Guns, guns, and more guns. What can America do to reduce mass shootings?

Great Debates
101

Sorry, I hadn’t read your initial post in this thread. I was addressing only what you wrote in your one comment.

To address the Mother Jones data, I would say that you are probably reading it wrong.

  1. A desire to murder and the ability to murder are completely unrelated to each other. Your average murderer is caught without ever having done anything, because he’s a dumbass. Occasionally, though, he kills a dozen or more, because he has the intellect, demeanor, and free time to pull it off. A metric that is based on the sheer number of people killed is going to swing massively just based on the capability of the psychos that year. It’s pretty much just random.
  2. Or, if the metric we look at is the total number of cases in a year (rather than the total number of deaths), then you have note that we’re talking about a handful per year in a country with 300,000,000 people. If there’s a 2 in 100,000,000 chance that someone would try to execute a mass murder in a year, on average we would expect about 6 per year. That doesn’t mean that you actually get 6 every year though. You would probably expect it to fluctuate between 0 and 20, randomly. Randomness is a lot more friendly to patterns than our brain likes so we tend to find patterns in small datasets that aren’t there. It’s entirely reasonable to get 5 or 6 years in a row with low numbers and then another five with high numbers, and there’s genuinely no explanation for that divide other than random happenstance. A good video: https://youtu.be/tP-Ipsat90c
  3. I suspect that a large artifact in their data is the availability of information to them. With computers, police stations can record and find cases that match a certain search query. Probably most police stations weren’t computerized until the mid to late 90s. With the Internet, it becomes easier for journalists to find more cases. Between those two things, we would expect to see more homicides that conform to their criteria as we move ahead in time, just on the basis of the ease of discovery. I strongly suspect that their data is missing a majority of cases that have occurred during the time period they searched.
  4. The choice of a gun as the implement of murder is arbitrary. Guns are largely unrelated to the homicide rate and usually reduce it, so singling it out as a metric is silly. Why not just document “mass murder”? Why, instead, document “mass murder with a gun”? To be sure, if you keep track of mass murderers and the implements that they use, it doesn’t hurt to track the implement they use and - when there’s enough data to make a conclusion - see if it’s likely that you could reduce the rate by changing the rules around access and use of that implement (if we ignore the 2nd Amendment). But that’s at the end of the scientific processes. Our largest and most effective mass murderers used an airplane. We have had effective mass murderers use swords, arson, bombs, and other means to accomplish the same thing. I wouldn’t be surprised if arson is the most effective and common means of mass homicide being utilized today so, while the FBI probably has people scanning Facebook posts to find people talking about guns, they potentially aren’t having it looking for accelerants simply because the political focus is elsewhere, and that could be allowing people to die needlessly.
  5. Legally, not a lot has changed since 1982. We can’t expect any regulatory effects on the mass homicide by gun rate. The Internet and social media is, plausibly, a cause of increased mass homicide rates starting from the late 90s. But, at the same time, homicide rates are down since 1982 and that’s popularly hypothesized to be due to a reduction in lead fumes making people crazy and violent. It seems strange that general craziness would reduce and yet mass homicides would purely increase. Even if we accept that the Internet taps in to some murderous desire and unlocks it even better than lead does, we should see a reduction in mass homicide until the greater take-up of the internet. The dataset should look like a V not a ramp. This strongly implies that the data is incomplete.
  6. I haven’t checked the growth of the US population, but I doubt that it was 0 in 1975, so I also doubt the accuracy of the general trend of the data on that basis.

I would say that the data is probably a reasonable set of examples of mass murder. But in terms of spotting trends, the numbers are too small to be statistically significant, the data collection seems suspect, and I question the validity or usefulness of the “gun” criteria when it comes to the ultimate question of trying to save the most lives that can be saved.

102

But first- your assumptions* they present a greater danger to you and your family than not having one. * and* The fact that you own a handgun will almost never prevent someone else from killing you with a handgun,* are both untrue.

The first is based upon a discredited study where the conclusion was assumed before the study and it use a false metric to measure.

But in any case, what does this have to do with mass shootings? Read **Bone ** Post
*This thread is specifically about mass shootings, not overall gun deaths or general gun policy, though there may be overlap.

