Mass Shootings, Rampages, And Cascades of Failure

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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263 Responses

  1. John Puccio says:

    The video game Call of Duty had about as much to do with this week’s tragedy as white supremacy had to do with last week’s tragedy. There are multiple factors that lead to each one of these horrendous events, but the one common thread is the deteriorated mental health of isolated individuals (usually young men).

    The sooner our ruling class move focus away from politically expedient peripheral factors, the better chance we have as “doing something” that actually makes a difference.Report

    • Philip H in reply to John Puccio says:

      That deterioration wouldn’t result in massive death if guns were not so freely and readily available.Report

      • John Puccio in reply to Philip H says:

        Outside of repealing the 2nd Amendment and conducting full scale gun confiscation, I don’t see how you put a dent into an environment of freely and readily available guns.

        Of course, such action would likely prompt wide scale violence of its own. And it still would not prevent sick individuals determined to inflict damage on society from using other means to do so.Report

        • InMD in reply to John Puccio says:

          I like to mention that there are mass casualty attacks, including mass shootings, in countries with far stricter gun laws. Probably not as many at scale but they aren’t what makes America an outlier in gun deaths compared to rich European countries. That’s what I mean in my comment below, which is the need to tightly define what we’re really talking about.

          Like you might call 5 or 6 people being killed in a gang fight with illegal weapons a ‘mass shooting’ but there isn’t going to be a major national media event over it and it’s not really the same issue as a psycho shooting up a school.Report

          • John Puccio in reply to InMD says:

            Agree. We could use better definitions of what constitutes a mass shooting and honesty about the types of gun violence that is happening. You have the mentally ill, criminally motivated and of course suicide. Two of those three are mental health issues, the other a law enforcement matter in which most of the guns are illegal anyway.

            Unfortunately too many people have a vested interest in conflating all aspects of “gun violence” in order to make/bolster their points about ineffectual gun control.Report

            • Philip H in reply to John Puccio says:

              Many of us have proposed additional restrictions on handguns to address the suicide aspects and been beaten out of the room. then we propose mental health programs and law changes and are told we can’t afford them. So we get angry and toss it all together because that’s all we have left.Report

              • Jesse in reply to Philip H says:

                Yeah, it’s weird pro-gun people think “ha, you don’t care about handguns” is such an own.

                No, we do, we just also know any kind of restriction of handguns is even less popular, so what’s the point?Report

        • Philip H in reply to John Puccio says:

          In Texas, where this latest attack occurred, a person in a mental health crisis can walk into a gun store, purchase a long rifle and ammunition and walk out with it in less then an hour. Do you really think disrupting that flow would have no impact?Report

          • Damon in reply to Philip H says:

            Please tell me how a person who’s having a mental health crisis can be identified by some random clerk in a store, be it a gun store, a cutlery store, etc.? How will someone once identified as having a crisis be identified to these same individuals?

            Let’s say a teacher id’s a guy in crisis, and it gets reported to social services. Does SS communicate to the gun store? What if that crisis is lifted? Please document how you expect the vast majority of retail transactions for items that can be used as weapons will be altered both back and forth. I’m not criticizing, I’m asking you to explain how you think this process should work.Report

            • Philip H in reply to Damon says:

              If you have to wait 5 days or 7 days or 10 days to take possession then that reporting has time to get to people who can act to help the person. It’s not about the retail establishment intervening – its about giving other systems time to work.Report

              • Damon in reply to Philip H says:

                Thanks for the clarification. So the FFL will be required to do what additionally? He’ll have to forward a customer’s application to the state’s/local gov’t Social Services, the Cops, etc.? and wait for 7 or 10 days until the person is “cleared” to purchase the weapon? Is the weapon to be purchased cleared by default if the relevant reviewing agency fails to approve/deny in the mandated time, or does the purchased item become effectively on hold until such time as it’s approved/denied.

                Switching gears, who is deemed qualified to assert that an individual is undergoing a mental health crisis? Those individuals must then, I assume, become MANDATORY reporters of such info. School teachers, school counselors, doctors, etc.?

                How do you plan on identifying those undergoing a mental health crisis who have no regular interaction with medical care, or wave off their issues with “growing pains” or such?

                What role does social media have in all this? Are FB algorithms needed to troll peoples posts and flag potential suicide comments or comments about mass killings and then report same to cops, mental health authorities, etc.? What if the algorithms fail? Who’s liable?Report

              • Philip H in reply to Damon says:

                He’ll have to forward a customer’s application to the state’s/local gov’t Social Services, the Cops, etc.? and wait for 7 or 10 days until the person is “cleared” to purchase the weapon? Is the weapon to be purchased cleared by default if the relevant reviewing agency fails to approve/deny in the mandated time, or does the purchased item become effectively on hold until such time as it’s approved/denied.

                That’s how it works already in states with waiting periods.

                who is deemed qualified to assert that an individual is undergoing a mental health crisis? Those individuals must then, I assume, become MANDATORY reporters of such info. School teachers, school counselors, doctors, etc.?

                THose folks are already mandatory reporters for all sorts of other things. Why should this be different?

                How do you plan on identifying those undergoing a mental health crisis who have no regular interaction with medical care, or wave off their issues with “growing pains” or such?

                No situation is perfect, but again, waiting periods leave time for things to work.

                What role does social media have in all this? Are FB algorithms needed to troll peoples posts and flag potential suicide comments or comments about mass killings and then report same to cops, mental health authorities, etc.?

                This already occurs for all sorts of other things . . . .

                What if the algorithms fail? Who’s liable?

                Who’s liable currently for this?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                The good news is this guy seems to have planned this for 8+ months. So we had time for “other systems to work”.

                That is also the bad news. Worse, this whole “planning for months” thing seems to be pretty normal.Report

            • Kazzy in reply to Damon says:

              “Please document how you expect the vast majority of retail transactions for items that can be used as weapons will be altered both back and forth. I’m not criticizing, I’m asking you to explain how you think this process should work.”

              Sincere question here… can a gun seller choose to not sell a gun to someone for any reason he wants? Like, if someone seems in crisis, can they say no? What if someone seems enraged? What if they come in bleeding from the head? What if they seem drunk? What if they just seem… shady?

              To circle back to the quoted portion, we do have mechanisms in place for certain transactions: a bartender can cut off a drunk patron; a liquor store can refuse to sell to someone who looks underage even if they have an ID; maybe it is an urban legend but folks at the hardware store may inquire and/or report you if you buy the wrong combination of supplies; certain medicines require you to scan your ID and/or have limits on how much you can purchase, even at different stores.

              So, we do have certain mechanism that allow for increased attention paid to retail transactions.

              But I’m really curious if gun sellers can exercise any discretion or if that varies by state or if that’d be considered discrimination.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kazzy says:

                Yes, they can, and often do. Hell, they even have an easy out, because the background check is done over the phone, so the buyer has no idea if they cleared it or not. The seller can just say they failed to clear.

                But sellers are not social workers or psychologists. A person would have to be very clearly around the bend before a seller would necessarily hesitate to sell to them.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                “But sellers are not social workers or psychologists.”

                Agreed. I’m not expecting that they are or asking that they become such.

                But is it legal to deny someone a gun if for one reason or another the seller has a bad feeling about it? Or is it something they can get away with but, technically, they can’t actually deny the buyer the right if they do clear all the legal hurdles (which I know vary by state).Report

              • InMD in reply to Kazzy says:

                Here is info on the federal form you have to fill out.

                https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Form_4473

                It includes certain certifications by the buyer about criminal history and mental health history and some other things. Oscar probably has more info on it than me but I’d imagine if someone is obviously behaving in a really strange way or says the answers are false the seller wouldn’t complete the transaction. Maryland has an additional form.

                At that level though you’re probably only filtering out people who come in clucking like a chicken or announcing an intention to commit a crime or something like that.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kazzy says:

                It is totally legal for a seller to deny a sale for any reason. They are not legally obligated to sell anyone a gun.

                There are specific, legal requirements that force a seller to deny a sale (like the buyer admitting they were buying the gun for someone else and not listing that person on the form, or anything else that would indicate they were committing perjury on the form).

                That said, the buyer can just go to the next shop and try to buy from them. Sometimes FFLs will warn others about sketchy buyers, but not always.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                If you find a private seller willing to sell you a dozen guns at a surprisingly good price, congrats.

                It’s a fed.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                Thanks. I don’t think that is a mechanism we can or should rely on… I was just curious how the mechanics of those transactions worked. But it is good to know that if a seller really has a bad feeling about a buyer, they can opt not to deal with them.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Kazzy says:

                Anytime! 🙂Report

          • John Puccio in reply to Philip H says:

            I don’t. These mass shootings are happening everywhere, including the states with the strictest of gun laws. New York’s laws did nothing to prevent the mentally deranged teenager from shooting up that supermarket in Buffalo. Nor do they seem to stop the gun violence happening everyday in NYC.

            You can wave a magic wand and apply NY gun laws to the entire country and we will still have mass shootings. These laws don’t work. They treat the symptom, not the disease.

            We need to treat the disease. And frankly it should be a lot easier to get congress to agree on mental health than what to do about guns.

            If they can agree to fight a proxy war with Russia, they should be able to find common ground here.Report

            • Philip H in reply to John Puccio says:

              We need to treat the disease. And frankly it should be a lot easier to get congress to agree on mental health than what to do about guns.

              If they can agree to fight a proxy war with Russia, they should be able to find common ground here.

              Free and easy access to guns is integral to the progression of the disease. As I outlined below the disease has many dimensions.

              And frankly it should be a lot easier to get congress to agree on mental health than what to do about guns.

              Did you fall and hit your head? Congress doesn’t work that way, and hasn’t for most of my adult life. The only thing they do jointly and on time is military spending. Right now Republicans don’t want to vote with Democrats on much of anything because they believe that’s how they take back both houses of Congress and set up retaking the White House.Report

              • John Puccio in reply to Philip H says:

                I didn’t say it would happen. I said it would be easier. Which it would be since the useless laws you advocate for are never getting passed w/ Republicans. Mental health at lest provides a shot at common ground.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to John Puccio says:

                “Mental health at lest provides a shot at common ground.”

                So then we can count on Republicans to support free mental health care for everyone?Report

              • John Puccio in reply to Kazzy says:

                We can’t count on anything. But if you are following conservative talking points, you’ll notice a far heavier emphasis on mental health as the underlying issue. As such, it’s an opportunity to see if they mean it.Report

              • Kazzy in reply to John Puccio says:

                Well, therein lies the rub.

                Put talking points in one hand, crap in the other, see which fills up first.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to John Puccio says:

              I don’t. These mass shootings are happening everywhere, including the states with the strictest of gun laws. New York’s laws did nothing to prevent the mentally deranged teenager from shooting up that supermarket in Buffalo. Nor do they seem to stop the gun violence happening everyday in NYC.

              This is nonsense.

              The reason state-level strict gun laws do nothing is that it is trivially easy to go to other states to buy guns. This is so blatantly obviously that I have to suspect the people who don’t seem to understand this are arguing in bad faith.

              Stricter gun laws clearly _do_ work when guns cannot just be carried in. Other countries have massively fewer mass shootings, precisely because guns cannot just be carried in from jurisdictions with laxer laws.Report

              • Damon in reply to DavidTC says:

                “The reason state-level strict gun laws do nothing is that it is trivially easy to go to other states to buy guns. ”

                You’ve verified that? Virginia, last time I checked, had a more liberal view of buying guns, by a dealer is going to ask for ID and if you flash a MD or NY license (maybe if you show a passport IDK) some questions are going to be asked. Person to person, maybe not so much. I imagine a FFL selling a gun to an out of state customer, who then commits a felony, is going to be in for a whole lot of investigation, fines, trouble with the state and the AFT agency.

                If I’m wrong, please cite….Report

              • InMD in reply to Damon says:

                An FFL resident in one state can’t complete a sale to a resident of another state. They have to transfer it to an FFL in the buyer’s state of residency to do the transfer to the buyer.

                You could have ‘straw sales’ where a resident of state A with looser laws buys a gun and transfers it to a person in state B with stricter laws. This is of course illegal.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

                Note that the claim is “Illegal sales”, as in the FFL is breaking the law.

