Mass Shootings, Political Correctness, and Magical Thinking
diegobasch.com
diegobasch.com
I really wish we would have a meaningful debate over the best tools and strategies for protecting people in large groups in public places. Because of the delay of so-called first responders, it is really left to the people who are there to take action.
Outside of banning and confiscating all guns, gun control isn't going to solve the problem. People with criminal intent will always find a way to carry out their plans (c.f. the recent spate of knife attacks in China).
We need defensive and offensive measures to minimize harm. I believe the lockdown plan put into action at the school probably saved more lives than any other one thing, until the police arrived. So giving schools more tools for effective plans like this would probably help.
On the offensive side, teachers and staff were left to fight guns with their hands. If they had had a weapon of their own (tasers or guns with rubber bullets, for example), they would have stood a better chance of minimizing harm. We allow pilots to carry weapons if they so choose and it is probably at least somewhat effective as a random deterrent, in addition to providing some actual protection.
Sadly, I don't think this line of thinking will come up. This thing is going to be played out largely in Washington, where entrenched groups will be mostly pushing existing agendae, not thinking in new ways to actually minimize the problem.
The classroom presents special challenges not present in other situations when it comes to arming civilians.
If it were left to school boards, they could do things like require a stringent process to certify particular staff who have access to a cabinet, for example (this could include safety training, a background check, and psychological testing). Unfortunately, we have a zero tolerance position in most school systems (which makes sense for students, obviously). It will probably not even be considered due to existing bias.
They have the training. Many of them are still in their 40s and 50s.
In my state many middle and high schools have assigned SROs (School Resource Officers / Deputies), whose primary role is not protection, but to work with students. The secondary benefit is the presence an armed, actively trained LEO who could respond to an active shooter.
While many would decry the costs of adding these SROs to every Elementary - High School, the cost would likely be insignificant (in terms of money and effect) to turning schools into secured facilities (with prison like barriers).
http://www.tricities.com/news/local/article_a66f42d4-4806-11...
Nor did I think you were, but added due to other comments I have seen in the media.
What I did not add / explain in my prior post is that one LEO salary per school (a M-F 7A-3P job) is both something that could be implemented very quickly, without the time and costs associated with reinforcing schools.
To which one of the first comments is "How are we going to pay for these SROs in Elemtary Schools now?"
My suggestion would be fewer police activities in other nations.
"Readily available" can be addressed by concealed handguns that aren't too easy to get to; you might have to give an attacker a "first bite of the apple" in favor of making them too accessible. On the other hand, a few M4s in a quick to open safe in the principle's office ought to be doable, as long as the staffers there have the right attitudes, to "march towards the sound of canons".
And it's attitude above all that needs to be addressed, we don't take this threat seriously, perhaps in part because it's quite new as these things go (we'll ignore the far more deadly 1927 Bath school massacre done with explosives).
This school had a crust defense; once the perimeter was compromised by the attacker shooting out a window (according to the latest never very reliable reports) there was nothing left but for the teachers to interpose their bodies between the shooter and their charges. Which was no obstacle to him (one does wonder what it takes for someone who doesn't seem to have suffered from schizophrenia or mania to shoot a bunch of 5-6 year old children 3-11 times each ... I admit the existence of evil, won't claim to ever really understand it).
Teachers/staff prepare for those by knowing how to evacuate students from the schools and calling 911. They aren't expected to actually fight fires, aside from using a fire extinguisher.
"Readily available" can be addressed by concealed handguns that aren't too easy to get to; you might have to give an attacker a "first bite of the apple" in favor of making them too accessible. On the other hand, a few M4s in a quick to open safe in the principle's office ought to be doable, as long as the staffers there have the right attitudes, to "march towards the sound of canons".
In order for that to be effective and safe, those teachers/staffers will have to regularly train with those weapons in addition to their other duties. Look at the NYPD - we have a population (police) that are trained to use firearms and have to qualify at certain intervals and yet their rates of accidental firings were so high that they needed to have their handguns modified to reduce those accidents. Despite their training, their hitrate when they actually use their weapons on duty is abysmal.
