Many Americans think of school shootings as mass casualty events involving an adolescent with an assault-style weapon. But a new study says that most recent school shootings orchestrated by teenagers do not fit that image — and they are often related to community violence.
The study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, analyzed 253 school shootings carried out by 262 adolescents in the US between 1990 and 2016.
It found that these adolescents were responsible for only a handful of mass casualty shootings, defined as those involving four or more gunshot fatalities. About half of the shootings analyzed — 119 — involved at least one death. Among the events, seven killed four or more people.
A majority of the shootings analyzed also involved handguns rather than assault rifles or shotguns, and they were often the result of “interpersonal disputes,” according to the researchers from University of South Carolina and University of Florida.
Sounds like a lie to me. Semi-automatic handguns are absolutely the fastest, most lethal and most common way to turn interpersonal disputes and property crimes into murder.
You can’t genuinely be looking to reduce these murders if you’re unwilling to change gun laws. It wouldn’t just require 100 years of work to solve inequality, it would require literal mind control.
Even if you pulled it off, there is still all the other motives you’re handwaving away, like domestic abusers and “responsible gun owners” answering their doorbells by opening fire.
It doesn’t take mind control, because once you change external circumstances, people tend to change their minds on their own without being forced into re-education camps, or going through cult programming.
Changing social conditions also reduces domestic violence. People that aren’t afraid of random crime–most of which is bullshit ginned up by Fox, OAN, etc.–don’t start blasting the second someone knocks on their door.
Sure, semi-automatic handguns are the fastest, easiest, most readily concealed way now to to turn arguments into murders, but you know what happens when you take the guns and don’t fix all the other shit? People start stabbing each other. Then you have to start trying to take all the knives. Then the clubs. Then bottles, and bricks, and hammers, and screwdrivers. You’re never going to be able to take all of the tools that people use to commit murder, because “bare hands” account for something like 5% of all homicides in the US (unless you’re proposing preemptive amputation?) Fix the underlying problems, and most of that violence–the violence that turns into murder–ends up going away on it’s own.
Even giving you a free pass on that actually being true, stabbings are both easier to flee and less lethal. It would be a genuine improvement
Isn’t it just fascinating that this slippery slope always starts at “guns”?
Somehow, it’s impossible to stop at “lets not sell guns to idiots and psychopaths” like sane people. Once we start down that road, we have to just keep banning more and more things forever, despite the fact none of those things are covered by the second amendment and could be banned right now if we actually wanted to.
You may as well be claiming “Driving under the influence? What next? Driving sober? Bikes? Horses? Legs?”.
Meanwhile, guns account for 81% of those homicides because they’re more lethal, in less time, with less chance of escaping or being interrupted.
Most of the guns used in those homicides are legally purchased, but that’s mostly academic given that 99% of guns used in crimes were originally legally purchased from dealers, pawnbrokers or manufacturers, clearly demonstrating that the background checks and storage laws are not even remotely adequate.
You keep accidentally admitting how much better things would be if Americas had gun laws in line with the rest of the world, instead of pretending every murder is inevitable like you wanted.
Sure. Let us know when you’re done building that utopia so we can look at actual crime stats that actually exist, rather than fantasy statistics that the pro-gun community insists will come true eventually.
Until then, why do you staunchly oppose measures designed to reduce the number of murderers armed with the tools you openly admit are best-in-class for murder?
First: Yes, that is the way things work. We’ve seen that happen in other countries. Moving outside of guns specifically, that’s happened with abortion rights; first it was just some abortions, then all of them (depending on the state), then the right to travel to another state, now they’re working on banning birth control and overturning no-fault divorce.
Second: No, 2A doesn’t specify guns, it says arms. So if you wanted to ban knives and swords because they’re arms, then there’s a 2A argument against it.
That’s not the argument you think it is. Yes, people use the best tool that they have available. If that tool magically didn’t exist–and there are more guns than people in the US–then people would switch to a different tool, and you’d be talking about how people used X because it’s better than Y, and so we need to ban X.
People in other countries have these same debates, trying to create ever stricter security measures to prevent crimes, even though they have far, far lower rates or murder. The argument is that there needs to be ever more invasive gov’t control, because that’s the only way to make people feel safe and secure.
