That means that capital punishment is not enough of a deterrent - same with prison.
There is however an effect from people being basically lazy and doing things that make sense only in the spur of the moment, without thinking things through. If getting a gun meant a headache inducing amount of work and waiting time, only people who really want a gun would have one.
This is basically the situation in the rest of the world. There are guns, and criminals that want one have no problem getting one on the black market. But even so, most criminals don't get a gun, because the day to day situation simply doesn't give you exposure to them.
Punishment is very limited as an education tool. It has some uses, but positive incentives complement it and, in the end, are more powerful.
To my mind, the US has a violence problem and guns much more so than a gun violence problem.
Focusing specifically on murder by guns, California and Texas, who are largely similar in murder rates are also largely similar in murder-by-gun rates despite having regulatory environments that are about as far apart as you can get in the United States. I'm not taking a position here, and I understand there might be compounding factors (like both states being border states); but it does make me wonder if what has been effective in other cultures will be effective in the United States.
I think your points about reducing poverty and providing for education are on point. Generally speaking, states that I consider "poor" states and regions within states that are generally depressed seem to have higher gun-murder rates. They also seem to have generally more violence. These are things we should focus on anyway (and would probably also help with gun-suicide and gun-related accidents).
In the US, I think both sides in this argument are generally disingenuous. Speaking very broadly... Gun control advocates manipulate statistics and call any death by gun "gun violence" as if there is no distinction between a suicide victim and a murderer. They also don't separate out legal versus illegal gun access in the use of gun murder, which I think is meaningful if you're talking about adding more laws/regulations. Some are at least honest enough to state they want to restrict all private gun ownership. Again, broadly speaking, they push laws that are about restricting legitimate gun ownership rather than promoting responsible gun ownership. On the flip side, gun control opponents oppose any change in law and while they acknowledge that there are differences in types of gun-related deaths, they aren't any more nuanced in their views about it and generally don't seem to acknowledge that non-murder gun deaths are also a problem we need to work on.
I'd much rather see everyone gather around responsible gun ownership for those that want it. (And I do think that more severe punishment would be useful in reducing accidents and maybe suicides, even though I think it wouldn't do anything for murders.)
This has turned into a bit of a ramble I suppose, but I'm just generally wondering what you think the path forward should be, why you think such a path would work in the United States specifically, and how regulations work if deterrents don't work.
I would be happy if we could avoid that kind of death and the pain that their family and friends suffer. So, they are different by definition, but both are avoidable and should be reduced as much as possible.
> responsible gun ownership
That's an oxymoron. The most responsible is to not own guns. Guns are not toys. Buy a PlayStation if you want to shoot something. VR is also getting better.
> how regulations work if deterrents don't work.
Deterrents are just one of the tools. In combination with reducing gun advertising, and concienciation campaigns on the dangers of weapons, it could cause a great improvement. Mental illness treatmeants, better general education, etc. also help.
> That's an oxymoron. The most responsible is to not own guns. Guns are not toys. Buy a PlayStation if you want to shoot something. VR is also getting better.
Your two first statements cannot both be true. The latter statement ("most") implies a continuum, the former a binary condition. It is also unclear to me if you mean private gun ownership or any gun ownership (such as organizational ownership: police, army, etc.). Regardless, I'm not sure your statements are meaningful in a world in which both violence and knowledge of guns exist. And, even if so, I think only dedicated pacifists could hold such a view without cognitive dissonance.
Regardless, the opposite of not owning a gun is not "I own a gun because I see it as a toy."
> Deterrents are just one of the tools. In combination with reducing gun advertising, and concienciation campaigns on the dangers of weapons, it could cause a great improvement. Mental illness treatmeants, better general education, etc. also help.
Most of those things are not gun regulations. I agree that those things would help. However, my question was about the inherent conflict between your claims regarding deterrence and regulation.
Either some criminals are not in a state of mind where any rational cost-benefit calculation is happening at all, or a considered cost-benefit calculation puts their own life below the perceived benefit of the act (maybe religiously motivated attacks, say). Alternatively they truly think they won't get caught, which, depending on the crime, place and competence might be the most rational reason.
There is nothing that you can do so to deter these "irrational" crimes by just twiddling knobs on the sentence harshness generator.
These people aren't even doing the mental accounting where Z disincentivizes X if it isn't plainly obvious. The most responsible and humane thing to do is to ask why are they able to skip that gap. I think what you'll find is that they're victims to society in many cases - removed from opportunities through any number of institutional or economic processes. E.g. criminal record, or living in an economically depressed area (which itself has many widespread effect). In other cases they're possessed of a genuinely destructive pathology. And in any of these cases they're probably poor. This shit occurs when people are poor. Stop making poor people and violence goes down to the point where pathologically violent or otherwise unstable people are the baseline.
Do you think the situation would not get substantially worse? You could ban guns tomorrow but the type of people who are firing 30 shots in to random houses aren't going lay down their arms.
There's a leap of faith involved in making that connection, but it is a small leap once you look at other countries and see how their systems work. The fundamental step is to not make life so awful that desperate people decide a high-stakes life of crime is worth it.
I don't think any kind of punishment could effectively deter this because I don't believe this was intentional or that the perpetrator even imagined that the bullet could still kill someone despite the distance and obstacles on the way. Not to mention that as another comment points out, capital punishment is a thing and that still isn't enough to deter murder/etc.
