Firearm Expertise

[SissySalina]

Now you have gone from taking Assault Weapons to Back Ground Checks.
Looks like someone is backing up.

 

[coachdb18]

*not actually a fact.

It actually IS a fact, and more than one of these shooters has documented their targeting based on gun free zone status giving them more time to run up a big score unapposed.

 

[NightL]

Now you have gone from taking Assault Weapons to Back Ground Checks.
Looks like someone is backing up.

Once again you spout forth without thinking or apparently reading

Here is another quote from the same published article
"67 - 29 percent for a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons;"

 

[OTCurve]

Noting that assault weapons have been banned before, at least partially (the 1994 bill didn't encompass pre-existing weapons) so that doesn't necessarily require amendment to the Constitution. That ban also encompassed some semi-automatic weapons.

(For the benefit of gun enthusiasts who may be grinding their teeth right now, I will acknowledge that "assault weapon" is a vague and unhelpful term, and that the 1994 bill had some very weird inclusions.)

BTW, I realised there's one thing missing from NightL's list, which I will also advocate: kill the Dickey Amendment.

(re. "Surrounding school with razor-wire fences and armed guards. Kindergarteners being taught to yell and throw books at an attacker - not to stop him, not to save their own lives, but to draw out their deaths so their schoolmates have a few more seconds to get away. ")



From this post and this one, you certainly seemed to be advocating armed guards and perhaps even arming teachers, but perhaps I misunderstood?

Fencing has been widely advocated as part of a defensive strategy; if you google through recent discussion on school safety measures or see e.g. here, you'll find it. It's pretty much inevitable if you want to defend something the size of a school campus without hiring dozens of guards (unlikely to be affordable); you need to restrict access to a few choke points that can be covered by a small number of guards, and that means serious fences or walls or something similar.

And you'd better hope the guards are good, because if they don't stop that shooter in a hurry... well, the same measures that were meant to stop the shooter from getting in will also stop students from getting out.



http://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens...d-to-throw-books-at-school-shooters-1.4542023



I'll agree that Everytown is partisan. Breitbart is very, very partisan. Unfortunately, thanks largely to that Dickey Amendment, it's very hard to find non-partisan sources on this issue. But in this case we can make some headway by looking at the partisan sources.

The Everytown report I linked to was published in 2017, drawing on data about shootings up to December 2016. The Breitbart article was published in 2014, so obviously it's not a direct response to that report, but let's look at it anyway.

The Breitbart piece is drawn pretty much entirely from this 2014 CPRC report. The first author on that report is John Lott, and as I mentioned before, Lott only considers public mass shootings. The introduction makes this clear: "In this report, the CPRC looks at mass public shootings since the beginning of 2009."

They do go on to criticise a 2014 report from Everytown (not the same one I linked to):

"The CPRC also re-evaluates Everytown for Gun Safety's recent findings on mass shootings... Everytown greatly exaggerated their number by including gang killings and shootings as part of some other crime as well as residential killings involving families."

In other words - both sides are in agreement that the Everytown stats include residential mass shootings, and CPRC's do not. To give CPRC their due, they are very clear that their stats refer only to public mass shootings (i.e. less than half of all mass shooting incidents).

Breitbart repeats that language in the article, but their headline drops out that important qualifier "public". People who only read the headlines then cite that as "92% of mass shootings in gun-free zones", which is simply false, and not supported by either report.

The CPRC report states that "Everytown's discussion contained numerous other errors. Everytown’s claims were flawed as to the extent of mental illness, the age of the killers, and even where the attacks occurred. Those errors occurred because they did not do a complete news search on each case."

As noted above, this refers to an earlier report from Everytown, not the 2017 report that I linked.

The one I did link includes an appendix which gives the details of all the shootings they looked at in order to get their numbers. So you don't have to take it on trust; if you don't believe Everytown has reported them accurately, you can go verify those reports for yourself.

Since home shootings are the central point of contention here, I randomly picked three of the "home shooting" incidents in their appendix.

#1: Sinking Springs, PA, 08/06/2016. Everytown says: "Mark Short, 40, fatally shot his wife and their three children ... before fatally shooting himself."

So, did that happen?

Yep.
Yep. He shot the family dog, too.

#2: Liberty, SC, 10/14/2011. Everytown says: "Susan Diane Hendricks, 48, fatally shot her ex-husband, their two sons, and her stepmother."

Yep.
Yep.

#3: Greenwood, NM, 9/10/2015. Everytown says: "Brian Short, 45, fatally shot his wife and their three children ... before fatally shooting himself. The shooting took place in the family’s home."

Yep.
Yep.

In all three of those cases, the Everytown appendix seems to be an accurate summary of the facts as reported. I didn't check further - reading up on this kind of shit is profoundly depressing - and I'm sure that if you looked long enough and hard enough, you could find an error in the details here and there. But three for three is enough for me to be pretty confident that their reports are mostly correct.

I haven't hunted down the earlier report that CPRC was criticising, so for all I know it's quite possible that it did have all the failings that CPRC attributes to it. But if so, it's also quite possible that Everytown saw that criticism and improved their quality-checking for the 2017 report.

Bottom line: a very large percentage of mass shootings take place in private homes, the CPRC stats explicitly exclude those events, and therefore they're not going to give accurate information about "mass shootings" in general.



Yes, if a zone has designated people on duty carrying guns there, it's not "gun free". That's what those words mean.

Otherwise, are we going to say that a school with armed guards is still "gun free" because the students aren't allowed to carry?



Last weekend I went to a concert with about 3000 other people. To the best of my knowledge, none of the audience were armed, and neither were the security guards. I expect there would've been a handful of police there, armed with handguns, but I didn't see them.