Much like your utopia where guns don’t exist?
Why do you resist the social changes that would reduce violence across the board, and not just one specific subset using one tool? Why do you want society to stay sick while eliminating a single manifestation of that sickness?
Why didn’t the pro-gun community stop it? Aren’t you claiming right now that guns are required to stop rights being eroded?
Yes, I want people to have worse tools for killing innocent people. You’re openly admitting it would would be an improvement.
Sure thing. I assume its also fine for me to extrapolate your views out forever and claim your goal is to legalise hand grenades, claymores and rocket launchers for all Americans, including felons, as the first step to eventually making WMDs cheap and freely available to everyone and the only way to prevent that is to immediately ban all private gun sales.
Of course, those might be your actual views since they’re not uncommon in the pro-gun community, unlike the mythical gun control advocates who start with “lets not sell guns to people who have been making death threats” and don’t stop until they’ve banned hammers.
How dare people try and prevent preventable deaths. What scumbags.
I wonder why they have “far, far lower rates for murder” since obviously the only way to truly be safe is the cold embrace of an AR-15.
Did you forget the rest of the world exists and has gun control? They even change their gun laws over time in response to changing circumstances, rather than just ask slavers with wooden teeth their thoughts then vow to use that forever.
Sure, you could have tried your luck with that when the pro-gun crowd was blaming dumb shit like video games, rock music and the number of doors a building had, but what are you suggesting I oppose now?
I support increased access to mental health services, universal healthcare and massively reducing wealth inequality. This has been my consistent opinion for over 25 years, before doing mass shootings with your legal guns became a fad among the far-right.
But I’m never going to support maximizing the damage that criminals, abusers, idiots and domestic terrorists can do just because there might be less of them in 50 years, especially in return for bullshit promises about rights, democracy and personal safety that are less true in America than in countries with gun control.
You’re missing the point, intentionally. The erosion of rights is the point; for the right wing, it’s the erosion of reproductive rights (and eventually the rights of women in general). For the people that believe they’re on the left, it’s gun rights, and eventually all rights to the tools of violence.
Which is also worse tools for defending themselves. So, again, not a win.
Yes. That’s correct. Private citizens could quite legally have artillery under the interpretation of the constitution that existed until 1934, when the National Firearms Act made it through judicial review due to prosecutorial malfeasance. And yes, I think that most felons should be allowed to be armed, because the law is structured in such a way that even non-violent felons have their rights stripped from them.
Okay, so you’re saying that there is no amount of evidence that would ever change your mind. Is that correct? So even if I could show you that other countries that have high levels of personal firearm ownership don’t see violence rates like the US does, you wouldn’t see that as relevant, because it doesn’t involve removing guns. Do I have that about right?
It’s a promise gun owners make, that you give them a free pass on, despite them clearly never delivering on it, which is a common theme through all your arguments.
Starting immediately with…
If guns made people safer, America should be the safest country in the world by a huge margin, not shrugging off mass shootings every month
So why is the crime rate in America practically identical to countries with gun control, except that America’s homicide rate is 400% higher?
Why do these “defensive gun uses” only appear when you ask gun owners how often they’ve experienced them and never in any kind of statistics?
To put it bluntly, Americas gun laws disproportionately help assholes be assholes – something that does show up in statistics.
But “responsible gun owners” rush to be their useful idiots anyway, deliberately oblivious to who they’re actually helping but demanding to be looked upon as heroes anyway.
Imagine you wanted to donate to the Democrats, but for $1 donated, it was mandatory to donate $4 to Republicans.
Would you rush to social media as Republicans won over and over again, insisting it wasn’t your fault, you were only helping the Democrats?
Would you advocate people donated every dollar they could to the Dems and then shame them when their candidate lost?
If the Dems won 3 out of every 100 elections, would you claim it was because the laws around donations were the best in the world?
Don’t worry, you’re not actually shocking me with that response, I just wanted you to say that idiocy out loud.
It’s important that people know that supporting the pro-gun community is supporting elevating the far-right from mass shooters in to a homegrown Hamas.
