I'm not looking forward to the coming months. It's going to be a political circus, with each side clamoring to push or protect their already strongly held beliefs and positions.
I really wish we would have a meaningful debate over the best tools and strategies for protecting people in large groups in public places. Because of the delay of so-called first responders, it is really left to the people who are there to take action.
Outside of banning and confiscating all guns, gun control isn't going to solve the problem. People with criminal intent will always find a way to carry out their plans (c.f. the recent spate of knife attacks in China).
We need defensive and offensive measures to minimize harm. I believe the lockdown plan put into action at the school probably saved more lives than any other one thing, until the police arrived. So giving schools more tools for effective plans like this would probably help.
On the offensive side, teachers and staff were left to fight guns with their hands. If they had had a weapon of their own (tasers or guns with rubber bullets, for example), they would have stood a better chance of minimizing harm. We allow pilots to carry weapons if they so choose and it is probably at least somewhat effective as a random deterrent, in addition to providing some actual protection.
Sadly, I don't think this line of thinking will come up. This thing is going to be played out largely in Washington, where entrenched groups will be mostly pushing existing agendae, not thinking in new ways to actually minimize the problem.
Putting weapons in the hands of teachers and other school officials makes intuitive sense, however the case where it will need to be used is very rare, yet to be useful the weapons will need to be readily available at all times. As a result, it's plausible that the total magnitude of injury would be higher due to accident, misuse, etc.
America has got to be the only country in the industrialized world where it seems reasonable to respond to mass shootings (and shootings in general) by suggesting that more people should have guns.
Here's a scatter plot of firearms per 100,000 and gun homocides per 100 for OECD countries:
A melee weapon versus a deadly ranged weapon is going to be a poor matchup.
> guns with rubber bullets
If you're the good guy who's doing the most damage, but it's non-lethal, non-debilitating damage, you'd better be prepared to draw aggro.
My guess is that only a teacher with a gun would have had a decent chance of ending the massacre early.
My understanding of tactics is largely based on video games. Anyone with any training/experience in real-life tactics is welcome to comment on my comment.
Arming classrooms is a direct solution to only the most visible problem. This is like doing the 5 Whys (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys), but stopping after the first one. Underlying causes will continue, requiring increasingly drastic counter measures at superficial levels.
The scale of the problem isn't in itself an argument for doing or not doing something about. The emotional impact is most definitely an important factor, and not something that can simply be argued away with numbers.
Most people don't live in fear of cancer or lightning strikes, unless they find themselves in the middle of an asbestos filled building or right underneath a lightning storm.
The knowledge however that so many people around carry deadly firearms, and maybe more importantly, apparently feel they have a pressing reason to own firearms, is a daily reality for many. This fear is real, and it is not irrational.
This is not about the odds. It's about not having to live in fear. Even though the odds are wildly in their favor, most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
The fear of lightning while in a thunderstorm is rational, the fear of a rogue shooter (outside of a war zone or extremely violent neighborhood) is not.
People's fear, by in large, is not rational. Many people would get into a car on a rainy Friday night with little hesitation or thought of risk, yet they are deliberately putting themselves in harms way.
What the author is trying to get across is that public policy should focus on things it can track its effectiveness on and things it can solve.
When choosing where to spend time and money, the odds are exactly what people should be focusing on.
People vote in politicians. We hope that politicians do the hard work of research and getting advice before making policy.
It'd be really nice if politicians could make use of science and good quality research to make their arguments and to craft policy.
It'd be really nice if politicians could say "We don't know what the answer is. We're running some 3 year trials, and at the end of those we'll have some data and information and we'll be in a better position to know what the best thing to do is".
But no politician is going to say that. No politician is ever going to say "I'm not sure, I'll have to look at the research and get advice".
Any politician who said anything other than "Mass shootings are devastating and something needs to be done" would be eviscerated by tv, newspapers, and blogs. There is no possibility of nuanced discussion.
> most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
But when people decide not to swim in a well run swimming pool because the media is constantly blaring entertainment shows about sharks with ominous music and shaky-cam then it's not so rational.
Is this something that is even attainable by exterior forces? I don't just mean as it relates to gun-crimes, but anything. Everyone has fears — from fear of failure to fear of heights. They are personal and, as such, are yours to conquer personally.
