It's time we start legislating based on empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals. Yes, if everyone was responsible perhaps it would be OK for all of us to own firearms. But so many people are utterly irresponsible, and guns make that irresponsibility lethal.
People should safely store their fire-arms, but they don't and guns get stolen and sold illegally, or used by their teenage child.
People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.
Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.
And when everyone is armed everyone wants to be armed. Cops pull their guns quickly out of fear of armed criminals. Regular people want to own a gun because they feel like everyone else does, and they're now less safe unless they also get one.
Growing up outside the US I never saw any guns. I don't know of anyone who had a gun. I don't know of anyone who knew anyone who had a gun. I remember seeing military members in parades carrying guns because it was one of the few times I'd actually seen one. Cops didn't walk around armed. There are other ways to kill people but guns are an especially effective, intuitive, and easy way to do so.
The problem with a lot of anti-gun measures is that the proponents readily admit that they would not have stopped any particular shooter. For instance, people talk about background checks, but this shooter and many others did not have a history and were not known to police. They would have passes a background check.
Often times the person acquiring the gun already broke a number of gun laws. Either straw purchase, borrowed someones gun, carrying across state lines, etc. So throwing more laws at it won't necessarily help. Enforcement of existing laws could help but is obviously difficult. Not to mention that gun violence is much higher in cities/counties/states with the most gun control measures. You can say that they just get the guns from elsewhere and national restrictions need to be imposed, but we should see SOME effect. Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan.
So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
But note that there were always guns in America. In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet.
Legislation won’t change anything. <the war on drugs has entered the chat> Proponents of stricter gun control are being idealistic.
Having kids in school right now, we are both quite concerned about the current state of affairs when it comes to school shootings. Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. To think otherwise is ignorance.
> So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
And even if we could wrangle the hundreds of millions in circulation, 3D printing democratizes gun manufacture and seems prohibitively hard to regulate.
> Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan. … In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
I haven’t heard these observations before; I would be really interested to hear potential explanations debated.
The anti-gun rebuttal is that having that many guns around makes breaking the existing laws. I don't care how you do it (buybacks + making it much more cumbersome to get one seem like a good start), the end result that I'm after is that the US goes from 120 guns per capita to 30.
The school shooting club thing is an example of how regulation works.
Just as you don’t see soldiers on military bases walking around with guns on their hips for fun, there were strict rules around high school shooting ranges - kids didn’t take guns home and had strict protocols around handling, etc.
The big difference now is you have a fetishization of guns combined with a low intensity insurgency. If you ask a more prolific gun person about why they are collecting weapons, the answer in 1965 was likely to be about antique or other technical factors. In 1995 they were worried about Clinton taking the guns away, so buy before it’s too late. In 2015, many are talking about fighting the government.
Marginal personalities are attracted to the power of weapons and attention.
I grew up in the midwest, where pheasant hunting was (and still is) popular. Many people had gun racks in their cars, and often parked with the guns in plain sight.
We had little crime and very few incidents of gun violence.
Quite a quick read and sounds somewhat better than knee-jerk reactions people might have
The 3 policy changes in the paper :
```
Evidence suggests that three priority policies
would have the greatest impact in reducing overall firearm homicide rates:
• Universal background checks;
• Prohibition of gun possession by people
with a history of any violent misdemeanor,
threatened violence, or serious alcohol-related crime or subject to a domestic violence restraining order. This must be accompanied by:
(1) a requirement that firearms already in their possession be surrendered;
(2) a procedure for confiscating guns if they are not relinquished voluntarily;
and
(3) procedures for confiscating guns in situations where a person becomes
prohibited from owning firearms after having passed an earlier background
check;
• Extreme risk protection order laws that allow removal of firearms from an individual who, after due process, is deemed to represent a threat to
themselves or others
As someone who supports the elimination of virtually all firearms restrictions, this is a gun control position that I think deserves to be taken seriously by gun rights advocates.
> It's time we start legislating based on empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals.
I would take anti-gun people more seriously if they actually paid attention to what this entails. For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.
Sometimes you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time. If guns weren't such a charged issue then more of us would advocate to directly outlaw private gun ownership. Guns add little value to people's lives and are likely to amplify poor decisions into death and serious injury.
> For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.
Yeah, for some reason people keep going on about the ability for any 18 yo nutcase to go into a shop and buy a military-grade weapon designed to shred organs beyond all repair*, enabling them to efficiently slaughter as many school children as possible before terrorized and outgunned LEOs finally have the guts to take them out.
These pesky humans and their dislike of living in fear of violent death for their children... Can't they just think about this in spreadsheet terms and look at the totally negligible numbers, like the rest of us psychos ? C'mon...
random mass shootings are so horrific that we should do something to make them less lethal. Even if focusing on hand guns instead would statistically save more lives.
>People should safely store their fire-arms, but they don't and guns get stolen and sold illegally, or used by their teenage child.
This is extraordinarily rare.
>People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.
Brandishing weapons is illegal in every state and not pointing the muzzle of a gun at anything you don't intend to destroy is basic gun safety.
>Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.
There's no evidence to suggest that gun ownership causes higher levels of suicide. Additionally, suicide isn't a crime.
As is mass shootings, when considering the population…what’s different is that all murder/suicides are now perfectly announced to everyone, almost instantly.
This problem needs several factors to resolve, and perfectly doing all of them (hardening soft targets, mental health response, reduction in the availability of guns, intervention in situations of parental abuse and neglect) will still not, 100%, make the problem go away. It’s a factor of a large population, people with a moral/ethical gap - possibly due to external factors, with ready access to very effective tools, broadcast to a passive population instantly - which brings revenue to the media.
Great news from Canada. Freeze put in place for handguns and mandatory buy back of assault rifles.
(Also as a side note to Moderators - some people in this thread are unnecessarily flagging comments that supports gun control. Lot of people speak about free speech , hope that is practiced here.)
Guns are built with a purpose. The purpose is to kill someone.
So it is not difficult to comprehend why Government needs to make it difficult to buy a gun more than it is difficult to buy medicine.
But there are people who propose to remove all restrictions instead to acquire guns. To take it to its logical conclusion that is how wild Wild West used to be. No police no governance no authority.
