The Thread Where We Discuss Guns and Gun Control

[Klaus Hergersheimer]

Sure, yeah. I'd be willing rewrite the 2nd Amendment, or replace it with something that gets the job done better, but the pro-gun lobby has demonstrated that they're uninterested in compromise, and the 2A means they don't have to. Why would they agree to an amendment of the amendment, if they don't even want to concede on magazines over 10 rounds? Also, the gun violence we currently experience violates the Constitutional rights of everyone in the whole country, and the 2A promotes said gun violence. If we look at the preamble of the Constitution as the document's "mission statement", the gun violence in this country actively frustrates or compromises every single clause: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." The proliferation of guns in this country violates or compromises every single ideal laid out there.


Yes, I think someone who has a legitimate need for a gun should be allowed to have one. Just because something isn't Constitutionally protected doesn't mean it's not allowable. Right now, the 2nd Amendment prevents sensible gun laws. It doesn't enable them.


Indeed, I was just about to ask whether the proliferation of guns in this country does indeed make queer people safer. Not just theoretically, but actually.


Okay. nbd.

I've been following these posts for a while now, and I don't understand this effort on your part to want to abrogate a constitutional guarantee for what is essentially crimes of a municipal nature. For that is where these offenses tend to get prosecuted anyway. Had guns somehow upset the disturbances between states, e.g. one state deliberately sparking unrest within another by moving deadly arms there, an intervention on the federal government would be worthwhile. That is the whole basis of a having political union you seem gloss over: that just because news reporting on violence "makes" it some national issue, it must undoubtedly be a national issue.

 

[Lexicus]

I've been following these posts for a while now, and I don't understand this effort on your part to want to abrogate a constitutional guarantee for what is essentially crimes of a municipal nature. For that is where these offenses tend to get prosecuted anyway. Had guns somehow upset the disturbances between states, e.g. one state deliberately sparking unrest within another by moving deadly arms there, an intervention on the federal government would be worthwhile. That is the whole basis of a having political union you seem gloss over: that just because news reporting on violence "makes" it some national issue, it must undoubtedly be a national issue.

I'm a voter in national elections; if I decide it's a national issue it's a national issue.

 

[Broken_Erika]

US politician Jeff Wilson arrested on Hong Kong gun charge​

A US politician has been arrested in Hong Kong for having a gun in his carry-on luggage on a flight.
Jeff Wilson, a Republican senator from Washington state, was arrested at Hong Kong International Airport after arriving from San Francisco.
He appeared in court on Monday charged with carrying a firearm without a licence, and was released on bail.
Mr Wilson said it was "an honest mistake"and he expected it all would be resolved soon.

In a statement on his website, the senator said he was travelling with his wife on the first leg of a five-week holiday in Southeast Asia.
He said the weapon was not detected by airport security in Portland, Oregon, and he only discovered it when he was rummaging for chewing gum on the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

Hong Kong's public broadcaster, RTHK, reported that customs officers found the revolver when conducting a bag check but the senator says he declared the item to customs as soon as he landed.
The US Transport Security Administration (TSA) told the BBC that they were aware of the incident and they were investigating the matter.
The senator said the gun was not registered in Hong Kong, but was registered in Washington state and that he holds a concealed pistol licence.
In Hong Kong, carrying a firearm without a licence is punishable by up to 14 years in prison and a fine of HK$100,000 (£10,400).

Mr Wilson appeared at Shatin Magistrates' Court on Monday accompanied by his wife and two other men.
He was released on cash bail of HK$20,000 (£2,100) and ordered to hand over his passport and return on Monday, 30 October.

The TSA says firearms cannot be taken in carry-on bags on international or domestic flights. They can be checked in, but the carrier must ensure they are locked in containers and declared to the airline while checking in.
The penalty for bringing a firearm to a TSA checkpoint may be as high as $15,000 (£12,300).
Hong Kong's Customs and Excise Department said in an emailed response to the BBC that they could not comment on the case since legal proceedings are under way.
The BBC has approached the US consulate in Hong Kong for comment.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-67204397

 

[EgonSpengler]

I've been following these posts for a while now, and I don't understand this effort on your part to want to abrogate a constitutional guarantee for what is essentially crimes of a municipal nature. For that is where these offenses tend to get prosecuted anyway. Had guns somehow upset the disturbances between states, e.g. one state deliberately sparking unrest within another by moving deadly arms there, an intervention on the federal government would be worthwhile. That is the whole basis of a having political union you seem gloss over: that just because news reporting on violence "makes" it some national issue, it must undoubtedly be a national issue.

