As expected, you casually dismiss an entire list of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that will reduce the gun violence problem. And note no one is arguing that addressing the mental health problem isn't needed (the idea of increasing security by increasing the number of guns carried around, on the other hand, is insane), but a reasonable approach to such a complex problem usually requires multi-prong approaches.
It has worked! I wish we all had Kennesaw's brand of success in preventing mass shootings! Imagine how many they'd have if not everybody owned a gun.
Yes, 58 killings in 30 days in a city of over 2.7 million people is clearly on the same scale as 10 killings in 10 minutes in a town of 22,000.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I know the knee jerk anti-gun crowd will require a feel good law to make them feel like they did something....I just don't think there is much in the way of evidence to support any actual positive changes unless we're talking about things that are unconstitutional. Making someone wait a while to get a gun doesn't really make it harder for them to get one if they plan on hurting people once they get it.
Agreed, plus factor in that almost all of the 58 killed in Chicago were poor and you're right to not care about them. 10 college kids is a MUCH bigger tragedy because they are people that might have mattered at some point.
Since the gun-nuts see flaws in every gun control proposal, how about we switch gears. The preferred Republican position appears to be that this is a mental health crisis. So, what are the Republican recommendations for how we combat this mental health crisis? Will we be spending a lot more on mental health care? (I believe all Obamacare plans include coverage for mental health, btw.) What's the plan here? Because from the Republican side I hear a lot about how controlling guns won't help a mental health problem, and not a whole lot about what will help this mental health problem. Or is mental health just cover to protect unfettered gun rights because Republicans have no intention at all to actually lift a finger to address mental health from a public policy perspective? (That's a rhetorical question, because we already know the answer.)
It's self explanatory only to people who consistently show lack of reasoning. if you have to wait to kill someone you are more likely to rethink yourself, or you are more likely to get the help you need. Id expect you to think of that benefit at minimum but you couldn't. Your grand suggestion of giving people more guns doesn't work to curtail danger whatsoever. Bottom line here is that you are definitively wrong. Accept it.
a useful read, from after Newtown. [rquoter]Sanctimony and social science after the Connecticut massacre Posted by Tom on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 After what happened Friday in Connecticut, North Korean missile tests don’t seem quite as important at the moment. We’ll get back to those another day. Newtown The Newtown massacre is personal to me, not just because I’m a father, but because this more than other tragedies has a lightning-strike, near-miss feeling to me. I had relatives in Newtown for years; the only major family reunion the paternal side of my family ever had was in Newtown. I actually know that small Connecticut town. It’s a tranquil, beautiful place. Or it used to be. There are some important questions we need to think about in the wake of this event, even if we don’t have all the details yet. Unfortunately, however, a tidal wave of sanctimony among media elites and a resulting flood of amateurish social science are creating the perfect storm of a pointless debate that now threatens to make us stupider by the minute just for having it so soon after this tragedy. As former Education Secretary Bill Bennett said on Sunday, we should let the tears dry before diving in on this. Tucson Tucson Well, good luck with that: we’re not that patient or thoughtful a society, and in a repeat of the Tucson mass shooting a few years back, everyone is rushing to conclusions in the absence of data. Back then, the rush to judgment included snotty, but wrong, politicizing by the usual suspects like Paul Krugman: The shooter was a right-winger! He was influenced by the Tea Party! He listened to talk radio…he…. Wait. He’s what? Schizophrenic? Oh. Nevermind. Conservatives are jumping to conclusions on this one, too: Dana Perino last night said on FOX that we know that the shooter had “a devoted mother.” In fact, we know no such thing. (Indeed, the whole business already has a creepy Norman Bates vibe to me.) Predictably, the debate is now centered on demands to ban assault weapons and calls for more investment in mental health services. And that’s where the crappy social science comes in. It’s a good idea to talk about both of those things. But neither of them is relevant to the Newtown shooting. “Gun violence” and “psychotic white males” are real problems. But they are not the same problem. (We have hard, tragic evidence that some of these alienated losers can kill more people with bombs than with guns. Timothy McVeigh killed more people in less than one minute in 1995 than the last dozen spree shooters combined.) They can’t be solved with simplistic bumper stickers about “gun control,” vague complaints about the “culture of violence,” or