LordOfThisWorld
Bluelighter
If those shoppers would've been armed themselves, I guarantee you that scumbag would've been shot dead on the spot.
[edited]
US Politics Mass Shootings and Gun Debate 2021
- Thread starter cduggles
- Start date
birdup.snaildown
Greenlighter
LordOfThisWorld said:
If the shooter didn't have a gun, I guarantee he wouldn't have shot anyone.
w01fg4ng
Bluelighter
I shopped there many times.
I'd have second thoughts about open fire in a closed space with a lot of innocent people.
I'd have second thoughts about open fire in a closed space with a lot of innocent people.
SKL
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There have been rare cases like this and this (second one is the only one that really makes sense to me though) both involving (gun) dealers, who were allowed to possess them. Both faced grand juries and were eventually found to have been justified but generally it's a bad idea to say the least to let rip with one in a populated area which where most self defense situations play out—one of the rules of gun safety is that you're supposed to be responsible for where every bullet you fire goes, and then what's behind that too. Hard to do with an SMG. So admittedly there are few such situations.
In the US, the process to own fully automatic weapons (and a shotgun or rifle with a shortened barrel, and a few other miscellaneous things) is an involved one including registering it with the feds. With fully automatics, the process is especially arduous because ones made after 1989 aren't eligible for civilian ownership, causing the price to skyrocket due to laws of supply and demand. The cheapest one will set you back about $15,000, a desirable one 2-3 times that at least. Particularly collectible ones (and that's why people own them) 10 times more easily. Heck, they are an investment. The price is only going up. There has apparently been exactly one case of one of these being used in crime, and ironically enough it was a dirty cop who did it. Full auto guns used by criminals obtained on the black market do exist but are very rare even among cartel members and such, unlike in the movies.
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Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
CAUTION: BIG POST AHEAD!
Good question.
If it had reduced the number of deaths by homicide on an average year by say.... 5-10% Yeah that's probably enough to call it a success.
It would have to be statistically significant enough to say that it has had a positive impact and has definitely saved lives to a statistically measurable amount. That would be enough for me to call it a success.
Other people might want it to save a higher percentage to justify the loss of freedom, and I might well have argued that at the time. But today I'd argue any measurable saving of lives in the actual homicide rates and such would constitute success.
Arguments can be made that reducing the number of mass shootings should be considered a success, and I'll admit to finding that argument pretty persuasive. What makes me want to dismiss mass shootings is they make up such a tiny number of people statistically speaking.
It's still tragic, it's still peoples lives we're talking about. But there are costs for having such laws in the first place. While in Australia there wasn't much if any kind of armed self defense culture anyway, to the point that I didn't put much consideration into the number of people saved by having a firearm to defend themselves, I quickly determined that to also be below a statistically significant quantity as to be worth including.
But there is also weight to the argument of personal freedoms, to the ability of people to feel safer, as costs of gun control that need to be considered along with how many people it might save.
Again, I appreciate that Australia didn't have an armed self defense culture or mindset to start with, but this is something you'd definitely have to consider in some countries.
And, getting more to the point. Say there's no statistically significant impact on homicides, which I believe to be the case, lets just take the mass shootings.
By reducing mass shootings, how many people do you save? Maybe a few dozen over a 5 year period. Once you start considering factors that are that... I hate to say this but, adhering to cold numbers here, that insignificant (again I don't want to come off heartless here, it's just that in a country of 25 million, 50 deaths in 5 years is statistically insignificant). Once you do that, You have to also start weighing in things like the impact on peoples lives in other ways. There are a lot of people for whom shooting is a sport, this significantly reduces and hinders their recreational activity.
Additionally, and this... this really gets to the heart of my quasi-pro gun beliefs. One major reason I hold the beliefs I do. I mean originally I would say if I'm being honest that I was brainwashed into them. I grew up around some very right wing progun type people and was taught from a fairly young age that guns are good anti-gun people are idiots liberals suck etc etc. Over time as I got older, and especially after moving to Australia and seriously questioning my beliefs, I stopped holding a lot of the right wing beliefs I once held. But one major part of my beliefs I've never stopped holding is my belief that people, and especially women, have a right to defend themselves.
I've never liked that because a bunch of young men, and it's almost exclusively young men, misuse guns and kill a bunch of people, that women are prevented from having a gun with which to defend themselves.
To many times I've seen or heard of women being stalked by dangerous men, being let down by useless police and ineffective restraining orders, and having to live in fear.
A gun provides another option, it provides a way to take back a degree of control and defend oneself and not be dependent on police response time.