The US Constitution isn't about maintaining the peace between the states. Or at least, it's not only about that. The Supreme Court case Brown v Board of Education (1954) for example, ruled that public schools at all levels cannot segregate students by race. At the level of elementary, middle, and high schools, public school systems are municipal.

In the case of guns and the 2nd Amendment, I frequently point to District of Columbia v Heller (2008), which held,

The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.

and

The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment.

Justice Scalia decided that the 2nd Amendment protects the individual right to own a gun for individual use, nothing to do with the State.

United States v Miller (1939) upheld the 1934 National Firearms Act, which restricted fully-automatic weapons and "sawed-off" shotguns, as well as silencers/suppressors. The motivation for the NFA was the use of those weapons by organized crime in the 1920s-30s; specifically, the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre" in Chicago in 1929. The Court's reasoning was that those weapons were not specifically in the context of the well-regulated militia.

From Miller:

The Court cannot take judicial notice that a shotgun having a barrel less than 18 inches long has today any reasonable relation to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, and therefore cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees to the citizen the right to keep and bear such a weapon.

I think that was pretty much the standard interpretation, until Heller.

 

[Samson]

Mr Wilson said it was "an honest mistake"and he expected it all would be resolved soon.

He said the weapon was not detected by airport security in Portland, Oregon, and he only discovered it when he was rummaging for chewing gum on the flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong.

It seems to me that this may be an excuse to not do 14 years of porridge in China, but it should also disqualify you from gun ownership. If you can accidentally leave a gun in your carry on luggage on an intercontinental flight then you are not a responsible gun owner. If it can be accidentally there, where else are you accidentally leaving it?

 

[Birdjaguar]

Really good essay on Gun rights and SCOTUS. Paywalled, but worth it if you can get around it.

Wall Street Journal

This full replica of our printed product provides you the newspaper as you know and love it from the convenience of the web.

ereader.wsj.net

 

[EgonSpengler]

The Health and Economic Toll of Gun Violence in Youth

Study details the physical, mental, and financial toll of gunshot injuries and deaths in children

hms.harvard.edu

https://www.healthaffairs.org/doi/10.1377/hlthaff.2023.00587

This is exactly the kind of thing I've been looking for. As I've mentioned before, the news media focuses on mass shootings and "assault weapons", both of which are just dots on the Bigger Picture. As Malcolm Gladwell said after interviewing trauma surgeons in Chicago and Washington DC, if all assault weapons could be magically erased (I'm paraphrasing), doctors & nurses who work in trauma centers wouldn't even notice anything had changed. National statistics, such as those the FBI collects, tend to look mainly at deaths. This study looks at the effect on those who survive gunshots and on their families. Also, this study looks at children, so it's necessarily an incomplete picture.

I'm unable to read the study, atm. I'm going to see if I can get my mitts on a copy. In the meantime, here's the abstract. It's hair-raising.

More US children and adolescents today die from firearms than any other cause, and many more sustain firearm injuries and survive. The clinical and economic impact of these firearm injuries on survivors and family members remains poorly understood. Using 2007–21 commercial health insurance claims data, we studied 2,052 child and adolescent survivors compared to 9,983 matched controls who did not incur firearm injuries, along with 6,209 family members of survivors compared to 29,877 matched controls, and 265 family members of decedents compared to 1,263 matched controls. Through one year after firearm injury, child and adolescent survivors experienced a 117 percent increase in pain disorders, a 68 percent increase in psychiatric disorders, and a 144 percent increase in substance use disorders relative to the controls. Survivors’ health care spending increased by an average of $34,884—a 17.1-fold increase—with 95 percent paid by insurers or employers. Parents of survivors experienced a 30–31 percent increase in psychiatric disorders, with 75 percent more mental health visits by mothers, and 5–14 percent reductions in mothers’ and siblings’ routine medical care. Family members of decedents experienced substantially larger 2.3- to 5.3-fold increases in psychiatric disorders, with at least 15.3-fold more mental health visits among parents. Firearm injuries in youth have notable health implications for the whole family, along with large effects on societal spending.

