I really wish we would have a meaningful debate over the best tools and strategies for protecting people in large groups in public places. Because of the delay of so-called first responders, it is really left to the people who are there to take action.
Outside of banning and confiscating all guns, gun control isn't going to solve the problem. People with criminal intent will always find a way to carry out their plans (c.f. the recent spate of knife attacks in China).
We need defensive and offensive measures to minimize harm. I believe the lockdown plan put into action at the school probably saved more lives than any other one thing, until the police arrived. So giving schools more tools for effective plans like this would probably help.
On the offensive side, teachers and staff were left to fight guns with their hands. If they had had a weapon of their own (tasers or guns with rubber bullets, for example), they would have stood a better chance of minimizing harm. We allow pilots to carry weapons if they so choose and it is probably at least somewhat effective as a random deterrent, in addition to providing some actual protection.
Sadly, I don't think this line of thinking will come up. This thing is going to be played out largely in Washington, where entrenched groups will be mostly pushing existing agendae, not thinking in new ways to actually minimize the problem.
After all, how elaborate are the protections they are stored behind likely to be? Not very, when you consider that (1) if the weapons are ever needed they'll need to be able to be gotten to fast, and (2) the people responsible for storing them are going to be middle school administrators, not military quartermasters.
"Readily available" can be addressed by concealed handguns that aren't too easy to get to; you might have to give an attacker a "first bite of the apple" in favor of making them too accessible. On the other hand, a few M4s in a quick to open safe in the principle's office ought to be doable, as long as the staffers there have the right attitudes, to "march towards the sound of canons".
And it's attitude above all that needs to be addressed, we don't take this threat seriously, perhaps in part because it's quite new as these things go (we'll ignore the far more deadly 1927 Bath school massacre done with explosives).
This school had a crust defense; once the perimeter was compromised by the attacker shooting out a window (according to the latest never very reliable reports) there was nothing left but for the teachers to interpose their bodies between the shooter and their charges. Which was no obstacle to him (one does wonder what it takes for someone who doesn't seem to have suffered from schizophrenia or mania to shoot a bunch of 5-6 year old children 3-11 times each ... I admit the existence of evil, won't claim to ever really understand it).
There currently exist laws that forbid law-abiding concealed carry permit holders from carrying firearms on school grounds. This law does not prevent dangerous people from bringing weapons into these zones and committing atrocities. Instead, I think we should really be encouraging teachers to make the commitment to go through the training process required for them to get their concealed handgun licenses and to regularly train to maintain safe gun-carrying habits. Perhaps teachers could receive some sort of compensation for having a concealed handgun license and engaging in regular firearms safety training.
I am sure that during the excruciatingly terrible events that took place in Newtown some teachers wished they had the means to defend the children and themselves. We should let teachers that want to legally and safely carry instruments of defense to do so. We shouldn't have laws that guarantee defenseless victims.
The classroom presents special challenges not present in other situations when it comes to arming civilians.
Schools, summer camps, sporting events, theaters, amusement parks, universities and other so-called gun-free zones -- are soft targets that are going to be exploited by criminals/terrorists (one just has to look at where those horrible acts were comitted in Russia (Beslan), Norway, US)
Just like the planes where in 9/11.
so training and arming a portion of the staff that is operating the facilities, as well as securing access -- is essential
Praying, reading books, closing doors and closets -- are not effective measures against evil-souled animals who are there to end their lives and to take as many people with them as possible.
There are schools that have been taking steps in this direction.
http://www.sacbee.com/2012/12/15/5056005/one-texas-school-le...
I would also venture to say that media coverage must change the protocol in cover this kinds of events things like a) name of the criminal must not be announced b) reasons/intent must not be announced/mentioned/discussed on broadcast networks c) number of victims
so that the media does not feed the possible copy cats.
If it were left to school boards, they could do things like require a stringent process to certify particular staff who have access to a cabinet, for example (this could include safety training, a background check, and psychological testing). Unfortunately, we have a zero tolerance position in most school systems (which makes sense for students, obviously). It will probably not even be considered due to existing bias.
Here's a scatter plot of firearms per 100,000 and gun homocides per 100 for OECD countries:
Needless to say, the dot in the top right corner is the USA>
Data is from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homi...
(Note: Mexico is excluded because its rate of gun violence is such a startling outlier that it squashes all the other values.)
I feel this is instructive because with all of the guns already in private hands in the US if they were banned outright today you'd end up with an enormous and uncontrollable black market. The same type of black market that exists in Mexico.