Please stick to the topic and avoid these types of hijacks. *

Yes,*Work through media, not law * will help with mass shootings if we could get the media to stop glorifying the killers.

103

To offer a recommendation beyond controlling the media, I’ll suggest (as I have before) adding dietary lithium to the water.

104

Huh? I doubt if this is what you meant, but it’s what you said. If he/she hasn’t done anything, how can he/she be a murderer?

I’m not sure that I agree. We’re in the midst of an ever-increasing upswing in frequency, but I guess we’ll have to wait another five years to see what the data tells us.

Isn’t that what this thread is discussing?

And we’ve taken some rather drastic and effective steps to ensure that it won’t happen again.

Can you back that up with any statistics? I found, via a quick Google search, seven mass murders committed in America in the past 30 years where guns weren’t used. I’m sure there are more, but that’s what I found. Two by arson, two plane hijacks, one with a truck, and two with bombs (Oklahoma City and Boston).

Again, the thread discussion is about reducing the number of mass murders committed with guns. I think the Mother Jones dataset is the most complete I’ve seen regarding this. But if you think the data cannot be trusted, then there’s really no point using it in any further discussions.

105

Poor phrasing. I mean your average individual who makes an attempt to pull off a mass murder.

By the statistics, there was zero or practically zero spousal rape before 1980.

Because of the emphasis on gun homicide, there aren’t good records of non-gun mass killings. Not being able to find them, though, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist.

Here, for example, is one that I have been able to find:

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/156232NCJRS.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjby_TPr-ziAhUJxVQKHeHgCzEQFjAMegQIAxAB&usg=AOvVaw3DgHcAu4zvcTrgqJ16_ddJ&cshid=1560632438209

They analyzed 10,000 homicide files to try and find arson-related homicides. Of that, they found 183. For our purposes the number is lower, they only identify 16 cases (on page 18) of arson that preceded death and caused more than one death. I don’t know from that how many had more than two deaths, more than three, nor more than four. But, let’s say that the number that we would consider to count as mass killings was 1.2ish. That’s 1.2 from among 10,000 homicide cases. There are about 17,000 homicides per year. Most homicide cases only involve a single victim, but some do have more than one so we’ll guess that the total number of cases is something more like 14,000 per year.

In the last 30 years, we would expect there to have been about 50.4 cases of mass murder by arson.

I don’t think it can be trusted at the level of trends.

106

Fair enough. I suspected that’s what you meant, but I wasn’t sure.

Except we know about the few number of mass murders that occurred before 1982. They tend to make headlines. Poor analogy, in my opinion.

Agreed, but the few arson cases and bombings that killed a lot of people were extensively publicized. One would think that if there are more, we would have heard about them.

Back to the topic. We aren’t discussing homicides with multiple victims. Rather, we’re talking about indiscriminate public shootings that kill or injure random strangers.

Yes, you’ve made that abundantly clear. But I still contend it’s the best dataset that is available.

107

Ah yes, I remember ye olde Caltrans maintenance yard shooting of 1997. :dubious:

Of the Mother Jones list, the only incidents that I recognize are Las Vegas Strip, Tree of Life, Orlando nightclub, Fort Hood, Columbine, Aurora Theater, and the UPS shooting from back in 1986. Notably, those all have more than 12 deaths. I don’t catch all news, but that sort of implies that 12ish is where you start to become extensively publicized.

The total number of cases with 12+ deaths in the Mother Jones dataset, over a span of 27 years, is 17.

But even among those 17, I’ve never heard of the Washington Navy Yard shooting. According to Google, it got 1/4th the attention as the Fort Hood shooting, even though they had the same number of deaths. I don’t know that I would say that it’s correct to believe that all mass homicides get extensive coverage.

https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=US&q=washington%20navy%20yard,fort%20hood

If you found 7 cases in 30 years, by just googling for a few minutes, when Mother Jones had professional journalists working on it for a few days or weeks, with multiple updates, searching for something that always gets far more press attention and is always far better documented if it involves guns and they only got to 17 that are of similar size as the ones you found…are you sure that you found everything?

