There is just one tinsy winsy little problem. A lot of those Middle America right wingers are enjoying the show because IT DOES NOT AFFECT THEM IN THE SLIGHTEST. Violence is skyrocketing in America’s progressive cites and has hardly changed a bit in rural America and flyover country. Even as the economy struggled and crime went up, little of it was violent crime. It has seriously been a wonderful bit of schadenfreude to watch panicking white suburbanites clear out gun store shelves after they smugly told us no one ever needs a gun and now find out much hassle those supposedly “reasonable” laws are.
I appreciate the argument Mrs. Rosenfield is trying to make and I understand that she wants Americans to come together to solve problems. The problem is that it does not affect both halves of America equally. In rural America and flyover country we are surrounded by guns and ammunition, well over 400 million of them in fact. Just to let that sink in, there are only about an estimated 150 million guns in circulation with the worlds militaries and that also means there are more guns than there are people in America. Many of them are so called scary “assault weapons,” which are just semiautomatic rifles and no, they have existed for well over half a century now. There is nothing new about them and despite what the Left would have you think, they are very rarely used in crimes. If you think you can just ban them and they will go away, you are dreaming. See as far as Middle America is concerned, why would they change things if they A, like their guns, B, strongly believe in the right to self-defense, and C, see few examples of their misuse?
Now compare that to many of America’s cities. Drive byes, gang shootouts, and carjackings are common. Gun control is strict and useless. Hardly anyone is doing background checks. Violent criminals are often just allowed to go free. I do not want to be mean, but I am just tired at this point. Leave us alone and deal with your own problems.
Very good point: “The problem is that it does not affect both halves of America equally.” Large cities and flyover country have different situations that require different policies. Trouble is that a lot of things you might want to do to deal with this kind of problem cannot be done locally, as long as guns, taxpayers, shoppers and workers can move freely between jurisdictions. Which is why violence-plagued cities cannot ‘leave you alone and deal with their own problems‘.
As for “Violent criminals are often just allowed to go free”, the US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world (of countries with reliable statistics) and is notorious in Europe for its harsh punishments. Don’t you think putting even more people in prison might get you into diminishing returns?
But violent criminals are often allowed to go free in the US. Indeed, they were released on to the streets during Covid – and they wonder why homicides etc are through the roof. The problem is that the jails are full of people who were put away for years and years for committing two or three minor drugs offences, largely due to the 1990s Crime Bill authored by Joe Biden.
Giving harsh sentences to minor drug offenders while letting violent criminals walk free. I mean when you put it like that, the American criminal justice system sounds kind of insane doesn’t it?
“IN Uk they lock up the victims and free the criminals’. Put like that UK justice seems insane, but that is because the statement is NOT true, and your statement is also untrue.
“The problem is that the jails are full of people who were put away for years and years for committing two or three minor drugs offences,” This is really myth. There used to be ‘Habitual Offender ‘ laws, and ‘Three Strikes and you are Out’ laws, but this is not the situation now, it takes a lot to get hard time.
That is false. The three strikes and your out law refers to felonies, not misdemeanors. Drug offenses that are classified as felonies are possession with the intent to sell. Possession for personal use is a misdemeanor and do not fall under the three strikes law. And there are no non-violent drug dealers. Selling deadly drugs to addicted people is a violent act. Coercing 14 year old to use drugs so they become addicted is a violent act. Drug dealers should go to prison for life on the first offense.
I know a lot of people are in prison in California because they counted low level theft in their three strikes. A lot of non-violent addicts found themselves serving long sentences over it. On the other end of the scale I know of places like Chiraq (local nickname for Chicago, let it sink in) where criminals who committed serious violent crimes were let off with a slap on the wrist. At the end of the day American prisons are full of many people who need rehabilitation and at the same time we have a lot of violent criminals who need to go to prison until they are old and grey.
You state that the violent gangs in the cities travel to more rural areas on a regular basis in order to commit crimes, which is totally false. Contrary to your assertion, the ‘violence-plagued cities’ can leave alone and for the most part they do. The violence is very localized, even within the cities so the problems can be addressed locally. It’s just that their is no will to address them. Meanwhile, The rich white liberals stay safe in their nice neighborhoods while voting for policies that guarantee the never ending deaths of poor black people.
You misunderstand me. I take it as given that the violence is indeed localised. The remedies are another matter. One solution might be to make it hard for teenage gang members to get guns – but that is impossible as long as guns are easy to get just outside the city. Other solutions might require money – i.e. higher taxes, which is impossible as long as the taxpayers can just run away to the suburbs where rates are lower. Meanwhile people outside the cities still share in the advantages the cities offer, from jobs to wealth creation to centralised services.
I entirely take you point that the rich white liberals are insulated from the inner-city violence – just like the rural republicans are. What I doubt, and what you would need to argue for, is that a republican mayor or governor could solve the problem of violence, given the economic social and racial situation the city has. In short, cities do not have crime because they vote Democrat – they vote Democrat because they have the voters, economy, and social situation they have, which also leads to higher crime.
They aren’t getting them outside of the city! That would require a background check, and if in another state, them shipping the gun to an in-state gun shop where you would be required to pass your state of residence background check. They are getting them out of the back of a van. Something like 80% of gun homicide in Chicago is committed with an illegal firearm not bought in a gun shop.
I bow to your superior knowledge. I was thinking more in the abstract. In Europe you can make it quite hard for gang members to get hold of guns, because there are no good sources nearby. As long as guns are freely available in the next state over, it must be in practice impossible to keep them from moving to where people want them, legally or otherwise.
Fair enough. I’ll conceed that we are heavily armed. Just not that being heavily armed = high crime. I don’t think that the illegal guns are following the same channels as legal guns, though I’ll concede I don’t know the stats on that. It would be interesting to know how many formerly legal guns have the regstration numbers filed off and end up on the black market as opposed to how many enter the country, say, from a cartel sneaking them over the border.
Mexican cartels import guns over the border. Also, there are background requirements here, so no, “any fool” cannot buy a gun. My heavily armed neighborhood has low crime. Violence hs class and cultural roots. Those who aren’t brave enough to face those uncomfortable truths focus on gun ownership and ignore the statistics.
Cartels get guns wherever they want to get guns. Sure they get some guns from the United States like handguns, and some rifles. They already have the smuggling and distribution network for drugs. Might as well bring some guns across along with your profits. Hell, the United States government even encouraged it. Look up Operation Fast and Furious some time for a beautiful feeling of outrage. As for the cartels they are also rocking GPMG’s, assault rifles, RPGs, grenades, and I think even a few MANPADS. Hint, you will not find those in a gun store.
Also to clarify a few things. FBI statistics have shown that most inner city crime is not caused by guns out of state. Even with strict gun laws most are obtained locally and those that are not were often stolen and trafficked. Most gang members use cheap, lower quality handguns. Killings with rifles, including so called “assault weapons” only number less than 5% of gun deaths (I’m pretty sure the number is lower but I do not have the statistics in front of me). The reason for this is that they were often straw purchased, and because you are going to ask, no they are almost never prosecuted.
Texas is now the 20th state to remove its statewide requirement to obtain a permit to carry a concealed firearm. I can argue both sides of that, but one thing is true: These laws have NO bearing on background checks or legal eligibility to possess a firearm.
In western Europe even illegal guns are quite hard to get. It is possible (of course) but it takes some serious criminals, with contacts. That cuts down on both shootings and suicides. Just to say that it is possible to reduce illegal guns, at least as long as legal guns are not too common. Admittedly it is kind of hard to see how the US could ever get there from the current starting point.
Just for fun, a couple of UK anecdotes:
Recently a dedicated Muslim terrorist sympathiser, let out of prison after finishing his sentence, decided to do a killing spree. He armed himself with a fake suicide vest and – a knife, and so managed to kill only two people before being overpowered by three bystanders with improvised spears.
There was a somewhat exaggerated fuss about a man called Mark Duggan. He was stopped by armed police in an intelligence-led operation, since it was known that he was transporting a load of illegal weapons for a criminal group, and was shot after leaving the car and moving fast, with his hands close to his jacket pockets. The point is that the load of illegal weapons consisted of – one single-shot converted starters pistol.
There are some advantages to living in a low-gun society.
“There are some advantages to living in a low-gun society.” Tell that to White South Africans. If they have no gun they are done. If USA was unarmed it would be completely lawless, life would be like Venezuela.
“In western Europe even illegal guns are quite hard to get.”
not these days. Most of the illegal guns in Europe, which law enforcement, particularly in France and the UK recognize, come from Eastern Europe or the Middle East and North Africa. Criminals can get illegal guns, don’t kid yourself that they can’t.
“There are some advantages to living in a low-gun society”
If you don’t want to own a gun, yes.
“Just to say that it is possible to reduce illegal guns, at least as long as legal guns are not too common.”
One doesn’t have much to do with the other unless you have some evidence that shows that lots of legal guns are being sold to criminals. Your assumption appears to be that all guns start as legal weapons and then become illegal weapons. But there isn’t any evidence for that.
If you are a criminal with contacts abroad or to other connected criminals, of course you can get weapons. Anything else would be a miracle. The point is that if you are a random teenager who wants to be a badass it is much harder. And if you carry that weapon around with you, you can get arrested for it. That does cut down on the spontaneous gun duels – and keeps the police less edgy when doing stop-and-search.
My assumption is that you cannot make it hard for the wrong people to get guns unles you make it a bit harder for everybody. For a random suburban teenager background checks might well be enough. But whatever the trade flows are now, it just does not sound realistic to do much about the supply of guns to gang members, as long as the country is awash with legally held guns.
“The point is that if you are a random teenager who wants to be a badass it is much harder. And if you carry that weapon around with you, you can get arrested for it. “
It probably used to be much harder but not these days. And if you carry an illegal gun around with you in the US you can get arrested for it as well. “My assumption is that you cannot make it hard for the wrong people to get guns unles you make it a bit harder for everybody. “ Yes I know that’s your assumption but the reason it’s incorrect is that all guns do not begin as legal guns. The vast majority of gun crime is not committed with legal guns.
“Recently a dedicated Muslim terrorist sympathiser, let out of prison after finishing his sentence, decided to do a killing spree. He armed himself with a fake suicide vest and – a knife, and so managed to kill only two people before being overpowered by three bystanders with improvised spears.”
if only those Charlie Hebdo employees had been as brave, eh? Is it better to be killed by a suicide bombing, though?
How do you explain a place like Switzerland, where nearly every household has at least one legal firearm?
Violent crime – including gun crime – in the US is very highly concentrated in large urban, mostly Democrat-run centres, like St. Louis, Minneapolis, LA, Baltimore, and (notoriously) Chicago. It is not correlated at all with rates of legal gun ownership.
Take away all the crime in those places, and you’d be left with a violent crime rate similar to that of most European countries.
In civilian guns per head you have
1) US 120 guns, 7) Canada 35, 10) Finland 32, 14) Austria 30, 17) Norway 29, 19) Switzerland 28, 22) Sweden 23. Switzerland is not that unique for civilian guns, apparently (though they do send military weapons home with their army reserve). Do you have a reference for your ‘every household has a gun’ quote – not that it matters enormously? In Sweden, as it happens, well over 90% of the firearms are rifles or shotguns – long guns.
For people to shoot each other , you need a shooter and a gun. Guns alone are clearly not enough. On the other hand you can surely avoid a number of homicides and suicides if people do not carry guns around, and they are hard to get hold of in a hurry when you feel like using one. You would need to do something about the most violent cities and neighbourhoods independent of gun control, no disagreement there. On the other hand I believe suicides in Europe diminished significantly as countries switched from (poisonous) city gas to (non-poisonous) natural gas, and poisonous drugs became harder to get hold of; the same would likely happen if you reduced the number of guns. Even if you managed to pacify Detroit there could still be gains from having fewer guns – not that I think you would be interested.
Rasmus, you haven’t read or reproduced your source correctly. It doesn’t show ‘guns per head’ (as anyone seeing your statistical breakdown of guns per country must surely have realised*) but ‘guns per hundred people’. I’m not saying that this destroys your argument, with which I largely sympathise, but – get the numbers right.
*It should leap to the eye that the average individual in the USA couldn’t possible own 120 guns!
Oh Shoot! That is the kind of thing where you just miss what you are actually writing, because you know what you really mean. Of course it is guns per 100 people.
Thanks for correcting it.
Yes, exactly. It’s not legal gun owners shooting people, that’s where Rasmus makes his mistake. He seems to believe that 16 year olds in Detroit (who cannot buy a gun legally anyway) are driving around suburbia purchasing guns from legal gun owners. So if legal gun owners lose their guns, somehow that Detroit teenager won’t be able to get a gun. That’s seems to be his theory anyway.
Whereas you seem to believe that legal guns with legal owners are totally isolated form illegal guns with illegal owners, and somehow you could take the illegal guns away form the illegal people without any of the easily available the legal guns ever migrating to the wrong users. To me that sounds like emptying half a swimming pool of water – without putting in a divider. But we are unlikely to agree on this.
“Whereas you seem to believe that legal guns with legal owners are totally isolated form illegal guns with illegal owners”
yes
”, and somehow you could take the illegal guns away form the illegal people without any of the easily available the legal guns ever migrating to the wrong users.”
yes. Although unless you lock up everyone using an illegal gun in a crime, eliminating the illegal guns won’t work. What we have to do is eliminate those who use guns in crimes. But essentially yes, there would not be a market for legal guns suddenly opened up to criminals if illegal guns were hard to get. Legal gun owners want their guns. They don’t have them so they can sell them to criminals.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, there is an example of a Muslim terrorist who wanted to do a killing spree and armed himself with a knife. Also of a criminal group who went to great trouble getting hold of and transporting a single-shot converted starters’ pistol. Anecdotal, yes, but a pretty good indication that it is not that easy to get hold of proper weapons.
If someone wants to commit suicide lack of a gun will not stop them.
Of course. But making it harder and more time consuming gives people more time to change their mind. Fewer people kill themselves (or others) that way.
This is your error: You are thinking in the abstract, with no knowledge of our laws or the practicalities involved. The comment about guns being available “in the next state over” is the tell here. You abstracted something that, in daily reality here, is barely relevant.
It’s a big country, so there are always exceptions. Criminals have their channels, but they are not the ones you have abstracted.
Would it be fair to say that as of now it is quite easy for anyone who can pass a background check to get (legal) guns? And that it is also quite easy for anyone who cannot pass a background check to get (illegal) guns – at least in the places where a lot of people want them?
My guess is that insisting on legal guns being easy to get is connected to the other kind being easy to get as well. Or, if you like, that it would be impossible to remove access to illegal guns while keeping legal guns easily available – even if the two supply routes are separate for now. But I’ll admit that it is rather academic, since there does not seem to be a lot of push for making either change?
Anyway, thanks for answering. I still prefer to live in a disarmed society, but I am at least less ignorant than I used to be.
If you can pass the check (look up Form 4473 if you are interested in the details), then it’s easy except in the worst anti-gun states with more restrictions.
How hard is it to get illegal guns? Hard to answer definitively. My guess from what I’ve read and heard is that it’s similar to other criminal activity. “Easy” for a criminal in the abstract, but not necessarily “easy” in real life given all of the various impairments most criminals have. (Drugs, stupidity, poverty.)
Removing access to illegal guns is, to me, like crime-fighting in general: a never ending task, pursued in the twilight. Two certainties in the real world.
First, no one will succeed in confiscating them. There are roughly 80 million lawful gun owners here, with 450 million firearms and at least a trillion rounds of ammo. Suffice to say that there would be resistance.
Second, no gun control scheme that I know of has kept firearms from criminals who want them. Even background checks have no impact on the availability of guns on the street among criminals, or so I have read. By definition, criminals don’t care about the laws.
You lot have been quite convincing, but I would still add that there are arguments, US arguments, that suggest that illegal weapons do flow from states with lax gun laws to states with strict gun laws. It would be interesting to hear where you think those illegal guns are coming from.
>70% of guns used illegally come from within the state where they are used. And again, it’s illegal to go to another state and buy a gun that would not comply with the home state’s rules.
“One solution might be to make it hard for teenage gang members to get guns – but that is impossible as long as guns are easy to get just outside the city.”
Because teenage gang members are known to travel far and wide looking for guns? And no one in places where legal gun ownership is high would notice this?
No gang member in Chicago is buying a gun anywhere but Chicago, which is awash in illegal guns. Why would any criminal have to leave Chicago to locate an illegal gun? It would be a top location to buy one.
