I am skeptical of the final implication of the blog entry, that improved gun-safety legislation would solve this issue. For someone taking such a strong approach to statistics, it's a shame that they focus on only one facet of such a complicated situation. American culture, mental health treatments, social programs, and gun laws are all different from most other countries on their list - it seems disingenuous to mention only the last.

I adjusted the OCED numbers to be on a per-gun basis as opposed to a per capita basis and non US OCED countries combined were more likely to have rampage shootings per gun than the US.

There are not issues in the US with social programs, mental health, etc as compared with other countries when looking at mass shootings. The only number that plays any significance is the number of guns per capita to influence the number of shootings per capita.

If other countries had as many guns per person as the US, the data indicates they'd proportionally have the same amount of shootings per person or more.

If I don't have access to a gun I can't go on a rampage shooting. If a friend of mine has a gun I could go on a rampage shooting, but I'm probably less likely to do it on impulse. If anybody in my household owns a gun I can likely go on a rampage shooting whenever I like. But if I own 10 guns I don't see how that makes a rampage shooting any more likely.

The proper statistic would be rampage shooting per household with at least one gun. But even that's probably still very flawed (are dangerous people more likely to own guns?)

Note that one's willingness to tell an anonymous voice on a phone that one owns guns changes with the political climate towards guns.

I have serious doubts that the actual number of gun owning households has dropped that much.

None of us buy them beause we're "afraid of being the next shooting victim".

And as noted in this discussion, any attempt to squeeze tight enough that there might actually be an effect on mass shootings of the current type would replace them with fantastically more "mass" shootings of the civil war type, which tend to be only exceeded by foreign invasions as "expensive".

For example, Mexico has 1 "rampage shooting" in the data referenced in the article. Yet you have cartels killing dozens of people on a regular basis. The question in my mind is that if we don't have lots of "rampage shootings" in countries with lots of access to weapons, why does the US have so many? Why aren't developing countries with ubiquitous AK-47s experiencing this phenomenon?

As to why the US has so many mass shootings, I have to think there is cultural component to it. The idea of randomly killing a bunch of people has taken root amongst violence-prone mentally ill in this country. When you look at all of these shootings the vast majority involve someone who is struggling with mental illness and possibly suicidal feelings who tend to be loners. These people in their misanthropy look to take the lives of others in their last act in a blaze of violence.

For a different example of culture and violence, look at South Korea. Murder is rare, but South Korea leads the world in suicide rate (more than double the US). There, social and cultural pressures that lead people in pain to taking their own lives. It's not the gun laws, or drug laws that are causing that situation. But in that society the idea of taking your own life is more widespread for whatever reason.

As for developing countries with ubiquitous AK-47's, I can imagine most of the violence is attributed to civil unrest and state-sponsored violence so it's not tallied the same way.

Given that almost all of these people commit suicide before being apprehended, yep. It's rare that we have case like the Charleston church, and the Colorado movie theater, where we know the guy was seriously mentally ill, for his university psychiatrist was so concerned she broke doctor-patient confidentiality to report him, something you're only allowed to do if violence to self or others seems likely.

And, yes, "the authorities" dropped the ball, once he withdrew the security group of the university, which included that doctor, dropped it instead of referring it to local authorities. Something similar happened with the Virginia tech shooter; it's clear to me that if partially reversed the "reforms" in institutional commitments we'd have fewer of the mass shootings. Hmmm, another case like that, where the shooter just didn't get a chance to commit suicide, was of the Arizona congresswoman. From reports of his behavior at a local college, in times past he would have gotten serious attention, if not commitment.

If you support our current policies in both, you might say that freedom is enhanced by limiting commitments and maximizing gun ownership, but I suspect few but libertarians support both.

The tough thing about these shootings is that there's really no punishment that can dissuade someone who wants to be killed during the commission of their crime.

Yep, it's clearly not a general answer. It's "obvious" in the three cases I cited, but even in 20/20 hindsight, under e.g. the old rules, it does not seem like it would have happened with the shooters behind the Charleston, Sandy Hook, and Littleton, Colorado (high school) shootings, and a whole bunch more. Heck, the perpetrator of that incident of "workplace violence" at Fort Hood was himself a psychiatrist, and, not particularly mentally ill.

I would also think that a bit of the Republican hypothesis about guns holds up here: people don't perpetrate mass shootings where guns are ubiquitous because the risk of someone shooting back is much higher. Law enforcement in these places is often corrupt if they exist at all, so individuals take policing into their own hands by carrying weapons everywhere. But personally, I don't want to live in a country where I have to carry a gun to feel safe.

But your remark on Mexico rings true to me, maybe they are excluded because the victims are mostly not chosen at random.

Mexico as a country still has about twice as many murders per year as the United States while having less than one-third the population. Mexico has FAR stricter gun laws btw.

Mexico has exactly one legal gun store for the entire civilian population. Ownership of guns in "military" calibers (previously adapted by a country's military) are illegal, once reason .38 Super was developed for the M1911. The whole country probably makes NYC look like a legal gun-owners' paradise (less than 60,000 each for handgun and long gun ownership permits for 8 million residents).

Chicago ranks higher than any city in Mexico save Acapulco (which is a short-term spike due to an especially violent cartel turf war raging there). That said, most of the worst of the cartel violence in Mexico takes place in rural areas, and wouldn't make this list.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate

You and I would be interested in seeing that data, and you and I will never see that data. ;)

Also the media never ever mentions most of those shooter kids were on those hardcore FDA drugs.