These are also people impacted by these kinds of laws. Now I would be tempted to say that it's perhaps still worthwhile if you can save thousands or even hundreds of lives a year by introducing gun control. But a dozen or so over 5 years? I'm not so certain.
And it doesn't HAVE to be this kind of gun control or no gun control!. There's no good reason we shouldn't try gun control that strongly clamps down on who can have guns but still allows women (and men) to have weapons to defend themselves with in these sorts of situations. As well as letting gun enthusiasts to continue their recreationally activity. While still saving lives!
That is why I don't like the Australian flavor of gun control. And why I think there are better ways, and why I don't consider it much of a success. If you're read this far though I wanna say I appreciate it.
One last thing, you'll note that among this 'pro-gun' argument I don't include society defending itself against a tyrannical state. And it's because like you I consider that argument a joke.
That was a very thought provoking post. The main thought it provoked was a hypothetical about what if only women were allowed to possess and carry firearms.
Given the negligible cases of mass shooting, armed robbery, and gun suicide by women and the fact that they are at significant risk of violent crime it could be a game changer in re-balancing the position of women in society.
I wonder if women, in general, would want that?
One other thought it provoked was that in balancing the rights of sporting shooters against shooting victims’ right to life it’s no contest. I’ve been a sporting shooter but if it could be proven banning the sport saved one life from death by shooting I’d go along with it.
birdup.snaildown
Greenlighter
Atelier3 said:
I was thinking a similar thing, but about dwarves instead of women.
Jabberwocky
Frumious Bandersnatch
Depends on what kind of dwarves I think.
SKL
Bluelight Crew
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This is why you train. The bad guys, generally, don't train. This supermarket shooter seems to have been pretty effective though (everyone died, no injuries, and the cop was killed by a headshot) so I wonder if he did. At least one of the school shooters I remember them talking about going to the range with his mom a lot. But generally speaking the bad guys, and this includes regular criminals, have a tendency to spray and pray. Don't get me wrong, there are criminals who train or even are ex-military (which doesn't equate as well as you might think with being good with firearms) and CC permit holders who barely know which is the business end of the gun, but it's a general rule.
Here's a great example of the "good guy with a gun" preventing a very bad situation:
This is incredibly unrealistic. Americans are an armed people. That's not going away no matter how much people would like to chip away at the Second Amendment. As @JessFR states confiscation is a nonstarter (and I didn't know you were born here and moved down under, Jess, it's interesting how that informs your perspective.)
Even in Afghanistan, when faced with a violent and hostile populace, the coalition forces didn't try to confiscate the many guns people had. And over there we're often talking about proper (i.e. fully automatic) AK-47s. This doesn't mean that they probably wouldn't have liked to disarm the restive Pashtuns, but that there was no way they were going to pull it off. It's a big thing in their culture for a man to be armed, too.
Anyways, it's both unhelpful to the discourse, and revealing of anti-gun people's real desiderata, to hear statements like this. In fact I think a lot of people's opposition to guns comes from cultural prejudice against subcultures which tend to be armed, and this sentiment reeks of that kind of smug condescension against White trash flyover smelly Walmart people or whatever.
birdup.snaildown
Greenlighter
SKL
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I'd be scared of arming the gully dwarves.
assclass
Ex-Bluelighter
Can you guarantee who wouldn't have stabbed, blown up or hit anyone with a car?
birdup.snaildown
Greenlighter
Xorkoth
Bluelight Crew
The point you were replying to which got edited due to expression of violence is that every single time a Democrat holds the presidency, conservative fear media makes people like you convinced that they're going to come to their door and take their guns. My cousin was absolutely convinced Obama was coming to his door to take his guns. Clinton was going to take his guns. Now Biden is. But no one ever takes the guns. In fact the assault weapons ban expired since the 90s, so now you are allowed to have more powerful guns than before. It's a fear tactic to keep you voting Republican and ignore all of the other issues that you might not agree with as much, no one is going to take your guns.
Democrats have fear tactics they use, too, I'm not saying Dems are better than Repubs. Just pointing out that your fears are unfounded, and that your leaders have purposely made you afraid so they can better control you.
SKL
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Bit of a nitpick maybe but this at least as I read it isn't really true. We can have the same guns we had before the AWB. Not more powerful. Many more people people do have AR-15s and similar though, because people bought them up big time after having felt they missed out on the fun when the only people who had them had "grandfathered" "pre-ban" models, then they became a much bigger part of the gun culture than they were before. They did get substantially cheaper and more widely available. There aren't really any new guns since then that are substantially more dangerous, though. Just scarier looking and with more accessories. No guns since then have really come out that are significantly more dangerous either. More military looking maybe, but that's just cosmetic.
