8 ms·

I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exis

by dgfitz 4y ago

I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet. Legislation won’t change anything. <the war on drugs has entered the chat> Proponents of stricter gun control are being idealistic. Having kids in school right now, we are both quite concerned about the current state of affairs when it comes to school shootings. Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. To think otherwise is ignorance.

bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago
Unfortunately, a lot of legislation seems to come from a place of ignorance.
nothingisbad 4y ago
That's not consistent with the reality of the rest of the world. Australia banned guns in 1996 and has had one mass shooting since, compared to 66 in the US in April of this year.
- bko 4y ago
  I never found this argument convincing. There are many differences between Australia and the US. It's like saying "American does X and is wealthy and relatively not corrupt, Mexico should just do X". This is the whole "bring democracy to the Middle East" argument repackaged.
  - cuteboy19 4y ago
    This whole thread is a just list of people eliminating confounding variables > Social media >> All countries have that > Violent video games >> All other countries have that > Media reporting on violence >> All other countries have that > Mental illness >> Other countries have it worse > Lack of Religion >> Some other countries have that At some point we are left with just one variable that is different from these other countries
    - justanorherhack 4y ago
      Lots of other countries have firearms and don’t have school shootings. Switzerland and Israel come to mind.
      - netfortius 4y ago
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        Both those countries require everyone to experience military service, where such a gun is used as a tool to kill. There's much less of a "gun culture" in those countries because guns aren't cool, everyone has used one, everyone is familiar, everyone understands what they are for, namely protection of the country as a whole. If the alternative to making guns much harder to access is to conscript everyone in the country for a few years to try and beat the gun culture out of them, good freakin luck
      - nothingisbad 4y ago
        Per wikipedia[0], the US has an estimated 120 guns per 100 citizens. Switzerland, the number is 27.6, Israel the number is 6.7. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
    - bko 4y ago
      US is 59th in murder rate. A lot of these countries have all those things + restrictive gun laws. You can't have a theory and just arbitrarily section off over 50% of countries and test your theory on that subset https://www.factsinstitute.com/ranking/countries-by-murder-rate/ https://www.factsinstitute.com/ranking/countries-by-murder-r...
      - cuteboy19 4y ago
        The other 58 are either extremely poor or in an actual war/insurgency. I don't deny that poverty and war cause violence but the US does not have those variables
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I have no doubt that Australia has fewer mass shootings than the US by pretty much any reasonable metric, but we should be careful in our comparisons. First of all, definitions vary widely on what constitutes a “mass shooting”, so we should always give our definition and make sure we’re applying the same definition to both operands (notably, by most common definitions, Australia has had several mass shootings and quite a few more mass murders since 1996). We should also adjust for known dependent variables, like population, population density, crime rates, number of guns in circulation (i.e., we would intuitively expect fewer mass shootings from a small, sparse, low-abiding country with few guns in circulation irrespective of gun laws)—Australia has only 8% of the US population and only 10% of the density—not sure about crime rates. I also suspect there were fewer guns in circulation prior to 1996, so even if officials could get the same share removed from the US market, it would likely leave more guns in circulation than in America (even adjusting for population, etc)—I also doubt Americans would be as willing to give up their guns as Australians were in ‘96, so the odds that America could get the same share of guns off the market as Australia did seems unlikely. That said, I’ve read that Australia’s gun count has crept back up to pre-96 levels (not sure if that is per capita or not), which is interesting—potentially it suggests there’s something else going on: either it matters what type of guns are banned (e.g., semi-automatic handguns), or perhaps there’s an altogether different reason or hidden factor behind the decline in Australian mass shootings. In any case, mass shootings is probably the wrong metric, but rather we probably want to look at number of mass murder deaths overall (presumably some people switch to stabbings or arson, but both of these are probably result in fewer fatalities). It’s also not clear to me why we fixate on mass murders/shootings rather than homicides overall—is it really worse when 10 people are killed all at once rather than 10000 people killed individually?
