No, guns are not really an easy scapegoat. It's been shown on this thread and countless other times, we are not an outlier in terms of mental health worldwide. We are an outlier is mass shootings and carnage. Sure, mental health is complicated but forgive me if I'm tired of listening to one side always knee jerk to mental illness yet vote against every single measure to try and make mental health more easily attainable for Americans.

It is staggering, absolutely staggering, seeing otherwise educated people bend so far backwards and do all these mental gymnastics to blame ANYTHING but guns. They will blame decline in religion, mental health, and other stupid bull**** like LGBT people becoming more accepted, premarital sex, and climate change activism.

Let me state it in plain English: AMERICA HAS A GUN VIOLENCE PROBLEM BECAUSE WE HAVE FAR TOO MANY GUNS, IT'S EASY TO ACCESS THESE GUNS, AND WE HAVE AN ENTIRE POLITICAL PARTY HELLBENT ON ENSURING THE STATUS QUO NEVER CHANGES.

My God, our obsession with guns is so troubling. People are denying a reality that is sitting in front of our faces, and we get reminded of this reality over and over and over and over again. We will do anything to blame anything but the guns. There's a reason we have the most mass shootings in the developed world. Europe is less religious than we are and shootings are very rare. It's not about the decline of God. Stop denying reality and accept the facts.

The United States of America is not the best country in the world. We tolerate mass murder because a bunch of slaveowners from the 1780s wrote something on a piece of paper and our government is run by a bunch of extremist lunatics beholden to the gun lobby. And our citizenry accepts this **** as normal. None of this is normal at all.

/rant

Guns have been around en masse longer than this has been an issue. So what changed?

And yes, it is much easier to blame a piece of metal than look at a young man and ask why is this poor soul so broken.

swimmerbabe11 said:

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Guns have been around en masse longer than this has been an issue. So what changed?

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Right, and there is a huge difference between white and black homicide rates in our country. Like an 8X difference.

Why? Does skin pigmentation make someone more violent? Of course not. Do people live under different gun laws? Of course not.

So there are clearly mental health, socio-economic, and cultural factors at play.

But yes, I'll also agree with LC and others that if you could aggressively and successfully ban and confiscate guns then gun violence would drop to 0.

Well, I mean they do, but there was a shooting in Buffalo, New York last week and Texas this week. Those states definitely have different regulations in place.

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So what changed?

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Media frenzy around shootings, social media "debates", a system that is allowing for guns to flow through easier to people who shouldnt have them.

Macarthur and others are absolutely correct: Something in America is causing mentally ill people to grab a gun and shoot up a school. Other countries mentally ill do not do this.

The issue with guns in our country isn't even really school shootings. it's suicides. We have lost many more people because they had access to a gun before they had access to the care they needed to get better than we have kids in schools.

I'm sure there's a number of things that have changed but the biggest, IMO, is the ease with which average citizens with zero training can get their hands on weapons of war that are designed to do maximum damage in the least amount of time. No one cares about your hunting rifle or your shotgun that you hunt dove. That is what has changed since I was a kid. I was around guns all the time. Not the kind of guns you can get now.

swimmerbabe11 said:

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Guns have been around en masse longer than this has been an issue. So what changed?

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‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens https://t.co/4wj764MPHd pic.twitter.com/E9HlVRW2dp

— The Onion (@TheOnion) May 25, 2022

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The thing I don't understand is the rabid opposition to ANY gun control.

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That's due to politics and nothing else. It's become a defining feature in the fight of "us" vs "them".

And both sides are the ones playing their bases.

so trying to avoid wading in to the political side of this, i just made a quick plot of estimated civilian owned guns per capita and homicide rates for every country that i could quickly find data for

On this plot, i don't see a clear correlation, so then i broke it down by gdp per capita to see if that made things clearer. Here is the to 50% of countries in the world:

and the top 25%

and here is the 1 std deviation of gdp per capita with the U.S. at the center


from a pure data standpoint, my main takeaway is that the USA is an outlier in the data, so drawing statistical correlations using us is problematic. honestly if you look at the last to charts, if you take out the outlier, you could make a case that there is a downward trend (though incredibly loose) in homicides with increasing gun ownership. To me this says it is unlikely that high gun ownership has a strong causal relationship with homicide rates. out of curiosity i swapped out the x axis to look at GDP vs homicides and saw a much stronger trend


This to me seems to say that violence is primarily a money and/or culture issue. To that point, I don't have the source to site on this, but I seem to remember a Jordan Peterson lecture where he said something to the effect of he did (or reviewed) a country wide, county by county study in the US, and the number one best predictor in violent crime rates was economic disparity. basically, in counties that were either all rich or all poor, there was much lower crime rates, but when you had these big gaps in socioeconomic classes pressed up against one another is where the highest rates of violent crime came out. To me this speaks to a theory that violence proliferates when an us-vs-them mindset dominates a culture. so maybe we are an outlier on homicide rates among the European countries because we have much more diversity and therefor more tribal mindsets. if you look at a lot of the lesser developed world with huge murder rates, even there, murder seems to be driven by "tribal" warfare, whether those tribes are literal tribes, or gangs, or opposing guerilla factions.

anyway, these are just my afternoon musings, and probably worth what you paid for them

swimmerbabe11 said:

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And yes, it is much easier to blame a piece of metal than look at a young man and ask why is this poor soul so broken.

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Its easier to ask the young man about his soul if he hasn't killed himself with a gun. . . I think there is a difference between blaming guns and saying that their accessibility contributes to the problem.

Calling a gun a piece of metal trivializes what it is. It is a tool designed to kill. A gun is a piece of metal the way sarin gas is just a chemical compound.

larry culpepper said:

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Ol_Ag_02 said:

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larry culpepper said:

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The whole idea of "I have muh guns to fight the tyrannical gubbment" is nothing more than a stupid fantasy, almost as stupid as Texas seceding.

