Is there X amount of mass shootings that would change gun supporters' minds, or is that the wrong way to think?

Based on polling yes, do I think that could translate to legislation, outside of blue states? Probably not, but that’s because a lot of legislation and voting right now is tied up in this “war” against the other side, so people will reflexively just refuse to do anything the other side wants. That is why I have tried to repeatedly point out that very little can be done for now, but history suggests we will have a period in which politics may not be so acrimonious on every issue.

Thanks for the response. This period, I fear, will not come in my lifetime.

No surprise - a poor, highly unequal country with a history of racial violence, a fairly recent insurgency and still flooded with guns, both from its own past as well as wars in neighbouring states.

What does that have to do with the actual laws, though?

You could be 12 (ETA: I should have gone with 13), with a tremendous genetic predisposition for longevity, and I would still agree with you :frowning:

The young man is NOT confused. From what I’ve been able to glean from the news reports he had put a lot of thought into his position and spent quite a bit of time setting up for murdering people. He’s not mentally ill. He’s pretty damn clear on his beliefs and actions. Nope, not confused. He is a bigot, though. And a criminal.

His “point”, such as it is, is that in comparing the US with other countries when assessing rates of gun violence, the US absolutely must be compared with South Africa, Venezuela, Brazil, Honduras, and other fundamentally broken countries with a long history of internal violent strife and/or widespread criminality. Because, you see, if you compare rates of gun violence in the US with other similar wealthy developed countries, the US is always dead last in such ratings, with more per-capita gun-related deaths than any realistically comparable country by a very wide margin. It is, in fact, quite literally off the chart if the chart were scaled to just wealthy developed countries.

He has made this so-called “point” – that one must compare the US to all these poor war-torn strife-ridden countries – many times in these debates, regardless of how often the ridiculousness of such comparisons has been pointed out to him, to the extent that I see no point in further engaging him on it.

Wait, do you think the Commonwealth is wholly in Europe?

The U.S. doesn’t easily compare to South Africa, but it is definitely closer in many problems it has had to South Africa than say…Sweden or Germany is. Choosing to ignore that reality is a political decision that seeks to portray America’s homicide problem as being solely because we have guns and other countries severely restrict them, sans any compelling causal evidence.

Oh, if only I were 12 again. Or maybe not.

Actually, I do have a genetic predisposition for longevity. Dad died at age 95, Mom at 101. I’m now 69. So I may be around for a while. I’m not real fond of what I think the future holds.

No one is trying to make the claim that America’s manifestly huge problems with both homicide in particular and gun violence in general are “solely” due to guns. One might conjecture that the sheer massive quantity of guns and their easy availability compared to the rest of the first world certainly suggests that this is a significant contributing factor to America’s problem with gun violence, but this is not the argument under discussion here.

The argument under discussion is what countries in the world are a fair basis of comparison with the US when assessing the success or failure of America’s gun policies. It’s obviously not meaningful to compare it with Lesotho, El Salvador, Honduras, Nigeria, Colombia, Guatemala, or indeed virtually any of the countries that do worse on gun violence metrics than the US. The meaningful comparisons are with countries that have similar wealth, economies, and values.

Does South Africa qualify in terms of those important similarities? Just because both the US and SA had (and have) a history of racism hardly makes them “similar” in any meaningful way, as those histories are very different and there are vast disparities between their wealth and economies. The per-capita GDP of the US is around $64,000. The per-capita GDP of South Africa is just over $5,000. That’s less than the per-capita GDP of Albania, and much less than, say, Bosnia or Botswana. And you say the US is “closer” to South Africa than to countries in western Europe?

The US numbers are so awful that even South Africa has a lower per-capita total gun-related death rate than the US, although SA’s gun homicide rate is much higher.

If you want to blame the effects of slavery and racism on America’s gun violence problems, I would argue that Canada is a much closer match. Are you aware that Canada had slavery for nearly 200 years? That we still have problems with racism against both Black and indigenous peoples? That, other than developing our own unique identity in many aspects, we have largely adopted American traditions in the broad evolution of our culture? And yet, by getting our act together with respect to strong gun control over the years, we compare pretty favourably with similar countries like those in western Europe, and with Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and other developed first-world nations. The US manifestly and very dramatically does not.

