I checked out the link, and I’m not going to try to say that those things did not happen since a somewhat random sampling of the source links would suggest that they did.
However, that same random sampling would also suggest that the vast majority of the incidents on this list appear to be either drug or gang related.
Lets talk about the definition of “mass shooting”
Cribbed from the excellent @therevenantrising , and this next section of text references 2015, but we’ll get to 2016 in a bit
The Anti-Gun Claim That There Have Been Over 350 Mass Shootings In 2015 Alone Is Still Absolute Bullshit.
Well, buckle up buckaroos! Consider this Part 2 to that post, because I have found some more evidence for that ass. So pull up a chair and let’s get started.
Next we have this gem brought to you bywww.TheFederalistPapers.org. This is where it gets really fun. Let’s do this.
GunsAreCool/Reddit has apparently become the go-to source for mass shooting statistics, but is their information accurate?
Hardball with Chris Matthews, The Daily Show and WaPohave all cited the “mass shooting tracker” featured on Reddit’s GunsAreCool forum which says America has seen somewhere in the neighborhood of 353 mass shootings in 2015 alone.
Mere seconds of investigation into this “tracker” proves otherwise.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation defines a “mass shooting” as an event in which four or more individuals are killed as a result of a shooting. This excludes the shooter, which GunsAreCool includes in their “tracker”.
Going by that definition, are Reddit’s statistics accurate?
Not by a long shot. Let’s take a look at the first seven “mass shootings” recorded by this “tracker.”
None of the first seven shootings qualify as “mass shootings.” Each shooting has a citation leading to a news story about the incident so everyone can confirm it’s not fabricated.
So how many of the 353 shootings listed actually meet the FBI’s definition of a “mass shooting?
22
Out of 353 proclaimed “mass shootings,” only 22 meet the FBI’s criteria of a “mass shooting.”
But let’s not stop there, let’s break down the stories by category. Some of the cases fit into more than one category.
Number Of Stories Where The Shooter’s Death/Injury Is Included In The Death/Injury Numbers:45
Number Of Stories Where The Victims Were Killed By A Family Member/Relative: 23
Number Of Stories Where There Were No Deaths, Just Injuries: 146
Cases That Aren’t Considered Mass Shootings For Reasons Other Than Death Count (Reasons Given Below): 4
Case 9: Murders took place in several different locations with a moderate amount of time between each killing.
Case 111: Police respond to a domestic violence call where they are attacked by a man. (Man did not use firearms in his attack.) Officers shot and killed him.
Case 282: Police confront two men with outstanding warrants, who begin shooting at the officers. Officers shoot back and kill the men. Only two dead are the perpetrators, only two injured are the police.
Case 336: Perpetrator only shot two victims, when the counter says 4. The other two deaths were linked to smoke inhalation after he lit the house on fire.
Number of Shootings That Took Place In A Social Setting (i.e., Party, Concert, Funeral): 114
Number of Shootings That Police Believe To Be Drug/Gang Related: 38
Number Of Drive-By Shootings: 32
Number Of Murder-Suicides: 23
There were several cases in which the facts in the story, and the numbers given on the tracker didn’t match up, such as case 337. The tracker says 5 dead, whereas the article says 5 injured.
So when I use the same site you went to, this is what we get when we sort by the FBI’s own classification system:
12 down from 200.
That is a 94% reduction in the number, using the FBI’s own metrics.
The woman accused of transferring guns used in the Excel Industries shooting spree has pleaded not guilty.
Sarah Hopkins, 28, is charged with knowingly transferring weapons to a convicted felon. Court documents show she and Cedric Ford had a past relationship.
….the gun was illegally obtained, and the 4th person killed was the shooter himself, so that one would fall off the list.
Serrano-Vitorino has had previous run-ins with other agencies.
He was deported to Mexico in 2004. It’s unclear when he returned to the United States, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
By September 15, ICE became aware Serrano-Vitorino had returned to the country illegally after he was fingerprinted at the Overland Park Municipal Court in Kansas.
But ICE mistakenly issued a detainer for him to the wrong sheriff’s office. As a result of the error, Serrano-Vitorino was not taken into custody then.
….so there is no legal way he could have gotten his hands on a gun.
The spokesperson said the .380 semi-automatic handgun Campbell used was owned by Terry Carlson, Lana Carlson’s deceased ex-husband.
Spokesperson Chief Ryan Spurling called Campbell a “career criminal,” someone with non-violent crime convictions in Missouri, Pennsylvania and Wyoming.
As a convicted felon, Campbell was not allowed to be in possession of guns.
So that’s 9. Down from 200.
I’m going to stop here.
If I had the time to go through each one on this list, and I mean the ones that have 3 or less deaths, I’m going to estimate that a lot of those are going to be crimes committed with illegally obtained weapons, people that shouldn’t have been in the country in the first place, and/or gang-related violence, which is just another way of saying illegal gun.
If someone else wants to pick it up from here, you’re welcome to it.
Question that I haven’t really seen explored or answered (though I could just be searching the wrong thing): we’ve seen a bunch of studies arguing that a society with less guns is or isn’t safer than, for instance, contemporary US.
However, given that you are in a society where a bunch of people do have guns, is it better for you to have one too?
Seems like a good question for the rationalist(-adjacent) out there, since I feel like most normal people will own or not own pretty much in tandem with their beliefs about guns. But it seems to be at least possible to be anti-gun but still want one so long as everyone else is going to have one, or be pro-gun but choose not to have one.
?
There was quite a while when I was pro-gun but had no interest in owning one.
I am now mildly against gun-legality (mostly to make overly impulsive suicide harder). But also vaguely interested in maybe getting into target shooting.
This depends a lot on the spread of gun ownership in society.
I’d probably prefer not to own a gun (in the sense of having one in my home or carrying it) everything else being equal.
But I’d want a gun to defend myself from dangerous people if I considered it necessary.
Necessary meaning in this context “how likely is any given adversary to actually be armed and assume absence of armament”
So my preferences would go:
bad guys think I have a gun, but don’t > bad guys know I have a gun > bad guys think I don’t have a gun, but do > bad guys know I don’t have a gun
If I apply intuitive game theory to this set of preferences, it suggests that attacking anyone isn’t safe because if guns are considered rare, they would have one, while if guns are considered common, they might not have one but the chance is too high to risk; simultaneously it would balance the amount of guns into an equilibrium where enough people have them to outweigh the number of bad guys with guns but not everyone has so the risks of impulsive people having guns and hurting themselves aren’t as big as with universal gun ownership.
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
wait wait wait wait wait wait
any gun control scheme that fails this specific edge case regardless of the reason deserves “mass scorning”
is that what you are saying?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding this suggestion.
Are you, @socialjusticemunchkin and by proxy @ozymandias271 (Though ozy has not stated the necessity for scorn and the degree of wrongness of the answer), by the above statement, in fact intending to say that any gun control scheme that fails to give MLK (understood to mean MLK in his current state, if you want to retcon MLK to have firearms training then do so explicitly, if he did already then source your evidence) the ability to purchase a firearm is A) shitty and B) deserving of mass scorn?
Any scheme that would render MLK specifically unable to get firearms, due to reasons that are political instead of competency-related, is what I’m saying. If he had eg. some health issue that would’ve made him unable to shoot straight it is one thing, but stuff that relies on “the government has decided this person is a bad person” is another. And a reasonable degree of training in safe handling etc. would obviously be retconned into the question, as it’s intended to be about the difference between MLK and some random guy somewhere.
Some further clarification: because the government is evil, it could still possibly find a way to prevent MLK from getting guns even with a reasonable system.
But the point of the test is to determine whether it’s obvious that MLK would’ve been totally barred from having guns; if it requires a significantly non-trivial degree of creativity from the State to find out a way to bully people it doesn’t like one can consider the test passed at least in the “not needing to mass scorn people” sense, but simple and naive things like “no guns for people on the no-fly list” need to be discredited from the popular discourse.
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
wait wait wait wait wait wait
any gun control scheme that fails this specific edge case regardless of the reason deserves “mass scorning”
is that what you are saying?
I want to make sure I am not misunderstanding this suggestion.
Are you, @socialjusticemunchkin and by proxy @ozymandias271 (Though ozy has not stated the necessity for scorn and the degree of wrongness of the answer), by the above statement, in fact intending to say that any gun control scheme that fails to give MLK (understood to mean MLK in his current state, if you want to retcon MLK to have firearms training then do so explicitly, if he did already then source your evidence) the ability to purchase a firearm is A) shitty and B) deserving of mass scorn?
Any scheme that would render MLK specifically unable to get firearms, due to reasons that are political instead of competency-related, is what I’m saying. If he had eg. some health issue that would’ve made him unable to shoot straight it is one thing, but stuff that relies on “the government has decided this person is a bad person” is another. And a reasonable degree of training in safe handling etc. would obviously be retconned into the question, as it’s intended to be about the difference between MLK and some random guy somewhere.
a surprising number of Democrats seem to be getting the wrong answer to the question “should Martin Luther King Jr. have been allowed to buy a gun?”
I love this heuristic. If your gun control scheme would render MLK unable to get a gun, what it is is a shitty gun control scheme. Now we just need to find a way to coordinate the mass scorning of every democrat who ever suggests a gun control scheme that fails the MLK test.
(And non-democrats too, let’s not discriminate unwarrantedly, but instead let reality do the discrimination for us at least until republicans start being less about the Second Amendment and more about the “Let’s bully black people some more” thing.)
Putting up barriers to entry based on skill and knowledge seems like a good way to reduce gun suicides (which probably reduces overall suicides) but not a good way to reduce gun homicides.
Well yes, and considering that gun suicides constitute the vast majority of gun deaths, I think that’s a reasonable goal to pursue while nonetheless not adversely impacting legitimate gun owners the way many other rules would.
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.
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.
Nothing is going to change. Americans love their guns more than they love people and after Sandy Hook we decided that killing over 20 children was acceptable and not outrageous enough to make reasonable restrictions on guns. This is America, a country that has been around for 200 years, a superpower, a 1st world nation, and one of the wealthiest countries on the planet and we refuse to protect our own people. We respect guns more than we respect the lives of people.
What specific gun control measures would you propose and how would they directly and effectively make society safer?
Absolutely get rid of all AR-15′s and the like.
Intense background and criminal background checks and anything violent automatically disqualifies you.
Make getting a gun/gun permit more like getting a driver’s license:
permit to learn
includes an exam with 18 or more questions on the policies, laws, and etc of guns and gun ownership
if you get more than 8 questions incorrect you must retake it.
30 hours of practical experience at a gun range with a licensed teacher
Must take a 5 hour class on the dangers of guns and how to use them safely which will then yield you a certificate that grants you to take the practical exam and lasts for one year. If you don’t gain the license within the allotted year you must retake the class.
A practical exam with a licensed instructor who will grade you on various skills. If you pass you may be granted a permit on the weapon of your choice, the exams may differ on the type of firearm you want.
Follow the Japanese model where you must have two gun safes in different areas of the house, one to store the gun and one to store the bullets and you must provide the police with information on where those safes are.
No concealed carry and only handguns may be allowed to be out in public.
If transporting a weapon, it must be in the trunk of the vehicle, in a bag or some other case, safety on and unloaded and may not leave the vehicle until you are at the destination.
If you’re a hunter or some other gun hobbyist that requires a functional weapon other than a handgun then the gun must stay on the premises, whether that is a gun range or the Fish and Wildlife facility.
If you live in a rural area where police (and people, for that matter) are few and far between, something akin to a deer hunting rifle should provide plenty of protection from predators and poachers, you still have to follow the aforementioned steps.
This doesn’t cover everything but I think it’s a good place to start.
Can you show me evidence that this would directly and effectively create a safer society?
I have never laughed so hard at a gun law post. Like seriously, the evidence is in fucking reality. The proposed restrictions are just fucking logic.
IIRC, gun control is useful for reducing suicides but not that useful for reducing murders?
Also, mass shootings aren’t a good basis for legislation, but if you’re focusing on them anyway, most of this probably wouldn’t help much. I feel like most terrorists could answer questions about how to use guns safely.
Absolutely get rid of all AR-15′s and the like.
Meaning “semiautomatic long guns” or “scary-looking guns”? The first is debatable, the latter is a terrible basis for laws. But if one wants to “absolutely get rid of”, that sounds like implying taking those guns away from their owners and…yeah, not going to happen in America. Even if it was a good idea (I don’t know whether it would be), it’s not an idea that would ever work.
Intense background and criminal background checks and anything violent automatically disqualifies you.
Making gun permits depend on being a well-behaved citizen is a good idea. I wouldn’t go as far to disqualify everyone with the slightest background of violence because people fuck up and get better (eg. having lesser crimes make one ineligible for a certain number of years would be satisfactory), but as a general rule yes, let responsible, peaceful, law-abiding (as far as victimful crimes go) people have guns (and make the permits easy to obtain if one is responsible, and easy to lose if one acts irresponsibly later) and just filter out the bad apples.
Make getting a gun/gun permit more like getting a driver’s license:
permit to learn
includes an exam with 18 or more questions on the policies, laws, and etc of guns and gun ownership
if you get more than 8 questions incorrect you must retake it.
30 hours of practical experience at a gun range with a licensed teacher
Must take a 5 hour class on the dangers of guns and how to use them safely which will then yield you a certificate that grants you to take the practical exam and lasts for one year. If you don’t gain the license within the allotted year you must retake the class.
A practical exam with a licensed instructor who will grade you on various skills. If you pass you may be granted a permit on the weapon of your choice, the exams may differ on the type of firearm you want.
I’d replace the mandatory hours part with just a thorough examination without regard for how those skills were exactly obtained. Such courses tend to become fodder for rentseekers via regulatory capture when the licensed gun teachers start lobbying ever more onerous requirements. Show me that you know how to handle the gun responsibly in both theory and practice, and that you can pass the shooting test (and a health examination on eg. eyesight and some other issues that might pose a risk) and you’re good.
Assuming $20/h for the range and class, the costs would end up being $700 for the mandatory parts and the examination probably won’t be free either. That’s not only incredibly expensive, but also adversarial towards people who have learned their skills from eg. parents (”sure, you could pass the exams anyway, but we’ll make you sit through a whole workweekful of stuff regardless because fuck you that’s why, and oh yes you’ll be paying an arm and leg to politically connected cronies for it too”) and thus fails the basic requirement of “don’t antagonize the people you’re regulating”.
If you want to build regulations that have a sense of legitimacy and thus might not be immediately repealed the instant political winds change, don’t act like you’re putting up arbitrary barriers for the sake of barriers but instead figure out the least burdensome way of getting what you want while also giving the people you’re regulating as much of what they want as well. Treat it as positive-sum cooperation, not a zero-sum game of “let’s get rid of $unpopular_group”.
I know red-blue polarization that turns even ridiculously simple questions into Grand Matters of Principles and Destroying the Hated Outgroup is a time-honored american tradition, but it should seriously be dropped in favor of more productive approaches.
Follow the Japanese model where you must have two gun safes in different areas of the house, one to store the gun and one to store the bullets and you must provide the police with information on where those safes are.
That sounds expensive and would make poor people drop out of the legal gun system to the illegal gun system, an outcome everyone probably regards undesirable.
I think gun laws should start from the assumption that even a poor black guy in the ghetto, or a borderer out in the basically-third-world-appalachia, should be able to abide by the requirements to be a legal gun owner, because let’s face it, those people are going to have guns and having their guns be legal would be far better than having them be illegal.
No concealed carry and only handguns may be allowed to be out in public.
Concealed carry makes it impossible for attackers to reliably know who are packing and provides a slight degree of security through obscurity to anyone. Open carry creeps people out, shows which ones are safe to attack, and I don’t think criminals on their way to do crime would obey carrying restrictions anyway. A gun is like a penis: I don’t mind a person having one as long as they don’t use it to do violence to people because I know many people like having them and using them responsibly, but I’d prefer if people didn’t wave them around in public. So if anything, I’d say yes for concealed carry, but you may only take your gun out in serious circumstances or suitable locations.
Probably the best rule on this would be that local communities may choose whether they allow open carry or not, and then I could live in one where open carry isn’t allowed and others may have their own style.
If transporting a weapon, it must be in the trunk of the vehicle, in a bag or some other case, safety on and unloaded and may not leave the vehicle until you are at the destination.
I don’t feel qualified to comment on this one.
If you’re a hunter or some other gun hobbyist that requires a functional weapon other than a handgun then the gun must stay on the premises, whether that is a gun range or the Fish and Wildlife facility.
This means that the facilities become targets for violent criminals seeking to obtain weapons, especially if illegal gun trade has been reduced. If it’s in a densely populated area effectively supervised by neighbors it’s not that much of an issue, but it’s a lot harder to adequately defend a valuable location with a fuckload of guns out in the wilderness, or some industrial area without that much traffic (especially if it isn’t manned 24/7, and it probably isn’t), than to store the guns in a decentralized manner (ie. in people’s homes) so the mafia doesn’t have a single place to raid profitably and not even be discovered until some time after the fact. (I think some european country tried exactly this and found that it was a very very good way to discreetly distribute lots of weapons to organized crime)
It doesn’t seem to be that much about guns, but instead very much about culture. It’s likely that the gun culture in the US is especially dysfunctional, but that’s an argument for trying to change the culture, because nobody will ever be able to take those guns away (and I’d consider it an undesirable outcome anyway; my ideal society would have a strong positive culture that keeps things in check so that most people could basically be trusted with their choice to obtain firearms if they want). And when one takes that into account, focusing on skills and safety, responsible usage, and gun laws that are reasonable (permits not excessively hard to obtain, and focus on competence in safe handling instead of excessive barriers and fees) would probably be the best option forward.
I also get the impression that there is not really a “The” gun culture in America. It is a huge country with very varied firearms cultures even within the individual states.
Well yes. And a certain subset of those cultures are messed up in a way that isn’t seen in many other first-world countries, and causes those problems. I don’t expect the gunblr guys to be the ones driving up the bad statistics, and I apologize for any confusion my previous broad statement might’ve caused, if the intent wasn’t clear from the context.
The
group, which advocates for gay Americans to carry firearms, just won a
major victory on Tuesday: a federal judge in Washington halted
enforcement of a portion of the city’s strict gun law, ordering
Washington DC police to stop requiring residents to demonstrate they
have “a good reason to fear injury,” which he ruled places “an
unconstitutional burden” on citizens’ right to bear arms.
The Group, which nobody seems to spend five minutes looking for on google, is named the Pink Pistols. Remember the goddamn name.
Good, I don’t care who you sleep with or what color you are we all need to fight for and exercise our Constitutional rights. Let’s also put an end to the anti-gun crowds “only white guys” like guns myth.
I’ve heard a lot about Pink Pistols. They’re doing good stuff
Do lgbt people in the US who own guns even have a lower chance of being killed/injured by hate crimes when you adjust for wealth, age, location, gender, etc. though? I don’t think the people who are in the most danger (young teenagers who ran away from their home or were disowned by their parents, sex workers in violent areas, extremely poor people) would have as much access to weapons (or other kinds of safety/self defense tools and training, for that matter) as everyone else. So if a “guns make you safer” effect actually appears, it might just be cofounding.
I would research this myself if I weren’t too sick and tired to put mental effort into anything right now. Maybe, little followers, if you have been very good, you will get heated-up leftover effortposts and chocolate milk for breakfast!
#armthegaysiffitsactuallyhelpingthem
Nobody has a clue, all the data is confounded to hell, but it makes a staggering amount of sense. Even if one were to assume that increases in concealed carry increase gun crime in general, I’d be highly surprised if a drastic specific increase in concealed carry by vulnerable populations wouldn’t reduce the risk of hate crimes, effectively turning it into a PD/tragedy-of-the-commons type situation. (And there would be a predictable increase in gun suicides because being lgbtq tends to suck for many people, thus offsetting the effect a bit.)
Probably the best test of this would be to choose some cities in random, provide firearms, training and concealed carry permits to as many eligible lgbtq volunteers as possible (especially TWoC) and publicize the fuck out of it. Considering the opportunistic and non-gainful nature of bashing attacks, I don’t think the absolute number of gun carriers would need to be that great as long as prospective bashers had a reasonable doubt that their victims might be armed. (My prediction would be that such a program would have a statistically significant effect compared to controls, mostly from the PR side of trying to make as many haters as possible aware that some lgbtq people are packing and thus none are safe to mess with. Especially if the people who get guns were selected to be externally indistinguishable from the general lgbtq population but with significantly lower suicidality, impulsivity etc. to reduce the harms increased gun ownership would cause.)
Encouraging a population to carry guns for the purpose of shooting people is *really* *fucking* *dangerous*. I would hazard a guess it’s part of that cultural difference that makes the US’s gun violence four times Canada per gun ownership capita. (Hum, does that rhetoric exist in Canada, fact check?)
How many gay people see cishets as the oppressors? As the Enemy? Who aren’t uncomfortable with throwing around notions of killing them. Not a lot, maybe. Those who do are going to be more afraid, more likely to want to defend themselves, and more likely to stop thinking of their oppressors as people and start seeing them as monsters. Then it’s simply a matter of getting over the fear of retribution and you have a gay shooting up a church or something. Introducing more weapons and training to kill into a world where people see categories of people as monsters is asking for trouble.
There are many countries in Europe where gun laws are as relaxed, or more, as in many states. In eg. the Czech Republic concealed carry for self-defense purposes is allowed for any gun owners, and a gun license is on “shall issue” basis, yet we don’t see a massive amount of gun violence (rate of gun homicides is 1/20th of that in the US). Similarly, there are countries with very strict gun laws, yet they don’t correspond to a comparable absence of lethal violence (Finland bans carrying by civilians and handgun permits are very hard to obtain nowadays, yet the gun homicide rate is twice that of the CR; the UK has higher rates of overall homicide than CR, and relatively close to that of Serbia or Bosnia despite the latter having very liberal gun laws and the UK having incredibly strict ones).
Or as the gun owners themselves say: “we carriers are some of the most well-behaved citizens because we know our permit will be taken away if we get drunk, act irresponsibly, get in brawls, etc.” and I basically trust them. Most gun owners are as reasonable and responsible people as anyone else, if not more (on average) because a properly functioning permit system will filter away the worst cases.
It doesn’t seem to be that much about guns, but instead very much about culture. It’s likely that the gun culture in the US is especially dysfunctional, but that’s an argument for trying to change the culture, because nobody will ever be able to take those guns away (and I’d consider it an undesirable outcome anyway; my ideal society would have a strong positive culture that keeps things in check so that most people could basically be trusted with their choice to obtain firearms if they want). And when one takes that into account, focusing on skills and safety, responsible usage, and gun laws that are reasonable (permits not excessively hard to obtain, and focus on competence in safe handling instead of excessive barriers and fees) would probably be the best option forward.
