João III
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Like I said, I don't think guns are the problem, but can we say that guns are helping?
Mass Shooting in Chicago
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TheMeInTeam
If A implies B...
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maybe? the data on it is a mess.
but if they are not "the" problem, we should not address "the" problem with legislation that track record tells us is virtually impossible to address it. it's like saying that bubble gum isn't helping mass shootings, so we need common sense bubble gum laws or something.
the degree to which we'd need to constrain gun ownership to have a noticeable impact on mass shootings implies gutting 2a, and even that would have a long lag time (there are lots of guns out there already). usa would look worse at the tail end of that imo, not better.
Provide the data (however messy) for the claim of "maybe". The question was "can we say that guns are helping". If you can (the default state is one of it being unproven), evidence it.
Or don't, if you can't. That works for me, for obvious reasons.
Why? Explicitly, lay out why would the US look worse?
As it seems relevant Nature has a article on what science we have about guns in the US. I have not read it in detail, it seems the main messege is that that if you make it illegal to fund science science does not get done.
The reason, Crifasi says, is mid-1990s legislation that restricted federal funding for gun-violence research and was backed by the US gun lobby — organizations led by the National Rifle Association (NRA) that aim to influence policy on firearms. Lars Dalseide, a spokesperson for the NRA, responds that the association “did support the Dickey Amendment, which prohibited the CDC [US Centers for Disease Prevention and Control] from using taxpayer dollars to conduct research with an exclusive goal to further a political agenda — gun control.” But he adds that the association has “never opposed legitimate research for studies into the dynamics of violent crime”.
Gun-violence research is also stymied by gaps in basic data. For example, information on firearm ownership hasn’t been collected by the US government since the mid-2000s, a result of the Tiahrt Amendments. These provisions to a 2003 appropriations bill prohibit the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from releasing firearm-tracing data. For researchers, this means not knowing the total number of guns in any scenario they might be studying. “If we want to understand the rate at which guns become crime guns, or the rate at which guns are used in suicide, and which kind of guns and where, then we have to have that denominator,” says John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC, an independent research institution at the University of Chicago, Illinois.
Gun-violence research is also stymied by gaps in basic data. For example, information on firearm ownership hasn’t been collected by the US government since the mid-2000s, a result of the Tiahrt Amendments. These provisions to a 2003 appropriations bill prohibit the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from releasing firearm-tracing data. For researchers, this means not knowing the total number of guns in any scenario they might be studying. “If we want to understand the rate at which guns become crime guns, or the rate at which guns are used in suicide, and which kind of guns and where, then we have to have that denominator,” says John Roman, a senior fellow at NORC, an independent research institution at the University of Chicago, Illinois.
This wiki has a pretty good summation. I've previously seen that Lott has a substantial pro-gun bias and Hemenway is equally biased to the anti-gun side. But very broadly speaking there seems to be agreement on between 60K and 2mil "defensive uses of a gun" (which may include pulling the trigger but usually involves pointing or even just revealing the gun) annually in the US.
Lexicus
Deity
Does George Zimmerman shooting Trayvon Martin count as a "defensive gun use"?
EgonSpengler
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I'm curious too. Other countries that are similar to us in some ways look just fine without the same proliferation of weapons, and without constitutional protections for gun ownership. We're not the only country where people like to hunt, for example, and we're not the only country that has crime. And we can see that the US looks pretty bad right now, under present circumstances, compared to those countries we like to imagine are our peers.
Indeed, I don't think it's a coincidence that the pro-gun lobby has worked vigorously to prevent research on guns. I think they suspect what it will show, just as much as I do.
My reading of that is mostly to confirm the post above, if you do not do proper science then you can not really tell. A random dial telephone survey to find out how frequently guns are used defensively, with the US gun politics? How could anyone take it seriously?
EgonSpengler
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I haven't looked closely at that page yet, but my first question would be whether the data on these incidents includes what alternatives were available to the gun owner at the time. For example, I believe there's reason to think that "stand your ground" laws increase gun violence, but I would imagine that many of those incidents are classified as legitimate "defensive gun use" in the context of those laws.
I had a brief look, this is the first one they mention (that said 3 million DGU/year) and this the anti-gun one. They are no where near that detailed, with the former the random dial phone survey and the latter I think just a literature review. I would say they are both bordering on the "not science".
It seems to me that we can't even quantify that as "maybe", though. Nobody is arguing that guns cannot be used defensively, or aren't used defensively. The point needs to be (a combination of):
- How does it weight against offensive use (including intimidation and the like)?
- How many defensive uses are the result of being threatened by a gun in turn (as supposed to something that requires less work to inflict injury than "point and click")?
- What is the legal context where the studies are being conducted (i.e. specific laws around open carry, concealed carry, etc)?
EgonSpengler
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Just thinkin' out loud here now, but what I'm curious to know is whether owning a gun actually makes a person safer. I suppose I'm also interested in how many times gun owners felt they needed their gun (even if only to show it, and not fire it), but that's not the same thing. In fact, the difference between those two numbers could be revealing, in itself.