Even in the US now, the vast majority of gun crimes are committed with illegally obtained guns. Something on the order of greater than 90%.
Edit: Not saying the scale is misleading on purpose... just that it is misleading.
It's not a peaceful place.
A melee weapon versus a deadly ranged weapon is going to be a poor matchup.
> guns with rubber bullets
If you're the good guy who's doing the most damage, but it's non-lethal, non-debilitating damage, you'd better be prepared to draw aggro.
My guess is that only a teacher with a gun would have had a decent chance of ending the massacre early.
My understanding of tactics is largely based on video games. Anyone with any training/experience in real-life tactics is welcome to comment on my comment.
If you desperately need to stop someone ASAP, rubber bullets are subpar unless they approach lethal energies, for obvious reasons, and a lot of school teacher types wouldn't be able to wield such weapons effectively. Your guess is correct.
I think regardless of your position we can all agree on this.
It would be useful if we could all see that we really are on the same side of this — everyone wants to prevent another tragedy like this. We just have very different beliefs about how best to go about that.
If that were true, wouldn't we'd only be seeing gun control proposals that directly flow from this event, not all the "usual suspects" that are also being proposed again? E.g. the "gun show loophole", which has not been implicated in any of these events to my knowledge. But it turns out gun shows are a vital part of the US gun culture and shutting them down, as the fine print of these proposals would do, would do it grave damage.
We're seeing a whole lot of what some people define as insanity, doing (recommending) the same thing over and over again, regardless of results. That doesn't strike me as a response to this event, but opportunism in using it.
Most people don't live in fear of cancer or lightning strikes, unless they find themselves in the middle of an asbestos filled building or right underneath a lightning storm.
The knowledge however that so many people around carry deadly firearms, and maybe more importantly, apparently feel they have a pressing reason to own firearms, is a daily reality for many. This fear is real, and it is not irrational.
This is not about the odds. It's about not having to live in fear. Even though the odds are wildly in their favor, most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
People's fear, by in large, is not rational. Many people would get into a car on a rainy Friday night with little hesitation or thought of risk, yet they are deliberately putting themselves in harms way.
What the author is trying to get across is that public policy should focus on things it can track its effectiveness on and things it can solve.
When choosing where to spend time and money, the odds are exactly what people should be focusing on.
It'd be really nice if politicians could make use of science and good quality research to make their arguments and to craft policy.
It'd be really nice if politicians could say "We don't know what the answer is. We're running some 3 year trials, and at the end of those we'll have some data and information and we'll be in a better position to know what the best thing to do is".
But no politician is going to say that. No politician is ever going to say "I'm not sure, I'll have to look at the research and get advice".
Any politician who said anything other than "Mass shootings are devastating and something needs to be done" would be eviscerated by tv, newspapers, and blogs. There is no possibility of nuanced discussion.
> most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
But when people decide not to swim in a well run swimming pool because the media is constantly blaring entertainment shows about sharks with ominous music and shaky-cam then it's not so rational.
Is this something that is even attainable by exterior forces? I don't just mean as it relates to gun-crimes, but anything. Everyone has fears — from fear of failure to fear of heights. They are personal and, as such, are yours to conquer personally.
Laws do not necessarily automatically assuage your fears — many people, as you point out, have irrational fears based on emotion rather than in fact / statistic probability.
You're almost twice as likely to be killed by a gun because you live in the United States vs. the next developed country (Finland). You're 2.6 times as likely to be killed than the next country, Canada.
Something is very wrong here.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
Yes, the average American (not necessarily you, it varies a lot depending on where you live) is more likely to be killed by a gun than the average person in Finland. That is completely irrelevant to my post. It's not a competition among countries, it's about making the US better. "Daring" has nothing to do with it.
But you conclude there is no need to fix the current problem. Comparing America to other Developed countries clearly shows there is.
Psychopathic spree killings are such a low-probability, extreme event that there's almost nothing you can do, at a public policy level, to influence them. Your monkey brain may protest that this simply cannot be (as mine does), but our monkey brains are wrong.
Instead we need to look for significant trends. Or consider that our actions might cause other harms more often, which is especially likely when our actions are driven by low-probability events. Basing public policy on such extreme events is not just stupid, it's immoral.
And yet, that's exactly the job of the media. The media works, by and large, by telling individual stories to provoke general sympathy or outrage. This is a good thing when that story is representative of a larger problem. What we have now is random phenomena driving larger political discussions.