The point is that there would be no hope of emptying Chicago of illegal guns, as long as they are cheap and plentiful just outside town (not that I am aware that anyone is trying). With eager buyers and simple (if illegal) supply, the market would take care of the rest.
No one is leaving Chicago to obtain an illegal gun though. If you wanted to obtain one, you’d GO to Chicago. Illegal guns are not cheap and plentiful in suburbia.
There aren’t people roaming around suburbia trying to buy illegal guns. You’re missing the key. The illegal guns are awash IN Chicago, not outside of it.
You seem to believe that if Chicago were somehow emptied of illegal guns (which would require emptying it of criminals too) that legal gun owners in suburbia would set up yard sales and sell their legal guns to criminals from Chicago. But legal gun owners want their guns.
You cannot really understand much until you grasp the difference between legally owned guns and illegal ones. Understand what criminals are committing gun crimes with.
There is no difference between cities, suburbs, and rural areas when it comes to legal gun availability. All purchases of new guns are accompanied by a federal background check, and in blue states with state-level checks on used guns, these apply statewide.
It is illegal to cross state lines to make a gun purchase that’s not legal in the buyer’s home state. Also, any gun that’s sold and then shipped — new or used — must be accompanied by a federal background check before it can be picked up. These rules apply in all 50 states.
In practice, the armed criminals (mainly in the cities) typically get their guns in the city, on the street, from other criminals. Thus, illegal guns are actually more available in the cities. As a rural resident with legally purchased firearms and the requisite array of state-level permits for carrying a concealed handgun, I can confidently say that someone not known to a seller would have a significant degree of trouble in finding a legal gun owner willing to transfer a gun to a stranger outside of the well-known legal channels.
That challenge would be especially tough in the countryside, where everyone tends to know everyone else. There ARE rural criminals, for sure, but the practicalities are aligned against them. If I were a criminal in search of illegal firearms, I’d head to one of the big cities where we used to live.
Most of the people who yammer about all of this don’t even begin to know what they are talking about.
True, and it’s even localized in cities. I lived in Chicago in a very safe neighborhood about one mile from a neighborhood with daily shootings. Night and day within one mile.
Almost all cities are like that. We lived in St Louis, which is having a gun-killing thing right now. I can tell you the exact location where the nice white people live, and the exact street where the change happens.
Sure. BTW, I’m from Arlington Heights, so know something of Chicago. And, yes, plenty of mixed race areas. Let’s be clear – it’s more class than race. Many on the lower class are black, many blacks are in higher classes.
Inner city criminals are mostly terrified of rural areas, with their trees, grass, cows, and gun-totin’ rednecks, and would never venture into them voluntarily.
Yes but sometimes Europeans think that committing a crime, having a trial, being convicted, etc. are not required before one gets incarcerated in the US.
Rasmus, you are a great poster, but you just fail to understand USA. I am originally from London, so know USA from both sides, and have lived all over – and what you Europeans do not understand is….
USA IS DANGEROUS AS THE UNDERCLASS ARE VIOLENT. Middle Class Americans are more law abiding then British. Crime in Middle class areas, and country, are safer than UK. The Crime comes from certain classes.
If you reduced the prison population you would have a big rise in crime, USA has TOO FEW in prison actually. You look at USA with glasses of European lenses, and they utterly distort the reality. USA is a mix of third world kind of areas mixed near Blue Collar, and Middle Class, and Wealthy. I recommend you watch the sanitized version of the rougher side of USA by watching ‘The Wire’ and a couple of the Netflix/Prime documentaries on Poor Rdeneck towns in West Virginia, or poor Hispanic sections of LA or El Paso.
What you just do not understand is USA is a mix, and like most mixes it is stratified, and as long as you remain in your strata that is what you get.
You could be right – as you say I do not know the USA so I could not tell either way. I am certainly not making any policy proposals. I cannot but wonder, though. The US already has more people in prison overall than any country with reliable statistics – third world included. If most of the prisoners come from a few strata, the incarceration rate for those people must be even higher. And unlike, say, China, all those prisoners are not enough to ensure law and order. How many prisoners would it take to bring inner-city crime down? If you doubled the prison population, what would it actually help? It may be, as you say, that there is no other way of managing, the way things are. But one would sort of hope that it might be posssible to find a strategy that led to better results than the current one.
“The US already has more people in prison overall than any country with reliable statistics”
and? What is it you think this signifies?
“How many prisoners would it take to bring inner-city crime down?”
well, it would require imprisoning anyone who commits a gun crime and not letting them out.
“But one would sort of hope that it might be posssible to find a strategy that led to better results than the current one.
You’re assuming that leaders in US cities with lots of gun crime want to stop it but where is the evidence for this? Like you do, most Americans look at US cities that are violent and shake their heads, happy that they don’t have to live in them. People get the lifestyle they vote for. If you want to live in fear of being shot, well, you get to do that. Vote for someone like Bill deBlasio and you can live surrounded by violent criminals.
Those “poor redneck towns”, as dysfunctional as they are, still have nowhere near the violent crime rate – or at least the murder rate – of large inner cities.
“Large cities and flyover country have different situations that require different policies” why would policies have to be different? Seems like a policy (actually a law) that punishes gun crime would work in large cities the same way such policies/laws work in “flyover country”.
“…the US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world (of countries with reliable statistics) and is notorious in Europe for its harsh punishments. “ Well, Europe is notorious in the US for its leniency and shocking lack of harsh punishment for even the most diabolical of crimes, eg. sentencing mass murderer Anders Brevik, who killed over 70 people, most of them teenagers, to a mere 20 years.
If we had a much higher crime rate than you, that would suggest that maybe we should try to imitate you. As it is, you have a much higher crime rate than we do. Of course it is not so simple, the number of crimes probably depends mostly on other things. But does your approach really work so well that you want to double down on it?
“If we had a much higher crime rate than you, that would suggest that maybe we should try to imitate you.”
You don’t have to have a high crime rate to incarcerate criminals. You just have to be willing to incarcerate those who commit crimes. Wouldn’t preventing anyone who commits a gun crime from doing so again bring the crime rate down?
“Don’t you think putting even more people in prison might get you into diminishing returns?” how can putting people who commit gun crime in prison lead to diminishing returns?
Coming from a country that doesn’t allow any idiot to buy military grade weapons I just wonder if you have any concept of how backward and retarded America looks from here with its gun ownership laws?You know what real freedom is? Its the freedom to know that you can go to school or walk down the street without being murdered by a mentally ill 16 year white supremacist toting a machine gun.
You’re talking out the back of your head. First you cannot buy military grade weapons in the US. So called assault semi-automatic rifles are nothing more than regular rifles dressed up to look bad ass. Second, the suburbs and countryside in the US is incredibly safe, and a good deal more so than many areas of London, for example. Crime is generally localized to the cities, and specifically to certain neighborhoods which is indeed a tragedy.
You are coming from a country where the govern executes decent people for having a different opinion, creed, religion or ethnicity. It has to be very safe there. The problem is not the “White supremacism” it is gang related activity, culture, as it was mentioned in the article, and fatherlessness. Reality matters more than ideology.
When communists took over my country, as long as the population had weapons, commies could not take over the country. After they disarmed us, we were under their boot. I hope that you understand the concept of freedom better, as long as you live in the West (as it seems)!
Is this what you think most of America is like? I thought non-American’s were supposed to be more enlightened? This would be like me posting that I don’t want to go to Italy because I fear getting hit in the face with flying pizza dough being thrown by a mustached guy named Luigi in a stripped shirt while singing Amore.
Switzerland has the highest gun ownership in the world .As I presume they don’t use chocolate bullets , its what you use the guns for- hunting in the rural areas-that counts. In the cities they seem to use their illegal guns on other people for target practice.
Statistically you have much more chance in the US of being eaten by a shark, struck by lightning, or dying from a dog bite, than of “being murdered by a mentally ill 16 year white supremacist toting a machine gun.”
As the entertainment industry is run by cosmopolitan types , they transfer their secret fear of being made to live in the countryside onto their programmes. There are endless films and fictional TV such as Knight Rider Mattlock etc who when the hero comes to the one-horse-town is treated badly by the sheriff ( who seems to be in control of everything) usually locked up , the people are depicted like something out of Deliverance & obviously this fictional version of small time America has taken shape as reality in people’s minds
A lot of those Middle America right wingers are enjoying the show because IT DOES NOT AFFECT THEM IN THE SLIGHTEST. This says more about you than it does about them. There are no “right wingers” who enjoy the ongoing carnage, especially when kids are among the victims. Come on, man. Do you get excited about violent death in other places?
The sum total of your argument is that the problem is not guns, it’s people and culture, but we’re not allowed to talk about those things.
I very much would like the discussion about people and culture. As you observe, the gun isn’t the problem. But, as always, we arrive at the discussion about guns – how easy or hard to get them.
James Rowlands
2 years ago
What’s clear, as the president ( Biden) has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country,”
He should have added “in the blue states” if he were honest, truly wanted a solution and America to come together on this.
But of course he didn’t.
The whole point of the article was that it acknowledged those statistics of a particular form of shooting but that as a proportion to overall gun violence they were relatively insignificant.
A similar thing happened here with the Dunblane tragedy. Instead of having an enquiry* , there was a sudden decidion to ban legal guns. This meant that the olympic team have to travel to France to practice , but the illegal teams can practice on whom they want. * As it became apparent this man should have had his license taken away-there were enough complaints for the police to do this-never explained why these complaints were ignored.Obviously legal gun owners can suddenly act ‘crazy’ & kill people-they usually then kill themselves.
That graph is totally irrelevant to what James said: it does not address which states had the highest level of gun violence, just the race of the killer in a tiny proportion of the gun crimes committed in the USA.
You’re like a politician in an interview, who, when asked one uncomfortable question, ignores it and answers another, more congenial, one.
It’s a pity that when you looked at the data, you didn’t bother applying even the simplest analysis.
At its most basic, the chart you cited demonstrates that while the black community make up less than 20% of the US population, they commit ~30% of the mass shootings of whites.
Your link says 53% of mass shootings (not defined) were by white perpetrators. That makes white shooters under-represented – a lot more than 53% of America is white.
Aside from the relative under-representation of Whites in mass shootings, your reference does not account for the more numerous deaths from shootings that are not mass shootings. In that case, you will find the more massive numbers associated with “inner-city” populations.
Or, Zac, you never learned to read a report without checking its provenance. If it’s easier for you to understand, I’ll put it this way: see if you can predict the political preferences of ‘Statistica’, the company whose information you quote, by having a good old look at their media partners.
Saul D
2 years ago
America has spree shootings that make headlines – and yes male, but not always white – but the deep problem is black victims of black shooters in (often US democrat run) cities – shootings that kill a disproportionate number under 18s (so children effectively). So far this year Chicago to 21st May has had 865 shootings, 195 murders and 658 sexual assaults.
This report is from this week – 21 shooting incidences on Wednesday. Absolutely terrifying for someone living in Europe. https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2021/5/27/22456250/2-killed-17-wounded-shootings-wednesday-may-26-chicago
Unfortunately the issue of guns is a U-shaped curve. Either no-one has them to be safe, or if bad guys have them, then everyone believes they need them to feel safe, and rural America is pretty safe. To protect Black American’s lives, reducing the terror of gun violence against Black Americans by other Black Americans would be the place to start.
“So far this year Chicago to 21st May has had 865 shootings, 195 murders and 658 sexual assaults.” yes. And they keep electing people who won’t stop it. It’s tough to feel much sympathy for them.
End the war on drugs. It is the root cause of much of the turf war gang violence that takes place in cities, and it increases the number of encounters between people and police that lead to the George Floyd type incidents.
On top of which, lots of guns get exported from the US to Mexico to arm the drugs gangs, with dire results – “black goes south and white comes north” as the Grateful Dead put it.
Even if all street drugs were decriminalized and regulated the way alcohol is now, there would still be massive amounts of unregulated, illegal drugs on the streets, and people killing each other over them.
The killing isn’t caused by the buying, selling, and consumption of drugs, and the enforcement of laws against them; if it were, the murder rate would be just as high in the many parts of poor rural America where drugs are epidemic.
First solution would be to move to someplace where the criminals are not in charge. Which many people do. Second……Anyone who commits a crime with a gun needs to be locked up. It’s very hard to commit another gun crime while in prison.
I thought you would say some like this, first you blame them electing the wrong people and then suggest they should just move instead, perhaps a bit impractical for everybody. Then the autoritarian solution of just trying to lock up as many people as possible. Do you not think, as mentioned above, that ending the war on drugs might make a difference?
Not only do I suggest people move away from poorly managed crime-ridden cities, they are actually doing it, if they can.
if you commit a crime with a gun, yes, you should go to prison. Not sure how that is locking up as many people as possible. You’d still have to commit the gun crime. What would you suggest happen to those who commit gun crimes?
Exhibit A would be NY before and afyer Rudi Guliani and his zero tolerance policy. Thar way you up the risk to commit crimes. Human beings, even criminals are risk sensitive, and will adapt their behavior accordingly (as happened in NY. Singapore is also a good example.) There is also a cultural cause that is more complex. Something like 75% of black inner city children grow up fatherless, no positive male figure, but lots of gangs to take that role. Lousy school systems that don’t make an effort to educate then because math is racist or some such nonsenae. Really terrible cultural role models like rappers and hip hop singers who glorify crime and irresponsible behavior. The welfare system.perpetuates this environment.
Between 70% and 75% of black children are born out of wedlock. But it gets worse: Between 40% and 45% of black children are born into a household without even a cohabiting father, as in “no father’s name on the birth certificate.”
Moving is exactly what we did 3-1/2 years ago, from Seattle to the WA State countryside. No one could have predicted the events of 2020, but the response of that city’s so-called leadership did not surprise us one bit.
‘To protect Black American’s lives, reducing the terror of gun violence against Black Americans by other Black Americans would be the place to start.’
But you can’t do that because it would be ‘racist’.
Yes, I occasionally follow the weekend death toll as reported in the Chicago Tribune and it is unfailingly depressing.
I used to skim read the physical Tribune (there were hundreds of pages) every Sunday lunchtime, my favourite time of the week during my two years in Detroit. I was able to chill out in a fine Mongolian restaurant, where the white guy frying my food wore a green T shirt declaring: “Proud to be an Irish Mongolian”, and read about part of the weekly slaughter 250 miles to the west (as if downtown Detroit, 20 miles to the east, was not bad enough).
I dimly recall 57 casualties one particularly bad Chicago weekend – 11 dead, 46 wounded, from late Friday to late Sunday.
And the mayor of Chicago’s response to this violence is decreeing that she won’t grant personal interviews to any reporters that aren’t black or brown. WTF. We see her priorities.
The most expeditious way to do which is to jail as many black Americans as possible. I am not sure how many you’d have to jail but it could be most of them.
Absolutely not. What is needed is help for the black American community to stand up to thugs and violence, to spike the tumour within. It cannot be imposed from outside. It needs leaders who can build the community forwards as successes and winners, not as victims dependent on external largesse.
Wouldn’t removing the criminal element plaguing the black community be a better solution? Would you suggest any white community stand up to thugs with guns? This is a law enforcement issue. Remove the criminals so peaceful non-criminals can live unmolested by thugs.
In my rural county, the crime rate is low. A major reason is that would-be criminals are quite aware that the large majority of people out here are gun owners. People occasionally ask me what my home defense gun is. I reply: “Which room?”
I would almost feel sorry for the drug addict who makes the mistake of thinking that we are sitting ducks. I hope it never happens, and I have little fear that it will, but if it did, my biggest problem would be cleaning the rug. LOL
Annette Kralendijk
2 years ago
“And in the meantime, whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives.”
yes. In democrat run cities. Gun crime in the US doesn’t happen all over. While it’s sad to see it explode in blue cities, most Americans simply aren’t affected by it – it doesn’t happen where they live. There may be plenty of guns around them but not much crime committed with them.
Cities like NY and San Francisco and Minneapolis really should ask themselves why they are covered up with crime while other cities are not. What is it that they are doing differently that leads to high gun crime rates?
Well yes and the people who commit gun crime get a vote. They may just be out voting the people who don’t want to live in crime ridden cities. People like that just tend to leave if they cannot afford the security or gated community.
