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> The shooting appeared to be a random act involving individuals participating in the reckless discharge of firearms. While the second amendment arms US citize

> The shooting appeared to be a random act involving individuals participating in the reckless discharge of firearms. While the second amendment arms US citizens and for reason, simultaneously, the punishment should be 100x greater than it is today for any gun violence of any kind that isn't pure self defense. Whether it's this or school shooters, a serious public example needs to be made that is strong enough to send a chilling effect to stop this horrendous behavior. I feel so sorry for him and his loved ones.

grey-area 5y ago
Your militia is not well regulated.
Hokusai 5y ago
> the punishment should be 100x greater than it is today for any gun violence of any kind that isn't pure self defense Even capital punishment for the shooter will not give that man his live back. If the USA was not so obsessed with owning weapons he would be alive, thou. > to send a chilling effect The USA puts more people in prison that any other developed country, by much. Vengeance does not stop bullets, removing weapons from the streets do.
- rasengan 5y ago
  That means that capital punishment is not enough of a deterrent - same with prison.
  - netizen-936824 5y ago
    Sounds to me like its not possible for such a deterrent to exist, I wonder what solutions other countries have come up with
    - hkt 5y ago
      Gun control and restorative justice approaches seem to be the trick. From the outside it appears a militarised police apparatus isn't working for the US and would be a great target for substantial budget cuts.
      - InsomniacL 5y ago
        Why would you talk about reducing the budget of your current solution before replacing it with something else? Do you think the situation would not get substantially worse? You could ban guns tomorrow but the type of people who are firing 30 shots in to random houses aren't going lay down their arms.
        hkt 5y ago
        Because you can then reallocate the funding from the solution that doesn't work (militarised police, mass incarceration) to solutions that do. The police don't prevent people from firing thirty random shots into a house, but decent alternatives to crime - even for those with little or no educational achievements - might. It requires a holistic approach though, with multiple agencies and policies working together, which is a hard transition from targeted intervention, whether that be policing or sticking plasters. There's a leap of faith involved in making that connection, but it is a small leap once you look at other countries and see how their systems work. The fundamental step is to not make life so awful that desperate people decide a high-stakes life of crime is worth it.
    - guerrilla 5y ago
      What you do is find the root causes and work on eliminating them. A lot of this stuff is just caused by poverty or mental illness. You can just eliminate those and be done with a large part of the problem.
      - netizen-936824 5y ago
        How would we eliminate poverty?
        yawaramin 5y ago
        Universal Basic Income.
        guerrilla 5y ago
        You give money to people who don't have it, like we do in Sweden. If they're disabled, get them pension. If they can't get a job, get them education or training. If they don't have a house, get them one.
        pandemicsoul 5y ago
        It's not that mysterious, lots of other countries manage to do it fairly well: You create a minimum standard of living and help anyone that falls below that. A social safety net. If you have no place to live, the government provides you with a relatively good alternative (not homeless shelters – those places are awful). If you don't have enough to eat, the government gives you food or money to buy it. You make sure newborn babies have food and care. You set up a system of laws that make sure companies provide time for parents to take care of their newborns. You make it easy and relatively cheap for parents to find early education options and child care. You give people healthcare so they're healthier as adults. You provide options for mental healthcare to help people avoid violence. All of this stuff raises the quality of life for everyone.