How do we curtail gun violence?

[Uncensored2008]

There has been a lot of talk about mass shooting incidents.
What I see in that talk are many people stricken by shock and grief and who have the means to make their voice heard. Very little is said about homicides among our poor.

Gun violence in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deadly mass shootings have resulted in considerable coverage by the media. These shootings have represented 1% of all deaths by gun between 1980 and 2008.​

The United States has a murder rate on par with Thailand.
List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of those murders, of the ones for which the FBI received weapons data, 67.5% involve the use of firearms in 2010.
FBI ? Expanded Homicide Data
The vast majority of homicides with a firearm were committed using a handgun, not an assault weapon. Most of these guns used in these homicides are obtained on the black market. The black market is fueled by the unregulated secondary market.

What are your thoughts on gun violence in America?
What are the proposals to curtail this secondary market and make a dent in the 99% of gun violence in our country?

8% of the criminal population commits 80% of the violent crime in the USA. Keep them in prison forever.

Careful, you'll be called racist for that suggestion...

 

[westwall]

The answer is simple. Make everyone carry a handgun or shotgun wherever they go. School kids starting in kindergarten should be armed with something small like a 22 and should graduate to a semi-automatic by high school. If everyone is carrying a gun, we'll all be safer. It's especially important for everyone going to a nightclub where alcohol is served to be carrying a gun.

Coming from a UK background I find it hard to believe such a system would result in increased safety. I can see the logic but it draws on Mutually Assured Destruction principles, no one will nuke because we will all start firing off. Better than MAD would be having no nukes so surely the same logic can apply here?

Semi-automatics in high school? Coupled with puberty hormones? I cannot believe that this would reduce gun violence, perhaps you could explain it further than; If everyone is carrying a gun, we'll all be safer. Or is this as simple as you can reduce your argument?

The UK is one of the most violent countries out there. Much more violent than the US. We have a higher murder rate but other than that the UK has us cold.


UK is violent crime capital of Europe

"The United Kingdom is the violent crime capital of Europe and has one of the highest rates of violence in the world, worse even than America, according to new research."

UK is violent crime capital of Europe - Telegraph

 

[jc456]

There has been a lot of talk about mass shooting incidents.
What I see in that talk are many people stricken by shock and grief and who have the means to make their voice heard. Very little is said about homicides among our poor.

Gun violence in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deadly mass shootings have resulted in considerable coverage by the media. These shootings have represented 1% of all deaths by gun between 1980 and 2008.​

The United States has a murder rate on par with Thailand.
List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of those murders, of the ones for which the FBI received weapons data, 67.5% involve the use of firearms in 2010.
FBI ? Expanded Homicide Data
The vast majority of homicides with a firearm were committed using a handgun, not an assault weapon. Most of these guns used in these homicides are obtained on the black market. The black market is fueled by the unregulated secondary market.

What are your thoughts on gun violence in America?
What are the proposals to curtail this secondary market and make a dent in the 99% of gun violence in our country?

I think that while there is certainly gun violence here, that it is blown way out of proportion. The chances you will be involved in such violence, unless your lifestyle is such that you increase your odds, is very small. You are in far greater danger on the roadways.

There are no proposals to curtail the issue that will have any impact upon it. If one is ever proposed, one that actually will have an affect beyond allowing some politician some face time on TV, then I may have a different perspective. Until then, I would much prefer to be free than to have illusionary safety.

right there with ya. How about extending technology that won't allow a cell phone to work in a running vehicle. I am more concerned that I will be affected by a texting driver than shot by a gun. My observation is that 70% of people text and drive. And incidents are escalating.

 

[asaratis]

Simple! We curtail violence! Guns are not the problem!

After all, you're trying to curtail deaths and injury from guns. The removal of guns from the general public is not the answer. We all know that criminals will obtain guns no matter what the laws are.

Gun-crime rates (and accompanying violence) in the USA are higher per capita in areas where guns are prohibited by law. (Again, the criminals do not obey the law.)

 

[whitehall]

Every mass shooter in modern history (including Oswald) was a left winger, the child of a left winger or a left wing crazy person. Think about it.

