[btilly]

The problem with this type of issue is that the topic is complex, it is hard to get anything like clean evidence, people start with strong opinions, and attempts at careful analysis immediately get derailed. We could try to reduce it to its component parts. But that fails, as Calvin points out at http://www.myconfinedspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/04/im....

But that said, here are my personal beliefs:

- Exposure to violence in mass media (including games) is probably correlated with overall violence in life across all of society.

- The individual correlation is very, very small.

- There are widespread confusions about cause and correlation that come up over and over again.

- Long term comparisons have trouble dealing with the confounding influence of a long-term decrease in violence in our society, with possible causes from changing mores to reduced lead to parents not resorting to corporal violence to who knows what.

- No simple correlation exists between levels of gun ownership and violence in a society.

- The "assault weapons" (yeah, that term is not well defined) that get used in high profile mass shootings are, on the whole, less often used in crime or to kill people than handguns. Even if a ban was effective, it would be unlikely to produce any noticeable effect.

- There is no way that, given how polarized our politics are, that anything resembling an assault weapon ban is getting through this Congress.

- The Supreme Court in Heller made it clear that governments have limited power to regulate the kinds of arms that are available, but has not ruled on what those limits are. There is a real possibility that assault weapons bans, like the one that just passed in New York, are going to be struck down on constitutional grounds.

I now return you to your regularly scheduled argument...

[_delirium]

The "assault weapons" (yeah, that term is not well defined) that get used in high profile mass shootings are, on the whole, less often used in crime or to kill people than handguns. Even if a ban was effective, it would be unlikely to produce any noticeable effect.

A corollary to this is a guess that the handful of high-profile mass shootings just aren't good proxies for violence in general. I think many people view it as the "straw the broke the camel's back", an extreme example of a general class of problems that finally got people to take the problem seriously, like the Cuyahoga River catching on fire did for water pollution. But an alternate hypothesis is that these rare events are very different (in causes and solutions) from the more common kinds of violence, so the discussion focused on these handful of anomalous data points is not very useful for figuring out how to reduce violence overall.

[btilly]

Exactly. A better mental illness safety net likely would reduce mass shootings. Tackling drug gang violence is more likely to have an impact on homicide rates.

See http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/editoria... for discussion of an approach that saves lives year in and year out, but does not reduce mass shootings.

[mattmanser]

It's when stories and comments like this come out that I realize just how alien America is sometimes.

Most of this comment is nonsense. But many of you can't see that because you're American. It's quite obviously nonsense when you're outside America. On THIS issue, your politicians are absolutely nuts, your citizens are absolutely nuts.

We can all tell it is utter nonsense because you can look at all the other countries in the world that don't have these weird mass murders at anywhere near the frequency per capita. All of them have violent video games. Few of them have massive gun cultures.

Yet Americans are seriously debating this. It's like some crazy countrywide delusion.

But it's not just your gun culture, it's something else. Who knows what part of the American psyche causes it. Perhaps it's the dark-side of the American dream. You have massive homicide rates compared to the rest of the stable developed world. When it comes to murder you're a backwards country. You're down there with Belarus and Georgia.

That's really, really weird. And it's not video games. Or we'd all be joining you.

So it's not really very complex at all. It's got nothing to do with video games.

[btilly]

For your information I grew up in Canada. A long time ago I would have immediately agreed with you.

But then I made the mistake of posting my views on Usenet. Unlike most people on either side of these arguments, I actually followed up on the deluge of references I got in return from both sides. And did my best to create an informed opinion for myself. Here are some basic points off of the top of my head from what I have learned over the following two decades.

- Gun ownership and gun violence are nothing like linearly correlated. For example Canada has a third the guns/capita that the USA does, and a fifth the gun violence.

- The USA's violence problems are tied closely to racial problems. Over half of homicides are committed by blacks, and over half of the remainder by hispanics, despite the fact that there are more whites than either of those other racial groups. I just ran across a reference that I'm not sure is trustworthy indicating the the homicide rate among US whites is actually 0.32 per 100,000. If true then that is down with Singapore and Iceland - and is under half of most European countries.

- When two areas have easy transport between them, the one with more restrictive gun rules tends to experience worse gun problems tied to crime.

- There is some evidence that removing guns increases levels of violent crime, but reduces odds of death during that crime. Whether you consider this an improvement is likely to depend on your politics.

- I've seen and found believable (but have not researched) the claim that in the short term after a major gun ban, the use of guns in crime actually goes up. (It is believable because criminals still have their guns, and have less fear about using them.)

- No matter what the truth is, there is no way in the US system that we actually could ban guns. It would require changing the Constitution in a way that most Americans do not like.

[galaktor]

>"the the homicide rate among US whites is actually 0.32 per 100,000. If true then that is down with Singapore and Iceland - and is under half of most European countries."

you're forgetting that the vast majority of those other countries might also find a large part of their violence being committed by "minority groups"

[dredmorbius]

In an ethnically homogeneous country (and not all are), the minority is likely not one readily distinguishable by skin color alone. There are the Yakuza, Kkangpae, and Ah Kong (the latter mostly Chinese Singaporeans). European nations often have issues with right-wing groups (and in some cases ethnic Muslim minorities). But the distinct racial and cultural division (and history) present in the US is fairly distinctive.

[btilly]

I'm not forgetting, I'm just not bothering to dig deeper.

