What’s worse, 20 accidents spread across the entire population or 20 concentrated intentional acts of murder? Is that your point?
No, we just locked up everyone with slanty eyes for a few years.
The limits of your imagination do not a compelling argument make. Suffice it to say, you’re wrong.
ETA: Sorry, Miller. Great minds and all that.
The methodology certainly has problems in trying to find this information, but those who’ve tried to quantify it have ranged from around 250k at the low end to 3 million at the high end. The 250k number came from a group that set out to prove that it’s so rare that it’s negligible. If there are credible studies that put the number lower than that, I’d like to see them.
I don’t see what’s so implausible about it, in any case. Out of tens of millions of gun owning households, does 250k of them per year having the chance to use their gun defensively (and this doesn’t mean shooting someone - it could just mean scaring them off by racking the slide on a shotgun) implausible?
Schools are a gun free zone. The absurdity is that people seem to think that erects a magical forcefield that prevents the presence of guns, which, clearly, it does not. The actual practical effect of this is that none of the teachers or school staff could’ve been armed.
I’m not saying they would’ve otherwise been, of course - not that many people carry - but you traded the possibility that they might’ve for the false sense of security that a magical forcefield that a “no guns” law and sign bring.
So what level of gun control should we have? Complete ban? UK-style? Norwegian-style? Austrian-style?
Serious question from one who sits, baffled, in the UK: what do you have these guns for?
We all just sit this side of the pond and scratch our heads in bewilderment at news stories like this one, and the subsequent debates. It seems so simple to us: ban gun ownership, owning a gun becomes illegal, it becomes incredibly difficult to get hold of one, people stop shooting each other. The chance of a burglar or robber or rapist having a gun dwindles to zero, because having a gun would be an offence with a greater penalty than the offence they’re planning to commit. Ergo, you don’t need a gun for self defence.
So, in the interests of fighting ignorance, what are your unloaded, locked up guns for?
a) If no gun regulation is possible without repealing the Second Amendment, then that should be our goal.
I don’t believe that’s the case. I believe that the Second Amendment allows for common-sense gun regulation. But if it doesn’t, and it’s an all-or-nothing choice, then fuck the Second Amendment with a bayonet.
b) These kids were the victims of a seriously disturbed individual who might have been able to kill three or four of them if he’d had a knife or an axe. Maybe a half-dozen with a chainsaw.
Guns make mass murder a hell of a lot more possible. Yes, these kids died for your rights. *The fact that you, with your clean record, get to have guns, means that the crazies do too. * (Because not all the crazies are identifiable in advance. Not that you gunnies are making it easier to deny gun access to identified crazies.) *And they kill. So their victims die to preserve your rights. *
Deal with it. But don’t pretend for a minute that that isn’t the tradeoff, unless you are willing to go along - and hopefully, as a knowledgeable gun owner, propose - ways of preserving as much as possible of your rights to own guns, while minimizing the resulting carnage as much as possible.
Cite please. I could be wrong but the page I looked at was Ryan Lanza’s and he appeared to be in his mid-20’s. How many 20-something Ryan Lanzas do you suppose there are out there?
No, my point is that emotional narratives appeal to you, and that you don’t have perspective. Ten thousand people die from gunshot wounds per year. This is 27 of them. 27, coincidentally, is 10,000/27. In other words, this is a normal death toll of people per day. But are you freaking out if 27 people are dying today of gunshots? No, because that is diffuse. They don’t each have their own little emotional story that you can attach yourself to. But 27 in one go? Kids? Big emotional story? NOW IS THE TIME TO ACT!
My point is that you get lead around by the nose by narratives that you relate to emotionally, rather than logically trying to analyze the overall picture. How many parents today had the gut reaction of “I need to homeschool my kids!” when school is actually the safest place for kids to be?
I have several orders of magnitude more respect for someone that says “here are the number of gun deaths happening all the time, and here’s a policy that I think can reduce them” rather than the people saying “OMG KIDS DIED! WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!!!”
I would personally make it illegal to own or sell any gun that is capable of holding more than a given number of rounds (e.g. 8) or of firing more than some number of rounds per minute. People can still own hunting rifles, or handguns / shotguns for self defense, but no more military grade weapons in the hands of any idiot who wants one.
This would not prevent gun crime. This would not make it impossible for something like this to happen. But this would make it harder for something like this to happen, which to me is good enough. Even if assault weapons remain available on the black market, you could legally detain someone pre-mass shooting if you catch them trying to obtain the tools needed to carry it out.
For those who oppose such gun control, please answer this:
- Can you cite any examples of something good happening that was only made possible by private ownership of these types of weapons, i.e. something that wouldn’t have been possible with a rifle, handgun or shotgun? What purpose do these weapons serve that guns less capable of mass killings would not?
