Mass Shootings and Gun Debate 2018 Thread

[zephyr]

Yeah thats true. Knives kill and so do crossbows which i had held at my head once (illegal weapon, he was nuts and killed himself with it) so there is no stopping someone intent on murder.

Its the ease of being able to kill and the amount of carnage that can be curtailed, knives do kill but its hard to wound over 500 in a minute .


Weapons that are easily available that can do that amount of damage, why would having them around be a good thing if having people armed with them makes people want to have their own weapons in defense?


Maybe the govt wants to put the lives of kids etc first before the right to have these weapons.

I dunno. Maybe the leftys are all mean and stuff taking guns away or rightys are all gun ho and couldnt care less about the death toll from gun rampages.


Both sides should see dollar signs in licensing and registering all guns and ammo. Great way to make money.

 

[JessFR]

Instead of taking them away, how about just having a register for firearms, a license proving that they are owned by trained responsible people and also kept out of reach of kids etc?


Having to pass a competence test for a firearm and have a license for it doesnt take them away, they are designed to kill so shouldnt they be taken seriously?

I agree with you entirely except regarding gun registration. But even then it's not so much that I disagree in principle, just that you'd never get the pro gun people to agree to it.

They're well aware that gun registration has been the prelude to outright confiscation everywhere its happened. So they'll never agree. Since I don't really agree with confiscation either I can't say I don't somewhat sympathize with that position. So it's not that I have an outright problem with registration as much as history has shown it gets misused.

It's also not just about confiscation. Gun registration lists in some places have wound up in the wrong hands and made those gun owners a target for robbery. By some places I'm talking about Australia not the US. But it's another consideration. But yeah I agree with you on licensing and training.

Yeah thats true. Knives kill and so do crossbows which i had held at my head once (illegal weapon, he was nuts and killed himself with it) so there is no stopping someone intent on murder.

Its the ease of being able to kill and the amount of carnage that can be curtailed, knives do kill but its hard to wound over 500 in a minute .


Weapons that are easily available that can do that amount of damage, why would having them around be a good thing if having people armed with them makes people want to have their own weapons in defense?


Maybe the govt wants to put the lives of kids etc first before the right to have these weapons.

I dunno. Maybe the leftys are all mean and stuff taking guns away or rightys are all gun ho and couldnt care less about the death toll from gun rampages.


Both sides should see dollar signs in licensing and registering all guns and ammo. Great way to make money.

I don't agree with the idea about how many people guns can cell vs knives. Not entirely anyway. No mass shooting in the US has had hundreds of victims. They've had up to dozens. There have been mass stabbings with similar victim numbers in other countries. But obviously if you have access to guns you're probably not gonna go with a knife anyway. Then you have people run just run a bunch of people over, which can also be a similar victim number.

It's not entirely gun exclusive. And it's not about wanting a gun to protect yourself from other people legally owning guns.

I live in Australia, and I'm a heroin addict with a relatively less than upstanding social circle. I've seen God knows how much gun availability in criminal hands. In terms of wanting a gun for self defense. The criminals get them anyway, and they're the ones I'm worried about, not the legal gun owners that are very rarely responsible for anything.

And.. Here's the other difference between a gun and say, a knife. Not everyone is physically equal. There's no way I'm going to be able to have good odds at over powering a grown man. Most women aren't going to be able to have good odds all other things equal in a straight up confrontation. Unless you involve a gun. A gun levels the playing field.

There's lots of complex interconnected issues relating to legal gun ownership and I won't pretend there aren't problems with it or that there aren't genuine causes for concern. But I just don't think it's right to take guns away from the entire public community. Everyone. Unless there's no other option. And no one's given me good cause and I've never found good cause to think that extreme is the only way. Not compared to say a licensing system as mentioned earlier.

Like, women make up such a small proportion of the types of crime were talking about. Why do women have to be banned from owning guns when all the reasons almost exclusively apply to men? Sounds like bullshit to me. Sounds to me like the general trend where society is only equal when it means women get screwed as a result.

I think people just tend to be unimaginative in general when it comes to this kind of thing. Always going for such simple and extreme solutions to any problem.

 

[JGrimez]

Weapons that are easily available that can do that amount of damage, why would having them around be a good thing if having people armed with them makes people want to have their own weapons in defense?

