The Answer, My Friend, is Blowin’ in the Wind? Perhaps.
Cartoon about gun culture and gun rights in the USA circa 1881 by Puck
“Yes, ‘n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ‘n’ how many deaths will it take till he knows
That too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind…”
I woke this morning with Bob Dylan’s words in my head, still thinking about what happened in El Paso, only to find out it happened again in Dayton. A store and a bar. Add them to the list: schools, churches, festivals, movie theatres, places of employment. Don’t forget the acts of gun violence, intentional and unintentional, that statistically take 3 lives each hour, every day of the week.
As the short lived television show (no pun intended) stated, there are 1,000 ways to die.
About every 40 seconds an American will have a heart attack, which is the number one killer in the nation. About 14% will die from one.
The second killer of Americans is cancer. Third is what is categorized as “unintentional injuries.”
The first two on the list are self-explanatory. Disease. Billions are spent each year to find cures. But death from unintentional injuries could be anything: a car wreck, a workplace accident, getting struck by lightning or being crushed by a rock falling off a cliff.
When you think about death from unintentional injuries the possibilities are endless. I would add death by random gunfire to this category. From the Amish girl who was shot and killed as she was piloting her horse-and-carriage by a random bullet that fell out of the sky to the people killed who were at the wrong place at the wrong time in El Paso and Dayton. Innocents in drive-by shootings. Hell, even my wife was inches away from being shot and killed by an accidental discharge of a firearm that passed through two walls and a mirror frame (a mirror she was sitting in front of) while on vacation in Florida a few years back.
I argue that all of the examples I have brought up are preventable except for cancer and heart disease, if you’re born with it.
There have been limits to the lengths we or the government will go in the name of safety and security.
The government puts forth regulations, rules, entities like the EPA or the USDA, licensing requirements, labels, police, the armed forces… you get the idea.
We as citizens are expected to follow the rules, but who has not stepped on the top rung of a step ladder or cut the tag off of a new couch, even coasted a stop sign? Many of these rules are there to help guide us in our daily lives, to keep us and others we interact with safe.
Not following some of them can have grave consequences, while following all of them to the letter can make one feel a little less free, like surrendering your belt and shoes at the airport security check or keeping it at 55 on the highway.
Gun issues need addressed, there is no doubt. Do I feel safer standing in line at the grocery store after noticing the guy ahead of me is strapped? Not at all. I have no idea if he will protect me or accidentally shoot me in the process of trying to protect me. Has he had training? He needs none to open carry in my state. You do not even need a permit to carry concealed in my state anymore. Does this put me at ease when I am out and about with my family? Nope. Not even close.
I have friends in law enforcement. They train and train and train some more in how to handle their weapon in high stress circumstances. Even with all that training, accidents happen. Collateral damage. When that occurs it makes a bad situation even worse. It was an accident but it still hurt or killed someone who should not have been. Now think about the untrained. It actually could be veterans or someone who took a pistol class. By untrained I’m referring to the people who do not train as frequently as law enforcement. If a cop can miss, chances are a minimally trained gun owner or vet who does not keep up with their training will miss too, badly.
There is a reason there are leash laws in many municipalities. Not all dogs will bite but when they do? it only takes a half a second. A blink of an eye. After that the damage is done. The leash is some semblance of protection, but a muzzle would eliminate the chance of being bitten. Saying that, how many people actually muzzle their dogs when they take them for a walk? Is it not a given that a dog on a leash is just as dangerous as a guy open carrying at the gas station? Each can maim or kill in a split-second if unleashed or unholstered but we still let both walk around in public, lawfully, knowing the threat exists.
Muzzling a dog to eliminate a threat is one thing; trying to muzzle a gun owner who chooses to open/conceal carry in public is another. That is an argument that will ebb and flow like the waves down on the beach.
There were “good guys with guns” in El Paso, Dayton and Las Vegas. They had ZERO effect on the outcome except for possibly some confusion by first responders as to who was good and who was bad. Seconds wasted making that determination opened up the possibility for unintended injury or death in situations where chaos was already in play.
There is no simple answer to the gun issue. Common sense laws through bipartisanship and addressing mental health issues are a good start. I believe in the Second Amendment but I do not believe that the Founding Fathers, men who put much thought into the verbiage when they crafted it, envisioned where we would be today. It’s time to put a leash on this issue before we are forced to muzzle it. Put the politics aside and find common ground to solve it before next time, because rest assured there will be a next time. I just hope it is no where near the people I care about when that time comes.
“Yes, ‘n’ how many times can a man turn his head
And pretend that he just doesn’t see?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind
The answer is blowin’ in the wind…”
E pluribus unum.
The recent shooting in El Paso was not connected to “mental issues”. It had a very cold and calculating logic to it.
The motto of terrorism is “a few dead, a lot watching”. The idea was to stage a wildly spectacular attack in order to inspire and provoke others.
When you have a nation with more guns than people, and white supremacy as the primary goal of the majority party and the most popular network broadcasting racial hatred and fear nonstop, the logic is clear that it may only take a spark to ignite a full fledged racial slaughter.
The “mental issue” we are facing is white supremacy.Report
“The “mental issue” we are facing is white supremacy.”
Chip, I know you have a real hard-on for this issue, but seriously, just stop. If you could determine the motivating factor for every mass shooting that might be 5%.Report
A few dead, a lot watching.Report
Yes. That is the problem.
The media has already given [cause] a lot of national air time.
Worse, they’re sending out the message that THIS WORKS!
All you have to do to be famous is to pick up a gun.
We are never going to harden every inch of the country to make us proof against this sort of thing. We’re never going to round up everyone’s guns. Most damning about the current set of proposals is they wouldn’t have stopped this guy.
We shouldn’t be giving air time to his ideology. We shouldn’t know what he wanted. We shouldn’t know his name.
White nationalism is a small minority of these things but they all want fame.Report
What if I told you that there was a massive media network, the most popular in America, that gives airtime to his ideology 24/7?Report
CNN? The Dayton shooter supported Elizabeth Warren (but might be okay supporting Harris) and the El Paso shooter also agreed with most of her positions.Report
I would say that your definition of “white nationalism” is “not a democrat”.
If everyone is a racist then no one is.Report
Given that the shooter’s manifesto reads like a script for Tucker Carlson’s show, I guess neither one of them is a white nationalist.Report
This is known as nutpicking. If you’re trying to argue that everyone Right of the Dems is eager to set up death camps then picking one nut isn’t even close to proving your case.Report
Tucker Carlson is nutpicking??Report
“I would say that your definition of “white nationalism” is “not a democrat”.
This seems to be accurate.Report
Few items:
Just for comparison, there have been 293 people killed by guns in Chicago this year. Lots of other cities, mine included, have had more gun deaths than the shootings over the weekend combined. No Instagram posts from presidential candidates. No calls for new legislation. No complaints about assault weapons. Why? Because that is perceived as black criminals killing other black criminals with handguns. We only seem to get worked up as a country when innocent white people are killed randomly with assault weapons.
– Some new studies have come out showing that universal background checks don’t do much to reduce gun crime. Can we stop talking about them?
– Assault weapons account for something like 1% of all gun deaths in the US…can we also stop talking about those?
– It’s time to start talking about federal gun permits for anyone that wants to buy, own and possess a gun. You get caught doing any of those things without a permit on file, it’s a felony. Period.
– Minimum 30 day waiting period on all gun purchases. Period.
– End of undocumented private sales. Period.
– Aggressive pursuit of gun trafficking with life sentences for anyone found guilty.
These are just starting points, but anything less than this level of seriousness is simply a joke IMO.Report
For the record I agree with your last four items.
There isn’t one single solution for gun violence because guns are used for many different things.
The solution to seemed robbery will be different than gun suicides, which will be different than gang murders, which will be different than terrorist attacks.
Right now, the biggest threat we face isn’t ordinary gun violence like robberies, but terrorist attacks which are designed to destroy our ability to function as a liberal democracy.Report
I have my own 10-point plan on gun regulation that can’t possibly pass either. In its absence, I’ll take what I can get.Report
A federal permit is fine, but it would have to negate local laws on ownership or transport. No more letting NY or NJ mess with people who are just passing through.Report
My understanding is that what they do in those jurisdictions is in contravention of federal law but obviously no one goes to bat over it and I’m not sure there’s any consequences.Report
True, so the permit would need some teeth to it.Report
Sounds like a plan.Report
We get into problems because of the way we switch stats around in conversation. Gun deaths include suicides; mass shootings include non-fatalities; murders include non-gun killings; child deaths include teens up to 18; school shootings include after-hours suicides in the parking lot. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop talking about any of those particulars. Even if “assault weapons” account for a small number of deaths, there can be a conversation about them. If school shooting stats are methodologically weak, we should make them more rigorous. We probably need a national conversation about our suicide rate, no matter what means people are choosing.
We’re never going to agree about which problems within the broad category of guns should be addressed, much less on what level of government or through what policies. It would require us to prioritize, and drop the talking points. But we should make the effort.Report
Right.
Ordinary gun crime like robberies and murders are actually being addressed pretty well by ordinary policing.
What is new and what is not being addressed is spree shootings, particularly those meant to inspire fear and terror. In some cases it is white supremacy, other times is is male rage and misogyny, but they both are meant as political statements, and intended to make us afraid.Report
About 15 years ago the NRA lobbying branch left Illinois disgusted with the lack of influence they were having. It had the toughest gun control laws in the state, or at least Chicago did, and its handgun ban was eventually ruled unconstitutional by the SCOTUS. Another federal court case ruled that is ban on concealed carry, the last in the nation, was unconstitutional. A few other restrictions were struck as well.
So until 10 years ago Illinois had the toughest gun control laws in the country, uninfluenced by the conspiratorial influence of the NRA. During this time, Chicago had one of the highest murder rates in the country, and it even increased slightly following the handgun ban.
It no longer has the toughest gun regulations (for one thing it moved to shall issue for CC), but it might have the toughest criminal penalties for violation of gun laws. Gun possession is replacing drugs as the contraband that snares young people into felony convictions and an inability to find employment. That was the alliance made btw/ progressives and conservatives when the State was forced to reform the gun laws; black politicians wanted something more forgiving, so that a mistake doesn’t brand someone forever.Report
Speaking personally, as an anti-gun person, I don’t talk about handguns, because it’s just pointless, considering many pro-gun people won’t even say, “ya’ know, maybe let’s not let anybody have a gun anywhere, at any time, for any reason.”
But yeah, sure, all four of those things sound good to me. The problem is it sound like the end of freedom to many gun owners.Report
Partial-birth abortion, but for guns.Report
When I got married I was told that the best thing to do was ‘choose your battles’. The problem as I see it is that liberals keep choosing the wrong battle i.e. assault weapons and background checks. Gun folks know these are dumb issues, so we just laugh them off. If they stopped wasting so much political capital on those things, got themselves educated on guns and then built some support with gun owners (they would find it among hunters for one) then they might be surprised what they could do.
Or they could just keep grandstanding about assault weapons and universal background checks every time there is a mass shooting and things will go nowhere.Report
You cast gun owners as helpless, passive bystanders. Why is that?
Have they no solutions? No urge to pass legislation? No desire to do anything about mass shootings but offer thoughts and prayers?
Why aren’t gun owners leading the charge for sensible changes in law, in regulation, in culture? I see no bills on the floor, neither state nor federal, no plan. (I discount the NRA’s “arm everyone”. Also known as “arm teachers” and “the solution to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun”. I won’t hold the average gun owner to such idiocy).
In the absence of gun owners offering solutions, why does it surprise you that non gun-owners will step forward? Their solutions may be sub-optimal, even foolish or stupid, but at least they are trying — rather than sitting back and declaiming no solutions can be accepted until every non-gun-owner in America has ‘been properly educated’.
Their education is ongoing, with every mass shooting, and if you don’t like the lesson they’re learning — give them a different one.Report
“Have they no solutions? No urge to pass legislation? No desire to do anything about mass shootings but offer thoughts and prayers?”
Gun owners usually talk about enforcing existing laws for possession by felons. They also talk about mental health, but that gets shouted down. But honestly, I don’t focus a whole lot on mass shootings because they are such unpredictable outliers and so much a symptom of the psychological health of our country, not of a gun problem.Report
What bills have they sponsored? What issues with “enforcing existing regulations” have they identified and proposed fixes to? What funding have they allocated to mental health?
*What have they done but talk*?
I hear vague platitudes. “Do something about mental health”. “Enforce existing regulation” but nothing about specifics. Do *what* about mental health? Pay for it how? Approach it how?
Enforce existing regulations? Which ones aren’t being enforced? *Why not*? What’s stopping it? What roadblocks lie in the way of implementation? Gun ownership by felons? Is there some *conspiracy* allowing them to hold guns? Some reason those laws aren’t being enforced? law enforcement turning the other way?
Empty words. No specifics. No legislation. No money. No *solutions*. “Thoughts in prayers” in another form, empty platitudes.Report
You’re assuming ‘gun owners’ is analogous to ‘Republicans’. It isn’t.Report
I assume he meant that all gun owners were “future Republicans”.
But in any event, I guess we’ll have to try to double the black prison population until the anti-gun folks pipe back down. It has always been thus.Report
No. I’m assuming “gun owners” are a sizable enough group to get pertinent legislation to the floor somewhere, even if it’s voted down.
They certainly have one of the most well known lobbyist groups.
If they wanted to. I’m not sure that’s the case. It seems gun owners either don’t have any solutions or don’t want any, because as I noted — it’s all platitudes. Words without even token deeds.
Take the one specific you’ve mentioned — regulations about felons with firearms. Can you tell me how they’re not enforced? What problems are there with enforcement? What’s preventing an actual, existing regulation from having the teeth to work?
Is it lack of money? Is it a conspiracy? Is it lack of infrastructure? Loopholes? Is it merely impossible to keep guns out of felons hands — although if that’s the case, then ‘enforcing regulations’ wouldn’t do any good would it, so it’d be an odd suggestion as a real action.Report
First, you need to clean house.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/02/us/nra-donors-wayne-lapierre.htmlReport
Gun owners are not a monolithic group. It’s a very fractured community with people that own guns for very different reasons.
As for enforcement, I was on the jury for a shooting case earlier this year. Two guys shot up a bar and even though both were felons, neither was charged with the possession of a firearm. They got one on an Alfred plea to the shootings, but they didn’t tack on the gun charge. His partner has never been in jail. Prosecutors are letting far too many of these cases go.Report
If you want to see gun owners vehemently disagree with each other, suggest that platform W chambered in X with load Y is optimal for purpose Z.
If you can find two gun owners who agree on all four then it’s time to head to Vegas and try the one-armed bandits.
This also seems to apply to them regarding almost all possible questions.
One thing most seem to agree on is that they’ve all been conned several times and they aren’t inclined to fall for it again.Report
When I bought my current deer rifle I had planned on bringing home a .270 but they had a .243 that i liked and the price was right. I just thought it was a better deal. Little did I know it would cause my hunting buddies such anguish. Had I known I would have done it much sooner.
Now i’m in the market for something with more distance. I’ve already settled on a .300 win mag but I keep hemming and hawing with my coworkers, just to hear their arguments for their caliber of choice. So entertaining…Report
As @JS said, OK, dumb anti-gun elitist liberals like me don’t know anything about guns, and frankly, I don’t really care to learn anything.
So, we don’t get a voice. Again, fine.
But, where’s the “Moderate Gun Owners Association of America” that’s out there, opposing dumb gun laws that dumb liberals like me support, but whom also opposing the “shall not be infringed” crowd as well as they try to pass laws making it basically legal for anybody to have a gun anywhere, for any reason?
Because from my view as an anti-gun liberal, for all the talk from supposed moderates like yourself, there seems to be no pushback from reasonable gun owners when the entire Republican Party, outside of a few suburban New Englanders, and the NRA attempting to paint anybody that supports any form of gun control as hating America, freedom, and the Founding Fathers.Report
I think the problem is that the moderate conservatives are scared to speak up because they will get eaten alive by the party. That’s why I think moderate Dems need to lead on this and the moderate conservatives can support knowing there is safety in numbers. Amy Klobuchar says she understands it because her uncles hunted…great. Time to lead. I would start with the hunting groups. Ducks Unlimited, Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, etc. They need to speak up.Report
I mean, that’s sort of the core of the problem, is that there is no organized national center-right in this nation.
As I said, I have no issues with any of the policies you said. I don’t think they go far enough, but they are a good first step.
But, let’s say Amy Klouchabar, Doug Jones, Joe Manchin, and hell, I’ll be nice and say, Pat Toomney introduce the Mike Dwyer Memorial Gun Bill, along with the hunting orgs you mentioned, etc.
I have zero faith that there will be any institutional support from the conservative movement at all. Fox News will saying nothing good about it, The Washington Examiner will paint a picture of it as the same as gun confiscation, The National Review will say nothing nice, and there’ll will be immediate primary challenge whispers to any Republican that supports this – at best, The Bulwark might say something about it and Larry Hogan will support it.
So, even if it passes, thanks to President Biden having a narrow Senate Majority, I also fully expect, because it’s a midterm, lots of Democratic losses in 2022, and the message being, “don’t do anything on guns – even something relatively small bore, because look, we lost seats.”
I’m not saying this to attack you, because I think your ideas are fine, but the truth is, we’re only getting any kind of gun law overhaul one of two ways – the demographic wave fully crests way down the road and Democrat’s need to care far less what exurban voters in suburban Milwaukee think _or_ some prominent national Republican’s are brave enough to go against their own party, and hell their own base, for the good of the country. The former might happen, but I see exactly zero evidence of the latter, unfortunately for people on the center right such as yourself.Report
Moderate conservatives in the hunting community have been rallying not just their own members but also fellow public land users to push back against a lot of bad land-grab legislation from the Right. They are oftentimes leveraging support from moderate Democrats to make that happen. So I guess I am a bit more optimistic on that front.
P.S. If we could maybe not call it a ‘memorial’ bill I would appreciate it.Report
Is imposing political will on people a good idea?
I ask that, because it sounds a lot like what is being discussed/desired.Report
Is imposing political will on people a good idea?
Have you read The Tragedy of the Commons?Report
Joe, this is, as per usual, when I reference Mancur Olsen’s book The Logic of Collective Action. 🙂Report
Do you remember what I would refer to after that?Report
Your treatise on how Stationary Banditry is a social construct? 🙂Report
Nope.Report
You suck at this reciprocity stuff, it’s been twice already.Report
I apparently really do suck at this because I can’t recall. What’s your response to Olsen?Report
Isn’t most legislation the imposition of political will?Report
Ya ever notice what happens when lawfare no longer maintains subjective value in rule of law?
That’s why I asked if it is a good idea, not what it is.Report
“That’s why I think moderate Dems need to lead on this and the moderate conservatives can support knowing there is safety in numbers.”
On what planet would moderate conservatives reps & Senators go against the GOP and the president to help out the Dems?
Don’t get me wrong, I would LOVE to see moderates from both parties come together on this and whole slew of other issues. But I think I have a better chance of being POTUS in 2020 than Democrats have of getting Republicans to stand with them on a red meat litmus test issue instead of falling in line behind Trump, regardless of how moderate they are.Report
What I’m suggesting is that Dems build a coalition among non-politicians that maybe lean a bit to the right. Start with the hunting groups. Most of us don’t have a boner for guns. They are a tool. We also voluntarily regulate the hell out of our sport. Hunting licenses, hunter education requirements, mentorship programs, bag limits…it’s all designed around creating a robust system of personal responsibility. I also don’t know any hunter worth his salt that buys a weapon 5 days before the season. I’m hunting with a crossbow for the first time this fall and I bought it in February so I could practice all spring and summer. The last time I bought a deer rifle it was about the same time frame. I honestly wouldn’t even want to be in the woods with a hunter and a recently purchased gun.
So the idea that we couldn’t be persuaded to extend the waiting period on guns to 30 days or that we wouldn’t agree to a federal gun permit…or whatever…would be a real misunderstanding of our community and millions of potential allies. Get us on board and we’ll drag the politicians kicking and screaming. Most of us don’t donate to the NRA. We give our money to conservation groups, so Wayne LaPierre can kiss our camo-covered asses.Report
Your senior Senator is currently blocking debate and floor action on a gun control measures which – ironically – is both bipartisan in terms of votes and in terms of name. What pressure are Kentucky’s moderates and the state chapters of the various groups you mention dong about that?Report
Democrats haven’t put forward a plan that I would get behind. No need to open floor debates so they can all grandstand (I watched the Mueller hearing).
And the state chapters of the outdoors groups are focused on public lands issues and a current problem we are having with the Fish & Wildlife department. They aren’t going to get involved without some trust-building first. That isn’t going to happen overnight.Report
SO in spite of all you statements here, you and your hunting buddies are not willing to call out your senator who is the only roadblock to background check legislation that’s already passed the House? Sorry dude, but if trust needs to be built, its not democrats who lack. They made a proposal, debated it in committee and voted on in on the House Floor. That’s how the process is supposed to work.
We put an idea out. We invested political capitol. We want it debated.
And you?Report
I don’t understand why the Left would want to spend the tiny, tiny bit of political capital they have on guns debating legislation that has pretty much been proven to be ineffective. is it just so you all can tell people you did something, even if that something was pointless?
i honestly don’t know too many people in the Louisville area that like McConnell but bad legislation is bad legislation. On this item, he’s making the right call. I would suggest you all go back to the drawing board, ask your Democratic politicians to talk to people that actually understand guns, and let’s craft something that might actually help things.Report
I don’t know. Last time they had a major gun bill they banned the manufacture of rifles with bayonet lugs, and ever since then the death toll from bayoneting people has been zero. It was zero before the ban, but you can’t be too safe.Report
Good point – maybe we should let them proceed. I do always get s kick out of seeing Diane Feinstein’s latest list of problematic weapon features.Report
Well, a far bigger death toll is from cars, and I don’t see anyone proposing we ban them, or make it illegal for them to go more than 10 mph, or restrict cars that contain any three features considered sporty, or ban black cars, or cars with oversized gas tanks.
Then again, it seems that half the Democrat candidates swear they’ll ban cars altogether.
And somewhere in all the proposals is the problem that Americans own almost enough AR’s and AK’s to equip all the active duty military personnel on the entire planet, including China, India, and the US. If you count firearms in general, not just AR-15’s and AK’s, they own enough guns to give 15 to every active duty soldier in the world.
As one recent meme put it, “How many times to we have to see a crowd of defenseless people die before we realize that being defenseless isn’t the answer?”