Laws do not necessarily automatically assuage your fears — many people, as you point out, have irrational fears based on emotion rather than in fact / statistic probability.
I live in Flint, MI (which has been #1 in violent crime for the past few years) and the thought of people around me potentially possessing and, possibly, carrying firearms around never crosses my mind when I'm out and about. Maybe I'd just prefer to not give myself a heart attack over worrying about someone nearby carrying a gun, but in one of the cities where one should be worried most about it, it doesn't even rank on the scale of things to think about generally.
Not once does the author dare to compare homicide rates to other developed countries.
You're almost twice as likely to be killed by a gun because you live in the United States vs. the next developed country (Finland). You're 2.6 times as likely to be killed than the next country, Canada.
Yes, the average American (not necessarily you, it varies a lot depending on where you live) is more likely to be killed by a gun than the average person in Finland. That is completely irrelevant to my post. It's not a competition among countries, it's about making the US better. "Daring" has nothing to do with it.
I think you missed the point. Gun control might be a good idea, but not because it will reduce the likelihood of psychopathic spree killings.
Psychopathic spree killings are such a low-probability, extreme event that there's almost nothing you can do, at a public policy level, to influence them. Your monkey brain may protest that this simply cannot be (as mine does), but our monkey brains are wrong.
Instead we need to look for significant trends. Or consider that our actions might cause other harms more often, which is especially likely when our actions are driven by low-probability events. Basing public policy on such extreme events is not just stupid, it's immoral.
And yet, that's exactly the job of the media. The media works, by and large, by telling individual stories to provoke general sympathy or outrage. This is a good thing when that story is representative of a larger problem. What we have now is random phenomena driving larger political discussions.
"I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem... That’s an average of 18 deaths per year. For comparison, three times as many die from lightning strikes."
This is a bullshit red herring designed to ignore 99.8% of the gun homicides that take place each year in the US [1]. Gun control works to control much more than just mass shootings.
[1] Using 8K as a rough estimate for annual gun deaths from here:
I think it's actually valid, as the author then goes on to say; "From a logical viewpoint, we should be more concerned with gun crime in general. If gun crime is a significant problem, then gun control could be a solution to that problem."
He's not cherry picking stats to make the matter of gun crime appear less serious. He's addressing the impending tidal wave of emotion in response to the events in Newtown, which happened to be a mass shooting.
I think most people have trouble visualizing effects of policy because the changes are not immediate and hence not discernible. So instead of trying to convince people why gun control can help reduce mass shootings, lets do the opposite. Let me try to convince you to legalize the use of bazookas, a portable antitank weapon. Do we feel safer in this new world? You need to draw a line in the sand for controlling the use of lethal weapons and I think that line starts with assault weapons - rifles that can mow down an entire room in a minute.
Another flawed argument is that these incidents are small anomalies which can't be controlled by regulatory changes. Yes, if you can categorically prove that this is just a blimp on the charts. Anecdotally it feels like this is spreading, increasing in frequency. At what point are you going to put your foot down and push for changes? Some social behaviors tend to be pretty viral, inspiring a new set of perpetrators. Lets treat this with caution and not bury it under the carpet of data & statistics.
Sorry, but TFA has it all wrong. This is about values, not ratios. The question at hand is whether you think these deaths are acceptable given our values as a society.
To put it in nerd-speak, the intolerance for any given death is a function V with multiple inputs. (I find this extremely distasteful but bear with me.) For cars and smoking, the output of that function scales quite slowly; we're mostly OK with those because we like cars and if you smoke it's your funeral. Note that we already spend a lot of money on automotive safety, so arguably we still want to bring those numbers down. For instance, look at recent safety-oriented recalls from various manufacturers. Likewise, we spend money to reduce teen smoking, et al. So even then those don't really wash as an example of hypocrisy around the value of human life.
For the murder of multiple people via gratuitously overpowered firearms, you might argue V scales linearly, perhaps even quadratically. Maybe V takes a time-delta which scales V even faster with smaller deltas; Aurora is still fresh in many people's minds, as are numerous other incidents.
For multiple children under the age of 8 gunned down by a madman with a high-capacity assault rifle, V might scale factorially. We as a society try to place a very high value on the lives and well-being of children.