The states with the most gun freedom in the US have relatively low homicide rates. When you take those states adding up to the population of Australia and compare them, the homicide rate is not that much higher. The highest murder rates are in densely-populated metro areas where gun laws are the strictest. I believe 2 counties in the US are responsible for close to half of the gun homicides. Brazil has a very thorough and strict system of gun regulation. I think there are close to 60,000 murders a year there from illegal firearms.

 

[JGrimez]

"I don't care to own a gun, but I'm glad my neighbor does"

 

[JessFR]

The states with the most gun freedom in the US have relatively low homicide rates. When you take those states adding up to the population of Australia and compare them, the homicide rate is not that much higher. The highest murder rates are in densely-populated metro areas where gun laws are the strictest. I believe 2 counties in the US are responsible for close to half of the gun homicides. Brazil has a very thorough and strict system of gun regulation. I think there are close to 60,000 murders a year there from illegal firearms.

If you're suggesting that gun control that just involves Banning guns is ineffective. I completely agree.

If you're suggesting that gun control causes increased crime of any sort of that crime goes down as a result of increased gun ownership, I completely disagree.

It's worth keeping some of these stats in perspective. Yes, many areas have low crime and high gun ownership. They are generally rural areas where everyone knows everyone. And being rural areas have higher gun ownership. But the relationship is purely incidental. Likewise many high crime areas put in place poorly thought out gun control laws to try and reduce the crime rates. Correlation yes but no greater connection beyond that. It is pretty notable how ineffective gun control laws as they've been written in many urban areas of the US have been though.

 

[Xorkoth]

No mass shooting in the US has had hundreds of victims.

Just wanted to point out that the Las Vegas shooting recently had over 500 victims, 58 (59?) of whom died, the rest were injured, with many of those near death and facing long recoveries. I think the idea that "mass stabbings" could get anywhere even close to that number is absurd, unless it was some organized thing with dozens of participants. Whereas, some crazy could get it in his head to put a bump stock on a semiautomatic rifle and open fire in a subway or a crowded street or a nightclub or a concert (which is exactly what happened in Las Vegas) and hit hundreds of people before anyone had any time to react. And the Las Vegas shooter did it from a hotel room window at range. What's he gonna do to equal such a mass stabbing? Have 500+ throwing knives lined up next to him and start throwing? Run down there and stab 500 people in the crowd with no one doing anything to stop him after the first few?

 

[JessFR]

Sorry, that was my bad. I poorly worded my post. By hundreds of victims I meant dead victims specifically.

Strictly speaking I think the word victim should probably be clarified in general if you're going to compare knives and guns and weapons generally where the goal is to kill as many people as you can.

I mean, of you're a student in a school on the day of a mass shooting. I'd say you were a victim of it even of you weren't injured at all. It's a somewhat vague word.

 

[JGrimez]

Authorities never properly investigated or explained Vegas though. So it's not useful in any context.
They also completely dropped the ball on the Florida kid who they knew was a threat.
Didn't the previous administration allow a heap of guns to go to gangs which ended up killing Americans
How about the gun laws are fine it's just the government is freaking incompetent.

 

[Captain.Heroin]

Just wanted to point out that the Las Vegas shooting recently had over 500 victims, 58 (59?) of whom died, the rest were injured, with many of those near death and facing long recoveries. I think the idea that "mass stabbings" could get anywhere even close to that number is absurd, unless it was some organized thing with dozens of participants. Whereas, some crazy could get it in his head to put a bump stock on a semiautomatic rifle and open fire in a subway or a crowded street or a nightclub or a concert (which is exactly what happened in Las Vegas) and hit hundreds of people before anyone had any time to react. And the Las Vegas shooter did it from a hotel room window at range. What's he gonna do to equal such a mass stabbing? Have 500+ throwing knives lined up next to him and start throwing? Run down there and stab 500 people in the crowd with no one doing anything to stop him after the first few?

One individual could use aerosolized drugs or neve agents.

Or explosives.

Nothing changed after mcVeigh. Why are we going to take the guns away?

 

[JessFR]

I really don't see better enforcement solving school shootings. It's basic reality. If a large number of kids can access guns, a few of them will go on a killing spree.

So long as you have a well armed largely untrained populous many of those kids will have access to guns. It's gonna happen.

