In Germany virtually nobody has firearms besides law enforcement, and those who do take their guns home can only have a certain amount of ammo. When I found out about this the American in me immediately was triggered so I asked my friend, what if a criminal wants revenge and goes after the cop, or what if a criminal has a gun but nobody else does. To germans, I’m speaking based on my friends experience, gun crimes such as homicides aren’t really even a concern. Nobody is thinking about some crazy guy shooting up a church, or worried the kid whos always bullied at school might bring his dads gun to show and tell. Apparently germans don’t have gun problems because firearms were regulated for a long time, similar to Japan which historically has regulated the shit out of every weapon, bows, crossbows, swords, etc… hence japan has virtually no gun problems. The last thing on someones mind in these cultures is “does this guy have a gun and is he going to kill me”
So my question is what can America do? Our population is much larger, and we have guns everywhere. So trying to ban guns is basically impossible, or even pass basic regulations such as closing gun show loopholes is difficult. I propose training children how to operate firearms and respect them. Thats the only thing I can see that will help reduce gun violence in america. IIRC we shot pellet guns in ROTC, but there wasn’t a specific class on gun training.
None of that will work.
So long as firearms are freely available, occasional mass shootings will be a cost of living in American society. We can mitigate some with better mental health services but even that will only be a band aid on the problem.
I’m all for trying to reduce gun violence in America - though the ideas I have in mind for doing so are a little different than the ones typically put forth. I’ve explained them at length in another thread - basically it boils down to 1. a concerted effort to establish mentorship programs for teenage males who are struggling with life, whether it’s in suburbs or inner cities, whether they’re affluent or economically disadvantaged, to involve them in productive activities and help them live in the real world instead of on the internet and inside their own heads; and 2. hammering the shit out of felons caught in possession of a firearm or who have used one in a crime, with legal penalties other than “2 years in prison with credit for time served” or other such meaningless sentences. The upside of my proposal is that it’s something that could actually attract bipartisan support instead of becoming a political wedge issue.
What I am not interested in ever doing is trying to make gun control arguments invoking Germany and Japan, two countries that were, within living memory, so collectively violent that they killed millions of people, enthusiastically falling in line behind dictatorial governments that are responsible for the largest orgy of death and destruction that the world has ever seen.
I’m not arguing for gun control, I’m simply giving examples of countries where gun control appeared to work. The US is too large in terms of firearms and population for any extreme gun control measures to be effective. We have a huge surplus of arms, and no matter what you do you’re never going to get rid of them. So my only proposal is having firearm classes in school, teach people how to respect and use firearms. Any kind of regulations on firearms will be shut down by arms manufactures and dealers who’ve bought congress. So the only realistic solution is to educate people, and increase our social welfare especially to the poor and mentally ill.
I don’t think firearm classes in school are going to affect anything. I don’t know why this is proposed so often - how many shootings exactly are prevented because the shooter had insufficient training? It just doesn’t make any sense to me. Most shootings in this country aren’t mass shootings and don’t have anything to do with school, nor do they have anything to do with the criminals not respecting firearms or not knowing how to use them properly.
I also don’t think it’s accurate to say that “arms manufacturers and dealers have bought congress.” Their lobby is an absolute pipsqueak compared to others like the pharmaceutical, insurance, and real estate lobbies. Like “grade-school T-ball versus the New York Yankees,” as Walter White might put it. They do exert some influence but it’s overstated.
In that respect, the gun lobby punches waaaaay above their weight. They have way more influence than would be apparent by just counting sheer dollars.
I suspect the reason is because the issue is so hot. Everyone in America knows exactly how they feel about guns, and WAY more people care deeply about the issue of gun control than they do about whether we ought to relax the requirements for extending patents on a 30-years-old blood pressure medication. The Russians didn’t send an operative to infiltrate big pharma; they sent her to infiltrate the NRA.
The size of our population and the number of guns we have is irrelevant to the task of banning guns. The reason we can’t ban guns is that too many people don’t want us to ban guns. If the American People decided to overwhelmingly support the concept of banning certain guns, they’d be banned and it would be surprisingly easy to manage.
People committing gun violence know how to operate firearms. There is really no problem with shooters failing to understand that guns are dangerous weapons. They get it, they understand THAT concept really well, which is why they’re shooters and not slashers.
At best this helps reduce accidental deaths from firearms, which are surely far higher than is optimal. At worst, this encourages more people to own firearms, by creating an increased level of comfort around them, and results in an increase in deaths via firearm due to increased availability.