One thing that did advance though was fancier optics for much less money. This is hardly ever discussed but probably actually does lead to an increase in lethality in mass shooting type scenarios as things like red dot sights make it easier for less trained people to acquire a target and shoot accurately. The gun used in the Boulder shooting doesn't even come with its own iron sights, so the shooter would have had to buy some kind of optic, my guess would be a red dot. Even a $25 piece of Chinese crap meant for airsoft does help substantially to accurately shoot man sized targets more rapidly.
Shh, don't want to give the gun grabbers any ideas though. Just goes to show the issue is way more multifaceted than people think.
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JessFR
Bluelight Crew
Dude, what are you talking about?
Ok first I actually did say what the cause was but I was super tired when I wrote that post and it's probably a bit all over the place having been edited and reedited so it may not be that surprising if you glossed over it.
The cause was a good year (as in unusually low deaths) on the unarmed deaths followed by it returning to roughly baseline the next year which also happened to have an unusually had year for knife deaths.
The recovery from unarmed plus the bad year for knife deaths caused an overall jump in all homicides for that year above the average. It then returns to where you'd expect but that makes it appear as if the rate was increasing.
First, just look at the gun deaths in isolation, how can anyone honestly tell me they see an speed up I gun deaths declining?
And finally... And.. You seem like a pretty smart guy, I find it hard to believe you're unaware of this... Surely you gotta realize that you can't reliably plot trends changes of the size we're talking about in data like this? The sample sizes are inadequate. If gun homicides had dropped 80% you'd see it, but not a couple percentage points when it fluctuates randomly well above that anyway and we only have 30 odd samples.
You can't accurately make these assertions when you have only 100 or so deaths a year that can randomly increase and decrease by a dozen or so for reasons that have nothing to do with gun control.
There's enough samples to safely define a downward trend, but not to pick out an increase in the decline with only 7 or so samples prior to 98 and another change in 03.
It's exactly like those nonsense studies that come up with crazy conclusions out of imagining conclusions in statistical noise when they've only tested a hundred people.
And it shouldn't be my job to prove gun control didn't work in order to not have it. You can't prove a negative easily. But if there's no good reason to think it did work with the available evidence, why should we have it?
EDIT: What's really frustrating is all this data doesn't go back far enough, it all cuts off at the start of the 90s when the national homicide monitoring program began. But while that may be the most widely used source I'm sure there is data from before that time and I'm sure I've used it before. I'll have to try and go through the ABS and AIC records looking for it.
It exists though, and it's important for accurately plotting what impact Australian gun control has (or hasn't) had.
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JessFR
Bluelight Crew
There's a lot to this that never gets discussed. Like how automatic weapons in untrained hands are actually probably less likely to result in lots of deaths.. I mean there's a reason the marines actually stopped issuing fully automatic weapons for a few decades.
People just argue for what ever position they fundamentally approve of, using whatever talking points they've heard from others with their beliefs. Very few people have an interest in really knowing where the truth is.
As for the assault weapons ban. It's a joke. It doesn't ban semi-automatic rifles and never did. It didn't even get rid of 'assault weapons'. It just jacks up the price of the ones in circulation. And it won't do that nearly as fast today as it did in the 90s BECAUSE of the first assault weapon ban sunset in the 00s. There's now been a couple decades of mass buying by gun types of the kind of weapons likely to be targetted. It'll probably take hundreds of years of assault weapon bans before it got to the point of where automatic weapons are today (which is to say, only owned by fairly well off wealthy old guys). And that's a conservative estimate, I haven't done the math, it could be significantly longer.
Assault weapon bans are an attempt to ban a category of weapons that largely exists as a cosmetic style of firearm rather than actual fundamental attributes of a gun. At least as far as mass shootings and gun crime is concerned anyway.
What assault weapon bans are... are an ALTERNATIVE to gun control. They are what democrats can do, knowing they actually can't do anything at all. It's feel good. Nothing else.
Oh and since all this quasi pro-gun ranting has left a bad taste in my mouth, I wanna also add that this 'well if more people were armed' line of argument is really stupid. I'm sorry, but THAT ISN'T GOING TO HAPPEN EITHER. There are a LOT of people out there that legitimately don't want to carry a gun everywhere. Don't want to go out and train with guns every week. And it would be crazy to make untrained people carry guns everywhere. That's not gonna fix anything. Untrained people with guns aren't just gonna pull out their gun and shoot back in a mass shooting. Without training for such a situation they'll still flee like everyone else. That's how people will react if they haven't actually trained themselves into reacting with fight instead of flight.
