For the second time this week, Americans are dealing with yet another mass public shooting. This time, more than 20 are dead — most of them kids. I have a very simple argument — everything Americans and American policy is doing on this issue is being proven to be fundamentally wrong over and over and over.
Look — as sad as the shooting in Connecticut is, and it is devastating, aren’t we all tired of being sad for mass shootings? At some point, perhaps those who make arguments about the necessity of the second amendment, the need for a ‘strong militia’, the horrors of a society that would limit (or eliminate) guns, how freedom requires guns, that in a society that limits/ bans guns only ‘criminals’ get them, and my personal favorite ‘guns don’t kill people, people do’ will have to concede that this shit is just unacceptable.
And, sorry, but on this one I’m tired of having the conversation and being reasonable and open to other opinions. Until someone can propose a solution with proven effectiveness (with adequate and diverse expert sourcing), I’m just not interested.
And one more cross post from the conversation last week, just because I think it’s relevant…
In the US, there’s an average of a mass shooting every 5.9 days (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2179995/A-mass-shooting-happens-FIVE-days-America-Interactive-map-shows-gun-violence-epidemic-sweeping-nation.html) in the UK there were two mass shootings (1987 and 1996) in recent history before guns were outlawed (the 1996 shooting is why they were outlawed) and one (2010) since.
In the last decade there have been fewer mass shootings in all of Europe than in about 6 months in the US (http://www.expatica.com/be/news/local_news/mass-shootings-in-europe_195344.html) and where we see the shootings, we see legal firearms (except for the English case in 2010); however, even in the countries in Europe where guns are legal, controls on them are significant and aside from Switzerland (a bit of a different case because of the Swiss militia) the guns per capita is very low in those countries particularly compared to the US.
By most reasonable measures reducing gun ownership reduces gun violence and absolutely minimizes the risk for mass shootings. It’s pretty hard to have a mass-stabbing or go crazy on a group Robin Hood style with a bow and arrows. And yes, I know those examples actually exist — the point is they’re the exception rather than the rule.
A couple of follow ups to this post…. actually, they’re both cross posts from Facebook conversations last week about the shootings in Oregon…
‘While there is something to be said about our culture of violence. There’s also something to be said for all of the countries that don’t allow guns and their relatively low murder rates. Yes, if people want to do bodily harm, they will; however, it’s much harder to do the kind of harm that the US sees with gun violence every year without the damn things. The US also has a very large landmass, a relatively low population density, and usually social violence occurs with high population density (e.g., cities), so population alone doesn’t really account for our rate of violence. We need to be comparing the US to other western democracies. For example, the amount of violence per capita in a country like the UK (the US’s cultural kissing cousin) suggests that no legal guns not only means less gun violence, but fewer murders per capita each year. It appears as though fewer guns = fewer murders (http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/335-156/12554-58-murders-a-year-by-firearms-in-britain-8775-in-us)’