Another School Shooting in America, is there an answer?

Ok, let's step on the ball as we say. There are plenty of people out there who have problems and need help with them, but anything can trigger them, say something bad and bam, you are dead. My point is, it can be anything and it can't be fixed by removing a game ,movie etc (not saying you suggested we should do so). So if anything, health care should be better.

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Surely if you have a serious problem, whether it be personally or as a society, you try to find a solution rather than just saying it's the way it is?

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Khan, one point I was making in my post is that:

The vast majority of Americans don't go on shooting sprees. That includes people who have mental difficulties.

It's the media that makes it seem like every school in America is a war zone, it's not.

If there are 3 highly publicized school shootings in a year that equals 1 out of every 100 million Americans doing it. That's such a tiny number that you can almost say it's not really a problem...Except of course to the families and communities that suffer such a horror. I'm not trying to diminish it, but without the media circus, school shootings weren't be perceived as common place.

It's not "one diverse country" and "another diverse country," that's the point: America is a melting pot of cultures. The UK may be more diverse than Lithuania, but it's not as diverse as the United States. And it's not about justification, it's an explanation: different cultures clash. It's not a very pretty truth, but it's something we see again and again. Homogeneous populations have different cultures, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

That means you're just guessing. I'm not sure why you'd advance a guess as if it were an argument.

Guess might be too generous, too, because what anecdotal evidence we have about the shooters cuts against this guess: these events are usually planned. They seem to pretty much never be a case of someone who loses it and just happens to have guns nearby.

Agreed. And are those the kinds of people you'd expect to make rational, weighted decisions about the risks of violating gun regulations?

Yes, it does: people defend themselves with guns all the time. By your logic, if "even one person" is saved by defending themselves with guns (and it's a lot more than one), they should be legal, which makes the "even one person" logic self-contradictory, as I pointed out in the last post.

And if there were a good way to make sure lots of criminals gave up their guns, that might be an interesting point, but there isn't.

What?

Unless you're only proposing banning guns in certain neighborhoods, this doesn't really address the issue at all.

I've asked a couple of times if you've ever lived in a dangerous area. Can I safely assume the answer is "no"?

Killing in self-defense is not murder, by definition. And I hope that pretty much everybody has some circumstances under which they would use force to protect someone else, yeah.

Absolutely. I'm British and if you cut in a queue, I will publically shame you. I'll be openly disapproving, shake my head and I will tut you. I will tut you TO YOUR FACE!!!!

Now, if you're a tourist, you may not notice, but if you're a Brit you will die inside.

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You could say it’s false equivalence (which I think of as a type of equivocation). There are some parallels between drugs and guns (I also think there should be a spectrum approach on drugs) but interchanging them in the argument creates more confusion than clarity.

Here’s what I mean by spectrum: it seems reasonable to have some restrictions on both weapons and drugs, and also that neither one should be outright banned. On the far extreme, I think there’s not a right for a citizen to own a nuke. I also think that if there was a drug that gives an incredible high for 5 minutes, but then the person’s arms and legs fall off, that drug should be banned. On the other side, caffeine (by all means a drug) seems to act as a mild stimulant that many are able to use responsibly (though there certainly are some health and addiction risks that seem to go unnoticed), and many are able to use knives for practical and non-violent purposes.

Somewhere in between knives and nukes is a spot where I’d say, okay, beyond this line I don’t think we should allow these weapons to be sold. Somewhere between coffee and super-high limbs-fall-off drug is a line where I’d say, okay, beyond this I don’t think we should allow these drugs to be sold. In the area before these lines are shades of regulation, where yes, this should be allowed in principle, but it should be heavily regulated (only in lab settings/only for specially permitted cases), and before that a shade of medium regulation (Doctor’s prescription only/licenses), and so on.

