6 ms·

Spree killings/mass murders/rampage shooters/whatever are all a canard anyway. A canary in the coal mine. Add up all the spree killers in the US and they'll not

by vacri 11y ago

Spree killings/mass murders/rampage shooters/whatever are all a canard anyway. A canary in the coal mine. Add up all the spree killers in the US and they'll not break 1% of the murders. Just like the debate over automatic weapons is a canard, since they're very rarely used in murders. The US has a murder problem. It's murder rate is four times that of it's industrialised contemporaries. Most of those murders (~75%) are done with firearms, and most of those (>75%, can't recall exactly) are done with handguns. And by someone who knows the victim closely. The stereotype of the inner-city gangsta gunning down a gangland enemy with an automatic weapon is an outlier. And the same is true of the spree killer. As long as debates on either side center on these kinds of outliers, little will be achieved. The murder rate isn't going to be affected by open carry, since most murders aren't of strangers. And banning automatic rifles isn't going to do anything either, because it's handguns that do the dirty work. The problem is that these details aren't sensationalist. Being gunned down by a stranger on a rampage makes the news. Being killed by a crazy relative doesn't.

15155 11y ago
> because it's handguns that do the dirty work I'd also like to point out that the Supreme Court of the United States of America affirmed that individual ownership of semi-automatic handguns (cited example, but, "common use" is the test) is a protected right. We have a financial inequality and mental health problem (somewhat stemming from said inequality) in this country, not a firearm problem. These are the problems that need addressed to reduce crime.
- x0x0 11y ago
  The justices, as aptly demonstrated recently (viz scalia, whose textualism has no meaning besides whatever his personal politics prefer) are politicians, no more. Or one could ask why gay rights have done better than reproductive rights, and the answer comes down solely to Kennedy is more sympathetic. At this point, we are so inured to gun violence that my SO was at a community college a couple years ago while it had a lockdown because of a shooter on campus. She was ushered into a classroom by swat with them standing outside the door and it didn't even make the tv news that night. I grew up shooting guns with my father and have treasured memories of going to gun shows. I'd vote for an amendment for Japanese gun laws. ps: in 2008, the us had 12k+ firearm related homicides while japan had 11. The population ratio was 2.39, so the US would have experienced (rounding up) 27.
  - 15155 11y ago
    The Heller decision wasn't based on textualism, though that argument holds true as well. If you'd like to see stricter laws or the outlawing of personal ownership, feel free to lobby for an amendment to the Constitution.
- wisty 11y ago
  Yep. Banning guns will reduce mass shootings, and gang shootings (somewhat - well organised criminals will still have guns, but the stupid ones who cause the most damage won't). It can also reduce suicide rates (since guns don't give people time to change their mind). However, a crazy relative can still kill you without a handgun. In countries that introduce gun laws, they get more murders with knives, blunt objects, etc. US murder rates may be partly driven by guns. But they're mostly the result of education, prison sentences, and other social factors. The US is a developed country with the welfare system of a developing country (and a bunch of very expensive bandaids to catch the people who have fallen too far to really recover).
  - sdenton4 11y ago
    /However, a crazy relative can still kill you without a handgun. In countries that introduce gun laws, they get more murders with knives, blunt objects, etc./ Do you have data to back up this claim? I hear it quite often in these debates, but have never seen anything to back it up, and it seems suspect: It's pretty easy to imagine that even if the number of assaults were the same per capita, that the lethality of the weapon involved in the assaults will have a bearing on the total number of fatalities. (As for me, I would be happy with a sane approach to prisons, better mental health treatment, AND better gun controls... These need not be mutually exclusive.)
    - wisty 11y ago
      You can find cherry picked data here: http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/2013/12/murder-and-... They don't mention Australia, because the murder rate gradually decreased (though it was on a trend down anyway). Or you can find cherry picked data about how gun related crime falls if you ban guns. The only reason this debate keeps going is that there's bugger all hard evidence on either side. Sometimes overall crime rates drop. Sometimes they rise. So both sides just cherry pick stats, and call the other side idiots. If the occasional mass shooting is acceptable, there's no reason to either ban guns or keep them. "Guns cause crime" and "guns stop crime" are both red herrings. Whether the freedom to have a gun (which won't make you statistically more or less safe) is more important than stopping mass shootings is a value judgement. The statistics are a wash. I'd say something similar to Australia is a good compromise - allow single-shot long guns (for sport), and ban semis / handguns (unless you have a really good reason). There's also laws about gun safes, safety tests, etc. The most well-known mass shooting in Australia since guns were banned left three people dead - a shooter with a double-barreled shotgun, and two victims. Australian style laws do a good job keeping mass shootings from causing too much damage.