Unless you have teachers/staff that are already firearms enthusiasts, they are probably going to be reluctant to add range time to their calendar, and putting a firearm in the hands of a poorly trained user will end badly.
As for "effective and safe", so you'd think, and so did I (who started shooting in 1st grade in 1967 (sic)), but civilians with little or no training have demonstrated an amazing ability to responsibly use firearms in self-defense.
Police in general are not useful comparisons. They're required by their jobs to go in harm's way and frequently use their service handguns. The NYPD is a particularly poor example, they are run by people who don't understand guns and equip their men with ones that are particularly hard to shoot accurately---as you sort of note they prefer this vs. negligent discharges---and we learned after the recent debacle that their training, initial and continuing, is really subpar. And there are much better ways to avoid negligent discharges, the NYPD is the outlier here.
That's also why I suggested the option of M4 carbines. Long guns are a LOT easier to shoot correctly, skill with them doesn't seem to degrade like it's said to do with most people with handguns, with good choices of ammo they're more effective and less dangerous than handguns, etc.
You know, people normally hold out New York City as an object lesson in how not to run one, I'm amazed by anyone who thinks otherwise.
Schools, summer camps, sporting events, theaters, amusement parks, universities and other so-called gun-free zones -- are soft targets that are going to be exploited by criminals/terrorists (one just has to look at where those horrible acts were comitted in Russia (Beslan), Norway, US)
Just like the planes where in 9/11.
so training and arming a portion of the staff that is operating the facilities, as well as securing access -- is essential
Praying, reading books, closing doors and closets -- are not effective measures against evil-souled animals who are there to end their lives and to take as many people with them as possible.
There are schools that have been taking steps in this direction.
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/15/5056005/one-texas-school-le...
I would also venture to say that media coverage must change the protocol in cover this kinds of events things like a) name of the criminal must not be announced b) reasons/intent must not be announced/mentioned/discussed on broadcast networks c) number of victims
so that the media does not feed the possible copy cats.
After all, how elaborate are the protections they are stored behind likely to be? Not very, when you consider that (1) if the weapons are ever needed they'll need to be able to be gotten to fast, and (2) the people responsible for storing them are going to be middle school administrators, not military quartermasters.
There currently exist laws that forbid law-abiding concealed carry permit holders from carrying firearms on school grounds. This law does not prevent dangerous people from bringing weapons into these zones and committing atrocities. Instead, I think we should really be encouraging teachers to make the commitment to go through the training process required for them to get their concealed handgun licenses and to regularly train to maintain safe gun-carrying habits. Perhaps teachers could receive some sort of compensation for having a concealed handgun license and engaging in regular firearms safety training.
I am sure that during the excruciatingly terrible events that took place in Newtown some teachers wished they had the means to defend the children and themselves. We should let teachers that want to legally and safely carry instruments of defense to do so. We shouldn't have laws that guarantee defenseless victims.
A melee weapon versus a deadly ranged weapon is going to be a poor matchup.
> guns with rubber bullets
If you're the good guy who's doing the most damage, but it's non-lethal, non-debilitating damage, you'd better be prepared to draw aggro.
My guess is that only a teacher with a gun would have had a decent chance of ending the massacre early.
My understanding of tactics is largely based on video games. Anyone with any training/experience in real-life tactics is welcome to comment on my comment.
If you desperately need to stop someone ASAP, rubber bullets are subpar unless they approach lethal energies, for obvious reasons, and a lot of school teacher types wouldn't be able to wield such weapons effectively. Your guess is correct.
Here's a scatter plot of firearms per 100,000 and gun homocides per 100 for OECD countries:
Needless to say, the dot in the top right corner is the USA>
Data is from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homi...
(Note: Mexico is excluded because its rate of gun violence is such a startling outlier that it squashes all the other values.)
It's not a peaceful place.
I'm not sure what you have in mind when you say "founded by violence"...
Australia was at least as wicked with their aboriginal populations - and has a vastly lower level of gun violence.
The Netherlands was birthed in a revolution lasting 8 decades, and also has negligible gun violence.
Fun Fact: Most Australian's don't know the name of the first Prime Minister because it was so uneventful. A bunch of people sat down, signed some papers, and Australia was founded as a country.
