Virginia Beach Shooting-When will America stop?
Disclaimer: I am Canadian, but have lived on and off throughout my life in various parts of the (South) United States. In Canada, guns and gun violence do exist. Just not in the amount, grandiosity, or frequency of the United States. You cannot buy a gun here in Walmart-nor can you get one without a long and thorough license process (for hunting). Gun violence largely exists due to the illegal guns imported across the border.
Key Points:
Key Points:
- A recent gunman left 12 dead in Virginia Beach today.
- This is just one of many mass shootings that have taken place in the United States this year (105). Let alone in the past few years. Just this month a high school student lost his life tackling another student who had brought a gun to school with the intention to shoot his classmates. Last year a high school in Florida, the student protests brought the issue to mainstream attention. It seems that gun violence and mass shootings are a regular occurrence in America, something I grew up with the news of. Even here in Canada we had lock down drills with these events in mind.
- This does not even begin to describe another gun issue, that of family fire-the accessibility of firearms in the family home leading to children/toddler's accidentally shooting themselves or others, and the corroborating rate of domestic shootings with guns owned in the house.
- This is a severe problem in the United States, more so than anywhere else. With the growing hyper-individualism, right wing reactionists, and of course, the monetary interests of the NRA vice-gripping the American government, I don't see this getting better anytime soon.
- Of course I understand the 'constitutional' history of gun ownership-it is meant to protect citizens from tyranny of government. What must be understood though, is that this was written centuries ago, long before the invention of modern guns that make rapid (and de facto accurate) firing easy and extremely dangerous. It takes no skill to pick up a semi-automatic, untrained depressed teens can do it. Also what people fail to understand, the next civil war (if there is to be one on American soil) will not be fought with guns, at least, not on the civilian side. The American Military far outnumbers any other military in the world let alone the pathetic efforts of rural, illiterate, and dogmatic Americans that largely makeup the pro-gun demographic, therefore, the concept of "protecting" oneself and one's property from government tyranny with firearms is eh...useless. If anything, the next civil war will be fought digitally (in some shape or form)
- In no way am I implying that violence in America is somehow unique to America. Violence has arguably existed for as long as humans have existed, and at least, as long as agriculture and the concept of 'property' have existed. What has changed is the physical and moral ease in which technology has allowed people to be violent, extremely violent, and kill. My home city suffered a terrible domestic terrorism event last year, a man drove a van across the sidewalks during rush hour, killing a dozen or so, of course, van rentals are quite more benign than gun ownership. Though that being said, I do understand that guns don't kill people, people kill people, but guns make it super easy to kill people-even from a moral sense. Much easier to be morally detached when shooting random people from afar, than actively coming close, smelling their aftershave, sensing their pheromones releasing fear hormones, hearing their whimpering, feeling their bones crack beneath the impact ect.... I couldn't stab someone (probably) except in terrible cases of self defence, but I have been mad enough that I could have picked up a gun and shot someone in the heat of the moment, or shot myself in the heat of an intense anxiety attack or depressive episode. I also do not blame video games. While video games certainly help acclimatize children to violence-violence has always existed in some form, in the public sphere ie. public executions has equally helped desensitize and brutalize people to violence.
- My question of course, is multi-faceted, but it begins with, what do we do? What is the future? America is revealing some alarming tendencies-stripping human rights, over consumption and economic hyper individualism-the right is reacting to 'perceived' threats from the Left (as happens it seems, every 25-30 years)-but this is also a country with an alarming rate of class stratification, illiteracy, and various forms of overt oppression and brutality-not the least of which the recent attempt to ban abortions.
Comments (101)
And easily lead to slaughter.
Admittedly the later is from a guy who is a member of a church which told him he needed a bigger hand gun in order to remain a member of the parish ... I think there seems to be enough of this paranoia instill in US culture that it inevitably bubbles over as social stress presses home.
There is certainly a dark culture of one-up-manship that is becoming more prevalent in societies where social media has gripped us by the throat - that said I am still for social media and it is likely a case of a generation gap leading to conflict. I imagine the younger generations coming through will understand firsthand the power of mass communication and be in a better position to cope with it.
I've been asked this in Australia by an American as well. I found it an insane question.
source
source
Everyday 10 people die from famine, another 10 from car 'accidents', another 5 get their house burned down, another 5 middle schoolers die in a fight and so on.
Proportionally violence is much more rampant where I live than in the US, but I'm still worried about the elderly Japanese who commit crime to get shelter.
It's not a US problem, guns or no guns.
