> There is one developed country—and only one—in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one—and the only one—regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals.
> You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out. Yet even as the casualties from gunfire mount, Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-a...
A similar column from a few years ago:
> A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain.
> At regular intervals, flash floods wipe away houses, killing all inside. Less dramatic—but more lethal—is the steady toll as individual villagers slip and drown in the marshes around them.
> After especially deadly events, the villagers solemnly discuss what they might do to protect themselves. Perhaps they might raise their homes on stilts? But a powerful faction among the villagers is always at hand to explain why these ideas won’t work. “No law can keep our village safe! The answer is that our people must learn to be better swimmers - and oh by the way, you said ‘stilts’ when the proper term is ‘piles,’ so why should anybody listen to you?”
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-rea...
Sure, “the unique access to guns is a significant cause of the unique problem” is an obvious conclusion. Others are plausible, however, the most obvious alternative being that the two are effects of a common cause rather than cause and effect: that is, that America is uniquely heavily populated by violent maniacs, which produces the access to guns as a political result (both of the maniacs seeking arms to commit violence and others seeking access in fear to the maniacs) and the mass slaughter as a more direct result.
In that case, cutting off access to the guns might not have as much result as one might hope.
Do you think these numbers are even remotely comparable to US ones, where there have been hundreds of incidents only this year?
And when we make comparisons with Europe, we should remember that violence in Europe is rising, while violence in the US is declining.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/03/5-facts-abo...
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-c...
https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-bombings-grenade-atta...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shoot...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/13/health/gun-deaths-highest-40-...
* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/venezuela-...
It is a control on the variables that can confound comparison so we have a more apples-to-applies situation.
But social conditions in America and Europe are very different so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison if we keep talking about gun policy.
There people who are angry enough in other countries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack
The thing is that with easy access to powerful weapons, it is easier to implement such impulses in the US compared to other industrialized countries.
The US is not some hell hole where people have nothing to lose: for the most part it is a nice place to live (though, as with any place, it has better and worse areas). I think a lot of these incidents could be curtailed with better social conditions.
However, having a lot of weapons easily available is like having a lot of dry brush in the country: all it takes is one person's spark for things to catch on fire. Furthering the analogy, it's not that other countries don't have people who can be lit off, it's just the surrounding environment has reduced (though not eliminated) the chances of a large conflagration.
The general crime rate in the US is not too different from the crime rate in most other developed countries; see point seven:
* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/u...
However there's a lot more violent crime; see point one (ibid).
> it's about average, and far better than our neighbors to the south.
And yet as someone who lives in Canada, your neighbour to the north, we have a lot less gun crime. The difference is that we have good social services and decent filters on gun ownership. I don't know all the nitty-gritty details, but it seems that Canada's laws are roughly in line with what Massachusetts has:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
There will always probably be mass shootings:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting
But I think adding some filters or speed bumps to ownership (and especially CCW) will weed out the hot heads and incompetents that cause so much low-level carnage:
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11582078708082647...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11575509903437127...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_Schoo...
A little while later, another crazed man entered a second elementary school and also attacked staff and students. He used an XM15 and Glock 20SF; there were 2 injuries and 28 deaths:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...
> It's the violence that matters, not the weapon.
I'm guessing you have never read Marshal McLuhan. The tools (communication or otherwise) that humans have available shape society and our perception of the world. There are daily examples (both negligent and purposeful) of people acting in a way that they probably would not have if they only had knives or just their fists:
* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_
The effects of different tools are... different. The "Garlic shooter" was able to kill 3 people and injure many more before he was taken out in under 60 seconds:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shootin...
That kind of carnage is difficult to achieve with a baseball bat or a knife.
Which is why this is low-hanging fruit to deal with and long past due.
And then there are the mass killers, but since vehicles won't be banned because they have "overwhelmingly more legitimate use", they would remain available for mass killings. As would bombs, though that does require more skill than the other weapons.
And guns would remain available too. Gun control does very little to prevent criminals from obtaining guns, as the gun crime rate in Chicago shows.
