Gun deaths were the leading killer of US children in 2020
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
Wait?! What?!
This should be the headline. A 1.8x increase in the runner up is f-ing huge. Gun deaths edging out car crashes this year when they're normally neck and neck is irrelevant by comparison.
Alcohol and firearms are intimately intertwined in US history, from what sparked our revolution into a hot shooting one as the British attempted to destroy arms and ammunition stored in Concord, Massachusetts to the Whiskey Rebellion which started 16 years later.
One should not consider forcing a major social change without considering the consequences, the example of the lasting to this day damage done to the social order of Prohibition of alcohol being an excellent example. For example all but extinguishing the local tavern and replacing it with the speakeasy derived bar, massively damaging respect for the law, giving organized crime it's greatest period to entrench itself in the nation, etc.
"but guns are different than drugs". Yes, guns are durable. I don't know how long cocaine lasts, but 100 year-old cartridges are perfectly good.
Even if you assume one gun per murder, the required volume is a small fraction of drug smuggling.
Oh, and guns are actually easy to make. They're 19th century tech.
This is the same story as prohibition. You can criminalize, poison people, and shoot as much as you want, at the end of the day the geography of the U.S. makes it dumb easy to transport and sell anything.
Legal ownership of concealable weapons and automatic firearms is already difficult in a number of states, especially cities with high gun violence.
As an individual I have to have the right to protect myself from that harm. Firearms are designed to be equitable protection, it doesn't matter that I'm not 6'5 and a not body builder. I can defend myself just as effectively, especially when criminals aren't playing by the rules and already have firearms anyways.
I'm not sure what you mean by "automatic firearms," but what you describe is limited to a very small number of states, albeit some of our most populous. Counterexamples are legion, 42 states have "shall issue" concealed carry, that's like 72% of the population before the COVID flee big cities demographic changes to the extent they're lasting, and so far this year three states are improving that to "Constitutional Carry," a total of half the states in the union!
For how we got here, "The American Indian foundation of American gun culture" is essential reading: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
In almost all other western countries the notion of needing a gun to feel safe is totally alien. The context in which the American gun debate happens is rather unique and the real discussion should be about how to change the context/environment, not just banning guns.
The history goes from attempting to limit dueling, then disarming freedmen (black slaves after the Civil War), followed by new outside the Hajnal line immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe, to extending the list of undesirables to the entire population except for the ruling class' Inner Circle like Dianne Feinstein who at one point held one of the only two concealed carry licenses issued by San Francisco county.
See my reply in this subthread for one stark bottom line: on January 1st, 2023 in half the states of the nation (25 out of 50 for our foreign correspondents) you will not need a licence to carry a concealed handgun. (The number today is 22: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitutional_carry).
The "discussion" is at the margins, from weak sauce administrative fiat Federal regulations, to Purple or newly Blue states moving (more) anti-gun like Washington state, to the modern 8 slave states where legal concealed carry is non-existent or at the whim and/or bribery of local officials, and in Massachusetts and New York City that extends to mere ownership, and perhaps de facto New Jersey as well.
Your side will have to agree to disagree as the nation geographically further polarizes or try to force this with a civil war. I vote for the former option.
I live elsewhere and, like the majority of the world, this isn't even a debate, even in a country where about 25% of households have firearms but the availability and controls are strict and there's near zero expectation of being a victim of violent crime, let alone with firearm. Large swathes of the world have figured this out without the cataclysm that gun fantasists in the US claim would result.
Lastly, the winning, or rather the currently prevailing, side of anything does not necessarily mean that it is correct. What's wrong in the US appears to be the culture and so the solution would be to try to change the culture (cultures naturally form and change gradually over time). Unfortunately the current direction is for people to become ever more entrenched, leaving the nuanced middle ground virtually empty.
If you assume starting from the situation as it exists today that's just not realistically possible. The amount of bloodshed it would take would be exceptional. Most of thee people who'd resit you are people who'd made peace with going down fighting and said people are not even the same ones causing the violence that's the problem in the first place.
Do Not Want. Not. My. Fight.
