There absolutely were NOT cheap, widely available 30-round-magazine-fed semiautomatic rifles a hundred years ago. Such weapons were expensive and did not have magazines that large.
The first popular semiautomatic rifle in the USA, the Remington Model 8, you could get a 20-round magazine for… only if you were a police officer.
Moore may have made that point but he didn’t prove it.
Canadians have a great many guns, but absolutely do NOT have many high capacity semiautomatic rifles. Bolt action hunting rifles and shotguns are common as hell, but are not nearly as good for killing a lot of people.
The AR-15 and variants are restricted in Canada, as is any magazine with a capacity higher than 5. Handguns are very difficult to get. You also need to go through a more careful process to be allowed to buy firearms at all. It’s not expensive (actually, I think the cost is a nominal fee, like twenty bucks) but RCMP officers actually call references.
Moore didn’t really go into ANY of this.
Sure, but you’re just repeating what we all know, that the majority currently oppose repeal of the 2nd Amendment. Of course.
But that doesn’t speak to the question of whether repealing the 2nd is ultimately the only way to solve the problem. If that’s the case, people should honestly face up to the consequences of the choice they have made. In other words: no more deflecting by implicating mental health, the failure of the FBI, the fact that the Swiss own a lot of guns too. Fundamentally, this is the society Americans have chosen by valuing the freedom to own guns so highly, and nothing will change unless that value system changes. Expect more of the same forever unless you change your minds and repeal the 2nd Amendment.
I’m not sure why the idea of removing *all *guns from the U.S. is even under discussion. Try for something plausible, like a Canadian-level of gun ownership and use.
We have a fair number of guns, we’re just stricter on who can buy them and how to carry them. Surprisingly, our cites, despite supposedly being “target rich environments”, are pretty safe. Heck, the entire island of Montreal in the entire year of 2017 recorded 24 homicides. There are individual Amercan schools with comparable numbers.
There are entire US states with fewer homicides than that a year, though. Mine’s one. We have 1.3 million people and in a bad year we have 15 murders in the entire state. We have a whole lot more guns than Montreal, though, and despite having few murders we have more guns per capita than 36 other states do.
What we’re lacking in, however, is both urban areas with high population density, and poverty. How does the poverty rate in Montreal compare to US states with lots of murders like California, Texas, Florida, and Illinois?
This. What else has changed?
I have two theories for the rise in mass shootings :
a. The mainstream belief is starting to shift away from religion. (because the evidence says religion is bullshit and this has been slowly eroding religious belief, I think).
If you don’t believe in any punishment after your death, and you feel you have been screwed over or mistreated and want to kill yourself, why *not *take other people with you in a blaze of ‘glory’?
If you are just about to die anyway, and you do not think that there will be any consequences, good or bad, for your actions, this does make a kind of sense, at least for people who are also psychopaths.
Conversely, this might provide evidence for the theory as to why religion is so prevalent : it may provide a critical function in forming organized societies by deluding the members of that society into a different set of values. It may be a “helpful delusion”.
b. The news cycle. Every year, 42,000 people commit suicide. The news has permeated itself into everything, and also become much more virulent and optimized for clickbait. It is possible that these people would have quietly killed just themselves, were it not for learning that all they need to do is obtain a readily available firearm and lots of ammo, and they can play first person shooter until they die.
The thing is, I expect the news has gotten worse. It’s more clickbait worthy, refined over years of A:B testing. Now there’s actual video inside the school, taken from relatively high quality cameras that are in smartphones. This incident is being covered in far more lurid and gory detail than the original columbine massacre because the cameras are better and the news is more aggressive at monetizing clicks.
It’s possible that this will spur on more shootings, and so on. I wonder how the escalation would stop? Will mass shootings become so common, so humdrum, that the news just stops covering them?
I’d have to do some research, but I’m pretty confident the social safety net in Montreal (and Quebec and Canada generally) has fewer holes than any comparable U.S. venue, so while we have poverty and even homelessness, some of the harsher edges are rounded off.
One element we seem to be lacking is a climate of fear. I gather that was the main conclusion of Bowling for Columbine.
Pretty much every other industrialized nation has already done that shift before you and did not become more violent as a result. Even within the U.S., you could compare states that are less religious than others, and see if this correlates with more violence and mass shootings. I am not confident that it does.
