Shooting of the Week

[Steve James]

But, the gun violence in those localized areas aren't what drives American gun ownership. As you point out, people in those areas don't have high rates of gun ownership. However, crime is a poor indicator or motivator, since most deaths by firearms in the US are the result of accidents and suicides. They do not become celebrity causes. Otoh, the victims of gun violence protest all the time. Those who aren't affected often begin to protest, too, just like the father of the woman shot in SF. In any case, the fact that people bring weapons into their homes only increases the likelihood of gun deaths.

Anyway, this will eventually turn into a "whack a mole" argument where for every argument there are two or more counter arguments, and we'll always wind up with either gun ownership is good or it's a God-given constitutional right that a supporter would sooner die (or kill) than give up.

[windwalker]

the doctor is in



some one asked about studies.

[Steve James]

Here's an example of a protest earlier this month.

ST. LOUIS — Hundreds gathered to remember a 9-year-old girl who was killed when shots were fired into her Ferguson home as she did homework on her mother's bed.

Sobs grew audible and tissues were passed down the aisles as fourth-grade classmates of Jamyla Bolden sang in front of her casket Saturday, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (http://bit.ly/1fPrcwZ ) reported. The shooting Aug. 18 in the St. Louis suburb also left Jamyla's 34-year-old mother wounded. After searching more than a week, authorities charged a 21-year-old O'Fallon man with second-degree murder and several other felonies.

The pastor at Friendly Missionary Baptist Church told Jamyla's family as the funeral began that the shooting has "wounded" the whole community, region and country.

"We dare not say we experience it in the same way as you," the Rev. Michael Jones added.

Jamyla's killing brought renewed attention to Ferguson, where Michael Brown was fatally shot by officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9, 2014.

"We say go to school, get an education ... she tried to do all of that," former Missouri Rep. Betty Thompson said after the service.

Lillie Vinson, a longtime friend of Jamyla's great-aunt, said it seemed like the community worked well with the Ferguson Police Department and its new interim chief, Andre Anderson, to try to solve the crime.

"I hope we just stop all of this senseless shooting," Vinson said before the funeral began. "Enough is enough."

Officer Greg Casem told the gathering how he held Jamyla as she was dying and told her to "hold on."

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/hundre ... ar-AAdLxb0

[klonk]

But, the gun violence in those localized areas aren't what drives American gun ownership. As you point out, people in those areas don't have high rates of gun ownership. However, crime is a poor indicator or motivator, since most deaths by firearms in the US are the result of accidents and suicides. They do not become celebrity causes. Otoh, the victims of gun violence protest all the time. Those who aren't affected often begin to protest, too, just like the father of the woman shot in SF. In any case, the fact that people bring weapons into their homes only increases the likelihood of gun deaths.

Anyway, this will eventually turn into a "whack a mole" argument where for every argument there are two or more counter arguments, and we'll always wind up with either gun ownership is good or it's a God-given constitutional right that a supporter would sooner die (or kill) than give up.

http://www.firearmstatistics.com/gun-deaths.html

[grzegorz]

I do not think bizarre shootings are a distinctly American phenomenon. You could look for example to the Anders Brievik case in ordinarily peaceful Norway. Avoid conflating two things, America's gun violence rate in general and its rate from murderous lunatics. I suppose you could treat the two as indistinguishable, but I'm not sure that's convincing.

Yeah, because Norway is notorious for its gun violence.

[Steve James]

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2013 firearms (excluding BB and pellet guns) caused 84,258 nonfatal injuries (26.65 per 100,000 U.S. citizens) [2] and 11,208 deaths by homicide (3.5 per 100,000),[3] 21,175 by suicide with a firearm,[4] 505 deaths due to accidental discharge of a firearm,[4] and 281 deaths due to firearms with "undetermined intent"[5] for a total of 33,169 deaths related to firearms.

"Nonfatal Injury Reports, 2001-2013: What caused the injury? Firearm." Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. http://webappa.cdc.gov/sasweb/ncipc/nfirates2001.html. Accessed July 25, 2015.

