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.
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.
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"
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?
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.
What was her response?
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.
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"
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?
"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?