warning stickers on video games. Oklahoma City, 1995. No gun involved. Oklahoma City, 1995. No gun involved. Before we get into any of that, let’s start by just getting it out there about the huge hypocrisy involved in the outpouring of grief over Newtown. Yes, this was a horrible, even demonic crime. But the real tragedy of guns in modern America isn’t the handful of these kinds of freaky incidents of middle-class white kids attacking public places. It’s in the inner city, where African-American males are killing each other with guns at a staggering rate. Check the FBI data: half of all firearms murder victims are black, and more than half of the assailants are black, a rate far out of proportion to the African-American population. Homicide, including by handguns, is the leading cause of death for black males between 12 — twelve — and 19. But those killings don’t make for sensational news stories, and quite frankly, no one — at least no one in the media — seems to care all that much about black-on-black gun violence. That might be because (as some progressives argue) that America is still a racist country. Or it might be because the problems of the inner city (as I have heard conservatives quietly argue) are so intractable at this point that people, liberal or conservative, don’t want to talk about things they can’t solve. My point, in either case, is that obsession over the blue-moon event of a mass killing by nice white kid is like the disproportionate coverage of plane crashes instead of traffic accidents. The 747 going down is spectacular and gruesome, but far less threatening to the average person than not wearing a seat-belt. Also, note: I am not about undermining gun control. Insofar as I am a conservative, I am a gun control conservative. I believe the Second Amendment means every American has the right to possess a weapon, but I also do not believe that the intent of the Founders was to give every American the right to walk around with a bazooka strapped to each leg. No one needs the kind of artillery that can be purchased all too easily in the United States. Finally, I’m not going to review the “do guns cause violence” argument here, because it’s been done. You can read John Lott’s book, the criticisms of Lott’s work and especially James Q. Wilson’s dissent from those criticisms, if you’re interested in more on that. But if you want to have that argument, go somewhere else, because again: it’s not relevant to the Newtown shooting. Let’s start with gun control. When it comes to massacres like Newtown, there’s no comparative evidence that suggests that gun availability, or gun laws, have an effect one way or the other on these kinds of mass assaults. (On other crimes? Maybe.) People really, really want to believe they do, but the data isn’t there — or at least not enough from the small-n universe of cases of mass shootings like this. (The worst school assault in U.S. history, by the way, was a 1927 suicide bomb attack.) School Another American trage…no, wait, this is actually Germany. Switzerland and Israel have guns — really powerful guns — all over the place, and they don’t have these kinds of incidents. Germany has strict gun laws, but has had at least two of these school massacres in 2002 and 2006. One of the worst school shootings in Europe took place in the UK, which has tight gun controls and led to even tighter controls afterward. (No automatics were involved, but the assailant managed to shoot sixteen children with handguns as small as a .22 before killing himself.) Australia is the best case: it enacted tough gun legislation after a massacre in 1996, and hasn’t had another mass killing with a firearm. (Yet.) Whether that one case says anything useful isn’t clear. Maybe the lesson is that gun control works better in a sparsely populated continental island nation with no porous borders — and one in which you can actually do gun confiscation, which is a non-starter in most nations. A corollary but false assumption is that all those guns means America is uniquely dangerous compared to other nations. The U.S. is somewhat more dangerous than some other nations, but it’s not the Wild West; it’s not even in the top 10 countries for murder rates. Even within American cities, avoiding high-crime areas can mean practically eliminating the risk of being hurt by a gun. That hasn’t stopped people from recklessly throwing around numbers that do not distinguish between murder rates and firearm murder rates, which are not the same thing, nor among deaths from handguns (which are the bulk of gun homicides) and deaths from long guns and assault weapons (which are a fraction of those murders). For example, the Russian Prime Minister, former President Dmitri Medvedev, took the World Sanctimony Award yesterday morning by supporting a continued gun ban in Russia while sending sympathy to the Americans. He neglected to mention that Russia, which has incredibly strict laws against guns, has a murder rate far higher than the United States, even if the firearms murder rate is lower. In other words, there’s lots of ways to kill people, and the Russians use them regularly. So thanks for the kind thoughts, Mr. Prime Minister. Maybe one day we dumb Americans can catch up to Russia in vodka-fueled knife murders and contract killings. But okay, let’s enact the assault-weapons ban, and tighten control over