                Now, of course, Indiana has no requirement to respect the IL FOID system, so as long as the person passes the federal system, and they are only buying a long gun, and that long gun is legal in IL, then the dealer is in the clear.Report

              • Slade the Leveller in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I think Chicago’s main beef is straw purchasers. There’s a gun shop that advertises on local sports radio, and the last line of the ad copy is “Don’t buy for the other guy.”Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

                Probably, but the straw purchaser is breaking the law, not necessarily the FFL. DAs would have to prove that the FFL knew or should have known that the buyer was doing a straw purchase. It’s a tricky thing to prove. Not impossible, but you have to wait until you have considerable data.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Damon says:

                You are not wrong . . . Though some states have done a better job of codifying this then others.

                Take Wisconsin – my in laws live there and on occasion while visiting I have inquired from an FFL dealer about purchasing particular weapons that interest me. When I lived in Maryland I was not allowed to because Maryland had more strict laws then Wisconsin and would not accept the sale. So they wouldn’t do it. Now that I live in Mississippi I am welcome to buy firearms in Wisconsin any time I visit.Report

              • John Puccio in reply to DavidTC says:

                Thanks for reading.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to DavidTC says:

                First off, you often can not casually buy a gun across state lines*.

                Second, the Buffalo shooter bought his guns in NY.

                *It’s possible, for long guns only, if you would be able to buy that firearm in your state (the firearm is legal in your state of residence). Typically this means that the FFL is up to speed on your states laws and is comfortable selling it to you, because if they get it wrong, it can blow back on them.Report

              • InMD in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I didn’t realize you could technically do it with a long gun. Every FFL I’ve ever encountered has wanted nothing to do with a direct transfer to someone from another state, but obviously anecdata.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                First off, you often can not casually buy a gun across state lines*.

                I mean, they’re going to walk into a shop, be informed they have to pick up their weapon at a FDL in their state, and, if the gun is not legal their state, walk out.

                They will then either send a friend into a different shop to buy it for them or just go to a gun show.

                And, yes, I am aware that ‘sending a friend in to buy it for them’ is illegal, but that’s a law designed to stop mass purchases and resales, not literally ‘someone buying a gun for a friend’, which is almost undetectable, as evidenced by the sheer amount of teens that have no problem at all obtaining booze.

                Whereas gun shows…I’m not actually sure that is illegal?

                Second, the Buffalo shooter bought his guns in NY.

                Well, yes, but I was addressing the weird idea that strict gun laws in a location could possibly stop gun violence in a location when you can put them in your car and drive them.

                The idea that mass shootings are somehow related to this is rather absurd…almost every mass shooting has been done with legal guns, which makes John Puccio argument that they prove tighter gun laws don’t do anything pretty still.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to DavidTC says:

                Everyone does indeed argue this point in bad faith.Report

            • Brandon Berg in reply to John Puccio says:

              Realistically, a mental-health solution is going to require a) reasonably accurate identification of threats, and b) involuntary treatment. To the best of my knowledge, we’ve seen few if any rampage shootings by people who attempted to seek mental health treatment and didn’t get it because they couldn’t pay.

              It’s obviously true that mental health problems are a necessary precondition for a rampage shooting. You can fill my house with guns, and I’m not going to go on a rampage shooting, because that would be stupid.

              But this trivial observation doesn’t easily translate to a workable solution. What specific mental health policies do you think would help here?Report

      • Oscar Gordon in reply to Philip H says:

        Maybe, or they get inventive on how to commit mass murder. Digging into that motivation is very important.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

          People in other countries, when barred from having guns, have not gotten inventive at mass murder. They mostly just ineffectually attack people with knives, which results in laughably few fatalities. Or they randomly drive their car at them, but that seems to happen less often because it’s a lot harder to target specific groups of people that way.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

              I mean, that’s a good link, but they don’t actually break down weapons used, so I’m not sure what I’m supposed to get out of it.

              The places that I see with a lot of fatalities are places that I know guns are pretty easy to obtain, and when I look at any specific thing guns tend to be involved, so…yeah.

              And some of the bigger ones are serial killers and don’t really belong on the list. Like, sorting Europe and disregarding things pre-gun, the biggest was Dnipropetrovsk Oblast…but that was 21 murders over a month, committed mostly individually.

              In fact, I just checked every single European thing that killed 10 or more people on that list, and of everyone I can figure out the details of, it either was with a gun, or not a ‘spree killing’ in any reasonable sense. (I’m not actually sure what this page is trying to categorize?)

              And, as I said: Spree killers almost always want to kill specific people, or specific types of people, which means they can’t really just pick the ‘objective best’ location that will give them the best casualties.

              The Buffalo shooter back in…*check notes*…also May…um….12 days ago (Really? We have to disambiguate which May 2022 mass shooting we’re talking about?) had to drive to find a place full of people he wanted to shoot.

              Guns allow people to individually target who they want to kill (In addition letting them kill people outside the zone so they can go and murder them _first_.) and then kill a bunch more people. That really doesn’t work with anything else…sure, you can drive a car at a crowd, but what if you _really_ want to kill Person X and then a lot of people like them, that’s really hard to do via car…you have to be in exactly the right place at the right time to be sure you’re getting them, and also get a bunch of other people.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to DavidTC says:

                The W-column gives a basic description of the weapons used in the murders

                F – Firearms and other ranged weapons, especially rifles and handguns, but also bows and crossbows, grenade launchers, flamethrowers, or slingshots
                M – Melee weapons, like knives, swords, spears, machetes, axes, clubs, rods, stones, or bare hands
                O – Any other weapons, such as bombs, hand grenades, Molotov cocktails, poison and poisonous gas, as well as vehicle and arson attacks
                V – indicates that a vehicle was the only other weapon used
                A – indicates that an arson attack was the only other weapon used
                E – indicates that explosives of any sort were the only other weapon used
                P – indicates that an anaesthetising or deadly substance of any kind was the only other weapon used (includes poisonous gas)Report

  2. InMD says:

    Very good piece. I think there are two big challenges to learning from these events. The first is easier, in that you have to define specifically what you’re talking about. My perception is that the initial thing that happens is to conflate the incident with a bunch of other issues and events in ways that don’t make logical sense, or based on only the most superficial similarities.

    The second, and perhaps impossible part, is to check ideological baggage and priors at the door. No one is worried about an agenda at the FAA. And who knows, maybe we should be worried about that, but the fact that we aren’t goes a long way towards getting answers that may prove useful. Of course it’s also easier to do that when we’re dealing more with protocols and technical failures, and less about human agency. Mass shootings may in practice be less like a screw up and more like that German pilot who intentionally crashed his plane a bunch of years ago.Report

    • Philip H in reply to InMD says:

      We should always be suspicious of the FAA – it has the dual legally mandated missions of promoting airline travel and the airline industry and regulating that industry to promote safety.Report

  3. Jaybird says:

    Fundamentally, I think it has to do with a lack of trust and this sinking feeling that the people who are proposing solutions are riding a hobbyhorse rather than trying to address a problem.

    “To stop murders, we need to legalize marijuana. Couchlock would have prevented up to half of the mass murders of the last 30 years.”Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

      I was going to object, but your sinking feeling is pretty persuasive.

      My gut says this is going to take a lot of effort to counter, while my hunch is that other objections can be explored. I suspect this is irresolvable.Report

  4. Philip H says:

    I’ll start with a point of order – the NTSB investigates airplane crashes, determines causes and makes recommendations for regulatory fixes. The FAA merely implements them.

    As to the rest – we don’t need more studies or commissions, or data. We have a pattern, and we know the major issues that are woven together here, which include:

    – lack of a sense of social connection or community
    – lack of recognition of and treatment for mental health issues
    – online radicalization
    -ease of purchase of firearms and ammunition, including unregulated private party sales
    – system economic failings including lack of real economic opportunity in urban areas for minority groups
    – systemic underfunding of and restrictions applied to public education

    We know how these things can be addressed. It will take money, usually in the form of increased taxes or majorly redirected spending. It will take time, which also includes consistent implementation. And it will take societal acknowledgement that we built a world where we have, in fact, cut people off form meaningful choices – in other words we will have to admit we were wrong about things from NAFTA to public education.

    What we lack is not a how, or a why, or a what.Report

    • Dammit, you are correct on the NSTB. Updated the post to fix that. Thanks.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

      – system economic failings including lack of real economic opportunity in urban areas for minority groups
      – systemic underfunding of and restrictions applied to public education

      If memory serves, minorities don’t commit mass murder at rates above or below their population rate. So both of those issues are probably moot.

      I have not seen statistical breakdowns by class, although I think a lot of these guys have been “loosers” which implies low class or failed middle.

      If that’s right, well… someone needs to be the bottom X%. Given how this seems sex related (i.e. almost all of them are male), this might be an instinct to engage in risky violence to impress the ladies if you’re in the bottom X%.Report

  5. LeeEsq says:

    America’s continual need to reinvent the wheel rather than what seemingly works well enough everywhere else in the world strikes again.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to LeeEsq says:

      I may not be a scientist, but I know if an engineer wanted to reduce failures a logical place to start is comparable systems which already reduced failures.Report

  6. Chip Daniels says:

    This conversation reminds me a lot of climate change.

    Any solution to global climate change requires the administrative state. A government entity that can effectively control and administer and enforce rules and regulations.

    This is, a priori, rejected by a very large minority of Americans. So any solution is derided and litigated and nitpicked.
    Or the problem gets massively expanded so as to become unsolvable (e.g. “The real problem is human nature itself!”)

    But the real objection is to the solution because that cuts against the cherished American myth of the rugged individual, the miracle of the free market, the contrarian crank.Report

  7. Saul Degraw says:

    As a scientist, you should know that Australia saw murder and suicide rates plummet when it did a massive gun buyback.We have solutions with evidence. We also have a minority and a party that absolutely refuses to consider the solutions.Report

    • Pinky in reply to Saul Degraw says:

      I already addressed this on the other thread.Report

    • The US also saw murder and suicide rates drop in the same time frame. The entire developed world did.Report

      • Saul Degraw in reply to Michael Siegel says:

        I disagree that these are infrequent events though except in an extremely scholastic sense by people looking to avoid doing anything.

        There have been 213 incidents in 2022 where 4 or more people have been injured or killed by guns this year. There were nearly 700 last year. This does not happen with the sane frequency or really at all in nearly every other country except in those with completely ineffective civil governments.

        But everytime this happens in the United States, there is an adamant minority of people who launch into action about how gun control will never work here, or how these incidents are are rare and they disagree with what is a mass killing number, or any other objection to protect people with arsenals that can equip a platoon.

        This is nuts.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Saul Degraw says:

          What does “4 or more people injured or killed by guns” mean? Does that mean “213 rampage killers” or does that mean Chicago has a lot of gang bangers?Report

  8. Kazzy says:

    “rampage shootings at schools are incredibly rare, a literal one-in-a-million chance.”
    With all due respect… literally… no. There are approximately 130K schools in America. For a shooting in one to be a one-in-a-million chance, we’d need these events to happen every 8 or 9 years.

    They are much more frequent than that.Report

    • Philip H in reply to Kazzy says:

      There have been 27 school shootings so far in 2022, in a sea of of 212 mass shootings so far this year. These are not isolated incidents. They are not statistically rare.

      https://www.npr.org/2022/05/24/1101050970/2022-school-shootings-so-farReport

      • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

        If memory serves, that’s defining a “school shooting” as “any gun use on school grounds at any time for any reason”. So if a drug deal goes bad in the parking lot at midnight, that’s a school shooting.

        We see this a LOT by anti-gun advocates. “Gun violence” which combines suicide (which is the big number driver) and homicide… while ignoring gun free societies can have very high suicide rates.Report

        • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

          Here is a more realistic assessment:

          https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-we-know-about-mass-school-shootings-mdash-and-shooters-mdash-in-the-u-s/

          From an apples to apples it’s more like 13 since 1966. Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be thinking about how to do better but mass hysteria media activism isn’t really about that. The death of innocents is by far the worst part of these but the National Tragedy Media Event is in my opinion becoming an evil of its own.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

            Good link.

            All male. Some motivated by glory and some by rage/self-hate/etc. Most (all?) are loosers that decide to go out with one big attention getting final act.

            I think this brings us back to the “don’t let them become famous” idea for countering this.

            Although to be fair I doubt that works for all of them. Virginia Tech’s head was so not dealing with reality that he may have thought he was doing good things. Pulse was political.Report

            • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

              Not letting them be famous has a backdoor problem, in that even if the media actually keeps quiet about the killer, it will be public info at some point, and there appear to be online groups that trade such info.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I think it’s too late by the point some loner is actively researching this. Or maybe that’s the 80/20 rule applies.

