Seem gun control doesn’t work

In fact, as more limitations have been imposed by state and city as well as federal governments, the more mass shootings there have been. Really jogs the noggin, that.

Not sure why anyone cares. 20~ people a couple of times a year out of 300m people.

Why does it happen in the USA? News coverage. They become notorious celebrities. Swiss gun laws are about as liberal.

People texting on their phones while driving is a far bigger killer.

In the developed world, it does seem – I emphasise ‘seem’; I haven’t run the numbers – to be mostly an American phenomenon.

I’m against gun control on libertarian grounds. But even if I was fervently in favour of it, I’d need a lot of persuading that the frequency of this kind of behaviour was a consequence of widespreadgun-ownership.

I get the impression that in many ways America is the canary in the coalmine for a lot of things – drugginess, vibrancy, political polarities, grotesque celebrities and the lust for fame. I could go on. We always end up copying them one way or the other anyway.

Point is, and after all it’s a libertarian argument albeit at a practical level, if it wasn’t guns it’d be summat else. Lorries, for e.g. The point is the murderous nuttiness, not the tools deployed by the murderous nutter.

Jim – I don’t think SSRI’s are causing it, although I take them and sometimes feel a bit murdery when I forget my crazy pills.

I think the underlying social decay that leads millions of people (who don’t necessarily have anything inherently wrong with their brain chemistry) to need SSRI’s is what’s causing it.

Modern society is simultaneously alienating and insanifying.

We agree with Canadian lobster-wrangler Jordan B. Peterson that we crowdsource sanity, I hope?

Well, what happens when the traditional methods of keeping people engaged in, invested in, and moderated by this thing we call society start to break down?

It’s no one thing. Mass immigration constantly tickles the threat centres of our brains, because we’re still a tribal species even though we pretend otherwise. The internet may turn out to be the most antisocial invention in history, it’s having all sorts of negative effects on people’s mental health in an era where relationships are increasingly mediated by technology. The sexual revolution has created a generation of incels – a horrifyingly large percentage of Milennial men simply can’t get a shag. Smaller families and the helicopter parenting that breeds has raised the most socially awkward and isolated generation in human history. Modern workplaces feel insecure and unsatisfying. We’re funnelling millions of youngsters into fake university degrees that lead to NEETdom. People no longer believe in God, so they’re not soothed by the traditional opiate of the masses.

The question isn’t why some young white men go Tonto and start killing people, the question is what’s stopping this from being a daily event.

And the politicians flap their gums about gun control. Which is like trying to stop WW1 by banning pickelhaubes.

The West has been sowing the wind since 1945, and it’s about whirlwind o’clock.

We’d all better strap in, because the next few years are gonna be lit af with all the yeeting and boogaloos going down. #yolo

Gah.

Act out

Sky-high

https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1158074774297468928?s=21

“In the past 48hrs, the USA horrifically lost 34 people to mass shootings.

On average, across any 48hrs, we also lose…

500 to Medical errors
300 to the Flu
250 to Suicide
200 to Car Accidents
40 to Homicide via Handgun

Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.”

It’s caused quite a stir, as you’d expect. But nobody has said it’s false.

Guy at Garlic Festival raises his rifle and shoots. One or two bystanders pull out their pistols and shoot the shit out of him. The end.

I love a story with a happy ending. But it didn’t end that way, did it? The bad guy fires away for a minute before police arrive. “The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.” The good guy doesn’t have to be a police officer. Bad guys tend to look around to make sure no officers are around before they start their dirty deeds.

The idea that you can monitor the mental state of 325,000,000 people and intervene before they start a killing spree is preposterous.

The concept of “gun control,” that you can keep an adult who isn’t locked up from getting a gun in a country with 200,000,000 guns, is juvenile.

Adequate defense on site is the only solution. An armed citizenry.

‘A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.’

Government infringes. Nut cases exploit it. Government declares, “We must infringe some more!” Government strives to make it easier for nut cases to mass murder.

It doesn’t work in the US. It works here to the extent of stopping me buying a pistol or an automatic rifle. If it stopped criminals getting them too it would be an unqualified success.

On the other hand, maybe it has further worked here by making it hard for the insane to get guns. Or is it just chance that we’ve not had a slaughter on those lines lately?

The whole point of gun control is that Hillary and Bill’s professionals get you before you get them.

Banning guns entirely just rigs the odds even further in their favour.

Note that banning guns does NOT apply to everyone. It only applies to those who are neither rich nor famous.

Anyone, Mr Ecks, can make a firearm given a modicum of engineering skills & a few simple tools. Set yourself up for under £1000. It’s the ammunition’s a challenge.

If you’re talking about a homemade Glock then I’m not really seeing it. If, however, you are talking about a 1940’s style sten gun then I can easily see that being mass manufactured in some seedy backstreet factory somewhere, in fact, I suspect that it is only the easy availability of guns in the US and elsewhere of far higher quality and smuggled into the UK which is preventing backstreet manufacture.

If you’re manufacturing sten guns, you can just as easily manufacture the rest of the equipment, from cartridges up to magazines.

The gunpowder can be manufactured, but again it is probably just as easy to smuggle it in from places where it is easier to obtain (currently the US, but there are other sources as well), just hide it in bags of compost, cement or whatever.

John Galt –

There a numerous examples of small black market gun manufacturers all over the world. There are a fair number of them along the Pakistan and Afghanistan border, and it is very easy to get a homemade 1911 just about anywhere in the Philippines. Hell, the North Vietnamese made a number of homemade 1911s back in the ’60s and ’70s. They pop up on rare gun auctions over here every now and again.

For some reason the media seems to have ignored the 11 people shot in Chicago this weekend. Eight of them in one incident. Somehow that was not a “mass shooting”.

