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Comment by jumbopapa | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely do not believe the access to the guns are the issue here. There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method. It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this.

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On the contrary, its lazy to assume that gun control won't fix the issue, because it implicitly assumes the massive difference between the US and other nations in violent murders is due to some other, vague, unexplained societal malady that somehow is only a problem in the US and not in other first world countries. Occam's razor would assume that the unique extent to which firearms are readily available in the US probably has a major connection to the unique extent to which mass shootings and gun violence occurs. Even if you were to make the argument that the underlying issues, whatever those may be, would persist, it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.

A point David Frum makes in his latest column:

> There is one developed country—and only one—in which it is not only legal, but easy and convenient, to amass a private arsenal of mass slaughter. That country also happens to be the one—and the only one—regularly afflicted by mass slaughters perpetrated by aggrieved individuals.

> You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out. Yet even as the casualties from gunfire mount, Americans express befuddlement, and compete to devise ever more far-fetched answers.

* https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/guns-are-a...

A similar column from a few years ago:

> A village has been built in the deepest gully of a floodplain.

> At regular intervals, flash floods wipe away houses, killing all inside. Less dramatic—but more lethal—is the steady toll as individual villagers slip and drown in the marshes around them.

> After especially deadly events, the villagers solemnly discuss what they might do to protect themselves. Perhaps they might raise their homes on stilts? But a powerful faction among the villagers is always at hand to explain why these ideas won’t work. “No law can keep our village safe! The answer is that our people must learn to be better swimmers - and oh by the way, you said ‘stilts’ when the proper term is ‘piles,’ so why should anybody listen to you?”

* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/10/the-rea...

America is not a violent country, it's about average, and far better than our neighbors to the south.

And when we make comparisons with Europe, we should remember that violence in Europe is rising, while violence in the US is declining.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/03/5-facts-abo...

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-europe-migrants-germany-c...

https://www.politico.eu/article/sweden-bombings-grenade-atta...

> America is not a violent country,

The general crime rate in the US is not too different from the crime rate in most other developed countries; see point seven:

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/10/2/16399418/u...

However there's a lot more violent crime; see point one (ibid).

> it's about average, and far better than our neighbors to the south.

And yet as someone who lives in Canada, your neighbour to the north, we have a lot less gun crime. The difference is that we have good social services and decent filters on gun ownership. I don't know all the nitty-gritty details, but it seems that Canada's laws are roughly in line with what Massachusetts has:

* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...

There will always probably be mass shootings:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting

But I think adding some filters or speed bumps to ownership (and especially CCW) will weed out the hot heads and incompetents that cause so much low-level carnage:

* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11582078708082647...

* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11575509903437127...

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

Both you and Vox are trying to limit the discussion to gun crime, as if knife crime or acid attacks or bombings or mass vehicular homicides don't matter. That's misleading and borderline dishonest. It's the violence that matters, not the weapon.

And the effort required to kill a number of people with a gun is significantly less--like, to the point where the "but but what about that?" verges on ludicrous--than knife crime or acid attacks. Gun violence requires less specialized knowledge and provides fewer opportunities to catch a criminal before their plan goes off than bombings. And vehicles have overwhelmingly more legitimate use than guns that present a meaningful and socially valid argument against their restriction where guns have no such value.

Which is why this is low-hanging fruit to deal with and long past due.

The vast majority of killers aren't aiming to kill a lot of people. Just one, usually. You're focusing on the dramatic mass killings instead of the significant majority of murderers, who could switch to knives and acid.

And then there are the mass killers, but since vehicles won't be banned because they have "overwhelmingly more legitimate use", they would remain available for mass killings. As would bombs, though that does require more skill than the other weapons.

And guns would remain available too. Gun control does very little to prevent criminals from obtaining guns, as the gun crime rate in Chicago shows.

> And then there are the mass killers, but since vehicles won't be banned because they have "overwhelmingly more legitimate use", they would remain available for mass killings.

Yet curiously, almost all mass murders are committed with guns, not vehicles.

The ones you hear about, because there's a political agenda behind publicizing them.

Have you heard about any of these?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack

You say political agenda, but your own source lists the most recent vehicle attack as occurring last year, and no casualties occurred. Multiple mass shootings have claimed tens of lives in the past few days alone.

Are we reading the same page?

