I'm from a part of Canada where rifles are common because the hunting is good and if you're up north fishing you need a gun to scare off the bears. I believe there has been one school shooting in my home province of Saskatchewan. Boy, who was bullied, took a hunting rifle to school and opened fire. The only folks who have pistols or assault weapons are cops or criminals. BUT Canadians also do not have a constitutional right to a firearm like Americans. That's a tough hurdle to overcome. Also, once the guns are out in the community, it's tough to get them back. They're enduring tools that don't spoil like milk. You can 3D print a gun now. I think that cat is out of the bag for good.
We need to talk about mental health, socialization of young men, and parental competence. I don't have the answers but that seems like the place to start.
May 26, 2022·edited May 26, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
I'm not from Canada and know very little of its politics or cultures, but I recently enjoyed reading an essay by an Albertan lawyer on self-defense and gun-rights law in Canada (https://mackenzieinstitute.com/2018/04/self-defence-and-firearms-in-canada/). He made it sound like gun-rights jurisprudence is at least as inconsistent and dishonest in Canada as in the US, especially given that Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would appear to recognize a right to sufficient means of self-defense, and like the RCMP are a bunch of statist tools (though I also generally expect that from federal law enforcement officers in the US). Out of curiosity, do you have any idea how widespread these ideas are in Canada, or at least in certain provinces?
Like most cultural issues, opinions on such matters are divided between urban and rural, for the most part. Those of us who grew up in the relatively safe urban environments where police response times can be counted in minutes rather than hours we don’t see the need to be able to defend ourselves with firearms. It’s very different out on the farm and up north. My impression is that essay was written in the context of R v. Stanley, wherein a Northern Saskatchewan farmer was charged with second-degree murder for shooting a first nations man named Colten Boushie who had come onto Stanley’s farm with his friends, intoxicated and purportedly looking for help with a flat tire. They were not behaving in a pro social manner, attempting to steal ATVs and driving erratically. Stanley was acquitted and the Prime Minister and media responded by saying the all-white jury was racist. Canada isn’t any more harmonious than the US when it comes to these issues and there’s little motivation by political leaders to find unity as they will use these issues to campaign on.
Would you debunk dumb pro-gun arguments? It could be helpful since a) you won't be accused of being on the other side (probably?) of the debate, and dumb arguments likely make the discourse around this worse.
I'm happy to. Let me know which one you think needs debunking. Most of the pro-gun arguments I find to be "dumb" aren't particularly dumb per se, they're just based in ideology and I find that ideology literally isn't necessary at all to understand the pro gun position. I think you can arrive at a pro gun position purely via math, so that's what I stick to around here. I don't think I've even referenced the Second Amendment once in my writing.
But I might go ahead and drop this one, which is very spicy and got me looked at very sideways at SHOT Show this year:
The Second Amendment literally doesn't matter. It's a nice thing to have on paper because it's a bureaucratic impediment to gun seizure, but at this point it's immaterial. There is no possible way to get the guns back, so who cares? The gun tribe won, and they won by buying so many damn guns. This would be a true thing that is true whether I was pro gun or anti gun. Gun folks put their money where their mouth is, and now the mouth yammering doesn't matter.
I don't think that's true. Or at least not as much as I'd like it to be.
At the end of WWII, Europe was absolutely flush with guns. A few decades later, they were mostly gone. They didn't do it by going door to door and taking them. They just made them mostly illegal to acquire, transfer, or shoot. Then they patiently seized the gun and harshly punished the possessor every time one turned up. It's a big, slow task but if they get their way legislatively, it can definitely be done. And that's before you consider how much easier it would be to just cut off the ammo supply.
May 27, 2022·edited May 27, 2022Liked by Handwaving Freakoutery
California and New York are proof that concerted majoritarian opposition to guns (and armed self-defense) can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Especially since the Second Amendment is functionally void in these states, because the courts refuse to enforce it. The result is an ever tightening ratchet of laws that increase the difficulty and risk of gun and ammo acquisition, ownership and use to the point where most people just give up.
Meanwhile, those who still really care about their guns leave these states and take their guns with them.
How can you say the “gun tribe won” when nearly a third of the U.S. population can’t enjoy that “win?”
