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One Statistician Thought Gun Control Was The Answer – Then She Looked At The Data
So on Thursday, we spent quite a bit of time editorializing around an opinion piece published in The New York Times.
The Times piece received quite a bit of attention because it represented a conservative explicitly calling for the Second Amendment to be repealed (the title is "Repeal The Second Amendment"). Needless to say, the Breitbarts of the world were not pleased.
While we agree with common sense gun laws, we did add what we thought were some important caveats. Here are some excerpts fro
I agree with most of that ” Younger men at risk of violence need to be identified before they take a life or lose theirs and to be connected to mentors who can help them de-escalate conflicts.” etc.
I get she’s done research but here in the UK after a madman went on a killing spree killing kids in Dunblane we reformed gun law = no more mass shootings. Same thing in Australia after the Port Arthur massacre. Very tough gun restrictions in Japan = no mass shootings. It doesn’t take a genius to work this out.
One thing I kinda disagreed with you in the other piece was, “If someone breaks into your house armed with a gun, there is only one effective deterrent: another gun.” In the UK I’m not going to get robbed with a gun. Guns just aren’t prevalent here. It’s a vicious circle, if a would-be robber thought the homeowner would have a gun, he’d take a gun with him, and if the homeowner thought a robber would have a gun he’d get a gun for protection and so on and so on into the nightmare situation that the US finds itself in.
The bottom line is the US has a massive gun problem and something needs to be done about it – unless you’re happy with mass shootings occurring every other day (actually 273 in 275 days as of a couple of days ago). https://heisenbergreport.com/2017/10/03/the-number-of-mass-killings-has-exceeded-the-number-of-calendar-days/
PS. My father has a shotgun (with a licence obviously) as he’s into clay pigeon shooting and the police come round every couple of years to make sure it’s looked after and stored in a locked cabinet. He says every time he has to renew his licence he has to jump through more hoops – which I think is a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Great_Britain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate
UK still has mass murders and suicides which is the whole point of the article. Those two things won’t change regardless if you restrict guns or not.
This is the most garbage, gun apologist opinion article ever. Statistics and the study of gun violence have told us so much more than is mentioned about the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence and gun accidents.
I have to ask this question: If taking away defensive firearms from the law abiding civilian population completely is the only solution to mass gun violence, doesn’t the same logic apply to their nations with their equal propensities for violence? There are 22 nations on the planet that have no standing army which begs the question as to why we need such a large one “for defense”?
Ironically, many of those same US law abiding civilians – that gun control lobbyist suggest should have their firearm ownership rights revoked, or greatly and progressively inhibited by bureaucratic time and tax cost threshold/”nag” penalties, are the same people our government armed and trained in the use of lethal firearms and other weapons of mass violence. Which more significantly – that same government frequently and regularly sent out these people to do that governments forceful and lethally aggressive bidding in foreign countries. The US military has not significantly defended the US mainland in a foreign aggression war on that mainland in more than two hundred years. If you are ruled by a government that so frequently uses lethal force internationally in their highly debatable self-interests and as well a country that continues to have excessive use of lethal force problems in its domestic police and intelligence forces, is it logical for civilians to give up what little leverage and power they have defend themselves against abusive criminals – be they civilian or governmental?
IMO the gun debate is absurd and more demonstrative of a lethal lack of critical thinking skills in the US population – than the gun control debate is about the potential or reality for mass violence in the US population. It’s absurd because it only seeks to address symptoms/enablers of the causes of violence, but not the primary causes of violence. I would suggest if we spent as much money as we do on gun regulation, on “The War on Drugs”, and their respective policing – and spent it on mental health out reach and treatment programs, we would have a far greater impact on all violence than the knee jerk emotional panic attacks and political posturing that we see every time there is a gun related tragedy. It makes as much sense as outlawing automobiles every time an out-of-control (for whatever reason) crashes into a crowd or a school bus with mass fatalities.
The US military budget is larger than all other countries combined. What if we spent half the current military budget on US mental health issues and treatment – and most especially including a formal and structured mandate for critical thinking skill (CTS) education at all levels of the US education system? Lack of CTS is a demonstrative mental developmental health issue. In case you didn’t know, its a barely a cursory topic taught by generally non-formally trained CTS instructors in all or most US schools and colleges. Personally, I think in the US there is a far greater mental health/education deficit in CTS – than STEM – even though CTS should be the foundation of all STEM. It all so absurd.
Does the US and its massive military expenditures sound like a country who has a mentally stable and secure view of its own collective psychic – or one that demonstrably paranoid/over-compensatory – fostered for generations by a self-serving MIC? Does this description sound like a government who under political duress – perhaps if they felt suitably threatened by any segment of the civilian population, would not use unnecessarily excessive lethal military force to quell it? Kent State, Ruby Ridge, Waco massacres come to mind as an answer to this question.
What if a “free” nation like the US, suddenly became aware that its election system and its “elected” executive government and its Congress had been effectively compromised directly and indirectly by a foreign aggressor nation’s efforts and influence? Do we really want a defenseless civilian population of sheep? Does that sound like paranoia? Or, does that sound like history and today’s news?