But what I predict will happen is that the entire Democrat field will race each other to see who can get the furthest left on the issue. When the general election rolls around they’ll lose almost as badly as McGovern because they’re going to lose the support of the union folks and the people in working class neighborhoods. You’d be amazed how little regard regular folks give to politicians and Hollywood “influencers” who are protected by private armed bodyguards.Report
There’s also this to consider:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-ramming_attack#List_of_non-terrorist_incidentsReport
Bad things happen in other countries. Even in other wealthy nations such as ours. They seem to happen far less often in those countries, though.Report
89th of 230.Report
My consideration ended up something along the lines of: “Looking at the body counts vs. mass shooting events, turning all the mass shooting events into ramming events looks like it would decrease the death toll.” I don’t have hard comparative data, but scanning the numbers it looks like it is harder to kill many people with cars than with guns.
Restricting gun access is not about reaching 0 dead people. It is about forcing use of more difficult to deploy and less lethal means. This has been done rather effectively with bombs post Oklahoma City and post 9/11. This even applies to the handgun/suicide cases. Forcing suicide attemptees to use less successful means gives additional opportunities to possibly save a life.Report
If we want to talk about gun deaths, again, it comes back to handguns.Report
You have to get a license to operate a car. In most states you have to pass proficiency tests to operate cars. You have to have special insurance to operate cars. You can have your privilege to operate cars taken from you for all sorts of bad life choices.Report
Was the same true for horses, or did the government just take full advantage of people’s nervousness about a novel form of transportation?Report
Best I can tell – the latter.
And that has what to do here exactly?Report
Oh, it’s just a semi-related note that we shouldn’t be nearly as restrictive with cars as we are, from the perspective of social equality, freedom, etc. I know of no one who was ever banned from riding or owning a horse. The whole idea would be inconceivable to the Founders.
But due to the ubiquity of the automobile, we’ve built our towns and cities in such a way that a vehicle is a requirement almost like clothing and shelter. It is, functionally, now a horse.
Take away a rural person’s car and they might as well be living back in the 1800’s, but with cable TV. They can’t get to work or get to town to shop.
Restricting blacks and minorities from owning or driving cars has had devastating effects in many communities across the country, especially in California. Their inability to pay traffic fines, thus piling up bigger and bigger fines, was used as a revenue stream for the courts, but it meant they have severe problems getting and holding jobs.
So maybe car licensing isn’t a sterling example of proper government regulation.Report
Let’s follow the comparison. My teenage children have driver’s licenses despite their mishaps with cars. Thus far all have been in accidents.
If THAT is the level of licensing and control you have in mind, then this will work, and the comparison is valid. However for places like Chicago that will mean tearing up a ton of their gun control laws because they’re the equiv of preventing everyone from having access to cars and making them drive 10 mph.
Unreasonable (traffic/firearm) laws are ignored. It’s expected everyone with very rare exceptions will have access.
If “regulation” actually means “proscription” then don’t expect good things from prohibition.Report
Jesse,
The answer is because Mike is only a moderate in his own mind. He is a self-described moderate because he thinks moderate sounds good.
In terms of policy, time and time again he has shown himself as a reliable conservative whose offer to liberals is the same as Michael Corleone to the Senator at the start of Godfather Part II, “nothing.”
Gun people obviously see mass shootings as the price paid to Moloch for their arsenals and they are willing to accept it.
Many of them will not admit this though. They will deny it to their dying day.Report
Saul,
I’m going to say this as politely as I can…i don’t think you would know a moderate if one of them invited you to the symphony. Seriously man, if you have demonstrated anything over the years of your posting and commenting here it’s that you are so far out of touch with normal America that I’m sure I do see like some kind of mainline conservative to you. Meanwhile my Team Red friends tease me about being a closet liberal. I mean, really dude, you are clueless.
As for how we view mass murders, they are a very unfortunate byproduct of a culture where more and more men are lonely and filled with an impotent rage. What separates me from you is that I see the root cause while you only see the symptom.Report
“As for how we view mass murders, they are a very unfortunate byproduct of a culture where more and more men are lonely and filled with an impotent rage. ”
That sounds a lot like an incel line. I must have misunderstood your general thrust there.Report
When was the last time you saw the captain of the football team. the president of the student counsel or the popular guy at the office engaging in a mass shooting? They are nearly all lonely in some way, angry and unable to find a healthy outlet to express that.Report
They’re saying on the news that the shooter only has traffic tickets on his “criminal record”. We’re going to find out that none of these have anything to do with reducing these mass shootings that are fueling public outrage.Report
Our laws are aimed at crazy people and criminals, not demented masterminds plotting mass murder from their imaginary hidden lair on Skull Island. Some of these loners will never have had any interactions with the police, and possibly not all that many interactions with reality. Some of them are probably starring in their own version of “The Day of the Jackal.”
However, the Dayton shooter was a known known. He’d been kicked out of school three times for threatening behavior like circulating kill lists and rape lists. His fellow students had contacted police about him.
Somewhere in this thread I mentioned restrictions on anyone who is voted “Most likely to commit mass murder” by their high-school classmates. Our background check system doesn’t drill down into school records, and probably can’t check juvenile records. That’s cutting it off from a potential gold mine of red flags because that’s where a lot of maladaptive behavior shows up. However, their are due process considerations with translating the idea into results.Report
This. The (correct) position from the Right is typically that mental health problems are the root cause of mass shootings. Even people that adhere to some type of troubling ideology (Chip would call them ‘Republicans’) probably have some issues that set them on that path. And you’re right, often that happens in high school and other kids knew about it. How does the government accept, consider and archive that information for the future? Figure that out and we might be able to start shifting our focus to the other 99% of gun crime.Report
I just read some on his childhood background in a Daily Mail story.Report
Some new studies have come out showing that universal background checks don’t do much to reduce gun crime. Can we stop talking about them?
End of undocumented private sales. Period.
Universal background checks do nothing _now_ because almost all criminals purchase grey market guns, aka, guns that were legally purchased from a gun store, and then sold (Often illegal) to the criminals. Even if the law requires
If you ban undocumented private gun sales, you would presumably already _have_ universal background checks on private gun sales. Like, if it has to be put in a database anyway, there’s no reason not to have that database reject people.
Aggressive pursuit of gun trafficking with life sentences for anyone found guilty.
Yeah, and to do that we have to do most important thing: Tracking each and every gun from the moment is manufactured to the moment it is destroyed. Put a serial number on each new one, and require a serial number be etched on any existing one before it is transferred, which the government will do for free. And if a gun is recovered from someone who it is not registered to, whoever is the last owner of record is punished.
And someone is about to say ‘What if people claim their guns are stolen?’, there are a few obvious ways to close that loophole. The easiest is simply: You have to renew your license, every six months, which the government will send to you with every gun you own on it. And you have to swearing on the application that you have personally seen X gun on Y date, etc, when Y is within the last week or whatever.
Which…is going to be very interesting if you do that, but the police just recovered your gun somewhere else two months ago and sat there and waited for you to lie on the renewal. Whoops, that was prima facia evidence of an illegal gun sale.
And they don’t even have to do that half the time, because they often find bullets from crimes long before the gun itself. If they have a bullet fired at someone a year ago, and match it to a gun they just pulled off a criminal, they check back through the file, discover the owner signed a statement four months ago saying they still have possession of the gun, well…no need to wait around until the owner lies again.
Oh, and if they have evidence someone is actually selling guns (And filing the serial numbers off or something.), they can get a court order demanding the owner actually produce said guns to check the serial numbers of.Report
That sounds like an enormous amount of work – which nobody is going to comply with, not even the police, who own lots of guns and sometimes have fun shoots with all the free ammo from the evidence locker.
I had a friend who had a top of the line AK stolen. He knew how to track down who stole it because the thief also fired up his stolen X-Box that night. My friend tried everything to get the cops to send a proper notification to Microsoft so they could conduct an IP trace to find the stolen X-Box and serious piece of military hardware.
He couldn’t get them motivated to do anything. So he started calling the state police, the mayor’s office, our representatives office, the governor’s office, Rand Paul’s office, and Mitch McConnell’s office. He made himself persistently annoying to everybody, for weeks and weeks.
Finally the FBI, state police, and local police came knocking on his door. He opened and there were big black SUV’s up and down the street. They asked to come inside (where he had weed and guns) and he invited them in. They sat him down and told him to stop calling people because several cops almost lost their jobs due to his nonsense. And so he quit calling.
The AK’s whereabouts are still unknown.Report
Well, I guess I can’t argue with ‘The cops are lazy jackasses so we shouldn’t have laws against theft.’ logic?
But I would suggest the solution is, in fact, ‘Get rid of all the cops and replace them with better ones’ (Which incidentally is my solution to a bunch of _other_ problems). Maybe that’s just me.
It honestly seems a bit inconsistent as an argument from the right, though. Not only the police thing, but often complaints about gun control is that the police have too much authority and are abusing their power, so ‘They’d just never bother to enforce the law’ seems a bit silly, especially, as I pointed out, parts of these are basically self-enforcing….all they have to do is sit quietly for a few months after recovering a gun, and wait for the illegal gun seller to file a false renewal statement.Report
Oh, they do all sorts of crazy things.
My housemate, who was also a public defender till he retired (among all sorts of other jobs in the legal profession, including assistant DA), was one of four inheritors to his parent’s house. One of his brother’s had been residing there and wouldn’t let my housemate step foot on the property.
So that brother called the police and the police told my housemate that they would arrest him, basing it on their usual involvement in marital disputes where wife can kick the husband out.
They also drug him in for a mental health evaluation and whatnot, while he filed lawsuits over the house and his brother charged him with assault for sending an e-mail to the brother’s attorney, which the judge wanted thrown out of court so bad that it was headed to the state supreme court. (Several of these cases are still proceeding, years later).
So as this stuff was starting, my housemate called the city attorney and the mayor’s office to voice his complaints that the police were not following the law. He knows the city attorney quite well and said “I love ya, but I’m going to sue your client.”
So a couple days after that he gets a knock at the door and there’s three cops, two regulars and a trainee. The trainee gets up in his face and says “If you contact the mayor’s office again, we will arrest you.”
And that’s pretty much how it goes. You can’t get your stolen military grade hardware back, they will unlawfully prohibit you from stepping foot on your own property, and if you petition the government for a redress of grievances, you will be arrested.Report
As with so many things, it’s about incentives.
There is no federal war on illegal guns. Drugs, yes. Terrorism, sure.
Guns… Meh.
Police bust you with drugs, they get a kickback from various states and federal drug agencies. Police discover your terrorism plot, Homeland gives them lots of love. But recovering a stolen weapon gets them bupkis. Sure, it gives them a slightly higher overall clearance rate, but even that is just PR, but PR doesn’t help you buy a Bearcat.Report
This sounds like a description on how we’re going to force Prohibition and other Serious cultural changes on the country and it’s going to work. Everyone will put the huge amounts of work into this that it requires because everyone agrees the liberals are right.
My collector friend with his hundreds of pieces in storage will get them all out every few weeks to fill out paperwork. Law enforcement in my own zip code (and his) with our combined murder rate of ZERO will make this their top priority because gangs in Chicago need to be stopped.
There will be no bad actors who already have international supply routes. Everyone will act like sheep and turn in their existing stocks to be registered. Even the criminal element. 3D printers won’t be used to make untraceable weapons even though it will be cheap and effective.
The law won’t be so complex and onerous that it’s effectively impossible to either enforce or follow, and it won’t become “if the police feel like arresting you they can”.Report
Law enforcement in my own zip code (and his) with our combined murder rate of ZERO will make this their top priority because gangs in Chicago need to be stopped.
You’ve hit upon a real problem there: Law enforcement in places where there is no gun violence will, because they don’t care about guns, uh…completely ignore the guns they are…recovering from all the criminals with guns…um…huh. Not really sure what you’re talking about there.
Or do you think local law enforcement would, for some insane reason, be doing the paperwork? Well, to clarify something that should have been very obvious: I am proposing a _national_ system, and violations of it would be _Federal_ crimes, presumably under the direction of the ATF.
My collector friend with his hundreds of pieces in storage will get them all out every few weeks to fill out paperwork.
I specifically said ‘Every six months’, not ‘every few weeks’, so a smart person would just run inventory twice a year, and I also said specifically that existing guns wouldn’t be labeled until resold, so this really wouldn’t matter to him, anyway.
And, uh, someone with a large collection of guns probably _should_ have to do an inventory twice a year and make sure no one’s stolen any of them!!! Or they could just…put them where they can see them, so it’s pretty easy to sign a piece of paper asserting that have, in fact, seen a specific one.
Or they could, you know, not have huge collection of guns to start with. There are a _lot_ of collectible things that are hard to maintain, maybe they should pick an easier one if they don’t want to spend the time required on guns. Which…actually isn’t that much.
I have to _physically put a sticker_ on my car each year, I think to require people to sign a form saying ‘Yup, I’ve see the _thing that people could steal and use to kill others_ that I own’ twice a year is not a particularly onerous requirement.
There will be no bad actors who already have international supply routes.
How do guns get to the criminals under what I proposed?
Let’s say that Mexican drug cartels start shipping guns north along with drugs. Seems like a reasonable premise. But where is that drug cartel buying guns?
Every gun in the world in a criminal’s hand was manufactured somewhere legally, usually the US, and then sold somewhere legally, which is even more likely to be the US. Guns are grey market, not black market. Drug cartels are not growing guns in fields in Mexico, or in someone’s back room, or mixing them together in some shitty lab in a mobile home. And they sure as hell aren’t buying them in the _only_ gun store allowed to operate in Mexico, which has incredibly tight rules about who can buy guns legally.
Right now, criminals buying guns through straw purchasers or criminal gun dealers in the US, and smuggling them south. We can stop that, or at least stop them from sending them _back_ into the US. (And Mexico would probably happily inform the US government of the serial numbers of any gun it finds there, so we could still get the US person who purchased it.)
If we punish the people that put guns in criminal hands, which we _can_ do quite successfully under what I said, they will no longer end up in criminal hands.
Everyone will act like sheep and turn in their existing stocks to be registered. Even the criminal element.
Who cares about existing guns? Like I said, no one will have to legally register anything until they transfer it. And the turnover on illegal guns is _huge_, and criminals would pretty rapidly run out. And also start having to use them more sparingly so they’re less likely to lose them, which can’t help but reduce gun violence. A criminal with a $100 gun he can ditch or afford to lose if the cops grab him is not the same as the same criminal with the same gun that cost him $1000.
3D printers won’t be used to make untraceable weapons even though it will be cheap and effective.
I thought we already did this nonsense. 3D printers are not even vaguely a viable source for the sheer number of guns that criminals currently have. Even metal shop guns, a much _more_ reasonable ‘amateur gun’ producer, are not viable.
And this is something that is really easy to show, as countries that have outlaw guns do not have homemade guns showing up to replace them. The law time we discussed this absurd premise, I managed to find a _single_ metal shop that had started making illegal guns in Australia and managed to make a few hundred before it got shut down. That, plus like a dozen or so derringers-like objects that probably would just take someone’s hand off, are the entire extent of homemade guns in the modern history of gun control.
Even scaling that up, hypothetical worst-case scenario, a few thousand amateur guns made a year is not even vaguely close to the several million professionally-made guns a year that make it to criminal hands.Report
This deserves a long answer but I’m going to be out for a week.Report
The phrase “criminals with guns” is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, inappropriately so considering you’re radically changing that definition and drastically increasing the percentage of the population who fit in that category.
A third(ish) of adult households have guns in them, anyone who doesn’t fill out your paperwork is, with the stroke of a pen, now a criminal with a gun. You’re expecting local law enforcement to deal with them harshly and round up the guns of these “criminals”. In other contexts we’d call these people “voters” and “civilians” and we’d call their “criminal guns” “private property”.
In other posts you’ve said the police are too “lazy” (your words) to enforce the anti-gun laws we already have. What you mean is the police have limited resources and this isn’t a priority. It probably can’t be a priority. The local police here deal with a murder rate of zero. The Chief is elected. If he decides their top priority is harass local voters to stop crimes which aren’t hurting people and aren’t causing local problems then he’ll be replaced.
He’s got them sealed away deep enough that just getting them accessible enough to count would be both problematic and make them less secure. We’re not talking about a collection you can put on your wall, we’re talking about scores or hundreds of old pieces. And this is a tiny portion of his actual collection which is WW2 stuff which wouldn’t fit in his large house.
As long as you’re insisting other people live their lives according to your desires, it’d be more useful to insist people not shoot each other over shoes and that sort of thing. That’s a much smaller group of people and they’re the problem you’re trying to fix.
If it’s not possible to insist that with a very small group, then moving a much larger group of society is likely to be a problem.
A better comparison would be insisting that everyone track and label every bottle of alcohol they have and use (btw the number of Alcohol related deaths makes the number of gun deaths look small).
You’re trying to insist large numbers of people make lifestyle changes which won’t benefit themselves.
This is like saying “where will they buy drugs”. You’re creating a huge unfilled demand. The people involved have lots of money and are already used to breaking the law. It’s not that hard to build guns, it’s just the big mass producers make them at such a low cost and high quality it’s not profitable.
If Pfizer starts producing and cocaine+heroin and then selling them for pennies, all the illegal producers will go out of business. That’s our current world for guns.
And how are you going to maintain this current situation after you make creating amateur guns very profitable? 3D printers and metal shops are legal. A front for a criminal organization can trivially set up one, or a dozen, or a hundred, and start producing… just exactly like they do with illegal drug labs right now.
Because even in Australia the homemade industry is competing with the professional industry. If you have money and want guns you’re going to buy and smuggle rather than build a shop.
Similarly, the first drug labs were pretty clown school amature hour things.
The illegal markets currently servicing drug dealers can function at a large scale. Trying to claim they can’t because they don’t currently do that with guns ignores our history with drugs.Report
I disagree with most of David’s proposal, but I do think it’s time for a federal gun permit for all gun owners. We adopted a stamp program for automatic weapons years ago and we do hunting and concealed carry licenses now. Plus driver’s licenses, etc. I don’t really see any reason why we can’t do a permitting program and I think it gives cops more teeth to take people off the street when they are caught without one.Report
You could sell it as a Permanent Background Check Card.Report
That would appeal to those on the Left that have a boner for background checks, but it needs a lot more teeth.Report
The stamps and additional requirement thresholds will have little to do with gun deaths per year(per criminal action), and creating more thresholds will likely increase gun deaths per year as smuggling and cartel/gang profits will grow.
We don’t even know if we are in a sweet spot for the fewest deaths. I would propose going the other way and eliminating all restrictions and see if the deaths decrease as criminal profit decreases.Report
Are you familiar with the laws around poaching and hunter’s education programs?Report
Hmmm the previous topic was on crime and gun deaths,(I may be making a assumption on the premise of human deaths in the US and maybe Australia)
I am willing to look at a different context, but first if we are going elsewhere I must say in the new context that I know of some poaching and hunter’s education programs but within a specific parameter of geography.
What’s on your mind?Report
Hunter’s Ed establishes a foundation of personal responsibility for the safety of yourself and your fellow hunters (i.e. fellow citizens) and it establishes best practices. Hunting licenses create buy-in and establish funding for conservation (i.e. making things better). Regulations create structure around participation and establish bright lines for enforcement.
If you get caught hunting without a hunter’s ed card on file, you are poaching, plain and simple. If you violate hunting regulations, you are also subject to fines, etc. Fish & Wildlife officers have far more latitude than regular police officers, especially concerning seizure of assets. (Example, a friend of a friend was caught shooting one dove over his bag limit – he forfeited a brand-new $500 shotgun).
My idea would be to establish gun owner education programs, establish a yearly gun permit requirement and then when people violate, take their shit. I’m just really tired of the hunting community regulating the heck out of ourselves while rec shooters, collectors and preppers have almost nothing to contend with.Report
I want to be specific so we are not talking past each other here.
If someones intent is to poach regardless of the licenses, best practices, regulations, enforcement, then those things just become a threshold for non-poachers.
This doesn’t even make it to a Catch 22, as in your first sentence ‘personal responsibility’ is a trait of people who aren’t the problem.
In addition you are building social constructs that have chance processes that skew in a particular way.
–” I’m just really tired of the hunting community regulating the heck out of ourselves while rec shooters, collectors and preppers have almost nothing to contend with.”
What are you talking about in this sentence?Report
Felons possessing guns almost always starts with a legal purchase by someone else. If you say that guns can’t be sold to anyone without a permit, I can hold the person that last owned the gun legally accountable. The permits also create a barrier to ownership for the people that might buy one because they are thinking about killing their ex wife or shooting up a school. It slows things down.
Hunters regulate themselves extensively. What regulations do sports shooters and collectors place on themselves? I suspect many would take their Pittman-Robertson dollars back if they could.Report
This looks odd because the end parameters of only rich/legal people owning guns will somehow stop ex wife shootings or shooting up schools?
It could very well be effective in thresholds but I don’t think it will have the desired ‘slowing things down’ for the desire/measure of slowing things down is for bad things not to happen.
Also it is a hell of a ask for people who don’t meet the requirements of ‘rich enough’ or ‘legal enough’.
Hunters will eventually be priced out of the wildlife market. If 10 million people have to continually pay higher prices for the activity of hunting, they will likely have less prosperous economic incentives to keep it up or pass it along to the next generation. Soon that pool will be less than a million.
The quantity of hunters is a drop in the bucket, and if you want to make a ruckus that they self regulate to a extreme, be my guest. I don’t see how it makes any difference of the self inflicted harm it is doing.
We are actually living in a pretty peaceful slice of human existence, and instead of rewarding the fruits of peace we seem to be determined to spin the knobs.Report
I’m not clear why you think that this would mean only rich people would have guns. In Kentucky, hunter’s education class is less than $20. Concealed carry classes run about $150.
https://fw.ky.gov/Education/Pages/Hunter-Education.aspx
“Hunters will eventually be priced out of the wildlife market. If 10 million people have to continually pay higher prices for the activity of hunting, they will likely have less prosperous economic incentives to keep it up or pass it along to the next generation. Soon that pool will be less than a million.”
I don’t understand what you mean by this at all. Hunters already pay more for their gun-related activities than any other group. And all gun & amo buyers pay into Pittman-Robertson. I’m just suggesting that many of same regs around hunting could easily be expanded to ‘all gun owners’.Report
“Hunters already pay more for their gun-related activities than any other group.”
Yes, I know, maybe let’s make all this stuff more reasonable than less so.
Which regs do you think need to be proliferated that aren’t already part of ordinary gun ownership?Report
I think you’re misunderstanding me…I don;t have a problem with hunters doing and paying all of that stuff. I want it expanded to everyone else.
I would adapt the gun safety stuff from hunter’s ed and concealed carry classes and make it a mandatory class to own, carry or purchase a firearm. The resulting certificate would have to be combined with some kind of renewal process and fees to do so. Same as concealed carry. And if a non-felon was caught doing any of the above without their permit, we take their stuff.Report
I actually do have a problem with hunters paying for all that stuff, because I want more hunters in the future with fewer barriers to entry. Of all the gun owners, we need more of this particular type.