It made sense in the 18th century when we were being harassed by a British monarch. But it's such a silly idea now. You have every right to protect yourself and your family but please stop it with this fantasy about you and your well armed friends overthrowing the democrats or something.

And a bunch of kids being murdered in a classroom isn't an acceptable price to pay for this fantasy.

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And clearly, as I said a couple of times, I have no fantasies about doing anything of that.

Try and have a good day guys.

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Maybe you dont, but lots of others do. It's the excuse used to justify a wild west approach to guns. Dont regulate anything, all laws are an infringement.

I can't and won't have a good day today. I'm disgusted by what happened yesterday, and by all the nutcases in leadership who still refuse to do anything about it and continuously prioritize lining their pockets with NRA money over the lives of innocent people.

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I just realized I'm being chastised about not doing enough to protect the lives of children by an abortion supporter.

Cognitive dissonance indeed.

Ol_Ag_02 said:

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I just realized I'm being chastised about not doing enough to protect the lives of children by an abortion supporter.

Cognitive dissonance indeed.

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An abortion supporter that does not believe an embryo is a child.

Disingenuous indeed.

larry culpepper said:

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It is staggering, absolutely staggering, seeing otherwise educated people bend so far backwards and do all these mental gymnastics to blame ANYTHING but guns. They will blame decline in religion, mental health, and other stupid bull**** like LGBT people becoming more accepted, premarital sex, and climate change activism.

Let me state it in plain English: AMERICA HAS A GUN VIOLENCE PROBLEM BECAUSE WE HAVE FAR TOO MANY GUNS, IT'S EASY TO ACCESS THESE GUNS, AND WE HAVE AN ENTIRE POLITICAL PARTY HELLBENT ON ENSURING THE STATUS QUO NEVER CHANGES.

My God, our obsession with guns is so troubling. People are denying a reality that is sitting in front of our faces, and we get reminded of this reality over and over and over and over again. We will do anything to blame anything but the guns. There's a reason we have the most mass shootings in the developed world. Europe is less religious than we are and shootings are very rare. It's not about the decline of God. Stop denying reality and accept the facts.

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When you come up with something that forces you to say that the person sitting across from you must be an idiot if they don't agree, maybe you should consider that there may be more to it than you're allowing for?

You talk about facts, but what you really have here are a bunch of unsupported assertions. Here are some facts.

• Gun ownership in the US has been flat-to-trending-down for decades (from roughly 50% of households in the early 70s to around 35% today).
• Female gun ownership has stuck around 10% for the past forty years
• Male gun ownership overall has trended down from around 50% to 35% in the same time frame
• Statistically there seems to be no correlation between mass shootings and gun ownership rates
• Mass shootings represent less than 2% of all gun related deaths. 35% are homicides, and the balance are suicides.
• Around half of US adults grew up in a gun-owning household. 72% of rural areas grew up with guns; 52% of small town adults grew up with guns.
• Around 60% of US adults say people in their community have a positive view of most gun owners
• Roughly 1/3 of Americans believe each of the following: more gun owners would cause more crime, more gun owners would cause less crime, gun ownership rates have little effect on crime
• Only 47% of the public believes that there would be fewer mass shootings with stricter gun laws
• Nearly half of blacks and a third of hispanics say gun violence is a very big problem in their local community; only 11% of white say this is a very big problem
• Only 8% of rural Americans say gun violence is a very big problem in their area, despite having the highest gun ownership rates
• 86% of adults say ease of access to illegal guns contributes a gun violence. In fact this is the only area where gun owners and non-owners agree - 83/87 respectively say the easy with which people illegally obtain guns contributes a great deal to gun violence

The problem is your analysis is facile and lazy, and unsurprisingly you line up your views on guns with partisan political points. What you see as reality I see as poorly reasoned pearl clutching, whether you type in in all caps or not.

Here's a final fact for you. Switzerland has one of the highest gun ownership rates in the world - around 48% of households in Switzerland own guns. And yet their overall murder rate is near zero and they haven't had a mass shooting since 2001. Your analysis does not compute. Take a breath and start over.

Switzerland's gun ownership stats are because of their compulsory military service. The possession of guns is highly regulated.

It's far from comparable to the situation in the US. Would any of you support the swiss gun laws?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/05/19/tighter-gun-laws-appear-pass-switzerland-despite-opposition/3731629002/

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Forgive my language for being harsh, but I think many of us are pretty shaken and pissed off by the events of yesterday, and that these events continue to happen over and over again.

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So why is your outlet to argue about it on the internet with people you KNOW disagree with you using arguments you don't respect?

I bet there's more carpentry in places with hammers readily available than in places where hammers are very rare.

The embryo doesn't have a freaking clue.

Macarthur said:

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The embryo doesn't have a freaking clue.

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Neither does a new born baby, doesn't make it any less human.

Sorry, I'm just not going to listen to the ramblings about the loss of innocent life from someone that wants to codify its legality.

There is one thing in all this that, for whatever reason, keeps sticking with me.

Body Armor.

Can we all, at least, agree that someone buying a few guns, tons of ammo and body armor should cause some sort of red flag of attention?

schmendeler said:

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Switzerland's gun ownership stats are because of their compulsory military service. The possession of guns is highly regulated.

It's far from comparable to the situation in the US. Would any of you support the swiss gun laws?

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/05/19/tighter-gun-laws-appear-pass-switzerland-despite-opposition/3731629002/

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ok? his assertion is that its an obvious reality that we have a gun violence problem because we have far too many guns. Switzerland says that probably isn't the root cause.