I don’t think anyone needs the news cycle to learn the mechanics of firearm-suicide but there might be something to the “climate of fear” concept and steady exposure to shock without a calming period. If violence happens to you personally (and it doesn’t kill you), you have years to recover as best you can with help from your social support system. In contrast, the news will blare “MULTIPLE DEATHS IN GUN RAMPAGE” and there is no recovery period before they’re on to “MULTIPLE DEATHS IN THIS OTHER UNRELATED GUN RAMPAGE”. It’s a constant diet of adrenaline with no dietary fiber to aid digestion.
Personally, I cope by tapping the internet’s blessedly infinite supply of cat videos.
I haven’t ever seen Bowling for Columbine., mostly because I don’t like his filming style, so I can’t comment on that at all. Canada mostly benefits from different social pressures and conditions and is not great on the front of mental health services although it is in a better spot than the US.
The two options I see being pushed are not possible in this country. Those being the removal of from society or tieing background checks to non adjudicated mental health assessments.
In the case of Florida, it seems to be related to a failure to prosecute that individual under laws which could have possibly flagged a background check and a lack of mental health services mixed with a stigma against seeking help.
There are several other aspects that may be related, like the copy-cat nature of these crimes as a result of mass media coverage and public preoccupation with the subject (which I guess I am participating in here)
But as Canada is brought up I will provide this cite.
https://ontario.cmha.ca/documents/violence-and-mental-health-unpacking-a-complex-issue/
It is most likely the lack of access to services, stigma and other limiters do prevent people from receiving effective treatment. The latest Florida case there were lots of warning signs, and it sounds like the nother and the school often called police for assistance. And it seems like all of the actions tended to increase isolation and anxiety from the perpetrator.
I know everyone wants some big simple answer to all of these problems, but they are not simple. There is no real correlation between the overall access to firearms to the murder rate in the US unfortunately. This doesn’t mean that removing guns wouldn’t save lives, just that it doesn’t address the actual causes.
I am sure that there are several hard to accomplish elements in play here, but another point to consider is that Queen Victoria, who had several people fake or attempt assassination, and these decreased after laws were passed that reduced the ability of perpetrators to become infamous.
The point is that a sigma against help seeking and a lack of services does probably contribute to acts of violence like mass shootings, but it is important that it is not the fact that someone is suffering from a mental illness that makes them violent. The anxiety, stress and isolation of being debased due to having a condition, or the fear of disclosure are probably more related to the acts than the illness itself.
Other way around, surely? The State would claim that X is not fit to own a firearm and have to prove that to a judge. Otherwise someone could just say that no one is of sufficient mental health to own a gun. You know, just like the laws that were used to exclude black voters.
I don’t have any cites and am not a medical or psychiatric professional, but I imagine the United States’ gun violence problem is influenced by a number of factors. Mental health problems and easy gun availability are just two, but there are probably others. I fear that none of these factors are anything Republicans would be interested in doing anything about.
No Republican pol is going to want to add any restrictions to gun availability. They are doing everything to weaken Obamacare rather than improve on it, so they are certainly not going to want to increase funding for mental health treatment. They also want to strip away what little safety net the US has as far as food stamps, welfare, Medicaid, etc.
I really feel like a stronger social safety net for providing medical care, mental health care, food, housing, schooling/job searching aid, etc., would help people on the fringes who otherwise don’t see any way out from their problems and are angry at society for sweeping them aside and then on top of that possibly have mental illness or psychopathy. Environment can contribute to mental illness too, IIUC.
It wouldn’t help in every case. The Las Vegas shooter apparently had the monetary resources to get whatever help he needed yet did not access it. I don’t know if this Cruz guy would have been amenable to treatment or not. Not sure what treatment he already had. It’s probably not possible to 100% accurately predict whether someone who says “I want to be a school shooter” is just trolling You Tube or is actually a danger.
Not sure what the FBI could have done even if they had pursued before he could commit the shooting. Would/could they have remanded him to psychiatric treatment before he had shot anyone and was just talking about it? Would he have been held long enough for doctors to realize he shouldn’t be out in the community? Could he be thrown into long term residential care without having committed a crime? Bunch of stuff I would be curious to know.