Maybe if gun nuts where 100% of the population, then mass shootings might end with fewer deaths (but certainly not no deaths, and I wonder how many extra deaths such a policy would be likely to add now that everyone has to have guns). But contrary to what non americans believe. 100% of americans aren't gun nuts. So lets drop the "if everyone had guns" bs, you might as well be saying "well if mass shooters just stopped mass shooting!". It's a pointless hypothetical.
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indeed. i'll try once more... @LordOfThisWorld can you tell us how many of your guns were taken away by the obama administration? if you choose to not answer, then fine.
here's a pop quiz for you about 2 recent presidents...
potus #1 signed two laws related to guns. the first allowed gun owners to carry in national parks (and replaced a reagan-era policy requiring guns to be locked in the glove compartment or trunk in national parks). the second allowed passengers on amtrak trains to carry guns in checked baggage (reversing a measure put in place post 9/11). so two laws, both of which expanded rights of gun owners.
potus #2 publicly floated the idea of taking citizens' guns without due process.
who are the two presidents here?
alasdair
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TheLoveBandit
Retired Never Was, Coulda been wannabe
This statement loses me. How many deaths are attributed to sporting shooters? Or even someone 'borrowing' their guns? The sport actually would cultivate both a respect for the power of the weapon AND general safety practices that anyone should learn. If anything, sport shooting helps lessen the chances of such deaths, IMO. Removing the sport would not remove the guns, if that was your implication. And given guns cannot be removed at this point in time, groups like sport shooters are an aide to living safely in society with such weapons.
TheLoveBandit
Retired Never Was, Coulda been wannabe
While this thread focuses on the gun debate, I can't help but feel sick at the flood of early morning responses to the shooting claiming it was a white Christian male again exercising his white supremacy. MSM is still a serious problem in my view, as it feeds misinformation about a situation.
Flurry of 'White Male' Shooter Tweets Spark Backlash After Boulder Suspect's Identity Released
After a gunman opened fire in a grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, and killed 10 people on Monday, a series of tweets about the shooting preemptively assumed the suspect to be a white male, connecting him to a trend found among mass shootings in America.
However, Boulder police identified the suspect as Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, a 21-year-old from a nearby Denver suburb, who is not white.
Some Twitter users were quick to comment on the fact that the shooter was taken into police custody unharmed, arguing that the suspect would not have received the same treatment if he were a person of color. Others suggested that the motive from the shooting stemmed from entitlement.
...
Among these users was Meena Harris, niece of Vice President Kamala Harris. Shortly after news of the Boulder shooting broke, Harris wrote in a now-deleted tweet, "The Atlanta shooting was not even a week ago. Violent white men are the greatest terrorist threat to our country."
Harris addressed her mistake on Tuesday, tweeting, "I deleted a previous tweet about the suspect in the Boulder shooting. I made an assumption based on his being taken into custody alive and the fact that the majority of mass shootings in the U.S. are carried out by white men."
A recent analysis by Statista found that whites accounted for more than half of the suspects in the 121 mass shootings that occurred between 1982 and this year. However, the suspect from Monday's tragedy was not white.
I hate MSM, and big tech media, making their own rules and applying them unevenly.
Twitter Says Calling Boulder Shooter a 'White Christian Terrorist' Is OK
Atweet describing Ahmad Al Aliwi Alissa, the suspected gunman in Monday's Colorado supermarket shooting, as a "white Christian terrorist" does not violate the social network's misinformation policies, Twitter told Newsweek.
Many Twitter users assumed the shooter was white before his name was released by police in Boulder, Colorado. Several pointed to the massacre as another example of racial injustice and white supremacy in the United States, coming a few days after a white man killed six Asian women in an Atlanta shooting spree.
Those tweets backfired when police named Alissa, whose family immigrated from Syria and whose now-deleted Facebook pages suggested he was a Muslim. Many conservatives accused the left-wing Twitter users of race-baiting.
Some users have deleted their tweets calling him white. Others have defended their claims, saying they were based on Alissa's skin color rather than his ethnicity.
Newsweek put the misleading posts to Twitter. The social network has been accused of left-wing bias and anti-Christian prejudice in the way it polices speech on its platform.
In January, for example, Twitter locked the account of The Catholic Review, apparently for tweeting an article that described assistant Health and Human Services Secretary Rachel Levine as "a biological man identifying as a transgender woman."
A Twitter spokeswoman said the "white Christian terrorist" tweet and other false posts did not violate its rules.
"The Tweets referenced are not in violation of the Twitter Rules," the spokesperson told Newsweek in an email. "We will not take action on every instance of misinformation. Currently, our misinformation rules cover COVID-19 misinformation, synthetic and manipulated media and civic integrity."
