As long as the antagonists/protagonists play cherry-picking games with each other, nothing will change.
In 1969 the Stonewall riots erupted over police harassment of gays in New York City. At the time no one could have dreamed that 40 years later homosexuals would be allowed to marry. At the time such an outcome would have been inconceivable, and yet, here we are in 2012 and it’s true.
Right now it seems impossible to stop incidents like Sandy Hook. There are too many guns and the gun culture seems too deeply entrenched. But 40 years from now, things could look quite different. The thing is, they will only look different if we start fighting RIGHT NOW. And we must fight with the knowledge that victory will be something that we will never experience personally. It will only be something that our children and grandchildren will experience.
Thanks for this. I’ve had this thought every time I’ve heard or read that there are just too many guns to do anything about them now. If we had started doing something 30 years ago, or even 20 years ago, wouldn’t things be different now?
I read on CNN an estimate that gun owners in the US own one third of all the firearms in the world, and that the number of gun owners is shrinking. Stockpiling can’t serve any defensible purpose.
How the mighty have fallen. Remember that Fitzgerald guy ? “We choose to do these things not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard” ? What happened to you, America, man ? You used to be cool.
As I have responded to you in other threads, you are pretending that gun ownership rates and alcohol use rates are not actually very similar. In fact, “gun deaths per gun owner” and “alcohol deaths per alcohol user” come out to pretty much the same number. Depending on what statistics you use, you may end up with a factor of 2 in either direction. I really don’t care. The difference is not as dramatic as you are trying to imply with these comparisons between tigers, elevators and anthrax.
And please don’t start with the “but guns are much more dangerous when they’re used” bullshit. That has nothing to do with anything. Owning a gun is “using” it for the purposes of this discussion. Saying that guns are only used when they’re used to shoot someone, and that shooting someone is obviously much more dangerous than having a drink, therefore guns are obviously much more dangerous, is a ludicrous comparison.
Good point. Thanks. But I guess I’m wondering whether there really is that great of a need to start fighting now or ever. 20 dead kids sure makes an impression when they all come violently and at once. But when you compare it to deaths from various causes over the course of a year, it starts to fade in significance.
A lot of folk die from a lot of causes. How do we choose where we direct government resources? And what personal rights to we infringe in our efforts to accomplish what goals?
Also, even if we were to change peoples’ mindsets as you observe has done re: gay rights, a simple change of midset doesn’t eliminate the hundreds of millions of guns out there. Is there any reason to believe increased gun regulation woul dbe more effective in limiting access to guns than the highly successful war on drugs has been?
I don’t own any guns. But I prefer not to live in an America where the government has complete knowledge of everything I possess.
I think regulation alone probably doesn’t do much, because it comes right up against attitude.
But I think it’s possible for attitudes to change. I think it is possible to go from a gun culture to not a gun culture.
Now, in my opinion, the 2nd Amendment does more than make guns legal; it makes guns AMERICAN. So I think repeal of the 2nd would be necessary, eventually.
But violent crime is down, and still dropping (so far as I know). This incident can lead to greater thought and awareness even if the trend is already in the right direction.
And Republicans, who are more likely to be gun owners and more likely to be single-issue gun voters, are dying off. This will probably skew the gun conversation toward the other side, too.
Really good point.
Does it make sense to simply lump these types of shootings in with “violent crime”? I’m certainly no expert, but at least in Chicago, it seems as tho the majority of “violent crime” appears to occur in impoverished and non-white neighborhoods. But it seems pretty infrequent for mass shootings to occur in such neighborhoods. Am I simply being selective in my memory?
It seems possible to me that entirely different measures might be most effective in reducing gangbanger drivebys, as opposed to troubled youth mass murders.
The ignorant comparison of the raw number of deaths (or other outcomes) between two conditions without reference to the rate of use or conditions of exposure to risk between the two conditions is stupid. Abjectly ignorant.
Of course there will be fewer tiger deaths in the US per year than eating deaths since the amount of time the population spends eating is far greater than the amount of time people spend around tigers, or engaged in ultimate fighting. When these comparisons are made, often “person years” are used to quantify the cumulative exposure time of all the people over all the time exposed to risk.
The amount of time the US population spends in one year engaged in alcohol consumption is simply vastly higher than the amount of time it spends using firearms.
Kinda like oil drilling in Alaska? If we’d started 20 or 30 years ago, we’d be producing a massive amount of oil now.
You can say the same about anything, but it only applies to things you (generic you) personally support. If we’d started 20 or 30 years ago, we’d have a base on Mars by now. But not enough people support that. Or oil drilling. So it ain’t happening.
Re: gun bans in other countries - when the ban was enacted, did the privately owned guns vanish overnight? Did the government come and seize them? Did all the law abiding citizens who were made criminals overnight show up at the police station to turn over their guns and face their sentence?
Do you envision that happening in the U.S.?
Mass shootings do not happen because we have “too many (by whose count?)” guns - they happen because a very VERY small number of the total guns in the U.S. get into the hands of psychopaths. If you do not seize every single gun in the country, you cannot guarentee an end to any types of shootings, mass or otherwise.
So what will it be - door-to-door raids to ensure all guns are confiscated? Do you really think that can be done, even in a totalitarian society? People can and will hide guns, especially in that scenario.
Rely on the citizenry to do the right thing and give them up? If you really believed that “the citizens” will do the right thing, you wouldn’t worry about gun ownership - after all, only criminals use guns to commit crimes. Better to make all gun owners criminals instead, because Joe Average cannot be trusted to do (your) “right thing”?
We live in a world with 7 billion people. Huge numbers of those 7 billion people are going to do some stupid things from time to time, many of them criminal and even homicidal. It can’t be stopped - the best you can hope for is to mitigate the damage. And you don’t do that by attacking a tool, you do that by confronting the people using them.