The most recent attack listed in my source was in March of this year and killed six.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaoyang_car_attack

And that's just the last time someone added one to the page. I doubt the list is comprehensive or that was the last attack.

He clearly meant the last attack on American soil.

I think we all agree American murderers prefer to use guns rather than vehicles or acid. That's our culture. But it's not worse than other cultures where murderers prefer to use acid or knives or vehicles or bombs.

It's a pragmatic preference, not a cultural one: guns are much better murder weapons than cars.

You don't hear a lot about many of them because there are only so many hours in the day:

* https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

Compare the list of Canada which fits on one page (going back to 1689):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Canada

to the US, which has page-per-year breakdowns:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

Canada has the sixth-highest firearm ownership rate, yet has a death rate lower than many EU countries:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

So firearms aren't alien to Canadians, and yet the number of blood baths occurring is much, much lower. Incidents do occur:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting

but much less frequently.

> The vast majority of killers aren't aiming to kill a lot of people.

The amount of low-level carnage that happens daily in the US from either incompetent, negligent, or malicious gun owners is quite impressive:

* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11575509903437127...

* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11578845404777594...

* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11581452335924346...

* https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/11582078708082647...

A total ban on firearms isn't even necessary; just a filter on the dumb asses and hot heads:

* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...

In December 2012, a crazed man entered an elementary school and attacked several staff members and students. He used a kitchen knife and while there were 24 injuries, there were zero deaths:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chenpeng_Village_Primary_Schoo...

A little while later, another crazed man entered a second elementary school and also attacked staff and students. He used an XM15 and Glock 20SF; there were 2 injuries and 28 deaths:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Hook_Elementary_School_s...

> It's the violence that matters, not the weapon.

I'm guessing you have never read Marshal McLuhan. The tools (communication or otherwise) that humans have available shape society and our perception of the world. There are daily examples (both negligent and purposeful) of people acting in a way that they probably would not have if they only had knives or just their fists:

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

The effects of different tools are... different. The "Garlic shooter" was able to kill 3 people and injure many more before he was taken out in under 60 seconds:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilroy_Garlic_Festival_shootin...

That kind of carnage is difficult to achieve with a baseball bat or a knife.

If you compare the US to only developed countries, it is an extreme outlier with regard to violence, and that violence correlates strongly with the number of guns [1]. Gun violence in the US is rising, not declining [2].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/07/world/americas/mass-shoot...

[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/12/13/health/gun-deaths-highest-40-...

By what logic do you exclude Central and South America from the discussion?

The logic that they have different social conditions that place different incentives on people's behaviour. For example, Venezuela banned private gun ownership, but that is not the reason for firearm deaths falling. The reason for that is because of the economic meltdown is so bad that bullets are too expensive for even criminals:

* https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/venezuela-...

It is a control on the variables that can confound comparison so we have a more apples-to-applies situation.

Well now we're talking about what we should be talking about: social conditions. Why people angry enough to kill and end their own lives in America?

But social conditions in America and Europe are very different so it's not an apples-to-apples comparison if we keep talking about gun policy.

This is an answer to every single tricky political problem. If people resort to something those in power don't like - then they didn't provide good enough conditions for people to be happy and not do that.

I don't agree, but if you're right and it's "an answer to every single tricky political problem" the nation should discuss it immediately.

> Why people angry enough to kill and end their own lives in America?

There people who are angry enough in other countries:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_shooting

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_van_attack

The thing is that with easy access to powerful weapons, it is easier to implement such impulses in the US compared to other industrialized countries.

The US is not some hell hole where people have nothing to lose: for the most part it is a nice place to live (though, as with any place, it has better and worse areas). I think a lot of these incidents could be curtailed with better social conditions.

However, having a lot of weapons easily available is like having a lot of dry brush in the country: all it takes is one person's spark for things to catch on fire. Furthering the analogy, it's not that other countries don't have people who can be lit off, it's just the surrounding environment has reduced (though not eliminated) the chances of a large conflagration.

Does the AUM cult in Japan not disprove most of his main argument? They didn't have easy access to guns but still found it relatively easy to commit mass murder. More recently it took little more than some gasoline to murder 33 animators in Kyoto. Guns are an easy method of mass murder but hardly exclusive. Is there any reason to believe these murderers wouldn't switch methods? The attacks in Japan show that it's still easy to commit mass murder without guns.