bmelton 11y ago
I hate to be pedantic in discussions like this one, and please know that I certainly don't mean any offense beyond correcting a technical error that perhaps nobody really cares about. "Just like the debate over automatic weapons is a canard, since they're very rarely used in murders" There is no debate surrounding automatic weapons, or, at least there isn't one on the national stage. Automatic firearms are dramatically different from semi-automatic firearms, and it's been a (specifically expressed) political maneuver to confuse/conflate the two. The number of deaths attributable to automatic firearms is effectively nil, as they've been highly controlled since the days of Al Capone and his ilk. When people are referring to "automatic firearms" in today's political arena, they almost always mean to say "semi-automatic firearms", which most closely maps to the sorts of weapon used in the Newtown and Aurora shootings. It's a subtle, but important distinction, but as those who are trying to conflate the terms generally intend to do so to confer additional scariness to semi-automatic firearms that are simply not there.
- vacri 11y ago
  It's fine to be pedantic against someone who is claiming the issues are not what they seem. Even encouragable :) You are correct of course, regarding auto vs semi-auto, but I mean that the anti-gun lobby makes a lot of noise over 'big scary rifles' when it's actually handguns doing the most damage. I'm for gun regulation myself, but even if do rifles get heavily regulated in the US, it'd do very little to the stats. It'd actually work against the anti-gun lobby, because the pro-gun lobby would be able to point to the relatively unchanged stats.
  - bmelton 11y ago
    Agreed. That said, thus far, handgun regulations are the most easily struck down under Heller & McDonald. The sea change of going after "assault weapons" has less to do with mass shootings and more to do with the Brady group's adaptation to the court's relative intractability on handgun regulations. As ownership (keep) and carriage (bear) of arms has been upheld by the Supreme Court as individual rights, the shift has been more and more towards "feature tests" that are defined as such that the assault weapons fail them. California has had luck simply increasing the feature list such that almost every firearm is effectively banned, but I suspect that won't last.
sudioStudio64 11y ago
That's absolutely true. The discussions on this site tend to the abstract and miss this point.
pjc50 11y ago
The US has a murder problem The US has a gun violence legitimization problem. Yes, other countries have guns. But America has a particular culture surrounding the idea that shooting someone whom you percieve to be a threat is a reasonable thing to do, and moreover you're likely enough to encounter this situation that it's worth arming yourself beforehand. Whenever one of the controversial police shootings happens, there are plenty of commentators on hand to say how the victim deserved it (and therefore his grieving relatives should shut up and stop complaining about the police). But this attitude isn't limited to the police, it's part of wider American society. So whenever two people get into the kind of stupid altercation that in other countries results in black eyes and lacerations, in the US somebody might pull a gun. Undoubtedly this makes a lot of domestic violence situations worse. The US concept of "right to life" is applied really narrowly, leaving both judicial executions, police shootings, and wider acts of negligence in public safety untouched. Not to mention the racism problem. You don't need guns for this, other forms of attempted mass murder are available: http://time.com/3942688/black-church-burning-mount-zion-ame-south-carolina/ http://time.com/3942688/black-church-burning-mount-zion-ame-...
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Houshalter 11y ago
But no one is afraid of being murdered by a relative. Mass shootings are what people are afraid of. Mass shootings are what make the news and get people's attention. The issue is entirely about fear. If people really cared about the most effective policies to decrease premature deaths, maybe we'd all be arguing about traffic safety issues or banning swimming pools or something.
rayiner 11y ago
The interesting thing is that we've always had a murder problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_by_decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention.... We've been at 5-10x the per capita murder rate of England and Wales going back to at least the 1910's. It looks like between 1910 and today the lowest rate in the U.S. was 4.0 murders per capita, in 1957. That same year, England and Wales had only 18% as many murders as the U.S. per capita. I think the scale of violence here is really hard for Europeans to understand. New York is one of the safest large cities in the U.S., and the murder rate there is more than 3x that of similarly-sized London.
- hga 11y ago
  Then there's the flip side about how many people died from state sanctioned violence in Europe since 1910 (and going back a long ways; see especially the Thirty Years War). We in the US only understand that from immigrants who wanted to escape that scene, as well as the usual media, and it is one of the primary motivations of a bunch of us pro-gun types. Neal Knox, one of the top figures there in the last century, got his start at boot camp, where he heard an eyewitness story from a recent immigrant from the Netherlands. The Nazis went to a family's house where a handgun was registered to the homeowner but since he couldn't find it, they took the whole family and machine gunned them in the village/town square.