It wasn't scary at all. The only thought I had for safety was checking that there wasn't any risk of a crowd crush (there wasn't) and then I spent the rest of the evening listening to music and chatting to my partner.

I can understand that if you're used to a violent society, it would feel instinctively scary to know that somebody could attack and you don't have the means to fight back. Even in my neck of the woods, it's not completely risk-free; last year some dickhead killed six people with a car before the police stopped him. But the fact that it's so hard for those dickheads to get guns - especially rapid-fire high-capacity guns - greatly outweighs the tiny difference that carrying a gun might make to my own safety.



As an example, "gentlemen's club" wasn't always a euphemism for "strip joint". Once upon a time it was a place where men could go and spend time exclusively in the company of other men of similar social status and political persuasion. They've declined a bit lately, and some now admit women, but there are still quite a few men-only clubs around. A club may not be officially white-only, but it's easy for them to end up that way; people have plenty of ways to discourage others from showing up.

That's a safe space. It's not called that, it's not advertised as that, it doesn't officially impose the same sort of rules you'd find in a university campus safe space, but in practice it serves the same sort of purpose: it's a place where people can go to relax or to focus on something, without the unpleasantness of having to encounter a contrary opinion.

One thing that these "sheltered snowflakes can't deal with the world, so they demand safe spaces" discussions pretty much always miss is that nobody is expecting to live in that sheltered environment 24/7. Safe spaces are about giving people space where they can breathe easy just for a few hours without having to argue with somebody who believes they shouldn't exist/etc. etc.



"The criminal set" is not a monolith.

Australia has organised crime. I walk past a mob-owned restaurant almost every day. I would expect that our local mafias still have access to semi-automatic weapons if they want them; they have the connections and the resources to smuggle them in, or occasionally to steal them from police/military.

But mafias are businesses, and the people who run them want to stay in business. They may be vicious sons-of-bitches, and sometimes they go after one another, but they're smart enough to understand that mass murder - or any murder of innocent parties - is very bad for business.

I have no doubt that there are other people who've held on to their semi-autos. But a ban gives them a very strong incentive to stash them out of sight, which reduces the temptation to pull them out in the middle of a domestic argument, and reduces the risk that somebody else will get hold of them. That's very nearly as good as taking them out of circulation altogether.

Note also that mass shooters almost always turn out to have a track record of domestic violence, which means at least one family member who has a strong incentive to report any illegal firearms.



They can, and occasionally they do. But there are reasons why guns are the mass killer's weapon of choice.

If a killer just wants to rack up a body count and make the headlines, and doesn't care who they kill, yeah, they can do what the guy in Nice did and drive a vehicle into a crowd during a public event.

But most mass murderers want to target some more specific group: workmates, family members, classmates, and so on. Vehicle attacks aren't so effective for that kind of attack.

There's also the psychological side. Shooting somebody is a different act to bombing them or stabbing them or driving a truck into them; it lets the attacker maintain a certain distance while still seeing the consequences first-hand. A terrorist who can't get a gun will look for some other weapon that does the job; it's not so clear that other would-be killers will simply substitute weapons.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Kunming_attack

Your numbers are roughly correct, but note that this wasn't a lone attacker like mass shootings are, or even a two-person attack like Columbine or San Bernardino. It was an organised attack by a group of eight terrorists. Between them they killed 31 civilians, i.e. on average ~ four per attacker. Eight attackers with a gun could've killed a lot more.

Indeed, and it was less than a rousing success. From what I can tell, there was not a noticeable decrease in crime. Reasons given vary, from the scarcity of crimes committed with rifles before the ban to the large amount of rifles grandfathered and still in the population.

That does bring something up, the vast number of rifles already out there. A ban on further purchases does not address that issue, and the only solution would be removal (confiscation), which leads to war. I still think, given how many rifles are actually used in crimes and murders, this needs to be approached from a direction which does not include a ban. These rifles will last decades, and some generations, before they wear out.

You are correct in that I do advocate protecting schools far more than is done now, which is what, locked doors and maybe a resource officer? Given the levels of protection we give to our money in banks and the armed security details for every politician and government building, it seems measures to protect children should be higher than those.

By 'those things', I was referring to razor-wire and the kingergarteners acting as distractions, which I do not agree with at all.

Fencing may be advocated, but I think two or three choke points, hardened, would be a better start. Also, I recall the doors to classrooms being quite flimsy, what about rethinking that with a bullet-resistant measure, plating or whatnot. That isn't my field, but a nice robust door that can be secured against intrusion would be a good compromise, at least something we can all agree on, yes?

Measures have to be taken if you want to save children in their place of schooling. Leaving it just the same as it was isn't likely to change anything.

At this point I think all these reports have errors, whichever side it represents. I don't know I would classify a domestic violence killing as a mass shooting, regardless if it can technically be called that. But I would ask why no huge outcry over the domestic mass shootings, if that report is accurate on the numbers? Where is the outrage? And by that, I do not mean people feeling sick that a husband could do that to his family. I mean why isn't it on the news, demanding change?

Like Chicago, it is a cesspool of law-breaking and violence. Far more than this latest mass shooting. Where is the outcry? Not trying to deflect, I want you to ask yourself why there is no outcry with more killing than these mass shootings going on, every month? Why is no attention being brought to it?

To me, a gun-free zone is an area where citizens (not law enforcement or military), who are allowed to carry (either open or concealed) normally is not allowed to do so in this instance. Sports arenas, courthouses, things like that. You will find most people on the pro-gun side of the fence use this meaning.

Yes, a school with armed guards is considered a 'gun free' zone as I, who is legally allowed to carry concealed, may not do so in that area. Same with any place that posts a 'no guns allowed' sign.

I hope you had a good time at the concert, who did you see?

The point I was trying to make was over here, if people thought a gathering was vulnerable to attack, then purposely made it a 'gun free' zone, effectively disarming the law-biding folk while allowing a criminal free reign, was scary.