“Whatever it is.” Hmmm; has anything happened since this time last year that might have contributed to the spike? Couldn’t have anything to do with months of rioting, a ‘defund’ movement, DA’s refusing to prosecute, eliminating bail, or a thousand other things done by the elected class, almost all of those being Dems.
I have seen that widely discussed. Crime has rocketed in US cities that have defunded the police. Further the escalating violence in certain US cities (we know which ones!) has resulted in more people buying guns to protect themselves.
J Bryant
2 years ago
Interesting article. The byline is “Nobody wants to tell the true story of gun crime in America.” Even the author of this article confines herself to describing the phenomenon and how America’s political camps manage to talk past each other. Unravelling the causes of gun violence would require a much longer article, I’m sure.
America is hopelessly divided. Gun violence is just one in a long list of important topics the left and right can’t meaningfully discuss. Biden might succeed in partially restricting gun ownership, and if the republicans are reelected they’ll try to dismantle his reforms. Nothing will truly change until America finds common ground as a society again.
“America is hopelessly divided. Gun violence is just one in a long list of important topics the left and right can’t meaningfully discuss”
if you mean divided in the sense that only part of the population bears the brunt of gun crime, yes. But I have to disagree when you say the gun violence is not discussed in the US. Gun violence is continually discussed in the US. I think we could agree that people don’t necessarily agree on solutions but we cannot say that it isn’t discussed.
One place we could start would be in looking at US cities that do not have a lot of gun crime and determine what they are doing that’s different from cities like SF, NY and Minneapolis. It would not take Biden to help these cities, they have the power to tackle gun crime themselves just like every US city with little gun crime. In addition, Biden can’t dispense with the 2nd amendment,
That is an interesting idea. Can you give a list of large American cities with little gun crime? My guess would be that they are too different from SF, NY and Minneapolis in terms of economic situation, wealth, and racial mix, for the difference to be transferable. But it would be worth looking at.
The ones with low levels of gun crime tend to be those that are run by Republicans. Of the top 20 most violent cities, 18 are run by Democrats. The solution is to stop voting Democrat because the inevitable consequence of their belief system is high levels of crime.
And there are no other differences to note between high- and low-violene cities? Size? Wealth and wealth distribution? Racial composition? Economy? Presence of ghettoes?
Absolutely there are differences. San Francisco, Washington DC, and NYC are the three wealthiest cities (highest cost of living) in the US, and are among the worst (with Chicago, Detroit) for crime. Why? These are also the cities with the widest income gap between rich and poor. And these are deeply Progressive cesspools. The policies of the decades of Democratic government have created the conditions – including wealth gap – that produce unrest. High taxes drive out the middle class, and over-regulation drives out small businesses, leaving behind the rich who are insulated from the problems, and the poor who can’t get out. And the Donkey politicians are stoking the racial and economic divide on a daily basis. BLM and antifa, that are both anti-democratic, anti-liberty, violent organizations, are not merely permitted but abetted by the local Donkeys. And with no viable opposition, these fools have no incentive to resolve problems. So the people get the government and crime they deserve.
Best way to cut crime: end the war on drugs.
Tell me more: What are the biggest low-violence cities in the US, and how do they look? What are the chances to make NYC or DC more like them? It would be useful to have a working example of how to do it, for comparison.
We already have a working example – NYC under Rudy Giuliani vs Bill de Blasio. It’s not like we don’t know what works and what doesn’t. We know that letting criminals roam the streets invites crime. We know that not prosecuting lesser crimes leads criminals to commit greater crimes. We know that stop and frisk works. We know who commits gun crime – its not middle aged women. It’s young men. When you see case after case of young men with criminal histories miles long, someone isn’t doing their job. You don’t see this in more peaceful cities where people expect to live unmolested by gun crime.
Peaceful cities where people expect to live unmolested do not have lots of young men with long criminal records. That is undoubtedly true. It is less obvious how to get rid of those young men, once they are there – or better how to stop producing so many of them in the first place.
It takes more than one example without controls to establish what works – how did the crime rate change in other cities that had neither Giuliani nor de Blasio?
“That is undoubtedly true. It is less obvious how to get rid of those young men, once they are there” It is much tougher to commit additional gun crimes from prison. It seems like repeatedly allowing them to commit crime after crime may not be the best way to handle things. Since you specifically asked about NYC, I gave you an example of how to lower violent crime and make the city more livable in NYC.
I actually did some work, and checked out the stats. If you order US cities by violent crime, Washington is 24th, LA 32nd, San Fransisco 37th, New york 59th, The highest rate of violent crime is in St Louis , Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland, all of which are indeed Democrat.
Of the 20 biggest cities, the lowest violence is in Austin, San Jose, and San Diego, all of which also have Democrat mayors.
The biggest cities with Republican mayors are Jacksonvile (52nd in violence), Fort Worth (57th in violence) and Oklahoma City (30th in violence), all doing worse than New York,
I do not know enough about the US to make this into a coherent story, but it looks like it might be a bit more complicated than just ‘Democrats=violence’.
Culture plays the biggest role. When you look at places with low educational attainment, high rates of single parenting, long-term unemployment and intergenerational poverty you see high rates of gun violence, whether it’s Appalachia or the inner city. I lived in a heavily armed yet very safe city in Texas and also lived near an incredibly violent neighborhood in Chicago with strict gun laws. The cultural elements above were present in the latter and not the former.
OK, My top seven violent cities are all in the top 25/100 for black population percentage. Next, however, you get Stockton, Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Oakland,San Bernardino and Anchorage, before you get to Nashville, New Orleans, and Minneapolis.
I wont even think about making conclusions about race in the US.
“The biggest cities with Republican mayors are Jacksonvile (52nd in violence), Fort Worth (57th in violence) and Oklahoma City (30th in violence), all doing worse than New York,”
in 2020, there were 178 murders in Jacksonville vs 436 in NYC, so NYC is worse. In 3020, Ft Worth had 112 murders compared to 436 in NYC, so NYC is worse.
Come on! Jacksonville has ca. 900 000 inhabitants, and NYC has 8.6 million. Do you really not understand why you get more crime committed in a city with a nine times larger population?
Someone did – but is it me or Annette?
My calculation is simple:
Jacksonville: 178 murders, 900 000 inhabitants, ca. 200 murders per million people
NYC: 436 murders, 8 600 000 people, ca. 50 murders per million people.
Conclusion, Jacksonville is about four times more violent than NYC, by this count. If I got it wrong, or you have a better calculation, could you please tell me?
I think that it is important to establish the proper causal links: the large income gaps cause violence, or violence causes poverty, or (as it is very likely), it is a circular connection. What can break the cycle? By cultural norms, good education, honesty (If you can face it, you can fix it) – but Democrats are more concerned about the image of minorities than to tackle honestly the deep seated cultural problems.
There are Black conservative leaders who speak up, and therefore marginalized. I am talking about Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Candace Owens, etc.
To what extent is income gap causative or merely relational? Income gaps may correlate with crime, but some percent of people with low incomes are there because of unsavory tendencies. The income gap argument is often used as an explanation, but I doubt its validity.
This is true of so many statistical analyses. People are very keen to assume that correlation means causation, but forget that it can run in both directions, or that the apparent link may be caused by a third factor (like the famous ‘ice cream causes drowning’ example).
I doubt it (gun crime) is caused by any income gap, but rather the lack of opportunity in many of these communities. When whole industries have been gutted or displaced, leaving every member of a family with no work, with not having the resources to leave, the only options are some form of the dole or crime.
If you look at NYC, when it was run by a Republican, crime fell, including violent crime, under democratic leadership as it is today, violent crime is sky rocketing.
“My guess would be that they are too different from SF, NY and Minneapolis in terms of economic situation, wealth, and racial mix, for the difference to be transferable.” You seem to be making the case that guns are not the problem. That poverty makes people commit gun crime? That would be tough to prove since millions and millions of poor people don’t commit crimes. How do you see race fitting in? Since you brought these up, you must believe they have some bearing.
Getting rid of guns would certainly help. People would still be violent, but you kill fewer people, and a lot fewer innocent bystanders, if the violent are limited to using knives or fire extinguishers instead of firearms.
For the rest, you hear it from other debaters. Violence is a lot larger in big cities, and even in particular neighbourhoods. I am sure there are a lot of differences here, wealth, race, culture, family structures, social capital, attitudes, job opportunities, education, drug use, housing, you name it. What happens depends on all those things, and they all interact. It makes no sense to pretend that there is only one single cause, or that a single set of policies would work the same everywhere. Whatever policies work to provide low crime in Honolulu or Stockholm, there is no reason to think that they would work the same in St Louis.
”Getting rid of guns would certainly help.” I agree that getting rid of illegal guns would but since gun crime isn’t generally committed with legal guns, how would that help? “Whatever policies work to provide low crime in Honolulu or Stockholm, there is no reason to think that they would work the same in St Louis.” on the contrary, locking up anyone who commits a gun crime works no matter where you do it.
Jennifer (above) quoted her very peaceful and heavily armed community. Only one murder in living memory – the wife who came home to her hsuband shagging a neighbour and shot them both. Just possibly, might three people have been much better off if the returning wife had not had a firearm to hand?
For the rest, I continue to think you are dreaming if you think you can keep criminals disarmed while legal guns are easily available everywhere.
Yes, you think that because you believe that criminals are buying legal guns from legal gun owners. And they aren’t. If you want to buy a gun illegally, you would do that somewhere there are a lot of illegal guns. Like Chicago.
Like Jennifer I live in a very peaceful community and lots of people here own guns. Since we already have almost no gun crime, forcing people who are not committing gun crime to give up their legal guns would not do a thing. And because there is no supply of illegal guns available here, young urban men don’t come here to buy them. They know quite well where to obtain one. In fact, we all know where they’re getting them.
Violent crimes per year per 100 000 people:
Chicago: 1099
Houston 1095
San Antonio: 708
New York: 539
San Diego: 367
All five are large cities with Democrat mayors, I believe.
What was I supposed to conclude?
‘Biden might succeed in partially restricting gun ownership,..’
Yes, among the law abiding. The criminals, meanwhile, will have all the guns the want, and the Democrat DAs etc will fail to prosecute them and/or put them back on the streets with ‘no cash bail’. Thus the number of killings will continue to increase. That’s the Dumbocrats for you.
This begs the question, why is it that the criminals will have all the guns they want? Could it have something to do with the fact that the country is awash with guns? Could it be that a serious (properly determined, crisis level, massive use of state resources à la vaccine rollout) attempt to do something about this would be the single biggest thing you could do to reduce gun violence?
Yes, but that would require going after the black market for guns instead of tightening background checks, as illegal handguns are used in the vast majority of gun homicides. We are indeed awash in guns available from the back of a van. When Democrats start talking about cracking down on this illegal market I will take their gun control rhetoric seriously, but I’m not holding my breath because that would require jailing a good number of their voting base.
Not to worry – once currency becomes digital and your phone is your wallet every second of your life will be tracked, every cent you spend, and crime will become very hard, in the nu-Police state you crave.
“why is it that the criminals will have all the guns they want?” well, it’s because other criminals are willing to sell them illegal guns. You may be making a common mistake in thinking that all guns in the US start life as legal guns that are then sold by legal gun owners to criminals. But there’s no evidence for this. It isn’t legal gun owners selling guns to criminals, it’s other criminals doing so.
The Left like restrictions, the Right prefers proper education, but as long as the Left pushes Critical Race Theory, do you think real unity can happen? Ben Shapiro was right that the Overton Window needs to be pushed to the center, because the entire press is left leaning (Tim Groseclose, Left Turn) and it alienates a large portion of the population.
Why should a Republican give up his right to own a weapon, when Democrats, Antifa and BLM creates chaos in the country? Perhaps folks in Europe cannot comprehend that some people actually care for their lives and do not wish to die by the hands of anarchists.
Americans look with dismay at the grooming gangs in Europe (especially Britain), where Pakistani men raped and traumatized British women for decades and the brave men of Britain didn’t move a finger. The police was more afraid of being labelled racist. This is the level of abnormality!
Plus,in Britain the criminals seem able to obtain guns yet the rest of the population are just evulnerable. Soft policing, preference for monitoring people on the internet and light sentencing of violent crime all contribute to growing violent crime. Knife crime and even machete attacks now occur. Huge immigration has also broken down community relations and trust particularly in cities as studies have shown .
It’s difficult to know really when crims have real guns or not. One hears rumours… but by their very nature even legal gun owners are discreet about it and Illegal gun owners must be massively so.
I suspect it’s a case of knowing people who know people, if I had the power to order a police raid of their homes I doubt I’d find a gun there – it’s somewhere close by they can get their hands on it but still deniable.
Soft policing is a large part of it too, basically the police don’t get brave with people who’ll fight back – they’ll turn up later camera crews in tow protesting “injustice” or crying racism about how they were “unjustly targeted”.
I understand what you are saying, and am grateful the UK doesn’t have what looks like an unsolvable problem to me. I also take the point about the abuse of young girls in some cities; the police didn’t react properly, thanks to perceived public opinion, but the left-wing opinion creators eventually had to retreat, and the police now deal with such problems, although that’s not to say the same fear of being labelled racist isn’t even more pronounced elsewhere since the current ridiculous copying of BLM ballooned here one year ago.
While reading the article, the situation which came to mind as being most similar in the UK is the waxing and waning of ‘stop and search’. In its absence, use of knives (with regular murders) increases and hits the headlines, followed by demands for action. On re-imposition, violent crimes reduce, only to be followed by a campaign of criticism utilising statistics, because it tends to affect young males of colour disproportionately.
This is greatly propagated by parts of the media, including, extraordinarily, the national public service broadcaster. The statistics are, of course, selective, omitting consideration of the local areas and cultures affected, or the activities occurring. Such disproportions also tend to apply to convicted perpetrators, another useful statistic, and to victims, too; not so useful.
Of course care must be taken to expunge racial prejudice from within a police force, but anyone opposing ‘stop and search’ either wishes to carry a weapon, has an ulterior political motive, or is being fooled. I’d also add that encouraging negative feelings towards the police doesn’t help to increase non-white recruitment to the police, or to reduce the idea that they themselves are being stereotyped, or ‘profiled’.
This American owns 16 guns, somewhere north of 30,000 rounds of ammo, and 22 long knives, a couple of which I carry on my belt (one at a time), on the other side from the concealed handgun.
“What are you so afraid of?”
“To be perfectly candid, not too much.” LOL
Last edited 2 years ago by Jake Jackson
Fraser Bailey
2 years ago
‘They’ll blame progressive lawmakers for empowering criminals to offend with no fear of arrest, from Chesa Boudin in property crime-plagued San Francisco to Jacob Frey in violence-ridden Minneapolis.’
Well that’s because the progressive law makers are to blame for this state off affairs. They have so much blood on their hands that it defies all belief. They are evil. Another interesting fact is that, apparently, no member of the NRA has ever been responsible for a mass shooting. If true, this is something the MSM will never tell you.
It is all a great conspiracy, the Bilderberg Group‘, The Davos Group, the Donor Class.
Try reading ‘The Creature From Jekyll Island.’
You are just a serf to the global masters, and they use their left and Right to fight amongst them selves to stop the people from unifying and getting rid of them, as they have for thousands of years.
Peter LR
2 years ago
That’s frankly depressing: 4 or more people killed or wounded sounds awful. I’m glad to have been born in the UK. Britain must sound like Utopia to US folk where even our police don’t carry guns on patrol.
It’s the suicides too which seem to get dwarfed in discussions: it must be too easy to pull a gun out of a bedside cabinet in a moment of depression or hopelessness and end it all in second.
Hello Annette, there were only 12 shooting deaths in London in 2019. In 2014 there were only 4. London homicides are most from knife crime: knives can’t really be banned.
Peter, just wait – it is Coming! You will find the crime grows exponentionally with the EU shifting culture, OR, and this more likely, the combination of digital currency tracking every single penny, and facial recognition and GPS data makes it a Distopia of epic porportions where freedom is gone and you are basically ‘Pets’ of the elites, fed, kept healthy and crime free, given your drugs, TV, AI, VR, and welcome to the Matrix.
Well you completely ignored his point about suicide though, which accounts for almost two thirds of American deaths by gun. This problem doesn’t exist anywhere in the UK and in the US I’m not sure if it’s limited to Democrat run cities.
It’s not the object but it’s much easier to commit suicide if you have a gun compared to not having one. That’s undeniable and statistics in the US reflect that.
I agreed it’s not the object so I don’t know why you felt the need to make that terrible point. You ignored the other point that I made again, did you even read it?
