A binary analysis would lead us to conclude that gun regulations are completely bereft of any benefit whatsoever, given that gun violence, even mass shootings/spree killings, happen in countries with quite strict gun control - I mean, the former PM of Japan was killed via firearm just this month! But that is not the case. There is a clear gradient of occurrence and effectiveness of regulation. So, we need to move into the realm of statistics.
And the statistics are that over the course of the decade from 2010 to 2019 ~350 kids were killed in school shootings, and ~26000 took their own lives.
My assertion is that given these numbers, an inordinate amount of resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth is being spent on what is actually a rather rare occurrence and that this is largely a waste compared to what we could be spending said resources, political capital, and conversational bandwidth on - namely, solving the problems that affect broad swathes of the populace and that I, and others, believe actually drive people to commit such violence in the first place.
Or, we can spend the next century fretting about a statistically vanishingly rare occurrence, keeping the blue and red tribes divided, making little to no progress on the existential problems that we as a country, culture, society, and species face, as the world becomes increasingly uninhabitable.
They absolutely do not, not even remotely close to the scale and frequency in the United States. At least not in countries with equivalent socio-economic metrics as the US (El Salvador does not count).
I thought we weren't analyzing gun violence statistically?
But since you walked down the statistical path anyway, the least you can do is not be completely wrong about it.
I compared the rate of school shooting deaths to suicide deaths for the purpose of pointing out the outsized amount of resources the issue takes up.
You claimed that it is wrong to analyze gun violence statistically.
I, for the purpose of demonstrating the absurdity of such an assertion, analyzed gun violence using a non-statistical and binary approach.
You then took exception to me conceding your point for the purpose of argument and using said non-statistical approach by then bringing statistics back into the mix and arguing that the frequency of gun violence is much higher in the US than other places.
So, which is it? Can we, or can we not use statistics to analyze gun violence? If we can, then we can compare the statistics across regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts and show that gun violence can be affected in degree by those factors. If we cannot, then we cannot show that regulation is effective, since gun violence still happens in highly varied regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts.
I would argue that statistics is an appropriate approach since, in my opinion, it allows us to come to a better reckoning of reality. Ultimately, your view is up to you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here - you have to either admit that the use of statistics is appropriate, or that aforementioned factors are irrelevant to gun violence occurring. They are simply mutually incompatible views.
In this one sentence you betray yourself as uninterested in debate, and instead just like to hear yourself talk. The person you are responding to offered an interesting comparison, that of stats from the US versus other countries (and, I might add, they gamely came to your turf, which you subsequently tried to dismiss). Instead of doing the hard work of revising your views in the face of a potentially fruitful comparison, you dismiss it out of hand and assert your self-righteousness.
They did the exact opposite of this. They asserted that it is wrong to examine this issue statistically.
Spaceman posted > rbj challenged that stats should be used > spaceman answered, alluding to stats widely searchable > rbj dismissed the use of stats.
Edit: Re-reading through all posts, I see I am incorrect in this summary.
Classic. They're not having trouble following your argument. They just disagree.
This reads as appalling smug. Whether spaceman_2020 made a good argument or not, you are quibbling over ultimately unimportant figures when the situation remains that mass shootings of children in their schools are orders of magnitude more common in the US than other developed countries.
You should also be appalled by the adolescent suicide rate involving firearms - that's also not normal.
I just think that, given the status quo, the best approach to reducing all forms of gun violence is to just generally make life better for everyone, and that the resources spent on trying to wrench guns from the hands of the citizenry are much better spent on just about anything else.
Can't really hear your argument, if any, over the smug.
This is not an argument against gun control, but against spending so much time and effort fighting for that gun control at the cost of letting slip the lower hanging fruit that could prevent more deaths.
Statistics deals in degrees; violence against children is something that is sufficiently cognized in absolutes.
This is the only moral choice when dealing with absolutes.
A cute rhetorical parlor trick.