The gun tribe has still kinda won in those places. I mean, the guns are still illegal, but compliance is in the single digits. An example of this would hypothetically be the "freedom week" situation in California a few years ago. You can bet your ass the number of legal "high-cap" mags in the state increased by a lot more than the number bought and shipped in. The value in that ruling wasn't as much legalizing mags overall, but creating plausible deniability of the origin of millions of magazines as well as bringing in millions more.
Rights exist, whether the state recognizes them or not. If they exist, then the part where you win is in the exercising of it, recognized or not.
As someone in CA who is pro-gun, I don't believe this is accurate. Most of CA (landwise) is semi rural or rural, even though the population centers are super urban.
We have bears, mountain lions, and other large predators that might require an armed response, not counting the "bad guy with a gun" aspect.
I'd say the majority of the population isn't pro-gun, but enough of us are... For now.
If she's from Europe, the real question you should've answered is "why don't you just revise the 2nd amendment and give up your guns? Guns should be (in a) safe, legal (with a license) and rare"
Safe gun storage is an important feature of gun ownership in my opinion, and gun culture has definitely pivoted towards it in the past two decades. Partly because of accidents and theft, and partly, I think, because gun culture is a consumer culture and gun safe manufacturers wanted to get in on the market. I have children, so safe gun storage is very important to me. I don't support gun storage laws, however, because someone who legitimately owns a gun for self defense needs quick access to it, and the enforcement of safe gun storage laws is very disproportionate against minorities who are getting raided for other reasons. There's a systemic racism layer in those laws that's not often talked about.
Licensure likewise is sketchy because of one of the reasons to have a gun. The 2A was not written for hunting or sport, it was written because the British Empire was stealing guns and burning women and children in churches. All of the amendments were limits on government power to ensure our government could never enact certain behaviors we'd just witnessed the British Empire enact against us. Licensure is harmless at its face, but it's antithetical to the point of the 2A. I do advocate expanding background checks in a way that doesn't require licensure, however, and reference that in two of the links above. It just has to be done without a registry to preserve the intent of the 2A, or else the incentive to bypass the check will drive more owners to bypass it.
And "rare" has flown the coop. 40% of households own guns in the USA, 10% of the all guns in the USA were bought in 2020 during Covid, between 5% and 10% of all gun owners in the USA are new owners from the 2020 panic, and most of the 2020 new owners are liberals. If you magically evaporated half the guns in the USA we'd still control a quarter of the gun supply in the known universe. Guns in the USA are more ubiquitous than snakes in Australia, and there is no possible way to undo that, so any policy we cook up to deal with our problems has to take that into account. Anything less is not rational.
Yes, I've read the gun fairy article. It says "we can't get rid of existing guns because Americans won't agree to that", but *why* won't they agree to that? If Europeans were convinced that a gun is a dangerous implement that should be restricted to a small licensed and trained subset of the population, why can't Americans form a new national consensus similar to that one?
Mostly because the guns get a *lot* less dangerous once they're over here. I mean, I personally own quite a few firearms, but all the ones I own that have actually shot at and possibly killed people? They only did it while they were still back in Europe. I can understand why y'all might have felt the need to deport them. But once they're over here, they pretty much settle down. America's a fairly amazing place like that, where people and firearms from different cultures can meet and get along with each other. Nothing like the centuries or even millennia long ingrained cultural conflicts over there, with the massive ethnic and even *linguistic* segregation. It'd be almost charmingly backwards if it didn't explode so frequently. I suppose things *have* been pretty quiet since America started keeping an eye on the situation. I imagine Europeans must be pretty grateful.
I mean, jeez, if you do a yearly amortization of the rates for "death by firearms" over the last 200 years for the European and North American continents, y'all absolutely and utterly *dwarf* us. It's not even close. Of course, the couple of years with the tens of millions of deaths really didn't do your stats any favors. Particularly since it happened more than once.
I am, of course, being facetious. I obviously understand that it wasn't the *firearms* that did all that killing over in Europe. It was the actual Europeans who were *holding* those firearms that washed a flood of crimson across the continent.
I mean... hrm. That's a really tough one for me. Usually I'm **very** adamantly in favor regarding firearms rights, but thinking about it... you just might be right. Maybe Europeans really *shouldn't* be allowed to own guns.
But by that same token, Europe isn't in a particularly good position to be lecturing America about gun deaths, or gun violence.
