Can we please just admit that maybe gun control is a good idea finally?

Here's a fun factoid: it looks like the weapons that the shooter used were probably not his. They most likely belonged to his mother.

Good thing she was armed!

Look, it's a known fact that a crazy depressed suicidal guy will not go on a shooting rampage if he thinks there's the possibility that he'll be killed.
In this case, since he shot the teacher first, if all the teachers were armed he'd have only killed 12 or 13 children before another teacher confronted him with a gun and he surrendered immediately because that's what suicidal crazy people do when confronted by reason.

Money shot (har har har) is at 5:20.




Personally, I'd go with arming teachers with tasers or OC spray if anything. But no, your ability to do anything useful after getting shot is pretty much gone for at least long enough for another shot.

Part of the problem is defining "worse". The stats someone was nice enough to find and post earlier to the best of my memory show that under 32,000 people were injured by guns in 2011. That's all guns, not just handguns, and all injuries, not just deaths. Take out the suicides and it's if I recall under 20,000 total injuries (not just deaths) by all guns (not just handguns), or far less than 0.01% of the total population. So is there anything else manufactures in the US that injures more than 20,000 people per year? Definitely.

So to be smart about it we have to consider policies that are narrowly targeted to the problem areas rather than broadly covering everything in a swath due to reactionary fear-mongering. This is why some policies that I think would be a good start are very niche: closing gun show loopholes, restricting high-cap clips/mags, better available care for potential suicides, palm-print type technologies*, and ending the drug war. Except for the clips/mags idea, none of these would be shouted down by most gun owners, though as with most things of course the most vocal will freak out but fuck them.

*wishful thinking but totally do-able these days

My comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek. I'm certain that I can come up with some ways to demonstrate that guns are the most dangerous product in the United States; a quick google search indicates that 10.8mn firearms were sold in 2011. Based on your numbers, that's one injurous event for every 337.5 units sold. I doubt you'd find a product that results in nearly as much damage per unit sold! :)

Cars are more dangerous, by that metric. There were about 5.5 million cars sold in 2010, and about the same number of auto accidents. So that's one injurious event per one unit sold. Of course we can then ask, do we need guns to the same extent that we need cars? I'd say "not even close," but it's a fair topic for discussion.

Edit: I'll also note that nobody gets their panties in a twist when it comes to talking about sensible regulation on car ownership and operation. We take it as a given that it makes perfect sense to have strict laws on licensing and registration and maintenance, that it's okay for the government to require that you purchase insurance to protect others from your potential mistakes, or to take away your right to operate a vehicle if you show egregiously bad judgment (i.e. drinking and driving), or have a medical condition that precludes safe operation of the vehicle. Try to talk about regulating gun ownership, though, and you run into a brick wall of HERP DERP SECOND AMENDMENT. This despite the fact that the second amendment explicitly makes allowance for regulation.

We certainly provide much more stringent requirements for car operation than we do gun operation!

This is all tongue-in-cheek of course, but it does kind of get at a larger point: it's astounding to me the degree to which guns are given a free pass. They're tremendously dangerous pieces of equipment, and yet any attempt to regulate them in the slightest is vehemently opposed. Imagine the shitfit that would ensue if we decided we were going to license all gun owners and register their weapons!

Cars are a large factor in climate change. Imagine the way our society would work if we had viable public transit instead of cars. If, in the US, we as much on rails as roads, if we built a network of bike paths.
So many people would be alive today. And so many lives would be improved.

But people in the US hate being told they can't do something. And if it is the government telling me I can't do something I react strongly to that. As with most issues, I don't new laws and restrictions can solve societal issues. We are a nation that loves violence until it hurts us at the national stage, and then we are a reactionary nation. Legislating reaction is never, or rarely, a good thing.

Jim Fallows demonstrates why he (and Ta-Nahesi Coates) are probably the only people left at the Atlantic worth reading.

Here he is discussing the NRA's absolutist stance on firearms regulation.
And here he mentions a nice rhetorical shift from gun control to gun safety.

From the articles I read, I thought the shooter was only wearing a tactical vest not Kevlar armour.

Regardless, it's sort of irrelevant to the case for arming teachers with guns, because that would be stupid.

jeffd, those articles were interesting. Focusing on "gun safety" instead of "gun control" does seem like a good move rhetorically, and more practical in the short- to medium-run in the U.S. with its existing supply of guns.

I was particularly interested in the idea of getting 100,000 gun control safety advocates to join the NRA. I was just thinking about joining myself for that sort of reason. What the heck, we get gun catalogs in the mail all the time because the prior homeowners were gun enthusiasts.