I've said before that I think people refuse to keep these spree killings in statistical perspective, so perhaps you could argue they're not statistically significant enough to warrant intervention. Buy if they do, I don't see how you can solve it without stricter gun laws.

Well, actually, there might be one other way. Get rid of the schools instead. Replace them with a less centralized education system. Frankly I've long thought our method of educating people was outdated and extremely ineffective.

But nobodies gonna suggest that, cause like I said. No imagination

 

[Xorkoth]

Ultimately I don't think the mass shooting issue is caused by our gun laws, at all. The mass shooting issue is a multifaceted, complex thing and it's hard to say what the cause is... I'd say there are a variety of causes. I think the main one is the fact that our society is sick right now. We have a lot of immensely frustrated, scared and angry people, which is the result of our ability to support ourselves and our families being slowly eroded since Reagan in the 80s. We have an intensely partisan political situation filled with hateful rhetoric. We have a generation of parents and adults who have failed children in many ways, leading to disturbed teenagers/adults who decide killing a bunch of people is the best way to be heard or whatever it is that goes through their heads. We also have a history at this point of mass shootings and those mass shootings feed into the idea that a disturbed person could do a mass shooting.

That said, if the only guns people could get couldn't spray dozens of bullets very quickly, the lethality of mass shootings would be reduced. At this point changing the laws probably wouldn't stop people from getting them because they're already out there. But do we just say, oh well, too late, nothing we can do about it, let's do nothing, or do we do something and hope that years from now the problem will be reduced?

The most important thing we can do, though, is to eliminate the root causes of the problem, which, again, is not guns. To do that we need to get the corruption out of our government and start aiming our society again towards building up the middle class, and making it easier for everyone to support themselves and their families without constantly being terrified.

Authorities never properly investigated or explained Vegas though. So it's not useful in any context.
They also completely dropped the ball on the Florida kid who they knew was a threat.
Didn't the previous administration allow a heap of guns to go to gangs which ended up killing Americans
How about the gun laws are fine it's just the government is freaking incompetent.

I don't think the gun laws are "fine", mostly I just don't think semiautomatic weapons should be available to civilians, and even (much) more so than that, I think the gun show loophole where you can skip any sort of background checking is absurd and needs to change. But I do agree the government is incompetent in many cases, most notably the failure to act on tips given repeatedly about the Florida school shooter.

Sorry, that was my bad. I poorly worded my post. By hundreds of victims I meant dead victims specifically.

Strictly speaking I think the word victim should probably be clarified in general if you're going to compare knives and guns and weapons generally where the goal is to kill as many people as you can.

I mean, of you're a student in a school on the day of a mass shooting. I'd say you were a victim of it even of you weren't injured at all. It's a somewhat vague word.

Noted. But in my mind, when we're talking about people attacked in mass attacks, "victim" should refer to anyone injured, not just deaths. If someone set off a bomb and 1 person was killed but 11 were maimed, wouldn't you say there would be more than one victim? I'd certainly draw the line at those injured or killed though and not start getting really vague about emotional damages or whatever. I don't think it's vague to suggest that anyone injured in an attack is a victim.

 

[swilow]

One individual could use aerosolized drugs or neve agents.

Or explosives.

Nothing changed after mcVeigh. Why are we going to take the guns away?

To the average person, obtaining a gun is going to be significantly easier than obtaining either aerosolized drugs or nerve agents. I think that is largely the point. I am sure that if these things were available, and in hundreds of millions of homes, we would see these sort of attacks.

They aren't, guns are, so that whole line of argument just seems like obfuscation (with all due respect dear Cap'n). We need to deal with problems that are real. So, perhaps we should restrict guns and certain aspects of them so that you don't continue to to have the problems you imagine that you would have with nerve agents/aeroslised drugs.

I'm all for freedom, and part of that freedom can be a choice to restrict certain things for the good of bigger things.