One big difference in the USA is that the right to own guns was somehow inserted into its Constitution among the rights to expression, assembly, fair trial and so on. I can't think of any other countries in which owning a gun is explicitly listed among the set of human rights.
We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness
We have rights to life and liberty, and the right to private ownership of weapons acknowledged in the 2nd Amendment is an instrumentality to help ensure that. It should also be noted that the Bill of Rights (1st though 10 Amendments) were a price demanded by the Anti-Federalists for accepting the Constitution.
I feel this is instructive because with all of the guns already in private hands in the US if they were banned outright today you'd end up with an enormous and uncontrollable black market. The same type of black market that exists in Mexico.
Even in the US now, the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained guns. Something on the order of greater than 90%.
Fair enough - the only reason I took it out was because it squashed all the other values into the bottom left corner so that you could no longer distinguish their relative positions. I still made sure to mention it because Mexico's case is instructive.
Edit: Not saying the scale is misleading on purpose... just that it is misleading.
I think regardless of your position we can all agree on this.
It would be useful if we could all see that we really are on the same side of this — everyone wants to prevent another tragedy like this. We just have very different beliefs about how best to go about that.
If that were true, wouldn't we'd only be seeing gun control proposals that directly flow from this event, not all the "usual suspects" that are also being proposed again? E.g. the "gun show loophole", which has not been implicated in any of these events to my knowledge. But it turns out gun shows are a vital part of the US gun culture and shutting them down, as the fine print of these proposals would do, would do it grave damage.
We're seeing a whole lot of what some people define as insanity, doing (recommending) the same thing over and over again, regardless of results. That doesn't strike me as a response to this event, but opportunism in using it.
Well of course. But wanting that is not exactly out of the mainstream, is it? Who doesn't, besides the fantasies of NRA members and/or gun owners that too many gun grabbers hold in their minds?
Piers Morgan is a good example (http://bit.ly/12q3n4q) -- he contributes nothing to the conversation or debate because he insults anyone that has a view opposing his.
Most people don't live in fear of cancer or lightning strikes, unless they find themselves in the middle of an asbestos filled building or right underneath a lightning storm.
The knowledge however that so many people around carry deadly firearms, and maybe more importantly, apparently feel they have a pressing reason to own firearms, is a daily reality for many. This fear is real, and it is not irrational.
This is not about the odds. It's about not having to live in fear. Even though the odds are wildly in their favor, most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
People's fear, by in large, is not rational. Many people would get into a car on a rainy Friday night with little hesitation or thought of risk, yet they are deliberately putting themselves in harms way.
What the author is trying to get across is that public policy should focus on things it can track its effectiveness on and things it can solve.
When choosing where to spend time and money, the odds are exactly what people should be focusing on.
It'd be really nice if politicians could make use of science and good quality research to make their arguments and to craft policy.
It'd be really nice if politicians could say "We don't know what the answer is. We're running some 3 year trials, and at the end of those we'll have some data and information and we'll be in a better position to know what the best thing to do is".
But no politician is going to say that. No politician is ever going to say "I'm not sure, I'll have to look at the research and get advice".
Any politician who said anything other than "Mass shootings are devastating and something needs to be done" would be eviscerated by tv, newspapers, and blogs. There is no possibility of nuanced discussion.
> most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
But when people decide not to swim in a well run swimming pool because the media is constantly blaring entertainment shows about sharks with ominous music and shaky-cam then it's not so rational.
Is this something that is even attainable by exterior forces? I don't just mean as it relates to gun-crimes, but anything. Everyone has fears — from fear of failure to fear of heights. They are personal and, as such, are yours to conquer personally.
Laws do not necessarily automatically assuage your fears — many people, as you point out, have irrational fears based on emotion rather than in fact / statistic probability.
You're almost twice as likely to be killed by a gun because you live in the United States vs. the next developed country (Finland). You're 2.6 times as likely to be killed than the next country, Canada.
Something is very wrong here.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Yes, the average American (not necessarily you, it varies a lot depending on where you live) is more likely to be killed by a gun than the average person in Finland. That is completely irrelevant to my post. It's not a competition among countries, it's about making the US better. "Daring" has nothing to do with it.