Principle 1: Children should not be victims of arbitrary violence
Principle 2: Children should be educated
These are compatible principles. Your proposal (one of many potential proposals) is to undermine principle two rather than addressing the source of the issue which is violent third parties.
And to forestall any further swiss-cheese a priori logic: this is not something fantastical. There are other societies with have honored both principles one and two, and have experienced zero, as in ABSOLUTELY zero acts of mass violence in educational settings.
To do otherwise is to be biased one way or another.
Um, I don’t know maybe morally? As in, it is morally abhorrent and unconscionable for children to be preyed upon in school, one of the places they should safe by definition.
I agree that kids should not be preyed upon in schools.
Now what?
This is ultimately my point - we have a lot of other avenues to address the problem rather than this, IMO, fruitless attempt to deal with the guns.
And just because it's difficult doesn't mean it's impossible. If one side can stack the Supreme Court with people who suddenly realize there's no constitutional right to privacy, the other side can find some judges to suddenly notice the "well-regulated militia" part of the second amendment, and act accordingly.
Gun-control opponents... generally choose to ignore the first clause altogether, hoping that no one notices that there was never an unabridged right to gun ownership.[1]
The solution to the gun-control issue and, perhaps, to some of the lawlessness in our communities is for the states to invoke the Second Amendment and require gun owners to join a militia.[1)
The 2nd Amendment says well-regulated militia shall not be infringed, it's the right of the people. Gun owners should be drafted into militia and whipped into shape. Whether regulation works or not is incidental because the 2nd requires it.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1987/08/22/t...
I understand your perspective, and I believe I understand how you arrived at it. I even largely share your concern - but I don’t think you fully realize just how repugnant it is to many people.
Have you considered how many lives your proposal would cost, or how likely it would be to succeed in any measurable way?
This is not a rhetorical question. I would definitely consider myself part of “American gun culture.” I would resist disarmament with lethal force if necessary. That statement may be somewhat shocking in this context it wouldn’t so much as raise an eyebrow amongst gun owners.
… and this is about banning one kind of weapon. One kind. An ill-defined class of firearms that are used in a tiny fraction of crimes. How many deaths would be worthwhile to make that happen?
> But when the patient is bleeding out, you first STOP THE BLEEDING.
Attempting to disarm the US may or may not “stop the bleeding” - but I’m extremely confident that it would create many times more patients.
There hasn’t been an “assault rifle” used in a school shooting for decades. “Assault rifles” are highly regulated— it’s nearly impossible to own one. There have been a fair number of sporting semi-auto rifles used in mass shootings.
Can we please stop describing these weapons as something they are not? The “AR” in AR-15 means “ArmaLite Rifle”. ArmaLite being the company that originally developed the weapon.
Respectfully, aren't these definitions just semantics about firing capability?
My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15 is semi-automatic-only (ie not an assault rifle [0]) as they do not have select-fire capability, meaning the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, multi-short burst, and/or automatic firing mode. Semi-automatic fire means that one shot is fired upon each depression of the trigger. [1]
Regardless of firing capability, there is "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2] battle rifle [3].
This evidence is borne out in our schools [4]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle
[1] http://www.weaponslaw.org/glossary/selective-fire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assault_rifle#M16
Statements like "ban all assault rifles" require semantics, and the entire discussion around "which weapons to ban" is entirely semantics. If this person genuinely means "assault rifle", then you already can't own these as a civilian (generally, unless it was made before 1986 and you pay a ton of money for it). If this person means "assault weapon", then we're talking about a poorly defined class of weapons, which are largely based on cosmetic features.
> My understanding is the mass-shooter weapon of choice, the AR-15
The AR-15 is the most common rifle in the country. It's a popular rifle because it can do everything. It's cheap, you can hunt with it if you want (larger magazines are popular for hunting feral hogs, which are infesting the south), you can shoot sporting competitions with it. If you want to shoot a different caliber, for example to change to .22 for cheap target shooting, you can pop two pins, swap to a second upper, and go ahead and plink away at your soda cans. With it being the most popular platform of rifle in the US, of course it pops up in mass shootings. Wanting to ban the AR-15 is like wanting to ban RAM 2500s because they're the "truck of choice for drunk drivers" [1].