If something is not a necessity, I see permits, licensing, fees, etc. as limiting something that is not wanted. IMO hunting should be a completely free action, and probably a tax right off.
Not only that, I want the NFA repealed, as it does stuff like categorize silencers as a fire arm plus other idiocy.
I want constitutional carry, not as a access granted/priviledged/provided by a government body, but to recognize the BOR in its framework is a stark warning of government/legislation to self regulate against infringe on peoples freedom to bear arms.
You know this stuff, you know the idiocy and contridictions of banning short barreled shotguns because they were never a ‘militia’ weapon, and then under the same umbrella banning automatic rifles because they ARE military weapons.
Hell, you now the drop in a bucket mass shootings are compared to street killings.
It reminds me of that quote:
“It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
At some point we are going to have to get some thick skin or be forever tormented by busybodies attempting to craft a world without discomfort.Report
I am with you on all of the arbitrary bans of certain gun types and accessories, however this:
‘I actually do have a problem with hunters paying for all that stuff, because I want more hunters in the future with fewer barriers to entry. Of all the gun owners, we need more of this particular type.
If something is not a necessity, I see permits, licensing, fees, etc. as limiting something that is not wanted. IMO hunting should be a completely free action, and probably a tax right off.”
That is a fundamental misunderstanding of hunting in America. Hunters are extremely proud of the dollars they put towards conservation through Pittman-Robertson and hunting licenses. In my 32 years afield I have never heard a hunter complaining about any of those things and to the contrary, we’re all pretty outraged when people are caught hunting without paying their dues, both monetarily and metaphorically.
Again, for me it’s about personal responsibility, training shooters and creating barriers to entry. It’s an awesome privilege and one I don’t take lightly. If I am being blunt, I know far too many recreational shooters and casual gun owners that i would not want to be around when they had a loaded gun in their hand. I can’t really say that about any of the people I know that hunt. It’s just a different IMO.
I think it’s important to note that barriers to entry are not about trying to limit who gets to do something. As Randy Pausch said, barrier are about proving how bad you want something. I want gun ownership to not be less common, but to be harder to obtain and I want it to require a reaffirmation at least once every few years.Report
I probably don’t have to harp on unintended consequences, but I will mention them in this first sentence. As what barriers are intended to be or not to be, the future will show how this unfolds.
Land owners who hunt their own land probably don’t much care what regs are passed.
The future of hunters is probably in the exterior of suburbs. This is a issue as regs from the inner city start contacting the newer hunting base.
It took hunters a while to learn what safety looks like. It was passed on and became more within individual constructs. Now we get pretty upset about getting flagged, or trigger control, or near misses.
We learned it through decades of real experience with real people. I think we can make the information available, but if hunting is going to become a suburbs issue, there should be nothing in their way to the same experiences that will eventually lead to the building the same individual constructs.
Yes they would benefit from learning from the mistakes of others, but this is hoping for a people we may or may not have.
Freedom got us to where we are now, if we start changing that, we may end up somewhere completely different.Report
it would be wrong to look at declining hunter numbers as a function of entry costs. Hunting is contracting significantly because Baby Boomers are aging out.
But again, this isn’t about hunting specifically. It’s about applying decades of best practices to the large gun culture in the United States. This would not only reduce gun death IMO, but also put the rest of the country a bit more at ease with the idea of guns in the first place.Report
Oh I understand it’s not all about the entry costs, but entry cost is part of it. I would speculate the biggest decline is due to video games or social media.
Media/social media is pretty tough competition then you add costs on top of that, I don’t think hunting has much of a future IMO.
The part of America that isn’t at ease with guns will likely not be at ease as long as guns are in america, then it will be knives next.
Note that this is occurring in a slice of time that the same busy body faction doesn’t much mind some foreigners with no driving credentials driving 5000 pound vehicles at 70 miles per hour on public roads, and will likely face no repercussions in doing so.
This is the time we are living in.
What are the numbers for deaths due to hunting related stuff? I think I found a source of maybe around a 1000. Most of those were related to trip and falls or some other people being people accidents.
I propose cutting back regs/costs and see what it takes to get it to 2000.
If it gets 10 million couch potatoes out in the wild then so be it.Report
“Oh I understand it’s not all about the entry costs, but entry cost is part of it. I would speculate the biggest decline is due to video games or social media.”
You’re absolutely entitled to speculate, however your conclusions don’t align with any survey data I have read. Declining numbers are due to A) aging out of Baby Boomers and not enough recruitment of new hunters. The latter part is not due to costs and couch potatoes but lack of access to land and no one to mentor them. The hunting organizations I belong to put a ton of time, money and effort into mentorship programs for that very reason. Why do I know it’s not due to people being to lazy? Because plenty of other outdoor sports are exploding (ex, disc golf).
“I don’t think hunting has much of a future IMO.”
I don’t disagree. I don’t really mourn the eventual loss of a pastime that has been an important part of my life. We as a nation will find other ways to support conservation (GOP be damned) but I do mourn the ultimate loss of more sensible voices within the gun community.Report
“not enough recruitment of new hunters”
yepReport
@mike-dwyer
I disagree with most of David’s proposal, but I do think it’s time for a federal gun permit for all gun owners.
Do you object to what I actually suggest, or what people seem intent on twisting what I suggest into?
Here is my actual suggestion: All new guns are required to have a serial number engraved. Every sale, private or otherwise, has to be reported to the government, including the serial numbers…which means if the gun you already own doesn’t have a serial number engraved, you have to go get one engraved on it for free first before you can sell it.
Twice a year, the Federal government will require all gun owners to confirm that they had, personally, laid eyes on all guns they say they own, with the understanding that if they lie (For example, if the government happened to recover that gun two months ago from a criminal.), they’re going to jail. If they _have_ legitimately misplaced a gun or realize it was stolen, they need to admit it.
I have, in previous discussions, come up with more complicated stuff, about time periods to register existing guns and report thefts and rules about losing guns, but whatnot, but, no. I’m dropping all that.
So my plan is now essentially very simple to explain: The Federal government will know what guns are purchased from this point forward, and who is supposed to own them. When they find one of those gun in the wrong hands, they will simply wait for the supposed owner to lie about still having it, and then arrest them. That’s it. That’s the core of the plan.
Tada. No more guns exiting the legal market, because every gun that exits is going to put the legal owner on the hook (and probably in prison) when it’s recovered.Report
Now that you have elaborated, that’s better, but I still want to see the permitting for a couple of reasons:
– More robust enforcement capabilities. You get caught with a gun, you get your stuff taken away.
– Creates hurdles to ownership. I want the would-be mass shooter or would-be girlfriend murderer to have to wait a while before they can legally buy a gun.Report
Mass shooters typically plan their things out for months or years before doing anything. Typically they get their guns legally, occasionally they steal them or even kill for them.
The only exception I can think of who might have been delayed by a waiting period is that Pulse guy… but that’s just on paper. He was a professional gun user so access to guns wasn’t really an issue and he planned it for a long time so it’s really not an issue.
Do we have any evidence that a cooling off period actually helps?Report
I think the cooling off period can help with crimes of passion – but it’s also just about gun safety too. Being forced to wait some time and have a safety class before a purchase is going to prevent accidents. I view gun deaths as needing a holistic approach.Report
I am conflicted about hurdles to ownership on two grounds. One is simply that I get leery about infringing on people”s rights, especially their right to defend themselves from violent crime, but that is… part of the difficult balancing act we have when both rights and essential state interests (like stopping violent crime) come into play.
The other problem is that every obstacle you add provides an incentive to circumvent the system. My general knee jerk is if you want a registration scheme you want to make compliance as easy as possible.Report
Looking from afar (and therefore with imperfect knowledge) I think the system in the Czech Republic would be best in an ideal world, which is constitutional right plus affordable shall issue licensing scheme. People can arm themselves without silly restrictions
and they still have normal European homicide rates.
Frankly I’m surprised we don’t talk about them much but they do have a historical/cultural affinity for personal firearm ownership that is unusual for a lot of Europe. Having been forcibly disarmed twice in a short period seems to have also left an impression.Report
Interesting. I didn’t even know the Czech Republic had gun laws that were atypical for Europe.
:puts on “to google” list:
Usually the comparisons I hear are with Switzerland and Israel, both of which are extremely different models from what we have in the US.Report
I didn’t know about it either until a year or two ago. I also don’t find Switzerland or Israel or really any European country to be a helpful or close to apples to apples comparison.
Better guages are other big countries in our hemisphere with complicated racial histories, much greater inequality, and an entirely different crime/criminal justice situation. Of course I would think that given my priors.Report
Hunting regs are pretty easy to comply with and no one has seen it as an infringement of their right to hunt. When they passed the hunter’s ed requirement in KY I was four months shy of being grandfathered in, so I had to take the class. I still apply lessons learned around gun safety. I also dutifully purchase my hunting license and permits every March. It’s all done online and it’s an easy process, but it creates a lot of structure around hunting and (again) gives teeth to enforcement.Report
You can lie to Congress for twelve straight hour and not get slapped with perjury, so I doubt checking a box is going to put anyone in jail, especially since no jury is every going to return a conviction unless the guy had also committed some other heinous crime.
To legally purchase a firearm from a dealer in the US, you have to check some boxes about drug use. To my knowledge, there has never been anyone convicted of lying about pot on their 4473, question 11e.Report
The Dayton shooter had a friend who helped him get equipment, and the 11e question is how the feds charged the guy.Report
You’re expecting local law enforcement to deal with them harshly and round up the guns of these “criminals”.
I’ve said several times ‘Existing guns do not need to be registered until sold’. And it’s not ‘fill out a form’. When a gun is purchased under this system, you’d have to register it. And from then on, the government would send you a form every six months with ‘Please confirm you still have possession of each individual gun listed below, under penalty of perjury’ and return it. We could even do it via email.
There’s no local police doing checks, or whatever thing you have imagined required for enforcement of the law. Enforcement of the law happens at the _other_ end, when a weapon is _recovered_ from someone who should not have it. The serial number is passed up the line to BATF. At which point BATF simply…wait a few months to see if the person is going to lie on their form, and if they do, arrest them. (And presumably, BATF would then get a warrant compelling them to show _all_ their registered weapons, to see what else is missing.)
A better comparison would be insisting that everyone track and label every bottle of alcohol they have and use (btw the number of Alcohol-related deaths makes the number of gun deaths look small).
We don’t require the private unlicensed sale of alcohol to be tracked in this country because we usually don’t allow the private unlicensed sale of alcohol in this country at all! Like, literally the thing I’m suggesting we track for guns we don’t even let people do with alcohol. The only places that generally are allowed to sell alcohol are duly licensed places, and they _are_ required to keep track of inventory.
Now, we don’t require serial-number level tracking, but we don’t do that because alcohol is sold in easily removable and quickly disposed of containers, so the concept is rather silly. If alcohol _had_ a black market, which it doesn’t, the people on the black market just put it in new containers.
But alcohol doesn’t have a black market of illegal resales, just a grey market where legal owners sell it to illegal owners who then consume it. This means that basically every illegal alcohol owner that’s caught can flip on who transferred the alcohol out of the legal system, so we hardly need serial numbers to be able to track where alcohol came from anyway. ‘How did this alcohol end up in the hands of you underaged kids?’ is a trivially answered question most of the time (If we even bother to try to find out.), so we don’t need tracking.
Illegal gun owners usually don’t even know how the gun they have ended up on the black market, and can’t flip. They got their gun from some random guy on a street corner.
The people involved have lots of money and are already used to breaking the law. It’s not that hard to build guns, it’s just the big mass producers make them at such a low cost and high quality it’s not profitable.
We all know that making things cost much higher and be of crappy quality means…uh…nothing? Or, wait…it means fewer people have them, right? How do economics work again?
And how are you going to maintain this current situation after you make creating amateur guns very profitable? 3D printers and metal shops are legal. A front for a criminal organization can trivially set up one, or a dozen, or a hundred, and start producing… just exactly like they do with illegal drug labs right now.
We have literally already had this discussion before, and I’m not going to get sucked into this nonsense every time. To repeat very briefly: It is almost utterly _unimaginable_ for metal shops (Much less 3D printers.) to produce anywhere near the number of guns produced a year currently. Right now, 10 million guns are made a year. In a world where legal guns no longer keep wandering off to the illegal side, and they have to manufacture illegal guns, I’d put the estimate of the _absolute high-end_ production at 100,000 for illegal guns. I don’t know if that’d be like 100 places doing 1000 a year, a ‘gun factory’ type thing (Which is a rather risky thing to set up.), or 1000 metal shops sneaking out 100 guns a year on the side, or some mix of those. That’s the max guess, my more reasonable guess is about 10,000.
I wouldn’t be surprised if illegal production really consisted of, basically, chop shops…which are a lot less numerous than people think. And they’d make out an illegal gun or two on the slow days. Maybe expand a bit, start up a permanent line and consistently throw out three guns a day.
You can’t replace giant precision factories churning out hundreds of thousands of weapons a day with…some people with a metal shop. We actually have evidence of this, in that countries that have barred guns don’t have that.
Having a hundred times fewer guns on the street, and having them much much more expensive, is…that’s the end, that’s what I’m aiming at. Not zero. Zero is absurd.Report
I think it would take at least 50 years for your plan to actually start to make a dent. I own guns my dad purchased in the 1960s. They aren’t going to be sold when I am gone. They will be gifted to relatives. I fear your plan leaves hundreds of millions of guns unregistered for a very long time.Report
I don’t mind having unregistered guns at all. I don’t care how many guns sit around in attics or are used legally for hunting or anything. They can exist forever, unregistered.
I’d even be willing to put some sort of ‘transferred to relatives’ exception in the law for original registration, although I think that’s a bit silly. But I know that would be a sticking point and half the people would ignore it and then there’d be stories about how the government is abusing their powers by arresting some grandfather who gave a grandkid his first rifle, blah blah. So I’d be fine with some sort of transfers for currently-unregistered weapons between relatives for free.
Of course, with registered weapons, you’d have to tell the government you transferred them to a family member, if only so you stop getting asked if you’ve personally seen them instead of the new owner. This process should be very easy and essentially logging into a web site by the new owner, confirming he now owns whatever gun.
Or you just do it when sent the questions every six months, it should be an option on that. ‘Oh, I gave that gun two months ago to a relative, Federal license number blah blah, please confirm with them.’. (And you hope they didn’t sell the gun illegally since then or lost it, and lie and say you didn’t give it to them, because, doh!)
I’m okay with being fairly forgiving about this stuff even with registered guns as long as all registered guns are _eventually_ tracked down to a legal owner who takes responsibility for it. Which should be as easy as answering a damn email prompt saying ‘Do you now own gun #####? The current owner says you do. Do you formally take responsibility for it?’.
That puts the onus firmly on the saler as to how much they trust the other person. If they don’t, the legal transfer is something they’d want to do in real-time from their phones during the sale. If it’s a relative, they can deal with the issue later.
I’m not concerned about any of that. What I concerned is guns being sold to people who are no longer allowed to own guns.
For the guns that your dad bought in the 1960s to bother me, _you’d have to sell them to criminals_. You and everyone else.
Now, it is hypothetically possible that legal gun owners could, in fact, set up large-scale gun-running operations for their currently-unregistered weapons and a lot of those weapons could make it to the black market…but…I don’t really think so.Report
“So I’d be fine with some sort of transfers for currently-unregistered weapons between relatives for free.”
My gut tells me that a lot of the guns that are used in mass shootings would fall into that category. It would also circumvent any kind of permitting/education requirements and facilitate crimes of passion. So, yeah, I wouldn’t be on-board with that.Report
What happens if someone just ignores the 6 month notice?
And on a side note, I expect 3D printers to get scary good and common over a period of time a lot less than 50 years.Report
I work in the additive industry. I have seen things printed from all kinds of powdered metals that would blow your mind. The only limitation is the imagination of the designer. It’s the next wave in manufacturing. I’ve worked in manufacturing in one way or another for 30 plus years. This stuff is cutting edge, the next wave.Report
What happens if someone just ignores the 6 month notice?
The first time it’s another letter, or email, or a phone call. ‘Hey, you didn’t do this when you needed to, do it within the next month or you’re in trouble. If you’re out of the country or something you can have a friend sign they are still there for you, or if there’s some other problem like your landlord has seized them or something you can ask for an exception. But you can’t just ignore this.’.
Fail to that sort of thing, BATF shows up and says ‘Since you will not confirm you still possess these weapons, we will confirm it for you. Get them out, let’s see them so we can check them off. Also, here’s a $500 fine because you made us come here and do this.'(1)
If they refuse, it’s ‘Okay, we’ll be back with a search warrant, and when we come back…you’re not keeping those guns anymore. And if any are missing, like if you try to hide them, we’re charging you with selling them illegally. You probably want to call your lawyer at this point. You could have just let us see them, or swore you still had them, but no, you had to do this.’.
And…what are _you_ trying to imply here? Are you trying to imply that gun owners are a bunch of lawless individuals who will get in shootouts with the police because the police have asked them to comply with the law by merely swearing they still have possession of their weapons?
I will never understand why people who are anti-gun control are so prejudiced against gun owners, asserting they are literally incapable of following the law. And then surreally assert we should let people who can’t follow the law have firearms! Huh?! Surely if they were really like that, we should systematically evacuate everyone near them and attempt to safely bring them into custody and remove their guns! Like, this is a literal hostage situation that is being asserted to exist.
It’s _not_, of course, but that’s a really absurd anti-gun-control argument.
1) At which point they occasionally realize the gun owner died and no one knew what was going on so never responded, and they’re like ‘Uh, oops…okay, no fine this time, but you need to go ahead and pull the guns out, so we can check them off.’.Report
“I will never understand why people who are anti-gun control are so prejudiced against gun owners, asserting they are literally incapable of following the law.”
*ahem*
https://www.forbes.com/sites/frankminiter/2015/06/24/nearly-one-million-new-yorkers-didnt-register-their-assault-weapons/#1f0bb804702fReport
People are not going to tell the government about their property if they don’t trust the government to not abuse that information.Report
This is why, though I think it would be good policy for the government to know where all the guns are, I can’t really blame gun rights advocates for their reluctance to go along with a scheme politically.Report
Is there any evidence of gun registries turning into gun confiscation?
Other than that one. And other than that one. And other than that one. These examples are all in Europe!
Well, California doesn’t count either.Report
We confiscate cars, based on government registries.
We confiscate land and buildings, based on government registries.
We confiscate boats, planes, and cargo shipments all based on government registries.
I don’t know why the idea of confiscating illegal weapons is such a woo woo thing.Report
Maybe yall ought to figure out how to house those folks on skid row before you waste more time and energy attempting to disarm a nation.Report
You’ve seen how cops confiscate cars and houses used by drug dealers and use that for budget enhancement…?
Mm hmm.
Confiscate houses of illegal gun owners, and distribute them to the homeless.
Sort of a New Homestead Act, really. Settling the wild and ungovernable rural tribal areas.Report
We should ask every Democratic Candidate whether owners of illegal guns ought to have their houses given to The State to redistribute to the less fortunate.Report
“Hello, I am an Angel Mom, whose child was gunned down by a reckless gun owner.
Mr. Yang, do you support our heroic police officers, the Thin Blue Line that protects us from gangs and terrorists? And further, do you support transitional housing for our wounded warrior veterans?”Report
“Wow. They were somehow able to gentrify Harlem three times as fast as we thought they’d be able to.”Report
I would absolutely give their houses to someone else. Or at least their car.Report
…have we learned nothing from Asset Forfeiture?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UANRvFNc0hwReport
The primary law enforcement folks I have dealt with is fish & wildlife and they are all-powerful. They seize millions of dollars in assets yearly and you hear no real complaints.Report
Just in case it isn’t obvious, I’m being tongue in cheek about confiscation and asset forfeiture.
But the serious point is that the government regularly seizes all sorts of property, but somehow the seizure of illegal guns sets off the hysteria alarms, because the attitude of too many people towards guns is irrational and unhealthy.
Before we can have a rational discussion of guns we need to have a rational view of them.Report
I don’t disagree with Chip on this. If someone can’t follow existing laws regarding guns they need to not only lose their guns but probably also lose some other belongings to re-enforce the point.Report
The word ‘Illegal’ is doing a herculean amount of effort here.
Again, we come back to the War on Drugs. The government regularly decides that something which was perfectly fine yesterday, is now illegal today, and the penalties of continued ownership are severe.
Of course, with drugs, there is a shelf life, so legally owned drugs will soon be spoiled or consumed shortly after they are made illegal. People don’t hold onto drugs like they would a car, or a firearm.
Now, if we are talking about something like the GCA of 1968, where full auto weapons were made illegal to purchase after the given date, but could still be owned and traded as long as they were made and sold prior to the date, you’d have less pushback, because no one is being forced to give up legally owned property.
And yes, prior to the law being passed, the firearm in question was legal, and was made illegal. Making it illegal is, IMHO, a taking, and if government is serious about it, they should be paying people for the property, at the very least.
Otherwise they are just abusing their power and people are right to protest that.Report
This is why I chuckle when leftward folks project that the rightward are nihilists. Usually the first thing the left go for is a nihilistic collapse of the principles of property.
And it’s like where bad ideas go to get worse, and the mantra is pretty predictable, and has been weighed over and over in the market place of ideas and history. Found wanting, as damn near every idea that comes out of the church of needs has been found wanting.Report
So tomorrow, your state politicians decide that your favorite hunting rifle is banned in the state, and you need to surrender it or not it out of state. That’s something you think the state should be able to sieze your house over?Report
Three separate conversations:
1) What guns should be banned? (Mike says zero)
2) What should be the requirements of gun ownership and usage? (Mike says lots of them)
3) What should be the penalties for people that violate #2? (Mike says take lots of their stuff)Report
Find a way to guarantee 1), and 2 and 3 are less of an issue.
But until 1) is settled…Report
It’s always going to be a conversation, especially as more and more people move to cities and have less contact with guns. But just how responsible gun owners have never really been successful at reassuring the non-gun owning public that most guns are in safe hands, the not-friendly-to-guns crowd is never going to be able to reassure us completely. But with that said, we have SCOTUS for a generation so I think we’re mostly safe on that front.
(I would also suggest that if we actually insisted on 2 & 3, similar to what hunters did in the past with hunting regulations, we would actually facilitate #1)Report
I strongly suggest you visit CalGuns, and see what CA, which has registration, regularly does with that information.
The feds might be unwilling to cross that line, but plenty of states are happy to.Report
The not-friendly-to-guns crowd has shown complete ignorance repeatedly in legislation. Not only that, it’s not that they are ‘not friendly to guns’ to the point that the state is disarmed, its just people they disargee with that have to be disarmed.
The fact that they hire other people to point guns at people is a pretty hard indicator that they shouldn’t be trusted at all.
