How many of those suicides are by firearm? Would the rate be higher if more firearms were available?
Incidentally, prior to the pandemic at least, Japan’s suicide rate had reached its lowest rate in decades and is now only a tiny bit higher than the USA.
IIRC, it’s very low for suicides in Japan. I don’t see how it could be higher, since they are the highest in the world (or was prior to Covid apparently), but I guess you could posit that if guns were more available the method of suicide in Japan could and possibly would change. I think that the suicide rate in countries is kind of a sunk cost, in that I don’t think weapon availability is a crucial factor…it’s more than what’s available and culturally acceptable is going to be what is mainly used. I know that most on this board disagree with me on this, so not going to argue that again here, just IMHO and all.
I didn’t know that. Thanks for the info. I wonder if this is just a blip due to Covid or a real trend. I hope the latter.
Just to clarify because I’m not sure what parts of your reply were written in response to what, the Japanese suicide rate is not the highest in the world or even close to it. Even next door South Korea is WAY higher.
Ok, sorry…I thought it was at one point. I may be misremembering. South Korea, of course, also heavily restricts guns, but that’s neither here nor there. Sorry for the error and thanks for pointing that out, as for some reason it was stuck in my mind that Japan was the highest wrt suicides per 100k in the world.
Which is strange because you can own guns in these countries, they are simply well regulated. Why does regulating guns become a loss of a right? Speech is regulated, voting is regulated, freedom of association is restricted via the Smith Act. etc.
Ultimately the question isn’t why does America allow people to die from guns. The question is why does America allow so many people to die from guns. Of course so many is by necessity comparative. Since it’s comparative you absolutely should, in good faith, use countries with similar views on human life, political expectations, economic development, and of sufficient population to make comparisons statistically relevant.
As for losses from “cheeseburgers, alcohol, tobacco, and firearms” it would seem the first three have been regulated to minimize deaths.
I never said regulation means a loss of the right…though, the devil is in the detail there. If regulation is not for the purpose of basically banning a whole class of firearms, with the goal of ultimately banning all of them, then there isn’t any loss of right. We regulate free speech after all, and other things in the Constitution are subject to government oversight and regulation. I have no issue with the regulation of firearms when it’s common sense and effective regulation without an ulterior motive.
What is ‘so many’ though? How do you judge that? I mean, a hell of a lot more Americans die from alcohol, tobacco, and even air quality than die from guns every year. So, how many are too many and how do we figure out which things we allow folks to die from we should continue to do so and which we should mitigate or even ban? In the past, a lot of Americans died from a lack of seat belts, yet the public and car companies resisted seat belt laws…until the public overwhelmingly decided on the need for regulation on this. It was a good call. We also used to allow people to smoke in public places and inside buildings, but, again, we regulated against that. These certainly mitigated the number of deaths. We have, of course, put in regulations for firearms as well, though the amount of mitigation there has been less straightforward. That is because, unlike alcohol, tobacco, or seat belts, the right to keep and bear arms is protected by the Constitution, so you need to craft your regulations to try and honor the spirit of the right…not something we have always or uniformly done in the US on this issue btw.
Of course, we have regulated all of these to attempt to at least mitigate deaths and to minimize them in the context of still allowing access to them (i.e. not banning them)…but the first 3 still kill more Americans each year than firearms, despite this. And we, the US public seem to be ok with that.
I read something recently where someone who had lived in various European countries was talking about the lack of violent crime and, more generally, the fact that people “got along better”, for lack of a better word - acted less selfishly and more compassionately in daily life. This person used the phrase “high-trust society,” and it occurred to me that America is the EXACT OPPOSITE of such a thing. The political and social divisions that have occurred over the past 10 years - which I think are a product largely of social media, but that’s another topic - have made this “low trust society” worse right now than it’s ever been before.
I’m not a sociologist and all I have to back up this view is my own intuition, but I’d say this lack of trust is largely what’s responsible for not just the high level of gun violence in general in this country compared to other similar countries, but also the virtual impossibility of passing any gun control measures that would make much of an impact. Yes, the fact that the guns are already out there in massive circulation is part of it, but the real obstacle is this lack of social trust.
Further supporting this notion, to me, is the fact that in the past few years I’ve witnessed a number of ardent left-wingers post publicly about the fact that they themselves have elected to purchase firearms, including AR-15s, in response to the right wing’s apparent embrace of - well, for lack of a better word, lawlessness and mob violence. What happened at the Capitol isn’t an isolated incident, there’s been a long and steady buildup of public intimidation being normalized (exemplified by the open-carrying of rifles - something that I vehemently despise and would like to see made completely illegal, despite myself being opposed to any further bans on particular types of guns. Owning it is one thing, displaying it publicly to intimidate people [and there’s NO other reason to do so] is another.)
Actually, the US is a high trust society, by and large. Americans mainly trust our institutions and each other. Certainly, there is quite a bit of right/left hate going on these days, but there are all sorts of issues in Europe as well, especially on the immigration issue. That doesn’t make them or us a low trust society, however, in that there is a lot of trust in the basic institutions. If you want to see REAL low trust societies, go to Mexico or to a lot of 3rd world countries (or, say, China or Russia) and you’ll see systemic corruption and a society that has an institutional corruption mindset from the get-go.