I don’t want to get into a debate right here about cause and effect, but let’s at least get our facts straight and do apples-to-apples comparisons, and reach conclusions based on the observation that the US numbers are a huge statistical outlier.

This may be the big disconnect, simply put gun owners (myself included) largely don’t see homicide rates (gun or otherwise) as a failure of gun policy. We see it as a failure on crime policy broadly, which has many inputs. You’re intrinsically linking legal gun ownership with illegal gun crimes, and that we reject because we take no moral responsibility for someone using a tool immorally, someone outside of our control.

I think most gun owners would certainly concede some number of excess deaths each year can be related to having lots of guns, I do not think it is nearly as clearcut as you would like to suggest that much of the difference in our homicide rates between Canada and America are meaningfully attributable to gun policy. I know you really really want to believe it, but you don’t have any true proof of it, just speculation.

It doesn’t take very many illegal guns to commit a lot of murders–look at Mexico, which has far fewer total guns than America and more murders, and most of that with illegal guns. Colombia has the same problem. I just reject this idea that gun policy drives crime, sorry but I do. Guns don’t make people criminals. On the margins they make criminality more lethal, but that still requires an active decision by a criminal to get a gun, usually illegally.

I don’t pretend to have an easy explanation for why America is a more violent country than other wealthy countries–but I know that it is. You choose to believe ownership of legal firearms by people that never commit violent crimes is a major driver of this, I simply don’t see compelling evidence that is true.

I also firmly want it understood—I am 100% willing to trade more deaths for gun rights. This is because I do not believe in a pure utilitarian ethos that maximum death minimization is always the right path. I value liberty and individual rights. You can disagree with that, but that’s a matter of political opinion, not objective right and wrong. There are many ways we could significantly lower various types of deaths in America.

A national speed limit of 65 mph. A requirement that all new cars have BAC sensors in the steering wheel (technology already exists for this.) Banning of all tobacco products. Prohibition of alcohol sales. A tax on sugary drinks and high calorie fast food and snack items.

I would be against each and every one of those policies, because I am simply not in favor of restricting people’s liberty to produce a utilitarian death minimization result.

Yes. it seems so. But it would be close. However, considering all voters, it is fairly popular.

Nope. My point was some poster bragged how great South Africa’s laws are.

However, you won’t include any nations from South America, Africa or Asia, are you saying that outside the Commonwealth and Western Europe all nations are fundamentally broken countries with a long history of internal violent strife and/or widespread criminality? Every African nation, every South american country, and so forth? You seem to want to cherrypick a half dozen of so nations to prove a point as to worldwide homicide rates. There are like 100 nations you know.

Yes, and those Western European nations didn’t have a big murder problem before gun laws, either. It ain’t gun laws that make those nations less violent.

Interesting case in point, around 1910 the United States had around 5.5x the homicide rate of England & Wales. Note that this was before either country had passed any significant firearms regulations. England had passed the Pistol Act in 1903, that required you to have a Gun License to purchase a pistol from a dealer or to carry one outside of your private property. However, in effect the 1903 Pistol Act did very little because a Gun License could be purchased on demand at any post office and there wasn’t really much more to the process. The Pistol Act also only regulated Pistols, and also did not limit private party sales at all. The first significant gun laws in England passed in 1920 with the Firearms Act.

In 1930 after 10 years of the Firearms Act being in effect in England, the U.S. had about…11.5x the homicide rate of England, which is pretty significant. However by the 40s the ratio was down to around 4x, and has fluctuated since then. It could be suggested the Firearms Act caused English homicide rates to get even better than American rates (although again, they were already 5.5x better), but if that was true it didn’t persist into the 40s when the multiplier was back to around where it was in 1910.

Oddly even without any real firearm regulations until 1920, England & Wales were simply much less homicidal than the United States. Almost like homicides are not driven by gun poilcy.

