Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015) (opens in new tab)

Bullying: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/25/uvalde-texa...

The gunman in Tuesday’s elementary school massacre was a lonely 18-year-old who was bullied over a childhood speech impediment, suffered from a fraught home life and lashed out violently against peers and strangers recently and over the years, friends and relatives said

In middle school and junior high, Ramos was bullied for having a stutter and a strong lisp, friends and family said. Stephen Garcia, who considered himself Ramos’s best friend in eighth grade, said Ramos didn’t have it easy in school.

“He would get bullied hard, like bullied by a lot of people”. Ramos’s cousin Mia said she saw students mock his speech impediment when they attended middle school together. He’d brush it off in the moment, Mia said, then complain later to his grandmother that he didn’t want to go back to school.

Contagion: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mass-shootings-ar...

My >80 year old friend has suggested to me that this kind of problem didn’t exist before we started handing out pharmaceutical drugs of the variety that ‘handle’ mental illness.

Sidebar semi-related story time: my wife got her Masters in childhood education and went directly to work for a public high school after. She was a.. I forget, counselor assistant or something like that at a very large school in Texas. She quit after just a few months because she could see that they were just using her position as a funnel to get kids on some kind of pharmaceutical drug. She was literally reprimanded more than once because she recommended against putting some of the students on drugs and pushed them toward professional counseling instead. The parents are often clamoring to get a diagnosis so they can get their kids on drugs to ‘fix’ their problems, so it’s not exclusively the fault of the government, but they’re damn sure doing their part.

They’re drugging our children, MOST often unnecessarily. Perhaps if we used other methods to help, we would see other outcomes.

As a non US resident you can't help but think that is a massive part of the problem.

Many other countries have problems with bullying, mental health, radicalisation. We've also had mass shootings. But our tolerance is so much lower for that kind of BS. One shooting and it's over. The populace will support further gun control and stricter measures. This seems sensible to me since curing the underlying causes takes time. So why would you give firearms to people that aren't in the right state of mind to use them responsibly?

I think the real question is, why is the tolerance of Americans as a population, so high with regards to mass shootings? Are the lobby groups really that powerful they are changing the minds of regular people?

I maintain the US has a bruce willis problem. An ethos that a good guy with a gun is the solution to all problems. It may even be, the issue is when someone thinks they're the good guy with a gun, and they're not. They think they're bruce willis, and they're not. They think they're righting wrongs, and they're not. Their narrative is out of sync with mine.

This is a cultural issue apart from firearms. I may not be sober enough to make this statement, so salt to taste - but firearms aren't the root cause, they're the lubricant in a wider issue where you're all bruce willis in your own story. This combination of firearms and individualism is what separates you from examples such as Switzerland, Czechia, etc. The guns are only the medium through which a deeper problem is expressed.

We should also look at what prevent school shootings. What in society might protect against a kid going to school with the intention to harm staff or students? A fatal event only occur if there is enough risk factors and not enough protective factors.

My own thoughts go to increase stress in schools as one factor, social media/news focus, increasingly larger difference in social class among students (source for social tensions), a lack of trained psychologists at schools, a culture that focus on individualism. Out of those, tensions from social class would be my primary suspect when asking why say Serbia has less school shootings than the USA.

You hand wave away ease of access, but it probably matters. It certainly matters at the margin.

A threat to gun ownership is equated to a threat to the freedoms fundamental to what makes the US 'the best country in the world'.

Any argument restricting gun ownership, no matter how logical or however great the weight of evidence, is up against this "the very DNA of the country" emotional position.

Gun availability has been said to be similar in the US to some other countries. Mental illness isn't limited to the US. The US' foundation is based on a war fought for freedom, using guns. That's the differentiator. (this, my apologies, papers over the requested nuances of mental illness drugs, the cost and availability of medical care, the individual and societal effects of uber-capitalism at all costs, the equating of any level of socialism to be full-on communism, the widening ideological divide and/or the decreasing tolerance for the existence of differing ideologies to one's own).

My cynical take is: Why would this incident make any difference if none of the previous incidents have? It's a harsh observation, but this is "US normal", and has been for a long time.

It is impossible to assign any single causality to events that have such low occurrences unless you have billions of examples.

