EU is large for sure, but I don’t know how many mass killing over the whole region would pan out. Still something that happens 4 times over the whole of the EU is certainly less sensationalistic than in one nation. Would one even consider it a problem?
And yes that is my point with the UK numbers and time. I put in the time measurement for perspective. But if you don’t have anyone that crazy in your whole nation, time isn’t going to be a direct factor. You have to wait for more people to be born before the one crazy is born, or perhaps the one sorta crazy to degrade. Add to it the better health care, maybe the one person crazy enough is getting help. And certainly the UK gun laws do have an affect. I won’t pretend the don’t. They had confiscation and what is legal now is very small and restricted. I just think making laws to stop ONE person over TEN years is the height of insanity.
Well, it sure screwed up the university pistol club I was a member of in 1996…
I won’t claim to be all that bothered by the handgun ban although I did enjoy shooting, but people weren’t carrying them around anyway. Our club kept them locked away at the range. Hard to know if the handgun ban stopped any mass shootings between 1996 and 2010, given how rare they are in the UK anyway. IIRC, Hungerford led to a ban on (semi-?)automatic weapons, Dunblane on handguns.
A friend of my dad’s did get his house done over all all they did was find, force and empty his gun safe.
Honestly, I’m having a really hard time finding data. I’ve found lots of sources that compare lots of different things, but none of them seem useful. People try to paint Norway as being worse for mass shootings than the US by comparing per-capita mass shooting deaths over the last five years (thereby capturing Anders Breivik and ignoring the complete lack of these incidents in the decades before that - effectively saying that Norway is a violent society because they’re one mass murderer was especially good at mass murder). Some lists only contain events where 6 or more people died, others exclude school shootings. I couldn’t find anything to do a really good comparison with.
I’m not sure we know what our criteria are to qualify as part of this phenomenon.
What I can say is that the US is by far over-represented in school shootings (http://www.mibazaar.com/schoolshootings/), and that these theatre shootings seem to be the hot new trend in mass shootings that haven’t spread out of the US yet. I think it’s the school shootings that really got people thinking that the US has a problem.
But I still think this idea of people being “crazy” just doesn’t cut it. In 1979 Brenda Spencer opened fire on an elementary school. When asked why she did it, she said, “I don’t like Mondays, this livens up the day.” She is smiling in her mug shot. She was sixteen, not firing on her own school. She is smiling in her mug shot photo, which you can see on wikipedia. Now that’s crazy.
Anger and prejudice has paired up to cause a lot of deaths in history. If you want to say you can’t prevent having the occasional Brenda Spencer born in the world, I don’t know if I can disagree. But we aren’t talking about creating a massive mental health system to prevent ten deaths a year. Teaching empathy and anger management in elementary schools could help everyone, not just the people who might otherwise kill people. A better societal understanding mental illness (e.g., mentally ill people are not more likely to be violent and are far more likely to be the victims of violence) could help more mentally ill people participate in society instead of being pushed to the side, which, again, ends up helping everyone. Helping with poverty is definitely a good idea economically, but it is also the proof that the society doesn’t think human life is disposable.
I think these kinds of shootings (not the actual one that launched this conversation since it wasn’t really a shooting and more like an elaborate suicide, though we’ll never know what was actually going through his head) actually do point to the way that America is broken.
Maybe not, though. Things might just happen and that’s that. I don’t really know.
Either that, or comparing the universe to human laws is an exercise in anthropomorphism. Why it works is that I don’t need to believe in how subatomic particles work. Westerners often overlook the subtle anthropomorphisms which exist in their models of everything, because they have secular science, yet they refer to the universe and organisms as being constructs. As to say, made by somebody who conspicuously resembles a Mesopotamian tyrant with a knack for pottery.
People commonly refer to jumping electrons and gravity as obeying laws. And to plants and animals as creatures - literally, that which someone created. It might seem to be semantic nitpicking to some, but I think that people casually modelling even the most basic fundamentals of existence this way has pervasive and subtle effects which are yet easy to take for granted.
It is possible to implement “Universal Background Checks” without registration, without building a database of guns and gun owners. Yet every Democrat-backed proposal for UBC inherently populates such a database. Why?
[quote=“Chipsa, post:318, topic:63165”]
You have a list of where guns are, so when you decide to ban them in general, or a specific class of them, it’s relatively easy to know who’s doors to knock on.
[/quote]Ever the NRA strawman.[/quote]
How is it a strawman?