Hey, it's only $25/year right now (on "sale" from $35)!
http://membership.nrahq.org/default.asp?campaignid=XR021747

They claim 4 million members, though, so 100,000 probably wouldn't change much.

Got my first FB picture of that "I'm not allowed in schools" tshirt & felt moved to respond, but kept it pretty mild. "I find it hard to believe God would be so petty. Do you really believe that?"

I guess I should have specified New Testament God, because on reflection, OT God would definitely smite a whole community, including kids, for the sins of its adults. But still, that shirt really makes God sound like a whiny little b___.

I'm surprising how much of a reaction this has gotten from the public compared to the other mass shootings. I guess it's somehow worse if it's a bunch of kids who get mowed down.

On the specific question of mass shootings, the interesting detail isn't "what about the guns" - it's "why the hell does the US have so many people who want to do this?" I really doubt the mass shooting rate would drop if half the guns in the US vaporized overnight. What's the mechanic there - people who are willing to kill 20 kids give up if they can't get a gun? Seems implausible.

My theory is some combination of individualism, high inequality, distrust, blaming everyting that happens to you on others, and a love of using violence to solve problems makes Americans uniquely eager to shoot each other. "Unstable 20 something male with problems goes into a downward spiral" seems to end in "murder-suicide" way, way more often in the US.

Alternatively, I guess it could just be an artifact of our high murder rate baseline. Does the "1% of murders are mass murders" thing hold up internationally?

Is "category bias" the right name? Guns are about resolving conflicts for those that wronged you, in one way or another. Buckyballs are a dangerous kids toy, and we love danger! Toughens up the kids.

Not really. Killing twenty people in minutes is impossible to do without a gun. None of these shooters were extremely skilled in anything, not even guns, so the NRA fantasy that they would have launched a deadly rampage with a sword or a knife is just that. This is why guns were invented in the first place.

Bombs. People always bring up bombs. Bombs require components and knowledge and foresight as well as TIME. A person in a depressed, angry, suicidal mood will not be in that same mode long enough to gather bomb making ingredients and build them.

Of course the most determined will, of course, but not all of these people fit into that category. Real quick look around wherever you're sitting for something to go on a murder spree with: which object on hand can kill people yards away, can cause multiple injuries in seconds, and requires no strength or skill beyond a 5 year old?

Buckyballs were not kids toys. They were specifically marked as NOT FOR CHILDREN on their packaging, website, promotional materials. They were not aimed at or created for children.

One, unless guns become very, very, very hard to get - like Japan level hard to get - I really don't see how that would impact the mass killing scenario. I don't think it's a continuous function of availability, it's more of a stepwise thing as certain levels of regulation are introduced. Note that "attitudes" are an implicit form of regulation; I gather no one in Japan will give you a damn gun if you ask unless you're in their mafia.

Two, correct me if I'm wrong here, but we're not talking about people just up and snapping and turning into maniacs, and they'd just go back to normal given another 24 hours. Columbine was plotted out months in advance. I recall interviews with attackers and depressed young males that show a long history of fantasies about the scenarios leading up to it. Eventually they do just snap, but they've already scoped out and acquired what they need months in advance. Given #1, you're looking at scouring their entire world of weapons, not just stopping impulse acquisition.

Three, guns aren't the only way to kill a bunch of people at once. They could wire the school with explosives - it's happened. They could use poison gas - it's happened. They could drive their car at top speed into a crowd of people - it's happened. Given #2 it doesn't matter that you need to plan.

Cite please.
What makes you think the US has more crazy people. Perhaps the simple explanation that the crazy people in your country has access to better tools is the right one.

Cite please.
It's like you didn't read the post before yours. Where's all these mass killings done without guns happening? Oh right, they're not (and no, not because you have all the crazies). As stated earlier in the thread, China had it's own attempted mass killing on the very same day - 22 kids wounded. Because the perpetrator wasn't crazy enough? No, because he had to make do with a knife.


In other news, I read the two threads on this over at QT3 (I was there looking for an old thread) - made me happy, I don't do that often anymore.

Explosives/gas generally don't work/kill many people. For example, the columbine guys tried to blow up the school but their bomb didn't work. The Aurora shooter tried to rig his apartment to blow up, but the police were able to defuse it. Anders Breivik killed 10 times more people with guns than he did by shooting them.

Guns are designed to be reliable, effective, and easy to use. Homemade explosives are not.