by vacri 11y ago

15155 11y ago

> because it's handguns that do the dirty work I'd also like to point out that the Supreme Court of the United States of America affirmed that individual ownership of semi-automatic handguns (cited example, but, "common use" is the test) is a protected right. We have a financial inequality and mental health problem (somewhat stemming from said inequality) in this country, not a firearm problem. These are the problems that need addressed to reduce crime.

x0x0 11y ago
The justices, as aptly demonstrated recently (viz scalia, whose textualism has no meaning besides whatever his personal politics prefer) are politicians, no more. Or one could ask why gay rights have done better than reproductive rights, and the answer comes down solely to Kennedy is more sympathetic. At this point, we are so inured to gun violence that my SO was at a community college a couple years ago while it had a lockdown because of a shooter on campus. She was ushered into a classroom by swat with them standing outside the door and it didn't even make the tv news that night. I grew up shooting guns with my father and have treasured memories of going to gun shows. I'd vote for an amendment for Japanese gun laws. ps: in 2008, the us had 12k+ firearm related homicides while japan had 11. The population ratio was 2.39, so the US would have experienced (rounding up) 27.
- 15155 11y ago
  The Heller decision wasn't based on textualism, though that argument holds true as well. If you'd like to see stricter laws or the outlawing of personal ownership, feel free to lobby for an amendment to the Constitution.
wisty 11y ago
Yep. Banning guns will reduce mass shootings, and gang shootings (somewhat - well organised criminals will still have guns, but the stupid ones who cause the most damage won't). It can also reduce suicide rates (since guns don't give people time to change their mind). However, a crazy relative can still kill you without a handgun. In countries that introduce gun laws, they get more murders with knives, blunt objects, etc. US murder rates may be partly driven by guns. But they're mostly the result of education, prison sentences, and other social factors. The US is a developed country with the welfare system of a developing country (and a bunch of very expensive bandaids to catch the people who have fallen too far to really recover).
- sdenton4 11y ago
  /However, a crazy relative can still kill you without a handgun. In countries that introduce gun laws, they get more murders with knives, blunt objects, etc./ Do you have data to back up this claim? I hear it quite often in these debates, but have never seen anything to back it up, and it seems suspect: It's pretty easy to imagine that even if the number of assaults were the same per capita, that the lethality of the weapon involved in the assaults will have a bearing on the total number of fatalities. (As for me, I would be happy with a sane approach to prisons, better mental health treatment, AND better gun controls... These need not be mutually exclusive.)
  - wisty 11y ago
    You can find cherry picked data here: http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/2013/12/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/ http://crimepreventionresearchcenter.org/2013/12/murder-and-... They don't mention Australia, because the murder rate gradually decreased (though it was on a trend down anyway). Or you can find cherry picked data about how gun related crime falls if you ban guns. The only reason this debate keeps going is that there's bugger all hard evidence on either side. Sometimes overall crime rates drop. Sometimes they rise. So both sides just cherry pick stats, and call the other side idiots. If the occasional mass shooting is acceptable, there's no reason to either ban guns or keep them. "Guns cause crime" and "guns stop crime" are both red herrings. Whether the freedom to have a gun (which won't make you statistically more or less safe) is more important than stopping mass shootings is a value judgement. The statistics are a wash. I'd say something similar to Australia is a good compromise - allow single-shot long guns (for sport), and ban semis / handguns (unless you have a really good reason). There's also laws about gun safes, safety tests, etc. The most well-known mass shooting in Australia since guns were banned left three people dead - a shooter with a double-barreled shotgun, and two victims. Australian style laws do a good job keeping mass shootings from causing too much damage.

