[IgorPartola]

> We know it's not guns. So what's the cause?

You misspelled “I want to believe it’s not guns.”

I am from Ukraine originally. Poverty is the reason there. So yeah let’s have that proper safety net instead.

But when we are talking about this, let’s break it down a bit between different types of violence where guns are used: police shooting suspects, gang violence, run of the mill murder, and acts of terrorism. You don’t believe that the police are shooting suspects because the officers are poor, do you? Or that the Vegas shooter was poor? Or the Sandy Hook one? Gang violence is a result of poverty, but terror attacks (the US likes to call these mass shootings when the suspect is white and/or Christian), are not.

I think it is time to repeal the second amendment. It clearly failed to create an organized militia that could stand up to an oppressive government. The US police force alone is enough to suppress any rebellion by the civilians, and if aided by the military, no militia could stand up to it. You can have gun ownership without the second amendment. Individual laws could grant access to weapons. But it is time to switch from a loophole that lets us have all the guns unless specifically disallowed by a law to a denied first, allowed second system.

Do I hear you ask about all the criminals that would keep their guns anyways, and only the law abiding citizens would be left unarmed? I will buy that argument the day it’s applied across the board to drugs and abortions.

[dclowd9901]

I would go further to say that the second amendment failed so miserably that if you shoot a police officer in self defense (such as in the case of the article), it is game over for you. You either won’t see the light of day again or be put to death. They’ve essentially made acting against the establishment _so illegal_ you’d be crazy to even try.

By merely being engaged by a police officer, you’re dead.

[throwaway30yo]

Even with all the technology police + military has. I don't think it would be an easy win if the gun owning population decided to revolt. There would be millions of deaths. The government may end up on top, but the consequences would be dire.

Not an American. Canadian here. I actually wish we had American gun laws, even with their consequences.

[IgorPartola]

See, I want to send my kids to school and be reasonably sure that some idiot can’t go down the street, buy a couple of rifles, and murder them and their classmates. Being able to go to the gun range once in a while and post on /r/guns is sorta secondary to that. Different priorities I guess.

Edit: and funnily enough the above scenario doesn’t happen in the developed world, except in the US, where it happens multiple times a year. Here we don’t tolerate things like weed, or abortions, or refugees because the societal price for those is too high, but mass child murder is cool because otherwise how would we prove our manliness?

[barsonme]

> See, I want to send my kids to school and be reasonably sure that some idiot can’t go down the street, buy a couple of rifles, and murder them and their classmates.

Everybody does. Let's not be disingenuous, though: the chances one of our children dies from a gunshot wound at school is incredibly small.

By my counts, 4 students have been killed at school shootings this year. 4 students out of ~50 million kids at over 130,00 schools. Consider also there are over 350 million firearms in the US.

People only care about it because of _guns_.

<soapbox>

Nobody seems to care much about the ~30,000 firearm deaths in the US each year.

They don't care that 2/3 of them are suicides, usually of middle-aged men.

They don't care that most of the remainder are usually in poor areas (often because of the US' long history of racism) and often gang-related.

They only care about the sensational (and very tragic) 0.0001% of deaths.

It annoys me to no end because it's proof they don't care about gun deaths. No, they just care about tear-jerking cable news stories. It's gross and disingenuous.

</soapbox>

[IgorPartola]

I lived next door to Sandy Hook when it happened. A relative of mine was a student in their school system and for a while I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. My town and towns around it have events every year honoring each person that died in the shooting. Yeah it’s a little close to home both figuratively and literally.

And I never said anything about not caring about other gun deaths. I don’t have a magical scale to weigh lives, and say which gun deaths are more meaningful objectively, but my solution to most of these is exactly the same: repeal the second amendment. Don’t let suicidal middle aged men buy guns. Don’t let legally owned guns become illegally owned guns. Don’t pawn them, privately sell them, hide them, find them, etc. Don’t put them in the hands of 12 year olds, or 50 year olds. What does seem true to me is that you almost never see a story where the gun made a difference and a life was saved. The NRA loooooves to talk about self defense the reason to sacrifice the poor, the defenseless, and the sick every damn year. Yet there is no damn evidence for this.

Also yes sure you can say schools are “safe” because it might not happen at yours. Add churches, malls, movie theaters, concerts, etc. and the picture gets a lot bleaker.

This experiment with guns has clearly failed. Arming a bunch of civilians and glorifying gun culture to the point of fetishism turns out leads to a not insignificant amount of death, a good chunk of which is innocent bystanders. So we can spend another year or ten or 100 pretending that this is a good idea or we can repeal the second amendment and start over. I am willing to bet that mayhem and pandemonium won’t happen and instead we would learn that not having a bunch of people armed to the teeth is a good idea.

[barsonme]

> Yet there is no damn evidence for this.

This is blatantly incorrect. From the Violence Policy Center:

"Using the NCVS numbers, for the three-year period 2012 through 2014, the total number of self-protective behaviors involving a firearm by victims of attempted or completed violent crimes or property crimes totaled only 263,500."[0]

In other words, about 87,000 defensive uses of a firearm per year. This is up from the VPC's previous numbers, which totaled ~67,000[1].

> Also yes sure you can say schools are “safe” because it might not happen at yours.

They're "safe" because 4 deaths out of 50 million is safe. Similarly so with the other venues.

I will say, though, I respect your position on gun control much more than the folks who think we'll solve our gun death issue by banning characteristics of firearms (i.e., "assault weapon" bans).