What's the point? We know the gun was responsible for the killings. /s

One thing that people may not have heard about the Columbine shooters (because of the usual press corruption) is that they were sexually abused by the police, and were trying to get back at them.

The psychiatrist you mentioned surely believes the same of guns, that guns can't possibly "give you enough energy to be violent". Because mostly they don't.

What makes this interesting is the political context.

Petzold does a really good job of debunking the original claim that the US is not statistically significant when it comes to the number of mass shootings. However, all of the effort he goes through only points to one conclusion: the number of shootings we have in the US isn't statistically random. All this means is that there's something causing the rate of shootings to be higher here than is expected by random influences. It doesn't point to what that cause is.

It's odd to see how statistics are abused by interest groups/media. Intuition is usually a pretty good yardstick for the validity of a statistic, insofar as knowing what kinds of conclusions should be able to be drawn from what kinds of data. If you've got a bunch of data about who likes what flavor of ice cream, it's not likely that data says anything about /why/ each person likes what they like. In the same way, it doesn't matter if you say that the US is normal when it comes to number of shootings or to say that it's abnormal as Petzold does, when you try to say /why/ this is the case, you better be drawing direct conclusions from your data.

The United States is just that - United. States. 38 mass shootings, however defined, means there is /less than one per State/. Guess what? That makes Finland's two /much/ higher. That's...statistically significant!

Explaining how completely incapable frequentist statistics are at describing anything at a low sample size doesn't mean that something succumbs to "random fluctuation." There is nothing random about a person deciding to take arms and shoot lots of people. Not only that, this data is based on a full population sample - it's not a survey of 5,000 people extrapolating to the whole population - it IS the full population.

And he removed the idea that the original chart was designed show - lack of data that shows compelling evidence that more restrictive gun laws prevent either mass shooting incidents or mass shooting deaths.

He should step away from the statistics - it's a loaded gun and he's not trained to use the weapon properly.

The data as shown indicates the US has a cultural mass shooting phenomenon, but it's simply not accurate. The US just has more guns, and mass shootings happen at extremely rare rates among gun owners everywhere.

This approach would be like comparing drunk driving fatalities in Los Angeles vs Venice, Italy.

Edit: I was curious and just ran the numbers with the full OCED countries. The US had 0.136 rampage shootings per gun (compared to 0.120 rampage shootings per capita), and non-US countries had 0.177 rampage shootings per-gun (compared to 0.246 rampage shootings per capita). I used the author's numbers and the Wikipedia page data for guns/100 residents.

A per capita analysis starts discussions about how the US is different in multiple ways. Oh, well, in the US a person is 5x more likely to go on a shooting rampage than in other OCED countries. Maybe it's US media coverage? Maybe we don't have the background checks or psychological evaluations other countries have. Maybe it's our action movies?

No.

It's simply that we have more guns. In fact, on a per gun basis, other OCED countries combined have a 50% higher rate of spree shootings. We just have a LOT more guns than other countries.

Now, whether this is a good or bad thing is a much broader discussion. But the ONLY data driven answer to "why does the US have more spree shootings than the rest of the world?" is: "Because the US has more guns".

TL;DR: A per-capita analysis leads to sociological problem solving as the base metric is people-based. A per-gun analysis cuts directly to the significant factor.

(It's probably reasonably good, I'm interested in what the numbers would be, not trying to put forward a conclusion)

I guess in the US over recent decades the number of people with access to guns has increased relative to the number of guns (because I think there are less hunters and more self defenders).

First off, I don't live in the US and I don't have a horse in this race.

You may have a point. However, wouldn't the fact that having a large number of gun owners directly correlating to mass-shooting fatalities still come down to the same conclusion: that guns should be regulated further? Or do you think that if the analysis was done it'd show something different to what the analysis in the original article shows?

However, the fact that these are extremely rare occurrences needs to be noted. Gun control has a lot more factors that are probably much more important than the rare issue of mass shootings.

To put it in perspective, doctors' sloppy handwriting kills roughly 7,000 people annually. That's far more than combined spree shooting victims. Certainly mandating doctors to type out all communication would be much easier than the herculean task of ridding the US of guns.

And the broader gun control issue has other issues and data that would need to be examined. Unfortunately, we don't have particularly good data regarding guns in the US due to the effective ban on government funded gun data (thanks NRA!).

Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion?

For example, a study in the 1990s found between 800,000 to 2.4 million defensive gun uses annually (Kleck & Gertz). And apparently while in the UK roughly half of all burglaries are when homeowners are present, in the US it's only 13%. There's also some data that suggests increases in crime rates in the years after gun bans, but the data comes from strong pro-gun sources and I'm a bit skeptical as to the validity.

Basically the data I could find regarding general gun control is spurious at best. We need better data on the pros and cons of gun ownership, and our decisions should be driven from that data and not anecdotal or tragic but extremely uncommon (statistically) events. So in my opinion, the rallying cry when national attention is on guns should not be taking head conjecture from all sides, but rather a national plea for better data so we can have an informed opinion on the issue.

If we/"the NRA" had any faith that researchers like Kleck would get some of this funding, we might go for that. But with the formal US medical establishment, i.e. the CDC, AMA, NEJM et. al. cheering on fraudulent research that concludes "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder", which score "success" for gun owners only as killing an intruder, which is not by itself even legal....

(It can be legal to threaten or use deadly force to stop an intruder, but intentionally using it to kill an intruder is illegal.)

The CDC, at least, needs to focus on its official mission; the Ebola outbreak and multiple lab safety screwups shows that it's been living on past glory and really needs to refocus.

