Two words: Adam Lanza.
Two words: basically zero.
Nonononono, you are doing gun debate all wrong, there is no mention of caliber, cars, swimming pools, magazine capacity or alcohol.
You just mention a guy who lived the dream of every gun fetishist. How can we have a rational debate about guns if you don’t mention stepladders?
So now that we’re in a slightly more controlled forum for this argument, I want to talk about @Keith1 's post (#47) in which he linked A Pew Research Center article about gun deaths. The point of the OP is about mass shootings, so I want to try to focus on that, as we have posters taking the ‘all guns are bad’ and ‘all guns are innocent’ stances already.
So lets dig into the numbers, and if people want to talk about other side issues, or cite other articles, that’s fine as well. A couple of key points from the article for those who don’t want to scroll through it.
Though they tend to get less attention than gun-related murders, suicides have long accounted for the majority of U.S. gun deaths. In 2017, six-in-ten gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (23,854), while 37% were murders (14,542), according to the CDC. The remainder were unintentional (486), involved law enforcement (553) or had undetermined circumstances (338).
How many people are killed in mass shootings in the U.S. every year?
This is a difficult question to answer because there is no single, agreed-upon definition of the term “mass shooting.” Definitions can vary depending on factors including the number of victims and the circumstances of the shooting.
The FBI collects data on “active shooter incidents,” which it defines as “as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” Using the FBI’s definition, 85 people – excluding the shooters – died in such incidents in 2018.
The FBI found an increase in active shooter incidents between 2000 and 2013. The average number of incidents rose from 6.4 a year in the first seven years of the study to an average of 16.4 a year in the second seven-year period. In subsequent studies, the FBI recorded 20 active shooter incidents per year in 2014 and 2015, followed by 20 incidents in 2016, 30 in 2017 and 27 in 2018.
Yes, I’m cherry-picking quotes, just trying to put in a few bites that are directly related to the post. Because we’ve had people discuss how to define a mass-shooting, and others quibbling about whose definition was appropriate. So, if we go by numbers, there are certainly upticks in FBI defined active shooter (which is NOT the same as mass shooting, but overlap) situations over the last ten years or so. We can argue what degree that media overemphasis has on encouraging these situations, but active shooters are more frequent.
As for this year/last year, I am definitely worried, but at the same time, I don’t think anyone is going to say the last two years are by any definition normal. We’ve had a literal political insurrection, immense social and financial pressures related to lockdowns and income loss, and racial bias incited at the highest levels of government. Other posters in other threads have made the point that YES we should be concerned, yes, we should consider what we can do to change the underlying legal and social issues regarding guns, but to focus on just the last two years would be doing research on outliers. Fine if you do it in context, but not so good if you consider it the norm.
Going back to the OP -
So, @ThelmaLou - do you (as OP) think that we have seen a fundamental change in acceptance of mass shootings (for good and/or ill) or are we situationally numb due to the world circumstances as a whole? Do we want to talk about causation, or do we want to talk about prevention? Because we need to reframe if we’re going to work in Great Debates - there are several worthwhile discussions to be had.
So if your kid takes the gun out of its safe (or from inside the couch ) and shoots himself/his friends/his parents/takes it to school, do you count that as ‘stolen’ or does it not qualify for your “basically zero” figure?
That’s not the premise. The premise is “People who are willing to accept some level of gun deaths in exchange for their perceived benefits are not callous, inhuman monsters insensitive to human suffering, but instead applying the same thought process that almost everyone accepts uncontroversially in the context of alcohol.”
As has been discussed umpteen times before - the difference between guns and all the other things you mention, is that there is no well-funded, highly visible faction enjoying substantial political and media support and relying on appeals to emotion that is advocating for a complete ban on cars, swimming pools, alcohol, etc.
The obstacle to reasonable gun regulation in the US are the people shouting “Ban them all!”
My broader point was that, and …
The ‘perverse incentive’ aspect. The industry wants to sell guns and peripherals. The thrill of target shooting ain’t cutting it, so they go the other way: fear.
[The whole concept of perverse incentives should be something we debate loudly and publicly in this country – crime and punishment, health care, guns, tobacco, etc., etc.]
