18 Dead In First European High School Shooting - What About The Gun Control Argument?

Well, ExTank, looks like I’ve been drawn into this after all.

  1. Accidents: Decent point, but I would have to look at the numbers. I know that motor vehicle deaths are huge. In fact, IIRC, they are huge compared with, say, deaths from the Vietnam War. But that hardly serves to trivialize the deaths from that latter conflict for a number of reasons.

And, actually, we have something called the Consumer Product Safety Commission which rather stringently regulates child toys and the like. Which partly explains the lack of media coverage on that. (Another reason is that when a dangerous toy emerges, the problem is quickly “solved” by a mandatory recall.)

[The complexity here is that, in the public eye certain deaths cause more fear and dread than others, a point that Anthracite will be familiar with. People freak out about low level radiation from nukes, pesticides and electrical plant sitings and are relatively blase about the more familiar risks of smoking, driving and eating too many cheeseburgers. And, IMHO, it’s not merely being a case of the scientists being right and the public wrong (all there is a lot of that). Some deaths are simply scarier than others.]

  1. But let’s get back to the ideology. Suicide: I find it odd that gun control advocates doubt the use of cross-national homicide studies, but think cross-national suicide studies are valid. I’ve looked at the suicide figures by country and they are all over the place. The confounding factors are overwhelming.

OTOH, I have read studies (or reports of studies) suggesting that firearm suicides are more likely to be successful. Hey, I may be wrong. I’m suggesting, though, that you have to switch methodologies.

  1. Homicides. Most homicides are crimes of passion, IIRC. Of course, what I worry about is getting shot and mugged in my local urban area. This, BTW, is probably close to the political nub of the issue.

(The other part is a wildly varying valuation of the right (or “right”, depending upon your persuasion) to bear arms.)

"Black Males between the ages of 17 and 24 (IIRC) alone commit 3 times the total national rate of all firearms deaths; 6 1/2 times after suicides are removed! " (Typo corrected, I hope) Um, that’s fine but what I want to know is the share of all homicides perpetrated by that group.

Then, I would have to wonder a little about the argument you’re making. That the deaths from firearms are focussed in one demographic group seems irrelevant to me.

  1. Undetermined. Jeez it’s not noise. It’s simply, “We don’t know whether it is an accident, suicide or whatever.” This only matters if you (eg) weigh suicides less than homicides. Hey, that may be fair, but giving “undetermined” a moral weight of zero sounds dubious.

  2. Legal intervention: This needs an adjustment. Quite possibly though, the number might be lower if the cops needed to defend themselves against fewer guns. Again, it needs to be weighed less than a homicide, but still given some weight, IMO.

Look, I don’t want to claim that this issue is clear-cut. I have not seen a definitive gun control study, nor have I looked for one. (Although, I did take note at ExTank’s recommendation some months back of a gun control pro/con book. Thanks, btw.)

One interesting exercise might be to take a hard look at the history of gun control in Switzerland and Israel, two countries with lower levels of non-terrorist violence (AFAIK, IANAE) and looser gun restrictions than most of the rest of the world. For example, I am unaware of the extent of their restrictions on 1) concealable weapons, 2) Automatic weapons or weapons that can be easily transformed into automatic weapons and 3) weapons that are poorly built or flimsy (I’m thinking of the Tek-9, for example).

The other open issue for me is the extent to which a firearm would enhance or detract from (say) my personal safety, or the average firearm owner’s personal safety, on balance. (Then I would have to somehow weigh the rights of handgun owners who are enhancing their safety against the estimated carnage associated with the handguns. Furthermore, I would have to make another adjustment for the fact that the former handgun holders would be allowed to switch to rifles). Again, this issue is pretty involved, which is part of the reason why I prefer to stay focused on narrow aspects of it.

Hm. I see that there have been about 4 posts since I started this. Ah well. Nighty-night gang. :wink:

While this is starting to get Clintonesque, “Is” means currently, not seven years ago.

The raw data is not online, but a paper cite is still a cite. I can dig up a few links to newspaper articles (from AFAIK relatively unbiased sources) summarizing the data, but the raw data won’t be released for a while.

Your presentation of the data was dishonest, because you presented an older set of data than the one I cited as if it was what I had cited. It’s certainly possible that it was a unintentionally dishonest, but if you’re going to make a whole table of data then you really should check that what you’re using is what the other person was using as a source, or people might presume that you’re doing so deliberately.