Now question is this. Which option seems more sane to you? You decide.
The point of a gun is that it's a simple machine that works when you need it. Geofenced microcontroller safeties somewhat compete with this and would not be a popular idea.
Sure, create an environment for black market cartridges. Turn every hunter into a criminal. Forget standards on these black market cartridges so they are blowing up in people's guns.
Is it? What empirical evidence do we have that mandatory veganism or outright banning of cars would be a net positive, let alone feasible? To me those two ideas sound like perfect examples of the non-empirical lofty ideals that the previous comment was rejecting in the very first sentence.
Before fire arms being invented people took other's lives with knives, swords or clubs. Or poison. Or bare hands. What makes you think that not owning a gun will make people less murderous?
Their argument is gonna be that people will find other ways to kill. Maybe invest in a system that makes people less likely to murder an innocent croud? Wonder what could do that... Better education? Better mental health facilities? Lesser access to the easy people kill machine?
-60 percent or more US states have no gun registration, I know as I live in Indiana which changed to a no gun registration state despite objections from their own citizens and cops.
-Among religious right guns are seen as a male status symbols
-Can we cure this economically by requiring liability insurance in addition to gun registration? It work by, if you have a past history of danger signs then you would be accessed via insurance companies the largest liability insurance price of owning a gun. Similar to vehicle registration and liability insurance
Liability insurance just means rich people have guns. the people who would most benefit from guns for self defense, low income people in high crime areas, would be excluded from gun ownership due to excessive costs. The police also aren't the answer as they have no duty to actually protect you, and have shown repeatedly that they will simply wait for overwhelming force while a shooter is killing people.
Gun registrations just tell the government, or anyone who can access the registration where to get guns. Registrations don't stop anything and only serve to create more criminals from otherwise innocent people if they don't file paperwork on time. Also, in the U.S. any form of government list of people is heavily suspect regardless of guns, a vast majority of people simply don't want anything that can let the government easily track them. Social Security is barely tolerated for keeping massive amounts of seniors from starving to death, even then the creation of the SSN was hugely controversial.
I am deeply supportive of the second amendment but liability insurance for guns seems like a fantastic idea to me. Love in rural Montana and own a long rifle for hunting? You insurance is quite cheap. Live in Brooklyn, are 17 years old, and own a handgun? Quite expensive.
Unfortunately like automobiles all this would due is punish the honest people. The people who most should have this insurance just wouldn't buy it.
> It's clear that this is the way Americans wish to live
That’s not clear at all. The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
There is some amount of friction, different in each country but not zero anywhere, between “what people want” and “what is the law”. Do you think North Koreans prefer living under a corrupt dictatorship? Why don’t they just make the dictatorship illegal?
That’s an extreme example of course: the US political system is closer to European-style proportional parliamentary systems than it is to North Korea, but it’s still very different from them, and in many meaningful ways is not actually a democracy.
The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
Because other people don't have this problem. And when you get right down to it, they have megaphones and placards, while their opponents have guns. Amazingly, the gun owners have more political power.
My views on gun ownership are complex and don't fit neatly into existing pigeonholes - I'm very much in favor of the right to own weapons, but also in additional social responsibilities that ought to accompany that. I have a lot of sympathy with the gun control crowd even though I disagree with many of their arguments, but the fact is their tactics are simply not working. Unfortunately they don't want to change their approach because they're so locked into the moral dimension of their argument that they're unwilling to consider any other approach. Likewise the 2nd amendment absolutists are so intransigent that they keep retreating to a hardline position of 'shall not be infringed! shall not be infringed!' and then complaining about how unreasonable their opponents are.
As another outsider, I can remember seeing reports of mass shootings in the US every year or two for the last 30 years or so. Each time I thought "this time they have to do something" and yet the pattern continues. So to me it also seems "clear" that there isn't _enough_ will in the US to act on this.
We only have more anti-gun-violence activists because we have more gun violence. I forget where we are on the murders per capita scene, but I think we rank somewhere around Uruguay and Cameroon.
Great company while pretending to be "the leader of the free world."
> That’s not clear at all. The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
Well, you don’t really need activists if you don’t really have a problem. So it is not really surprising that countries with saner gun control policies have fewer activists.
Also, the number of activists does not correlate with the opinion of the people overall. Even though the US is not perfectly democratic, the situation does seem to reflect how a majority of states and a large fraction of the people want to live. This is utterly terrifying to us watching from the other side of the pond, but that’s the way it is.
I don't want gun violence, but I 100% want the 1986 National Firearm Act repealed.
I believe fully automatic assault weapons and machine guns should be available for purchase, new, just like any other weapon. (Fully automatic weapons are legal to buy and own right now in the US, if you pay a $200 stamp tax and wait 9 months for the ATF to process the paperwork, but you can only buy "NFA" regulated machine guns that were registered in 1986 or before ... which means they're all collectors items now, and the cheapest machine guns are $15-20k and up).
Most people I know would like to see the existing laws enforced, and don't want anything new passed or put in place.
As a foreigner, I have an impression that americans can buy a gun at 18, but cun buy a cigarette at 21. Maybe I’m wrong, but still... Call me an “old-timer” but I do think you could use better psychological tests before letting them buy a gun.
I have learned that some Americans consider it crucial to arm themselves in case there is a tyrannical government in the future. This seems nuts to almost everyone else in a first world country, and probably many other Americans. But these people, who are not in fact nuts or cretinous, actually believe this and consider it of paramount importance. In one sense, the point can't be argued.
My view: If the US population really wants to do something school shootings in the near term, then the physical layout of schools should be changed so that someone can't just walk in and shoot children. Does this make school look and feel like a dystopian prison? Yes. But that's the price of freedom, which probably shouldn't be born by dead primary school children. This strikes me as the only politically feasible solution right now.
Gun regulation seems likely to help and is a fairly logical solution, but too many people seem allergic to it, and there are already so many unregistered firearms out there. While we are dreaming, reshaping society so everyone is kinder and less likely to shoot each other is also likely to help.
Schools are already pretty buttoned up. But you would be hard pressed to secure them to the point where a shooter couldn't just blow away the first guard and walk right in. Similar to the grocery store shooting.