Most Americans aren’t affected by gun crime. I live in South Carolina in a nice lake community that is heavily armed and there hasn’t been a shooting in a decade. That one ten years ago was a domestic. A woman walked in on her husband sleeping with the neighbor and shot him. So I guess it’s more correct to say my neighborhood is safe providing you don’t have an affair. My husband lived in London and then Marlow in his 20’s and experienced the same level of gun crime, none, that he does here in the States. The only difference is that here the neighbors are all armed. It’s not the guns it’s the culture.
Regarding suicides you are sadly correct. It’s much easier to act on impulse and successfully kill yourself when you own a firearm.
How does the police carrying guns prevent crime? The only way this could be possible, is if you had such a large armed police presence that potential criminals were deterred from committing crimes. It’s uncertain if it would even work, it certainly is not desirable if you want to live in free society.
I am from London, 40 years in USA, and NO UK is NOT a Utopia! It is dreary, the people are rightly more afraid of crime than Americans outside of the crime neighborhoods (it is safer in 90% of USA than it is in UK). Every thing you do is regulated, there is no freedom except to do the dreary thing –
UK is great to visit, but I would hate to live there. I am there a lot and after 3 weeks I am ready to leave, the entire society is claustrophobic, it is like living in a series of stacked rat cages.
Very interesting comment. I’ve enjoyed my dozen or so visits to the UK, especially when we get out of London, a city with all four cheeks sucked in. I wouldn’t want to live in the UK either, but would honestly say that this is because, in my extensive travels both internally and internationally, I find the U.S., or at least my corner of it, and lots of the rest, to be paradise.
Yes, the vast majority of this country is very safe. Stay away from the central cities, and the Mexican border, and there’ll be no problems. The very safest areas happen to be the same areas where legal gun ownership is most common. Imagine that.
I know, I know. I just called the U.S. “paradise,” as if there’s nothing wrong anywhere. That’s not even remotely the case, but I come by my view honestly and through experience. Europe and Asia are great places to travel, but I do like coming home.
And in the UK there are areas that unarmed police simply won’t enter.
Steve Craddock
2 years ago
I think there is a common problem across many western countries in that the laws created by their elected governments require some basic level of enforcement.
However, certain contrarian, and i think incompetent, local leaders have realised they have the autonomous influence to decide which laws to enforce. This is done under the guise of community priorities or other such nonsense.
For a politician this a perfect scenario, they create the crisis that they can spend 4 years or more grabbing headlines about. While quietly behind the scenes their snouts are firmly in the trough of public spending and their true loyalties to corporate entities, and not the people they have sworn to serve, remains quietly hidden.
I think the governments should be forced into a moratorium on new laws until the ones we already have are being enforced.
Exactly. Chicago (or Illinois) has pretty much the strictest gun laws in the US. But those laws are not enforced because the politicians don’t want to upset certain communities. The inevitable result is hundreds of corpses every year.
IL’s gun laws aren’t as strict as you think. Too strict IMO, but most of New England, some of the mid-Atlantic, California, and Hawaii are far more restrictive.
Alex Lekas
2 years ago
The truth is that once suicides are stripped out along with inner city gang warfare, this is far less of an issue than people like to pretend it is. Millions legally own guns. If the problem was metal objects springing to life and harming people, you’d know it. whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives. What? There is no whatever. There has been the rioting that followed the Floyd incident which led to dozens of murders, and there have been dozens more in the wake of the “defund” movement. The vast majority of the victims are black, as is the vast majority of assailants. This has mostly served to expose BLM as a farce that was built on a lie. Black people account for 25% of the cases in which cops kill civilians. UNARMED blacks, of unarmed people of any color, is a far smaller raw number. And in case someone is thinking of “well, but blacks are only 13% of the population,” keep in mind they also commit half the homicides, usually against other black folks.
As of 2018 (the latest year for which I have the complete data from the Centers for Disease Control, which records deaths from all causes), for every non-Hispanic white male murdered with a gun, 15 non-Hispanic black men were murdered with a gun. According to the FBI, which compiles the data from around the country, 89% of all murders are committed within racial groups. The conclusion should be obvious.
Walter Lantz
2 years ago
Canada’s large metropolitan areas are now seeing a rise in gun crime similar to US cities. It’s almost always related to ethnic gang violence. Illegal unregistered guns are easily smuggled in from the US when two countries share the world’s longest undefended border.
Of course there’s much gnashing of teeth and faux outrage from the usual suspects but the only solution they can think of is a ban on legal ownership of hand-guns which already happens to be severely restricted.
If politicians and community leaders haven’t got the intestinal fortitude to call out the criminal element then I’d rather they just say nothing instead of virtue posing nonsense laws that only affect people that were law-abiding in the first place.
As long as being branded with the Scarlet R is considered to be the one unredeemable sin a politician can commit, worse than any other financial or policy fail, there’ll never be progress on this issue.
hargreaves0105
2 years ago
I’m surprised by your statement that background checks are a good idea; Federal law already requires a dealer to perform a background check when transferring a firearm.
When laws are proposed which target criminals, I’ll listen. Until then, it’s all politics.
Most guns used in mass shootings are purchased legally originally. Some are re-sold illegally. But the notion that we can stop mass shootings by controlling gun access is simply idiotic.
The issue is anger control, not gun control.
Jeff Mason
2 years ago
The uproar over ‘ghost guns’ is a red herring. I defy anyone to buy a gun kit on line and assemble a fully functional weapon with no serial number. Such kits always are missing one irreplaceable piece – the lower receiver. This crucial part does have a serial number, is reported to the ATF, and can only be obtained through a Federal Firearms Licensee after a background check. I also take issue with suicides being lumped in with criminal gun violence. If someone is determined to kill themselves, they will do so with or without a gun. Suicide is not a crime; only attempted suicide is. Even law enforcement recognizes that there is no point in having a crime where the perpetrator is dead once it happens.
Emotional soundbites are, I’m afraid, a particular talent of the left. As a European, I too was shocked when I found out that two thirds of all gun deaths in the US were suicides. The left never tell you that bit. Europe is a dead, echoing hell. There is literally no life here because all the great questions have been decided and history has concluded, at least if you listen to the MSM. The supposed parties of the right have completely internalized the values of the left and never argue about ideas or political philosophy. Left-right arguments in Europe consists of bickering about a penny or two off or on taxes here and there. It looked like the Republicans in the US were going down that road too, at least until Trump exploded onto the scene. It’s still too early to tell for sure what long term effect he’s had, but it’s encouraging to see younger Republicans getting right into the Democrats faces and fighting them for every inch of ground. Keep that up. We’re literally back where we were in the 1930s now, with America the beacon, the only hope left.
Also, as long as you are not a felon and do not intend to sell them, it has been perfectly legal to make your own unregistered firearms. Most 3D printed firearms are rather useless given that you need a metal barrel to make it reliable. 3D printed furniture are popular. Of course CNC machining has been a thing for over 50 years and CAD/CAM is common place these days. MIM is also a thing but I personally hate MIM parts. Things might start get a bit interesting with improvements to metallic 3D printing. Currently it is rather cost prohibitive and the accuracy is only within a couple thousandths of a inch, not bad for most parts and receivers, but unacceptable for barrels. However, with improved precision, lowering costs, more widespread industrial use, and the promise of electrochemical rifling, it may soon become easy for amateurs to easily manufacture their own reliable firearms. I seriously doubt this will change much in the United States, but things might get rather interesting in other countries.
As a side note, the usual know nothing idiots were shocked about home manufactured firearms because as a culture war issue, you are not required to know a damn thing about what you are saying. One particularly useless member of the Washington Post called it “gunsplaining.” “How dare you use actual knowledge and facts to show I have no idea what I am talking about!?”
Simon Newman
2 years ago
“whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives.”
It’s the media. They distort stories to create racialist rage and hate. They cropped out all the non-white police around the white officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, because they wanted a narrative of white police killing blacks. They don’t care about police killings as a non-racial issue, and they don’t care about all the people who die as a result of their actions.
regnad.kcin.fst
2 years ago
I’m a USA citizen. I used to be on the left, but am now right-of-center.
Here is a truth: The USA DOES NOT HAVE a gun problem.
Here is a truth: Many persons in the USA have ANGER PROBLEMS.
In the last few years, most massacres have occurred with legally purchased guns. In many cases, the guns were purchased a long period before the shooting.
What we do see is 1) young men (mostly) who 2) were humiliated and 3) use the weapon to “get back” from the humiliation.
Take the shooting in San Jose. The shooter was a guy who hated his job. He probably had been humiliated there. In the USA, blue collar culture often includes a “roasting” or “toasting” element, in which routine kidding is used to establish camaraderie. Of course, if you don’t get the joke, having some guy tell you something on the toasting side can be taken wrong. I think the killer in SJ took stuff wrong.
I see killers as those in the Culture of Honor. In this Culture, if you are humiliated, you recover your honor by a duel or other feat of arms. I see much of the killers in that way.
As the article notes, a large proportion of the killings involve young BLACK men in the Inner City Culture of Honor.
What we do see is 1) young men (mostly) who 2) were humiliated and 3) use the weapon to “get back” from the humiliation. I’m also in the US and there are too few people who are unwilling to call out what you posted for what it is – a culture problem. When homicide is seen as a reasonable response to one’s embarrassment, there is no law that can stop that. A man of gun crimes committed screams the truth, but people don’t want to hear it. I’d suggest that simply ending the drug war would have the single biggest impact of any move, but govt won’t do that. There’s too much money and power involved, and if some inner city children get caught in the crossfire, they are the eggs in the proverbial omelet.
Some suspect the recent shooting in London of a loud and obnoxious BLM activist (a video of her getting in a black mans face freely offering violence can be found on YT) was possibly due to her disrespecting one of more of the gang who shot her. “As the article notes, a large proportion of the killings involve young BLACK men in the Inner City Culture of Honor.” also rings true in the UK, usually with knives and machete’s, but also with illegal firearms.
Cynthia Neville
2 years ago
‘… were virtually all people of colour’. Wow; congratulations to you for digging up this news-breaking announcement. Perhaps you should wean yourself off CNN and indeed all MSM. Had you done so a long time ago you’d have realised that black-on-black killings in the USA are nothing new in the world. Not reporting them is not new either.
CHARLES STANHOPE
2 years ago
If the US authorities are incapable of arresting and charging the black Police Lieutenant who shot & killed Ms Ashli Babbitt in the Capitol Building itself what hope is there?
Clemenceau’s* statement, made of over a century ago that the “ US had gone from barbarism to decadence without the normal interval of civilisation “ still holds true.
(* Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, 1906-9 & 1917-20.)
Last edited 2 years ago by CHARLES STANHOPE
John Lewis
2 years ago
Today in Florida a “Ghost” mass shooting took place outside a rap concert. I doubt we will hear much more about it. Wrong sort of perpetrators.
kecronin1
2 years ago
I am so appreciative of Unherd. Serious issues treated seriously. I am tired of policy being formed by cheap theatrical headlines. We need to dig deep. Guns terrify me but I understand it is a second amendment right. I also know that in parts of our country kids grow up with guns. A friend’s husband, from Montana, had gun safety training as part of his high school curriculum.
Most issues are nuanced. In LA we have a horrific homeless problem. Our council person, Harvard trained I believe, treats all homeless the same in her email missives complaining about the lack of housing. I’ve repeatedly written asking why those who have low paying jobs and can’t afford rent are treated the same as someone else who is drug addicted and most likely, without a credible recovery program, will never live a productive life again. If you go to the hospital they don’t treat heart disease the same as someone with cancer. There is some overlap but there are different protocols. Lumping it all together ends up with poor outcomes.
I have a history with guns, both as a longstanding gun control advocate and more recently (2013 or so) having changed my mind and gone the other way.
I give you credit for your honest statement, “guns terrify me.” I think quite strongly that if you went to a firing range you would quickly overcome your terror, but I do not say that in a disparaging or condescending way. Rather, it reflects my own experience, and stories I’ve heard from reliable and honest gunner friends. It’s very much against my personal code to urge anyone to arm themselves, and by recommeding a couple hours at a range I am not trying to tell you to become a gun owner — only suggesting it as a way to overcome your fear.
If nothing else, you’ll be surprised at the warm welcome you’ll get, especially if you omit any politics and forthrightly acknowledge your ignorance and fear of guns. The fact that you went there anyway is going to be greeted positively. There are classes, and trainers supplied by the Nat’l Rifle Assn., whose main function (by a long shot — look up their budget) is training and gun safety. You can learn a whole lot from these certified instructors.
People legally own guns for four overlapping reasons: personal protection, hunting, target shooting, and collecting. I’m in three categories, not being a hunter. My prime reason is target shooting, which is a recreation. Perish the thought, but shooting is fun. To me, personal protection turns out to be a side benefit; where I live, there are wild animals in close proximity.
The only wild animals I haven’t seen here are antelope, grizzly bears, polar bears, and wolves. Which means I regularly see black bears, cougars (aka mountain lions), HUGE bobcats, coyotes, elk, wild turkeys, and deer. A note about Bambi, who has enjoyed great public relations courtesy of Wal Disney. In truth, Bambi is a graceful animal that carries ticks and bacteria, and who kills more Americans than any other wild animal.
So my “personal protection” is just as likely to involve a wild animal, or certain dogs, the latter being FAR less cautious than wild animals when it comes to attacking people. I carry a sidearm on my property just in case I need it, such as this morning when I inadvertently flushed out a big buck that likes to bed down underneath my barn. If push comes to shove, I hope this or that potentially dangerous animal is as terrified by guns as you are.
But we soon forget, and then after a suitable pause of say fifty years, charge them with murder.*
As recently happened to former members of the Parachute Regiment in Belfast.
(* Shooting dead an IRA terrorist in the Markets area of Belfast in 1971.)
Gun bans worked in Australia. Only Americans believe they are the greatest country in the world. The rest of the world is so grateful they don’t have their warped gun loving culture.
I think the culture here in the US is VERY different from Australia. As always, comparing countries does really mean much – there’s more to the story than the prevalence of guns. I suppose you could look at the increase in knife killings in the UK. Violent people will always find a way to kill each other.
Btw – are you aware of how few people are killed outside of large, urban areas? The weekend total of gun deaths will be ZERO in my town. And I can pretty much guarantee almost everyone here has guns in their houses or on their person.
I’m far from being a gun fan, but growing up in the UK half urban, half rural, I frequently encountered shotguns in the countryside, but I got the impression it was chiefly towns and cities where they were used for crime – though even there, chiefly for scaring rather than shooting anyone. That began to change around 1990, with cocaine arriving big time, and with it huge amounts of illegal money to be kept or stolen.
congratulations for spotting the connection between drugs and guns. Anytime govt bans something, the key result is that something becomes more expensive and more dangerous to acquire. Eliminating the drug war would have the single greatest effect in lowering gun violence than any other action. Which, of course, means we’re not going to do it.
I’m no follower of Milton Friedman, but I tend to go along with with his views on drug legalisation: “I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there’s a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they’re sure of the quality.” Exactly how we should go about it I don’t know, but the war on drugs has been nothing but disastrous for all concerned.
Australia had problem with the people thinking they were sovereign people, so they took all their guns, just as Mossulin*, H* itl*er, Mao, Stalin, and every, single, last, tyrant has done to his people so they can consolidate absolute power. That is why the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution.
Nation wide, and it was the implemented by the ‘Right’ who were voted in again and again. It’s never been raised again as a major issue for voters. As I stated earlier, very different culture in Australia. No mass shootings recorded since the gun ban/gun buy back scheme.
It is easy to get a shotgun permit in UK, I got my application in on the day I was legal age, and got it very soon after. I was already an expert at shooting though, it being in my family, and my father had one, and I had places to shoot…
But in UK if you join a club, say shotgun clay pigeon one, get the required safe, then getting the permit is automatically given. BUT if in the Police interview you say you wish it for self defense you will NEVER get a permit, ever in your lifetime! In USA defense is the grounds for getting one, or getting a concealed carry permit in the states which require one (about half of them) BUT in UK you may NOT own a gun for defense.
POLICE ARE NOT TO DEFEND YOU, this is entirely a misconception. They are there to investigate crime, and try to catch the offender. NO where in their mandate does it say their job is to defend people in their house, or on the street unless they see a crime in progress.