This is a false alternative. There's nothing forcing us to solve just 1 of these problems.

> Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion?

Another question that should be asked to be fair - do gun ownership among general population encourages criminals to take guns with them when they perform crime? Does the presence of a gun increase probabililty of a crime turning violent/deadly?

My expectation: gun ownership makes crimes slightly less frequent (higher barrier to entry), at the cost of making it much more common for the crime to turn violent/deadly to someone.

The real discussion is the everyday issue regarding guns. And you're probably correct with your assumptions. Here in the US, we have 4x the homicide rate as, say, the UK, where gun ownership is very low.

And our violent crimes is probably only about 60-70% of their rate.

BUT, if we look at per capita rates for that, it means here we have about 3 more people killed out of 100,000 each year, but they have about 200-300 people beaten, raped, etc each year out of 100,000.

Again, crime rate comparisons are a very inexact and difficult thing to do well, but my numbers for this come from a rebuttal of a pro-gun sound-byte, so I'm hoping they're a bit on the conservative side: http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checkin...

Personally, I'm lucky to not know anyone who has been shot dead by a criminal. (I do know someone who was shot dead by police while drunk though - but police gun ownership is not at all on the discussion table in the US). I do know two people who were beaten and left brain damaged, and one that was raped in front of her kids during a home invasion with a knife-welding assailant. Now, I've mostly lived in areas in the US that were the least gun friendly (NYC and CA), so maybe people in other areas would have different stats. But certainly even here in the US, violent crimes are around 100x more common than homicides, and a reduction of 30-40% there would improve a greater quantity of lives than a 4-fold reduction in homicides. (The net quality of a trade-off is extremely debatable. And a debate we should be having.)

Still, I'd love to see better and more trustworthy data at a greater scale than what's currently available before I throw my weight behind one side or another. I can argue either side because both have valid points. But I find myself at a loss for which I ultimately agree with, as I simply don't have enough information to make an educated decision. And as someone that actually actively looks for the data, if I can't figure it out, I have a hard time listening to self-assured opinions on the matter (of which there are plenty on both sides).

This is a complex issue that needs sophisticated analysis, but that's not at all the attention it gets as long as the only time it's discussed is in the context of a knee jerk reaction to a 1 out of 7,000,000 occurrence.

P.S. I bring up the ways violent crime has reached the people around me not to try and sway with an appeal to anecdotes, but simply to add the human element to the generic "violent crime" term. We have the human element of gun violence constantly put before us in the media, but the crimes people survive (though often scarred and broken) simply don't get the same attention. These are often serious matters and at 100x an already 4x inflated homicide rate, they are the issues I find myself more worried about than guns.

Not living in the US presumably subjects you to position bias. Those who live in countries where gun rights are strong tend to favor gun rights. Those who live in countries where gun control is strong tend to favor gun control. This is true of most things, as the moral compasses of most are drawn from what is currently normative to their existing environment. This is true of most places in which socio-political biases are codified into law, whether regarding religion, gay rights, whatever; Change in these areas tends to come slowly if at all.

> guns should be regulated further

Perhaps they should, perhaps they shouldn't. I have my bias, as I'm sure does everyone engaged in the discussion, but, at the end of the day, the document of the highest possible authority suggests that the citizenry should have access to guns, and the only way to overturn that is by ratifying that document. Thankfully, the document itself offers prescriptive measures for such ratification, but at the end of the day, without a strong enough amount of support throughout the nation and states for such a measure to pass.

At present, such support does not exist, so our politicians play different games on what does or does not constitute "infringement".

In the past, the argument was that it wasn't infringing if the person who wanted to exercise gun rights wasn't a member of a militia. We can prove historically and grammatically that this isn't true, but it took the Supreme Court's agreement for the legislature to accept it.

Then, the argument was that sure, it's an individual right and not limited to those in the militia, but hey, the second amendment says you can keep and bear arms, but it doesn't say where, so instead, the government insists that the right is only applicable to within the home. Have as many guns as you like, and carry them anywhere you want, as long as it's inside your home.

It took Chicago v. McDonald getting that one overturned in 2012 by the Supreme Court.

So, legally speaking, we know that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, disconnected from membership in a militia, and it extends outside the home. To those who favor gun rights, the matter might settled, but to those who favor gun control, it's a challenge to come up with a new rule that doesn't directly contradict those recently affirmed rules by the Supreme Court.

In D.C., the argument is currently that the right to keep and bear arms is only available to those with a heightened need... but what other right in our Constitution merits such a high bar to exercise? Would it be okay to restrict voting only to those harmed by the current administration? Would it be okay to limit speech only to those who can show that they have been victimized?

Anyway, I'm obviously ranting, and there's certainly more of my bias in this post than I intended, so I should shut up. The point, that I'm sure I made poorly, is that the law here says that we can have firearms, and that not even the elected legislature has the power to overturn that without ratifying the Constitution... unless they can come up with something legally clever, or wait until there exists a more favorable court to their cause.

In the past, the argument was that it wasn't infringing if the person who wanted to exercise gun rights wasn't a member of a militia. We can prove historically and grammatically that this isn't true, but it took the Supreme Court's agreement for the legislature to accept it.

I don't see any legislators changing their mind about this, or any laws being passed based on it, although I might have forgotten some state ones. Except for:

Then, the argument was that sure, it's an individual right and not limited to those in the militia, but hey, the second amendment says you can keep and bear arms, but it doesn't say where, so instead, the government insists that the right is only applicable to within the home. Have as many guns as you like, and carry them anywhere you want, as long as it's inside your home.