America has already stopped. :grin:
The overwhelming majority of gun violence comes from the very same place it has for over half a century - the hood. So let's stop pretending (extemporaneously speaking, of course) that these few and far between gun assaults in non-impoverished inner city venues are the real issue. Prior to Columbine H.S., there was zero general concern for gun control (particularly on the political scene). How very coincidental.
Lol, with all due respect.
But in communities dominated by illegal commerce, I dont see how the ""blacks"" and ""poors"" benefit. It's a funny paradox.
:lol: :cry:
Oh, the irony. Do you watch the news at all?
That would make nice thread.
What we need to figure out is why the people who are snapping are snapping and tackle those issues. My suspicion is that the core of it is often a combo of survival pressures and relative isolation or marginalization, when those are felt by someone who has the "right" combo of mental issues. As was the case here, many of these shootings have been precipitated by loss, and often, as in this case, a lost job.
In the U.S., there's not a feeling of a "social safety net." Especially as folks get older, they worry about how they're going to find another job--as there seems to be a lot of age discrimination (combined with wanting to hire younger employees because you can pay them less), and in conjunction with that, people worry about a loss of health care, an inability to keep paying rent/a mortgage/car payments, etc., and so on.
On top of this, a lot of people feel relatively isolated or marginalized, which is due to a number of both cultural and geophysical factors.
And because of the health care issues we have, a lot of people with mental problems do not get help (or even get diagnosed). You have to worry about insurance covering it, it's expensive otherwise, and of course there's a cultural stigma associated with it.
None of these sorts of things are easy to change.
So finally re gun availability, my stance is that we should try any and every approach, from a complete gun ban on one extreme to mandatorily arming and training everyone on the other extreme, and then any and everything in between--to see if any different approach would lessen gun violence, or in other words, my stance is "We should do whatever would work to lessen gun violence"--I don't actually care about what the gun laws would happen to be. I care about what, if anything, would work to decrease gun violence. We'd need to experiment to see what might work in our particular culture.
If the issue is primarily cultural instead of just hinging on the availability of guns, then probably no gun availability stance will have much effect. It's much easier to focus on guns than it is to focus on the more complex socio-cultural (and political) issues, such as fixing our health care system, our approach to employment, cultural norms that make it easy to be isolated or marginalized, etc. I do think that tackling the gun issue is worthwhile--because who knows, maybe it would have some effect, but my suspicion is that that's not going to really be the problem.
Because, with one or two exceptions, this is an American problem. Other countries don't allow guns. Still other countries do allow guns, but their citizens rarely shoot each other. As you Americans say: go figure.
Because offenders are quickly disarmed. Go figure.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
The tools change, but war lives on. Are mass stabbings and being run over by a car better? :roll:
No, it's just that, in general, they don't shoot each other. I believe Switzerland and Canada are good examples of countries that allow guns, but whose citizens manage to resist the temptation to kill one another. :chin:
Quoting Shamshir
So you will allow guns because there are other causes of death? That's logical....
It's not that people resist the urge, PC, it's that any such attempt leads to a civil and consequently world war.
The recently attemped coup at Turkey illustrated that quite well. The governments far east are holding down the floodgates to a civil war and you're unlikely to hear about it, because it's not reported. :smile:
America being so public about anything irrelevant leaves the impression that the problem is exclusive only to it.
And yeah, I do find America's failure in homeland security irrelevant, when governments have started arming themselves with nuclear arms again.
So you agree that free access to guns is a Bad Idea?
Wait! Are you saying here that removing guns from general circulation would CAUSE civil and world war? :gasp:
No, free access to guns is not a bad idea. Desensitizing the public to violence through entertainment is a bad idea.
If you ban guns, please ban cars as anyone can simply get in his car and run over a dozen people at will. :smile:
Any kid could stab another kid with a pencil in the neck, but they mostly don't; sometimes they do however, and it's not because of the pencil, is it? :roll:
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Didn't it already happen with the French Revolution? :chin:
I distinctly remember a bunch of french peasants with makeshift weaponry committing regicide.
On a purely practical basis, cars have a use: transport. Guns are just for killing people. Even knives have other uses than stabbing people, although the case for them is nowhere near as clear as it is for cars.
Quoting Shamshir
Did it? Did the removal of guns from French society cause the French Revolution? I'm not a history buff, but I'm not convinced that happened. Yes, there was a revolution, but it wasn't caused by the removal of guns from citizens. It was caused by the rich, who took everything and left the poor to starve. The poor had other ideas, eventually.
Except they're not. They're for hunting wildlife and firearms displays and shooting competitions too. :grin:
I'm sure you're well aware gunpowder's main and intended use was for fireworks displays at festivals; but much like atomic energy, it got quickly militarized, due to warmongering.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
It was caused by a populace left to rot. That was unarmed, unless you count turning farming implements in to makeshift pikes and using their alcohol rations as molotov cocktails; in which case they would be highly armed - despite under severe famine.
