It’s not just that people are more familiar with cars, it’s that cars are measurably less dangerous when you compare odds of death/injury per encounter. Most city dwellers will encounter hundreds or thousands of people actively using cars before they finish their morning coffee. On a case-by-case basis, you’re much less likely to be hurt or killed by a person driving a car than by a person holding a gun.
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[facetious]
Clear evidence that everyone should always be armed. Then, people will encounter a lot more guns, and the ratio of (guns used to hurt or kill you/guns encountered) will go down.
[/facetious]
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Guns don’t kill people, people insisting that the right to own guns does not come with any responsibilities do.
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What in the description leads you to believe that he had magazines that hold greater than 10 rounds? In California new purchases of magazines must be 10rds or less unless owned prior to the year 2000 (when CA SB23 went into affect) IIRC.
If he had the dreaded “hi-caps” aka “standard OEM parts” I am pretty sure it would be headline fodder.
The early descriptions indicated a rapid barrage of shots that were more than a couple pistols could fire off. At this point it sounds like he was using 10 shot clips which were a factor in limiting the fatalities.
I doubt it was much of a factor. Swapping magazines, even for a novice, takes very little time.
Obviously it’s speculation. I haven’t ever tried swapping a magazine while driving and shooting out the window of a moving car, but it seems like it’d be a little more complex than you suggest.
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It hasn’t come up much, but there was a vaguelyey similarey car-only incident in 2001 (Isla Vista/UCSB) when someone with recognized-in-advance mental issues murdered 4 with his Saab.
David Attias http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Teenager-Charged-With-Murder-In-Car-Deaths-In-2947894.php
We won’t know anything about the limitations if any that the 10rd magazines imposed. It is pure speculation to suggest they had any affect. It would be somewhat useful to know how many shots he fired before shooting himself, but even that may not be indicative.
Widespread gun ownership in the USA just doesn’t follow the same fact pattern and history of other modern 1st world nations. Also, many of the other countries are hard to compare because they don’t have the same disparity of income, racial/heritage/creed/immigration mixing/lack of homogenaity that the US does.
The largest numbers of deaths are concentrated around poverty ghettos and get discounted by those who live in relative safety outside of them, along with the statistics they generate. Probably similar in other countries like Brazil with favelas. Are the problems highly concentrated or spread and distributed throughout the fabric of the whole? In the USA the drivers of the numbers are highly concentrated, but the mass shootings seems to be spread throughout the whole (though statistically very small in number of deaths).
I think it ultimately comes down to a few core items:
-do you believe law abiding civilians should have unbiased access to guns?
-do you believe is is wrong for the government to confiscate property?
Given the number of guns already owned in the USA the two above issues probably outline the extreme positions and of course there are a broad mixture of compromise options in between.
They are much easier with guns, which is why they happen way more often than guns. Derp…
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High gun ownership = higher rate of gun death. Vermont has average rates, while some of the typical extremely red states have much higher, and the deaths to match.
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Don’t you think it speaks volumes that you had to dig back to 2001 to find a similar example of someone using a car as a weapon of mass murder, and that even in that case the death toll was relatively low compared to most mass shootings?
Factor in the fact that almost all Americans have access to a at least one car compared to the much smaller number who have access to guns, and you’ve just made an excellent case for the “guns are more dangerous than cars” theory.
Right—it’s the ethnic minorities and the immigrants causing the problem. Even though it’s white dudes committing most of the mass shootings, I knew it was really because of the ethnic minorities and the immigrants.
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Mixing numbers here. Total shootings vs mass shootings.
At the top of a search I did on “santa barbara” “mass shooting” was a six-death mass shooting by a female postal worker from 2006. It’s fairly amazing how much slop is being thrown at the wall by the gun-fondling community every time one of their fellow gun nuts has a bad day, or someone gets hold of one of the guns they sold on the black market, er, reported stolen. And the slop they throw at the wall all slides right back down to the ground. I think they’re trying to make a pyramid.
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The 2001 rundown came immediately to mind - I didn’t have to search hard for it at all because my brother was a UCSB student at the time. It probably didn’t hit national news, but was pretty big CA news when it happened. The current manifesto even planned to steal his dad’s SUV in order to run more people down. Sadly enough I read about people purposefully running down others quite often (including many bicyclists), I only pointed out this one because of the many similarities.
Also, I wasn’t trying to blame or bash immigrants, but I think that when many people point to other countries that don’t have the same societal problems much of it stems from them having a single dominant/homogenous cultural and racial makeup, particularly examples like Japan and Northern Europe. People seem to act and operate in a more orderly fashion and have more similar standards of living which we won’t/don’t have in the US, and I don’t expect us to have. I’m very glad to live in a country that believes in ethos and not bloodline for citizenship, but it does create more complications for us (along with the crazy history of racial discrimination and its lasting effects)
Please notice how only three people of over 15 attacked died. I think deaths would’ve been higher if we were talking about high speed moving pieces of metal, piercieng skin and bone. But no, it’s probably for the best.
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Rodgers only killed three people with a gun (and injured a further 7 I’m led to believe), though I suppose he gets a bonus point for killing himself after. Fine, you win then. If guns hadn’t been part of the equation, the perpetrator would probably have survived. Totally different outcome.
I think people should have to take two exams per year, every year. First is the stupid test. You HAVE to pass it. Then, if you passed, you have to take the asshole test, to prove that you aren’t one. If you pass both with an 80 or better, you can own a gun or a Hummer or an espresso machine. Your choice. Next year you can pick a different one.
I think your premise is just wrong. Chicago and Toronto are, in a lot of ways, very comparable cities. Chicago’s murder rates is between four and five times as high as Toronto’s. In both cities a substantial part of the murder rate is gang-on-gang violence and collateral damage from gang-on-gang violence. But from the stats I found (admittedly from the mid-90s for some reason) it appears the number of intimate partner homicides in Chicago is greater than the total number of homicides in Toronto.
These types of homicides span income levels. There are more people in Chicago killing their spouses and boyfriends/girlfriends over relationship disputes than there are gang members killing gang members in Toronto.
I know in recent years Chicago has become a real hotbed for murder, but in the 90s it wasn’t the murder capital of the country by a long way. And even if Chicago does have a problem with murder, the point is that the problem with murder isn’t isolated. It appears to affect all portions of the population.
And mass shooting may be statistically rare, but murder is statistically rare. The US has an outrageous number of mass shootings. I’m not saying that having more guns around does this, because there are tons of guns in Switzerland and Israel and they don’t have the same problems. I think the attitudes in US gun culture contribute though - the right to have a gun, regardless of how responsible you are with it, is taken as absolute. It’s much more complicated than that, but it seems weird to suggest the cultural relationship with guns isn’t a factor when lots of people are getting killed by guns.
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Wait, wait, wait…you’re saying the state with the motto “Freedom and Unity” has lower gun ownership rates than your average red state? Very interesting.
[edit] sorry, confused Vermont for New Hampshire there for a minute.
Vt is just the boring “Green Mountain” state. Which is just a translation of the name. I guess we didn’t feel the need of a jingle to remember. Too busy shoveling snow.