As for gentleman's clubs being safe spaces, well, that's an interesting viewpoint. I don't think everyone in a club like that had identical opinions on everything. Going to relax, sure, but the reports on university safe spaces seemed to be more of the emergency variety. Like that university where students were feeling traumatized because someone had used chalk to write the word Trump on some steps.

Mature people can discuss contrary views without getting triggered or traumatized. Losing control just because someone has an opinion that is not in line with yours is a different matter completely, don't you think?

I get what you say about organized crime and how 'the criminal set' isn't a monolith. You have these, for lack of a better term, businessmen, and they operate in a certain understanding that, as you say, mass murder is bad for business. The mass shooters over here, the ones publicized in the news, don't have that restriction. They do not care about business, they certainly do not care about laws, as they go and murder people. I don't know of the correlation between these murderers and domestic violence, but it certainly is a factor to investigate. One of the problems that arises are the new laws proposed that allow people to report on other people when something is 'off'. If used properly, certainly they can save lives. The problem is that these laws are almost always abused, like the restraining orders. Used properly, and assuming the party that is 'restrained' feels like obeying the law, which is not all cases by far, and it works. But when they are used spitefully, like to set up property and child custody in a divorce, well, that abuse needs to be considered as well.

I don't know if most mass murderers want to target specifics. Certainly a lot do, but I wonder, if the San Bernadino duo didn't have access to the workplace, would they have shot up others? Or that guy in the Pulse nightclub, or Vegas, they seemed a little on the vague side. The nut that shot the Congressfolk playing baseball, yeah, he had an axe to grind it seemed. Still, I think the answer is simpler than that. Guns over here are a mass killer's weapon of choice due to availability, something that will not change noticeably after a ban, given the numbers involved. But, theorize the absence of guns and out come the trucks, etc. Before you say the number of killings without rifles will be lower, do know that both blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc) and 'personal weapons' (hands, fists, feet, etc) each were responsible for more deaths than rifles. That's all rifles, not just the AR series.

No, it isn't clear what the would-be killers would do without rifles. I do believe, though, that someone that bent, who is ready to murder the innocent, will most likely wind up doing so in some manner.

I will ask one thing, again, not to deflect, but an actual question. Why is it, do you think, that in all other murders, whether it be by hammers, fists, crowbars, knives, hit and runs, and such, the object used is never blamed, it is always the person doing the killing. But with a gun, so often it is the item blamed and not the killer?

 

[OTCurve]

The dinosaurs are feeling threatened, but it was the young who were slaughtered yet again. The young will take over and your world will cease to exist. If they feel short changed and dismissed in the forthcoming nationwide school walk out, just remember they are the next round of voters. When offered the opportunity they will vote in numbers like never before.

An NRA controlled government is establishment they will reject. The young are never fond of establishment. They also don't fear your kind OTCurve.

Your arguments and scrabbling for Breitbart "statistics" will soon enough be just irrelevant.

_______________________________

I mentioned my disdain for what I see as the influence of American nightly television shows and also violent games has on the normalising and glorification of guns. Guns are nightly portrayed as the easy solution to solve disputes and also the almighty attention seeker. If you throw in lax upholding of laws, laws that allow military style weapons to be easily accessible, the careless nature and regard to storing weapons then those bent on self-destructive attention seeking or have a propensity toward domestic abuse are likely to gravitate to what is dished up nightly as "normal". If guns are easily accessible they will use them to tragic results time and time again.

The argument "but if they bring in tighter gun laws it will only be a matter of time before the government regulates how you wipe your arse" is just nonsense. As I mentioned in an earlier post here, you don't drive the kids to school in a formula 1 car, nascar or indeed an armoured tank as they are deemed dangerous to be on public roads. Regulation, restriction and licensing for the safety of the public - the world has not gone to hell and back again because of that, nor will tighter gun control laws be the downfall of modern America.

This whole "but they will use knives or drive cars" - maybe, but I fancy my running ability against someone wielding a knife any day, or even leaping from the path of an oncoming car than trying to dodge a bullet, especially when the bullet is followed almost instantaneously by countless other rounds.

Stupid stupid dinosaurs. Young people now resent you and their bite, even before they can vote is making the NRA controlled government nervous as all hell.

I'm curious OTCurve, how will you respond to this growing swell of protest from the young? Threaten them with an automatic weapon?

I find it very telling, NightL, that in that whole overdramatic diatribe, you seem to blame an inanimate object, never the killer.

You seem okay with killing, and will take your chances running or leaping, but there is never any thought about the killer.

Goodness, you do seem to view the opposing side as violent. Threatening people with an automatic weapon? You're talking to the wrong side for that.

 

[OTCurve]

"Support for Gun Control Surges to Highest Level Ever as GOP Lawmakers Sit on Their Hands"

"In a new poll, a whopping 97 percent of people say they support universal background checks."

Yet Florida legislators vote down attempt to ban assault rifles

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/po...ault-rifles/K7yhWC5B2wTAggC88PRLLP/story.html

The motion failed by a 36-71 vote.

 

[SissySalina]

Once again you spout forth without thinking or apparently reading

Here is another quote from the same published article
"67 - 29 percent for a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons;"

Poles are great for people that like numbers. If you keep asking the same people same or different questions you still come up with the same type numbers.
A pole is only as good as its data base. sissy can ask the same people with a little different worded question and get the result that sissy wants. Poles are for politicians because they can be manipulated to say anything you want it to.

 

[NightL]

unlike Australia (which is a country that sissy likes) America is free and not a penile colony.

Poles are great for people that like numbers.

So you are talking of penile poles?

Intriguing to witness a character broken.