If you’re unscrupulous and you represent the interests of any of these Profit From Misery industries, think of what you would lobby for and what you’d lobby against when what’s best for our nation is what’s worst for your EBITDA and EPS.
Things that get at the root cause of crime, poverty, and misery create profits for these industries. Initiatives – hell, even discussions – that threaten to ameliorate these root causes – are threats to those profits.
And these industries represent a relatively huge collective percent of our GDP, so it’s David and Goliath.
When I was in early elementary school, a neighbor took a lawn dart to his head and died, so … yeah … good analogy.
The story you linked certainly doesn’t refute it, given that the question was “How many stolen rifles are used to commit violent crimes?” and the article does not involve a rifle.
I think that misrepresents the NRAs charter 
Unfortunately, no matter how you rephrase the whataboutism it remains untrue. There have been constant and ongoing efforts for decades to mitigate the risks and the damage caused by alcohol. The same is not remotely true of guns, because there isn’t a powerful drinkers lobby demanding the right to increased access to a wider array of alcoholic beverages.
Sounds familiar…
Thank you for amply demonstrating my point.
The obstacle to reasonable gun regulation in the US are the people who immediately reframe any reasonable gun regulation as an attempt to “ban them all!”.
Or is could be people who purport to support an idea like regulate guns like cars and then backpeddle like crazy when they realize cars are regulated at a much lower level than guns.
It’s hard to have gun regulation debate when your side proposes regulations that do nothing to address the problems they say they think is an issue. Take mass shootings aside from “if there were less guns there would be less gun deaths” there have been no proposals that would actually have prevented any of the mass shootings. That means it does come down to banning and removing guns.
Maybe if the anti gun side could address issues productive conversations could arise. Most of the gun nuts I know don’t want crazy people to have guns (there is pretty wide support for red flag laws) but saying a gun looks scary doesn’t accomplish much. To go back to the car regulation argument looking at how license works and how it could be applied to guns might make sense but it wouldn’t do much to prevent suicides or murder any more then getting a driver’s license prevents people from killing with their car.
@Absolute. Still waiting for that cite.
That’s like saying “people who think swimming in lava is a good idea are just applying the same logic that people who like hot springs do”, and while that’s true, the two aren’t at all compatible, because drinking alcohol DOES NOT GIVE YOU THE ABILITY TO END HUMAN LIVES WITH A TWITCH OF YOUR FINGER. So that’s an incredibly shitty comparison.
No, the difference between guns and all the other things he mentioned is that POOLS, ALCOHOL, CARS, ETC DO NOT GRANT YOU THE ABILITY TO END HUMAN LIVES WITH A TWITCH OF YOUR FINGER. GUNS DO.
So you’d be fine with banning pistols but keeping rifles legal? Or are you just drawing a distinction between rifles and pistols because you know including pistols makes your argument look bad?
The topic has taken on a life of its own. I hereby relinquish ownership. Your question is an interesting one, but this is no longer the place to talk about it.
Sure there is! The drinkers lobby has just won the discussion so completely across the entire political spectrum that there is no chance of ever banning the substance that causes far more harm and suffering in society than firearms.
And there are certainly “constant and ongoing efforts for decades to mitigate the risks and the damage caused by firearms.” If your perspective is limited to “Are they completely banned yet? No? No progress then.” you may be missing all the restrictions and partial bans that have been passed at the state level in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, California, etc. over the past decade.
You should read the entire thread instead of just responding to the posts at the end. This discussion started with someone making a claim about “all firearms” which I thought was a gross exaggeration and I used a hypothetical example about rifles to challenge it.
We weren’t talking about the relative merits of banning different types of firearms, that’s a topic you just randomly inserted here.
Clearly, there’s no hope of formulating regulations to effectively combat mass shootings, which is why they are an unresolved problem in every country on Earth.
Really, all this hand-wringing about how one could possibly find a way to deal with the problem is starting to sound a bit silly when the obvious answer is, just pick any country at random and do what they do, because odds are they’re doing a better job of it.
I literally typed those phrases into Google and pulled results from the CDC and other official sources. I didn’t save the links, I’m not writing a research paper here. Feel free to quibble about them if you want.