“Well it doesn’t matter what you think, because its been ruled constituational”.
You don’t get to make that argument for guns and then handwave it away when you don’t like it.
The evidence I’ve been waiting 25 years for? Sure, you could change my mind with it, but if you actually had it, you wouldn’t be desperately latching on to semantics to try and make me sound unreasonable.
Sure, you can do the “b-b-but Switzerland” thing if you want to, but I’ll just point out what their actual laws are, so you probably shouldn’t unless you support gun control measures like:
Some of them, you’ve already openly opposed, such as prohibiting grenades and artillery.
Others, the pro-gun community actively opposes, such as safe storage and denying guns to domestic abusers.
But if you want to replace America’s gun laws with Switzerland’s, I’m happy to officially congratulate you on becoming a gun-control advocate.
Nope, but it gave you the premise you needed to push misinformation, which is all you were really interested in.
Which is not what I said, but okay.
How about, ALL of my trans friends, and the overwhelming majority of my gay friends are armed, because they’ve got people that will happily murder them in the streets with their base hands, and cops will not give a fuck?
How about the women I know that have had to get restraining orders against violent and abusive ex-husbands and boyfriends, and got armed and trained because cops do not give a fuck until his hands are around her neck?
How about the people threatened like my nephew that were threatened by a gang because he was a witness to a murder, and was compelled to testify in court? (He ended up having to move, because, again, cops did not give a fuck. And no, there was no “witness protection”; it was either show up and testify, or be jailed on contempt and perjury.)
America has a violence problem, period. It’s not a gun problem, it’s a violence problem. You want to make shit safe? Fix the conditions that cause the violence.
To rephrase that, why are you concerned only with affecting murder, rather than affecting ALL violent crime? If you reduce all violent crime by correcting underlying conditions, then murder decreases along with everything else. So, why the focus on a single issue?
… Why do people only drown at home when they have bathtubs, and not people that just have showers? Your question is nonsensical. Defensive gun use only shows up when you ask gun owners because non-gun owners don’t have guns to use defensively. (And, BTW, since you are familiar with DGU, you know that conservative estimates are around 1.5M per year in the US.)
My local gun store has a cannon for sale. It can be yours for just $5000. I think it’s 4"–but don’t quote me on that–and it’s a smoothbore, so you can absolutely use it for grapeshot if that’s your desire. Of course, it’s going to take you about a minute and a half to load if you’ve practiced, so maybe don’t miss with that first shot? Oh, and you’re going to want a spotter to help you aim, and you’ll need to find a way to tow it around, since it weight a couple thousand pounds.
…With a cannon that takes a crew of four people to operate effectively, and has a range less than a decent bolt action rifle? 'Kay.
Gun control laws, sure. Since those are almost always intended to and disproportionately affect minority groups. Like Reagan passing gun control laws in California because the Black Panthers were policing the police. Or Georgia denying MLK Jr. a carry permit. Or D.C.'s gun ban. (Fun reading for you: This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible, by Charles E. Cobb
(You missed Finland, which is likely more heavily armed than the Swiss.)
But, again, roughly similar rates of gun ownership.
Vastly lower rates of violent crime. Not even gun crime, violent crime.
Because–as you notes previously–many guns used in crimes in the US were legally purchased. So there’s no good reason to believe that a Swiss person couldn’t easily jump through the hoops to get an SIG 550 (or use their military-issued rifle, and the military-issued ammunition) to commit a mass murder. But you simply don’t see that. You don’t see that in Finland either. You don’t see much violent crime in either country, with or without guns. In the UK and Australia, you see a lot of violent crime.
Safe storage laws. Dear god. If the state subsidizes the cost of storage, sure, I’m fine with that. But gun “safes” are a fuckin’ joke. There’s a lot to unpack, but there’s no country I’m aware of that requires firearms to be stored in a container that would be considered a burglary-resistant safe. RSC-1 is the standard for a gun “safe” under storage laws in the US (it actually exceeds most requirements), and the UL RSC-1 standard only requires that a container resist attack for 5 min with hammers not more than 2#, and a pry bar not longer than 12".