 

[Emerson40]

Albert Brudzewski:

A Pole with a fondness for numbers, and a pretty boss beard.

 

[SissySalina]

So you are talking of penile poles?

Intriguing to witness a character broken.

Guess sissy will just have to go out and get a couple of assault rifles this weekend before they get banned by NightL.

 

[twister947]

The mind boggles...

 

[Bramblethorn]

It actually IS a fact,

Do you have a cite for this that doesn't fudge the numbers by ignoring shootings in private homes?

Besides, you're still conflating causation and correlation. If you saw a study that said 90% of people die in hospital, would you be trying to make the world safer by banning hospitals?

If you saw a study that says 100% of mass shootings take place in the presence of a gun, would you be arguing for banning guns?

 

[coachdb18]

Do you have a cite for this that doesn't fudge the numbers by ignoring shootings in private homes?

Besides, you're still conflating causation and correlation. If you saw a study that said 90% of people die in hospital, would you be trying to make the world safer by banning hospitals?

If you saw a study that says 100% of mass shootings take place in the presence of a gun, would you be arguing for banning guns?

According to the Crime Prevention Research Center, from the 1950’s through July 10th of 2016, 98.4 percent of mass shootings have occurred on gun-free zones, with just 1.6 percent occurring where citizens are allowed to have firearms with them.

A spreadsheet with the collected details of the 53 mass shooting incidents from 1998 to 2013 show that 51 of these have been in 'gun free zones'. The details are available here
https://crimeresearch.org/2014/09/more-misleading-information-from-bloombergs-everytown-for-gun-safety-on-guns-analysis-of-recent-mass-shootings/

https://crimeresearch.org/2014/09/more-misleading-information-from-bloombergs-everytown-for-gun-safety-on-guns-analysis-of-recent-mass-shootings/

https://www.theblaze.com/news/2017/01/09/over-98-of-mass-shootings-occurred-on-gun-free-zones-research-shows

 

[NightL]

A spreadsheet...

The Blaze & Crime Prevention Research Center???

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/crime-prevention-research-center/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-blaze/

Oh this will be so funny

popcorn time

 

[toeskr]

The Blaze & Crime Prevention Research Center???

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/crime-prevention-research-center/
https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/the-blaze/

Oh this will be so funny

popcorn time

^^^^^^ aussie still jerking off to shit she can't change. Still trying to mold the world and lit into her comfy box of safety and security.

Keep fighting the good fight sister.

 

[NightL]

I am just curious twinkletoes on how you plan on preventing the change that is happening around you?

 

[toeskr]

I am just curious twinkletoes on how you plan on preventing the change that is happening around you?

Is this the " big " change you have been hoping for?

Sorry for you but it will be anticlimactic.

Preventing, you are funny. Delusional but funny. There will be absolutely no change that affects me in the slightest. Life will still be great for me but then again, I don't make it my personal crusade to worry about other countries laws or try to bend this "porn" board to cater to my personal beliefs.

Carry on.

I'm sorry, I lied to you a lil bit.

I'll change a little. What I will do is wait for the fake panic created by you and your kind to drive up the price of weapons. I'll sell about half of mine to your brothers and sisters that don't want to admit they want one but are afraid of not being able to get their hands on one. Then when the fake news panic goes down, I'll buy some more and wait for the next CNN propaganda wave. Kinda like a liberal driven money making machine. Does CNN or MSNBC report on the daily inner-city crimes, usually committed by the same race. Kills more people biweekly than a big news making "mass" shooting by an AR-15 "type" weapon? No, because it doesn't generate great emotions.

Your kind keeps perpetuating this cycle and if you keep eating the soylent CNN keeps feeding you, there is not much that can help you.

Like I say, keep to your own politics and just enjoy lit as a "porn" board. You will drive yourself crazy if you don't.

 

[NightL]

 

[toeskr]

^^^^^ clueless about America.

Stick with your country's politics sister.

We're all laughing at you here.

 

[Bramblethorn]

[re. assault weapon ban] Indeed, and it was less than a rousing success. From what I can tell, there was not a noticeable decrease in crime.

Well, it wasn't much of a ban. It didn't do anything about weapons manufactured before the date of the law, and as you note, rifles can last for generations before they wear out. I'm not arguing for the 1994 bill as a model for effective legislation, just as evidence that it is possible to make laws around this stuff.

That does bring something up, the vast number of rifles already out there. A ban on further purchases does not address that issue, and the only solution would be removal (confiscation), which leads to war. I still think, given how many rifles are actually used in crimes and murders, this needs to be approached from a direction which does not include a ban. These rifles will last decades, and some generations, before they wear out.

This is why a major part of the Australian gun-control plan was a buyback of existing weapons. And, yeah, even if gun control was legally imposed through democratic process - anything's popular if you get enough support to modify the Constitution, and gun control is pretty popular at the moment - I'm sure there would be some extremists who would get violent rather than accept that law.

But if the only reason for denying a democratically-produced change is the fear of violence from those who oppose it... well, that really is tyranny.

You are correct in that I do advocate protecting schools far more than is done now, which is what, locked doors and maybe a resource officer? Given the levels of protection we give to our money in banks and the armed security details for every politician and government building, it seems measures to protect children should be higher than those.

Ronald Reagan had an armed security detail, several highly-trained guards all tasked with his protection, and it still didn't prevent him from being shot.

Children aren't banknotes. You might be able to protect them from shootings by raising them in a school built like an armoured vault, but there's a cost to that. You risk creating a generation of institutionalised kids who don't know how to cope in a more open environment.

Fencing may be advocated, but I think two or three choke points, hardened, would be a better start. Also, I recall the doors to classrooms being quite flimsy, what about rethinking that with a bullet-resistant measure, plating or whatnot. That isn't my field, but a nice robust door that can be secured against intrusion would be a good compromise, at least something we can all agree on, yes?

