America's Gun Violence

unsung

tempo_n_groove

@benjs good info there. One thing I never understood though is how can you compare a country like Ireland and shooting deaths there to the US? The population is much lower. 

As for gun ownership in the US you should have to take a class to own one. 

Im not for mass registration either. If you want that then have the same law across all 50 states. 

vaggar99

some eye opening new research:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vTpkVyEpTS9czP2oLypeMvlWqXgml6Uul-FZsjRaxDtqiu8kNS_m997320WjL4WNQeHU2GZNNc2vCmy/pubchart?oid=1566344965&format=interactive

Meltdown99

CM189191 said:

Meltdown99 said:

CM189191 said:

Meltdown99 said:

Other can coming on to bands web site to bitch about gun control, what are any of you doing that would be useful to change gun laws?  I would think after 300 pages of the same people on opposite sides digging your heals in...

I tailgate cars with NRA bumper stickers

Lol...could be risky...

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a truck is a good guy with a truck. Pretty sure that's how it works. 

I doubt it...

CM189191

unsung said:

You know...the Constitution is more than just the 2A.  My favorite part is the Preamble. 

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.

Bentleyspop

Idiots.....

https://twitter.com/CNN/status/966292707286175746

CM189191

tempo_n_groove said:

@benjs good info there. One thing I never understood though is how can you compare a country like Ireland and shooting deaths there to the US? The population is much lower. 

The charts are 'per capita'

cincybearcat

unsung said:

Would you prefer they show the dead bodies of the teenagers? Or maybe dead bodies of the elementary school kids from sandy hook? 

Halifax2TheMax

unsung said:

Classy Unsung. Did you make that one yourself with your crayolas?

benjs

tempo_n_groove said:

@benjs good info there. One thing I never understood though is how can you compare a country like Ireland and shooting deaths there to the US? The population is much lower. 

As for gun ownership in the US you should have to take a class to own one. 

Im not for mass registration either. If you want that then have the same law across all 50 states. 

As mentioned by CM, this comparison was per capita (to normalize to account for population size differences). Of course, size and density likely have some impact on the trending, as more densely packed areas subjected to a mass shooting has the potential for greater fatalities, but it'd be hard to chalk up that radically different homicides per capita between USA and Ireland to population densities alone.

All of this being said, a person I know said it very eloquently: society shows what it values by what actions or inactions are taken. To add to this, the word "impossible" is a mental blocker which allows people to stroke their consciences while doing anything within the range of 'as little as possible' to 'the opposite of what they feel is right'. It seems to me that the terms "difficult" and "impossible" have been conflated to create an ultimate complacency of citizenry.

Kids offer something different. Kids are naive, impassioned, and lately - enraged. If this is channelled properly, this may be the beginning of a youth-generated engagement of society towards what some here call (either as a positive or negative) the liberalization of society. 

dankind

dignin

cincybearcat said:

unsung said:

Would you prefer they show the dead bodies of the teenagers? Or maybe dead bodies of the elementary school kids from sandy hook? 

I would.

Thirty Bills Unpaid

cincybearcat said:

unsung said:

Would you prefer they show the dead bodies of the teenagers? Or maybe dead bodies of the elementary school kids from sandy hook? 

Yes.

Show the kids with their heads blown apart so the idiots that have no clue can get a clue.

We treat the victims as numbers (in this case 1-17). And the morons who fail to comprehend the reality of the situation need to see the reality of the situation.

Halifax2TheMax

benjs said:

11) The states with the most guns report the most suicides

12) Guns allow people to kill themselves much more easily

Estelle Caswell/Vox

Perhaps the reason access to guns so strongly contributes to suicides is that guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting and poison.

Jill Harkavy-Friedman, vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, previously explained that this is why reducing access to guns can be so important to preventing suicides: Just stalling an attempt or making it less likely to result in death makes a huge difference.

“Time is really key to preventing suicide in a suicidal person,” Harkavy-Friedman said. “First, the crisis won’t last, so it will seem less dire and less hopeless with time. Second, it opens the opportunity for someone to help or for the suicidal person to reach out to someone to help. That’s why limiting access to lethal means is so powerful.”

She added, “[I]f we keep the method of suicide away from a person when they consider it, in that moment they will not switch to another method. It doesn’t mean they never will. But in that moment, their thinking is very inflexible and rigid. So it’s not like they say, ‘Oh, this isn’t going to work. I’m going to try something else.’ They generally can’t adjust their thinking, and they don’t switch methods.”

13) Programs that limit access to guns have decreased suicides

Estelle Caswell/Vox

When countries reduced access to guns, they saw a drop in the number of firearm suicides. The data above, taken from a study by Australian researchers, shows that suicides dropped dramatically after the Australian government set up a gun buyback program that reduced the number of firearms in the country by about one-fifth.

The Australian study found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking.

