AMA study: shooters armed with semiautomatic rifles kill twice as many people

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Tell me where are they on all those shootings where the shooter’s information was uploaded properly? Where are they on the many ways of aquiring a gun without undergoing a background check? What practical solutions have they proposed? Where is the popular out rage on the other issues? There’s a certain lock in on that because it allows taking a purported principled stand while still arguing against the slim regulation we already have.

Or you could read the article he provided which points out using actual facts and numbers that they are outliers in that they happened at all. In the sense that they are far, far, far, far, far, less frequent in nearly every other country than the US. As in there’s not many of them. What’s been done is the the numbers have been carefully selected and presented in order to take very rare events in Europe and magnify their effect. While also minimizing the impact of much more frequent shootings in the US.

Here. I’ll help:

The FBI, for example, defines a mass shooting as involving the murder of three people. The pro-gun-control nonprofit group Everytown for Gun Safety defines a mass shooting as one in which four people are killed, not including the shooter. Mother Jones , which tracks mass shootings in the United States, defines the phenomenonas “indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in four or more victims killed by the attacker.” The Mass Shootings in America project, run by Stanford University, defines a mass shooting as one involving three or more victims (not including the shooter) but is not limited to fatalities.

The first thing to note about the rankings is that Lott has compared the mass shooting death rate in the United States with that of other countries where there was a mass shooting between 2009 and 2015. This might seem obvious, but it’s important to point out that very many countries did not see a single mass shooting as defined by Lott during this period.

The second striking thing about the list of mass shootings in Europe is that it is dominated by outliers. Where the United States saw at least twelve mass shooting deaths every year between 2009 and 2015, some of the other countries on Lott’s list experienced one or two rare but very high-casualty shootings. When you average out the death rates, this creates a highly misleading impression about the consistency and lethality of mass shootings outside the United States.

In his analysis, Lott used the mean to calculate the average annual death rate from mass shootings, which is calculated by adding all the numbers in a set divided by the amount of numbers in the set. This is a problem in situations such as these, as it assigns equal value to all numbers. (The mean of a set of numbers is also referred to as its average.)

The median, which is the middle point in a list of values in which half the numbers are above and half are below, can give a far better sense of what is typical.

If we apply the median to Norway’s annual death rate from mass shootings between 2009 and 2015, we mitigate against the enormous skewing effect of one of those years (2011), and get a much more realistic statistical picture of mass shootings in Norway. The median, in this case, is zero. That means that in a typical year between 2009 and 2015, nobody in Norway was killed in a mass shooting.

As you can see, the United States is the only country on the list where mass shootings took place consistently between 2009 and 2015, with the CPRC recording at least 12 deaths annually in that period. In fact, of the sixteen countries that Lott chose for his analysis, only one saw mass shooting deaths in more than two out of those seven years — the United States.

This table shows the reality of mass shooting deaths in sixteen countries. In fifteen of them, year after year goes by without a single death, but with sporadic fatalities in one or two years. In the United States, there were at least 12 mass shooting deaths every single year.

Just to grab the major points.

Interesting that deaths with guns seem to happen in places where there are purportedly no guns or gun owners. Who is shooting those people and with what?

Crime concentrates in an almost perfect correlation with population density. Also with economic class.

And to repeat myself:

Up to 2/3rds of gun deaths in the United States are suicides. Crime is not the issue. Crime is not why guns should be regulated or the standard by which regulations should be established.

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Criminals can get guns, whenever and wherever they desire to do so. This is certainly true in France, Belgium, and places like Brazil.

I am kind of glad you put that down. Maybe that is a source of the miscommunication we are having. I believed the anti-gun movement was primarily about prevention of violent crime. If the goal lies elsewhere, that would explain why so many of the proposed solutions would be unlikely to prevent or lessen criminal violence.
Many of my neighbors believe that the gun control movement is primarily led by urban leftists in order to remind rural conservatives who is really in charge, and to defer to their betters. I still think that is a simplistic view, but your comments do not do much to contradict it.

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And yet places with few barriers to gun ownership have higher rates of gun crime.

How very odd.

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IIRC, the going rate for a clean black market pistol in Sydney these days is about $10,000. And it ain’t the sort of thing you can just find at your local pub; serious criminal contacts are required.

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And yet they don’t seem to acquire guns as easily or to the same level as criminals in the United states.

HMMMM…

For about the 8th time. Including at least one time previously to yourself.

Get better neighbors.

I own a gun. Most of my family members own a fire arm or two. I live next a damn potato farm, and for many generations back my family have been avid hunters and outdoors people of various sorts. 2 members of my family are firearms instructors, one civilian one military, with 5 or more guns in their collection.

I have never heard that anywhere but conservative press and political materials.