I'd want to hear from security experts before I agreed with that. No doubt an armoured door will make it harder for an attacker to break into a classroom (if he isn't already inside) but it also makes it harder for SWAT to get in, and potentially harder for students and teachers to get out if they need to - plenty of ways to jam a door. Is that a net positive? Maybe, but I'd need to ask somebody who thinks about this sort of stuff for a living (and who doesn't have an interest in selling me armoured doors).

What about windows? Are we armouring those too, or just bricking them up?

How much is all this likely to cost?

At this point I think all these reports have errors, whichever side it represents. I don't know I would classify a domestic violence killing as a mass shooting, regardless if it can technically be called that. But I would ask why no huge outcry over the domestic mass shootings, if that report is accurate on the numbers? Where is the outrage? And by that, I do not mean people feeling sick that a husband could do that to his family. I mean why isn't it on the news, demanding change?

Why do people pay more attention to other murders than others? Important and complicated question. I'm not a psychologist, but a couple of things that I think contribute:

#1: People aren't very rational beings. Unless we make a conscious effort to seek out facts and let them guide decision-making, we tend to run on instinct. Stuff that gets more publicity has more impact on people's world-view. A terrorist kills a couple of people, and an entire nation loses its shit and demands drastic measures; an abusive husband kills his wife and kids, it barely makes the middle pages of the paper. (Unless he comes from a background that lets them exoticise it as a "honour killing", anyway.)

#2: Seriously addressing domestic violence would require us to think seriously about toxic/fragile masculinity, and a lot of people aren't ready to have that conversation.

I hope you had a good time at the concert, who did you see?

Ben Folds, and yeah, it was a great night out. Didn't even have to pay for the tickets

The point I was trying to make was over here, if people thought a gathering was vulnerable to attack, then purposely made it a 'gun free' zone, effectively disarming the law-biding folk while allowing a criminal free reign, was scary.

Well, "vulnerable" has two parts to it - the risk of an attack, and the magnitude of the harm that would be done if a risk did happen.

Like I posted previously, most mass shooters seem to go after a place that has some significance to them. They have a grudge against a particular person or organisation, and they go after that. There are a few who just want to kill as many as they can, but mostly the place is determined by their motivations. Mother Jones looked at 62 mass shootings up to 2013 and found none where the killer chose the target because it was a gun-free zone.

And most mass shooters aren't expecting to survive their attack. So I don't see much reason to believe that designating a place as a GFZ has much likelihood of encouraging a planned mass shooting.

But when a shooting does take place?

Civilian GGWAGs have a small chance of stopping the attacker earlier than they would have stopped otherwise. It's hard to find examples of it actually happening, but I'll certainly accept that there is a non-zero probability. Against that, though, they also present a risk to themselves, to unarmed civilians, and to the police. It's not at all clear to me that the risk of "friendly fire" shooting outweighs the small chance of stopping the shooting earlier.

Here are a few threads from trained soldiers and police about the challenges involved in a real-life shooting. They're worth a read. They came up in the context of arming teachers but most of the discussion applies more generally.

https://twitter.com/pecunium/status/966511946576121856
https://twitter.com/Iamwhoismoses/status/966482378645438464
https://twitter.com/KoolMoeSteve/status/964690097625972736

Meanwhile, GFZs reduce the likelihood of unplanned stupidity from the sort of guy who pulls his gun over a $12 IHOP bill.

I get what you say about organized crime and how 'the criminal set' isn't a monolith. You have these, for lack of a better term, businessmen, and they operate in a certain understanding that, as you say, mass murder is bad for business. The mass shooters over here, the ones publicized in the news, don't have that restriction. They do not care about business, they certainly do not care about laws, as they go and murder people.

Yep. And nor did ours. My point was that while some criminals will still be able to obtain banned guns, that doesn't necessarily mean would-be shooters can get them. Most don't have the right connections, or they don't have the patience and self-control to keep their guns a secret.

I don't know if most mass murderers want to target specifics. Certainly a lot do, but I wonder, if the San Bernadino duo didn't have access to the workplace, would they have shot up others? Or that guy in the Pulse nightclub, or Vegas, they seemed a little on the vague side.

As per the Mother Jones link I posted above - it's generally guys killing their own families, or people shooting up their own workplace, or kids shooting up their own school, that sort of thing.

The guy who attacked Pulse was known for hating LGBT and Hispanic people. He attacked a gay nightclub on "Latin night", and over 90% of the people he killed were Hispanic, so it seems plausible that that was a specific target.

The Las Vegas attack: seems like the attacker had researched other open-air concert venues for a while beforehand, so I'll grant that one. But a guy shooting from elevation 450 metres from the crowd... I'm having trouble thinking of a plausible scenario where allowing concert-goers to carry arms would've helped there.

The nut that shot the Congressfolk playing baseball, yeah, he had an axe to grind it seemed. Still, I think the answer is simpler than that. Guns over here are a mass killer's weapon of choice due to availability, something that will not change noticeably after a ban, given the numbers involved. But, theorize the absence of guns and out come the trucks, etc.

...but they don't.

In the ten years up to 1996, Australian had eleven mass murders that I'm aware of (defining as four or more dead), all by shooting.

In the following twenty-two years, since the gun laws changed, there have been eight. Three by arson, two where people killed their own children with knives, one blunt instrument, one shooting, and one vehicular attack.

So, no, people aren't just substituting weapons. Mass murders are happening about one-third as often as they did before the gun ban; if you convert to per capita, the rate of mass murder has dropped by almost 75%.

Before you say the number of killings without rifles will be lower, do know that both blunt objects (clubs, hammers, etc) and 'personal weapons' (hands, fists, feet, etc) each were responsible for more deaths than rifles. That's all rifles, not just the AR series.