In other words, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than simply comparing inputs to V, and a small input to V for some category of deaths is not in itself a justification to ignore it. The author has committed the fallacy of looking at morality and society primarily or even solely through the lens of statistics.
The author's laziness is also ironic, all things considered. The UK and Australia are other western industrialized nations quite similar to ours, in a great many respects. They've experienced some success in reducing gun violence since the '90s, when they banned private handgun ownership. The irony is that the author's blindness here is a far better example of magical thinking about how regulation might or might not work in the US.
"I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?"
But is that the best comparison?
What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different disease. So here, I think it would be more informative to have comparative study done across countries, societies rather than this distraction.
Author is basically saying, anything that is statistically small, does not deserve attention. So research into any low probability disease should be ended because there bigger fish to fry. I think we can do both.
Author is basically saying, anything that is statistically small, does not deserve attention.
No, he is not. He is saying, anything that is statistically small, and the elimination thereof would substantially restrain the rights and freedom of others, should be questioned.
No matter how you are going to argue, there is at least "some" purpose for guns - for self protection, etc. If the discussion were really about saving lifes, it makes no sense why not putting a ban on smoking, something that clearly has no purpose at all.
He's saying that things that have such a low occurrence that they're indistinguishable from statistical outliers are not good targets for generalized public policy, since the benefits are not provable.
Yes, it is. You have a limited amount of resources -- in this case, tax dollars and political capital.
If you're spending dollars or votes to save lives, you should spend them on the thing which saves the most lives per dollar spent.
> What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
Another commenter on this article said that this comparison indicates that gun control doesn't really help [1].
To this, I'd add that most countries that have a strong gun control never had the situation of the US: millions of guns already in public circulation; many pro-gun individuals and a powerful political faction; and a very difficult procedure (amending the Constitution) required for changing policy.
These obstacles are pretty much insurmountable right now; you'd be well-advised to spend your political capital on an issue where you have a decent chance of winning.
I visited Phoenix a couple of weeks ago and was shown a gun collection owned by a previous member of the army. I was shown a pistol collection, then rifles, then semi-automatics. Really a quite staggering amount of hardware. When I asked what license was required to own this type of equipment he replied none. Without making a judgement on whether or not civilians should be allowed to own this type of equipment in the first place, should it not be an absolute minimum that people first obtain a licence to purchase guns. We don't allow people on the roads without a licence and they're not even designed to kill. A simple first step would seem to be requiring basic equipment/awareness training and a licensing process.
Sort of; the author does go onto say how R&D could help "solve" both mental illness and mass shootings. There is definitely a cap on what can be done, so the suggestion is to bake the cost into issues that are already more statistically large and probably solvable.
Theoretically, he does compare to other countries, as the statistic is a rounding error -- not statistically relevant.
I have read very vocal arguments from both sides here, and only a handful of well reasoned, balanced ones. It is ironic that we criticize Washington for their petty politics yet we are as one-sided and partisan as they are. We are not going to solve the gun problem by just restricting access to specific weapons. It baffles me that almost no one mentions better healthcare as a plausible solution. If these kids can be spotted and given access to quality treatment we might have a significant impact on their lives for the better, and if we don't, then well at least there is a paper trail that would prevent them from buying guns legally. We can't make the problem disappear just by removing guns from the equation, there has to be a multi-pronged solution that covers social, cultural and legal issues.
Well then what is the magic number when this becomes significant enough to do something about it? Lets say even 1/100 of people who die from tobacco i.e 5k per year or 13 per day in mass shooting. Who wants to wait till then. My point is that dying from tobacco use and mass shootings are not the same. So lets not even compare them. Mass shootings is more of a symptom of something really wrong with the society. It is effin inverted where universal healthcare is debated and challenged all the way to the supreme courts but universal access to assault rifles and guns has bipartisan support.
We frequently see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearm homicides in the US is higher than that of other developed countries.
We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.
I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.
If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.
Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.
I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.
Using this http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_cr... as my primary source, figures by specific instruments or methods (with about as many US murders unspecified as U.K. murders total, the unspecified not used), I get a 1.34 per 100,000 rate of non-firearms but otherwise specified murders in the US in 2004, compared to a 1.45 per 100,000 for all of the U.K.