> "overwhelming evidence that the AR-15 could bring more firepower to bear than the M14" [2]
A potential, but never materialized, military AR-15 that they're talking about here, would have been select-fire. Then that military AR-15 would be an assault rifle. This has no bearing on semi-automatic AR-15s not being an assault rifle.
This is the third uninformed comment from you that I've needed to respond to today, loaded with more sources but lacking comprehension.
[1] https://insurify.com/insights/car-models-most-duis-2020/
...
Around _400_[1]. That's ALL rifles. Hunting rifles, bolt action, "assault weapons", whatever, in a country with ~300M-1B guns and a population of 330M. While we should look at why these deaths happening, banning the tool used to commit such an incredibly low number of crimes is just silly. I'd compare it to trying to ban swimming pools because 390 people drown in them per year [2]. "No one NEEDS a swimming pool, ban them all!"
People like you that want to go off and "ban everything" while being completely uninformed and refusing to do any kind of simple research are the worst kind of voters / citizens.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
[2] https://www.edgarsnyder.com/statistics/swimming-pool-statist...
Not saying I agree with this line of thinking, but that is a common retort.
My understanding is that it is up to the courts (ultimately the US Supreme Court) to interpret the Constitution, and define things like "Arms", "security", etc..
> I can’t own a nuclear weapon
Careful what you wish for. If personal nuclear weapons ever become a thing, they too may be "Arms" "necessary to the security of a free State". It is hard to understand some rulings of the Supreme Court.
At the time of writing the 2nd Amendment (December 15, 1791), the accepted "Arm" was a musket, with a muzzle velocity between 1425 fps (434 m/s) and 1700 fps (518 m/s) with a ¾” (19.05 mm) diameter ball (. 640 caliber), and an approximate weight of .9 oz (25.5 g) [1]. Today the court accepts that an ArmaLite AR-15 is an "Arm", with a muzzle velocity of 3,300 ft/s (1,006 m/s) using a .223 Remington cartridge with a 55 g FMJ bullet [2].
The momentum of the AR-15 round is therefore approx 55,330 gm/s compared to 13,209 gm/s for the musket ball (ie more than 4 times greater). Too many American shooters make the mistake of thinking these modern "lightweight" weapons translate into less lethality, but it is the increased momentum from higher muzzle velocities that does the devastating damage to soft tissue and bone.
Take a look at the X-ray of a leg showing a bullet wound delivered by an assault rifle used in combat compared to an X-ray of a leg that sustained a bullet wound from a low-energy bullet, inflicted by a weapon like a handgun in Philadelphia. [3]. The trauma surgeons of the 19 children killed in the Robb Elementary massacre reported "They were so pulverized, he said, that they could be identified only by their clothing." [4]
[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15740773.2019.16...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.223_Remington
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/04/health/parkland-shooting-...
[4] https://khn.org/news/article/trauma-surgeons-uvalde-mass-sho...
Why is it that political philosophy that hates constitutional originalism in every other case wants to try and selectively apply some weird quasi-originalist argument not to the amendment itself but to two individual words within it?
If the amendment was written before muskets were common would you argue in only applied to swords, bows, slings, and catapults? The amendment is about providing the populace with a mechanism to keep tyranny in check, its not about caliber and projectile ft/s.
Example: The US military just replaced the .223 with .277 Fury for exactly the reason that the .223 is _too fast_ and doesn't shed enough energy when hitting a target.
Furthermore, you're mixing grains (gr) and grams (g). A 55gr (grain) bullet is 3.56 grams. A 0.9oz musket ball is 25.5 grams. So your momentum calculations are (11'067-13'209) grams * m/s for a musket and 3'581 grams * m/s. So the musket actually has 3+ times more momentum than the .223 round.