(Yes, the rest of the world data can provide counterfactual data, but it is still mathematically impossible because there are 100s of variables at play)

> Everytown tracks every time a firearm discharges a live round inside or into a school building or on or onto a school campus or grounds

Which means they're counting individual fights, and or gang violence in with all these shootings. In addition it looks like the vast majority of their data points list no injuries or deaths. They also include things like this in their statistics:

> A car entered the east parking lot at a high speed and hit one student. The CCSD police officer ordered the car to stop, and when it didn't, fired their gun at the car. Two teenagers in the car-- one a 16-year-old boy and one a juvenile-- were struck and injured by the officer's gunfire.

So this is an injury sustained from an officer trying to stop two kids who injured somebody with their car, not a gun.

If you want to talk about how we can combat school shootings how about we agree to use honest statistics? It doesn't help anyone to quote shoddy studies like this. In addition I found this[1] research paper that claims the original paper people quote to show the US is the leader in school shootings does not show how they got their data. In addition they refuse to show how they calculated their statistics. This paper goes on to show that the US may be significantly lower than the number one spot.

The reason I even looked at this stuff is because in the link you posted it said there 288 school shootings in the US this year! That claim sounded very far fetched. I know there have been some nasty events so far this year, but if there had been 288 shootings this year alone, I feel like there would have been a lot more news about it. That averages to almost 2 shootings every day this year. And I'm expected to believe these statistics are a factual claim?

Edit: And yes I know that this paper is from 2018, but I'm posting it because there is clearly weird stuff going on with the statistics that were quoted in the original posters linked "research" website.

[1]: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%BDiti%C5%A1te_shooting

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velika_Ivan%C4%8Da_shooting

Serbia's gun laws are much closer to those in NYC than to those in Texas.

It's not really much of a comparison or illustration that the problem isn't ready access to firearms.

We are literally the only country on there that has more guns than people (the 2nd highest is literally half our amount per capita!). Now look at the ratio of unregistered to registered in the US. We clearly have a problem compared to other countries.

392 times more unregistered guns than registered, good god.

The only way to break the positive feedback loop would be to significantly ban most reporting of these incidents, which violates the first amendment, while the other band-aid solution violates the second. And neither of these address the cultural problems creating a fearful culture with so many socially isolated people who may want to get attention by doing the things our culture teaches us to fear.

If we can move this debate one epsilon forward it will be through recognizing that some events have many causes that combine in complex ways.

It certainly feels like someone alive for the last 40 odd years that Columbine was the inflection point at which media really started to cover this. Either that is just because 1999 happens to be my own graduation year and I was too young or not paying attention any earlier, or maybe media coverage really did pick up compared to prior incidents, for whatever the heck unknown and largely random reason. We were still early into the 24 hour cable news cycle and widespread availability of the world-wide web, but as we can see, this was not the first even in 1999.

Assuming this is an accurate list, I don't see how we can possibly identify a root cause. This was happening before there was a 2nd amendment. Before there was heavy metal. Before video games. Presumably not before mental illness, but that is hardly a uniquely American problem. Sometimes national culture just picks up a particular character for whatever quirk of history that may not even be fully known or knowable, some forgotten confluence of events that continue to influence us today without anyone knowing it is happening or why.

We were among the first countries to offer widespread public education, weren't we? This was even true in colonial times. Maybe the gathering of fairly vulnerable people just makes an enticing target. And sure, there are other public gatherings of vulnerable people, but this one has been around for a very long time, enough to have presented opportunity centuries ago and get woven into barely conscious national memes about where you go if you want to shoot a bunch of people. In other countries, churches and trains seem to fill that role.

Then my first question to you, regarding your "what can we do" issue, is simple: are you connected to your kids? Are you engaged in their lives? Do they feel like you care about them?

When I was a kid, my answer to all three of those questions about my parents was always an unqualified yes. And the idea of committing any kind of violence, let alone a school shooting, would never have occurred to me. You could have had me at the gun range practicing every day and it would never have crossed my mind to actually try to kill someone with a gun, unless it was absolutely necessary for self-defense.

When the background eventually comes out on mass shootings, one common factor I always see about the shooters is that they weren't connected to other people. So I think one obvious thing any of us can do for others to keep such things from happening is to give other people connections.

The conversations aren't the problem, the guns are. There's not really a path to compromise here, I don't think. Either we stop having guns like we do now and a lot of people will be vocally upset, or we continue allowing the routine murder of children. Talk about it as carefully as you want, either way there's going to be conflict.

Can we rephrase the problem as: how do a society gets rid of a bad meme?

I'm a gun owner btw.

