Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa...
The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said
In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said. Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school.
“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people”. Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.
Contagion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-ar...
The issue there is that the solution is (at least in Denver Public Schools) that the burden is put squarely on the students. The message is that only students can prevent bullying. My experience is that teachers and administrators absolutely will not intervene. One of those 4 kids was getting picked on/bullied, sometimes directly in front of a teacher. Who did nothing. The only times I got any help from schools was when an actual, observable injury, like broken skin, appeared. Other than that, my bullied kid just experienced "restorative justice" where the bully refused to show up, and therefore nothing changed.
I dreaded going to lunch, then school in general. At one point I didn’t want to leave my house.
You know what stopped it? Mr. Alexander, a NYC schools science teacher who let me eat lunch in his room, saved me the Tuesday Science NY Times section and gave me science teacher manuals with experiments to do. He was a wounded Korean War vet, I believe a master sergeant who presented a very stern appearance. I’d do random errands and do science stuff and eventually helped with a few things in class. He took the time as an adult to help me understand that I was something, was a mentor and worthy of friends. Looking back, he changed the course of my life. One of the only regrets that I have in life is the I was never able to find him and thank him, as he’s almost certainly passed by now.
Every kid needs a Mr. Alexander. Someone who gives a shit and takes a moment to do something. It makes me angry that these shooters are often kids struggling with emotional problems, and instead finding someone to help, end up on online forums grooming them to be bigots or monsters.
Mr. Alexander knew he changed your life, and expected nothing in return. Teaching was his reward.
That’s not to justify shootings at all. But people who suffer years of abuse, especially during childhood, can’t imagine a better life because they’ve never experienced one. An irrational act of terrorism to us is a rational act of balancing the scales to them.
In general, I think that teachers do use bullies to extract revenge on students they wouldn't otherwise be able to punish. Same as we as a society let cops do extra-judicial killings and such.
Some family's studied in the U.S., and even their middle school and elementary is 2000 students ! That's enormous, gigantic!
Here in Mexico schools are small-scale. Education here is much, much smaller scale. I think that the bigger the student population is at the campus, the bigger the chances are of failing at important problems such as bullying, since extreme standardization of these processes creates more problems than genuine solutions. Plus.
All this is just my n=1 experience, and I could be misreading things, but I'm convinced there's a cultural element that can explain the helplessness of bullied kids in the US school system.
Maybe the problem with the US is that the society is just too free. Or not enough churchgoing.
The big difference between UK and USA is the number of guns we have in our country compared to theirs. We probably can't stop bullying, but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society. We humans are nothing but animals down to the core. If a person wants to kill they will find a way.
Another issue in the USA is the lacking mental Healthcare that other nations have. Many are afraid to seek mental health help because of the stigma of looking weak, much like men not reporting rape or sexual assault that they experience. Also couple that with covid19 lockdowns and that gives these at risk people lots of time to think, plan, and execute. At this time its far to late for them. As a result you get more mass shootings.
In the UK we had one school shooting (conducted by an adult), and after that very strict restrictions were put on gun ownership. A similar case happened in Australia.
The fact that it is still controversial whether “guns are the issue” shows that the US has not yet begun to grapple with the issue.
In your opinion what lead to the crumbling of the institution of family, that did not happen in other countries?
- Decline of religion/spirituality is more pronounced in usa.
- More dual working parent homes (due to free labor markets). I also suspect that while real incomes have risen, actual disposable income has decreased, which pressures households into dual working arrangements. This means less time invested by parents in kids.
- institutional rot of public education . As some poster said, school bureaucracy is now defacto enabler of bullying - by doing nothing when observed... and punishing teachers that actually try.
- the internet has cracked the authority of social groups, with more time spent online and people more fractured among niche interests. This means less oversight and more activities happening without a concerted response by the group
You want to look at countries with high per capita ownership of firearms.
With the exception of uruguay, most comparable countries [1] place higher importance on religion vs USA [2]
That veing said, there are confounding factors. These surveys are not measuring spirituality, for example.
Then there is the elephant in the room with regards to gdp per capita. I've been told of an old chinese proverb that illustrates this point:
No food. One problem. Much food. Many problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
vs where?
It shows.
You haven’t _THOUGHT _ of killing another person? Ever? It must be amazing to live with such purity of thought.
> The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society.
The United States is unique when it comes to crumbling family?
If you read this bit of text:
“Imagine killing another human”
What happens in your head? Is it blank save for a triumphant “Not today, Satan!”?
If I were to write “Imagine pushing somebody off a cliff”, it would be common for people to just… not imagine that? And this refusal of imagination is a virtue that, if it were more common, would somehow be helpful to society?
I fear this message has lost something in translation.
Anyways, I digress. But here are some of my thoughts: I just got from a three-day trip to Monterrey, a city in Mexico. This is where my mom and dad went to college. Yet there is this vibe, always, either inside or outside the school that just feels like _everyone_ is always hustling. Making their lives work. Going to big measures to achieve their dreams, whether legal or not. I met a wealthy guy, interesting acquaintance. We talked about life. One of the main things he said to me was that - emphasizing that although it's cliché it's just too true - "the universe is yours. take it."
And this just rings too true for me, I think that our education has decoupled from American values. Or maybe those values were already broken to begin with. My point is, bureaucracy has led us to do unimaginable things and not see "action -> result." Yet we were raised by our parents telling us that dreams will come true with hard work and effort. We are all socially forced to follow the rules, not skipping lines, etc. But it feels more and more like those lines are crossed everyday and goals are more important.
I was viciously bullied from 3rd grade through 6th and eventually stopped it through physical violence. The guy who bullied me (we exchanged black eyes on multiple occasions) ended up being one of my best childhood friends and I attended his father's funeral last year after he was killed in a tragic accident. Fighting amongst boys is normal.
But yeah, it's true. One could argue that the school shooter was doing this for himself, which of course isn't something I'd wish on anyone. I think that these teenagers feel helpless, without any purpose in life. I'm not saying it's the worst time to be alive, but the mass appeal of no-religion, being agnostic is a real problem. I even doubt if I should continue being agnostic at times. Every once in a while I lose purpose and really haven't found a good way to cope with it.
Generally speaking, I think the cause of these shootings comes down to the feeling of helplessness and not feeling useful to society.
My daughter is younger and smaller than my son, but in any "fun sibling violence" situation she just doesn't stop hassling until she thinks she's "won" or us parents have to intervene. They never really come close to even danger of the spilling-blood-kind of physicality, but my daughter constantly surprises me with what punishment she's willing to risk just to try and "get the last one in". She's tougher than him.
The "gun as solution" psychology is definitely a large part of the problem.
With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.
Well, the people suffering from it who haven't figured out that it doesn't matter. And the school certainly won't tell you that because of moral hazard; suffering ensues.
>With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.
Working as intended.
Can we? AnimalMuppet already mentioned the legal barriers, but there's another issue: the US is currently suffering from extreme political polarization which has already led to an insurrection. How do you think that would interact with an attempt at mass confiscation[0] of guns?
I fear such a policy any time in the near future would spark a civil war, leading to many times more deaths than all the school shootings added together.
[0] I read your post as implying mass confiscation. Simply restricting the purchase of new guns would take many decades to significantly reduce the number of guns in circulation.
I'm sure there'd be pushback, but restrictions on gun advertising might be another option. Other countries have regulations around advertising pharmaceuticals, fast food, tobacco, gambling and so on.
Interestingly among those polled from the Democratic party, which is broadly considered the entirely pro-gun-control party, only 54% felt that gun control laws were the most effective way to prevent mass shootings. (31% of Independents and 17% of Republicans responded similarly.) The rest seem to mostly fall into the camps of either 'more effective policing' or 'preventing the spread of extremist ideologies.'
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/05/25/most-vo...
We can't solve this problem because we're all talking about highly theoretical and utopian solutions that don't account for actually existing realities.
The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The US constitution says "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preface about a well regulated militia, and yes, people were using muskets when it was written, but the Supreme Court has ruled that this confers an individual right to possess modern firearms.
And the Supreme Court is even more right-wing now, and likely to force blue states to loosen their gun laws to look more like red states.
So maybe we'd have a more productive conversation if we talked about what's possible in the actually existing United States instead of dreaming about Australia's successes, because there's zero probability that we'll be able to learn from Australia.
I doubt that even with our previous level of gun ownership we would have had the same outcome either. We have a social healthcare system that at least provides some level of mental health support and our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power. While this may have eventually changed with greater cultural homogenisation to American content via the internet, I’m unconvinced that it would have ever been the same as we see in America today.
The school shooting problem is very very American and i suspect it has a lot to do with cultural contagion brought on by the 24hr news media circus whipping everyone into obsession every time there’s a tragedy.
I've fired a gun on three occasions (I was an Army Cadet, I quite enjoyed the experience) and have handled realistic replicas (backstage on set of a theater show). In both settings they're treated as risky objects. You are handed the gun, you use it, and then you hand it back to be locked up.
My grandfather is the only person in my family I know who ever owned a gun. He used to keep it in the cupboard under the stairs. He handed it in to police to be destroyed long ago - he felt that he didn't need it, and that the most likely outcome of keeping it was an accident that he would regret.
Personally, I'm very happy to live without guns around. If I do want to shoot, I would be able to comply with the regulations in my state fairly easily. It's a bit of paperwork but no worse than, e.g. acquiring powerful lasers, or being allowed to enter an aerodrome for flight training.
Australia still has plenty of legal guns around. And it's clearly still a problem with illegal guns. Not as big a problem as the US, but still a big problem.
"But the latest crackdown did little to shift attention from the body count: in the past 18 months, 13 men have been shot dead in a western Sydney turf war and there is no end to the bloodshed in sight."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/23/more-...
Definitely- the most recent mass shooting committed by an Australian national didn't even occur on Australian soil, but in Christchurch, NZ.
>our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power
As opposed to the US, whose cultural relationship with school shooters sees them made Person of the Year by a popular nationwide magazine. Their media reports stories of "Could [popular movie] result in mass shootings?" throughout the time it was in the theaters to the point you'd wonder if it was actually part of a marketing campaign.
Not actively promoting this particular kind of crime or the people who commit it would indeed be a good start to eliminating it but why do that when there's money and political hay to be made over it?
But it’s not the same as American news. For one thing American news is weirdly musical… like why the hell does all American news come with a subtle soundtrack trying to obviously steer my emotional reaction to what I’m seeing? Other places add music too in plenty of places often for the same reasons but it’s not the same level… American news basically has a soundtrack going almost all the time, it’s excessive and blatantly an attempt to manipulate the viewers emotions.
It’s way more obvious when it’s a wedge issue like gun rights, drug legalisation, abortion, or anything political.
I don't know about that. I know plenty of people on the left that have gun 'obsessions'. I think it's just culturally unacceptable for them to talk about it. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, pretty much everybody (who doesn't tout their minority right-wing victim status on the back window of their pickup truck) will tell you they are anti-gun; but if you feel them out carefully, a good number of them will quietly admit they own guns and enjoy shooting. There are many, many hidden gun collections here.
How much of "the left" is actually about no guns, versus having a few hoops that you have to jump through first, à la (e.g.) Massachusetts:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
Compared to: "Only in Texas: Lubbock jeweler offers free gun with engagement ring purchase":
* https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2016/10/25/only-in-tex...
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
The left actually says "more background checks", though there are an unreasonable group that goes for absolutely no guns.