The populace of the Balkans is also rotting away, and would cause a bloody revolt to start another World War if the government decided to forcibly seize people's armaments, due to the number of home invasions on the rise. The Balkans are already revolting, mind you, but the guise of 'democracy' is what's withholding a full blown civil war. Even rats grow furious when backed in to a corner. :smile:
Here, I'll give you another example as a freebie.
When the Ottoman Turks took over Bulgaria, they confiscated all armaments and culled the populace far and wide, whilst also enlisting Bulgarian children in to their ranks - commanding them to kill their own parents. This suppression of the local populace did not stop it from revolting, it only served to fuel their hatred for the Turks and lead to many revolts.
And cars are flexible in ways guns are not.
Also, how is a bullet to the brain deadlier than being beheaded or disemboweled?
Do you think guns are deadlier because they've got range and rapid fire? Just load some fireworks with shrapnel, like you know... frag grenades?
Quoting Maw
It's not the abundance or availability of guns, it's an education rooted in violence.
A pacifist with a hundred tommy guns won't shoot you, but a homicidal maniac will kill you with a fork, without a second thought.
Go ahead, remove the guns and watch people go back to swinging pipes and bats and knives; they'll die just as often.
Quoting Maw
It's not waving deaths caused by guns, it's waving the presumption that deaths are caused by guns and not by people and positing that the same stones that were used to build walls, meaning to defend, were used to stone people to death, meaning to kill.
The US has always been something of a mixing pot so the extreme ends of society are maybe due to the freedom in the country which is also geographically and politically quite out on its own. The mantras of ‘making it in America’ or ‘the land of hopes and dreams’ perhaps plays into people feeling falls harder than they should and abandonment when they see such inclusivity preached?
I certainly don’t think the attitudes possessing some people in the US are an effect of owning guns; not that I am for the ownership of guns or feel it necessary for every citizen to own one.
See this is exactly what's I'm talking about. The responses here are so tortuously awful it's difficult to tell if this is just outright stupidity or sheer nihilism.
What you are attempting to describe here is more pointedly a mental healthcare issue, and as the Times article I linked to points out, mental health issues don't correlate as a factor.
It could simply be that the shakers and movers of the 80’s are now what is being translated into the upper echelons of politics - those in positions of financial power back then have now grown into political attitudes.
Countries are necessarily driven on by the old guard - those holding attitudes related to the times they grew up in. People may joke and pass out scathing remarks to so-called ‘millennials’ but there is certainly some truth in how history shapes generational attitudes and the political compass.
Yes, the America has a deeply ingrained gun culture, exactly.
MTV, Hollywood, hero worship, lack of a Monarchy (therefore the surrogate “President” royalty - Kennedy’s and such), not to mention the racial tensions due to the slavery of the past directly on your own soil. In the later respect racism is apparent enough in places like Australia due to the segregation of groups of people following massive slaughter (not exactly slavery as they were simply wiped out); the difference in the US being the wounds are still relatively fresh and constantly being prodded at for political gains.
The US is a strange concoction, but it has worked well enough up to now.
So, do you disagree it's people that kill people?
Germany has four times as many guns per 100 people than the UK (20+ compared to 5 per 100), yet homicide rats in the UK are 44% greater.
It ain’t simply about the guns. If you look at other countries like Finland or Canada it is clearly not about the numbers of guns compared to Uruguay. There is certainly a plethora of guns in the US which we could suggest is indicative of gnu deaths, but not necessarily so as it doesn’t play out in such a way when we compare the number of guns per person in other countries compared to homicides (it undoubtedly plays into the number of gun related homicides though).
Those are unusual uses of guns, and "firearms displays and shooting competitions" are just demonstrations of how they could be used to kill people. Such uses do not take away from the primary point: guns are for shooting people with. Empirical evidence shows conclusively that the most common use of guns - by far the most common use of guns - is to kill people.
So hunting with a gun is unusual despite there being Hunting Rifles? Hmm.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
So competitive archery and javelin throwing are about killing people, right?
Because something gets militarised it's suddenly only for killing people, is that it?
And guns being predominantly militarised is your check, right?
Cigarettes' primary use is to harm people. But they're okay cause they're not as graphic.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Full stop.
When the empirical evidence confirms that this is so, then yes. Guns are used by people to kill people. That is their primary function, as verified empirically.
You being from England, may have heard of Walter Arnold who got fined for driving at 8 mph.
This in modern day's time seems ludicrous, as it's about the speed of a leisurely bicycle ride.