Even prisons need huge sally ports and clear zones to prevent stuff like ram raids and car bombs. Securing EVERY school this way would be nearly impossible. Especially since we can barely staff them in the first place.
The terrorist always has the advantage of picking the least fortified target. In addition they have the drop on the defenders. So unless we have teams of armed and armored QRF guards in ready rooms and a single entry gate at EVERY school we're still going to be vulnerable.
Then, even after we secure every school, the terrorist just waits at the first bus stop, walks on the opening doors, and then kills a busload of kids.
If we couldn't stop it in Iraq and Afghanistan with trillions of dollars of military hardware and surveillance, I don't seeing domestic terrorism being much easier. Especially with the prevalence of firearms and explosives in the United States.
> I have learned that some Americans consider it crucial to arm themselves in case there is a tyrannical government in the future. This seems nuts to almost everyone else in a first world country
Yet they continue to absolutely dominate the world, culturally and economically. Can't rule out the possibility entirely that we are nuts and they are not.
> I have learned that some Americans consider it crucial to arm themselves in case there is a tyrannical government in the future.
OK but you realize that some in this case is a small percentage. Most people just want to defend their homes from intruders, defend their property from animals, hunt a few days a year, plink on the weekends, or just don't want to turn in the cherished firearm that was passed down in the family.
Gun registration wouldn’t have done anything to stop this shooting. A legal adult with no criminal record purchased the guns in advance of his rampage. A waiting period wouldn’t have worked, and his registration would have gone through because he hadn’t done anything yet.
I don't think the opinion of someone with no skin in the game, who only gets their information from the news, and doesn't know much about firearms to be worth all that much.
I think a good first step everyone can agree on to stop gun violence is: stop it's gamification.
Almost every mass shooting in the last decade was someone looking for media attention and high score. And yet, every shooting is followed by detailed biography and a tally of bodies.
Something as simple as a one month moratorium on information for anyone outside the community would probably work wonders, as the public eye will have moved on by then.
Only 10% of the domestic news reports on the mosque shootings in Christchurch, NZ in 2019 even mentioned the shooter by name[0]. News reports in other countires didn't follow suit, but there's at least one example where an effort was made to deny the shooter a platform.
Imagine the chaos of multiple people with guns trying to take down an assailant with the police involved. Who are the good guys here? Friendly fire happens with cops accidentally shooting hostage victims occasionally and they are well trained.
Do civilians really know how to deal with hostage scenarios?
Do teachers want to carry firearms to protect elementary school students?
Are the school districts going to pay for training and armament?
What if a teacher attacks the children in their class? What if a student carries a weapon to the school and creates a hostage situation? (You eliminated a gun free zone).
Assailants can be better armed than teachers and they can wear armor, which teachers/security personnel will not be equipped with. (See Buffalo massacre)
These are just off the top of my head. I would like to hear a security analyst take on it.
I looked up something quickly, to see if it was still true.
In the UK, where you're not allowed to use firearms to defend yourself, home invasions where someone is home is 64%. In the US, where it is permissible, home invasions where someone is home is 27.6%.
You're over twice as likely to be robbed while you're home in the UK as you are in the US. I'm sure the factors are complex, but knowing that you're actually risking your life when you break into a home in the US has to be one of the factors.
There are norms the media choose to follow on their own accord.
Think for example how suicides are generally covered. Reputable organisations don't publish the details of the precise method, and they include a link/phone number to a help line for those who struggle themselves.
> What is the punishment if you break it?
The same as with most norms: Professional embarrassment, and loss of reputation among your peers.
Someone responsible for a news organization can choose to set the policy. Maybe everyone can stop retweeting this stuff and engaging in a flame war online. Or stop consuming articles and videos about this incident. Not every problem can be solved by the state.
> Enforced by whom? What is the punishment if you break it?
The government. We need a comprehensive set of media safety laws that prevent publication of these dangerous reports so they won't fall into the wrong hands.
In some countries, criminals faces are blurred when shown on TV. American media’s obsession with tragedy and its wider reach is culprit number one in my book.
How would you contain the spread of information? Maybe you could do so 30 years ago, but I think that ship has sailed. It is very difficult to contain information these days.
It's not about stopping it so much as not promoting it. Most people aren't going to spend time digging up information about rumored mas shootings. That alone would kill the fame and name recognition component.
I've had to dismiss and block more than one news organization from my feeds to avoid knowing the name of the most recent shooter. I'd settle for their information just not being shoved down my throat.
The same as the inventor of Pacman feels for teenagers popping little white pills while listening to repeatitive computer music.
The fact that first person shooters are played by hundreds of millions all over the world, but mass shootings are 99% a US thing (which much predated first person shooters, e.g. "I don't like Mondays") should answer the question...
Sure, one can try this - but I suspect that 4chan will only get more powerful as a place to "get information that is being surpressed". Qanon started on pol, and making pol the best place to go to find the sweet details on the shooter is going to blow up in your face.
Yeah you can go and read what was in the buffalo shooters head though which is a thing. He's pretty much a schizo christchurch copy cat. Amusingly he seems mostly in favor of shootings since it intensifies the gun control debate and accelerate the schism in the united states.
Gun control is not going to fix this kind of radicalism or its impact. The dude was a straight up terrorist and IMO he made the correct observation that this sort of terrorism will be successful in driving the divide and creating more extremism.
How about having a mandatory committee that seriously investigates {physical, social, cyber, etc.}-bullying more instead of just ignoring it? We can both work on stringent gun laws and take the mental health of children/teenagers more seriously. There is a clear pattern of which demographic of people consistently commit such crimes. Using this subset of gun owners to dictate gun ownership policies is going to be a hotly contested political issue and it is going to take a while to make progress on that. I personally would hope for a future where gun ownership is very very strictly controlled. However, to claim that gun ownership is the root cause of such incidents occurring doesn't sit right with me. Sure it amplifies the amount of damage that can be done but I don't think that most of these individuals randomly woke up and decided to cause mayhem.
How would that work? lol. There are thousands of weirdos and anti-social kids for every one school shooter. Plus if a disproportionate number of black kids are investigated it would be legally challenged.