There's also the questions about what to do with aftermarket triggers that allow for burst-firing or even fully-automatic firing, which are legal right now (and were used in the Las Vegas mass shooting attack). Banning certain items (ex: large-capacity magazines, trigger-mods, bump-stocks and the like) would still be an improvement.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/12/26/2018-27...
https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2021/12/bump-stock-ban-heading-...
Bump-stocks remain a public political issue, likely heading to the Supreme Court.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gun-owners-of-am...
The important bit is that each item here is a legal issue.
* Bump-stocks, yes or no?
* Trigger-mods, yes or no? (Especially the ones with burst and/or automatic fire modes).
* Magazines, what size should we ban? Is 10 bullets enough? 30 bullets? 100 bullets?
* Should bullets be regulated in general? We regulate larger-capacity bullets (ex: 155mm artillery shells aren't exactly sold in the streets, nor are 30mm autocannons). So where do we draw the line there?
Its not like mortars and grenade launchers are commonly available at gun stores. We have drawn the line and cutoff many kinds of weapons from normal use within this country. If we draw the line a bit more towards background-checks and removing the "automatic-weapons" (bump-stocks and trigger mods) from legality, that probably will help our country out.
There's really no way to make a semi-auto firearm that impedes full auto modification. Full auto is the default behavior. It's the trigger disconnector that makes a handgun semi-auto. That said, full auto isn't very useful. It's inaccurate and eats up ammo quickly, necessitating reloads.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_Owners_Protection_Act#...
This isn't true for any modern rifle or pistol design- the absence of the disconnector just means the gun stop working (hammer follow). You need additional parts to ensure that the gun works properly in full-auto; this is accomplished by a secondary trigger (the 'auto sear') that trips the hammer/striker after the bolt closes.
>There's really no way to make a semi-auto firearm that impedes full auto modification.
The only designs that work this way are all already classified as machine guns in the US, so they aren't made/sold there any more.
The original comment was about handguns specifically, and was likely a reference to auto sears on Glocks. The combination of striker-fired and reciprocating slide makes it very easy to trip the sear at the right time, giving you better reliability than simply disabling the disconnector. This tweet has a useful diagram showing how Glock auto sears work.[2]
The ATF did restrict the manufacture of new guns that fire from an open bolt (since they are trivially made full-auto), but old open bolt guns aren't classified as machine guns.
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qc2xpGQ_8w8&t=250s (just FYI this guy swears when his gun accidentally goes full auto)
2. https://twitter.com/keegan_hamilton/status/15074309018771292...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
The fully-automatic question comes up because of pragmatism and practicality. The guy used 1000+ bullets to fire upon a crowd. You physically cannot do that if you only had semiautomatic.
Luckily very few mass shooters have plans that are so well thought out.
I wish you hadn’t made your quip about the left saying “no guns”, because it isn’t important at all to your central point, which is that structural issues in the US prevent meaningful progress on gun control regardless of whether it’s good policy or the majority of people want it.
But you have like five people responding to that “left no guns” thing specifically, instead of to your real point, which is absolutely correct and the heart of the issue.
Oh, also? Has anyone actually been fired by the federal government? A cursory search shows 1800 people are on unpaid leave, but they haven’t been terminated. 1800 people out of an estimated 320k employees.
Weird.
Hint: it's what 92-96% of the US public consistently agrees with. Background checks without loopholes, for instance.
Background checks are standard procedure. I'm not sure what "loopholes" you are referring to. Usually this refers to private party sales. Do you want private party sales banned?
(I’ll give you my personal opinion: we can’t because of structural flaws in the US political system, and the problem is impossible to fix.)
> The root cause may be bullying combined with the media contagion effect.
You need the bullying (or other oppressive social condition) and the media contagion. And, as you say, you need the massive amounts of guns.
> but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
It is not clear to me that your statement is true. Given the Second Amendment, given the Supreme Court (and, in particular, the current makeup of the Supreme Court), I'm not sure what can be done.
If you see a path, we'd all love to see the plan...
But we probably wouldn’t even need to restrict it. If the president and other politicians shamed every media company that named the shooter when this happens we could probably make some progress.
According to a report[1] by Small Arms Survey in 2017, there were an estimated 120 civilian firmarms per 100 people in the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
That's almost twice as many as the next-closest nation.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smalla...
What gives?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/gun-owners-stud...
(correlation does not explain causation, but it may help to guide analysis)
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20211204010352/https://www.mothe...
Are there any numbers on how many people commit suicide with guns they bought in the last 6 months of their life?
I haven't yet, although I did find this publication from Boston University positive correlation between increased gun ownership and increased non-stranger homicide rates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-...
The post also questions how studies like the one you linked are measuring gun ownership rate. Every reliable study uses % of suicides with guns as a proxy for gun ownership rates. RAND notes the same thing: "A fundamental limitation for all of the studies is the lack of direct measures of gun prevalence. All of the authors use FS/S as a proxy for gun prevalence" https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...
The Buffalo shooter bought his rifle legally in New York. Same goes for the most recent shooter in Texas. The San Bernardino shooters bought their firearms legally in California, then modified magazines to accept more than 10 rounds. The Orlando night club shooter bought his guns legally. He even had a valid security guard license.
The only example I know of is Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter. He lived in Nevada and bought a WASR-10 (an AK variant) there, then drove to California to massacre people. While the WASR-10 is illegal in California, very similar rifles are legal in the state. Had he lived in California, he could have purchased a Palmetto State Armory GF3 (or any other CA-legal AK clone), then removed the grip fin and modified the magazine to accept 30 rounds.
The point I was trying to make is that people cannot take advantage of less restrictive gun laws in neighboring states. Almost every mass shooter either got their guns legally or stole them from a close relative (often by murdering that relative). There's no glaring legal loophole that these people are using.
What an oddly specific comment.
Comparative population could be relevant, although also doesn't explain the statistics you reference.
To try to prove/disprove the argument: has the prevalence (or nature) of bullying changed?
Quite possibly, not much.
It's something that varies a lot from one culture to another, and you need a lot of it, unchecked for years to destroy a person.
[1] https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2016/08/media-contag...
Is there a stronger element of the individual and individual glory/success/achievement in the US than other countries that might explain the narcissism?
The problem is our lack of social fabric. Kids don't have enough friends. They spend too much time looking at screens, and they can't imagine positive futures that they'd like to live out. They don't have enough guidance from parents and other adults to put them on a more positive path.
This isn't the one I was thinking about, but is on the same topic: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43323577
I have no comment on the contagion effect.
My >80 year old friend has suggested to me that this kind of problem didn’t exist before we started handing out pharmaceutical drugs of the variety that ‘handle’ mental illness.
Sidebar semi-related story time: my wife got her Masters in childhood education and went directly to work for a public high school after. She was a.. I forget, counselor assistant or something like that at a very large school in Texas. She quit after just a few months because she could see that they were just using her position as a funnel to get kids on some kind of pharmaceutical drug. She was literally reprimanded more than once because she recommended against putting some of the students on drugs and pushed them toward professional counseling instead. The parents are often clamoring to get a diagnosis so they can get their kids on drugs to ‘fix’ their problems, so it’s not exclusively the fault of the government, but they’re damn sure doing their part.
They’re drugging our children, MOST often unnecessarily. Perhaps if we used other methods to help, we would see other outcomes.
In the United States this has not been controversial for decades and is common knowledge among educators. I’m sorry, either you gravely misunderstood the situation, or your story is complete fiction. I’m concerned that you don’t know what her title was but you know they wanted the kids on drugs and maybe if we didn’t do that some kids would still be alive. I’m also concerned your story just happens to be in Texas, of all the places.
Source: Educator.
Edit: lol, six downvotes between HN cache misses kinda proves my subtle allegation, genius
At the time there was a lot of discussion about ADHD, the causes, treatments, etc and how to recognize it. Teachers had the authority to remove a child from the classroom if the teacher claimed the child was disruptive. The school would not allow the child to return to class until that kid was no longer disruptive. They used school nurses to make diagnoses of ADHD and to recommend on the official records in the school system that the child be medicated to help them deal with their "learning disability".
Parents needed to schedule appointments with pediatricians or child psychologists so that the kid could be evaluated and if that professional determined the child needed medication to be able to sit still in class, or to be able to sit quietly without talking out of turn then the child was required to take medication, typically Ritalin.
I don't know where you're from but a diagnosis of ADHD back then followed an individual through their entire public school career and teachers absolutely had the right to refuse to have a child labeled "hyperactive" in their classroom unless that child was medicated.
I have no idea how all that ended up as standard procedure. Texas began a decline in the quality of education in their public schools a long time ago and there is no opportunity to arrest that fall without removing most of those currently in office.
Your original poster may not have all his ducks in a row but he at least knows that he has a flock of something that quacks. I may also not have all my facts straight but I know I am pretty close. They are both ordinary adults now in spite of the things they had to go through as students in Texas public schools.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/21/children-who...
Quoting the article:
"According to America’s Centers for Disease Control, 11% of four- to 17-year-olds in the US have been diagnosed with ADHD, a label for those who are disruptive in class and unable to concentrate; just over 6% are taking medication."
"In the UK, meanwhile, about 3% of children are diagnosed with ADHD; just 1% are on medication. American children can go through six or seven different drugs quite early in their lives; in the UK, children are usually sent for cognitive behaviour therapy first, in line with guidance from the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence."
"It is now generally accepted, says David Healy, professor of psychiatry at Bangor University, that 20%-25% of students at most universities in the US are on medication, often on multiple prescriptions"
Maybe no one in your school is getting involved with it, but her school was doing diagnosis and referrals to external psychs.
But you don't see children being gunned down every other week in Europe.
The problem is guns.
No, the problem is guns in the possession of people who can't use them responsibly. Guns aren't magic. They don't take over a person's mind and make them shoot other people. The people who misuse guns would misuse any other weapon you gave them. Or even things that you might not think of as weapons.
But the vast majority of gun owners are not such people; they are responsible law-abiding citizens. So any policy about guns, at least in the US where we have the Second Amendment as part of our Constitution, has to be based on letting responsible, law-abiding citizens have guns. Otherwise you are punishing responsible, law-abiding citizens for the misdeeds of a very small number of people who are not responsible or law-abiding. That's not a good idea.
The problem is that guns are so readily available that even those that cannot use them responsibly can still get their hands on them. Three of the four guns used in Columbine weren't even purchased by the killers but by a fellow school mate who had turned 18 and could buy them for the killers. Similarly, with the Sandyhook shooting -- it wasn't even the shooter's gun that was used.
In the Columbine case, was the school mate prosecuted for, at the very least, negligently contributing to homicide?
With the Sandy Hook shooting, was the owner of the gun prosecuted for allowing the shooter to have it?
>With the Sandy Hook shooting, was the owner of the gun prosecuted for allowing the shooter to have it?
No, because she was the first person killed by the very weapon.
You don't see how, if people know they are legally responsible for what guns they own are used for if they give them to someone else, they would be more careful about who they give them to?
Obviously prosecuting someone after the fact is retroactive for that particular act. But that in no way means it does not send a signal to other people to proactively change their behavior. That is how most law enforcement has its effect. And it has the advantage of putting the responsibility where it belongs; whereas if you take away everyone's guns because a few people can't use them responsibly, or can't be bothered to be careful about who they give them to, you are punishing the wrong people.
Speed limits: Speed doesn't cause accidents just people who go faster than their ability to control the vehicle. Many people are sensible and wouldn't do this.
Drugs: Many people can take drugs and enjoy them and not descend into anti-social and criminal behavior.
Sure, and if "regulated" means a person has to show some proof of being a responsible citizen, that's fine.