Of course this is pretty normal for Chicago. Whatever doesn’t support the narrative.

This is from a Canadian PhD economics student who is as “liberal” in the American sense as they come:

“The effect of gun control on homicides is ambiguous. Possibly positive because guns kill, possibly negative because they deter and defend. Suicides, on the other hand, have a strong positive relationship with gun ownership. If we control guns it should be to stop suicides.

Are guns significantly more effective at mass killings than motor vehicles? It’s good that we have security around airplanes and nuclear weapons, but I’m not sure we can stop someone who wants to kill a dozen people. Not without a complete surveillance state.“

Whatever your view, it’s probably too late, the genie isn’t going back in the bottle no matter how much legislators try.

One point that’s often forgotten, the government being scared of the people and not the people being scared of the government was the thinking behind the idea of an armed militia.

Bloke in Westerville, I’ve had a look at the site you kindly recommend. It has more data than I have time to plough through.

A propos my observation about prevalence in the developed world, I noticed from the mass shooting figures you quote above that the following countries are absent: Britain, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Japan, Sweden, Russia, Italy, Canada, Greece, Hungary, Poland, South Korea, Singapore, Ireland, Israel, Australia and New Zealand.

I dare say we can palter about which countries are truly developed, but in your list you include Macedonia and Albania.

Steve,

Its really about the rise of wall-to-wall news coverage. Decades ago, someone who murdered their classmates in a rural area would be a local news item.You couldn’t easily get a crew there in time, you had 30 minutes of news per night. You couldn’t get a photo of the perp. There was nothing to run for a long time.

Now, there’s a crew there that day and they can spend days on it. it gets great ratings. So they become famous. They achieve some sort of recognition for their existence.

Edward and Bongo –

Feel free to provide the data that is either missing or incorrectly defined.

I’m going to take a wild guess and say neither of you will. You will say you don’t have the time… I will say that facts have bumped up against your preconceived (and uninformed) notions and you don’t like the feel of it. Better to throw out a bit of criticism and walk away with opinions intact than do the work necessary to validate them.

And I can’t help but notice that Spiro hasn’t been back…

Bloke in Westerville, are you related to Dennis?

I don’t have a dog in this fight – as I made clear in the first sentence I wrote. So, you may be right, you may be wrong. I don’t care. You’re objecting to something that wasn’t there, then jumping up and down in triumph.

It’s a bit odd.

Ah. Now the angry sweary prose makes sense.

I don’t have a dog in this fight – as I made clear in the first sentence I wrote.

It might be useful to remind you what you did write:

In the developed world, it does seem – I emphasise ‘seem’; I haven’t run the numbers – to be mostly an American phenomenon.

And when I provided the numbers to run, your response – which should have been along the lines of ‘maybe I need to rethink this’ – was basically ‘meh’. And here I was taking you seriously enough to give you the data to allow you to rethink an opinion and perhaps move a bit closer to reality. Which is what a discussion of a serious nature on a serious topic deserves, right?

Oh, Dennis, bless you, you silly old sod.

If my response was “meh”, then it can scarcely be the case “that facts have bumped up against [my] preconceived (and uninformed) notions and [I] don’t like the feel of it”, can it?

As for replacing your data with other data, well. It’s possible you’re very clever and can parse this stuff in seconds. But when this morning I looked at the site to which you kindly referred me, it very quickly became clear that the data is voluminous, liable to multiple interpretations and the subject far more complex than certainly I’d imagined.

So perhaps the subject can be digested in a minute, if you’re very clever. But I doubt it can.

Go and put your feet up.

What about home-made rail guns, Mr in Spain?

Without wishing to bring GCHQ down on our esteemed host’s head. I am merely curious, and not even asking for a friend.

But when this morning I looked at the site to which you kindly referred me, it very quickly became clear that the data is voluminous, liable to multiple interpretations and the subject far more complex than certainly I’d imagined.

Sorry, I made the mistake of taking you seriously. Won’t happen again.

You sound like NiV.

Ok Dennis – this took about a minute.
“The United States has the largest prison population in the world, and the highest per-capita incarceration rate.[3][4][5] In 2016 in the US, there were 655 people incarcerated per 100,000 population”
I’m treading on dangerous territory here because I’d bet that a surprising number of people in the UK believe they should have a say in what laws the USA passes over themselves. A surprising number of people in the UK ( 48% according to a 2016 referendum ) appear to think that the UK should have more say in the internal affairs of smaller countries in the EU than they do over themselves ( thanks to QMV and the net contribution to EU funds ). They disgust me.
The USA should of course set its own laws. It would be absurd though to base the framing of any new laws on a claim that crime in the USA is not an outlier in international comparisons.

‘Senator Diane Feinstein displays an assault rifle at a press conference in 1994.’

A lie. She would have been arrested had she actually had one.

‘That law was known as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, and it was temporary. Written into the legislation was an expiration date of 10 years. But for that decade, the law essentially banned the manufacture, sale, and possession of some military-style assault weapons, including the AR-15.’

Colossal ignorance of firearms displayed. But it’s Quartz. Lying in support of their agenda is moral.

‘A recent study found that the ban reduced the number of mass shootings during the decade it existed.’

Another lie. It was a colossal failure. Well, okay, the study was commissioned to find that the Assault Weapons Ban worked. It didn’t. But that’s not the answer the researchers were paid for.

‘the lack of consistent countrywide regulations has been a matter of intense debate in recent years, especially as mass shootings become more and more frequent. After two mass shootings over the weekend in Dayton, Ohio and El Paso, Texas, those debates are likely to escalate.’

“We are going to exploit these tragedies TO THE MAX!”

The Left doesn’t want you to be able to defend yourself, your family, or your community. They want you fully dependent on government. They will say ANYTHING to achieve that.