Agreed, and what I took away from that was that if you want to tackle gun violence, focus your energy and resources and money there.
Disclaimer: I don’t own a gun. I don’t want to own a gun. I’ve never been shot, but I have had a gun pointed at me by someone who was more likely than not prepared to shoot me if I didn’t make the right move. At this point, I feel that having one in my home with my 3 kids would put us all in greater danger. I realize not everyone feels the same way because not everyone has had the same experiences in life. I have no answers. But when you want to solve a problem you target where the problem is the biggest. That’s inner cities, it seems.
I think it would be instructive to plot that cdc data next to the rate for violent gun crimes. During the 80s the rate of violent crime continued to rise even as murders and homicides dropped. I’m not sure what’s happened since but it seems most if not all of that drop is better credited to advancing medical techniques than any other factor.
There’s a fairly close correlation between individual gun ownership (which has been in general decline despite gun sales being high from collectors/hoarders) and gun violence, though there’s more to it. There seems to be be a number of factors that contributed to the increase of gun violence that started in the 70s peaked in the 80s and started to decline except for the peak in the 90s (changes in policing, gang violence, imprisonment, etc.), the one constant is that gun ownership rates have correlate to gun death rates for a long time.
The trick is educating people about the data which shows that individual gun ownership is harmful to communities, societies, and families, despite the naive feeling of security and protection (and the fact that guns can be fun toys).
I am not clever enough to come up with a fair and reasonable way to do that. But I do think that solving real world problems means that one must be able to look at honest data about what the problem is. If your data has been manipulated by someone with political motives, then solutions based on that data are unlikely to solve the real problem you are trying to solve. Instead, your solution just advances someone’s political agenda.
I seem to recall that was the period when crack was spreading rapidly. As one academic explained when asked why the crack epidemic started to go down “the addicts and dealers died.”
So long as they are white. Interestingly, the rate of gun ownership among black Americans is less than that for white Americans, but the odds of being killed by a gun are the other way round.
My situation is exactly the same. The person who pointed a gun at me was a guard at a car plant in Fort Wayne, because I attempted to walk through the gate for cars and not walk along the fence to the one for pedestrians, and then back again to my car.
What’s really important to remember is that when guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns. Oh, and also that there are so many guns out there that if we make it harder to get them, criminals will still find ways to get them.
Okay, never mind, I can’t sustain the snark any longer. This latest shooter, I’ve read, had fourteen guns, all obtained legally. If it was much harder to get them, maybe he wouldn’t have gone through the trouble and risk of getting them. So maybe this mass murder wouldn’t have happened. I don’t see why that’s hard to understand.
I’m reminded of George Buehler’s comment about carrying a gun on a boat: that if you should be boarded by pirates chances are they are much, much more experienced at shooting people than you are.
No amount of target practice prepares someone for actually shooting to kill. In the days of conscript armies, most people on the battlefield did not shoot at other people; in fact, their function was to act as decoys and give the real soldiers some protection, hence the expression “cannon fodder”. It is easier for military aviators to kill because they mostly don’t see the consequences of their actions.
Yet every time there is a mass shooting some of these ordinary people will panic and buy a gun which is probably a bigger danger to themselves than to a villain.
I think the NRA has a lot to answer for here, but maybe not in the way it’s usually assumed. They prevent any kind of gun regulation, yes; but they also campaign for, and represent, a social attitude that the solution to violence is violence. Canadians have guns too, yet somehow a civilian-owned gun in the US is much deadlier than one in Canada. Canadian cops have guns, but they don’t kill people the way US cops do.
It almost makes me wonder if a better tactic would be to give up on gun control completely, and agree that guns will never be regulated in the US. It wouldn’t stop the periodic random massacres, but at least they’d stop being turned into ad campaigns for why people need more shootings.
A few college students are acceptable collateral damage to allow you to keep your guns so you can start a civil war when Obama comes to take them off you.
Also, cars and swimming pools are really dangerous too, so stop focussing on mass shootings.
That study, reproduced in Quartz, is a perfect example of data presented in a way that pushes an agenda. Gun ownership was estimated, if I recall correctly, by suicide rate. I am not sure on that, because the link is dead on the website you referenced. Most of the analysis that use these data sets put Wyoming right up there near the top for gun violence, even though deaths by firearm in that state each year can usually be counted on one hand. But Illinois does not make your list at all, even though it listed 1175 deaths with firearms in 2013. Do you honestly believe that Cody is a more dangerous place than East St. Louis?
A year or two ago I went through the best lists I could could find on mass killings in the United States (sadly I can’t find my old notes, but it started in the early 1900s, maybe 1910-something) using the FBI definition of 4 or more deaths (not including the murder) versus deaths due to heart disease, the number one killer in this country. Did some curve fitting and regression analysis…
As I recall, if the trend continues (and it seems to be going strong), by 2160 mass murder will be the number one killer of United States citizens.
The numbers are misleading as they are including suicides, which comprise two-thirds of the number. That’s why it’s titled “Gun Violence” and not “Homicides.”
Click through the link in the original post - that data, along with more, is there. Total incidence is higher (of course) but the decline tracks with the drop in gun homicides.
So, you obviously must have performed this “analysis” in '92 - '93 as Pew states the gun homicide rate is down by 49% since then. Either that, your basis was wrong, or you need to revisit Stat 101.
There is no realistic solution. A significant portion of the American populace thinks that the right to own a gun is worth 30,000 American lives a year. They’d probably maintain that belief if it was 10 times that figure. Which is why the repealing the 2nd amendment - the truly honest way to approach this - won’t happen in my lifetime.
You live in a nation where guns are culturally central to the identity of a huge number of citizens, and the fact that you don’t subscribe to that belief means nothing in the face of such large numbers of people who do.
Sorry, but welcome to democracy, where you learn that there are a lot of people who believe in everything you don’t. They get to impose gun “rights” on you. You want to change that, you have to persuade them. And given that statistically you abhor everything they stand for, that’s not likely to happen.
Or to put it another way. There’s probably a 100,000 Americans willing to kill to keep their guns. I doubt there’s 100 Americans willing to kill to deprive Americans of guns.
(And yes, I thank God I live in Canada. We’re just as violent, but end up with 1/6th the homicide rate.)