The reason I find it to be more confusing than helpful is that the line on the spectrum is already difficult enough on one issue, comparing it to another issue magnifies those disputes. I might think pot is analogous to a crossbow, you might think it’s analogous to an assault rifle. It’s trying to have both those conversations simultaneously, when I don’t think the translation works (at least, not until there’s agreement on at least one spectrum).

Now, all of that is a bit moot because the scenario you brought up next works much better for me because it limits the scope of what we’re talking about, but I wanted to clarify.

I know very little about weapons trafficking, but on the face of it I think you have a point that if we were to ban guns, it’s not as if we could realistically expect them to disappear. Off the top of my head, some differences are that:

I imagine manufacturing weapons is more difficult than manufacturing drugs (so restrictions cutting into the supply are not as easily replaced by home-brewed operations in the case of guns).

The illegality of drugs create a situation where addicts are less likely to pursue treatment. I don’t see a clean analogy in guns for that scenario.

Guns (at least the ones that would be banned) seem more difficult to traffic, the amount of buyers would ostensibly be lower, the product is larger, and I’d imagine between the two scenarios of seeing a drug deal go down and a gun deal go down, one is more likely to immediately contact the police in the case of the second.

But you are right that we couldn’t expect guns to disappear in the aftermath of a ban.

That said, the US is so lax on gun restrictions that the black market is supplied via purchases at legal locations (often gun shows). Guns are actively trafficked out of the US and into Mexico.

Again, I’m not advocating a total ban on guns. But I think that doesn’t mean we can’t put some sensible restrictions in place.

The John Oliver video is indeed pretty good. I’m always a bit upset that the jokes are a bit formulaic (the non-sequitur “saying *topic* is like *simplification* is like saying *good thing* is like *bad thing*. I’m not even saying that joke form is bad, they just lean on it a bit too hard) because they are suspiciously evenly spaced out. It feels less like using humor to condense a complicated subject, and more like reward to keep my attention. All in all though, I think the show picks typically excellent topics in that they are usually unnoticed or ignored problems that just a little exposure can get people riled up about.


Just an observation. I’ve heard the argument about keeping the gap between civilian arms and government arms as narrow as possible, but it seems like if the gap was the main concern we’d also hear calls for demilitarization and reducing the firepower that government agents (e.g. police) have. But I typically hear the opposite from those very same people, which seems counter intuitive, no?

Can’t say I’m satisfied by your line of argument here.

Partially because it seems to imply that the nation is wholly set against gun control because of a violent history. And to be frank, the gun control “brand” isn’t doing the best right now(partially because of extreme positions taken by advocates, but also partially because of misinformation). But I saying we’re just violent and we love guns is a mischaracterization.

Take, for example, some of the actual gun control issues up for debate. Just recently (but before this shooting) there was some Preventive Medicine research on where public opinion is at 2 years after the Newtown shootings. The findings on specific issues are what interest me the most:



Edit: That image cut off the caption explaining what the bottom axis represents: the horizontal axis is %support for the position

The first 3 policies strike me as particularly sensible (I’m for the last 2, but I’m not sure how we go about performing temporary removals, I’d have to know more). And support seems to cut across the divide between gun owners and not. Public opinion is not the end-all be-all metric for what law should be, but I’d like to reframe what a gun control agenda actually means.

We’re not going to get a ban on handguns, we probably aren’t even going to get a ban on assault weapons. But having to go through those discussions when that’s not what’s on the table is tiresome.

I find your thoughts a little hard to follow in this section. You start with saying that there are a small amount of highly publicized school shootings, and if the media didn’t highly publicize them, there would be none (by definition, right?). Surely we’d want to talk about number of school shootings (or just shootings), publicized or not?

I also find the last sentence odd because in the very first post of this thread, you say:

If you’re playing devil’s advocate that’s totally alright (it’s a good thing to have in these conversations really), but your position seems to shift a lot. I don’t think you’re a bad person, and from what I’ve seen you post elsewhere on films, I know you’re not a dumb person. Forgive me if it seems I’m implying either.