 

[JessFR]

Ultimately I don't think the mass shooting issue is caused by our gun laws, at all. The mass shooting issue is a multifaceted, complex thing and it's hard to say what the cause is... I'd say there are a variety of causes. I think the main one is the fact that our society is sick right now. We have a lot of immensely frustrated, scared and angry people, which is the result of our ability to support ourselves and our families being slowly eroded since Reagan in the 80s. We have an intensely partisan political situation filled with hateful rhetoric. We have a generation of parents and adults who have failed children in many ways, leading to disturbed teenagers/adults who decide killing a bunch of people is the best way to be heard or whatever it is that goes through their heads. We also have a history at this point of mass shootings and those mass shootings feed into the idea that a disturbed person could do a mass shooting.

That said, if the only guns people could get couldn't spray dozens of bullets very quickly, the lethality of mass shootings would be reduced. At this point changing the laws probably wouldn't stop people from getting them because they're already out there. But do we just say, oh well, too late, nothing we can do about it, let's do nothing, or do we do something and hope that years from now the problem will be reduced?

The most important thing we can do, though, is to eliminate the root causes of the problem, which, again, is not guns. To do that we need to get the corruption out of our government and start aiming our society again towards building up the middle class, and making it easier for everyone to support themselves and their families without constantly being terrified.



I don't think the gun laws are "fine", mostly I just don't think semiautomatic weapons should be available to civilians, and even (much) more so than that, I think the gun show loophole where you can skip any sort of background checking is absurd and needs to change. But I do agree the government is incompetent in many cases, most notably the failure to act on tips given repeatedly about the Florida school shooter.



Noted. But in my mind, when we're talking about people attacked in mass attacks, "victim" should refer to anyone injured, not just deaths. If someone set off a bomb and 1 person was killed but 11 were maimed, wouldn't you say there would be more than one victim? I'd certainly draw the line at those injured or killed though and not start getting really vague about emotional damages or whatever. I don't think it's vague to suggest that anyone injured in an attack is a victim.

No I don't either. But once we expand the line to injured, it becomes much harder to compare. How injured is injured? How bad is bad enough?

Personally I do think emotional harm should count in general. But back on topic, my point was that victim numbers can easily be similar between mass stabbings and mass shootings. And bombings are probably worst of all.

And about bombings, yes they are rarer and require more competency to pull off, but they usually involve more victims. So even if they're rarer it can balance out in overall harm.

 

[Xorkoth]

I don't think victim numbers can be "easily" as many with mass stabbings (do these even happen?) as with mass shootings. With stabbings, you have to get right up next to someone and then stab them. Then you have to get up right next to the next person, and stab them. I mean with the element of surprise you could do some damage, but it wouldn't take much time for people to react and run away from you. It wouldn't be hard for someone in the crowd to tackle you from behind or something. A person you're trying to stab could fight back, they could dodge, they could be well-trained in self-defense and grab your wrist and disarm you unexpectedly. Whereas with a rapid-fire, large magazine gun, what can you do against it? Pieces of metallic death tearing through a crowd at a thousand miles per hour or whatever just doesn't compare to a guy with a knife running around stabbing people.

I agreed that bombs are the worst, or nerve agents or biological weapons. But I would guess that if you could head down to the local bomb show and buy fully functioning bombs, mass bombings would be far more common. As it stands, in order to use bombs to kill people, you need to learn how to make bombs and gather materials, build the bomb, and then use it. This makes them much less common than they would be if you could freely buy them.

 

[JessFR]

Mass stabbings do happen. But they don't make the news as often, and they aren't particularly common in countries where guns are widely available.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_stabbings

You might think that someone would tackle and stop them, but they can still hurt a lot of people before that happens. Generally as you said, people panic and run off. What you might not realize is how difficult accurately aiming a firearm, and especially a handgun really is. People running off and hiding tends to be what caps most mass shootings in just the same way as it does with mass stabbings. But it depends on the environment. A concert in a wide open area with lots of people for example will result in far more casualties than a school where people can run behind walls and objects and barricade doors and such.

Generally most people run and don't fight though.

The ready availability of guns in itself reduces the number of mass killings by other means because they are perceived as easier. To an extend that's not just perception, but it's also not as true as you might think.

Really, building a bomb in the US is stupid easy. Building one anywhere is generally feasible but when you can easily obtain quantities of black powder it's easier still. Though it's really not hard to make, with potassium nitrate being the principle difficult substance to get.

But yes, most people aren't perhaps that resourceful.

To be honest, I think the perception of mass shootings, the effect the media has on society, is the single biggest contributing factor. Gun availability obviously plays a role to. But the extreme media coverage also puts it in the minds of people vulnerable to behaving like that. These kinds of events tend to cluster.