AUM was 1 attack 24 years ago. If you sum that and KyoAni, you end up with something like 50 victims in 25 years.

Do you think these numbers are even remotely comparable to US ones, where there have been hundreds of incidents only this year?

Organized mass killing efforts are unstoppable, but emotion driven ones are amplified by the lethality of easily available weapons and people's experience with them. Meaning that all this culture of having guns, playing with them, knowing how to use them is the reason mass shootings can happen. You can't shoot lots of people with a kitchen knife if you suddenly get passionate and emotional about killing people.

Except Americans have ALWAYS had extensive access to firearms, but frequent massacres by emotional hotheads are a fairly recent problem. In the 1920s you could buy a fully automatic Thompson sub-machine gun via mail order. People weren't shooting up schools regularly, and the worst massacre in the 1920s was done with explosives. Access to weapons hasn't really changed, so what has changed about the American PEOPLE?

My guess is - it was naturally suppressed in the past since there was only top down, centralized, slow and spotty in reaching audiences mass media and recently internet freed it. Everyone with a smartphone became its own little mass media, able to easily find like minded people, supercharge hateful propaganda through feedback loops. Who is spreading that propaganda and why is another question though. Anyone from politicians, foreign, local state actors to gun manufacturers.

> You would not think that this is a complicated problem to puzzle out.

Sure, “the unique access to guns is a significant cause of the unique problem” is an obvious conclusion. Others are plausible, however, the most obvious alternative being that the two are effects of a common cause rather than cause and effect: that is, that America is uniquely heavily populated by violent maniacs, which produces the access to guns as a political result (both of the maniacs seeking arms to commit violence and others seeking access in fear to the maniacs) and the mass slaughter as a more direct result.

In that case, cutting off access to the guns might not have as much result as one might hope.

Only the US has a religious mythology of personal gun use. Guns aren't just weapons, they're practically symbols of inspired personal expression.

So it's not just easy access to guns. It's the surrounding culture of gun play, gun heroism, gun rhetoric, gun rights, gun "freedom", gun permissiveness, guns-make-you-a-real-person-who-matters - and so on.

Other countries don't have anything like the same culture to anything like the same extent. Which is why you can have equivalent levels of gun ownership without the same problems.

I remember seeing a picture of a somewhat old gun (WW2 era) repainted in bright colours and the amount of hate the poster got from people left and right.

This doesn't fit in the 'a gun is a tool' mindset, it's fetishism, pure and simple.

That's dangerous because gun owners have convinced people their kids are safe if they play with toy guns that don't look like real guns.

They aren't, but it's a convenient fiction.

I'm not sure this is something we can assume, as I don't think there is a country with anywhere close to the same levels of gun ownership as the US.

Agreed. The US was probably the first country to rely on personal arms ownership to establish their independence. Its important to Americans.

It's important to Americans because it's been sold to us as a fictitious part of a national identity. The gun industry has very successfully crafted this narrative, to the point where so many people take it for granted now, but it wasn't always this way; this is a thing that developed in (depending on age) some of our lifetimes.

Here's a book that takes a closer look at how guns took on this sort of mythic role -- more special than other tools and appliances -- in American identity:

https://www.pamelahaag.com/books/gunning-of-america/

Funny. I kinda thought it was the U.S. Constitution that sold us on guns.

No, and until 2008's Heller vs DC decision, private gun ownership was not considered an established right. America's status as a gun-loving nation is a relatively modern invention, and entirely one devised by gun manufacturers. It's working, too (and with somewhat predictable results).

> until 2008's Heller vs DC decision, private gun ownership was not considered an established right.

Only in certain circles.

Just take a look at the pop culture. Music is full of guns and showing violence can be hip. This horrible culture is now in exported to others countries too but nevertheless only in America people would dismiss it as ohh it's just showbusiness.

TV too. Living in Japan I find Japanese TV overwhelmingly boring, lots of shows of minor celebrities reacting to things (uncomfortable situations, food, travel)....with almost the exact same expression, every time. That, or drama shows with terrible acting.

Then I come back to the States and I'm honestly shocked at how macabre American TV is in comparison. It's non-stop crime shows, murder investigations, action, and militarism, with a shootout key to the resolution of almost any episode.