When pressed they always say how such and such social construct will take away your property(which you actually said up above in the vein of fish and wildlife), they NEVER say that they will come. Which means this is just a faction hiding behind hired guns. Its just one dishonest power play wrapped up in a specific flavor of social objectivity.Report
I’m sure the artillery folks can figure out how to redistribute all those bricks yall dirty capitalists have been hording in those population centers.
And why is it such a woo woo thing to march liberals out to the country side, i mean that main streamer centrist Pol Pot might of been onto something.Report
The state of CA likes to make certain models of guns illegal to own, and demands that owners either surrender them, or move them out of state. Such antics are driven purely by politics, and they annoy people who broke no laws.
Let’s say, for instance, that someone drove their F350 through a farmers market and killed a dozen people. Then the politicians decided that F350s are just too dangerous for civilians to own and everyone who owned one in the state had to either sell it or move it out of state, or surrender it to the police.
How many times do you think something like that would happen before folks were less inclined to register their vehicles with the state?Report
States have in fact made certain models of automobiles illegal. You couldn’t market a Model T nowadays for a host of reasons like taillights, windshields, seatbelts etc.
Except there isn’t mass confiscation, but the process of attrition as older models are junked.
Which is where the “gun as automobile” analogy starts to break down.
First as has been pointed out, guns don’t have the short shelf life that cars do so the attrition process would be absurdly long.
But mostly, while its true that some people think of a gun as simply a tool to do something like hunt or target shoot, for way too many people the gun is a sacred totem, and their attachment to it is irrational and not subject to a sober analysis.
So I keep coming back to the diseased and dangerous pornographic gun culture.
If we compare it to car culture, its as if hot rod enthusiasts demanded the personal right to drive top fuel dragsters on the freeway, and saw any attempt at rules for headlights or wheelbase or fender covers as a violation of their rights.
And that hot rods were an integral part of their culture, a way to preserve and defend themselves from enslavement.
And that they became violently angry and threatened revolution if they lose the election.
This is not…reasonable. This isn’t amenable to the normal push and pull of politics and democracy. It becomes religious zealotry.Report
You guys would be just as afraid of the jaw bone of an ass if that was the preferred means of your opponent to limit your political power.
Fear is the real religious zealotry in the room.Report
This is not…reasonable. This isn’t amenable to the normal push and pull of politics and democracy. It becomes religious zealotry.
And you should see what happens when abortion is threatened! The left simply and silently lays down, considers all of the actions they have performed as over and done with, to be protested nevermore. A single tear is shed while they pack-up and move to the next crisis.
Your whole analogy falls when looked at closely, as two key issues are conveniently forgotten. One, all the rules about car ownership; the safety glass, smog requirements, seatbelts, insurance, etc, only apply when driven on public roads. There is no provision for the gov’t to regulate a vehicle driven solely on private property. Those cars can be transported, usually by trailer, to other private properties without triggering any provisions to get the gov’t involved. Also, one can own that proverbial Model T and drive it one the public highways, due to being grandfathered in for all safety concerns. No seat belts, no smog equipment, and so on. So that analogy, of comparing automotive laws to firearms laws fails.
Second, there is black letter law, in the most basic legal document of the country, saying that the ownership and transport of weapons is a basic, recognized right. Now, there is, obviously, a tug-of-war about the wording, but for so many in the country today, that wording is clear as anything else in that document. And, due to this, for those many peoples any action by the gov’t without going through the proper amendment process, is inherently an act of tyranny. Thus worthy of the actions you feel are not acceptable in this day and age.Report
Your analogy is crap. Fears of registration leading to confiscation are not about people wanting to carry their AR-15 in public, but just to own it and be able to use at the range.
A person in CA can own a drag car all they want, as long as the only place it operates is on private property.
You regularly confuse and conflate ownership with public usage, as if the two things are equivalent.Report
You’re right, the analogy of guns to autos falls apart but mostly because we think of them as very different things.
The totemic meaning of guns and gun ownership is not healthy or rational, so I wouldn’t expect there to be any analogy that fits.Report
Thing is, there are a great many things that people own that have problematic totemic meaning/value. Cars, boats, houses, memorabilia, people*, etc.
Firearms are just the latest totem that has come to the fore.
But the totemic value, while certainly a concern, is a minor thing across the entirety of those who own such a thing. Very few car owners have cars that are overpowered and which are driven in a dangerous and irresponsible manner.
Likewise, few firearm owners equate their firearm with some kind of masculine power totem, and even among those who do, only a small number of them will commit some manner of violence against another.
Yes, those who commit violence with a firearm are more of a problem that those who drive stupid with an overpowered car. But about the only value in this line of thought is that men who seem to place value in masculine totems** are men we should keep half an eye on.
*Epstein, and even Weinstein, have shown that this remains an issue.
**How much overlap do you think there is for men who have multiple such totems? I’m betting it’s pretty high.Report
Pot. Meet Kettle.Report
I am always a bit amused about gun owners that think the government doesn’t know about their guns. It’s 2019. Paper trails are very long these days.Report
The question is, do they ‘know’, or is it just possible for them to find out, if they have a good cause to.
The whole resistance to a register isn’t that law enforcement should not be able to know, but rather that they shouldn’t be able to simply pull up a map of a given neighborhood and know instantly who has what, should they be told to go sieze them all.
And yes, that last bit is the paranoid fever dream. Or at least, it would be if politicians didn’t regularly entertain activists who want police to do that.
Even Chip has said, with seriousness, that the whole “cold dead hands” bit are terms he finds acceptable.Report
If Chip is not in Law Enforcement, that just means that he wants Scot Peterson to go into a place with guns and arrest people.
Which… well, want things in one hand, poop in the other, see which hand fills up first.Report
Police can be motivated to do it. We got them willing to storm into private residences where they suspect that the residents are well armed, just so they can sieze recreational chemicals or herbs.
And the police regularly boast about how good it makes them feel, even when the target was harmless and had barely any chemicals or herbs.Report
I’ve no doubt that if, instead of bullets, rumors were flying of a bong being in the bathroom next to the teacher’s lounge, Dippity Peterson would have been On The Case.Report
Huh, I thought Swalwell and the nuclear thing was Chips preference.
That had a lot of potential as there are few, faster ways of killing ‘really smart’ socialists than letting them tinker with radiation.Report
I’m saying that if we’re moving to a “cars” model for enforcement, similar to how my state mandates all cars have insurance, the number of people who ignore that law is more than 20%. Which implies we’re going to need a lot of cops to enforce this because the non-compliance rate will be very high.
So it means for this sort of thing to work we’d need to make policing guns a serious(!) priority.
My intuition is rather than burden the entire country with this it’d be cheaper and easier to put a cop on every street corner in the neighborhoods where it’d we want the results to be felt.Report
I’m saying that if we’re moving to a “cars” model for enforcement, similar to how my state mandates all cars have insurance, the number of people who ignore that law is more than 20%. Which implies we’re going to need a lot of cops to enforce this because the non-compliance rate will be very high.
Uh, no, it won’t. Because, and this literally the premise of what I said, all _new_ guns would be registered when sold. (And all guns would be supposed to be when resold.)
Which means this, literally, is just a database. There’s a big database of guns, there is a big list of people that have failed to update their current possession, those people will be contacted by law enforcement. Again, _Federal_ law enforcement, I have no idea why you keep trying to make this about ‘local police’.
This is like asserting that _property tax_ can’t work, because people won’t just pay them. Yeah, because it takes so much resources to track down who hasn’t paid property taxes…oh, wait, no it doesn’t, it takes no resources to ‘track them down’ at all. There’s a big list of properties, and they just check off the damn ones that paid!
I don’t even understand how you think this is hard.
—
Now, you probably want to argue that _existing_ unregistered guns would still be sold without registering them, okay. Except, as I said, I don’t care about that. I don’t care if existing guns are ever registered. The entire point of this is to stop the supply of guns getting into the hands of people who should not have them, and even if all these ‘responsible’ gun owners go illegally selling _their_ unregistered guns to criminals, even that supply will eventually run out.
Now, I actually think most gun owners are law-abiding citizens, and would understand that selling their guns without registration and thus without a _background check_ is not only a criminal act, but possibly putting a gun in the hand of someone who is going to do harm with it. And they’d go ahead and actually register the thing before a sale, and go through the proper process for the sale, assuming it’s easy enough, which we need to make sure it is. But I guess I can’t _prove_ that current gun owners aren’t sociopaths that don’t care if people are killed? If that’s the claim you’re making?Report
Because you’re pointing to examples (cars) where vast numbers of people don’t obey the law and claiming you’ll do the same thing but they’ll obey the law. Worse, our RL examples of gun registration suggests a compliance rate of close to 5%.
So when we have 95% of the gun owning population disobey this… what happens?
Does the federal gov send the ATF to every household where this happens? (That’s why I’m claiming you’ll need a lot of cops). If the federal gov checks it’s budget and sees it doesn’t have money for this number of cops and gives this “priority” to the locals we’re back at local official foot dragging (which is where we are now for current laws).
The VAST number of guns aren’t used in crimes, is keeping the database up to date going to be a national priority to the point where we use those kind of resources?Report
Does the federal gov send the ATF to every household where this happens? (That’s why I’m claiming you’ll need a lot of cops). If the federal gov checks it’s budget and sees it doesn’t have money for this number of cops and gives this “priority” to the locals we’re back at local official foot dragging (which is where we are now for current laws).
‘Oh, how are you going to enforce this newfangled property tax? Are the police going to go to _every_ property owner that doesn’t pay it?’
That’s not how disregard for laws work. People ignore laws for two reasons…they either think they can get away with it without the government knowing (Which is why gun owners don’t currently register, which I solve here by having gun stores register the gun when they bought it.) or they think the law is rarely enforced even when the government knows they did it. (Speed limits, the most disregarded law of all, are both of those.)
No one has to send the ATF to every household. Just…some of them. At some point it becomes clear the US government visits and fines people for not responding, and people will realize they need to actually do it, or they are risking idiotically paying fines for no actual reason each six months.
Once it becomes clear that the law is enforced, even if only 5% are actually fined, people start saying ‘I can’t afford that risk for literally no benefit to me, and in fact greater hassle when the AFT show up, vs. just following the damn email and confirming I still have my guns.’, and they comply. At which point the people failing to comply drops even more and becomes even risky, etc.
I also am baffled as to why you think this is a huge drain on the budget. You realize that large-scale refusal would actually bring in money, right? Fines bring in money, especially if the fines escalate each time. An employee visiting an average of _just_ one person a day, every workday of the year, would collect fines of $130,000 a year. And, yes, they’d probably go in twos, and employees have other expenses beside salaries…OTOH, they’d probably do more than _one_ a day, especially if the refusal was so large they can basically just drive down the street. A few will probably refuse, and they’ll have to come back with a warrant, but…there’s still a fine anyway.
Actually…forget the ATF having to visit people to fine them. Sure, the ATF will visit people and demand to see the guns if they didn’t comply with confirming possession, but the fines should get issued _regardless_ of whether you’re one of the visited people or not. Hope you weren’t expecting that income tax refund this year.
Again, this is a massive civil disobedience situation you are imagining because gun owners _are unwilling to respond to an email or letter_ and confirm they still have possession of their weapons. That’s it. That’s literally what I’m requiring of them. And you think gun owners are so lawless they will steadfastly refuse to do that even if we charge then $1000 a year _and_ the ATF shows up twice a year at their door to manually check things.
Admittedly, there is a small percentage of gun owners who have had their brains completely fried by the NRA who _will_ refuse to do this willingly and have the ATF show up every six months…and I don’t care. I just turned them either into a nice revenue stream, or…alternately, they refuse to show the guns to ATF and we end up taking them away. Either way is fine with me.Report
As you are talking about how simple this all is, let’s keep in mind just how effing stupid law enforcement can be about such things.
The kicker here isn’t that it’s a case of mistaken identity during the issuance of a Red Flag, it’s that law enforcement just did a simple database search based upon a name match, at ran with that.
So yes, the guy in question will get his property and rights back, after he pays money, and time, jumping through bureaucratic hoops.
Law enforcement is REALLY bad about doing due diligence in these kinds of things, so your system has to be idiot proof on the LE side.
Because LE has some seriously well crafted idiots working for them.Report
As you are talking about how simple this all is, let’s keep in mind just how effing stupid law enforcement can be about such things.
The police have access to all sorts of information, and can use it to randomly look up names and hassle all sorts of people.
The problem is stupid laws allowing them to seize property without due process, not if they are using that law against the ‘right’ people. And it’s probably unconstitutional to allow that sort of seizing of property. OTOH, the courts still haven’t bothered to say the obviously-unconstitutional asset-forfeiture-without-trial is unconstitutional, so who knows when they’ll get around it. The problem with Red Flags laws aren’t that they can hit the wrong target, the problem is that those laws are stupid and unconstitutional, period. Even when aimed at the ‘correct’ people. The government should have to follow due process to take them away, just like anything else, not someone pointing a finger at them and saying ‘Bad!’.
And it seems very silly to point out that this guy lost his gun because of nothing…when the police could have just shown up, asserted that he purchased his gun with drug money, and taken it that way. Or taken his car. I don’t think it’s the concealed carry database that’s the problem here! It’s letting the police _steal shit_ that’s the problem.
Seizing property, including weapons, should work roughly like detaining people…the police can do it for 48 hours and then they need a damn judge-issued warrant or have to give it back, and then _later_ there should be a trial and the government actually has to prove things even with a warrant.(1)
Fix that problem, not ‘Oh no, now the police have a new way to randomly seize whatever they want without due process’. At least the stupid Red Flag laws don’t put the money straight into their own pocket, I assume?
And what I’m proposing would be _Federal_, so could have checks on it to stop moronic state legislatures and police from using it in such a way. In fact, I’m not sure why the police should have access to it at all outside of ‘Who owns the gun we found with this serial number?’ and possible ‘Of this small list of people that are suspects in this specific crime, do any of them own a gun that could have fired the 9mm bullet we found?’, neither of which are particularly abusable as questions.
But trying to restrict information to the police to stop them from _finding_ people to infringe on the rights of is almost surreal as a concept. If we don’t want them to do what they do, we need to bar that behavior and hold them accountable, not say ‘Well, we better not keep track of one specific thing, then, so the police can’t know it.’.
1) And as I’ve made it clear before, I’m not even happy letting the police _do that_. I want a signed warrant before any sort of detention or even arrest, and likewise I would want a signed warrant before any sort of seizure of property…although with property I will at least let the police keep people from touching something for, like, ten minutes while they get the warrant. But that’s my pipe dream, so ignore this footnote.Report
If we had perfectly rational legislators crafting this, I’d be all for it.
But that’s not how the sausage is made.Report
This entire line of argument is it could similarly be used to argue why Prohibition would simply work.
For the same reason I think the War on Drugs is a drain on the budget. Vast amounts of money and other resources are spent with little to show for it. The gov runs around creating criminals by passing laws that people aren’t willing to follow.
I think you’re making it harder to follow the law than to break it. There will be a huge demand for off the books weapons which don’t end up with gov insisting on micromanaging how you use/store them and threatening fines/imprisonment.
I think there will be “lost” guns where the real answer is “I don’t feel like filling out paperwork or getting it out”. Keep in mind the vast number of guns aren’t used in crimes so this is a low risk move.Report
“This entire line of argument is it could similarly be used to argue why Prohibition would simply work.”
Well. Prohibition did work. There was significantly less drinking in the United States after the Volstead Act than before, and even post-Repeal it was lower than before the Act was passed.
Prohibition had all sorts of other issues but it’s not true to say that it failed to greatly reduce the amount of alcohol consumption in the United States.
Of course, you can go on to say “very few of the bullets that actually kill people are bullets that these laws would make illegal, fired from guns that these laws would make illegal, and thus the laws wouldn’t actually affect the gun murder rate in any significant way,” but it’s important to remember that Prohibition did achieve the goal it intended.Report
My zip code’s murder rate of zero can’t go down. Ergo my area benefiting from this plan is a non-starter.
The bulk of our murder rate comes from places that already have serious anti-gun policies and everything that’s happening in terms of people getting and using guns is already illegal.
My expectation is they’re are already getting the “benefits” of Prohibition-of-guns with their murder rates reduced to whatever degree gun control is going to work. Getting rid of Prohibition of Drugs would serve those places better in terms of reduced crime and cultural attachment to violence.
The rest of the country has murder rates approximating that of the first world so there are little “benefits” on the table for us to collect.Report
This entire line of argument is it could similarly be used to argue why Prohibition would simply work.
Someone violating prohibition _had_ a point: It let people drink.
Someone failing to respond to demands to confirm they still possess their firearms _does not_ have a point. It accomplishes nothing for the person who does it except to expose them to fine and put them in eventual legal trouble.
There will be a huge demand for off the books weapons which don’t end up with gov insisting on micromanaging how you use/store them and threatening fines/imprisonment.
Good! The higher demand for existing unmarked weapons are, the more expensive those will be, and the harder it will be for criminals to get them!
I hope that gun nuts horde every single one of them. That they have giant racks of the older unregistered guns from wall-to-wall. I hope those guns cost thousands of dollars each because no one will sell theirs.
I think there will be “lost” guns where the real answer is “I don’t feel like filling out paperwork or getting it out”.
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it here, but losing guns, or having them stolen, would at some point make people ineligible to buy guns. I’m not saying the first time, but fairly quickly.
And honestly, I was thinking more ‘stolen’ might get them another chance or even two, that people can honestly have firearms stolen but…if they just inexplicable ‘lose’ their gun, even once, maybe they’ve shown they are too incompetent to have one.
Also, why do you think there wouldn’t be paperwork for losing a gun?Report
A interesting conversation, well done. However at this point to continue it would be circular.Report
Preventive laws will eventually be seen as big an error as labor theory of value. It will have harmed as many innocent people in the process.
These are as terrible ideas, as they where 60 years ago.Report
“[T]rying to restrict information to the police to stop them from _finding_ people to infringe on the rights of is almost surreal as a concept.”
Broke: the Second Amendment is bullshit and should be repealed
Woke: the First Amendment is bullshit and should be repealed
Bespoke: the Fourth Amendment is bullshit and should be repealed
“Sure, the ATF will visit people and demand to see the guns if they didn’t comply with confirming possession, but the fines should get issued _regardless_ of whether you’re one of the visited people or not. ”
Toke: The *Sixth* Amendment is bullshit and should be repealedReport
You think issuing fines for failing to conform with a registration requirement is a violation of the sixth amendment? And I feel like such a sucker, paying for my car tags all these years. I could have just refused, and they fine me, and I would have asserted a sixth amendment right to due process…oh, wait, I _can_ do that. That’s how fines work., people can appeal them.
How dare I propose a new law without specifically explaining that due process under that law would work exactly like under every other law.
Of course, most people fail to confirm possession would be _actually_ guilty of what they have been fined for. It’s a pretty clear-cut case, they’re required to do something every six months, they didn’t do it. But a few situations would qualify for some sort of exception in the law, like the owner died or something, or there was a disaster and they couldn’t get back to their property for a month, or the system was somehow broken and wouldn’t let them confirm it, or just screwed up, or whatever.
—
As for fourth amendment issues: If someone registers a gun and asserts it stays at a specific location, and then fails to confirm possession when asked, and fails to let the ATF see it voluntarily when they nicely show up and ask, yes, they can get a search warrant, because that is way more than probable cause that _something_ criminal is going on, namely, that they have transfered that weapon to someone else without telling the government.
Again, this is someone that merely has to say ‘I have seen that firearm in the last month, and as far as I know, still have possession of it’. They are refusing to do that. That is incredibly suspicious, and within my understanding of probable cause, although I’m not a lawyer.
The equivalent under current law would be a police officer seeing you have a weapon that requires a permit and _asking_ if you have a permit for that. Not even asking to see the permit, merely asking ‘You have a permit, right?’, and you take the fifth amendment in response. Yeah, that’s probable cause, right there. And that’s certainly constitutional, in fact, states can require you carry your permit around. That’s settled law.
Now, there is an interesting point in that the likely crime can’t be proven by anything they find, and can only be _disproven_. I have no idea if that impacts search warrants and probable cause. I don’t particularly care if it does, and this part of my suggestion won’t work. I was suggesting the search basically as a courtesy for NRA-brain-fried people with some sort of dumbass moral objection to speaking to the ATF, where the ‘solution’ to that is just…the ATF will search your house and point out you still have possession of your guns _for you_. But it’s certainly not any sort of requirement to make the law work.
We can instead just keep leveling larger and larger fines against them until they tell us if they still have possession of the things they are supposed to have. (And not letting them buy more guns.)
Oh, and just in case it’s unclear: All this would work under perfectly normal due process. It all can be appealed in court. Like everything.
—
And let me _preemptively_ address your next obvious objection, that this is a first amendment issue, that the government can’t compel speech.
Because there’s a really easy solution to that: The law will instead require people to bring each registered gun into the local police station every six months. _Or_ they can, if they want, deal with it via just confirming they still have possession via email or letter or phone or whatever. Tada. The speech is no longer compelled…they can bring their guns in, show their ID, show the registration number on each gun, and never say a word. This is moronic, when they could have just clicked some buttons in an email, but they can do it that way.Report
“I’m okay with being fairly forgiving about this stuff even with registered guns as long as all registered guns are _eventually_ tracked down to a legal owner who takes responsibility for it. ”
Every bullet fired in Newtown came from legally-purchased guns that were registered to an owner and had a clear chain of record and title. It’s not record-keeping that will deal with this.Report
Every bullet fired in Newtown came from legally-purchased guns that were registered to an owner and had a clear chain of record and title. It’s not record-keeping that will deal with this.
It’s not this we need to deal with.Report
On top of that, I’m not sure ‘it would take at least 50 years’ is actually a good objection. Right now, the situation is getting worse. This reverses the trend.
You can’t just dismiss it on the grounds ‘It won’t instantly fix things’, especially since the reasoning is ‘there are still a lot of guns out there’, which is true regardless of _any_ solution, and is a problem my solution actually helps change, because gun manufacturers will no longer be distributing guns to the illegal markets, which means they will produce less.
Nothing anyone does is going to magically make the guns out there disappear, and I suspect even if something did, you wouldn’t like it. So that’s a…weird objection.Report
Well, no I understand why there’s no underage drinking in the US. It’s illegal and there isn’t an underground alcohol market. 🙂Report
Related data point, someone has printed an upper.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2019/08/09/3d-printed-ar-15-22-caliber-upper/Report
At this point, it’s probably safe to assume an entire gun can be printed, even multiple shot life on barrels.Report
Firing pin should still be metal, but aside from that…
The trick with breech and barrel will simply be a question of can you build up enough material around those parts to let them last long enough to get whatever job you need done.Report
Don’t assume metal primers.