It took Chicago v. McDonald getting that one overturned in 2012 by the Supreme Court.

Errr, McDonald v. Chicago just applied Heller to the states and specifically Chicago, and further Federal court action, not appealed to the Supreme Courts, enforced a shall issue concealed carry regime on the state ... which I'll note for a blue state is much better balanced between the big cities and "downstate" for it.

Not counting California and Hawaii, where this is still being litigated, every other Federal judicial challenge to a restrictive concealed carry regime has failed, and the Supremes have then denied cert, despite the circuit split. As it stands in the Federal courts, we now have a right to keep arms in our homes, and to bear them there (that was actually an issue litigate in Heller and is elsewhere one, based on so called "safe storage" laws), but not outside our homes.

That's more to rebut the perennial tide of "Well, if you read the second amendment it clearly states that it belongs to a well regulated militia" argument that invariably crops up in lesser discussions on the subject.

"Errr, McDonald v. Chicago just applied Heller to the states and specifically Chicago"

Correct. I crossed it with Moore v. Madigan. It's late, and they're in the same jurisdiction, which I don't live in. Apologies for the error.

"Not counting California and Hawaii, where this is still being litigated, every other Federal judicial challenge to a restrictive concealed carry regime has failed"

And D.C., as Pena v. Lindley is being reheard en banc, and the new panel has stayed their previous injunction on enforcing "good and substantial"... otherwise, yes, agreed.

The question is whether U.S. law (including the constitution) should support gun ownership, which is something completely different.

Congress could not simply pass a law to ban speech because it is protected by the Constitution. To ban free speech, you would have to modify the Constitution. To modify the Constitution, you would have to have much more support for it than currently exists.

I'm sure Petzold and everyone in this thread knows that gun control laws are hard to change -- what you're talking about has nothing to do with the actual question at hand, which is whether they should be changed.

Just because you know everything already doesn't mean that everybody else does. My apologies for trying to be informative.

That is to say - it should be impossible to remove a right that is not granted, but is simply innate.

Who would ever agree to removing the 1st, 4th, 5th, or 6th. No one. So why would they agree to removing the 2nd?

I don't understand what people don't get about the fact that one has an absolute, irremovable, and inalienable right to self-defense.

Which was indeed the purpose of the 18th, which was quite the grand mistake.

Sure. And I have my own opinion on the matter, but I kept it out of my comment for a reason: my opinion isn't particularly important on this matter. I was merely discussing the article and kromem's call for a different analysis.

http://wmbriggs.com/post/5969/

Since we have a (very rough) control for that variable, it suggests we need to look elsewhere. One I like is detailed demographics, younger men tend to be the most violent, and the demographic Baby Boom may explain most of that.

Some people just want to solve the problem by changing the law so that people have fewer reasons to own guns.

As long as mass shootings are discussed as a uniquely "US-issue" and not simply as a uniquely "Gun-ownership issue" these red herring discussions will continue. Especially as the narrative that the US is different from the rest of the world is one we love to tell (even when negative). There is a difference, but that difference is only the # of guns. All other sociological differences don't seem significant.

Now as I've said elsewhere in this thread, the issue of gun ownership has a heck of a lot more nuance than the two sides seem to recognize, and personally I find that I don't have enough solid data to be pro-gun or anti-gun, and mostly just want for the country to finally agree this is an issue worth spending national dollars on studying.

But I think so far we're much more likely to end up with studies on video game violence, mental health treatment models, etc, as NO ONE on TV utters anything but rhetoric after these events, and ironically these extremely rare and statistically insignificant (but anecdotally significant) events are the only time it comes up at all.

In fact, the leading cause of gun deaths in the US is suicide. And there's actually some REALLY interesting data and discussion to be had there (such as extrapolating bridge suicide nets with successful suicides before and after), and with around 20,000 annually this is a much bigger public safety issue than a few hundred spree shooting deaths, but it's also a discussion we'll simply never have at a national level.

Probably not the best post to throw my 2c in to but... I don't see how the right to own guns could ever be anything more than opinionated. For me personally the numbers are just too low (especially after accounting for gangs deaths) to get behind anything other than increased purchasing checks.. Even then not sure how much actually good that would do.

Nordic countries (Finland, Norway) and Swizerland rank very high in gun ownership among OECD countries. http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Gun-own...

Nations with stringent anti-gun laws generally have substantially higher murder rates than those that do not. The study found that the nine European nations with the lowest rates of gun ownership (5,000 or fewer guns per 100,000 population) have a combined murder rate three times higher than that of the nine nations with the highest rates of gun ownership (at least 15,000 guns per 100,000 population).

For example, Norway has the highest rate of gun ownership in Western Europe, yet possesses the lowest murder rate. In contrast, Holland’s murder rate is nearly the worst, despite having the lowest gun ownership rate in Western Europe. Sweden and Denmark are two more examples of nations with high murder rates but few guns.

and

the study also shows that Russia’s murder rate is four times higher than the U.S. and more than 20 times higher than Norway. This, in a country that practically eradicated private gun ownership over the course of decades of totalitarian rule and police state methods of suppression. Needless to say, very few Russian murders involve guns.

source: http://www.theacru.org/harvard_study_gun_control_is_counterp...