[0]: http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable16.pdf

[1]: http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf

[IgorPartola]

That's fair, but as easily dismissed as the 4 in 50 million number: from http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable16.pdf it's clear that only in 0.9% of cases was the victim offering resistance using a gun. From what I can tell the outcomes of such resistance have not been compiled to see if offering resistance using a firearm made things better or worse for the victim.

In other words, personal firearms made very little difference in preventing crime. "The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" is therefore at best a stretch.

I will grant you that the media does sensationalize mass shootings over someone defending themselves from a criminal. Sensationalizing mass shootings is possibly one of the reasons there are so many of them. I am not a huge fan of Malcom Gladwell, but he did describe school shootings specifically as spreading in an epidemic-like fashion: after Columbine they were given so much attention that it sort of self-perpetuated. But the fact remains that if I am being mugged in a dark alley, I am most likely safer if I simply hand over my wallet and phone, then cancel my credit cards when I get home, than if I try to resist.

> I will say, though, I respect your position on gun control much more than the folks who think we'll solve our gun death issue by banning characteristics of firearms (i.e., "assault weapon" bans).

I appreciate that. I don't believe that the problem is scary looking rifles. The problem is first and foremost hand guns which are responsible for most firearm-related deaths. At the same time, mass shootings are a US-specific problem that I do believe comes from two sources: easy access to firearms AND fetishizing guns. As a society we can't change the latter. By definition it's the very rare outliers who go on mass killing sprees. You can't just teach them to not do it. So the solution is to control the former: gun control. You can take incremental measures like stricter background checks, but people will still slip by that. That's the thing about a sociopath: they know exactly how to get around rules and restrictions. But I am in favor of just starting over: repeal the second amendment, remove as many guns as possible from the society, bring that 101 guns per 100 people down to 1.1 guns per 100 people. Then see if there is an actual need to introduce them back into society. My guess: you won't see a strong need beyond the cries of a few enthusiasts.

I also support the hunting exception. I am not a hunter myself, but I know that lots of people derive their livelihood from it. But weapons used for hunting are significantly different than you'd use for self defense. You don't need a huge quick reload magazine to take down a deer for example, because deer by their nature will bolt shortly after hearing the first shot. You won't be able to unload into one unless you are spot lighting the. You can make hand guns used for hunting boar or bear highly reflective orange. Again, quick reload is likely not necessary for these guns.

I looked into bow hunting for a bit, and the funny thing is that the advice I got in one of the classes was to always zip tie your bowstrings when leaving the hunting area so that if a rangers stops you, you can show that you aren't actively using your bow. But you can carry a loaded pistol with the safety off at your hip while doing this and the ranger can't do a thing about it because the pistol is protected by the second amendment. A bit ironic, I think.

</soap-box>

[dkns]

That's 4 more students dying in school shootings more than in Europe for example.

[barsonme]

You miss my point.

[davemp]

Apparently the USA is behind Norway, Finland, and Switzerland in mass shooting deaths per 100k population [1]. For typical gun related homocides it is most certainly correlated with poverty and education.

[1]: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/sTbiw2S8fHl89qyY6AXbohcKkv...

[samastur]

When number of shootings is 1, you are not actually doing useful statistics. It can easily be an aberration.

[davemp]

Mass shootings are almost by definition outliers

[PeterisP]

In USA, the measure "number of mass shootings per year" doesn't have real outliers, it has a reasonable number every year. In Norway, it's different, you get a streak of zeroes, followed by a 1.

[davemp]

Norway has __considerably__ lower population than the USA. There has to be normalization or your comparison is just bogus.

[tveita]

The comparison is bogus, because you can make the numbers arbitrarily high by subdividing into tiny areas and then conveniently ignoring all the places where they are zero.

Why not subdivide further and claim that Buskerud is a veritable warzone, compared to the whole of USA on average?

[samastur]

Sure, but that doesn't solve the original problem which is that you picked small population countries with number of shootings too low to do meaningful statistical analysis your way because any rare event will have an outsized effect.

There are however plenty of European countries with populations large enough to avoid this problem (Germany, France, Italy, UK...).

[ryanlol]

So why not compare the US to the EU or parts of it?

[ryanlol]

Which year is this for? The Finland numbers don't seem right at all.

Neither do the Norway ones.

The numbers are in fact so wrong that one has to seriously question the motivations of the author, it seems like this is a propaganda piece with made up numbers designed to make the US appear slightly less terrible.

[qw]

The number from Norway is from a single mass shooting in 2011 where a man shot children trapped on an island. There have never been anything like that before or later. He killed more people than the total number of murder victims in an average year.

[ryanlol]

I'm well aware, but they still don't make sense in the context unless this is supposed to be a cherry picked list of worst years for each country.

I'm still not sure which events the Finland one refers to.

[m55au]

It lists the mass shootings between 2000 and 2014. Take a look at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/05/obama-gun-co... for more information.

The Finland events are obviously Jokela and Kauhajoki.

[ryanlol]

>The Finland events are obviously Jokela and Kauhajoki.

It's not that obvious with the 2009 Sello shooting being dropped out and the 2011 Utoya shooting being included.

Given the poor coverage it is very difficult to reverse engineer what this graph is supposed to portray without finding the original source.

[davemp]

The data appear to be correct. Maybe you’ve ingested to much propaganda to believe these numbers.

I’m always skeptical of statistics about highly politicized issues as the interpretations and sampling can be very irresponsible/biased.

[ryanlol]

The data is for a really arbitrary timespan, why 2000-2014?

It’s clearly missing data, Finland for example had more than two mass shootings during those years.

The numbers look bad because they are bad, they may however be bad for different reasons than I originally suggested.

[davemp]

It’s old I think.

I might try to dig up some more recent stuff.