Perhaps because your numbers are wrong? Time magazine contradicts your statement that there were no mass shootings from 1987-1990.
Do most high school students have the connections to buy something like that on the black market? I don’t really know shit about how the black market works. I’m assuming most high school students know someone who can at least get them weed. Those people may or may not know someone who can get them coke or heroin. If AR-15s were a black market item, would these same individuals really overlap with the kind of people who illegally sell firearms? Are teenage would-be school-shooters really going to try to make connections with outlaw bikers or gang members or whoever the hell else it is who sells illegal guns?
I know very little about the specifics of the gun debate. It is my understanding that one point of discussion is “Incrementalism” - making many, many little changes over time to have a cumulative effect. Pro NRA folks fight any law to avoid that incrementalist effect.
And yes, there is truth to the concept. No one change can transform the currently-wide-open access in place now. It must be incremental. Each step matters. Banning AR-15s may not impact more than a fraction of scenarios, but they are a step in a good direction.
Wrong.
There was the ESL shooting in 1988.
In 1989, there was the Cleveland Elementary School shooting in Stockton, California.
That same year, there was also the Standard Gravure shooting in Louisville, Kentucky.
In 1990, you had the Las Cruces bowling alley massacre in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Also in 1990, you had the GMAC massacre in Jacksonville, Florida.
Care to comment on any of that, Ashtura?
Me neither. You’d have to ban or limit all semi-automatic guns in order to make a significant reduction.
In my understanding (from reading and from serving in the military and qualifying on various firearms, though I did not see combat), what makes the AR-15 style rifle a particularly effective in school shootings and other mass shootings are the following characteristics:
- Maneuverability and ease of aiming due to size and shape (16-20" barrel, pretty much a carbine length – accurate for distances likely in large indoor environments [classroom, gymnasium, cafeteria, etc.] while small enough to easily maneuver and aim at new targets)
- Large magazine size, meaning that reloading (and thus a significant pause in which targets can escape or fight back) is less frequent
- High-powered ammunition resulting in significantly deadlier wounds than pistol calibers
- Semi-automatic action (single finger pull = single bullet comes out, without need to “cock” or pump the weapon)
In my understanding, all of these characteristics are available in many other weapons, though AR-15 style rifles are, by far, the most common weapons that combine all three.
ISTM that there are regulations that, if successful, could reduce the body counts of future shootings without reducing the capacity to hunt or defend one’s home. For example, magazine sizes could be restricted to 10 for civilian weapons (or for rifle-caliber weapons, or other variations). In my understanding, 10 shots between reloads is enough for home invasions short of zombie attacks or The Purge. Rifle calibers could be restricted to weapons with barrel lengths of greater than 24 inches. Semi-auto action could be outlawed for weapons of carbine length (i.e. only pistols or long-barreled rifles can be semi-auto).
I’m not sure if any of these are politically feasible, and if they were feasible, I’m not sure how well they could be enforced with so many guns and magazines already out there that would violate them. But it’s certainly worth considering and discussing, and maybe even trying. Suppose all these restrictions were passed – at worst, they’d be ineffective, and essentially nothing would change. At best, school shootings would have lower body counts, and criminals would have less effective weapons at killing multiple people.
Or perhaps because the concept of ‘mass shooting’ is somewhat slippery to quantify. Those stats include any ‘random’ shooting with 4 or more killed. It’s supposed to exclude ‘gang violence’ and ‘related to other crimes’ (some ‘mass shooting’ stats don’t even do that) but the low threshold includes lots of incidents, all deplorable and ideally avoidable, which don’t fit the pattern of the incidents which cause national debate. And even among the latter school shootings are a subset of the high body count cases.
This doesn’t necessarily cut one way or the other when it comes to ‘solutions’ (no realistic solution actually exists IMO, there are policies which might somewhat ameliorate the problem). Lower body count incidents are less likely to use magazine fed semi-automatic rifles (the term ‘assault’ gun, rifle or weapon referring to civilian semi-auto rifles needs to be dropped by serious people IMO). A fact which itself could cut either way: ‘see, banning them wouldn’t do as much as you think’ v. ‘see, if the shooter doesn’t have one at least fewer people are killed per incident’.