This is completely false. Being rare doesn't mean there aren't things that can make it even more rare. Many countries have taken steps that make these events far less likely.
This is a bullshit red herring designed to ignore 99.8% of the gun homicides that take place each year in the US [1]. Gun control works to control much more than just mass shootings.
[1] Using 8K as a rough estimate for annual gun deaths from here:
He's not cherry picking stats to make the matter of gun crime appear less serious. He's addressing the impending tidal wave of emotion in response to the events in Newtown, which happened to be a mass shooting.
The reddit attention span appears to be alive and well at HN.
Yes he eventually talks about all these gun deaths and then he hand waves it all away, too much thinking:
"I’m not even going to try to answer those questions, because they are extremely complex."
Too much work, forget it. Man, if only scores of other countries had gone through something similar and we could draw on those experiences but ... thinking is HARD!
Another flawed argument is that these incidents are small anomalies which can't be controlled by regulatory changes. Yes, if you can categorically prove that this is just a blimp on the charts. Anecdotally it feels like this is spreading, increasing in frequency. At what point are you going to put your foot down and push for changes? Some social behaviors tend to be pretty viral, inspiring a new set of perpetrators. Lets treat this with caution and not bury it under the carpet of data & statistics.
To put it in nerd-speak, the intolerance for any given death is a function V with multiple inputs. (I find this extremely distasteful but bear with me.) For cars and smoking, the output of that function scales quite slowly; we're mostly OK with those because we like cars and if you smoke it's your funeral. Note that we already spend a lot of money on automotive safety, so arguably we still want to bring those numbers down. For instance, look at recent safety-oriented recalls from various manufacturers. Likewise, we spend money to reduce teen smoking, et al. So even then those don't really wash as an example of hypocrisy around the value of human life.
For the murder of multiple people via gratuitously overpowered firearms, you might argue V scales linearly, perhaps even quadratically. Maybe V takes a time-delta which scales V even faster with smaller deltas; Aurora is still fresh in many people's minds, as are numerous other incidents.
For multiple children under the age of 8 gunned down by a madman with a high-capacity assault rifle, V might scale factorially. We as a society try to place a very high value on the lives and well-being of children.
In other words, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than simply comparing inputs to V, and a small input to V for some category of deaths is not in itself a justification to ignore it. The author has committed the fallacy of looking at morality and society primarily or even solely through the lens of statistics.
The author's laziness is also ironic, all things considered. The UK and Australia are other western industrialized nations quite similar to ours, in a great many respects. They've experienced some success in reducing gun violence since the '90s, when they banned private handgun ownership. The irony is that the author's blindness here is a far better example of magical thinking about how regulation might or might not work in the US.
"I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?"
But is that the best comparison?
What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different disease. So here, I think it would be more informative to have comparative study done across countries, societies rather than this distraction.
Author is basically saying, anything that is statistically small, does not deserve attention. So research into any low probability disease should be ended because there bigger fish to fry. I think we can do both.
No, he is not. He is saying, anything that is statistically small, and the elimination thereof would substantially restrain the rights and freedom of others, should be questioned.
No matter how you are going to argue, there is at least "some" purpose for guns - for self protection, etc. If the discussion were really about saving lifes, it makes no sense why not putting a ban on smoking, something that clearly has no purpose at all.
Yes, it is. You have a limited amount of resources -- in this case, tax dollars and political capital.
If you're spending dollars or votes to save lives, you should spend them on the thing which saves the most lives per dollar spent.
> What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
Another commenter on this article said that this comparison indicates that gun control doesn't really help [1].
To this, I'd add that most countries that have a strong gun control never had the situation of the US: millions of guns already in public circulation; many pro-gun individuals and a powerful political faction; and a very difficult procedure (amending the Constitution) required for changing policy.
These obstacles are pretty much insurmountable right now; you'd be well-advised to spend your political capital on an issue where you have a decent chance of winning.
I think what I was reading sounded like "there might be less gun violence over there, but don't look into why, it's not worth your while".
My thought was that maybe it is worth our while to look into why.
when one decides upon controlling guns, it would be prudent to grandparent people in. New rights revocation would only be applied to the upcoming generations. This way you don't alienate a population from something they hold dear, but would ensure whatever you're enacting becomes effective over time.
When you are required to get a license to cast your ballot or attend your church, then you can make the argument for getting a license to purchase a firearm.
I'm not convinced by this argument. Firearms are not used in public spaces, but in private land, or on club-owned property.