Is it any surprise that Americans reach for their weapons to solve problems with increasing regularity? I blame American's Puritanical streak.....we can't have nice, pleasant things like topless women on TV like they do in Europe.

>>>Occam's razor would assume that the unique extent to which firearms are readily available in the US probably has a major connection to the unique extent to which mass shootings and gun violence occurs.

Well let's look at just the United States, over time, rather than the US compared to other countries. In the US, a proliferation of firearms has been a constant throughout our history. But it is only recently (really starting with Columbine) that we've had REGULAR outbursts, almost always by men under 30. I would hypothesize that the elephants in the room are a)prescription psychotropic drugs and their side-effects b)constant negative media about males/toxic masculinity c)overall ineffective child-rearing practices and extended adolescence, some of which stems from a reduction in two-parent households.

These are vague partly because so few people will take a deep dive into these subjects when so much money flows from these influences (pharmaceuticals, media, etc...).

But why aren't we looking at the variables, instead of the constant?

>>>it is absolutely progress to have mass murderers be forced to utilize something like a knife than head on down the street and pick up an automatic/semi-automatic weapon.

1. You can't "head on down the street" and pick up an automatic weapon in the US. You need a Federal Firearms License for that. And historically, FFL holders are some of the most law-abiding citizens in the country. Even if there were a ban on semi-auto weapons, the market would adapt. I've already brainstormed on how to optimize a bolt-action rifle for rapid, sustained fire and I'm not even a firearms designer.

2. Tightening the gun proliferation sounds great...in theory. How do you actually accomplish it in practice? There are 300 million+ firearms spread across the country in about 40% of households. This is a land area greater than that occupied by the Germans on the Eastern Front, with a greater number of potential "partisans", and the Germans never even came CLOSE to securing their rear areas. That anyone expects widespread gun confiscations to NOT turn into a bloodbath is naive IMO, and if the objective is saving lives than it would also be counter-productive.

3. Maybe the mass murders will switch to homemade explosives instead of knives, which would be a significantly WORSE outcome? Ever think of that? Maybe they'll get guidance from jihadis. Hell, explosives already gave us one of the worst school massacres in American history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster

I believe you that it's genuine. But no. Look at other countries. Look at the history of gun control laws in Germany or other countries and their effect. Shootings like this are 100% caused by the easy access to guns.

If someone does not have access to guns, it's harder to do something like this. It gives time to think again. Organizing different attacks gives law enforcement a chance to catch someone planning it beforehand.

HN is not the right forum to discuss this in detail, so I won't go further into this. But it's better to think about this than to follow Cloudflares lead.

> HN is not the right forum to discuss this

Then why are you doing it? Don't reply to me though, HN isn't the place to discuss it.

France has pretty strict gun controls laws which have not proven to be much of a protection against terrorism, who used AK47, explosives or simply trucks to cause mass casualties.

We don’t know how different the situation would be if France didn’t have the current regulations, but I personally think the death toll would be higher. For sure you cannot completely remove the risk of mass killing, but you can make it more expensive/difficult for attackers to do a lot of victims.

Gun control is necessary to avoid a lot of the smaller scale problems - accidental gun deaths, suicide, violent revenge, robberies, etc.

But for anything serious like terrorist attacks, it won't make much of a difference. Guns come in through criminal networks anyway (as in Europe). Norway has gun control laws, yet Breivik was still able to kill nearly 80 people regardless. Vehicles have proven to be decent weapons to kill many people with. 9/11 used airplanes and improvised knives to kill thousands.

Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.

>Gun control will not fix the underlying issues behind mass shootings and while discussing it has to be done, it won't make the problems causing things like this to happen stop.

But reduce the overall deaths.

> There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method.

The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two:

* https://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-st...

> It's lazy to just say that "gun control will fix this" because you're ignoring solving the actual problem of why people are doing this.

While the desire to do certain things may remain, it may be possible to limit the practical ways that desire may be implemented. These extreme cases will probably be the hardest to stop, but there's a lot of low-level carnage that could be reduced:

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

And it isn't even necessarily about bans, but simply a few filters and speed bumps to reduce the chances of hot heads and whack jobs packing heat:

* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...

just want to point out that per capita gun deaths is the wrong metric to use - the vast majority of deaths by gun are suicides

"If we reduced mass shootings by restricting gun access, we might accidentally reduce suicides" sounds like an upside, not a downside.