But you conclude there is no need to fix the current problem. Comparing America to other Developed countries clearly shows there is.
Gun deaths in the United States have been declining for the since the 90's in spite of loosening of gun laws. We need to be studying those factors so that we can craft better policy.
Don't get me wrong, clearly if less people have guns less people can shoot other people. But if you really want to improve society you've got to get at the root causes of violence rather than just attacking the tools.
I simply said it's very clear there is a problem and something needs to be done about it.
Again, comparison to other developed countries proves there are.
Edit to answer to the comment below: think what you want. Don't try to convince me. I'm skeptical, you're not. Write to your legislators instead of here. Write your own blog posts.
If heterogeneity was a factor, surely homicide rates would be climbing in countries like Canada and Australia that have the highest immigration rates in the Developed world[1]. They are not.
Number of guns is precisely the factor at the heart of the issue.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_net_migrat...
In terms of number of guns, no other country is. That's the point: other countries made decisions and implemented policies to severely restrict access to guns, and the predictable result today is that there are far fewer guns and much less gun violence.
The decision to restrict guns is a long-term decision - it won't reduce gun violence overnight, but it will reduce gun violence over decades.
But I think you're wrong about the path that restrictions would take in the US: the slowly boiling a frog approach won't accomplish the goal, anything too quick, sharp and raw will merely spark the 2nd American Civil War during which "gun violence" will go way up. And most any restriction scheme will increase gun violence, if only on the part of the authorities using force to seize guns and the like.
Maybe in the long term public attitudes could be changed, the 2nd Amendment repealed, and the path you envision might happen, but that's the work of generations and will require a reversal of the renorming of gun ownership we've seen in the last quarter century (I take Florida's 1987 establishment of a shall issue concealed carry license regime as the start; today 42 states have them, de facto or de jure).
The US can also mandate safe storage of weapons and ammunition in separate, locked, secure cases. That in itself would reduce the incidence of gun suicide and so-called crimes of passion by introducing a long-enough delay between decision and action that sanity prevails.
Unless by "restrict ownership" you mean, say, the same as the current policy for handguns, can't buy unless you're 21? Can be gifted with one, though.
"Lock up your safety" (so called "safe storage") is off the table per the Supreme Court. D.C. insisted on that sort of insanity and got slapped down in Heller, the state must allow guns to be readily available for self-defense.
Then again, I might be wrong about the civil war bit. It's possible that America is simply culturally incapable of regulating its firearms in a safe, responsible way, and that a death-by-firearms rate several orders of magnitude higher than the rest of the industrialized world is an intractable side-effect.
Given that, if you live in the US, it's a "you bet your life" proposition, you'd best be very careful before possibly sparking one, no matter how low a probability you think it is from people you've shown yourself to know nothing about. And you're definitely limited in your imagination, we've watched recent history and know "real movements" as such aren't an option (at least in the beginning). Fortunately they're not needed.
You would also do well to remember a couple of quotes misattributed to Imperial Japanese Navy Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, the architect of their attack on Pearl Harbor:
"I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve."
"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle behind every blade of grass."
As for the risk of people dying if something is done: we know for certain that people will continue to die from gun violence by the thousands on an annual basis if something is not done.
Psychopathic spree killings are such a low-probability, extreme event that there's almost nothing you can do, at a public policy level, to influence them. Your monkey brain may protest that this simply cannot be (as mine does), but our monkey brains are wrong.
Instead we need to look for significant trends. Or consider that our actions might cause other harms more often, which is especially likely when our actions are driven by low-probability events. Basing public policy on such extreme events is not just stupid, it's immoral.
And yet, that's exactly the job of the media. The media works, by and large, by telling individual stories to provoke general sympathy or outrage. This is a good thing when that story is representative of a larger problem. What we have now is random phenomena driving larger political discussions.
This is completely false. Being rare doesn't mean there aren't things that can make it even more rare. Many countries have taken steps that make these events far less likely.
So, I'll revise what I'm saying to this: if you have a measure that you want to take that is only justified by such extreme events, it's probably not a good idea.