In the UK you can essentially own a shotgun if you jump through a lot of hoops, in certain areas, but otherwise you have gun bans. While we can argue the merits of that, I just want to make you aware your country’s gun laws are actually probably the most restrictive in the world. Most all of continental Europe has not chosen to allow gun ownership. Norway has somewhat permissive gun ownership, Germany as well. They both have licensing regimes more complex than Americas, and both require you state a purpose for the gun you want to buy. But both would allow you to acquire the sort of guns used in massacres.
So while “ban guns” may seem simple to the British, this isn’t a “America-vs-Rest of the World” divide. Most of the rest of the Western world allows gun ownership, the UK is an outlier in that regard.
The position of “the only reason you need a gun is to defend against other people with guns” has always been ridiculous and yet I hear it quite a bit.
If no one has a gun, those with the greatest physical prowess and element of surprise then control the situaton. Criminals generally tend to be young men - usually healthy and strong. You’re saying that a woman wouldn’t need to carry a gun because her rapist wouldn’t have a gun either? What about the fucking massive physical strength advantage the rapist has over her?
This doesn’t even make sense. If you were to give up your guns to prevent murder by firearms, you wouldn’t need guns anymore. Given the choice between a perfectly ideal situation where everyone, including you, is safe, and children dying, you choose children dying. What?
As long as we’re ranting…
Beyond the gun control issue, how about getting to the real reason this (and so many of the other violent killings and suicides in the past 20 years) probably happened - another individual on anti-depressants whose dosage or prescription changed.
And guess what? All the victims’ families now get prescribed their own meds! Another win for big Pharma.
That wasn’t the guy. And reports are coming out that his name may be Adam, not Ryan. You’re stupid, ill-informed, overconfident, and you have poor reading comprehension, so I have to ask: have you considered a career as a shitty journalist?
Yeah, “freedom is not free.”
You know what that means? That people who desire and enjoy certain freedoms should be willing to fight to preserve them.
But you expect SOME CHILDREN who had nothing to do with your freedoms, to die bloody deaths on the altar of your freedoms.
Well-adjusted sociopath.
I’m willing to accept the tradeoff. But let me turn this around on you.
If everyone reacted to these events as I do, with a “shrug, shit happens, sucks, there are crazy people in a country of 315m”, these things would be a lot less frequent. I don’t give them the glory and the infamy. I don’t fuel the weeks of media coverage.
When people do this, they want to become infamous, to go out with a bang, to show the world something. And you are the ones who give them that. You attaching yourself to this, getting all worked up, watching 24/7 news coverage - you are the ones giving them what they want, the reason they did this. You are more responsible for this tragedy than the countless gun owners who’ve done nothing wrong themselves.
So turn this around. Quit all of this “OMG GUN OWNERS HOW DO YOU LIVE WITH WITH YOURSELVES!!!”
You are giving the perpetrator of these crimes exactly what he wants. In turn, some other crazy guy will see this, realize he’ll get what he wants, and do it in the future. How do YOU live with yourself?
I’m guessing something like “My home is my castle and anyone trying to storm my castle is going to be shot in the face.”
Maybe he doesn’t have a Concealed Froot Loop License.
What’s the actual magazine limit? A limit of 8 would be more restrictive than either Norway or Germany, and they have very low gun crime.
In Germany 16 students were killed in a spree shooting some years ago by a guy who owned a pistol with a 15 round magazine. I do not know if you’ve ever shot a weapon, but with a semiautomic pistol like the one that shooter used, unless the victims are actively working to disarm the shooter there isn’t a huge difference between 8 and 15. Namely because reloads are very, very fast.
Assuming a “perfectly enforced ban” I think you’d need to ban all rifles other than single shot rifles, and all pistols other than revolvers. You would need to criminalize ownership of revolver autoloaders, and perhaps even mandate revolvers be double-action. That would make it difficult to get a high rate of fire, and would make it easier for unarmed people acting in concert to disarm the shooter.
But even then, the incidents where people are trying to disarm the shooter appear to be quite rare. Even against a gun with a 30 round magazine 10 people in close quarters bum rushing him, as someone with some professional experience that gives me at least some expertise on this, I would put my money on those 10 people. Against a determined enemy guns drop in utility rapidly at very close range, and if you have 10 people all who start within 10 feet of you and all want to take you out, I just don’t believe anyone other than a fictional Rambo-style gunman would be able to prevail.
The problem however, in shootings like this, is most people are focused on one of three things:
- Flight
- Hiding
- Trying to cover someone else
The problem with that then, is that it means the victims are especially vulnerable to just be picked off one by one. There were hundreds of kids on Utoya, if they had rushed Breivik they could have torn him to pieces, literally. But people don’t usually respond that way to guns. So even a double-action revolver you’d probably be able to take out 20+ people unless you had a nucleus of resisters.