                What we want is for them to not see this as an easy ticket to success.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                They’re probably not looking for subreddit-level fame; they’re looking for national name recognition. They shouldn’t receive it. Their causes shouldn’t receive it. Maybe even we should stop talking about them.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to InMD says:

            And… ouch.

            We get one school shooting every 4 years. Out of a nation of 320+ million.

            The proposed solutions that look like they might work involve restructuring society.

            Either by redoing freedom of speech or by eliminating the 2ndAM and becoming gun free.Report

            • InMD in reply to Dark Matter says:

              I don’t want to be overly blasé about it. I do think there’s a certain looseness to firearms policy in a lot of of this country that doesn’t stand up super well on its own merits. However the idea that we’re facing an acute crisis doesn’t hold up well either, especially regarding the particular issue of school massacres.Report

            • cam in reply to Dark Matter says:

              Um, 1 every 4 years? I wish. There was one in MI just last November – kid at the high school who was suspended and came back with a gun. Number dead were in single rather than double digits and were teens rather than little kids though so it made national news but didn’t hit the same level of horror. Are we just memory-holing any that don’t hit double digit deaths of under 12 yrs old because that accords with our desire that school shootings be ‘rare’?Report

            • Brandon Berg in reply to Dark Matter says:

              1 every 4 years is a bit misleading. I assume you’re referring to Robby Soave’s recent Reason article pointing out that there have been 13 since 1966, but there are some important caveats here:

              1. This is mass school shootings with at least four dead, excluding the shooter. The total number of shootings occurring on school grounds is much greater. This is not a bad definition to use, since it most closely matches what people have in mind when they hear “school shooting,” but it’s important to be clear about what definition we’re using.

              2. It counts only K-12 schools, excluding universities.

              3. Since Columbine, these have occurred at the rate of about one every two years, rather than one every four. We’ve actually had four in the past five years.Report

              • KenB in reply to Brandon Berg says:

                Yes, the 1966 thing was confusing — it’s the first year for which they had data for any kind of incident in their database, but the first qualifying “mass school shooting” in that database wasn’t until 1989. (That was in Stockton, and my wife & I were surprised that we had absolutely no recollection of it — we were in CA at the time and she was an elementary school teacher, so you’d think it would’ve stuck)Report

              • InMD in reply to KenB says:

                My understanding is that there’s a core tracking issue that essentially until that time (i.e. about 1990) these things were not being reported on the way they are now. For example I believe the biggest school massacre on record was in the 20s and involved explosives but nobody really ever talks about it.

                This gets to my previous comment about the importance of definitions. Like, is it really fair to count ‘a gun went off in a parking lot in the middle of the night and no one was injured’ a ‘school shooting’ for purposes of this conversation? My gut says no, and it’s misleading to count something like that. What about a longstanding dispute between two students that ends with someone being shot on school property? I think that’s inching closer, but we certainly don’t have a massive media event about it when it happens, and it doesn’t inspire the terror a psychotic person on a ramdom rampage does.

                I do think the link I shared though is helpful in the sense that it lays out its definition. One could certainly have other definitions that result in a higher rate. However I don’t think a conversation is really possible without setting that out at the beginning.Report

  9. PD Shaw says:

    I have grave misgivings about the red flag system as presented in the linked piece because it operates from the belief that any mental health issues are dangerous. The first example given of how this system would work is with the Virginia Tech shooter.

    In middle school ,the shooter was diagnosed and treated for depression and selective mutism (severe social anxiety). That diagnosis does not mean he was dangerous and to red flag people who’ve received a diagnosis or sought treatment for any mental health condition is bad mental health policy.

    I also think the nature of the judicial interdiction is not understood. Some college students reported strange behavior and stalking. The school notified the district attorney of their concerns, and based upon the red flags noted by the college students, a judge issued a temporary detention order solely for the purpose of determining whether he was dangerous to himself or others due to a mental illness. The order is like a warrant, it indicates credible evidence existed for a limited deprivation of his rights to facilitate a mental health examination, but its not conclusive. The police served him with the order and took him to the mental health facility. An independent psychiatrists found that he was not a danger, but that he was mentally ill (unspecified mood disorder) and should be receiving outpatient care. The shooter denied that he was depressed or suicidal and admitted he was taking Ativan for anxiety. The judge discharged him with an order that he seek outpatient care, which he did once. Psychiatrists aren’t mind readers. This seems like a reasonably thorough process that is not going to be an iron-clad protection against mass shootings.

    His mental health declined over the next year when he purchased his first gun. The main thing I saw when I revisited this that I wish would have happened is that the college notified the parents. This is a dicey issue, but these parents were supportive of him getting help when he lived at home.Report

  10. DavidTC says:

    I have the same misgivings as PD Shaw above, and in fact I don’t even know how people think this system is supposed to work.

    Literally no one seems to be actually sitting down and trying to work out what percentage of people should be denied guns due to mental health issues, and I suspect either the net is so narrow that it is effectively no one (If you are a ‘danger to others’ you are already supposed to be involuntarily committed), or that it is so wide that it would include _vast_ ranges of people and thus make it a non-starter with Republicans.

    And, honestly, with me too. I am for strict gun control, what I am not for is some weird system where that is enforced by the mental health system, because…not only can that not possibly work, it is extremely ableist, assuming that everyone with mental health issues is dangerous.

    The shooter was diagnosed with depression and social anxiety. That’s…not someone who looks dangerous, and those two conditions are, individually, the two most diagnosed mental health issues and individually about 10% of the _entire population_ has one of them.

    Are we going to carefully monitor the mental health of ten percent of the population to make sure it doesn’t get worse?

    Or…maybe we should require constant checks, under government control, for owners of guns? So we’re just giving up on any sort of medical privacy or even consent, for one…if you have a gun, you have mandatory mental health checks?

    Like, how exactly do people who think the problem is ‘We don’t pay enough attention to mental health’ think this problem is solvable _via_ doing? Please propose a system in which this can be solved that way. Just, if you could magically spring a system into existence, no politics involved, just one springing fully formed from the head of Zeus, what the hell do _you_ think it looks like?Report

    • Philip H in reply to DavidTC says:

      Well Texas Governor Abbot thought the way to improve mental health services was to cut $211 Million from his state’s budget in that area this year. Because like Thoughts and Prayers its a dodge.

      https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/abbott-calls-texas-school-shooting-mental-health-issue-cut-state-spend-rcna30557Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Philip H says:

        No, people need to stop saying that like it’s a valid complaint. It’s not.

        Yes, it’s extremely hypocritical to do that and then talking about mental health, but the simple fact is, it is completely impossible to solve this via providing mental health services. Don’t play into the Republican narrative that that is the issue, no matter how much it seems like an obvious attack to point out that these ‘mental health issues’ are untreated because of them.

        The issue is guns, period.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

      Agreed, in 2005 he seems to have been in “10% of the population” level mental illness (maybe more).

      But at the end he was a raving lunatic. His mental issues in 2005 (and before) were vastly different from his 2007 mental health issues.

      Now, for all the red flags raised in 2005, I don’t see any raised in 2007.Report

      • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

        theBut from what I understand, he wasn’t under anyone’s care at that point, right? He was acting crazy around other people, but there was no one to actually diagnose him?

        I mean, at this point we are talking about mandatory mental health evaluations of gun owners, at least upon the complaint of someone else, and that seems like something that conservatives are not going to like?

        Also, are we talking about inventing some middle ground that isn’t quite ‘threat to others’ and thus doesn’t quite hit the point of involuntary commitment, but does require guns to be taken away? What is this threshold?

        Or are we just taking guns away from everyone who makes threats on the internet, which whild honestly would be utterly hilarious to watch, but again seems like something conservatives would have a problem with.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

          But from what I understand, he wasn’t under anyone’s care at that point, right? He was acting crazy around other people, but there was no one to actually diagnose him?

          Yes. I think I’m making the same point you are in terms of how unworkable this is.

          He came to the attention of the authorities in 2005 and was evaluated by mental health professionals at that time. In 2005 he was functional enough to not get kicked out of college. In 2007 he wasn’t functional at all.

          It’s not even clear the “acting crazy around people” was a thing in 2007. He was way more crazy but way more isolated. We know the “raving lunatic” part because of the videos he left with his “manifesto” (if that’s the word). At that time he was seriously delusional and not interacting with reality.

          If memory serves the way it was presented in the media was the authorities knew he was a problem but couldn’t do anything about him. The GOP+Dems changed the laws so that they did have options. However it’s not clear to me that this was even slightly helpful in practice because of the whole 2005 v 2007 problem.Report

  11. Michael Cain says:

    Since no one else has said it to this point, the Constitution does not say anything about the right to operate an airline, or other transportation business. If it did include something about, “…the right to operate a business providing transportation services, or equipment intended to provide transportation services, shall not be infringed” that the SCOTUS could interpret as a personal right, hence a corporate right, well… Air travel in the US would no doubt be much more dangerous. There would no doubt be new cars available for $2,000 because every possible corner that could be cut was cut. Air in major urban centers would be unbreathable.

    “Arms” interpreted as “personal firearms” are in their own special category.Report

    • Chip Daniels in reply to Michael Cain says:

      The personal right never existed until a couple years ago when it emanated from the penumbra of the living Constitution.Report

      • Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels says:

        It’s the literal words of the thing.Report

        • LeeEsq in reply to Pinky says:

          So the entire well-regulated militia part was just fancy language that meant nothing?Report

          • DensityDuck in reply to LeeEsq says:

            it says “shall not be infringed” right there in the text, bro

            unless you want to argue that putting the Ten Commandments right in the middle of the courthouse or putting “under God” in the Pledge Of Allegiance is okay because they aren’t actual lawsReport

            • We infringe the right to bear ams all the time. There are both federal and state laws against switchblades, and lots of overlapping prohibitions and regulations about swords. And just forget trying to buy heavy-duty military weapons like grenades and land mines.

              Guns get special protection. Either it’s because the Constitution mentions them explicitly or because “originalists” are making stuff up.Report

              • Damon in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                You do realize that you can buy and use a lot of military equipment IF you can afford to 1) pay for it 2) have the space to use it, 3) can afford / wait for all the paperwork you need to fill out and get approved for? I’m talking .50 caliber machine guns, anti aircraft cannons, etc. I read about a guy who has all that stuff and annually he hires a guy to fly a plane on his property and tow a target. He and his friends then shoot at the target with anti aircraft weapons taken off ships from WW2.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Damon says:

                But that’s gun control, right there. The guy has to have the resources to acquire the weapons, has to register them with the state, is limited to using them on his property, etc.Report

              • IIUC, there are also restrictions on fully automatic weapons that would be deems unconstitutional again semi-autos like AR-15s, as if that distinction was found in a document written in the 18th century.

                Originalism is rampant BS.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                Yeah its amazing how Jefferson and company, in 1789, had the foresight to draw a line in the Constitution between semiautomatic rifles and full automatic rifles.

                I mean, I didn’t find it, but I’m assured its there, nestled among the penumbras.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                The standard is “in common use”. Full auto and explosives have not been “in common use” .Report

              • Things that have been restricted have not been in common use and can therefore be restricted.

                Things that have not been restricted have been in common use and can therefore not be restricted.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Mike Schilling says:

                Full auto rifles and grenades were never in common use, semi-autos were.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I don’t see the words ‘in common use’ in the constitution either.

                And surely if those words were there, or somehow inferable from the text, then originalism would mean ‘in common use’ _at the time it was written_, not later.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

                It’s actually really interesting, from an objective viewpoint, to try to read what Alito writes about gay marriage and try to square it with what he thinks about guns.

                He says that gay marriage shouldn’t be a right because it _might_ infringe on someone’s religious liberty and force them to issue marriage licenses they don’t want to.

                Which, first of all, it’s an inherently stupid concept to say that states have to build laws in such a way that no employee could possibly end up having to do something they disagree with…or we’d have no liquor licenses or casinos or driver’s licenses (Somehow the Amish ended up working at the DMV.) If you have a religious objection to doing something the state does, don’t work for them in that specific job! Hell, we even let you get out of _mandatory_ government employment, aka, the draft, if you have a religious objection!

                So this is stupid by itself. But it’s an amazingly surreal concept when the same person doesn’t think that buying a gun can’t hypothetically infringe on someone’s right not to be shot to death, which is, incidentally, much more of a real concern and one that people can’t avoid simply by _not_ becoming clerks that issue state marriage licenses, a job it is actually pretty easy to avoid.

                Note I’m not saying ‘People should have a right to stop other people from exercising their rights because of some hypothetical infringement that might happen.’…that’s dumb.