What is your source for that?

I'm aware that Breitbart has published a claim along those lines. Citing the FBI's 2016 Uniform Crime Report, they report the numbers as: 374 killed by rifles, 656 "hands, fists, feet, etc." and 1604 "knives or cutting instruments".

But Breitbart doesn't deserve your trust or mine. On checking what the UCR report actually says... yes, it does report 656 "hands, fist, feet, etc." and 374 "Rifles". But it also reports another 3263 "Firearms (type unknown)" which isn't mentioned anywhere in the Breitbart article. With no information about those other deaths, the actual number killed by rifles could be anywhere between 374 and 3637. The high end of that range would be more than blunt instruments and hands/fists/feet/etc. put together.

All in all, firearms account for 11,004 of 15,070 murders in the UCR data. Of those, most (7105) are "Handguns"... but then, that's why I'm also in favour of handgun control.

I will ask one thing, again, not to deflect, but an actual question. Why is it, do you think, that in all other murders, whether it be by hammers, fists, crowbars, knives, hit and runs, and such, the object used is never blamed, it is always the person doing the killing. But with a gun, so often it is the item blamed and not the killer?

I find it very telling, NightL, that in that whole overdramatic diatribe, you seem to blame an inanimate object, never the killer.

Not true. NightL's words were: "Those fighting against sensible gun control and discussion, that so many other countries successfully implement, have their fingers on the trigger alongside the next mass murderer or the child who takes their parent's gun to school". Pretty clear there that s/he isn't absolving the killer of responsibility.

But most tragedies come from a combination of causes, not just any one thing. Identifying guns as a major cause of the tragedy isn't saying that they're the only cause, or that we shouldn't also address the other causes of the problem.

Re. other weapons: it's not such a big topic of discussion in the USA because two-thirds of murders there are committed with firearms, but in UK and Australia there has in fact been a fair bit of discussion about "knife crime" and legislation aimed at discouraging people from carrying knives around without a legitimate reason.

I'd also note that hammers, knives, and vehicles are all tools with important uses that don't revolve around killing. Guns, not so much.

A few things to consider about that graph:

(1) It doesn't list the source for either of the data series it's presenting. In my experience, when somebody withholds the sourcing on this sort of thing it's generally because there's something about the source that they don't want to know.

To the best of my knowledge there is no authoritative source for the number of privately-owned firearms in the USA. It can be estimated by sample surveys or other methods, but it's not trivial to do so, and the method used may well be important to knowing how trustworthy those numbers are.

(2) It gives an apples-to-oranges comparison: it plots the number of privately-owned firearms against the gun homicide rate, which would presumably be per capita.

(3) Causation/correlation fallacy again; I could just as well look at that chart and conclude that electing Democrat presidents decreases gun homicides.

Speaking of Ben Shapiro, though...

Yesterday, Shapiro spoke at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), which is absolutely full of "right to bear arms" types. A couple of days ago, 45 also spoke at CPAC, decrying "gun-free zones" and arguing that schools needed to arm teachers to defend against shooting.

Guess what you're not allowed to bring into CPAC, unless you're a security guard or a cop?

Guess why there's a long line to go through a metal detector before attendees can get into the conference?

If these people really believed what they're telling you and me, they'd be encouraging every attendee at CPAC to carry firearms, to make it safer. They don't.

 

[NightL]

^^^^^ clueless about America.

Stick with your country's politics sister.

We're all laughing at you here.

Maybe all the "we" of yourself should turn on the tv and watch the news of your country. May help that clueless about America thing.

Edit: Even Fox will do this time since they are getting ever so titchy about the students - actually fairly hard to ignore.

 

[coachdb18]

.....

 

[coachdb18]

Well, it wasn't much of a ban yada yada yada ...

Congrats on a screed longer than the Unabombers manifesto (nobodies gonna read all that much whimper..). should a just said ‘let conceal carry in the schools’ and be done with it![/QUOTE]

 

[OTCurve]

Well, it wasn't much of a ban. It didn't do anything about weapons manufactured before the date of the law, and as you note, rifles can last for generations before they wear out. I'm not arguing for the 1994 bill as a model for effective legislation, just as evidence that it is possible to make laws around this stuff.



This is why a major part of the Australian gun-control plan was a buyback of existing weapons. And, yeah, even if gun control was legally imposed through democratic process - anything's popular if you get enough support to modify the Constitution, and gun control is pretty popular at the moment - I'm sure there would be some extremists who would get violent rather than accept that law.

But if the only reason for denying a democratically-produced change is the fear of violence from those who oppose it... well, that really is tyranny.



Ronald Reagan had an armed security detail, several highly-trained guards all tasked with his protection, and it still didn't prevent him from being shot.

Children aren't banknotes. You might be able to protect them from shootings by raising them in a school built like an armoured vault, but there's a cost to that. You risk creating a generation of institutionalised kids who don't know how to cope in a more open environment.



I'd want to hear from security experts before I agreed with that. No doubt an armoured door will make it harder for an attacker to break into a classroom (if he isn't already inside) but it also makes it harder for SWAT to get in, and potentially harder for students and teachers to get out if they need to - plenty of ways to jam a door. Is that a net positive? Maybe, but I'd need to ask somebody who thinks about this sort of stuff for a living (and who doesn't have an interest in selling me armoured doors).

What about windows? Are we armouring those too, or just bricking them up?

How much is all this likely to cost?



Why do people pay more attention to other murders than others? Important and complicated question. I'm not a psychologist, but a couple of things that I think contribute:

#1: People aren't very rational beings. Unless we make a conscious effort to seek out facts and let them guide decision-making, we tend to run on instinct. Stuff that gets more publicity has more impact on people's world-view. A terrorist kills a couple of people, and an entire nation loses its shit and demands drastic measures; an abusive husband kills his wife and kids, it barely makes the middle pages of the paper. (Unless he comes from a background that lets them exoticise it as a "honour killing", anyway.)