And yet the speed limit has continuously increased and with it the amount of car fatalities.
So empirically, car deaths correlate to the speed limit - but it hasn't receded, has it?
No, authorities don't constitute it's due to high speed, but due to careless driving.
So how come shootings aren't due to careless wielding of firearms?
All I'm hearing are excuses on how guns hold all the responsibility and humans hold none.
There's always been murder with instruments of every kind, if you can't accept it, not sure what to say (the desire to kill doesn't originate in America). What scares me more than these senseless murders is the slightest intimation AI could predict public terrorism/shootings. Let's not be too over alarmed by it, eh. After all, a lot of people are killed by cars and other technics, if you want to look at that way. Blaming technics when they fail or do harm (in combination with agency) is failure to think on it in the round.
But they are. ... The ones that aren't deliberate, of course.
Quoting Shamshir
Guns don't kill people, people kill people? It's a tired old cliche, true as far as it goes, but incomplete and dismissive of the real world. Humans kill other humans, even though we all say (and apparently believe) that we shouldn't. So we need to remove temptation from our paths. And that's guns. Yes, there are many other things that can be used to kill people, but to minimise the number of killings, we need to minimise the number of weapons available.
Those potential weapons that have no other use but as weapons: we should get rid of them straight away. That includes guns, for example. Other things, that have other uses, maybe the best we can do is to be careful of/with them. That includes cars, for example.
The responsibility for all the killings lies with us, the killers. And since we cannot control our deadly urges, but we want to, we do the next best thing, and remove temptation. That is the rationale behind banning guns, and it's what America must do if shootings are to be minimised. Or don't bother, if you're happy with the level of gun crime in your country?
Quoting Shamshir
Driving at high speed when the road conditions don't permit it is careless driving. It's not one or the other; one is (sometimes) the other.
Of course, not only those - but all of them, as shooters care less for the lives of those they intend to shoot, hence they are careless.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Give your dog a gun and tell me the death toll.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
There is nothing that can't be anything but a weapon.
That's a very convoluted presumption which again you're trying to scapegoat in to avoiding responsibility.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
See, I've never heard of someone wanting to not kill someone, but killing him anyway, much as I've never heard of someone who wanted pizza but got salad instead.
What you're voicing through this statement is a lack of commitment; it's like kids who want to work part time and earn a huge salary right off the bat.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Sure, less guns equates to less shootings. But are the shootings the issue or the homicides?
Like I've explicitly told you, with or without guns, people will kill and not less.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
My country has a low gun crime toll and yet is proportionally worse in every aspect of the justice department. When every house legally possessed firearms, crime was at an all time low.
Funnily, crime back then and now is not connected to guns, but to education.
Back when people had guns, people were far more disciplined.
Now they don't have guns, but kill each other on the daily, as they've degenerated.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
The road conditions never permit high speed, because it reduces reaction time and crashes happen at the last second.
Stopping distances is the first thing they teach you, when you take Driver's Ed.
And yet the statistics clearly show that countries where guns are controlled or forbidden have less gun crime (obvious? :wink: ). And the difference is not taken up in murders using other weapons. There are not appreciably more stabbings when there are no guns around. Guns make it easy and convenient to kill, quickly and efficiently, in anger, before one has the time for sober consideration.
I thought you were American. :blush: Sorry for my mistake. What country do you come from?
In a population of 56 million, that adds up to about 50 to 60 gun killings annually. In the USA, by contrast, there are about 160 times as many gun homicides in a country that is roughly six times larger in population. There were 8,124 gun homicides in 2014, according to the latest FBI figures.[/quote]
The US allows its citizens to possess and use guns; the UK does not. We have 1 gun-killing per million per year, and our neighbours across the Atlantic have about 22 per million per year. Taking just these two countries as examples, it would seem that the availability of guns leads to the use of guns (for killing each other with).
Overall, there are 8493 deaths per million (from all causes) in the USA (source: link), and 8887 deaths per million (from all causes) in the UK (source: link).
So our overall death rates are very similar, but the gun-killings are not.
P.S. Guns aren't banned in the UK, because to ban them, they must once have been allowed. I have no idea when or if guns have ever been generally available in the UK, but it has not been so in my lifetime (born 1955), and I don't think it was ever the case.... :chin: So guns were never banned in the UK; they've never been allowed. [There are exception for shotguns, used in the country by gamekeepers and the like.]