They don't have to be that hard to get. In fact the killer in this case didn't even own a gun, his mother did. If she was properly trained and instructed on how to lock her guns up, guess who would be alive today? I don't know where you grew up but "Mom can I borrow your gun?" isn't a question that gets answered without some investigation.
There is ahealthy middle ground between "everyone everywhere gets any gun they want ever" and "no one anywhere ever gets any guns"

I don't like quoting myself at people but here we are.
Do you have locks or an alarm on your house? Why? To keep people from getting in? No. Nothing can keep a truly determined person from getting into your house. What you're doing is keeping out ALL BUT the most determined.
People who plan for weeks and months are the exception and, more often than not, have been stopped because they had so much time. A manic depressive person who snaps will reach for the first thing he can, how about we try to avoid that first thing being a gun?

"Wire the school with explosives"
Show me where that happened. Unless you mean "built pipe bombs and tossed them around" in which case you're being disingenuous.
Regardless: bombs mean components and TIME. Time to change your mind, time to get caught. Have the batteries on your remote ever died during a show you only kinda liked so, instead of changing the channel in a fraction of a second you change your mind and watch the rest?
"Poison gas" See "explosives" I mean just all of it.
"drive their car" probably why driving a car requires licensing and periodic safety checks and yearly inspections and classes and tests and on and on and on, most things that guns don't have. Also are you really trying to compare ramming a car into a group of people to firing dozens of bullets in minutes at people on all sides of you?
I'll tell you what: we'll have a duel. we'll start off right next to each other. You can have a car and I'll have a gun. That sound fair to you? Or we can start yards apart. Either way, for whom is the advantage?

I don't think the US has a higher incidence of "crazy" people, I just think they choose difference actions based on the culture and society.

As pointed out, "remove all guns from the US" would certainly reduce the mass killing rate, but it's a ridiculous scenario.

Yes, I know explosive and gas are harder, but so what? Some dude in South Korea managed to kill 200 people by setting a subway car on fire.

I do not see plausible model or evidence for the overwhelming difference in mass killing rates between the US and the rest of the developed world around firearm access. For example, Germany's ownership rate is about 1/3rd of that in the US, but their homicide rate is 1/6th. Russia has 10% the ownership and 250% murder.

I suppose you could postulate some non-linear model, but countries with comparable ownership rates have such huge gaps in murder rates I don't think it's a substantial factor regardless.

If this is the case for mass killings, yes, gun access would matter more than I think, but this does not agree with what I've read on the subject over the years - that it's overwhelming depressed men who go into a "depressional spiral", with months of lead time where they work out the details and resources for a fantasy revenge scenario. Let me know if there's surveys or something about how that's wrong.

There are virtually no anti-murder regulations around cars, other than checking for explicit mental illness, but that's done for guns too. They check your ability to drive it safely and that it's up to safety code, but that's about it. If you want to kill or at least very severely injure a ton of people with your car it's trivially easy.

It is a ridiculous scenario, and that's why no one has proposed removing all guns from the US.

Yeah, and South Korea took steps to try and ensure that never happens again. Whereas you seemed to be more interested in throwing your hands up in the air.

I mean, seriously, we take a lot of steps to make it difficult for people to build homemade bombs, to aquire poison gas, and to start deadly subway fires. It's only when it comes to guns that the price of liberty is 20 dead children.

How, exactly, are you going to stop access to guns then? Pick a fantasy scenario where you remove 67% of the guns in the US, bringing the US down to the Germany level. Are you going to tell me with a straight face that it's hard for someone to find a gun in Germany?

You're changing the argument. I was responding to the assertion that without guns it would be really hard to kill a lot of people.

That's probably because gun owners are like cat owners; they tend to have more than one.

By the way, the question "why don't people in the US do mass killings with other things than guns" is an interesting question in itself. Yes, guns are a more practical and convenient. But think about it - these guys always kill themselves at the end of the spree. You say it's an impulse thing - what's easier than climbing into your car, driving downtown, and running over a crowd of people, smashing into a wall with no seatbelt on?

Yet virtually no one in the US has long, drawn out fantasies of revenge they take out in their car. Outside of the US where guns are way harder to get it's still the case that the bulk of mass killings happen by gun.

I see this as a completely convincing support for my concerete evidence-free theory about it being a violence attitudes things.

I can tell you out of personal experience that it is very difficult to find a gun in Canada, a country with a lot of guns but a lot of gun restrictions, particularly a handgun.

I don't think anyone has said that. The assertion is that guns make it much easier to kill people, not that any other means of mass killing is super hard or impossible. It is possible to kill many people in other ways, but those ways are much harder than using a gun. The fact that some people commit killings through other means doesn't say anything about the relative difficulty or easiness of those means when compared to guns.

That's gotta be because of the agency of a gun right? I'd hate to be all "Cars are for drivin', guns are for killin' ", but yeah.