                I’m saying that is the _conservative_ argument that Alito thinks applies to gay marriage but not gun ownership. Gay marriage can cause just too much harm to someone’s rights, apparently, because of the incredibly rare clerk who is forced to do something she doesn’t want. Guns, meanwhile, cannot harm people’s rights at all!

                Conservative supreme court logic is nonsense.Report

              • rexknobus in reply to DavidTC says:

                A fantasy world four-step solution to deranged 2nd Amendment originalism…

                1. Build a time travel device.

                2. Travel back to where the discussion about what became the 2nd Amendment was happening and demonstrate the operation and capabilities of the AR-15.

                3. Show the Framers a picture of a group of African-Americans holding AR-15s. (Actually the race doesn’t matter, but we’re going for the best effect.)

                4. Make sure you have taken with you a group of 2nd Amendment absolutists so that they can see the reactions of the Framers.

                End of problem.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

                I find myself wondering how this logic would apply, not to guns, but to, say, imprisonment.

                Let’s say there’s a police officer who has a religious objection to imprisoning people. For those who don’t know, there actually are a lot of well-reasoned Christian objections to imprisonment, this isn’t something I’m just making up as a hypothetical, someone could actually hold this belief, and they could actually be a police officer.

                I wonder if the current Surpreme Court would hold it it is constitutional for the states to require them to imprison people, or for the state to continue to require _any_ people to be in prison, just in case the police have a religious objection to imprisonment.

                As far as I’m aware, there’s not a constitutional right to be imprisoned, so this isn’t even two conflicting constitutional rights, so the answer seems obvious: if the state cannot require behavior from employees that an employee may have a legitimate religious objection to, then the state cannot have employees imprison people.

                Who thinks this court would actually say that?Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                The easier way to solve this is to never give that cop duties that might involve imprisoning people.

                Now if all the cops in a state decide to do the same thing then I don’t know what you do. However I don’t see how this ends up in court, much less the Supreme Court.

                A cop decides to not arrest someone and lets them go. That’s not illegal, it’s something normal cops do all the time. Several times over the years I’ve committed traffic offenses and not been arrested by the cop that caught me.Report

              • Pinky in reply to DavidTC says:

                I haven’t read much Alito, but I’m going to guess that his arguments don’t entirely ignore that gay marriage isn’t in the Constitution and gun rights are.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                Marriage isn’t in the Constitution in any form.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to Philip H says:

                “Marriage isn’t in the Constitution in any form.”

                That doesn’t make the argument you think it does.Report

              • Pinky in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Shush. You’re spoiling the joke.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

                I haven’t read much Alito, but I’m going to guess that his arguments don’t entirely ignore that gay marriage isn’t in the Constitution and gun rights are.

                Um, you do understand that my comparison is a _hypothetical_, right? Because conservatives on the court never bother to think about how they want different rights to be treated differently.

                And, incidentally, ‘gay marriage’, or at least ‘equal marriage’ is in the constitution, in that the courts have said granted via the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause. The fact it is not explicitly listed under that doesn’t meant anything…nothing is explicitly listed under that!

                Gay marriage is ‘not in the constitution’ in the same sense that ‘the government cannot murder political opponents’ is not in the constitution…as in, the government is required to treat everyone equally regardless of who they are, and any denial of rights must follow the courts. This applies to every possible thing the government can do.

                The government cannot say that a person cannot marry an entire class of people (unmarried adult human women) who otherwise can get married, just because that first person is a woman, anymore than they can arrest someone because she is a woman or shoot someone because she is a woman or deny her the right to vote because she is a woman. (That last thing is also an explicit constitutional amendment, but it is also true implicitly under Equal Protection.)

                The government, of course, isn’t required to provide marriage at all, but if it does it has to provide it equally.Report

          • Pinky in reply to LeeEsq says:

            As near as I can figure, “well-regulated militia” refers to the ability to pull a militarily-trained force from the population. The phrase was for emphasis and clarity, not to contradict the second half of the sentence. Whatever one may think of our having a standing army, that wasn’t the original intention. The Founders wanted citizens who knew their way around military drills and weapons.Report

          • Slade the Leveller in reply to LeeEsq says:

            Scalia addressed this objection in his Heller opinion. Really what we’re dealing with is the extremely tortured wording of the 2nd Amendment. Scalia even restates it in his opinion (naturally in a way that comports with his holding). Truly, the majority of the opinion is akin to a 5th grade lesson in sentence diagramming.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

              There’s a contradictory logic at work.
              On one hand, the amendment is interpreted to guarantee that the people have the right to form militias for defense.

              But military regulation of guns is more strict than anything ever attempted by states.

              So then they fall back on, well it’s not really about militias, it’s about sport and recreation.
              But then the whole purpose is frivolous and lacking any compelling need that overrides public safety.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                That’s not true.

                The question is what did the document mean at the time. If it was for shooting down spaceships, it doesn’t matter, or hunting, or whatever. It doesn’t matter what we think of their reasoning or whether it still applies. If it doesn’t, we should amend it. All that matters to a court is what they meant by those words.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Pinky says:

                The whole point of “originalism” is that it DOES matter what their logic was.

                Otherwise any interpretation of ambiguous language is entirely arbitrary.
                You say the two clauses are meant to work together, he says they work separately and no one can resolve it.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                It matters what the words meant in order to understand what their thinking was. It doesn’t matter what we think of their thinking. Otherwise yeah, it becomes arbitrary.

                So yes, the amendment was passed because of the Founders’ prioritization of self-defense. The US military doesn’t currently rely on the civilian for self-defense, nor does the issue of hunting come up at all except that it makes us remember how common firearms were. They made a dependent clause that said we all know how important this is, then an independent clause saying that the right shall not be infringed.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Pinky says:

                Well if citizen militias are obsolete and hunting doesn’t apply, what application does the amendment have, at all?

                Notice how there is not one word about personal self defense.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                “This amendment is obsolete.”

                Seems like it’d be easy to overturn a la Prohibition.Report

              • Chris in reply to Jaybird says:

                This raises an interesting question for political philosophy. Gun rights are, effectively, obsolete for the reasons they were initially coded into the Bill of Rights, and are likely, from a practical standpoint, socially and culturally harmful. However, they are deeply ingrained in American culture, which not only makes repealing the 2nd Amendment unlikely, but puts them in a category similar to religious practices that might also be socially or culturally harmful, but are protected. How do you go about changing harmful aspects of culture without trying to legally restrict them?

                A question that I continue to think about is, at what point does gun culture, which is in some ways as old as the country, and in other ways relatively new, begin to change in the face of the destructiveness of guns? To this point, the response from the culture has always been to react to gun violence by calling for more police, better armed and funded police, etc., but with police increasingly showing that they cannot, and in fact even when they can, will not stop gun violence, despite being such large portions of most city budgets that they severely restrict the ability of cities to function in ways that might actually help to alleviate some of the underlying causes of violence. I think the turn to increased policing, surveillance, etc. (effectively choosing to reduce our overall liberty to maintain one specific right) will become too obviously pointless, even counterproductive, to continue. How will gun culture justify its continued worship of firearms at that point? Do people who worship at the alter of the firearm begin to change their minds about guns then? Or do they find some other useless and expensive solution to avoid having to face the reality of their own complicity? I am too cynical to believe the answer to that last question is no.

                I truly believe that in order for gun worship to begin to wane, our culture will have to change more dramatically and fundamentally, and I think there are signs that this is possible in the medium to long-term future, but I worry greatly about how bad things will get between now and then, particularly as the sorts of changes I hope for produce strong reactions among the worst types of gun worshipers.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Chris says:

                The long term trends of gun culture are that the sport use of guns is fading as there become fewer and fewer hunters.

                So the public image of a gun is less and less “Something Uncle Bill uses to kill deer” and more “weapon for killing people.”

                Notice how the rhetoric is from the pro gun side is less about responsible hunters and more and more about resisting tyranny and killing intruders.Report

              • Chris in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Yeah, my neighborhood has a couple “we don’t call 911” signs (i.e., invitations to gun thieves), and I’ve seen the shift in the culture, from my country-ass grandparents, who had a bunch of rifles and shotguns for hunting just leaning against the walls of the hallway and their bedroom, but never owned a handgun in their lives, to concealed and even open carry becoming a big thing. Every time I try to wrap my mind around the logic of combating gun violence with more guns, my head starts to spin, but that’s the way we’ve combatted it.Report

              • Saul Degraw in reply to Chris says:

                IIRC gun ownership is fading. However, a lot of gun owners end up with what look like small to medium sized arsenals of guns clearly not meant for hunting.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Look, it’s Friday…are we going in circles just to prove that you can keep going in circles, or do you really believe this? If you do, we can keep going, but if this is for show, we’ve got a long weekend coming up.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Pinky says:

                I would pose the question to everyone reading this.

                When you think of “guns” or “gun owner” which is the image that comes to mind?Report

              • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Having gone to the big gun show in the DC area my image is something close to ‘America in Miniature,’ though definitely more dudes than ladies. Maybe ‘crowd you’d expect to see at a football game’ is a little more on point.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Pinky says:

                I know I said that this conversation was pointless, but I did want to jump back for a second and point you guys to today’s Clare Briggs.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

                The 2nd certainly didn’t include any restrictions on the abilities of _state governments_ when it passed.

                The 2nd amendment never should have been subject to incorporation, and doing so fundmentally misunderstood the fact that the dangers the amendment was trying to stop was the Federal government disarming the state militias and leaving states defenseless…which is obviously not a right a _state_ can infringe.

                Which makes it all the more absurd we’re mostly talking about _state laws_.

                But, hey, luckily, precedent doesn’t mean anything anymore, and a future Supreme Court can just ‘Nope, no right to gun ownership _at all_ outside of state militias’.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                On one hand, the amendment is interpreted to guarantee that the people have the right to form militias for defense.

                This is, incidentally, nonsense. It’s the sort of nonsense that is the result of the right redefining words for decades, but still nonsense.

                People cannot group up and form militias.

                A militia is a fighting force _authorized by a government_, just like a military. It is operated by a government, under their control. It is not, as the right-wing has tried to claim, any sort of unofficial force. Militias are just when they are not professional soldiers and maybe have their own equipment. Miltaries exist all the time, militias get called up.

                If you make them up out of thin air, even for ‘defense’ they are not militias, they are armed thugs. Which is what the right-wing has been created for decades, and managed to convince people should be properly called a ‘militia’.

                Now, at some point, what exactly a ‘government’ is starts getting sort of confusing. In a resistance-type situation, sometimes a ‘government’ is a lot less official than people would think. So, sure, if there’s some resistance movement going on and an armed force fighting it, sure, it can be a militia even if the government is ‘one guy in a hat’.

                But, um…that would imply that America right-wing ‘militias’ are, um…under some other government, because they’re not under ours! (Now, I think should take them at their word and capture them as POWs, try to figure out what government they’re working for. If they want to be an army…well, we have an army too, and it’s bigger.)

                But, anyway, they aren’t actually militias. They’re just violent armed thugs.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to DavidTC says:

                So those people smashing windows and burning stores in 2020 weren’t just citizen militias carrying out tactical operations?

                Huh.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                A militia is a fighting force _authorized by a government_

                Yes and no. It’s authorized/controlled by the gov on a dime in an emergency. Before that it’s just every male able bodied citizen of age who isn’t a solider.

                There needs to be a personal right to arms for civilians so that the militia can exist if the gov needs it.Report

            • InMD in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

              He does. And approaching 15 years out I don’t think that decision has had the impact critics or proponents thought it would. As best as I can tell the vast majority of gun laws have remained constitutional.

              So far the practical take-away has been you can’t completely regulate out of existence the ability to own a handgun as DC and Chicago had. My understanding is that a complete handgun ban has never polled remotely well so I don’t see the outcome as being way out of step. Not to derail but I think it’s relevant to compare it to, say, what’s probably about to happen with Roe v. Wade where the decision is, at the very least, going to enable a bunch of things at odds with public opinion.Report

              • PD Shaw in reply to InMD says:

                At the time of Heller, I believe Eugene Volokh opined that the Heller decision holding only implicated gun regulations in DC, Chicago and Illinois (because it was the only no-issue state). Illinois’ carry ban was ruled invalid by the Court of Appeals and not appealed. I’m not sure at all what gun restrictions people think are popular in any given state that are banned by the SCOTUS.Report

              • InMD in reply to PD Shaw says:

                I guess Volokh was right. The interesting thing will be to see what happens with the NY ‘may issue’ case. That could be much farther reaching as far as the law is concerned though I doubt it will change much about day to day life.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to LeeEsq says:

            So the entire well-regulated militia part was just fancy language that meant nothing?

