The big difference between UK and USA is the number of guns we have in our country compared to theirs. We probably can't stop bullying, but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society. We humans are nothing but animals down to the core. If a person wants to kill they will find a way.
Another issue in the USA is the lacking mental Healthcare that other nations have. Many are afraid to seek mental health help because of the stigma of looking weak, much like men not reporting rape or sexual assault that they experience. Also couple that with covid19 lockdowns and that gives these at risk people lots of time to think, plan, and execute. At this time its far to late for them. As a result you get more mass shootings.
In your opinion what lead to the crumbling of the institution of family, that did not happen in other countries?
- Decline of religion/spirituality is more pronounced in usa.
- More dual working parent homes (due to free labor markets). I also suspect that while real incomes have risen, actual disposable income has decreased, which pressures households into dual working arrangements. This means less time invested by parents in kids.
- institutional rot of public education . As some poster said, school bureaucracy is now defacto enabler of bullying - by doing nothing when observed... and punishing teachers that actually try.
- the internet has cracked the authority of social groups, with more time spent online and people more fractured among niche interests. This means less oversight and more activities happening without a concerted response by the group
vs where?
You want to look at countries with high per capita ownership of firearms.
With the exception of uruguay, most comparable countries [1] place higher importance on religion vs USA [2]
That veing said, there are confounding factors. These surveys are not measuring spirituality, for example.
Then there is the elephant in the room with regards to gdp per capita. I've been told of an old chinese proverb that illustrates this point:
No food. One problem. Much food. Many problems.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_religious_populations#...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
It shows.
You haven’t _THOUGHT _ of killing another person? Ever? It must be amazing to live with such purity of thought.
> The issue isn't guns the issue is the crumbling family and tge degradation of society.
The United States is unique when it comes to crumbling family?
If you read this bit of text:
“Imagine killing another human”
What happens in your head? Is it blank save for a triumphant “Not today, Satan!”?
If I were to write “Imagine pushing somebody off a cliff”, it would be common for people to just… not imagine that? And this refusal of imagination is a virtue that, if it were more common, would somehow be helpful to society?
In the UK we had one school shooting (conducted by an adult), and after that very strict restrictions were put on gun ownership. A similar case happened in Australia.
The fact that it is still controversial whether “guns are the issue” shows that the US has not yet begun to grapple with the issue.
I fear this message has lost something in translation.
With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.
Well, the people suffering from it who haven't figured out that it doesn't matter. And the school certainly won't tell you that because of moral hazard; suffering ensues.
>With crap middle school administration, the bullied are ending up in detention (or worse) while the provocateurs are getting away without repercussion.
Working as intended.
Anyways, I digress. But here are some of my thoughts: I just got from a three-day trip to Monterrey, a city in Mexico. This is where my mom and dad went to college. Yet there is this vibe, always, either inside or outside the school that just feels like _everyone_ is always hustling. Making their lives work. Going to big measures to achieve their dreams, whether legal or not. I met a wealthy guy, interesting acquaintance. We talked about life. One of the main things he said to me was that - emphasizing that although it's cliché it's just too true - "the universe is yours. take it."
And this just rings too true for me, I think that our education has decoupled from American values. Or maybe those values were already broken to begin with. My point is, bureaucracy has led us to do unimaginable things and not see "action -> result." Yet we were raised by our parents telling us that dreams will come true with hard work and effort. We are all socially forced to follow the rules, not skipping lines, etc. But it feels more and more like those lines are crossed everyday and goals are more important.
But yeah, it's true. One could argue that the school shooter was doing this for himself, which of course isn't something I'd wish on anyone. I think that these teenagers feel helpless, without any purpose in life. I'm not saying it's the worst time to be alive, but the mass appeal of no-religion, being agnostic is a real problem. I even doubt if I should continue being agnostic at times. Every once in a while I lose purpose and really haven't found a good way to cope with it.
Generally speaking, I think the cause of these shootings comes down to the feeling of helplessness and not feeling useful to society.
I was viciously bullied from 3rd grade through 6th and eventually stopped it through physical violence. The guy who bullied me (we exchanged black eyes on multiple occasions) ended up being one of my best childhood friends and I attended his father's funeral last year after he was killed in a tragic accident. Fighting amongst boys is normal.
My daughter is younger and smaller than my son, but in any "fun sibling violence" situation she just doesn't stop hassling until she thinks she's "won" or us parents have to intervene. They never really come close to even danger of the spilling-blood-kind of physicality, but my daughter constantly surprises me with what punishment she's willing to risk just to try and "get the last one in". She's tougher than him.