If the police find a person who has been shot, they pretty well know that it’s suicide or murder and, generally, they can figure out which it is. But how often can they tell when there’s a fire death? What if they can only determine that it’s arson in 1/5th of all cases?

If you find a dead hitchhiker by the side of the road, the victim of a hit and run, how do you know that the killer doesn’t do this regularly? A good number of serial killers admitted that they would just run people over when they were out in the middle of nowhere. It’s not a single, headline making event, but the numbers add up over the life of the killer. We’re still talking about the actions of an unstable person, leading to the deaths of many.

The Hillside Strangler, as the name implied, strangled; Jake Bird mostly used an axe; William Bradford mostly strangled; Ted Bundy used blunt instruments; Charles Cullen used medicine; etc.

And sure, that’s not what we’re talking about, but why aren’t we talking about it?

Are we concerned about homicide? No, apparently we’re not interested in the actual homicide rate.
Are we concerned about homicides leading to a skewed ratio between the number of perpetrators and victims (i.e. mass murderers)? No, apparently we’re not interested in mass murderers.
Are we concerned about homicides by crazy people? No, apparently we’re not.
Are we concerned about homicides against strangers? No, that’s just the same as asking about homicides by crazy people.

Why is homicides that have the exact definition of including 1 single incident, a skewed ratio between the number of perpatrators and victims, craziness, stranger deaths, and guns a topic of discussion? Why have we blown by all of those other things? Why can’t I say that crazy people mostly don’t use guns? It’s true. Some of them strangle, some of them use fire, some use bombs, some use axes, some use cars, some use poison, some do it slowly over time, some do it all in a single burst, and so on.

To be sure, guns are popular. But they’re just a fraction. One-time incidences are just a fraction.

But do we care about death or do we care about craziness leading to death, or do we just care about guns regardless of anything?

Strangling is not a popular murder technique for crazies who want to go out all dramatic-like. But the stranglers might well be killing more people than the shooters. It may we be that if we spent $28m per year on forensics dedicated to creating better systems for identifying fibers and tracking them back to the place of purchase, that we could find stranglers a lot more easily and save more lives than we would by stopping gun murders.

What if guns are 20% of all murders by crazy people, and I can either ban guns and we figure that will prevent half of the people who would have shot someplace up from going ahead with their crime (the other half just light a dance club on fire) well then we’ve only achieved a 10% reduction in homicides. Or, I can add lithium to the water and reduce all crime by all crazy people in the country by 60%. A 60% reduction in murder by crazy people is a larger reduction in murder than 10%. We’ve just saved more lives by the simple process of not drawing an arbitrary circle on the ground and only looking inside that circle.

I want to stop MURDER.

If you get murdered, you don’t fucking care if you got shot, blown up, beaten, or injected. What makes the people who have been left grieving sad is that you’re dead and they’re never going to be able to talk to you again, not that you’ve got a lump of lead somewhere in your body.

To be sure, this is all going outside of the bounds of the definition, but the definition was invented to target guns. It will never include stranglers or axe murders or evil doctors. It disregards bombs and cars and gasoline. It’s a dishonest definition and pointing that out is not going off-topic because it’s worth saying that MURDER is what’s bad and if you’re wasting your time fighting guns instead of murder, then you’re murdering people.

I can’t give exact statistics on many things, but it absolutely the case, incontrovertibly, that you can prevent more deaths by a) lowering the GINI coefficient, and b) finding a solution to craziness. Either and both of those will also lower the number of gun deaths, but it won’t do jack-doodle to the gun ownership rate. Which matters to you more?

108

What’s ‘extensive coverage’? I would think that an incident that is covered for even a day by CNN would be considered extensive coverage. Or if I read about it in my local daily, even though the incident occurred 1000 miles from where I live. Your definition may vary.

I’ve already stated that there are probably more cases than I found. Did you find any more? And you think that the OKC bombing or the Boston bombing didn’t receive as much attention as, say, Columbine? Indiscriminate mass murder always gets a lot of press attention, no matter what the weapon used.

I would guess that everybody does, except maybe the murderers.

Lowering the number of gun deaths, obviously. I don’t believe I’ve said a damn thing about gun ownership rate. I don’t know why you brought that up.

