“Austrian media guidelines have had an impact on suicidal behavior.”
Umm, that’s because the last year we have solid data on is 2012 which is why your cite quoted it, the rest are extrapolations. I quoted your cite, I didnt pick a year.
But in any case, this has little to do with mass shootings, since mass shootings are a drop in the bucket for over all homicides rates.
Look at ** Railer13**'s Mother Jone cite. Even if we figure 10,000 gun murders a year, there’s usually less that 100 people killed in mass shootings per year.
The only effective way we can reduce that is to get the media behind the idea of not glamorizing them. Look, the media usually doesnt name rape victims, right? Not due to a law, but due to public pressure.
Why not put public pressure on them to not name mass shooters?
The fact that people want gun control, can’t get it, and endure mass shooting after mass shooting is evidence that we have something other than a democracy. We live in a constitutional republic, but don’t call it a democracy. That’s not what we are.
A varying number of people want gun control. Let us take assault weapons, since this thread is about mass shootings, OK?
WASHINGTON, D.C. – *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 latest findings, from an Oct. 1-10 survey, mark the eighth time since 1996 that Gallup has gauged public opinion on banning “semi-automatic guns, known as assault rifles.” These types of guns, which reload automatically but fire only once per trigger pull, have been used in a number of mass shootings in the U.S. in recent years.
Background: Support for banning assault rifles has changed over time. In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed a ban on assault weapons in the U.S. When Gallup first asked Americans about such a ban in 1996, 57% were in favor and 42% opposed. By the time the 10-year ban expired in 2004, support had fallen to 50%. In recent years, opinion has generally been against such a law, and an attempt to pass a new ban – after the Newtown, Connecticut, school shooting – was defeated in 2013.*
So about 40% of the people want a assault weapons ban and 57% oppose banning. Thus the will of the people has been followed.
Admittedly it varies, usually going up steeply right after a big, well publicized mass shooting.
But we cant ban them one year when 51% want one, the un ban when 57% dont want one.
Overall, year after year, historical average has 47% in favor of a ban. Not quite a majority.
Now get that to 60% and keep it there for a decade and you can complain about “we have something other than a democracy”.
In any case, such a ban would not reduce the number of mass shootings. I concede the casualty count might go down a bit.
This is true.
But, in a democracy we also wouldn’t have mandatory seatbelts and the result of that would be far more deaths than are caused by mass shootings. In a republic, the bean counters and the people who think of the bigger picture have a larger sway.
If all of the political energy and money that goes to fight guns went to, well, just any of a hundred other things, you could save lives. Instead, because you would rather fall prey to a phobia of guns and ignore math, people die.
Irrationality would ban guns. Irrationality causes death.
Constitutional republics mitigate that, but only to an extent. It depends on how free they are to get their republicking on.
The USA has a hell of a lot of mass shootings to go to match the 6 million of Germany.
Can we explore underlying assumptions? Like the one you’re demonstrating, that mass shootings are somehow a different topic from general gun policy (“may be overlap” indeed), and not a subset of it? If you have any ideas of how to address the lesser problem without addressing the larger problem that includes it and fosters it, they would certainly be welcome.
How much energy and money is that exactly Mr. Math?
Like what?
Saving lives isn’t the issue. Everybody dies. Preventing absolutely needless death is the issue.
Wanting to limit the availability of killing machines is not really a phobia by any reasonable definition. But go ahead and continue your own phobia of not having killing machines.
I sure do, thanks for asking!
First of all you start a media campaign focusing on handguns. Show how that while handguns might feel cool to own and wear, that they are actually uncool as they present a greater danger to you and your family than not having one. The fact that you own a handgun will almost never prevent someone else from killing you with a handgun, if they have an intention to kill you.
Work through media, not law.
That’s just a start.
The reason that just one cause(reportage of mass shootings) is being pushed is that it allows the person pushing this to narrow the solutions to just one(censorship of the media) that he knows can never be implemented in real life.
Then how do you address the fact that media and reporting impact incidents of suicides, otherwise known as the Werther Effect?
I agree that this is a good idea. But who exactly is ‘you’? Is it me, the average Joe citizen? How can I start a media campaign? Is it a gun control advocacy group like the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence? They issue press releases regularly, which are barely mentioned by the media. How can they, or other groups, conduct an effective media campaign?
I’m not trying to be snarky or play the devil’s advocate here. I really want to know how you think this could be effectively implemented.
I never said it wasn’t a cause-But when it is pushed as the only cause worth talking about, and the only proposal is one that cannot possibly be implemented, then what is actually being pushed is no solution at all.
Admittedly just eyeballing it, but the lobbying dollars pro and con look to be about $27m per year on average:
I suspect that it’s greater than that, with local spending and loss of individual time, but we’ll discount that for the sake of not getting distracted in something that probably isn’t really germaine to what you want to know.