I also wonder what interesting things would happen if in order to own a gun you must drill with a militia.

The USA has had 52 mass shootings in April of 2021 alone.

If it's such a "complicated issue", why did the frequency of mass shootings in Australia drop to negligible levels after they took the simple step of enacting a comprehensive gun ban?

Ban. The. Guns. It's that simple.

- Well Afghanistan people have access to lot of guns , lots of it and maybe even tanks. But they don't go to school that much. And in Serbia the population is thinly spread across vast swatches of ice. Not exactly LA.

Lets simply stop talking and just bring a bill to buy back all automatic guns and destroy them. This country needs it.

People will make up all kinds of reasons why "this doesn't happen anywhere else", they'll completely ignore the actual cause of the violence (a person), they'll make excuses, bring up solutions that are illegal, entirely ignore cultural issues, ignore that psychopaths are looking to be famous, point at more laws which won't do anything because the existing ones didn't work/etc.

That's why things have gotten much worse in the US in the past decades. The rules haven't changed but the number of guns has. And given the percentage of people with guns and the percentage of people with mental issues, the Venn diagram of those two groups intersecting produces a percentage of armed homicidal maniacs at a high enough frequencies that stuff happens. Simply put: when millions of assault rifles get sold, a few of them are going to end up being used by exactly the type of people you'd never want to own such a thing. Simple math. There's nothing mysterious about that.

I'd probably want to own a gun if I lived in the US. There are war zones that have less casualties per year than some cities and areas in the US. I think Kiiv probably has better statistics than Chicago in the last half year or so. That, or it's alarmingly close. Combat medics actually get trained in hospitals in in big cities in the US. If you work in the ER in Chicago, LA, etc., you are going to get plenty of practice. Every day. So, yes, I'd probably feel a need to defend myself in such a place. I'd be part of the problem.

However, I don't live in the US. I live in Berlin, Germany. I feel safe here and feel no need to own a gun and tough luck if that weren't the case because it's pretty hard to get one here. It's not a perfect city and there are occasional incidents involving gun violence just like everywhere else. Generally if you see a gun you are either in an armed robbery, looking at a person in uniform, or in the country side with people responsibly handling their legal guns while hunting. The first happens but not very often. Most crime does not involve guns. And when it does, the sentences are steep, the guns are typically small (easier to conceal), and highly illegal. Anything involving illegal guns is not cool with the authorities. People in uniform discharging their arms is generally involves lots of paper work and scrutiny. More so for civilians with permits and legally owned guns. Getting permits is not super easy and keeping your permit requires sticking to the rules. So, that narrows down the situations that can escalate considerably. It still happens but not very often. Same math, different variable values.

It really is not.

There are too many guns available, too easily obtained, to too many citizens who have not been properly indoctrinated with a sense of civic responsibility, let alone trained in the proper ways to handle a gun.

The answer isn't to throw more guns at the problem or to blame inadequate mental health facilities. It is to reduce gun availability. And we aren't willing to do that because politicians on the right find it more valuable to demagogue on the subject as a wedge issue.

I think this also helps explain why girls never shoot up schools, despite having the same access to guns as boys. All of our safety nets are designed around helping females, and letting males sink or swim.

I see no mechanism by which those laws would reduce mass shootings. A mass shooter would simply ignore them.

The other policies you mention may be more relevant, but it goes to show how easy it is to conflate various kinds of harm and what laws might prevent it.

I think gun owners would be much more receptive to regulation if they felt people were genuinely trying to separate narrow and effective laws from broad infringements that annoy many and accomplish little. But it's hard to get past the "more guns laws the better" mentality that is so wodespread.

Here is another from the conservative newspaper The National Post (aka I am not sourcing from a place likely to be incredibly biased against guns) reporting on the police chief of Toronto stating that a large majority of the guns used in violent crime in the city are illegally imported from US: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/guns-used-in-crimes-a...

We have other people in this thread using the example of Australia and asking what the difference is and I would state that a large portion of it is simply that Australia is surrounded by an ocean and Canada is right next to the US. As long as we have that anchor dragging us down its always going to be difficult to make major progress on gun crime.

Nitpick to avoid confusion: these numbers are per million (not per capita).

That is to say that if evil bob can go by a rifle and go downtown to whack the neighborhood it is as irrelevant as it is possible to be if 2 or 20 of his neighbors are gun owners unless they are literally shooting back at him right now.

