by not reporting on it, the public is not made aware of this very tragic problem which can in fact be improved by several orders of magnitude with the return of some simple political will. Political will requires media publicity, so in that sense, the media is doing the right thing here.
Gun control is a "third rail" in many political jurisdictions in the USA. Many Americans will vote against any agent who would disarm them; those voters are unlikely to see disarming to diminish the (very roughly) ~0.000001% chance of death by mass shooting as a sensible--or even Constitutional--trade.
In the abstract, yes, virtually everyone agrees with "wouldn't it be great if bad people couldn't get guns". The problem is the moment it becomes specific a lot of the support is lost.
It's worth pointing out that the House passed the "Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019" back in February, and that Republican leadership in the Senate refuses to bring it to a vote. I have not heard of any House representatives facing enormous backlash at home over their vote.
As it is, the House is more representative of the population of the US than the Senate, so it's fair to say the biggest barrier to increased gun control right now is the quirky nature of the US political system, not popular sentiment.
That bill would do nothing to combat these mass shooters. I can't think of any offhand that have bought their weapons through private sale. Most don't have a criminal record so they just buy them from random gun shops.
So if it won't solve anything related to these incidents, what's the point?
There are many types of gun crime in the US. Background checks would help with a lot of individual murders, particularly in domestic cases where one partner has already been arrested for domestic abuse.
No, it wouldn't solve everything. But if we wait to pass a law that solves everything, we'll never pass anything.
I guess I would need to see numbers on how many murders use a gun that was bought by a prohibited person through private sale. I highly doubt its anything significant.
So your presumption is that all the people calling for background checks and that have drafted and passed a complete background check law have not considered any of this, or looked at any data? And despite not actually knowing yourself you're comfortable dismissing it as something you "highly doubt"?
I have tried to find numbers on this after I made my comment and couldn't come up with anything.
> have drafted and passed a complete background check law have not considered any of this, or looked at any data
Yes, generally because the people proposing gun laws know nothing about guns.
I have watched national politicians tell townhalls that it's perfectly legal for someone to order a gun online right to their door without a background check, that is a felony.
I have watched them tell people that fully automatic guns are easy to obtain, which they are not.
I have watched them tell people that banning the AR-15 should be our #1 priority, when in reality more people are punched and kicked to death each year than are killed with rifles.
So yes, politicians generally talk out of their @$$ to pander to their bases and get votes. They are not experts on most subject matter so I wouldn't expect them to have any info that isn't widely known.
Seems like exactly the opposite is true. Where specific bills have reached the floor, they've passed. The tactics of the opposition are to use procedural control and veto power to prevent these from becoming laws. The assault weapons ban of 1994 was a successful law, and would have removed access to almost all the weapons used in the recent attacks. It had a sunset provision, and expired in 2004. But it passed, and it worked.
It's a common founding myth among gun rights people that "The American People" are pro-gun, but it's just not really true. It's a particular driving issue for a particular subset of the republican base, and beyond that opinions aren't as strong, but are broadly pro-gun-control.
That's total nonsense. The AWB accomplished nothing at all, and did not remove access to any weapons for anybody. It banned specific models of weapons and a few specific features that don't correlate to anything in particular. Manufacturers basically instantly made minor modifications and kept selling the exact same thing.
Seconding your assertion that the AWB was ineffective. It barred certain cosmetic features--some malarkey about muzzle brakes and folding stocks or foregrips or whatnot. While doing nothing to diminish the availability of equally potent weapons. 100% toothless, feel-good legislation.
I was under the impression that the 1994 ban targeted specific models of firearm and silly features like pistol grips, flash suppressors, and bayonets (I might be confusing this with a california ban). The whole "Assault weapon" thing is considered something of a joke to a lot of firearm enthusiasts. For example, the ruger mini 14 wasn't legally considered an "Assault weapon" (but would be considered one if it had a collapsible stock? might be a myth idk this is what some people claim) despite it being a well regarded semi-automatic rifle which was also used in an infamous shootout with the fbi to devestating effect.
> might be a myth idk this is what some people claim
It was a flawed list of too-specific rules that were self-contradictory or incomplete in a bunch of places, and indeed that became part of the mythology about it in gun circles.
But it also directly outlawed clones of the Kalashnikov and AR-15 rifles that have been preferentially used (for fairly obvious reasons) in much of the recent violence. It worked, within its domain.
No one likes the ACA either, but you can still buy insurance with a pre-existing condition. Same deal. The gun folks like to conflate "flawed law" with "useless law", but that's not how it works in practice.
People agree with the specifics too, until the media outlets they watch start pumping out misinformation about whatever the specific proposal says. After a few weeks of watching their favorite pundits bloviate, many people’s “personal preferences” change.
How about a background check and a mental check? Gun owners always call it a mental health crisis, so let's make sure all new gun owners are vetted and have to pass a psychological exam.
> How about a background check and a mental check?
That would pretty much guarantee that people who need mental health services would deliberately avoid getting it to prevent it from showing up on their records, e.g. a security guard who needs to carry a firearm for their job.
It gets worse. If you’re flagged with a mental illness, most states will yank your professional license (you lose your job and possible primary income). Our society has an economic incentive to underreport mental illness.
Uh, what do you think a psychiatric exam is? There's no crazy-o-meter that they stick into an orifice to objectively determine whether you're mentally ill or not. You simply get asked a series of questions which you can reply to in any way you like.
Replying to the other comments under this reply: in Canada we check for past history of mental illness but don’t flag gun license applicants just because of that. They need to have a history of being treated due to illness that could lead to violence.