> 'Mass killings are as inevitable as lightning deaths..'
Not so.
The New York Times has referred to Australia's gun laws as a "road map" for the US, saying that "in the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings - but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect."
"Public policy should not be dictated by emotions."
But the media knows that a large share of their "news business" is driven by emotion. And so here we are all thinking about mass shootings.
And we know the media has an enormous influence on politics.
So add this all up and what do we have?
A terrible tragedy that affects a small community but also a lot of tangential effects, remote onlookers, politicians and an enterprising "media business".
I have a cousin who as a child was a student in a narrowly averted early grade school classroom mass shooting. Honestly, when I first heard about this incident in Connecticut I thought of him. I can only wonder what he thought about when he read about this incident. When it hits close to home, there might be hesistation to even talk about these things, they are so horrible. We might block them out. We might tell the children to close their eyes. We might try to pretend it never happened.
But for the media and the "news business", it's a different ballgame.
For example, it’s feasible that a 100% tax on the price of cigarettes would save thousands of lives ever year. Why is this not attempted? Probably because the special interest group that controls tobacco sales is powerful enough to stop it.
Nothing to do with liberty, the constitution or anything...
50,000 deaths are attributed to second hand smoke every year... That's 5X the homicide rate and isn't remotely related to liberty (children and many workers don't have the freedom to avoid 2nd hand smoke). I personally would love to have the freedom not to subsidize the health care costs of millions of smokers.
Mass shootings are a strawman which allows convenient comparison to lightning strikes.
The correct meaningful numbers in establishing public policy regarding firearms are approximately 19,000 suicides by fire arm per year, and 11,000 homicides by firearm per year.
If we look at those numbers, the deaths in the recent school shooting are quite ordinary. The homicides are equivalent to the extra day in a leap year, and the suicide of the gunman was statistically background noise.
Since it is hard to compare one country to another since there is a long history of the attitudes and mentality of each's citizens that makes them different. One statistic that is rarely seen is "# of guns per 100 gun owners" to go along with that. Having 2x the number of guns per 100 citizens is a little less significant if the average US gun owner has 2 guns. Meaning, the number of people that are armed is the same.
Let's say you are in a room with 100 people and you know that 88 guns are in there. Would you feel better if you knew that 88 different people each had 1 gun or that 44 people each had 2 guns?
(Can we start abbreviating Correlation Is Not Causation as CINC now? In any case, if you're going to argue that more guns = more murders, at the very least you're going to have to concede that other factors are much, much more important.)
"I personally hate guns. I have never owned or even fired one. I wish they didn’t exist, but they do" - Everyone should try to put at least two dozen rounds down the range. It's a great experience, and it can help you focus, make your mind faster and clearer (IPSC is simply awesome - go to an event).
I don't really care about the self defense aspect - even though it's enticing, having some of my stuff stolen is probably better than killing a person.
I searched for data, and found out that in the past 30 years, 543 people have been killed in 70 mass shootings. That’s an average of 18 deaths per year. For comparison, three times as many die from lightning strikes....
Mass killings are as inevitable as lightning deaths
There are public policies which deal with lightning risk, e.g. formal implementation of the 30-30 rule for sports facilities.
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
[+] [-] Todd|13 years ago|reply
I really wish we would have a meaningful debate over the best tools and strategies for protecting people in large groups in public places. Because of the delay of so-called first responders, it is really left to the people who are there to take action.
Outside of banning and confiscating all guns, gun control isn't going to solve the problem. People with criminal intent will always find a way to carry out their plans (c.f. the recent spate of knife attacks in China).
We need defensive and offensive measures to minimize harm. I believe the lockdown plan put into action at the school probably saved more lives than any other one thing, until the police arrived. So giving schools more tools for effective plans like this would probably help.
On the offensive side, teachers and staff were left to fight guns with their hands. If they had had a weapon of their own (tasers or guns with rubber bullets, for example), they would have stood a better chance of minimizing harm. We allow pilots to carry weapons if they so choose and it is probably at least somewhat effective as a random deterrent, in addition to providing some actual protection.
Sadly, I don't think this line of thinking will come up. This thing is going to be played out largely in Washington, where entrenched groups will be mostly pushing existing agendae, not thinking in new ways to actually minimize the problem.