Essentially you are looking at a partial success story through a lens of faulty analysis and concluding that nothing is working.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Nova_Scotia_attacks

There are regular shootings in public in Vancouver and Toronto due to gang activity. Hell, some random innocent person was killed in Calgary when shooting started during a traffic incident.

Your results will be starkly different if you search for school shooting rates, and not mass shooting rates. Gangland homicide of several individuals is still considered a mass shooting. It spooks the city-dwellers somewhat, but nationally no one cares. They care about school shootings, or more broadly, mass shootings of innocent bystanders. Canada fares way, way better than the U.S. in this fashion.

Actually, there were polls based on which gun owners support gun regulation a lot more then one would say. There is subgroup of gun owners represented by NRA who dont - but they dont represent average gun owner.

The support for gun regulation is quite high in general public.

The actual crusade against weapons, and I say that as an European left-wing Citizen is just because unrest was predicted due to neoliberal ruling [1] and they dislike the idea of an armed population that a day might shoot against them. In Italy fascists have done the same erasing military conscription NOT because it produce bad results (it do, but that's another story) but because they choose to even remove such hyper-basic training to form generations who shoot every days in videogames and in reality they'll probably follow what they have seen in movies, like run to the root trying "to escape", lock themselves in bathrooms, protect themselves with sofa or fridge door etc and I'm pretty sure most movies have done such absurd choices exactly to mentally push people toward such absurd behaviors.

Consider a thing: if you are satisfied you do not want war nor violence. If you are not your dissatisfaction might be weaponized to push you do things you do not want (including hard work, war etc) for the sake of the élite of the moment, if you are pushed toward illegality is even better: they can let you go and if needed trap you with legit reasons. That's how our societies are ruled and our subjects, not Citizens, allow that.

Weapons are common in USA just because they support the infinite-war economic model of USA rulers, but people need to be kept in a sorry state to obey, that's is.

[1] for USA just see https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Global%20Trends_Mapping%... along it's publication date (not 2020 but 2004 FOR 2020)

Your point about cultural similarity holds true mainly for descendants of European immigrants. The shared culture here isn't just Marvel movies but values passed down among families from the Old Country like a Christian moral framework, Anglo-American law, the Protestant work ethic, Puritan attidues towards sex, etc. If you break America's homicides down by ethnic category, non-Hispanic whites have a murder rate per 100k of around 2.6 per annum [0]. Canada's murder rate hovers around 1.7. These numbers are roughly comparable, despite the many differences in firearm availability.

America's overall homicide rate is something like 5.7 per 100k per annum. This number is propped up by one ethnic group in particular, Afro-Americans, with a murder rate of over 20 per 100k per annum. This is not just a function of poverty. The white poverty rate is half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of 10. The Asian-American poverty rate is similarly half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of closer to 100 (10x less than that of white Americans).

Telling hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans to disarm themselves because of social, cultural, and economic problems largely confined to a small & largely separate social group is a losing proposition. But asking why that group commits so many murders, even as the first step in bring that number down, is a political third rail too so here we are.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/murder-homi...

> For example, the United States Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) defines a mass shooting as a single attack that happens in a public place and in which three or more people are killed with a firearm. However, most other stat trackers require at least four fatalities. Similarly, some databases include events in which at least four people were wounded, but not necessarily killed. Others do not. Some databases include occurrences in which the shooter killed only family members (but still in a public place, such as a restaurant). Others do not. Some databases include organized terrorist attacks, armed robberies gone wrong, and gang-related shootings. Other databases discard some or all of these incidents. In fact, in a 2019 study that compared four different databases, the number of mass shooting events recorded in the U.S. for the year 2017 ranged from a low of 11 to a high of 346. Clearly, a significant error margin exists, particularly when creating country-to-country comparisons.

> Transporting them from your home to the range is legal, but they must be unloaded, locked, and permits are required for the transport.

Why not make transporting a firearm illegal if it's done with the intent of committing a crime? There's a well defined notion of intent in criminal law. Why are guns magically exempt from this and the assumption is immediately made that the owner is malicious?

> The harsh reality may be that the number of guns per capita floating around really is an important factor.

To me it points toward the opposite conclusion. People will just commit mass murders differently. Now, these won't get labelled as mass shooting so the stats will look better. [0] [1] [2] [3] [4].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shafia_family_murders

[1] https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/quebec-police-release-new-deta...