I just do feel the occurrences could be reduced, probably not eliminated, but that will never happen with all the NRA and Koch owned so-called representatives/senators in Congress.
To me, the parents and grandparents of today’s schoolchildren have failed them. I hope that those children will find solutions that we cannot or will not provide.
I am greatly encouraged by the eloquence and passion of those students who spoke out during the past few days. Perhaps they will lead a modern children’s crusade on this issue. They deserve to be safe.
Oops. Wrong thread but thought still holds.
Right. It isn’t a crime to *seem *like a crazy school shooter. You need very specific statements of intent. Some kid who brags about all his rifles and remarks on how glorious it would be if someone “shot this place up”? Not a crime.
Only very specific statements, like “next Monday you better watch out”, or if the kid had collected illegal weapons, or if the kid had actually written down his plans in a diary would be a crime.
Of course, the school can *expel *someone for making people uncomfortable, even if the police can’t send him to prison. Which ironically, seems to have cost 17 people their lives. (it’s quite possible that the expulsion set the kid off, provided the casus belli to actually act)
As for being crazy, most state mental hospitals were closed. Now it’s basically just prisons. And you can’t imprison someone who hasn’t been convicted of a crime.
It looks like a society where the political class sold the moral compass and banked the cash.
Blaming guns or mental health is so last-century. FBI’s Russia investigation was to blame for the Florida shooting.
For the record, if you graph this table of access to mental health care (using the 2014 values):
To this graph (using the 2016 values):
Then the best fit line of those x,y coordinates says that the best state for mental care would be predicted to have half the murders of the state with the worst mental care. The average state would only have a reduction in homicide by about 1/4th.
The national homicide rate is 5.3 per 100,000, meaning that about 16,000 people were killed in 2016. With equivalent mental health care as the best state spread to every other state, we would expect that number to reduce to 12,000. 4,000 lives would be saved.
It should be noted, though, that even though the graph does look decent and a visual inspection leads one to trust that this prediction isn’t complete baloney, you would really want to throw in average income by state and/or gini coefficient by state as a third variable before making any real predictions on the data. (But I’m feeling lazy today.)
The total number of gun homicides in 2014 (according to the Wikipedia) was 8,124.
Now if a gun ban would reduce gun homicide, then the 8,124 gun homicides would go away.
However, gun homicide is a fake statistic. It’s of no value to reduce gun homicides if it doesn’t impact homicides. The only positive links that I have found (positive meaning “more guns = more deaths”) between gun ownership rates and homicide are in 3rd world countries. In the US, gun ownership rates are negatively correlated to homicide rates and on average across the globe gun ownership is generally correlated to lower homicide rates.
Basically, banning guns doesn’t save lives. At best it makes people kill each other with other weapons - bombs, knives, trucks, etc. At worst, it encourages criminals to use force against the innocent (or whatever real-world factor it is that is causing the negative correlation).
So the option isn’t 8,124 lives versus 4000. It’s 0 or 4000.
Also, lithium in the water supply would save lives. It’ll prevent suicides as well.
How 'bout that. I must have missed all the school bomb, knife, truck killings here in south London.
Not sure that would work out. Mineral Wells, Texas appears to have lithium in its water supply. It’s definitely present in all the well water.
Quote:
…the most famous mineral water brand was Crazy Water from the Crazy Well. The well is currently located at the Crazy Water Retirement Hotel. The well received its name because— the story goes—a demented elderly lady drank from the Crazy Well twice every day and overcame her illness. The crazy lady story could well be true, because in Mineral Wells most of the water wells have a significant amount of lithium, which is used to treat various mental and mood disorders today.
I actually drive there and buy water from the Crazy Water well today, but because it settles my problematic digestive tract, not for any mental reasons. (I buy #4, if it matters)
But it appears the crime rate there isn’t just higher than normal, it’s noticeably higher.
'Nuther quote:
…categories are property crimes and violent crimes. According to the table, the overall crime rate is 53% higher than the average of crimes committed in Texas. It is also 73% higher than the national average.
The UK has better mental health care, a lower gini coefficient, a more homogenous society, the ability to “section” people against their will, and a smaller population count than the US.
Also: