841–850 of 1001 posts
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> Enforced by whom? What is the punishment if you break it? The government. We need a comprehensive set of media safety laws that prevent publication of these dangerous reports so they won't fall into the wrong hands.
Am I the only one sensing sarcasm in this?
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Before fire arms being invented people took other's lives with knives, swords or clubs. Or poison. Or bare hands. What makes you think that not owning a gun will make people less murderous?
It's an issue of volume. It's hard for an 18 year old to kill 20 people with their bard hands, or even knives, without being subdued.
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Here’s a roadmap for policymakers that I think is steeped in evidence: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/claireboine/files/policy.b... There are 3 recommended policy changes in there.
Quite a quick read and sounds somewhat better than knee-jerk reactions people might have The 3 policy changes in the paper : ``` Evidence suggests that three priority policies would have the greatest impact in reducing overall firearm homicide rates: • Universal background checks; • Prohibition of gun possession by people with a history of any violent misdemeanor, threatened violence, or serious alcohol-related cri…
Break that one down.
Universal for everyone, or just those who want to buy a gun? If I buy a gun because I pass the background check, and then snap and shoot up my place of employ 4 years later, what good was the background check? Who pays for the background check? Who does the background check? What do they check? HIPPA laws would eliminate anything health/medical related. Do they comb all the discoverable social media accounts? Are we just checking criminal history? Should a background check be re-done every 2, 3, 5, n years?
I like the idea, but I've been chewing on this problem for the past few days and I don't think background checks would be as simple or effective as we would all like them to be. This is not an argument against background checks in that I think they're a bad idea. I don't think they would do much.
I think a good first step everyone can agree on to stop gun violence is: stop it's gamification. Almost every mass shooting in the last decade was someone looking for media attention and high score. And yet, every shooting is followed by detailed biography and a tally of bodies. Something as simple as a one month moratorium on information for anyone outside the community would probably work wonders, as the public eye…
I wonder if John Carmack feels any compunction about first person shooters and their proliferation.
Canada is the U.S.'s neighbour and is probably closer, culturally, than any other nation. Gun ownership is also high in Canada. In terms of guns per capita, the U.S. is #1 by a long shot, but Canada is #7 [1]. In Canada, guns owned per capita is one third of what it is in the U.S.. Canada also has mass shootings. The annual deaths from mass shootings per capita in Canada is 0.032, which is about one third that of the…
Mass shootings are very different from mass _school_ shootings though. Outside of the obvious Polytechnique, for which Canadian engineering schools still mourn for every year, I don't think Canada's experienced anything close to what this article's referring to.
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> It's time we start legislating based on empirical evidence instead of lofty ideals. I would take anti-gun people more seriously if they actually paid attention to what this entails. For one, anti-gun enthusiast would stop going on about "assault rifles", because only around 200 people a year in the US are killed by rifle homicides. It's totally negligible. Less frequent than blunt instrument homicides. Yet, that's…
Sometimes you have to eat an elephant one bite at a time. If guns weren't such a charged issue then more of us would advocate to directly outlaw private gun ownership. Guns add little value to people's lives and are likely to amplify poor decisions into death and serious injury.
Surely you're aware of the second amendment. I'm not sure how your proposition and said amendment can live in the paradigm.
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I was talking to my wife about this the other night and we came to the same conclusions as the points you made. What we posit at this point is: what didn’t exist in 1969? Social media. The internet. Legislation won’t change anything. Proponents of stricter gun control are being idealistic. Having kids in school right now, we are both quite concerned about the current state of affairs when it comes to school shootings…
>> Making guns illegal won’t stop anyone touched enough to shoot up a school/gay bar/concert/grocery store. They’re going to find a way to do it. Somehow in my country (Poland) and in most of Europe they do not find a way to get the guns. Most of incidents of this class is done with knife or with some kind of vehicle (car or truck). I think that throughout history we had like literally one or two shootings in schools…
Now I'm sure my friend had to go through more extensive vetting than they have in the US. But here's the strange part: many US mass shooters would pass these checks anyway. Not all, certainly. But many would. So when you say "they do not find a way to get the guns", you're suggesting that the potential mass murderers are out there, looking for a way, but failing to get the guns. But clearly they should be succeeding occasionally, the legal way. And yet we don't see it. Why not?
We need to know what else is different about the US. But why complicate things by comparing the US to vastly different countries? Why not compare it to a mostly similar country: itself from the recent past. The US has had essentially the same gun laws forever. There have been 2 major overhauls to US gun ownership: one in the 30s and one in the 60s. Other than that, basically no changes. But these mass killings are fairly new, having started in earnest in the late 90s. Why? It's not surprising that the body count has increased, since AR-15s are more deadly than the kind of guns Americans used to commonly own 30 years ago. They have become incredibly popular in recent years and are very cheap and accessible now. But as I pointed out earlier, there's nothing stopping anyone from racking up a huge number of victims using the kind of semi automatic pistol that has been around for over 100 years, and we do see this in the US.
This question weighs on my mind all the time. What is different about the US? I feel as though I know the answer, but it's ephemeral, hard to put words on it. Everything is more extreme here. Success, failure, happiness, misery, love, hate. So in a sense it's not that surprising that the crimes are more extreme too. But I know that's not a very useful observation. I just know that it's 100% possible for people to be able to own guns, and for this stuff to not happen. Hopefully it's possible in America too.
My hot take on the issue: Don't regulate the guns per-se; regulate the bullets. An adult (only adults should be shopping for ammunition?) must take end-to-end responsibility and ownership of each bullet the purchase, and subsequently fire. You own the bullet from the time you take it home to the store to the time it comes to rest after firing out of a gun. The guns, other than as a mechanism for firing bullets, are n…
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