You basically described the adult world. While our justice system isn’t perfect, it helps to curtail the chaos caused by the “thousands of weirdos and anti-social” adults.
I don’t claim to know the intricacies of this problem but it seems directionally correct to have such a thing rather than not.
The goal shouldn’t be to necessarily punish kids but to better identify issues and rehabilitate kids. The school systems are currently turning a blind eye and letting problems fester and compound. That is not the way to go.
From what I understand, there are legal implications for teachers who intervene and this prevents them from doing anything even if they wanted to. We can definitely do better.
> How about having a mandatory committee that seriously investigates {physical, social, cyber, etc.}-bullying more instead of just ignoring it?
Because that's actually hard, and requires a culture change. Much easier to simply add extra regulations (that criminals will ignore) for the average law abiding citizen and get reelected claiming you "did something".
Anything that violates the tight seal that the nuclear family has relative to society in the United States is universally hated. All the problems start in the family but you are not allowed to go there here, probably because of religion. It's just the way we are, unfortunately.
While most of the comments here centre on the 2nd amendment, this small thread is the only one that touches what matters.
Why are kids plotting mass shootings? It's not because they have access to weapons. It's because something is VERY broken in their family nucleus and values.
I understand your point that there's no way the government can police family education. But what I would suggest is to make parents and legal guardians directly and fully responsible for their kids crimes.
Your children killed? You are charged with accessory murder or manslaughter. Your daughter stole? YOU are charged as well.
It is YOUR choice what you decide to teach or not to your kids. But on the flipside, it also becomes your responsibility.
This would also work with the problems the UK had (I lived there several years ago) of delinquent kids. You had 10 year olds doing crime who just got ASBOs (collectable paper for them,) and the parents were nowhere to be seen. Charge the parents for their children crimes, as adults.
I honestly think precedent and copy-cat syndrome are hugely to blame. "Shooting up a school" has just become synonymous with going on a shooting rampage. How do we go back from this? Even if we ban guns, how do we stop the determined from getting their hands on a gun so that they can shot up a school? It think it's incredibly tragic that we have gotten to the point where killing multiple primsry school aged children is the go to outlet for mentally ill people who want to go on a killing spree in the United States.
We have to start by giving less attention to these events.
We have to start by being kind to the people who need it most and are often the most difficult to be kind to.
You can’t just create a way to think of people who do things as some sort of “other”, we are all human and capable of similar things given the wrong circumstances.
I agree. I'm in favor of the second amendment for a variety of reasons, but since it is clear that firearms are amplifying the casualties inflicted by crazy people and the US has a lot of crazy people, I'm open to restrictions that I think can have a tangible effect.
That said, it is treating the symptom instead of the cause. Our society is fundamentally rotten. We are growing increasingly irrational and violent, we are hating each other more and more, we believe in wild nonsense because we want to believe in it. People are lashing out, but where is all that anger coming from?
I think this single-minded focus on firearms any time these events happen is a distraction, a furthering of the divide between people who don't understand each other and increasingly have no desire to. The real issue is that people feel trapped, oppressed, caged, and helpless, and because they feel like that they act rashly. People do not shoot up schools, run over protesters, and storm government buildings because they feel like things are mostly ok. As long as we continue to pretend that our society as it is today is fundamentally sound we'll continue down this path.
The country is fascinated with crime. Fascination of the masses and breathless media coverage keep reinforcing each other. The worst criminals are almost treated with awe — referred to with their full names, including fucking middle names, like FDR or JFK; when do you see Bill Gates referred to as William Henry Gates? Right now, if you’re a failure in life, the easiest way to make a name for yourself and have a loud exit is to shoot up as many people as possible. I wonder what would happen if these idiots are given as little attention as possible and just referred to as John Doe.
I blame the media. Everything is just another storyline for reactions. Don't romanticise it. In any way. Because you dont know what glory looks like to a school shooter.
Mass shooters overwhelmingly prefer to target such locations for obvious reasons. If it becomes known that most attempted mass shooters will die an ignominious death before they achieve their goal, the incentive for copycat shooters will be gone.
OK, I'm hoping for a nuanced and civil discussion, but here goes... America (where I live and was raised) does not like to parse numbers, when it comes to these things. Both "mass shootings" and "mental illness" are dividable into smaller chunks than their current definitions and need to be handled in different ways than a "winner take all" approach.
"Mental Illness" is a broad spectrum and cannot be lumped into a giant bin, and should in no way be discussed a such. Of course there are mentally ill people who should not be near guns. I don't think that's a question... well, to most. Anyone who says different is using them as a lever to get things pushed through or has no experience. This, however is not all mentally ill people. The definition is so vague as to be almost meaningless, at times. Oh, do you have a sexual deviancy like being choked?... You might, technically, have a mental illness, but since it isn't very detrimental to your well being, so long as you set boundaries, you're probably OK. Probably.
"Mass shootings" are defined by any shooting that has 4 or more victims. This does get divided, once you dig down a little further in the database, but it's all lumped under the "Mass shooting" header. This is driveby's (sp?), party shootings, drug buys, etc... not that that is better, or should be taken with a cavalier attitude. Far from it. But, if you are looking at it from a preventative stand point, it's a completely different equation. These aren't going to be legally obtained, randomized violence, caused by mental illness. These are generally crimes of poverty, means and lack of opportunity. Gun laws and access to mental health facilities aren't going to stop these, but job programs, education, birth control, manufacturing facilities, infrastructure and treatment services might.
An even better number is the types of guns used in homicides. AR style weapons are used in less than 150 shootings a year on average out of 24,000 homicides. It's mostly handguns. Just because they are prevalent in particular tragedies do they get such attention. It's dumb.
>But, if you are looking at it from a preventative stand point, it's a completely different equation. These aren't going to be legally obtained, randomized violence, caused by mental illness. These are generally crimes of poverty, means and lack of opportunity.
So someone is killing people because he is poor and needs money? Why doesn't he work instead?
In the U.S. this is often because someone can't work. When you're stuck in a poor area, job opportunities are extremely limited. Public transport is very limited, so you often can't get out of the immediate area to find a job, and most jobs are very restrictive about criminal history.
