Gun Control Debate

[River]

In the top five causes of death for ages 1-44[/url] according to the CDC. Over 86% of all victims are male. Over half are suicides. In children, though, most of the gun deaths are homicides. It comes out to about 124/day. Link to a New England Journal of Medicine article on the matter. Also, if you have a gun in your home, the risk of everyone in the home getting shot skyrockets and 85% of the children between 0 and 12 who died by gunshot were killed at home. In my personal experience, the gun-worshippers like to respond to these facts by changing the subject or busting out personal attacks. When called out on their tactics, they slink off.

I don't personally know anyone who died by gun violence, but a coworker's brother shot himself in 2020 and there was a mass shooting at a King Soopers five or six miles from my home in 2020 as well (the shooter bought his weapon legally and remains incompetent to stand trial, which is of great frustration to the prosecutor and anyone who doesn't want firearms in the hands of the insane). I think, with the types of numbers we're seeing for gun violence in the US, pretty much everyone is only a degree or two away from a gun death though no one likes to talk about it. Kinda like with COVID, but with bullets instead of a pathogen.

[Eldy]

One of my aunts shot herself with a legally-owned handgun a couple years ago. I have to wonder whether she would still be alive if she had lived in a house without guns, since making suicide even slightly more difficult reduces rates. I lived in a house with sometimes poorly secured guns for much of my teenage years, and I spent a lot of time fantasizing about using them on myself. Looking back, I'm still kind of amazed I never did anything, considering how bad my untreated depression was at the time. But it's hard to talk about possible solutions when mainstream society has a collective unspoken agreement to ignore just how common it is to want to die, and stigmatize those who do. I don't have any answers myself, though I like to think that acknowledging suicidal people as still being normal people would be a step in the right direction (not a statement directed at anyone on this forum). Having fewer guns around probably wouldn't hurt, either, the same way the phasing out of old-fashioned gas ovens helped.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

Eldy, I'm so sorry.

[Eldy]

Thanks, V. I've gotten to a place quite recently where the desire to die is not merely in the background but in fact totally absent most of the time, which is really weird after having it always lurking around for the best part of two decades (some of my earliest distinct memories from when I was nine are of realizing what my desire to sleep and never wake up actually meant), but it's a very welcome change. I am immensely fortunate to have made it this far, and to have people who don't get upset with me when I slip up and have really bad days again. I don't bring this up as a plea for attention or sympathy, but just because I think talking about it frankly and without embellishment is the best way to demystify suicidal ideation and reframe it as an awful but nonetheless normal part of many people's lives.

[Sunsilver]

Narya posted this statistic on HoF a few years ago:

[RoseMorninStar]

Eldy I went through a dark period in my teens that I've been fortunate enough to mostly shake.

Last year a local man who lived in a rural area was a victim of a shooting (not common around here). Someone with mental and drug issues stole a car and crashed it near this man's home. He then attempted to steal another car but the homeowner had a gun 'for protection'. The car thief overpowered the man, stole the gun, killed the man with his own gun & then took his car, which he also crashed. A sad situation.

[N.E. Brigand]

The Austin American-Statesman has video showing the gunman entering the school, and in the hallways up until entering the classroom, as well as police in the hallway afterwards. It does not show anyone being shot, and while there is audio, they removed the sound of children screaming. I don't recommend watching it lightly, but it further corroborates a lot of what has come out about the shooting after the first week or two.

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/20 ... 370384007/

Per the AP, a preliminary report by Texas legislature has found that there were almost 400 law enforcement officers at the school as the violence unfolded.

Apparently all it takes to stop a bad guy with a gun is 401 good guys with guns. They were so close!

[N.E. Brigand]

Some people reacted to the Uvalde shooting by saying that the poor police response was a result of anti-police decisions by the courts. For example:



Well, according to the Texas legislature's report, their committee determined that "the person that the Uvalde police saw was a coach who was ushering children inside, and found no evidence that any law enforcement personnel had a chance to engage the gunman outside the school."

In other words, those pesky legal precedents kept police from shooting the kids' coach!

[N.E. Brigand]

The New York Times published a review last month of more than 400 mass shooting incidents that found such events ended with armed citizenry shooting the attacker roughly 3% of the time. And there was one more to add to that list yesterday:

In Indianapolis over the weekend, a mass shooter killed three people and wounded two others before being killed by an armed civilian.