This was exactly the purpose of the text in the second amendment when they talk about having a "well regulated militia":

The phrase “well-regulated” was in common use long before 1789, and remained so for a century thereafter. It referred to the property of something being in proper working order. Something that was well-regulated was calibrated correctly, functioning as expected. Establishing government oversight of the people’s arms was not only not the intent in using the phrase in the 2nd amendment, it was precisely to render the government powerless to do so that the founders wrote it.

source: http://bearingarms.com/well-regulated/

Essentially this meant every citizen should be properly armed should they be called into duty for defending the country. Sure, a lot has changed since then, but most gun owners I know still take this wording very seriously and believe it is their duty to defend against government tyranny.

I don't see how you get from point A ("well-regulated" means keeping in proper working order) to point B (the purpose of the militia was to defend against government tyranny).

One of the motivating purposes of the Constitutional Convention was to respond to the failure of the state militias to put down armed rebellions against the government. Whether or not the second amendment guarantees the right to own personal firearms, the idea that the framers intended those firearms be used against the government is ludicrous. The most reasonable conclusion from the primary materials is that those well-regulated militias exist to put down those who would take up arms against the government!

God forbid we should ever be twenty years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented, in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions, it is lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. … What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.

But he was most certainly a firebrand, and you do have a point about motivations for our current Constitution if this book is to be believed: http://www.upenn.edu/pennpress/book/13777.html (it's new (2003) and sounds revisionist, but that doesn't mean it's incorrect, just that as with anything historically political like it it has to be checked, see e.g. Arming America).

Needless to say, like the Revolutionary War smoothbore musket (not necessarily as useful for hunting as a slow to load back then rifle), today's "assault weapons" are the arms particularly suited for that duty.

The wildlife in the Nordic area is very rarely dangerous. In the whole of Norway (60% more land area than the UK) there are a couple of dozen wolves and about 140 bears. The commonest large animal is elk and that is what the Norwegian hunting rifles are for.

You are more likely to be bitten by an adder than attacked by a large mammal and even then fatalities are rare.

As for the sparse population that is an example of averages being very misleading. Where there are any substantial numbers of people the population density is similar to the average for the UK while the mountains and high plains are almost not populated at all.

I write as a long term resident of Norway.

:-)

LOL no. We have lots of guns because we hunt.

As an aside, I don't think Finland is celebrating in the streets with shouts of "we're number one".

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...)

If you merely look back to about 1939, you would find numbers for Poland alone that dwarf any statistics for the US, even ignoring differences in population! Poland isn't the only such example. Around that time, certain groups of people suffered from numerous horrific shootings, decimating their populations, despite those groups having been recently disarmed almost entirely. Of course, I'm being sarcastic. These people suffered at the hands of their own governments because they were disarmed, not despite it. There are some still alive who remember.

An honest assesment of history, even very recent history, makes it clear that America's current level of gun violence is a mere rounding error next to the real threat: descent into tyranny. We're lucky that we live in such a relatively peaceful time, but let us not delude ourselves. No human will ever live without the threat of tyranny. No government of the people or by the people will ever, by it's own internal guidance, remain civilized indefinitely. We must never surrender the tools needed to provide the most drastic of course corrections for a government gone astray.

We are fortunate that by keeping and maintaining arms, we make it more likely that we will never have to use them. Armed violence is always the absolute last resort, but if we give up our last resort, we give up all the other ones too. Speech, for example, is of little use against a tyrant with absolute power. But speech from the mouths of well-practiced riflemen, with their weapons close at hand? Those words cannot be safely ignored by anyone.

It is for this reason that the right to keep and bear arms is not unique to just the United States. Rather, it is a fundamental and irrevokable human right. The Constitution of the United States does not and cannot grant this right -- though it does explicitly recognize it, lest we forget.

Yes, gun violence is awful, and we should work hard to reduce it. But let us not forget that is is the price we pay for a civilized society, and it is a small price compared to the alternatives. I grow tired of articles that completely miss this point.

The US has a murder problem. It's murder rate is four times that of it's industrialised contemporaries. Most of those murders (~75%) are done with firearms, and most of those (>75%, can't recall exactly) are done with handguns. And by someone who knows the victim closely.

The stereotype of the inner-city gangsta gunning down a gangland enemy with an automatic weapon is an outlier. And the same is true of the spree killer. As long as debates on either side center on these kinds of outliers, little will be achieved. The murder rate isn't going to be affected by open carry, since most murders aren't of strangers. And banning automatic rifles isn't going to do anything either, because it's handguns that do the dirty work.

The problem is that these details aren't sensationalist. Being gunned down by a stranger on a rampage makes the news. Being killed by a crazy relative doesn't.

"Just like the debate over automatic weapons is a canard, since they're very rarely used in murders"

There is no debate surrounding automatic weapons, or, at least there isn't one on the national stage. Automatic firearms are dramatically different from semi-automatic firearms, and it's been a (specifically expressed) political maneuver to confuse/conflate the two.

The number of deaths attributable to automatic firearms is effectively nil, as they've been highly controlled since the days of Al Capone and his ilk.

When people are referring to "automatic firearms" in today's political arena, they almost always mean to say "semi-automatic firearms", which most closely maps to the sorts of weapon used in the Newtown and Aurora shootings.

It's a subtle, but important distinction, but as those who are trying to conflate the terms generally intend to do so to confer additional scariness to semi-automatic firearms that are simply not there.

You are correct of course, regarding auto vs semi-auto, but I mean that the anti-gun lobby makes a lot of noise over 'big scary rifles' when it's actually handguns doing the most damage.

I'm for gun regulation myself, but even if do rifles get heavily regulated in the US, it'd do very little to the stats. It'd actually work against the anti-gun lobby, because the pro-gun lobby would be able to point to the relatively unchanged stats.