The "gun as solution" psychology is definitely a large part of the problem.
Can we? AnimalMuppet already mentioned the legal barriers, but there's another issue: the US is currently suffering from extreme political polarization which has already led to an insurrection. How do you think that would interact with an attempt at mass confiscation[0] of guns?
I fear such a policy any time in the near future would spark a civil war, leading to many times more deaths than all the school shootings added together.
[0] I read your post as implying mass confiscation. Simply restricting the purchase of new guns would take many decades to significantly reduce the number of guns in circulation.
We can't solve this problem because we're all talking about highly theoretical and utopian solutions that don't account for actually existing realities.
The left says "no guns". The right says "more guns".
The US constitution says "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." Yes, there's a preface about a well regulated militia, and yes, people were using muskets when it was written, but the Supreme Court has ruled that this confers an individual right to possess modern firearms.
And the Supreme Court is even more right-wing now, and likely to force blue states to loosen their gun laws to look more like red states.
So maybe we'd have a more productive conversation if we talked about what's possible in the actually existing United States instead of dreaming about Australia's successes, because there's zero probability that we'll be able to learn from Australia.
The left actually says "more background checks", though there are an unreasonable group that goes for absolutely no guns.
There's also the questions about what to do with aftermarket triggers that allow for burst-firing or even fully-automatic firing, which are legal right now (and were used in the Las Vegas mass shooting attack). Banning certain items (ex: large-capacity magazines, trigger-mods, bump-stocks and the like) would still be an improvement.
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2018/12/26/2018-27...
https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/2021/12/bump-stock-ban-heading-...
Bump-stocks remain a public political issue, likely heading to the Supreme Court.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gun-owners-of-am...
I don't know about that. I know plenty of people on the left that have gun 'obsessions'. I think it's just culturally unacceptable for them to talk about it. Here in Eastern Massachusetts, pretty much everybody (who doesn't tout their minority right-wing victim status on the back window of their pickup truck) will tell you they are anti-gun; but if you feel them out carefully, a good number of them will quietly admit they own guns and enjoy shooting. There are many, many hidden gun collections here.
I doubt that even with our previous level of gun ownership we would have had the same outcome either. We have a social healthcare system that at least provides some level of mental health support and our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power. While this may have eventually changed with greater cultural homogenisation to American content via the internet, I’m unconvinced that it would have ever been the same as we see in America today.
The school shooting problem is very very American and i suspect it has a lot to do with cultural contagion brought on by the 24hr news media circus whipping everyone into obsession every time there’s a tragedy.
I've fired a gun on three occasions (I was an Army Cadet, I quite enjoyed the experience) and have handled realistic replicas (backstage on set of a theater show). In both settings they're treated as risky objects. You are handed the gun, you use it, and then you hand it back to be locked up.
My grandfather is the only person in my family I know who ever owned a gun. He used to keep it in the cupboard under the stairs. He handed it in to police to be destroyed long ago - he felt that he didn't need it, and that the most likely outcome of keeping it was an accident that he would regret.
Personally, I'm very happy to live without guns around. If I do want to shoot, I would be able to comply with the regulations in my state fairly easily. It's a bit of paperwork but no worse than, e.g. acquiring powerful lasers, or being allowed to enter an aerodrome for flight training.
But it’s not the same as American news. For one thing American news is weirdly musical… like why the hell does all American news come with a subtle soundtrack trying to obviously steer my emotional reaction to what I’m seeing? Other places add music too in plenty of places often for the same reasons but it’s not the same level… American news basically has a soundtrack going almost all the time, it’s excessive and blatantly an attempt to manipulate the viewers emotions.
It’s way more obvious when it’s a wedge issue like gun rights, drug legalisation, abortion, or anything political.
Definitely- the most recent mass shooting committed by an Australian national didn't even occur on Australian soil, but in Christchurch, NZ.
>our cultural relationship with guns didn’t fetishise them as implements of power
As opposed to the US, whose cultural relationship with school shooters sees them made Person of the Year by a popular nationwide magazine. Their media reports stories of "Could [popular movie] result in mass shootings?" throughout the time it was in the theaters to the point you'd wonder if it was actually part of a marketing campaign.
Not actively promoting this particular kind of crime or the people who commit it would indeed be a good start to eliminating it but why do that when there's money and political hay to be made over it?
Australia still has plenty of legal guns around. And it's clearly still a problem with illegal guns. Not as big a problem as the US, but still a big problem.
"But the latest crackdown did little to shift attention from the body count: in the past 18 months, 13 men have been shot dead in a western Sydney turf war and there is no end to the bloodshed in sight."
