8 ms·

> 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

> 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.

throwaway30yo 9y ago
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 9y ago
  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 9y ago
    > 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>
    - y_u_no_rust 9y ago
      IMO Everyone who owns a gun wants to be a murderer and probably fantasizes about it
    - dkns 9y ago
      That's 4 more students dying in school shootings more than in Europe for example.
      - barsonme 9y ago
        You miss my point.
    - IgorPartola 9y ago
      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.
davemp 9y ago
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/sTbiw2S8fHl89qyY6AXbohcKkvXrCTKg33VwEQ-n-JieBT9aW1mr8d8s65TxJJj-nOCRfN6e1L_wJ8qC8efdaa530z35xQ_cwcGE2g-n98rRB7SprMFZrnpjhvEUgxNKyK_h_OU https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/sTbiw2S8fHl89qyY6AXbohcKkv...
- samastur 9y ago
  When number of shootings is 1, you are not actually doing useful statistics. It can easily be an aberration.
  - davemp 9y ago
    Mass shootings are almost by definition outliers
    - PeterisP 9y ago
      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 9y ago
        Norway has __considerably__ lower population than the USA. There has to be normalization or your comparison is just bogus.
        samastur 9y ago
        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...).
dclowd9901 9y ago
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 9y ago

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 9y ago
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 9y ago
  > 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>
  - y_u_no_rust 9y ago
    IMO Everyone who owns a gun wants to be a murderer and probably fantasizes about it
  - dkns 9y ago
    That's 4 more students dying in school shootings more than in Europe for example.
    - barsonme 9y ago
      You miss my point.
  - IgorPartola 9y ago
    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.

davemp 9y ago

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/sTbiw2S8fHl89qyY6AXbohcKkvXrCTKg33VwEQ-n-JieBT9aW1mr8d8s65TxJJj-nOCRfN6e1L_wJ8qC8efdaa530z35xQ_cwcGE2g-n98rRB7SprMFZrnpjhvEUgxNKyK_h_OU https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/sTbiw2S8fHl89qyY6AXbohcKkv...

samastur 9y ago
When number of shootings is 1, you are not actually doing useful statistics. It can easily be an aberration.
- davemp 9y ago
  Mass shootings are almost by definition outliers
  - PeterisP 9y ago
    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 9y ago
      Norway has __considerably__ lower population than the USA. There has to be normalization or your comparison is just bogus.
      - samastur 9y ago
        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...).

dclowd9901 9y ago

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.