An emotionless, robotic observer, setting aside the shocking increases in mental health disorders in people who've survived gun violence and their families, might notice the $34,884 increase in medical bills, 95% of which is picked up by insurers and employers (most of whom are likely to be small businesses). I'm not sure we know how many people survive gunshots in this country each year. Let's say it's 50,000, just to pick a round number. That would mean gun violence is costing this country $1,744,200,000 a year, just in medical costs (so that's not counting lost productivity, although with kids we'd be talking about time lost in education, rather than time lost to the workforce). Our robotic overlords would be horrified (or they would be, if they could experience horror).

Parents of children who survive gunshots experience a 30% rise in psychiatric disorders. For parents who lose a child to gun violence, that's a 250%-500% increase (-ish, I'm rounding off). I imagine parents are nodding their heads and thinking, 'well, I didn't know the numbers, but yeah, that makes sense.'

Some of you may recall that the gun lobby successfully blocked the government funding of studies of the effects of gun violence. I always presumed they didn't want anybody to know the effects of guns on our country, because they suspected the news would only be bad for them. Well, here's some. Would love to see the violence fetishists try to spin it. (I'm kidding. I wouldn't.)

 

[Lexicus]

doctors & nurses who work in trauma centers wouldn't even notice anything had changed.

Yeah, they would. Handgun injuries are significantly less (physically) traumatic than those inflicted by military-style rifles.

In a typical handgun injury that I diagnose almost daily, a bullet leaves a laceration through an organ like the liver. To a radiologist, it appears as a linear, thin, grey bullet track through the organ. There may be bleeding and some bullet fragments.
I was looking at a CT scan of one of the victims of the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, who had been brought to the trauma center during my call shift. The organ looked like an overripe melon smashed by a sledgehammer, with extensive bleeding. How could a gunshot wound have caused this much damage?
The reaction in the emergency room was the same. One of the trauma surgeons opened a young victim in the operating room, and found only shreds of the organ that had been hit by a bullet from an AR-15, a semi-automatic rifle which delivers a devastatingly lethal, high-velocity bullet to the victim. There was nothing left to repair, and utterly, devastatingly, nothing that could be done to fix the problem. The injury was fatal.

And:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/interactive/2023/ar-15-damage-to-human-body/

 

[Farm Boy]

Would love to see

The violence fetishist suggests the wilting daisy start at the statistics of parents who lose children, flat. The loss of a loved one is bad enough, the worst day ever is bad enough, but the grind down comes from all the days after. Pain is tedious, exhausting, lonely, and boring.

 

[Broken_Erika]

Yeah, they would. Handgun injuries are significantly less (physically) traumatic than those inflicted by military-style rifles.

I think he meant that handguns make up the vast majority of shooting injuries/deaths.

 

[EgonSpengler]

The violence fetishist suggests the wilting daisy start at the statistics of parents who lose children, flat. The loss of a loved one is bad enough, the worst day ever is bad enough, but the grind down comes from all the days after. Pain is tedious, exhausting, lonely, and boring.

Indeed. The study found a 250-500% increase in psychiatric disorders among parents who lose a child to gun violence (and a 30% increase even among parents whose children survived being shot). I'm still unable to read the full study, but I'm curious why that range is so big. I'm wondering if the effect of gun violence on survivors' emotional and psychological health is so severe that it was actually beyond the study's ability to measure with confidence, like the radiation dosimeter that only goes up to 30 Roentgen when the reactor explodes. Until other studies are done, we can't take this one as definitive, and it's totally possible that this paper underestimates the effects of violence.

 

[Farm Boy]

Have you looked real hard at people in thier 70s when everyday opening the paper is straight to the obits to look for thier friends? I would guess the range is so high because they're nearly all crazy, in multiple ways, at that point. So finding the baseline is, to some extent, simply arbitrary.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Have you looked real hard at people in thier 70s when everyday opening the paper is straight to the obits to look for thier friends? I would guess the range is so high because they're nearly all crazy, in multiple ways, at that point. So finding the baseline is, to some extent, simply arbitrary.

The study used a control group (a large one, too, almost 5x the study group). I don't know if the study looked at people who had ever lost a child, or just those who'd lost one recently. That would be interesting to know. If it was the latter, then probably few of the people in the study would be in their 70s.