You’ve been repeating, endlessly, claims and statistics about crime that have been widlely debunked. People here have provided you with those debunkings and more legitimate information. You just waded through 143 comments (and counting) from “urban leftists” outlining the many and varied ways that fire arms regulation is not about lowering crime rates, and isn’t about making all those brave conservatives “defer to their betters”.

And when I finally got you to actually look at all that reality we’ve been pointing to. Your response is:

Personal invective.

Off topic but:

One of my favorite bits of Guy Richie’s earlier out put is how much of it is all about “wait how the fuck do we get a gun?”. Because in the UK, its rather difficult for criminal’s to get one. So it becomes this nice reality based plot complication to build a farce around. I mean that’s basically the entire plot of Lock-Stock, but I recall it coming up in one or two of his other films.

And one of my favorite details about Children of Men is that Clive Owen’s character never fires a gun, and off the top of my head never touches a gun through the entire movie. (ETA: I think he does pick up a gun once, only to immediately toss it away. Need to watch that one again). Very British approach to action.

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Bullshit. Prove it. It’s quite difficult to get firearms in France or Belgium, and quite risky for a “criminal” to carry one. It’s trivial in the US. I was traveling in rural Louisiana (which has gun homicide rates the same as Chicago, BTW) and handguns can be purchased at a gas station.

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with me… boom boom and bammm… :smile:

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I’m sorry your neighbors are so paranoid and prone to Trumpist conspiracy theories.

The gun control movement has zero, nothing to do with “showing the yokels who’s in charge” (especially since, er, yokels are currently in charge). It’s about trying to prevent situations where people can stockpile guns in a hotel room and murder people from his window with semiautomatic weapons, or pass a background check that doesn’t actually show their history of mental illness and violence. It’s about trying to keep kids from being murdered in their schools.

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I think you make a really good point. So what to do? All I can come up with is to have honest, informed dialogue between the camps to come up, hopefully, with solutions that make sense to both sides.

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One article about the availability of guns in Belgium:

https://www.ft.com/content/33a2d592-8dde-11e5-a549-b89a1dfede9b

Brazil has a whole industry of covert firearms manufacture.


Australia is also emerging as a source of illegal machine guns:

In Louisiana, a criminal who carries a gun or uses one in the commission of a felony “shall be imprisoned at hard labor for not less than ten nor more than fifteen years without the benefit of probation, parole, or suspension of sentence and be fined not less than one thousand dollars nor more than five thousand dollars.” La. Rev. Stat. § 14:95.1

I have not seen handguns for sale at gas stations. If so, then that station owner has a Federal Firearms License, and is required to submit any sale to the Federal background check system.

I assume you mean that the gun homicide rate is high in Louisiana, not rural Louisiana. It looks to me like several urban centers in La have very high murder rates, which raises the state’s overall per capita murder rate. If my math is right, 84% of people in Louisiana live in Urban areas. But in any case, gun violence is largely concentrated in certain cities in the US, and closer inspection shows that even in those cities, it is concentrated on certain streets and neighborhoods.
A “common sense” approach to gun violence would be to figure out exactly why the people actually commit those gun crimes, and what we can do to stop them. Passing laws that primarily affect law abiding people in low crime areas is not productive. And, as others here have pointed out, you end up with single issue gun rights voters. I would love to move towards voting Women’s healthcare rights as a primary issue.

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I’m not writing a treatise on the issue, nor am I trying to distill it down to my above statement. I don’t think there is anything wrong with constitutional gun control measures. I am just saying that we need to stop making a bad situation a lot worse by calling for measures that are unconstitutional. We can not realize our goals until we win more elections. Getting rid of bad electoral strategies is a good idea.

By the same token, I am pretty fed up with the far side of the pro-gun folks, who are reflexively against any and all ideas.

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At the moment, not much, as long as the NRA holds sway in Washington and all three branches of government are staunchly against helping the situation. The big key, in my opinion, is figuring out how to stem the flow of propaganda and money from the NRA. As long as there’s a huge lobbying group dedicated to preventing any talk of even gentle fixes to clear issues with the system, and making sure that people like ArchStanton’s neighbors think that Democrats are evil gun-robbing maniacs, we’re not going to make any progress, I fear.

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Look, I grew up in New Orleans and have know three people who were murdered in Louisiana. It’s not “just on some streets.”

The first was killed in my own neighborhood. It was a fairly suburban area in New Orleans East, with a high rate of theft but not a high rate of violence. That one was a targeted drive by committed by a person that the victim had been friends with in jail. The victim was driving my mom’s car when it happened, the other passenger was unharmed. The shooter was picked up a year later, the cops found him hanging out on a corner, they hadn’t exactly been looking very hard for him.

The second was a teenaged girl who was killed along with everyone else living in the same trailer. It is suspected that the murderer had a personal problem with someone living there but it was never to my knowledge discovered who or why.