Mainstream publications should publish the crime scene photos.
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A lot of other countries have banned guns and had more success with it but they did not have nearly as many guns and not nearly a strong gun culture. With almost 400 millions guns in the US, there is simply no way to get rid of them all. And those are the just the currently existing ones.
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If the war on drugs and prohibition has shown us anything it is that (at least in the US) if people really want something, they will get it. If someone wants a gun, they can get a gun.
Does this mean that enacting strong gun bans will not do anything at all? No, I agree some gun violence will go down, no doubt. But I think it will be far short of what gun control fans think it will. If anything I think the real payoff may be in the following decades. As 80-100 years go by, the numbers of guns will steadily decrease (Of course that has big assumptions that 3D printing will not completely turn gun control on its head).
The only part of this that actually matters is gun culture. Our country could easily collect and destroy 400 million small steel objects. It would take some logistical work, to be sure, but it’s all just basic block and tackle stuff.
The hurdle we can’t jump is gun culture. Our existing gun culture means that it’s politically impossible to pass sweeping reform, and even if you did, large numbers of owners would refuse to follow the law. It’s not that we can’t collect and destroy 400 million guns (because 400 million is too big a number), it’s that tens of millions of gun owners will actively try to prevent a gun ban from working.
Mass shootings are a tiny fraction of gun violence. They’re rare and sensational and capture our attention and so they get a very disproportionate amount of our reaction to gun violence, but as a percentage of gun violence, as a percentage of murders, as a percentage of deaths, they’re basically just insignificant and random noise. Almost 350m people live in this country - you can find all sorts of shit that occasionally kills 10 or 20 of them. There’s also basically no way to specifically target mass shooters with gun laws - they tend to be relatively unpredictable and can use a wide variety of weaponry, whatever is available.
Nonetheless, if you want to target mass shootings specifically, there is a very targeted, specific solution that would likely reduce them significantly: stop giving the shooters the infamy they crave.
Usually, mass shooters feel like they’ve been wronged by the world in some way, and overlooked. The mass shooting is often their way of making the world notice them, to take revenge on the world. When we choose to watch excessive news coverage of these incidents, we’re giving them exactly what they want - which means that the next shooter that wants to go out in a blaze of infamy knows what they’ll get.
Whenever there’s a mass shooting, we know for the next month at least that the shooter will get a significant share of all media coverage, public discourse, and basically public attention. The media will tell us all about them, read their manifesto if there is one, speculate on whether what music they listened to or what they watched made them do it, and basically cover that person from all angles. Which is exactly what they want - to be noticed, to be important, to shock people, to get revenge on the world. You feed and encourage mass shooters by giving this to them.
The absolute best solution to mass shooters is to get over it. To not focus on it. To not give them the infamy they crave. To not say their name on news broadcasts, to not read their manifesto, to not have psychologists on the air going over their lives with a fine tooth comb, to not give them the infamy they crave. Other countries with more responsible media already do this, and not coincidentally, places that have widespread access to guns but a responsible media (like Canada) do not have a significant mass shooter problem.
But we’re not willing to do that. We love the salacious news. We love to be a part of the process of trying to figure out where they went wrong. We want every gorey detail. We love that shit. And so the media will continue to cater to us and give us what we want, and in the process give the shooter the infamy they want, and show the next potential shooter they’ll get the infamy they want and encourage them to take that leap.
We also love using these incidents to tell those guilty, evil gun owners what monsters they are because this is all their fault. The rest of the world gets to talk about how dumb Americans are. Anti-gun Americans get to talk about how dumb and evil gun owners are. I’m sure on some level you actually feel shock and outrage, but you also love the excuse to be smug and insult the people you hate every time these things happen, too.
There’s basically no law that can target mass shooters specifically, but we absolutely have an effective tool for stopping these shootings. But we won’t do it. Because you love the salaciousness of it, and the chance to preach and be smug and blame over. Because you’re willing to watch the excessive news coverage, participate in discussions about it, and give the infamy the shooter craved every single time.
if we don’t talk about it, it will go away?
By more than half at least, yes.
Can you show us an example of this working in real life when it comes to gun violence?
I already gave one, Canada. Canada is #7 on the gun ownership per capita ratio worldwide and has basically no mass shootings. When they occasionally have something resembling one, their news media reports the incident but often refuses to even name the shooters, let alone give their whole story and a month of media focus. Finland is another. Iceland. Austria. Norway. Switzerland. New Zealand. All of them in the top 20 civilian gun ownership per capita countries, all with significant amounts of guns.