That'd completely be an upside, if the data showed that happened. I don't know that it does. The US has a lower suicide rate than some other developed countries even with guns, and the Americas in general are significantly under Europe in crude rate per capita numbers.

Comparing countries against each other gets very sticky, due to differences in reporting.

We do, however, have a variety of same-country data demonstrating it happens. Several examples here:

https://americanhealth.jhu.edu/article/how-do-gun-laws-affec...

IIRC, there's also the factor that attempts with guns tend to be more successful - other methods like pills tend to take longer, be easier to mess up, and offer the ability to renege or have someone intervene in a way guns tend not to.

Those are interesting. Unfortunately, the only definitive bit shows that CAD laws are likely to lower general suicide rates by about 8% among people age 14-17. That's important, and those laws should probably be enacted in order to make that happen.

Unfortunately, laws about the age at which it is legal to purchase or possess a gun show no effect. Basically, if you are allowed to own a gun or not as a child, there's no relationship. The decrease only happens when there is a gun in the home and it is stored properly, where children can't get at it easily.

The message I get from that is make guns more difficult to get in times of mental crisis and it will lower the firearm related suicide rate, but not necessarily the general suicide rate outside of that 14-17 age group.

Also, the relationship with suicide attempts is likewise sticky, because a lot of suicide attempts are not really a driven attempt to die. Many take a number of pills, for example, then purposefully leave out the pill bottle or tell people prior to the attempt. It's a difficult thing to track in terms of metrics.

> the vast majority of deaths by gun are suicides

Which can be reduced by restricting access to guns:

> The use of firearms is a common means of suicide. We examined the effect of a policy change in the Israeli Defense Forces reducing adolescents’ access to firearms on rates of suicide. Following the policy change, suicide rates decreased significantly by 40%. Most of this decrease was due to decrease in suicide using firearms over the weekend. There were no significant changes in rates of suicide during weekdays. Decreasing access to firearms significantly decreases rates of suicide among adolescents. The results of this study illustrate the ability of a rela- tively simple change in policy to have a major impact on suicide rates.

* https://www.gsoa.ch/media/medialibrary/2010/12/Lubin_10.pdf

Also:

> In 1995, Connecticut established a "permit to purchase" law, which required a background check and eight hours of safety training for those seeking to buy a handgun.

> Missouri used to have a law like that, too, but repealed it in 2007.

> New research shows what happened afterward. Firearm suicide rates fell 15.4 percent in Connecticut — but rose 16.1 percent in Missouri. The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, only confirms what other papers have found: Making it harder to access guns correlates with fewer suicides.

* https://www.vox.com/2015/9/2/9242147/gun-control-connecticut...

>New research shows what happened afterward. Firearm suicide rates fell 15.4 percent in Connecticut — but rose 16.1 percent in Missouri. The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, only confirms what other papers have found: Making it harder to access guns correlates with fewer suicides.

That's a misread of the study - making it harder to access guns does not correlate with fewer suicides - it correlates with fewer Firearm suicides. Further, reading the studies referenced, you will find that they simply show correlation without examining other risk factors. I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that less guns=less shooting, personally, though I know some people disagree with that for some reason. I don't know about less guns=less violence in general, though.

That study of the IDF is interesting, especially how they ignore the fact that there was not actually a 40% drop in gun related suicides; there was a 70% drop in suicide by gun, from 10 to 3, and a more general drop from 28 to 16.5 with another 4.5 per capita coming from non-gun related suicide. Despite this, they claim the entire 40% drop was driven by the gun change. This is interesting because it was not the only significant policy change the IDF put in place between 2005 and 2007 in order to address suicide, so it's pretty difficult to claim a direct causal relationship which is what they did.

Based on that, you would expect countries with lower rates of gun ownership to have lower adolescent suicide rates, and those with higher rates of gun ownership to have higher adolescent suicide rates. According to the WHO, though, that is not the case. The US, for example, had a below average adolescent suicide rate in 2000, whereas New Zealand, Luxembourg, Ireland, norway, Austria and others had higher than average rates.

>> There are plenty of ways to accomplish something like this without a gun, so removing the guns from the picture would just change the method.

>The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths

The latter does nothing to refute the former. The first is claiming gun control can reduces deaths by gun, but only by shifting deaths to a different category. The latter claims that in the category of people dying by gun, number of guns and deaths is correlated.

