It’s a reasonable threshold, but the definition would lump together the following scenarios:
And I’m not sure it’s helpful to conflate acts of violence with such disparate causes (and, most likely, solutions).
The motives for the shootings differ but the common denominator is that the shooters all had easy access to guns. That’s why no other first-world country has to deal with piles of bullet-riddled corpses on such a regular basis.
Besides, all the people bandying about auto death numbers upthread didn’t specify circumstances. Why do we lump drunk drivers together with people who died due to mechanical failure?
Maybe, but I have a sense that criminal gangs typically don’t get their weapons through legal channels in the first place, so the usual anti-gun control arguments about this apply. DC has high gun crime rates and very strict gun control laws. And I understand the counterargument that strict gun control laws aren’t necessarily very effective when there are less stringent laws over a border just a few miles away. But. There’s no good direct evidence that criminals in DC are driving to Virginia to get their guns, so this counterargument is largely supposition. Meanwhile, the fact that DC has worse gun crime rates than a lot of places with less stringent gun control laws suggests that such laws have very little effect.
Unfortunately, my suspicions regarding where criminal gangs get their weapons put me in tinfoil hat territory, so I’m not enthusiastic about putting it in a comment here.
That said, I do imagine there must be some reasonable gun control regime somewhere between banning guns outright and the status quo that might help to prevent mass shootings.
Well, that’s begging the question. Canada has similar rates of gun ownership, but much less gun-related crime.
This is a good point, especially in regard to anyone who says we’re not doing enough about automobile deaths. We’ve had serious, costly, long-standing federal programs to decrease drunk driving and increase the proportion of people wearing seatbelts. A more granular analysis showing the relative frequency of different kinds of deaths by automobile would be very interesting, I think. I suspect deaths due to drunk driving have fallen, while deaths due to texting or other mobile phone use have turned into a big chunk of the road fatalities per year.
Similarly, we know violent crime in general is falling. It would be interesting to see, e.g., if gang violence is actually rising at the same time that overall violent crime is falling and is what is driving the increase in mass shootings, or if gang violence is falling at the same time and the increase in mass shootings is more driven by cases like Adam Lanza or James Holmes. (Or whether ideologically-motivated shootings by white supremacists or anti-abortion activists might be driving the rise.)
I would define it as any defined group one of whose major functions is criminal activity. Regardless of age or ethnicity. And yes, I support decriminalization of drugs as a significant way to reduce the attractiveness of gang activity.
If you want to reduce gun violence, sooner or later you have to think about who is committing it, and target (sorry!) those people.
It might feel good to say “White male Christians are doing the killing, so let’s focus our effort on gun shows, gun dealers etc. where white male Christians hang out.”
That may have a measurable effect on gun violence, or it may not. I suppose even if it doesn’t, many would be pleased that at least they’d managed to piss off a lot of white male Christians, which may be an end in itself.
I don’t think I disagree with you.
I think it’s quite likely that social interventions of various sorts are absolutely more likely to reduce gun violence than will trying to reduce the number of guns, the success likelihood of the latter being fuck-all.
Unemployment, actually. The hardest hit demographics/areas saw the biggest decline in car death rates. Less use = fewer deaths and injuries. I think the per-mile-driven death rates didn’t see a drop like that - it’s been more of a long-term steady drop from regulation, enforcement and implementation of safety features.
I found this analysis - they list recession and wider usage of technologies like ESC as main reasons.
I regret that I had but one like to give.
It’s much more difficult for a criminal to get their hands on a pistol or an AR-15 in the United States than in most developed countries. Restricting access to guns works in places where it’s actually attempted in earnest.
As you note regional gun laws are ineffective when a would-be criminal can just drive to the next county and buy all the guns they want. The only effective legislation would have to be implemented on a national level, as it is in every nation that has effective gun control laws.