“But Canada has hunting rifles and shotguns, not assault weapons!”, right? When you’re shooting up a crowd the gun is nearly irrelevant. I’m a gun guy. I’ve shot all sorts of guns. I’ve shot all sorts of “machine guns”, “assault weapons”, the whole gamut. Most guns made in the last, oh, 80 years or so barely make a difference in the effectiveness of shooting up random people in a crowded area. Non-gun people really don’t understand how it works and have some severe misconceptions about how much certain guns are disproportionately powerful. Virginia Tech, which IIRC is the most deadly mass shooting we’ve had, used regular old handguns. Very likely that if someone was shooting up a school or a movie theater or whatever, a 12 gauge shotgun like your grandpa has would likely be the most lethal weapon.
There’s one exception to this - the Vegas shooter - in that case the choice of weapons was integral to his tactics - but for the rest it really wouldn’t have mattered.
The reason that the shooters choose “assault weapons”, or scary looking weapons, over more conventional weapons is the same reason Dylan and Klebold wore trench coats. They wanted to look cool. They had a certain idea of how their crime should look and be remembered and that usually means using weapons that seem disproportionately scary to an ignorant public. They know it will increase the outrage and their infamy.
And so when in reaction to a mass shooting, we spend 2 months of media time examining the shooter from every angle, and screaming about how we need to ban these dangerous assault weapons, it misses the point entirely. In fact it does the exact opposite of what you nominally intend - it focuses all the attention on a nearly irrelevant detail of the shooting while giving the shooter (and the future shooters that follow) almost everything they crave.
And gun violence (specifically homicide) is a very uncommon cause of death. Interestingly Bill Gates just tweeted a graph yesterday that compares actual causes of death with media coverage of causes of death.
Tweet: https://twitter.com/BillGates/status/1138520780042465280
Direct link: https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2019/05/Causes-of-death-in-USA-vs.-media-coverage.png
Yes, high-performance guns matter a lot when you’re going up against other people with guns. Other than that, perhaps the size of the first magazine can make a difference but after that, everyone’s running or hiding.
What factors made him so effective?
Media/incentives matter more than guns/resources here. I’m wondering how that could be changed though. Even if you get most of the media to go along, how do you get the people working at Fox to be decent human beings?
People have a misconception about “battlefield weapons” - now, if you’re shooting up time square on new years eve, having an MG-42 would absolutely be effective in that scenario, but in general, war doesn’t work how people think it does. They assume that everyone shoots off a few dozen rounds and hits someone else, and enough people doing this and that’s how battles are decided. But in reality, between around 250,000 to 750,000 rounds are fired for every small arms combat casualty in combat. The number of rounds fired and their relative ineffectiveness is staggering. In WW2, small arms in total - machine guns, rifles, everything - accounted for less than 20 percent of casualties inflicted. In most battles, the purpose of small arms was basically to throw enough lead at your enemy so they were locked in place and keeping their heads down, which means they weren’t doing the same to you. At that point you call in artillery and wait for that to do the actual work.
I actually have no idea. I don’t buy into the fascination with spree shooters. I don’t look up information about them or the shootings. I assume he was just well practiced - it’s actually fairly tricky to kill people with pistols compared to pretty much any long arm, so for him to get that kill count I assume he was just very good with them.
This isn’t a Fox News thing, so I’m not sure why you brought that up. It’s not a conservative/liberal thing. All Americans love news designed to scare them, news designed to focus on the sensational and salacious. We want to be scared out of our minds. WHAT COMMON ITEM UNDER YOUR SINK WILL KILL YOU? WHAT CUTE WHITE GIRL WAS KIDNAPPED LAST WEEK? WATCH OUR NEW 3D RECREATION OF THE LATEST MASS SHOOTINGS! This is common to almost all American news. And people are gobbling it up, because if they wanted good responsible news they could watch PBS newshour, and they don’t.
You ever get a chance to see the news media in other countries? It’s so much better, so much more responsible, so much less focused on giving you that recreational fear that you (the collective you) love so much. Americans seem uniquely addicted to shitty news designed to scare us and provoke outrage. Our news media is really a huge outlier in the world.
If we get the media to stop glorifying the killers, that would help too. One noted sociologist claims that the big rise in student caused school shootings after Columbine was due to media attention and even glorifying the shooters.
But yeah, more mental health services will also help.
Nothing short of door to door confiscation will stop them. 
I have no problems with your ideas and they could work.
I agree comparing American to Japan, etc is pointless. Or even Denmark.