The breech and barrel problem are likely overcome with a lowish pressure powder, which would create less distortion.Report
Drilling a rifle barrel in high grade steel just isn’t that difficult. 1800’s technology worked just fine. Gun drills (the bits) run anywhere from $20 to $120 from machine tool retailers.
There’s not much of a market for low production-rate equipment because it’s cheaper just to buy a barrel from a custom shop that can profitably crank them out in volume.Report
You and I both know what the costs of making a turnkey production line and heat treating for this kind of stuff.
The key parameter David TC is using as a deterrent is the ability to track via federal controlled serial numbers on new guns. The quickest, least investment, least risk way of defeating that is 3D printing.
How many printed/80% lowers do you think are out there already?
This tack is getting easier, not harder.
If the barrier to defeating is equal or less costly than a production model gun, then the deterrent likely has a low probability of being effectual.Report
Exactly, we already have polymer one shots, and we are rapidly heading towards the days of polymer 1000 shots.Report
The weirdness starts when we start printing the ammo in the gun.Report
The day someone comes up with a cheap electric primer (think motor ignitors for model rockets, but way more reliable), we will head down that path.Report
I think they can print conductive ribbons right into the component, If they can thin those down in a primer area and when energized reach auto-ignition temperatures, they in theory could just print the circuit and primer right into the gun/ammo. That method still requires a battery though.
[Plastic primers have the advantage of no metal at all.]Report
Somewhat the hazard in perpetual regulations, is that eventually guns could be printed to mimic normal looking objects like cell phones, books, or plastic cups.(with integral silencers)Report
The El Paso shooter explained the logic of attacking gun-free zones, mainly that he’d probably just get shot by a security guard or bystander before he took tens steps if he did otherwise. His logic was confirmed by the Dayton shooter, who was engaged within 20 seconds of opening fire and was dead 10 seconds later.
Seconds mattered in Dayton, but in El Paso the shooter wandered around for twenty minutes before giving up. In Vegas it took police an hour and fifteen minutes to breach the hotel room.Report
The El Paso shooter explained the logic of attacking gun-free zones…
It wasn’t a gun-free zone, at least not by policy. There were CC holders in the mall. None of them engaged the shooter.
His logic was confirmed by the Dayton shooter, who was engaged within 20 seconds of opening fire and was dead 10 seconds later.
Which is one reason why, for good or ill, a lot of people are looking at “assault rifles”. This asshole managed to kill nine people and injure however many more in the space of 30 seconds. You need a semi-automatic to do that.Report
You’re wrong. These guys are using guns because that’s what attracts the media and their attention. It fits the pattern of what has happened before.
This existing blueprint probably makes the low functioning guys more efficient. It also makes the high functioning ones less efficient. If we get rid of “assault rifles” without dealing with the media’s driving force fueling this, we may look back at these days wishfully.
It’s a REALLY bad idea to talk about how to min/max mass murder so I’m not going to go into details and PLEASE no one else take this any further.Report
We only seem to get worked up as a country when innocent white people are killed randomly with assault weapons.
Did you even look at who died in El Paso and Dayton? I had been considering a comment to the effect that the real tragedy after El Paso and Dayton was that you wouldn’t be able to use that bit anymore, but decided it was in bad taste. Maybe not.Report
The Dayton shooter didn’t discriminate on the basis of race or gender. He didn’t even discriminate in favor of his family, shooting and killing his sister during his spree.
I suspect the El Paso shooter didn’t discriminate either, and had said he would be at pains not to.
I guess his logic was that shooting people is one thing, but discrimination is just plain wrong, even though he wanted the US carved up into separate countries to stop the racial strife, or some such thing.
It could be that the US is so messed up that even our mass killers are infected with political correctness. There’s bound to be some metric where that sounds like progress on some front that we just weren’t paying attention to.Report
So, there’s basically two kinds of mass shooters: Personal and impersonal. (And there are other kinds too, but let’s just talk about those.)
The El Paso shooter shot up a Walmart, and pretty clearly had no personal motive. (In fact, he had driven 600 miles away from home, presumably to get to a more Hispanic area.) His murders were completely impersonal, motivated by some external thing. In this case, a political ideology.
The Dayton shooter appears to have a personal motive. People don’t _incidentally_ kill their own sister during a mass shooting. Maybe in some completely absurd coincidence that could happen, but it’s not what happened here.
Now, it is worth mentioning that _both sides_ sometimes misrepresent personal shooters as impersonal ones whenever it fits their narrative. And it’s reasonable to call them out on that.
But we also need to notice that, despite how much the right-wing doesn’t want to admit it, far-right ideology is getting pretty common at terrorism. This isn’t even the first this year.
Whereas the far-left…isn’t doing that. And hasn’t been for decades. Pointing at the Dayton shooting’s political position isn’t going to magically make ‘Murdering his sister’ a political thing. For the most obvious thing: Who the hell was he attempting to kill? Random people on the street? Were those random people his ‘political enemies’?
What is also getting common is the notable ‘batshit crazy ideology’, like the motives of the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooter which was just ‘read a bunch of random crap from the far-right and far-left and weird conspiracy places and set your mind to puree’.Report
Is it? Or is it more the media wants this to match a narrative so whenever it does (or maybe does), we hear a lot about it?
You find what you’re looking for with data this noisy and sparse.
There’s a cause a effect issue here too. We have violent people looking for violent causes and doing violent things… who can become heroes/celebs in their own story this way. Some of them kill for racism, or religion, or something else… but are these various causes actually creating them?Report
If it bothers you, we could drop the right/left language and just note how many mass shootings are motivated by misogyny or racism.
What ties nearly all of them together is a white male feels aggrieved by some injustice and wants to strike back.Report
‘If it bothers you, we could drop the right/left language and just note how many mass shootings are motivated by misogyny or racism.”
Please do. I’d like to see those numbers.Report
What percentage of mass shootings are you explaining here? If it’s something like 50% or more then we should sit up and take notice. If it’s in the single digits then you’re just trying to score political points by blaming people you want to be guilty.
If we’re go down the “white supremacy is an info-hazzard creating these” line of thought and look for a solution, then we need exclude (and thus live with) Pulse, Vegas, Columbind, Sandy Hook, etc. If we’re excluding the bulk of the problem before looking for solutions then we should look for a different theory to explain what is going on.
Opposing 5% of these events because they match up with who we politically want to blame can’t go anywhere useful.Report
Here is an interesting article in The Atlantic:
“To Learn About the Far Right, Start With the ‘Manosphere’”
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2019/08/anti-feminism-gateway-far-right/595642/
Key statistic:
A Mother Jones database of all U.S. killing sprees since 1982 records four female killers and 111 male ones.
The idea that aggrieved young men make up the bulk of killers shouldn’t surprise anyone; this same demographic makes up most violence of any kind.
What separates spree killers from garden variety criminal killings is the intent to make a statement of righteous revenge upon society as a whole.
They aren’t “mentally ill” like the guy who hears voices from his dog. And they aren’t disconnected from the political world.
They are deeply engaged in a small community of extremely political fellow travelers who form a support and cheering section.Report
Your link is an opinion piece which is assuming this is an anti-feminism thing… much like you’re assuming it’s white supremacy thing.
That the bulk of the killers are male is beyond doubt, that their ideology matches what you (or that author) want to fight is not.
The “aggrieved/revenge” aspect seems reasonable but I don’t trust my intuition and can easily picture other motivations. We get about a third of these guys alive, we really should be talking to them.Report
I’m sure we can picture all sorts of motivations, provided we ignore the facts.
Here’s a handy list:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States
They aren’t all political. Some are political, some are disgruntled employees, some are vengeful ex-husbands.
What ties all those together is, yep, aggrieved men, almost always white, who feel that their rightful place in society has been usurped, and they want to right this injustice with violence.
What’s startling is how out of proportion this is to actual injustice.
Like, a immigrant working as shitty job who gets cheated out of wages would have a more righteous cause than a guy who got burned on alimony;
A woman who was raped and saw her rapist walk free, would have a more sympathetic case;
In almost all these mass shootings, the man who felt so aggrieved and oppressed, really never was.Report
Chip,
I agree with most or all of this. However it doesn’t support what you’ve said early. You’ve jumped from “White Supremacy the ideology is the problem” to “men who are angry at the world and have white skin”.
And the “white skin” part seems to be optional.
If we have an angry young man who is unhappy with where he is in the world and who is thinking about killing his girlfriend, her lover, and anyone who gets in the way… transforming that into “white supremacy” because of his skin color is probably not all that helpful.Report
There is a problem within white culture though, when so many white males react to perceived injustice this way.
Like I pointed out, there is a lot more injustice dealt to many other types of people, yet we don’t see lonely middle aged black women shooting up the mall for example.
How do they manage to handle their problems without so much violence?Report
You answered your own question Chip, you just don’t realize it. I would suggest you start here:
https://ordinary-times.com/2012/02/20/parenting-by-class/
Basically, it’s a class thing. People from lower socio-economic statuses develop different coping mechanisms. Essentially they are better at dealing with life’s bad moments because they see more of them. More affluent kids also have coping mechanisms but it’s more based on mom & dad helping them and relying on the safety net afforded by their higher economic status. When they experience something that mom & dad can’t fix (girlfriend dumped them, they get bullied, they flunk out of college, they get fired) they sometimes lack the mental coping mechanisms to deal with it and sometimes they snap.
That any of this has to do with race is the legacy of actual racism (not the bogeyman that keeps the SJ Left up at night). Blacks in general are more poor than whites. The fact that we have seen an uptick in suicides among blacks in recent years could actually be an ironically positive sign that they are also transitioning into a period where more of them have lives similar to their white counterparts and have the same lack of coping mechanisms. Weirdly, if we start seeing black shooters, it might mean we have started to arrive at true racial economic equality.Report
Class is multiracial, isn’t it?
If class was the variable to explain mass shooters we would expect there to be female shooters, black shooters and Hispanic shooters, roughly in proportion to their presence in the class.
The underlying motive for mass shootings is to attack the world at large which they felt has done them injustice.
Yet the prevalence of white men is bizarrely out of proportion here.
As a group they suffer less but act out more.
My explanation is that white men are not taught how to accept injustice the way minorities have. There is no such thing as The Talk in white community.
White men expect police and government and the world to treat them fairly and justly.
And when they don’t , they tend to react very badly.Report
Yet the prevalence of white men is bizarrely out of proportion here.
This is an attempt to get people to post the proportions of FBI crime stats to the thread.Report
“My explanation is that white men are not taught how to accept injustice the way minorities have. There is no such thing as The Talk in white community.”
Yeah, that’s basically what I said. But I don’t consider that misogyny or white supremacy. I view it as basic, emotional, impotent rage. It’s usually not part of some larger narrative.Report
Agreed. Class doesn’t do much for us here.
That or they’re trying to make their mark. That it’s a guy thing suggests this is a (misused high-risk) mechanism to impress the women and get a mate.
Only if we exclude the carnage of the streets. Include that and it’s still men but whites are under represented. Or if everything on the streets shouldn’t be included, including even part of the streets does the same.Report
I would be fine with “cultural differences being why they’re less violent” except when we count corpses we see the opposite.
The carnage that is the streets is either obscuring or absorbing the problem of young-men-too-attracted-to-violence in those communities.
The question is whether this is “other things happen” sort of thing (i.e. violent people express their violence differently) or merely a “data collection” issue (i.e. when this sort of thing happens it gets put into a different media bin).Report
The simple answer is they don’t. Other parts of this posting talk about the blood soaked streets of various parts of the US and claim we ignore them because they’re minorities. Counting corpses suggests other groups have FAR worse issues with their young men running around killing people.
The concept that they’re less violent combined with a much higher murder rate suggests we have a data classification error or gathering bias.
For example if that angry young man thinking of killing his romantic rival(s) does so and is black, then it clearly doesn’t get written up as white nationalism and might not show up on that list of yours at all.Report
Why are black women so underrepresented in mass killings?Report
Because they have the lowest rate of suicide of any race/gender group.
There was a good article at Quillette this morning that talked about this very subject (I’ll link to it when I get to my desktop PC). They make the point that nearly every mass shooting is intended to end in suicide. When you think of that as the driving goal all of that other nonsense drifts into the background.
Chip, you are seeing murder as the primary motivator and basing your conclusions on that. When you realize these people primarily want to kill themselves, you start to realize whatever reasons they tack on are secondary. It’s similar to when a depressed person leaves a suicide note claiming they are doing their friends and family a favor. They might believe that but they really just want to die.Report
For the same reason White Women are. This is a guy thing.Report
Chip,
I asked you above to provide some data on how many mass shootings were due to racism and misogyny. You linked to a couple of articles, but as dark matter points out, you are trying to add your own pet issue between the lines. As he says, that they are white males is beyond dispute (there is a reason for that, but it’s not white supremacy). That they are angry is probably also beyond dispute. You were doing fine on both counts until you jumped to , “…who feel that their rightful place in society has been usurped, and they want to right this injustice with violence.” That was you taking creative liberties. Please try again.Report
So, white, male, angry is OK, but you balk at “who feel their rightful place has been usurped” as an explanatory factor?
Would you accept “who feel a great injustice has been done them”?Report
Yeah, i would substitute that because it means something totally different. If I get fired and I think it was bullshit, and I’m fired up, it’s not because my rightful place in society was usurped. I’m going to be mad because I feel like I got fucked over. If I get dumped by my girlfriend, I don’t feel my white male privilege flaring up, but I might be mad about the thought of her banging some other guy. You’re making this some existential thing when most of the time it’s just human emotions man.
The sister of one of my good friends murdered her ex husband, his new girlfriend and then killed herself. I also worked with a women whose boyfriend found her and her ex husband dead in her apartment in a murder suicide. People do really fucked up things when they are sad, angry, lonely, etc. My dad killed himself because my stepmom died and he couldn’t stand the heartache. Some people become so distraught over their emotions that they also kill others. I don’t know why you need to make this some kind of political statement.Report
Serious question for every non-conservative here: If forced you to watch nothing but Trump speeches and Fox News and hang out on white supremacist chatboards for a year…would you be more likely to become a mass shooter?Report
Serious response – no one is forced to watch Fox News or hang out on white supremacy chatboards. Those are choices. Make better choices.Report
No one is forced to spend their Friday nights on Pornhub, but it’s weird how things turn out when you are alone and horny. So I will ask again, when some 20 year-old kid ends up mainlining Fox News or Trump’s speeches on CSPAN…is he going to be more likely to commit a mass shooting?Report
Honestly, probably a little bit – I mean, from .00000000001 to .000000002, but sure, yes.
I mean, after all, when I get into intense arguments with dumb conservatives (not people here, but randos on Twitter/Reddit), I physically feel myself getting angrier, so yeah.Report
So then what factors play a role in someone being more like 90%? And how do we mitigate them?Report
The El Paso shooter seemed to subscribe to quite a lot of elements of leftist ideology, and was at pains to say he developed his beliefs before Trump took office. He’s in agreement with much of what Elizabeth Warren stands for.
However, that’s just backdrop. The left is all about big, important causes (however wacky I think those are), such as ensuring fairness and equality and saving the planet and all of humanity, whereas the right is all about lowering the capital gains tax rate and eliminating the SALT deductions.
Most ideological crazies will be citing the big planet saving reasons instead of financial or regulatory policies – unless those policies directly impact them and they fly a Cessna into an IRS building, which has happened, or they get all upset about some particular incident of government violence and blow up a federal building, which has also happened.
But from Brevik through Christchurch, and touching on many chained incidents, there’s been a strain of nationalism crossed with socialism crossed with environmentalism that looks a whole lot like the philosophical underpinnings of National Socialism.
They’re crossing the streams (despite warnings never to do that), tying together anti-corporate agendas, which are likely anarchist or syndicalist in origin, with progressive environmentalism (greens), and then mixing in anti-immigration stances that they tie in to the big issues of saving the planet and Western civilization. And they say they’re doing it to preserve their people, and in some cases their really nice welfare state, etc. That’s pretty much straight up National Socialism without the idea of vengeance over the Versailles Treaty.
You’d think that the anti-immigration stance would be purely right wing, but when you drill down into neighborhoods, the left is every bit as adamant about preserving their woke little slice of upper-class genteel utopia.
So, over at Instapundit, the day after the shooting, I was arguing with some on the right and far right who held that these manifestos were merely ironic trolling. I argued that they weren’t, and that they could prove quite dangerously viral to the young who are picking and choosing from a smorgasbord of ideas instead of settling in with an existing camp.
They’re likely combining the right’s urging to be a self-starter, take personal responsibility, etc, with the left’s “we’re all going to die if we don’t act now!” message, which is actually just meant to get people to hit a “donate” button. The coldly logical thing to do, if the left’s message is real, is to do something very, very drastic, like cut the planet’s population in half.
I think I ended by dismissing the right-wing commenters’ idea, that it’s just ironic trolling because nobody would ever mix left wing and right wing ideas, by saying something like “When you’re staring at a Reese cup, stop arguing that nobody can possibly be serious about mixing chocolate and peanut butter. It’s real, and we have to on guard for it.”
The right wing, of itself, doesn’t have the big, all-encompassing, planet saving narrative these nutcases need to feed their grandiose visions of their historical self-importance, an importance that will see their names resonate through the ages as martyrs or human saviors.
But the left-wing preaches that alone, none of us can have any effect, and only through collective action can we really make a difference. Donating $5 or joining a campaign or going on a pointless march is not going to make these losers feel like an minor alpha teen, much less a figure whose very name strikes fear into the hearts of men, or whose bold actions inspire generations.
If you ignore groups like Antifa, who at this stage haven’t escalated to frequent intentional murder, neither our conventional left-wing or right-wing have all the requisite elements to make an ideological mass killer. But odd combinations definitely seem to, and that mix also seems to spread from one nutcase to another, which makes it a self-sustaining threat that will have to be dealt with.Report
Sure it has that Narrative – keeping white men in power. Its why Reagan said black people weren’t used to wearing shoes. Its why 1990’s Donald Trump railed against the Central Park 5. Its why David Duke almost because Louisiana Governor. Its why President Trump calls Mexican rapists and drug runners. and Its why myriad right wing politicians refer to Hispanic immigrants and an invasion and infestation. Which the El Paso shooter took great pains to remind us all he was seeking to repel since even Trump hadn’t done enough to stop it.Report
The narrative is no less grandiose than Defending Western Civilization, Christendom, and Classical Liberalism from the hordes of barbarians who seek to ravish our wimmin and conspiracy of weak beta male cucks who will sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.Report
Having spent 20 years on the Right, it’s astounding how many meetings I attended where white supremacy never came up.Report
You sir are too lefty to have been invited to those meetings. Sorry.
You have to remember that I grew up in a state where David Duke made a serious run at Governor and got 39% of the vote against Edwin Edwards in a year where once campaign slogan was “vote for the crook, its important.”Report
But I have friends that would probably at least make the initial invite list and some of them drink too much. It seems like it would have come up around the campfire at some point.Report
That’s just dumb. Really. I believe El Paso has the largest Latino population in the US. The race of the victims is just statistics. Also, as soon as Dayton happened, it did seem to dominate the news feeds. I wonder why?Report
The news I am hearing seems to lead with El Paso and then mention Dayton as an also.
I think mainly because more is known about the El Paso shooter and motivations. Those motivations seem to fit with the well worn narratives at this point, so it is easier to discuss El Paso. Also, maybe just that the death toll in El Paso is more than twice as high.Report
I believe El Paso has the largest Latino population in the US. The race of the victims is just statistics.
Until you learn the shooter drove 600 miles to get there. At which point, you realize ‘Oh, the large Latino population in El Paso was the _point_. He wanted to be somewhere he’d statistically kill Latinos.’Report
I don’t think there is anything unconstitutional about banning semi-automatic and assault rifles. Heller only protects handguns. The problem I suspect is that seriously reducing gun violence in the United States is going to require huge amount of mandatory buybacks for the weapons above and the accessories used at El Paso and Dayton.
I suspect our right-wing paranoid white nationalist, Trump and QANON enabled whackjobs are going to say “You can buy back my arsenal from my cold dead fingers.” When people say that these massacres are the price we pay for freedom, it is not a philosophical statement. It is a threat that the real murder sprees begin once anything positive is tried.
I’m tired of being held hostage by loons and paranoid whackjobs.Report
Heller protects “In common use”, semi-auto is “in common use”.Report
Is the right Oscar? My understanding was that Heller was restricted to hand guns used for personal defense in a person’s home and that “in common use” was necessary, not sufficient, condition.Report
IIRC (and that is something of a big if, I haven’t read the decision in a while), it focused on the bearing of arms, specifically handguns, but also talked about the larger issue of ownership, which is where the whole “in common use” enters into it.
Thus the federal government could not ban the ownership of firearms in common use as a way to end-run around the inability to prevent the bearing of arms.Report
Saul, please tell me if a Marlin Model 60 is on your ban list.Report
Most handguns are semi-automatic.Report
So are nearly every ‘assault weapon’ owned in the US. I suspect most people don’t know that.
Also, so is my squirrel rifle. And my buddy’s duck gun.Report
“You can buy back my arsenal from my cold dead fingers.”
People like me would respond, “Your offer is acceptable.”Report
Is the best response to mass murder really to advocate massively increased amounts of mass murder? I’m thinking maybe it’s not.Report
Then maybe they shouldn’t issue ultimatums of defiance.Report
That’s like someone listening to Meir Kahane saying “Never again” and taking it as a challenge.Report
Because regulating guns is like the Holocaust.
First they came for the assault rifles.
Then they made us register and license our semiautomatic pistols.
Then when it came time for me to go to the gun range…um, nothing stopped me. I had a pretty good time actually.Report
Yeah. You’d have thought the Jews would have resisted, but for some reason they didn’t have any firearms. No idea why…
Maybe Moses should have said “From my cold dead hands!”Report
This nonsense again?
You realize that the Jews were a minority, right?
And if everyone in Germany had a gun, the Jews would still have ended up in the same place, right?Report
Well, then I guess it’s good that nobody got hurt.Report
Excuse me?
Maybe if you think that everyone’s gun would cancel each other out, you could come up with that. But you don’t get to dictatorial powers without the Enabling Act, and you’d have to demonstrate how that would have been passed if there were an armed population. And that’s a minimum for your thesis to hold up.Report
The civilian Nazis had guns too. And they outnumbered the Jews by a lot.
In fact, most dictatorial governments rely on an advance party of armed civilians who want to do its will.
Because dictators are wildly popular- that’s how they rise to power!
So the number of pro-dictator armed civilians will almost always outnumber the number of anti-dictator armed civilians.
Check out the “Colectivos” in Venezuela if you want a left wing version.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-maduro-venezuela-motorcycle-gangs-20190314-story.htmlReport
The Jews initially outnumbered the Nazis. In 1939 the party had only about 4 million men, but most of them were white-collar and blue collar workers who had other priorities, and many were pretty old.