No! Say it ain’t so! :wink:

The thing is, crime policies are not all that dramatically different (to keep the discussion simple) between the US and Canada. But gun policies are dramatically different. Given these facts, how do you account for the great difference in gun violence outcomes?

This recurring mantra about harmless legal gun ownership is a mirage, a convenient obfuscation. I said it before but I’ll say it again: every legal gun owner is law-abiding and harmless until he isn’t. Every human is subject to irrationality and violence (or suicide) given enough anger, jealousy, fear, or any of the other myriad human stressors that can affect anyone, perhaps enhanced by alcohol or drugs. Further, every legal gun owner also contributes to the problem by presenting the potential for that gun to be stolen, or sold to someone not so “law-abiding”, or – as has happened far too often – falling into the hands of a child who kills another child, or herself. Yes, I know, it can never happen to you, or to me. Because we’re careful and law-abiding. That’s just what every one of those parents who lost a child believed, too. Including the mother of the Sandy Hook shooter.

So quite simply, as the number of guns in circulation grows, the probability of all of those things increases accordingly. And we have the results we see today.

Which brings us to this:

Let me cut to the chase to avoid an overly long post. I mentioned in my previous post that Canada would be a good basis for comparison, because we’ve broadly adopted American traditions in the evolution of our culture, while developing our own unique identity in many aspects. One of those cultural aspects is building a society commonly referred to as a social democracy. Social democracy in my view is not just an economic policy, although that’s important, and is what gave us universal single-payer health care. It’s also a principle of governance that recognizes the fact that individual liberties are a zero-sum game. Put in context here, it means that your individual liberty to play with guns has to be balanced by my individual liberty to freely go about in public places without fear of getting shot, to send my child to school without fear of the school being shot up, and to live in safe neighbourhoods free of gang warfare and stray bullets.

I don’t know if I can claim that our strong gun control has been solely responsible for our relative degree of success in achieving those things, and we have certainly not achieved them perfectly, though many of those problems are due to gun smuggling from the US where apparently (from our point of view) anybody and their dog can get a handgun or ten. But we have, by and large, mostly achieved them, and if things other than gun control have helped, I would venture that those things are other aspects of a social democracy that balances individual liberties with the broader public interest of maintaining a peaceful and just society.

It’s a choice that we made, and that most other similar countries have also made. If Americans want to make a different choice, it’s their prerogative and none of my business (except for the gun smuggling problem). But if they are going to adhere to an extremist doctrine that individual liberties are absolute, and that the right to shoot beer cans off a fence post is more important than a child’s life, then the gun violence problem will never be solved. It’s certainly never going to be solved by any of the ridiculous suggestions we sometimes hear, usually from Republicans, like improving mental health care to try to reduce the number of certifiable lunatics wandering around armed to the teeth, or arming schoolteachers.

Wait until a bunch of militant black people start shooting influential and powerful conservative leaders, then we’ll get gun control.

Thats about it though. Guns are to a large degree a metaphor for insecurities about race and masculinity. People view the deaths as a price they’re willing to pay to hold onto that security blanket in a world they find scary.

Bullshit. I also would not find it in any way useful to include in such a comparison countries like Singapore, Hong Kong, Romania, Azerbaijan, or Zimbabwe, all of which have some of the lowest per-capita gun death rates in the world. It may seem to help my argument but it’s an almost completely useless comparison.

What I want is to look at a valid sample with the fewest confounding variables, to compare wealthy first-world democracies that are economically and culturally similar to the US, without any bias or advance consideration of what their gun stats might be – countries that are, you know, actually comparable. Your ridiculous accusations of “cherry-picking” are really getting old.

Did “some poster”? I must have missed that.

Mmm, what happened in the '20s that could have contributed to increased violence in the USA, I wonder. It surely couldn’t have been Prohibition, because that would apparently lower deaths.

But are you against driving licenses? Because most Americans would be in favor of that level of gun regulation, and if you oppose gun licensing on libertarian grounds it seems to be an inconsistency.