Is this a case of a "good guy with a gun" stopping a "bad guy with a gun"? Not if you're one of those five murdered or wounded people.

[Dave_LF]

Many articles on this incident are referring to shooter #2 as a "good Samaritan". The fact that the definition of a "good Samaritan" has evidently changed from a person who tends to a wounded crime victim he finds on the street to a vigilante who guns down bad guys means...something.

[Alatar]

[RoseMorninStar]

Do we laugh or cry? (cry for Dave's post, laugh at Al's)

[elengil]

Not sure how old this is but here's an interesting approach

https://www.alwaysbewoke.com/post/690799968881082368

[RoseMorninStar]

Two men (who don't know one another) who have their families in their respective cars CHOOSE to get caught up in a road rage pissing contest & end up pulling out their 'trusty' (gag) firearms. Two daughters now have bullets in them. Two fathers are charged with attempted murder.

[RoseMorninStar]

Why Does the U.S. Have So Many Mass Shootings? Research Is Clear: Guns.

If the article is paywalled and someone wants to read it I can copy/paste.

[N.E. Brigand]

Colorado passed a red flag law nearly three years ago. Such laws are meant to prevent people who may pose a danger to themselves or others from acquiring or possessing guns, and this one was popular in Colorado. Nonetheless, "37 of the state's 64 counties declared some form of '2nd Amendment Sanctuary,' wherein the local police have refused to enforce the law." That includes the county where the man who killed five people in Club Q was able to buy a gun despite having been in an armed standoff with police last year.

[RoseMorninStar]

All at once I'm incredibly sickened, overwhelmingly sad, and simply outraged at the wanton carnage this country is willing to accept. Day after day, massacre after massacre. Senseless death after senseless death. It breaks my heart.

[Sunsilver]

To add something positive to this horrible situation:

[N.E. Brigand]

A panel of three judges on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously ruled today to strike down a federal law that prohibits someone who is subject to a restraining order for domestic violence from possessing a firearm.

The judges' ruling appears to be based on the fact that, in legal terms, there was no such thing as domestic violence when the Constitution and the relevant amendments were ratified. In other words: since it wasn't a crime for a man to beat his wife in the 1700s and 1800s, laws that deem such behavior criminal can't be applied to determine whether someone may safely possess a gun. This reading derives from a 2022 Supreme Court decision, N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, and overturns a previous decision by (a different panel on) this same circuit regarding this same case, U.S. vs. Rahimi.

The facts are that in February 2020, Texas had issued a protective order against Zackey Rahimi because he had allegedly assaulted his ex-girlfriend, which prevented him from harassing her and from possessing a gun. Then in December 2020 and January 2021, "Rahimi was involved in five shootings in and around Arlington, Texas. On December 1, after selling narcotics to an individual, he fired multiple shots into that individual’s residence. The following day, Rahimi was involved in a car accident. He exited his vehicle, shot at the other driver, and fled the scene. He returned to the scene in a different vehicle and shot at the other driver’s car. On December 22, Rahimi shot at a constable’s vehicle. On January 7, Rahimi fired multiple shots in the air after his friend’s credit card was declined at a Whataburger restaurant." Once he was identified as a suspect, his home was searched and he was found to be in possession of guns that the domestic violence protective order said he couldn't have, and he was charged for that. He appealed the charge, lost, and pled guilty, but then the Supreme Court issued Bruen, and now the Fifth Circuit says it was fine for him to have these guns after all.

The ruling seems to say that if the federal law they've struck down wasn't so specific about domestic violence but had instead prevented "dangerous" people from possessing firearms, then the court would have been okay with that. (I'm not so sure they would have been okay with that.)

My view is it's all nonsense based on nonsense, i.e., the Supreme Court's bad rulings on the meaning of the Second Amendment.

[N.E. Brigand]

Eight people were shot last night, three fatally, on the campus of Michigan State University. The killer later took his own life.

Among the students currently enrolled at MSU, who was not injured or even on scene but was locked down with the rest of campus, is a young woman who survived the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Connecticut in 2012, when she was ten years old.