Australia is far from alone in these types of results. A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent — particularly on weekends — when the military stopped letting soldiers take their guns home over the weekend.

This data and research have a clear message: States and countries can significantly reduce the number of suicides by restricting access to guns.

14) In states with more guns, more police officers are also killed on duty

Given that states with more guns tend to have more homicides, it isn’t too surprising that, as a studyin the American Journal of Public Health found, states with more guns also have more cops die in the line of duty.

Researchers looked at federal data for firearm ownership and homicides of police officers across the US over 15 years. They found that states with more gun ownership had more cops killed in homicides: Every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed in homicides over the 15-year study period.

The findings could help explain why US police officers appear to kill more people than cops in other developed countries. For US police officers, the higher rates of guns and gun violence — even against them — in America mean they not only will encounter more guns and violence, but they can expect to encounter more guns and deadly violence, making them more likely to anticipate and perceive a threat and use deadly force as a result.

15) Support for gun ownership has sharply increased since the early ’90s

Over the past 20 years, Americans have clearly shifted from supporting gun control measures to greater support of “protecting the right of Americans to own guns,” according to Pew Research Center surveys. This shift has happened even as major mass shootings, such as the attacks on Columbine High School and Sandy Hook Elementary School, have received more press attention.

16) High-profile shootings don’t appear to lead to more support for gun control

Although mass shootings are often viewed as some of the worst acts of gun violence, they seem to have little effect on public opinion about gun rights, based on surveys from the Pew Research Center. That helps explain why Americans’ support for the right to own guns appears to be rising over the past 20 years even as more of these mass shootings make it to the news.

17) But specific gun control policies are fairly popular

Although Americans say they want to protect the right to bear arms, they’re very much supportive of many gun policy proposals — including some fairly contentious ideas, such as more background checks on private and gun show sales and banning semi-automatic and assault-style weapons, according to Pew Research Center surveys.

This type of contradiction isn’t exclusive to gun policy issues. For example, although most Americans in the past said they don’t like Obamacare, most of them also said they like the specific policies in the health-care law. Americans just don’t like some policy ideas until you get specific.

For people who believe the empirical evidence that more guns mean more violence, this contradiction is the source of a lot of frustration. Americans by and large support policies that reduce access to guns. But once these policies are proposed, they’re broadly spun by politicians and pundits into attempts to “take away your guns.” So nothing gets done, and preventable deaths keep occurring.

I just spent 20 or so minutes reading through your posts. None of it was surprising and most of it I was already aware of. I just wish Team Trump Treason had the focus and intellectual capacity to do the same.

unsung

dankind said:

Too bad he couldn't have defended himself with a defensive firearm.  Instead he is dead as a result of a gun free zone.

Halifax2TheMax

Thirty Bills Unpaid said:

cincybearcat said:

unsung said:

Would you prefer they show the dead bodies of the teenagers? Or maybe dead bodies of the elementary school kids from sandy hook? 

Yes.

Show the kids with their heads blown apart so the idiots that have no clue can get a clue.

We treat the victims as numbers (in this case 1-17). And the morons who fail to comprehend the reality of the situation need to see the reality of the situation.

The FBI should do a presentation to the president, VP and the heads of all the congressional committees and include large, movie theater sized pictures of the death scenes before the bodies are removed after each mass shooting. Then the pictures should be made available to the public so gun control advocates can blow them up to placard and billboard size and stand out in front of gun stores and gun shows and churches and supermarkets, much like the pro-life zealots do outside abortion clinics. Speaking of the pro-life folks, what’s their position on gun violence?

Thirty Bills Unpaid

In a nutshell... and people have been stating it for years now... more guns equals more deaths by guns.

It's that simple.

It's ironic that some here are mocking the emotions of survivors and a mourning public. It's ironic because in many cases, emotions are the driving force behind many (if not most) murders by guns. A fit of rage, bout of anxiety, or surge of desperation sometimes amounts to murder in the US, while in other countries... it amounts to an angry phone call, text message, on-line rant or punch in the nose.

Thirty Bills Unpaid

unsung said:

dankind said:

Too bad he couldn't have defended himself with a defensive firearm.  Instead he is dead as a result of a gun free zone.

See... and I say, "Too bad he had to deal with some lunatic that legally purchased a machine gun from the local gas station." Now he's dead because the gun industry plays US politicians like puppets.

CM189191

unsung said:

dankind said:

Too bad he couldn't have defended himself with a defensive firearm.  Instead he is dead as a result of a gun free zone.

some of us would like to live in a world where we don't have to arm ourselves everyday to leave the house

I don't think that is too much to ask for

Halifax2TheMax

unsung said:

dankind said:

Too bad he couldn't have defended himself with a defensive firearm.  Instead he is dead as a result of a gun free zone.

No, he’s dead because a “responsible” adult legally purchased a legal firearm.