YOUR DEFENSE IS ENTIRELY UP TO YOU. If you are weaker, or not as tough, as a criminal you are utterly at their mercy, and that is not much. As Samuel Colt said of his pistol, it is the great equalizer. If I was a woman I would have a gun, or if not allowed one, would demand that right. That weak are prey to the strong is unjust. A gun in the hand of a woman is more than a match for the most powerful and violent man.
It is much better to be a Pu** y hiding behind your locked car and house door than to be able to take your defense in your own hands.
Stanley Beardshall
2 years ago
Slightly off-topic, but still mind-numbingly horrific, have a look at heyjackass.com. Dealing only with Chicago, this site tells you more about the gun problem in America than any news item or article will.
James Chater
2 years ago
‘The 2nd Amendment I believe has been wrongly interpreted by most Americans‘
The right to defend yourself with firearms must mean ultimately you can kill someone else with firearms if you need to, surely?
Like the bow and arrow was not the gun invented for just one thing? The facility to bring down your prey or your enemy whilst lessening the chances of your own injury or death, with the elements of physical distance, seclusion & surprise. Perfectly logical.
Yes, deterrence comes into it, but if guns are so numerous, so relatively easy to obtain, it stands to reason that the desperate criminal or the mentally ill person will be able use them sooner or later… and so the spiral continues.
Just who are the ‘right-minded’ people who should own them? Responsible hunters, gamekeepers. There is the same mentality in the UK but the subtle difference being it’s a ‘priviledge’ and not a ‘right’ to own a firearm in the UK.
As a UK citizen there is only so much I can or should say about this topic. Obviously it’s tied up so much with North American history and culture.
It’s futile to argue with someone who has only known that culture. I will never forget being told by my brother about an incident in a bar in the US. He got chatting with another guy and I guess debating vigorously but on a humourous and friendly basis. My brother went to the toilet and the same guy came up behind him and stuck a pistol in his head so as ‘finish’ and ‘win’ the ‘argument’. He was no ‘hoodlum’ type. Nice…
In the USA, there is something termed the “castle doctrine”. This gives a person the right to defend the “castle”. If you are in your home, and it is invaded, you have the right (in states that have passed the CD) to use deadly force to defend the castle. You sometimes have the right to defend other castles, like your car. The opposite of the CD is the “obligation to retreat”. In this view, if you are invaded, you have the obligation to NOT engage. Not every state has the CD. These are the “red states”, which are the interior states.
The so-called “castle doctrine,” in states that have it, isn’t nearly as all-encompassing as you think. On their face, those laws do not give the homeowner the unrestricted right to shoot intruders. They do remove any “duty to retreat,” but the shooter still must show that (s)he had a reasonable fear of imminent death or grave injury for the defense to be legal
Non-gunners are typically unaware of the plethora of regulations, but legal gunners are well aware. I’ve read the occasional story about a questionable “legal” shooting of an intruder, but those the the exceptions that prove the rule.
In my rural county, where the large majority of households are armed, I know of one homeowner who went to prison for shooting an intruder in the back, in his house, as the intruder was trying to flee. And guess what? Our “second amendment sheriff” made the arrest. The “castle doctine” has limits.
I would add that, in my experience, no one is tougher on specious self-defense claims than law-abiding gunners. See, we know the laws, and we know guns. We are typically the very first people to invalidate phony self-defense claims.
The root cause of the increased violence is the Cultural Marxist assault on our society. The increased violence is the result of political tools of division. Just as the administration in Washington DC assumed power by blatant disregard for rule of law so it is with the increased violence across America. No rule of law at the border to control illegal immigration, no rule of law in our law enforcement, no rule of law in our judiciary. Even the Supreme court has turned its back on rule of law. The FBI and CIA are political tools used to intimidate, coerce, and kill the political opposition. This violence will continue to increase until we re-establish our most basic rights which is to have our votes counted on election day.
The cause is the withdrawal of police from central cities, and the reluctance of those who remain to aggressively enforce the law. The increase in murder is heavily concentrated in those central cities. In short, you have black criminals killing other black criminals, and terrorizing everyone else. The numbers that the media won’t mention prove it.
oneononeproductions
2 years ago
I know this is going to sound crazy but this is what I believe is going on you people can tell me you weather you think I’m right or am I wrong. Defund the police has provided communists with Deep Pockets with all the money being divested from the police forces. This money he’s partially going to citizens in the form of cash payments but it’s not free they do have to work for it. This work is more or less harassing certain citizens on a list. A list that was generated before all this went down. They harass, monitor, and ensure their targets never have a single free moment to themselves. The people singled out for this treatment are generally smart, quiet, few friends, and not prone to violent outbursts generally speaking.
Eventually, though, with the RELeNTLSS stalking, ûthe extreme stress levels induced are too much and he snaps. Kills a bunch of folks, cops show up, kill gunman, and the nation takes another step toward comprehensive gun control measuresm
Ian Perkins
2 years ago
“the two dozen black children killed in incidents of community violence since the start of 2021 don’t seem to matter to anyone”
I thought there were various initiatives in the US, many led by ex-gang members, addressing the issue of gun violence within their communities.
There are countless ‘initiatives’ in the US, the UK and all over the place with regard to such issues. Needless to say, they never work because they are run by lefties (I won’t even call them ‘well meaning’) looking for public money and who don’t really even acknlowledge the concept of crime or the darker sides of human nature. Whenever you see or hear about an ‘initiative’, run for the hills.
The initiatives I’m thinking of are run by hard guys only too well aware of the dark side of our nature. They don’t seem to get any public funding for the most part, and if they are lefties, they’re most certainly not dogmatic lefties driven by ideology – they’re driven by their own past experience of doing exactly what they’re trying to stop. Which isn’t to say their initiatives work – they’re not too sure themselves, merely to say that, contrary to what Rosenfield says, there are people to whom these issues matter deeply, deeply enough for them to often knowingly put themselves in danger by intervening.
There are still plenty of gangs that don’t much care what a few ex-gang members think. Ex-gang members are not the problem. Most of the kids killed are just caught by stray bullets like that 4 year child in NYC awhile ago. Not the intended victim but caught in the crossfire. Life is cheap in some US cities.
Sure, but these ex-gang members do seem to care, and at least they’re trying. They know all too well that it’s often bystanders who get shot, which I gather is something they try to impress upon those still using guns to settle their scores..
It isn’t the ex-gang members committing gun crime. I don’t think there’s much evidence that gangs are unaware that their actions cause people to lose their lives. Your mistake is assuming that they care.
New news cycle, new politics cycle, new “initiatives” , same outcomes.
Fraser Bailey
2 years ago
NRA members know exactly how to interpret 2A. And I have read that not a single member of the NRA has ever been responsible for a mass shooting. The fact is that those responsible for the vast majority of the killings are urban dwellers who, for the most part, could not even spell the word ‘constitution’.
Kremlington Swan
2 years ago
I don’t understand the resistance to background checks. I would have thought it was in the interests of mentally stable and non criminal gun owners to keep guns out of the hands of the unstable and criminally inclined.
As for the manufacturers and distributers, surely better to sell fewer guns to people more likely to use them responsibly, than all the guns you like up to the point that something so bad happens there is an unstoppable public insurgence in favour of abolishing them altogether.
I don’t understand the resistance to background checks. why should I have to ask permission in order to exercise a constitutional right? Doing so makes it sound more like a privilege than a right.
Fair enough. Don’t get me wrong, I wish we were more like you – I mean ‘you’ as in those of you prepared to stand upright and defend personal liberty. Over here we seem to have just lain down and accepted that it is our fate to be trodden on. It is absolutely sickening.
In every state, the buyer of a new gun must pass a federal background check. Look up “Form 4471.” The background check debate is about private sales of used guns. That’s mostly (but not entirely) a state-level issue, and states vary.
If I, a resident of WA State, which has a private sale background check law, were to travel to Idaho, which has no such requirement, to buy a gun, this is a violation of both state and federal law. The seller can easily be criminally liable too, if he knows that I’m not an Idaho resident, or should have known.
The reason for resistance to those private-sale checks is that, together with the required new gun checks, they make de facto gun registration a reality. Once the guns are registered, it becomes a lot easier to confiscate them. That’s where the push-back comes from.
None of this has any discernible impact on criminals who illegally obtain and possess guns. The overwhelming majority of guns obtained by criminals are stolen and/or traded without regard to any laws. Background checks affect only those who care about the laws.
Thanks for the explanation. As a UK citizen it makes no practical difference to me, but I was curious about the resistance. Now I am better informed.
Over here the only people who have rifles are criminals and specially licensed police. Some country people have licensed shotguns, but it is much harder to get a firearms certificate.
I’m interested a little because I grew up with guns and learned to use a small bore rifle from an early age. It makes me unusual for a Uk citizen. I imagine most of my friends and acquaintances would not share my appreciation for firearms, but there is something a bit special about a well made gun. I used to have the use of a bolt action Winchester rifle, as well as a semi-automatic, and I have fond memories of both.
Something else. The “progressives” here make a lot of noise about “internet gun sales.” The minute the seller puts that gun into the mail, it must be shipped to a dealer that’s been federally licensed; most people shorten this to “FFL,” for federal firearms license.
Before the buyer can take possession, (s)he must fill out Form 4471 (the background check form), and this applies whether the gun is used or new. I have bought four guns this way, so I know. Three were new, and one was used. Form 4471 for all four of those purchases.
As for shotguns, my spouse’s Winchester 37 single-shot 12ga has a special place for me. When we were married six years ago, we took it to a country road and I fired three blasts to celebrate. And thus my love affair with firearms began.
In 1952, my father bought me a beautiful BSA .22 rifle (we lived in Ireland). He was a professional soldier (commanding a battalion which landed on Gold beach on D-Day), and thought that education about a firearm was important; ‘never, never, never point a gun at someone, even if you are certain that it is unloaded’. Keep it clean it. Keep it secure. Shoot straight. Be aware of where the bullet will land, etc..
When we moved back to the UK, he was compelled to obtain a licence, but it was the start of decades of struggle with police and later, ‘firearms officers’ (retired policemen), first by him, and later by me. I gave up about 10 years ago, and transferred it to a gun dealer for destruction, a sad day for me, as it was a reminder of my father. It was never a threat to anyone.
Incidentally, rifles are not useful to a criminal, especially a .22.
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G Harris
2 years ago
It sounds brutal but when the US civilian population famously has more guns than the US military it seems that America has passed the point of no return when it comes to gun ownership and control.
Basically it is simply going to have to live with these almost daily shootings.
Mass shootings aren’t anything like a regular occurrence elsewhere in the world because gun ownership, and far more specifically unregistered gun ownership isn’t endemic in those countries, and that’s even those with comparatively high rates of ownership.
To put this into perspective, according to the Small Arms Survey in 2017, the US has over 120 small arms for every 100 US citizens, almost twice that of the next highest The Falkland Islands where gun ownership counted as 62 per 100 citizens and where 1700 guns are registered and an estimated 300 aren’t.
Contrast that with the vastly more populous US, and when you factor in the vast complexities and inequalities of American society compared to others and you see, from that study at least, that there are around 1.1m registered firearms in the US as opposed to an estimated 392m unregistered weapons.
A gargantuan number which makes up 45% of the world’s entire estimated civilian held firearms total incidentally.
Even if these estimates are ‘out’, ‘way out’ even, those are pretty shocking statistics, so I’d pity and admire the politician who wants to put his or her name to trying to get this particular toxic toothpaste back in its tube.
Switzerland has fewer guns per 1000 than the us by a factor of about 5 The US has 12 deaths per 100,000 whilst the Swiss have 7 so it’s clearly more complicated than just the number of guns per head of population. If that were the case then Switzerland would have about 2-3 deaths per 100,000 not 7. My suspicion is that it’s less about gun ownership and more about culture.
Funnily enough, Switzerland is the goto example for the NRA.
They too studiously ignore the point that the vast majority of civilian guns are registered, the polar opposite of the US.
Never mind the comparative homogeneity and entirely different social and economic culture that so obviously prevails in Switzerland.
Their gun deaths per 100000 are 3 not 7 by the way.
Nevertheless it stands to reason that any country that has guns in any abundance is far more likely to see more deaths, either inflicted or self-inflicted, by them as a result.
I’m not arguing for or against guns here, merely stating the fact that the US state getting its hands back on that many unregistered firearms or even a fraction of them is pie in the sky now and fraught with major problems.
They too studiously ignore the point that the vast majority of civilian guns are registered, the polar opposite of the US. That’s going to require a citation. Law-abiding people have this of being, well, law-abiding, meaning that if they are required to register a gun, they will do so. Anyone buying from a federally licensed firearms dealer has a registered weapon, and those dealers do not cut corners with their licenses. This argument is a straw man either way. Registration does not stop a person from using a gun to harm someone else. It’s funny how so many of you get agitated over pieces of metal, but say nothing about those who would misuse them.
The citation comes from the 2017 Small Arms Survey as already stated in the OP.
Again, as I’ve already said in different words above, it’s up to you how much of a pinch of salt you choose to take it with, but that rather misses the point given the disproportionately huge amounts of unregistered guns there are in the US.
Straw man indeed.
‘It’s funny how so many of you get agitated over pieces of metal, but say nothing about those who would misuse them’.
Funnily enough, I’m not making a moral judgement here and I’m not talking about the traceable, legally held guns of law-abiding citizens, but the overwhelming majority of the ones that aren’t and which you, much like the NRA, are either choosing to pretend don’t exist or apparently have no bearing on the situation.
As I have already said, I have no axe to grind about firearms per se, the US is where it is.
I never said unregistered guns don’t exist, just that they are not the majority. But let’s say all of them are unregistered. So what?
If I have to ask govt permission in order to exercise a right, then it’s not a right anymore. Should we have to register with some authority before exercising first amendment rights, too?
‘I never said unregistered guns don’t exist, just that they are not the majority.’
Well, the figures suggest otherwise with knobs on, but I’m only quoting a survey.
‘Should we have to register with some authority before exercising first amendment rights, too?’
For those presumably like you for whom the centuries old US Constitution always supersedes everything else including your elected government then apparently not, but that’s your business. I’m not American.
The thrust of my argument is that hundreds of millions of unregistered guns undeniably existing amidst a civilian populace is more likely to have negative consequences than positive ones on it.
The fact that there are over 1m legally registered ones doesn’t change that I’m afraid.
“The thrust of my argument is that hundreds of millions of unregistered guns undeniably existing amidst a civilian populace is more likely to have negative consequences than positive ones on it.”
Perhaps a PR campaign to convince criminals to register their guns then?
Perish the thought that you might be being flippant there Annette but again I can only reiterate what I have already said.
I’m clearly not the first to identify this as a major problem if not THE problem at the heart of this, and it’s difficult to see a simple solution that wouldn’t spawn further, possibly greater problems, if not impossible.
Hence my reluctant suggestion in my original post that the US is just going to have to acquiesce to these shootings just as it has long grown used to all the usual ‘woe is me’, ‘serious questions need to be asked here’ conspicuous hand wringing, the Second Amendment fetishists and those who seek to score cheap political ‘whataboutery’ points each time one of the more notable such events happens.
Yes, I was being flippant because somehow it has escaped your notice that gun crime in the US is not caused by legal, registered guns. You’re not identifying the problem, you’re identifying the non-problem.
Americans would love to get rid of unregistered, illegal guns. Getting rid of legal, registered ones would do absolutely zero.
‘Getting rid of legal, registered ones would do absolutely zero’
Eighty three of the mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and April 2021 involved weapons which were obtained legally; a clear majority. Only 16 incidents involved guns that were obtained illegally.
Nearly 75% of the mass shooters studied by the FBI legally purchased or possessed the firearm used in the crime.
Granted mass shootings are only a small fraction of the overall death toll associated with firearms in the US, but those figures still tell a story.
Now maybe these people would have got their guns illegally if they’d been unable to access them legally. Who knows? It’s a counterfactual hypothesis, but what is clear is that having access to the world’s largest pool of firearms, be they legal or illegal, particularly when you have murder in mind, means logically that a gun is far more likely to be involved.
Which brings me back to the point which I have been making ad nauseam all along which is that these guns aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, least of all the illegal ones, hence these multiple gun deaths are an immutable fact of life in America in much the same way as traffic deaths are due to the ubiquity of ‘the pieces of metal’ involved in both cases.
In fact the hundreds of millions of illegal guns in circulation are effectively used, in part, to justify the need for legal ones by the gun lobby, so when you say,
‘Americans would love to get rid of unregistered, illegal guns.’