This sort of attitude is a big reason why US politics is polarized around this issue. So let me try to adjust your "small punishment for a greater good" attitude a bit.
Guns are self-defense weapons. They are particularly useful as equalizers: a little old lady who can shoot can defend herself against a mugger much larger than her in a way she couldn't possibly do by any other means. So any government that proposes to take away people's guns "for a greater good" has an absolute obligation to extirpate any kind of violent crime that might cause a person to need a gun for self-defense. I mean "extirpate" literally: zero violent crime. Or at least so close to it as to be rounding error. But of course no government on Earth ever has or ever can achieve that level of control over violent crime, at least not in a free country. Perhaps China could do it, though even there I doubt it: China has criminal gangs.
So given that the government can't possibly make it truly unnecessary for any law-abiding citizen to need a gun, if the government still insists on taking away people's guns "for a greater good", the government is taking the attitude that, as long as the politicians who live in gated communities and have personal protective details can have their bodyguards have guns so they aren't victims of violent crime, they don't care that the people they're supposed to be representing are victims of violent crime and can't defend themselves. And that is not an acceptable attitude for the government of a free country.
Ah yes, the classic example of little old ladies defending themselves. This is pretty much a "think of the children" trope.
Guns in a home actually lead to greater dangers especially for women. Most people are actually murdered by someone they know, quite often a close relative of friend. It may not feel that way but you are actually safer not owning a gun.
No, you are actually safer not having an irresponsible person in your home. If everyone in your home is a responsible person, you might well be safer owning a gun. At worst it will be neutral as far as your safety goes (if you live in an area that is safe anyway). The fact that irresponsible people will use guns to do irresponsible things is not a valid reason to blame the guns. The blame lies with the irresponsible people.
Gun violence solved: Just don't have an irresponsible person in your home.
It's not like people have mental breakdowns or have an onset of a mental illness, right? Of course not, once responsible, always responsible.
Doing that doesn't just "solve" gun violence. Focusing on the guns as though they're the root problem when irresponsible people are involved is like painting over the rust on your car and thinking it "solves" the problem.
> once responsible, always responsible
I made no such claim. Obviously the responsible/irresponsible judgment is not one you just make one time and then it never changes. Any reasonable person will understand that making such judgments is an ongoing process.
Guns aren't the root problem but their accessibility is an enabler -- a multiplying force for opportunistic carnage.
>Any reasonable person will understand that making such judgments is an ongoing process.
This goes against what we've seen with mass killers and the third parties involved: Average, every-day people convince themselves that their loved one / friend will get over whatever they're dealing with. We also know that many of these mass killers are sociopaths and have no difficulties in acting normal and hiding their motives.
That still doesn't justify taking away guns from people who aren't going to commit opportunistic carnage. The root problem is the people, not the guns.
> Average, every-day people convince themselves that their loved one / friend will get over whatever they're dealing with.
I get that this happens. But the average, every-day people still have to understand that, if there is a gun in the house, "convincing yourself" is not enough. Unless you are sure, i.e., sure enough to bet your own life on it (because you are) that the person is not going to misuse the gun, you cannot allow them access to it. That is perfectly compatible with still believing that they will get over it in time.
> We also know that many of these mass killers are sociopaths and have no difficulties in acting normal and hiding their motives.
If you are not sure that someone is not a sociopath, then don't allow them access to your gun.
I simply don't see any of these things as valid reasons to take away guns from people who are responsible adults. If your definition of "responsible adult" actually does not include making judgments like the above, and being able to separate your emotional desire for a loved one to "heal" from your rational, practical need to not give them access to guns until you're sure they are healed, then your definition of "responsible adult" is wrong. And if our society has deteriorated to the point where the definition of "responsible adult" I am giving--which to a person of, say, my parents' generation would have seemed so obvious as to not even be worth stating--is something "average, every-day people" do not think they can live up to, then we have a much, much bigger problem with our society than gun violence. Our society has adult problems that require adult solutions. That requires adult citizens. If we don't have adult citizens, our society is doomed.
I don't think you're arguing in good-faith here. The Misdeeds of criminals? It's not like mass shootings are carried out by felons. They're carried out by mentally ill people that have access to guns they should not have access to. They're not criminals until they take action.
I could say the same about you, but I'll just leave it that I don't think you have thought through your position.
> They're not criminals until they take action.
And nobody calls for banning guns until they take action either. At which point, as you say, they are criminals. So the calls for banning guns every time there's a mass shooting are exactly what I said: calls to punish law-abiding citizens for the misdeeds of criminals.
However, Canada has stricter gun laws. While bolt-action hunting rifles are legal and unregistered in Canada, owning one involves getting PAL, which is similar to earning a driver's license. It involves lessons and tests.
And more... murder-y weapons like pistols and "assault-style"[1] rifles are either banned or restricted. Restricted means the gun is registered, you take extra certifications, and you fill out paperwork just to transport it from your home to the firing range, which is basically the only place you can legally fire the thing.
Shootings still happen. There was a tragedy in Quebec City a few years back where a "great replacement" nut shot up a mosque (which illustrates how we have the same cultural problems as Americans). But the number, per capita, is tiny compared to Americans.
It's hard to escape the obvious conclusion that the reason there are so many gun deaths in America is because guns are so poorly controlled.
Most of the street crime guns here are smuggled over the border (America is to guns as Escobar's Colombia was to cocaine), so the lax gun laws don't just impact the USA.
[1] yes I know it's a vague term but you also know what I mean don't @ me.
Our world is filled to the brim with vague constructed terms to solve for a problem, not for a clean categorization. The assault-style category is a desire to lump all the guns that multiply too much the assailant's power. It's not about a certain bullet type, or a specific barrel length. If it's too good at doing a mass shooting, it's assault-style.
The Wikipedia article only covers the major ones, but Canada has a mass shoot pretty regularly too. And if shooting scale by population, you'd expect the US to have 10x as many - all else being equal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_shootings_in_Can...
Certainly NOT saying it's not a problem, but one needs to put things in perspective if you want to get to the root cause.
US has 10X as many firearms deaths per capita compared to Canada, which implies 100X as absolute value.
https://globalnews.ca/news/2378037/gun-violence-by-the-numbe...
But murder rates are only 3x the US v Canada.
See the importance of the right statistics?
1000x more firearm deaths, but only 8x more firearm homicides but then 3x more murders.
I would definitely agree the US has a worse murder problem than Canada, but making is purely a gun problem misses the point. Do guns play a role? Sure.
IMO the biggest problem with the US over Europe is lack of social cohesion, lack of familial cohesion that includes extended families, focus on individualism over community, and lack of social safety nets. These factors have a huge impact on mental well being.
The idea that Europe and the US are very similar other than access to guns just because both are developed western nations is very naive…
California, Illinois and New York have different populations and different issues than Ohio, Texas, and Alabama for example.
And the social issues I pointed out are not state specific. I’d argue it largely applies to the US as a whole.
The person you are replying to did not say guns caused the tragedy. Rather the availability of guns in the U.S. is why we see school shootings every week in the U.S. and not in Europe.
When people in other countries lose their minds they cannot go on rampages as easily because of filters on gun ownership.
In fact before people go on rampages they often go to the US first to get guns so their rampages can be more 'effective' where they actually do live:
They totally can, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China:
> On March 23, 2010, Zheng Minsheng (郑民生)[7] 41, murdered eight children with a knife in an elementary school in Nanping,[8] Fujian province...
> An attacker named Wu Huanming (吴环明), 48, killed seven children and two adults and injured 11 other persons with a cleaver at a kindergarten in Hanzhong, Shaanxi on May 12, 2010...
> On 4 August 2010, 26-year-old Fang Jiantang (方建堂) slashed more than 20 children and staff with a 60 cm knife, killing three children and a teacher at a kindergarten in Zibo, Shandong province....
> The death toll has risen to nine in Friday's stabbing attack outside a middle school in northwestern China allegedly carried out by a former pupil seeking revenge for having been bullied....
etc.
> Reaction and response
> ...The state media has also been keeping news of these attacks quiet by deleting forum entries on the internet and releasing few facts on the incident for fear of copycat crimes and mass panic...
> Following the Chenpeng school attack, the Chinese government began posting security guards in schools throughout the country. It was planned that all schools have a security guard by 2013.
There's a reason 99.8% of this stuff is done with guns. AR-15s, to be specific, or something very similar.
It's because that's what is easy. These people aren't geniuses.
If you take the assault weapons away, the vast majority of this will just stop happening. This is a solved issue. We know how to solve it.
As a non US resident you can't help but think that is a massive part of the problem.
Many other countries have problems with bullying, mental health, radicalisation. We've also had mass shootings. But our tolerance is so much lower for that kind of BS. One shooting and it's over. The populace will support further gun control and stricter measures. This seems sensible to me since curing the underlying causes takes time. So why would you give firearms to people that aren't in the right state of mind to use them responsibly?
I think the real question is, why is the tolerance of Americans as a population, so high with regards to mass shootings? Are the lobby groups really that powerful they are changing the minds of regular people?
And then lots of states have similar structures.
I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. It may even be, the issue is when someone thinks they're the good guy with a gun, and they're not. They think they're bruce willis, and they're not. They think they're righting wrongs, and they're not. Their narrative is out of sync with mine.
This is a cultural issue apart from firearms. I may not be sober enough to make this statement, so salt to taste - but firearms aren't the root cause, they're the lubricant in a wider issue where you're all bruce willis in your own story. This combination of firearms and individualism is what separates you from examples such as Switzerland, Czechia, etc. The guns are only the medium through which a deeper problem is expressed.
Lots of movies made outside the US seem to have similar themes (But I guess I haven't watched that many; a recent one is The Raid).
Some of us can tell the difference between fact and fiction, between make-believe and reality.
I am reminded of the end of this scene from the movie Team America: World Police where the Parisians have mouths agape:
I mean, the majority of people everywhere are able to do this just fine, that's my point. US movie culture isn't particularly different than elsewhere.
Here's a popular French movie that celebrates impunity. A cop steals cocaine from some drug dealers and then makes war on them when they kidnap his son:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz_VfNacaeo
Maybe I got lucky and found the only one.
I think this is a commonly held belief, and that it is also false.
Why does Japan have a swat team? Why is the US sending antitank weapons to Ukraine?
Yeah, except there was a police officer right outside the building already:
> The suspect was immediately engaged outside the building as he approached the school by a Uvalde Independent School District police officer, who was shot by the suspect, the sources said.
* https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-elementary-school-reports-ac...
And this isn't the first time on-site individuals have been useless:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoneman_Douglas_High_School_s...
Even if officers respond with-in a minute, you still have multiple deaths and many injuries:
> Police at the scene engaged him within a minute of the first shots being fired, firing 18 rounds and hitting the gunman several times.[5]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shootin...
We should also look at what prevent school shootings. What in society might protect against a kid going to school with the intention to harm staff or students? A fatal event only occur if there is enough risk factors and not enough protective factors.
My own thoughts go to increase stress in schools as one factor, social media/news focus, increasingly larger difference in social class among students (source for social tensions), a lack of trained psychologists at schools, a culture that focus on individualism. Out of those, tensions from social class would be my primary suspect when asking why say Serbia has less school shootings than the USA.
The bullies become experts in the system. They trip, push, flick ears, and these days probably far worse.
I believe the stories from my parents day, that the solutions for kids USED to be, as others have also said, to throw a punch, to fight back. That sort of behavior worked because it prevented the creation of something terrible.
Victims. Fighting back is how you prevent the creation of victims. It works in the realm of the savage.
dsizzle, elsewhere in the thread: "You can't buy automatic or semiautomatic weapons, and registration — including background checks and safety training — is required for all gun owners."