everything that fires a bullet. I’m good with that: it should be really hard to buy a gun. Not impossible, but hard, and to own an assault weapon, you should have to prove that you live next to a house full of North Korean commandos. Are you a member of Seal Team Six? No? Then you don't need one of these. Are you a member of Seal Team Six? No? Then you don’t need one of these. Now, let’s move on: what do we ban the next time a lonely white kid from a nice home decides to kill Mom and Dad and go to the mall? Let us assume for the sake of argument that these young men are impulsive, rather than planners — despite all evidence to the contrary — and that they can’t just go unlock an assault rifle when they’re having a bad day. What then? These kids tend to be smart, and can just as easily build pipe bombs or explode gas cans. McVeigh used fertilizer and chemicals in a truck. (Sixteen years later, the government got around to proposing restrictions on sales of ammonium nitrate — but the regulations haven’t been implemented. Surprise.) How about Molotov cocktails? Nail bombs? [Update: Sure enough, in May 2013 a kid with six home-made bombs was stopped from slaughtering his high school when someone — thankfully –got worried and called the cops.] What next? A license to buy premium unleaded? As for the mental health services argument, has no one noticed that these mass shootings generally happen in nice places like Colorado, Oregon, and Connecticut, and not in impoverished states with poor social services like Mississippi or Louisiana (where there are more guns, as well)? The Newtown killer lived in a veritable mansion, and his mother was living on a major six-figure income. He was not bereft of care. And imagine the counseling challenge: the killer’s mother knew her son was emotionally disturbed, and yet took him to gun ranges. That makes the Newtown case so weird, and so unique, as to obliterate any comparison or conclusions about guns per se. But let’s press on. Gosh. Who’d have suspected? Even Arizona, supposedly a Red State hick preserve, actually has one of those crisis hotlines where anyone can drop a dime on anyone they think is dangerous. And there wasn’t a person who encountered the Arizona shooter, Jared Loughner, who didn’t think he was a menace — but no one called, not even after his community college banned him from the campus. Meanwhile, the young man who killed 32 people at Virginia Tech had long experience with the mental health system. He was getting plenty of “help.” People were worried beyond expression about him. He got years of treatment and examination, including from his university. So much for that. (You can read the Commonwealth of Virginia’s investigation here.) The problem isn’t the lack of mental health intervention services, it’s that no one uses them effectively — or that people are afraid of the consequences of using them. With gun control and mental health out of the way for the moment, we have to start talking honestly about the real problem: the kids themselves, and specifically, the emergence of the new personality type of the “enraged loser.” (Bloggers think they’ve discovered a new term in “beta male rage,” but it’s not new.) The question no one wants to confront is to ask why modern societies produce psychotic loners who feel they have to wipe out a school to make their last stand. A good start is to look at what’s common rather than different among these incidents, including the fact that this doesn’t always happen only in America. There have been mass shootings — and more to the point, mass attacks on children — over the past decade or so in Europe and Asia, including in tiny countries like Finland and Norway, larger nations like Australia and Germany, and of course, the ghastly Dunblane school attack in Scotland. (Interestingly, it seems limited to developed nations, making such events almost entirely, as my colleague John Schindler has opined, a post-modern phenomenon.) There has also been a rash of knife attacks on children in China. Gun control advocates smugly point out that an attack practically the same day as the Newtown massacre injured 22 kids, but didn’t kill anyone, because there was no gun involved. But this is where a having only a little bit of information can make you say really stupid things, especially if you don’t bother to check this cool gizmo called “the internet.” There’s been a spate of these attacks in China [in 2012] that have left at least nineteen children dead, and more than eighty — correct, that is 80, eight-zero, not a typo — wounded. (Clearly, we need better international knife controls.) The issue isn’t whether the attackers had guns. We can all grant that cutting off access to guns would lower the body count. But the most important question is this: why do these the attacks happen at all? Here’s where we go from the realm of what we know to the realm of speculation, so let me just preface what I’m about to say with the admission that while I am a social scientist, I am not a sociologist, and I do not specialize in the problem of domestic violence. But I’m an American male who’s lived his entire 52 years in this country, and I have seen first-hand the trends that have been reported as growing since roughly the late 1970s, which is when my generation of men came of age. I’ve also been a teacher of college and graduate-school age