This is a bullshit red herring designed to ignore 99.8% of the gun homicides that take place each year in the US [1]. Gun control works to control much more than just mass shootings.
[1] Using 8K as a rough estimate for annual gun deaths from here:
He's not cherry picking stats to make the matter of gun crime appear less serious. He's addressing the impending tidal wave of emotion in response to the events in Newtown, which happened to be a mass shooting.
The reddit attention span appears to be alive and well at HN.
Yes he eventually talks about all these gun deaths and then he hand waves it all away, too much thinking:
"I’m not even going to try to answer those questions, because they are extremely complex."
Too much work, forget it. Man, if only scores of other countries had gone through something similar and we could draw on those experiences but ... thinking is HARD!
Another flawed argument is that these incidents are small anomalies which can't be controlled by regulatory changes. Yes, if you can categorically prove that this is just a blimp on the charts. Anecdotally it feels like this is spreading, increasing in frequency. At what point are you going to put your foot down and push for changes? Some social behaviors tend to be pretty viral, inspiring a new set of perpetrators. Lets treat this with caution and not bury it under the carpet of data & statistics.
To put it in nerd-speak, the intolerance for any given death is a function V with multiple inputs. (I find this extremely distasteful but bear with me.) For cars and smoking, the output of that function scales quite slowly; we're mostly OK with those because we like cars and if you smoke it's your funeral. Note that we already spend a lot of money on automotive safety, so arguably we still want to bring those numbers down. For instance, look at recent safety-oriented recalls from various manufacturers. Likewise, we spend money to reduce teen smoking, et al. So even then those don't really wash as an example of hypocrisy around the value of human life.
For the murder of multiple people via gratuitously overpowered firearms, you might argue V scales linearly, perhaps even quadratically. Maybe V takes a time-delta which scales V even faster with smaller deltas; Aurora is still fresh in many people's minds, as are numerous other incidents.
For multiple children under the age of 8 gunned down by a madman with a high-capacity assault rifle, V might scale factorially. We as a society try to place a very high value on the lives and well-being of children.
In other words, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than simply comparing inputs to V, and a small input to V for some category of deaths is not in itself a justification to ignore it. The author has committed the fallacy of looking at morality and society primarily or even solely through the lens of statistics.
The author's laziness is also ironic, all things considered. The UK and Australia are other western industrialized nations quite similar to ours, in a great many respects. They've experienced some success in reducing gun violence since the '90s, when they banned private handgun ownership. The irony is that the author's blindness here is a far better example of magical thinking about how regulation might or might not work in the US.
"I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?"
But is that the best comparison?
What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different disease. So here, I think it would be more informative to have comparative study done across countries, societies rather than this distraction.
Author is basically saying, anything that is statistically small, does not deserve attention. So research into any low probability disease should be ended because there bigger fish to fry. I think we can do both.
History indicates otherwise.
I guess I just don't have the "sophisticated" European point of view that says that millions killed by government don't count.
In addition to the wars per se, European governments have killed millions of their own citizens, and they've been at it for centuries.
"You had Norway last year [where 77 died]. Two years ago, you had the shooting in Austria at a Sikh Temple. There have been several multiple-victim public shootings in France over the last couple of years. Over the last decade, you’ve had a couple of big school shootings in Germany."
http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/Lott-guns-Connecticut-shooti...
Theoretically, he does compare to other countries, as the statistic is a rounding error -- not statistically relevant.
I'm not convinced by this argument. Firearms are not used in public spaces, but in private land, or on club-owned property.
I can't speak for others, but I can say that almost every time I walk outside I've carrying a M1911 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M1911_pistol).
Which is silly - where I live half the office is gone during deer season.
> But in the last couple of years, residents began noticing loud, repeated gunfire, and even explosions [from propane gas tanks used as targets], coming from new places. Near a trailer park. By a boat launch. Next to well-appointed houses.
> [...] ''We're growing,'' [Council Ordinance Committee Chairwoman, Mary Ann Jacob] said on Saturday, describing a town where hikers and mountain bikers competed with gun owners for use of trails and forested areas.
http://www.smh.com.au/world/guns-are-why-were-free-8230-peop...
