Gun Control: US and Global II

[The Bread Guy]

Just throwing these recent tidbits out there to add ingredients to the discussion stew …

… Two policies-universal background checks and "may issue" laws* that required a heightened showing of suitability for concealed carry-were associated with lower firearm homicide rates in large cities but were not associated with firearm homicide rates in suburban and rural areas. In contrast, laws that prohibited gun possession by people convicted of a violent misdemeanor were associated with lower firearm homicide rates in suburban and rural areas, but were not associated with firearm homicide rates in large cities. Permit requirements were associated with lower firearm homicide rates in both large cities and suburban and rural areas … This article provides the first evidence that state firearm laws may have a differential impact on firearm homicide rates in suburban and rural areas compared to urban areas in the United States ...

From "The Impact of State Firearm Laws on Homicide Rates in Suburban and Rural Areas Compared to Large Cities in the United States, 1991-2016" (Journal of Rural Health, based on FBI data)

… Universal background checks were associated with a 14.9% (95% CI, 5.2–23.6%) reduction in overall homicide rates, violent misdemeanor laws were associated with a 18.1% (95% CI, 8.1–27.1%) reduction in homicide, and “shall issue” laws* were associated with a 9.0% (95% CI, 1.1–17.4%) increase in homicide. These laws were significantly associated only with firearm-related homicide rates, not non-firearm-related homicide rates. None of the other laws examined were consistently related to overall homicide or suicide rates … We found a relationship between the enactment of two types of state firearm laws and reductions in homicide over time. However, further research is necessary to determine whether these associations are causal ones ...

From "The Impact of State Firearm Laws on Homicide and Suicide Deaths in the USA, 1991–2016: a Panel Study" (Journal of General Internal Medicine, based on CDC data)

* - More on "may issue" & "shall issue" laws here.

 

[Jed]

I think it’s  a combination.  Societal factors with the added issue of easily accessed weapons and a stunted government not willing or able to deal with either.

In your opinion it is a combination of Societal factors (mainly some form of individual mental health) or easy access to scary demonized firearms. I would say that the facts all over the world lay waste to your opinion.

One obvious conclusion is that there is a Societal Fear of scary firearms akin to people being afraid of snakes, etc.  Maybe we should exterminate all deadly snakes to prevent the unnecessary death of people? After all one loss of life is too many.

 

[Remius]

In your opinion it is a combination of Societal factors (mainly some form of individual mental health) or easy access to scary demonized firearms. I would say that the facts all over the world lay waste to your opinion.

One obvious conclusion is that there is a Societal Fear of scary firearms akin to people being afraid of snakes, etc.  Maybe we should exterminate all deadly snakes to prevent the unnecessary death of people? After all one loss of life is too many.

Not quite, Jed but thanks for trying to give me my opinion.  The US has a gun culture no other western country has.  Bordering on the religious (heck for some guns and religion are linked) An almost romanticised version TBH.  It has a history of racial divide.  A divide where guns were the perceived solution.  In fact guns figure prominently in US history.  (The revolutionary war, the Civil War for one, the Conquest of the West another). 

This is more than just a mental health issue.  It is also more than just a gun control issue.  Mental Health issues exist throughout the western world yet we don't see the same rates as we do in the US with these incidents.  Some countries have easy access to guns and yet we don't see the same rates of gun violence the US has. 

So what is it?  Is it disenfranchised young racist men? 

There are similar traits that can be found in young jihadi men and young white supremacist men.  Both groups feeling disenfranchised and angry at the world that found something to belong to and something to fight and some willing to act on it.  Maybe that is part of it.

Then add just how easy it is to get a gun and you have a recipe for disaster. 

I'm not sure why some people think that some more rules would be bad.  Not bans or confiscations.  But universal rules as opposed to individual state laws that create inconstancies.  I find it odd that people balk at background checks being unreasonable.  But it needs to be about more than just gun control and mental health.

I hope the US can figure it out at some point.  Not very hopeful though.

So yes it is a combination.  this isn't an all or nothing game the left and the right like to play. 

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Armed off-duty firefighter halts armed suspect at Walmart store in Missouri, police say

https://www.foxnews.com/us/armed-man-arrested-at-missouri-walmart-police-say?fbclid=IwAR2fbj7be3fqLqXHbFH79Q-lS7dnZRQ1DebXrl3CxiRDIWQg-Ps5H0eIRJg

An armed man reportedly wearing body armor and pushing a shopping cart at a Walmart store in Missouri on Thursday led a store manager to pull the fire alarm and sent customers fleeing -- but an armed off-duty firefighter was able to detain the man until police officers arrived, Springfield police said.

The 20-year-old suspect was carrying loaded tactical weapons, according to reports. He was arrested at the scene and taken into custody, however, police didn't immediately say what charges he was arrested on.

