[flagged]
The civilian gun stock has grown significantly since the 60s [1]. These data, together, seem to imply a large (but declining) number of households with a couple of guns and a few households with a ridiculous number of guns.
Of course, the dagger in your argument is that American divorce rates are not extraordinary [2]. Our gun ownership and school shooting rates are.
Given school shooters [3] (and now political shooters) come from gun-owning households, it seems fair to pin the blame for these events on that fraction of one third of American households who maintain private armories.
[1] https://www.thetrace.org/2023/03/guns-america-data-atf-total...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_divorce_r...
[3] https://publications.aap.org/aapnews/news/27379/Study-Adoles...
Similarly, it surely is better to compare the same country over time instead of comparing different countries which differ in many additional respects? If your thesis that the availability of guns causes school shootings is true, you should expect to see school shootings going down in the U.S. as the practical availability of a gun goes down.
Why?
> Similarly, it surely is better to compare the same country over time instead of comparing different countries which differ in many additional respects?
Mass shootings are a distinctly American phenomenon. (One happened today. It probably won't make any front pages [1].) It absolutely makes sense to ask what we're doing wrong relative to other countries.
> If your thesis that the availability of guns causes school shootings is true, you should expect to see school shootings going down in the U.S. as the practical availability of a gun goes down
One would expect to see more school shootings in states with "more permissive firearm laws and higher rates of gun ownership" [2]. One does.
I also challenge the notion that fewer households with more guns makes guns less available to kids. A household with one or two guns is probably keeping track of them in a way one with a new gun every Christmas is not.
82% of school shooters don't grow up in stable homes [3]. Practically all of them are from gun homes. More critically, the prevalence of two-parent households has been going up since the mid-2000s [4]. So have mass shootings.
(Kirk's assassin grew up in a stable home. He used the rifle his family gifted him to do the deed [5].)
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gvgr7w2yko
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35449898/
[3] https://schoolshooters.info/sites/default/files/shooters_myt...
[4] https://ifstudies.org/blog/the-resurgence-of-the-two-parent-...
[5] https://people.com/tyler-robinson-received-rifle-as-gift-use...
Because 0 to 1 is the big step.
> A household with one or two guns is probably keeping track of them in a way one with a new gun every Christmas is not.
That’s a theory, but what’s the evidence? Do you think farmers locked up their guns? Kids used to bring guns to school for sports shooting back in the day.
> Mass shootings are a distinctly American phenomenon.
Sure, but it’s been exceptional in terms of widespread gun ownership for longer than it’s had a major problem with mass shootings. When doctors are trying to diagnose people, the first thing they ask is: “what have you been doing different?”
This doesn't answer why 0 to 1 households with guns is a bigger step than 0 to 1 guns.
> what’s the evidence?
It's a hypothesis. The observation is monotonically more guns, monotonically fewer gun households, more school shootings, all while single-family households become more and then less prevalent.
The corollary of the first two is more guns per gun-owning household. The implication of the last is it's not causative. The hypothesis is the larger number of guns in fewer households may have something to do with the mess.
> it’s been exceptional in terms of widespread gun ownership for longer than it’s had a major problem with mass shootings
Source? My understanding is these data weren't well tracked before WWII.
> When doctors are trying to diagnose people, the first thing they ask is: “what have you been doing different?”
Why wouldn't the NRA's radicalisation from a gun-safety orientation to Second Amendment extremism count?
Reading comprehension moment: the parent comment was carefully not claiming either side of the argument.
Your response, and the downvotes, are as if they declared for the locally unpopular side. They did not.
> The conservative view simply is that this correlation is causal, while the liberal view is that the causation runs in the opposite direction of the correlation.
You're right that the poster doesn't make it clear (deliberately or not) but the use of the word "simply" feels sympathetic, and suggesting that the "liberal view" is that correlation and causation are opposed (when that would typically be counter-intuitive) sounds critical. At least, that was my comprehension of the post, as someone without any skin in the game.
I upvoted rayiner’s comment because it’s argued in good faith.
(What would be in bad faith would be putting forward a third party’s flawed argument without pointing out the flaws for shits and giggles.)
One takeaway from that evidence, however, could be that single-parent homes should have restrictions on how many guns they can own, what kind of guns those can be and how they must be stored. The fact that American single-family kids turn into school shooters, while the rest of the (rich) world's do not, continues to speak to a uniquely American nexus. The most obvious and evidenced one is our prevalence (and loose regulation) of guns.
Coupled with entertainment that primarily revolves around people aiming guns at each other while barking orders, then shooting to see who gets to be in charge, then more aiming/barking. Guns are framed as the obvious solution to problems, and the media reinforces this by making sure every shooter gets their 15 minutes (or days). Frankly with this setup, the surprising thing is that there aren't more mass shootings.
The most interesting question that arises from this is why the switch from explosives to firearms by perpetrators of mass casualty events.
It wasn't due to regulations on high-explosives, which were essentially cash-and-carry for the entire 20th century. On the other hand, regulation of firearms greatly increased starting in the 1960s.
Bombings were the popular mode of creating mass casualties 50+ years ago even though actual machine-guns were widely available back then and almost completely unavailable for the last several decades.