When you are required to get a license to cast your ballot or attend your church, then you can make the argument for getting a license to purchase a firearm.
I'd imagine it's something that won't be out of the question in about 20-40 years. Gun owners are overwhelmingly white, male and older. A demographic that is dying of old age.
This is something that often goes without mentioning, so thanks for bringing it up.
The founders were not idiots. They did not want to create a set of stone tablets, a collection of unchangeable holy texts. The Bill of Rights and the Constitution were intended to be changeable, living documents, adaptable to the times.
Maybe it's time to question whether or not the status quo can scale and remains consistent with our societal values.
[1]http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/files/2012/07...
For one thing, there are multiple restrictions on freedom of speech. Maybe you think those oughtn't exist, but we're talking about the status quo, not ideal worlds.
This is not to mention the idea that there are multiple ways to adjudicate whether this means "all guns" or "some guns," since there's quite a difference between an assault rifle or handgun and a simple rifle. Then there's the "well-regulated militia" piece.
I'm not advocating for any particular reading. Rather I disagree that the Bill of Rights ought to be the last word in any discussion. I think the Bill of Rights is better suited to a starting point, and the history of the judiciary in this country seems to bear this out in practice.
Also, all the rights listed in the first ten amendments are limited to the point at which you're infringing on someone else's rights. The threat of death or injury, such as it is, would seem to be a pretty clear reason to limit that right.
If you fail to operate it properly, I could be struck by a bullet fired by you at somebody else.
2nd Amendment absolutists love talking about their rights, but spend precious little time talking about the responsibilities that come with them. Which are (or should be) significant, when the right you are talking about is the right to wield a lethal weapon.
I'm not a "2nd Amendment absolutist" as you put it, no more than I am a free speech or free press absolutist. I have no problem with licensure or registration so long as it's not prohibitive, and you will be hard pressed to find gun owners who say there are no responsibilities associated with gun ownership. To get a license to carry a concealed firearm in my state requires $20 and a few weeks while they do a cursory background check, depending on the county. To get a handgun or rifle takes half an hour for a phone call background check.
If politicians like Sen. Feinstein would stop talking about banning weapons wholesale that had nothing to do with any recent tragedy, and instead talk about a national level of firearms reciprocity (while requiring locations like NYC, Chicago and DC to come up to par), you'd see folks on the Right move quickly and decisively to supporting more common sense gun regulations.
"for some reason gun advocates think that the right to bear arms is the only constitutional right that is virtually without limit. You have the right to practice your religion, but not if your religion involves human sacrifice. You have the right to free speech, but you can still be prosecuted for incitement or conspiracy, and you can be sued for libel. Every right is subject to limitation when it begins to threaten others, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that even though there is an individual right to gun ownership, the government can put reasonable restrictions on that right."
>Also, all the rights listed in the first ten amendments are limited to the point at which you're infringing on someone else's rights. The threat of death or injury, such as it is, would seem to be a pretty clear reason to limit that right.
Apparently, if someone legally owns a gun, this presents a "threat of death or injury" to others. Of course, if the gun weren't legally owned by an individual but still existed, it would either be illegally owned by an individual or be legally owned by the government or by some other exempted institution. You might feel safer with only the government and criminals owning guns, but many others would feel less safe. What makes your fear more legitimate than theirs? Other rights are restricted only when exercising them would directly infringe on the rights of others. You can't demonstrate that you would be safer if a particular gun owner with no criminal record were forced to turn in his gun. You can't even demonstrate that you would be safer if all law-abiding gun owners were forced to turn in their guns. Even if you could, you couldn't demonstrate that your increased safety wouldn't be more than offset by the decreased safety of the gun owner(s).
The comparison between gun ownership and first-amendment rights is not a good one, because there are already restrictions on gun ownership comparable to the restriction on first-amendment rights. True, you don't have the right to practice human sacrifice--you also don't have the right to murder people with your legally owned guns. True, you can be prosecuted for incitement--and also for waving your gun around in public. True, you can be sued for libel--and you can be prosecuted for brandishing.
EDIT: The word I used was threat, which, if arguing in good faith, you would have read as "actual risk", rather than "angsty feelings".