“His intent obviously was to cause chaos here, and he did that,” Springfield police Lt. Mike Lucas told The Springfield News-Leader.

It wasn't immediately clear if the man who was detained told cops why he was at the store, however, the incident comes five days after a mass shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, that resulted in 22 deaths.

    “His intent obviously was to cause chaos here, and he did that.”
    — Lt. Mike Lucas, Springfield Police Department

In a Facebook post, Springfield police wrote that officers were dispatched to the Walmart store around 4:10 p.m. Thursday on reports of  “an armed white male.”

More at link

 

[Fishbone Jones]

Armed Citizens Are Successful 94% Of The Time At Active Shooter Events [FBI]

https://www.concealedcarry.com/news/armed-citizens-are-successful-95-of-the-time-at-active-shooter-events-fbi/?fbclid=IwAR261zWxPHGrYy_TE6O0aovIMMzxAgNxzuzLZF9wncOntZ59ON2dyh1zJtc

The FBI has published 3 reports that collectively detail active shooter events from 2000-2017. The first report covered events from 2000 to 2013, the second covered 2014-2015, and the third and most recent covered 2016-2017.

It is important to note that the FBI has no specific system in place for finding and cataloging active shooter events. They manually search for and include them in their reports the same way anyone else might Google it which of course means there is room for error particularly in missing events that should have been included.

The FBI definition of an Active Shooter event is: “One or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.”

A few important distinctions about the FBI definition of Active Shooter include:

    A firearm must be used by the attacker. This then means they have not included incidents like the armed citizen who saved a woman outside the GM building in Detroit from a stabber or the man who was stopped by a CCWer in a Smiths Grocery store in Salt Lake City when he was stabbing shoppers at random.
    Domestic incidents are not included. The FBI feels that an Active Shooter event has to be one in which the attacker is endangering strangers not only their own family members.
    Gang-related violence is excluded also.
    For the FBI to define an incident as an Active Shooter incident both law enforcement personnel and citizens have to have the potential to affect the outcome of the event based upon their responses to the situation.

Much more at link.

 

[Jed]

Ah, gun violence. What a BS terminology. This is basically human beings committing uncontrolled evil and mayhem using a firearm. All countries all over the world do this regularly.  People in Africa have been especially good at it. I believe what society seem to be focusing on is these tragic individual Mass Shooter instances (with no apparent sane motive) that have started cropping up mainly in the US in the past few decades. All sorts of other criminal or ideological behaviours keep getting lumped in just to confuse the issue.

Thank goodness that the US has had their 2nd amendment right to allow people to individually protect themselves from corrupt or merely inept big government. Canada benefits greatly due to our proximity on the same continent as this great Nation.

Personally I would sooner live in the freedom of our country or in the US than in the restricted environments of many European and Asian countries. For the time being I am at least able to voice my own opinion without reprisal from some wayward big government bureaucrat.

Watching England  and other Commonwealth countries take away freedoms from their subjects is very disturbing to me. Seeing Canada choose this future is not one I would prefer. Our children and grandchildren will have to live with it, I suppose. I imagine that the North American Indians and the Mountain Men may have had the same feelings when the push from the populated areas began to civilize a pristine world.

 

[Remius]

Time magazine has a piece on the dangers of linking gun violence to mental health issues.

https://time.com/5645747/gun-violence-mental-illness/

This para in particular echoes some of what I have stated.

"The false link between mental illness and violence has another deeply troubling public health impact. When we blame gun violence on “mental illness” (or “video games” or even “assault rifles”) we create a bugaboo that keeps us from doing the hard work needed to make real progress on gun violence. The U.S. mental health system, and our country’s approach to mental illness, is far from perfect. But even if we perfected treatment, we would not stop the current American gun violence epidemic. To do so requires hard discussions and good research evidence about issues ranging from structural inequality, to addiction, to racism and misogyny, to firearm access by at-risk people, to social media. Blaming mass shootings on mental illness stops us from making forward progress."

 

[Jed]

Time magazine has a piece on the dangers of linking gun violence to mental health issues.

https://time.com/5645747/gun-violence-mental-illness/

This para in particular echoes some of what I have stated.

"The false link between mental illness and violence has another deeply troubling public health impact. When we blame gun violence on “mental illness” (or “video games” or even “assault rifles”) we create a bugaboo that keeps us from doing the hard work needed to make real progress on gun violence. The U.S. mental health system, and our country’s approach to mental illness, is far from perfect. But even if we perfected treatment, we would not stop the current American gun violence epidemic. To do so requires hard discussions and good research evidence about issues ranging from structural inequality, to addiction, to racism and misogyny, to firearm access by at-risk people, to social media. Blaming mass shootings on mental illness stops us from making forward progress."