[+] [-] rictic|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|13 years ago|reply
Here's a scatter plot of firearms per 100,000 and gun homocides per 100 for OECD countries:
http://i.imgur.com/ZAI3T.png
Needless to say, the dot in the top right corner is the USA>
Data is from here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homi...
(Note: Mexico is excluded because its rate of gun violence is such a startling outlier that it squashes all the other values.)
[+] [-] csense|13 years ago|reply
A melee weapon versus a deadly ranged weapon is going to be a poor matchup.
> guns with rubber bullets
If you're the good guy who's doing the most damage, but it's non-lethal, non-debilitating damage, you'd better be prepared to draw aggro.
My guess is that only a teacher with a gun would have had a decent chance of ending the massacre early.
My understanding of tactics is largely based on video games. Anyone with any training/experience in real-life tactics is welcome to comment on my comment.
[+] [-] nollidge|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] harlanlewis|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rickmb|13 years ago|reply
Most people don't live in fear of cancer or lightning strikes, unless they find themselves in the middle of an asbestos filled building or right underneath a lightning storm.
The knowledge however that so many people around carry deadly firearms, and maybe more importantly, apparently feel they have a pressing reason to own firearms, is a daily reality for many. This fear is real, and it is not irrational.
This is not about the odds. It's about not having to live in fear. Even though the odds are wildly in their favor, most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
[+] [-] amckenna|13 years ago|reply
People's fear, by in large, is not rational. Many people would get into a car on a rainy Friday night with little hesitation or thought of risk, yet they are deliberately putting themselves in harms way.
What the author is trying to get across is that public policy should focus on things it can track its effectiveness on and things it can solve.
When choosing where to spend time and money, the odds are exactly what people should be focusing on.
[+] [-] DanBC|13 years ago|reply
It'd be really nice if politicians could make use of science and good quality research to make their arguments and to craft policy.
It'd be really nice if politicians could say "We don't know what the answer is. We're running some 3 year trials, and at the end of those we'll have some data and information and we'll be in a better position to know what the best thing to do is".
But no politician is going to say that. No politician is ever going to say "I'm not sure, I'll have to look at the research and get advice".
Any politician who said anything other than "Mass shootings are devastating and something needs to be done" would be eviscerated by tv, newspapers, and blogs. There is no possibility of nuanced discussion.
> most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.
But when people decide not to swim in a well run swimming pool because the media is constantly blaring entertainment shows about sharks with ominous music and shaky-cam then it's not so rational.
[+] [-] 13rules|13 years ago|reply
Is this something that is even attainable by exterior forces? I don't just mean as it relates to gun-crimes, but anything. Everyone has fears — from fear of failure to fear of heights. They are personal and, as such, are yours to conquer personally.
Laws do not necessarily automatically assuage your fears — many people, as you point out, have irrational fears based on emotion rather than in fact / statistic probability.
[+] [-] numo16|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] boboblong|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grecy|13 years ago|reply
You're almost twice as likely to be killed by a gun because you live in the United States vs. the next developed country (Finland). You're 2.6 times as likely to be killed than the next country, Canada.
Something is very wrong here.
[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
[+] [-] diego|13 years ago|reply
Yes, the average American (not necessarily you, it varies a lot depending on where you live) is more likely to be killed by a gun than the average person in Finland. That is completely irrelevant to my post. It's not a competition among countries, it's about making the US better. "Daring" has nothing to do with it.
[+] [-] neilk|13 years ago|reply
Psychopathic spree killings are such a low-probability, extreme event that there's almost nothing you can do, at a public policy level, to influence them. Your monkey brain may protest that this simply cannot be (as mine does), but our monkey brains are wrong.
Instead we need to look for significant trends. Or consider that our actions might cause other harms more often, which is especially likely when our actions are driven by low-probability events. Basing public policy on such extreme events is not just stupid, it's immoral.
And yet, that's exactly the job of the media. The media works, by and large, by telling individual stories to provoke general sympathy or outrage. This is a good thing when that story is representative of a larger problem. What we have now is random phenomena driving larger political discussions.
[+] [-] Steko|13 years ago|reply
This is a bullshit red herring designed to ignore 99.8% of the gun homicides that take place each year in the US [1]. Gun control works to control much more than just mass shootings.