[ The so-called ban on handguns in 1997 in the UK actually refers to a law that tightened up exceptions to our existing gun controls. Handguns were already illegal, except for some carefully-controlled exceptions. After the Dunblane massacre, some of these exceptions were removed or tightened up. ]
It's fairly deceitful to supply a percentage difference without simultaneously supplying the numbers you are comparing. The homicide rate is 0.81 in the UK and 1.17 in Germany, which is a difference of 44% but in real terms is hardly distinguishable. As you point out, Germany has many more guns than UK. There are nearly 20 civilian-owned guns per 100 people in Germany and nearly 5 civilian-owned guns per 100 people in England. But this is very much in line with gun deaths: in 2015 there were 269 homicides committed with a firearm vs. only 14 in England (19x more). Per 1 million people, there are 3.26 murders committed by a firearm in Germany vs. 0.236 in England (14x more). This is not surprising when there are four times as many guns per people in one country than another, there are much more gun-attributed deaths, which is precisely my point, not that there is some vague cultural aspect involced which no one can seem to actually articulate.
In America, there are 120 civilian firearms per 100 people, or 5 times more than Germany, so it's unsurprising the USA has 32 gun-attributed murders per one million people vs. Germany's 3.26 (10x more) and 9,369 murders in 2015 compared to Germany's 269 (35x times more). More guns more gun-related murders, and to @StreetlightX's point, none of this even takes suicide via firearm into account.
the problem has four elements. First, if you are to focus on killing alone, then it is very clear from FBI statistics that the majority of homicides in the USA are not from strangers involved in home invasion. Family and 'friends,' living in the same domicile kill each other far more frequently, by a factor of 2:1, and most frequently husbands shoot their wives. And this is not idle speculation, or drawn from anti-gun lobby group data. I put two years into analyzing all the reliable data I could find, here:
https://www.yofiel.com/guns/916-report
The second element is the ease with which people can kill each other when guns are available. The same report shows that death is far more likely if guns are available, and that guns are the preferred method of attack in the USA by an order of magnitude.
The third element is that 2nd amendment advocates have proliferated an enormous amount of propaganda purely aimed at increasing gun sales. It's been claimed that there are now more people selling guns in the USA than all the people who work in Mcdonalds, Starbucks, and all supermarkets combined, although I haven't seen ratification of it, it is not an unfair statement that too many people in the USA are very vocal about their vested self interest.
The reason I wrote the first report was after asking some gun owners if they would shoot children who broke into their back yard to steal apples off an apple tree. I was so astonished by the results, I asked 500 gun owners. 90% said they would. At the time no one believed me but now people rarely doubt it. that is to say, attitudes to guns have got markedly worse in the last decades to the extent where even Americans are starting to notice it. I wrote a report on that in 2018 which I sent to John Oliver, and he did a show on the NRA the following week, you can see it here:
https://www.yofiel.com/guns/nra
the fourth element is the sparcity of reliable data. The anti-gun lobby in the USA is almost as fanatical as the pro-gun lobby, frequently making wild emotive claims of the same order. If there were more sanity, similar data on violent gun injuries, which have been increasing at a far greater rate in the USA, would be available, but the NRA was successful in sponsoring a bill to stop further government research into firearm injuries.
As a result, there is not much data on the actual cost of gun violence. I attempted to calculate it, and it figured out to be about $400 per gun in the USA. So I proposed a per-firearm 'gun violence tax' which would reduce if gun violence went down, offset by a gun tax credit for all Americans equal to the amount of income from the gun violence tax. That would create a unified interest to reduce the cost of violence, and hence result in sensible legislature, rather than the piecemeal hodge podge now existent in the USA. Moreover, as most people who own guns own more than one, the tax credit is more than the cost of owning one gun, which would actually make it cheaper for someone who doesnt own a gun to buy one. That would incentivize the gun industry to stop selling assault weapons, which is now its man source of revenue here, and causing the problem in my opinion. Currenlty the firearm industry is trying to sell guns to people who already have one, so they are marketing more lethal ones. Instead they would try to make guns safer. Then with reduction in gun violence, everyone would benefit from the tax credit. A number of politicians contacted me about making a gun violence tax, but none were interested in returning its income to everyone as a tax credit, so I gave up on the gun tax solution.
I tried proposing a government buy-back program to convert assault weapons into low-velocity sports toys, but my proposal was not liked by the low-income neighborhood where I was living at the time. They shot my cat with an air gun, shot guns across my yard from a violent person's front yard to a tree on the other side, and tried to beat me up several times, to 'teach me how stupid I am.' the police couldnt do anything about it. So I moved out of that city and didn't tell anyone where I now live. My house is still there, but I am too frightened to go back to it, and probably they have ransacked it too by now.
So that's what happens if you try to stop gun violence in the USA.