students for 25 years. The killers are always male. They’re almost always white. (The Virginia Tech shooter was Asian.) [Update: the Navy Yard killer was the first black male, that I know of, since the LIRR killer, Colin Ferguson, a complete loon who killed six commuters in 1995. h/t to alert reader Don on Twitter.] They’re always disaffected about something that has injured a massive — but fragile and often unearned — sense of self-esteem. In some cases, especially among the few cases that involve post-adolescent males, it stems from divorce or romantic failure of some kind. (Ted Kaczynski, for what it’s worth, took to the woods and started mailing bombs after – you guessed it – being spurned by a female co-worker.) In the case of the younger men, there’s a break from society that’s often abetted by immersion in the internet. Note, however, that the “violent computer game” hypothesis, popular some years ago, has not panned out with later research. That’s not to say the games are good for you: there are definite links between excessive game playing and being an ******* anti-social behavior. (People have assaulted each other in real-life over Call of Duty. I am not kidding.) If this is your life, you need to get another one. But it doesn't mean you're a psycho. If this is your life, you need to get another one. But it doesn’t mean you’re a psycho. I think the emotional problems of the shooters aren’t enough to drive them to kill. The combustion occurs when these natural loners enter the chaotic social environment created by the debris of the “revolutions” in sexual norms, education, and public social behavior, including the fetishizing of self-esteem in the educational system, and especially by the relatively recent collapse of traditional notions of masculinity. And make no mistake, this is a male issue, first and foremost. Girls and women are not mass killers; even among terrorists, they’re new arrivals and a minority. The failure of generations of young men to launch to adulthood and deal with its stresses is at the root of the growth of stalking, harassment, sexual assault, and other crimes. And every one of the man-boys involved in these mass shootings has been, to the core, a classic “beta” among their peers, the emotionally under-developed males who don’t get picked for softball, who get humiliated by other males, are shunned by peers who are often scared of them, and who rarely, if ever, have stable relationships, especially with females. Nor are the traditional conventions of dating and marriage any help. American and European kids since the 1970s have been immersed in a highly sexualized society where successful boys maintain a kind of harem culture and who in turn ridicule, directly or implicitly, the boys who can’t compete. (That misogynistic harem culture, and the male deferral or avoidance of marriage, is destroying Western civilization far more decisively than gun violence, but that’s another subject for another day.) These beta males no longer live in a world where there’s a Jack for every Jill, or where social institutions like schools, the police, churches, or the military – all decimated by repeated social attack since the 1960s — provide some kind of equalizing effect among men, protecting and building up the weaker boys while disciplining and maturing the stronger ones. Today, the already anarchic environment of adolescence has been turned completely toxic by the absence of responsible adults and especially of male role models. In the jungle, the strong and aggressive rule, and in that world, the losers, the “kind of a loner” geeks, the misfits, feel they have no place. They’re not entirely wrong. And so they settle on every young loser’s fantasy: Revenge. Does this sound a lot like the same explanation of what produces self-hating, frustrated, p*rn-loving jihadis, the type German writer Hans Enzensberger called “the radical loser?” I hope so, because I think they’re the same phenomenon. But that’s also another issue for another day. The result is that American kids live in a kind of Lord of the Flies domain where the Wild Boys act without restraint and the weak kids fall off the ledge, without even a noble Ralph to mourn them. Some of them strike back, turning to guns or bombs as the equalizer. 539w A world full of Jacks and Piggies, but no Ralphs. If you don’t get the reference, read the book. Pronto. But still the mysteries remain. Why is it almost always white kids who lose it? And why do they tend to come from middle class backgrounds, instead of poverty? I can only guess at the answers. One reason is that poorer kids have to work, or at least to hustle for money somehow. Economic needs force them into interaction with the world. They do not have the luxury to spend thousands of dollars on computers while living at home with Mommy and Daddy into adulthood. Working, and the self-esteem it brings, is one of the most important cures for adolescence there is. In many of these cases, it seems that the boys involved had nothing but time and money on their hands, puttering around (as the Newtown and Arizona killers did) at the local small colleges, but mostly living inside their own heads. So what do we do? Here’s the scary part: there isn’t much we can do, which is why everyone should put a lid on the sanctimony and drop the goofball notions of armed crossing guards, 1984-style