  - renaudg 4y ago
    Use any other country you like as a comparison. The UK for example changed gun laws after a mass school shooting 26 years ago. Not a single one since.
    - quantumwannabe 4y ago
      Not true. There was one literally less than a year ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_shooting Another one in 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moss_Side_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moss_Side_shooting And another in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings And in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massereene_Barracks_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massereene_Barracks_shooting Britain has also had numerous mass stabbings, bombings, and vehicle ramming attacks.
- jrs235 4y ago
  66! Where are these? Also, what is the definition of a mass shooting?
  - nothingisbad 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...
artificialLimbs 4y ago
>> what didn’t exist in 1969? Mass distribution/encouragement of antidepressants.
- Damogran6 4y ago
  That doesn’t seem to be a correlative factor. How would medically treating depression increase gun volence?
  - artificialLimbs 4y ago
    Go find out how many of these shooters were taking these drugs. Edit: In case you're busy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513220/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513220/
    - tenacious_tuna 4y ago
      Is there not selection bias in this? That people being treated for mental illness have high incidence of mental illness?
- nradov 4y ago
  There is evidence that some antidepressants cause "violent suicidal preoccupation". But it's unclear whether that is a significant factor behind the increase in mass shootings. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.147.2.207 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.147.2.2... https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001875 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
- renaudg 4y ago
  Again this isn't unique to the US. Shootings are.
v-erne 4y ago
>> Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. Somehow in my country (Poland) and in most of Europe they do not find a way to get the guns. Most of incidents of this class is done with knife or with some kind of vehicle (car or truck). I think that throughout history we had like literally one or two shootings in schools and I don't think in any one instance there was automatic weapon involved. To think that this kind of prohibition of gun possession does not work You have to be really ignorant of what really is happening in other countries.
- NateEag 4y ago
  Sure - you can't shoot people (with bullets) if you don't have a firearm. What gun control proponents miss about the US is that we literally have more guns than people. I don't know of a feasible way to take even a meaningful fraction of those out of civilian hands, just at a practical enforcement level. Never mind the political nightmare taking guns away en masse would produce. It might just actually trigger a civil war here.
  - renaudg 4y ago
    You have to start somewhere and before considering taking them out of people's hands, not adding any more assault weapons is progress. The Uvalde shooter purchased his a few days prior to the attack. Who knows what might have happened if he hadn't been able to.
  - v-erne 4y ago
    I still insist that this seems like lack of political will rather than means. I'm sure that there are a lot of ways that this can be done. It's like with this old saying about how You eat an elephant (a piece at a time). Same here - this can be done slowly and gradually. It does not have to be done out right. They could start with limiting current sale of guns (by bringing some control over to who can buy what and when). Introduce some sort licences (but maybe for guns bought after the law was introduced). And than taxing the shit out of bullets (for personal use). Prohibit trade of guns between people (only b2c, this could be quite hard and unpopular but could address the problem of existing guns). And then start to buy guns of people with sufficient premium on price. This could be costly but I believe that over the time would eliminate this strange culture of mass gun possession.