That said, thus far, handgun regulations are the most easily struck down under Heller & McDonald. The sea change of going after "assault weapons" has less to do with mass shootings and more to do with the Brady group's adaptation to the court's relative intractability on handgun regulations.

As ownership (keep) and carriage (bear) of arms has been upheld by the Supreme Court as individual rights, the shift has been more and more towards "feature tests" that are defined as such that the assault weapons fail them. California has had luck simply increasing the feature list such that almost every firearm is effectively banned, but I suspect that won't last.

Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons' menacing looks, coupled with the public's confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons. In addition, few people can envision a practical use for these weapons.

Where of course self-defense is not "a practical use", e.g for bog standard "plastic gun" "assault weapons" such as the Glock.

That's from an "assault weapons" political campaign he had ready for the first screaming headline abuse of one, conveniently in the following year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockton_schoolyard_shooting

Thanks for the correction.

And, yeah, well, I suppose we might be the two most "expert" on this subject, with my having joined the gun politics battle in the early 1970s (sic), and you having worked at the ATF (!!!, I hope that was a youthful indiscretion! :-). I'm just particularly ... sensitive? in that the Brady groups are now really fading (see especially their $$$ lawsuit loss WRT to the Colorado movie theater shooting), and Bloomberg replacing them as the big threat. Hmmm, haven't heard much about the VPC since I and many other research minions helped Clayton Cramer destroy their "Concealed Carry Killers" paper.

attuned is, I think, the word you're looking for.

As for my dalliance at the ATF, it was, frankly, about three years worth of time in which I had not yet developed much of a political conscience.

Actually working for the government has helped shape much of my opinions of the government, and in most ways, for the poorer.

Politics aside, I would have a very hard time convincing myself to work for any of the agencies again, if only because I can't bear to watch tens of millions of dollars evaporate when someone's opinion changes, or an election year happens, or the government decides that, despite having gotten to year 4 of the project with all milestones succeeding, they've neglected to budget for years 5+.

Well, since we're going to be pedantic, this should really say "the number of deaths attributable to legally owned automatic firearms", since there is quite a bit of criminal violence (as in, violence to support criminal activities, like drive bys, rip deals resulting in shootings etc) and deaths involving automatic weapons (although it's quite hard to find statistics on this, to my surprise). MAC 10's and Mini Uzis are rather popular for that sort of shenanigans, because of their small size (thus easily concealable). An AR15 style weapon (which is usually the type of weapon people talk about when the discussion is about 'assault rifles') is very impractical for such a thing, as per your point.

> there is quite a bit of criminal violence and deaths involving automatic weapons

Is that true? I don't know that it is. Because of the inflated value of automatic firearms, I would simply have assumed that the cost to benefit ratio just wasn't there for automatic weapons.

I suppose the two arms you mentioned may have easily replaceable sears or something to that effect, but every time I've seen an incident in the news involving a Mac 10 or the like, it's been a semi-automatic version.

One incident I remember specifically from when I was working at the ATF had been recently (e.g., within a few months) from when it was initially purchased to when it was used in a crime, but its initial purchase was a straw purchase from an FFL, and was decidedly not full auto.

That said, I've only anecdata at this point as I no longer have the ability to scan the ATF databases.

Since you have provided no citation, I can only judge this statement by my own anecdotal experience.

As someone who is closely involved with "gun culture", I'm aware of only a handful of cases where automatic weapons were confiscated in the US - and of no cases they were used in a murder in my adult lifetime.

If you get your hands on an old enough SKS, for example, a full auto conversion is dead simple (though obviously illegal without the $200 tax stamp), but for that very reason, those types of arms tend to get snatched up by the legitimate collectors and spirited away into collection vaults while their value climbs.

I'd guess it as unlikely that there are fully automatic firearms in use in crime of any significant amount, but that's only a guess, and not really based on anything other than my gut.

As far as political strategies go, I agree, in theory. As with all deeply held sentiments, in practice, it's harder to live and let live to those in opposition than just trying really hard... a fault I share with many.

You are very evenhanded about this subject. I would like to thank you for it.

I tend to freely acknowledge my biases, but I've learned long ago that there's no "right" political answer. I can tell you that my opinion is very well educated, and predicated on (literally) years of research that begins with Madison's original 19 amendments, but as it's a matter of opinion, I can't prove that my opinion is more right than the other guy's, and I try to keep that in mind as much as I'm able.

Danke, for appreciating the effort I'm making at least.

I absolutely fault any movement that refuses to use correct terminology in order to scare people and misrepresent reality. Because ultimately it makes it far more difficult to have a logical discussion about the issue at hand, and it often results in the focus being put in the wrong place.

Rather than focusing on scary 'semi-automatic' weapons maybe if the focus were more on what leads to shootings we could develop better social programs and policing strategies. Maybe the focus would shift towards ending the drug war and reducing criminal recidivism.

Instead many people focus on 'assault' weapons and there's never any progress because pro-gun people rightly point out that focusing on assault weapons is misguided.

So rather than remove some of the ease with which people obtain firearms, why don't we build a European style welfare state and decriminalize drugs? I'm all for it. How likely is that?

Progun forces describe their opponents as actual traitors that are actively trying to destroy the basics of what makes us a free people... for regulating a dangerous consumer product. When you start policing their tactics I will take you seriously, until then I support anything that defeats them.

There are pro-gun that spout silly things like, "We need to arm every teacher!" and there are anti-gun people that say things like, "We should go door to door and confiscate every gun by force!"

"When you start policing their tactics I will take you seriously, until then I support anything that defeats them."