"FastStats: Mortality" - All firearm deaths.
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/homicide.htm (accessed July 27, 2015).

Accidental deaths and deaths by suicide outnumber deaths by homicide. Innocent bystander killings are considered homicides. Children shooting their friends or family, or adults shooting themselves while loading are accidents.

[klonk]

The gun accidental death rate is a tiny part of the whole and falling. That does not mean it is a trivial part; it is not trivial if you are the one who gets shot. It does mean that generally when someone is shot it is intentional: Someone decided to shoot at self or others. The idea here is to get away from the idea that firearms pose some kind of inherent danger, absent the purposes of people.

Indeed, I would say that with proper precautions in storage and handling--consistently observed--gun accidents need not occur. Guns lack volition and thus don't up and do things on their own.

[Steve James]

Um, the stats show that accidental deaths and suicides make up most of the gun deaths. Gun safety has little to do with suicide. However, my point was that the debate does not come up because of the usual homicides, accidents or suicides. It comes up when a mentally disturbed or irate person commits a particularly heinous mass murder or public assassination, particularly in communities where gun crimes are uncommon.

Accidental gun deaths are going down, but is there a specific reason for the decline or is it a statistical phenomenon? Why did it go down around 2000? Why did it start to drop even more after 2010? In any case, it's a good thing. Moreover, it supports the argument that fewer guns equal fewer accidents, because gun-ownership in the US has been declining --though the number of guns has been increasing.

Is gun ownership falling? The answer is yes, at least if you believe a new General Social Survey (GSS) by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Supposedly, since the late 1970s, the percentage of homes with a gun has fallen from approximately 50 percent to 32 percent. "The number of Americans who live in a household with at least one gun is lower than it's ever been,” reported Emily Swanson of the Associated Press.

http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2015/03/ ... erica.html

Gun ownership is now back at the low point it reached in 2010: Only 32 percent of Americans own a firearm or live with someone who does, compared with about half the population in the late 1970s and early 1980s, according to the 2014 General Social Survey (GSS). The survey is a project of independent research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, with principal funding from the National Science Foundation.

The poll also found that 22 percent of Americans personally own a firearm, down from a high of 31 percent in 1985. The percentage of men who own a firearm is down from 50 percent in 1980 to 35 percent in 2014, while the number of women who own a gun has remained relatively steady since 1980, coming in at 12 percent in 2014.

http://www.newsweek.com/us-gun-ownershi ... nes-312822

[grzegorz]

As I prolly said sometime already, America has its gun violence stats skewed all to hell by the presence of a smallish set of localities that are practically free fire zones. If you look at these hot spots in isolation from the rest of the country, the rest of it looks distinctly peaceful.

Personally I think that the gun laws should be different in the cities and in the country side (where is could take half and hour to get a police response).

Currently there over 80 LEOs who have been killed this year and unless they drowned in their own pepper spray I imagine most were killed by gun violence. There's no point in trying to deny the problem by saying people don't understand stats. But far as stats and charts go I have always found it interesting that the states with the some of the least regulations on guns seem to have higher levels of gun violence.

[Steve James]

If Norway had a mass shooting like Brevik's even every week or year or decade, it might make sense to compare it to the frequency of mass shootings in the U.S.. But, again, my point was that the gun control debate usually comes up after a mass shooting, not because of gun crimes in bad neighborhoods. Rather, gun violence in those areas are given as the counter argument to gun legislation. Gun crime may be more prevalent in certain areas, but that's true all over the world. However, gun crime doesn't account for most gun deaths or injuries.

Alaska has a high rate of gun deaths and gun crimes. Is there a reason?https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100714005234AAuB3b8

[windwalker]

The last of the four suspected thieves, a slightly built man in yellow rain boots, surrendered on the roof, crying out, "Jesus saves!"

Police put him into a truck and drove away. But then witnesses watched, confused, as the truck circled back.

A video secretly recorded that rainy day in early August showed police officers taking the man to a concrete alley in the complex where his three companions already lay dead. They held him in place, and then shot him point blank. The video does not show the deaths of the others, but two witnesses told The Associated Press they saw the trio lined up against a wall earlier in the morning, police pointing guns at their chests.

