Something like 66% of gun deaths in America are suicides. Gun violence in places like Detroit and New Orleans can be attributed in part to urban poverty and gang activity.

I could be way off base, but my thoughts are that trying to hammer through restrictive gun control will be hard fought and largely fruitless. Efforts to improve the nation's mental health services and combat widespread poverty would have as much or more effect on gun deaths as attempting to tightly control their distribution. Additionally, I have heard that existing measures have failed to stop people who shouldn't have gotten a gun in the first place. Shoring up those measures should be a priority.

tl;dr: I think fighting about how much more gun control we need is a wasted effort. There are other more important things we can focus on that will have the side effect of lowering gun deaths.

10/7/2015 11:00:02 AM

Quote :

"Both NRA types and gun-control advocates have called for greater emphasis on screening for, and treatment of, potential mass murderers by the mental health system. There is no question that the public mental health system in this country has been shredded by decades of ever-intensifying fiscal starvation, as I well know from having worked in that system for 20 years. Likewise, there is no question that a MUCH more robust and effective public mental health system might prevent some small portion of the seemingly ever-more-frequent mass murders by gun in this country. But the idea that the mental health professions, even if lavishly supported, could stem this epidemic of extreme violence in the absence of effective gun control measures, is not just an obvious attempt at distraction and diversion by the NRA but even a fallacious assumption by the best intentioned advocates of mental health services. In brief, you don't treat stop epidemics with targeted medical treatment of individuals but rather with public health measures, ESPECIALLY when it's so difficult to identify the individuals who are actually at high risk of manifesting the "disease."."

10/7/2015 11:15:08 AM

Quote :

"Nothing like including suicide statistics to try and exaggerate gun violence."

Are you saying if the 60% from that 100 who commit suicide did not have guns, they would still all kill themselves using other means?

I say they won't. Perhaps half of them or less. Killing yourself with a gun is easy, is instantaneous, and doesn't require much guts/balls/courage/callitwhatyouwant.

10/7/2015 11:17:11 AM

^ Taking away the easy means of suicide from everyone is two things. It is not fair to everyone else and it does not address underlying mental health issues.

^^ I honestly brought that up more because of the suicide numbers than for mass murderers.

[Edited on October 7, 2015 at 11:24 AM. Reason : ]

10/7/2015 11:23:26 AM

Not to mention, many people who try to commit suicide but fail, report a sense of regret. For example, that person who jumps off of a bridge instantly realizes that life isnt that bsd, and that the problems they face acrually arent insurmountable.


Of course, suicide prevention is important, but not really the primary goal.

[Edited on October 7, 2015 at 11:28 AM. Reason : D]

10/7/2015 11:26:54 AM

why wouldn't suicide prevention be the primary goal ?

making it more likely for you to fail at committing suicide seems like a backwards way of addressing the problem ....

10/7/2015 11:36:04 AM

I just think that reducing gun deaths in general is the goal, which of course includes suicides by firearm

10/7/2015 12:56:17 PM

ahhh ok fair enough

10/7/2015 1:13:06 PM

^^ I think the things I mentioned will reduce gun deaths in general and likely more successfully than trying and failing to push restrictive gun control measures.

10/7/2015 2:06:26 PM

So, there is a pretty convincing argument that gun laws work.... it is just that weak gun laws do not. And it would appear that trends support this, whereas states with more gun laws tend to have fewer gun deaths.
But when laws fail to pass, are watered down in congress, or are otherwise circumvented (think Chicago with strict gun laws, but a gun shop directy outside of city limits), we are left with gun laws that arent significant as a deterrent.

10/7/2015 2:16:05 PM

For real though, can we discuss congress blocking the CDC from even collecting data on gun deaths. This prevents researching this problem as a healthcare issue, and limits the discussion to that of a societal issue imo.

10/7/2015 2:27:10 PM

^^ I don't know that there is a convincing argument for that. There may be trends on a state level, but on a city-level, it seems to be the exact opposite at times. Even the supposed poster-child of gun control, Australia, is a toss-up as to how their laws performed. At the very least, I don't think there's a convincing case for gun control for the purpose of preventing suicides. I think targeted anti-suicide measures would be far more useful and effective while reaching a much broader group of people, not to mention you wouldn't also have to deal with the NRA's opposition.

^ That is dumb. We do need data. It'd be nice if that data wasn't from a politicized process, but that's not gonna happen any time soon. There is a compelling point that we would lack data from the early 1900s and that could skew the conclusions a bit, but that really just means we need to be more careful in analyzing the data.

Quote :

"Not the total weed/court cost bullshit that TGL is echoing like an ignoramus."