 

[Uncensored2008]

Simple! We curtail violence! Guns are not the problem!

After all, you're trying to curtail deaths and injury from guns. The removal of guns from the general public is not the answer. We all know that criminals will obtain guns no matter what the laws are.

Gun-crime rates (and accompanying violence) in the USA are higher per capita in areas where guns are prohibited by law. (Again, the criminals do not obey the law.)

So, how do we curtail violence?

A couple of observations;

The less educated, the less well off, the more violent people are. Desperation leads to people who engage in violence. A man who's kids are hungry is libel to do anything to feed them.

So how do we increase education among people who are openly hostile to education? Those who equate education with "going white?" How do we decrease poverty among those who are unable to defer gratification in favor of future reward?

You're right that we have a violence problem, but what do we actually do to address it?

 

[M14 Shooter]

Is there any truth to the idea of imposing a vice tax on guns? Would imposing a vice tax on guns and/or ammunition make illegal guns prohibitively expensive? Would the thought of lost revenue make the government more likely to enforce the laws we already have?

Taxing the exercise of a right for the purpose of restricting that exercise qualifies as an infringement and violates the constitution.

 

[Delta4Embassy]

There has been a lot of talk about mass shooting incidents.
What I see in that talk are many people stricken by shock and grief and who have the means to make their voice heard. Very little is said about homicides among our poor.

Gun violence in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Deadly mass shootings have resulted in considerable coverage by the media. These shootings have represented 1% of all deaths by gun between 1980 and 2008.​

The United States has a murder rate on par with Thailand.
List of countries by intentional homicide rate - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Of those murders, of the ones for which the FBI received weapons data, 67.5% involve the use of firearms in 2010.
FBI ? Expanded Homicide Data
The vast majority of homicides with a firearm were committed using a handgun, not an assault weapon. Most of these guns used in these homicides are obtained on the black market. The black market is fueled by the unregulated secondary market.

What are your thoughts on gun violence in America?
What are the proposals to curtail this secondary market and make a dent in the 99% of gun violence in our country?

After WWII and the Holocaust a lot of research was done trying to figure out why despite advanced knowledge and technology we're so f'in stupid and cruel. Answers werre found and solutions discovered.

We know how to reduce violence. We just don't want to because having scapegoats and fear in societies benefits governments.

 

[Little-Acorn]

a completely deregulated economy just isn't working, and hasn't worked,

It's never been tried.

 

[Little-Acorn]

The less educated, the less well off, the more violent people are. Desperation leads to people who engage in violence. A man who's kids are hungry is libel to do anything to feed them.

Yes, that's why the murder rate (in particular murder by gun) went so high during the Great Depression.

Except... it didn't. That period was no higher than the periods before or after it... and considerably LOWER than many periods.

(By the way, there were virtually NO so-called "gun control" laws then.)

Compare that to the last 30 years, when people were much more prosperous... and the murder rates were HIGHER.

The idea that falling prosperity leads to greater violence, or rising murder rates, or rising gun murders, is one of the more easily debunked notions in the whole debate. And it has been repeatedly debunked. Yet people keep citing it as though it held any truth.

 

[Abatis]

"In 1991, Warren E. Burger, the conservative chief justice of the Supreme Court, was interviewed on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour about the meaning of the Second Amendment's "right to keep and bear arms." Burger answered that the Second Amendment "has been the subject of one of the greatest pieces of fraud--I repeat the word 'fraud'--on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime." In a speech in 1992, Burger declared that "the Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to have firearms at all. "In his view, the purpose of the Second Amendment was "to ensure that the 'state armies'--'the militia'--would be maintained for the defense of the state."

Can you quote any statements from Burger on the right to arms or the 2nd Amendment from when his thoughts mattered, you know when he was on the Court?

What you have posted above is a mish-mash of claims, some attributable and some not from when Burger was a paid shill for Handgun Control Inc.

Burger's statements can only be explained by the abandonment of reason for $$$$$ or dementia.

Have you ever read his Parade Magazine article? He sounds like he's schizophrenic . . .

 

[Bush92]

We clean-up our culture and destroy the inner city gangs in America. Then go to church and read the good book.