            “Militia” back in the day meant “able bodied man of a certain age who is not in the armed forces”.

            “Regulated” mean “working”. A clock was well regulated if it gave accurate time. This is before the regulator state.

            So it has meaning and that meaning is important.Report

            • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

              That is not, and has never been, what militia means.

              Militias are the people that the state _has called up_ or been accepted as volunteers for military service. (As opposed to the professional soldiers who are always employed in military service.)

              You are not in a militia merely because you are abled-bodied man. The government merely _proclaims a right_ to put you in a militia, via a draft.

              Sometimes the government even preemptively says that because you are an able-bodied man, it is putting you in a militia automatically, but that does not mean that militias are defined as all abled-bodied men.

              Most importantly: It is utterly impossible to be in a militia against the wishes of the government, which makes it exceptionally absurd to try to use a claim of ‘militia’ as any sort of justification to own a gun that the government does not wish you to own.

              If the government says you can’t have a gun, it presumably thinks it you are not in one of its militias, or possibly you are in one of its militias but it just doesn’t want you to have a gun! Not everyone in a fighting force gets a gun, and no one is allowed to carry them around willy-nilly!Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                That is not, and has never been, what militia means.

                Basic definition of militia according to google: “all able-bodied civilians eligible by law for military service”

                There are other definitions. Some of the able-bodied civilians engage in training so they’re not total noobs in that emergency.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                No it’s not. the definition from Google is ‘a military force that is raised from the civil population to supplement a regular army in an emergency.’

                militia are, by definition, a military force. they’re not some hypothetical group of people who could be in a military force.

                it is perhaps possible to use the word to mean people that the law has already said can be called up as part of a militia are in a militia, but again, that’s only if the law already says that, which means it has nothing to do with gun control which declares that they can’t have weapons, and thus presumably would not be in any state militia.

                far right nut jobs have tried to redefine that term for about 50 years at this point, but they are lying, and ‘all abled-bodied men’ is not what the term has ever meant. it is certainly not what was meant when the second amendment was written.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                If google (really dictionary.com I think) have multiple definitions, then they all work.

                You not liking my definition doesn’t change that it’s a black letter quote.

                To repeat: Basic definition of militia according to google: “all able-bodied civilians eligible by law for military service”Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                *sigh*

                Ask yourself what on earth it could possibly mean to be ‘eligible by law for military service’. Because that phrase is complete nonsense.

                There is no one ‘eligible’ to be in the military who is not in the military. There are no laws that say ‘This civilian who is not in military service can enter military service, we will let them in’.

                There are laws _excluding_ people, but there is no one with some sort of automatic admission to military service. There never has been. Which rather disproves this entire nonsense.

                Even _drafted_ people are not ‘eligible by law for military service’. People who were drafted were examined and plenty of them rejected.

                This is part of the absurd distortion of that term, where people just lie and claim ‘It meant all men’ and then mutter under their breath ‘who are eligible for military service’, and ignore the fact that they are speaking gibberish, because military service doesn’t work that way.

                The people ‘eligible by law’ to enter military service are people already in the actual militias, the various state Natural Guards and even some other state-level things, because they have already joined the militia, but are not currently in active service.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                Ask yourself what on earth it could possibly mean to be ‘eligible by law for military service’. Because that phrase is complete nonsense.

                There are laws _excluding_ people…

                Your second phrase answers your first.

                There are laws excluding people (back in the day the big exception would be slaves). With that exception, the entire able bodied male population is potentially in the militia if things hit the fan.

                In order for that idea to work, they need to have access to guns before the emergency happens.

                The militia isn’t a standing organization. It’s an organization that’s supposed to pop into existence in an emergency.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to DavidTC says:

                The idea that everyone is in a militia, and thus everyone has the right to own a gun, is flat-out utter nonsense, completely legal gibberish, regardless of what anyone thinks about the second amendment.

                A militia is a government-controlled organization that exists because the government says it does, and people are in it because the government says they are. No rights can attach to this.

                Governments assert all sorts of rights to draft people, but that doesn’t give those people the rights they would have while drafted at all times, executed randomly and under no one’s control.

                On top of that nonsense, even if people were in a militia, they wouldn’t have some right to personally own a random gun, that’s not how military is work, and in fact military forces tend to be very VERY strict about gun ownership and possession. If they could somehow make the argument that they legally were in a militia *despite* the government, then they should go to ask the government to issue them any guns or other equipment that the government wishes to issue them… and expect to be court-martialed if they found to have any weapons of the government does not allow, because that’s how military forces work.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                In order for the gov to have the ability to draft people into a militia on a moment’s notice where those civilians will be supplying their own arms, the people’s right to keep and bear arms will not be infringed.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                At it’s root, you’re claiming that although the federal gov doesn’t have the right to impede the right to a gun the states do.

                Does that work for the 1stAM? Do the States have the right to tear it up?Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Initially, yes, they did. The constitution was only ever a check against the federal government. The BOR started to be incorporated against the state governments later, if a given state didn’t already have such rights listed in their own constitution.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to DavidTC says:

                America has one of those political cultures that attempts to valorize insurrection, but of course only in the abstract historical sense.

                Like, the idea of citizens mobilizing and using their guns to attack and overthrow the government has this romantic aura about it that you see in both right and left wing rhetoric.

                Jan 6 is a perfect example but of course so are the Weathermen.

                The difference between a “militia” and “mob with with guns” is really that one is regulated by some central command and the other is not.

                But in any case, a militia isn’t necessarily a force for good or even a force acting for the good of, or at the behest of the People.
                So the idea that the word should be shrouded with some romantic or patriotic aura should be dispelled.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Very true and well put.

                Worse, after the Revolutionary war, I’m not sure if I can point to any point in history where armed civilians has been really useful in terms of preserving freedoms.

                Now if it had been useful then I’m not sure we’d know so there’s that.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Ukraine?

                Depending on your POV, Vietnam and Afghanistan also count.Report

              • Irish War of Independence?Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to Dark Matter says:

                There was the Battle of Athens in 1946, but that was local.Report

              • PD Shaw in reply to Dark Matter says:

                After the Civil War, Southern states passed (or revived) Black Codes that barred blacks from bearing arms, while forcing them back into involuntary servitude as unemployed vagrants. When protests were made, blacks were massacred by state militias or private paramilitary forces often with military arms from the War. Reports of these travesties were made to Congress who passed various Civil Rights laws and the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) with members of Congress expressly stating that it would protect the freemen’s right to bear arms.

                The refusal of Southern states to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment led to Congressional Reconstruction and military imposition of new civilian governments, which repealed the Black Codes and ratified the 14th Amendment. But in 1873, around one hundred black men were massacred by a white paramilitary group armed with rifles and a small cannon. When federal charges were brought, the SCOTUS dismissed them stating that the 14th Amendment does not guarantee a right of peaceful assembly nor a right to bear arms against any by the federal government. Cruikshank (1876)

                After that decision, violence against blacks increased, the Black Codes were reinstated and the Jim Crow period had begun. So there was clearly a point in time in which armed civilians could have used federal protection of their rights to preserve their freedoms. The SCOTUS did not want to though.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to PD Shaw says:

                This works pretty well as an example where having an armed population put a serious upper limit on the power of the gov.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Kinda, but as always “it depends”.

                Like, we toss around the phrase “The People” as a singular noun, when it is plural.

                If one fact of “The People” turns their guns on a hated minority, that upper limit of the power of government goes away.

                Which is the problem writ large, where tyranny depends on the people being divided into classes, some of which get treated well, and others not, thereby purchasing the support of the one class at the expense of the other.

                Adding more guns to this equation doesn’t change anything.
                The Irish Troubles are one example, Jim Crow another.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Worse, after the Revolutionary war, I’m not sure if I can point to any point in history where armed civilians has been really useful in terms of preserving freedoms.

                The government tends to preemptively kill those people if they have _guns_. Well, they do if they’re a member of a minority.

                Like, that’s the entire problem with this, and I don’t really know how to explain it to people who do not understand it already: No one is ever going to be allowed to fight for their rights with guns. Because the police will just assert they’re a threat (And perhaps be correct), so will have ALREADY shot them, well in advance of any armed force existing.

                There have been uprisings in the US where repressed minorities did violently respond. However it almost always was with bricks and rocks, or sometimes with farm equipment or whatever. Because, again, oppressed people aren’t allowed to carry weapons around to start with (Regardless of any ‘right’ to do so. You would think this would bother so-called ‘2nd amendment absolutists’, but weirdly it does not.), and thus they generally do not. They don’t have weapons on hand when this start.

                Oh, and Happy Pride, everyone. In case everyone forgot about one of those riots.Report

              • InMD in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                The historical context was Cromwell’s new model army established during the English civil war. It was seen as fundamentally lacking legitimacy by the founders and Cromwell’s rule is probably the one time from the early modern period to the present you could say the UK was under military dictatorship.

                Conversely the militia consisted of local freemen summoned to see off occasional threats. There’s a long tradition of those forces going back to the Anglo-Saxon fyrd being required to bring their own weapons. Either way it’s wound up in the idea of a standing army being dangerous and a preference for popular defense over self-interested professionals with their greater propensity for abusing their power.Report

    • PD Shaw in reply to Michael Cain says:

      I don’t think that is an issue, gun manufacturers are strictly liable if they manufacture a defective product. As far as I know, these are successful if the gun malfunctions or does something reasonably unexpected without warning. Plaintiff’s lawyers, keeping the world safe for Jeffersonian democracy.Report

  12. LeeEsq says:

    Republicans propose stopping school shootings by fewer doors at schools. I am not making this up.Report

  13. Chip Daniels says:

    Elections have consequences.
    Senate GOP blocks domestic terrorism bill, gun policy debate

    https://apnews.com/article/uvalde-school-shooting-senate-republicans-938382083f82e187531d604db3edf211Report

    • Philip H in reply to Chip Daniels says:

      One report I read on this indicated that the Republicans are hiding behind a statement by the Administration that they already have all the legal authorization they need, so Republicans can pitch this as wasteful.Report

  14. Every time I think we’ve reached peak Republican, I’m wrong again. Now they want to arm the groomers.Report

  15. Tim (@Gurdur) says:

    The assertion that “gun control only has small effects on gun violence” is fundamentally flawed here, relying on two studies that can only come to that conclusion if you believe the USA to be the only nation on Earth. It would be FAR more truthful for Americans to admit gun control can work, and does work, see Britain, Australia etc., but Americans don’t want that. They also don’t want liability insurance on gun sales and purchases, which would put a crimp in gun numbers. Without the actual truth here, it comes over like handwaving.Report

    • Chris in reply to Tim (@Gurdur) says:

      This. Gun control works exceptionally well. We’ve just never really tried it on a scale that would matter.Report

    • Saul Degraw in reply to Tim (@Gurdur) says:

      Most Americans want gun control including a good number of Republicans but as with so many issues, a majority has managed to hijack one whole political apparatus and two Democratic idiots refuse to destroy the filibuster. Though I guess you can argue people refusing to stop voting Republican despite GOP opposition to gun laws or caring more about has prices is being pro-gun in effect for you.Report

      • InMD in reply to Saul Degraw says:

        You’re looking at the polls and seeing what you want to see. Certain measures poll well as do general sentiments about ‘common sense’ gun control. However other specific things like ‘completely ban handguns’ poll incredibly poorly. It’s also just not a major priority for most voters. Gun control is among the classic issues of support being a mile wide, an inch deep, and subject to all kinds of nuances that frustrate poll questions.

        It’s comparable to polling on universal healthcare or abortion. People want universal healthcare but not to pay more in taxes for it. People want abortion to be legal but are also happy to restrict it well before the line Roe/Casey drew.Report

  16. Chris says:

    A thing that fascinates me about the idea of red flag laws is that, after being told that gun rights are so basic to human liberty that they outweigh any number of deaths they might cause, we’re told that all it takes to take those rights from someone is a diagnosis or an interaction with police, without trial. Putting aside how such laws would inevitably be unequally applied (because some people will be able to afford good lawyers), and that they turn the mental health profession into de facto law enforcement, thereby seriously undermining the ability of mental health professionals to do their jobs, or that they make all of us into potential snitches, heightening the very sorts of isolation and alienation that we’re trying to avoid, we’re still left with the fact that red flag laws are a pretty clear admission that gun rights are not actually that important, because we can take them from anyone at anytime without due process.

