Maybe stop some accidental shootings, but that’s about all.
I concur and I have made that very point.
That’s because there are something like 70 Million gun owners in this nation. And 5-10 m of them are single issue. The lobby is peanuts, the voters are powerful.
There are about as many cars & pickups in the USA as guns.
Let us say we put the following “very reasonable” regulations on them- every vehicle that is a gross polluter can not be driven on public streets*, all vehicles must get at least 25 mpg, and no vehicle can have to ability to go faster than 90MPH. People would revolt. All reasonable, all would help the environment & global warming and cut traffic deaths.
- they actually passed that in CA, giving them like a year to fix or CA would buy it, but there was a massive revolt. A watered down version remains.
That would- according to sociologists- increase the number of mass shootings.
I’m a sheltered* Canadian who gets most of his news from The Economist magazine so I guess I don’t have as much of a handle on the state of American media.
Ground & pound, much like MMA. Establishing initial fire superiority is where having high capacity and rate of fire matters.
I’ve read that stats about the number of rounds per casualties. Is that the total number of rounds expended in a year divided by the number of confirmed enemy casualties? If it includes rounds expended thru training, that may give us a skewed perspective on what engagements were like even if heavy weapons are still predominant.
This is absolutely true.
Tell that to the 90% of us who supported the assault weapons ban, but were thwarted by the NRA-owned GOP majority in Congress.
Maybe not the shooters themselves, but their ability to take our lives, yes. See above.
Americans’ support for a ban on semi-automatic guns in the U.S. has dropped eight percentage points from a year ago, when opinions were more evenly divided after the mass shooting in Las Vegas. Last year’s measure was unusually high for the trend over the past several years; the current 40% is back to within a few points of where it was between 2011 and 2016.
The trick here is, that’s not what Americans want. Americans flock to any media source that glorifies the killers, and good luck getting a law banning these articles past the 1st amendment.
Exactly the same problem as banning guns, the people don’t want it to happen, so it won’t happen.
Yep, sad but true. 
Part of the problem is that there seem to be a good many people in the media and elsewhere who think that we are one mass shooting away from passing gun control so the more publicity the shootings get the sooner gun control will happen and the sooner gun violence will be stopped. Thus for many of the people that work in the media things may have to get worse in the short term so they can be better in the long term.
It is important when discussing the level of gun violence in the US to keep in mind the millions of guns that are purchased in the US every month that don’t lead to mass shootings. Gun ownership is very popular in the USA. 2 to 2 1/2 Million sales, each and every month. You are not going to pull an Australian solution with these kind of numbers. I know that there are many posters on the Dope who do not seem to grasp these numbers.
Here is the official chart from the FBI criminal background checks, by month. Up to date as of the end of May this year. Of course each background check does not equal a sale, but it is pretty close for sales estimate purposes. Most people who are not supposed to buy guns will not get to the background check stage.
The 300 million guns in the US number is at least as old as 2008. And it continues at a rate of 2 million each and every month. This is an indication of the support for gun ownership in the US.
Across high-income nations, more guns = more homicide.
Until you deal with the number of guns you’re just spinning your wheels, or pistol chambers as may be.
Heck, America has tons of shows and movies where the main characters are ‘bad guys’ or act like ‘bad guys’. Being able to kill people left and right is a power fantasy. It’s not surprising that when you hand every Tom, Dick, and Mary easy access to a way to kill lots of people, some nominal percentage decide to use it.
Right, guns aren’t *the *problem, and a-holes/sickos aren’t *the *problem either. The *combination *of the two is the problem. But we can meaningfully reduce only one of them.
I think this is true, and I would compare the gun culture in America to religion. No, not in the sense that everyone who owns guns “worships” them, though there’s definitely a subset of gun owners who are overly obsessed with guns, but even among those people, most of them never actually wind up firing a weapon “in anger”. In the sense that it equates to “a very strongly held belief that has existed for a really long time and is passed down through the generations.”
So imagine the “gun culture vs. different countries” argument in terms of a religion. Imagine that Japan wanted to ban the Islamic religion. Leave aside the idea that it’s wrong to ban a religion - imagine that they just wanted to do this. Could they do it? Probably. There are almost no Muslims in Japan. It’s not something that the average person there has any stake in. It’s not part of that country’s history.
Now imagine that India wanted to ban the Islamic religion. While it is not the dominant religion there, 14% of India’s population is Muslim, amounting to 172 million people - in fact, the largest population of Muslims in the world outside of countries whose population is majority Muslim. Do you think that would work? Hell no, and not just because those 172 million people would object to it. Islam has a long history in India. There have been large numbers of Muslims there for hundreds of years.
Gun ownership is sort of like a religion. Leave the objects themselves, the guns, out of it for the sake of this argument - it’s a deeply held belief about something. Large numbers of Americans hold that belief. That belief has been part of the country’s history from the very beginning. And it’s been passed down over the generations, and there’s also an entire economy supporting it which has existed for a long time.
This is why America is unlike other countries of the world when it comes to this particular issue, and comparisons to them are never really strong debating points.
Could it be honor culture? If you believe the world is a dangerous place where you have to constantly make sure other people know you’re willing and able to hurt them (because they’re constantly angling to get you) then it makes sense to prize guns that much.
Gun culture is stronger in the South and among the rural white working class, just like fundamentalist Evangelicalism, honor culture and the grunts of the Republican Party.
Relatedly, Prostestants in Northern Ireland treated Catholics like Southerners treated blacks, had paramilitaries and one of their leaders, Ian Paisley, was a mix between Fred Phelps and Pat Robertson. I haven’t looked at South Africa much but perhaps those who know more can tell us of any patterns that might exist between the gun/violence/honor cultures of Apartheid South Africa, Northern Ireland and the rednecky parts of the US.
That’s fake. Everybody knows that MORE guns makes everyone safer.
It isn’t the shooter we should be worried about training. It’s the bystanders. People with guns prevent shootings all the time, both private citizens and professionals. The more people out there with the tools and training to stop violence in progress, the better.
When half the people in any crowd are potential security guards, shooters who aren’t suicidal are much more wary of shooting in the first place. And the victims and survivors won’t have to wait thirty minutes to an hour for help to show up, and hope it’s not one of those cowardly police who will wait outside until the threat neutralizes itself.
See?
I think it would change the debate over gun control. Fast.