Gun ownership is probably quite high because of war in recent decades, but it would be much more difficult for someone to impulsively buy a gun because they were currently angry and looking for an outlet or revenge.
The invention of the first person shooter (aka: the mass shooting simulator.) 30 years almost to the day.
But we’ve always had guns, so it’s not just the availability of guns.
We didn’t see mass shootings until the FPS was invented. And just about every mass shooter (certainly every school shooter) has been trained on FPS.
1. Most people can play FPS and not carry out a mass shooting.
2. FPS increases the chances that someone who is mentally ill carries out a mass shooting.
Also there's numerous studies that have come out over the past 20 years showing there's little to no connection between virtual violence and real violence. If anything, they help as an outlet. Google is your friend here.
Finally, Jack Thompson is a good cautionary tale of what happens when you let your tyrannical crusade overwhelm you to the point of destroying your career. Don't be a Jack Thompson. Violent games are very far down on the list of things to address regarding the US gun problem.
afaik the studies are all investigating whether video games make the average person violent or if they increase population-level violence and obviously they don't because until very recently violent crime has been at all-time lows.
> but it's only the US with the gun problem
Because we have guns. We all know this. But we've always had guns, and only recently have had mass shootings. So something else is at work here.
It's bizarre to me that so many tech people think we need to regulate speech, and news, and social media because it makes people do things they otherwise would not, but then they have this special carve-out for what are essentially mass shooting simulators, which they believe have absolutely no effect on anyone.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating for any policy here.
I don't think we do focus on individualism, either, and that's a problem. Proper individualism entails rigid personal accountability. Perhaps it's implied, and in effect what we've done is given a child a hammer without teaching them to swing it, no doubt many a sore thumb. In fact I really wonder if it's even probable that teachers can meaningfully interface with all but a few students.
I think workload has been increasing, and that's the anecdotal feedback I've gotten - harder work for younger kids. Less time for exploratory learning. Boys are perceived to have a significantly worse time than their female peers by their teachers. They also end up more disciplined. They're more likely to be "diagnosed" with ADHD than girls by a factor of two. Boys also experience higher dropout rates and juvenile detention. There's also an increasing rate of single mothers, and single parents just do not have it easy, women especially - and that puts more pressures onto the kids.
Support structures can be dogshit. Economy has moved. Families have been fractured and dispersed over long distances. And society doesn't really have the many support groups it once did. I can't speak statistically, but hearing about the dirt roads of the Denver Metro in the 70's and driving through it now, it's insanely packed. I grew up in rural areas, there were never any pretensions about danger or safety, and me and my friends wandered all over the town totally unsupervised as late as 2004. I don't know that such privileges are extended to these kids growing up in cities.
Expectations is another thing. Not only do the institutions make comparisons, they do it explicitly and loudly, but so do the kids. Yeah, the socioeconomic disparities I don't have any doubt play a role, but there's also kids watching these "perfect family" videos on youtube, watching super-human feats of every sort, egregious conspicuous consumption... And then they're just average, but the skew that such exposure introduces is, I can only imagine, pretty dangerous to some kids.
It's so multifaceted though. We've really got to look at the individuals holistically, track every step and kind of come to a real understanding of why they did it.
You hand wave away ease of access, but it probably matters. It certainly matters at the margin.
It is plainly obvious to any US citizen that has spent a significant amount of time outside the US, that the problem is guns.
The guns haven't changed in 60 years, and in fact regulations have increased across the board on both purchasing and manufacturing.
But, let's say it is "so obviously" the guns- how is "what is the solution" some kind of naive or ignorant question? Do you know the solution?
Carry regulations have decreased as evidenced in this animated map:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Right_to_Carry,_timeline....
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_concealed_carry_in_...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_...
In 1986 there were 16 no-issue states (including Texas(!)); in 2022 there are zero. One unrestricted carry state in 1986, 21 in 2022.
Of course overall gun violence is dominated by pistols (but I wouldn't expect the people using pistols to commit illegal violence to be overly worried with carry permits).
Regulations on purchasing have increased drastically over the last 60 years. It's harder to buy a gun now than it ever has been in this country.
I see this thrown around all the time, right before the term "ammosexual" comes out and right along with the allegations of compensating for dick size.
My counter-ancedote is that I haven't seen it, honestly. Guns are a hobby for some people, and I imagine that's been the same forever, right? Maybe a growing hobby, but to call it fetishization dismisses the vast vast majority of people who just like to peacefully enjoy their interests.
Also... what's changed with guns in that time frame? I wasn't trying to be dishonest in saying that. Modern ARs don't have any significant difference from the original Armalite model. Same with AK variants. Non-autoloaders haven't changed in well over 100 years.
I don't know your background, but for my part... I live in Canada, in a province that enjoys fishing and hunting (a great part of which is for leisure).
Notwithstanding, the fetishization of guns I observe from the US is deeply rooted: it's not so much a sexual thing (though I have no doubt that in some cases it could be) as it is an identity thing. (For an example of how the word "fetish" applies to guns in American culture, see [1] or [2].)
Enshrined in the very constitution, it defines what it is to live in America.
Politicians go on TV and passionately advance every argument, meritorious or malicious, that they can against gun regulation.
Civil discourse around guns lacks nuance and is extremely dogmatic.
The loud minority that worships their guns is particularly loud. "Regular people" are obviously more numerous and less noticeable, and my criticism of gun fetishization should not be confounded with denial of their existence or numerical superiority.
Still, the overton window in the US seems to be very accommodative to people with more guns than IQ points, and any proposed solutions to try and protect the vulnerable from violence, or ameliorate the situation, are met with outrage.
Generously speaking, the US (and the American sense of identity) has seriously struggled to transition from a society that broadly depends on guns to function, into a more specialized and developed society.
---
> What's changed with guns in that time frame?
Frankly, I don't know enough about gun design and technology to give your question the treatment it deserves or to give a good answer.
---
I don't think guns are an identity thing (in general). I think individualism and self-sufficiency are part of a particularly American identity though, and guns can be a symbol or reflection of that. The loud minority that worships guns (to the extent that it is their identity) might be particularly loud, but they're not the main drivers of policy. For every 1 of that loud minority, there's 10 "regular people" with more nuanced and well-thought-out opinions that do drive policy, which is why you haven't seen sweeping legislation involving either side's favorite wedge issues.
The 1:10 ratio is made up... point being that like you said, "regular people" are obviously more numerous BUT what we see legislatively is their noticeable effect, not that of a loud minority. It's a common trope on the internet, mass media, and politicians that there's somehow some small pocket of psychos holding us back from utopia.
Don't know how close you follow US politics, but a good example is the talk around West Virgina's Senator Manchin, who's become a very convenient scapegoat for why the party in power can't pass their more controversial pieces of legislation. In reality, there's just much less solidarity amongst Democrats than politicians want you to believe. And that's fine- all lack of solidarity means is that there's some room for compromise, an absolute necessity in a melting pot of 330 million people.
You're 100% correct on the politicians and the shitty, un-nuanced civil discourse. It makes extremists on either end just scream louder and louder past each other while the rest of us are just more and more stressed out every day, worrying for the future of our communities and country.
> any proposed solutions to try and protect the vulnerable from violence, or ameliorate the situation, are met with outrage
This is tough, and there are huge historical factors to take into account. The history of gun control legislation in the US is rife with racism, classism, ignorance, incompetence, and dishonesty. Whenever the topic comes up, the outrage you see is a direct result of that history, whether those involved in the outrage are aware or not.
> Generously speaking, the US (and the American sense of identity) has seriously struggled to transition from a society that broadly depends on guns to function, into a more specialized and developed society.
I think this is part of a broader "crisis" on how individualism and self-sufficiency fits in modern, developed society.
I honestly hope we figure it out, because I enjoy individualism and being self-sufficient; on a personal level, it makes me feel good about myself, and I think (maybe counterintuitively?) that it makes for stronger communities where people feel better for doing their individual part.
> Kerri Raissian, a professor in public policy at the University of Connecticut, said: “The NRA has crafted a narrative for decades that guns are a part of American social identity.”
https://www.ft.com/content/a5fce2c9-12f2-4457-af63-40a8d9b0c...
We had an assault weapons ban in the US, for a while, under Clinton. It worked. We should still have it.
The solution is to ban assault weapons, outright, and then institute strict background checks, without any loopholes. The vast majority of the public supports this.
Was that clear enough? Yes, I do know the solution.
"Assault weapon" is a political term with no solid definition. If you mean banning semi-automatic guns, that's at least a meaningful proposal. Again though- this class of weapons have been around and readily accessible for over 100 years. Mass shootings are a modern problem. Why would banning them now be the answer?
Until the Orlando shooting, the VT shooting, committed with two handguns and 10 round magazines, was the deadliest in US history. Charles Whitman killed 14 people with a bolt action rifle from the UT bell tower. I'm not saying these disprove your assault weapons ban solution, but it's certainly not as straightforward as you're making it out to be.
Was it an AR-15 with a ProMag 65-round drum magazine? Or did he bring in his Glock with several 9mm 40-round magazines?
Something has changed in our gun culture, for sure.
1. What kind of gun? Semi-auto or bolt action? 5.56, 30-30, .22LR?
2. How many guns did each person have? Each household?
3. What was the per capita ownership rate in the US when he was in school? (There are currently more guns than people in the US: 120.50 firearms per 100 people.)
I'm in New Zealand. New Zealand has guns. You need to take a class and be approved by the police who interview you and inspect your gun safe. Pistols are much harder to get. More than 10% of people have a gun license. There is almost no culture of using guns for self-defense against other humans. Farmers consider them necessary tools on the farm, hunters use them to hunt food, and DoC workers use them to cull pests (so do farmers). I also feed my dog about one-third of her diet by shooting rabbits and possum. Recently certain semi-automatic weapons were prohibited, but even before that we didn't have school shootings. Sometimes a family household would be slaughtered by a member of that household. Last night in Auckland seven houses were shot up in gang related violence.
At what point are we going to start blaming the criminals and not the implement they chose to use to commit their crimes?
Do those things happen in those countries on a daily basis?
* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting
There were 10 people murdered in Buffalo barely a week ago, and now there's been 22 people murdered.
How many 'mass knifings' have occurred in Japan in the last ten days? Were there two? Were there two 'mass drivings' in Japan in the last ten days?
Obviously this is the criminals fault. Knowing that doesn’t actually solve anything though. People are looking for solutions.
Aren't there already heavy penalties? Have there been any mass shooters that haven't been "adequately" punished?
My whole thing is that I do believe that "gun control" would result in less gun related deaths... but it wouldn't stop psychos from killing people. It's been shown time and time again that you don't need a gun to kill 10+ people.
I also don't think that we're at the point where we trust our government to the point of surrendering our best/final line of defense. I feel any sort of "gun ban" or "gun control" would be irreversible, certainly irreversible at any point it's needed most.
"I need my gun so I can get killed while holding it" is a boring argument.
Not at all.
The idea of armed citizens serves as a deterrent for any tyrannical regime. In what scenario do you see the military successfully occupying or holding control of the country for any significant period of time while the citizens are armed?
I also find your argument disingenuous, since when Democrats talk about “gun control,” it is always in terms of banning/confiscation. I don’t recall any calls to ban SUVs because some dimwit ran over a bunch of old ladies in a parade a few months ago. Therefore, it seems to me that Democrats are standing on the graves of children to push their agenda, rather than trying to actually solve the issue of people wanting to mass-murder others.