You can get something minor on your record, and be stuck out of work until you can get enough money to move closer to a place which will hire someone with a crime on their background check, which is now near impossible to do legally.
This situation can make one desperate enough to attempt crimes which can lead to murder, such as armed robbery.
I apologize for being late to reply. @THjr responded very well to this, but there is one more point I would like to lay out. When everyone has talked about these numbers, they've been referring to deaths and that isn't how gun violence numbers work. I understand it sounds like semantics, but when we look at statistics semantics are important. In the modern news cycle, media outlets leave you with the term "shot" and of course we think killed... and in this latest tragedy, it is an unfortunate truth. Any wound suffered is an injustice, but it doesn't mean a death and murder... though, being shot does increase the chance, I understand. Modern weaponry is very efficient (though I'd have to look up the numbers).
It is not fair to place the blame for this epidemic of violence squarely on those suffering from mental health issues.
Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.
People who suffer from mental health issues are tremendously more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrators. These individuals already suffer from tremendous discrimination and hardships in their lives.
Those who would place the blame in this direction while deflecting from the ease of access to firearms are acting disingenuously.
We continue to do nothing, and I wish I could say that nothing continues to happen - but Americans continue to die from this senseless violence with shocking regularity.
> Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.
I'm not so sure that is true. I'd wager that Americans are suffering more than most right now due to institutional rot (or at least the perception and portrayals of it).
I suspect you're probably right, but I'm not sure it's to the point that it discounts their point. I think the "institutional rot" is a smaller factor than other elements impacting mental well-being.
A hormonal, bullied, enraged teenager where I live is less likely to do monstrous amounts of damage to others. They can get easy access to a knife and might own a car. Out of hundreds of people here, I think I know one person who has a gun, and they live on a farm with a rifle that I'd imagine emerges once a year to shoot foxes or kangaroos.
If we're going to talk numbers - most gun deaths involve gang/drug activities.
The real numbers once you remove suicide and gangs all point to mental illness and DV/Violent individuals.
it's not like this changes the debate though even if it's accurate, if anything it broadens the argument. Cartel/gang grime is a huge issue and fueled by access to arms. Not only in the US, but also in Mexico and Latin America because a large supply of weapons goes illegally across the border.
In the UK, where the civilian population does not carry arms and even most cops don't, the police fires a few hundred shots per year(!) with a population of 60 million. In the entire post war era (The Troubles aside) less police has been killed than in the US in a year.
So if you care about the safety of law enforcement an arms race has bad consequences for everyone. And the militarization of police is another bad consequence.
You cant remove gangs, because half of what is called gang is a bunch of young guys living in low socioeconomic area. When then hang around together and some of them is suspect of crime, they are fairly often classified as gang. It does not take much to be classified as gang. And then, any shooting involving them is gang shooting. Similar with drug related shooting, if one of them shoots because he is jealous of girlfriend and there are drugs in his pocket, it is drug related shooting.
Gang membership as traced by law enforcement is not something super formal.
Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42
As a non-American I found Heather Cox-Richardson's recent substack newsletter post [1] to be useful in understanding how the US has got to this point. She's a history professor at Boston College and she does a good job of describing how gun ownership and control came to be (intentionally) politicised, and how the NRA's role has changed over time.
Honestly, I don't see how the US is ever going to dig itself out of this hole. The reward system that leads to the perpetuating the culture war that lies behind this problem (among many others) just seems too strong. It's deeply structural and embedded in US culture, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it. I wish there was.
It's difficult to take that article with more than a grain of salt when there's clear political bias and a lack of proper sourcing from the start. Of course political bias is inevitable, but to claim that our gun laws are the result of a takeover by "a minority of radical extermists" is ridiculous.
Then when referencing hard numbers and talking about the influence the NRA may have had, she doesn't back that up with anything. Her "notes" are mostly other highly opinionated articles. Had she followed any form of standard or proper notation[1] it'd be easier to believe her. But usually when people fail to make their sources easily available it's because they don't have them/they are low quality.
Just to add another comment to this. Typically when someone claims that something which is supported by a large percentage or even the majority of a given population is the result of "extremism", they themselves are like the extremists, for better or for worse.
Indeed. Prior to the 1968 Gun Control Act, you could order pretty much any gun through the mail.
The political violence and radicalism of the 60’s drove the legislation. Only automatic weapons were controlled before that.
So seems silly to claim “radicals took over the NRA” when any type of gun control is a very recent phenomenon. Hell, even during the 80’s most of the US had incredibly lax gun control laws compared to what is being suggested today.
Regardless of the gun issue, there’s a glaring issue that seems more obvious to me: mental health. The solution seems to be a much better mental health system and safety net. If we got rid of all the guns in the world, psychopaths would make pipe bombs, etc. Getting rid of guns would help, no doubt. It would add friction to the process of pulling off massacres. But the real, root problem seems to me that we have completely gutted our mental healthcare system.
Gah! I can’t edit my comment, but evidently, this “mental health” thing is a Republican talking point. Let’s see if they put their money where their mouth is. (I doubt it.)
Readit News
People should safely store their fire-arms, but they don't and guns get stolen and sold illegally, or used by their teenage child.
People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.
Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.
And when everyone is armed everyone wants to be armed. Cops pull their guns quickly out of fear of armed criminals. Regular people want to own a gun because they feel like everyone else does, and they're now less safe unless they also get one.
Growing up outside the US I never saw any guns. I don't know of anyone who had a gun. I don't know of anyone who knew anyone who had a gun. I remember seeing military members in parades carrying guns because it was one of the few times I'd actually seen one. Cops didn't walk around armed. There are other ways to kill people but guns are an especially effective, intuitive, and easy way to do so.
The problem with a lot of anti-gun measures is that the proponents readily admit that they would not have stopped any particular shooter. For instance, people talk about background checks, but this shooter and many others did not have a history and were not known to police. They would have passes a background check.
Often times the person acquiring the gun already broke a number of gun laws. Either straw purchase, borrowed someones gun, carrying across state lines, etc. So throwing more laws at it won't necessarily help. Enforcement of existing laws could help but is obviously difficult. Not to mention that gun violence is much higher in cities/counties/states with the most gun control measures. You can say that they just get the guns from elsewhere and national restrictions need to be imposed, but we should see SOME effect. Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan.
