"Thoughts and prayers". It's always "thoughts and prayers" and invoking an inaginary "good guy with a gun". Can it get much more magical/mystical/performative than that?
More gun homicides per capita happen in states with looser gun laws by and large. The good guy with a gun is largely a myth as compared to “i have a gun and I’m going to use it to kill you”.
The existence of active shooter threats and especially their prevalence shows that the best protection - prevention - isn't working. And in the US, the best possible protection (strict gun ownership laws) is prevented based on an ideology that arguably misreads the Constitution on purpose to keep a whole industry alive.
And should it come to an actual active shooter, the response needs to be a properly equipped and trained police force acting against it rather than sitting it out outside the building. That is not the proverbial "good guy with a gun" because that's implied to be a random untrained civilian on the scene.
This is not super on topic, but ANW is the US version of the Japanese TV show Sasuke, which is itself inspired by the Adventure Zone segment on Takeshi's Castle. So, yes, it is connected.
A top seller in Libya, Somali, Iraq, and that one particular first-world country which our lawyers from that country advise us to refrain from naming! Buy one today!
“We’ve tried absolutely nothing and we’re out of ideas!”
It’s also idiotic to not support mental health restrictions, gun violence research, liability but the well (russian) funded NRA isn’t a fan anymore so here we are.
They should give every student a gun at this point (/s because I feel like someone would agree with me).
Edit: everyone should also wear a bulletproof vest at minimum. Desks should be equipped with reactive armor to defend against anti-tank warheads. A Phalanx C-RAM will be installed on the roof next to the AC units.
I proposed to equip the drones with explosive load instead of pepper spray. Much more effective and faster on stopping the shooting. And have at least 3 drones pursuing the active shooter (3 per shooter).
All fantastic ideas! I bet you we could get our illustrious U.S. "Department of War" right on that without too much effort spent tryin' to convince 'em.
Pretty easy to make glib comments like that. How do you propose the problem be addressed? The Constitution as written makes banning guns a non-starter. So amending the Constitution is step 1, and a big step it is. 3/4 states ratifying is a non-trivial threshold. And then what? There are already more guns than people in the US. Going to confiscate them all? Good luck.
Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions in response to tragedy, has vast numbers of illegal (and legal) weapons still in civilian hands. So clearly that isn't the answer.
> Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions
It has certainly always been painted that way, particularly in US media driven by NRA framings.
An alternative description might be that Australia simply (almost but not quite) made gun regulation uniform across all states and territories.
At the time of the Port Arthur massacre all the states with larger populations had gun regulation, much like they had car and truck regulations - paperwork on ownership, licencing, etc.
Two relatively low population states, Queensland and Tasmania, had no regulation and territories had zero to mixed regulation.
Following a then world record lone shooter event in Tasmania the public pretty much overwhelmingly supported uniform regulation across the country- which meant imposing much the same laws as were then current in Western Australia on the alternative reality of Queensland.
Much of the buy back went towards buying back old guns and unused extra just in case guns that owners decided weren't actually worth formally licencing and paying annual fees (like a car rego) for.
The result of near uniform gun regulation across the country, all sales tracked, etc. was a decrease in gun incidents and two decades of near zero mass shooting events.
Australia didn't confiscate vast numbers of guns by violence. It introduced a buyback scheme, which a lot of gun owners took up. The buyback was "an offer they couldn't refuse" for classes of firearms that were banned, but once it was done it meant it was more tractable to keep firearms in check. The big thing is did was reduce the number of households that contained a firearm even if some of the remaining (paranoid?) license holders increased their number of guns.
You must have misunderstood the assertion, then. I will attempt to clarify.
- Australia tried to get rid of guns, still has millions. Several hundred thousand of them illegal.
- Australia has a much lower firearms homicide rate, despite still having quite a lot of guns. Not the same ratio as the US, sure, but 4.5M guns for 28M people is still fairly prevalent and available.
- So the rate 1:50 ratio is not easily explained by simply reducing the number of guns in circulation. Something else is going on. Something harder to solve, even, than the second amendment.