confidantlake 4y ago
Most other countries have social media. Few other countries have a mass shooting problems. Restricting access to guns absolutely will lower school shootings. A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun.
- throwaway894345 4y ago
  I fully believe it will help minimize most school shootings, but I don’t think it would deter the more meticulous disturbed shooters like Columbine or perhaps even this most recent Texas shooter. If you are planning it out in detail, figuring out how to print a gun or buy one on the black market probably isn’t much of a deterrent. I would “only” expect gun control regulation to deter impulsive killings (including a lot of suicide). But it won’t deter criminals who are savvy to the black market, and it’s plausible that they might be more emboldened to victimize more people from the “civilian” population (as opposed to police or rival criminals) if they have more assurance that they’re unarmed. That effect is probably exacerbated in an era of de-policing (if criminals can rely on a hamstrung police force and a disarmed civilian population, they’re probably going to be even bolder).
- bko 4y ago
  > Restricting access to guns Again, this goes to my original point. What does this mean? You can't just hand-wave policy.
- dgfitz 4y ago
  > A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun. Apparently you've never been to Baltimore and/or forget what it was like to be 18. Show me a law prohibiting or vastly restricting something and I'll show you a very healthy black market for said thing.
  - notch656a 4y ago
    Yeah an 18 year old including even Salvador could have easily 3d printed an FGC-9 without any connections and that would have done everything he sought out to do at the close quarters he was operating in. This guy clearly had spent months saving up for a fucking Daniel Defense (gucci) AR on fast food wages, he absolutely had the time and dedication to have found another equally lethal method. If ARs didn't exist he'd have undoubtable used something else equally lethal.
cout 4y ago
Social media as we know it today didn't exist in 1999 when the Columbine high school shooting happened. That's the first mass school shooting in my memory, though Wikipedia lists several before that, as far back as the late 80s.
- injb 4y ago
  The first of that kind of shooting that I know of was in the 60s in the University of Texas. Before that there was a school massacre in the 20s but they used a bomb.
  - Dracophoenix 4y ago
    The Texas Tower Sniper https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
pnutjam 4y ago
What if it just stops one in ten. What if only 20 kids are saved and 100 families are not changed forever. Pro-tip: you're wrong, it would take time, but it would help. I think handguns should be highly regulated, along with magazines over 10 rounds. If you are licensed to own them, you need to have them in a secure location with some way to ascertain they have been tampered with and you are responsible if they are mis-used. There is plenty of low hanging fruit, but we go after stuff like silencers or "assault style" weapons instead of good common sense rules like limiting ammunition that can be purchased without being consumed at a range.
tablespoon 4y ago
> I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet. Also cable TV news. The need to drive viewers to consume a surfeit of airtime probably lead to a lot of socially damaging choices. I'd say it's a qualitatively different thing than the nightly news. Another important question is what things did exist in 1969 that don't exist now (or are far, far weaker).
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  Other countries have cable too you know. We don't see them shooting up schools
  - tablespoon 4y ago
    > Other countries have cable too you know. We don't see them shooting up schools Neither did the US, before cable TV news.
netizen-936824 4y ago
How big was the population in 1969 compared to now With bigger population you'll see a greater number of rare events
mahastore 4y ago
Yes they will find a way .. it is always like that .. and so should we. It is not a perfect solution to ban AR-15s and like guns but it is an incremental solution. Opinions may vary to its effectiveness but it is 1000 percent worth a try. I don't care about someone's right to own guns like that. F** it.