Obviously, I could simply say putting that money towards the top causes of death (e.g. cancer) since that’s obviously the mathematical answer, but to be a little more fair to the concept that we’re talking about unnecessary death here, let’s look at the top preventable deaths.
- Smoking
- Medical errors
- Obesity
- Infectious diseases
- Environmental contamination
- Traffic accidents
Smoking, there is a fairly good effort to reduce so, while it is a leader, I don’t that more emphasis is going to do more.
For medical errors, investigation into AI to interact with doctors and nurses to ensure that they don’t forget anything would be useful and probably is very within the range of $27m+ spending per year to have added. If we even halved the number, then we would be saving something like 320,000 lives per year. If, somehow, reducing gun ownership didn’t increase the homicide rate, despite projections that it would, a similar percentile reduction would be 15,000 lives. And we can note that the likelihood of the $27m+ having an effect on reducing gun ownership is liable to be lower than the likelihood that the money would help to combat medical errors.
A reduction in obesity by half could save 55,000 lives. This could likely be accomplished through the use of pricing laws that ensure that price if strongly correlated to portion size. It’s like mandating that the sizes on women’s clothing conforms to actual measurement standards and are consistent across the industry. You would mandate a minimum cost per portion, and that (per restaurant) the price of more portions is always more expensive than fewer.
I could go on, both with further preventable deaths and further measures per each type of preventable death that would be liable to reduce the number of mortalities that could be lobbied for or put into practice.
I’ll note that I have made no effort to remove the suicide count from the above 15,000, but if this is your philosophy then that 15,000 number should probably shrink.
Humans are killing machines, as history will attest. Gun homicides are going to reduce as a vehicle for mass murder over the next decade for the simple reason that it’s not a very effective means of doing it and technology is improving the ability of crazy people to communicate ideas.
They have already discovered the power of the every day truck. Drive it through a crowd and you have murdered more people more easily and cheaply than you would have with a gun or bomb.
There are better things than trucks and guns, I assure you. Though, for that same reason, I refuse to name any.
Going forward, you can do whatever you want with guns, so far as mass murder is concerned. But if you want to save lives, improving our ability to detect and intervene with the lives of mentally unstable individuals is more important and likely more necessary.
The UK bans guns, that is true. But they also can forcibly institute you and put you on meds. There is no such ability here. And while there are reasons for it not being allowed here, as said, it may become necessary to deal with that a lot more than we will need to deal with guns, because guns are not an effective means of mass murder.
Woops, the 320,000 number should be halved. 160,000.
I wish I could believe this. But if you take a look at the Mother Jones database that I presented earlier, the data refutes this statement. While the number of mass murders using firearms is still quite small, the frequency is increasing. 2018 had the most mass murder incidents involving guns in our country’s history, with 12. 2017 is second, with 11. If what you say is true, those numbers should be decreasing, right?
The population is increasing. By the same token, I could probably* say that infant mortality is at the highest it has ever been in all of history just since, even though the rate has declined massively from where it was a hundred years ago and through all of history before that, the total population is so much significantly larger than it has ever been in history, I wouldn’t be surprised if in the raw count there were more infant deaths in 2018 than in 1208.
Though, I’ll make it more clear that I don’t believe that cars are making any strong headway against guns yet. I meant that I would expect that we would see it starting to do so over the period of the next decade.
- Maybe not, I haven’t looked up the numbers. But hopefully you understand my point.
I should also note that two data points, one year apart, is not statistically meaningful. If I ate 3000 calories on Monday and 2000 calories on Tuesday, that’s not strongly indicative that I’m now fasting on Saturday and will never eat again.
I see your point. But, if this is true, then the number of mass murder by firearms should have increased every year since the statistic was first recorded. After all, the population has increased in each of those years. But there was a sharp dropoff in the years 2000-2005, and then the number started climbing again. And in 2012 is when the number really jumped from the previous year, which I think bolsters my earlier point about the influence of social media.
I used those two years to illustrate that the number is as high as its ever been and is still climbing.
The fact that the number has increased each year for the past 7 years is not statistically meaningful?
Well, Mass shootings are quite different.
Most killings are done by criminals with handguns ("assault weapons are very very rarely use, like well less than 5%), usually during the commission of a crime or during a gang war. The violent crime rate is going down, we are actually doing a good job of reducing violent crime. We can fight violent crime by more jobs, better economy, better laws and police. Banning assault weapons wouldnt reduce violent crime at all. Better background check requirements would reduce criminals getting hold of guns.
Most mass shootings are done by maladjusted non criminals, who more often use “assault weapons”, like 75% of the time. We can prevent more mass shootings by better mental health and getting the media to stop glorifying the killers. Banning assault weapons would likely reduce the body count. Better background check requirements would not reduce mass shootings.
The two problems are wide apart. And no constitutional gun control measure would reduce mass shootings (altho, as i said, it might reduce the body count).