It's funny you posted this, because NPR did a story yesterday talking about how low-level offenders are being habitually returned to prison for not paying court costs, or even the cost of their public defenders. It's maybe not the "tons of guys who get busted once for weed and end up in prison for 10 years because of it," scenario, but something similar is certainly happening.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/10/07/446681086/aclu-sues-benton-county-wash-for-operating-modern-day-debtors-prison

10/8/2015 7:38:59 PM

Quote :

"Even the supposed poster-child of gun control, Australia, is a toss-up as to how their laws performed."

wat

10/8/2015 11:17:47 PM

Quote :

"NPR did a story yesterday talking about how low-level offenders are being habitually returned to prison for not paying court costs"

JAIL != PRISON

man i got a dwi, had to do a night in county PRISON


[Edited on October 8, 2015 at 11:24 PM. Reason : .]

10/8/2015 11:23:13 PM

people do go to prison for DUIs though

10/9/2015 1:46:55 AM

Like, their third one, maybe, if they're a black male.

But, in NC, even the fourth one is often weekends in jail for 6 months or whatever.

I think TT10 is overlooking certain localized places that actually do have a real problem with locking people up for what we largely regard as misdemeanors.

But he's right that we should be clear about the circumstances that have led to most nonviolent offenders ending up in prison. We can't paint them all as stoners who just like weed too much--that's not an accurate picture of who's actually in prison.

And, if like me, you wanna get those people out, then we need to be real about the behaviors we think should be legal...I'm not gonna pretend this is a marijuana law problem when I really wanna let drug purveyors of all types out of prison.

10/9/2015 2:06:03 AM

Weirdo Burro continues to lead the dumb on this issue.

[Edited on October 9, 2015 at 2:12 AM. Reason : And the suicide thing is the red herring of the century ]

10/9/2015 2:10:37 AM

So is this a "school shooting" or just beef in the parking lot?

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/latest-news/article38312709.html

also, do we blame gun control on those coked up fuckes a few years back at our football tailgate? i mean, shooting, near school and stuff

Quote :

"I think TT10 is overlooking certain localized places that actually do have a real problem with locking people up for what we largely regard as misdemeanors."

it definitely seems pretty fucked up that you could get locked up for not paying court costs. but anytime the word prison gets thrown out there, it's implying you don't pay your speeding ticket, and you become cell mates with someone serving a life sentence for murder. also the term "debtors' prison" is extremely misleading in modern terms

[Edited on October 9, 2015 at 7:51 AM. Reason : .]

10/9/2015 7:43:25 AM

It's not what the media is hoping... Based on time and location I'm calling a drunken fight.

10/9/2015 9:45:32 AM

i'm pretty sure having one person dead just because of a drunken fight is exactly the kind of shit that supports gun control.

because if there wasn't a gun involved, it's pretty damn likely nobody would be dead.

but because some asshole had a gun and was a bitch, somebody's dead. just like the tailgate murders at NC State

[Edited on October 9, 2015 at 9:50 AM. Reason : .]

10/9/2015 9:50:05 AM

Yeah, pretty much.

I guess I was just pointing out that I wouldn't call it a "mass school shooting" or whatever per se, even though multiple people were shot at a school.

10/9/2015 9:57:15 AM

The media is hoping for a "mass school shooting." Had this party been off campus it would be the same outcome but no national media coverage.

10/9/2015 10:05:47 AM

Quote :

"it definitely seems pretty fucked up that you could get locked up for not paying court costs. but anytime the word prison gets thrown out there, it's implying you don't pay your speeding ticket, and you become cell mates with someone serving a life sentence for murder. also the term "debtors' prison" is extremely misleading in modern terms"

True, but a lot of jails are also grossly overcrowded and not a cool place to be either, especially when you're there instead of making moves to try to get the money to pay court costs. People on the edge can get tossed into a nasty cycle fast--they're in jail, they lose their jobs, can't even approach covering their child support, definitely not paying insurance/registration on the cars everybody knows that they're driving anyway...if they ever even had a license, it's probably been suspended for years. Like, they're perpetually a "criminal" just for existing, and in the absence of child support, their original debts are rarely even all the hefty--they just snowball with a series of not-so-smart decisions.

And it's almost exclusively happening to dudes.

10/9/2015 11:41:06 AM

and then republicans keep making it harder to get an abortion so they can avoid the child support

10/9/2015 5:50:51 PM

^ que?

10/10/2015 5:07:56 PM

Grenovetters threshold model may help people like goalielax understand how shootings can be a contagion, because of changing threshold levels
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/19/thresholds-of-violence

10/12/2015 12:39:22 PM