Okay. I should have interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't the full answer". I interpreted it to mean "So clearly that isn't part of the answer".
I think reducing the "saturation" of guns is important, as it is a big driver of people's mindset, whereby they see a gun as an answer. By "saturation, I mean the number owned, their availability, their visibility, their promotion and so on. The US is a standout in ownership, in that it has almost twice as many civilian firearms per person than the next closest country [1]. I suspect the US is also a standout in the other areas: availability (Walmart, but less than before), visibility (open carry), promotion (NRA).
The two statements are not inherently contradictory.
Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.
In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it.
(Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)
> it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.
A lot of us do, I think what happened is that a majority have decided it is a political loser. It reliably spins up republicans and gets them to the polls, probably even more so than abortion. It costs a lot of political capital with near zero hope for meaningful action. So progressives have prioritized issues with broader appeal (and still somehow fail most of the time, despite what appears to be much broader appeal).
> turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards
In some places. That's perhaps part of the issue. My suburban schools lock the doors, and that's about it. No metal detectors or turn stiles. They have like two security guards for a thousand students and no cops, just a liaison at the local PD if something comes up. The school does not feel like a fortress, nor a dystopia. So this gets written off as a big city problem.
Which poses the question, is it predominantly a big city problem? What fraction of gun violence in school is gang violence? The AR15-wielding mass shooters get a lot of press, but if we want the violence to drop meaningfully then we are probably wasting time over-focusing on that. And then the question, will taking guns way from the gangs solve the problem? Or do we have a socioeconomic and culture problem? Talk about hard to solve.
Maybe it would be time for us non-Americans to finally accept and move on. Accept that most Americans are totally fine with their kids getting murdered at school, gun violence on the streets and whatever else. And that wearing vests on the streets, living in fortresses and giving up communities is the future they at least accept, if not straight-out favour. As much as we like to yap here, they're adults in a democratic country and fully able to choose what they want.
Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.
However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.
And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.
I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.
This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.
The founders didn't think we ought to have a standing army, either, and a militia of ordinary citizens was their answer. So I guess first we will need to bring back militias made from ordinary citizens, first, and then we can debate how that changes the applicability of the amendment. Not to mention the definition of well-regulated, which I think (hope) most people interested in this issue understand.
"I think it's worth it. It's worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment..." -Charlie Kirk
The Supreme Court likes to play games with words and disregards precedent. Expand the court and shove "well-regulated militia" down their throats. Problem solved.
We have a corrupt Supreme Court that transmutated the Constitution’s “well-organized militia” into “any individual”, combined with that and the Paranoid Style (Richard Hofstadter) of our politics, there’s absolutely 0 that can happen.
Is there some sort of astroturf campaign going on about this? I have never seen so many comments about this in random places as I have in the last month.
I fail to understand why this should make the lack of US action on gun control any more justifiable.
Per your linked article:
> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.
> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.
Well, the US does have one of the outsized shares in the causes of climate change, which is now resulting in these heat waves in the northern hemisphere (US included). Don't throw stones when you're sitting in a glass house.
>The European heat death figures are based on modeled "excess deaths"—a standard epidemiological approach that tries to capture everyone who died earlier than they would have in cooler conditions, including from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory failure, which casts a wide net. "But the US number," Ritchie wrote, "isn't based on this type of modeling; it's based on heat deaths recorded on death certificates." That's a far narrower count which only captures cases where a physician specifically wrote heat as the cause of death. The result is that the two figures being compared are not measuring the same thing. "If you used death certificate figures for Europe," Ritchie wrote, "they'd be far lower."
Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.
People don’t evaluate risks based on stats. They do it based on vibes. We do have a disproportionate amount of gun violence for a developed nation but statistically it’s still a very low risk.
I recall pointing this out back during the post 9/11 terror panic. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack were still phenomenally low even after 9/11. It would have taken a relentless stream of constant 9/11 scale attacks to even approach automobile or drug overdose deaths.