> The numbers don't seem to bear this out. There seems to be a fairly proportional relationship between gun ownership and per capita gun deaths; see point two:

Well, not exactly: https://twitter.com/mark_j_perry/status/672946028706996224

That's highly misleading. The tweet conflates gun ownership with gun counts. The chart largely illustrates the tiny percentage of gun hoarders expanding their collections.

> Rates of personal and household gun ownership appear to have declined over the past decades – roughly two-thirds of Americans today say they live in a gun-free household. By contrast, in the late 1970s, the majority of Americans said they lived in a household with guns.

> But America’s gun super-owners, have amassed huge collections. Just 3% of American adults own a collective 133m firearms – half of America’s total gun stock. These owners have collections that range from eight to 140 guns, the 2015 study found. Their average collection: 17 guns each.

(See also the chart showing a couple percent increase in female gun ownership, but a fairly hefty decrease amongst men.)

True, but it is still false to say that more guns necessarily means more gun crime. I don't think this chart proves anything, it just shows another perspective of the data.

Another point of interest is the number of CCW issued (estimated to be around 17 million now) and the liberalization of carry in general since the 1980s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry#/media/Fi...

> True, but it is still false to say that more guns necessarily means more gun crime.

The research seems to indicate otherwise:

* https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jels.12219

* https://www.bmj.com/content/364/bmj.l542

* https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...

* https://www.nber.org/papers/w7967

* https://www.jhsph.edu/news/news-releases/2018/handgun-purcha...

I think there is a point in diminishing returns--some gun control measure are more effective than others--but many places in the US have not even plucked the low-hanging fruit.

I have guns in my home. My wife hates guns and she has a home defense weapon. That's my intro because I don't want to be mistaken for anti-gun. I like guns and I like shooting.

How would you accomplish this without a firearm? Do you think you could accomplish this with a bat or a knife? The attack happened at a Walmart. They sell hard objects. This couldn't have gotten far. I can't imagine a location or situation where you could be so effective in harming so many without a weapon that gives you so much distance from your victim.

Do you have kids? I have one. Every day I look at my toddler and have to think about how to keep her safe (statistics are in my favor but they were in every parents' favor). Then I have to look at my wife and assure her that our baby will be able to live a long life.

I'll relinquish my second amendment rights, if I never again ahave to live through a year where there are more mass shootings than days. For now, we're just moving out of Texas.

The three most deadly mass killing in the US where not done by guns, two where by bombs and the other one was done by jets. One was done with diesel fuel and fertilizer and it leveled half of a 10 story building. 4 to 10 bags of fertilizer would have done some serious damage to that Walmart, as well as most likely killed and maimed a lot more people. That amount would not put him on any radar (we do monitor ammonium nitrate purchases in bulk after Oklahoma City)

Personally I think there is a link in A-moral violent video games as well as violent music that glorifies killing. Now in saying that please don't construe it with me being an advocate for censorship. I am not, but I think there is a link.

Further if you couple that with young males who have little prospects in this brave new world, fresh out of school or getting ready to graduate, no real direction and probably a hand full of romantic rejections due to being awkward you have a powder keg waiting to happen.

Funny enough in the case of the Texas shooter, after reading his manifesto, I was surprised he did not use explosives. His reasoning where more like Timothy Mcveigh's than many of the other shooters. He does not fit the typical profile.

The science on the matter disagrees with your personal opinion's about the impact of video games. There have been more than a handful of studies around this.

I don't couple that with young males having little prospects because they still have more than their counterparts. Why aren't young black women shooting up Walmarts? Why not Mexican men? I'm a white male. I didn't graduate from a college. I was awkward. I haven't killed anyone and I know a lot of others that fit that mold. You're ignoring the poison being put into their heads by people using your exact talking points. That creates the powder keg.

Bombs don't get you the praise from the gutter. The alt-right incels like the glory. You're right, we could see a rise in bombings but we also might not. What we'll definitely see (and already do) is nothing changing by doing nothing.

and most of them have led to the conclusion of increased aggression, so it's not really a personal opinion (as I tend to hold opinions fairly loosely):

https://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2003/10/anderson

As well just because someone fit's a profile does not mean they are predisposed to commit acts of violence. That being said, when there is a pattern, there is a pattern. There are many young white males, of similar experience who do not pick up a gun and start killing people. That being said, there is a definitive pattern of behavior and interest among these white males that do, rejection, isolation and immersion in video games (almost always violent) are certainly some of those patterns.