Trick question - there is not even any correlation between gun homicide and firearm ownership rate, let alone all homicide: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-...
So even by the myopic logic of taking away rights because the first-order consequences are desirable, it doesn't work out.
- None of the sources in your source do a regression analysis, so there's almost certainly confounding variables. This probably happened because the author was super motivated to make their point, rather than engaging in good faith analysis.
- You're the only post narrowing to homicides, everything else in this thread and the OP are about deaths. The post you link makes it seem like broadening to deaths is tricky sophistry, but there are lots of gun suicides, and lower gun ownership rates brings those down. That's not sophistry, that's saving lives.
- If you look at one of the article's sources, gunpolicy.org, there seems to be a direct correlation between ownership and homicides [0][1]. Again this isn't a serious analysis, but it's more serious than your link (I actually clicked into some charts), and indicates the opposite conclusion.
[0]: https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/194/proporti...
[1]: https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/194/number_o...
EDIT: Sorry your article does try and take on a study that does perform regression, which finds "For each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership [via gun suicide proxy], firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9%", but poo-oos it because it finds other correlations, which is an argument against regression analysis, not against gun laws.
You mean like in Japan...
The assisted-suicide folks argue that some suicide is arguably better than the alternatives.
20-30 years ago, Time Magazine did a "here's a picture of everyone in the US who died by gun during {interval}" issue. (I think that the interval was one week.)
I remember thinking that the vast majority of the suicides seemed reasonable.
Also note that "leading cause" is a meaningless phrase. Depending on how finely you split the other causes, anything could be the "leading cause of death". For example, it seems that in the article "car crashes" are a separate category. If we instead had an "accidental death" category (car crashes, plus drownings, plus accidental drug overdoses, etc.) I suspect that that "accidental death" would be the leading cause.
In my country there are usually zero gun deaths among children (0-17) (usually here means that they do exist, but are so rare that I think the last one was in 2009)
No matter how you fine tune your stats, gun deaths will never be a leading cause for them, while In 2017, nine children and teens were killed with guns each day in America — one every 2 hours and 34 minutes ...
More fundamentally, however, we don't really care how many children die of gunshot wounds. Other mechanisms of death are just as worrying. In particular, most gunshot deaths are suicides (for the general population, not sure about children 0-17 in the US). If guns are unavailable, at least many of these children will find some other way to commit suicide. Unless you're in a really small country, I doubt that there have been zero suicides of children 0-17 in recent years.
The graph in the paper linked from the article seems rather uninformative, actually. It shows lines for "Firearm-related injury" and for "Motor vehicle crash", both of which are a combination of accidents, suicides, and homicides. Surely to make any useful conclusions you have to look at what these underlying causes were (of which there is some mention in the paper, but not enough to really see what's happening).
if you consider Italy a fairy small country, yes, I am living in a fairy small country.
Are you sure that your claim of no gun death of a person under 18 since 2009 is actually true? Could it instead be that there was no gun homicide of a person under 18 since 2009?
Bunching them up together lets the ones who are trying to control the narrative away from sharply rising mental health issues and toward guns (which actually got diminished when compared against auto accidents and/or strangulations).
- https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/u9der0/comment/i5qvp2...
- https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
- https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
Those are overlapping categories; homicide is broader than just intentional homicide.
Edit. In the meantime, deer remains the most dangerous animal in the US. It is deer who causes a couple millions of car crashes every year. Yet, nobody is afraid of deers.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
It's not super useful since roughly half of the homicides aren't categorized though -- and something like 120,000 people are shot every year, it just happens that many of them survive. Let's not be too excited about our 'self-restraint'. Especially when some 4channer just live-streamed another mass shooting.
Deer may cause a lot of accidents (more like 1 million than 'a couple'), but they're the size of a large dog.. very few people die in car-deer accidents -- on the order of 200 per year.
You haven't seen my wife drive along the park near sundown. (Or if you have, you may have leaned on your horn.)
Last year, a co-worker was widowed, another co-worker was badly wounded, in both cases by random bullets probably from an inter-gang dispute having nothing to do with them. But inter-gang dispute though it likely was, one man is dead, the other recovering slowly.