So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.
But note that there were always guns in America. In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
https://nypost.com/2018/03/31/when-toting-guns-in-high-schoo...
Legislation won’t change anything. <the war on drugs has entered the chat> Proponents of stricter gun control are being idealistic.
Having kids in school right now, we are both quite concerned about the current state of affairs when it comes to school shootings. Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. To think otherwise is ignorance.
And even if we could wrangle the hundreds of millions in circulation, 3D printing democratizes gun manufacture and seems prohibitively hard to regulate.
> Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan. … In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.
I haven’t heard these observations before; I would be really interested to hear potential explanations debated.
Just as you don’t see soldiers on military bases walking around with guns on their hips for fun, there were strict rules around high school shooting ranges - kids didn’t take guns home and had strict protocols around handling, etc.
The big difference now is you have a fetishization of guns combined with a low intensity insurgency. If you ask a more prolific gun person about why they are collecting weapons, the answer in 1965 was likely to be about antique or other technical factors. In 1995 they were worried about Clinton taking the guns away, so buy before it’s too late. In 2015, many are talking about fighting the government.
Marginal personalities are attracted to the power of weapons and attention.
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I grew up in the midwest, where pheasant hunting was (and still is) popular. Many people had gun racks in their cars, and often parked with the guns in plain sight.
We had little crime and very few incidents of gun violence.
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There are 3 recommended policy changes in there.
The 3 policy changes in the paper :
``` Evidence suggests that three priority policies would have the greatest impact in reducing overall firearm homicide rates:
• Universal background checks;
• Prohibition of gun possession by people with a history of any violent misdemeanor, threatened violence, or serious alcohol-related crime or subject to a domestic violence restraining order. This must be accompanied by: (1) a requirement that firearms already in their possession be surrendered; (2) a procedure for confiscating guns if they are not relinquished voluntarily; and (3) procedures for confiscating guns in situations where a person becomes prohibited from owning firearms after having passed an earlier background check;
• Extreme risk protection order laws that allow removal of firearms from an individual who, after due process, is deemed to represent a threat to themselves or others
```
I would take anti-gun people more seriously if they actually paid attention to what this entails. For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.
Yeah, for some reason people keep going on about the ability for any 18 yo nutcase to go into a shop and buy a military-grade weapon designed to shred organs beyond all repair*, enabling them to efficiently slaughter as many school children as possible before terrorized and outgunned LEOs finally have the guts to take them out.
These pesky humans and their dislike of living in fear of violent death for their children... Can't they just think about this in spreadsheet terms and look at the totally negligible numbers, like the rest of us psychos ? C'mon...
*https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/what-i-...
This is extraordinarily rare.
>People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.
Brandishing weapons is illegal in every state and not pointing the muzzle of a gun at anything you don't intend to destroy is basic gun safety.
>Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.
There's no evidence to suggest that gun ownership causes higher levels of suicide. Additionally, suicide isn't a crime.
Literally 5 seconds to google:
https://med.stanford.edu/news/all-news/2020/06/handgun-owner...
> Additionally, suicide isn't a crime.
Why would that matter? Restricting access to guns is not aimed at reducing crime, but tragedies.
As is mass shootings, when considering the population…what’s different is that all murder/suicides are now perfectly announced to everyone, almost instantly.
This problem needs several factors to resolve, and perfectly doing all of them (hardening soft targets, mental health response, reduction in the availability of guns, intervention in situations of parental abuse and neglect) will still not, 100%, make the problem go away. It’s a factor of a large population, people with a moral/ethical gap - possibly due to external factors, with ready access to very effective tools, broadcast to a passive population instantly - which brings revenue to the media.
https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/32630640/5385318...
Are you required to know basic gun safety in order to obtain one?
My body, my choice. Suicide is not a valid reason to restrict guns.
(Also as a side note to Moderators - some people in this thread are unnecessarily flagging comments that supports gun control. Lot of people speak about free speech , hope that is practiced here.)
https://www.foxnews.com/world/canadas-trudeau-freeze-handgun...
Now question is this. Which option seems more sane to you? You decide.
-evidence that assault weapons ban significantly reduced firearm related mortality in USA in 1994 for 10 years.
There are tests to allow people to drive a car though.
Gun registrations just tell the government, or anyone who can access the registration where to get guns. Registrations don't stop anything and only serve to create more criminals from otherwise innocent people if they don't file paperwork on time. Also, in the U.S. any form of government list of people is heavily suspect regardless of guns, a vast majority of people simply don't want anything that can let the government easily track them. Social Security is barely tolerated for keeping massive amounts of seniors from starving to death, even then the creation of the SSN was hugely controversial.
Unfortunately like automobiles all this would due is punish the honest people. The people who most should have this insurance just wouldn't buy it.
There's a (already fairly 'culty') church here where every adult male wears a pistol to church.
When was there ever gun registration in Indiana?
It's clear that this is the way Americans wish to live, and it is their perogative to do so.
That’s not clear at all. The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.
There is some amount of friction, different in each country but not zero anywhere, between “what people want” and “what is the law”. Do you think North Koreans prefer living under a corrupt dictatorship? Why don’t they just make the dictatorship illegal?
That’s an extreme example of course: the US political system is closer to European-style proportional parliamentary systems than it is to North Korea, but it’s still very different from them, and in many meaningful ways is not actually a democracy.
Because other people don't have this problem. And when you get right down to it, they have megaphones and placards, while their opponents have guns. Amazingly, the gun owners have more political power.
My views on gun ownership are complex and don't fit neatly into existing pigeonholes - I'm very much in favor of the right to own weapons, but also in additional social responsibilities that ought to accompany that. I have a lot of sympathy with the gun control crowd even though I disagree with many of their arguments, but the fact is their tactics are simply not working. Unfortunately they don't want to change their approach because they're so locked into the moral dimension of their argument that they're unwilling to consider any other approach. Likewise the 2nd amendment absolutists are so intransigent that they keep retreating to a hardline position of 'shall not be infringed! shall not be infringed!' and then complaining about how unreasonable their opponents are.