It's just occurred to me that it really might *be* environmental. Because now that I think about it, **our** firearms are generally pretty well behaved over here as well, just like yours are when they immigrate, but ours do go absolutely kill crazy when they reach *your* shores.
I wonder what it is that makes Europe such a violent, divided place.
Well, whatever it is, I hope that some day too, Europe can also experience the freedom and safety that America does.
Are we really, super sure that most laws won't help? That the assault weapons ban didn't do much? That bans on high capacity magazines in particular have no effect? I am currently bombarded with links and sources and papers that say these things do matter, and I'd really appreciate your thoughts.
As a representative sample, Everytown Research references these studies:
Paul M. Reeping et al., “State Gun Laws, Gun Ownership, and Mass Shootings in the US: Cross Sectional Time Series,” BMJ 364 (March 2019): 1542.
Charles DiMaggio et al., “Changes in US Mass Shooting Deaths Associated with the 1994-2004 Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Analysis of Open-Source Data,” Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery 86, no. 1 (January 2019): 11-19.
They reference this article, which rests on an analysis by Michael Siegel, purporting to show that magazine bans are the single best predictor of mass shooting incidence:
Sam Petulla, “Here Is 1 Correlation between State Gun Laws and Mass Shootings,” CNN, October 5, 2017, https://cnn.it/2J4sWCC.
They also have some colorful graphs showing that "assault weapons" (I assume they're using the legal definition, which is such a tangle that I'm not sure what this means) increase the number of people shot in any given massacre by six-fold. They claim to show that high capacity magazines alone increase the number five-fold.
I understand that Everytown is an advocacy organization, and that mass shootings are so statistically rare that our efforts will have more payoff elsewhere. But people are understandably aghast at yet another mass murder of schoolchildren, and they want to do something - anything - to make this sort of thing stop.
How confident can we be that magically evaporating all the rifles and tacticool gear wouldn't help us? The scary-looking black AR seems to be an important part of many perpetrators' personal psychodrama, at least. The shooter in Buffalo seems to have been even more in love with his gear than his racial ideology. Are there really for sure no gains worth having here?
FWIW I interviewed the researcher for RECOIL Magazine, and it's worth listening to what he has to say in a long form podcast format instead of an NPR soundbite:
I listened to your interview with Michael Siegel twice over. It's interesting that his work is being used to push assault weapons and high capacity magazine bans, when he's crystal clear that legislation targeting high-risk people is far more effective than legislation targeting high-risk hardware.
Well, 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Unless you believe that suicidal individuals will just give up for lack of a firearm, that is already a majority of the problem that won’t disappear.
Rifles, as a whole, are more deadly than pistols. It’s why the military issues M4s rather than Glocks to infantry units. Range, ammo capacity, accuracy at distance, all go play a part. What makes an M4 dangerous in a combat theater is what makes it dangerous in a city. It’s primary downside is lack of stealth.
I think many gun owners would be willing to give up certain rights if we felt it would stop there. But each new compromise becomes next year’s loophole needing new laws. Judge Benitez referred to this in his opinion on “high capacity” [standard capacity] magazines: restrict to 10-rounds works until the next mass shooting where 10-round mags are used. Then it’s calls for 5-round magazines…and so on.
I would conceivably agree to "universal background checks" if there was provably no registry, in exchange for a complete repeal of NFA 1934 and the bits that make up GCA 1968. And the Hughes Amendment, of course.
I'm talking specifically about mass shootings, not gun deaths. The gun suicide problem seems to have a different etiology, and it's probably best to reason about it separately.
The stance I've seen here at HWFO is, "Mass shootings are statistically so rare that gun policy should basically ignore them." (I hope I'm stating this fairly.) This is a really unsatisfying answer when my newsfeed is tiled from wall to wall with dead children and accounts of parents pepper-sprayed for trying to rescue them. It might still be the right answer. Media blackouts might do more to decrease these attacks than all the gun laws in the world, simply by erasing the School Shooting Cultural Script that seems to be so tempting for disaffected young men.
I'm asking if there's any validity to studies showing that there are policy interventions which might result in fewer dead schoolchildren. Is the answer, "Yes, but those studies only offer like 10 fewer dead kids a year, and it's probably not worth the costs"? That's quite a bullet to bite, given the emotions involved.