No, they won't. The simple fact borne out by empirical evidence is that the more powerful the weapon the more enhanced the affects of aggression applied to it. Someone with a bat may expend all their aggression hitting you with it once, which may harm but not kill you, but the same level of aggression expressed through pressing the trigger of a gun much more easily will. That's why we don't allow people to buy grenades and rocket launchers. Because we know that they are too dangerous to be put in the hands of regular humans who are prone to sudden fits of pique. So, the principle is accepted everywhere, including in America, that people will die more the more dangerous weapons are available. It's just that in America, which is already awash with guns, people don't feel safe enough to give theirs up and don't fully appreciate the advantages in security of an environment where everyone has.
and
The first graph sums it up fairly well. The more dangerous the weapon, the more magnified the effect of the aggression involved. That's why 'dangerous' weapons like guns are so-called. I sometimes resent having to make these obvious points, but it seems they must be made.
Didn't notice this point before. More or less what I said.
An increasingly dumbed-down population + dangerous weapons to play with = :fire: :death:
the total amount of deaths from guns since 9/11 passed half a million in May 2017. This was from September 2016, at which time guns had killed a thousand Americans for every single American citizen killed by a terrorist. So you might thing what you say is funny, but its not funny to about a thousand times more people than you, actually.
Don't waste your time on him. Future stupidities will meet an appropriate mod response.
The difference is actually Germany at 1.18 and UK at 1.20; so there is a slight difference, but it trends to say guns owned doesn’t effect homicide rates. The US has about 5.00 homicide rate like Argentina (Argentina slightly higher), yet the guns owned per 100 people differs by over 100!
My point was that there is not a 1 to 1 correlation between homicides and gun ownership. Having more guns around doesn’t make people more murderous.
I also (in a non-deceitful manner) stated that the US is such an extreme outlier that we cannot tell how much gun ownership on such a level plays into murderous intentions - the most dominant and reasonably well known feature of homicide rates, and violent crime in general, is that they increase where there is a stark difference in wealth equality.
"When will America stop?" Or "Will America stop?" Oh... probably not.
The vast majority of Americans are remarkably non-violent. But, as noted, "the hood" accounts for a lot of the gun violence, and "the hood" is, in many cases, a behavioural sink. So, there you find -again- a small numbers of anti-social agents who account for a larger than proportional share of shooting and knife deaths (guns being more effective when used as directed).
As it happens, multiple death shootings are far, far more news worthy than thug shooting thug in the slums so are given lavish coverage. A thug's wild shot killing a baby in its crib inside a house is exquisitely appalling too, so that gets fairly good coverage. Otherwise, who cares? 12 bodies in one batch in Virginia Beach or 12 bodies over the weekend in Chicago's slums? No comparison in news value.
The urge to kill is, possibly perhaps maybe, universal but 99.9% of us are able to suppress that itchy urge. .1% (1/10 of 1%) are prone to pulling the trigger.
I'm not quite sure what ails killers. Around a third of Americans own guns, and very very few murders -- individual or group packages -- are carried out by these 100 million people (and I say that as a devoted foe of the NRA).
I've shown multiple times that research on gun ownership routinely shows that more guns correlates to more gun violence. This analysis is true across countries, states, and even towns, and that legislation that restricts firearms corresponds to a decrease in firearm deaths. If you wanna say that people will find ways to murder one another, then sure people in countries without access to firearms have resorted to knives, but there's no other tool like a gun which can be carried, concealed, and used to attack multiple targets from a distance.
My point is it is deceitful - for whomever - to equate violence with gun ownership. To repeat, there is a very strong correlation between wealth disparity and violent crime. Where very rich people live next to very poor people crime rockets.
If we’re looking for REASONS behind social outliers in the spat of incidents in the US then I think people are looking in the wrong direction for several reasons if they put the blame almost completely on guns. One pretty obvious point would be that it is an unrealistic proposition to get rid of all those guns. Other would be that anyone can make a bomb instead - the IRA were quite successful in that regard. Boys like guns because they’re “cool” - you’re not going to change that either. The point is more about managing ways for people to express themselves and understand their violent capacities and to keep the extreme ends of wealth away from each other and to, in general, balance out general wealth inequality. There are bigger factors at play here than gun ownership.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-01/two-australians-made-a-viral-gun-control-video/11118340
But even that won't change a single mind in the 'guns=freedom' crowd.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States
I don’t think banning guns outright is a sensible option either. For sports and hunting I don’t see an issue - plus some places in the world require guns for hunting and protection (from wild life).
In the US I would certainly put some law in place to either reduce the availability of guns and/or police ownership more carefully (that is a longterm solution though). Banning completely is overkill - having much more strict rules in place for ownership works in other countries well enough.