As well they might but, given the scale of the problem, it just ain’t gonna happen is it.
You know nothing about gun “registration” in the United States. Of course, being the “progressive” that you are, utter ignorance is no barrier to your self-righteous lecture.
Iron Law: You can always tell a “progressive,” but you can never tell a “progressive” a single thing. They think they know it all. LOL
Bless you. Wouldn’t be the fella in the headline photo, would ya?
I think your flailing, desperate repeated replies tell their own story, nevermind the lack of further responses from the other two posters.
Being ‘progressive’ has got nothing to do with it by the way, it’s called being realistic.
Still, I’m sure it would make things much simpler for you if I fitted your own simplistic looping narrative.
A dark fantasy world that plays endlessly inside your own head where you singlehandedly save the world from the wicked ‘progressives’ with your trusty ‘piece’ possibly?
Go back and read what I wrote rather than reflexively frothing at the mouth and thinking you’re the next Charlton ‘cold dead hand’ Heston eh.
As shown by the almost universal supports for the killing of Ms Ashli Babbitt by most if not all, ‘Democrats’
She was guilty on three counts:
1: Being a White woman.
2: Being a US Airforce veteran.
3: Being a supporter of Mr Trump.
As such she had forfeited her right to exist, and was thus slaughtered in the Holy of Holies, the Capitol, by a black ‘avenger’.*
Consummatum est.
(*In this particular case by a Lieutenant in the fabled, Capitol Police, the US’s answer to the Praetorian Guard.)
Robert Malcolm
2 years ago
Broadly speaking, one life lost through pointless rage-driven gunfire is a life too many, and in terms of life-years lost, many victims are young, meaning that this US love affair has gone too far. After Dunblane we in Scotland said ‘enough is enough’ – sure you can kill people many ways, but guns make it easy for any punk with an attitude problem and a skinful of liquor to go rogue.
Whatever. Know this: 90 million American gun owners will keep them. Woe betide anyone who tries to take them.
Johnny Kay
2 years ago
The only question to ask when there is a publicized “mass shooting event” is this:
Was it a false-flag attack — a real attack carried out by the government in which there are real victims? Or was it a hoax attack — an attack carried out by the government in which everything is staged and no one is killed?
Here are the 17 characteristics of a hoax attack:
1. Coordinated speeches by politicians, entertainers, and news celebrities immediately after the “shooting” demanding more gun control;
2. Coordinated speeches by politicians, entertainers, and news celebrities immediately after the “shooting” demanding more censorship of “hate speech”;
3. Interviews with strangely calm “relatives” of the “victims” that quickly turn into emotional appeals for more gun control;
4. A “manifesto” by the “shooter” promoting ideas that the international corporate elite wants to discredit;
5. Recently-created social media accounts by the “shooter” containing posts and photographs promoting ideas that the international corporate elite wants to discredit;
6. A cute victim who becomes the face of the “tragedy”;
7. A designated hero who rushes at or tackles the “shooter”; fearlessly leads people to safety; or shields his wife, child, or girlfriend from the “shooter”;
8. Perfectly lit and composed photographs of people fleeing from the “shooter” or hiding from the “shooter”;
9. Prayer circles, flower drops, and candlelight vigils for the “victims” within hours of the “shooting”;
10. Extreme discrepancies in eyewitness accounts that cannot be reconciled — vast differences in the number of shooters, number of shots fired, length of time of the shooting, length of time before the arrival of the police, length of time before the shooting stopped after the arrival of the police, etc.;
11. Statements from family members of the “shooter” within a day or two of the “shooting” validating the official narrative in its entirety — accepting without question the guilt of their son/grandson/nephew, condemning his actions, and denouncing the ideology of his “manifesto”;
12. Awkward, inconsistent updates on the medical status of the “victims” by doctors and hospital spokesmen;
13. Interviews with “gravely injured” victims who recover in a few days, show virtually no sign of injury, and almost immediately begin talking about gun control;
14. Strangely festive “remembrances” or “memorials” to the “victims” featuring “butterfly releases” or “dove releases”;
15. News reports that there was an “active shooter drill” scheduled near the location of the “shooting” around the time of the event;
16. Witnesses who — by amazing coincidence — were also present at a previous “mass shooting event”; and
17. When the script calls for the “shooter” to be captured, the “shooter” is apprehended without incident and makes a complete confession.
The official narrative presented by the government and the corporate media is useful only in that it tells us what didn’t happen. . .
Last edited 2 years ago by Johnny Kay
Cycle Calves
2 years ago
Blame guns, blame scary sounding *assault rifles* (sorry Libs, that isn’t what AR in AR-15 stands for). A vast majority of weapons are 1 bullet for 1 trigger pull (semi-automatic), regardless of magazine capacity.
… a reasonably cared for revolver manufactured 100 years ago will still work. Ban all you want, pass all the laws you want, it has zero effect (see: Chicago).
The only shred of hope is to stop the manufacture of ammunition, because guns don’t kill people, it is the hunk of metal that comes flying out of a gun at a high rate of speed that does the damage.
Words of wisdom from 50 years ago:
Gloria: Daddy, did you know that sixty-five percent of the people murdered in this country in the last ten years were killed by handguns?
Archie Bunker: Would it make you feel any better, little girl, if they was pushed out of windows?
Murder by defenestration requires both parties being in the same room, and the window being a considerable height above ground. Knives and many other weapons also require close physical proximity. Guns are subject to none of these restraints on their lethality.
That probably doesn’t make the families of knife crime victims feel better. The truth is that you can kill with just about anything, a car, an airplane, a knife, you can even beat someone to death. We cannot eliminate every possible weapons someone could use.
The weapon isn’t the problem, as evidenced by millions of Americans who own guns without committing gun crime. The problem is the person wielding it with intent to kill.
Drugs don’t kill. They are inanimate objects that only kill if you take them just like guns only kill if you fire them. Cars only kill if you drive them. Parked on the side of the road they kill absolutely no one.
How else do you think many millions of Americans own guns without killing anyone?
The illegal guns may be more of a problem (suicides are more frequent among legal gun holders; are accidental shootings, eg toddlers, cleaning?), but I guess it’s a lot easier to acquire them in a country awash with guns than one where most people don’t own any and aren’t allowed to.
Accidental gun deaths have always been very rare, but they’ve gotten much rarer in the last 25 years. In fact, no category of accidental deaths (you can check the data from the Centers for Disease Control if you don’t believe me) has seen any material progress in the past quarter-century — except for accidental gun deaths, which have declined by about 60%.
You might ask why.
Gun ownership used to be primarily motivated by hunting. Today, the #1 reason people buy a gun is for personal protection. Hunting is more dangerous by its nature, with groups of hunters splitting up in the field, and occasionally shooting each other. These accidents are rare enough to be considered bizarre, such as when a deer hunter in a tree stand drops his rifle, hitting a rock, causing it to fire and kill him.
People with guns for personal protection are much more likely to confine their use of them to firing ranges. Guess what? Ranges are extremely conscious of liability, and thus have tight rules and a range master to enforce them. The rules are based on protocols developed by the Evil National Rifle Association, and their application at ranges has reduced gun accidents to nearly the vanishing point.
Those would be facts. Whether you choose to accept them is another matter.
The anti-gun forces will often fixate on gun accidents involving children. These are tragic for sure, but consider that for every accidental gun death, between 10 and 13 kids under 15 years of age (the ratio changes depending on the year, and the magnitude of the yearly changes is exaggerated because the absolute numbers are so low) drown, mostly in swimming pools.
Four or five kids die in fires for every accidental gun death, and about 25 kids die in car accidents. Those are facts, easily checkable through the CDC’s annual causes of death report.
I lived in Japan for a few years. If someone asked me, “Why do you think Japan is so clean, safe, orderly, and prosperous?” I would likely answer, “Probably has something to do with the fact that it’s full of Japanese people.”
North Dakota is safer than NYC, Chicago, DC, or London because it’s full of North Dakotan people.
jamesgjulie
2 years ago
I am now leaving UnHerd. Most people on this site are part of the right wing Herd, not thinking or caring people whose political affiliation does not affect their thought processes. I am disgusted.
This is indeed the danger of ANY platform for informed debate – that a feedback spiral occurs due to low level ‘bullying” so that eventually a homogeneous group end up in an echo chamber- which functions to inform a steadily decreasing group from the edge of a platforms ‘mainstream’. I rather think that the sites moderators should pay attention to this phenomenon lest Unherd degenerates. A reason that I am withholding membership to see what transpires. Generally I agree with much of what is discussed here and am learning a lot- however we need more diversity of informed opinion that is encouraged rather than multiple ‘downthumbed’ and sometimes rather brutally challenged ! After what point is there preaching to the converted ??
That sounds like code for ‘stop people expressing opinions I don’t approve of’.
The cry of ‘bully!’ is so often the cry of the person who opts for persecution status to get his own way that it is immediately suspect.
You probably include me among the ‘right wing herd’. The irony is that if I could have lived anywhere, at any time, it would probably have been Denmark in, say, the 1980s, which was a very high-tax, high-trust and ‘social democratic’ country. I have also lived much of my adult life in the Netherlands partly because it is not too dissimilar to Denmark and one can cycle everywhere.
Pointing out that the vast majority of gun crime in the US takes place among the black and Hispanic communities in 15 or 20 cities is not a ‘right wing’ view, it is a fact. And ignoring that fact will not make the problem go away, as we have seen over the last 50 or so years.
You also fail to understand that a very small ‘right wing herd’ congregates here because we have been banned from forums such as the Guardian for expressing views that do not align with the liberal media’s group think.
Ain’t that the truth. Nothing stays the same, but I cannot help but mourn the passing of the Guardian of old.
They evidently don’t know how bad things are at this new Guardian. I suppose anything can become normal eventually.
Funnily enough I have just had a drink with relatively leftie-type who used to work for the Guardian Media Group or whatever it’s called. And even he can no longer stomach its twisted narrative.
I’ve heard that it is a wretched place to work now.
As far as I can tell it has given up any pretence to be anything other than a conduit for grievance politics.
The atmosphere of censoriousness is reported to be as suffocating and toxic as an old fashioned London smog.
It used to be wonderful, too.
To each his own but it would help to know what you find so uncaring and disgusting. As the article plainly states and many posters have articulated, the vast majority of gun crime takes place in poverty-stricken non-White neighbourhoods. That’s not Breitbart conspiracy spin, so it stands to reason the people that live in and govern those neighbourhoods have some serious work to do and the rest of us need to lend a hand. Again, as stated in the article, many in government and media aren’t helping by making sweeping declarations of nation-wide culpability as if a gun-owning Iowa farmer is just as bad as gangbanger with an unregistered Glock.
um – so how is this not bullying ??????? Kremmy did you know that the number one cause of everything that is wrong with humanity is arrogance ?? It is not a case of being correct or incorrect it is the attitude of aggressiveness/ put down that also creates the opposite effect of what you might be striving for eg wider comprehension. I suspect I would rather have James in a position of power in my world rather than yourself EVEN though you may be better informed.. think about it – it is not all about winning a debate to demonstrate who is the ‘smarter’. That said I do appreciate your knowledge etc.
Ah yes, the GBCW post. Feels good for a couple minutes to blurt out, “Goodbye Cruel World,” and then you realize you’ll have to re-register under a new pseudonym. Trust me, child, this internet veteran has been there. LOL
Andre Lower
2 years ago
The author states that the narratives of both Left and Right are biased, presumably equivalent. Yet her own description glaringly misses the make-or-break point of what makes the disarmament argument the clear win: that EVERYBODY shall be disarmed.
Contrary to the narrative of the pro-gun crowd, it is perfectly possible to disarm everybody except a meagre team of police special forces. The world is full of indisputable examples for everyone to see – the UK, Japan, Singapore and others. In these countries, the rare instances where some criminal still manages to use a firearm are quickly dealt with (with universally approved use of deadly force if required) by the aforementioned special forces, which actions are otherwise intensely scrutinized and kept clean of racism, etc.
The truth being skirted by the author is that what perpetuates gun deaths in the sick US culture is not crime itself (which no society was able to fully erradicate), but the infantile egotrip of people who insist that their “right” to own guns must trump society’s right to enjoy a much better reality like that of the UK or Japan.
But alas, for some people the US is “exceptional”, their people are “different” from the rest of humanity and therefore logic must not apply to their citizenry.
Uhu. An engineering solution. People, being like parts of a machine, only need to be marshalled in the right way to crate a perfect society. Does it not occur to you to look at your underlying suppositions before proposing such a solution? Because another way of seeing it is that people are themselves discrete entities, complete in themselves, and not created to serve some notional social entity which, when correctly run, will enrich and make happy all the parts?
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but yes, there is a right to bear arms and it exists for a reason. The reason is that it is for the individual to decide whether or not he needs — or perhaps just wants — a gun. He can make this decision because he is a grown adult and does not need to give account of himself to someone who supposedly “knows better”. You don’t know anybody who “knows better”, do you? Oh, by the way, I’m not American. I don’t think they are “different” from the rest of humanity. I just like their logic and think it should apply to the rest of us.
Iron Law: You can always tell a “progressive,” but you cannot tell a “progressive” a single thing. They think they know it all. In any case, woe betide the “progressive” who tries to get my firearms.
that EVERYBODY shall be disarmed. That’s been the viewpoint of every dictator in human history. The American experience was made possible BECAUSE OF guns. Without them, the colonists would have been powerless beyond things like dumping tea in a harbor. The world is full of indisputable examples for everyone to see – the UK, Japan, Singapore and others. Which of those resembles the US in terms of demographics, constitutional rights, or the nature of its founding? It’s a nice collection of straw men, but otherwise, there is no substance to the argument. In the UK, a person can be criminally punished for a mean tweet or a Facebook post that offends someone. Perhaps the appeal to your own authority is misplaced here. By the way, how’s that “reality” you keep mentioning working out amid the grooming gangs, acid attacks, and assorted other treasures that your import class has brought?
Ah, I see – freedom is a privilege that only exists in the US, then… The rest of the world lives in some sort of cage that only luminars like Alex can “detect”. And Akex is here to teach us all that freedom can only exist with weapons…
See Alex, a delusional and hateful person like yourself is a clear example of why allowing wholesale access to firearms is a disastrous idea. I am very glad we’ll never meet. You can enjoy your “exceptional” country and its dystopian reality all by yourself.
“You can enjoy your “exceptional” country and its dystopian reality all by yourself.” and 330 million other people, you mean. As to freedom existing only with the ability to defend oneself, well, yes, that’s quite true. Not sure what you mean by “wholesale access to firearms”.
The only “hateful” person I’m seeing here is you. If you stay away from the “dystopian” U.S. because of guns, both the laughable ignorance and the loss is yours and yours alone. You will not be missed, limey. LOL
There have always been a lot of guns in the US, and there always will be. This is not the problem.
The problem is a small, extremely violent, urban criminal underclass which is responsible for an overwhelming majority of gun murders, mostly against members of their own communities.
Perfectly reasonable, you say. My response is this: Good luck to anyone who tries your preferred scheme.
Miguelito
2 years ago
This is a thoughtful article but it certainly misses a couple of points that are relevant. (1) I used to care for a caiman, a South American alligator. They are about as smart as a bird and he was trained some. You could see that when he dropped his head he had realized that he wasn’t in a life or death fight so he was pretty safe to manage at that point. But, he had those teeth and when you have teeth like that, you’re going to use them. So you never ever got in the way of those teeth. America is absolutely awash in guns now. They are going to get used. (2) What is making the first point worse is that Mr. Trump has amplified the Darwinian principles that Mr. Gingrich introduced to Congressional affairs. Nations and economies thrive when there is law and order. Others thrive when there is chaos. The Law of the Jungle that Mr. Trump has promoted as a replacement for Constitutional law, is known for being red of tooth and claw. Does it surprise you that there is an increase in violence when it has been explicitly promoted so much?
Please stop. There are millions of guns in the hands of law-abiding people. If they were the problem you think they, it would be easily documented. Yet, the bulk of gun crimes occur 1) in inner cities, often involving gang bangers and 2) in places where guns are difficult to come by.
The mayor of Chicago and others like her love to blame “lax laws” in Wisconsin and Indiana, yet neither of those states has her city’s problem. Maybe, just maybe, it’s the inanimate metal object that is at fault, but rather, the person using it.
Oh, good lord. America has ALWAYS been “absolutely awash in guns”. And Trump isn’t President anymore. But he was very much a “law and order” President. That was a big part of his appeal. And the economy thrived during his presidency.
This is silly. People shooting people significantly predates the Trump administration, and homicides are up 800% in Portland, Oregon, this year not because of anything that administration did or did not do, but because of what locals with a progressive bent have done or have not done. It’s knives in the UK; it’s guns on the West Side of Chicago. Ignore the facts about who is doing the lion’s share of the killing and you’ve tied your brain behind your back. No matter how one fudges the numbers with definitions, so-called mass shootings remain statistically insignificant. (Meanwhile, could we at least agree that it is criminal to overuse “pivot” and to pretend that “multiple” is an adjective and that it makes a writer sound smart?)
There is just one tinsy winsy little problem. A lot of those Middle America right wingers are enjoying the show because IT DOES NOT AFFECT THEM IN THE SLIGHTEST. Violence is skyrocketing in America’s progressive cites and has hardly changed a bit in rural America and flyover country. Even as the economy struggled and crime went up, little of it was violent crime. It has seriously been a wonderful bit of schadenfreude to watch panicking white suburbanites clear out gun store shelves after they smugly told us no one ever needs a gun and now find out much hassle those supposedly “reasonable” laws are.
I appreciate the argument Mrs. Rosenfield is trying to make and I understand that she wants Americans to come together to solve problems. The problem is that it does not affect both halves of America equally. In rural America and flyover country we are surrounded by guns and ammunition, well over 400 million of them in fact. Just to let that sink in, there are only about an estimated 150 million guns in circulation with the worlds militaries and that also means there are more guns than there are people in America. Many of them are so called scary “assault weapons,” which are just semiautomatic rifles and no, they have existed for well over half a century now. There is nothing new about them and despite what the Left would have you think, they are very rarely used in crimes. If you think you can just ban them and they will go away, you are dreaming. See as far as Middle America is concerned, why would they change things if they A, like their guns, B, strongly believe in the right to self-defense, and C, see few examples of their misuse?
Now compare that to many of America’s cities. Drive byes, gang shootouts, and carjackings are common. Gun control is strict and useless. Hardly anyone is doing background checks. Violent criminals are often just allowed to go free. I do not want to be mean, but I am just tired at this point. Leave us alone and deal with your own problems.
Very good point: “The problem is that it does not affect both halves of America equally.” Large cities and flyover country have different situations that require different policies. Trouble is that a lot of things you might want to do to deal with this kind of problem cannot be done locally, as long as guns, taxpayers, shoppers and workers can move freely between jurisdictions. Which is why violence-plagued cities cannot ‘leave you alone and deal with their own problems‘.
As for “Violent criminals are often just allowed to go free”, the US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world (of countries with reliable statistics) and is notorious in Europe for its harsh punishments. Don’t you think putting even more people in prison might get you into diminishing returns?
But violent criminals are often allowed to go free in the US. Indeed, they were released on to the streets during Covid – and they wonder why homicides etc are through the roof. The problem is that the jails are full of people who were put away for years and years for committing two or three minor drugs offences, largely due to the 1990s Crime Bill authored by Joe Biden.
Giving harsh sentences to minor drug offenders while letting violent criminals walk free. I mean when you put it like that, the American criminal justice system sounds kind of insane doesn’t it?
“IN Uk they lock up the victims and free the criminals’. Put like that UK justice seems insane, but that is because the statement is NOT true, and your statement is also untrue.
“The problem is that the jails are full of people who were put away for years and years for committing two or three minor drugs offences,” This is really myth. There used to be ‘Habitual Offender ‘ laws, and ‘Three Strikes and you are Out’ laws, but this is not the situation now, it takes a lot to get hard time.
That is false. The three strikes and your out law refers to felonies, not misdemeanors. Drug offenses that are classified as felonies are possession with the intent to sell. Possession for personal use is a misdemeanor and do not fall under the three strikes law. And there are no non-violent drug dealers. Selling deadly drugs to addicted people is a violent act. Coercing 14 year old to use drugs so they become addicted is a violent act. Drug dealers should go to prison for life on the first offense.
I know a lot of people are in prison in California because they counted low level theft in their three strikes. A lot of non-violent addicts found themselves serving long sentences over it. On the other end of the scale I know of places like Chiraq (local nickname for Chicago, let it sink in) where criminals who committed serious violent crimes were let off with a slap on the wrist. At the end of the day American prisons are full of many people who need rehabilitation and at the same time we have a lot of violent criminals who need to go to prison until they are old and grey.
You state that the violent gangs in the cities travel to more rural areas on a regular basis in order to commit crimes, which is totally false. Contrary to your assertion, the ‘violence-plagued cities’ can leave alone and for the most part they do. The violence is very localized, even within the cities so the problems can be addressed locally. It’s just that their is no will to address them. Meanwhile, The rich white liberals stay safe in their nice neighborhoods while voting for policies that guarantee the never ending deaths of poor black people.
You misunderstand me. I take it as given that the violence is indeed localised. The remedies are another matter. One solution might be to make it hard for teenage gang members to get guns – but that is impossible as long as guns are easy to get just outside the city. Other solutions might require money – i.e. higher taxes, which is impossible as long as the taxpayers can just run away to the suburbs where rates are lower. Meanwhile people outside the cities still share in the advantages the cities offer, from jobs to wealth creation to centralised services.
I entirely take you point that the rich white liberals are insulated from the inner-city violence – just like the rural republicans are. What I doubt, and what you would need to argue for, is that a republican mayor or governor could solve the problem of violence, given the economic social and racial situation the city has. In short, cities do not have crime because they vote Democrat – they vote Democrat because they have the voters, economy, and social situation they have, which also leads to higher crime.
They aren’t getting them outside of the city! That would require a background check, and if in another state, them shipping the gun to an in-state gun shop where you would be required to pass your state of residence background check. They are getting them out of the back of a van. Something like 80% of gun homicide in Chicago is committed with an illegal firearm not bought in a gun shop.
I bow to your superior knowledge. I was thinking more in the abstract. In Europe you can make it quite hard for gang members to get hold of guns, because there are no good sources nearby. As long as guns are freely available in the next state over, it must be in practice impossible to keep them from moving to where people want them, legally or otherwise.
Fair enough. I’ll conceed that we are heavily armed. Just not that being heavily armed = high crime. I don’t think that the illegal guns are following the same channels as legal guns, though I’ll concede I don’t know the stats on that. It would be interesting to know how many formerly legal guns have the regstration numbers filed off and end up on the black market as opposed to how many enter the country, say, from a cartel sneaking them over the border.
I doubt that many guns come from abroad. Who would produce them? Very few countries have the laws of the USA, which allow any fool to buy a gun.
Mexican cartels import guns over the border. Also, there are background requirements here, so no, “any fool” cannot buy a gun. My heavily armed neighborhood has low crime. Violence hs class and cultural roots. Those who aren’t brave enough to face those uncomfortable truths focus on gun ownership and ignore the statistics.
But where do the cartels get the guns?
Cartels get guns wherever they want to get guns. Sure they get some guns from the United States like handguns, and some rifles. They already have the smuggling and distribution network for drugs. Might as well bring some guns across along with your profits. Hell, the United States government even encouraged it. Look up Operation Fast and Furious some time for a beautiful feeling of outrage. As for the cartels they are also rocking GPMG’s, assault rifles, RPGs, grenades, and I think even a few MANPADS. Hint, you will not find those in a gun store.
Also to clarify a few things. FBI statistics have shown that most inner city crime is not caused by guns out of state. Even with strict gun laws most are obtained locally and those that are not were often stolen and trafficked. Most gang members use cheap, lower quality handguns. Killings with rifles, including so called “assault weapons” only number less than 5% of gun deaths (I’m pretty sure the number is lower but I do not have the statistics in front of me). The reason for this is that they were often straw purchased, and because you are going to ask, no they are almost never prosecuted.
Well Obama gave them quite a few under operation Fast & Furious. Research it.
Are those background check requirements not what Texas is now removing? Or did I misunderstand that?
Texas is now the 20th state to remove its statewide requirement to obtain a permit to carry a concealed firearm. I can argue both sides of that, but one thing is true: These laws have NO bearing on background checks or legal eligibility to possess a firearm.
That is one more thing I have learned from this debate. Thanks.
Of course – it had to be the mexicans! There we go, now we know who is to blame.
I wish we all could be that insightful…
If it’s a Mexican cartel, yes it’s probably Mexicans. Would you expect a Mexican cartel to be run by Thais?
There are many gun producers around the world and if you have money you can buy.
The laws of the USA do not “allow any fool to buy a gun.” You clearly know nothing about our laws.
In western Europe even illegal guns are quite hard to get. It is possible (of course) but it takes some serious criminals, with contacts. That cuts down on both shootings and suicides. Just to say that it is possible to reduce illegal guns, at least as long as legal guns are not too common. Admittedly it is kind of hard to see how the US could ever get there from the current starting point.
Just for fun, a couple of UK anecdotes:
There are some advantages to living in a low-gun society.
“There are some advantages to living in a low-gun society.” Tell that to White South Africans. If they have no gun they are done. If USA was unarmed it would be completely lawless, life would be like Venezuela.
“In western Europe even illegal guns are quite hard to get.”
not these days. Most of the illegal guns in Europe, which law enforcement, particularly in France and the UK recognize, come from Eastern Europe or the Middle East and North Africa. Criminals can get illegal guns, don’t kid yourself that they can’t.
“There are some advantages to living in a low-gun society”
If you don’t want to own a gun, yes.
“Just to say that it is possible to reduce illegal guns, at least as long as legal guns are not too common.”
One doesn’t have much to do with the other unless you have some evidence that shows that lots of legal guns are being sold to criminals. Your assumption appears to be that all guns start as legal weapons and then become illegal weapons. But there isn’t any evidence for that.
If you are a criminal with contacts abroad or to other connected criminals, of course you can get weapons. Anything else would be a miracle. The point is that if you are a random teenager who wants to be a badass it is much harder. And if you carry that weapon around with you, you can get arrested for it. That does cut down on the spontaneous gun duels – and keeps the police less edgy when doing stop-and-search.
My assumption is that you cannot make it hard for the wrong people to get guns unles you make it a bit harder for everybody. For a random suburban teenager background checks might well be enough. But whatever the trade flows are now, it just does not sound realistic to do much about the supply of guns to gang members, as long as the country is awash with legally held guns.
“The point is that if you are a random teenager who wants to be a badass it is much harder. And if you carry that weapon around with you, you can get arrested for it. “
It probably used to be much harder but not these days. And if you carry an illegal gun around with you in the US you can get arrested for it as well.
“My assumption is that you cannot make it hard for the wrong people to get guns unles you make it a bit harder for everybody. “
Yes I know that’s your assumption but the reason it’s incorrect is that all guns do not begin as legal guns. The vast majority of gun crime is not committed with legal guns.
if only those Charlie Hebdo employees had been as brave, eh? Is it better to be killed by a suicide bombing, though?
How do you explain a place like Switzerland, where nearly every household has at least one legal firearm?
Violent crime – including gun crime – in the US is very highly concentrated in large urban, mostly Democrat-run centres, like St. Louis, Minneapolis, LA, Baltimore, and (notoriously) Chicago. It is not correlated at all with rates of legal gun ownership.
Take away all the crime in those places, and you’d be left with a violent crime rate similar to that of most European countries.
In civilian guns per head you have
1) US 120 guns, 7) Canada 35, 10) Finland 32, 14) Austria 30, 17) Norway 29, 19) Switzerland 28, 22) Sweden 23. Switzerland is not that unique for civilian guns, apparently (though they do send military weapons home with their army reserve). Do you have a reference for your ‘every household has a gun’ quote – not that it matters enormously? In Sweden, as it happens, well over 90% of the firearms are rifles or shotguns – long guns.
For people to shoot each other , you need a shooter and a gun. Guns alone are clearly not enough. On the other hand you can surely avoid a number of homicides and suicides if people do not carry guns around, and they are hard to get hold of in a hurry when you feel like using one. You would need to do something about the most violent cities and neighbourhoods independent of gun control, no disagreement there. On the other hand I believe suicides in Europe diminished significantly as countries switched from (poisonous) city gas to (non-poisonous) natural gas, and poisonous drugs became harder to get hold of; the same would likely happen if you reduced the number of guns. Even if you managed to pacify Detroit there could still be gains from having fewer guns – not that I think you would be interested.
Rasmus, you haven’t read or reproduced your source correctly. It doesn’t show ‘guns per head’ (as anyone seeing your statistical breakdown of guns per country must surely have realised*) but ‘guns per hundred people’. I’m not saying that this destroys your argument, with which I largely sympathise, but – get the numbers right.
*It should leap to the eye that the average individual in the USA couldn’t possible own 120 guns!
Oh Shoot! That is the kind of thing where you just miss what you are actually writing, because you know what you really mean. Of course it is guns per 100 people.
Thanks for correcting it.
You also know nothing about the dynamics of suicide.
Yes, exactly. It’s not legal gun owners shooting people, that’s where Rasmus makes his mistake. He seems to believe that 16 year olds in Detroit (who cannot buy a gun legally anyway) are driving around suburbia purchasing guns from legal gun owners. So if legal gun owners lose their guns, somehow that Detroit teenager won’t be able to get a gun. That’s seems to be his theory anyway.
Whereas you seem to believe that legal guns with legal owners are totally isolated form illegal guns with illegal owners, and somehow you could take the illegal guns away form the illegal people without any of the easily available the legal guns ever migrating to the wrong users. To me that sounds like emptying half a swimming pool of water – without putting in a divider. But we are unlikely to agree on this.
“Whereas you seem to believe that legal guns with legal owners are totally isolated form illegal guns with illegal owners”
yes
”, and somehow you could take the illegal guns away form the illegal people without any of the easily available the legal guns ever migrating to the wrong users.”
yes. Although unless you lock up everyone using an illegal gun in a crime, eliminating the illegal guns won’t work. What we have to do is eliminate those who use guns in crimes. But essentially yes, there would not be a market for legal guns suddenly opened up to criminals if illegal guns were hard to get. Legal gun owners want their guns. They don’t have them so they can sell them to criminals.
I assume you’ve tried <G>
If someone wants to commit suicide lack of a gun will not stop them.
True. Japan has a very high rate of suicide with few legal guns.
As I’ve posted elsewhere, there is an example of a Muslim terrorist who wanted to do a killing spree and armed himself with a knife. Also of a criminal group who went to great trouble getting hold of and transporting a single-shot converted starters’ pistol. Anecdotal, yes, but a pretty good indication that it is not that easy to get hold of proper weapons.
Of course. But making it harder and more time consuming gives people more time to change their mind. Fewer people kill themselves (or others) that way.
This is your error: You are thinking in the abstract, with no knowledge of our laws or the practicalities involved. The comment about guns being available “in the next state over” is the tell here. You abstracted something that, in daily reality here, is barely relevant.
It’s a big country, so there are always exceptions. Criminals have their channels, but they are not the ones you have abstracted.
Would it be fair to say that as of now it is quite easy for anyone who can pass a background check to get (legal) guns? And that it is also quite easy for anyone who cannot pass a background check to get (illegal) guns – at least in the places where a lot of people want them?
My guess is that insisting on legal guns being easy to get is connected to the other kind being easy to get as well. Or, if you like, that it would be impossible to remove access to illegal guns while keeping legal guns easily available – even if the two supply routes are separate for now. But I’ll admit that it is rather academic, since there does not seem to be a lot of push for making either change?
Anyway, thanks for answering. I still prefer to live in a disarmed society, but I am at least less ignorant than I used to be.
If you can pass the check (look up Form 4473 if you are interested in the details), then it’s easy except in the worst anti-gun states with more restrictions.
How hard is it to get illegal guns? Hard to answer definitively. My guess from what I’ve read and heard is that it’s similar to other criminal activity. “Easy” for a criminal in the abstract, but not necessarily “easy” in real life given all of the various impairments most criminals have. (Drugs, stupidity, poverty.)
Removing access to illegal guns is, to me, like crime-fighting in general: a never ending task, pursued in the twilight. Two certainties in the real world.
First, no one will succeed in confiscating them. There are roughly 80 million lawful gun owners here, with 450 million firearms and at least a trillion rounds of ammo. Suffice to say that there would be resistance.
Second, no gun control scheme that I know of has kept firearms from criminals who want them. Even background checks have no impact on the availability of guns on the street among criminals, or so I have read. By definition, criminals don’t care about the laws.