New York city used registration to enforce their 1991 “assault weapon” law, and more recently to enforce ammunition capacity limits. Recently Buffalo New York uses their pistol permit system to confiscate handguns from the widows of deceased owners… Illinois has an ongoing program to seize firearms from residents whose FOID has expired.
California routinely uses registration records for firearms confiscation, including when they reclassified the SKS. And the LAPD’s “gun squad” is infamous for their paperwork spot checks.
So basically it’s used to keep guns out of the hands of people who have them illegally, and to you, this is a bad thing?
If you want to be taken seriously, maybe you shouldn’t quote news websites that openly link and cite to white supremacists and call for the death of women - and also make sure your links actually work. When you quote websites like “PoorRichardsNews”, it makes it pretty clear your agenda is one of causing as much death and suffering as possible.
But hey, this isn’t really a surprise from someone like you, who has defended actual, literal nazis on these comments in the past.
Earlier in the thread, someone linked to this politifacts page, which has some useful data.
Cross referencing that list of countries with the list of 18 countries that are as free or free-er than the US AND which have lower levels of gun violence, we’re left with Australia, Canada, Finland, Germany, Norway, Switzerland, and UK (assuming UK = England, which it does at least as far as the relevant legislation goes).
The combined popn of those 7 countries is 210M, or 66% of the US.
Total Mass public shootings = 16, or 12% of the US
Total Killed = 153 or 31% of the US
Total wounded = 150, or 30% of the US
Total casualties = 303, or 31% of the US.
Normalising for population (ie, boosting the popn of those 7 countries to 310M)
… RoW v US
Shootings: 24 v 133 (18%)
Killed: 232 v 487 (48%)
Wounded: 227 v 505 (45%)
Casualties: 459 v 992 (46%)
Remember: this is specifically just mass killings, and compared to countries as free or free-er than the US. The RoW countries also represent a wide variety of cultures, and some of them have significant immigrant issues. Also remember that the trend in the US is upwards, while the trend elsewhere is downwards.
But that’s a good thing, right? I mean, you are the one who brought up spread spectrum frequency hopping, so you must have had a good reason to do so. Right?
I think some blood is on the corporate media’s hands here.
Just before the right winger shooting at the “Crazy Train” film, I predicted there’d be another copycat shooting shortly after watching (gag) some corporate media coverage of the Colorado theatre shooting as the verdict was getting closer. MSNBC, for example, was basically calling Holmes the “Dark Knight Shooter” on the air. I gritted my teeth and told my GF we could expect a copycat soon. It happened several days later.
The media glamorizes these killers and disturbed copycats inevitably get motivated to claim their sick fame.
If you’re not trying to make a point, then that’d make you a troll, wouldn’t it? Though, since you appear to be dismissing the text you quoted, I was assuming the point was that the NRA is badwrong, and anything they say can be safely dismissed as coming from badwrong people. Because all rightthinking people are against the NRA.
But I could be wrong about your point. You could not have one. You could just be a troll.
Sure, if people prefer to dwell in delusional models of the world at large. I doubt if it helps anybody.
Why did I mention this? My point was that many people rely upon this to work, and it does so automatically. Regardless of who calls or what they say. And it is so seamless that the users don’t even need to think about it. This is because it is a protocol. Since it is built–in, it doesn’t need to be “enforced”. In contrast, governmental machinery is never straightforward, because it is being made up by people for whom “being in power” is more important than having everything work. I prefer DIY government to be based more upon protocols which can be easily used than some ad-hoc business which needs constant fixing.
Whether or not you find it relevant, or good, is up to you.
I see you trust the law. It is pretty easy for the law to go wrong.
In some third-party website, when I was looking for something entirely unrelated, I found a story from former Yugoslavia. Somebody had a HAM radio as a hobby. Was properly registered, had a callsign. One day the cops came and seized the hardware, from all the registered people.
I don’t consider it to be a good idea to let the govt know what communication and defense articles one has in ownership. Some big cheese then gets an idea that something should be changed and not allowed anymore, and it gets way too easy to enforce. Same for lapses in permit-keeping; you forget to beg for extending your permissions, and then the cops come to take your property away.
Meh. You’re just jealous because von Braun did better job than you could ever do, and all the historical pooh-poohing won’t make all the satellites that are his legacy any less useful.
It’s easy to say that, since for every other post people complain that I don’t write a whole essay to support it. The funny thing is that the same people who complain tend to be those who don’t actually posit anything of their own. If you don’t like or agree with what I say is fine, but you don’t seem to be directly refuting it, nor offering any better alternative.
And yes, all models are incomplete. That’s why they are models.
Are models and plans the same thing? Anyway, I am about as apolitical as they come.