When somebody finds a solution to craziness, I imagine it will be well received. Doubtful if it will happen in my lifetime, however.

And while I appreciate your passion about lowering the homicide rate, regardless of the means of homicide, this thread is about mass shootings. Perhaps a discussion of lowering the overall homicide rate would be better discussed in its own thread.

109

Then why are school shootings in particular a recent phenomenon?

There are eleventy-upteen stories from the 1940s and 1950s about children being allowed to have guns on school property for various reasons – ROTC, demonstrations of one sort or another, going hunting after school, etc. – and yet there were essentially no school shootings until the last 20 years.

In addition–
Why does virtually every single mass shooting occur in places that the government or corporate owners have officially declared to be a “gun-free zone”? Many malls, shopping centers, etc. have signs at every entrance “banning” weapons. So do schools. If the free availability of guns is the real problem, then why are mass shootings so overwhelmingly-disproportionately at places like that, instead of being randomly distributed at gun shops, police stations, and the like?

110

Hard to know, but my personal guess would be:

  1. We’re too far outside of our natural environment. We’re bored, don’t get enough physical labor, and have too much food energy.
  2. The genie problem. Once out of the bottle, you can’t put it back. They simply have the benefit of knowing that it’s a thing.
  3. Lack of discipline and fear of their elders.
  4. We allow crazy people to live, work, and breed successfully, through medication. Historically, the crazy person would be hidden away and die without children, be chased out of town for being violent, or beaten down until he was too broken to do anything but obey. The numbers were always being shuffled out of the gene pool as soon as they were put in. Now we preserve that and let it meet and find others. Medication doesn’t change the DNA, it just lets it continue, get worse, and command a greater percentile of the gene pool.

Either we need to go back to farming, embrace transhumanism, or accept that there are plusses and minuses to everything and overall we’re still up from where we were.

111

How come they’re never in airports past security or in sports stadiums?

112

Yeah, that is an interesting fact, especially when one considers that in 1967, there were just 1200 JROTC units in the country. But in 1992, there were 3500. In light of these stats, your argument holds no water.

And, just curious, how many after-school hunters do you think were allowed to bring their rifles and shotguns into the school building? I’m guessing the answer is zero. And a rifle locked in the pickup in the parking lot probably won’t deter a determined shooter.

113

My Dad grew up in small town Iowa. During hunting season, he would walk to school with his .410 shotgun. He’d store his gun in the Principal’s office and hunt rabbits on his way home after school.

I would bet he wasn’t the only one who did so in the 1950’s

114

Hell, I was in high school in the mid 1980s in Melbourne, Australia and schoolkids my age carried rifles on their backs to school.

115

Well, I went to high school in the late 60s in small-town Kansas. During pheasant season, it wasn’t unusual to see a dozen or more pickups in the parking lot with shotguns in the back-window rack. But nobody even considered bringing them into the building, and I doubt if it would have been tolerated.

Regardless, however, the presence of weapons on school property was not a factor in the fact that there were no school shootings fifty years ago.

116

History of School Shootings in the United States

117

I stand corrected. Thank you, Muffin.

Actually, however, this link serves to further contradict the argument put forth by Flyer. He stated that there ‘there were essentially no school shootings until the last 20 years.’ That statement is obviously wrong, according to this source.

118

Well, there’s been a sharp uptick: *According to the National School Safety Center, since the 1992-1993 U.S. school year there has been a significant decline in school-associated violent deaths (deaths on private or public school property for kindergarten through grade 12 and resulting from schools functions or activities):

1992-1993 (44 Homicides and 55 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1993-1994 (42 Homicides and 51 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1994-1995 (17 Homicides and 20 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1995-1996 (29 Homicides and 35 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1996-1997 (23 Homicides and 25 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1997-1998 (35 Homicides and 40 Deaths resulting from school shootings in the U.S.)
1998-1999 (25 Homicides from school shootings in the U.S.)
1999-2000 (25 Homicides from school shootings in the U.S.)*

119

That is the answer!! TSA everywhere.

120

I don’t think the point was that guns prevented school shootings but more along the lines of what happened in recent years (maybe more than 20) to cause a sharp uptick in school shootings?
Guns have been around the entire time.