 

[MaryL]

They used to sell Thompson sub machineguns in mail order catalogs, guns were sold freely back 80 years ago. No mass shootings, no workplace shootings. Well, until the Mafia in Chicago got a hold of the Chopper, the Chicago typewriter. The original gangsters doing drive by's. During prohibition. Now we are talking about a new prohibition on firearms...Well, I would rather have a time machine, and go back 80 years than deal with this conflicted mess America is in NOW. There is no answer. We are better off without guns, but that ain't gonna happen. We were better off without alcohol, too, but that didn't work. Late at night I have heard the rapid fire report of a fully automatic weapon firing off in the distance. This isn't what America or the what the second amendment was meant to be. I would like a new amendment to the constitution, freedom from fear of people baring arms.

 

[AquaAthena]

How do we curtail gun violence? We don't. On one side you have the armed assailant, who kills with a gun. On the other, you have a citizen who owns a gun, who can capably defend themselves with one.

Our mental health system is one of the biggest causes of mass murder. More often than not you have people who snap and in a blind rage kill a bunch of people with a gun.

And there is no way, to detect when a lost person, is going to lose it completely. If they are on meds, they may not even take them as prescribed. There are symptoms in certain people.....things to be on the lookout for, but until someone has committed a crime against others or themselves, there are no solutions. Even then, only stopgap measures can be implemented.

 

[AuntiE]

Related Story: Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study - Los Angeles Times

Gun crime has plunged, but Americans think it's up, says study

Gun crime has plunged in the United States since its peak in the middle of the 1990s, including gun killings, assaults, robberies and other crimes, two new studies of government data show.

Yet few Americans are aware of the dramatic drop, and more than half believe gun crime has risen, according to a newly released survey by the Pew Research Center.

In less than two decades, the gun murder rate has been nearly cut in half. Other gun crimes fell even more sharply, paralleling a broader drop in violent crimes committed with or without guns. Violent crime dropped steeply during the 1990s and has fallen less dramatically since the turn of the millennium.

The number of gun killings dropped 39% between 1993 and 2011, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported in a separate report released Tuesday. Gun crimes that weren’t fatal fell by 69%. However, guns still remain the most common murder weapon in the United States, the report noted. Between 1993 and 2011, more than two out of three murders in the U.S. were carried out with guns, the Bureau of Justice Statistics found.

The bureau also looked into non-fatal violent crimes. Few victims of such crimes -- less than 1% -- reported using a firearm to defend themselves.

Despite the remarkable drop in gun crime, only 12% of Americans surveyed said gun crime had declined compared with two decades ago, according to Pew, which surveyed more than 900 adults this spring. Twenty-six percent said it had stayed the same, and 56% thought it had increased.

It’s unclear whether media coverage is driving the misconception that such violence is up. The mass shootings in Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo., were among the news stories most closely watched by Americans last year, Pew found. Crime has also been a growing focus for national newscasts and morning network shows in the past five years but has become less common on local television news.

“It’s hard to know what’s going on there,” said D’Vera Cohn, senior writer at the Pew Research Center. Women, people of color and the elderly were more likely to believe that gun crime was up than men, younger adults or white people. The center plans to examine crime issues more closely later this year.

Though violence has dropped, the United States still has a higher murder rate than most other developed countries, though not the highest in the world, the Pew study noted. A Swiss research group, the Small Arms Survey, says that the U.S. has more guns per capita than any other country.

Experts debate why overall crime has fallen, attributing the drop to all manner of causes, such as the withering of the crack cocaine market and surging incarceration rates.

Some researchers have even linked dropping crime to reduced lead in gasoline, pointing out that lead can cause increased aggression and impulsive behavior in exposed children.

The victims of gun killings are overwhelmingly male and disproportionately black, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data. Compared with other parts of the country, the South had the highest rates of gun violence, including both murders and other violent gun crimes.

 

[Rikurzhen]

What are your thoughts on gun violence in America?
What are the proposals to curtail this secondary market and make a dent in the 99% of gun violence in our country?

If you want to investigate a problem, then you should look at all features of it.