Also please stop trying to pin it on alt-right (or left for that matter), these guys are popping up all over the political spectrum.

> That being said, when there is a pattern, there is a pattern.

There is a pattern of mentally unhinged men being radicalized by the right wing and committing heinous acts of violence with guns.

The Ohio shooter described himself as a left wing Satanist. Most of the school shooters had little to no political ideology. A few have been hard left leaning and some have been alt-right. It is disingenuous to state that they are motivated by political ideology as the overwhelming majority have has little to no interest in politics given their age. I don't dispute that some of the mass killings have been done out of ultra-radicalized political ideologies but the majority are not committed for that reason.

> It is disingenuous to state that they are motivated by political ideology as the overwhelming majority

No it is not. You provided one or two examples that do not eliminate a pattern, and as you yourself said- "A pattern is a pattern."

There are three problems here: mental illness, (far right) radicalization, and guns. I don't have any solutions to propose for this but saying videogames are somehow the cause of this is absurd.

Why not see it as a bigger culture rot? Guns and violence is glorified by games, music, tv. It might a sign, not a cause. Also, a lot of these shooters talk about high score (kill count), a lot of these extremists (right wing) and tied to gaming communities etc. So it's a lot to think about, people like to nitpick things they like and say it doesn't have anything to do with it because it does not affect me.

I'm not pinning this on any group (although if we look at the rhetoric from major events in the past few years, it clearly supports doing so) but I am saying your talking points come straight from the alt-right playbook. Hate fueled rhetoric, plus making the world the bogie man for the sad displaced white boy is literally the alt-right SOP. Let's not stop pointing fingers at them as part of the problem.

For the record, I do not consider myself to be right, I may lean to the right on some issues but as a supporter of Universal-Basic-Income and Universal Healthcare, environmental science etc. I would say many of my view lean left of center. It total I consider myself a centrist.

Where I don't waver from the alt-right on is on constitutional rights, so while my talking points may seem to you to come out of a playbook they are my views on the world and I tend to form those views based of my experiences and reasoning.

I do not believe I am making the world a boggy man for anyone. Just calling the numbers as I see them. I believe these young men are cowards as evident in the Texas shooters manifesto where he explicitly states that he targeted Walmart as he would not meet armed resistance.

I think you misunderstand the things I'm saying are talking points. The sad white boy having no place in the world and sexual rejection being a new and uniue problem that justifies disproportionate response, is what I'm talking about. That's the alt-right bogeyman. That's the fuel for a lot of this fire.

Ugh. This is nonsense.

Do you think Timothy McVeigh was inspired by Doom?

Violent video games seems to be the talking point du jour coming out of the gun rights/white supremacist media machine... Was weirdly all over fox news yesterday. Is it a genuine concern, or just a trial balloon, looking for the best way to derail the conversation this time around? You be the judge!

While I don't doubt the right is using it as a talking point, ignoring one link because one likes it (games) while demonizing another link (guns) is not the answer to actually solving the issue and is a form of filter bubbling.

So then let's go back to stuffing our heads in the sand and doing nothing instead.

Show a link between games and hate crime fueled mass shooting by sad white boys and we can put it on the list of things to worry about. Until then, perhaps making it harder to get guns could help...

>>>gun rights/white supremacist media machine

Why do you link these two things, as if no minority is pro-gun rights and active in the media?

https://www.youtube.com/user/MrColionNoir

People play and have been playing violent videogames all over the world for many years.

Much like mass shootings, violence in videogames might be symptoms of rots within our capitalist society.

Very powerful people are profiting off our rots.

I think there is a link, but the causation arrow is opposite what you think it is.

Violent video games don't create violent people necessarily, but video people like to play violent video games.

I don't disagree, that is why I choose the term link as opposed to causation, it could very well be that they are choosing to immerse themselves in violent content because they have a predisposed desire for it.

It is also why I am anti-censorship, as I believe it is the opposite side of the same coin as blaming the gun for mass murders.

Just as guns are linked to these issues as the tool of choice, we find back linking to excessive immersion in violent media.

