This weekend’s mass shootings come as the country mourns the victims of its deadliest mass shooting this year. Days earlier, 18 people were killed in a shooting in Lewiston, Maine.
This weekend’s mass shootings come as the country mourns the victims of its deadliest mass shooting this year. Days earlier, 18 people were killed in a shooting in Lewiston, Maine.
Why isn’t the huge amount of gun suicide not interesting to you? They are victims of guns as much as anyone else. For most, suicidal ideation is a temporary state they recover from, and later regret attempting if they survive. Success rate with gun suicide is way higher than other methods, turning this generally temporary psychosis into permanent and untreatable death.
And what is this other killing tool that’s just as effective and easily accessible as a gun?
Of course easy access to guns isn’t the only problem. But I would argue it’s far and away the largest for most of these issues, and explains the massive divide you see between the United States and other countries that are otherwise quite similar. There’s no real solution to these things without reducing the amount and access to firearms.
Homicide specific chart showing the immense gap:
Source: Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (Global Burden of Disease 2019), Small Arms Survey (Civilian Firearm Holdings 2017)
It is interesting, it’s just interesting separately from other gun-related issues because the causes are quite different.
For example, simply requiring guns be securely stored (with annual checks by police or gun sellers) could drastically change suicide numbers because it would make guns less easily accessible. But that’s probably less effective in resolving issues with homicides, since those are often planned further in advance. Likewise, red flag laws are probably more effective with suicidal people or those who are likely to commit mass shootings (both tend to have more obvious mental health issues), whereas they’re probably less effective with homicidal people since those who would report them would be worried about retaliation (i.e. they’re probably already domestic violence victims).
So that’s why I think they should be tracked separately. Some policies could impact all, but most would probably only impact one or two metrics.
That really depends on the type of crime. For hate crimes and other forms of mass murder, cars are apparently relatively common. For homicides, knives are readily accessible and effective. For suicide, perhaps car exhaust? Self-hanging is also pretty common (my friend used a belt when he killed himself). Idk, I try to avoid thinking about such things.
They have some of their own unique individual contributors as well sure, but easy access to firearms is a contributor they all share. Better gun control would help some of these things in different amounts.
For the issue of suicide, there is extensive research on how the access to firearms in particular is a problem.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1916744
I’m not saying it would prevent every suicide, but reducing access to guns would prevent many of them.
Too often when gun controls are discussed no matter what specific problem, people just say, “well this regulation wouldn’t have prevented this particular shooting so it’s useless and we shouldn’t even try any regulations.” Gun controls don’t have to prevent all gun problems to still have a big benefit and save many lives. We shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good when it comes to solutions to these problems that America’s gun culture have made so much worse than they need to be.
Sure. My point is that lumping everything together doesn’t really tell anything interesting about gun violence/crime, it just says there’s a lot of gun-related deaths. It’s not really actionable.
We should be looking at groups of gun-related violence/crime and come up with solutions that target each one.
It’s absolutely actionable! With gun control. All these other countries have these problems too, but they’re way less of a problem without so many guns. There’s no such thing as a solution to gun violence that doesn’t address guns.
Right, but it’s how you address guns that’s interesting, especially when taking into account the 2nd amendment.
I’m just trying to convince people we should attempt something, any kind of gun control. So many people on America are stuck on this, there’s just no helping it, nothing we can do, thinking. The onion headline “no way to prevent this, says only nation where this regularly happens” bears constant repeating.
If that involves needing to get rid of the second ammendment, so be it. I think it’d be fine to stay with effective regulations if the current conservative courts didn’t have such an insane understanding of it, basically forbidding any form of gun regulation.
Right, and to do that, you need specific data that indicates what the change in the law is attempting to fix. A lot of the gun control efforts have been around banning “assault weapons,” which largely just means “scary looking semi-auto rifles,” and that doesn’t really impact most of the numbers. Suicides, gang violence, and 1st degree murders tend to use handguns, and that’s where the bulk of your combined numbers are going to come from, so banning “assault weapons” doesn’t actually reduce those numbers. Likewise, background checks (which are done already) won’t decrease gun crime when most gun crime seems to be done with stolen weapons.
So in order for policy to actually be effective, it needs to specifically address some class of gun crime, because “feel good” legislation doesn’t solve anything, it just annoys gun owners.
I agree a lot of the “assault weapon” bans are poorly done. Handguns should be the main focus if you look at the statistics. A lot of these efforts are poorly done because of courts blocking more effective alternatives. See DC vs Heller. Another problem is states with no controls letting guns flow easily to states with more controls, effective controls have to be at the federal level.
Background checks won’t catch every problem, but they’ll catch a lot of them. So what if sometimes people steal guns, that type of thinking is exactly what I’m talking about! We shouldn’t have background checks because there might be some way to circumvent them sometimes? So just ditch it altogether? And we don’t have universal background checks yet, because organizations of gun owners and gun manufacturers fight tooth and nail to keep gaping loopholes open. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/19/us/gun-background-checks.html. We have more guns than people in the United States, it would be way harder to steal guns, if there are less guns to steal in the first place!
I think a great place to start would be the policies enacted by Australia in 1996 that resulted in a dramatic free fall in both mass shootings and homicide rates:
“Under the 1996–7 Australian Firearms Buyback, 643 726 newly prohibited semi-automatic and pump-action rifles and shotguns were purchased by the federal government from their civilian owners at market value, funded by a levy on income tax.1 Tens of thousands of gun owners also voluntarily surrendered additional, non-prohibited firearms without compensation.2 In total, more than 700 000 guns were removed and destroyed from an adult population of about 12 million. Australia’s revised gun laws also require that all firearms be individually registered to their licensed owners, that private firearm sales be prohibited and that each gun transfer through a licensed arms dealer be approved only after the police are satisfied of a genuine reason for ownership.”
Or just look to the gun control laws of literally any other developed country. There are tons of solutions out there, people just don’t want to hear em.