I also qualified it with the phrase such as it is. Which, again in good-faith discourse, means "if it exists" or "whatever form it takes".
But do continue to tell me more about how I feel.
> Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons. Pp. 54–56.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller#...
this is considerably more limited than the restrictions on attending churches. w.r.t voting, you do need to register ahead of time and in some states you may even have to show a photo ID, though this is under debate.
To turn this round, this constitutional right is the reason that Americans are allowed to own weapons that are normally used in warzones at the age of 18 and without any safety measures. The world has changed since the constitution was written. If you were writing it today, would you still include the right to bear arms?
Somehow, these actions always happen to disarmed people....
They are, at least here, truly "unthinkable", for "it can't happen here" without a preceding confiscation of the nation's guns. Which is a sufficient tripwire to provoke a counter-revolution to stop things from ever getting that nasty.
One might also look at the Swiss experience.
No, he is not. He is saying, anything that is statistically small, and the elimination thereof would substantially restrain the rights and freedom of others, should be questioned.
No matter how you are going to argue, there is at least "some" purpose for guns - for self protection, etc. If the discussion were really about saving lifes, it makes no sense why not putting a ban on smoking, something that clearly has no purpose at all.
Yes, it is. You have a limited amount of resources -- in this case, tax dollars and political capital.
If you're spending dollars or votes to save lives, you should spend them on the thing which saves the most lives per dollar spent.
> What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
Another commenter on this article said that this comparison indicates that gun control doesn't really help [1].
To this, I'd add that most countries that have a strong gun control never had the situation of the US: millions of guns already in public circulation; many pro-gun individuals and a powerful political faction; and a very difficult procedure (amending the Constitution) required for changing policy.
These obstacles are pretty much insurmountable right now; you'd be well-advised to spend your political capital on an issue where you have a decent chance of winning.
I think what I was reading sounded like "there might be less gun violence over there, but don't look into why, it's not worth your while".
My thought was that maybe it is worth our while to look into why.
when one decides upon controlling guns, it would be prudent to grandparent people in. New rights revocation would only be applied to the upcoming generations. This way you don't alienate a population from something they hold dear, but would ensure whatever you're enacting becomes effective over time.
I'm afraid you're wrong, and are proposing just another way to spark the 2nd American Civil War, which I'd rather avoid. (I'm assuming you won't repeal the 2nd Amendment first, since I can't see that happening politically in the foreseeable future.)
We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.
I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.
If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.
Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.
I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.
For better or worse, we're a violent people.
Not so.
The New York Times has referred to Australia's gun laws as a "road map" for the US, saying that "in the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings - but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-17/us-urged-to-consider-a...
But the media knows that a large share of their "news business" is driven by emotion. And so here we are all thinking about mass shootings.
And we know the media has an enormous influence on politics. So add this all up and what do we have?
A terrible tragedy that affects a small community but also a lot of tangential effects, remote onlookers, politicians and an enterprising "media business".
I have a cousin who as a child was a student in a narrowly averted early grade school classroom mass shooting. Honestly, when I first heard about this incident in Connecticut I thought of him. I can only wonder what he thought about when he read about this incident. When it hits close to home, there might be hesistation to even talk about these things, they are so horrible. We might block them out. We might tell the children to close their eyes. We might try to pretend it never happened.
But for the media and the "news business", it's a different ballgame.
Nothing to do with liberty, the constitution or anything...
The correct meaningful numbers in establishing public policy regarding firearms are approximately 19,000 suicides by fire arm per year, and 11,000 homicides by firearm per year.
If we look at those numbers, the deaths in the recent school shooting are quite ordinary. The homicides are equivalent to the extra day in a leap year, and the suicide of the gunman was statistically background noise.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/28/guns-ownership-aroun...
note that the black circle is not scaled by the population of the country so it isn't visually as useful as it could be.
Interesting take aways:
* 88.9 guns per 100 U.S. citizens
* 45.7 guns per 100 swedish citizens (next highest country in the world)Swiss you mean? ;)
That said, a quick look at the list and it appears that no western country can compare to USA in firearm homicide per 100k citizens.