[2] https://www.the-sun.com/news/2445508/toronto-van-attack-ince...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London,_Ontario_truck_attack

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Calgary_stabbing

The problem with a lot of anti-gun measures is that the proponents readily admit that they would not have stopped any particular shooter. For instance, people talk about background checks, but this shooter and many others did not have a history and were not known to police. They would have passes a background check.

Often times the person acquiring the gun already broke a number of gun laws. Either straw purchase, borrowed someones gun, carrying across state lines, etc. So throwing more laws at it won't necessarily help. Enforcement of existing laws could help but is obviously difficult. Not to mention that gun violence is much higher in cities/counties/states with the most gun control measures. You can say that they just get the guns from elsewhere and national restrictions need to be imposed, but we should see SOME effect. Wyoming should have a higher murder rate than Michigan.

So the conversation from anti-gun people basically amounts to less guns everywhere, but that genie might be out of the bottle already. There are already hundreds of millions of guns in the US and it would be impractical to seize even a tiny percent of them.

But note that there were always guns in America. In fact, guns were often brought to high schools. In 1969, most public high schools in NYC had a shooting club. And yet there were no school shootings.

https://nypost.com/2018/03/31/when-toting-guns-in-high-schoo...

There are 3 recommended policy changes in there.

I would take anti-gun people more seriously if they actually paid attention to what this entails. For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's exactly what anti-gun people focus on.

This is extraordinarily rare.

>People shouldn't point a gun at someone unless their life is in danger and they're prepared to take a life, but they do and people get shot by accident, or road rage turns deadly.

Brandishing weapons is illegal in every state and not pointing the muzzle of a gun at anything you don't intend to destroy is basic gun safety.

>Not to mention the suicides. If you own a gun ideation can turn into action in less than 30 seconds and it can seem like a painless, easy way to go.

There's no evidence to suggest that gun ownership causes higher levels of suicide. Additionally, suicide isn't a crime.

My body, my choice. Suicide is not a valid reason to restrict guns.

(Also as a side note to Moderators - some people in this thread are unnecessarily flagging comments that supports gun control. Lot of people speak about free speech , hope that is practiced here.)

https://www.foxnews.com/world/canadas-trudeau-freeze-handgun...

Now question is this. Which option seems more sane to you? You decide.

-evidence that assault weapons ban significantly reduced firearm related mortality in USA in 1994 for 10 years.

  -60 percent or more US states have no gun registration, I know as I live in Indiana which changed to a no gun registration state despite objections from their own citizens and cops.

  -Among religious right guns are seen as a male status symbols

  -Can we cure this economically by requiring liability insurance in addition to gun registration?  It work by, if you have a past history of danger signs then you would be accessed via insurance companies the largest liability insurance price of owning a gun. Similar to vehicle registration and liability insurance

It's just that we have public roads, upon which it's difficult to hide a car while in use. Yet routinely many people drive unregistered and uninsured vehicles.

Then we'd have to get rid of a LOT of gun control laws. You sure you want that?

Which isn't to say there isn't some reasonable compromise to be had there, just that there is a pretty reasonable argument why we don't do that.

Mufflers would be illegal. If you are driving between states, you need to check to see if your driver's license is accepted by each state you go through -- and some counties. Adjustable car seats are illegal. Automatic transmissions are illegal. Building your own car would be illegal. If your truck is too short, it's a felony. Unless you call your truck a car, and never put anything in the bed. If you have a criminal record for drug use, you cannot drive a car, or even ride a bus. Some states will only let you put 5 gallons of gas in your tank, claiming that large gas tanks are a risk for ramming attacks. California will only let you purchase cars they say are safe--and haven't updated the roster for years. Politicians keep insisting that your tires should be laser etched with microscopic serial numbers so you can track down criminals by the tire marks left behind, and that your car should have a kill switch controlled by the government. Movies like Fast and the Furious get blamed for causing drunk driving. If you buy a Tesla, people constantly demand that you explain why you NEED to own it, and that everyone should be perfectly fine with a Vespa scooter. Whenever a drunk driver hits someone, society blames you personally, and says that you just want your dumb hobbies and don't care about children.

Its illegal to license a right.

We shouldn't penalize the hundreds of millions of legal gun owners in the US because we're unable to catch psychopaths before they kill people.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8547820/

If the expected outcome of an attempted mass shooting is a quick and ignominious death it will be a major deterrent.

Teachers and administrators have been voluntarily carrying concealed firearms in Utah for roughly a decade.