 

[Farm Boy]

"Psychiatric disorders" is what is being measured? So the amount they inconvenience other people. But I guess if we're looking internally then it'd be more if it was the former than the latter. Even the ones I know that "coped with it well" are wearing a gossamer mask. All it takes is a breeze. Forever, pretty much. I think.

 

[Lexicus]

Have you looked real hard at people in thier 70s when everyday opening the paper is straight to the obits to look for thier friends? I would guess the range is so high because they're nearly all crazy, in multiple ways, at that point. So finding the baseline is, to some extent, simply arbitrary.

It's honestly pretty fudged up that you're rhetorically conflating people who die in their 70s with children being murdered in, like, school but par for the course when you dial the cynicism to 12

 

[Farm Boy]

"Losing your people makes you crazy."

"That's ****ed up."

Yes, Lex. It's ****ed up. But at least it's universal.

 

[EgonSpengler]

"Psychiatric disorders" is what is being measured?

Seems so, yes.

So the amount they inconvenience other people.

I don't know what that means.

But I guess if we're looking internally then it'd be more if it was the former than the latter. Even the ones I know that "coped with it well" are wearing a gossamer mask. All it takes is a breeze. Forever, pretty much. I think.

Yes, I think it has to be only measuring the people who've been diagnosed with something. I think it's close to certain that this study is only showing us the tip of the iceberg of the effects of such rampant violence.

 

[Lexicus]

"Losing your people makes you crazy."

"That's ****ed up."

Yes, Lex. It's ****ed up. But at least it's universal.

But it isn't. When my 96 year old grandma died, that wasn't traumatizing. It was sad, but it's the course of life. Having my friend's head blown off in 6th grade would have been incrediblt traumatizing. More importantly from the standpoint of public policy, people dying from gun violence is almost entirely preventable while people dying of old age is not.

 

[Farm Boy]

Seems so, yes.

I don't know what that means.

Yes, I think it has to be only measuring the people who've been diagnosed with something. I think it's close to certain that this study is only showing us the tip of the iceberg of the effects of such rampant violence.

Well, if you cope well enough nobody else notices much then it's not a disorder.

If you're old, it's not a disorder, you're just old. We have warehouses for that. Rite?

But definitely. Diagnosed stuff is definitely the tip.

But it isn't. When my 96 year old grandma died, that wasn't traumatizing. It was sad, but it's the course of life. Having my friend's head blown off in 6th grade would have been incrediblt traumatizing. More importantly from the standpoint of public policy, people dying from gun violence is almost entirely preventable while people dying of old age is not.

That's why I didn't specify young people scouring the obits for their elders, did I? They aren't as traumatized. You should walk graveyards more, it's fascinating to watch the end dates on multistones. Well, until it's not. Then it's just... human.

 

[EgonSpengler]

"Losing your people makes you crazy."

"That's ****ed up."

Yes, Lex. It's ****ed up. But at least it's universal.

I dunno. I don't have kids, but I do get the sense that losing a child is worse than losing a friend. I also think there's more emotional trauma associated with losing someone to violence than to other causes. I would believe that having a child killed in a shooting is worse than losing an elderly friend to "natural causes." I've experienced the latter, but never the former. But again, this is why we have the control group. It's possible (probable?) that some of the people in both the study group and the control group lost someone to causes other than gun violence in the course of the study. That would be one of the things the control group is trying to control for.

Well, if you cope well enough nobody else notices much then it's not a disorder.

Well, there are two things at work there: First, a state of mind or pattern of behavior has to be harmful ("maladaptive") to be diagnosable as a disorder. Second, a person needs to be diagnosed by a professional for us to say they have a disorder (and I think it has to be in a clinical setting - mental health professionals aren't supposed to diagnose someone from a distance). We can't declare that anyone who's lost a loved one has a disorder as a result. Being sad isn't a disorder. I was thinking that probably 100% of the people in the study group are sad, but then it occurred to me that some of the people diagnosed with a disorder might not be sad. Not being sad after losing a loved one is probably a symptom of something. "Lack of affect" is a symptom of depression, for example.

But definitely. Diagnosed stuff is definitely the tip.

Yeah, it can't really be any other way. We wouldn't want the authors of a study like this simply declaring who does and who doesn't have a disorder.