If people haven’t gotten motivated enough after literally decades of this shit, I find it really hard to blame the law.
Great company while pretending to be "the leader of the free world."
Well, you don’t really need activists if you don’t really have a problem. So it is not really surprising that countries with saner gun control policies have fewer activists.
Also, the number of activists does not correlate with the opinion of the people overall. Even though the US is not perfectly democratic, the situation does seem to reflect how a majority of states and a large fraction of the people want to live. This is utterly terrifying to us watching from the other side of the pond, but that’s the way it is.
I believe fully automatic assault weapons and machine guns should be available for purchase, new, just like any other weapon. (Fully automatic weapons are legal to buy and own right now in the US, if you pay a $200 stamp tax and wait 9 months for the ATF to process the paperwork, but you can only buy "NFA" regulated machine guns that were registered in 1986 or before ... which means they're all collectors items now, and the cheapest machine guns are $15-20k and up).
Most people I know would like to see the existing laws enforced, and don't want anything new passed or put in place.
Dead Comment
Smoking is not.
That said, the 21yo requirement may be unconstitutional as well.
We should just move the age of majority to 24 or so. Guns and voting would start there. Vices and contracts would be some sliding scale.
My view: If the US population really wants to do something school shootings in the near term, then the physical layout of schools should be changed so that someone can't just walk in and shoot children. Does this make school look and feel like a dystopian prison? Yes. But that's the price of freedom, which probably shouldn't be born by dead primary school children. This strikes me as the only politically feasible solution right now.
Gun regulation seems likely to help and is a fairly logical solution, but too many people seem allergic to it, and there are already so many unregistered firearms out there. While we are dreaming, reshaping society so everyone is kinder and less likely to shoot each other is also likely to help.
Even prisons need huge sally ports and clear zones to prevent stuff like ram raids and car bombs. Securing EVERY school this way would be nearly impossible. Especially since we can barely staff them in the first place.
The terrorist always has the advantage of picking the least fortified target. In addition they have the drop on the defenders. So unless we have teams of armed and armored QRF guards in ready rooms and a single entry gate at EVERY school we're still going to be vulnerable.
Then, even after we secure every school, the terrorist just waits at the first bus stop, walks on the opening doors, and then kills a busload of kids.
https://miami.cbslocal.com/2012/12/20/teen-school-bus-shooti...
If we couldn't stop it in Iraq and Afghanistan with trillions of dollars of military hardware and surveillance, I don't seeing domestic terrorism being much easier. Especially with the prevalence of firearms and explosives in the United States.
Yet they continue to absolutely dominate the world, culturally and economically. Can't rule out the possibility entirely that we are nuts and they are not.
OK but you realize that some in this case is a small percentage. Most people just want to defend their homes from intruders, defend their property from animals, hunt a few days a year, plink on the weekends, or just don't want to turn in the cherished firearm that was passed down in the family.
You don't live in a tyrannical government?
Dead Comment
Almost every mass shooting in the last decade was someone looking for media attention and high score. And yet, every shooting is followed by detailed biography and a tally of bodies.
Something as simple as a one month moratorium on information for anyone outside the community would probably work wonders, as the public eye will have moved on by then.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8547820/
If the expected outcome of an attempted mass shooting is a quick and ignominious death it will be a major deterrent.
Teachers and administrators have been voluntarily carrying concealed firearms in Utah for roughly a decade.
Imagine the chaos of multiple people with guns trying to take down an assailant with the police involved. Who are the good guys here? Friendly fire happens with cops accidentally shooting hostage victims occasionally and they are well trained.
Do civilians really know how to deal with hostage scenarios?
Do teachers want to carry firearms to protect elementary school students?
Are the school districts going to pay for training and armament?
What if a teacher attacks the children in their class? What if a student carries a weapon to the school and creates a hostage situation? (You eliminated a gun free zone).
Assailants can be better armed than teachers and they can wear armor, which teachers/security personnel will not be equipped with. (See Buffalo massacre)
These are just off the top of my head. I would like to hear a security analyst take on it.
In the UK, where you're not allowed to use firearms to defend yourself, home invasions where someone is home is 64%. In the US, where it is permissible, home invasions where someone is home is 27.6%.
You're over twice as likely to be robbed while you're home in the UK as you are in the US. I'm sure the factors are complex, but knowing that you're actually risking your life when you break into a home in the US has to be one of the factors.
https://www.nimblefins.co.uk/home-insurance/burglary-statist...https://www.thezebra.com/resources/research/burglary-statist....
Tell us again how giving a firearm to Betty the school lunch lady will help in any way ?
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
This is just not realistic suggestion.
Think for example how suicides are generally covered. Reputable organisations don't publish the details of the precise method, and they include a link/phone number to a help line for those who struggle themselves.
> What is the punishment if you break it?
The same as with most norms: Professional embarrassment, and loss of reputation among your peers.
It's so realistic that it's already a real thing.
The government. We need a comprehensive set of media safety laws that prevent publication of these dangerous reports so they won't fall into the wrong hands.
I've had to dismiss and block more than one news organization from my feeds to avoid knowing the name of the most recent shooter. I'd settle for their information just not being shoved down my throat.
The fact that first person shooters are played by hundreds of millions all over the world, but mass shootings are 99% a US thing (which much predated first person shooters, e.g. "I don't like Mondays") should answer the question...
Gun control is not going to fix this kind of radicalism or its impact. The dude was a straight up terrorist and IMO he made the correct observation that this sort of terrorism will be successful in driving the divide and creating more extremism.
I don’t claim to know the intricacies of this problem but it seems directionally correct to have such a thing rather than not.
The goal shouldn’t be to necessarily punish kids but to better identify issues and rehabilitate kids. The school systems are currently turning a blind eye and letting problems fester and compound. That is not the way to go.
From what I understand, there are legal implications for teachers who intervene and this prevents them from doing anything even if they wanted to. We can definitely do better.
Because that's actually hard, and requires a culture change. Much easier to simply add extra regulations (that criminals will ignore) for the average law abiding citizen and get reelected claiming you "did something".
