here’s the thing
I actually don’t know for sure if gun control will help
It seems to have helped in other places but perhaps the us is different
I honestly in humility must admit I do not know
But it seems to me that trying out incremental measures like background checks and like making it harder to get certain kinds of weapons and seeing whether they work is not by itself tyranny
Tyranny would be OK THATS IT NO GUNS FOR ANYONE EVER BOOM
incremental measures can be tried out and tweaked or reversed if they do not work
I mean I know people are terrified of a slippery slope but you know what? Even if we pass some laws we will still have an nra
they will still be loud
if shit goes south I guarantee you they will say something about it
Where the alternative is doing nothing out of fear of even trying something else at all
And doing nothing is getting us nowhere
The usual argument against incremental change is that anti-guns would push their advantage until guns are totally banned. So pro-guns prefer keeping the current situation as a Schelling fence.
Some examples are given in this SSC subthread : http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/06/15/open-thread-51-75/#comment-372796
I personally don’t know enough to form an opinion, but they might have a point.
That’s what I’m saying I disagree with.
Or at least think we should test the outer boundaries of to see if it looks likely to actually happen.
It is my understanding that the outer boundaries have, in fact, been tested. For example, the 10-year assault rifle ban. You can also look at other countries, such as the UK, or Australia, and what happened when they passed increased restrictions (including total bans) on guns. On the whole, increased gun control tends to reduce “gun violence” yet leave “total violence” unaffected; if violence was trending up (as it was in UK) it continues trending up in the same manner; if violence was trending down (as it was in Australia), it continues trending down. And I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.
The reason that gun advocates are so testy about gun control laws is because they are law abiding citizens, so they have to put up with the consequences. Not the anti-gun people, who don’t buy them, and not the criminals, who disobey the laws.
I’ll give you that the assault weapons ban was poorly designed. I’ll also give you that humans are pretty violent and that those who would use a gun often would just go for a knife instead. (Though I also see little blurby statistics now and again that suggest that as a whole, violence is actually generally trending down. But that doesn’t really affect this.)
What I won’t give you is this:
“I don’t see how turning eleven thousand shooting murders into eleven thousand stabbing murders is an improvement.”
I’m pretty sure it is one, because if Omar Mateen had brought a couple knives to Pulse, I doubt anywhere near as many people would be dead.
I do understand that mass shootings are rare in the grand scheme of things. But compared to other countries they happen strikingly often here.
The US has a massively larger population than most countries, and in the developed world has a much larger homicide rate, both of which would result in a substantial increase in mass shootings. For example, The US has around 10 times the population of Canada (320 million to 35 million), and about 2.7 times the homicide rate (3.9 to 1.4). We could then naively expect the US to have 27 times as many mass shootings as Canada. And since the US has 10 times as many people as Canada, there would be 10 times as many people being informed that their country has 27 times as many mass shootings, even if gun laws had no impact on mass shootings.
There may be disproportionately more mass shootings in the US than in other countries, even accounting for things like the large population and higher homicide rate. But I have not seen good evidence that this is so, and non-trivial evidence against.
Is this a consistent finding? Because if so its pretty damning to the left’s claim to actually be informed about expert opinion.
That’s pretty astonishing and it seems actually valid. Checking the numbers for Finland, the death toll for mass shootings in the last 10 years is approximately 0.47/1M annually. Dropping just to the time period they examined gives the results they had. Taking a longer time period to compensate for the difference in population and the excessive variance it causes makes the numbers a bit more moderate: 0.16 for 30 years, approximately 0.1 for 70 years, and of course this is getting ridiculous but it shows that assuming their US numbers are correct then even controlling for rare and anomalous incidents, the US is actually safer nonetheless.
The numbers seem to have an interesting relation to overall homicide rates: (normalized for murders/100 000 population)
Russia 0.001
Italy 0.01
US 0.023
Canada 0.023
Germany 0.025
England 0.027
Belgium 0.071
Netherlands 0.073
Finland 0.083
Austria 0.136
Slovakia 0.168
Czech Rep 0.175
Switzerland 0.284
France 0.298
Norway 3.15
So actually the Anglosphere+Germany seems to have pretty constant rates of mass shootings vs. overall homicides, with a lot of Europe lagging behind. Only Italy is able to solidly beat the US in that area and Russia and Norway are total anomalies and probably not relevant for this. But the main point is: the mass shooting rate in the US is not that exceptional, and actually pretty low when the overall rate of violence is controlled for.
And in light of this the US is just freaking out absurdly and needs to calm the fuck down and stop issuing bulletproof blankets to schoolchildren.
2 weeks ago · tagged #guns cw #violence cw · 73 notes · source: fierceawakening · .permalink
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princess-stargirl reblogged this from fierceawakening and added:“The concern I hear most often is that any gun control measure at all begins an accelerated slide to massive limits on...
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kairyu92 reblogged this from isaacsapphire and added:I’m a little curious to see how total murders per event would change with gun control. It’s already been established...
isaacsapphire reblogged this from fierceawakening and added:Um, it seems like people attachment a lot of importance to guns, specifically, in what I have to see as a symbolic or...
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machine-elf-paladin reblogged this from explodingbat and added:Well, that’s possible, but it’s also possible that growing up in a culture where guns are extremely rare divorces people...
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guns-and-freedom reblogged this from fierceawakening and added:But it seems to me that trying out incremental measures like background checks and like making it harder to get certain...
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inferentialdistance reblogged this from fierceawakening and added:No, but I suspect it’s part of why the US has a larger crime rate in general. And the funny thing is, causality is hard....
fierceawakening reblogged this from princess-stargirl and added:The concern I hear most often is that any gun control measure at all begins an accelerated slide to massive limits on...
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toreblogallthethings reblogged this from fierceawakening and added:Let me try to clarify what I think may be the (mutual) misunderstanding happening here.Statements (that seem to me to...
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h3lldalg0 reblogged this from lyycernment and added:I think testing governments is inherently difficult, due to the incentive to retain power. But in a more ideal world,...
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brazenautomaton reblogged this from fierceawakening and added:But why is it good to do that, if it doesn’t lower the number of people killed?
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe and added:That’s pretty astonishing and it seems actually valid. Checking the numbers for Finland, the death toll for mass...
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south-lands reblogged this from wirehead-wannabe and added:Three questions, then, because as much as I instinctively want more gun control I want to be sure of all the facts...
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drethelin reblogged this from rendakuenthusiast and added:doing nothing out of fear is in fact better .
wirehead-wannabe reblogged this from inferentialdistance and added:Is this a consistent finding? Because if so its pretty damning to the left’s claim to actually be informed about expert...
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