Ok, 1 last point. “More stringent statistical tests” means using a less forgiving estimate of the standard errors.

While this is starting to get Clintonesque, “Is” means currently, not seven years ago.

The raw data is not online, but a paper cite is still a cite. I can dig up a few links to newspaper articles (from AFAIK relatively unbiased sources) summarizing the data, but the raw data won’t be released for a while.

Your presentation of the data was dishonest, because you presented an older set of data than the one I cited as if it was what I had cited. It’s certainly possible that it was a unintentionally dishonest, but if you’re going to make a whole table of data then you really should check that what you’re using is what the other person was using as a source, or people might presume that you’re doing so deliberately.

Fine Ribo, show me the data. Or a link to an article. Put up or…

I went into detail about what I did and the basis for my claim. Step by fricking step. Again, if 2000 data existed on the table, I would have included it.

Funny how your interpretation of the evidence always seems to point in the same direction. Evidence is never mixed; gun control advocates are always wrong. I wonder who the honest analyst is.

Finally, the issue at hand is whether the US has more dangerous streets than Europe, due to different gun control regulations. For that, the 1987-1995 data is certainly relevant.

(Right, ExTank cross-national comparisons are inconclusive, without controlling for confounding factors. I’m just trying to get the basic facts here, and am evaluating a claim made on p.1 by MaxTorque.)

A report on the Crime Survey data can be found here:.

The survey was discussed in this thread.

To be fair, I think the issue at hand is whether individual countries would be safer if they relaxed their strict gun laws, or tightened their lax gun laws.

Unless someone has access to a parallel universe where the Brits are armed and the vast majority of Americans are unarmed, then the statistics are ultimately meaningless.

All I can say for sure is that, as a Brit, I feel safer in a virtually gun-free country. YMMV, as they say.

Oh. Sorry, I didn’t know Mexico, North Ireland, and Estonia were not counted in “Western civilization.” Sorry about that.

As for a cite, I can offer a couple. The previously mentioned International Journal of Epidemiology seems to give the least biased info (PDF file), mostly centering around 1994. GunCite gives a slightly larger list, for 1995, but is also a “pro-gun” site. It also includes several links to its sources, including the Internation Journal of Epidemiology.

I have a solution. The problem is that our state borders are too porous. We need to tighten our borders so that smuggling will become much more difficult. I propose that a National Passport be created (although a normal international passport could also be used), and that no person may cross a state border without presenting it at an authorized border crossing. In addition, no person shall cross a state border unless he or she is authorized by the state – sort of an internal visa.

Since it has been shown that even in Europe, where firearms are severely restricted, guns can get into the hands of unauthorized individuals, and since travel between countries in Europe seems to have become easier in the last couple of decades, the only logical and practical solution to prevent the smuggling of guns in the U.S. is to close the state borders.

In this way we will not have to prosecute those who commit felonies by perchasing handguns outside of their home states and/or smuggling them into states where they are not allowed. By preventing casual cross-border traffic and by requiring a visa to visit another state, the smuggling of guns will be severely curtailed. As a bonus, the transfer of illegal drugs between states will also be lessened.

A beautiful treatise, Johnny, simply beautiful…
you blankity-blank, I almost got a hernia from laughing when I read this…