No one is arguing that people convicted of a domestic violence offense should be allowed to be armed. (Okay, I’m sure some people are. No one that I know of is making that argument.) Convicted is the key term here. As it stands, an accusation is sufficient; if you have a restraining order, you may not own a firearm. That’s not the same thing as a conviction; you are not provided with an attorney, there is no investigation done by outside parties. The process has far, far looser rules than any criminal proceeding.
What evidence would you accept? I have already demonstrated that countries without any realistic path to gun ownership can still have very high violent crime rates, even if the murder rates are lower. I’ve also demonstrated that countries with high rates of individual gun ownership–including military arms–do not necessarily have high rates of violent crime (including murder). So it’s clear that the firearms by themselves do not cause the crime, but are only the tools used.
What you’re trying to do is “cure” pneumonia with a cough suppressant, and hoping that the underlying pneumonia goes away on it’s own once you stop coughing. That’s dumb. Even if you took all the guns in the US, you’re not going to fix the violence, the gangs, the domestic abuse, the rape, or even the suicides.
And yeah, conservatives oppose fixing all that shit too. So, good on you for agreeing with Republicans on that, I guess?
It’s literally the next argument you make.
But they don’t use their bare hands, they use the guns you demand they are sold, significantly increasing the chances of your friends being killed.
Violent, abusive partners that you also demand are sold guns, despite domestic abuse being one of the strongest predictors of homicide.
What about him? 99% of guns used in crimes were either legally sold to the criminal, or sold to a “responsible gun owner” that failed to secure the weapons and promptly had them stolen.
The laws you’re leaping to the defense of armed the murderer, the people who threatened him and from the sound of it, guns only made his life significantly worse.
I’m not even sure how you think you’d solve this in your gun utopia. If your nephew was a child at the time, they wouldn’t be eligible to carry a handgun with them at all times. If they did have a gun, your expectation seems to be that he could have murdered the criminal back, which would have only made the trauma, threats and court appearances even worse.
If you didn’t make all these people up, it’s clear you’re just using them as props. It’s genuinely surreal that you could have at least 7 people in your life that you ostensibly love, all of whom have been the target of violence, yet you support their abusers and oppressors buying handguns and semi-automatic rifles.
Nobody advocating gun control thinks it will end all forms of violence, nor do they oppose other forms of violence reduction.
They oppose supplying violent people the tools they use to maximise their violence, with near-zero consideration of the risk that poses to innocent people.
They ask themselves “How many people would have died at Pulse nightclub if the killer only had a bolt-action? What about if he only had a knife? What about if we lost our minds and let the pro-gun community pick up a 6 pack of hand grenades like many of them openly support?”.
But the pro-gun community doesn’t. They just say “49 killed and 53 wounded is fine. 61 dead and 400 injured is fine. 21 children mutilated beyond recognition is fine. 3 women a day is fine”, because none of those people matter as much to them as their guns do.
Which violent crimes am I blocking reduction efforts for? I will support any moral and demonstably effective method of reducing violent crime of any sort. The current gun laws meet neither of those requirements.
I’m focusing on a single issue because that’s the issue we’re discussing, not because it’s the only one I support.
Because showers have a near zero drowning risk and bathtubs don’t. Beaches and swimming pools have a higher drowning risk still, which is why we have systems in place to mitigate those dangers through lifeguards.
If you think this simple concept is “nonsensical”, we’ve probably isolated why you think gun laws are perfect just the way they are – you’re completely unable to identify different risk levels, even when they’re extremely obvious.
Which would have been a great point if I’d suffered a traumatic brain injury and actually asked “why don’t people without guns use their guns defensively”.
Defensive gun use must inherently prevent a crime and the pro-gun community has been completely unable to demonstrate this crime reduction statistically.
Only 8% of firearm researchers agreed that 'In the United States, guns are used in self-defense far more often than they are used in crime
Which is roughly the number of violent crimes reported in America each year. You’d think if 50% of all violent crimes were prevented by guns, that would be trivial to prove.
Instead, we end up with figures that say things like “only 3% of all mass shootings are ended by a good guy with a gun”.