Given that rifles are, on the whole, more deadly than pistols, I get why non-gun-people are freaked out by the proliferation of scary-looking models over the past couple decades. The culture surrounding them can be really alienating and threatening to non-participants. Seriously, the Buffalo shooter was really, really into his gear. Its edgy cool seemed like a load-bearing structure in his LARP. Might there be something here worth investigating? Could this market be interacting dangerously with our subpopulation of psychos?
I know there's no magic gun evaporation fairy. But when people shame me for owning a gun or enjoying firing a friend's AR-15 at the range, when they say I'm contributing to a sick culture that promotes incidents like Uvalde, what the hell do I say to them?
I think your characterization of the HWFO position is accurate. Talking specifically about mass shootings means talking about events that are less than 1% of gun homicides, which is tremendously less than 1% of gun deaths.
I recently stumbled into this analysis of rampage killing deaths you might find interesting:
The average number of people killed in mass shootings when stopped by police is 14.29.
The average number of people killed in a mass shooting when stopped by a civilian is 2.33.
If your concern is rampage killings, then the only solution is to get more guns into the hands of private citizens who aren't going to take an hour to breach a door. That's the only mathematical and honest approach. I acknowledge there may be problems with arming teachers or such, and those problems may be bad, but if you care at all about rampage school shooters you have to weigh the unlikely event of a rampage school shooting against the drawbacks of armed teachers and see which one is worse.
I personally rather like the idea of putting a few AR-15s in a safe in the principal's office, giving the combination out to the coaches, and making it very known that the school has arms and will shoot back. That will not reduce the number of mass shootings, but it would force them to pick a different softer target like a grocery store or a movie theater. Right now they're doing schools because schools are the softest target.
Really interesting stuff. The more I look into this, the more I get the impression that death counts in rampage shootings are determined largely by how long the shooter goes unchallenged.
As for arming teachers - it may be practically feasible, but politically? It's going to sound crazy and horrifying to non-gun people, who are freaked out by the idea of any scary killing machines in their kids' schools.
I'll go ahead and state up front that I'm biased, here. My ex Brother-in-law is both a 4th grade teacher (like in Uvalde) and a former member of the US Marine Corps.
Unlike any school resource officer who is mostly present to earn a paycheck and happens to have a firearm with him, any teacher that actually went to the effort of getting licensed to do that is going to be *serious* about it. And... beyond that, as referenced one sentence above, there are already armed people at schools.
I truly cannot understand why anyone would think a renta-cop would perform better than a teacher who cared enough to *add* this to their existing job. Especially since teachers generally seem to have better PR in this country than the cops do. And while I understand that I have a position that's a significant outlier when it comes to firearms, *not* having them is like a school not having fire extinguishers.
The problem in the debate sphere is this odd situation where everything is distilled down to "compulsory or verboten". We say "An armed teacher may have really helped the situation." The response we get is "So you're going to make all the teachers carry guns?" No. No. No. NO! It's currently illegal in many places for teachers to carry guns at all even for their own defense outside of work. Even if it is technically legal, many school districts have prohibited it as part of employment. What if these rules were relaxed and school simply *allowed* teachers who were licensed to carry too do so? Obviously some details to work out, but creating the option.
The cynical part of me worries that the chief reason for this reluctance, other than it being another gun in a school, is the allowance being seen as a "win" for the gun culture, as well as what happens to the debate if an armed teacher actually *does* stop a shooting. There is so much cultural baggage to the debate that even a "win" of saving lives would be seen as a ideological loss.
Nobody's done a longitudinal study on it, unfortunately, so I can't say by how much. It would be difficult to sort overall suicide rate increase from the noise with only a few states who've transitioned from "no waiting period" to "waiting period" in the sample set. So the statement is admittedly anecdotal.
I'm from a part of Canada where rifles are common because the hunting is good and if you're up north fishing you need a gun to scare off the bears. I believe there has been one school shooting in my home province of Saskatchewan. Boy, who was bullied, took a hunting rifle to school and opened fire. The only folks who have pistols or assault weapons are cops or criminals. BUT Canadians also do not have a constitutional right to a firearm like Americans. That's a tough hurdle to overcome. Also, once the guns are out in the community, it's tough to get them back. They're enduring tools that don't spoil like milk. You can 3D print a gun now. I think that cat is out of the bag for good.