[1] Using 8K as a rough estimate for annual gun deaths from here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ushomicidesbyweapon.svg
[+] [-] _sentient|13 years ago|reply
He's not cherry picking stats to make the matter of gun crime appear less serious. He's addressing the impending tidal wave of emotion in response to the events in Newtown, which happened to be a mass shooting.
[+] [-] throwit1979|13 years ago|reply
The reddit attention span appears to be alive and well at HN.
[+] [-] metalsahu|13 years ago|reply
Another flawed argument is that these incidents are small anomalies which can't be controlled by regulatory changes. Yes, if you can categorically prove that this is just a blimp on the charts. Anecdotally it feels like this is spreading, increasing in frequency. At what point are you going to put your foot down and push for changes? Some social behaviors tend to be pretty viral, inspiring a new set of perpetrators. Lets treat this with caution and not bury it under the carpet of data & statistics.
[+] [-] wonderzombie|13 years ago|reply
To put it in nerd-speak, the intolerance for any given death is a function V with multiple inputs. (I find this extremely distasteful but bear with me.) For cars and smoking, the output of that function scales quite slowly; we're mostly OK with those because we like cars and if you smoke it's your funeral. Note that we already spend a lot of money on automotive safety, so arguably we still want to bring those numbers down. For instance, look at recent safety-oriented recalls from various manufacturers. Likewise, we spend money to reduce teen smoking, et al. So even then those don't really wash as an example of hypocrisy around the value of human life.
For the murder of multiple people via gratuitously overpowered firearms, you might argue V scales linearly, perhaps even quadratically. Maybe V takes a time-delta which scales V even faster with smaller deltas; Aurora is still fresh in many people's minds, as are numerous other incidents.
For multiple children under the age of 8 gunned down by a madman with a high-capacity assault rifle, V might scale factorially. We as a society try to place a very high value on the lives and well-being of children.
In other words, you're going to have to do a hell of a lot better than simply comparing inputs to V, and a small input to V for some category of deaths is not in itself a justification to ignore it. The author has committed the fallacy of looking at morality and society primarily or even solely through the lens of statistics.
The author's laziness is also ironic, all things considered. The UK and Australia are other western industrialized nations quite similar to ours, in a great many respects. They've experienced some success in reducing gun violence since the '90s, when they banned private handgun ownership. The irony is that the author's blindness here is a far better example of magical thinking about how regulation might or might not work in the US.
[+] [-] mc32|13 years ago|reply
"I would start by measuring the magnitude of mass shootings as a problem. How does it compare to other issues such as preventable diseases, regular crime, terrorism?"
But is that the best comparison?
What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
When we want to evaluate the effectiveness of a treatment, we don't measure efficacy against the treatment to a completely different disease. So here, I think it would be more informative to have comparative study done across countries, societies rather than this distraction.
Author is basically saying, anything that is statistically small, does not deserve attention. So research into any low probability disease should be ended because there bigger fish to fry. I think we can do both.
[+] [-] stfu|13 years ago|reply
No, he is not. He is saying, anything that is statistically small, and the elimination thereof would substantially restrain the rights and freedom of others, should be questioned.
No matter how you are going to argue, there is at least "some" purpose for guns - for self protection, etc. If the discussion were really about saving lifes, it makes no sense why not putting a ban on smoking, something that clearly has no purpose at all.
[+] [-] Daishiman|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] csense|13 years ago|reply
Yes, it is. You have a limited amount of resources -- in this case, tax dollars and political capital.
If you're spending dollars or votes to save lives, you should spend them on the thing which saves the most lives per dollar spent.
> What about comparing it to frequency and impact in other countries?
Another commenter on this article said that this comparison indicates that gun control doesn't really help [1].
To this, I'd add that most countries that have a strong gun control never had the situation of the US: millions of guns already in public circulation; many pro-gun individuals and a powerful political faction; and a very difficult procedure (amending the Constitution) required for changing policy.
These obstacles are pretty much insurmountable right now; you'd be well-advised to spend your political capital on an issue where you have a decent chance of winning.
[1] http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4934323
[+] [-] ollysb|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] thezilch|13 years ago|reply
Theoretically, he does compare to other countries, as the statistic is a rounding error -- not statistically relevant.