I don’t know that you’re being selective in your memory. They may not happen, or they may not get reported (or hyped to the same extent). After all, when young white girls disappear, the news is all over it, and when young black girls disappear… well, it’s not quite the same treatment.
But spree or mass killers might be like serial killers and fit a particular profile (note: I know very little about serial killers and don’t want to open this up to a wider discussion of profiling serial killers). But does that change what we should be talking about?
Let’s say that spree killings go up and continue to garner lots of media attention and maybe even laws or regulations. And let’s say at the same time that violent crime is going down and gun crime is less common. But the will to make the gun laws is engendered by the spree killers, with a weird inability for people to separate big risks from small ones (or to recognize when they are being fed hysteria by the media). If this were happening, and I would argue that it probably is happening right now, how big of a problem is it? I don’t have an answer to that. Empirically, I’d like to have laws that are effective against the things they hope to prevent. Subjectively, I think laws impact us in ways beyond the direct control they have on our actions. I think there is such a thing as attitude that is shaped by law. I think our cultural norms are greatly impacted by our laws, and vice versa.
You can do both. Gun rights activists downplay guns when it comes to defending their ownership as “just a tool” and “guns don’t kill people.” And then they elevate their ownership when it comes to rights as “right to protect myself” and “enshrined in the Constitution.” Guns are very symbolic items and, as with pretty much every symbol, the meaning can be changed.
Please define “using” in the context of firearms. Remember that you are implying that a gun that is not being used is no risk to anyone.
Don’t mind me. I’m just loitering in front of your house with Colt .45 strapped to my waistband. Not using it. No need to be concerned! Until I use it you are not at any increased risk whatsoever. And if I storm your house and point it at you but don’t fire it, don’t be alarmed! You’re still not at any increased risk. I’m not using it.
Your crazy neighbor that has a whole arsenal under his bed? No need to be worried when your dog runs into his yard at night and you chase after him. After all, the guns are not any risk to you until he uses them.
Not to belabor the point - the problem with your definition is that gun “use” is orthogonal to risk. Meaning, independent. The risk of gun violence comes from people having quick, ready access to a dangerous weapon. If someone owns or has access to a gun, they are subject to this risk, regardless of how often they “use” it legally. Conversely, legally “using” a gun for hunting or target practice has absolutely zero correlation with the risk of intentionally using it to shoot someone.
When someone takes their gun to the shooting range and fires a few rounds at a target, that is unquestionably “using” it. But this kind of use poses zero additional risk to anyone else, compared to what results from them just owning the gun in the first place. If your neighbor goes to the firing range for two hours each month instead of one hour, he unquestionably uses the gun twice as much, but is the risk of crime greater? No. He’s still just as likely to freak out at 2AM and think you’re a burglar and shoot you.
Conversely, the risk of harm from alcohol is highly correlated with use. That is why the only meaningful statistical comparison you can use is alcohol use, and gun ownership.
I swear I’ve made this point to you before, but maybe it was someone else arguing the same insane position.
Do you mind if we take further discussion of this to my thread in GD and avoid clogging up this one?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=15806622
Especially the alcohol one. How exactly would I go about murdering someone with alcohol? Tie them down and force them to drink it until they OD? And to get 20 children to do it would be doubly difficult, I would suppose.
Good grief this is one of the more ridiculous posts I’ve seen in a while. 
Absolute has already addressed most of this, but what the hell:
Well, I’m glad that ‘XT logic’ equates to reality then. Sad that your own doesn’t though.
Except that orders of magnitude more people play at playgrounds than bungee jump, so it’s not exactly a good analogy…except in your own mind. To paraphrase from Ghost Busters…you never studied in school, did you?
Yes, because clearly there are as many tigers roaming around attacking people in the US as there are elevators, and this equates somehow to the fact that guns are as likely as tigers while alcohol use equivalent to elevators…or, um, something. Tiger attacks are clearly BAD though…and so are guns! So, yes…perfect analogy! For the WIN!
Etc etc, blah blah blah. Thanks for playing Hentor…we have some lovely parting gifts for you. Here is the straightdope edition of Probability and Statistics for Dummies…and here is the SDMB Board game for you…oh, and this lovely ceramic dog…
Do the “North by Northwest” treatment and force alcohol on them then force them to drive down a mountain!
Careful. You handwave too much you might strain your shootin’ arm.
Ah, see, you think it’s handwaving…I think it’s derision and scorn. I suppose it’s all in what the rose smells like to you…
However, I’m curious now. Do you find Hentor’s argument compelling? Tiger attacks verse elevators? Do you see that as a close approximation of guns to booze? :dubious:
You have to compare the amount of use to get a reasonable comparison.
67% of Americans drink alcohol.
32% of households have guns.
You’d have to control for number of people per household and the number of households with guns that are ready to fire (with ammunition and in good condition) to make a reasonable comparison.
You are still comparing apples to oranges. You are comparing individual Americans drinking to HOUSEHOLDS that have guns. Even assuming your uncited figures there are accurate it’s not a good comparison. And it’s a bit further off of tigers to elevators. I’m not going to bother looking it up, but there are probably more elevators in a small US city than there are tigers in the entire country…yes?
ETA: And this isn’t the point of the analogy anyway. The point of it is that alcohol and guns are both something that society doesn’t ‘need’ (depending on how you look at it), and both things that cause a non-zero amount of harm, both things that are regulated and that we have laws in place to mitigate abuse…and both things that a large percentage of the populace want and are willing to have that non-zero risk in order to continue to have. So, it’s a good comparison IMHO, and one that is being handwaved away with ridiculous counters and called ‘stupid’ (interestingly, by the same poster in this case) instead of rationally looking at the argument.