observation of public spaces, and fantasies of gun confiscation. Moving on, we need to start thinking about the things we can control. I’ll say it again, just so there’s no confusion: by all means, ban assault weapons. It might do some good. But it won’t change a damn thing in the inner city, which relies on a healthy pre-existing black market in guns. And it’s not going to stop another Newtown: there are 300 million legal guns in America, and you’re not going to get them back, legally or otherwise. Kids will always get guns if they want them. (Although prohibition does work, as we’ve seen with drugs and alco…oh, wait.) Something more achievable in the short-term is to restrain the lawyers. By that, I mean we have to make it easier to make a phone call and report the dangerous behavior of the next mass shooter without worrying about the cumbersome privacy, civil rights, or defamation actions that inhibit people from picking up the telephone. It goes against every molecule in my civil libertarian bones to say that, but we need to treat the “enraged losers” like we finally started treating their less capable brethren, the stalkers: we have to start enacting preventive, rather than reactive, measures. A lot of women had to get killed before the stalker laws went on the books, and we’re making the same mistake with mental illness now. Teachers, especially, have a sixth sense for this stuff, honed from years of dealing with kids, and they should be able to report a budding psychopath without having a well-heeled, middle-class parent storming in and raising hell about the way their little Poopsie is being discriminated against. One possibility is to enact a kind of “good Samaritan” exception to the law for people who want to report on other people who are scaring the crap out of them. If investigations turn up nothing, no harm and no foul from an excess of caution. But maybe a peek inside the house of someone like the Newtown shooter or a young Kip Kinkel by an outsider might be just the thing to turn on a light bulb in the head of a sharp social worker or even a police detective. Kip Kinkel today. He wants to be transferred to a mental hospital -- which is where he should have been at 15. Kip Kinkel then and today. He wants to be transferred to a mental hospital — which is where he should have been at 15. Think about the tragic timidity that always emerges on the morning after one of these incidents: everyone knew the shooter was different, he scared people [Update: the Navy Yard killer “terrified” his neighbor], he had issues, he was removed from schools, fired from jobs, and on and on. But no one wanted to get involved and get sued. The social services network has to change as well. It’s not a matter of money, it’s a matter of intention. Mental health programs, following the massive (and well-meaning but ill-advised) deinstitutionalization movement of the 1970s, are designed to keep people out of institutions, not lock them up. It’s almost impossible to get someone remanded even for a short-term psych hold in most jurisdictions now. Finally, there’s the toughest cure of all, and that is the restoration of some kind of social order among young men. I don’t know how to do that, to be honest. The multiple horses of promiscuity, affluence (even among “poor” kids), permissiveness, violent and ghettoized teen culture, and perpetual immaturity are so far out of the barn now, and so entrenched as a lifestyle that parents and children alike defend, that I have no idea how to stop it. Older men can no longer mentor younger men in any meaningful numbers, nor can we fight the epidemic of divorce, the pop culture, the media, and the nitwittery pumped by schools of education and social work all by ourselves. There has to be a sea-change in social attitudes, but I’m stumped about how to make that happen in a nation as self-indulgent and as averse to hard introspection as ours is now. (We’re good at self-flagellation and self-pity. On the things that would make us do something…not so much.) We don’t know why this particular young man in Connecticut turned into a monster. But the debate should not obsess over how to lock up his mother’s guns. That’s a good idea in itself, but it’s only a band-aid over a severed artery. Instead, we have to figure out why children are turning into ghouls. How to keep guns away from them is a distraction that makes us feel better, because it makes us feel like we’re doing something, but sooner or later we’re going to have to ask real questions about manhood and growing up in America, instead of engaging in facile, self-serving, and self-aggrandizing sloganeering about gun control and mental health services. Now back to nuclear weapons and civil wars. Things that fill me with less despair than this.[/rquoter] http://tomnichols.net/blog/2012/12/18/sanctimony-social-science-connecticut-massacre-2/
The wait is over. By my calculations, you only had to wait negative 2.5 years to hear Obama *finally* address this issue. <iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/00EVOIYf2sI" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Februay 2013: Obama compares Chicago, Newtown Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/...-gun-violence-in-chicago-087726#ixzz3nQnUuS00
Not sure why this is a bad thing. I'm 99.999999% more likely to be killed by an American than a terrorist.