That said, I do agree that the US seems to be going through a much more chaotic period where this is dropping substantially, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. Guns and gun ownership is only one small piece in this, however, though again it’s part of the left/right divide and part of the current culture wars raging through the country.
Well oddly, we would look at comparative countries and see how many people die by firearms. If the US rate is higher…substantially higher… then you would have a basis to “so many”. But of course you could look at other countries and declare that the rate is reasonable. You should consider the state of those other countries, and whether or not their rates are aspirational or not.
| Afghanistan | Ecuador | El Salvador | Guatemala | United States | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 Year avg | 5.0 | 11.3 | 42.9 | 31.4 | 4.4 |
It’s mainly irrelevant though as each society has to choose for itself (assuming it can) what is or isn’t ‘so many’. Different countries and societies will make different calculations based on their own history and cultural norms. Often I’ve been in countries where the risk/reward for something they do went against my own upbringing and experience but had to just shrug…it’s their country, after all, not mine.
If you half forget that you keep a gun in your nightstand you are NOT a responsible gun owner.
Many Aztecs felt that the lives sacrificed to Quetzcoatl were worth the sub rising the next day. We wouldn’t let a Nahuatl priest entertain that particular delusion in our modern society, though.
How are we supposed to analyze whether the choice we made as a society is good or not other than by comparing results?
Yes, we chose the current shitty situation we are in. Some gun rights advocates (though not you) argue that this choice has no cost. Demonstrating that it does is totally valid, as is arguing that this cost is in no way worth it.
Well, when subs rise…
The thing is today, in modern societies, many things that are allowed cause death. And IMHO down the road a few hundred years, those societies are going to be appalled at what we, collectively, allow. I can give you a laundry list of them, but the point is that societies choose in their own time what they do and don’t allow and whether the costs are acceptable.
Why would we? If in France they choose, say, to allow public and indoor smoking, why should that impact whether we allow it? If in other countries they have different drinking laws (say, set the age for purchasing alcohol at 16 or even younger, or have different laws on drunk driving, etc) why should that impact our own laws?
All choices by society have a cost, so anyone arguing they don’t is…not correct (I was going to say something more caustic, but I’m trying to be better :)). If a society chooses to allow alcohol sales to its citizens, that has a cost. If you change the speed limit it’s going to have a cost. Allowing citizens to have personal firearms is going to be a cost, definitely, for sure. People will die. Whether society accepts that is going to be up to them. Thus far, US society has deemed the cost worth the benefit. We can, of course, change that, as we can change basically anything if enough of us want it.
Because basing our decisions on facts and evidence is probably a good thing?
If France did allow public and indoor smoking, and study after study showed that this caused no increase in lung cancer or nicotine addiction in their population, we’d be pretty fucking dumb to continue banning public and indoor smoking. On the other hand, if this caused an increase in said undesirable outcomes, that would justify our ban.
Again, if we find that countries with a drinking age of 16 have lower rates of alcoholism and drunk driving because people learn to deal with alcohol at a younger age and handle it more responsibly, that would be evidence that our drinking age of 21 is ineffective, counterproductive, and should be changed. If we find that a drinking age of 16 exposes children to alcohol before their brains are fully developed and leads to permanent damage or higher rates of alcoholism, then again this justifies our own drinking age.
Laws aren’t (shouldn’t be) a matter of aesthetic preference; they are put in place to accomplish goals. How well similar or different laws work in other countries is evidence we can use to determine whether our laws are effective in reaching desired goals.
I’m not sure what the point of this paragraph is; it is self evidently true and there’s not much for me to say about it, but you’ve posted these sorts of thoughts a number of times so - yes, I agree.
If the implication is that all those guns deaths are essentially “surplus” murders- if there were no guns they simply wouldn’t have happened- then I’d have to respond with two obvious caveats:
first, there’s no way to know how many of those would have taken place by other means if guns weren’t available. Saying that the USA leads in gun crime is sort of like saying that if it was one of the few nations where you could buy red-handled knives, it would lead in red-handled knife crime; it’s sort of by definition.
And second, while we’re comparing the USA and Canada, I’ll point out that my home state of Minnesota has a gun violence and murder rate equal to Canada’s IF you disallow the predominantly African-American crime rates associated with gang and drug dealing activity in the urban Minneapolis/Saint Paul metro area.
The whole idea that firearms are an epidemiological vector of injury and death simply doesn’t hold up when you look at the huge demographic skew of those incidents. Gun crime and violence is NOT randomly distributed throughout the population. To the point where I have said that America essentially has two different gun cultures, which couldn’t be more different. ETA: and to be told that nonetheless we must restrict guns because of their misuse by the worst selection of society imho amounts to “this is why we can’t have nice things”.
Back to saying the quiet part out loud, I see
Gee, such a devastating rebuttal. Guess I’m pwned.
Of course my next post was about homicide rate by other means at which point the US is unremarkable compared to Canada.
So yes those gun deaths could be considered “surplus” if you assume guns provide an easier and more effective way to kill someone compared to strangulation, beatings, poisons, etc. They most definitely provide a more immediate and consequential means of attacking someone.