The third was a friend of my dad’s who lived in a trailer near the trailer of a friend where Dad was couch surfing. Getting there involved turning onto a dirt road and then turning off on to an even smaller dirt road. She was killed by her domestic partner.

That third one, that’s the most preventable type of gun murder. And suicide is the most preventable type of gun death. My mother and brother each have several attempts in the past. Neither wants to die, they just have serious episodes and thankfully no guns.

Casual, reckless gun owners get called “law abiding” until a family member ends up dead. The lucky ones get to pretend that they are responsible because the dice stayed in their favor. We need actual standards and mandatory training.

My uncle was lucky that when my cousin stole his shotgun and hauled it into her tree house that no one got hurt. It was on a high shelf but he had a very smart kid with ADD and no impulse control.

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Framing most victims of gun violence as gangbangers and violent criminals is a convenient way for gun apologists to pretend the problem doesn’t extend to “real people.”

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Exactly this, even in the first case I mentioned, that guy wasn’t a gang member. I don’t know if the shooter was.

Gang activity is real but it always gets thrown out as a dog whistle to write off victims as part of some totally separate criminal world. And the obvious racist implications.

I grew up with some people who took drugs and occasionally stole things, but not in some crazy violent underworld. Crminal is not a class of people, just like sucidal is not an identity. These are things that happen to people who are real and have real lives.

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Sure, you’re absolutely right. The gun debate would be improved by both sides dropping all victim-blaming and ad-hominem arguments, but I’m not holding my breath.

Remember a great deal of money is spent to keep the debate unresolved, contentious and alive, since it has massive effects on elections. Splitting the electorate, preventing coalition-building that would undermine the two-party system is the point.

EDIT: @Ryuthrowsstuff adds, below, that keeping a rancorous debate going also sells guns.

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I think that’s what people are pushing back against.

Discounting total bans on gun ownership, which are typically pitched as constitutional ammendments (so neither unconstitutional, or really possible). There’s very little reason to believe any such bans are unconstitutional. Even under the weight of Heller, multiple hand gun bans have been held constitutional by lower courts. Including portions of the gun laws enacted in DC to replace the hand gun ban that fell in Heller. The automatic weapons ban still stands, is still considered constitutional. What you’ll find is even among people who think bans, however broad are part of the solution. Noone is explicitly calling for unconstitutional ones. People are specifically arguing that bans are constitutional if structured right (because they are, there are many such bans that are completely constitutional), and would like to see more or specific constitutional bans.

Accepting or assuming that any or a specific ban is automatically unconstitutional is effectively accepting the gun lobby’s hardline position as settled fact. But a fair bit of the debate is people across the political spectrum fighting to maintain that it isn’t. And to prevent that position from becoming deeply imbedded in constitutional law. That’s a rather critical part of this whole movement for better fire arms regulation thing. Because the further embedded the NRA’s take gets in the law. The more practically impossible it is to do anything on the gun front without a constitutional ammendment.

Personally I’m a litte frustrated with your line because an awful lot of people (myself included) have been doing exactly what you’re claiming needs to be done. For a very long time. And it hasn’t “won” any elections by suddenly altering the dynamic on guns. Because when an influential lobby group, in command of a rigidly ideological voting block. Actively punishes any mention, however reasoned, of any measure. You arent exactly dealing with that sort of situation.

IIRC Hillary Clinton has been calling for federally administered tiered licensing, universal background checks, combined with more limited and focused bans on specific weapons, and a whole bunch more comprehensive, inclusive shit. Since the 90’s. It hasn’t won her any elections. In fact she’s public enemy number one on the government is coming for your guns and kids end of the arguement.

The only position the left can take on guns that “wins elections” is the Bernie Sanders one. Voting against every gun regulation. Every time.

Moreover I think your discounting the level to which strong support for better regulation does win elections. Especially now its been a significant driver of turnout on the left and there are a great many blue states where a pro-gun dem or leftist can’t win.

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The 2 million dollars the NRA spent on lobbying in 2018 so far puts them way below Indian Casinos or Garbage companies in lobbying influence.

I don’t think the perception here is of gun control folks as evil maniacs, it is more like the relationship in Office Space between Lumbergh and Milton, where Lumbergh always wants just a little more space, or asks for one more thing. Right now, Lumbergh wants AR15s. Tomorrow he might ask for any rifle that can accept a magazine, or some other thing which will be explained as a common sense measure. But Lumbergh is always going to come back and ask for something else.

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You do realize that Milton was the one who flipped out and burned the building down at the end of the movie, right?

Are you SURE you want to use his character as a metaphor for people who want to buy AR-15s?

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That’s a very misleading number and doesn’t include individual contributions or those of NRA-associated political groups. I’d add a few decimal points to that figure to be more accurate.

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