by dgfitz 4y ago

bitxbitxbitcoin 4y ago

Unfortunately, a lot of legislation seems to come from a place of ignorance.

nothingisbad 4y ago

That's not consistent with the reality of the rest of the world. Australia banned guns in 1996 and has had one mass shooting since, compared to 66 in the US in April of this year.

bko 4y ago
I never found this argument convincing. There are many differences between Australia and the US. It's like saying "American does X and is wealthy and relatively not corrupt, Mexico should just do X". This is the whole "bring democracy to the Middle East" argument repackaged.
- cuteboy19 4y ago
  This whole thread is a just list of people eliminating confounding variables > Social media >> All countries have that > Violent video games >> All other countries have that > Media reporting on violence >> All other countries have that > Mental illness >> Other countries have it worse > Lack of Religion >> Some other countries have that At some point we are left with just one variable that is different from these other countries
  - justanorherhack 4y ago
    Lots of other countries have firearms and don’t have school shootings. Switzerland and Israel come to mind.
    - netfortius 4y ago
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      Both those countries require everyone to experience military service, where such a gun is used as a tool to kill. There's much less of a "gun culture" in those countries because guns aren't cool, everyone has used one, everyone is familiar, everyone understands what they are for, namely protection of the country as a whole. If the alternative to making guns much harder to access is to conscript everyone in the country for a few years to try and beat the gun culture out of them, good freakin luck
    - nothingisbad 4y ago
      Per wikipedia[0], the US has an estimated 120 guns per 100 citizens. Switzerland, the number is 27.6, Israel the number is 6.7. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
  - bko 4y ago
    US is 59th in murder rate. A lot of these countries have all those things + restrictive gun laws. You can't have a theory and just arbitrarily section off over 50% of countries and test your theory on that subset https://www.factsinstitute.com/ranking/countries-by-murder-rate/ https://www.factsinstitute.com/ranking/countries-by-murder-r...
    - cuteboy19 4y ago
      The other 58 are either extremely poor or in an actual war/insurgency. I don't deny that poverty and war cause violence but the US does not have those variables
throwaway894345 4y ago
I have no doubt that Australia has fewer mass shootings than the US by pretty much any reasonable metric, but we should be careful in our comparisons. First of all, definitions vary widely on what constitutes a “mass shooting”, so we should always give our definition and make sure we’re applying the same definition to both operands (notably, by most common definitions, Australia has had several mass shootings and quite a few more mass murders since 1996). We should also adjust for known dependent variables, like population, population density, crime rates, number of guns in circulation (i.e., we would intuitively expect fewer mass shootings from a small, sparse, low-abiding country with few guns in circulation irrespective of gun laws)—Australia has only 8% of the US population and only 10% of the density—not sure about crime rates. I also suspect there were fewer guns in circulation prior to 1996, so even if officials could get the same share removed from the US market, it would likely leave more guns in circulation than in America (even adjusting for population, etc)—I also doubt Americans would be as willing to give up their guns as Australians were in ‘96, so the odds that America could get the same share of guns off the market as Australia did seems unlikely. That said, I’ve read that Australia’s gun count has crept back up to pre-96 levels (not sure if that is per capita or not), which is interesting—potentially it suggests there’s something else going on: either it matters what type of guns are banned (e.g., semi-automatic handguns), or perhaps there’s an altogether different reason or hidden factor behind the decline in Australian mass shootings. In any case, mass shootings is probably the wrong metric, but rather we probably want to look at number of mass murder deaths overall (presumably some people switch to stabbings or arson, but both of these are probably result in fewer fatalities). It’s also not clear to me why we fixate on mass murders/shootings rather than homicides overall—is it really worse when 10 people are killed all at once rather than 10000 people killed individually?
- renaudg 4y ago
  Use any other country you like as a comparison. The UK for example changed gun laws after a mass school shooting 26 years ago. Not a single one since.
  - quantumwannabe 4y ago
    Not true. There was one literally less than a year ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plymouth_shooting Another one in 2018: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moss_Side_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Moss_Side_shooting And another in 2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cumbria_shootings And in 2009: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massereene_Barracks_shooting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massereene_Barracks_shooting Britain has also had numerous mass stabbings, bombings, and vehicle ramming attacks.
jrs235 4y ago
66! Where are these? Also, what is the definition of a mass shooting?
- nothingisbad 4y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2022#Statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

artificialLimbs 4y ago

>> what didn’t exist in 1969? Mass distribution/encouragement of antidepressants.

Damogran6 4y ago
That doesn’t seem to be a correlative factor. How would medically treating depression increase gun volence?
- artificialLimbs 4y ago
  Go find out how many of these shooters were taking these drugs. Edit: In case you're busy: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513220/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3513220/
  - tenacious_tuna 4y ago
    Is there not selection bias in this? That people being treated for mental illness have high incidence of mental illness?
nradov 4y ago
There is evidence that some antidepressants cause "violent suicidal preoccupation". But it's unclear whether that is a significant factor behind the increase in mass shootings. https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.147.2.207 https://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/doi/abs/10.1176/ajp.147.2.2... https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0030372 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001875 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo...
renaudg 4y ago
Again this isn't unique to the US. Shootings are.

v-erne 4y ago

>> Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. Somehow in my country (Poland) and in most of Europe they do not find a way to get the guns. Most of incidents of this class is done with knife or with some kind of vehicle (car or truck). I think that throughout history we had like literally one or two shootings in schools and I don't think in any one instance there was automatic weapon involved. To think that this kind of prohibition of gun possession does not work You have to be really ignorant of what really is happening in other countries.