    If you favor red flag laws, you’re basically there, even if you don’t realize it. Just have to take that final step.Report

    • DensityDuck in reply to Chris says:

      “If you favor red flag laws, you’re basically there, even if you don’t realize it. Just have to take that final step.”

      you realize you’re just copying the right-wing anti-regulation rhetoric here, right

      like

      just…you know you’re doing that? right?Report

      • DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

        The right-wing rhetoric is fundamentally correct at this point. Any sort of regulation of guns like that is a step towards the slippery slope of banning all guns. And it’s because gun fanatics absolutely refused to give any ground earlier, and the entire system is at a breaking point.

        The right _keeps_ doing this. They keep locking the machinery in place and using imbalances built into the system to keep it in place long after the majority of people have moved past that point, and eventually the system snaps off and…we all get gay marriage.

        The anti-gun control situation is going to snap. It’s just going to break off. And no one will be (hell, no one _is_ at this point) going to be in the mood for ‘reasonable gun control’. Guns are going to be _gone_.

        We could have had mandatory tracking and registration on guns, we could have had larger clips banned, we could have had easily-converted-to-full-automatics banned…we could have stopped at some reasonable point, two decades ago, any point where schools weren’t regularly shot up.

        But now it’s too late.

        It’s the same with abortion, and in fact weirdly was designed to be that way…with harsh laws passed to go into effect the second Roe v. Wade was overturned. What could have happened is a ‘boiling the frog’ with reasonable-sounding regulations, but…nope. Jam the lever as far right as possible, act startled when the pushback is strong.

        When you stand atop history yelling stop, don’t be surprised that, when people finally make it past you and manage to move in the direction they wanted, they start flat-out sprinting and end up pretty far down the road. You probably could have just walked a few dozen feet there, with them, but…nope.

        (Or, to put it another way, because it always is projection with the right: There actually is such a thing as ‘peaking’ someone, resulting massive pushback, but it’s not what they seem to think it is…but it is something the right has done for…well, decades.)Report

        • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

          Guns are going to be _gone_.

          By what mechanism?

          “We’ll use *POLICE*!”

          I have found a fundamental flaw in your plan.Report

          • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

            LOL.

            That would be a reasonable objection if I was proposing having the police take guns away from _people_. (Which is, in fact, something that many on the left should remember. Gun laws need to be enforced, and giving the police power to enforce them is bad, because the police are bad.)

            But I’m actually proposing shutting down gun stores and disallowing guns sold to civilians by manufacturers.

            Gun stores and gun manufacturers, being owned and operated by capital, are in no danger from the police’s fascist violence, and I have no qualms about pointing the police at them. The police will be extremely deferential and polite to them, almost apologetic. If anything, we’re going to run into problems getting the police to do this, but they will.

            Here’s the secret about guns: They go away by themselves. I know that it’s some sort of supposed truism that ‘we can never remove all the guns’, but…we can. We just have to wait.

            We seize every gun we take from people, and don’t give it back (But we explicitly don’t make that criminal, so the police can’t use it as an excuse for anything, although there’s very little they could do with ‘seize gun’ powers that they can’t currently do with ‘seize drugs’ powers anyway.), but, most importantly, we don’t let people sell new ones…or even make them for sale.

            They will disappear from the ecosystem. It might take a decade, but they will.

            This is the point I keep making in every discussion we have here about guns: It is pretty easy to bar guns. We’ve actually, fairly successfully, banned tons of guns and those guns barely exist anymore! Simply by not having them available for sale.

            Everyone wants to focus on weird outliers, or demand a situation that magically works in two days.

            Stop letting people sell guns. Seize every gun on the inventory of gun stores so they can’t sell them illegal as they go out of business. I promise, it would make a massive dent in guns within a year, as people cannot resupply.

            Edit: Note, I’m not ‘proposing’ this, I’m just pointing out that at some point the population is going to snap and do _something_ like this. Hopefully, they are smart enough to not criminalize ownership, as that way lies more police fascism. And stopping the open and legal sales of guns would end up in a ‘no guns’ situation by itself.Report

            • Chip Daniels in reply to DavidTC says:

              The war on cigarette smoking shows an example.

              The enforcement mechanisms were mostly passive or subtle nudging- First banning smoking in elevators and store, then offices, finally bars and concerts.

              Along the way were social norms erected making smokers an isolated and shunned minority, which in turn helped to discourage children from starting the habit.

              And yeah, the number of smokers dwindled to a negligible number.

              Guns of course have a lot of differences but the idea is that social behavioral change can be brought about with nonviolent means.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                But everyone in the gun rights conversation remembers that, and it’s why they refuse to give an inch.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Pinky says:

                Then maybe they should work on improving outcomes instead of defending the slaughter of children.

                Remember that the tobacco industry had its version of the NRA and they won election after election, knocking down bill after bill, savoring victory after victory.

                Until they didn’t. And then, it was too late for compromise and half measures.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                You just accused people of defending the slaughter of children. Are you also invoking Kazzy’s “it’s not defamation if I’m grieving” theory?Report

              • Jesse in reply to Pinky says:

                If you’re OK w/ eaay access to guns, you’re OK with occasional slaughters of children. Because it happens a lot in the only advanced country w/ such easy access to guns.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Pinky says:

                Amd that is how they win each battle, and ultimately lose the war.

                Some sort of reasonable gun control could have stopped this, some sort of monitoring and tracking of guns could have stopped this, reasonable limits on guns for self-defense and hunting could have stopped this, all sorts of things could have stopped this, but at this point gun control is frankly unstoppable, and it is going to be _vicious_ and _petty_ and as strong as we can make it, because y’all assholes spent 20 f*cking years standing by while kids got murdered, rejecting literally every compromise that anyone could come up with.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                Some sort of reasonable gun control could have stopped this,

                Really? What exactly.

                Shooter planned it for 8+ months. He had no criminal record.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                At least two things could have stopped this that come under the banner of ‘reasonable gun control’.

                Not selling to 18 year olds

                Not selling weapons with a magazine larger than around six (as I’ve mentioned repeatedly before as something that puts a lie to any sort of ‘hunting’ or ‘self-defense’)

                Hell, not selling semi-automatic rifles at all.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

                These guys use these rifles because of style and plot, not because there are no alternatives.

                He even brought hand guns and might have used them as his primary.

                Not selling weapons with a magazine larger than around six

                With an hour to do his thing and three firearms, he can reload or switch to another gun.

                Not selling to 18 year olds would have worked… assuming his grandmother wasn’t a gun person.

                I’m not sure I like it as an idea nor am I sure the US is ready for that, but those are different issues.Report

              • A second-order sort of thing, but we could stop letting civilians buy military ammunition. I mean that in the sense that the 5.56x45mm cartridge was designed to do one thing, and it does that very well: kill people, typically at a range less than 200 yards. The AR-15 was designed around that cartridge. It’s a crappy cartridge for any civilian application — there’s no reason to let civilians have it, or guns that use it.Report

              • InMD in reply to Michael Cain says:

                An AR-10 will chamber .308, which is fairly common hunting ammunition. I’m not sure that would change a lot of the outcomes. I think at VA Tech the damage was done with 9mm handguns.Report

              • Oscar Gordon in reply to InMD says:

                Have you shot a 5.56 round? So little recoil…

                A .308 is something you have to get used to, a 5.56… not so much.

                As per Mike’s point, the 5.56 is not designed to kill, it’s designed to seriously wound an adult, because a wounded soldier consumes the attention and resources of their comrades. Dead soldiers don’t.

                It’s also very lightweight, so a soldier can carry more rounds.Report

              • InMD in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

                I have. For the kinds of situations we’re talking about I’ve never been convinced ammunition type is all that important. Someone could run around with a ruger 10/22 and kill a whole bunch of defenseless people at near point blank range, to say nothing of any common handgun caliber (including .22lr). Pre-Sandy Hook I don’t believe AR-15s or 556/223 were particularly notorious.

                To me the ammo angle is one of those hair splitting things where the precedent isn’t worth the (IMO sure to be negligible) impact.Report

              • Michael Cain in reply to InMD says:

                Most of the world says the same thing about handguns that I said about the 5.56×45 cartridge: designed to kill people, not well suited to most other uses. And they take considerable care to keep them out of civilians’ hands.

                Yeah, one 9mm and one .22 LR at VA Tech. Hollow-point bullets for the 9mm. The shooter in Finland used the same kind of .22 LR pistol. I am personally surprised that more of the mass shooters don’t use handguns.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Michael Cain says:

                I am personally surprised that more of the mass shooters don’t use handguns.

                It’s because they’re following the pattern set by Derik and Eric.

                They had a budget of roughly zero. They stole their guns so they took what they could get. They weren’t very smart or experienced.

                There are way more efficient patterns. And I’ll stop there.

                I would like to avoid a conversation on optimizing mass murder.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                They’re copycats. There’s nothing less original than a pouting teen. The only problem is in saying that you might inspire someone to try to copy something grander.Report

              • An excellent decision. Oscar Gordon and myself have an unfortunate tendency to go off into “engineers talking hypotheticals” in bad ways.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Yeah, those happened all the time after 9/11 for a few years.

                Man, if terrorists really wanted to hurt us, they would…

                And then people would make lists. If you didn’t mind dying in the process you could… if you were okay with just getting arrested you could… If you wanted to stay anonymous you could…

                You know, you could buy one of those George W Bush dolls and stick pins in it. But first you have to read this poem three times.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Jaybird says:

                Those sorts of lists aren’t followed because the people attracted to it have a script to follow. Everyone has assigned roles, all you have to do is play your part and you’re a celeb.

                Wave a magic wand and remove all the guns in the us but leave the media as is. Does the problem go away, or does it get worse?Report

              • InMD in reply to Michael Cain says:

                I hear you on what a lot of other countries do. I will openly cop to my priors though, that part of my larger philosophy on this subject includes civilians being allowed to own weapons and ammunition designed to be anti-personnel.

                Re: the shooters I can only assume they pick them these days because it’s become part of their disgraceful need for notoriety.Report

            • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

              We seize every gun we take from people, and don’t give it back

              Who is “we”?

              Police?

              They aren’t willing to go into a school building when children are being murdered, David.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

                What I’m saying is, when the police arrest someone or come into possession of a gun in some way, they’d keep it instead of giving it back.

                Not sure why this is confusing.

                We can make things that you are not allowed to possess, without attaching a criminal penalty for that, and we can even create things that are not even seized, but if the government ends up with them the government simply keeps them.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

                What I’m saying is, when the police arrest someone or come into possession of a gun in some way, they’d keep it instead of giving it back.

                Oh, okay. I guess.

                Not sure why this is confusing.

                Believe it or not, there have been people who argue for doing house-to-house confiscation of guns.

                We can make things that you are not allowed to possess, without attaching a criminal penalty for that, and we can even create things that are not even seized, but if the government ends up with them the government simply keeps them.

                So something like Civil Forfeiture needs to be expanded.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

                I mean, I don’t think taking _illegal_ things from people really is civil forfeiture. Civil forfeiture is taking the supposed proceeds of a crime, the problem is that they don’t have to prove that crime even existed, much less that those are the proceeds of it.

                Whereas taking guns away from people (or, rather, just not giving them back when taken away for other reasons, like someone got arrested) would just be taking them away because the guns_are_ the illegal things…although I guess, if we wanted, we could have some sort of court proceeding in which people could challenge the assertation that their gun was a gun

                … honestly, now that I just said that, it’s not a bad idea, because there are all sorts of things that are like guns that would probably be legal, like prop guns, and there really should be a process via which people can point out that the cops seized something that they shouldn’t have.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

                Nah. I just figure that the people on the right side of the tracks will get to keep their guns and only the people on the wrong side of the tracks will have to worry about anything.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Jaybird says:

                I feel like ‘get to’ is doing a lot of work there.

                The ‘wrong sort of people’ will, indeed, lose their guns faster, because they will be arrested more, and thus it will be more likely cops will come across their guns, but, again, this is a nonsensical ‘the perfect is the enemy of the good’ problem.

                No one will be allowed to buy guns. Or ammunition. No one will be allowed to have guns in public. You walk around wearing one, you’re possibly going to be noticed by a cop and told to hand it over…again, in a fairly racially biased way, sure, but it’s a pretty stupid risk because all you have to do is stumble across the one cop that says ‘Give it’, and then you don’t have the gun anymore and you cannot buy new ones.

                It’s a really dumb risk, and the sort of people who take it will quickly lose their guns.