The main problem here is that people have access to and an obsession with deadly weapons. This obsession leads them to acquire those weapons even when they have no legitimate reason to own/carry them. Accidents are bound to happen even with trained users, but typically the risk is worthwhile when you have a legitimate need to own/carry the weapon. When you don't have a legitimate need however, it's just needless risk-taking that will eventually produce situations like this.
This is most certainly not what I or anyone else means by root cause. Guns are just instruments. This is like blaming hammers for building houses. The root cause is that which causes someone to use a gun they have or get a gun they don't have. Having the right to have one is not that cause.
> This has nothing to do with poverty.
You've provided zero evidence or argument for that yet sociologists over deacdes have accumulated masses of evidence that poverty does cause gun violence and countries have responded to this in real life by reducing poverty which in turn actually reduces gun violence.
> The main problem here is that people have access to and an obsession with deadly weapons. This obsession leads them to acquire those weapons even when they have no legitimate reason to own/carry them. Accidents are bound to happen even with trained users, but typically the risk is worthwhile when you have a legitimate need to own/carry the weapon. When you don't have a legitimate need however, it's just needless risk-taking that will eventually produce situations like this.
This is just a litany of assertions with no evidence or argument behind them which happens to contradict all research on the topic and effective policy (in most of Europe).
My argument is that the US has an unhealthy culture around guns that prompts people to acquire/carry them to make a point as opposed to a legitimate need of them for self-defense/etc. This in turn leads to more weapons being out there than necessary and more opportunities for someone to be stupid with them. I don't believe this particular shooter was involved in any kind of legitimate use of a gun during this shooting, and I doubt they had a good, rational reason to have one on them at the time. Rather, they were bored, stupid or under the influence, a gun was within reach and they decided to play with it.
> You've provided zero evidence or argument for that yet sociologists over deacdes have accumulated masses of evidence that poverty does cause gun violence and countries have responded to this in real life by reducing poverty which in turn actually reduces gun violence.
I definitely believe poverty causes intentional shootings. But so far I don't believe this was an intentional shooting (even if the original target was different); this sounds more like idiots negligently discharging a gun many times without thinking about the consequences but there was never an intention to kill or harm, so I'm not sure the usual statistics (which are mainly due to gun-related crime which can definitely correlate with poverty) would apply here.
> This is just a litany of assertions with no evidence or argument behind them which happens to contradict all research on the topic and effective policy (in most of Europe).
Potentially, and you are indeed welcome to disagree. This is just my personal opinion based on noticing an obsession with guns that I haven't seen in other countries that allow guns.
Its not an argument, it's just an assertion with nothing to back it up.
Anyway, if you do ban guns, you'll just end up with rampant knife crime like the UK. This has all been tried before and we know what works and what doesn't work already. Why not just do what actually works.
It's really hard to believe that people still write stuff online without doing some basic searching. But here we are...
Here's a couple links to illustrate how RAMPANT knife crime is in the UK:
[1] For the year ending September 2019, there were 221 homicides involving a knife or sharp instrument recorded by the police. This figure is for England and Wales only and it excludes data from Greater Manchester Police (GMP).
[2] Recorded knife crime rose by 7% from just above 41,000 in the year to June 2018 to just above 44,000 in the year to June 2019, knifepoint rapes, robberies and assaults logged by police continued to rise.
I think it's pretty clear that your "rampant" is off BY A LOT. Knife crime in the UK is definitely not something to dismiss but guns (and gun crime and gun accidents) in the US tromp pretty much every other crime statistic in the "modern, civilized" world.
[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_statistics_in_the_United...
I also don't think it's all merely poverty or mental illness; especially (but not exclusively) young adults can make stupid decisions without thinking through the consequences ("lol let's shoot {in the air,at this wall} it'll be fun!") which is even harder to eliminate. Yes, education helps, but everyone driving a car is educated (i.e. has a license) and look at the number of yahoos there.
Reality of the matter is, if you're opposed to gun control then you're making the trade-off that these type of things will happen. If you want to make his trade-off: fair enough! We make loads of trade-offs in society and human lives are often involved in them. What I find frustrating about the entire debate are comments such as this which pretend that this trade-off does not exist.
(For my part, I think it's actually not that important of an issue one way or the other and that the much deeper issue is this paranoid fear of criminals that has taken hold in US culture, and fear that even the most petty of criminals is really a Hannibal Lector who will kill you and your family just for shit 'n giggles. People arming themselves to protect against these imagined monsters is just one symptom among many, such as excessive police violence, mandatory drug testing, locking up more people than China which has literal concentration camps, etc.)
I don't think so. It's been done plenty of times in Europe. You can do it if you want to.
> I also don't think it's all merely poverty or mental illness
I agree. I think that's just the easiest place to start to knock out a whole hell of a lot of what's going on in the US.
> Reality of the matter is, if you're opposed to gun control then you're making the trade-off that these type of things will happen
Definitely, but they shouldn't be happening at the rate that they are. I think everyone sees that.
(Cool username btw.)
And yes, we can do it if we want to, but the political reality is that we don't seem to want to. You can think all sort of things about that, but that's just how it is.
And in the US specifically, the political reality is pretty fucked in all sorts of ways (that is my polite opinion) and I'm not expecting any significant movement on this in the foreseeable future.
For the record, the U.S. is reported at 1.7% poverty levels; not much above Sweden's levels.
I don't know you or your background, but I think of people who are relatively well off (i.e. programmers and the like) don't quite grasp how much harder everything is if you're working low-income minimum wage jobs. It's perhaps not "poverty" by some measured standard, but it sure isn't easy sailing either.