We have car control. Operating a vehicle requires a licence, training, registry and regular checks. Unlike owning a gun, which is inconceivable to everybody in the rest of the world.
Obviously there is criminal intent under all this but guns unequivocally amplify the impact. It's very hard to kill 25 people with a backpack of knives - this isn't a weekly occurrence, like shootings. You can't drive a truck down the corridors of a school.
I honestly don't know why we argue about this. Is there anything anybody could say that would change your mind?
Except there was a police officer right outside the building that engaged:
> The suspect was immediately engaged outside the building as he approached the school by a Uvalde Independent School District police officer, who was shot by the suspect, the sources said.
* https://abcnews.go.com/US/texas-elementary-school-reports-ac...
Not the first time even an immediate reaction still didn't prevent deaths and injuries:
> Police at the scene engaged him within a minute of the first shots being fired, firing 18 rounds and hitting the gunman several times.[5] The police chief credited the fast response to a heavy police presence with "many, many officers in the park".[18]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shootin...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10855093/Furious-fa...
A threat to gun ownership is equated to a threat to the freedoms fundamental to what makes the US 'the best country in the world'.
Any argument restricting gun ownership, no matter how logical or however great the weight of evidence, is up against this "the very DNA of the country" emotional position.
Gun availability has been said to be similar in the US to some other countries. Mental illness isn't limited to the US. The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. That's the differentiator. (this, my apologies, papers over the requested nuances of mental illness drugs, the cost and availability of medical care, the individual and societal effects of uber-capitalism at all costs, the equating of any level of socialism to be full-on communism, the widening ideological divide and/or the decreasing tolerance for the existence of differing ideologies to one's own).
My cynical take is: Why would this incident make any difference if none of the previous incidents have? It's a harsh observation, but this is "US normal", and has been for a long time.
A "war fought for freedom" is a long, long way from shooting innocent people at a school. Equating the two is a huge slap in the face to the vast majority of gun owners in the US who are responsible, law-abiding citizens and, while they would use their guns to defend themselves against tyranny, would never even think of using their guns to shoot an innocent person.
Ok, but why is this even a point worth making? The "difficulty" you refer to is there precisely because being a law-abiding gun owner who would still use their gun to defend against tyranny is not the same as being a criminal who uses a gun to shoot innocent people. Since they're not the same, calling it a "difficulty" that you can't take away the law-abiding citizens' guns in order to keep criminals from getting them makes no sense.
If your intent was only to take away guns from the criminals, not the law-abiding citizens, then the "difficulty" is not that the law abiding citizens view gun ownership as part and parcel of freedom. The difficulty is that of judging who is a law-abiding citizen and who is a criminal in advance, before any gun is used for anything. But, as others have posted elsewhere in this thread, the law-abiding citizens who own guns are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring people to show some evidence of being responsible law-abiding citizens before they can buy a gun, just as we require people to show evidence of being responsible drivers before we let them drive cars on public roads.
There are other countries where you don't really even know a gun owner and outside of video games or movies, entire social circles go months without even mentioning guns because they just aren't a big part of the localised zeitgeist. Completely different in the US where guns were a big part of the origin story of the nation.
Because it's a core component of the topic of this discussion thread. I think we're coming in at different angles to each other, but given what you've said here:
> law-abiding citizens who own guns are overwhelmingly in favor of requiring people to show some evidence of being responsible law-abiding citizens before they can buy a gun, just as we require people to show evidence of being responsible drivers before we let them drive cars on public roads.
I don't think we're in disagreement over some fundamental logical pathway to improvement. However, back to my original point: On this topic logic don't play, because history.
(and a powerful, entrenched lobby that leverages this emotional topic using slippery-slope, fear-of-loss-of-identity arguments).
It is impossible to assign any single causality to events that have such low occurrences unless you have billions of examples.
(Yes, the rest of the world data can provide counterfactual data, but it is still mathematically impossible because there are 100s of variables at play)
All this to say, this is a hard problem, composed of thousands of overlapping adjacent elements, we have very little insight (or reliable insight-gathering mechanisms) applicable to the system under investigation, and so throwing money or effort at the investigation is a gamble that a feasible solution exists at all, rather than a process of concrete deduction with a deterministic endpoint. Maybe the optimal amount of scrutiny should be different.
When an airplane crashes due to a design failure, thorough investigation often yields a specific design element or combination of elements acting as a root cause; and we have a much broader range of corrective actions available, including modifications to the design for improved redundancy, fault tolerance, higher likelihood of correct manufacture, lower defect rate, easier cockpit control, etc. We can also make process changes, like modifying the maintenance schedule, updating the maintenance checklist, pre-screening critical components for correlated early signs of defect, updating pilot training manuals, etc.
There are also plenty of cases where aircraft crashes occurred due to malfeasance. In rare cases, there might be a design mechanism that can prevent malfeasance, but aircraft are overwhelmingly designed to be built, maintained, and operated by people who aren't trying to misuse them for mass violence (sort of like malls, or public schools). But there's legions of process controls implemented on the hiring and training of the people directly involved with aircraft manufacture, maintenance, and operation.
And yet, Boeing still made a plane that dropped out of the sky twice. And that wasn't even necessarily malfeasance - a good chunk of it can likely be chalked up to second or third order effects of cost saving measures and siloed design teams. I guess you could make an argument for malfeasance, but something something incompetence indistinguishable from malice... in any case, the technical analysis of the design problem is totally solved, but what about the process control by which the design came to be flawed in the first place? I genuinely don't know whether they've modified or added to their process controls to prevent the same design flaw, let alone others not directly related.
Scores of new process controls were put into place in the wake of 9/11 (which incidentally resulted in about the order of magnitude of casualties observed in all US mass shootings since (I think? There's a few different numbers floating around, depending on the threshold for which a mass shooting is recorded)). Many additional "process controls", if you'll allow the tortured reading of the concept, were implemented outside of aviation - a multi-trillion dollar double decade war campaign, passenger luggage and body scanning, and mass surveillance systems, to name a few. 20 years later, and none of this prevented a pilot from doing some unauthorized loops in the Seattle sky before crashing, and very likely nothing except for a lack of killing intent prevented him from flying his plane into a building downtown. Were the process controls implemented after 9/11 effective? I genuinely don't know the answer. Maybe aviation terrorism just has a low base rate to begin with. Maybe I'm uninformed, and our process controls have foiled numerous attempts at terrorism. It's hard to tell with rare events.
Unlike with engineering design work, where you can deduce real responsibility for failure and synthesize a test case to prove the soundness of a design, debugging complex and rare psychological or sociological phenomena is substantially more inexact. Mass shooters are a statistical anomaly against the population as a whole. People are aware of process controls and can deliberately plan subversion tactics. The snarled mess of genetic predispositions and environmental insults that drive someone to terrorism are not guaranteed to be the same across multiple people, especially at the long tail of the distribution. Preventative policy proposals can be misguided or undermined for numerous unrelated reasons, never achieving the desired effect.
None of this is to say we shouldn't try to find and implement effective process controls on mass violence... I just hope to offer an explanation why mass violence can't be approached with the same rigor as human-designed engineering systems with any predictable return on investment.
> Everytown tracks every time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds
Which means they're counting individual fights, and or gang violence in with all these shootings. In addition it looks like the vast majority of their data points list no injuries or deaths. They also include things like this in their statistics:
> A car entered the east parking lot at a high speed and hit one student. The CCSD police officer ordered the car to stop, and when it didn't, fired their gun at the car. Two teenagers in the car-- one a 16-year-old boy and one a juvenile-- were struck and injured by the officer's gunfire.
So this is an injury sustained from an officer trying to stop two kids who injured somebody with their car, not a gun.
If you want to talk about how we can combat school shootings how about we agree to use honest statistics? It doesn't help anyone to quote shoddy studies like this. In addition I found this[1] research paper that claims the original paper people quote to show the US is the leader in school shootings does not show how they got their data. In addition they refuse to show how they calculated their statistics. This paper goes on to show that the US may be significantly lower than the number one spot.
The reason I even looked at this stuff is because in the link you posted it said there 288 school shootings in the US this year! That claim sounded very far fetched. I know there have been some nasty events so far this year, but if there had been 288 shootings this year alone, I feel like there would have been a lot more news about it. That averages to almost 2 shootings every day this year. And I'm expected to believe these statistics are a factual claim?
Edit: And yes I know that this paper is from 2018, but I'm posting it because there is clearly weird stuff going on with the statistics that were quoted in the original posters linked "research" website.
[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDiti%C5%A1te_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velika_Ivan%C4%8Da_shooting
Serbia's gun laws are much closer to those in NYC than to those in Texas.
It's not really much of a comparison or illustration that the problem isn't ready access to firearms.
Also isnt there recent history of people going to different states to buy guns to shoot people in another state? Its not like there are border police checks
We are literally the only country on there that has more guns than people (the 2nd highest is literally half our amount per capita!). Now look at the ratio of unregistered to registered in the US. We clearly have a problem compared to other countries.
392 times more unregistered guns than registered, good god.
Maybe we could try, I don't know, literally what Australia did after their mass shooting?
Heck, if it doesn't work, feel free to have all the guns you want. But can we at least fucking try to change it?
The only way to break the positive feedback loop would be to significantly ban most reporting of these incidents, which violates the first amendment, while the other band-aid solution violates the second. And neither of these address the cultural problems creating a fearful culture with so many socially isolated people who may want to get attention by doing the things our culture teaches us to fear.
If we can move this debate one epsilon forward it will be through recognizing that some events have many causes that combine in complex ways.
It certainly feels like someone alive for the last 40 odd years that Columbine was the inflection point at which media really started to cover this. Either that is just because 1999 happens to be my own graduation year and I was too young or not paying attention any earlier, or maybe media coverage really did pick up compared to prior incidents, for whatever the heck unknown and largely random reason. We were still early into the 24 hour cable news cycle and widespread availability of the world-wide web, but as we can see, this was not the first even in 1999.
Assuming this is an accurate list, I don't see how we can possibly identify a root cause. This was happening before there was a 2nd amendment. Before there was heavy metal. Before video games. Presumably not before mental illness, but that is hardly a uniquely American problem. Sometimes national culture just picks up a particular character for whatever quirk of history that may not even be fully known or knowable, some forgotten confluence of events that continue to influence us today without anyone knowing it is happening or why.
We were among the first countries to offer widespread public education, weren't we? This was even true in colonial times. Maybe the gathering of fairly vulnerable people just makes an enticing target. And sure, there are other public gatherings of vulnerable people, but this one has been around for a very long time, enough to have presented opportunity centuries ago and get woven into barely conscious national memes about where you go if you want to shoot a bunch of people. In other countries, churches and trains seem to fill that role.
Then my first question to you, regarding your "what can we do" issue, is simple: are you connected to your kids? Are you engaged in their lives? Do they feel like you care about them?
When I was a kid, my answer to all three of those questions about my parents was always an unqualified yes. And the idea of committing any kind of violence, let alone a school shooting, would never have occurred to me. You could have had me at the gun range practicing every day and it would never have crossed my mind to actually try to kill someone with a gun, unless it was absolutely necessary for self-defense.
When the background eventually comes out on mass shootings, one common factor I always see about the shooters is that they weren't connected to other people. So I think one obvious thing any of us can do for others to keep such things from happening is to give other people connections.
The conversations aren't the problem, the guns are. There's not really a path to compromise here, I don't think. Either we stop having guns like we do now and a lot of people will be vocally upset, or we continue allowing the routine murder of children. Talk about it as carefully as you want, either way there's going to be conflict.