Regardless, I think a parallel argument that the effect of the media’s widespread coverage of shootings exaggerates the actual danger that one is in of dying by gun violence (which is relatively small, even where the rates are highest) is a fair one. But I also think it’s fair to say that if one’s primary concern was media worrying the populace about things that are actually not likely to harm them, there are more salient misrepresentations:



Note: There's a version of this graph that includes 2001 (and 9/11), which had a death total of 2,990 for the year. But I can't upload from here and I couldn't find a hosted version of that graph in my quick search.

I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t “trade” gun control for other issues (health care, prisoner rehabilitation, education, to name a few) because it’s true, progress on those issues would likely net a greater, and clearer, benefit. But that sort of trade doesn’t seem to be on the table.

Slappy, I will try to answer all of your points, but I can't do that right now as I'm busy. I'll address one for now.

You and Sane asked roughly the same question or statements:

and
To explain... first I had seen this post by CiCi...

After reading that I decided to write a brief expose on the history of violence in America for the benefit of those who weren't familiar with America's past, as we have a multi national board. So I wrote this

That last line that I italics was meant to be an epilog to my expose. It works from a writer's perspective as it sums up the rest of my expose. Literally I'm saying what others have said, that American culture has a history of guns, violence and crime which is unique to us. Not all of us of course. That post wasn't meant as a solution.

No problem; clarification is good.

There's at least one major counterbalance, though, which is that drugs are consumable, and guns are not. Guns can last a really long time.

But yes, there are many differences and it's fair to point them out. Some things are harder or easier to ban for many different reasons. But almost everything shares the distinction that banning it isn't generally effective and has lots of unintended consequences, especially if there's a huge demand for them and hundreds of millions of them already around.

This goes back to the "state of the debate in this thread" thing I mentioned, though: several people here are calling for a total ban on guns. And that kind of needs to be addressed and rebutted before we can get into the sensible restrictions you're talking about.

I also noted, earlier in the thread, that a lot of gun control advocates have no idea of what current gun control laws are. Sometimes you'll ask them what a sensible restriction would be, and they'll list something that's already law. Combine this with the general ignorance about what gun terms even mean (having no idea what an "automatic" or "assault" weapon is seems to be the biggest issue), and one doesn't always get the sense that people are making a good faith effort to understand the thing they want to ban.

Getting past these problems is a prerequisite for any serious discussion about guns.

This is largely unrelated, but I wanted to say that I had the same thought and that this is very well put.

I heard that people on 4chan were egging the shooter on.....disgusted with humanity

2 more college shootings in the US today.

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Did they shoot enough people? You know it doesn't count if the numbers aren't big enough.

1 dead and some injuries at both. Not sure if your post is serious or not, though.

It was kind of serious in as much as there is a limit after which it is deemed a mass shooting. If we start taking shootings into account regardless of number or injuries/fatalities, I wonder how high the numbers would be?

What?! I didn't hear anything... lemme see....

Oh, it was just a fight in a college campus parking lot that escalated to gun violence. Happens every day.

in my country ( india ) guns are not officially allowed to be possessed by people except those who have licences .

on the other hand in my neighbouring country ( pakistan ) there has been a proliferation of kalashnikovs ( AK 47 , AK 56 etc ) ever since the days when the soviet union invaded afghanistan and pakistan decided to wage holy war against it .

this has led to less violence in india than in pakistan , where the streets are unsafe at night and the major highways are full of gangs armed with automatic rifles .

In the U.S. guns are not officially allowed to be possessed by people except those who have licences (here they're called permits).

Unfortunately, criminals ignore permits the same way they ignore "gun free zones."

Cultural homogeny - 99% of Japanese citizens are native Japanese.

I believe that much of the violence in general in the states including gun violence relates to racial tensions and a lack of strong shared cultural values - which is why it's so high in "diverse" areas such as Chicago.

Why are no politicians suggesting banning 4chan?

Me too.