Theoretically, he does compare to other countries, as the statistic is a rounding error -- not statistically relevant.
"You had Norway last year [where 77 died]. Two years ago, you had the shooting in Austria at a Sikh Temple. There have been several multiple-victim public shootings in France over the last couple of years. Over the last decade, you’ve had a couple of big school shootings in Germany."
http://www.newsmax.com/Headline/Lott-guns-Connecticut-shooti...
History indicates otherwise.
We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.
I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.
If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.
Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.
I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.
For better or worse, we're a violent people.
Not so.
The New York Times has referred to Australia's gun laws as a "road map" for the US, saying that "in the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings - but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-17/us-urged-to-consider-a...
But the media knows that a large share of their "news business" is driven by emotion. And so here we are all thinking about mass shootings.
And we know the media has an enormous influence on politics. So add this all up and what do we have?
A terrible tragedy that affects a small community but also a lot of tangential effects, remote onlookers, politicians and an enterprising "media business".
I have a cousin who as a child was a student in a narrowly averted early grade school classroom mass shooting. Honestly, when I first heard about this incident in Connecticut I thought of him. I can only wonder what he thought about when he read about this incident. When it hits close to home, there might be hesistation to even talk about these things, they are so horrible. We might block them out. We might tell the children to close their eyes. We might try to pretend it never happened.
But for the media and the "news business", it's a different ballgame.
Nothing to do with liberty, the constitution or anything...
The correct meaningful numbers in establishing public policy regarding firearms are approximately 19,000 suicides by fire arm per year, and 11,000 homicides by firearm per year.
If we look at those numbers, the deaths in the recent school shooting are quite ordinary. The homicides are equivalent to the extra day in a leap year, and the suicide of the gunman was statistically background noise.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/28/guns-ownership-aroun...
note that the black circle is not scaled by the population of the country so it isn't visually as useful as it could be.
Interesting take aways:
* 88.9 guns per 100 U.S. citizens
* 45.7 guns per 100 swedish citizens (next highest country in the world)Swiss you mean? ;)
That said, a quick look at the list and it appears that no western country can compare to USA in firearm homicide per 100k citizens.
Let's say you are in a room with 100 people and you know that 88 guns are in there. Would you feel better if you knew that 88 different people each had 1 gun or that 44 people each had 2 guns?
Looking at all homicides vs gun ownership seems to bear that out. In fact, there appears to be a negative correlation with gun ownership: http://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership
(Can we start abbreviating Correlation Is Not Causation as CINC now? In any case, if you're going to argue that more guns = more murders, at the very least you're going to have to concede that other factors are much, much more important.)
It seems insane to me (as a Canadian citizen) that the pro-gun folks continue to peddle that safety comes from increasing the number of "responsible" carriers. Here are the issues that I see with this:
1. The assumption that all gun users are trained and responsible. It seems obvious to compare this to other licensees such as drivers and you'll immediately see that it is not a valid argument. There are terrible drivers on the roads with valid licenses, who have presumably been trained with a lot of experience. The barrier to entry is even higher in that the cost of a vehicle is higher than a weapon.
2. How do you differentiate the good vs. bad in a situation such as Aurora? If you see a number of random strangers running around with guns in hand, few of whom would have any sort of melee training outside of video games, who do you shoot at? Where does the liability lie if one innocent murders another innocent by mistake?
3. The number of guns will increase (as they are now). With more lying around either forgotten or marginally broken, it increases the availability for non-licensed usage as I doubt responsible users dispose of their weapons appropriately (see item 1).
I say all this fully recognizing the gun's position as a tool, strongly advocating mental health reform and even supporting the OP's position of rational rather than emotional response to Newtown.
In China, where guns are generally (if not totally) banned, they've had a problem with citizens going on murderous rampages in schools with swords and knives. So yes, the lack of guns is not necessarily decreasing murderous intent. But look at something interesting: all 22 victims of the most recent China rampage survived (http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2012/12/14/china-sc...). If this man had a bushmaster, he'd have done a lot better.
Murder with highly refined weapons of war is much more effective than murder without. Removing assault weapons designed for wars would not necessarily decrease the count of incidents but would decrease the harmfulness of those incidents.
I don't really care about the self defense aspect - even though it's enticing, having some of my stuff stolen is probably better than killing a person.
Mass killings are as inevitable as lightning deaths
There are public policies which deal with lightning risk, e.g. formal implementation of the 30-30 rule for sports facilities.
I don't think that you will find that this number is a statistical fluctuation.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.