This is just not realistic suggestion.

A supermajority in both houses is doable, but you need all but 12 states to vote in favor, too. There are comfortably 15+ states in the "ain't ever gonna budge" category on that front, and while attitudes could shift in future generations that make such change possible, there is no doubt in my mind that it would take literal generations to happen.

And on a less philosophical note, there will be no changes to the constitution until we have a complete party failure on one side or the other. The current polarization does not seem correctable as it self perpetuates. And in this climate even public agreement on normal legislation that both parties privately agree on is rare, because that is seen as conspiring with the enemy.

It starts with "A well regulated militia..."

A well regulated militia has absolutely no relationship to selling assault weapons to teenagers and/or fantasists.

There is no constitutional "right to bear arms" outside of that context.

And while that's being clarified, it would be also be good to investigate the NRA's Russian money problem.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/sep/27/nra-russia-f...

Because the US doesn't have a gun problem so much as a stochastic terrorism problem, blatantly sponsored and encouraged by a hostile foreign power which is known for encouraging extremely destructive cultural subversion.

America also needs a comprehensive media safety law that bans dissemination of reports of things like school attacks outside of the affected communities. All the nationwide media coverage does is inspire copycat mayhem.

Will never happen in this lifetime.

That’s not clear at all. The US has more anti-gun-violence activists than anywhere else in the world.

There is some amount of friction, different in each country but not zero anywhere, between “what people want” and “what is the law”. Do you think North Koreans prefer living under a corrupt dictatorship? Why don’t they just make the dictatorship illegal?

That’s an extreme example of course: the US political system is closer to European-style proportional parliamentary systems than it is to North Korea, but it’s still very different from them, and in many meaningful ways is not actually a democracy.

My view: If the US population really wants to do something school shootings in the near term, then the physical layout of schools should be changed so that someone can't just walk in and shoot children. Does this make school look and feel like a dystopian prison? Yes. But that's the price of freedom, which probably shouldn't be born by dead primary school children. This strikes me as the only politically feasible solution right now.

Gun regulation seems likely to help and is a fairly logical solution, but too many people seem allergic to it, and there are already so many unregistered firearms out there. While we are dreaming, reshaping society so everyone is kinder and less likely to shoot each other is also likely to help.

We have to start by being kind to the people who need it most and are often the most difficult to be kind to.

You can’t just create a way to think of people who do things as some sort of “other”, we are all human and capable of similar things given the wrong circumstances.

That said, it is treating the symptom instead of the cause. Our society is fundamentally rotten. We are growing increasingly irrational and violent, we are hating each other more and more, we believe in wild nonsense because we want to believe in it. People are lashing out, but where is all that anger coming from?

I think this single-minded focus on firearms any time these events happen is a distraction, a furthering of the divide between people who don't understand each other and increasingly have no desire to. The real issue is that people feel trapped, oppressed, caged, and helpless, and because they feel like that they act rashly. People do not shoot up schools, run over protesters, and storm government buildings because they feel like things are mostly ok. As long as we continue to pretend that our society as it is today is fundamentally sound we'll continue down this path.

Mass shooters overwhelmingly prefer to target such locations for obvious reasons. If it becomes known that most attempted mass shooters will die an ignominious death before they achieve their goal, the incentive for copycat shooters will be gone.

How do you imagine this works? I’ve been ‘at the mercy of criminals’ my entire life, but I’ve never had to fear getting randomly gunned down in my school, or on the street, or in a bar brawl.

I do not see how a sensible person would ever choose the alternative.

Is that statement true though? The only person I know who owns a gun is a farmer and he never shot a criminal but wild boars. In the countries I lived(2 Western Europe, 1 Eastern Europe, 1 Middle East) no one I know ever shot at any criminals, any criminals were dealt through the police, we actually never saw the criminals because they avoid the confrontation even if you don't have any arms. The only time I was a victim of a crime where I was confronted by the criminal, it was when a person really high on drugs tried to rob me on a train. I wouldn't be shooting that person anyway, I simply notified the security at the train station and professionals took care of it. The rest of the times the criminals I encountered are usually things like selling me fake SD cards, which is also something I wouldn't shoot people for(though I wouldn't oppose capital punishment for fake media storage).

Is this different in the US? Are people shooting at criminals all the time? Will a JavaScript programmer in Austin be defenceless in the face of the dangers in Texas if they made the guns illegal? What's the situation on the ground? What is the number of criminals shot per year by an average US citizen?