[+] [-] sp332|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] elteto|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ranjeetbhatia|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bearcatfish|13 years ago|reply
We also see statistics quoted saying that the number of firearms is higher than that of other developed countries.
I'd like to see statistics comparing the number of murders with other weapons. It is perfectly plausible that we have an elevated rate of gun ownership for historical or cultural reasons, and (since they are such highly engineered weapons) we tend to use guns to murder people, rather than other weapons.
If number of murders perpetrated with other weapons is lower than in other countries, its entirely possible that enforcing stricter gun control would not have a significant effect on the total number of murders.
Factors that might go against this hypothesis are the fact that gun availability might encourage people to kill more readily, gun availability makes a successful murder easier, etc... There are a host of other confounding factors, as well.
I don't really have strong a priori beliefs about these questions, but I'd like to see some more statistics. Another interesting statistic would be to see a time-series comparison of overall homicides, gun homicides and gun ownership in America over time.
[+] [-] hga|13 years ago|reply
For better or worse, we're a violent people.
[+] [-] evolve2k|13 years ago|reply
Not so.
The New York Times has referred to Australia's gun laws as a "road map" for the US, saying that "in the 18 years before the law, Australia suffered 13 mass shootings - but not one in the 14 years after the law took full effect."
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-12-17/us-urged-to-consider-a...
[+] [-] vaxdigitalnh|13 years ago|reply
But the media knows that a large share of their "news business" is driven by emotion. And so here we are all thinking about mass shootings.
And we know the media has an enormous influence on politics. So add this all up and what do we have?
A terrible tragedy that affects a small community but also a lot of tangential effects, remote onlookers, politicians and an enterprising "media business".
I have a cousin who as a child was a student in a narrowly averted early grade school classroom mass shooting. Honestly, when I first heard about this incident in Connecticut I thought of him. I can only wonder what he thought about when he read about this incident. When it hits close to home, there might be hesistation to even talk about these things, they are so horrible. We might block them out. We might tell the children to close their eyes. We might try to pretend it never happened.
But for the media and the "news business", it's a different ballgame.
[+] [-] Tycho|13 years ago|reply
Nothing to do with liberty, the constitution or anything...
[+] [-] webwright|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Bakkot|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
The correct meaningful numbers in establishing public policy regarding firearms are approximately 19,000 suicides by fire arm per year, and 11,000 homicides by firearm per year.
If we look at those numbers, the deaths in the recent school shooting are quite ordinary. The homicides are equivalent to the extra day in a leap year, and the suicide of the gunman was statistically background noise.
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr61/nvsr61_06.pdf
[+] [-] engtech|13 years ago|reply
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/07/28/guns-ownership-aroun...
note that the black circle is not scaled by the population of the country so it isn't visually as useful as it could be.
Interesting take aways:
[+] [-] pathy|13 years ago|reply
Swiss you mean? ;)
That said, a quick look at the list and it appears that no western country can compare to USA in firearm homicide per 100k citizens.
[+] [-] jack-r-abbit|13 years ago|reply
Let's say you are in a room with 100 people and you know that 88 guns are in there. Would you feel better if you knew that 88 different people each had 1 gun or that 44 people each had 2 guns?
[+] [-] jbellis|13 years ago|reply
Looking at all homicides vs gun ownership seems to bear that out. In fact, there appears to be a negative correlation with gun ownership: http://diegobasch.com/homicides-vs-gun-ownership
(Can we start abbreviating Correlation Is Not Causation as CINC now? In any case, if you're going to argue that more guns = more murders, at the very least you're going to have to concede that other factors are much, much more important.)
[+] [-] jakeonthemove|13 years ago|reply
I don't really care about the self defense aspect - even though it's enticing, having some of my stuff stolen is probably better than killing a person.
[+] [-] hga|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|13 years ago|reply
Mass killings are as inevitable as lightning deaths
There are public policies which deal with lightning risk, e.g. formal implementation of the 30-30 rule for sports facilities.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] wglb|13 years ago|reply
I don't think that you will find that this number is a statistical fluctuation.
[+] [-] amckenna|13 years ago|reply
A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.
[+] [-] bearcatfish|13 years ago|reply
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