The amount of low-level carnage that happens daily in the US from either incompetent, negligent, or malicious gun owners is quite impressive:
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11575509903437127...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11578845404777594...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11581452335924346...
* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11582078708082647...
A total ban on firearms isn't even necessary; just a filter on the dumb asses and hot heads:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
Yet curiously, almost all mass murders are committed with guns, not vehicles.
Have you heard about any of these?
* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
Compare the list of Canada which fits on one page (going back to 1689):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Canada
to the US, which has page-per-year breakdowns:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
Canada has the sixth-highest firearm ownership rate, yet has a death rate lower than many EU countries:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
So firearms aren't alien to Canadians, and yet the number of blood baths occurring is much, much lower. Incidents do occur:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting
but much less frequently.
The most recent attack listed in my source was in March of this year and killed six.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaoyang_car_attack
And that's just the last time someone added one to the page. I doubt the list is comprehensive or that was the last attack.
So it's not just easy access to guns. It's the surrounding culture of gun play, gun heroism, gun rhetoric, gun rights, gun "freedom", gun permissiveness, guns-make-you-a-real-person-who-matters - and so on.
Other countries don't have anything like the same culture to anything like the same extent. Which is why you can have equivalent levels of gun ownership without the same problems.
Here's a book that takes a closer look at how guns took on this sort of mythic role -- more special than other tools and appliances -- in American identity:
Only in certain circles.
Then I come back to the States and I'm honestly shocked at how macabre American TV is in comparison. It's non-stop crime shows, murder investigations, action, and militarism, with a shootout key to the resolution of almost any episode.
Is it any surprise that Americans reach for their weapons to solve problems with increasing regularity? I blame American's Puritanical streak.....we can't have nice, pleasant things like topless women on TV like they do in Europe.
This doesn't fit in the 'a gun is a tool' mindset, it's fetishism, pure and simple.
They aren't, but it's a convenient fiction.
Well let's look at just the United States, over time, rather than the US compared to other countries. In the US, a proliferation of firearms has been a constant throughout our history. But it is only recently (really starting with Columbine) that we've had REGULAR outbursts, almost always by men under 30. I would hypothesize that the elephants in the room are a)prescription psychotropic drugs and their side-effects b)constant negative media about males/toxic masculinity c)overall ineffective child-rearing practices and extended adolescence, some of which stems from a reduction in two-parent households.
These are vague partly because so few people will take a deep dive into these subjects when so much money flows from these influences (pharmaceuticals, media, etc...).
But why aren't we looking at the variables, instead of the constant?
>>>it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.
1. You can't "head on down the street" and pick up an automatic weapon in the US. You need a Federal Firearms License for that. And historically, FFL holders are some of the most law-abiding citizens in the country. Even if there were a ban on semi-auto weapons, the market would adapt. I've already brainstormed on how to optimize a bolt-action rifle for rapid, sustained fire and I'm not even a firearms designer.
2. Tightening the gun proliferation sounds great...in theory. How do you actually accomplish it in practice? There are 300 million+ firearms spread across the country in about 40% of households. This is a land area greater than that occupied by the Germans on the Eastern Front, with a greater number of potential "partisans", and the Germans never even came CLOSE to securing their rear areas. That anyone expects widespread gun confiscations to NOT turn into a bloodbath is naive IMO, and if the objective is saving lives than it would also be counter-productive.
3. Maybe the mass murders will switch to homemade explosives instead of knives, which would be a significantly WORSE outcome? Ever think of that? Maybe they'll get guidance from jihadis. Hell, explosives already gave us one of the worst school massacres in American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
If someone does not have access to guns, it's harder to do something like this. It gives time to think again. Organizing different attacks gives law enforcement a chance to catch someone planning it beforehand.
HN is not the right forum to discuss this in detail, so I won't go further into this. But it's better to think about this than to follow Cloudflares lead.
But for anything serious like terrorist attacks, it won't make much of a difference. Guns come in through criminal networks anyway (as in Europe). Norway has gun control laws, yet Breivik was still able to kill nearly 80 people regardless. Vehicles have proven to be decent weapons to kill many people with. 9/11 used airplanes and improvised knives to kill thousands.
Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.
But reduce the overall deaths.
Then why are you doing it? Don't reply to me though, HN isn't the place to discuss it.
The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two:
* https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-st...
> It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this.
While the desire to do certain things may remain, it may be possible to limit the practical ways that desire may be implemented. These extreme cases will probably be the hardest to stop, but there's a lot of low-level carnage that could be reduced:
* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_
And it isn't even necessarily about bans, but simply a few filters and speed bumps to reduce the chances of hot heads and whack jobs packing heat:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
>The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths
The latter does nothing to refute the former. The first is claiming gun control can reduces deaths by gun, but only by shifting deaths to a different category. The latter claims that in the category of people dying by gun, number of guns and deaths is correlated.
Which can be reduced by restricting access to guns:
> The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents’ access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a rela- tively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.
* https://www.gsoa.ch/media/medialibrary/2010/12/Lubin_10.pdf
Also:
> In 1995, Connecticut established a "permit to purchase" law, which required a background check and eight hours of safety training for those seeking to buy a handgun.
> Missouri used to have a law like that, too, but repealed it in 2007.
> New research shows what happened afterward. Firearm suicide rates fell 15.4 percent in Connecticut — but rose 16.1 percent in Missouri. The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, only confirms what other papers have found: Making it harder to access guns correlates with fewer suicides.
* https://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9242147/gun-control-connecticut...
That's a misread of the study - making it harder to access guns does not correlate with fewer suicides - it correlates with fewer Firearm suicides. Further, reading the studies referenced, you will find that they simply show correlation without examining other risk factors. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that less guns=less shooting, personally, though I know some people disagree with that for some reason. I don't know about less guns=less violence in general, though.
That study of the IDF is interesting, especially how they ignore the fact that there was not actually a 40% drop in gun related suicides; there was a 70% drop in suicide by gun, from 10 to 3, and a more general drop from 28 to 16.5 with another 4.5 per capita coming from non-gun related suicide. Despite this, they claim the entire 40% drop was driven by the gun change. This is interesting because it was not the only significant policy change the IDF put in place between 2005 and 2007 in order to address suicide, so it's pretty difficult to claim a direct causal relationship which is what they did.
Based on that, you would expect countries with lower rates of gun ownership to have lower adolescent suicide rates, and those with higher rates of gun ownership to have higher adolescent suicide rates. According to the WHO, though, that is not the case. The US, for example, had a below average adolescent suicide rate in 2000, whereas New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, norway, Austria and others had higher than average rates.
We do, however, have a variety of same-country data demonstrating it happens. Several examples here:
https://americanhealth.jhu.edu/article/how-do-gun-laws-affec...
IIRC, there's also the factor that attempts with guns tend to be more successful - other methods like pills tend to take longer, be easier to mess up, and offer the ability to renege or have someone intervene in a way guns tend not to.
Unfortunately, laws about the age at which it is legal to purchase or possess a gun show no effect. Basically, if you are allowed to own a gun or not as a child, there's no relationship. The decrease only happens when there is a gun in the home and it is stored properly, where children can't get at it easily.
The message I get from that is make guns more difficult to get in times of mental crisis and it will lower the firearm related suicide rate, but not necessarily the general suicide rate outside of that 14-17 age group.
Also, the relationship with suicide attempts is likewise sticky, because a lot of suicide attempts are not really a driven attempt to die. Many take a number of pills, for example, then purposefully leave out the pill bottle or tell people prior to the attempt. It's a difficult thing to track in terms of metrics.
Well, not exactly: https://twitter.com/mark_j_perry/status/672946028706996224
> Rates of personal and household gun ownership appear to have declined over the past decades – roughly two-thirds of Americans today say they live in a gun-free household. By contrast, in the late 1970s, the majority of Americans said they lived in a household with guns.
> But America’s gun super-owners, have amassed huge collections. Just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms – half of America’s total gun stock. These owners have collections that range from eight to 140 guns, the 2015 study found. Their average collection: 17 guns each.