We need to talk about mental health, socialization of young men, and parental competence. I don't have the answers but that seems like the place to start.
I'm not from Canada and know very little of its politics or cultures, but I recently enjoyed reading an essay by an Albertan lawyer on self-defense and gun-rights law in Canada (https://mackenzieinstitute.com/2018/04/self-defence-and-firearms-in-canada/). He made it sound like gun-rights jurisprudence is at least as inconsistent and dishonest in Canada as in the US, especially given that Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms would appear to recognize a right to sufficient means of self-defense, and like the RCMP are a bunch of statist tools (though I also generally expect that from federal law enforcement officers in the US). Out of curiosity, do you have any idea how widespread these ideas are in Canada, or at least in certain provinces?
Like most cultural issues, opinions on such matters are divided between urban and rural, for the most part. Those of us who grew up in the relatively safe urban environments where police response times can be counted in minutes rather than hours we don’t see the need to be able to defend ourselves with firearms. It’s very different out on the farm and up north. My impression is that essay was written in the context of R v. Stanley, wherein a Northern Saskatchewan farmer was charged with second-degree murder for shooting a first nations man named Colten Boushie who had come onto Stanley’s farm with his friends, intoxicated and purportedly looking for help with a flat tire. They were not behaving in a pro social manner, attempting to steal ATVs and driving erratically. Stanley was acquitted and the Prime Minister and media responded by saying the all-white jury was racist. Canada isn’t any more harmonious than the US when it comes to these issues and there’s little motivation by political leaders to find unity as they will use these issues to campaign on.
Thanks for the context!
What was her response?
We shall see.
Would you debunk dumb pro-gun arguments? It could be helpful since a) you won't be accused of being on the other side (probably?) of the debate, and dumb arguments likely make the discourse around this worse.
I'm happy to. Let me know which one you think needs debunking. Most of the pro-gun arguments I find to be "dumb" aren't particularly dumb per se, they're just based in ideology and I find that ideology literally isn't necessary at all to understand the pro gun position. I think you can arrive at a pro gun position purely via math, so that's what I stick to around here. I don't think I've even referenced the Second Amendment once in my writing.
But I might go ahead and drop this one, which is very spicy and got me looked at very sideways at SHOT Show this year:
The Second Amendment literally doesn't matter. It's a nice thing to have on paper because it's a bureaucratic impediment to gun seizure, but at this point it's immaterial. There is no possible way to get the guns back, so who cares? The gun tribe won, and they won by buying so many damn guns. This would be a true thing that is true whether I was pro gun or anti gun. Gun folks put their money where their mouth is, and now the mouth yammering doesn't matter.
I don't think that's true. Or at least not as much as I'd like it to be.
At the end of WWII, Europe was absolutely flush with guns. A few decades later, they were mostly gone. They didn't do it by going door to door and taking them. They just made them mostly illegal to acquire, transfer, or shoot. Then they patiently seized the gun and harshly punished the possessor every time one turned up. It's a big, slow task but if they get their way legislatively, it can definitely be done. And that's before you consider how much easier it would be to just cut off the ammo supply.
California and New York are proof that concerted majoritarian opposition to guns (and armed self-defense) can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Especially since the Second Amendment is functionally void in these states, because the courts refuse to enforce it. The result is an ever tightening ratchet of laws that increase the difficulty and risk of gun and ammo acquisition, ownership and use to the point where most people just give up.
Meanwhile, those who still really care about their guns leave these states and take their guns with them.
How can you say the “gun tribe won” when nearly a third of the U.S. population can’t enjoy that “win?”
Kareem at OSD did a fabulous analysis of this in 2019, and Covid has just rolled the ball further.
https://opensourcedefense.org/blog/gun-rights-are-winning-and-nobody-has-realized-it
The gun tribe has still kinda won in those places. I mean, the guns are still illegal, but compliance is in the single digits. An example of this would hypothetically be the "freedom week" situation in California a few years ago. You can bet your ass the number of legal "high-cap" mags in the state increased by a lot more than the number bought and shipped in. The value in that ruling wasn't as much legalizing mags overall, but creating plausible deniability of the origin of millions of magazines as well as bringing in millions more.
Rights exist, whether the state recognizes them or not. If they exist, then the part where you win is in the exercising of it, recognized or not.