I'm not sure what you do about that. But I do think the media is irresponsible in how they handle these events.

But hypothetically speaking, if these mass shootings were never reported at all. I'd bet there would be fewer of them. Not saying I think the media should be censored, not at all. But I do think it plays a significant roll.

Most mass shooters have tended to have an obsession about them before doing them themselves. And the media fuels it. It tells people that this is how you do it.

 

[Xorkoth]

But hypothetically speaking, if these mass shootings were never reported at all. I'd bet there would be fewer of them. Not saying I think the media should be censored, not at all. But I do think it plays a significant roll.

Most mass shooters have tended to have an obsession about them before doing them themselves. And the media fuels it. It tells people that this is how you do it.

Yeah I totally agree with this. Seems like many school shooters almost seem to find past ones inspirational. Like the recent Florida shooter had apparently been saying he was going to be the "best" school shooter or something like that. It's not like the idea to shoot up the school came into his mind from nowhere. He had many previous examples. Kids who are disturbed and angry and outcast can look at many examples all the way back to Columbine of other kids getting revenge that way. If no one knew about the past ones, I bet there would be far less of them happening.

 

[swilow]

But hypothetically speaking, if these mass shootings were never reported at all. I'd bet there would be fewer of them. Not saying I think the media should be censored, not at all. But I do think it plays a significant roll.

I would agree here. It is troubling how accepted copycat crimes are. What an awful thing this says about the human psyche.

 

[JessFR]

I've mentioned before some of what I think about it. I feel like people indulge in competitive caring.

Similar to competitive outrage. People are under social pressure to react to events in a prescribed way. So they try to outdo each other so to increase the acceptance they feel it causes.

As a result. It's not enough to be horrified by someone shooting up a school, I gotta be so horrified I wanna put them in jail forever. Now *i* gotta be so horrified I want them executed. No I'm so horrified I think we should kill them slowly and painfully. Fuck you losers I can outdo you all, I wanna see them executed slowly and painful after we kill their parents too! That's just how outraged I am.

And similar with competitive caring. And the media feeds on and reenforces it. It's never enough of an emotional reaction. We gotta see the crying hysterical children. We gotta tweet about it and share it on Facebook. Then we gotta get involved in the advocacy and pressure out kids to get political and March about gun rights and shit they're too young to usually have an opinion about. Etc etc.

I don't think people care nearly as much as they say or even think they do. I think it's mostly conditioned response that's got this feedback loop from the press going on.

You see it all the time in countless human behaviors. Men's sexuality is another one.

I'm straight, I only like women. Oh yeah? I'm straighter than that, I'm disgusted by the idea of being involved in a homosexual act. Oh well I'm even straighter still, I'll punch any gay man who hit on me. You're all so gay! I'm so straight I'd murder a man who hit on me!

Well I would rape and then murder a man who hit on me, I'm just that straight! Wait what?

You get my point though. I know this is very cynical, and it's not that I'm saying nobody genuinely cares at all. Even the most guilty of this behavior likely believe they really do care. I just think a lot of people don't register how much of their reaction is conditioned by their perceived social expectations.

And the media has its roll in it. By being our self appointed voice, they have to outdo each other in coverage and sensationalism.

 

[zephyr]

I dont think the guns are going to be taken off Americans CH. Hopefully the right to bear arms will go hand in hand with the right to have people who choose to have guns be known to authorities who can make sure they are tesponsible enough to have them so people dont have their right to life taken away.

 

[Captain.Heroin]

To the average person, obtaining a gun is going to be significantly easier than obtaining either aerosolized drugs or nerve agents. I think that is largely the point. I am sure that if these things were available, and in hundreds of millions of homes, we would see these sort of attacks.

Yeah but the FL and Vegas shooters weren't average income Americans; they had ridiculous amounts of $ compared to the average American. They'd be the ones to be able to afford other means of mass murder.

It's important to think about that and take it into consideration when thinking about this.

This isn't an imaginary problem; people have used explosives before, and recently i.e. in Austin.

Guns aren't the only way to murder people.

I dont think the guns are going to be taken off Americans CH.

There's a huge push for an assault rifle ban that I'm not in favor of.