Anyway the further you go back, the fewer of the kind of high body count mass shootings and even 1982 isn’t really that long ago in terms of the evolution of society in various ways. Wide availability of semi-automatic rifles goes back much further than the rise of the worst of these incidents. Those rifles are pretty clearly not the cause of this phenomenon. That doesn’t however exclude the conclusion that they are a facilitating factor which could be combated, whereas the actual root causes simply aren’t solvable. I’m not saying I personally think banning sales of new ones would make much difference (I don’t think it would). And confiscating existing ones is simply not going to happen in the US (even banning new sales nationally is unlikely enough). But ‘fixing’ the decay of the family for example if one believes that’s one root cause (which I do, one root not the whole thing), that’s even more elusive than ‘ban guns in general’.
WAG here, but it seems to me that school shooters don’t become school shooters overnight. The ones we know about built up stockpiles. I imagine it was something they obsessed over. If you have an obsession, you will find the ways and means.
Search for “suicide fad” and “copycat suicide”, and you’ll find lots of documentation that publicizing these things spawns imitators- mostly by people who were disturbed to begin with, but who were given inspiration. I’d say that what’s really changed since ~1990 is the rise of the Web, social networking especially with smartphones, and the 24-hour cable news cycle. That tracks the massacre trend much more closely than any increase in guns or population.
I’m reminded of the “fad” for anarchist bombings and assassinations that occurred towards the end of the 19th century. What’s different today, apart from much improved conditions for the middle and lower classes, is that it’s not “trendy” anymore.
Exactly the same thing happened with airline hijacking. After the first ones to Cuba got lots of press, everyone wanted to do it. It is not like there was a great increase in love for Castro at the time. Fortunately there was no NRA arguing against security checks, so they addressed the problem without worrying about root causes.
It wasn’t perfect, of course, but tne number of incidences decreased a lot.
Instead of banning the weapons in question, why just not require them to be stored in registered firing ranges, where they can be used for practice or for fun whenever desired. They are not that useful for home defense, If you think hunting is a sport involving skill, they are useless for true hunting also.
This way we don’t confiscate guns, just require them to be stored safely and properly.
And they can be released back to their owners when the Commies or zombies invade, which should satisfy the nutcases out there.
Banning the AR-15 wouldn’t in itself significantly reduce the amount of mass shootings. I would still support a ban on semi-auto assault type weapons though. America has a gun fetish culture, which the reason our instance of mass shootings is 10 to 1 the ratio of other developed cultures. If we could agree on keeping hand guns and hunting rifles with a ban for anyone who has a history of violence we would be on our way to less shootings.
My apologies, I was looking at the wrong chart.
So, there were 5 incidents of mass shootings in my high school years. 4 years.
There were 34 in the last three months.
Are we really gonna say that’s because “more guns” and “more people”? Proportionately, it does not add up.
Nitpick. There were at least 5.
I agree. Americans have always had lots of guns. My friends and I took our shotguns and rifles to school (we kept them in our vehicles) so we could hunt together after school. Nobody gave it a second thought.
The 24-hour news channels and sensationalism is driving this pattern, IMO.
I’m guessing you don’t live in a rural area. The vast majority of people who live in rural areas don’t use “registered firing ranges”, they shoot in their back yards, on farms, and at non-commercial outdoor ranges.
As for the AR-15 not being useful for home defense or hunting, that’s partially true, but not completely.
Mass shootings are primarily a product of our nation’s failure at identifying and treating mental disease.
That guy in Florida is a textbook example. Dozens of police calls and no one cared or did jack shit until he massacred people.
Holmes, the Denver theater shooter had obvious mental problems. The university counselor had very grave concerns. He’d just been kicked out of graduate school and banned from their property. He still wired his apartment with explosives and massacred people at the theatre.
The list goes on. The few exceptions had either a radical religious agenda or other agenda understood only by them.
The killing won’t stop until the system is reformed. We have to identify these people earlier and protect society.
As a Canadian looking in how opposed would he US be to implementing gun control like Canada?
Here’s how it could work:
If you want to purchase a firearm, you need a permit (In Canada this is a Possession and Acquisition License [PAL]). To get this permit you take (and pass) a 1 day safety course then send you application to the RCMP. They do a background check and if you pass you get your PAL.
This permit allows you to purchase non-restricted firearms and ammunition.
If you already own guns and don’t see yourself buying any more guns you could get your “Possession Only License”. This allows you to possess firearms (non-restricted) and buy ammunition. When this system was introduced in Canada in the late 90’s anyone could get their POL, but after a certain date (12 months I believe) they no longer offered it.