I am not an expert on public policy, violence, jurisprudence, or legislature. It's not my place or responsibility to design or implement the solution to this problem.
I'm a citizen who is not willing to accept that routine events like this are an acceptable cost to pay for any freedom. There are probably a wide range of policies that could prevent this, it's up to experts to figure it out. My role is to demand that they do.
Bad policy can be, and is often, worse than the status quo.
Part of this depends on where you are in the US - but the gp statement is true - we have added more and more gun laws - and it's still illegal to murder people - and yet people still murder people.
Biden bans ammo imports from Russian - the main source of 7.62x39 ammo - one of the most common rifle rounds in the US. This massively spikes the cost of ammunition.
Biden has also pushed the ATF recently to start more shenanigans with redefining things in relation to SBRs, Pistol Braces, and Supressor parts. It remains to be seen what effect this will have.
I can tell you aren't a gun owner of course but you might still find the ATF interesting. Basically they 'reinterpret' things as they see fit and thereby things that were legal become illegal (but almost never the other way around). Its a work around as they are basically creating new laws - however that is not legally a power assigned to them.
The causal model for gun violence is simple. Motivation, and access to guns. We can and should address motivations. Reducing access to guns has a strong effect too, evidenced by other countries people bring up "mass knife murders" of like 5 people in.
Arms get tired with knives. Cars can't drive everywhere. Bombs and explosive devices take special skills. Restricting access (even indirectly, through increasing cost of ownership via mandatory insurance purchases, required registration of last owner of record [and having that owner culpable when their weapons are used], and so forth) reduces gun death.
Part of it is the notoriety and that comes with getting a large number - and if you can't do it will bullets - they will discover fire / carbon monixode, bleach and.. heck I'll bet there's a new fake ticktak challenge showing these things and more. how to recon to turn off AC and disable sprinklers and chain doors.. and the counts will be much higher.
I submit we need to focus on things like teaching conflict resolution, and have peer groups that can help the bullied and the slighted and things like that will likely have a better impact on changing these things.
(there's not enough counselors and they don't have enough reach when they are available)
I mean stressing the kids to learn geometry (and not conflict resolution) and just ignore the bullies is not working.
luckily locking doors and other methods can help with the bullets issue, that won't prevent mustard gas or a bus exhaust from penetrating and making someone famous.
Let's test thst assertion.
Every other argument I've seen has been appeals to emotion without actually framing the cost/benefit relationship in any useful way.
Can we rephrase the problem as: how do a society gets rid of a bad meme?
Memes do not stop at borders, and yet the hot zone for the school shooting plague is localized within the USA.
It's the cheap plentiful, underregulated firearms.
To be fair, the Canadian Supreme Court rarely does anything of everyday relevance to Canadians, much like all aspects of the political system except for which party happens to be in power (the exact identity of the PM is similarly irrelevant, though everyone knows who that is).
I'm a gun owner btw.
I also wonder what interesting things would happen if in order to own a gun you must drill with a militia.
Should people who have unfashionable or unpopular opinions be not allowed to purchase a firearm? Or is it that they made a threat of violence at some point?
https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/10/19/main-witness-in-santa...
Or for instance, does it mean that the federal government can't ban state organized militias?
9th: The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. 10th: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
What meaning would the 4th have, if "The People" were state assemblies? "The right of the people to be secure in their persons"... Would that mean it was up to individual states to decide if you are secure in... What, exactly?
Or consider the 1st, "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances"... Why would a state need to petition "The Government", as it is "The Government".
There is no reasonable reading of the constitution that reads the second amendment as anything but an individual right.
Social Media activity check is a violation of the 4th amendment.
You can't tax or gate a right by requiring someone to join a militia.
Checking your activity on social media during a firearms background check is not a violation of the 4th amendment.
You can certainly enforce the second amendment militia requirement, although it will require a vast different SCOTUS than the one we have now.
If it was non-public activity, I could imagine a court finding that it is. I could also imagine courts finding using social media activity that doesn't unambiguously indicate intent to commit a crime as part of a firearms background check to be a violation of the 1st and 2nd amendments.
The government looking through your personal information requires due process, otherwise its a violation of the 4th amendment.
Likewise, if the first amendment said something along the lines of "A personal connection with his creator being necessary for a upstanding and moral citizen, Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof..." I think you'd also have a hard time arguing that athiests and agnostics don't have a right to free expression or to not have a religion forced upon them by the government.
Who knew the solution was so easy.
However right now trust in the government is so low that even if the constitution was amended many gun owners would probably be unlikely to accept the result.
2/3rds of each house, 3/4ths of the states
You might get agreement on that point. You won't get agreement on what the bugs are, though, so fixing them by changing the Constitution is rather difficult.
Besides the blatant first amendment violations, this would be incredibly subjective and abuse prone.
> Increase the age to purchase to 21.
We should take away 18 year olds right to vote as well. If they’re incapable of owning a firearm then they’re clearly incapable of having a voice in deciding the rules around them.
Given the nature of American militias, likely white supremacist radicalization.
The USA has had 52 mass shootings in April of 2021 alone.
If it's such a "complicated issue", why did the frequency of mass shootings in Australia drop to negligible levels after they took the simple step of enacting a comprehensive gun ban?
Ban. The. Guns. It's that simple.
Edit: Okay I realize my comment was a bit flippant. It is a pet peeve of mine when solutions are proffered like this that don't take into account the many obvious difficulties in actually making it work (political, social economic etc.) as if nobody has thought of this. Sure, many people would love to ban and confiscate all the guns, but due to politics there is a 0% chance of that happening in the US, so it is not "simple".
It appears largely because the gun ban simply changed the method by which massacres occurred. Using the list from here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia), using the Port Arthur shootings as the pivot point for a 25 year look back and forward, we find before Port Arthur ('71 to '96) there were 123 people killed in some form of multi death incident and a total of 22 incidents. After ('96 to april '21) there were 146 people killed in 37 incidents.
There are some issues I take with that list as a whole, for example for this discussion familicide probably doesn't really enter into it, or a number of the incidents include the perpetrator (which I have tried to filter from the numbers above). If I try to cut the values down to just non-familicide incidents, it looks like 88 deaths in 16 incidents prior and 89 deaths in 23 incidents after.
Admittedly yes the raw number of shootings did go down. But at least to me, that would be a cold comfort to know a dead relative or friend was burned to death rather than shot. If the end goal is to stop people dying by firearm, then fair enough, Australia's laws appear to have done that. If the goal however is to stop people from being killed or attacked in senseless acts of violence, then I think these numbers make the argument that killers will kill with whatever tools they can get their hands on and the issue is indeed more "complicated" than just making one such tool illegal.
Sure there were more incidents, but the population also grew considerably from an average of 15.6m over the first period, to 22.1m over the second - a 41% increase. Applying that increase to the 16 incidents gives us 22.5, almost exactly the actual number (23). So even though the number of incidents per capita didn't drop, the deaths per incident fell 30%.
Honestly, to me that number isn't nearly as impressive enough to justify surrendering one of your only practical defenses against a tyrannical regime.
This takes your chances of dying from a terrorist attack from 0.0000001% to 0.000000066% ?
Likewise, there's an entire country currently undergoing an invasion being fought not only by their regular army but by civilian volunteers too. And sure, such an event happening in the US is unlikely given our particular neighbors, but then again even up to the day of the invasion various analysts were sure it would never happen so predicting the future can be a bit difficult.
We don't live in a post conflict world, and our country isn't immune to bad actors.
The fact that many, many people have thought exactly as you do. That they had reached the pinnacle of governance to the point that they would never collapse or need to defend themselves. A significant portion of the population figured WW1 was the "war to end all wars" merely on the premise that the war was so great, like nothing they had ever seen before. We are seeing unprecedented peace but I see no reason to think that historical peace == future peace.
If you want a more "objective" answer... Conflicts arise far too often to suggest one of them won't turn into a scenario that allows for occupation or tyranny. How many people seriously predicted Ukraine would be invaded?
If you truly think "most countries are past that point" - which countries are you referring to and how long do you think they will last/remain stable? How would one come to this estimate?
we are not talking about 1 or 2 people dying here, these are dozens of helpless lives gone in a matter of minutes!!
Those maniacs (first Sandy hook and now Rob elementary) wouldn't be able to kill dozens of innocent kids so easily if they didn't have access to firearm.
There are much more destructive and arguably easier ways to kill _more_ people. Someone that is more than willing to march into an elementary school and take the lives of innocent children wouldn't just stop their plan to do such a thing because they can't get access to a gun. They'll go down to their local uhaul or start a fire.
One guy with a truck managed to kill more people than even the deadliest shooting in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
The deadliest arson attack on a nightclub in the US killed nearly 2x as many people vs the deadliest shooting at a nightclub. And again, more people than the deadliest shooting in the US _ever_.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Land_fire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting
No idea how you can claim these methods are not as effective.
Because most of these killers aren't trying to kill as many people as possible. They're trying to get attention and "revenge" on society. I'm convinced Columbine literally started this whole thing, due to the way society views it.
>The fact that this 18 year old kid was able to order so much ammunition online is so ridiculous
Sure... but I still don't believe this 18 year old kid would have just given up on his plan to seek revenge. What would stop him from ordering or acquiring a machete and doing essentially the same thing?
There was a knife attack in Japan that left and equal amount of people dead. https://www.cnn.com/2016/07/25/world/japan-knife-attack-deat...
I honestly believe that tighter gun laws would reduce gun deaths... but I think its disingenuous to suggest they would prevent these mass killings or even meaningfully reduce the amount of deaths. Shown in my other comment, other and arguably even easier methods have proven to kill more people.
More kills, more attention and revenge.
An. But I agree with you that there may be some kind of media/ copy cat component. But what doesn't make since with that theory is that in today's global communications, why is it so much more in the US.
Nothing stopped him from acquiring any of that but still he waited for his 18th birthday so that he could legally buy guns. If it was made difficult for him to buy guns then probably he would have just dreamt about it and over time given up on it. Most 18 year olds are technically adults but still very very stupid and have no control over their emotions.
I don’t understand, this kid just killed 21 4th grade kids!!
I agree that there are other affective methods of mass killing but then why don’t we see them happening more often all over the world. You keep pointing at these one off incidents.
Anyway, I don't believe that owning a firearm without a license and strict government oversight is a right.
This sounds like an extreme exaggeration, do you have a source to back that up? I've heard similar said about Canada, for example, but I've familiarized myself with the legislation and some case law and there is a very high bar to getting somebody a slap on the wrist.
In context this is supplemental to violent suppression of minorities.
Except that's not what they did. Meanwhile New Zealand went much longer than Australia without a mass shooting without restricting people's rights. Unfortunately, they cracked down after Christchurch, but you get the point.
- Well Afghanistan people have access to lot of guns , lots of it and maybe even tanks. But they don't go to school that much. And in Serbia the population is thinly spread across vast swatches of ice. Not exactly LA.
Lets simply stop talking and just bring a bill to buy back all automatic guns and destroy them. This country needs it.
I think there have to be other approaches here that can actually happen. The element of cultural memesis and role of the media in making anti-heros of these deranged young men is worth examining. It’s also pretty clear that the current approach to bullying in schools isn’t working at all. It also seems like it’s just too easy for some young men in their late teens to just fall through society’s cracks, I don’t know what the answer is there.
Ironically, my home town in TN is a lot safer than where I now live in the Bay Area, where legal gun ownership is restricted and frowned upon. I don't think that's _why_ it's less safe here, but it's interesting to see the opposing mentalities.