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Root causes of this particular incident? The possession of deadly weapons by people who rarely have a legitimate need to have them beyond "MY RIGHTS" and "SECOND AMENDMENT". This has nothing to do with poverty. I don't think any kind of punishment could effectively deter this because I don't believe this was intentional or that the perpetrator even imagined that the bullet could still kill someone despite the distance and obstacles on the way. Not to mention that as another comment points out, capital punishment is a thing and that still isn't enough to deter murder/etc. The main problem here is that people have access to and an obsession with deadly weapons. This obsession leads them to acquire those weapons even when they have no legitimate reason to own/carry them. Accidents are bound to happen even with trained users, but typically the risk is worthwhile when you have a legitimate need to own/carry the weapon. When you don't have a legitimate need however, it's just needless risk-taking that will eventually produce situations like this.
  - Hokusai 5y ago
    Because better than deterrents, based in punishment, is to create a non violent society. That can be accomplished by regulating weapons, reducing poverty and exclusion, better education, etc. Punishment is very limited as an education tool. It has some uses, but positive incentives complement it and, in the end, are more powerful.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      "Why don't we just create a utopian society instead" is never a good argument.
      - Hokusai 5y ago
        Less violent societies with less encarcellation rates than the USA exist. That is the minimum that the USA should aspire to.
      - xxpor 5y ago
        There's a huge gap between the US and utopia. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
        BurningFrog 5y ago
        Fully agreed!
    - cgriswald 5y ago
      I'm not sure how to reconcile your choice to downplay deterrents with a claim that regulation is the way forward. Regulation without disincentives is meaningless, isn't it? To my mind, the US has a violence problem and guns much more so than a gun violence problem. Focusing specifically on murder by guns, California and Texas, who are largely similar in murder rates are also largely similar in murder-by-gun rates despite having regulatory environments that are about as far apart as you can get in the United States. I'm not taking a position here, and I understand there might be compounding factors (like both states being border states); but it does make me wonder if what has been effective in other cultures will be effective in the United States. I think your points about reducing poverty and providing for education are on point. Generally speaking, states that I consider "poor" states and regions within states that are generally depressed seem to have higher gun-murder rates. They also seem to have generally more violence. These are things we should focus on anyway (and would probably also help with gun-suicide and gun-related accidents). In the US, I think both sides in this argument are generally disingenuous. Speaking very broadly... Gun control advocates manipulate statistics and call any death by gun "gun violence" as if there is no distinction between a suicide victim and a murderer. They also don't separate out legal versus illegal gun access in the use of gun murder, which I think is meaningful if you're talking about adding more laws/regulations. Some are at least honest enough to state they want to restrict all private gun ownership. Again, broadly speaking, they push laws that are about restricting legitimate gun ownership rather than promoting responsible gun ownership. On the flip side, gun control opponents oppose any change in law and while they acknowledge that there are differences in types of gun-related deaths, they aren't any more nuanced in their views about it and generally don't seem to acknowledge that non-murder gun deaths are also a problem we need to work on. I'd much rather see everyone gather around responsible gun ownership for those that want it. (And I do think that more severe punishment would be useful in reducing accidents and maybe suicides, even though I think it wouldn't do anything for murders.) This has turned into a bit of a ramble I suppose, but I'm just generally wondering what you think the path forward should be, why you think such a path would work in the United States specifically, and how regulations work if deterrents don't work.
  - hyperman1 5y ago