"Gun people" might be skeptical of the 85% number because there are already background checks, with which "non-gun people" by definition are unfamiliar. Is there something preventing the existing system from becoming better naturally (I honestly don't know the answer here)? I would hazard to guess the 15% of dissenters to be wary of the survey-takers' motives, the particulars of how background checks might be governmentally instrumented to be better, stuff like that. Consider that the prior administration floated the idea of barring folks on the no-fly list from possessing guns, which seems an awfully bureaucratically unconstitutional thing after even slight consideration.
That is very well put, far from the rabid madness that usually seems to be conjured up when gun control is discussed. I spent some time studying it to spot the weak point.
I guess it is the phrase "to disarm them", which is somewhat provocative, since no-one would seriously advocate taking away all guns. Even Japan, with just 5% of the gun violence of the US, allows some citizens to have some guns.
Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
But most of all, it ignores the psychological impact from the threat of gun violence.
What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills? From having adults explain to them that this is a real threat, and that they better be ready for it? No child should have to carry that burden.
And maybe that leads back to some agreement with your point. If the actual danger from guns is as low as you say, then why have these drills at all?
> no-one would seriously advocate taking away all guns
While I believe this to be true, virtually any sort of "turn in some of your guns" event in the USA would... not be viewed with any nuance at all. Even machine guns were more-or-less exempt from turn-in, provided they were registered by a certain time. Moreover there are already very, very many semi-automatic pistols, revolvers, rifles, and shotguns in circulation--it's not as if a lot of folks have a bolt-action 22 cal rifle and just a few have semi-automatics--the sort of guns that can be fired and reloaded somewhat rapidly, that's what we've got. Setting aside the fact that a rifle is more powerful and aim-able, but harder to conceal, compared to a pistol, I'm not sure what characteristic of a "bad" gun the American government could successfully put forth.
All that said--from whom would you propose to confiscate what guns?
> Another issue is with your stated statistic of death via mass shooting. This obviously ignores maimings and other non-deaths, and also deaths from guns in non-mass events, such as burglaries, accidents.
Well, agreed! Mass shootings and terror attacks inflict many fewer casualties on the American population compared to robberies, gang and drug violence, alcohol and smoking, fatty foods, traffic accidents and DUI, swimming pools, etc. However, it does not seem to me that these other perils are used to buttress the case for banning the instruments of such trouble. I don't mean to be glib, and indeed it is hard to imagine a bad actor using an undoctored swimming pool against innocents, but it does seem to be the case that the electorate lacks the will to stamp out certain risks. And this lack of will is not really related to the measurable impact of the problem.
> What happens to a young child's mind from having to participate in active shooter drills?
We could reflect on the schoolhouse duck-and-cover drills for nuclear war in the 1950s and 1960s--like, isn't contemplating nuclear annihilation and nuclear winter much more terrifying and existentially dreadful than locking the classroom door? Maybe it isn't a good idea to traumatize children with visions of a terrible but statistically very remote fate. On the other hand, local police and school districts must be seen to be doing something, so maybe it is practically unavoidable.
Right, and they see their weapons as insurance against being the victims of a socialist famine like the ones that killed 100 million people last century.
If you want to viscerally understand their viewpoint, call to mind the reaction that you have when someone in the conservative camp goes "Look, it's snowing, so much for global warming!" -- and then substitute "snowing" for "school shooting" and "global warming" for "politically-induced mass starvation."
I don't buy this argument, but only because I don't think armed resistance would be effective, and there's a lot that I know I don't know on that front. What I don't believe is that this tradeoff has an obvious undebatable answer.
I didn't mean to imply any particular motive to the pro-gun / pro-2A camp. Like, I personally tend to think most live in somewhat rural areas, and value firearms as tools for self-defense and deterrence--in areas where there is zilch, zero chance one could scream or even effectively telephone for help from the police or a neighbor--plus hunting, protecting livestock, and the like. Surely there are some Americans who dream of resisting government oppression, but surely even the able-minded among them understand the pure futility, plus the crushing societal and economic collapse that would come with it.
*so in that sense, the media is juicing its numbers
thats all they're doing
>public is not made aware of this very tragic problem
everyone is quite aware of what the problems are, many view the children murdered during Sandy Hook as the end of the conversation. The decisions were made.
most first world countries have solved these problems, the US meanwhile...
‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens
Think about this event for 1 minute: He drove for -9- hours. NINE HOURS.
Do you think it would take less than 9 hours to pour some diesel fuel on fertilizer and flatten the entire WalMart?
People will just move on to other weapons: knives, bombs, etc.
Norway has very restrictive gun laws. Breivik managed to get enough fertilizer to make a bomb that was mostly a distraction, but still sent 8 people to grave and injured hundreds.
Are you going to cite anything about knife crime not being a problem in the UK?
How do you explain much lower homicide rates in different US states, many on par or better than "every other first wolrd country?
If you drill down deeper, by county level, or even more granular - the picture becomes much clearer still. You should research it, see what variables drive it, instead of arriving at conclusions without any data.
Why do such discrepancies exist, sometimes literally across the street?
The problem is much more complicated than "guns bad".
Which states and developed countries are you talking about? The EU28 homicide rate is ~1 per 100,000. NH sometimes hits that; no other US state does. There are about 6 US states <= to 2. The only EU states over 2 are Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Japan and South Korea are both under 1.
The UK ‘knife crime’ thing is severely overhyped (in particular, most of the figures you’ll see include mere possession of a knife under certain circumstances). The UK’s intentional homicide rate is middling for Europe and about a fourth that of the US. Homicide rate has risen a little bit over the last few years.