bmelton 11y ago

I hate to be pedantic in discussions like this one, and please know that I certainly don't mean any offense beyond correcting a technical error that perhaps nobody really cares about. "Just like the debate over automatic weapons is a canard, since they're very rarely used in murders" There is no debate surrounding automatic weapons, or, at least there isn't one on the national stage. Automatic firearms are dramatically different from semi-automatic firearms, and it's been a (specifically expressed) political maneuver to confuse/conflate the two. The number of deaths attributable to automatic firearms is effectively nil, as they've been highly controlled since the days of Al Capone and his ilk. When people are referring to "automatic firearms" in today's political arena, they almost always mean to say "semi-automatic firearms", which most closely maps to the sorts of weapon used in the Newtown and Aurora shootings. It's a subtle, but important distinction, but as those who are trying to conflate the terms generally intend to do so to confer additional scariness to semi-automatic firearms that are simply not there.

vacri 11y ago
It's fine to be pedantic against someone who is claiming the issues are not what they seem. Even encouragable :) You are correct of course, regarding auto vs semi-auto, but I mean that the anti-gun lobby makes a lot of noise over 'big scary rifles' when it's actually handguns doing the most damage. I'm for gun regulation myself, but even if do rifles get heavily regulated in the US, it'd do very little to the stats. It'd actually work against the anti-gun lobby, because the pro-gun lobby would be able to point to the relatively unchanged stats.
- bmelton 11y ago
  Agreed. That said, thus far, handgun regulations are the most easily struck down under Heller & McDonald. The sea change of going after "assault weapons" has less to do with mass shootings and more to do with the Brady group's adaptation to the court's relative intractability on handgun regulations. As ownership (keep) and carriage (bear) of arms has been upheld by the Supreme Court as individual rights, the shift has been more and more towards "feature tests" that are defined as such that the assault weapons fail them. California has had luck simply increasing the feature list such that almost every firearm is effectively banned, but I suspect that won't last.

sudioStudio64 11y ago

That's absolutely true. The discussions on this site tend to the abstract and miss this point.

pjc50 11y ago

The US has a murder problem The US has a gun violence legitimization problem. Yes, other countries have guns. But America has a particular culture surrounding the idea that shooting someone whom you percieve to be a threat is a reasonable thing to do, and moreover you're likely enough to encounter this situation that it's worth arming yourself beforehand. Whenever one of the controversial police shootings happens, there are plenty of commentators on hand to say how the victim deserved it (and therefore his grieving relatives should shut up and stop complaining about the police). But this attitude isn't limited to the police, it's part of wider American society. So whenever two people get into the kind of stupid altercation that in other countries results in black eyes and lacerations, in the US somebody might pull a gun. Undoubtedly this makes a lot of domestic violence situations worse. The US concept of "right to life" is applied really narrowly, leaving both judicial executions, police shootings, and wider acts of negligence in public safety untouched. Not to mention the racism problem. You don't need guns for this, other forms of attempted mass murder are available: http://time.com/3942688/black-church-burning-mount-zion-ame-south-carolina/ http://time.com/3942688/black-church-burning-mount-zion-ame-...

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Houshalter 11y ago

But no one is afraid of being murdered by a relative. Mass shootings are what people are afraid of. Mass shootings are what make the news and get people's attention. The issue is entirely about fear. If people really cared about the most effective policies to decrease premature deaths, maybe we'd all be arguing about traffic safety issues or banning swimming pools or something.

rayiner 11y ago

The interesting thing is that we've always had a murder problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate_by_decade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention.... We've been at 5-10x the per capita murder rate of England and Wales going back to at least the 1910's. It looks like between 1910 and today the lowest rate in the U.S. was 4.0 murders per capita, in 1957. That same year, England and Wales had only 18% as many murders as the U.S. per capita. I think the scale of violence here is really hard for Europeans to understand. New York is one of the safest large cities in the U.S., and the murder rate there is more than 3x that of similarly-sized London.

hga 11y ago
Then there's the flip side about how many people died from state sanctioned violence in Europe since 1910 (and going back a long ways; see especially the Thirty Years War). We in the US only understand that from immigrants who wanted to escape that scene, as well as the usual media, and it is one of the primary motivations of a bunch of us pro-gun types. Neal Knox, one of the top figures there in the last century, got his start at boot camp, where he heard an eyewitness story from a recent immigrant from the Netherlands. The Nazis went to a family's house where a handgun was registered to the homeowner but since he couldn't find it, they took the whole family and machine gunned them in the village/town square.