I second the sibling commenter in thinking you got it confused with Siberia.
People will make up all kinds of reasons why "this doesn't happen anywhere else", they'll completely ignore the actual cause of the violence (a person), they'll make excuses, bring up solutions that are illegal, entirely ignore cultural issues, ignore that psychopaths are looking to be famous, point at more laws which won't do anything because the existing ones didn't work/etc.
Which ignores the fact that its a lot harder to kill 18-children + 1 teacher with a sword, than it is to kill the same number with a gun.
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There's also the discussion point where "background checks won't have any effect", except we know that this person legally purchased a gun just days before deciding to shoot his grandma (and continued the shooting-spree into this school).
Just giving that person maybe 2-weeks of break between buying the gun, and having the gun, could have been the time needed for that person to calm down internally and find himself. As long as people can walk into a gunstore, pickup a gun the same day, they can execute these power-fantasy moves.
I'm not sure if a background check would work in this case. But any kind of "innate delay" to the gun buying process, to give any would-be mass shooter some time to think it over, would almost certainly reduce the amount of gun violence. Almost all major mass shootings in the USA for the past decade seemed to be with a very, very, very recently bought gun (within a week or two).
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The "background-check" argument seems to point out the issues of spouse-abuse as a high correlation to mass gun shootings. It'd probably work in other cases, but not this most recent shooting.
The "background check" against racism might work, since just a few days ago there was a racially motivated mass shooting.
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In any case, there's a lot of bad talking points on this subject, pretty much espoused by everybody? I'm not entirely sure how to move forward with discussion.
The question is "what should be on the background check". Spousal abuse seems like an easy one, since that is a crime and seems to correlate to these attackers. Adding it to the process seems easy enough, as long as we get enough people to agree it should be a background check option.
Racism unfortunately has free-speech / 1st amendment right issues. It'd be a harder discussion point in general. But there needs to be a discussion about the rise in hate-speech and racism, especially since a lot of these mass-shootings are racially motivated.
> Are you subject to a court order, including a Military Protection Order issued by a military judge or magistrate, restraining you from harassing, stalking, or threatening your child or an intimate partner or child of such partner?
> Have you ever been convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime of domestic violence, or are you or have you ever been a member of the military and been convicted of a crime that included, as an element, the use of force against a person as identified in the instructions?
The information is verified by NICS[2], which will reject you if you've been convicted of domestic violence or are subject to a court order. Lying on this form is a felony punishable by up to 5 years in prison. The penalty applies even if the NICS check fails (meaning you never got possession of the firearm).
1. https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/4473-part-1-firearms-trans...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Instant_Criminal_Back...
Question 21.i on Form 4473
Here is the system:
https://www.fbi.gov/services/cjis/nics
If have been convicted or under indictment for a felony, dishonorably discharged, have a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction or a restraining order, you will be denied.
If this sounds expensive and cumbersome, that's the point. It should be expensive and cumbersome to get a gun. The fact that it's so easy to get a gun in the USA is the problem.
If I were Biden, I'd get Congress to pass a comprehensive gun ban. No guns or ammo of any type without a federal license. Assault weapons completely banned. Mags over seven rounds completely banned. Trafficking in ghost guns or information on the manufacture of ghost guns including CAD files for 3D printed guns -- banned. I would get the IRS and the BATFE to conduct enhanced audits and investigations of businesses who sold guns to ordinary schlubs including gun shops and gun and ammunition manufacturers. Yes, this will raise constitutional issues, but the lawsuits would take years to work their way through the courts, during which time I would binge-nominate Supreme Court justices who aligned with my views on the matter, bringing the total number of justices to 12 or 14 or so, and ensuring that effective defanging of the Second Amendment becomes national precedent when the cases do finally reach the Supremes.
There is no excuse for so many guns being on the streets of a civilized nation.
Excellent point. Everyone is born a potential mass murderer until proven otherwise by the totalitarian government surveillance apparatus whose reach must be expanded even further to investigate the dangerous thoughts and opinions of the citizens so that subversive ideas don't galvanize into armed revolt and insurrection, and if you were president of the USA you'd do everything in your power to further corrupt and erode yet another one of the very principles the nation was founded upon.
Gun licensure will probably affect suicides more than it does mass murders. That's still an enormous improvement.
That's exactly what you are saying.
> only that you should need a license to own a gun
> you need to subject yourself to deep government scrutiny
The USA was founded upon some very simple principles. Everyone is innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to bear arms. You won't be subjected to unwarranted government interference.
What you're advocating for violates all of those. You don't see free human beings whose innocence and right to be armed is presumed. You see suspects, potential mass shooters who have no business owning firearms until they prove to the government that they're innocent.
The right to bear arms is a symbol of a people's freedom and self-determination. You'd see them reduced to sheep in exchange for the illusion of safety.
> The fact that you inferred "everyone is born a mass murderer" from that says a lot about how sick America is compared to the rest of the world on the matter of guns.
I'm not american, I'm brazilian. I'm part of "the rest of the world".
Brazil is a country that actually held a referendum about gun control, discovered that over 60% of the population was against it and then effectively disarmed us all anyway. As a result, armed criminals invade our homes with the absolute certainty that we pose no threat to them. Even in formerly peaceful rural cities where some of my relatives live.
I suggest you think very carefully about what sort of future you want.
Imagine saying this about blogging, another adjacent human right.
I would never harm anyone unprovoked and attacking anyone in my state would be suicide as everyone here is packing. The ratio is something like 221:1 firearms to people, yet no mass shootings, yet. No idea why. There are virtually no ammo or suppressor restrictions. My state and a neighboring state have a 66% firearm ownership rate but I think that counts children.
The only thing that really comes to mind is that most folks here are religious, mostly Mormon. They are very family oriented and if a kid is getting picked on the parents will confront the other parents, likely in church. There is a bit of peer pressure to not be a bad person. But that could be entirely unrelated.
In other words, there is not enough data to draw any conclusions about whether WY is better off in this regard.
Waiting periods are never effective for anything aside from suicide, and they may technically be unconstitutional, that is being fought in the courts right now.
NICS checks are really only effective in dealing with criminal behavior. In this case we're talking about a psychopath who had been manifesting outwardly for a while. For the most part you can't legally background check someone's mental health. What would've worked in this case is "social surveillance" and having the people he interacted with every day report him.
Wikipedia gives me the Kongsberg Attack, which was only 5 people killed + 3 injured. This is much much smaller than the 18 people killed in this elementary school, + the grandmother of the suspect (who was probably shot before the whole event started).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting
Las Vegas shooting was 50+ people killed.
Orlando Nightclub: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orlando_nightclub_shooting
49 people killed.
It seems like dropping down to knife/sword fights would cut deaths significantly, unless you can show me some mass-stabbing numbers close to these 50-ish sized crowds.
Then there are mass murders using vehicles, like it happened in Europe several times in the past 15 years, or mass destruction with vehicle, like the "Killdozer" in USA itself.
I'm arguing that in the USA, mass-murder events have 15 to 50 deaths involved. In other countries, the number is just 5 to 20.
Weapons of choice matter. Guns kill more people more reliably than a knife, or even a car.
If we're playing argument by anecdote though, the perpetrator of the Nice attack killed 86 people and wounded 458 with a truck: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack
Violent dangerous people find a way.
The scale is irrelevant to the actual problem.
I agree. Mass killers will find a way. But if the way they find is a gun, we are looking at 20 to 50 deaths.
If they find a knife or sword instead, it will probably be less than 10 deaths.
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Now we have video camera showing that the guy shot the police officer at the school before going on a rampage. Do you think the guy would have been able to attack the police officer (who almost certainly had a handgun) with just a knife?
The real question is that of motive - why innocent children in the first place? USA has more than an epidemic of mass shootings, it has an epidemic of school shootings. Where does the urge to do such an evil thing come from?
The literal argument, from 3 posts ago, was that they'd find a knife.
Now that I've destroyed the "knife" argument, people are making newer arguments... unironically moving goalposts back. In any case, cars and truck attacks can't kill people inside of elementary schools. The school would block the bulk of the damage. Or you put concrete barriers to protect the school from the road (which is needed for accidents / vehicles that lost control anyway)
> Were does the urge to do such an evil thing come from?
Why are you changing the argument? The evil is innate to us and worldwide.
Why should that evil be equipped with a gun in this country? Other countries, they're forced to make due with weaker weapons, such as cars, trucks, or knives.
If we cannot stop the evil, then we mitigate it.
My overall point: "They'll find a knife" is a bad counterargument. "They'll find a knife" is the very point of gun-restrictions, we cut back upon the worst damage they these mass killers can do.
> The evil is innate to us and worldwide.
Prevailance of school shootings in US show that this kind of evil is indeed not innate worldwide. It is strongly rooted in United States. Nowehere else in the world people with access to firearams choose to end innocent children's lives at such scale. This is what troubles me.
Availability of guns is not unique to USA but using those guns to kill innocent children at super-unproportional scale is. Why?
If you don't have the answer to that question, the obvious solution is to remove the gun from the equation until you can answer the question.
Motive is an interesting question, but I think it's worthwhile to consider means as well.
If that’s true it would still be a big win.
There are also a lot of people who believe people have the right to end their own lives.
Cutting yourself with a knife results in your pain overriding your own brain. The innate will to live in our bodies causes us to back off of that kind of pain.
Pills / Poison take a significant amount of time, time that someone can find you and rush you to the hospital and save you.
Guns are often the most reliable suicide. Either shooting yourself, or death-by-cop (attacking a cop, and having them shoot you).
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Yes, suicidal people will find other ways. But we should cut and minimize the "reliable" suicide methodologies. Suicide-by-cop is more successful if you have a gun( without a gun, the cops are more likely to use non-lethal force and bring you in. With a gun, you're absolutely going to die on the street as they light you up).
Are you saying that other countries with less gun violence per capita just have better people?
It's unclear why people keep claiming this. According to https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own... , in 2020 while rural firearms ownership was ~48%, urban and suburban firearms ownership was 23% and 25% respectively in the US. That's a minority, to be sure, but it's not by any means a "very small" minority.
In fact, gun owners (like the general population) are heavily in favor of increasing gun control, especially things like closing loopholes in background check laws[1].
The people who won't entertain a discussion about increasing gun control are a minority of extremists who just happen to be a large enough voting bloc to dictate the GOP's position on guns.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-a...
The reason that gun owners are in practice against this, of course, is that implementation of these has consequences like "you have to waive HIPAA rights to pass your background check" (WA).
I'm unconvinced that being in favor of an idea, but against the bad-faith compromises that always seem to come with it, qualifies as "extreme".
While technically true, according to this poll of 5,000 people, I think many may read 'gun control' in different ways, and do not think it's fair to the average person who would believe what they read at face value.
For example, this poll suggests a majority of the dems and repubs are in favor of "preventing those with mental illnesses from purchasing guns " and what the article says is "subjecting private gun sales and gun show sales to background checks"
But if you look at the question they asked: "Making private gun sales and sales at gun shows subject to background checks"
This is not exactly the same terminology.
I wish the question was broken up into three parts.. and I feel that a lot of repubs would go along with this answer in the poll for a few reasons, including that it's already understood that you go through background check when you buy at gun shows.. and the 'law and order' groups are likely to not give a fudge if people who could not pass a check do not get one.
Where it would be even more different is if they said 'all private transfers' (I think Wash State did something like this a while back or similar?) - I doubt most people are on board driving an hour to do a background check on uncle Bill to let him use a family shotgun for the weekend..