    In general, people assume they won't get caught. This means there is in most cases no deterring effect from any punishment. The human mind simply does not work that way. There is however an effect from people being basically lazy and doing things that make sense only in the spur of the moment, without thinking things through. If getting a gun meant a headache inducing amount of work and waiting time, only people who really want a gun would have one. This is basically the situation in the rest of the world. There are guns, and criminals that want one have no problem getting one on the black market. But even so, most criminals don't get a gun, because the day to day situation simply doesn't give you exposure to them.
  - jrochkind1 5y ago
    Correct
  - brnaftr360 5y ago
    No, that means that the idea that deterrents are constructed on is flawed. The fact of the matter is that no matter what "the people" opt to do, is that state forces in America are reactionary and not preventative - innocent until proven guilty. These people aren't even doing the mental accounting where Z disincentivizes X if it isn't plainly obvious. The most responsible and humane thing to do is to ask why are they able to skip that gap. I think what you'll find is that they're victims to society in many cases - removed from opportunities through any number of institutional or economic processes. E.g. criminal record, or living in an economically depressed area (which itself has many widespread effect). In other cases they're possessed of a genuinely destructive pathology. And in any of these cases they're probably poor. This shit occurs when people are poor. Stop making poor people and violence goes down to the point where pathologically violent or otherwise unstable people are the baseline.
  - adhesive_wombat 5y ago
    That capital punishment is not a deterrent simply goes to show that there a fatal (ha) flaw in the justification for it, leaving behind all the usual worries about executing innocents, giving the state the power to kill those it wants to or even the cost. Either some criminals are not in a state of mind where any rational cost-benefit calculation is happening at all, or a considered cost-benefit calculation puts their own life below the perceived benefit of the act (maybe religiously motivated attacks, say). Alternatively they truly think they won't get caught, which, depending on the crime, place and competence might be the most rational reason. There is nothing that you can do so to deter these "irrational" crimes by just twiddling knobs on the sentence harshness generator.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  There are too many guns out there now and no one has the political will to reduce them, just like climate change/carbon taxes.
melling 5y ago
"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Well, the reason has been debated endlessly so we should skip the debate here. What we can try to figure out is how to make it more difficult for people who commit crimes with a gun to get away with the crime. It's unlikely we will ever catch the person who committed this crime, for example. More technology might help. Machine learning, cameras, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator
- Karellen 5y ago
  It always confuses me how people quote the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution to end the argument without further discussion, as if it's impossible to - you know - amend the constitution somehow, if one wanted to. If people want to keep guns for their own reasons, they're allowed to have those reasons and should argue them. But the fact that the constitution was once amended to allow them to is not, by itself, a reason to keep doing so. That's just circular reasoning.
  - melling 5y ago
    I simply quoted it for completeness. Feel free to debate it endlessly or amend the Constitution, etc. We have a lot of pre-existing material. In the meantime, I’m simply trying to have a discussion on using technology to lessen an immediate problem where we should be able to get a little more consensus.
  - ufo 5y ago
    The thing I never understood is why the jurisprudence puts more emphasis on the "right to bear arms" part than in the "a well regulated militia" part.
    - sigstoat 5y ago
      there's a lot which has been written on the subject, from all perspectives. you can find whatever explanation will satisfy your political leanings.
devwastaken 5y ago
"public examples" don't scale.