As someone in CA who is pro-gun, I don't believe this is accurate. Most of CA (landwise) is semi rural or rural, even though the population centers are super urban.
We have bears, mountain lions, and other large predators that might require an armed response, not counting the "bad guy with a gun" aspect.
I'd say the majority of the population isn't pro-gun, but enough of us are... For now.
If she's from Europe, the real question you should've answered is "why don't you just revise the 2nd amendment and give up your guns? Guns should be (in a) safe, legal (with a license) and rare"
Safe gun storage is an important feature of gun ownership in my opinion, and gun culture has definitely pivoted towards it in the past two decades. Partly because of accidents and theft, and partly, I think, because gun culture is a consumer culture and gun safe manufacturers wanted to get in on the market. I have children, so safe gun storage is very important to me. I don't support gun storage laws, however, because someone who legitimately owns a gun for self defense needs quick access to it, and the enforcement of safe gun storage laws is very disproportionate against minorities who are getting raided for other reasons. There's a systemic racism layer in those laws that's not often talked about.
Licensure likewise is sketchy because of one of the reasons to have a gun. The 2A was not written for hunting or sport, it was written because the British Empire was stealing guns and burning women and children in churches. All of the amendments were limits on government power to ensure our government could never enact certain behaviors we'd just witnessed the British Empire enact against us. Licensure is harmless at its face, but it's antithetical to the point of the 2A. I do advocate expanding background checks in a way that doesn't require licensure, however, and reference that in two of the links above. It just has to be done without a registry to preserve the intent of the 2A, or else the incentive to bypass the check will drive more owners to bypass it.
And "rare" has flown the coop. 40% of households own guns in the USA, 10% of the all guns in the USA were bought in 2020 during Covid, between 5% and 10% of all gun owners in the USA are new owners from the 2020 panic, and most of the 2020 new owners are liberals. If you magically evaporated half the guns in the USA we'd still control a quarter of the gun supply in the known universe. Guns in the USA are more ubiquitous than snakes in Australia, and there is no possible way to undo that, so any policy we cook up to deal with our problems has to take that into account. Anything less is not rational.
> burning women and children in churches
I remember that scene in The Patriot, but such a massacre did not happen in the American Revolutionary War[1][2]. The Germans did it in WW2.
[1] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2000/07/did-the-brits-burn-churches.html
[2] http://www.patriotresource.com/thepatriot/factfiction/events/page9.html
He already has: https://hwfo.substack.com/p/the-magic-gun-evaporation-fairy
Yes, I've read the gun fairy article. It says "we can't get rid of existing guns because Americans won't agree to that", but *why* won't they agree to that? If Europeans were convinced that a gun is a dangerous implement that should be restricted to a small licensed and trained subset of the population, why can't Americans form a new national consensus similar to that one?
Mostly because the guns get a *lot* less dangerous once they're over here. I mean, I personally own quite a few firearms, but all the ones I own that have actually shot at and possibly killed people? They only did it while they were still back in Europe. I can understand why y'all might have felt the need to deport them. But once they're over here, they pretty much settle down. America's a fairly amazing place like that, where people and firearms from different cultures can meet and get along with each other. Nothing like the centuries or even millennia long ingrained cultural conflicts over there, with the massive ethnic and even *linguistic* segregation. It'd be almost charmingly backwards if it didn't explode so frequently. I suppose things *have* been pretty quiet since America started keeping an eye on the situation. I imagine Europeans must be pretty grateful.
I mean, jeez, if you do a yearly amortization of the rates for "death by firearms" over the last 200 years for the European and North American continents, y'all absolutely and utterly *dwarf* us. It's not even close. Of course, the couple of years with the tens of millions of deaths really didn't do your stats any favors. Particularly since it happened more than once.
I am, of course, being facetious. I obviously understand that it wasn't the *firearms* that did all that killing over in Europe. It was the actual Europeans who were *holding* those firearms that washed a flood of crimson across the continent.
I mean... hrm. That's a really tough one for me. Usually I'm **very** adamantly in favor regarding firearms rights, but thinking about it... you just might be right. Maybe Europeans really *shouldn't* be allowed to own guns.
But by that same token, Europe isn't in a particularly good position to be lecturing America about gun deaths, or gun violence.
It's just occurred to me that it really might *be* environmental. Because now that I think about it, **our** firearms are generally pretty well behaved over here as well, just like yours are when they immigrate, but ours do go absolutely kill crazy when they reach *your* shores.