The problem here is that you just aren't very realistic. If a person REALLY wants to kill people, you think they aren't willing to steal a gun if need be? I know, you'll throw laws at those willing to murder as many people as possible and that'll certainly stop them. Brilliant.
this is likely true. They're rare enough that a determined loon will find a way. And, although the incidents make headlines, they're statistically pretty insignificant in terms of overall gun violence. Politifact compared US mass shootings to other countries: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-m...-obama-correct-mass-killings-dont-happen-oth/ The hope with gun restrictions is that they address the multitude of other gun related deaths...a stat where the US is far above other developed nations.
If you can just get the criminals to turn over their guns along with the law abiding citizens so that ALL guns are in the hands of government, you will be safe, or will you????
- The US gun culture has existed for centuries. It is nothing new and it is nothing recent. - People with mental health problems have been around since the beginning of mankind. It is nothing new. And I seriously doubt there's been some sudden increase in folks with mental issues in recent decades. It is only in recent years that we are starting to actually acknowledge and understand mental health. We still have a long way to go, though. - Bad parenting has existed forever, and will continue to exist as long as humans exist. It is nothing new. - Classism, the social pecking order (official or unofficial), and the "haves and have-nots" have been around as long as mankind itself. You will always have the type-As, the success stories, the losers, the cowards, the socially awkward, the rich, the poor, the so-called "beta males" (dislike that term) etc etc. Nothing new. And all of these things will continue to exist. It's just human nature. So what has changed in our society that has resulted in the sharp increase in mass shootings in schools, churches, workplaces, etc over the past decade? I don't think the answer to that is simple, and I don't think it can be boiled down to one specific thing. There is an increase in overall societal anger, mistrust, fear and hate over the past 10-15 years. The mainstream for-profit media has gladly added fuel to the fire since that helps their ratings. Most politicians on both sides just recite tired talking points to fire up their bases. There has been a breakdown in face-to-face community over the past 15 years...people are becoming more isolationist, more selfish, less empathetic and more wary of others. Technology and the internet (places like 4chan) aren't helping either. It is notable that a lot of these shooters are people between the ages of 15 and 35. There has been an increase in entitlement (although some of that is relative), and there has been a decrease in teaching people how to cope with failure, rejection, etc and dust themselves off and move on. This is a complicated problem that requires comprehensive solutions, and may not be 100% fixable since humans are by definition flawed. Banning guns (which probably isn't feasible...the cat's too far out of the bag...it'd be like the failed War on Drugs) or at least much tougher gun control won't cure the root causes of this problem. Losers will still be losers, psychos will still be psychos, morons will still be morons, criminals will still be criminals. But it will make it much harder for troubled people to get access to a weapon capable of killing a lot of people quickly. That's arguably reason enough to move forward with tighter gun control. (A truly determined person that can improvise a bit will find a way, though...whether it's the black market, a homemade explosive made out of common off-the-shelf materials, etc.) Gun-free zones don't work and are little more than symbolic gestures...if you want real change on guns, it needs to done at the federal level.
He claimed he was a Conservative Republican Which means Conservative Republicans have killed 15 more people than anyone associated with Black Lives Matter So who is really the 'hate group'? Rocket River