grey-area 5y ago

Your militia is not well regulated.

Hokusai 5y ago

> the punishment should be 100x greater than it is today for any gun violence of any kind that isn't pure self defense Even capital punishment for the shooter will not give that man his live back. If the USA was not so obsessed with owning weapons he would be alive, thou. > to send a chilling effect The USA puts more people in prison that any other developed country, by much. Vengeance does not stop bullets, removing weapons from the streets do.

rasengan 5y ago
That means that capital punishment is not enough of a deterrent - same with prison.
- netizen-936824 5y ago
  Sounds to me like its not possible for such a deterrent to exist, I wonder what solutions other countries have come up with
  - hkt 5y ago
    Gun control and restorative justice approaches seem to be the trick. From the outside it appears a militarised police apparatus isn't working for the US and would be a great target for substantial budget cuts.
    - InsomniacL 5y ago
      Why would you talk about reducing the budget of your current solution before replacing it with something else? Do you think the situation would not get substantially worse? You could ban guns tomorrow but the type of people who are firing 30 shots in to random houses aren't going lay down their arms.
      - hkt 5y ago
        Because you can then reallocate the funding from the solution that doesn't work (militarised police, mass incarceration) to solutions that do. The police don't prevent people from firing thirty random shots into a house, but decent alternatives to crime - even for those with little or no educational achievements - might. It requires a holistic approach though, with multiple agencies and policies working together, which is a hard transition from targeted intervention, whether that be policing or sticking plasters. There's a leap of faith involved in making that connection, but it is a small leap once you look at other countries and see how their systems work. The fundamental step is to not make life so awful that desperate people decide a high-stakes life of crime is worth it.
  - guerrilla 5y ago
    What you do is find the root causes and work on eliminating them. A lot of this stuff is just caused by poverty or mental illness. You can just eliminate those and be done with a large part of the problem.
    - netizen-936824 5y ago
      How would we eliminate poverty?
      - yawaramin 5y ago
        Universal Basic Income.
      - guerrilla 5y ago
        You give money to people who don't have it, like we do in Sweden. If they're disabled, get them pension. If they can't get a job, get them education or training. If they don't have a house, get them one.
      - pandemicsoul 5y ago
        It's not that mysterious, lots of other countries manage to do it fairly well: You create a minimum standard of living and help anyone that falls below that. A social safety net. If you have no place to live, the government provides you with a relatively good alternative (not homeless shelters – those places are awful). If you don't have enough to eat, the government gives you food or money to buy it. You make sure newborn babies have food and care. You set up a system of laws that make sure companies provide time for parents to take care of their newborns. You make it easy and relatively cheap for parents to find early education options and child care. You give people healthcare so they're healthier as adults. You provide options for mental healthcare to help people avoid violence. All of this stuff raises the quality of life for everyone.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Root causes of this particular incident? The possession of deadly weapons by people who rarely have a legitimate need to have them beyond "MY RIGHTS" and "SECOND AMENDMENT". This has nothing to do with poverty. I don't think any kind of punishment could effectively deter this because I don't believe this was intentional or that the perpetrator even imagined that the bullet could still kill someone despite the distance and obstacles on the way. Not to mention that as another comment points out, capital punishment is a thing and that still isn't enough to deter murder/etc. The main problem here is that people have access to and an obsession with deadly weapons. This obsession leads them to acquire those weapons even when they have no legitimate reason to own/carry them. Accidents are bound to happen even with trained users, but typically the risk is worthwhile when you have a legitimate need to own/carry the weapon. When you don't have a legitimate need however, it's just needless risk-taking that will eventually produce situations like this.
- Hokusai 5y ago
  Because better than deterrents, based in punishment, is to create a non violent society. That can be accomplished by regulating weapons, reducing poverty and exclusion, better education, etc. Punishment is very limited as an education tool. It has some uses, but positive incentives complement it and, in the end, are more powerful.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    "Why don't we just create a utopian society instead" is never a good argument.
    - Hokusai 5y ago
      Less violent societies with less encarcellation rates than the USA exist. That is the minimum that the USA should aspire to.
    - xxpor 5y ago
      There's a huge gap between the US and utopia. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
      - BurningFrog 5y ago
        Fully agreed!
  - cgriswald 5y ago