(See also the chart showing a couple percent increase in female gun ownership, but a fairly hefty decrease amongst men.)
Another point of interest is the number of CCW issued (estimated to be around 17 million now) and the liberalization of carry in general since the 1980s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#/media/Fi...
The research seems to indicate otherwise:
* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jels.12219
* https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.l542
* https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...
* https://www.nber.org/papers/w7967
* https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2018/handgun-purcha...
I think there is a point in diminishing returns--some gun control measure are more effective than others--but many places in the US have not even plucked the low-hanging fruit.
How would you accomplish this without a firearm? Do you think you could accomplish this with a bat or a knife? The attack happened at a Walmart. They sell hard objects. This couldn't have gotten far. I can't imagine a location or situation where you could be so effective in harming so many without a weapon that gives you so much distance from your victim.
Do you have kids? I have one. Every day I look at my toddler and have to think about how to keep her safe (statistics are in my favor but they were in every parents' favor). Then I have to look at my wife and assure her that our baby will be able to live a long life.
I'll relinquish my second amendment rights, if I never again ahave to live through a year where there are more mass shootings than days. For now, we're just moving out of Texas.
Personally I think there is a link in A-moral violent video games as well as violent music that glorifies killing. Now in saying that please don't construe it with me being an advocate for censorship. I am not, but I think there is a link.
Further if you couple that with young males who have little prospects in this brave new world, fresh out of school or getting ready to graduate, no real direction and probably a hand full of romantic rejections due to being awkward you have a powder keg waiting to happen.
Funny enough in the case of the Texas shooter, after reading his manifesto, I was surprised he did not use explosives. His reasoning where more like Timothy Mcveigh's than many of the other shooters. He does not fit the typical profile.
I don't couple that with young males having little prospects because they still have more than their counterparts. Why aren't young black women shooting up Walmarts? Why not Mexican men? I'm a white male. I didn't graduate from a college. I was awkward. I haven't killed anyone and I know a lot of others that fit that mold. You're ignoring the poison being put into their heads by people using your exact talking points. That creates the powder keg.
Bombs don't get you the praise from the gutter. The alt-right incels like the glory. You're right, we could see a rise in bombings but we also might not. What we'll definitely see (and already do) is nothing changing by doing nothing.
https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2003/10/anderson
As well just because someone fit's a profile does not mean they are predisposed to commit acts of violence. That being said, when there is a pattern, there is a pattern. There are many young white males, of similar experience who do not pick up a gun and start killing people. That being said, there is a definitive pattern of behavior and interest among these white males that do, rejection, isolation and immersion in video games (almost always violent) are certainly some of those patterns.
Also please stop trying to pin it on alt-right (or left for that matter), these guys are popping up all over the political spectrum.
Where I don't waver from the alt-right on is on constitutional rights, so while my talking points may seem to you to come out of a playbook they are my views on the world and I tend to form those views based of my experiences and reasoning.
I do not believe I am making the world a boggy man for anyone. Just calling the numbers as I see them. I believe these young men are cowards as evident in the Texas shooters manifesto where he explicitly states that he targeted Walmart as he would not meet armed resistance.
There is a pattern of mentally unhinged men being radicalized by the right wing and committing heinous acts of violence with guns.
No it is not. You provided one or two examples that do not eliminate a pattern, and as you yourself said- "A pattern is a pattern."
There are three problems here: mental illness, (far right) radicalization, and guns. I don't have any solutions to propose for this but saying videogames are somehow the cause of this is absurd.
Violent video games don't create violent people necessarily, but video people like to play violent video games.
It is also why I am anti-censorship, as I believe it is the opposite side of the same coin as blaming the gun for mass murders.
Just as guns are linked to these issues as the tool of choice, we find back linking to excessive immersion in violent media.
I just find is strange the cognitive dissonance people make when wanting to ban the one but not the other when they are both clearly linked. They want law abiding people to give up their guns but find all kinds of reasons to deny the link with violent content.