NateEag 4y ago
Sure - you can't shoot people (with bullets) if you don't have a firearm. What gun control proponents miss about the US is that we literally have more guns than people. I don't know of a feasible way to take even a meaningful fraction of those out of civilian hands, just at a practical enforcement level. Never mind the political nightmare taking guns away en masse would produce. It might just actually trigger a civil war here.
- renaudg 4y ago
  You have to start somewhere and before considering taking them out of people's hands, not adding any more assault weapons is progress. The Uvalde shooter purchased his a few days prior to the attack. Who knows what might have happened if he hadn't been able to.
- v-erne 4y ago
  I still insist that this seems like lack of political will rather than means. I'm sure that there are a lot of ways that this can be done. It's like with this old saying about how You eat an elephant (a piece at a time). Same here - this can be done slowly and gradually. It does not have to be done out right. They could start with limiting current sale of guns (by bringing some control over to who can buy what and when). Introduce some sort licences (but maybe for guns bought after the law was introduced). And than taxing the shit out of bullets (for personal use). Prohibit trade of guns between people (only b2c, this could be quite hard and unpopular but could address the problem of existing guns). And then start to buy guns of people with sufficient premium on price. This could be costly but I believe that over the time would eliminate this strange culture of mass gun possession.

confidantlake 4y ago

Most other countries have social media. Few other countries have a mass shooting problems. Restricting access to guns absolutely will lower school shootings. A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun.

throwaway894345 4y ago
I fully believe it will help minimize most school shootings, but I don’t think it would deter the more meticulous disturbed shooters like Columbine or perhaps even this most recent Texas shooter. If you are planning it out in detail, figuring out how to print a gun or buy one on the black market probably isn’t much of a deterrent. I would “only” expect gun control regulation to deter impulsive killings (including a lot of suicide). But it won’t deter criminals who are savvy to the black market, and it’s plausible that they might be more emboldened to victimize more people from the “civilian” population (as opposed to police or rival criminals) if they have more assurance that they’re unarmed. That effect is probably exacerbated in an era of de-policing (if criminals can rely on a hamstrung police force and a disarmed civilian population, they’re probably going to be even bolder).
bko 4y ago
> Restricting access to guns Again, this goes to my original point. What does this mean? You can't just hand-wave policy.
dgfitz 4y ago
> A disturbed 18 year old isn't going to have black market gang connections to get a gun. Apparently you've never been to Baltimore and/or forget what it was like to be 18. Show me a law prohibiting or vastly restricting something and I'll show you a very healthy black market for said thing.
- notch656a 4y ago
  Yeah an 18 year old including even Salvador could have easily 3d printed an FGC-9 without any connections and that would have done everything he sought out to do at the close quarters he was operating in. This guy clearly had spent months saving up for a fucking Daniel Defense (gucci) AR on fast food wages, he absolutely had the time and dedication to have found another equally lethal method. If ARs didn't exist he'd have undoubtable used something else equally lethal.

cout 4y ago

Social media as we know it today didn't exist in 1999 when the Columbine high school shooting happened. That's the first mass school shooting in my memory, though Wikipedia lists several before that, as far back as the late 80s.

injb 4y ago
The first of that kind of shooting that I know of was in the 60s in the University of Texas. Before that there was a school massacre in the 20s but they used a bomb.
- Dracophoenix 4y ago
  The Texas Tower Sniper https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Whitman
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

pnutjam 4y ago

What if it just stops one in ten. What if only 20 kids are saved and 100 families are not changed forever. Pro-tip: you're wrong, it would take time, but it would help. I think handguns should be highly regulated, along with magazines over 10 rounds. If you are licensed to own them, you need to have them in a secure location with some way to ascertain they have been tampered with and you are responsible if they are mis-used. There is plenty of low hanging fruit, but we go after stuff like silencers or "assault style" weapons instead of good common sense rules like limiting ammunition that can be purchased without being consumed at a range.

tablespoon 4y ago

> I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet. Also cable TV news. The need to drive viewers to consume a surfeit of airtime probably lead to a lot of socially damaging choices. I'd say it's a qualitatively different thing than the nightly news. Another important question is what things did exist in 1969 that don't exist now (or are far, far weaker).

cuteboy19 4y ago
Other countries have cable too you know. We don't see them shooting up schools
- tablespoon 4y ago
  > Other countries have cable too you know. We don't see them shooting up schools Neither did the US, before cable TV news.

netizen-936824 4y ago

How big was the population in 1969 compared to now With bigger population you'll see a greater number of rare events

mahastore 4y ago

Yes they will find a way .. it is always like that .. and so should we. It is not a perfect solution to ban AR-15s and like guns but it is an incremental solution. Opinions may vary to its effectiveness but it is 1000 percent worth a try. I don't care about someone's right to own guns like that. F** it.