You know, this is getting to be amusing.
The guy was using legally bought weapons, and legally bought ammunition. He was required by law to first know how to handle a weapon safely and to use it properly before getting his license. It looks to me like the only thing the laws did was to make him that much more efficient in his killing.
Germany has very restrictive gun laws, and everyone here is debating whether gun laws are good or not. Good or not, effective or not, the laws don’t seem to make much difference. The Columbine shootings were carried out by two kids who were in illegal possesion of weapons; the Erfurt shhotings were carried out by a kid in legal possesion of weapons.
It seems to me that we have to look somewhere else for the cause and the solution. This is not about gun control. It is about young people with a burning rage who go out and kill. The solution isn’t gun control: Either they can circumvent the laws entirely and get weapons on the black market, or else obey the letter of the law and purchase weapons legally (while plotting murder and mayhem.)
We need to be looking for the cause of the rage, not trying to limit its effects.
What causes that much rage and hate? Why did those boys at Columbine hate the other kids enough to want to kill them? What caused the german kid in Erfurt to hate the teachers so much that he went hunting specifically for them?
Lets not blame this on the video games or the violent music videos. From my own experience, I know that the games and the music are an expression of the rage within - not the cause. The times when I play violent games and get in to violent music are the times when I have problems in my life. The games don’t make me angry - they give me a safety valve, a way to blow off the anger.
The anger and the hate come from something else. In my case, I have a well paying job and coworkers that I like and work that I used to really enjoy. I started turning angry and violent and didn’t know why. I played Quake III and Unreal tournament against my coworkers during the lunch break, and I was pure hell and sudden death for them all. I blasted my ears with heavy metal music on the drive home. I was terribly strict with my daughter and argumentative with my wife. The problem was my job. To all appearances, I should have loved it. It pays damned well, I have a company car, and I like the guys I work with. I travel a lot and work on a lot of really neat hardware. That didn’t stop me from not liking, hell out right hating, my job. Over the years, I have come to the opinion that what we do is useless, and that made me feel useless. Who likes to feel useless? I certainly don’t. That was my problem: A job I hated, but that I couldn’t let myself hate. It was also very hard to decide to leave it. Finding another job that pays as well is going to be difficult, but since I have faced up to the fact that I hate my job and must leave it, my mood has improved considerably - and I don’t play violent games like I used to, and my ears don’t ring from heavy metal music anymore.

This has a lot to do with the kids from Columbine, and now this guy in Erfurt. Something in the life of these kids is making them unhappy and angry. Something that they may or may not be really aware of, and it just gets worse and worse. It is the anger that drives them to play Doom with pictures of their classmates as targets. It is the anger that causes them to go in for the violent rock videos.
Columbine has been too long ago for me to remember the details of the boys’ lives that came out, but I do know some things about this kid from Erfurt:

  1. His parents are divorced.
  2. Despite what you may hear from the other students, the teachers thought him to be no more than an average student and certainly not above average in intelligence.
  3. He had already failed the final exam for his diploma once, and got expelled for having submitted a faked sick permission slip from his doctor before he could take the exam a second time (as he would normally have been able to do.)
  4. The second round of exams were being taken on 26.April. The Friday on which he went on his shooting spree.
  5. His mother (with whom he lived) and presumably his father did not know that he had been expelled - the newspapers here (Germany) are reporting from an interview with his mother that she wished him luck on the exams when he left the house that morning.
  6. His parents had put him under plenty of pressure to do well in school.
  7. Without a proper school diploma in Germany, you are pretty much up shit creek without a paddle when it comes to finding a job.

I would guess that his anger was focused more on himself (for screwing up the first exam, and screwing his chances on a second test by getting caught with the forged note from the doctor,) but that he wouldn’t admit it to himself and turned it outwards as hate for the teachers who flunked him on the first test. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place, and couldn’t see a way out.
His parents were soon going to find out that he had been expelled and hadn’t taken the exam over. They were going to find out that he had been lying for weeks about leaving the house to go to school every day. The other students were in taking the exams for the second time - and were going to leave him behind and go on with their lives by graduating. He saw his life as completely screwed up and over with. It wasn’t true. There are ways to make up the exams and get the diploma any way, but he couldn’t think that far ahead. He saw it that way, and saw his life as done and over with. That was the point at which he could contemplate mass murder and suicide. He thoughts probably went something like “Well, that’s it. 19 years old and washed up. Nothing to live for, I might as well die. And for good measure, I’ll take the assholes with me who ruined my life.”
I think that that is it:
Pressure with from with in and from without, and inability to take the responsibility for his own mistakes. A total lack of perspective. A scapegoat (or 15) to punish for his ruined life, and suicide to duck again from the resonsibilty for his actions.

There it is: Teach young people responsibility. Give them a perspective. Teach them that there is always a way to go on despite the problems - you just have to find it.

Lets drop the gun control business. The use of guns to kill is a symptom, not the problem. The problem lies in teaching the kids to take control of their lives, and to live with their mistakes and go on despite them.

flowbark: Unfortunately, any local regime of gun control can be circumvented by buying the guns in, say, Virginia and smuggling them into (say) NYC. As long as state borders are oodles more porous than national ones, any meaningful gun control would have to be done at a national level.

A good point, something in my haste I did overlook.

Riboflavin, it appears that your criticism of my CNN cite was valid, even though you gave me little reason to see why my list was incomplete other than you repeating yourself ad nauseum. I submit for your approval this very comprehensive site, along with graphs of the same page here, and a brief introduction here.