Congratulations, you’ve accidentally realized that different weaponry comes with different risks to the public and that those risks are significantly reduced when weapons are less portable, lower range and have a lower rate of fire.
But of course, your little story about cannons doesn’t actually represent your views on guns, otherwise you’d oppose handguns and semi-automatic weapons, aligning your opinions with the most widespread gun control laws across the globe.
You said “artillery”. Should we go through different forms of artillery and you can either say “Yes, I support anyone who can pass a background check owning that with no training or safety requirements” or “actually it turns out I’m not an arms absolutist after all and some weaponry isn’t worth the social risk”?
So now that those racist laws are gone, there’s no more race problems right? All the Black Panthers are living happily ever after and definitely weren’t executed by the state, guns or no guns.
Because it sure seems like your guns didn’t fix shit for them.
Police still execute them in the street and if they had a gun on them, there isn’t even an investigation. Hell, if they fired at the police, those police would probably get a medal for killing them.
But if you know the magic proceedure to follow to stop police brutality using cool guns, I’m all ears. You’re a black man, you’ve been stopped by police, you have a legal firearm in your pants. When do you start blasting?
Be specific, because the lives of people you don’t give a shit about are on the line.
Once you’ve sorted that, you can explain how selling guns to neo-nazis with a history of domestic violence helps them.
Here’s their gun laws.
What a surprise, they require gun licenses which won’t be granted for self-defense, guns that are not appropriate for their stated purpose or applicants with a history of mental health issues, violence or substance abuse.
All of that is gun control, which the pro-gun community opposes.
Fortunately, the people of Finland don’t. So after a two school shootings using pistols, police were grilled about why the gun licenses were issued, then legislation was updated to require two years of active, documented hobby shooting before being issued a pistol license, as well as being over the age of 20.
Crazy. It’s almost like those “hoops” filter out mass murderers.
Nah. You want to be a “responsible gun owner”, so its time for you to take responsibility.
You shouldn’t have any trouble finding countries that would revoke the gun license – if not criminally charge – anyone found keeping a handgun in a glovebox or sock drawer and an AR-15 in a closet.
Millions of Americans do, and it sounds like you’re among them. It sure seems like “responsible gun owners” hate the thought of that responsibility being mandatory.
The pro-gun lobby are, and they’re both funded by you and representing you.
Did you tell all those “women you know” at the top of your comment that you still support their ex-partners owning firearm, even though they have a restraining order? Did they ever speak to you again? Because I certainly wouldn’t if someone told me “I’d rather risk your murder than risk temporarily depriving an innocent person of an inanimate object”.
Yes, you have demonstrated that countries with gun control have lower murder rates (which is exactly my point) despite still having other crime (which I never claimed gun control would eliminate).
Except for all the murders you just acknowledged were lower with gun control, because guns escalate arguments and crimes into homicides since there’s no better tool for quickly and reliably killing someone.
I sure hope you’re not a doctor, because treating symptoms is exactly what they do until the underlying cause is discovered and addressed. If it can’t be cured, managing symptoms is literally their entire focus.
Not in your hospital though. Turn up with a broken arm? “Sorry, pain is just a symptom so we can’t give you anything for it. We also don’t think the bone sticking out of your arm is the actual cause, so we’re not going to address it until you’ve had 6 months of chemotherapy and undergone a colectomy because cancer can cause pain too. We’re not actually going to perform those proceedures, but if someone else does, come back and see us so we can give you new excuses”.
No, it wont. It will reduce the lethality and frequency of every single one of those things instead – an improvement you oppose.
You seem to be confused again. Name every single moral, effective change you can think of to reduce violence and crime and I’ll openly support every one of them. Universal healthcare, addressing wealth inequality, improving education? No problem. You can even raise my taxes to help fund them.
Then when you’re all out of ideas, I will say “Gun control is another moral, effective way to reduce the amount and severity of crime and violence” and you’ll throw a fit about “not that one, we will kill you if you try and implement that one”.
Your views on that one issue align perfectly with both Republicans and the gun-lobby that donates $16 million each year to them – money you give them.
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Gun control predated Hitler lol
A better example would be the NRA supporting gun control to disarm the Black Panthers.
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