.
The thing about firearms is they equalize power. You are almost certainly bigger and stronger than me, you could beat me up in a fight, if I had a knife you could probably take it from me. When I have a gun your power advantage is greatly diminished and your size becomes a detriment. If we're both armed with firearms the disparity in power is much closer than otherwise. If we played out a fight 10,000 times we'd expect the odds to be 50/50 on either side.
The same is true among groups of people: a pair of cops with a gun can control a dozen prisoners working in a chain gang until just one of those convicts has control over a gun. You only need to look at how expensive it is to clear a madman who's held up in their home or for soldiers to clear streets in the middle-east even when most people living there aren't armed (as they're just regular people caught in a conflict zone). Armed individuals mean it's no longer possible for 1 or 2 people with guns to overpower them, you need to outnumber 3, 5, 10 to one to tilt the odds in your favor again.
Look at how effective—or ineffective—powerful western armies were fighting comparatively poorly armed Afghan and Iraqi rebels. For the most part, these were people with relatively little training and practice, small arms, and loose organization and yet they've managed styme the west's greatest powers for nearly 2 decades. They're better armed than your typical dooms-day prepper, but not by much (and those same doomsday people argue they should be able to horde mortars and RPGs if they want to). If we took the most extreme 'weapons-rights' view I think it is reasonable to think a few million angry Americans could oppose a president like Trump ordering the US military to enforce some sort of tyranny. We've seen that kind of thing have great effect in recent history and all the way back to the first and second world wars where armed citizens were able to take bake their cities (Warsaw) and mobilize into effective resistance movements.
That's where the value of an armed population is found. The government can kick in my door with a half dozen thugs and take everything from me. What they can't do is take everything from a town where half the homes have people prepared to resist. An armed population makes it impossible for a government to effectively oppress the people. Can you imagine the Khmer Rouge making much progress in Texas or Arizona? That's the way a firearms owning population protects against tyranny. The government can get away with "picking on" small groups: klansmen, draft-dodgers, homosexuals, men's-rights activists, but it is much more difficult to impose a more totalitarian rule without popular support.
That's the system I think most people generally support: the government has a "right" to use violence against its enemies provided that use is targeted and narrow. It doesn't have a "right" to broadly disregard the will of the people or to try and enforce rules most people won't somewhat-willingly comply with.
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Some people don't think that's okay: they see the cost of policing in America, where police (rightly?) assume everyone is armed and angry and the police are quick to violence and say "there is nothing worth this!" There are people who will point at the rates of violent crime and say "even if a gun ban won't help, it certainly can't hurt." and they'll hear stories of children killing themselves or their parents 'accidentally' and say "even so-called responsible gun owners can't be trusted not to put themselves and others in danger through negligence."
I understand those positions, I'm even sympathetic to them. At the same time, I don't think it's too much to ask that those of us who think that maybe the American relationship with firearms could use some changes at least try to consider the arguments, rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
The old Wild West adage, "God Created Men and Sam Colt Made Them Equal!"
> rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
Of course that's impossible, but look at what small groups of insurgents have done to the US military in various parts of the world. But yea, even if every person in a city owned an AR-15, they would only be an annoyance if the government really became a tyranny.
> Look at how effective—or ineffective—powerful western armies were fighting comparatively poorly armed Afghan and Iraqi rebels. For the most part, these were people with relatively little training and practice, small arms, and loose organization and yet they've managed styme the west's greatest powers for nearly 2 decades. They're better armed than your typical dooms-day prepper, but not by much (and those same doomsday people argue they should be able to horde mortars and RPGs if they want to). If we took the most extreme 'weapons-rights' view I think it is reasonable to think a few million angry Americans could oppose a president like Trump ordering the US military to enforce some sort of tyranny. We've seen that kind of thing have great effect in recent history and all the way back to the first and second world wars where armed citizens were able to take bake their cities (Warsaw) and mobilize into effective resistance movements.
A few things about this:
1. It's worth noting that every single one of the guns being used by the resistance in Iraq is illegal. If anything, this isn't an argument that gun rights are important, it's an argument that gun laws are irrelevant.
2. It's also worth noting that your best examples here had fairly limited success. The "tyrants" in Iraq have control of the economic resources of the country, which is arguably their goal.
3. I'd argue that the limited successes of using guns to resist tyrants were due to a group united around a shared cause, not guns. Each of the successes of guns you mentioned could be attributed to this. The most effective resistance during WW2 wasn't even gun-related: it was the vast underground that smuggled soldiers and Jews.
> Can you imagine the Khmer Rouge making much progress in Texas or Arizona?
I get your general point, but this is a bad example: the Khmer Rouge was a fairly populist movement. Pol Pot's army was mostly uneducated monarchist peasants who didn't understand communism. A populist leader leading a bunch of people in Texas or Arizona to commit genocide is totally imaginable. But in that case the people with the guns doing the tyranny so I get that this isn't your intent. :)
> Some people don't think that's okay: they see the cost of policing in America, where police (rightly?) assume everyone is armed and angry and the police are quick to violence and say "there is nothing worth this!" There are people who will point at the rates of violent crime and say "even if a gun ban won't help, it certainly can't hurt." and they'll hear stories of children killing themselves or their parents 'accidentally' and say "even so-called responsible gun owners can't be trusted not to put themselves and others in danger through negligence."
> I understand those positions, I'm even sympathetic to them. At the same time, I don't think it's too much to ask that those of us who think that maybe the American relationship with firearms could use some changes at least try to consider the arguments, rather than trotting out some "lone man with AR-15 destroys US Navy thereby defending freedom of everyone from Trump's goon army" fantasy to poke fun at.
In fairness, that fantasy isn't a straw man: there are plenty of people who totally believe that.
That said, I do have a nuanced opinion on this. My ultimate position is that taking someone's gun and jailing them when they have never killed anyone with it is equivalent to convicting them of a crime because they might commit it--government needs very good reason to restrict the rights of individuals, in my opinion. But I also don't think that infringing the right to gun ownership is as damaging to society as infringing the right to, say, free speech, or privacy: plenty of people worldwide live quite happily without gun rights. I am sympathetic to the gun nuts, it's just not an important enough issue to me to affect how I'd vote in most cases.
If I take my car (a Jeep Grand Cherokee) and ram it into a crowd - I'm confident that can take out more people than I can with a gun, knife, probably even bomb.
Point being, I understand not facilitating trade, but for the love of god, videos? You really want to push the right over the edge?
We need guns. Legally, in the U.S. it's our right - one of the first and most protected rights. The ability to defend yourself and country in the face of tyrany. Look at what happened in Ukraine, Syria, etc. A government doesn't fuck with a populace that has guns, so it increases stability. When you don't have the ability to defend your rights, you don't have rights anymore.
Further, violence isn't associated with guns - it's associated with people being suppressed or by mental issues. The weather is more associated with murder than guns...
I even understand trying to reduce ways to kill massive amounts of people easily. But again, I have a car, I know how to make chlorine gas, so on and so forth.
Address the actual problem and stop making this political. We know you're afraid of guns - that's fine. I'm affraid of dogs, but I'm not going to support banning them (look at them, they are built to kill things human size).
Stop talking about mass murders and start talking about tragedies, do a black out on mass murders names. That'd probably fix the issue in time. Then teach everyone about gun safety, how to use them, the dangers, etc. I'm telling you right now, by removing these videos you're arming people, and exhasborating the problem.
In fact, they just pushed me to buy a weapon.
\flip table and walk out