                I don’t really care if some white people manage to keep a few guns in a gun cabinet for another decade. That literally does nothing. All these objections to ‘seizing guns’ are premised on the idea that is a problem, that the police have to go looking for those and track them down, but they, literally, do not.

                And you know who wouldn’t have guns, pretty quickly? Young people. You know, the actual people who do mass shootings? Because they don’t already have guns. Sure, a few of them will track down some of those guns in gun cabinets, owned by older people, but many will not have that option.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DavidTC says:

                I feel like ‘get to’ is doing a lot of work there.

                I figure it will be like the war on drugs. I’d be interested in hearing why it wouldn’t be.

                “Oh, police won’t be corrupt/captured like they are now” seems to be a fundamental premise.

                Would we bring back something like Stop & Frisk?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                This is an example of the argument of convenience I referred to .

                Like, when there’s a law you like and want enforced, corruption of the cops doesn’t seem to be an impediment.

                But when there is a law you would rather not be enforced, suddenly there are all sorts of excuses why it can/shouldn’t be.

                The fact is, any law can be “like the war on drugs”.
                And also, any law can be like the war on tobacco.

                If Americans collectively don’t want to give up their guns and prefer to accept the periodic slaughter of children, then the law can’t be enforced.

                But if Americans collectively make a different choice then the outcome will be different.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Chip, my starting point is something like “cops will refuse to go into a freaking ELEMENTARY SCHOOL while children are being murdered, you cannot trust law enforcement as part of any utopian plan you may have”.

                Like, when there’s a law you like and want enforced, corruption of the cops doesn’t seem to be an impediment.

                Yes. Those laws I like. That I can’t stop singing the praises of. All of those laws.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                Weren’t you the guy getting all upset over rampant shoplifting? Or rioting and looting? Or fentanyl sales in San Francisco?
                And didn’t you say you would side with the cops in the CHAZ/CHOP situation?

                I notice you never seem to call for those laws to be abolished. Just the laws you don’t like in the specific situations you want to see them not happen.

                This is why I say the dark view of society is a preferred belief because it enables the selective and arbitrary conclusions you want.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Yeah, I did find the rampant shoplifting to be a problem.

                Rioting and looting as well, yes.

                The open air drug markets have problems that deal with far too much regulation and far too little. Like bathtub gin problems.

                I notice you never seem to call for those laws to be abolished.

                When it comes to shoplifting, looting, and arson, it doesn’t look like the laws are being enforced in the first place. Why call for them to be abolished?

                Though I will grant:

                This is probably a pretty good opportunity to run with “Police Reform”.

                You know the whole “good guy with a gun” myth? Well, the shooter at the school was, in fact, stopped by a good guy with a gun. After an hour. With a whole bunch of people who weren’t particularly good standing outside of the building not knowing what to do.

                This is an opportunity to lay down a handful of policies that might change the way that police departments are made up, train, and so on.

                Like, once police departments are no longer captured, a lot of stuff becomes possible that is not possible with a corrupt and captured police force.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                How will your preferred laws and reforms be enforced and by whom?
                The same corrupt establishment?

                There is a circular illogic here. The government is incompetent, so you want reforms to be created and enforced by the incompetent government.

                See, this is why I mentioned before that you can’t articulate a preferred state of affairs because your own logic leads to a dead end.

                Your preferred outcome of a trustworthy and effective police force can only happen within the context of a society that is peaceful and cooperative and an administrative state that is competent and effective.

                But that requires you to see your own rights and behavior as negotiable and subject to imposition of restraints by others, even in situations where you would rather not.

                But you don’t like that sort of society, so you stay stuck in the dead end.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Chip, you misunderstand.

                My immediate goal is not “we need to end the shoplifting in San Francisco!”

                I’m merely looking at that and thinking “yep, more evidence that the government there has failed”.

                My goal is some variant of “reform the police”. Oscar has a nice essay about it.

                Your preferred outcome

                It’s recognition of a pre-requisite, actually.

                I see reforming the police as a pre-requisite to pretty much anything except legalizing pot at the federal level and getting rid of DST.

                Without reforming the cops? You’re going to find yourself calling for more laws and wondering why it doesn’t work.

                The pre-req needs to be accomplished before the other stuff.

                Yes, including house-to-house searches for handguns.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Jaybird says:

                Right, but the pre-requisite to the thing you want requires erecting the thing you don’t want.

                A society where the cops are reformed and well disciplined is a society where Jaybird is well disciplined.

                That is, it is a society where both cops and Jaybird have their behavior circumscribed, bounded and hemmed in by a million rules and regulations, norms and manners.

                So you’re left unable to construct any bridge that leads from “Here” to “There”.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Chip Daniels says:

                Hey, I’d love to see an argument for cops being reformed.

                Wait, I did see one. It was Oscar’s.

                “A society where the cops are reformed and well disciplined is a society where Jaybird is well disciplined.”

                While it’s true that I lack discipline, I lack discipline in a different way than the whole “let’s break the law” way. I’m more of a vaguely disappointing “didn’t live up to his potential” lacking in discipline.

                So you’re left unable to construct any bridge that leads from “Here” to “There”.

                Here’s Oscar’s essay again.

                My favorite stuff happens in “Other Ideas” (and I’d add a #7 for stuff reforming asset forfeiture) so you can look at that stuff.

                You may say that Oscar’s proposals are pie-in-the-sky and will never catch on. Yeah, I can see someone argue that.

                But I think that it’s got a better shot than most of the versions of gun control that are more interesting than the bland “common sense” ones.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to DavidTC says:

                “What I’m saying is, when the police arrest someone or come into possession of a gun in some way, they’d keep it instead of giving it back.”

                Congratulations, you’ve arrived at “confiscate the firearms of black men” from the liberal side of the argument.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Congratulations, you’ve arrived at Critical Race theory.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

                Congratulations, you’ve arrived at “confiscate the firearms of black men” from the liberal side of the argument.

                Oh yes, the police, famous for calmly confiscating guns from Black people and _not_ just shooting armed Black people without any cause besides ‘they had a gun’.

                Here in reality, confiscating guns from Black people would actually be an improvement of the behavior of the police. In reality, they’ll probably just keep shooting them.

                Also here in reality, a finite non-renewable supply of something, and some of it being constantly removed, will eventually get all of it gone.

                I do not actually care where they disappear from first.

                It sure is odd how all the conservatives here only care about police power being applied unjustly when they are laws they don’t like. The rest of us just know the police powers will be applied unjustly, which is, of course, why I don’t suggest any sort of criminal penalty whatsoever for firearm possession…

                … However, Jaybird just reminded me about civil forfeiture, and if we actually want the police to start taking guns that they see off the street, even from white people, we could just have the Federal government pay for every gun the local police seizes and hands over.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to DavidTC says:

                “[C]onfiscating guns from Black people would actually be an improvement of the behavior of the police.”

                …bruh. You’re not supposed to respond to accusations of “this would have a significant disparate impact and be a major violation of clearly-established Federal law” with “ah-yup, sure would”.

                “It sure is odd how all the conservatives here only care about police power being applied unjustly when they are laws they don’t like.”

                I would love for you to find examples of me saying “this particular ridiculousness is an example of police power being applied entirely appropriately, on account of it’s is a law I like”.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to DensityDuck says:

                There are still debates over Stop and Frisk.

                A handful of interesting lines from the page:

                A 2016 study found no evidence that stop-and-frisk was effective. One of the authors of that study, Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University, said that “you can achieve really very positive crime control, reductions in crime, if you do stops using those probable-cause standards. If you just leave it up to the officers, based on their hunches, then they have almost no effect on crime.” Fagan “found stops based on probable cause standards of criminal behavior were associated with a 5–9 percent decline in NYC crime in census block groups.”

                And:

                Another 2016 study by David Weisburd, Alese Wooditch, Sarit Weisburd and Sue-Ming Yang found that stop-and-frisk lowered crime, and that the size of the effect was “significant yet modest”. Robert Apel noted a deterrent effect that increased with the volume of stops (finding that each additional stop reduces the probability of crime by 0.02).

                And, finally,

                A 2017 study in The Journal of Politics found that the introduction of a mandate in 2013 that officers provide thorough justifications for stopping suspects led to far fewer stops, fewer innocent persons being detained and increased the ratio of stops that ultimately produced evidence of the crime that the police stopped the suspect for.

                The eternal question: What tradeoffs are you willing to make?Report

              • InMD in reply to Jaybird says:

                At some point there’s absolutely a trade off but I think those studies indicate we can still do pretty well without just accepting a huge number of racially disparate constitutional violations. The procedure itself is designed to produce numbers (i.e. stops) to justify budgets, as opposed to effectiveness (i.e. how many illegal weapons are you identifying, how many suspects are you apprehending with a high likelihood of successful prosecution).

                It wouldn’t shock me if there isn’t a point where you’re so focused on tossing people on the wrong side of town for soft pretext shake downs that you’re missing signs of other illegal activity. And it certainly isn’t helping if the people most likely to report illegal activity are nervous about interacting with you, lest they themselves be mistreated in some way.

                There’s a basic question of ‘is what we’re doing designed to deter crime or is it a big numbers game to allow the political operatives to make nice power point presentations?’Report

              • DavidTC in reply to DensityDuck says:

                …bruh. You’re not supposed to respond to accusations of “this would have a significant disparate impact and be a major violation of clearly-established Federal law” with “ah-yup, sure would”.

                No, my response was ‘They’ll just keep shooting Black people who have guns’.

                The fact police departments are racist and continue to be racist does not actually matter here, because, again, I have very specifically said I do not want any criminal penalties.

                Thus the only way this can harm Black people is by having them be unarmed and leaving white people armed, which IS HOW IT ALREADY IS. The police already just randomly shoot Black people with guns, and the system is already set up in such a way as to make sure huge amounts have a criminal record and cannot buy guns. Black people, already, cannot safely own guns!

                The worst case scenerio here is that functionally nothing changes except guns start getting more and more scarce to the point that white people no longer can resupply, even if the police literally completely ignore them. In reality, some of the white people are going to lose their guns also, because ‘walking around with a gun’ is a pretty objective things and cops will get in trouble if they start blatantly giving passes to white people with AR-15s strapped to their backs. I’m sure there will be a lot of looking the other way, but not an infinite amount.

                The rest of the white people will stick them in cabinets (Which the police will somehow ‘not notice’ when visiting) and I don’t actually care about those people…a gun sitting locked in a gun cabinet for decades is not actually anyone’s problem.Report

              • DensityDuck in reply to DavidTC says:

                “you don’t have to worry about disparate impact because they’ll just shoot you same as they do now”

                bro

                did you take your pills today because wowReport

    • Oscar Gordon in reply to Chris says:

      It depends on how the laws are written. You can write them to be horrible, or to be useful.Report

      • Chris in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

        It would be very difficult, if not impossible (given the current infrastructure and know-how), to thread the needle of not overwhelmingly using these laws on people who aren’t actual threats and capturing the vast majority of the people who are. And given the way cops, our criminal justice system, and really just our society in general work, I think we all know who’d be targeted most.Report

        • DavidTC in reply to Chris says:

          It’s not very difficult…it really is impossible. The shooter here was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, extremely common conditions that about 10% of the population has at least one of.

          His mental health deteriorated after that, yes, but what’s the premise here? Requiring _mandatory_ mental health evaluations for people who have access to guns?Report

        • Kazzy in reply to Chris says:

          As I said elsewhere… we’re too busy being racist to stop school shootings. America, 2022.Report

  17. Rufus F. says:

    I’ve stayed out of this conversation for the most part because I’ve just returned to the United States oh ONE WEEK ago. But, I agree with where you’re going here and you get at something that’s always bothered me about the debate: namely, the weird standard that whatever step we suggest to address the problem has to “fix it,” and then we can reject it by saying “that won’t fix it.”

    But, like I say often: Multicausal problems do not have single cause solutions.

    Say banning argyle socks would prevent 20% of mass shooting atrocities. Not good enough. Doesn’t fix the problem. But, it mitigates the problem. And that’s a step in the right direction. And, yes, we’ll never reach the ideal perfect state where mass murderers never succeed.

    But, so what. Instead, we act as if we’re hoping to maximize the severity of mass shootings, like we’re trying to create a perfect free market in murder and that will somehow correct itself. Observing from askew and askance, it’s frankly insane.Report

    • Dark Matter in reply to Rufus F. says:

      The current situation is being presented as something that has to motivate change or you’re in favor of killing children. But if the proposed changes would have done nothing, then pointing out that they would have done nothing is appropriate.Report

      • Rufus F. in reply to Dark Matter says:

        Those are two different issues. If there’s no desire to change the situation, it’s also appropriate to acknowledge there isn’t. Instead, we pretend there might be motivation, if only…Report

      • Slade the Leveller in reply to Dark Matter says:

        How do we know nothing would have changed? Rufus wasn’t writing about complete elimination, which I think we can all acknowledge is a practical impossibility. Discounting mitigation is throwing out the baby with the bath water.Report

        • Dark Matter in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

          How do we know nothing would have changed?