The Einsatzgruppen had 36,000 men and could call upon about 36,000 more that were in police and SS units.
In fact, Holocaust deniers point to the relatively paltry numbers of Germans involved as evidence that nothing that big could have occurred.Report
Bzzt.
Try again.
The number of people who despised the Jews were in the majority- Nazis, Communists, defenders of the old regime- its that anti-Semitism thingy that was all the rage in Europe among people of all parties and classes; Remember how even liberal Americans said that “none was too many”?
That’s why no one stepped up to defend them, and why the Nazis had such an easy time of taking over the country- because so many people kinda liked what they were doing.Report
Over twice as many Nazis as Americans were named “Righteous Among the Nations” for stepping up and rescuing Jews at the risk of their own lives.
Not absolutely everybody was an anti-Semitic nutcase, even within the party, much less wider European society.
One of the functions of an armed society is that atrocities are met with gun battles, and gun battles are a hard thing to cover up.
The public finds out and starts asking lots of questions. They demand hearings and put government officials in the spotlight.
No official really wants to lead a roundup that’s going to go all pear shaped.Report
Is it once again time for me to point out that the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising _had_ weapons? They had _plenty_ of weapons.
There were between 300,000-400,000 Jews, and around 2000 Nazis.
The Jews and the resistance managed to kill 160 Nazis.
The Nazis managed to kill 13,000 Jews.
Turns out when the government wants to kill people, it doesn’t matter _what_ weapons the people have. Because the government will just burn your damn house down.
And dictatorships _don’t cover things up_.Report
The Jews had tens of thousands of people and 68 firearms.
Several hundred resistance fighters, armed with a small cache of weapons, managed to fight the Germans, who far outnumbered them in terms of manpower and weapons, for nearly a month.
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/warsaw-ghetto-uprising
Hundreds of people in the Warsaw Ghetto were ready to fight, adults and children, sparsely armed with handguns, gasoline bottles, and a few other weapons that had been smuggled into the ghetto by resistance fighters.
The Nazis, who had every reason to exaggerate the number of Jewish arms, claimed the Jews had the following:
7 Polish Rifles
1 Russian Rifle
1 German Rifle
59 pistols of various calibers
Several hundred hand grenades, including Polish and home-made ones .
Several hundred incendiary bottles
Home-made explosives
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising
Report
Uh, literally right after that: Regarding the booty of arms, it must be taken into consideration that the arms themselves could in most cases not be captured, as the bandits and Jews would, before being arrested, throw them into hiding places or holes which could not be ascertained or discovered.
And, of course, those are only _captured_ weapons to start with. Most of the place burned down, and then was razed. A lot of weapons were obviously not captured. There is a much more sizable list on that article, which is the weapons that resistance organizations _formally shipped in_, which includes heavy machines guns. And that’s just the formal stuff, and to just one of the two resistance organization. But there was a lot of disorganized gun smuggling also…the Jews had learned about the death camps months earlier, made a stand that sorta paused the trains for a bit, and had been smuggling weapons into the ghetto since then like crazy.
Because, and this is perhaps the most important point: Guns were pretty available in Poland. Even Nazi-occupied Poland, believe it or not. We always assume that a conquering country would go door-to-door seizing guns, but that doesn’t really happen, or at least it didn’t really happen with the Nazis. And Poland didn’t really have much gun control before the Nazis came in…it had started a gun registry a while back, but no one bothered to register their stuff, and again the Nazis didn’t do anything about known gun owners!
There were so many guns that the Nazis just…burned the place down instead of dealing with it. Which was rather my point. Actual governments with actual armies will not be deterred by guns, because actual governments with actual armies do not need to individually exchange gunfire with people trying to kill them. Which…the Nazis actually knew. As did the Jews, they knew what they were doing was hopeless. Like, everyone knew this. It was really obvious.Report
And, as I keep pointing out, dictators are popular.
Like, really, really, Michael Jackson Rock Star type of popular.
In a nation with every civilian armed, the largest group of weaponry will belong to supporters of the dictator.
Fun fact: Josef Stalin today in 2019 is more popular than Putin.
https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2019-05-09/stalin-is-more-popular-than-ever-in-russia-survey-shows
For the record- I am 51% sure I will denounce him; but don’t push me.Report
So the Jews had a massive arsenal. that was never found, which included heavy machine guns, but somehow only managed to kill seventeen German in weeks of house to house fighting?
I guess they were shocked to realize that bullets just bounce right off of Aryan supermen – or something.Report
Guns were pretty available in Poland.
That does not match up with anything I’ve seen or heard from any Polish national, Polish museum, Polish memorial, etc first hand (and my wife has dragged me to a bunch over the years).
It also doesn’t match up with the blow by blow description of what happened in my wife’s home town. 100 Nazis killed a few hundred jews and put 10k or so on trains over the course of a few days.
That also doesn’t match up with either of the two history accounts I read where they talk about a “small” amount of arms.
So you’re going to need some serious sources to make that believable.Report
Yeah. Leningrad was cut off but everybody there fought back with guns, managing to inflict half a million casualties on the Wehrmacht before forcing them to surrender en mass, whereas in Warsaw people only inflicted less than 150 German casualties. Either a Russian is 3,600 times more effective at street fighting than a Polish Jew, or there was a vast, vast difference in available weaponry.Report
Guys….just…whatever. I don’t have the time or energy to argue this anymore. Here are the facts not in dispute by anyone:
After three days of gun battles with the Jews, the Nazis realized that the resistance was extremely dug in and fighting them was a hassle. So they burned the place to the ground. Three days, that was how long they put up with exchanging gunfire. And then, afterward, instead of engaging in street-level combat with the mostly defeated resistance, they smoked and flooded and blasted them out of the bunkers they’d made.
I repeat: Turns out when the government wants to kill people, it doesn’t matter _what_ weapons the people have. Because the government will just burn your damn house down.
That was my point.
The Jews could have had an automatic rifle and infinite ammo for every single person in the ghetto, and would have lost. Because the Nazis would have just stopped using incendiary devices by hand, and bombed the place via artillary or something.
Oh, and there obviously was a vast vast difference in available weaponry in Leningrad: They had AIR DEFENSES.Report
Yeah, God often fights for the side with the best artillery.Report
That didn’t help us at Monte Casino. We even blasted that place to rubble with heavy and medium bombers, thousands of artillery pieces, and anything else at hand, dropping well over two kilotons of explosives from the air alone. If they’re dug in enough, knocking out German soldiers apparently takes 5 tons of TNT per each.
Basically, it took four months and 50,000 casualties in a campaign to get past Germans lines and blast them out of a monastery, simply because they were well dug in and and kept shooting back.
Taking the monastery only took many thousands of casualties, but we did manage to capture thirty of them before the rest bugged out.Report
Monte Cassino is probably an exception and not the rule. I would say a lot of German defenses were more of the exception than the rule.Report
Gee. The Germans should have done that at Leningrad and Stalingrad. I wonder why it didn’t occur to them? But it’s a good thing the Germans had air defenses or the allies might have bombed German cities, too!
One problem with your premise is that the Germans were defeated by poorly armed Russian peasants who were given a ridiculously low amount of training. Many had hardly ever shot a rifle before, because through 1942 they only had one rifle for every three trainees, and many of the recruits were sent to the front to fight first, and then trained after they survived a few battles.
Look at how differently the Battle of Berlin played out. The Germans were running out of everything in a city that had been getting bombed for years. The were surrounded by massive numbers of Russian tanks and artillery and over two million Russian soldiers, and they were fighting in rubble.
Yet the Germans, almost entirely relying on infantry weapons, often wielded by children and the elderly, were able to inflict not just 150 casualties, but hundreds of thousands of casualties in vicious street to street fighting.
The key is that civilians and soldiers back then both wore wool or cotton clothes, dug into the same rubble, and fired the same bullets with about the same accuracy.
Second, vast numbers of civilians in WW-II were veterans with more years in the military than the young soldiers in uniform, and many were combat veterans who’d been all through WW-I.Report
You say all this like it supports your cause. Yes, the Nazis were going to win any specific battle where they could bring the resources to bear.
Yes, they could, and did, bring in bombers, artillery, and so forth.
However if that’s what they need to do to win, they can’t do that everywhere. The reason they didn’t need to bring in bombers and artillery against my wife’s home town was because they had no guns.
With guns, there are not an infinite amount of bombers or artillery and it becomes a question of which battles the Nazis chose to fight.Report
Even after all this time its a touchy subject in Eastern Europe, but…
If in 1939 every Pole and Czech and Slovak were armed with a gun, which way would the guns point?Report
Downrange. Always downrange.Report
“Your offer is acceptable.”
You! Scot Peterson! Go into that dangerous place and arrest that armed man!Report
This gets to why Australia (and most likely future NZ) isn’t the example people think it is. There are huge noncompliance rates but much like CT no one really has the appetite to go knocking on doors.Report
I think the example is not that bad. It changed incentives. I expect owners of now illegal guns are much more careful about what happens with them. They are going to take a lot more care around a mentally disturbed child knowing that if they take the guns and go nuts, it will blow back on them pretty hard. Prior, it was just “well crazy people do crazy shit. I am a responsible gun owner.”Report
I’m sure the best way to make most people respect law is to make them outlaws. That’s some damn fine leftwards logic right there.Report
Well, during WW-II Germans would shoot starving people for pilfering and theft, so I’ll bet there wasn’t much thieving going on. Law and order all the way!Report
Any way you slice it, it’s grim being hungry in a control freak socialist conflict.Report
I am not going to vote for him in the primary but credit to Beto for this call out of the press:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2019/08/05/el-paso-shooting-vigil-beto-orourke-sot-earlystart-vpx.cnnReport
The race of the victims is just statistics.
Indeed it is. It always is. For all killings. But you’re the one who keeps trolling about white victims, and that being why anyone cares about mass killings. This time, as well as in Dayton, it wasn’t a big bunch of white victims. Look at who died.Report
It’s not trolling to point out how silent the Left is regarding black-on-black crime. Thousands dies every year in city streets but you all clutch your pearls when a mass shooter kills five people in a grocery store. It’s shameful.Report
We’ve had an AWB in MD since 2013. It has had no impact on gun homicides nor have the handgun licensing requirements. The rates that make the state an outlier have to do with the complicated racial-socio-economic situation in a handful of impoverished urban zip codes.
But no one ever talks about that because it’s a very uncomfortable topic that defies easy answers.Report
Same with Connecticut. Thousands of CT reaidents are now felons for failing to turn in their tactical rifles for buyback.Report
Well, here gun owners cling to the Second Amendment. But in New Zealand, where there is wide historical acceptance of firearm restrictions, they banned semi-automatic rifles in the wake of the Christchurch massacre, instituting a buy-back program. Some may have worried that the program would prove expensive, but those fears have proved unfounded because New Zealand gun owners have, as of last month, only turned in 700 guns. That’s thought to be a compliance rate of about 0.1%.
Hilariously, some of their criminal gangs publicly stated that they wouldn’t turn in their weapons because they need them for crime. ^_^Report
Yeah, it turns out that most people don’t like prohibitions. The best thing Congress did for the gun industry was the previous AWB. Afterwards there was an explosion of tactical rifle purchases that hasn’t tapered off much. Nearly ever male coworker I have owns an AR variant. Same with many of my friends.
The fact is that it’s going to be very, very hard to put the genie back in the bottle concerning guns on the street. That’s why I favor federal permitting and aggressive prosecution of violators. No different than what we do now with hunting licenses. If you get caught with a deer in the back of your truck and no hunting license, the state has a variety of ways to punish you including huge fines, confiscating the truck and everything in it, etc. Someone without a permit being caught in violation should face similar repercussions.Report
The AWB here grandfathers in rifles owned prior to the effective date so it wasn’t as stupid as what CT did. It also carves out h-bar AR-15s and because the law prohibits a list of firearms (basically the Brady bill) and imitations of those specific rifles there are a number of other exceptions, seemingly for no reason other than that they are unusual makes and models so no one put them on the list.
Essentially the law defies logic and has had no impact on anything other than resume padding for having ‘done something.’Report
That is kinda like CA’s laws. There are whole website’s (CalGuns being a good example) that provide flow charts for people moving in from out of state to stay legal within the bizarre set of laws. Or for people who are not sure what the current state laws contain. And there is a cottage industry providing things such as Off List Lowers to make sure that people are able to purchase what the law allows, even in its ever-changing vagaries.Report
We have the same kind of thing.Report
This will sound partisan, even though I don’t really intend it to be, but the problem is that collectively Democrats are complete morons when it comes to guns. Like, there is no other issue I can think of where one side is so lacking in knowledge. That flows into the laws they propose and create and then the gun folks just sit back and laugh, then cry, then get mad about how dumb they are.Report
So instead of dragging Democrats for being gun morans why don’t conservatives propose their own sensible, highly intelligent gun regulations and drag them for not agreeing?Report
(“Enforce the laws we already have!” is a variant of this.)Report
Part of the challenge is getting to agreement on the problem to address. Is the concern homicides generally?
Is the concern multiple homicides of strangers in a soft target like a school or shopping center?
Getting some basic parameters I think is both a necessary threshold but also one we seem unable to cross.Report
Here’s an article I’ve linked to in the past whenever we get to this phase of the gun regulation debate:Report
You’re focusing on the partisan part. I’m focusing on the highly intelligent part. I concede Republicans can be quite stupid on this issue, at least as far as crafting legislation aimed at solving or mitigating a problem.Report
I’m focusing on the collective “agreement” part, not the partisan part. (That’s why I linked to *conservative* approval ratings on various regs.)
Now, if you wanna say that even the regulations *conservatives* support are stupid and show that they’re “collectively complete morons when it comes to guns”, then we’re at an impasse. 🙂Report
I am in fact saying that, including in the obverse (for example while there may be sound reasons for loosening CCW, I don’t think it has any meaningful relationship to violent crime rates, to the extent it is touted as such).Report
Impasse it is.
At least we agree that conservatives are *also* complete morons when it comes to guns. 😉Report
To me general ignorance of firearms at the policy making level contributes but I think far more of a problem is ignorance on crime, its causes, and a real weakness of understanding statistics by lawmakers and the public at large.
People are fighting over a cultural totem, the policy is at most a fig leaf for finding ways of each side to stick it to the other.Report
People are fighting over a cultural totem
Tweet this.Report
1861: The US Civil War.
Jaybird: People were fighting over a cultural totemReport
Is the criticism that I would have to be crazy to see it that way or is it that it would be obviously wrong to see it that way?
Because I would like to argue against the latter.Report
The criticism is that the the right to bear arms, like slavery, is more than a concept but an actual practice engaged by people with real world consequences for the people involved.Report
As an example, InMD doesn’t *really* think the gun debate is people fighting over a cultural totem. He thinks the fight is over *his right to own guns*.Report
Oh, I should do better at communicating that I care about the deeper moral issues that you are on the Right Side of?
Meh. I decline.Report
Well, if you’re comfortable saying that gun rights are merely a cultural totem for you then who am I to question you on it. I mistakenly got the impression over the years that you thought those rights were something worth defending on their own terms, tho.Report
Meh. It’s not like the cops will be bashing *MY* head in. I am up on my protection payments.Report
Ahh, good. So the debate actually *is* about more than cultural totems.Report
No, it is about cultural totems.
If you want to know why I’m not arguing in favor of one principle over another, it’s because doing so assumes that principles are relevant.Report
Is having a gun confiscated a totem? Seems like an action to me.Report
Is having a gun confiscated a totem?
Is that the sentiment we were discussing? The one I was discussing was the one that said:
Report
I don’t have the strength for Twitter.
But like, if you watched the Wire and said the takeaway is that all this human destruction is caused by the ability of someone to fill out the paperwork and buy a gun people would look at you really funny.Report
Well, you know, it was many decades ago that a famous media personality wondered if we were making a huge mistake by glorifying senseless violence, drugs, and gang culture. He’s in prison now for grossly misusing his pudding pop, and we dropped that conversation long ago.
Anyway, check out my new single, “I’m bein’ harassed and profiled by racist pigs.” and on the B side, “I’m dope with cash from sellin’ all this coke!”
But those are extrovert problems. El Paso and Dayton are introvert problems.
Perhaps one possible piece of legislation, though it might not pass constitutional muster, is that if your high school votes you “Most likely to commit a senseless mass shooting”, perhaps you should end up on a special list till you’re 30.
In most of these heinous cases, when the press interviews everyone around the shooter, most don’t seem a bit surprised.
Taking away one tool won’t stop them because they sit in their basement trying to make the most out of the tools that are available.
The recent devastating attack on a Japanese anime studio illustrates just how simple yet horribly effective their methods can be.Report
I agree with not understanding the crime statistics. It’s a real shame when there is SO MUCH data out there.Report
Honestly, agreement on parameters is probably not all that necessary. If the red team were to pick some along the lines you propose and put forth legislation to do that, you would probably get strong liberal support.
For something log jammed for so long, many (not all) liberals will support any positive movement. I just see absolutely nothing from the red team in terms of actual written bills.Report
The problem is that the Democrats who do know about guns, and there are lots of them, usually can’t get in front of the issue for political reasons, and the Democrats who can, politically, get in front of the issue don’t tend to know about guns.
As I said upthread, I have my own 10-point plan, which reflects my own considerable knowledge of guns. But even though I think it’s a reasonable plan and I believe large numbers of people would agree, it is politically DOA. It’s not politically DOA because some Democrats don’t know gun lingo — though it doesn’t help matters that they don’t — it’s politically DOA for well-understood reasons. Being able to talk gunspeak won’t help with that.Report
Being totally ignorant about the female reproductive system never impeded Republicans from enacting abortion restrictions.Report
I don’t know, the GOP does a fantastic job at being utterly clueless about abortion and women’s reproductive health…Report
Do remember that there are a goodly number of us on the Left who are “gun folks.” But Republicans don’t seem to want to be caught dead with us, and Democrats fall over faint when they encounter us. SO I’m not sure how we are supposed to be responsible for fixing this mess when we get ostracized by both sides.Report
Again, reach out to groups that aren’t political but are politics-adjacent (they all engage in lobbying, etc). We call it ‘trail head diplomacy’. Build trust, move forward from there.
For what it’s worth, nearly all of my close coworkers are gun guys, but none of them hunt except me. I brought up the idea of a federal permit yesterday and they all balked at it. It’s going to be an uphill climb with that crew.Report
Statistically it’s hardly a mess.
The mass murders are so rare they vanish into the margin of error.
The street level killings are in a subculture thing and while unfortunate, are part of the price of being multicultural.
The suicides/murders are a problem but my personal solution is to not have a gun in the house so there’s that.Report
“The street level killings are in a subculture thing and while unfortunate, are part of the price of being multicultural.”
Let’s file this under, “objectively untrue things for $500, Alex.”Report
Are you objecting to the “cultural” aspect or the “things we need to put up with” aspect?Report
“The price of being multicultural part.”
Poor people who get involved in crime tend to be violent, for a variety of reasons, but multi-culturalism isn’t the reason, unless you have something to tell me about the Italian mob that was even more violent in Italy in some ways that it ever was in America, and that’s just one example.Report
Let’s put it this way. We have a subculture which has a murder rate that is scary high by 1st world standards.
Most of the solutions on table are for the rest of America to change. Every other subculture, or at least the ones which have lots of guns around and still have a murder rate of zero, is supposed to restructure themselves because of this.
These other groups insist that they’re not the ones with the problem and are blocking change… and there is much finger pointing and wailing and gnashing of teeth on how unreasonable they’re being.Report
I read an interesting article comparing US and European urban crime rates which found that the two are effectively the same but that the homicide rates in the US are astronomically higher. The conclusion they came to (obvs) is that guns are the relevant variable.
Here:
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/27/9217163/america-guns-europeReport
IIRC, the police in Europe are much more motivated to go after gun crimes than the police in the US are. As I mentioned elsewhere, drug crimes and terrorism get local PDs money and resources. AFAIK, gun crimes don’t.Report
And you say, without a shred of evidence to back it up, that it’s racially-motivated. And you keep saying it after two mass shooters finally killed some non-white folks and got the same reaction other mass killers got. That’s shameful.Report
“I know we completely ignore the genocide happening in our cities on a daily basis, but look how upset we are this time and there were brown people killed! See! We do care!”
I guess you feel like you were given a real PR win here, but let’s not try to invent liberal credibility on this issue. Around 1% of all gun deaths are from mass shootings. You all have been nipping at the slimmest of margins at least since Newtown. Time to start playing serious ball or just shut up.Report
The “genocide” happening in our cities on a daily basis is ordinary crime, of the type we have always had, in which people mainly kill people like themselves. Nobody ignores it. It is the main business of the police, and in most major American cities, it has been going down steadily for decades. In many major cities, homicides are at lows not seen in the lives of people now middle-aged. Mass killings are a relatively new phenomenon, that springs from different causes, and will likely have different solutions, than ordinary homicides. I should hardly have to remind a conservative of the wisdom of Adam Smith. He attributed much of the material improvement of his time to the division of labor. Moral and social improvement also profit from the division of labor.Report
I live in a really affluent area and people don’t kill each other. Even in the poor areas of Louisville that are mostly white that isn’t happening in nearly the same numbers. It’s a problem in poor black areas. That mean it isn’t normal and it’s a cultural problem leading to the genocide of several generations now. But yeah, keep handwaving it away.Report
That mean it isn’t normal and it’s a cultural problem…
Could you elaborate on this point, like really fill out the details? I see conservatives say this all the time, so I get the impression they view it as a legitimate analysis, or account anyway, of inner city (read: black) communities, but I’ve never read anyone really make the case.
Or, if you don’t want to make the case yourself, could you point me to an article which does so? I’m curious (sincerely!) about how that argument goes.Report
That’s an interesting point. Homicide is largely the work of poor folk, who mainly kill people like themselves. Mike’s ancestors got drunk and killed fellow Irishmen. Mine got drunk and killed fellow Italians. It’s probably true even in Louisville that most killers kill folks like themselves, for the simple reason that that is who they hang with and who get the opportunity to piss them off.Report
Look at the dead bodies, then look at the motivations of whoever killed them. “Respect” or “Conflict Resolution” plays a big role. Person X dies, the guy who killed him is killed, and so forth. Or Person X disses person Y’s girlfriend so Y shoots him. Or some teenager shoots a different teen over shoes.
We have the war on drugs, so there are vast amounts of the economy that have no access to the legal system to enforce contracts or handle business disputes. Drug dealers need to handle their disputes with guns. The drug dealers are the big economic power houses in certain places, people respect and look up to them, ergo the local teens mimic them and handle their disputes the same way.
If one kid brings a gun to school to be a big man then they all need to. The same holds true outside of school in teenage disputes in general.