Most mass killers want to kill someone in particular. For example, they want to kill their coworkers, fellow students, teachers, a particular celebrity, church members, etc. It is pretty easy to shoot up your workplace; it is pretty hard to do the same damage with a car. Generally these aren't wholly random acts.

Canada appears to have the same gun ownership rate as Germany. I do know that if I mentally delete 2/3rds of the guns I can probably get access to that still leaves an assload of guns, mostly hunting rifles. Where are they all in C & G?

I think Canadians try not to brag publicly they have firearms. I personally don't admit to it out loud that I own guns, partially out of the stigma and fear it creates from (sub)urbanites and partially out of not wanting a possible burglary.

Ok, but that goes with how I don't think the specific case of mass murder events are crimes of passion / impulse events. I think they're closer to "finally decide to kill your spouse after years of fighting" than "drunk guys shoot each other outside of bar." I actually do think firearms access increases crimes of passion - having a gun on your makes those bar fights way worse - but those are a minority of US incidents, and I'm not too sure on the statistical support for that regardless.

Another bit I forgot to mention: that the mass killing rate is so stable over the last two years (1% of the

This really happened. Worst school killing of all time in the US.

This slate piece has some interesting stuff in it. From a linked WA post bit:

The data says otherwise. There is a strong correlation between homicide rates and gun availability, not just in the US but in other countries, too. When guns are harder to get, or when ownership rates are lower, homicide rates drop accordingly. This study also found that there is a positive correlation between gun ownership and homicide rates, and additionally found that there was a negative correlation between the rates of ownership and the rates of homicide committed by other means. Which means that when you take guns out of the equation, people don't just find other ways to kill. A statistically significant portion of the time, they simply don't kill at all.

All three are relatively ineffective ways to murder people. Shooting into a crowd of people is going to result in a lot more casualties than trying to drive a car into them. Homemade explosives require technical know-how and planning and, even then, they tend to be unreliable. It's a whole lot easier to just shoot someone. As for poison gas, there's a reason why US soldiers carry guns and not poison gas, and it's not the Geneva Convention. Guns are a very effective way to kill people. Poison gas is not. Even when it saw widespread use in WWI, it didn't result in very many casualties. It was really more effective at causing panic than it was at killing.

Normally I stay out of these discussion, but what the hell. As a German - depends on the gun. A 9 mm pistol ? I wouldn't know where, but I am sure if you are determined enough you might find some. Machine guns or similar ? No clue, and I do not think you will be able to get them short of working in a military base or similar.

Edit: And I'd advice against trying to buy guns from friendly people on the street - the police is keen o

Yes, and can you easily go and buy dynamite and detonators now?

You are really arguing without any base in facts or logic. It's on par with nute and helium about now.

Oh lemme see...there was an event that happened just recently...hmmmm...lemme see if I can dig it up...

You know when you have to pull out "regulations on guns won't reduce gun violence" more than saaaayyy 5 times a year in response to mass gun murders...well...

Whoops! Those darn goalposts! They seem to have moved over to "severely injure" and "a ton of people"! Haha those wacky bastards! Where will they turn up next?

Oh! Over to "it's possible" instead of "it's harder"! Haha you things! Get back to where you were!

I see those Harvard studies get linked everywhere, but I gather they're not a reliable overall picture.

Regardless, assume they're right. Now take a look at the international murder and gun ownership tables; look at the distribution tables of the circumstances of US murders. There is no goddamn way the relationship is big enough to be the dominating factor for international murder rates - look at that 10% of guns and 250% of murder US vs. Russia number.

That's kind of what i mean - all it takes is one 9mm, a bunch of ammo, and the will to create a mass killing incident. Better weapons will up the body count, but the "more gun access = more mass killings" assumes a linear model I find implausible. I think it's more all or nothing.

Along those lines, look at the non-gun murder rate. For the US it's 2; for Germany it's 0.95. It you removed every single gun from both countries and make the completely implausible assumption assume those murders don't use any alternate implements, that's still a crazy 100% gap.

I think if the US's guns vaporized we probably would see the bulk of mass murder cases replaced with mass stabbings and bombings. We just really like to kill each other.

Okay, he killed 38 people using a literal ton of pyrotol and dynamite that he planted in the school over the course of a year. The shooter in CT killed almost that many by walking through the front door with a pistol and a rifle. Do you think that one of those scenarios might be just a little bit easier to pull off?

Yes, of course? He said it was an exaggeration, but it's an actual example.

Better guns probably introduces the body count, but if you model it like this:

Mass killing deaths = desire rate * success rate in acquiring and starting * lethality of instrument rate

I think desire rate is the overwhelmingly dominating factor.