I'm thinking of a hypothetical study of gun owners and non-gun owners who live together in the same cities or counties, so that they would be exposed to the same threat-level, whatever it may be. Are the non-gun owners more likely to be victims of crime? If they're not, it suggests they're taking other steps. Of course, it's also possible that non-gun owners are more constrained somehow, in their efforts to mitigate risk without a gun, in ways that gun-owners are not. At the same time, we'd need to find out what crimes are created or exacerbated by the presence of a gun, in order to weed those out as legitimate DGUs.
At least superficially, without giving it a lot of thought, I'm not sure what the simple number of DGUs really tells us. Among other things, I simply don't believe that most people are good judges of when a gun needs to be used and when it doesn't. My basic problem with "stand your ground" laws is that they empower every Tom, Dick & Harry to decide, in the heat of the moment, that someone else needs to die. On the face of it, that just sounds silly, like letting people decide for themselves whether they're okay to drive after a few drinks. I think the expectation has to be that it's a bad idea, and that testing the hypothesis in real time, using the general population as unwitting test subjects, is an unethical experiment.
I'm thinking of a hypothetical study of gun owners and non-gun owners who live together in the same cities or counties, so that they would be exposed to the same threat-level, whatever it may be. Are the non-gun owners more likely to be victims of crime? If they're not, it suggests they're taking other steps. Of course, it's also possible that non-gun owners are more constrained somehow, in their efforts to mitigate risk without a gun, in ways that gun-owners are not. At the same time, we'd need to find out what crimes are created or exacerbated by the presence of a gun, in order to weed those out as legitimate DGUs.
At least superficially, without giving it a lot of thought, I'm not sure what the simple number of DGUs really tells us. Among other things, I simply don't believe that most people are good judges of when a gun needs to be used and when it doesn't. My basic problem with "stand your ground" laws is that they empower every Tom, Dick & Harry to decide, in the heat of the moment, that someone else needs to die. On the face of it, that just sounds silly, like letting people decide for themselves whether they're okay to drive after a few drinks. I think the expectation has to be that it's a bad idea, and that testing the hypothesis in real time, using the general population as unwitting test subjects, is an unethical experiment.
It is even more unethical to do the experiment, but make it illegal to collect the results. It seems that is the situation in the US ATM.
Obviously we need to harden parades. Every participant and spectator should be required to be armed and on the lookout for bad guys with guns. Training will be required to help the good guys distinguish between facial tattoos and clown makeup.
Remorseless1
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One interesting data point about gun owners: firearms are as popular as electronics for home burglars. It also points out how few gun owners lock their weapon(s) in a safe or use gun locks.
"Let's disband the police force entirely and make every citizen an armed 'deputy'."
If you liberally swap 'disband' and 'defund' back and forth I think you could get bipartisan agreement on this.
EgonSpengler
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Right, in the hypothetical experiment that would test the hypothesis that, "if guns were illegal, only criminals would have guns" we would have to see how many of the illegally-owned guns were stolen from people who bought them legally, and how many were bought legally and then transferred illegally. Unless guns are being stolen directly from wholesale warehouses or retail stores, every illegally-owned gun probably started out being purchased legally (although "ghost guns" are becoming a problem).
I remember reading a while back that the chief of police in one of the big Midwest cities - St. Louis? Cincinnati? - noted an uptick in stolen-gun reports on Monday mornings in the Fall. Gangs were sending people to the parking lot of the NFL stadium to take guns out of people's cars, 'cause people couldn't bring them into the stadium. In some cases, they didn't even need to break a window, they'd just try lifting the latch first. A friend of mind told me there was someone going through the parking lot of their apartment building late one night a couple of weeks ago, just walking through and trying every door handle...
That's what we had when the US Constitution was being written."Let's disband the police force entirely and make every citizen an armed 'deputy'."
Another update.
The dad? helped him buy the guns 3 years ago?
Told the cops 3 years ago all the knives in his son's room were his?
The gunman mural on the house last week was no big deal?
https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/highland-park-shooter-robert-crimo-father-speaks-about-son/
https://nypost.com/2022/07/06/highland-park-shooter-robert-crimo-painted-gun-mural-on-moms-home/
Dad might be in some legal trouble, but I'm not sure.
Anyway, the shooter planned this for weeks.
About 70 bullets from an AR-15 style rifle from a rooftop.
At nearly 6ft tall (180cm) and only 115 pounds (52kg), the death toll would have been way lower with knives ya.
Narz
keeping it real
Damn dude needed to be hospitalized for eating disorder as well as general psychopathy. Maybe if he had better nutrition he wouldn't have lost his mind quite so hard.
As someone who's been extremely underweight for a couple years in my early twenties it definitely can exacerbate extreme thinking and mental illness in general. Ssris too, I wonder if this guy was on em, very common for mass shooters.
Note : I agree w making assault weapons difficult to possess along w mental health measures.
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