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2022/may/23/more-...
Hint: it's what 92-96% of the US public consistently agrees with. Background checks without loopholes, for instance.
(I’ll give you my personal opinion: we can’t because of structural flaws in the US political system, and the problem is impossible to fix.)
Background checks are standard procedure. I'm not sure what "loopholes" you are referring to. Usually this refers to private party sales. Do you want private party sales banned?
How much of "the left" is actually about no guns, versus having a few hoops that you have to jump through first, à la (e.g.) Massachusetts:
* https://www.vox.com/2018/11/13/17658028/massachusetts-gun-co...
Compared to: "Only in Texas: Lubbock jeweler offers free gun with engagement ring purchase":
* https://www.dallasnews.com/news/texas/2016/10/25/only-in-tex...
Oh, also? Has anyone actually been fired by the federal government? A cursory search shows 1800 people are on unpaid leave, but they haven’t been terminated. 1800 people out of an estimated 320k employees.
Weird.
Own a musket for home defense, since that's what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. "What the devil?" As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he's dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it's smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, "Tally ho lads" the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.
I wish you hadn’t made your quip about the left saying “no guns”, because it isn’t important at all to your central point, which is that structural issues in the US prevent meaningful progress on gun control regardless of whether it’s good policy or the majority of people want it.
But you have like five people responding to that “left no guns” thing specifically, instead of to your real point, which is absolutely correct and the heart of the issue.
I'm sure there'd be pushback, but restrictions on gun advertising might be another option. Other countries have regulations around advertising pharmaceuticals, fast food, tobacco, gambling and so on.
Interestingly among those polled from the Democratic party, which is broadly considered the entirely pro-gun-control party, only 54% felt that gun control laws were the most effective way to prevent mass shootings. (31% of Independents and 17% of Republicans responded similarly.) The rest seem to mostly fall into the camps of either 'more effective policing' or 'preventing the spread of extremist ideologies.'
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2022/05/25/most-vo...
> The root cause may be bullying combined with the media contagion effect.
You need the bullying (or other oppressive social condition) and the media contagion. And, as you say, you need the massive amounts of guns.
> but we actually can do something about the number of guns in our country.
It is not clear to me that your statement is true. Given the Second Amendment, given the Supreme Court (and, in particular, the current makeup of the Supreme Court), I'm not sure what can be done.
If you see a path, we'd all love to see the plan...
But we probably wouldn’t even need to restrict it. If the president and other politicians shamed every media company that named the shooter when this happens we could probably make some progress.
According to a report[1] by Small Arms Survey in 2017, there were an estimated 120 civilian firmarms per 100 people in the USA:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
That's almost twice as many as the next-closest nation.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20180620231909/http://www.smalla...
What gives?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/school-sh...
Comparative population could be relevant, although also doesn't explain the statistics you reference.
To try to prove/disprove the argument: has the prevalence (or nature) of bullying changed?
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/07/gun-owners-stud...
(correlation does not explain causation, but it may help to guide analysis)
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20211204010352/https://www.mothe...
Are there any numbers on how many people commit suicide with guns they bought in the last 6 months of their life?
I haven't yet, although I did find this publication from Boston University positive correlation between increased gun ownership and increased non-stranger homicide rates: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4167105/
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-...
The post also questions how studies like the one you linked are measuring gun ownership rate. Every reliable study uses % of suicides with guns as a proxy for gun ownership rates. RAND notes the same thing: "A fundamental limitation for all of the studies is the lack of direct measures of gun prevalence. All of the authors use FS/S as a proxy for gun prevalence" https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...
https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/fir...
The Buffalo shooter bought his rifle legally in New York. Same goes for the most recent shooter in Texas. The San Bernardino shooters bought their firearms legally in California, then modified magazines to accept more than 10 rounds. The Orlando night club shooter bought his guns legally. He even had a valid security guard license.
The only example I know of is Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter. He lived in Nevada and bought a WASR-10 (an AK variant) there, then drove to California to massacre people. While the WASR-10 is illegal in California, very similar rifles are legal in the state. Had he lived in California, he could have purchased a Palmetto State Armory GF3 (or any other CA-legal AK clone), then removed the grip fin and modified the magazine to accept 30 rounds.
The point I was trying to make is that people cannot take advantage of less restrictive gun laws in neighboring states. Almost every mass shooter either got their guns legally or stole them from a close relative (often by murdering that relative). There's no glaring legal loophole that these people are using.
What an oddly specific comment.
Quite possibly, not much.
It's something that varies a lot from one culture to another, and you need a lot of it, unchecked for years to destroy a person.