Keep in mind, this page gives more than just deaths at schools from firearms, and it extends back to the Bath, MI incident of 1927. However, I’d like to quote this especially pertinent part, emphasis added:

I hope that we can now actually debate my points.

Quix

flowbark, others: again, I would submit that in the USA, we do not have lax gun control laws. We do a fairly good job (and geting better with time as NICS becomes more refined) at keeping store-bought guns from getting to criminals.

As has been pointed out, it’s cross-state second-person sales that seem to be getting more attention lately, the nominal “strawman” purchase.

While I’m not personally conversant with what percentage of gun trnsactions are the “strawman” type, I do seem to recall a DoJ estimate that 60% (a common and recurring number) of the guns hitting the criminal market are stolen from private residences.

Instead of waiting periods, gun purchase limits or magazine restrictions, this datum seems to suggest that some form of mandatory storage might be worth looking at. I personally have no problem with that, as I have a gun safe.

But unitended consequences lurk not far behind such a law. For instance, what impact would such a law have on a person’s 4th Ad. rights? What modifications to police search powers would have to be made? How are police going to know who has guns without some form of registration scheme?

On another topic: I’m glad someone else has picked up that book. It’s a complex read, a touch dry, but very informative on the underlying issues. It doesn’t actually answer too many questions, but instead seems to pose food for thought on the entire issue, thoughfully representing both sides.

It’s rabidly partisan representatives of both sides that are doing the harm, that are obstructing rational debate. In defense of gun owners and gun rights advocates, we didn’t start this “war,” so to speak. We have been on the defensive since 1934, and the first knee-jerk passage of gun control laws that impact more upon law-abiding gun owners than upon the criminals misusing firearms for personal gain.

Look at it like this: if there was a national imperative to reduce motor vhicle crime with measures similkar to gun cntrol laws we might have laws like:

[list=1]
[li] Any car which looks like it can go fast is on a “banned” list. This includes red cars, gloss black cars, or cars with racing stripes, air spoilers, ground effect kits, fancy wheels, etc.[/li][li] Any car which can go more than 100 miles on a single tank of gas is banned. Wy does anyone need to go more than 100 miles from their home?[/li][li] Any car which can exceed 55 mph is banned. Why would anyone need to go faster than that?[/li][li]All P/U Trucks and SUV’s are banned. Why does anyone need a vehicle that large, unless it’s to intimidate other drivers, or cause more damage when they succumb to Road Rage (and they will, because big cars and trucks cause people to succumb to Road Rage.[/list=1][/li]
Some people will yammer that autombiles serve a more socially useful purpose than guns. That may be true, from their point-of-view. Others may disagree. That us “others” have their arguments dismissed outright (quite often because it’s viewed as a minority viewpoint) as ridiculous is just another road-block to progress on the debate.

Civil rights are not a popularity contest, as efforts to ban pornography and hate-speech have shown to be in our courts of law. The fact that the basic right to keep and bear firearms is itself under attack as people debate its meaning is relevant to the issue.

Consider: on the one hand, every type of firearm has been held up for ridicule, and we have been asked again and again to justify why we need such firearms. On the other hand, we are continuously told by control advocates that we have no right to keep and bear, or only an extremely limited one that must take place in conjunction with state service in the National Guard when it is called to federal active duty.

Such arguments completely ignore American history, from the Ratification Debates up through today. Look at the hot water revisionists are getting into (like Michael Bellesiles) in their efforts to reconstruct history to support gun control positions. Look at the compendium of scholastic research by people like Sanford Levinson, and his treatise, The Embarassing Second Amendment. He outright claims that he doesn’t like guns in his opening paragraphs. Yet he honestly looks at the issues and concedes an individual right to keep and bear arms int he traditionally accepted sense.

Or look at U.S.v Miller, one of the most hotly contested SC rulings, even if in a narrow context. Miller simply held that there was no evidence to support a claim that a sawed-off shotgun represented the type of arms a person could keep and bear for militia purposes, and looked at the history of the militia, finding that the arms should represent those in common use by the military service at the time.

This would seem to indicate that the very weapons being recently banned (paramilitary assault weapons) are exactly the type we should be able to keep and bear. As AZ Cowboy pointed out, there are no explicit self defense or sporting purpose provisions in the 2nd Ad. Only a militia provision.

Ach, well. Nothing resolved, hopefully justt more food for thought to chew on.