That’s because they don’t just let any nut job off the street buy a gun, and the vast majority of their guns are designed (and used) for hunting. They don’t have a powerful gun pushing for the idea that all citizens should be allowed to carry concealed handguns into schools and theaters and churches. Canada is an example of a country that supports responsible gun ownership, and I’d be happy if we traded in our gun regulations for theirs.
Even so we carefully regulate the manufacture, sale, ownership and use of cars because we recognize that they are inherently dangerous objects. If only we applied the same approach to firearms.
We don’t really.
Manufacture? I think it’s the same: I can build a car without breaking the law and I can build a gun without breaking the law.
Ownership? I think just about anybody is allowed to own a car. I think it’s illegal in a lot of places for felons to own a gun. So firearm ownership rules are stricter. I could go on Craigslist today and buy 5 cars. The ease of buying a gun varies greatly across the US.
Use? There are strict rules about the operation of cars on public roads. Even on private property, there are rules against things like drunk driving. Likewise, there are also strict rules about the use of guns in public places and even on private property.
If you accidentally kill somebody with your car, you will likely get very minimal punishment, if any. If you accidentally kill somebody with a gun, punishments are often quite harsh.
Edit: One idea I wish we would borrow from the world of cars would be mandatory insurance. If you want to use a car in a public place, in most places you are required to have insurance. I think we should apply the same standard to guns. If you take them out of your home, you must have liability insurance.
Source? In the US WAAAAY more guns are used for hunting than hurting people as well. You can still get “assault rifles” (semi-autos) in Canada. Some are banned, while others are restricted, based on lists that aren’t consistent. You can have two rifles that are more or less identical in function and have one restricted and the other not. Though Canada does allow imports from China, so they get some neat Chinese clones of Garands and broom handled Mausers (think Han Solo) from Norinco that we can’t import directly into the US.
Show me where these gun laws work though. Here are Canada’s laws:
Here is Canada’s homicide rate:
“Live by the sword, die by the sword”
With any luck, the gun-happy killers have been doing eachother in.
The statistics on this are somewhat encouraging, but not slam-dunk. As usual, statistical arguments in the social sciences simply do not have enough power to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree.
Yes, but I still don’t think that’s actually what’s happening. I’d love to see some data about the origins of guns used in crimes in the DC area. I strongly suspect that few of them would have been legally purchased from legitimate firearm retailers within 100 miles of DC.
There are alternate hypotheses which anti-gun control arguments will obviously invoke. Specifically, US has higher population density, more racial diversity, more poverty, less welfare, much higher incarceration rates, stricter sentencing laws…all sorts of factors that might contribute to gun crime besides just availability of guns.
That said, I’m not opposed to imposing whatever gun control regime Canada has in place, if only to see how it goes.
For the type of law that halts the sale of guns, the dip may take a long time to appear. Generally, there is a correlation between the number of guns available and the amount of gun crime in a place. If the US were to suddenly restrict the sale of guns it could take decades to have an effect.
I really wonder who the creator of that site is. They seem a bit…obsessed.
And apparently they don’t include suicides or suicide attempts in the numbers. Which is known to be more likely when a gun is available. Like I said: what is the bee in this person’s bonnet?
9 out of 10!
Lotta bites there, bub.
The situation in Puerto Rico would seem to support this idea. They have extremely strict gun laws, but their rate of gun deaths is six times the national average. They are an island and can’t drive anywhere to buy guns.
Actually, if you look at the gun crime analysis of large cities, that is what is happening. Most of the people killed in gun crime in large cities have multiple arrest records and involved involved in illicit activities.
Though there are always more entering the system so I don’t know if that is why the reduction in crime. Though, in the book Freakonomics, they argue a decent case that the drop in crime in the 90s correlates with the legalization of abortion. So perhaps less poor babies that can’t be cared for properly being born did lead to less people becoming criminals.
That freakonomics explanation has become passe. The latest explanation is lead:
(In reality, I think both legality of abortions and reduction in environmental lead could have contributed)