I wonder what it is that makes Europe such a violent, divided place.
Well, whatever it is, I hope that some day too, Europe can also experience the freedom and safety that America does.
Are we really, super sure that most laws won't help? That the assault weapons ban didn't do much? That bans on high capacity magazines in particular have no effect? I am currently bombarded with links and sources and papers that say these things do matter, and I'd really appreciate your thoughts.
As a representative sample, Everytown Research references these studies:
Paul M. Reeping et al., “State Gun Laws, Gun Ownership, and Mass Shootings in the US: Cross Sectional Time Series,” BMJ 364 (March 2019): 1542.
Charles DiMaggio et al., “Changes in US Mass Shooting Deaths Associated with the 1994-2004 Federal Assault Weapons Ban: Analysis of Open-Source Data,” Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery 86, no. 1 (January 2019): 11-19.
They reference this article, which rests on an analysis by Michael Siegel, purporting to show that magazine bans are the single best predictor of mass shooting incidence:
Sam Petulla, “Here Is 1 Correlation between State Gun Laws and Mass Shootings,” CNN, October 5, 2017, https://cnn.it/2J4sWCC.
They also have some colorful graphs showing that "assault weapons" (I assume they're using the legal definition, which is such a tangle that I'm not sure what this means) increase the number of people shot in any given massacre by six-fold. They claim to show that high capacity magazines alone increase the number five-fold.
I understand that Everytown is an advocacy organization, and that mass shootings are so statistically rare that our efforts will have more payoff elsewhere. But people are understandably aghast at yet another mass murder of schoolchildren, and they want to do something - anything - to make this sort of thing stop.
How confident can we be that magically evaporating all the rifles and tacticool gear wouldn't help us? The scary-looking black AR seems to be an important part of many perpetrators' personal psychodrama, at least. The shooter in Buffalo seems to have been even more in love with his gear than his racial ideology. Are there really for sure no gains worth having here?
It's a lot of really bad, really partisan p-hacked "science." Follow the first link in the article and you'll get here:
https://opensourcedefense.org/blog/gun-policy-needs-a-decision-support-system
Which is based around the most robust and unbiased piece of science on the subject done in 2019, here:
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11606-019-04922-x
FWIW I interviewed the researcher for RECOIL Magazine, and it's worth listening to what he has to say in a long form podcast format instead of an NPR soundbite:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9huK8APIOhw
Thanks so much for the reply and resources.
I listened to your interview with Michael Siegel twice over. It's interesting that his work is being used to push assault weapons and high capacity magazine bans, when he's crystal clear that legislation targeting high-risk people is far more effective than legislation targeting high-risk hardware.
Well, 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides. Unless you believe that suicidal individuals will just give up for lack of a firearm, that is already a majority of the problem that won’t disappear.
Rifles, as a whole, are more deadly than pistols. It’s why the military issues M4s rather than Glocks to infantry units. Range, ammo capacity, accuracy at distance, all go play a part. What makes an M4 dangerous in a combat theater is what makes it dangerous in a city. It’s primary downside is lack of stealth.
I think many gun owners would be willing to give up certain rights if we felt it would stop there. But each new compromise becomes next year’s loophole needing new laws. Judge Benitez referred to this in his opinion on “high capacity” [standard capacity] magazines: restrict to 10-rounds works until the next mass shooting where 10-round mags are used. Then it’s calls for 5-round magazines…and so on.
I would conceivably agree to "universal background checks" if there was provably no registry, in exchange for a complete repeal of NFA 1934 and the bits that make up GCA 1968. And the Hughes Amendment, of course.
I'm talking specifically about mass shootings, not gun deaths. The gun suicide problem seems to have a different etiology, and it's probably best to reason about it separately.
The stance I've seen here at HWFO is, "Mass shootings are statistically so rare that gun policy should basically ignore them." (I hope I'm stating this fairly.) This is a really unsatisfying answer when my newsfeed is tiled from wall to wall with dead children and accounts of parents pepper-sprayed for trying to rescue them. It might still be the right answer. Media blackouts might do more to decrease these attacks than all the gun laws in the world, simply by erasing the School Shooting Cultural Script that seems to be so tempting for disaffected young men.