          The shooter planned this for 8+ months.

          The shooter didn’t have a criminal record, this was his first criminal act.

          If the shooter had any mental health issues no one has mentioned them.

          His first murder was his grandmother, so not only do we need to keep guns out of his hands but we need to keep them out of hers too.

          He bragged about it online, so maybe there’s something there for red flags, but his so called GF was in Germany so it may have been just chat stuff anonmously.

          So what do you suggest? Was banning argyle socks a serious suggestion? Banning bayonet fixtures didn’t work and we actually tried that.

          I don’t see a lot to work with here which is why we end up at “restructure society” suggestions.Report

          • Slade the Leveller in reply to Dark Matter says:

            I wasn’t writing specifically. This crime may not have been preventable, given the facts as we know them. But that doesn’t mean others wouldn’t have.

            I’m not of the opinion that throwing up our hands is a viable solution. We need to start thinking more broadly instead of trying to prevent one specific crime that’s already been committed.Report

            • Dark Matter in reply to Slade the Leveller says:

              We both are, and are not, throwing up our hands.

              The schools are doing a lot. Local news reported right before covid that they got some potential shooter before he started pulling triggers, and from their description he fit the profile pretty well.

              My expectation is every incident we avoid doesn’t make the news.

              At the same time, we have a school shooter every four years over the entire nation if the above stats are right. It’s nuts to be accused of “doing nothing” after every event when none of the proposed alternatives (short of restructuring society) would have prevented this specific event.

              That’s “let no crisis go to waste” and just drawing a line from what happened to some other policy goal.

              The big obvious problem showcased this time was the lack of intervention by the police. That’s probably where we want to focus unless someone finds something new about this shooter.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                The big obvious problem showcased this time was the lack of intervention by the police. That’s probably where we want to focus unless someone finds something new about this shooter.

                Given the often documented lack of alleged politicla support for police reform (hell we can’t even get QI trashed) this comes off as another attempt at misdirection.Report

              • Jaybird in reply to Philip H says:

                I believe that there is a window for “Police Accountability Reform” that is now pretty wide open.

                Don’t run with “Defund”. Run with “Protect and Serve”.

                Seriously.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                Police reform is probably a LOT easier than disarming the entire nation.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Which no one is proposing. I surely didn’t. Regulating guns further as we go forward is not even close to disarming.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Philip H says:

                Which no one is proposing.

                Go read what DavidTC is posting.

                Regulating guns further as we go forward is not even close to disarming.

                When we insist on new anti-gun laws after every school shooting, even if those laws couldn’t possibly have prevented the shootings, we’re engaged in a slow march towards full disarming.

                This is strongly implied when people point to gun free nations and insist that’s what is desired.

                The anti-abortion movement is great at this. Every new restriction and regulation is just one more step to being where they want to be in practice even if not in theory.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                That’s a fair point if you’re trying to challenge your opponents’ motives, but not if you’re trying to refute their policy proposals. If someone who opposes 2A suggests a policy, we should ask if the policy would address the problem being debated.Report

              • Dark Matter in reply to Pinky says:

                we should ask if the policy would address the problem being debated.

                Far as I can tell, nothing, short of banning civilian access to guns, would have stopped the current shooter. Even David’s idea of not letting 18 year olds have guns probably wouldn’t have worked because he’d already waited a year.

                However we’re being told that “nothing” isn’t an acceptable answer, so we need to… what… do something about guns in general even if that couldn’t have worked?Report

              • Pinky in reply to Dark Matter says:

                I don’t think that the question on the table is “how could we have prevented this”, but “how could we reduce the chances of things like this”.Report

              • Philip H in reply to Pinky says:

                Dark’s challenge – as I suspect a lot of people’s challenge – is they expect any solution they back to do both things, all the while protecting causes they hold dear. They want perfection or nothing, and while I believe he personally finds these things abhorrent, he’s not willing to sacrifice the Perfect for the Good.

                Plus he clearly doesn’t trust anyone like me proposing a solution.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Philip H says:

                I don’t trust any of us, including me.Report

              • InMD in reply to Philip H says:

                I actually don’t think anything you’ve proposed is beyond the pale, even the parts I don’t agree with. You have guns. Maybe you are fooling me but I don’t get the sense you’re operating from a place of ‘civilians should never be able to have guns.’ You just want some sanity and safety.

                The concern I think is you (and TBH probably also me) being used as a stalking horse for those who would just as soon eliminate the right/ability entirely.Report

              • Philip H in reply to InMD says:

                Exactly. As I have repeatedly noted I shoot. I own guns. I’m training my kids to use them safely. I do want more sanity and safety – and if school shootings don’t get us to really think about this, nothing will. Not the high rate of gun enabled suicide, not the repeated stories of kids killing other kids with unlocked loaded guns in home, not anything.

                As to the stalking horses – that could be said about any number of things. Frankly I don’t care. Let them stalk.Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                “However we’re being told that “nothing” isn’t an acceptable answer”

                Well…is it?
                In your mind, is “nothing” an acceptable answer?Report

              • Chip Daniels in reply to Dark Matter says:

                What are these “gun-free” nations?Report

              • Slade the Leveller in reply to Dark Matter says:

                The anti-abortion movement is great at this. Every new restriction and regulation is just one more step to being where they want to be in practice even if not in theory.

                And quite successful, despite the measures’ relative unpopularity.Report

              • Worth noting that, even as they’ve done this over a few decades, the anti-abortion movement, and the evangelical right they effectively control, have complained bitterly about lack of sufficiently extreme action on abortion by their politicians. Only now are they beginning to be satisfied, as politicians effectively ban abortion in several states.Report

              • Pinky in reply to Chris says:

                That’s not accurate. The more conservative states have had trigger laws in place for a while, and every few years have passed legislation to test Roe. And the anti-abortion movement doesn’t “control” the evangelical right.Report

              • Chris in reply to Pinky says:

                It is accurate: They have been openly upset, perhaps not with state politicians (though they have been here over the years, but I dunno about other states), but definitely with national politicians. They were upset with the Bush administration, for example.

                And yeah, they definitely control the evangelical right. If you don’t think so, you haven’t heard evangelicals, over and over again, excuse voting Republican because of abortion regardless of how objectively awful the Republican is from an evangelical Christian perspective (and I don’t just mean Trump, but also, I mean, Trump). Nor have you watched evangelicals freak out with every new manufactured controversy anti-abortion activist drum up. The anti-abortion movement has the evangelical right wrapped around their little finger, they have for decades, and I can’t believe anyone would dispute that.Report

              • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

                Technically speaking, I’m not ‘proposing’ disarming the nation.

                I’m asserting that we have reached the point that the vast majority of people become completely disillusioned with the idea of any reasonable reform, and have decided that if reform is going to constantly fail all the time and be this difficult, the solution is either repeal the second amendment or have a court decision that functionally does that and just bar all guns, period.

                I’m actually given quite reasonable proposals for gun control in the past, things like tracking every weapon and bans on magazine size and rate of fire, but the thing is, and I think we’ve all known this for more than a decade, none of this is ever going to happen. None of these reasonable rules are ever going to happen. The gun lobby will not allow it to happen, the far right, which needs this paranoia to exist, won’t let it happen.

                The only thing that can happen is we continue on this course, until a critical mass of people says ‘we are not doing this anymore’, a mass of people large enough to force a law through, and those people are going to be (and in fact already are) incandescently angry and not going to compromise with hunters or sportsmen or people arguing for self defense.

                Due to structural issues with how the government works and how the courts work, and the fact that the elected Democrats are all cowards and morons living in 1992, the actual change won’t happen for quite some time, I’m just asserting that it, psychologically, already has.Report

    • DavidTc in reply to Rufus F. says:

      Actually, by definition, mass shootings do have one single thing you could change that would stop them from happening, and the key word is ‘shooting’.

      Shootings, by definition, require firearms. thus, to stop mass shootings, all you need to do is make sure people don’t have firearms.

      And laws stopping firearm possession seem to work in other places, mostly because firearms are very difficult for people to manufacture for themselves at large scale and consistent quality, at least without getting noticed.

      So, objectively speaking, there actually is single change that would stop mass shootings from happening.Report

      • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTc says:

        While you’re at it, you might as well prevent all drunkeness by outlawing alcohol.

        And laws stopping firearm possession seem to work in other places,

        Let me guess, these would be laws that have the support of the public?Report

        • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

          While you’re at it, you might as well prevent all drunkeness by outlawing alcohol.

          You’re just ignoring the ‘firearms are very difficult for people to manufacture for themselves at large scale and consistent quality’ part of the post, eh? And so you think a comparison to alcohol, something that literally is produced randomly in nature, is reasonable?

          We could outlaw drunkenness by outlawing alcohol, but we can’t outlaw alcohol because literally anyone who possesses some rubber tubes and some sugar can make alcohol.

          But they can’t make guns, and they certainly can’t make _good_ guns. We’ve actually had this discussion before, about the inability of people to produce firearms…and there the discussion was actually about _any_ firearms.

          But even if we accept the idea that people might really print handguns (Which I don’t), firearms used in mass shootings have to be to rather higher tolerances than some 3D printed POS that might fire thrice before falling apart, or some slightly-misaligned machine shop output. You might be able to hold up a store with them, or shoot someone in the street, but you’re sure as hell not going on a ramage with them, and if you do, you’re rapidly going to end up with a non-functional gun.

          Let me guess, these would be laws that have the support of the public?

          So what’s the theory there? The general public will ignore gun smuggling? Help gun smuggling?

          No. We won’t.

          The problem is that ‘support of the public to do crimes’ doesn’t work the way you think it does. It’s not some majority vote, where 51% wins. It’s whether _almost everyone_ is willing to look the other way, that’s the only way you get away with crimes in view of the public.

          Like drug use…plenty of people don’t particularly want it legalized, but almost _no one_ is willing to call the cops on someone for possession or even being offered some. I’ve had people try to sell me cocaine before, I said no and walked away. There are some circumstances where I might consider trying to do something about a seller, but I’d never consider trying to do anything about a random _user_, to try to get them arrested for possession.

          OTOH, if someone tries to sell me, for example, a _baby_, I am going to call the police. If I just see that happening, I would call the police.

          There are some crimes that happen in the full light of day simply because we don’t care. There are other crimes, equally illegal crimes, that do not, because we do care and tend to call the police. It’s not a majority vote, it’s whether 99% of the population is apathetic. They might approve of the crime, or disapprove of the crime, that’s not the issue, the issue they face is ‘Does this affect me to the point that I need to get involved?’

          Now, the question you have to ask yourself is: How will people think of their neighbors having illegal guns? Selling illegal guns? Making illegal guns?

          I’d almost certainly try to stop at least the last two, because that actually endangers me. The first one would sort of be a judgment call, based on if I thought they were being responsible with it.Report

          • Dark Matter in reply to DavidTC says:

            We have many hundreds of millions of firearms in circulation right now, and you don’t have the political support to pass these laws, much less amend the Constitution. When this was done in Australia they had enough the support from the public that those weren’t issues.

            In the US we have a large minority who is going to oppose this and they’re pretty culturally unified. We also have a large black market for illegal guns right now used professionally by drug dealers and other criminals.

            You are also taking the world as it exists without a market (because the legit market dominates) and assuming no one will change their actions… in spite of very strong cultural resistance, very strong economic motivation, and a pre-existing very large inventory.

            This set up suggests these sorts of laws would not work well.

            The first point where it will fail is just getting the political will to do this. That’s not a bug in our system, it’s a feature.Report

            • DensityDuck in reply to Dark Matter says:

              “there’s too many illegal guns for us for ownership restrictions to help anything” is maybe not making the argument you think, sir

              like

              “if the problem is that bad then maybe banning gun ownership should only be the start” is an answer to that objectionReport

            • DavidTC in reply to Dark Matter says:

              In the US we have a large minority who is going to oppose this and they’re pretty culturally unified.

              Oh, we’re getting a pretty large minority who opposes guns existing at all.

              Failure to do gun control doesn’t exist because of a vocal minority, anyway. It exists because of structural issues in the US government’s representation.Report