Here is how the CDC records all of the homicides in the US in 2011 and the corresponding homicide rate.

Let's look at the white, non-Hispanic, homicide rate. How does it compare to Northern Europe, the lands that liberals love to point to as being model societies.

The American white, non-Hispanic, homicide rate is lower than what is seen in Estonia, a tad higher than what we see in Finland, and unquestionably higher than what is seen in Denmark.

How do we compare to Canada and how do the individual states fare?

Look at the upper-midwest and compare to British Columbia and Ontario. About the same.

Overall, looking at all American demographic groups, how do we compare on the issue of domestic homicide? We have the lowest share in the world.

Now go back and look at the first table, the one from the CDC. Our homicide rate in the US is high, but when we isolate out population groups we see that American non-Hispanic males have a homicide rate in the ballpark of what we see in Europe. We're definitely on the high side compared to many European nations but there are also nations there which match and even exceed ours. That analysis doesn't even factor in the massively disproportionate gun ownership rate, for in many European countries gun ownership is quite rare.

America doesn't have a gun-centered homicide problem, we have a black-centered homicide problem that other nations don't have because they have small black populations or none at all. Look at the CDC table again and note the 19.43 per 100,000 homicide rate. That is the problem and it drastically inflates the overall US homicide rate.

If you want to fix the problem, the problem really isn't homicide rate, it's black homicide rate.

 

[Bush92]

They used to sell Thompson sub machineguns in mail order catalogs, guns were sold freely back 80 years ago. No mass shootings, no workplace shootings. Well, until the Mafia in Chicago got a hold of the Chopper, the Chicago typewriter. The original gangsters doing drive by's. During prohibition. Now we are talking about a new prohibition on firearms...Well, I would rather have a time machine, and go back 80 years than deal with this conflicted mess America is in NOW. There is no answer. We are better off without guns, but that ain't gonna happen. We were better off without alcohol, too, but that didn't work. Late at night I have heard the rapid fire report of a fully automatic weapon firing off in the distance. This isn't what America or the what the second amendment was meant to be. I would like a new amendment to the constitution, freedom from fear of people baring arms.

The mob violence of the 1920's is tame by comparison of the violence meted out by the rap gang culture that glorifies packing a 9 and randomly shooting someone because they are wearing red or blue.

 

[Bush92]

What are your thoughts on gun violence in America?
What are the proposals to curtail this secondary market and make a dent in the 99% of gun violence in our country?

If you want to investigate a problem, then you should look at all features of it.

Here is how the CDC records all of the homicides in the US in 2011 and the corresponding homicide rate.

Let's look at the white, non-Hispanic, homicide rate. How does it compare to Northern Europe, the lands that liberals love to point to as being model societies.

The American white, non-Hispanic, homicide rate is lower than what is seen in Estonia, a tad higher than what we see in Finland, and unquestionably higher than what is seen in Denmark.

How do we compare to Canada and how do the individual states fare?

Look at the upper-midwest and compare to British Columbia and Ontario. About the same.

Overall, looking at all American demographic groups, how do we compare on the issue of domestic homicide? We have the lowest share in the world.

Now go back and look at the first table, the one from the CDC. Our homicide rate in the US is high, but when we isolate out population groups we see that American non-Hispanic males have a homicide rate in the ballpark of what we see in Europe. We're definitely on the high side compared to many European nations but there are also nations there which match and even exceed ours. That analysis doesn't even factor in the massively disproportionate gun ownership rate, for in many European countries gun ownership is quite rare.

America doesn't have a gun-centered homicide problem, we have a black-centered homicide problem that other nations don't have because they have small black populations or none at all. Look at the CDC table again and note the 19.43 per 100,000 homicide rate. That is the problem and it drastically inflates the overall US homicide rate.

If you want to fix the problem, the problem really isn't homicide rate, it's black homicide rate.

Somebody just dropped the atomic bomb on the 2nd Amendment haters and won this war.

 

[Politico]

Yeah with the black haters at least.

 

[Rikurzhen]

Yeah with the black haters at least.

Don't worry about hurting my feelings. Rip the data I presented. Show us all how I'm wrong.