I'm asking if there's any validity to studies showing that there are policy interventions which might result in fewer dead schoolchildren. Is the answer, "Yes, but those studies only offer like 10 fewer dead kids a year, and it's probably not worth the costs"? That's quite a bullet to bite, given the emotions involved.
Given that rifles are, on the whole, more deadly than pistols, I get why non-gun-people are freaked out by the proliferation of scary-looking models over the past couple decades. The culture surrounding them can be really alienating and threatening to non-participants. Seriously, the Buffalo shooter was really, really into his gear. Its edgy cool seemed like a load-bearing structure in his LARP. Might there be something here worth investigating? Could this market be interacting dangerously with our subpopulation of psychos?
I know there's no magic gun evaporation fairy. But when people shame me for owning a gun or enjoying firing a friend's AR-15 at the range, when they say I'm contributing to a sick culture that promotes incidents like Uvalde, what the hell do I say to them?
I think your characterization of the HWFO position is accurate. Talking specifically about mass shootings means talking about events that are less than 1% of gun homicides, which is tremendously less than 1% of gun deaths.
I recently stumbled into this analysis of rampage killing deaths you might find interesting:
https://dailyanarchist.com/2012/07/31/auditing-shooting-rampage-statistics/
The average number of people killed in mass shootings when stopped by police is 14.29.
The average number of people killed in a mass shooting when stopped by a civilian is 2.33.
If your concern is rampage killings, then the only solution is to get more guns into the hands of private citizens who aren't going to take an hour to breach a door. That's the only mathematical and honest approach. I acknowledge there may be problems with arming teachers or such, and those problems may be bad, but if you care at all about rampage school shooters you have to weigh the unlikely event of a rampage school shooting against the drawbacks of armed teachers and see which one is worse.
I personally rather like the idea of putting a few AR-15s in a safe in the principal's office, giving the combination out to the coaches, and making it very known that the school has arms and will shoot back. That will not reduce the number of mass shootings, but it would force them to pick a different softer target like a grocery store or a movie theater. Right now they're doing schools because schools are the softest target.
Really interesting stuff. The more I look into this, the more I get the impression that death counts in rampage shootings are determined largely by how long the shooter goes unchallenged.
As for arming teachers - it may be practically feasible, but politically? It's going to sound crazy and horrifying to non-gun people, who are freaked out by the idea of any scary killing machines in their kids' schools.
I'll go ahead and state up front that I'm biased, here. My ex Brother-in-law is both a 4th grade teacher (like in Uvalde) and a former member of the US Marine Corps.
Unlike any school resource officer who is mostly present to earn a paycheck and happens to have a firearm with him, any teacher that actually went to the effort of getting licensed to do that is going to be *serious* about it. And... beyond that, as referenced one sentence above, there are already armed people at schools.
I truly cannot understand why anyone would think a renta-cop would perform better than a teacher who cared enough to *add* this to their existing job. Especially since teachers generally seem to have better PR in this country than the cops do. And while I understand that I have a position that's a significant outlier when it comes to firearms, *not* having them is like a school not having fire extinguishers.
Wife is a teacher and we both absolutely agree.
The problem in the debate sphere is this odd situation where everything is distilled down to "compulsory or verboten". We say "An armed teacher may have really helped the situation." The response we get is "So you're going to make all the teachers carry guns?" No. No. No. NO! It's currently illegal in many places for teachers to carry guns at all even for their own defense outside of work. Even if it is technically legal, many school districts have prohibited it as part of employment. What if these rules were relaxed and school simply *allowed* teachers who were licensed to carry too do so? Obviously some details to work out, but creating the option.
The cynical part of me worries that the chief reason for this reluctance, other than it being another gun in a school, is the allowance being seen as a "win" for the gun culture, as well as what happens to the debate if an armed teacher actually *does* stop a shooting. There is so much cultural baggage to the debate that even a "win" of saving lives would be seen as a ideological loss.
"Waiting periods and the inability to entrust a gun to a friend, for instance, increase suicide rates which are two thirds of the problem."
Do you have a source WRT waiting periods increasing suicide rates?
Nobody's done a longitudinal study on it, unfortunately, so I can't say by how much. It would be difficult to sort overall suicide rate increase from the noise with only a few states who've transitioned from "no waiting period" to "waiting period" in the sample set. So the statement is admittedly anecdotal.