We’ve had multiple generations grow up watching all this play out. My expectation is a lot of people in prison for violent crimes were exposed to violence when they were young and had their inhibitions against it broken.
And although the war on drugs was the big thing which moved us here, culture is amazingly hard to change and stable. After we end the war on drugs we’re going to be dealing with “too much violence” in certain sub-cultures for a generation or three.Report
The shooting case i was on earlier this year was over someone stepping on someone else’s shoes. 7 people were shot as a result. That wasn’t caused by the easy availability of guns. That’s cultural.Report
Maybe we should start asking questions about what is making culture less tolerant?Report
The culture is intolerant in different, unrelated ways. The honor culture surviving from the Old South is intolerant of insult, and it’s always been so.
That’s separate from the snowflake culture of microaggressions and subsequent purity spirals, which is separate from, but undoubtedly related to Trump Derangement Syndrome or the nonsense about white supremacy, which are primarily desperate attempts at swaying an electorate with smoke and mirrors.Report
There is a difference between the old honor culture in that there was awareness of uncertainty who would survive a duel.
Killing on a insult without prior awareness is ambush killing and is therefore not the same. I think one would have to pry the lid off of why ambush killing is becoming a acceptable means to an end, in the absence of honor.
I see your second paragraph as spot on, although I would add something about the seeking of power via political priviledge.Report
Wait, are we talking about the violent, uncivilized ghetto culture where people kill over an insult, or the proud Scotch Irish honor culture where people kill over an insult?Report
What are you, racist or something?Report
well done, ChipReport
There probably was a time when Chip wasn’t ‘woke’ enough to parse that and expect it to hold any greater meaning.Report
The difference is respect. One of my relatives involved in a dispute walked up to a Howard right in the middle of our main street, Cumberland Avenue, pulled out a pistol, and shot him dead (for which he wasn’t indicted). But when he killed him he exclaimed “Dead center by God, Sir!”
That “sir” at the end is key, an marks it as the act of a proper civilized man. You just don’t see that in ghetto drive-bys.Report
If you really want to see the demarcations of cultural ambush killings, do it with a badge and uniform on…Report
That “sir” at the end is key, an marks it as the act of a proper civilized man. You just don’t see that in ghetto drive-bys.
Well bless your heart.Report
Thomas Sowell wrote a book about just that very thing, Black Redneck and White Liberals. Talks about how both are bad and the first is descendant from the later.
Then again, he is a black conservative. So an unperson.Report
There was a time when “no Irish need apply” signs were a thing.Report
When I was in high school I got stuck with an assignment to dig into past discrimination in South Omaha that turned out fairly interesting. The waves of “no X need apply” were, IIRC, blacks, Irish, Italians, and finally folks from central Europe. At that time (~1970), calling someone a “bohunk” in the wrong setting could get you into a fight.Report
Ahem.
I am in fact 50% bohunk.
And yeah, there was a time when my white-as-a-sheet aunts and uncles were required to stay indoors when the Klan were out riding. That whole Papist thing, you see.
Which is what makes it so deliciously ironic and so utterly American that those very same children of immigrants grew up to be suburban Republicans.
When Tucker Carlson or the El Paso shooter go on about the immigrant invasion, they might as well be talking about my family, those drunken dirty folk who were, in Reagan’s words, unfamiliar with wearing shoes.Report
Sigh… I am some huge amount Anglo-Saxon, and look like it. From 1st through 9th grade, though, I lived in northwest Iowa at a time when it was still obvious that part of the country was settled by Scandinavians brought over by the Great Northern Railway project. “F*cking vikings” was a part of my mental vocabulary. In ninth grade I walked one of the Lund sisters to a rehearsal for a play we were in and then back home after dark. Grandma Lund was visiting and insisted on talking to me. The next day, the Lund sister said, “Oh, you should have heard Grandma Lund. ‘He seems like a nice enough young man, but he’s so dark.'” When she got done laughing, she told me, in a tone that really didn’t leave any room to argue, “You’re taking me to the movie on Friday, because I want to see Grandma Lund do that again.”Report
It’s kind of an interesting point alluding to the Know Nothings. They were certainly bigoted towards Catholics, but there wasn’t really a racial component. To the contrary, they were very much opposed to the pro-slavery Democrats. But they were true nativists.
The old line, again, is that ‘America beckons, Americans repel’. When i was younger I found that some of the worst bullies were the kids one rung up the social ladder from the bottom because it was important to them that they keep someone below them. Same with immigrants. Some of the most xenophobic are the last generation that arrived. That’s how you know they have begun assimilating.
So I think rather than talk about white supremacy, it would make more sense to talk about xenophobia or nativism, because that is the actual driving force. When Liberians and Bosnians tell you they voted for Trump because he promised to ‘keep out illegal immigrants’ then you know this isn’t about race, it’s about immigration.
As previously discussed, we’re going to see a huge increase in refugees/asylum seekers/illegal immigrants in the coming decades. If we’re going to figure out a national policy, we need to understand the dynamics that make people resistant to this. Calling them all white supremacists or white nationalists seems really intellectually lazy, even for an SJ Left that is obsessed with race.Report
We already understand the dynamics.It goes by various names around the world, mostly “ethnic tension”.
We know why Ben Franklin was terrified of the Germans, or why everyone hated the Irish, or why the (insert name here) hates the Mexicans.
The dynamic of ethnic fear and rage doesn’t need understanding but to be confronted and resisted.
The more we appease ethnic fear, the more we nod sympathetically, the bolder it gets. Its a classic case of “defining deviancy down”.Report
Yeah, but ‘ethnic’ is just trying to steer things back towards race. It’s not about that. It’s about people that think they are Americans not wanting non-Americans here. Focus on that.Report
Given we know that Russia seems to enjoy messing with America at various levels, I wonder if they aren’t jumping into these various forums and helping to dial things up to 11 until someone pops.
I mean, unlike people in the US, a foreign agent has zero fear that the FBI will be busting down their door for inciting violence or hate crimes.
Although maybe we don’t need the help.Report
“Given we know that Russia seems to enjoy messing with America at various levels, I wonder if they aren’t jumping into these various forums and helping to dial things up to 11 until someone pops.”
If we’re speculating about which OT commenters are Russian agents, I have some thoughts…Report
Getting mad about someone stepping on your shoes is cultural. Getting shot because you stepped on said shoes is because a gun was easily available.Report
That’s actually not how root cause analysis works.Report
Not legally available.
We’ve already outlawed murder, criminal access to guns, children’s access to guns, & put in a cooling off period. We’ve passed all sorts of laws which prevent this behavior, but the people involved aren’t willing to follow them, and society doesn’t have the resources (or perhaps will) to enforce the law.
Now we could launch a massive “war on guns” style effort to disarm the people who are shooting each other… who are mostly minorities. So this would fill the prisons with minorities, convert large numbers of civilians into criminals, and empower criminals who presumably would still ignore the law.
I’m having problems convincing myself that the positive effects would outweigh the negative side effects.
The war on drugs has been a mess and has showcased the limits of the law and gov power. On paper it’s supposed to help people; In practice, not so much. If ending the war on drugs would be a good thing, then firing up another would probably be a bad thing. And it’s very hard to see how a “outlaw it” approach doesn’t end up there.
Going after guns-in-general is pretending that putting restrictions on the law abiding will deal with the law disabiding.Report
Kay: “But Michael, Senators and industrialists don’t go around killing people!”
Michael Corleone: “Now who’s being naive?”Report
As a conservative, let me confirm the importance of the division of labor in efficiency. That’s why you assign one person to go up to the teller, one to watch the door, and one to drive the getaway car. Quick in, quick out, because time is money and inefficiency costs time. Hard time.
This ad brought to you by the Auto Ordnance Corporation of Bridgeport Connecticut, the makers of the Thompson submachine gun, the gun for all your needsReport
A trade: Get rid of the War on Drugs and replace it with the War on Guns.
We can still kick in doors in the inner city, we can still arrest black people in massive numbers. And law enforcement will turn a blind eye in the suburbs and the rural areas so long as people keep a lid on things.
Everybody’s happy.Report
This is where we are eventually headed.Report
broke: “WINNERS DON’T USE DRUGS — William S Sessions, Director, FBI”
woke: “WINNERS DON’T USE GUNS IN REAL LIFE — Christopher A Wray, Director, FBI”Report
The President of Mexico is demanding that the US restrict access to guns, while one of his top officials is going to take legal action to force the US to protect Mexican citizens.
Well, that blows up any Democrat push for gun control because:
We don’t do what Mexico commands.
Mexico has gun control and their murder rate is about 100 a day, with 17,000 killed in the first half this year. That is five times higher than the US murder rate. Twice as many people are getting killed in Mexico than the US, and virtually all of them are Mexicans. The day of the El Paso shooting, Mexico likely had the equivalent of five El Paso shootings, just like they do every day, day in and day out.
We’re not giving up our guns to protect Mexicans in the US. If we’re getting sued because we don’t have enough of a police state to protect them everywhere, we will send them someplace else, like Mexico perhaps, and let the Mexican police do all the protecting.
Americans need guns to protect themselves from all the Mexican gang members, drug dealers, and human traffickers who flock across our unprotected border.
You can bet that Donald Trump will make all these points throughout his campaign.Report
They’re going to institute protections for their citizens in America and make us pay for it.Report
Unfortunately, they aren’t allowed to institute protections here, just as Americans aren’t allowed to possess a firearm in Mexico.Report
Meanwhile, Twitter is being overrun by feral hogs.Report
I have been following gun control discussions in the US for many years. There appears to have been little progress or consensus in that time. Not sure there will be in my lifetime.Report
Why would you care about consensus, are you a social supremacist?Report
I would prefer an approach that might reduce gun deaths rather than posturing about who is right. You can label me as someone who hates to see people gunned down in the street/mall/restaurant.Report
Good, now take that approach and go sell it to the people who gun down people in the street/mall/restaurant, and leave the rest of us alone.Report
Wow…reducing gun deaths is not something you subscribe to. Go figure…Report
Nice try let me restate this:
now take that approach and go sell it to the people who gun down people in the street/mall/restaurant, and leave the rest of us alone.Report
For someone who doesnt appear to like rules you seem keen to impose a few of your own on other people. What makes you think you are the “us” by the way? And which “us” do you claim you represent? Asking for a friend.Report
I made no reference to rules.
Us is anyone that doesn’t fit under your umbella of social objectivity in the framework of consensus you commented above.(eta, whiich exists by your own admission of there not being a consensus)Report
I guess you’re saying that you shouldn’t have to get a vasectomy because your neighbor is having too many kids?Report
That’s pretty much it.Report
Well, statistically the overwhelming bulk of our gun deaths are from urban violence in decaying areas, fueled by extreme poverty and drugs. Subtract that out and the US homicide rate looks similar to Canada or the portions of Europe.
That is certainly an attainable goal because our violent urban culture is little different from previous iterations of European violent urban culture. Before it was so violent, London used to be peaceful, but before that, it was quite violent, and someone had to be Jack the Ripper to rise above the noise.
It wasn’t that long ago that Italy was incredibly violent, and Rome especially so. Old friends would stab each other to death at a cafe over coffee, because real men used deadly force to maintain their reputations as real men. Their homicide rate with knives was vastly higher than our homicide rate with guns.
The homicide rate is going to be almost entirely some function of the attempted homicide rate, and it’s the attempted homicide rate that needs to drop towards zero, because until it does even fists and feet will convert a significant number of attempted homicides into actual homicides.Report
The Babylon Bee looked at an interesting CDC study on gun violence.
The causes are much as I expected.Report
One of my biggest problems with the debate is that everyone says, “all the studies say gun control” works when all the studies say no such things. The last comprehensive meta study came to no conclusions. Many of the most touted studies (e.g., the Connecticut study) turn out to be deeply flawed. People then fall back on post-hoc logic (Australia saw a drop in gun deaths after passing a buyback; but the United States saw an even sharper drop without one) or plots that consist of a meaningless scatter of points and the United States as an outlier, proving … something.
In the end, this is not about whether gun control works or not. It’s a culture war issue. Liberals don’t want guns being around; conservatives want them around. And it also shows an astonishing faith in government.
What we’re witnessing with these mass shootings is a social contagion. Each shooter studies the methods of his predecessor and wants to build on those to rack up an even bigger body count. Maybe gun control lowers the body count, maybe it doesn’t. But it’s not going to stop them. I don’t know what will.Report
I’d like to see a study comparing the 1st World parts of the United States to the rest of the 1st World.
And then I’d like to see a study comparing the 3rd World parts of the United States to the rest of the 3rd World.Report
We all know that would raise way too many uncomfortable questions.Report
Wouldn’t it be a great idea to have some objective body like the CDC study gun violence, so we could get some hard data?Report
“Look, in every other First World nation, this doesn’t happens far less often, and when it does, it’s a giant event, as opposed to something people forget in a couple of weeks, but ya’ know, there’s no proof it’s the guns,” sounds incredibly silly to anybody who actually looks at the world.
Bad things happen in other countries, but they happen far less often.
But, I agree, it is a culture war issue. Because all the evidence, actually show, it’s about easy access to the type of guns that are easily available in the United States. Period.
Pro-gun people think easy access to handguns, assault rifles, and the like are worth thousands of needless deaths of people they don’t know, because they feel safer in their suburban home from the Other because of the gun in their closet.Report
“Pro-gun people think easy access to handguns, assault rifles, and the like are worth thousands of needless deaths…”
Oh good, are we finally going to talk about handguns and urban crime?Report
Check out this city council meeting. The law abiding citizen is certainly fired up.Report
Again, Mike, I’ve said this before – I’m perfectly OK with banning handguns. A-OK, do it tomorrow, hurrah!
But, unfortunately, that’s one of the gun control positions that is quite unpopular.
Also, urban crime happens everywhere – Oslo, London, Tokyo, etc. Anywhere there are large groups of poor people close together. That type of urban crime is only incredibly deadly in the First World in America, because your average criminal has a gun, as opposed to the rest of the world.Report
Are you kidding? The US only has five cities (St Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, San Juan, and New Orleans) in the world’s top 50 for homicide rates. The really violent cities are, of course, gun free zones of peace and harmony.
Moscow, Vilnius Lithuania, Tallinn Estonia, and Glasgow Scotland have higher homicide rates than New York, and Brussels has a higher murder rate than San Diego.Report
It’s unpopular because the Left keeps having unserious conversations about assault weapons when every gun guy knows handguns are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun deaths. And even when they talk assault weapons, it’s abundantly clear they have no idea what they are talking about. They are wasting what little political capital they have while being laughed out of the room.
Basically, liberals need some kind of gun mentors that will hold their hand through this conversation, but it also might mean a tactical retreat temporarily while they put together an actual plan. It doesn’t help that all of your presidential candidates are out there blasting 20 different messages on social media in the wake of this past weekend. Go to any of their social media pages and read the comments. THIS is why there is no movement on the issue.
Also, see George’s reply for the urban gun crime rebuttal. I’ll just cosign what he said. Every time you all hand-wave away urban crime I find it hard to even take this conversation seriously.Report
Not only is most of the body count from handguns, there’s no particular reason they can’t be used in mass shootings. I try not to speculate too much about whats going through the heads of people who do this but my guess is they’re trying to imitate the last guy the media ensured will live in infamy and these rifles are part of the recipe.
But they aren’t necessary to shoot a lot of people. The VA Tech shooter used a Glock and Walther with comparable carnage to more recent events.Report
I was just thinking of the VA Tech shooter as well. Ban assault weapons and people will just use other guns. This is where again, there’s so much lack of knowledge on one side of the aisle, and so much lack of responsibility on the other.Report
It’s entirely valid to declare that individual shootings are a different concern than mass-casualty events, and that weapons with features intended to make mass-casualty events easier to achieve should be subject to more scrutiny than ones without those features.
On the other hand if you want to say “well pistols have detachable magazines, pistols can have shoulder stocks and sound suppressors and sighting devices attached” I’ll say “you’re right, maybe they shouldn’t.”Report
I understand your point, but again, this is barely moving the needle on gun deaths, but expending tons of political capital to do it.
I’d be okay with shifting the focus away from types of guns completely and looking at proposals that would apply across the board. Federal gun permits are the best place to start IMO.Report
Mike, I’ve been enjoying the back and forth. Thank you and everyone else participating for taking the time to read my piece and discuss.👍Report
We have one of the lowest homicide rates in the New World, and yet the rest of the New World has stricter gun control, often vastly stricter.
Looking just at the America’s, the US represents 32% of the population, has 84% of all the guns, but only accounts for 10% of the homicides.
Globally, the US has 46% of the world’s privately held firearms, has only 4.3% of the world’s population, and strangely enough, accounts for only 4.3% of the world’s homicides.Report
So if I give up easy access to guns in my zip code (which has a murder rate of zero), Chicago’s gangbangers will give up their illegal guns and live in peace and harmony?
How is that supposed to work? Intuitively it seems like I’d be worse off and they’d be no better.Report
Mayor Pete striking the right notes on this Fox News segment, imo. (I hope this posts…)
https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1158138251703726080
He did two good things here, well three really.
1. Emphasized areas of agreement between liberals and conservatives.
1a. Blamed the inability to get those agreed on regs through Congress on the NRA.
2. Highlighted the choice each of us as individuals faces going forward.
Ehh, didn’t post.
Report
Well, it looks like Hollywood has a problematic movie on its hands (PJMedia link)
It’s a pretty low budget movie, but now they have to figure out what to do with it.Report
Daily Mail story on the movie, with trailers.
As a side note, the two Canadian teen serial killers, who obviously weren’t Eagle Scouts, were found dead in the woods after just two weeks away from home. Apparently there’s more to being a mountain man than growing a hipster beard.
Their tragic end could probably have been avoided if they followed the age old practice of fleeing to Mexico. Criminals don’t flee to Northern Manitoba because it’s a stupid thing to do.Report
This is the link to the Quillette article I referenced:
https://quillette.com/2019/08/07/the-deadly-boredom-of-a-meaningless-life/
Some key points (bold emphasis mine):
I’m certain some people, perhaps those inclined to see race and misogyny as the primary societal problems of our day, will likely read, “…little sense of connection or belonging…” and think that references feelings of white male superiority slipping away. I read it as a condemnation of our disconnected modern society. Want proof? There is a post on the site right now celebrating someone’s extreme introversion. Imagine if the author was a young, white male. Would we be more concerned?
Also from the Quillette piece (bold emphasis mine):
Again, it could be argued that failed expectations and shame again point to dwindling white superiority or toxic masculinity in the face of increased female equality…but I don’t see it that way. I think we have a generation of young men who don’t really know who they are because we have de-emphasized so many of the things that used to help build that sense of self. What does this mean? They are essentially dealing with the same issues one would be faced with if they had Borderline Personality Disorder. From one site about BPD:
Let’s repeat that…” Without that anchor, changes can feel chaotic and even terrifying.” We live in a world that is rapidly changing through technology and evolving social norms. I’ve heard anecdotally that if you want to get laid, Tinder is awesome, but if you want a relationship, forget it. Kids don’t know how to talk to each other. We ask our 20 year-old basic facts about her friends and she has no idea. Borderlines are extremely prone to lashing out. When we have a generation of men dealing with some of those same issues, some of them are going to lash out as well. What’s the solution? In the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of the American Community the author offers up some ideas:
Not a bad place to start. What I am positive won’t work though is blaming this on the president or white nationalism or even dark websites. The problem is a generation of disconnected men that we need to reconnect with.
Report
After Columbine and other school incidents some thought was given to the idea that our schools were too large, and thus instead of everyone getting properly socialized (as they would in a smaller group like Sunday school or one-room schoolhouses), the kids were in a community of peers large enough to fragment into factions and clans, which may be a quite unnatural situation for children because humans rarely lived in groups large enough to put together hundreds of kids in a single age group.Report
I know I have told this story here before but it is worth repeating. The prep school I went to had just under 2,000 kids when I was there in the early 90s. I was just an average guy. I had friends, dabbled in sports, got okay grades, mostly just kept my head down. It was SO EASY to get lost in the crowd and I kind of preferred that because I was never going to be the cool kid, so the only direction that would have gained me attention was down the social ladder. For the kids at the bottom, bullying could be pretty bad, at least for the first couple of years (kids mostly outgrew that by Junior year).
A few years after I left they started a house system which breaks up the student population into 10 houses, all named for Catholic thinkers and theologians. The houses all send reps to the student government so it grew in size from about 10 kids to over 70 now. They do intramural activities, mentoring, etc. It’s awesome. One story I heard was of a meek little freshman kid who had his books knocked out of his hands by a senior. Another senior, captain of the football team, saw the incident and slammed the senior into a wall and told him to pick the books up, apologize and never mess with him again. You see, the little freshman was in his house and they take care of each other. The person telling us this story, also an alumni, said, “That freshman’s experience here will be radically different than it was for us because he knows someone has his back.” There are other stories I could tell about my introverted nephew becoming an extrovert because of the house system. It truly changes lives.
Anyway, all of that is to say your point is 100% valid.Report
I just checked, and Plano Senior High School covers grades 11-12 and has 2,627 students, which would be 5,200 kids for 9-12.Report
Exactly – that is ridiculous. We should probably be keeping a close eye on McCracken County HS.Report
Posting this here because it relates to a number of threads:
I think that a lot of mass shootings could rightly be considered crimes of passion, even if there was pre-meditation. The impulse to assume it is part of an ideology is (I think) a coping mechanism people use to deal with their inability to explain what happened. Just look how frustrated people have been about the Las Vegas shooter because still no one really knows his motivations.
Another thing I was thinking about with regards to ideologically-motivated attacks… The US doesn’t really have any history of suicide attacks to advance ideologies. Even Timothy McVeigh left the scene before the OKC bomb went off. It’s just not what we do. But most of these mass shootings are planned as suicides. That, again, should demonstrate that their ideology is a secondary motivation at best or it isn’t even a factor. We really need to start thinking of these in those terms if we’re going to start coming up with solutions. Otherwise, yeah, we’ll always be talking about ancillary issues like guns.Report
Most certainly a secondary motivation (I would not discount it as a factor, as the ideology is often why they chose that path to suicide).
But yes, I could see most of them as being suicidal, but so narcissistic that they can not tolerate the thought of being a sad loser loner who kills themselves. Better to die the monster than the forgotten loner.Report
“…the ideology is often why they chose that path to suicide.”
Is it though? I don’t know that I agree with that. I suspect most of these shooters were already heading down that path, or at least the path to something bad happening, long before. Or the two things might happen in parallel and then they converge due to some kind of trigger.
I basically agree with your second paragraph.Report
I see it as heading down the path to suicide, finding the terminal condition (sad loser loner kills self) to be intolerable, and looking for a more acceptable end state. The fringe ideologies then become the “cause to kill and die for”. If the fringe ideologies weren’t readily accessible via the internet, along with the already large number of proven methods for getting attention from the media, we’d probably have much different outcomes.