I am certain this guy will not get many headlines because he does not fit the narrative.
TheLoveBandit
Retired Never Was, Coulda been wannabe
I do find it ironic this keeps whipping up buying frenzies. I was unaware they are all unregistered.
In reference to this, I give you all
List of mass shootings in the United States in 2020
This is a list of mass shootings in the United States that have occurred in 2020. Mass shootings are incidents involving multiple victims of firearm-related violence. The precise inclusion criteria are disputed, and there is no broadly accepted definition.[2][3]
Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group that tracks shootings and their characteristics in the United States, defines a mass shooting as an incident in which four or more people, excluding the perpetrator(s), are shot in one location at roughly the same time.[4] The Congressional Research Service narrows that definition, limiting it to "public mass shootings", defined by four or more victims killed, excluding any victims who survive.[3] The Washington Post and Mother Jones use similar definitions, with the latter acknowledging that their definition "is a conservative measure of the problem", as many shootings with fewer fatalities occur.[5][6] The crowdsourced Mass Shooting Tracker project has the most expansive definition of four or more shot in any incident, including the perpetrator in the victim inclusion criteria.[7]
There were 15 mass shootings in 2020 that fit the inclusion criteria of this article, resulting in 521 deaths and 2,541 injuries, for a total of 3,062 victims. Compared to the previous year, there were 181 more incidents.
By that, 2020 was a bang up year dropping from 181 (2019) to 15 (2020). My point in posting it is to give some reference to your point, but also as I was seeking something that would let me look at the 10 deadliest incidents. Sorting that wiki table by number killed:
Sep 7 Aguanga California (7 killed, 0 injured) - I can't find a killer's identity but it was a marijuana grow house, all victims were from Laos, and it appears to be gang related.
Jun 4 Valhermoso Alabama (7k, 0inj) - Domestic shooting (2 white men, 2 black men, 3 white women). No perp, no motive, but the victims indicate this was not White Christian supremacy.
Mar 15 Moncure NC (7,0) - Family murder suicide. White guy, but doesn't sound like white supremacy at work.
Jun 11 Monroe LA (6,0) - Family murder suicide. Black mom, doesn't sound like white supremacy at work.
Feb 26 Milwaukee WI (6,0) - Workplace shooting. Black guy.
Dec 25 Atkins AR (5,0) - Family shooting, white woman.
Dec 22 Meridian MS (5,0) - Family murder, then suicide. White guy.
Jul 29 Eyria OH (5,0) - Family murder suicide. White guy.
Apr 27 Milwaukee WI (5,0) - Family shooting. Black guy.
Mar 15 Springfield MO (5,2) - Gas station shooting, suicide. Hispanic male, confirmed mental issues.
These do indicate a little are related to crime, but the vast majority are tied to mental illness, and none appear to be race related.
Perhaps it is misleading in that I went for those with the most dead. Yes, that represents 'deadliest' situations, but not the overall picture. I'll try to dig deeper later, time permissing. For now, let's take a step back to my earlier quote citing statista indicating whites (males) commit most of the mass shootings.
Between 1982 and March 2021, 66 out of the 121 mass shootings in the United States were carried out by white shooters. By comparison, the perpetrator was African American in 21 mass shootings, and Latino in 10. When calculated as percentages, this amounts to 54 percent, 17 percent and eight percent respectively.
Race of mass shooters reflects the U.S. population
Broadly speaking, the racial distribution of mass shootings mirrors the racial distribution of the U.S. population as a whole. While a superficial comparison of the statistics seems to suggest African American shooters are over-represented and Latino shooters underrepresented, the fact that the shooter’s race is unclear in around five percent of cases, along with the different time frames over which these statistics are calculated means no such conclusions should be drawn. Conversely, looking at the mass shootings in the United States by gender clearly demonstrates that the majority of mass shootings are carried out by men.
Mass shootings and mental health
With no clear patterns between the socio-economic or cultural background of mass shooters, increasing attention has been placed on mental health. Analysis of the factors Americans considered to be to blame for mass shootings showed 80 percent of people felt the inability of the mental health system to recognize those who pose a danger to others was a significant factor. This concern is not without merit – in over half of the mass shootings since 1982, the shooter showed prior signs of mental health issues, suggesting improved mental health services may help deal with this horrific problem.
Many helpful charts available there, even if you stay among the free ones. Of extra interest, I found a stat on US murders and how many were by legally (82) vs illegally (16) vs unknown (22) obtained firearms between 1992 and March 2021.. I was not expecting that.