#2: Seriously addressing domestic violence would require us to think seriously about toxic/fragile masculinity, and a lot of people aren't ready to have that conversation.



Ben Folds, and yeah, it was a great night out. Didn't even have to pay for the tickets



Well, "vulnerable" has two parts to it - the risk of an attack, and the magnitude of the harm that would be done if a risk did happen.

Like I posted previously, most mass shooters seem to go after a place that has some significance to them. They have a grudge against a particular person or organisation, and they go after that. There are a few who just want to kill as many as they can, but mostly the place is determined by their motivations. Mother Jones looked at 62 mass shootings up to 2013 and found none where the killer chose the target because it was a gun-free zone.

And most mass shooters aren't expecting to survive their attack. So I don't see much reason to believe that designating a place as a GFZ has much likelihood of encouraging a planned mass shooting.

But when a shooting does take place?

Civilian GGWAGs have a small chance of stopping the attacker earlier than they would have stopped otherwise. It's hard to find examples of it actually happening, but I'll certainly accept that there is a non-zero probability. Against that, though, they also present a risk to themselves, to unarmed civilians, and to the police. It's not at all clear to me that the risk of "friendly fire" shooting outweighs the small chance of stopping the shooting earlier.

Here are a few threads from trained soldiers and police about the challenges involved in a real-life shooting. They're worth a read. They came up in the context of arming teachers but most of the discussion applies more generally.

https://twitter.com/pecunium/status/966511946576121856
https://twitter.com/Iamwhoismoses/status/966482378645438464
https://twitter.com/KoolMoeSteve/status/964690097625972736

Meanwhile, GFZs reduce the likelihood of unplanned stupidity from the sort of guy who pulls his gun over a $12 IHOP bill.



Yep. And nor did ours. My point was that while some criminals will still be able to obtain banned guns, that doesn't necessarily mean would-be shooters can get them. Most don't have the right connections, or they don't have the patience and self-control to keep their guns a secret.



As per the Mother Jones link I posted above - it's generally guys killing their own families, or people shooting up their own workplace, or kids shooting up their own school, that sort of thing.

The guy who attacked Pulse was known for hating LGBT and Hispanic people. He attacked a gay nightclub on "Latin night", and over 90% of the people he killed were Hispanic, so it seems plausible that that was a specific target.

The Las Vegas attack: seems like the attacker had researched other open-air concert venues for a while beforehand, so I'll grant that one. But a guy shooting from elevation 450 metres from the crowd... I'm having trouble thinking of a plausible scenario where allowing concert-goers to carry arms would've helped there.



...but they don't.

In the ten years up to 1996, Australian had eleven mass murders that I'm aware of (defining as four or more dead), all by shooting.

In the following twenty-two years, since the gun laws changed, there have been eight. Three by arson, two where people killed their own children with knives, one blunt instrument, one shooting, and one vehicular attack.

So, no, people aren't just substituting weapons. Mass murders are happening about one-third as often as they did before the gun ban; if you convert to per capita, the rate of mass murder has dropped by almost 75%.



What is your source for that?

I'm aware that Breitbart has published a claim along those lines. Citing the FBI's 2016 Uniform Crime Report, they report the numbers as: 374 killed by rifles, 656 "hands, fists, feet, etc." and 1604 "knives or cutting instruments".

But Breitbart doesn't deserve your trust or mine. On checking what the UCR report actually says... yes, it does report 656 "hands, fist, feet, etc." and 374 "Rifles". But it also reports another 3263 "Firearms (type unknown)" which isn't mentioned anywhere in the Breitbart article. With no information about those other deaths, the actual number killed by rifles could be anywhere between 374 and 3637. The high end of that range would be more than blunt instruments and hands/fists/feet/etc. put together.

All in all, firearms account for 11,004 of 15,070 murders in the UCR data. Of those, most (7105) are "Handguns"... but then, that's why I'm also in favour of handgun control.





Not true. NightL's words were: "Those fighting against sensible gun control and discussion, that so many other countries successfully implement, have their fingers on the trigger alongside the next mass murderer or the child who takes their parent's gun to school". Pretty clear there that s/he isn't absolving the killer of responsibility.

But most tragedies come from a combination of causes, not just any one thing. Identifying guns as a major cause of the tragedy isn't saying that they're the only cause, or that we shouldn't also address the other causes of the problem.

Re. other weapons: it's not such a big topic of discussion in the USA because two-thirds of murders there are committed with firearms, but in UK and Australia there has in fact been a fair bit of discussion about "knife crime" and legislation aimed at discouraging people from carrying knives around without a legitimate reason.

I'd also note that hammers, knives, and vehicles are all tools with important uses that don't revolve around killing. Guns, not so much.



A few things to consider about that graph:

(1) It doesn't list the source for either of the data series it's presenting. In my experience, when somebody withholds the sourcing on this sort of thing it's generally because there's something about the source that they don't want to know.

To the best of my knowledge there is no authoritative source for the number of privately-owned firearms in the USA. It can be estimated by sample surveys or other methods, but it's not trivial to do so, and the method used may well be important to knowing how trustworthy those numbers are.

(2) It gives an apples-to-oranges comparison: it plots the number of privately-owned firearms against the gun homicide rate, which would presumably be per capita.

(3) Causation/correlation fallacy again; I could just as well look at that chart and conclude that electing Democrat presidents decreases gun homicides.

Speaking of Ben Shapiro, though...

Yesterday, Shapiro spoke at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), which is absolutely full of "right to bear arms" types. A couple of days ago, 45 also spoke at CPAC, decrying "gun-free zones" and arguing that schools needed to arm teachers to defend against shooting.