Actually, flowbark, I’m not sure this is a good point, the more I sit on it. Some things that might lend credence to it, though, are sources which point out average gun sales per capita versus population. States with higher than average ratios would then be examined: are they bordering states with tougher controls? Or are we assuming that criminals will travel three states to get a gun? Or are we assuming that because of lax controls in one state that there are significat black markets based around these states?

Another thing that really needs to be examined is the source of illegal guns. Does a person legally buy it then claim it was stolen? Are they really stolen? If the majority of guns used in crimes are stolen then what can regualtion say about that?

The issue is really much more complex than a simple one-to-one matching of “more guns more deaths”. I think population factors also need to be taken into account. Raw numbers are difficult to swallow when we are dealing with population sizes that can vary by an order of magnitude. It is all well and good to take an ideological stance like “50 thousand deaths are too much anywhere” but I think it is a bit unrealistic. If population estimates are accurate and the US has 280 million residents, then even 280 thousand deaths are only .02% of the population. I would think that the majority of Americans don’t even know someone who have died as a result of guns, giving the fever with which they are combatted a somewhat religious stance (and that is assuming there are, in fact, 280,000 deaths a year!). Yes, gun deaths are possibly preventable even on this scale, but as a matter of priority I think hunger, disease, automoboile safety, and numerous other concerns may be demonstratibly more important in a world of finite resources.

This isn’t to say, again, that any gun deaths are somehow acceptable, or that we should simply give up, but rather they are a hidden cost of gun ownership rights and we need to learn to integrate that into our conception of society. We don’t want anyone to starve, either, or die from cancer, but realistically I think we will always need to swallow some tragedies that could be averted simply because man is a strange animal indeed.

I remain opposed to most gun regulation for reasons I have given in various threads from time to time. The reason I remain this way is partly ideology, but mostly a skepticism about pro-gun and anti-gun statistics, and their (AFAICT) inability to sample most of the variables which could reasonably affect the number of gun deaths in any country.

For instance, what sort of things that would interest me are:
are the number of violent crimes increasing (on average) with respect to population density? Are the number of violent crimes increasing (on average) with respect to income disparity? Not trivial questions, and population density coupled with income disparity seems reasonbly accountable for crime in general. So what if guns make more efficient killers? The point is we want to eliminate the killers. I thought it was, anyway.

Again, I am simply very skeptical about both sides, and so I’d rather just stick to the one I am on. I’m not a proponent of the saying that everything is “lies, damn lies, and statistics” but rather that, on heated issues, ideological purity sometimes obscures the facts and the interpretation of these facts.
I’d hate to ever give up my right to own a firearm, but I am not beyond being compelled by facts.

Germans (similar to Americans) believe their superiority is a birthright. Bavarians (similar to Texans) believe they are superior to their fellow countrymen.

** JohnBckWLD**, but you make I mistake; I did not forget. I just don’t agree in the least.

More importantly I find it rather beside the topic being discussed in the thread. That it was brought up once was natural due to my hasty error while composing the OP. But at that I think we should leave this hijack aside now - once and for all.

With sincere apologies for this hijack

Sparc

Well, if it’ll keep people from Massachusetts out of New Hampshire… :smiley:

Hey!

I don’t want to rule out the possibility of some clever empirical work on the issue. But, yes, I was assuming that people can drive 3 states (or more) to get guns. OTOH, if there was a “you can buy only 1 gun per day” law (which, in fact, there may well be at the moment) then perhaps we’d have something to work with. I trust some of the gun advocates will jump all over me on this point.

Well, I have somewhat more skepticism about requirements to keep your gun locked up; it seems difficult to enforce. Rather, I would advocate mandatory liability if your gun gets stolen. Meaning, if a criminal is caught with your (registered) stolen gun, you would have to pay some function of the criminal damages. Hey, I might cap it at $1000- $5000 per weapon. And I would allow users to take out insurance for such an event. The idea is to encourage responsible storage of your weapon.

It depends on what your using the numbers for. In certain contexts, you want to know “risk per citizen” in order to compare it to other risks (I didn’t appreciate this last evening when I responded to ExTank on point 3 (homicides)). Total damages, though, would be a function of the sum of all risks to the entire citizenry. (Though total benefits would be the sum of all benefits across the citizenry; much (not all) of this is intangible).

Don’t know. AFAIK, however, crime dropped during the Clinton era.