"Jesus saves!"

http://news.yahoo.com/dozens-venezuelan ... 08127.html

[Steve James]

Well, it's true that police violence in the US is nothing compared to some other places. In terms of this discussion, that fact works both ways. I.e., America's worst neighborhoods are not nearly as bad as some places elsewhere.
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/08/04/world ... -killings/

The situation in Brazil (Rio) surprises no one there, since it has been worse. The only reason it is getting attention now is because of the upcoming Olympics --which is why the police are now going in to "clean up" the favelas.

Oh well, it's completely tangential to the fact that we rarely hear of mass "American-style" shootings in Brazil, though violent crime is relatively high.

[klonk]

Contrary to public perception, Western Europe, most of whose countries have much tougher gun laws than the United States, has experienced many of the worst multiple-victim public shootings. Particularly telling, all the multiple-victim public shootings in Western Europe have occurred in places where civilians are not permitted to carry guns. The same is true in the United States: All the public shootings in which more than three people have been killed have occurred in places where civilians may not legally bring guns.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/2 ... -r-lott-jr

http://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/compar ... nd-europe/ You need the article to contextualize the table below:



Something that needs attention in this discussion is whether the nature and frequency of news reporting creates a false impression that recent US shootings constitute an epidemic as opposed to an ongoing tragedy. I don't have time to get into all that (busy week ahead) but you might all google around on that heading.

Things are tough all over, guys. People are getting wasted by cops in Brazil and by everyone, apparently, in Venezuela. The trouble is aberrations in human nature and the way people deal with them. I think we should have better outreach to the crazed and the broken people among us.

Here is something peculiar: a similarity of facial expressions among mass murderers that I find chilling, and it crosses national boundaries. Can anyone explain this? http://shootery.blogspot.com/2014/05/ma ... -eyes.html

[Peacedog]

The part that irks me the most in "gun crime" statistics as usually reported is the extreme dishonesty.

For example, gun deaths in the US include suicides. Most countries do not include suicides in their gun death statistics.

The rate of violent crime throughout Europe is significantly higher than it is in the US in every category except arson and murder.

With an armed public if a situation becomes violent, the odds of someone dying are much higher. This does come with the benefit of violent conflict happening much less frequently.

Outside areas like New York, home invasions are virtually unheard of in the US. They are very common throughout the rest of the industrialized world due to the general public largely being unarmed.

The US is rapidly becoming a multi-ethic society. These are also always much more violent than homogenous societies.

[Steve James]

The US is rapidly becoming a multi-ethic society. These are also always much more violent than homogenous societies.

The Americas were "multi-ethnic" before the arrival of Europeans No country in the Americas has ever been "mono-ethnic" or "mono-cultural." Rather, in every American society, one culture has dominated. This is no less true in Europe, either. European is definitely not an ethnicity. French isn't one either. The argument that France, Spain or Italy are homogeneous culturally is false. What is true is that different ethnic cultures are considered as being historically linked. England became multi-ethnic with the invasion of the Romans, and later the Norsmen, then the Normans, not to mention the Jutes, Picts and Danes.

Cultural dominance may be inevitable. But, this country has always been multi-cultural. Any American who doesn't think so obviously doesn't listen to the blues, eat Chinese food, do Asian martial arts, eat pizza, or yams, or corn, and the list goes on. In fact, Americans are the most multi-cultural of peoples. They'll have scones and croissants and biscuits and corn bread for breakfast, and never think they're doing anything "un-American."

Otoh, it's true that it's unlikely that "Americans" will think of themselves as one people or "e pluribus unum" and all that other pc bs.

Not even the Pilgrims were the same in terms of class, ethnicity or religion. That's why they made the Mayflower Compact:

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, defender of the Faith, etc.

Having undertaken, for the Glory of God, and advancements of the Christian faith and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the Northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents, solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic; for our better ordering, and preservation and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue hereof to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony; unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.

In witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, 1620.[13]

Of course, there were people of different ethnicities living in Jamestown before the Pilgrims arrived.