I also suspect that a large component of America’s production of mass shootings is in how our media covers it and, more recently, how teachers react.
We have studies showing that the more you report on suicides, the more suicides it will cause. Likewise, the more you report on a serial killer, the more copycats you get. The mass media’s ever increasing ejaculation every time there’s a shooting is, if you were to compare headline count to shooting count, probably correlated and probably precedes the growth of shootings. That is to say, you would probably be able to show a strong chance of causation.
And having schools teaching students how to react to a school shooting is, straight-up, implanting the knowledge into the heads of children that 1) there is such a thing and, 2) it’s normal for kids to perpetrate. Any angsty teenager with access to weapons is 10x more likely to take this to heart as soon as they learn the wondrous ways of schoolhouse murder.
In general, I’m all for freedom of speech and all of that, but it really does need to be tempered with the understanding that an increased quantity of speech - regardless of whether it’s for or against a thing - is almost universally advertising for that thing. The more you teach about racism, the more people are going to start thinking about race; the more you talk about Trump, the more people are going to start thinking about Trump; and so on. There’s a correct balance between keeping people informed about history and learning from the bad choices that our species has made in the past, and turning into a walking generator of divisiveness and pushing people towards misbehavior by daring them constantly into misbehaving. Balance is important and going too much in either direction screws things up.
(Note: Just jumping off from Stranger’s post, not arguing against it.)
I wouldn’t go so far as to say that the media feeds mass shootings but they often have little consideration for how their breathless reporting of every detail may contribute to some confused and angst-ridden person may take it as a way to garner attention.
Regardless, if children and people with mental illness did not have ready access to firearms, there would be fewer shootings, and while the reflexive response to that is that would-be killers would just shift to other weapons like knives or flammable substances like gasoline, there isn’t an epidemic of school shootings or arsons, and those means are far less convenient to sneak into a school and use to harm dozens of people. Responsible gun owners need to take responsibility for policing firearms ownership overall lest public opinion turn to an excess of restriction, and this may mean accepting rational and practicable constraints on purchasing and possessing firearms that are consistent with not ‘infringing’ in a material way on the fundamental right to own firearms.
The problem with the “armed society is a polite society” line of thinking is that you only have two hands and eyes on one side of your head. (I’s an evolutionary oversight and our genetic engineers are working tirelessly to merge octopus features with the hominid planform, but thus far the response from focus groups has been…less than favorable.)
No amount of “a good guy with a gun” would have stopped Stephen Paddock from shooting up the Route 91 Music Festival and killing fifty-eight people, nor despite the suggestions from some quarters would arming teachers be a sensible action without adverse consequences when the inevitable occurs and a student finds an unsecured or misplaced firearm in school. Carrying a firearm for self-defense is a personal choice for someone willing to undergo the necessary and ongoing training for it but it is unlikely to offer protection against a random shooter who attacks with no warning and for no reason.
I think this is right. Many gun owners hear about mass shootings or violence and think, “See? It’s a dangerous world out there. I need to be able to protect myself and my loved ones.” And they’re going to take a dim view of anyone who tries to take away what they perceive as their power to defend themselves.
And we have been over that time after time. No, guns are not designed to kill people.
They are designed for target shooting for hunting (and a lot of people in the USA, especially the Natives, still hunt for food), for collecting, police and for home security.
There are 400 MILLION guns in the USA. About 20000 are used to kill another human. If one gun in 20000 actually works for the purpose you say they are designed for, that certainly means they are not doing what they are made for.
And there it is.
And that is why honest law abiding gun owners fight any gun laws, because that is on many peoples minds- a ban, door to door confiscation, etc.
I think sales back to gunstores or to the police are pretty reasonable exclusions, no?
Not so much The strawman sales are not anywhere that the police may patrol or the public can see. They are in a hidden area, at a designated date and time, and to some pretty shady dudes,
The intent of the law was not to require transfers between private individual have a background check. That is what we need to change.
And the militia was all able bodied free adults.
Good cite, but yeah, we need to regulate the SALE of handguns (well, pretty much all guns, but…).
And very few proponents of gun control bother to read the current law of the land, which defines the “militia” as FAR, FAR more than the National Guard.
Yes, handguns. Some PDs don’t have a line to report what sort of gun.
Exactly.
Those are red flag laws, and I am in support of those IF, as the ACLU says*, we have So-called “red flag laws,” which provide for protective orders to remove guns from people who pose a significant risk to themselves or others, can also be a reasonable way to further public safety. To be constitutional, however, they must at a minimum have clear, nondiscriminatory criteria for defining persons as dangerous and a fair process for those affected to object and be heard by a court.*
Bump stocks are already illegal, and yes, those were stupid.