Musket balls are absolutely huge, there are effectively zero modern rifles which shoot a .640 caliber round. The .223 is a very small rifle round.
https://www.quora.com/Would-it-be-worse-to-be-shot-with-a-mu...
Can you stop with the nonsense? You produce it faster than I can correct you.
I don't believe any of the points you make are drivers of violence at all. You perhaps failed to analyze the typical issues.
I do agree that a society might want to ban guns. Policing is much safer and there are a lot of other advantages. Fewer deaths too of course. But I heavily doubt the presence of guns is reason for an increase in violence among younger people. On the contrary, I think some people are well underway to create self-fulfilling prophecies. Security at schools is part of that.
There is a recent increase in crime but certainly to none of the factors you mentioned. I live happily in a country without access to assault rifles. But we probably disagree on what constitutes drivers of violence.
You could just limit sales of these guns to folks over 25 and make everyone much safer.
In fact, every single school shooter was white...
It seems like you want to say that broader mental health problems are more important than gun violence, but that's only more reason to restrict access to guns. Most other places in the world are able to recognise that mental illness and guns are a bad mix, and act accordingly. The US has had nearly one third of the mass shootings in the world since the 60s yet people like you continue to defend access to guns as though it's not a contributing factor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...). That alone seems to point to one of those broad problems affecting the populace. It doesn't have to be the only cause, to merit a treatment.
The rest of the world doesn't view gun access as a given, or even a good. It's earned and revered, or prevented, but never normalised. It's why Abe's assassin had to make his own gun, because Japanese laws didn't make things easier for him. It's why here in Australia, even gangsters don't even have guns, for the most part https://youtu.be/BYsXCnxbnj0?t=461
But we don't judge the effectiveness of these restrictions by some bogus standard of absolute zero gun violence. We judge them by assessing our rare incidents of gun violence, and whether we think we think we could or should have done more to prevent them from obtaining and using a firearm.
And when we look at the numbers of mass shootings in the US, particularly in sensitive places like schools, we wonder how in the world you can think you're doing enough.
Both are horrific, but the latter seems even more horrific because it includes not only death, but psychological torture before the death.
People need to quit embarrassing themselves trying to somehow reason away why the USA is an outlier via some kind of cope metric. It's the guns.
your 80:1 stat seems pretty dubious -- do you have a source for it?
Firearm related injuries are the #2 killer of children after automotive accidents[1]. The rate of firearm related deaths for young people went up nearly 14% between 2019 and 2020 alone.
I do agree with the importance of socio-economic solutions, though, even before gun regulations.
We have enough food and housing for everyone right now, except in some popular places, why exactly have we become so desperate? Why can't we give up some economic growth and use the resources we have on general human well-being?
You have to. For effective policy you need to distance yourself from the deed no matter how terrible they are. All other venues for grief are better than policies motivated by retribution, which will very likely not lead to constructive outcomes and resulting in repeats. Otherwise you end up invading random countries because someone attacked you.
You're being disingenuous if you're trying to claim that, say, the Beslan School Siege is the same as the Columbine school shooting. One was committed by a terrorist organization with a political goal. The other was just a couple of fellow students.
Say what you mean instead of being a fucking pussy and dancing around it by asking pointed questions that we have to then fill in the blanks on.
Do you mean to say "people in Africa and the diaspora thereof have a shit culture and the places they reside end up being war-torn and using child soldiers?"
If so, say so. If not, please clarify because I may just not be quite smart enough to grok your meaning if it is otherwise.
And if the taboo suddenly blew up? I believe I’d actually blame it on culture, not race.
We can do amazing things with culture. Let’s try. But we can only tackle it if we can address the taboo problem.
This doesn't happen anywhere else on the planet outside of war-torn countries. Saying that "actually kids are more likely to kill themselves" is just about peak cope.