Why are kids plotting mass shootings? It's not because they have access to weapons. It's because something is VERY broken in their family nucleus and values.
I understand your point that there's no way the government can police family education. But what I would suggest is to make parents and legal guardians directly and fully responsible for their kids crimes.
Your children killed? You are charged with accessory murder or manslaughter. Your daughter stole? YOU are charged as well.
It is YOUR choice what you decide to teach or not to your kids. But on the flipside, it also becomes your responsibility.
This would also work with the problems the UK had (I lived there several years ago) of delinquent kids. You had 10 year olds doing crime who just got ASBOs (collectable paper for them,) and the parents were nowhere to be seen. Charge the parents for their children crimes, as adults.
People have repeatedly called out online hate speech as a contributory factor in mass shootings, and that runs into first amendment problems.
Dead Comment
We have to start by being kind to the people who need it most and are often the most difficult to be kind to.
You can’t just create a way to think of people who do things as some sort of “other”, we are all human and capable of similar things given the wrong circumstances.
(Obviously this would either have to be a voluntary media cooperation or violate the free press. But an interesting hypothetical.)
Dead Comment
That said, it is treating the symptom instead of the cause. Our society is fundamentally rotten. We are growing increasingly irrational and violent, we are hating each other more and more, we believe in wild nonsense because we want to believe in it. People are lashing out, but where is all that anger coming from?
I think this single-minded focus on firearms any time these events happen is a distraction, a furthering of the divide between people who don't understand each other and increasingly have no desire to. The real issue is that people feel trapped, oppressed, caged, and helpless, and because they feel like that they act rashly. People do not shoot up schools, run over protesters, and storm government buildings because they feel like things are mostly ok. As long as we continue to pretend that our society as it is today is fundamentally sound we'll continue down this path.
Mass shooters overwhelmingly prefer to target such locations for obvious reasons. If it becomes known that most attempted mass shooters will die an ignominious death before they achieve their goal, the incentive for copycat shooters will be gone.
"Mental Illness" is a broad spectrum and cannot be lumped into a giant bin, and should in no way be discussed a such. Of course there are mentally ill people who should not be near guns. I don't think that's a question... well, to most. Anyone who says different is using them as a lever to get things pushed through or has no experience. This, however is not all mentally ill people. The definition is so vague as to be almost meaningless, at times. Oh, do you have a sexual deviancy like being choked?... You might, technically, have a mental illness, but since it isn't very detrimental to your well being, so long as you set boundaries, you're probably OK. Probably.
"Mass shootings" are defined by any shooting that has 4 or more victims. This does get divided, once you dig down a little further in the database, but it's all lumped under the "Mass shooting" header. This is driveby's (sp?), party shootings, drug buys, etc... not that that is better, or should be taken with a cavalier attitude. Far from it. But, if you are looking at it from a preventative stand point, it's a completely different equation. These aren't going to be legally obtained, randomized violence, caused by mental illness. These are generally crimes of poverty, means and lack of opportunity. Gun laws and access to mental health facilities aren't going to stop these, but job programs, education, birth control, manufacturing facilities, infrastructure and treatment services might.
So someone is killing people because he is poor and needs money? Why doesn't he work instead?
You can get something minor on your record, and be stuck out of work until you can get enough money to move closer to a place which will hire someone with a crime on their background check, which is now near impossible to do legally.
This situation can make one desperate enough to attempt crimes which can lead to murder, such as armed robbery.
Mental health issues are distributed globally, but the gun violence problem is not.
People who suffer from mental health issues are tremendously more likely to be victims of violence, rather than the perpetrators. These individuals already suffer from tremendous discrimination and hardships in their lives.
Those who would place the blame in this direction while deflecting from the ease of access to firearms are acting disingenuously.
We continue to do nothing, and I wish I could say that nothing continues to happen - but Americans continue to die from this senseless violence with shocking regularity.
I'm not so sure that is true. I'd wager that Americans are suffering more than most right now due to institutional rot (or at least the perception and portrayals of it).
A hormonal, bullied, enraged teenager where I live is less likely to do monstrous amounts of damage to others. They can get easy access to a knife and might own a car. Out of hundreds of people here, I think I know one person who has a gun, and they live on a farm with a rifle that I'd imagine emerges once a year to shoot foxes or kangaroos.
In the UK, where the civilian population does not carry arms and even most cops don't, the police fires a few hundred shots per year(!) with a population of 60 million. In the entire post war era (The Troubles aside) less police has been killed than in the US in a year.
So if you care about the safety of law enforcement an arms race has bad consequences for everyone. And the militarization of police is another bad consequence.
Gang membership as traced by law enforcement is not something super formal.
I found this, although it mostly contradicts your claim (with the exception of gun deaths due to assaults on people in the age range 5-34): https://web.archive.org/web/20180829034947/https://injuryfac...
Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42
Honestly, I don't see how the US is ever going to dig itself out of this hole. The reward system that leads to the perpetuating the culture war that lies behind this problem (among many others) just seems too strong. It's deeply structural and embedded in US culture, and there doesn't seem to be a way to change it. I wish there was.
[1] https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/may-24-2022
Then when referencing hard numbers and talking about the influence the NRA may have had, she doesn't back that up with anything. Her "notes" are mostly other highly opinionated articles. Had she followed any form of standard or proper notation[1] it'd be easier to believe her. But usually when people fail to make their sources easily available it's because they don't have them/they are low quality.
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources]
Edit:
Just to add another comment to this. Typically when someone claims that something which is supported by a large percentage or even the majority of a given population is the result of "extremism", they themselves are like the extremists, for better or for worse.
Why is it ridiculous? Where are your sources for that?
The political violence and radicalism of the 60’s drove the legislation. Only automatic weapons were controlled before that.
So seems silly to claim “radicals took over the NRA” when any type of gun control is a very recent phenomenon. Hell, even during the 80’s most of the US had incredibly lax gun control laws compared to what is being suggested today.
I'm not American, but yes it seems that way. Its not available or accessible to the people who need it.
Poverty, poor housing, unemployment and dead-end jobs, ambient violence, social media, endless precarity and culture war. People are being driven mad.