But anyhow - I find it a tough sell when I hear folks like Shumer say 'a majority are in favor of more gun control' - and to have many believe the words coming his mouth to mean something.. when more accurately he could say 'a majority of Americans are in favor of "Preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns" -
which sounds a bit different, and then it begs more questions about like - someone who has a mental breakdown this week.. or someone who's gotten X or Y drug for the last 10 years or what does that really mean, and what about starting a national DB of all people who have met with a counselor.. and what that path looks like.
I really think we all need to change the term gun control and get more accurate descriptors to use... preventing subsections of people from buying them? preventing certain types? confiscation?
I wish we would all be more specific, as this is leading a lot of people into believing that 'hope and change' is a thing when really, unless you confiscate, none of that other stuff is going to reduce the millions on the streets.. so you might not want to be restricted in what you can get in the future. For some folks maybe not - there are absolutists who think 1 less on the street makes everyone safer. I myself think it depends on the 1 and depends on the street.
[actual poll questions] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/wp-content/uploads/site... - Glad they are this transparent.
I know we see some violent pro-gun extremism online, but it doesn't represent the vast majority of gun owners.
"An unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment." —Huey P Newton
It is difficult for governments to commit large scale atrocities without the consent of the governed unless those so governed are first disarmed.
A more modern example was the prohibition of the free movement of the Australian population during covid. Australians were held prisoner by the state and were not permitted to leave.
Let me guess, public school teachers teaching... gasp... CRT? Indoctrinating children?
Oh my, the government!
And if the American government were to start the next holocaust, I don't trust the armed American populace to stop them.
What is happening right now isn't the Holocaust. What is happening right now - and has been happening for years - are weekly mass shootings.
This doesn't happen anywhere else in the world. It only happens in the US. Guns are clearly the problem.
Not when the government has tanks, attack helicopters and assorted hardware that IS prohibited for the public to own
> A more modern example was the prohibition of the free movement of the Australian population during covid. Australians were held prisoner by the state and were not permitted to leave.
Not true. You could leave and you could also enter - but would have to stay in mandatory quarantine.
We've demonstrated time and time again what a determined populace in their home region is capable of doing to a technologically and numerically superior opponent.
Such as in Vietnam which isn't incredibly dissimilar from the deep South, or Afghanistan which is very similar to the environment you would find in Idaho and Wyoming.
I mean the wider discussion can still be had but if the federal government decided to start a fight over this it would be very similar to an Afghanistan or Vietnam situation but about 2-3x worse as the area to cover would be much larger and would likely have to deal with internal problems in the military as they tend to be very well represented in the pro-gun crowd.
Unless your suggesting the US military would start carrying out strategic bombing operations against its own citizens on its own soil.
Almost 1% of US citizens are in prison. Your police forces routinely brutalise and oppress large parts of your population even though (or perhaps because) you are all armed to the teeth. The majority of your fellow citizens are a couple of paychecks or one health scare away from homelessness, your social security safety nets are in tatters and your collective Labour rights have been eroded away over the last 50 years. Thank goodness you've got your guns or your government might screw you over
Gun rights have been systematically (illegally) denied the demographics that comprise the majority of those so imprisoned, which furthers the argument that large cross-sections of the population being armed reduces violence.
> Your police forces routinely brutalise and oppress large parts of your population even though (or perhaps because) you are all armed to the teeth.
Those are the groups frequently denied weapons. The police generally actively avoid armed confrontation with those they know to be armed (such as we recently saw in Texas). This is one of the reasons it's so easy for them to shoot and kill (mostly unarmed) minorities.
Not true: https://www.legislation.gov.au/Details/F2020L00306/Html/Text
"An Australian citizen or permanent resident (the person) must not leave Australian territory as a passenger on an outgoing aircraft or vessel on or after the time this instrument commences"
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-australia-59058945 "Australia has confirmed it will lift a ban next week that has prevented its own citizens travelling overseas without permission."
That's why things have gotten much worse in the US in the past decades. The rules haven't changed but the number of guns has. And given the percentage of people with guns and the percentage of people with mental issues, the Venn diagram of those two groups intersecting produces a percentage of armed homicidal maniacs at a high enough frequencies that stuff happens. Simply put: when millions of assault rifles get sold, a few of them are going to end up being used by exactly the type of people you'd never want to own such a thing. Simple math. There's nothing mysterious about that.
I'd probably want to own a gun if I lived in the US. There are war zones that have less casualties per year than some cities and areas in the US. I think Kiiv probably has better statistics than Chicago in the last half year or so. That, or it's alarmingly close. Combat medics actually get trained in hospitals in in big cities in the US. If you work in the ER in Chicago, LA, etc., you are going to get plenty of practice. Every day. So, yes, I'd probably feel a need to defend myself in such a place. I'd be part of the problem.
However, I don't live in the US. I live in Berlin, Germany. I feel safe here and feel no need to own a gun and tough luck if that weren't the case because it's pretty hard to get one here. It's not a perfect city and there are occasional incidents involving gun violence just like everywhere else. Generally if you see a gun you are either in an armed robbery, looking at a person in uniform, or in the country side with people responsibly handling their legal guns while hunting. The first happens but not very often. Most crime does not involve guns. And when it does, the sentences are steep, the guns are typically small (easier to conceal), and highly illegal. Anything involving illegal guns is not cool with the authorities. People in uniform discharging their arms is generally involves lots of paper work and scrutiny. More so for civilians with permits and legally owned guns. Getting permits is not super easy and keeping your permit requires sticking to the rules. So, that narrows down the situations that can escalate considerably. It still happens but not very often. Same math, different variable values.
It really is not.
There are too many guns available, too easily obtained, to too many citizens who have not been properly indoctrinated with a sense of civic responsibility, let alone trained in the proper ways to handle a gun.
The answer isn't to throw more guns at the problem or to blame inadequate mental health facilities. It is to reduce gun availability. And we aren't willing to do that because politicians on the right find it more valuable to demagogue on the subject as a wedge issue.
Banning guns is not the answer. Instilling that civic responsibility is - the benefits are astronomical.
What's interesting is that the number of people who take a shot at certain political figures is very low in the US, despite politics being so deeply concerning to so many adults. This feels like an adolescent/young-adult problem that's come to light. If there was a force like the Secret Service/FBI that cracked down on a WHIFF of threatening schools and the media coverage was blacked out for a month, we might see progress without getting mired in a gun control debate that won't be solved in our lifetime.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... [2] https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-israel-s-new-pu...
Banning guns is clearly the answer. There will always be psychopaths, and these people will not care about "civic responsibility." The only thing that can be done is to restrict their access to guns.
Germany:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erfurt_school_massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emsdetten_school_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnenden_school_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidelberg_University_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coburg_shooting
Finland:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jokela_school_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kauhajoki_school_shooting
France:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-39292755
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toulouse_and_Montauban_shootin...
Spain:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barcelona_school_killing
Estonia:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/estonia-school-shooting-leaves-...
Greece:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OAED_Vocational_College_shooti...
Hungary:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8380822.stm
Poland:
https://tvn24.pl/tvn24-news-in-english/poland-two-wounded-in...
Netherlands:
Ukraine:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerch_Polytechnic_College_mass...
Russia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perm_State_University_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazan_school_shooting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Moscow_school_shooting
https://siberiantimes.com/other/others/news/three-wounded-in...
Europe also has had the two deadliest mass shootings of all time: Bataclan (2015, 130 deaths) and Oslo (2011, 77 deaths).
>Do you see school shootings happening in Europe?
Implying that school shootings don't happen in Europe. I then listed 20 school shootings that have occurred in Europe over the last 20 years and your response is to claim that there are "orders of magnitude more [school shootings] in the US".
"Orders" implies that there is at least 100 times more (as a single order is 10 times more) school shootings in the US than in Europe. That is also not true, even counting events such as "Two boys, aged 11 and 14-years-old were shot in the parking lot of the Searles Elementary School around 1 am" and "An individual who was not a student accidentally shot himself in the leg in the parking lot of Glades Central High School" as school shootings, which Wikipedia and most media do. Even with all the stat padding, there are have only been 365 "school shootings" in the US over the last 22 years (i.e. a single order of magnitude more than my partial list of European school shootings); the actual number of school shootings by the common definition is in the same ballpark as Europe.
Uvalde shooter locked himself in a classroom than proceeded to kill 18 ten-year olds and their two teachers. Why?
https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/article/mass-shootings-in-amer...
1. https://news.yahoo.com/psychiatrist-colorado-movie-gunman-th... 2. https://www.cnn.com/2013/11/25/justice/sandy-hook-shooting-r... 3. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/107885790
If we reduced access to firearms, we can still work the motivation angle in a lot of ways, but have overall reduced gun violence. Other countries show that the offset increase in violence through other means would still be lower than current death rates.
For example, it might make sense to restrict the availability of very high-calorie, low-nutrition foods like fast food, or tax them to raise their price and/or subsidize healthy food. It would make sense to educate people about nutrition and exercise and healthy eating.
This kind of thinking could easily hold for the gun control conversation. Let people buy guns if they want, but not the really unnecessarily dangerous ones, and only one at a time. An 18 year old walks into your gun shop and wants to buy two powerful rifles. Why? What do you want them for? Why do you need two? These are valid questions.
if the supposedly intelligent HN can't arrive at the conclusion that reducing guns is the right answer since it was already successfully done by Canada and Australia then what chance do the rest of the US have?
it's been instilled from their birth that will be born with and die with guns. No amount of persuasion will change their minds. It's absolutely 100% futile to argue with Americans that guns are the root of all evil.
It's a fucking straight forward issue. Gun violence is increasing so reduce gun. Even for this linear problem every American is blaming everything else from Saturn in retrograde to bullying /mental health (as if its not an issue across the world)
so aggravating.
Honestly, probably not much worse odds. HN may be knowledgeable about computers, but there’s a big contingent here that doesn’t want to be told what to do, and doesn’t care whether other people get hurt in the process. And once you adopt that ideology, it is all downhill from there
I think this also helps explain why girls never shoot up schools, despite having the same access to guns as boys. All of our safety nets are designed around helping females, and letting males sink or swim.
So how is this reality supposed to be processed by males who find themselves stuck? Many, or perhaps most, will internalize it and just push forward. Others will lash out.
Females have a societal safety net designed to catch them when they fall, males do not. I don't think anybody would dispute that, the question is what effect does that have on the psyche of those who are left helpless?
I'm not sure where you think you read that there were no shootings prior to the rise of divisive identity politics.
We can't have discussion about this in an intellectually stimulating way in congress, we can't have this discussion in the media, we obviously can't have this discussion on social media so HN is the last bastion of hope.
It is a multi-faceted problem with a lot of complexity. The fact stands that USA has a school shooting problem [1] unlike any other country in the world. My main question is how did we get here? There must be an inflection point in the past - any historians out there who can tell us when did this began to be a thing and what was the root cause?
Also any argument like "mental illness" or "ease of access to firearms" needs to explain why the same does not apply to the rest of the world. There are mentally ill people everywhere and many countries have easily accessible weapons, yet no school shootings at this scale.
Can we investigate all the contributing factors? What can we do as individuals and as a society to move forward on this issue?
(parent of three elementary school kids here)
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...
edit:
I see many comments already default to "guns are the problem". I was hoping for a more nuanced discussion.
Let's look at data. While US has most guns per capita, other countries are close, in the same order of magnitude [2].
For example Serbia has 40 civilian firearms per 100 people (!) and zero school shootings in its entire history. United States had 288 just this year. Why is that? Where does the urge to kill innocent children come from?
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...