The evidence in this area shows that increased police presence in schools does not reduce the amount of school shootings, but does increase the number of students arrested.

So, ah, what are the Police for?

Also, hundreds of millions of people in developed countries without guns around the globe live "at the mercy of criminals" but experience less crime, less violence, less homicides and less gun deaths than people living in America.

Your statement makes no sense.

As an American, this is a risk I’m willing to take.

With guns, a bullet is a bullet for the most part (if we are talking about human fired calibers), an the risk any given undirected bullet poses is effectively the same. Larger magazines don't increase accident risk, while being automatic or explosive does.

I.E. if you're a responsible gun owner, an assault rifle with with a 100 round magazine carries the same risk to your neighbor as an old revolver (if not less since most old revolvers have no safety). The risk to others only diverges when you assume ill-intent, but then risks get whacky for tons of legal objects (plastic bags, cars, planes, pens, household chemicals).

As for needing more than 5 rounds for self defense, well, it's a bit tongue in cheek but I go along with this logic: https://www.reddit.com/r/liberalgunowners/comments/am4epf/en...

0: https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/32869/this-man-owns-th...

1: https://www.hotcars.com/here-are-the-worlds-largest-private-...

2: https://www.forgottenweapons.com/category/artillery/

If you're scared of criminals having these, I have something unfortunate to tell you; the law is not stopping these people. It's the exact same thing with small arms controls in the US. The controls people suggest are going to stop fuck all. Every time somebody brings up universal background checks or assault weapons bans in a discussion, they end having to admit that those things wouldn't have stopped the shooting that triggered that discussion. They MIGHT allow you to prosecute somebody after the fact, for whatever that's worth.

Framers intended for individuals to be able to own weapons as powerful as what was available to the military at the time. I'd say framers wanted us to be able to legally buy tanks (with the gun still operational!).

Because that's actually hard, and requires a culture change. Much easier to simply add extra regulations (that criminals will ignore) for the average law abiding citizen and get reelected claiming you "did something".

People have repeatedly called out online hate speech as a contributory factor in mass shootings, and that runs into first amendment problems.

OTOH, school shootings as a vivid call for action on policy that address the drivers of firearms injuries (generally or among children specifically) — currently the leading cause of death in children in the US — do not become less valid because school shootings are themselves a small slice of that problem.

Looking at raw death numbers is dumb. Not all deaths are considered equal. At my grandfathers funeral people told nice stories and laughed at jokes. Despite it being sad for us no one thought it tragic - he died at 90, had lived a fun life, and was a respected and loved man. For all time the death of innocent children has been viewed as tragic. It is. It's worse than death of 40 yos, whose deaths are worse than a 90 yos(all else equal). Similarly, few were upset by Bernie Madoff's death, nor Epsein's (bad people).

1. It completely ignores non-fatal gun injuries. I cant find a source atm but I believe around 40% of non-fatal gun injuries are accidental. To me, this is an indication that SOME level of training is required. Even if it's a $20 online course. This is an incredibly moderate take but many of the 2A enthusiasts I know would be opposed to this because "shall not be infringed" has been pushed as an axiom from 2A special interest groups. Which brings me to point #2

2. The article places the burden of action on the "liberals". No matter how sane the laws, no matter how good the messaging from the American "left" it will not penetrate the right's sphere of influence. Why? Because we all exist in our own media echo chambers. Any proposal will be completely misrepresented in bad faith, no matter how much of a compromise it is.

3. In many instances the implementation of gun control has not been lefty loonies taking guns away from red-blooded conservative Americans. The laws had bipartisan support. The Mulford Act in California was motivated by Black Panthers open carrying, and was passed under Reagan's Governorship. Bush Sr. banned importation of assault weapons in an attempt to be "tough on crime" and Clinton passed gun control legislation while also passing the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which turned us into a de facto police state.

The liberal media doesn't focus on data, it never has. Their analysis is flawed and their purpose is to drive traffic and manufacture consent. But even if CNN was repeating this article's proposals word for word, it would fall on deaf ears. The reason why we can't even have a discussion in the first place is because gun ownership has been fetishized and turned into an identity for people. It is now a facet of "identity" politics.

LOL. Um, IDK, some people might disagree. Some people - like those innocent childrens' parents - might think it's like 99% of the problem.

If the victims of these crimes had guns(or threat of having a gun), what would the statistics look like?