Let's say you are in a room with 100 people and you know that 88 guns are in there. Would you feel better if you knew that 88 different people each had 1 gun or that 44 people each had 2 guns?
Looking at all homicides vs gun ownership seems to bear that out. In fact, there appears to be a negative correlation with gun ownership: http://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership
(Can we start abbreviating Correlation Is Not Causation as CINC now? In any case, if you're going to argue that more guns = more murders, at the very least you're going to have to concede that other factors are much, much more important.)
In China, where guns are generally (if not totally) banned, they've had a problem with citizens going on murderous rampages in schools with swords and knives. So yes, the lack of guns is not necessarily decreasing murderous intent. But look at something interesting: all 22 victims of the most recent China rampage survived (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/14/china-sc...). If this man had a bushmaster, he'd have done a lot better.
Murder with highly refined weapons of war is much more effective than murder without. Removing assault weapons designed for wars would not necessarily decrease the count of incidents but would decrease the harmfulness of those incidents.
It seems insane to me (as a Canadian citizen) that the pro-gun folks continue to peddle that safety comes from increasing the number of "responsible" carriers. Here are the issues that I see with this:
1. The assumption that all gun users are trained and responsible. It seems obvious to compare this to other licensees such as drivers and you'll immediately see that it is not a valid argument. There are terrible drivers on the roads with valid licenses, who have presumably been trained with a lot of experience. The barrier to entry is even higher in that the cost of a vehicle is higher than a weapon.
2. How do you differentiate the good vs. bad in a situation such as Aurora? If you see a number of random strangers running around with guns in hand, few of whom would have any sort of melee training outside of video games, who do you shoot at? Where does the liability lie if one innocent murders another innocent by mistake?
3. The number of guns will increase (as they are now). With more lying around either forgotten or marginally broken, it increases the availability for non-licensed usage as I doubt responsible users dispose of their weapons appropriately (see item 1).
I say all this fully recognizing the gun's position as a tool, strongly advocating mental health reform and even supporting the OP's position of rational rather than emotional response to Newtown.
Then there are the cases where the building codes are not observed; Wikipedia even has a category "Fire disasters involving barricaded escape routes" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Fire_disasters_involvi...). Only one of these is listed as an arson attack, I know of one other (Happy Land), although both of these were code type problems. Hmmm, and according to Wikipedia, the Dupont Plaza Hotel arson, 2nd worst in US history at a minimum of 97 killed, locked emergency exits on a casino floor were a factor (wow, I'm impressed Wikipedia's article does not use the word union once...).
Still can't find a list of arson fires, so further analysis by me will have to wait, but I know plenty of smaller scale ones I've read about have involved the arsonists blocking the entrances, often by setting more than one fire.
Are they foolproof? Not at all. But aside from more inspections to prevent code violations, what additional steps are there? Preventing doors from being locked? Providing better battering devices for police? Banning fire?
The way I see it, the pro-gun lobby and enthusiasts have so successfully barred the door to future attempts at legislation that most consider it a topic un-worthy of discussion.
And, again, I say all of this not even really believing that more gun legislation is the answer. These are the better options:
- Better, easier to access healthcare (including mental health resources -- this is something that most western countries should improve)
- Close the income discrepancy between the wealthy and poor which will open up advancement opportunities for lower income families and individuals
- Decriminalize certain drugs, or at least possession
- De-emphasize incarceration over re-habilitation in the prison system (for profit prisons? Jesus...)
Address the perceived necessity for weapons rather than the weapons themselves.
But how can you ever do that?
No matter how much the above prescriptions change the facts on the ground, there will still be criminals and mentally ill people who attack others. And you'll never change what's historically the biggest killer of all, the threat of governments, most especially including your own as the last century's history wrote in blood.
So I don't think you'll ever change my perception that I need weapons.
(I also "need" "weapons" to target shoot, but that gets a little complicated.)
I don't really care about the self defense aspect - even though it's enticing, having some of my stuff stolen is probably better than killing a person.
Mass killings are as inevitable as lightning deaths
There are public policies which deal with lightning risk, e.g. formal implementation of the 30-30 rule for sports facilities.
I don't think that you will find that this number is a statistical fluctuation.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.