Still, this isn’t really addressing the OP as far as I can tell. The problem is deeper than mere gun ownership - like I said bombs work just as well and can be made by anyone wishing to systematically murder (which are the kinds of incidents referred to in the OP rather than spur of the moment psychosis).
Quoting Maw
Your proposal is a good idea. I'm in favour. However...
There are something like ... 200 million guns in the US. 100 million people own guns. Despite the absurdly large number of guns, the location and circumstances of killings is fairly circumscribed. There is a concentration of killings in zip codes that have high rates of poverty and marginality. Are the white guys doing the group killings mentally ill, terminally alienated, totally outraged, or what? I don't know, but it seems axiomatic that they aren't 'normal'. After all, we live in a society that is a regular factory of insanity, alienation, and rage. We can be thankful, I suppose, that most white guys who are at the end of their rope kill themselves rather than somebody else.
I really don't know if there is any way to address the individual problems of MI, alienation, and rage. As for dealing with these problems collectively, doing so would be revolutionary. I don't see any revolutions on the horizon.
I don't see much likelihood of retrieving at least 200,000,000 guns. Do you?
So, that's why Brazil with all of its gun crime wants to fix the issue by loosening gun laws, right?
And Iceland, with all of its firearms, is peaceful - but that's an anomaly, right?
Stop beating the poor dead horse, please.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
There are, when the culture of warmongering has not dissipated.
Please, I implore you to remove guns and see the outcome for yourself; I've seen it.
Quoting Pattern-chaser
Picking up a rock from the ground and smacking a passerby in the back of the head with it is an easy and convenient way to kill, quick and efficient, in anger, before one has the time for sober consideration.
Also, stabbing someone in the throat.
But you don't see it, so out of sight out of mind, right? :roll:
Quoting Baden
So, you're going to ignore all history up to the point when men started firing rocks with gunpowder instead of slings?
And it appears to me anyway, that the really powerful weapons - like nuclear ones, actually subdued human aggression, out of fear for the ramifications.
The simple fact, if there is one, is that the more powerful the weapon - the more enhanced the effects of aggression might be when applied to it.
I don't see how guns are dangerous without a finger to pull the trigger.
Tie a bunch of guns to a tree and tell me the death toll.
Quoting ernestm
And here we go back to square one, when I asked - why do you think this is a US problem, because husbands kill their wives without guns anyway. It happens here, everyday.
When Cain killed Abel, that was due to this weapon of choice, right? Not due to his seething hatred for his brother, right?
And this story, mind you, is present all around the globe.
Numbers don't matter without a motive.
Point it out for me, if you will.
If you actually bothered to read the New York Times article I provided, you'll find studies/material showing that a comprehensive comparison across 10 countries, US states, and even US towns, correlating that more guns is associated with more to gun violence. It's not apparent because you are being fucking lazy.
The Australian government issued a mandatory buyback program and subsequently destroyed 20% of privately owned guns, which reduced the number of suicides and homicides, so that's certainly a start, which is undeniably better than throwing our hands in the air complaining how difficult the task might be.
That said, 20% reduction of privately owned guns in the US would still be about 96 privately owned guns per 100 civilians, which is still extremely high. I'm sure there are others who have put forward viable solutions that are not necessarily "revolutionary" to greatly reduce the number of guns in America, but I for one am a full proponent of abolishing the 2nd Amendment
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rR9IaXH1M0
Finally! A comment on topic. Nice job :)
Sadly no one cared for it :(
Just because I point out your facile interpretation of selected stats it doesn’t mean I think everyone should own a gun. If people want to own a gun I simply wonder why they want to ow a gun. Hence my opening gambit of asking if it is a matter of paranoia given what I’ve heard from US citizens and how they tend to say they ‘feel safer’ when they live in other countries.
This says to me there is something underlying US culture that effects people’s behavior.
The dumb NYT article you presented showed complete ignorance of statistical analysis. Take away the US and there is NO PATTERN. We can look at the massive outlier of the US and suggest that more guns means more homicides (not just gun related) ... but that simply does play out if we look at the countries I‘ve mentioned. The second chart doesn’t seem to take into account the obvious differences between Yemen and the US ... ? The rest shows more or less that any pattern below that doesn’t show any particular trend - I can account for the Philippines well enough because I know something of the MASSIVE inequality in the country and the conflicts in Mindanao PLUS the drug problems. Other factors to account for are population densities which play into the need to have the poor living on the doorstep if the rich; this creates obvious tensions.
Gun use is a symptom not a direct cause. People don’t turn into murderous idiots just because they own a gun and to argue that ‘guns are dangerous’ is the dumbest possible argument there is to explain the civil discontent being expressed - without guns they’d likely be more bombs (eg. IRA methods of terrorizing).