    I'm not sure how to reconcile your choice to downplay deterrents with a claim that regulation is the way forward. Regulation without disincentives is meaningless, isn't it? To my mind, the US has a violence problem and guns much more so than a gun violence problem. Focusing specifically on murder by guns, California and Texas, who are largely similar in murder rates are also largely similar in murder-by-gun rates despite having regulatory environments that are about as far apart as you can get in the United States. I'm not taking a position here, and I understand there might be compounding factors (like both states being border states); but it does make me wonder if what has been effective in other cultures will be effective in the United States. I think your points about reducing poverty and providing for education are on point. Generally speaking, states that I consider "poor" states and regions within states that are generally depressed seem to have higher gun-murder rates. They also seem to have generally more violence. These are things we should focus on anyway (and would probably also help with gun-suicide and gun-related accidents). In the US, I think both sides in this argument are generally disingenuous. Speaking very broadly... Gun control advocates manipulate statistics and call any death by gun "gun violence" as if there is no distinction between a suicide victim and a murderer. They also don't separate out legal versus illegal gun access in the use of gun murder, which I think is meaningful if you're talking about adding more laws/regulations. Some are at least honest enough to state they want to restrict all private gun ownership. Again, broadly speaking, they push laws that are about restricting legitimate gun ownership rather than promoting responsible gun ownership. On the flip side, gun control opponents oppose any change in law and while they acknowledge that there are differences in types of gun-related deaths, they aren't any more nuanced in their views about it and generally don't seem to acknowledge that non-murder gun deaths are also a problem we need to work on. I'd much rather see everyone gather around responsible gun ownership for those that want it. (And I do think that more severe punishment would be useful in reducing accidents and maybe suicides, even though I think it wouldn't do anything for murders.) This has turned into a bit of a ramble I suppose, but I'm just generally wondering what you think the path forward should be, why you think such a path would work in the United States specifically, and how regulations work if deterrents don't work.
- hyperman1 5y ago
  In general, people assume they won't get caught. This means there is in most cases no deterring effect from any punishment. The human mind simply does not work that way. There is however an effect from people being basically lazy and doing things that make sense only in the spur of the moment, without thinking things through. If getting a gun meant a headache inducing amount of work and waiting time, only people who really want a gun would have one. This is basically the situation in the rest of the world. There are guns, and criminals that want one have no problem getting one on the black market. But even so, most criminals don't get a gun, because the day to day situation simply doesn't give you exposure to them.
- jrochkind1 5y ago
  Correct
- brnaftr360 5y ago
  No, that means that the idea that deterrents are constructed on is flawed. The fact of the matter is that no matter what "the people" opt to do, is that state forces in America are reactionary and not preventative - innocent until proven guilty. These people aren't even doing the mental accounting where Z disincentivizes X if it isn't plainly obvious. The most responsible and humane thing to do is to ask why are they able to skip that gap. I think what you'll find is that they're victims to society in many cases - removed from opportunities through any number of institutional or economic processes. E.g. criminal record, or living in an economically depressed area (which itself has many widespread effect). In other cases they're possessed of a genuinely destructive pathology. And in any of these cases they're probably poor. This shit occurs when people are poor. Stop making poor people and violence goes down to the point where pathologically violent or otherwise unstable people are the baseline.
- adhesive_wombat 5y ago
  That capital punishment is not a deterrent simply goes to show that there a fatal (ha) flaw in the justification for it, leaving behind all the usual worries about executing innocents, giving the state the power to kill those it wants to or even the cost. Either some criminals are not in a state of mind where any rational cost-benefit calculation is happening at all, or a considered cost-benefit calculation puts their own life below the perceived benefit of the act (maybe religiously motivated attacks, say). Alternatively they truly think they won't get caught, which, depending on the crime, place and competence might be the most rational reason. There is nothing that you can do so to deter these "irrational" crimes by just twiddling knobs on the sentence harshness generator.
candiddevmike 5y ago
There are too many guns out there now and no one has the political will to reduce them, just like climate change/carbon taxes.

melling 5y ago

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Well, the reason has been debated endlessly so we should skip the debate here. What we can try to figure out is how to make it more difficult for people who commit crimes with a gun to get away with the crime. It's unlikely we will ever catch the person who committed this crime, for example. More technology might help. Machine learning, cameras, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

Karellen 5y ago
It always confuses me how people quote the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution to end the argument without further discussion, as if it's impossible to - you know - amend the constitution somehow, if one wanted to. If people want to keep guns for their own reasons, they're allowed to have those reasons and should argue them. But the fact that the constitution was once amended to allow them to is not, by itself, a reason to keep doing so. That's just circular reasoning.
- melling 5y ago
  I simply quoted it for completeness. Feel free to debate it endlessly or amend the Constitution, etc. We have a lot of pre-existing material. In the meantime, I’m simply trying to have a discussion on using technology to lessen an immediate problem where we should be able to get a little more consensus.
- ufo 5y ago
  The thing I never understood is why the jurisprudence puts more emphasis on the "right to bear arms" part than in the "a well regulated militia" part.
  - sigstoat 5y ago
    there's a lot which has been written on the subject, from all perspectives. you can find whatever explanation will satisfy your political leanings.

devwastaken 5y ago

"public examples" don't scale.