My point is that the vast majority of the crazy homicide rate in the USA can be attributed to the existence of large minority populations with huge problems of all sorts. I am not aware of any other Western country with similar demographic issues. Once you sort out that, the portion of the US homicide problem that is explainable by the prevalence of guns is nowhere close to what most non-Americans naively assume it to be.

If someone had access to statistics on comparative homicide rates only among the majority ethnic group in different countries, I'd gladly look at it. It frankly seems hard for me to believe that US whites score so well on that score given the size and diversity of the circumstances of the white population. But no matter what the answers are, you're going to have a hard time coming up with objective, unarguable evidence saying that guns are more than a tiny fraction of the problem in the USA.

[_delirium]

I've lived in both the U.S. and Europe (and have family in both places), and see it as fairly complex. I don't really see Europe as having many solutions, though, except that I do like the European economic and social-safety model better. Europe does not do well at all with violence except in pretty narrow cases: monocultural to the point of being pretty racist nation-states, with a sort of extended-family village mentality. Once you try to have any kind of diversity in Europe, people get shot, even if the differences are pretty minor! Northern Ireland, the Balkans, the French banlieues, anywhere with mixtures of populations and cultures and you've got trouble. I live in Denmark currently, and it has low overall violence, but seems to basically consider multiculturalism the root of all evil, and everyone assimilating to fit within a narrow range of acceptable Danishness as the #1 strategy to keep everyone from harming their neighbor. Seems like a pretty depressing approach to peacefulness.

And on the high-profile mass-shooting cases, there's little difference at all: Europe has its Utøyas and Erfurts, too. There's a lot less drug-war going on, though, or at least whatever drug trafficking is going on is more out of sight.

[tunesmith]

I've been in a few America-nonAmerica debates over this subject recently. What surprises me is that it seems like the nonAmerican generally can't get past the existence of the 2nd amendment, when most of the debate on the American side is what policies are or are not compatible with the 2nd amendment.

Anyway, I guess it's fine to disagree with the 2nd amendment and believe it should be overturned, but it's not exactly a useful point to make.

[willyt]

Anecdote: My kids are preschool age. Obviously we regulate what and how much TV they watch; I don't let them watch violent stuff or stuff that's agressive on TV but occasionally things slip through the net like power rangers or spider man cartoons, etc. I live in the UK and I have noticed that often when they play a game that involves a lot of aggression they put on an American accent, it was amazing the effect one episode of power rangers had. I haven't spent much time in the US but from consuming plenty of US media, it always seems like violence and aggression in general is a big part of American culture and is portrayed as heroic, rather than tragic. I don't think you can change that through legislation.

[thesagan]

It is complex, because the U.S. is a very, very complex society. In many parts of Europe you're looking at a much less diverse and separated population compared to that of the States. Public discussions in the U.S. have a vast number of voices coming from a similar number of interests and backgrounds. This convolutes and masks various points of public discourse in ways/degrees I'm not sure you see as much in individual European or Asian countries. But this is only my two cents.

I do admit I haven't spent much time in abroad (I'm in the U.S.), but living my whole life here I find it a full-time job at times to follow public debates in an educated manner and make meaningful decisions at the ballot box.

[smokeyj]

> Most of this comment is nonsense. But many of you can't see that because you're American.

You're not even trying to sound reasonable.. is there even a point in there?

[abraininavat]

I'm American, and I'm not nuts, at least not when it comes to guns. Our problem is that we worship our Constitution as a source of morality. We don't have the ability to ask whether this "right" makes sense in a modern context.

Life, liberty, pursuit of happiness. Yeah, those all make sense. Guns? Why does the right to bear arms grant us the right to own handguns, rifles, and shotguns, but not rocket launchers? Why not landmines? In the future will the Second Amendment grant us the right to lasers? Does it only include lasers that have a rifle shape or a handgun shape? What about phasers? Only if they have a barrel? Will future phaser nuts buy off-market adapters to set their phasers to Kill?

We can keep on trying to interpret this vague amendment; or we can grow up and realize it is a stupid amendment that wasn't made with much forethought, repeal it, and learn to think for ourselves.

[thesagan]

Last week Eleanor Clift of Newsweek (put as much stock in her opinion as you wish, she almost always leans left) opined the Second Amendment applied much more to establishing militias to help put down rebellions in the early days of the U.S. (and I do know the threat of rebellion(s) then was quite high).

Personally, I'm not sure yet just how many people share this view that rebellion suppression was one of, if not the primary motivator for that language, but it does weigh on my mind as part of the overall debate, and factors into my weighing of how backward-looking AND forward-looking the amendment was/is.

[btilly]

My impression of the history is that the 2nd appeared at a time of change in the USA. At the point it was written it was clearly an individual right. By the time it got ratified, in some states it was seen as an individual right, and in others it was seen as a right to organize militias.

The legal question about which way to interpret it in the courts was not settled until 2008. Now we have clear precedent saying that it is an individual right, and moreover one that thanks to the 14th restricts state and local government's ability to regulate. See http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&#3... for the text of that decision if you want to form your own opinions on what it now means.

(Note, I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, etc.)

[thesagan]

Thanks for the link, I think that will be very helpful filling in gaps in my knowledge and thought that applies to this topic. An excellent source!

[dclowd9901]

Thanks for your personal beliefs. Who are you?

[btilly]

I just updated my profile with a little bit of information.

The rest you can find with Google.