How am I supposed to 'police' anyone's tactics? People have a right to free speech and that means spouting nonsense to further their goals. My point is that spouting nonsense rarely results in meaningful progress.

I take your point, I really do, but I think that you are overestimating the desire to have a meaningful debate on the progun side. The two sides are not equally obstructive or vitriolic. They just aren't. Perhaps you have heard people like me... some guy on a forum... say something bombastic, but the progun leadership are purveyors of extreme fear mongering and slander of their fellow citizens that disagree with them. They equate compromise with appeasement and negotiation with collaboration. Gun control people don't go around threatening armed rebellion.

I'm sorry for going on, but I get really tired of the way that no one seems to be able to change their mind. A large chunk of the vehement progun crowd are also fundamentalists who think the world is six thousand years old. I grew up around them. I'm very clear about their position.

Joe the Plumber: "Your Dead Kids Don’t Trump My Constitutional Rights"

I appreciate your point and what you are trying to say, please don't think I'm being disrespectful... In fact, I'm kind of typing out loud, if you will. I'm still coming to grips with my own changes of position on the issue. Its really difficult. Its such a foundational issue where I'm from. Its at least as big a deal as coming to grips with being an atheist. Its really about identity at a core level... and being able to really look at those deeply held ideas in the face of a life that contradicts them.

My bad...i'll stop. Cheers.

As far as people who want to ban guns outright, there are certainly people who believe fervently in that, but I think a lot of those people don't necessarily think about the enormous financial and human cost of doing so. They look at a country like Japan and say, "See, if we ban guns like they did..." But ultimately if someone seeks to confiscate guns by force, they're advocating for violence because there are many, many people who would kill and die for the 2nd amendment. Most people don't see it that way, but in practice that is what it would come down to.

I agree that a lot of extreme pro-gun folks are opposed to any and all sorts of compromise. And you're right that there is a significant contingent "Earth is 5000 years old" people in there. But there are a lot of liberal gun owners, white-collar gun owners, and everything in between.

Either way the discourse is not helped by coming to the table with intentional falsehoods designed to scare people who don't know better. Whether it's 'Obama is trying to take over Texas' or 'Assault weapons are to blame for mass shootings'.

Can you specify any compromise offered to us by the gun grabbers in, say, the last 50 years, that wasn't of the form "we'll only take half of your arm off"?

Maybe the Firearms Owners Protection Act of '86, which had a poison pill ending sales of new machine guns to civilians? Nowadays lots of gun owners who weren't watching the BATF exterminate gun culture in the '70s and early-mid '80s say we shouldn't have accepted that deal for the precedent it established, which was furthered in "assault weapons" bans (prior to that there were no firearms technically banned from civilian ownership, even if NFA arms like machine guns had onerous acquisition regimes ... which the BATF is even now trying to make more onerous/impossible).

Stepping back a bit, after, oh, 81 years of bad faith (going back to the NFA of '34 which attempted a de facto ban on handgun transfers for all but the rich), might we be somewhat justified in not being willing to give up another fraction of an inch? Especially when we have members of our community like my father who remember how things used to be, without problems? (OK, he was 4 years old when it passed, but you get the idea, e.g. when he was in high school in mid-late '40s he and others would store their guns in their school lockers while attending to make hunting before or after more convenient, and "school shooting" were unheard of.)

Onerous acquisition regimes were put in place for machine guns because of the psychopaths that were running from county to county gunning down law enforcement officers. That's the thing, the law in question wasn't a beachhead to take more of your stuff...they may have actually wanted to make sure that we didn't have a wave of new Machine Gun Kelly's running around.

Does your dad remember how it used to be for everyone or just people like you? I'm not trying to be too facetious, here. My dad mentions a time when you could take a sack of squirrels to the doctor for payment as an example of the good ole' days...but I don't think that's a good idea just because it worked for him and my grandfather. (Though I still like squirrel stew.)

Many, many, things are different between now and the 40 s including all of the weird social/psychological pressures that are at the root of many school shootings. Hell, when I was a kid I remember seeing people have deer rifles in their gun rack in their truck at school. (I was very little.) Would that be a good idea today? Surely, I don't have to answer that question...because things have changed. Radically.

What would be a place where we could compromise? Is it even possible? What's an area where you think there is some give and take on?

Hmmm; I suppose there are pro-gun individual who say we should arm every teacher, but I'm unaware of any; that certainly seems less mainstream than the very common calls for house to house confiscation, which we can see upon occasion in HN.

It is mainstream in pro-gun groups like the NRA to say it should be an option that teachers and administrators can be armed and that it should be encouraged to a degree, while it's no longer mainstream for anti-gun groups to admit they want to ban all guns in civilian hands (that may have finished going out of style when Dukakis' wish to that effect helped sink his presidential bid 1988 ... against the rather anti-gun G. H. W. Bush...).

The US has a gun violence legitimization problem. Yes, other countries have guns. But America has a particular culture surrounding the idea that shooting someone whom you percieve to be a threat is a reasonable thing to do, and moreover you're likely enough to encounter this situation that it's worth arming yourself beforehand.

Whenever one of the controversial police shootings happens, there are plenty of commentators on hand to say how the victim deserved it (and therefore his grieving relatives should shut up and stop complaining about the police). But this attitude isn't limited to the police, it's part of wider American society. So whenever two people get into the kind of stupid altercation that in other countries results in black eyes and lacerations, in the US somebody might pull a gun. Undoubtedly this makes a lot of domestic violence situations worse.