Seems like a cop out statement to me.  No one is saying that all forms of ‘Mental Illness’ result in ‘gun violence’.  There are specific form of Mental Illnesses that relate at an individual level that is the problem. Thank God these are very rare occurrences.

Blaming mass shootings on Guns stops us from making forward progress.  See what I did there.

 

[Remius]

Seems like a cop out statement to me.  No one is saying that all forms of ‘Mental Illness’ result in ‘gun violence’.  There are specific form of Mental Illnesses that relate at an individual level that is the problem. Thank God these are very rare occurrences.

Blaming mass shootings on Guns stops us from making forward progress.  See what I did there.

Reread the quote Jed it says essentially what you did there...

When we blame gun violence on “mental illness” (or “video games” or even “assault rifles”)


I also agree with that statement so I guess we agree.

Yes.  Thank god they are rare here where we have some sort of balance.

 

[tomahawk6]

Gun control has been the 3d rail of US politics. One side wants to ban guns and the other votes against anything that threatens private gun ownership.

 

[Remius]

Lovely.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/suspect-in-disturbance-at-missouri-walmart-said-he-was-testing-2nd-amendment-rights-prosecutors

 

[brihard]

Lovely.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/suspect-in-disturbance-at-missouri-walmart-said-he-was-testing-2nd-amendment-rights-prosecutors

What an idiot...

 

[RocketRichard]

Armed off-duty firefighter halts armed suspect at Walmart store in Missouri, police say

https://www.foxnews.com/us/armed-man-arrested-at-missouri-walmart-police-say?fbclid=IwAR2fbj7be3fqLqXHbFH79Q-lS7dnZRQ1DebXrl3CxiRDIWQg-Ps5H0eIRJg

More at link

2 dudes legally allowed to carry. How did that work out? Lucky no one was killed.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Kat Stevens]

2 dudes legally allowed to carry. How did that work out? Lucky no one was killed.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

You just answered your own question. No one was killed.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

I'd rather look at the glass as half full and say what stops a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun. Nobody but the perp knew what he was thinking or whether he is lying after getting caught. What we do know, is this wacko, whatever his intentions, was stopped in his tracks by a good guy with a gun.
Personally, I think his 2nd amendment ploy is bullshit.

 

[Fishbone Jones]

A different perspective.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/mass-shootings-by-country/?fbclid=IwAR2rmMpF18zVhF8vZYD03B6kaxA7M2Av7qNl1-eMaMGpNeHqBPIHxcfjOBM

 

[brihard]

A different perspective.

http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/mass-shootings-by-country/?fbclid=IwAR2rmMpF18zVhF8vZYD03B6kaxA7M2Av7qNl1-eMaMGpNeHqBPIHxcfjOBM

Crunching data on that will definitely take some time. At first glance, Norway can be excluded immediately from meaningful comparison; their small population means that the single mass shooting event at Utøya accounts for almost the entirety of their aberrantly high mass shooting death rate. Without that single outlier theirs would be very nearly nil.

I’m confident that France and Belgium’s mass shooting rates are mostly attributable to Islamist motivated terrorist attacks, but again it will take more time and digging to bear that out.

High rates in Eastern Europe don’t surprise me.

I’m curious about their selection of 2009-2015 for comparison given that the source data set runs from 1998-2019. Bigger samples are always better if they’re more representative. I’m curious what including the full data set would do for these rates.

There is of course still the fact that apples and oranges are being compared here. Most of the discussion lately has revolves around random mass shootings in the sense of an individual flies off the handle and tries to rack up a kill count, versus a broader categorization that will also capture Islamist terrorism as well as gang shootings. It’s tough to compare the situations of a gangbanger with ready access to illegal firearms, or an organized terror cell to a 21 year old kid who hasn’t moved out of his parents’ basement and has easy access to legally purchase an AR.

 

[Colin Parkinson]

What I don't agree with is the FBI definition of 4 or more people killed, this muddies the waters and makes determining causes and prevention difficult. I don't believe that most people think a gangland hit when they think a mass shooter. This link discusses the issue.


https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/analysis/essays/mass-shootings.html

 

[Brad Sallows]

There are a lot of definitions in use out there, but pretty much all of them spell out exactly what they are counting.

Statistically, even the outliers are likely to eventually happen.  We just don't know over how many years they should be averaged.

 

[dapaterson]

The New York State attorney general has filed suit to dissolve the NRA for self-dealing and illegal conduct.  They are alleging that the senior leadership of the organization diverted millions of dollars for personal use and benefit, failing to follow state and federal law governing charities.  The alleged misconduct by four senior leaders, including Wayne LaPierre, includes:

trips for them and their families to the Bahamas & safaris in Africa
private jets
expensive meals
and other private travel

See: https://twitter.com/NewYorkStateAG/status/1291397976200548353