Mass shootings are a meme in the United States, like a sort of cultural epidemic. You fight epidemics with techniques like quarantines to stop the spread, medicine to help those that are already infected, and inoculations for people who haven’t been.

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...

I agree with your first two points. Point 3 I have sort of fussy disagreements with (firearms have value, buybacks tend to short change this value, and overarching tend to target already poor folks).

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?

Good points.

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.

It's strange that everyone brings up symptoms of poor education and healthcare. Racism, violence, shootings, these are all symptoms of lacking infrastructure. I feel like banning 8chan, instituting stricter gun policy, it's all bandages on a deeper wound.

If the ATF has a gun registry with names of owners, it would be in violation of the law. There are only a couple of ways that it can be done: first by capturing and retaining information called in for NCIS check (against the law) for form 4473, and the other by sending people out to photocopy and enter data into registry of firearm sales log at gun store (I believe this is also illegal).

Do you agree with the law prohibiting the maintenance of an up to date and accurate gun ownership registry?

I absolutely do agree with that law. Why? Because maintaining an ownership registry makes it too tempting for big brother to begin confiscation.

We require licenses to prove people are competent to operate a motor vehicle and we require most motor vehicles to be registered. Yet, car confiscation isn’t a huge issue in this country.

That's because no one seriously wants to confiscate cars.

Got it. So we managed to find out footing on that’s slippery slope somehow. Why can’t that happen with guns?

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.

No one is saying its coincidence. But is Europe without those same issues? No depression? No political polarization or social isolation? No news, no social media? The problems you describe aren't unique to the US. What is unique is the ease of access to firearms. Conversely, you are the one who is assuming that the vast difference in access to guns correlating to the vast difference in gun violence is simply a coincidence around the world today.

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.

You can have more than one problem. Think of it like a post mortem. Don't just look for root cause hut also think about mitigating factors. Solve for as many as possible.

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.

In 2014, 29 people were killed in an attack with knives (multiple attackers). In 1927, 38 children were killed in a school bombing in Michigan. There was a sarin gas attack in Japan that killed many. There are also numerous examples where many have been killed by fire.

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.

No but you can do so very easily with fire, a car or a trivial fertilizer bomb.

Then why don't they? It's just as easy, right? Just as effective, if not more so? You're making a supposition that the perpetrators would switch but in order for that to be considered in our post mortem, you need to provide evidence to support the argument

More important, as it's not a factor in the current incident, it's irrelevant.

Do you remember the anime studio attack less than a month ago that killed more people than these last two killers put together? That was done with only a gas tank and lighter

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack as an example found in seconds.

> 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?

That's not how a post mortem works. You want to identify the root cause of an incident and any factors that increased the impact or prolong the incident. Solving for every possible scenario is how you end up solving for nothing. Playing the "what if?" game leads to an infinite set of potential problems and time, being finite, means you can never succeed

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.

This isn't a service we can restart and try again on. Unlike software issues, you can't assign attacks into single-fault instances and go case-by-case. One attack does not indicate another, nor is it a template. We're dealing with a hydra, not a dragon - "fixing" one attack doesn't alter future ones just as preventing a single incidence of cancer doesn't fix cancer.

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.

So if you can't solve for everything, you can't solve for anything? Gun massacres, in this country are on the rise. What else is and at what rate? You're arguing assumptions when we have facts and we can try to do something about facts.

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.

I feel like you're taking the wrong conclusion here. Perhaps modern society and guns being widely accessible don't mix. Other countries took measures when the problem became apparent, the US didn't.

2 things: other countries don't have 2nd amendment in constitution, and US doesn't pretend to be the same as all the other countries.

> other countries don't have 2nd amendment in constitution

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.

You're 100% correct - changes to the constitution can happen (and have happened). It's not beside the point because any additional controls have to be weighed in the context of the 2nd amendment (as it is written and interpreted today).

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.

Agreed! If a conscious decision is being made to value the ability for people to own guns in expense of frequent killings then go for it.

But it's usually phrased as "there's nothing we can do" and gun control wouldn't help, which is dishonest.

A Thompson was sold for around $225 in 1925, so adjusted for inflation that's roughly $3300. A good AR-15 style rifle will be around 1/3 of that, and an AK style rifle around $500.

I'm pretty sure those $225 Thompsons were fully automatic. You're not getting a full-auto AK for anywhere close to $500. Most full-auto weapons today are also in the $2000+ range.

The difference between a semi-auto AK and a full one is a very small, easily made piece of metal... Has no bearing on the cost.

It has no bearing on the manufacturing cost but it absolutely impacts the retail price.

https://www.gunbroker.com/item/825012731