Do you think Timothy McVeigh was inspired by Doom?
Show a link between games and hate crime fueled mass shooting by sad white boys and we can put it on the list of things to worry about. Until then, perhaps making it harder to get guns could help...
Why do you link these two things, as if no minority is pro-gun rights and active in the media?
Much like mass shootings, violence in videogames might be symptoms of rots within our capitalist society.
Very powerful people are profiting off our rots.
Now it's happening in a time of rampant depression, polarization, social isolation, 24-hour news, and social media. That can't be a coincidence.
I think the quarantine is for information in this case. Instead of breathless, stop-the-world coverage of these events, treat them like traffic accidents: “22 people were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in an El Paso Wal-Mart this afternoon. Now here’s Bob with the weather.”
Gun buyback programs are 1 kind of medicine. Some people won’t take it, but we should try. Maybe we can institute some kind of guns-for-Medicare program (only sorta joking).
Gun control legislation is the inoculation. I don’t think we can get to full-on prohibition in the US without repealing the 2nd amendment, but we can implement licensing and registration requirements and longer waiting periods.
We also need to improve the existing systems. The ATF has a “gun registry”, but it’s not a searchable database. See https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-database...
4. What good does registration do? Like, awesome, now you have a database with all the gun owners in it.. but for the purpose of stopping mass shooters how does that help you? Likewise, what licensing requirement do you foresee which will help with (1)?
5. Again, how does this help?
I’d argue that 3 is an implementation detail. If we’re serious about getting guns off the streets, then we need to make it worthwhile to trade them in.
As to 4 and 5, I’ll just say that not all shooting are “mass shootings” like we saw in El Paso. Chicago alone has something like 1500 shootings each year, many of which go unsolved. The article I linked says that the ATF gets 1000 gun trace requests per day and it takes an average of 4-7 days to compete one of them. That seems a bit slow to me, but I honestly can’t say what effect speeding that up would have on our ability to prosecute perpetrators of gun violence.
In fact, some states already have licensing and registration laws for guns and they’ve also managed to not tumble down that slippery slope.
I‘ll grant that some people do want to confiscate guns, but that’s not a popular view. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx.
I think it isn't absurd today that poor mental health, social isolation, and digital media consumption is making certain segments of the population more likely to violently lash out, and for the countries which afford these people easy access to firearms, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher.
Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.
It's naive and wrong to assume that there would be no mass killings without guns. There would likely be less, but it wouldn't be 0. Before anyone counters me with "we should prohibit all guns because it will prevent some mass killings", we still have 2nd amendment.
More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
> More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.
Well now that seems like a bad faith kind of argument. Since none of us have a time machine, surely our intent is to solve potential future issues and not go back and change the past?
When we've solved for the current problem, we can address the next worst thing. We won't know what that is until it happens.
We could also solve for knife and sword attacks because there was that one time in Japan where someone murdered a bunch of kids or chainsaws because of that other one time that guy had a chainsaw but we do more by staying focused.
Historically bombings and arsons have always been a major problem, eg the Bath School Bombing. Car attacks are new-ish but rising. Shootings are an American phenomenon, but massacres are not.
We should not solve for shootings, we're just pouring the acid into a different jar. We should solve for massacres.
You're right, we can't restart this service. These people are dead. They were shot. To death. We can never solve their problem but if we don't learn from it and try _something_ then we can't avoid the same thing from happening again. And again. And again. And again. (Repeat a few hundred times.)
But don't let me stop you. Solve for allthethings and let us know when you're done. In the meantime, a bunch of us are going to fight to solve for this current problem.
Changes to the constitution can and do happen. And it's kind of beside the point anyway because a degree of gun control already exists in the US without being in conflict with the constitution.
> US doesn't pretend to be the same as all the other countries
Clearly. You're also the only one where this is such a problem.
The United States has more individual freedoms than most (if not all) countries. The downside of those freedoms is when individuals use their free will for evil purposes.
But it's usually phrased as "there's nothing we can do" and gun control wouldn't help, which is dishonest.