I just find is strange the cognitive dissonance people make when wanting to ban the one but not the other when they are both clearly linked. They want law abiding people to give up their guns but find all kinds of reasons to deny the link with violent content.

Multiple shooters have mentioned "high score" in their manifestos or messages left before the attacks.

If it were a gun access problem then it would have peaked when gun access was easiest, i.e. back when machine guns were sold by mail order.

Now it's happening in a time of rampant depression, polarization, social isolation, 24-hour news, and social media. That can't be a coincidence.

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

I think it isn't absurd today that poor mental health, social isolation, and digital media consumption is making certain segments of the population more likely to violently lash out, and for the countries which afford these people easy access to firearms, the cost will be orders of magnitude higher.

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

Even if you don't accept easy access to firearms as the root cause, it's definitely a factor. You don't kill 21 people with rocks and sticks.

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

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

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

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

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

Well now that seems like a bad faith kind of argument. Since none of us have a time machine, surely our intent is to solve potential future issues and not go back and change the past?

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

When we've solved for the current problem, we can address the next worst thing. We won't know what that is until it happens.

We could also solve for knife and sword attacks because there was that one time in Japan where someone murdered a bunch of kids or chainsaws because of that other one time that guy had a chainsaw but we do more by staying focused.

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

Historically bombings and arsons have always been a major problem, eg the Bath School Bombing. Car attacks are new-ish but rising. Shootings are an American phenomenon, but massacres are not.

We should not solve for shootings, we're just pouring the acid into a different jar. We should solve for massacres.

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

You're right, we can't restart this service. These people are dead. They were shot. To death. We can never solve their problem but if we don't learn from it and try _something_ then we can't avoid the same thing from happening again. And again. And again. And again. (Repeat a few hundred times.)

But don't let me stop you. Solve for allthethings and let us know when you're done. In the meantime, a bunch of us are going to fight to solve for this current problem.

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

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

It's naive and wrong to assume that there would be no mass killings without guns. There would likely be less, but it wouldn't be 0. Before anyone counters me with "we should prohibit all guns because it will prevent some mass killings", we still have 2nd amendment.

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

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

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

Changes to the constitution can and do happen. And it's kind of beside the point anyway because a degree of gun control already exists in the US without being in conflict with the constitution.

> US doesn't pretend to be the same as all the other countries

Clearly. You're also the only one where this is such a problem.

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

The United States has more individual freedoms than most (if not all) countries. The downside of those freedoms is when individuals use their free will for evil purposes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the quarantine is for information in this case. Instead of breathless, stop-the-world coverage of these events, treat them like traffic accidents: “22 people were murdered by a white supremacist terrorist in an El Paso Wal-Mart this afternoon. Now here’s Bob with the weather.”

Gun buyback programs are 1 kind of medicine. Some people won’t take it, but we should try. Maybe we can institute some kind of guns-for-Medicare program (only sorta joking).

Gun control legislation is the inoculation. I don’t think we can get to full-on prohibition in the US without repealing the 2nd amendment, but we can implement licensing and registration requirements and longer waiting periods.

We also need to improve the existing systems. The ATF has a “gun registry”, but it’s not a searchable database. See https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-database...

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

4. What good does registration do? Like, awesome, now you have a database with all the gun owners in it.. but for the purpose of stopping mass shooters how does that help you? Likewise, what licensing requirement do you foresee which will help with (1)?

5. Again, how does this help?

Good points.

I’d argue that 3 is an implementation detail. If we’re serious about getting guns off the streets, then we need to make it worthwhile to trade them in.

As to 4 and 5, I’ll just say that not all shooting are “mass shootings” like we saw in El Paso. Chicago alone has something like 1500 shootings each year, many of which go unsolved. The article I linked says that the ATF gets 1000 gun trace requests per day and it takes an average of 4-7 days to compete one of them. That seems a bit slow to me, but I honestly can’t say what effect speeding that up would have on our ability to prosecute perpetrators of gun violence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

In fact, some states already have licensing and registration laws for guns and they’ve also managed to not tumble down that slippery slope.

I‘ll grant that some people do want to confiscate guns, but that’s not a popular view. See https://news.gallup.com/poll/1645/guns.aspx.

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

I’d strongly suggest watching John Oliver’s Aussi gun control sequel. It’s hilarious and educating (surely he’s a biased source, but at min you’ll get a good laugh)

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