Sociologists have shown this to be true in the case of school shootings, at least.
Simple- voluntary “don’t name them” agreements, like currently we have to naming rape victims.
But it also seems that whenever a Democrat is about to be elected, gun sales skyrocket because of the perceived notion that regulations will soon be passed.
Yes I think so. In the extreme case I think that if every single person who drove a car got killed I would agree that I shouldn’t drive a car even though I hadn’t been killed yet. Somewhere below that extreme is a blurry line where car safety could be viewed as adequate enough to allow people to drive cars.
The availability of guns makes shootings so much easier, but I think it’s American culture that is most responsible for our elevated gun violence. I think we as a culture still worship violence, to some degree, elevating and venerating the lone ranger hero archetype, imagining that good guys with guns can always save the day. That means so many kids and men fantasize about being that good guy with a gun, and it doesn’t take much to twist that desire into radical causes, or sometimes from radical alienation and/or untreated mental illness, to the point that individuals think it’s time to go shoot a whole bunch of strangers (or sometimes acquaintances).
ISTM that mass shooting is almost like a Valhalla fantasy for many - they come to believe, through anger and alienation and internet nonsense and the media, that a mass shooting is the logical next step for whatever shitty life situation they are in.
Well it is a few hours after the Buffalo shooting and two of my relatives WHO WOULD NEVER BUY OR USE A GUN are already on WhatsApp circulating the stupid idea that the shooter would have stopped if more of the shoppers were carrying.
There is no serious/effective legislation that gun supporters will allow to pass. Even those who play lip service that they will support Biden’s suggestions think the suggestions are pointless or are actually against them when they read the details.
I’m not sure I’d call myself a gun supporter exactly; I have never had the slightest desire to own a gun myself and I don’t really understand why people do want them. However, I have often found myself at odds with other liberal Democrats on this issue, mainly because I’m 1) moderately skeptical that stricter gun control laws would work as advertised; 2) in favor of interpreting the Constitution in as broad a pro-individual-rights way as possible whenever there’s any doubt about what it means; and 3) convinced this is a losing culture-war issue and not really the hill that my party should choose to die on. So I guess I sort of qualify.
No, there isn’t an X amount of mass shootings that would change my mind, short of some unlikely hypothetical situation where mass shootings became many times more common than they are. Mass shootings are pretty much the definition of a high-salience outlier event, and I think basing public policy decisions on one’s emotional reactions to rare and unusual events is almost always a mistake. It’s the kind of thinking that has brought us fifteen years of taking our shoes off at security screenings. I’m open to changing my mind on this issue (at least on points #1 and #3, above), but it would have to be on the basis of evidence that tighter gun control laws would work and wouldn’t be so politically costly that they reduced the chances of passing other stuff that I care about more.
I live in Montana and know quite a few people who hunt for their protein, mostly deer and elk. I used to live in California and didn’t know anyone who owned a gun, let alone hunted, which is surprising considering it’s one of the highest “guns per capita” states, second only to Texas according to this.
As far as gun control goes, my friends fear their guns will ultimately be taken away by the Government (slippery slope theory) and therefore are against any gun restrictions, period. If you ever want to see reasonable gun restrictions implemented you would first have to take any possible gun confiscation off the table.
As far as mass shootings go, they see it as a big city problem. Too many people, too many nutcases, too easy to get a firearm from one source or another.
You can look at Statistica for a collection of sources on the hunting supply industry, permits and license sale, et cetera, but of course you can only make inferences from this on how much hunting is recreational versus sustenance. Given modern industrialized food production and distribution, the once common tradition of ‘putting meat on the table’ through hunting is as rare as people who actually maintain gardens and preserve vegetables that produce enough to sustain them year round versus just a hobby that provides the supplementary fresh produce in-season, but the necessity of game management is just as important a justification for hunting as is sustenance as anyone who lives in a state with a surfeit of whitetail deer can attest.
And, of course, there is the need for people to understand the “Circle of Life”.
Let Velocity speaks for themself, OK? But yes, as someone told me in an abortion thread, this mirrors the fear of pro-choicers. On this issue, people are convinced the real intention of gun control supporters is eventual nationwide absolute banning and confiscation. On that other issue, many of us are convinced the intention of pro-lifers is eventual nationwide absolute banning and criminalization, no exceptions.
Result, no consensus is reached to defuse the polarization, since we all are absolutely convinced one of the sides does not intend to ever be satisfied with a middle ground compromise (and many of them have said so out loud).