Attack my argument not me. You haven’t actually managed to offer up an explanation as to why people don’t shoot each other in Norway. The reason is if you did you’d be suggesting an alternative reason for the violence outside of gun ownership. By all means be pissed at the gun culture in the US (I can only agree), but it is stubborn to suggest there is no other factor involved when it comes to mass shootings when we can see - although it takes some effort to cross reference the data - that there isn’t 1 to 1 correlation between gun ownership and homicides, or homicides by guns (other than the blatantly obvious fact that a gun is involved in gun deaths; it’s scary that it has gotten to the point where I feel I have to make this explicit for fear of being misrepresented!?)
You may as well be arguing that guns are the cause of all war ... it’s just plain nonsense. Conflict begins for a number of reasons and the reason that countries owning guns don’t always go around shooting each other is due to a number of reasons. It is not like I’m arguing that 1000 years ago guns didn’t exist so there was no war/conflict, or that I’m suggesting having guns prevents war/conflict.
Also, as I’ve already mentioned, the correlation between violent crime and inequality is much more solid - those living in severe poverty next to those living in a wealthy environment means greater crimes rates and violence (Brazil is one obvious example of this ... oh, but then you look EVERYWHERE else and the same pattern plays out be it on a scale of neighbourhood, town, city or country).
If your only concern is gun law then maybe you should sit out the discussion? That or perhaps explore other possible factors given that the relation between homicidal tendencies and gun ownership are exactly a hard correlation? It is not like anyone is arguing that spoons cause gun deaths; meaning no one is stupid enough to suggest that NO GUNS means no gun crime. I’m simply saying guns are not needed to kill people - stupid gun laws in the US certainly play into the hands of gun crime rates BUT the motives of these people needs to be addressed rather than focusing primarily on gun laws.
As a hypothetical maybe you could look at this scenario:
The year is 2050 and after a revision in gun laws in the US gun ownership is equivalent to that of Germany ... yet the number of mass shootings has not fallen. Why?
It is always easier to pile the blame on one thing. In reality it is rarely - if ever? - the case.
Another good idea. The 2nd Amendment outlived its utility, if it ever had any, a long time ago. Second Amendment Fetishism is a relatively recent disease -- decidedly post WWII.
BTW, how do you get "about 96 privately owned guns per 100 civilians"? I've read that there are around 200,000,000 guns in the US and that about a third of Americans own them. It would seem more like 2 guns per citizen. (And 2/3s don't own a gun. What's the cause of that 'sickly inability to use force'? Low testosterone, I suppose.
"Religion, you see, is not in its roots adoration of a god or a goddess. Religion is fear. Religion is the spark that issues forth when the thought of death or danger strikes the individual. It's personal. It grows out of darkness and uncertainty.""
A E Van Vogt, Book of Ptath
Well I dont think so. Given the weight of empirical evidence that the 2nd amendment is wrong, and justified self defense is more dangerous to citizens than criminals, self defense with firearms has become part of the whole atheistic, Randian, Nietzschian, self above everything and then we die, Darwinian survival above all else cult.
Religious fanaticism is certainly a factor in violence. I still don’t any serious explanation why people are walking around scare? Where does this fear come from? Why is it not so apparent in other countries?
Quoting ernestm
I would say religion is more like a way of relating to fear. Fear is a psychological relation to a potential theat (whether real or imagined), and it exists in most primal levels of the psyche. The fact of our very existence is the primary cause of our fear.
People take measures against their fear (like turning to government/police/church for protection, or arming themselves). Yet, no matter what they do, they cannot outrun their fear - it seems, with every solution to neutralize a threat, there is always something else to fear ad infintum.
In the present age, religion has become a novelty and a group activity, and as far as common knowledge goes, the personal and psychological aspects are largely ignored.
Religion is a way of being that goes strait to the heart of the existing one's being. And in doing so, it confronts all things necessitated by that very existence, e.g. fear. Fear takes on a different relation in religion. Religion neutralizes the threat of fear by making any and all possibility of threat inconsequential in relation to one's existing...
I agree, that's why I think firearms for self defense have become a religion. People genuinely believe they are safer with a gun in the home, no matter how much the evidence repeatedly demonstrates otherwise.
It is a false religion, because it does not directly address the fear. Fear is not the possibility of threat in the world, it is a psychological condition in the individual. Guns rights or gun control might handle the external threat, but imo, religion is the only thing that truly addresses the existential fear (or psychological fear over the threat of existence) from which all other fears are derived.
There are approximately 120 privately owned guns per citizen, so remove 20% of that yadda yadda
Here, which percentage-wise is roughly the same as 393M civilian-owned guns out of 326M civilians.