The US concept of "right to life" is applied really narrowly, leaving both judicial executions, police shootings, and wider acts of negligence in public safety untouched.

Not to mention the racism problem. You don't need guns for this, other forms of attempted mass murder are available: http://time.com/3942688/black-church-burning-mount-zion-ame-...

I think the scale of violence here is really hard for Europeans to understand. New York is one of the safest large cities in the U.S., and the murder rate there is more than 3x that of similarly-sized London.

Neal Knox, one of the top figures there in the last century, got his start at boot camp, where he heard an eyewitness story from a recent immigrant from the Netherlands. The Nazis went to a family's house where a handgun was registered to the homeowner but since he couldn't find it, they took the whole family and machine gunned them in the village/town square.

The issue is entirely about fear. If people really cared about the most effective policies to decrease premature deaths, maybe we'd all be arguing about traffic safety issues or banning swimming pools or something.

I'd also like to point out that the Supreme Court of the United States of America affirmed that individual ownership of semi-automatic handguns (cited example, but, "common use" is the test) is a protected right.

We have a financial inequality and mental health problem (somewhat stemming from said inequality) in this country, not a firearm problem. These are the problems that need addressed to reduce crime.

However, a crazy relative can still kill you without a handgun. In countries that introduce gun laws, they get more murders with knives, blunt objects, etc.

US murder rates may be partly driven by guns. But they're mostly the result of education, prison sentences, and other social factors. The US is a developed country with the welfare system of a developing country (and a bunch of very expensive bandaids to catch the people who have fallen too far to really recover).

Do you have data to back up this claim? I hear it quite often in these debates, but have never seen anything to back it up, and it seems suspect: It's pretty easy to imagine that even if the number of assaults were the same per capita, that the lethality of the weapon involved in the assaults will have a bearing on the total number of fatalities.

(As for me, I would be happy with a sane approach to prisons, better mental health treatment, AND better gun controls... These need not be mutually exclusive.)

They don't mention Australia, because the murder rate gradually decreased (though it was on a trend down anyway).

Or you can find cherry picked data about how gun related crime falls if you ban guns.

The only reason this debate keeps going is that there's bugger all hard evidence on either side. Sometimes overall crime rates drop. Sometimes they rise. So both sides just cherry pick stats, and call the other side idiots.

If the occasional mass shooting is acceptable, there's no reason to either ban guns or keep them. "Guns cause crime" and "guns stop crime" are both red herrings.

Whether the freedom to have a gun (which won't make you statistically more or less safe) is more important than stopping mass shootings is a value judgement. The statistics are a wash.

I'd say something similar to Australia is a good compromise - allow single-shot long guns (for sport), and ban semis / handguns (unless you have a really good reason). There's also laws about gun safes, safety tests, etc.

The most well-known mass shooting in Australia since guns were banned left three people dead - a shooter with a double-barreled shotgun, and two victims. Australian style laws do a good job keeping mass shootings from causing too much damage.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2704353/

Here are the key points from the paper:

> A radical gun law reform occurred in Australia after a gun massacre (35 dead and 18 seriously injured) in April 1996. Semi‐automatic and pump‐action shotguns and rifles were banned; a tax‐funded firearm buyback and amnesties saw over 700 000 guns surrendered from an adult population of about 12 million.

> The total firearm deaths, firearm homicides and firearm suicides had been falling in the 18 years preceding the new gun laws. In all, 13 mass shootings were noticed in the 18 years preceding the new gun laws.

> In the 10.5 years after the gun law reforms, there have been no mass shootings, but accelerated declines in annual total gun deaths and firearm suicides and a non‐significant accelerated decline in firearm homicides. No substitution effects occurred for suicides or homicides.

edit: it is interesting that they looked for substitution effects. Like `sdenton4` commented, the lethality of the weapon matters.

If it is difficult to access firearms and there isn't really a similarly lethal alternative to easily kill someone else or yourself, it seems intuitively reasonable that we might expect to see less death.

Ban the sale of new guns to the public but allow secondhand sales. That cuts off the gun manufacturer money to the NRA; leave it a few years to bed in and the politics change. Then ban moving guns across state lines, and allow states, cities and counties to impose their own bans or permitting regimes. That would probably suffice.

I don't see how you and wisty deny that people on my side would turn our current cold civil war into a hot shooting war. We've read our 20th Century history, we know the potential end games for us and our families. We haven't been buying guns and ammo at historically unprecedented rates just to bury them.

Then again, you at least acknowledge a constitutional amendment would be required to do this legally, and that's not currently foreseeable. E.g. starting in 1986 with Florida, about the same number of states that would be required to pass an amendment enacted legal "shall issue" concealed carry regimes, which now cover 42 or so states, with the Federal courts only forcing Illinois and maybe California and Hawaii (that's still being litigated), see the first two country maps at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concealed_carry_in_the_United_...

My favourite trolling suggestion for getting popular support for gun control would be to find a couple of extremely brave people to restart the Black Muslim Gun Owners organisation. It would reprint all the gun advocacy material that talks about defending against state violence but with "black" or "muslim" inserted at key points. It would require extremely brave organisers because the chances of getting jailed as terrorism suspects or having your HQ burnt down by racists would be extremely high.

Roughly 85% of the NRA's money comes from sources other than gun manufacturers.

The big, bad, evil gun companies are a much easier target to lambast. Never mind the fact that many of those boogieman companies turn a profit by arming those same millions of citizens.

It's just another avenue for hoplophobes to attack something they don't like.

If you'd like to see stricter laws or the outlawing of personal ownership, feel free to lobby for an amendment to the Constitution.