So such ideologies are relevant, just not deterministic.Report
I guess my question is whether those sites/ideologies are pushing suicide attacks as a methodology to achieving their goals. I mean, we know parts of Islam does. We know that Japan did during WWII. Are we seeing that with white supremacist groups or do they find themselves scratching their heads as much as we are when someone decides to die for the cause?Report
Don’t know, maybe? I don’t hang out on such forums, and I ain’t gonna start just to satisfy that bit of curiosity.
It could be that they aren’t pushing martyrdom, but merely violent action, and these people are thinking, “violence tends to get met with violence, so…”
When one has a death wish, engaging in violence is a reliable way to get that wish granted.Report
That is kind of my analysis. They promote violence but not martyrdom (or even killing?) I mean, Antifa is pretty violent, but I don’t think they actually want to kill people. I mean, even the Klan sort of gave that up a long time ago.
So if killing and/or martyrdom is not actually part of the ideology but someone who is already troubled warps it into a justification…it still feels a bit like barking up the wrong tree to put so much focus on white supremacy and misogyny. I still come back to trying to figure out how to re-integrate these people into society and wrap our arms around them.Report
It’s worthwhile because it gives you warning signs. If junior suddenly starts making noise about white power or women, and is going all mall ninja, it might be time for some intervention.Report
Well yeah, in general we don’t want junior to be a white supremacist or join the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club. But my point is that if these ideologies aren’t actually telling people to martyr themselves for the cause, and we know suicide is the ultimate goal for most mass shooters, then why are we so sure that white supremacy and misogyny are the reasons for these shootings?Report
Have you actually been on those forums?
They directly encourage members to engage in mass shootings. Furthermore, they openly celebrate mass shooters.Report
That exactly.Report
Yesterday I saw some security footage of the Dayton shooter from inside the bar. He was standing alone looking more than a bit out of place, like so many do when they’re standing alone in a bar. He left, went home to grab all his gear, and was back an hour later to try and wipe out everybody.
I’d like to know his blood alcohol level (which could be almost anything) and what interactions, if any, he had while he was in the bar. It could be that his planning started in the bar, when he felt dissed, rejected, or outcast and just got really mad about it. Maybe his sister dismissed him as a third wheel and he seethed with rage.
But unlike most people who occasionally get really pissed off in a bar (usually when drunk), he had spent years cultivating violent thoughts about murdering people, shooting Nazis, and whatnot. He may have just had an uncontrollable urge to teach those dismissive drinkers who they were dealing with, and that he was a really dangerous alpha male, hear him roar, etc.Report
Also, regarding the hodgepodge of ideas these people have.
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Mike and Oscar-
These are all great observations, but they don’t address or explain the striking disparity in racial and gender makeup of mass shooters.
According to these analyses, we should see a thriving hub of Reddit and 4Chan boards where young black men gather to plot how they will strike back and the white power structure; Or boards where middle aged women plot how to make men pay for ignoring them in the dating world.
White men react differently to perceived injustice than women or people of color. Even when they choose suicide, they do it differently, in that they want to also take out as many other people as possible.
Why?Report
I’ve already explained that Chip. Minorities probably have much better coping mechanisms. It’s really that simple.Report
Mike isn’t wrong, in that certain cultures and classes have better coping mechanisms. Think about it, if you, as a person, have been at the top of the local heap (read: privilege), and you are rather narcissistic, and you get it in your head that your privilege is being stripped away, that you are being ignored…
If you’ve never had to learn to cope with being at the bottom of something, your reaction to finding yourself there, or believing yourself to be there… well, it ain’t gonna be healthy for anyone.
So yes, there is an element of class privilege (whether by dint of gender, race, or wealth) at play. These people are throwing a suicidal temper tantrum. And where a racial minority, or a woman, might turn that inward and be purely self destructive if they were unable to cope, men of privilege in the US are taught to attack the problem.Report
These people are throwing a suicidal temper tantrum.
This seems strained to me. First, enough of these mass shooters are taken alive that the entire premise is undermined. Second, it puts the emphasis on the wrong part of the act: these people are disaffected but that doesn’t entail (nor is it explained by) a desire to not live anymore while those acts *do* express themselves as a desire to kill a lot of other people. Maybe somewhere down in the Freudian muck we could tease out how a death wish results from a perceived loss of privilege and status, but it seems a difficult task without begging the question. Rage at “external forces” which laid that person low seems like a more commonsensical accounting to me.Report
Lots of people seriously attempt suicide, and pull away at the last moment because the desire to live outweighs what they believed was a desire to die.
Which makes me curious, of those we take alive, I wonder how many find themselves honestly remorseful, once the adrenaline comes down and the weight of their actions comes to bear? And how many are truly just evil.Report
What’s the old saying about the last thought that goes through a suicide jumper’s head before they hit the pavement? My dad’s suicide was an impulsive act, fueled by alcohol. I have no doubt that if he had slept it off he would have felt different in the morning.Report
There’s studies showing some insanely high number of people who botch their suicides never attempt to commit suicide again and are immediately regretful of their attempt.
People do underestimate how many suicide attempts are rash actions, not highly planned or even thought through situations.Report
“People do underestimate how many suicide attempts are rash actions, not highly planned or even thought through situations.”
You’re exactly right – so maybe it is more like a crime of passion than a pre-mediated terrorist attack.Report
Well yes, that was my point, that other cultures, cultures which experience much more injustice and suffering, somehow have developed better ways of coping with anger than white males.
My explanation for why this is, is that white males don’t expect injustice to be delivered to them. When we experience injustice, we don’t see it as just part of the inevitable workings of the universe, but as evidence that the natural order itself has become perverted, usurped.
This isn’t white supremacy, but a symptom of, lets call it white chauvinism, where when a white farm boy from Iowa walks onto the bridge of the Enterprise, he naturally assumes he will be sitting in the big chair, surrounded by the smiling faces of exotic others.
When he walks in and Captain Uhuru snaps rudely at him to get back to the kitchen, he feels like the universe has lost its bearings.Report
Yes.
Now, given that, what is to be done?
Since finding the unmoored and getting them re-grounded is not practical, what do we do?
I guess that depends on the assumptions being made.
If we assume that such acts follow a pattern of ‘contagion’, and there appears to be growing body of evidence that such as assumption is valid, then the answer is to head off the contagion. I’ve already noticed that many media orgs are already voluntarily not focusing on the shooter. I didn’t learn the name of the El Paso shooter until this morning* (CBS News article), and I still don’t know the name of the Dayton or Garlic Festival shooters.
And the evidence suggests that de-emphasizing the event, and the shooter, is the path to take. And that means putting pressure on media orgs to voluntarily decline to report those facts. Maybe search engines could filter out sites that list the name.
If someone wants to know the shooter’s name, they can wait for the FBI to release it on the FBI website.
*Granted, I wasn’t looking for their names, and thus I was kind of annoyed that CBS mentioned his name like 6 times in the article I’d read.Report
If they are a contagion, then the question is, what do we do with Typhoid Mary who sits on his toilet in the White House tweeting white rage all day long?Report
I hear there is an election coming up…Report
Think of it as we’re running a social experiment on whether or not that matters. To the best of my knowledge within the margin of error the answer is “no”, but I’m open to be convinced otherwise.Report
Chip – you were starting to actually make sense – but here we are again (and granted, Oscar tee’d you up so it’s not entirely your fault).
Here’s the deal…lots of white supremacists never engage in mass shootings. Lots of mass shooters aren’t white supremacists. But yet, you’re trying to correlate the two. The reason mass shootings are increasing is because we have a lot of American males that have no identity, no sense of self, no ability to cope with a changing society or life’s disappointments, etc and they decide to kill themselves, some of them in very spectacular ways. It’s really that simple.
Per Mother Jones, these were the number of mass shootings under our last three presidents. These numbers are growing exponentially, not because of resurgence white supremacy but because the flaws of our youngest generations are starting to surface.
Bush…….15
Obama….37
Trump……30Report
We’re just quibbling over terms now.
It seems like we agree that white people feel they are not being dealt a fair hand, and they are increasingly likely to lash out in violence.Report
Terminology matter. I have no problem saying, “Middle class white men have poor coping mechanisms and a very, very, very tiny % of them engage in mass killings in fits of impotent rage.”
What I don’t subscribe to is saying, “White men are angry over losing their supremacy in the world which and they are expressing this in mass shootings.”
These are subtle differences that mean a lot.Report
Rod Rosenstein has a term for it: white terrorism.
“Killing random civilians to spread a political message is terrorism. FBI classifies it as domestic terrorism, but “white terrorism” is more precise. Many of the killers are lone-wolf losers indoctrinated to hate through the internet, just like Islamic terrorists”Report
This line of thinking would only be useful if whites were seriously over represented in the ranks of mass shooters.
Since they’re not, race isn’t the issue. AFAICT, class, and even poverty.
Looking at this and calling it “white terrorism” says more about where Rosenstein’s head is at than it does about where the shooters’ heads are at.Report
Mass shootings didn’t really kick off till 1999, even though we were, in theory, up to our eyeballs in white supremacists from the American Revolution through the 1960’s.
About the only thing we started doing around the period where the shootings kicked off was giving millions of kids lots of mind altering drugs to make them behave or treat depression.Report
Drugs, the book Rage, plus endless Hollywood movies/shows pivoting on world destruction, with actual politicians saying the world is on its way to ending in X amount of years because of reason Y.
Layer that on top of the prison-ish hellholes public schools have become, its a wonder the nation isn’t burnt to the ground every week.Report
The justifications are within individual constructs. There is nothing you CAN do.
You will never be able to peak into the minds of the population and pick out the dozen or so people that are perceiving suffering or injustice, and building justification to kill.
To assume that a peaceful society is built upon social constructs is a complete fallacy. It’s when all those individual kill justifications add up to zero that society has a good day. And let me say, we haven’t killed a million people today, so we are doing pretty damn good.
Is that uncomfortable to people who want to be able to control what happens everyday? Yes it is.
Do they get to make everyones life hell in attempting to get that number to zero? No they don’t.
If they attempt to impose their will on everyone to attempt to get that number to zero, will that number go way up? Yes it will.Report
Before everyone gets too far along this path, I should point out that Mother Jones conducted an in depth study of mass shootings (that someone here linked, I think). Of 100 mass shootings, the breakdown of the shooters was:
63% white
19% black
10% Latino
8% Asian
Blacks and Asians are over-represented, not whites.Report
Over-represented, how?
Given that they suffer far worse than white people we should expect those numbers to be much much higher.Report
Well, that logic certainly did a quick 180. 🙂Report
It does raise the (possibly) interesting question of why the Latino percentage is so much lower than their percentage in the population as a whole.Report
I’m just imagining the reaction in the 8Chan and Tucker Carlson crowd to a series of videos showing black people shooting white people, then swaggering out of the courtroom scot free.
If you recall, this is the standard plot premise of the revenge movie, where the usually white, always male protagonist suffers a terrible injustice, and then is betrayed by the justice system.
And we all know the rest of the plot, right?
Involving a lone vigilante, who goes on a blood soaked rampage of gun violence?
I think this is a logic that’s woven very deeply into white American culture.Report
Related:
The Attorney General is an enthusiastic fan of such violence:
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/bill-barr-interview-dirty-harry-death-wish-vigilante-justice
“I believe a sense of justice is hardwired into human beings,” Barr recalled during an interview with Crime Story podcast host Kary Antholis. “Don’t ask me why, but it is there and it’s satisfying to see justice done.”
Barr elaborated on his theory of justice, recalling the Charles Bronson movie Death Wish and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry, icons of vigilantism in ’70s filmmaking that spawned movie franchises.
The original 1974 exploitation classic Death Wish tells the story of how a do-gooder Manhattan liberal sees the light after his wife is murdered and his daughter is raped. He becomes a one-man vigilante squad, roaming New York City and executing petty thieves.
“Death Wish, yeah,” Barr said. “That gives people a sense of satisfaction when they see it.”
Barr then recalled a scene in 1971’s Dirty Harry where Eastwood’s character – a loose-cannon cop – confronts a serial killer who has surrendered, but buried a hostage alive. Eastwood’s character has seconds in the movie to act to find and rescue the hostage, but the serial killer won’t give up the information.
In the attorney general’s telling, Dirty Harry “shoots him in the leg or something and the guy tells him where it is.”
Somewhere on 8Chan, they are taking notes.Report
One of the things I never tire of pointing out is the voice of reason in Dirty Harry in 1971: his partner Chico Gonzalez, with a wife, hoping to build a family, and in one of the sequels mentioned as having left the police to be a teacher.
It might not be quite true today, but in another generation, at least in the West, Hispanics will be white.Report
Both the Hispanics and Asians will be white in a generation. The blacks will take longer but they’ll get there too.
Which is not to say everyone will be.Report
Not if the Trumpists have any say in the matter.
One of the reasons poor whites fought so viciously for slavery was their fear of becoming the underclass, if freed slaves became “white”Report
“in another generation, at least in the West, Hispanics will be white.”
Already happened, bro, George Zimmerman was a white dude seven years ago!Report
You seem to be insisting that facts match up with the narrative.
That’s starting with the conclusion and throwing out what doesn’t match it.Report
Someone watched Death Wish too many times…Report
Chip is a little comical on the white thing, it’s as if there is this long history of whites multiplying from about a population 2000 to however many we have now, and Chip is one of the few who gets up and says, “you white guys are just afraid of becoming outnumbered and underclass!!!”, “Fear!! Fear!!!”.
And of course the reason for this is to make them flawed in a way that it’s ok for his political faction to punch them.Report
Translated into english, what George’s stats suggest is that…
This issue isn’t connected to race, or closely to poverty.
When faced with facts like this the solution isn’t to look for why it really is connected to race/poverty, but to look for what it is connected to (thus far, gender).Report
So why are American men so fragile?
Why do they feel like they are suffering injustice when they clearly arent?Report
Entitlement. Misogynistic Entitlement. And for whit men, racist, misogynistic entitlement.Report
Well I could not disagree with my friend Phillip more on this topic. Perhaps he has some kind of psychic insight that I do not possess but in 44 years of spending most of my time with white men, I just don’t see any of that. But…I also haven’t had the training to detect it that one gets on the Left. In much the same way that I see liberal paternalism and elitism, I guess we all have our biases.Report
in 44 years of spending most of my time with white men, I just don’t see any of that
As a mentor of mine once said: “We don’t know who discovered water, but we can be pretty damn sure it wasn’t a fish.”Report
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And, weak men create hard times.”Report
That’s a dumb quote from a trashy novel. And why the focus on strength, rather than the other virtues, such as compassion and kindness?
“Young men these days lack strength” — perhaps. I wouldn’t argue against that. However, they also appear to lack compassion.
Certainly I want people to be strong, in the sense of “inner strength” (although outward strength can be a fine thing also). But I’d also love to see a bit more compassion.Report
Feelings trump facts. Injustice is everywhere. That you feel they’re not suffering injustice (or at least that the white ones aren’t) doesn’t change that most of them don’t have mates and probably won’t (or that their lives are otherwise failing).
Presumably there are other countries where men aren’t getting laid so the question is why aren’t they doing something similar there.
I think the answer is advertising. These shooters study and revere the shooters who came before them. Picking up a gun makes their life story a success. Other people will study and revere them.
So it’s a combo of the internet, the media, Columbine, the size of our population, etc. Gun access certainly plays a role but probably more from a symbolic standpoint. If other countries routinely made movies where we routinely have the hero mow people down with his car and then that became “a thing” in real life with the media giving billions of dollars of attention to people who do that, then we’d see something like what we have.Report
So what you’re saying is that if nations like England, Canada and Australia were exposed to American films like Mad Max and if they had Rupert Murdoch style tabloid journalism, then they would also see regular mass shootings?Report
I think gun-as-a-symbol-of-power is going to be less of a thing with few guns around, so for them it’d probably have to be cars or something else capable of inflicting large amounts of death.Report
So , fewer guns= fewer mass shootings?Report
Possibly fewer, but potentially with vastly higher casualties, as we saw in Paris or even Orlando.
With drastically few guns (more gun-free zones) the shooters can keep going until their finger gets tired or they run out of targets.Report
England and Canada aren’t quite as bad as the US, but we’re better than Belgium and about a dozen European countries and only slightly worse than Austria. In worldwide rankings, I think we’re down in the 60’s for mass shooting deaths.
World Population Review: Mass Shootings by CountryReport
I have to wonder how much mass media attention plays into this. Other countries have mass shootings, but we don’t hear about it unless it’s really bad? But we hear about every single incident in the US, as long as a gun was fired.Report
Before everybody drives themselves nuts trying to read their favorite nightmare society into these incidents, as if they were searching for a good premise for a socially relevant horror movie, it might be wise to consider how little else their favored cause would explain.
These incidents are so rare that just one of them can dominate the new cycles for weeks, if not months. Mother Jones looked at 114 or so mass shootings, but to do that they had to go back to 1982 to get enough samples. If the mass shooters are somehow representative of something common, then surely too are Mega Powerball winners that outnumber them.
If it’s all about establishing or retaining power, is the same true of all the freaks who murder little kids? Could adults be trying to keep the next generation from taking over by striking while they’re still in diapers? Probably not.
Ascribing extremely rare events to widespread and ubiquitous causes must also explain why those rare events aren’t as ubiquitous and widespread as the suggested cause.
Most of these cases seem to require almost a planetary alignment of crazy, from abuse, sociopathy, bullying, ideation, ideology, and lots of ignored warning signs.Report
Agreed on all of the above.
I absolutely understand the impulse people have to make sense of things, I just think that ascribing it to anything other than abuse, sociopathy, bullying, ideation, ideology, and lots of ignored warning signs is more about advancing their own political interests than actually looking honestly at the problem.Report
Except, the guys who do these things aren’t actually bullied all that much.
And people who suffer the most bullying tend to not do this.Report
According to his friends and classmates, The El Paso shooter was bullied viciously all through school. So were the 1999 Colorado school shooters, and the Connecticut school shooter.
The bullying link was so strong that schools radically changed how we handle bullying.
According to the Secret Service and Department of Education, three-quarters of school shooters were bullied and harassed in school.
NPR storyReport
The defining factor of most mass shootings(1) is what is best described as impotent rage.
Sometimes this rage is against things we would consider unreasonable, like a guy being absurdly upset that some woman rejected him or someone who got laid off from work.
Sometimes this rage is against things that we, as a society, really really should have put a stop to a while back, and not let continue, like someone being bullied for years and not able to get any relief from it.
This is, I suspect, why the vast majority of shooters are men…it’s not that men are more violent. Whether or not men are taught to be more violent, or just are due to hormones, or whatever, is an entirely different question that missed the fact that mass shootings aren’t really ‘someone acting more violent’.
Violence is yelling and threatening people and operating by intimidation and sometimes punching someone, and a lot of men are indeed taught that is how you solve problems. But…making a plan, getting a gun, and shooting everyone is something else entirely. That’s technically ‘violence’, yes, but it’s not anything society teaches men to do under the guise of ‘macho’. No one is taught to _shoot_ their problems by carefully planning to shoot a bunch of people, nor can that result from too much testosterone.
No, the vast majority of shooters are men because those men haven’t been given any way to deal with what they are feeling. They have no one to talk to, they have no way to talk about what they are feeling, they don’t have any logical thing to do. Or…rather, they _have_ been given a logical thing to do, by the media, and it’s the only way they can see.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t solve people’s problem when those problems are real things, like bullying, but I rather suspect until we figure out how to get young men to process their emotions somehow, all that will do is mean all the mass shootings are for _unreasonable_ reason to be angry about something, things we can’t really solve for people (No, we can’t get you a date or get your job back.), and that hardly is helping anything.
1) Barring the straight-up terrorism ones, which…in a way, those are impotent rage also, the entire premise of terrorism is trying to get something via violence that people can’t get through the political process…but it’s a bit different than this.Report
I agree with all of this.Report
There has to be something that justifies the rage being directed externally, unless it just creates a abstract external action, but mass shootings don’t appear abstract. They tend to have a built up justification.Report
Bullied more than teenage girls?
Bullied more than students at prep and boarding schools?
Really?
And why the surge in shootings, after the advent of anti-bullying programs?Report
Is there any reason to suspect that anti-bullying programs actually help?
To be clear, I’m very anti-bullying, and in general pro anti bullying efforts, but it would be foolish to assume that we are currently doing the best job we can in that area. In fact, I’m willing to bet the current programs do a pretty poor job.
Your other points stand, however. Many kids are bullied, but a rather specific subset turns into mass shooters.
Bullying is bad on its own terms. We should oppose bullying in general, regardless of whether there are mass shootings. That said, it does not explain mass shootings. It’s not the “casual variable.” It’s something else.Report
The Los Angeles Times had a really interesting piece the other day which covered much of this (bold emphasis mine):
I think the story here is that a mass shooter is almost always years (decades) in the making. It’s a perfect storm of childhood trauma, a triggering event and a final push from society’s fascination with mass shootings. Is alt-right radicalization and/or misogyny sometimes a factor? Sure, insomuch is that a man might be sexist and lose a promotion to a woman or a teen might get a final nudge from a certain website…but. You and Phillip are so intent on blaming mass shootings on those final two things. It’s like blaming the Challenger explosion on going ‘throttle up’. That was just the final thing that happened in a long chain of events. Again, I think it says more about you wanting to add more confirmation onto your theories as to what is wrong with America broadly and this is a convenient example.Report
Also agreed… but add “advertising” to that list.Report
The same would hold true for the 1927 Bath School disaster, where a disgruntled school treasurer was pissed off about losing an election and decided to make the whole town pay by blowing up their kids. Rage, plotting, and vengeance run amok.
From one perspective, it’s amazing how rare such acts are compared to the frequency that the basic premise is used for a movie. I’ll bet we could all list dozens, or with the help of the Internet, hundreds and hundreds: Speed, Falling Down, Taxi Driver, Natural Born Killers, The Shining, Heathers, etc.
If you add in the number of police procedurals where the whole plot is finding the psycho killer or stopping the mass shooter, you’d think we’re up to our eyeballs in them, even though they’re statistically extremely rare.Report
@oscar — Since I’m linking Samzdat to today, there is this, which I think summarizes much of what is happening: https://samzdat.com/2017/06/28/without-belief-in-a-god-but-never-without-belief-in-a-devil/
A lot of young men these days are attracted to a deeply hateful subculture, mostly of the 8chan variety, but it spread across a lot of different message boards. It’s a big recruiting ground for the alt-right, but as the Dayton shooter illustrates, it is not limited to the right. It’s core is simply raw nihilism.Report
Great post – thanks for writing it.Report
Thanks for taking the time to read it Kristin!
And thanks to everyone else who has checked it out….the comments-WOW!Report
And here’s some more crazy from the BBC
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