Restricted firearms include all handguns and I believe certain semi-automatic weapons.
If you want to own/purchase restricted weapons, you get your restricted permit. This is another 1 day course you have to pass, and another background check. I believe this check is deeper (you have to include contact information for your current spouse, and any past spouses, significant others etc.).
Now every time you want to purchase a firearm (at a gun shop, supermarket, gun show, private sale, etc.) you need to present your permit before you can purchase your firearm. The seller should record your PAL information for their records and that’s it.
Will this stop all nut-jobs from getting their hands on firearms? No. But I think it could significantly cut down on the number of people who don’t own guns that go off the deep end from getting them in the first place. The whole process probably takes 4-8 weeks to get your PAL. If you’re unstable that should show up in the background and reference check.
I agree this doesn’t stop someone who already has their PAL and decides to go on a rampage, but you’re not going to find a solution that fixes your gun problem all in one shot.
And before people start spouting off with “this is my constitutional right to own a gun, I don’t need to register!”. Well it’s my understanding in the United States, you need to register to vote in an election. How is this different? Yes you need to take a 1 day course and pass a test and a background test is done. But even your own President when asked why he wants to arm all teachers said “I don’t want to arm ALL teachers, not everyone is adept at handling a firearm”. This process would keep the non-adept people from owning firearms.
I think this along with outlawing high-capacity magazines would make a huge difference. You want an AR-15? Sure here you go! But the magazine can only hole 5 rounds. If you can’t stop a “deer” with 5 rounds when you “hunt” with your AR-15 you better spend more time at the range. Because that’s what you want an AR-15 for right?
MtM
That’s a piece of the puzzle, but not the entire issue. If nuclear weapons were as easy to get as firearms, at some point a disturbed or extremist person would set off a nuclear weapon. Thankfully, they’re extremely hard to acquire. If firearms were as hard to acquire as nuclear weapons, then disturbed or extremist people would probably never shoot anyone.
That latter part isn’t achievable, but that doesn’t mean that no regulation or restriction is possible – obviously certain restrictions have worked for decades. We don’t see many grenade attacks, because grenades are a lot harder to get than guns. We don’t see many rocket attacks. We don’t see many attacks with fully automatic weapons. Regulation and restriction can be effective in some cases. Perhaps some further regulations (like I suggest a handful of posts prior) could reduce the damage and body count of these attacks.
No. The “easy availability of guns” is NOT the “root cause.” If that were true there would have been far more school shootings back in the early '70 when I was in high school and there were far fewer gun laws restricting who could buy and/or use them. In fact, it used to be common for many boys (including myself) to actually bring guns to school (left in vehicles) during the fall hunting season so we could go hunting immediately after school let out in the afternoon. Funny thing, despite all the guns, school shootings were virtually unheard of. Stop blaming the weapon and put the blame where it belongs: On the shooter.
Firstly, a .223 is a terrible hunting round for almost anything in the mainland US. Feel free to challenge me on it, but it’s really only good for yotes and I personally would use a 22-250. I know that some people use them for deer, those people are either cruel, idiots or just trying to prove a point.
To a larger point, I would go so far as to say that all semi-automatic weapons are unnecessary for mainland US hunting and with rare exception dangerous. The only time I think that a semi-automatic is useful is pig hunting when you have a spotter and a solid knowledge of your shooting lanes and the ability not to get excited and go outside of them. The risk isn’t worth the reward.
I’m still old enough to remember that the old hunters thought that the AR series was a joke. When they were coming out in the 70s and 80s they called them ‘plastic guns’ and I can remember specifically hearing, “If you want to play soldier, join the army” in reference to people that bought them. The prevailing belief was that a bolt action was more reliable and more accurate (I still think that’s true) and that wood was a superior material (not as true.) The rise of the AR and assault rifles was really post-ban when yuppie suburbanites and militia types started buying them up in fear of a renewal of the ban and future scarcity. Real hunters don’t use them and if they own them it’s for a toy at the range and not the field.
As for home defense, unless you’re defending against the zombie hordes, you’re better off with a shotgun with #4 buck. It’s not zero aim, but it’s slightly more forgiving than a rifle. The wall penetration is a myth, but it certainly has less penetration than a .223 and in a home with plaster walls likely won’t penetrate at all, and likely becomes sublethal with drywall after two walls, not perfect, but decent.