Guess what you're not allowed to bring into CPAC, unless you're a security guard or a cop?

Guess why there's a long line to go through a metal detector before attendees can get into the conference?

If these people really believed what they're telling you and me, they'd be encouraging every attendee at CPAC to carry firearms, to make it safer. They don't.

While the emotional side does certainly have steam right now, it is exactly that, emotional. Before the shooting happened, Congress was discussing new laws to keep this same demographic from eating laundry detergent, and now there words are treated as if they came from Constitutional experts. While I feel for what they went through, being shot at does not make one an expert on firearms laws, just as being hit by a car doesn't make you an expert on driving license regulation.

That being said, when you have a moment, check out the process to change the Constitution, then look at a voting map of the last election. The support is not there, no matter what the (and I include all stations in this) "news" tells you.

Yes, Reagan got shot, even with a security detail. That brings up an excellent point, which is anyone who wants to harm someone else, if they disregard their personal safety, has a heck of a good chance of doing so.

Everyone for gun control keeps shooting down every suggestion for protecting kids it seems. The NRA had proposals years ago for helping, which were ignored. Ideas ranging from structural changes to arming folk keep getting met with shouts of alarm. So I shall ask you, what do you think should be done? Keep in mind that those in the criminal world who supply arms would stockpile an insane amount in the event of a ban, so you cannot assume the criminal is unarmed.

Your #1 and #2 are darn good points.

Free tickets? Nice. Glad you had a good time.

I checked out that article you suggested, but am a little uncertain on their reasoning. They seem to claim they know what the killer was thinking, even though most of them died. While most of these nutjobs know it will end badly and seem ok with that, that in itself does not mean they want to die before causing a lot of damage, and it is far easier to do so when your targets cannot shoot back. Whether or not they were thinking that is up for debate, but it is a possibility.

The twitter threads were very interesting. I enjoyed the first one. The second, well, let's just say his comments were revealing. The last just sounded off to me. A firearms instructor, one of the few according to his requirements which could handle themselves with a firearm, giving them all up and keeping a small bat for self defense?

The IHOP thing is a reddit discussion. He pulled his gun over a manager grabbing him. Whole thing sounds really odd.

As for mass shootings taking place in gun-free zones, and the percentages, each side can whip out stats. Here's another: https://crimeresearch.org/2014/09/m...ty-on-guns-analysis-of-recent-mass-shootings/

I think it hinges around what people think are mass shootings. People shooting in a school, mall, concert, etc. vs. domestic violence. Both sides will still skew data to support their claim. I will say that in the domestic violence cases, cops advising women to get a restraining order, like a piece of paper is some sort of mystical shield that will stop an abusive boyfriend or husband, is woefully ineffective.

Using Australia stats are misleading I think. I mean I understand why you would want to, it's your country and you are very familiar with the goings on, but we are a unique country and culture. I've read many reports and articles on Australia and their confiscation and how the murder/violence rate was already decreasing and how the confiscation didn't affect that rate meaningfully. How other crimes increased, how many of the guns that were supposed to be confiscated were not, and so on. It could be Australians are less violent in nature, though you do get a crazy now and again.

For the US, we do have a violence problem. People theorize about the culture, all the drugs prescribed to school kids, the issues in certain demographics, the lack of discipline in the younger generation, you name it.

Breitbart, Mother Jones, Huffington Post, etc. are all biased in their own way. Some more than others, certainly. I'm not sure, but I think 'type unknown' firearms may be those that don't have an actual classification, like sawed-off shotgun and the like. People can cherry pick numbers and apply their biases to get all sorts of answers.

We shall have to agree to disagree on this one. NightL's rants are painful to read once, I can only refer you to past discussions (thread on the 1911) and the like to support my view.

So guns are designed to kill, while hammers are not. Guns can save lives, and in the right instance a hammer could as well. A tool does not determine its action.

CPAC was a great point. The politicians protect themselves at all costs. When it states 'gun free', you can be darn sure all the high ranking politicos have their armed security details. Just no guns for you or me. Which brings up another thought, let us assume a ban passed. Do you think for a microsecond the politicians will abide by it? Nope. Always exceptions for the 'important'.

Take a look at Florida and that tragedy. Cops with guns show up and do NOTHING. These same cops get called as many as 39 times to the killer's house. The killer should never have been able to legally purchase a rifle, but the FBI failed to follow up on posts of his that showed his mental state. There is now talk that there was a policy in place not to arrest school kids to get both political favor and grants due to 'reduced crime on the books'. They stood outside that school while the shooting was going on, and the pro-control crowd wants us to trust cops to protect us?

Lastly, there was a funny post on another board that was similar to the above. The government made drugs illegal. They cannot keep them out of elementary schools, they cannot keep them out of prison, the cannoy keep them off the streets. Yet you would have us believe they could keep guns out of the hands of criminals?

Cultural differences aside, our government/law enforcement seems to be a gigantic joke, so anything involving putting our safety in their hands isn't going to fly.

As always, great debate.

 

[NightL]

Everyone for gun control keeps shooting down every suggestion for protecting kids

No - what they are demanding is very clear, which it seems the majority of your country is now behind. It is not trade off. Tacky phrasing of words also.

Here's another: https://crimeresearch.org/2014/09/m...ty-on-guns-analysis-of-recent-mass-shootings/

Anything that comes out of Crime Prevention Research Center is tainted as offerings from Breitbart.

Using Australia stats are misleading I think. I mean I understand why you would want to, it's your country and you are very familiar with the goings on, but we are a unique country and culture.

As Japan, Canada, and the UK are unique unto themselves as well. They, along with Australia, all have implemented gun control laws that have had positive and proven results. They also don't try to hide gun violence research by NRA sponsored laws.