Sounds like we should keep the guns ??

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_India

China, with knives:

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/06/09/china/china-knife-attacks...

These things happen everywhere, aren’t necessarily reported in the same way.

One part of why they are so prevalent in America is how each event becomes such a cultural focus, half of what I’ve seen on social media has been people posting about this event. Perpetuating the idea by giving it such attention must be part of the cause that people go out and do these things.

I'm not so sure that is true. I'd wager that Americans are suffering more than most right now due to institutional rot (or at least the perception and portrayals of it).

Media reports often assume a binary distinction between mild and severe mental illness, and connect the latter form to unpredictability and lack of self-control. However, this distinction, too, is called into question by mental health research. To be sure, a number of the most common psychiatric diagnoses, including depressive, anxiety, and attention-deficit disorders, have no correlation with violence whatsoever.18 Community studies find that serious mental illness without substance abuse is also “statistically unrelated” to community violence.40 At the aggregate level, the vast majority of people diagnosed with psychiatric disorders do not commit violent acts—only about 4% of violence in the United States can be attributed to people diagnosed with mental illness.41,42

There is pretty much one single feature that we've decided should be reserved for military use: selective fire, aka automatic weapons. A "military-grade semi-automatic rifle" is a contradiction in terms. I believe all standard issue military rifles are selective fire, and no civilian rifles can be outside of extremely rare and tightly regulated situations.

The AR-15 is a counterpart to the M16. It is specifically not a military gun and the major difference is that it does not have selective fire.

"Cheap and barely functional enough to win a contract" = "government issue"

My Fox River combat boot socks (my standard everyday sock even when not in uniform) are definitely not cheap and barely functional.

But I otherwise agree with your overall point.

With regards to the most recent shooter, as far as I can tell, their only parent was a grandparent who they shot and killed before attacking the school.

Everything I have read indicates that he purchased the guns and ammo himself, legally, shortly after his 18th birthday.

For example, removing the PLCAA, for starters, to create liability from manufacturers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_of_Lawful_Commerce_...

So someone is killing people because he is poor and needs money? Why doesn't he work instead?

Then when referencing hard numbers and talking about the influence the NRA may have had, she doesn't back that up with anything. Her "notes" are mostly other highly opinionated articles. Had she followed any form of standard or proper notation[1] it'd be easier to believe her. But usually when people fail to make their sources easily available it's because they don't have them/they are low quality.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources]

Edit:

Just to add another comment to this. Typically when someone claims that something which is supported by a large percentage or even the majority of a given population is the result of "extremism", they themselves are like the extremists, for better or for worse.

So if a child's immediate family has issues, there isn't an alternative for that child to to go to to help or for a positive role model. And there are very few public positive role models.

The U.S. has the highest number of single parent households of any country. It also has some of the higher number of mental illnesses and lower numbers of mental health workers.

U.S. works longer hours, have less vacation and holidays, so children are left to their own devices more. Our food supply is laden with chemicals that are not allowed in other countries thanks to lobbying and the FDA. (I'd be interested to see how that impacts mental and physical health).

Our public schools are full of physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The latter being higher than Catholic churches and not very well reported on by any media.

Couple that with media addiction (old,new, and social) and the phenomenon of media "contagion" where you get mass shootings in clusters due to media coverage and you have a recipe for disaster.

Given the failure of the war on drugs, prohibition and the context above, not sure how gun control or confiscation would work when Americans tend to work around those kind of things. Even without guns, we now have drones so its only a matter of time before someone uses those.

However, all that generally gets talked about is either gun control or more guns e.g. arming teachers rather than the underlying causes. Kids used to bring guns to schools without incidents for decades until the 90s when you started to have many latch key kids coming of age from homes where parents were never around.

Be kind to people, especially people who don’t seem to fit in and are alienated by the world. Teach your children to be kind to people and encourage others to be too. A common thread in so many of these events seems to be someone breaking in an unkind world and lashing out violently.

It’s also why guns are enshrined in the constitution. There’s disagreement on why the constitution left the arming of militias up to “the people”, but I’m of the opinion that it was meant to facilitate another American revolution (against our own government should it turn tyrannical).

There's many people in this country that use guns to hunt and feed their family every year.

Ranchers also use guns to protect livestock from coyote and such.

False.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/01/10/guns-and-states-2-son-...

Of course the problem is not uniquely US-American, but I believe the way the US deals with this problem largely is.