You lot have been quite convincing, but I would still add that there are arguments, US arguments, that suggest that illegal weapons do flow from states with lax gun laws to states with strict gun laws. It would be interesting to hear where you think those illegal guns are coming from.
>70% of guns used illegally come from within the state where they are used. And again, it’s illegal to go to another state and buy a gun that would not comply with the home state’s rules.
An illegal firearm in the US? I didn’t realise there was such a thing.
Perhaps you need more information than you appear to have.
“One solution might be to make it hard for teenage gang members to get guns – but that is impossible as long as guns are easy to get just outside the city.”
Because teenage gang members are known to travel far and wide looking for guns? And no one in places where legal gun ownership is high would notice this?
No gang member in Chicago is buying a gun anywhere but Chicago, which is awash in illegal guns. Why would any criminal have to leave Chicago to locate an illegal gun? It would be a top location to buy one.
The point is that there would be no hope of emptying Chicago of illegal guns, as long as they are cheap and plentiful just outside town (not that I am aware that anyone is trying). With eager buyers and simple (if illegal) supply, the market would take care of the rest.
No one is leaving Chicago to obtain an illegal gun though. If you wanted to obtain one, you’d GO to Chicago. Illegal guns are not cheap and plentiful in suburbia.
There aren’t people roaming around suburbia trying to buy illegal guns. You’re missing the key. The illegal guns are awash IN Chicago, not outside of it.
You seem to believe that if Chicago were somehow emptied of illegal guns (which would require emptying it of criminals too) that legal gun owners in suburbia would set up yard sales and sell their legal guns to criminals from Chicago. But legal gun owners want their guns.
You cannot really understand much until you grasp the difference between legally owned guns and illegal ones. Understand what criminals are committing gun crimes with.
There is no difference between cities, suburbs, and rural areas when it comes to legal gun availability. All purchases of new guns are accompanied by a federal background check, and in blue states with state-level checks on used guns, these apply statewide.
It is illegal to cross state lines to make a gun purchase that’s not legal in the buyer’s home state. Also, any gun that’s sold and then shipped — new or used — must be accompanied by a federal background check before it can be picked up. These rules apply in all 50 states.
In practice, the armed criminals (mainly in the cities) typically get their guns in the city, on the street, from other criminals. Thus, illegal guns are actually more available in the cities. As a rural resident with legally purchased firearms and the requisite array of state-level permits for carrying a concealed handgun, I can confidently say that someone not known to a seller would have a significant degree of trouble in finding a legal gun owner willing to transfer a gun to a stranger outside of the well-known legal channels.
That challenge would be especially tough in the countryside, where everyone tends to know everyone else. There ARE rural criminals, for sure, but the practicalities are aligned against them. If I were a criminal in search of illegal firearms, I’d head to one of the big cities where we used to live.
Most of the people who yammer about all of this don’t even begin to know what they are talking about.
The problem is not that they are rich, but that they are Leftists and cannot help themselves because of ideological possession.
True, and it’s even localized in cities. I lived in Chicago in a very safe neighborhood about one mile from a neighborhood with daily shootings. Night and day within one mile.
Almost all cities are like that. We lived in St Louis, which is having a gun-killing thing right now. I can tell you the exact location where the nice white people live, and the exact street where the change happens.
It’s not always white neighborhoods. I’ve lived in mixed race neighborhoods that were low crime too, but they were more often working class.
Sure. BTW, I’m from Arlington Heights, so know something of Chicago. And, yes, plenty of mixed race areas. Let’s be clear – it’s more class than race. Many on the lower class are black, many blacks are in higher classes.
Agreed. Class and culture.
And I was born in Evanston. 🙂
Gangs in the inner city ALMOST NEVER travel to rural areas. They may travel to inner ring suburbs, but not out into the country.
Yes, I got a chuckle at the idea that no one would notice inner city gang members roaming around rural areas looking for guns.
Inner city criminals are mostly terrified of rural areas, with their trees, grass, cows, and gun-totin’ rednecks, and would never venture into them voluntarily.
And for good reason. Try it in our county, and it’ll be a one-way trip.
Incarceration rate is a meaningless figure unless you also consider crime rate. The US rate of the one is high because so is the other.
Yes but sometimes Europeans think that committing a crime, having a trial, being convicted, etc. are not required before one gets incarcerated in the US.
Rasmus, you are a great poster, but you just fail to understand USA. I am originally from London, so know USA from both sides, and have lived all over – and what you Europeans do not understand is….
USA IS DANGEROUS AS THE UNDERCLASS ARE VIOLENT. Middle Class Americans are more law abiding then British. Crime in Middle class areas, and country, are safer than UK. The Crime comes from certain classes.
If you reduced the prison population you would have a big rise in crime, USA has TOO FEW in prison actually. You look at USA with glasses of European lenses, and they utterly distort the reality. USA is a mix of third world kind of areas mixed near Blue Collar, and Middle Class, and Wealthy. I recommend you watch the sanitized version of the rougher side of USA by watching ‘The Wire’ and a couple of the Netflix/Prime documentaries on Poor Rdeneck towns in West Virginia, or poor Hispanic sections of LA or El Paso.
What you just do not understand is USA is a mix, and like most mixes it is stratified, and as long as you remain in your strata that is what you get.
You could be right – as you say I do not know the USA so I could not tell either way. I am certainly not making any policy proposals. I cannot but wonder, though. The US already has more people in prison overall than any country with reliable statistics – third world included. If most of the prisoners come from a few strata, the incarceration rate for those people must be even higher. And unlike, say, China, all those prisoners are not enough to ensure law and order. How many prisoners would it take to bring inner-city crime down? If you doubled the prison population, what would it actually help? It may be, as you say, that there is no other way of managing, the way things are. But one would sort of hope that it might be posssible to find a strategy that led to better results than the current one.
“The US already has more people in prison overall than any country with reliable statistics”
and? What is it you think this signifies?
“How many prisoners would it take to bring inner-city crime down?”
well, it would require imprisoning anyone who commits a gun crime and not letting them out.
“But one would sort of hope that it might be posssible to find a strategy that led to better results than the current one.
You’re assuming that leaders in US cities with lots of gun crime want to stop it but where is the evidence for this? Like you do, most Americans look at US cities that are violent and shake their heads, happy that they don’t have to live in them. People get the lifestyle they vote for. If you want to live in fear of being shot, well, you get to do that. Vote for someone like Bill deBlasio and you can live surrounded by violent criminals.
Those “poor redneck towns”, as dysfunctional as they are, still have nowhere near the violent crime rate – or at least the murder rate – of large inner cities.
In our rural county, there’ll be one murder every couple years. Almost always among meth users.
“Large cities and flyover country have different situations that require different policies”
why would policies have to be different? Seems like a policy (actually a law) that punishes gun crime would work in large cities the same way such policies/laws work in “flyover country”.
“…the US already has the highest incarceration rate in the world (of countries with reliable statistics) and is notorious in Europe for its harsh punishments. “
Well, Europe is notorious in the US for its leniency and shocking lack of harsh punishment for even the most diabolical of crimes, eg. sentencing mass murderer Anders Brevik, who killed over 70 people, most of them teenagers, to a mere 20 years.
If we had a much higher crime rate than you, that would suggest that maybe we should try to imitate you. As it is, you have a much higher crime rate than we do. Of course it is not so simple, the number of crimes probably depends mostly on other things. But does your approach really work so well that you want to double down on it?
“If we had a much higher crime rate than you, that would suggest that maybe we should try to imitate you.”
You don’t have to have a high crime rate to incarcerate criminals. You just have to be willing to incarcerate those who commit crimes. Wouldn’t preventing anyone who commits a gun crime from doing so again bring the crime rate down?
Yes, that was truly shocking that people would accept a sentence like that as adequate.
“Don’t you think putting even more people in prison might get you into diminishing returns?”
how can putting people who commit gun crime in prison lead to diminishing returns?
Coming from a country that doesn’t allow any idiot to buy military grade weapons I just wonder if you have any concept of how backward and retarded America looks from here with its gun ownership laws?You know what real freedom is? Its the freedom to know that you can go to school or walk down the street without being murdered by a mentally ill 16 year white supremacist toting a machine gun.
You’re talking out the back of your head. First you cannot buy military grade weapons in the US. So called assault semi-automatic rifles are nothing more than regular rifles dressed up to look bad ass. Second, the suburbs and countryside in the US is incredibly safe, and a good deal more so than many areas of London, for example. Crime is generally localized to the cities, and specifically to certain neighborhoods which is indeed a tragedy.
You are coming from a country where the govern executes decent people for having a different opinion, creed, religion or ethnicity. It has to be very safe there. The problem is not the “White supremacism” it is gang related activity, culture, as it was mentioned in the article, and fatherlessness. Reality matters more than ideology.
When communists took over my country, as long as the population had weapons, commies could not take over the country. After they disarmed us, we were under their boot. I hope that you understand the concept of freedom better, as long as you live in the West (as it seems)!
Is this what you think most of America is like? I thought non-American’s were supposed to be more enlightened? This would be like me posting that I don’t want to go to Italy because I fear getting hit in the face with flying pizza dough being thrown by a mustached guy named Luigi in a stripped shirt while singing Amore.
Switzerland has the highest gun ownership in the world .As I presume they don’t use chocolate bullets , its what you use the guns for- hunting in the rural areas-that counts. In the cities they seem to use their illegal guns on other people for target practice.
Statistically you have much more chance in the US of being eaten by a shark, struck by lightning, or dying from a dog bite, than of “being murdered by a mentally ill 16 year white supremacist toting a machine gun.”
As the entertainment industry is run by cosmopolitan types , they transfer their secret fear of being made to live in the countryside onto their programmes. There are endless films and fictional TV such as Knight Rider Mattlock etc who when the hero comes to the one-horse-town is treated badly by the sheriff ( who seems to be in control of everything) usually locked up , the people are depicted like something out of Deliverance & obviously this fictional version of small time America has taken shape as reality in people’s minds
Ah, a lecture from China. Enough said. LOL
A lot of those Middle America right wingers are enjoying the show because IT DOES NOT AFFECT THEM IN THE SLIGHTEST. This says more about you than it does about them. There are no “right wingers” who enjoy the ongoing carnage, especially when kids are among the victims. Come on, man. Do you get excited about violent death in other places?
The sum total of your argument is that the problem is not guns, it’s people and culture, but we’re not allowed to talk about those things.
I very much would like the discussion about people and culture. As you observe, the gun isn’t the problem. But, as always, we arrive at the discussion about guns – how easy or hard to get them.
What’s clear, as the president ( Biden) has said, is that we are suffering from an epidemic of gun violence in this country,”
He should have added “in the blue states” if he were honest, truly wanted a solution and America to come together on this.
But of course he didn’t.
It’s not even the blue states, it’s the blue cities. But the people in those cities keep voting for it and they wouldn’t want it any other way.
But of course you didnt actually look at any statistics did you James and just waved your red hat in the air instead.
• Mass shootings by shooter’s race in the U.S. 2021 | Statista
The whole point of the article was that it acknowledged those statistics of a particular form of shooting but that as a proportion to overall gun violence they were relatively insignificant.
A similar thing happened here with the Dunblane tragedy. Instead of having an enquiry* , there was a sudden decidion to ban legal guns. This meant that the olympic team have to travel to France to practice , but the illegal teams can practice on whom they want. * As it became apparent this man should have had his license taken away-there were enough complaints for the police to do this-never explained why these complaints were ignored.Obviously legal gun owners can suddenly act ‘crazy’ & kill people-they usually then kill themselves.
I don’t think you read carefully the article. Gang related activity causes a “discrete” genocide.
That graph is totally irrelevant to what James said: it does not address which states had the highest level of gun violence, just the race of the killer in a tiny proportion of the gun crimes committed in the USA.
You’re like a politician in an interview, who, when asked one uncomfortable question, ignores it and answers another, more congenial, one.
It’s a pity that when you looked at the data, you didn’t bother applying even the simplest analysis.
At its most basic, the chart you cited demonstrates that while the black community make up less than 20% of the US population, they commit ~30% of the mass shootings of whites.
Blacks are 12% of the US population in fact.
Your link says 53% of mass shootings (not defined) were by white perpetrators. That makes white shooters under-represented – a lot more than 53% of America is white.
Aside from the relative under-representation of Whites in mass shootings, your reference does not account for the more numerous deaths from shootings that are not mass shootings. In that case, you will find the more massive numbers associated with “inner-city” populations.
Or, Zac, you never learned to read a report without checking its provenance. If it’s easier for you to understand, I’ll put it this way: see if you can predict the political preferences of ‘Statistica’, the company whose information you quote, by having a good old look at their media partners.
America has spree shootings that make headlines – and yes male, but not always white – but the deep problem is black victims of black shooters in (often US democrat run) cities – shootings that kill a disproportionate number under 18s (so children effectively). So far this year Chicago to 21st May has had 865 shootings, 195 murders and 658 sexual assaults.
This report is from this week – 21 shooting incidences on Wednesday. Absolutely terrifying for someone living in Europe. https://chicago.suntimes.com/crime/2021/5/27/22456250/2-killed-17-wounded-shootings-wednesday-may-26-chicago
Unfortunately the issue of guns is a U-shaped curve. Either no-one has them to be safe, or if bad guys have them, then everyone believes they need them to feel safe, and rural America is pretty safe. To protect Black American’s lives, reducing the terror of gun violence against Black Americans by other Black Americans would be the place to start.
“So far this year Chicago to 21st May has had 865 shootings, 195 murders and 658 sexual assaults.”
yes. And they keep electing people who won’t stop it. It’s tough to feel much sympathy for them.
What are your solutions?
End the war on drugs. It is the root cause of much of the turf war gang violence that takes place in cities, and it increases the number of encounters between people and police that lead to the George Floyd type incidents.
On top of which, lots of guns get exported from the US to Mexico to arm the drugs gangs, with dire results – “black goes south and white comes north” as the Grateful Dead put it.
Oh please, the PKMs, RPG-7s, and Colt M4A1s with M203 grenade launchers were already there.
if you take the right of the people to keep and bear Arms seriously, surely every well-regulated US militia should have them too.
Even if all street drugs were decriminalized and regulated the way alcohol is now, there would still be massive amounts of unregulated, illegal drugs on the streets, and people killing each other over them.
The killing isn’t caused by the buying, selling, and consumption of drugs, and the enforcement of laws against them; if it were, the murder rate would be just as high in the many parts of poor rural America where drugs are epidemic.
First solution would be to move to someplace where the criminals are not in charge. Which many people do. Second……Anyone who commits a crime with a gun needs to be locked up. It’s very hard to commit another gun crime while in prison.
I thought you would say some like this, first you blame them electing the wrong people and then suggest they should just move instead, perhaps a bit impractical for everybody. Then the autoritarian solution of just trying to lock up as many people as possible. Do you not think, as mentioned above, that ending the war on drugs might make a difference?
Not only do I suggest people move away from poorly managed crime-ridden cities, they are actually doing it, if they can.
if you commit a crime with a gun, yes, you should go to prison. Not sure how that is locking up as many people as possible. You’d still have to commit the gun crime. What would you suggest happen to those who commit gun crimes?
Exhibit A would be NY before and afyer Rudi Guliani and his zero tolerance policy. Thar way you up the risk to commit crimes. Human beings, even criminals are risk sensitive, and will adapt their behavior accordingly (as happened in NY. Singapore is also a good example.) There is also a cultural cause that is more complex. Something like 75% of black inner city children grow up fatherless, no positive male figure, but lots of gangs to take that role. Lousy school systems that don’t make an effort to educate then because math is racist or some such nonsenae. Really terrible cultural role models like rappers and hip hop singers who glorify crime and irresponsible behavior. The welfare system.perpetuates this environment.
Between 70% and 75% of black children are born out of wedlock. But it gets worse: Between 40% and 45% of black children are born into a household without even a cohabiting father, as in “no father’s name on the birth certificate.”
What do you mean by “ending the war on drugs?” Be specific.
Moving is exactly what we did 3-1/2 years ago, from Seattle to the WA State countryside. No one could have predicted the events of 2020, but the response of that city’s so-called leadership did not surprise us one bit.
‘To protect Black American’s lives, reducing the terror of gun violence against Black Americans by other Black Americans would be the place to start.’
But you can’t do that because it would be ‘racist’.
Yes, I occasionally follow the weekend death toll as reported in the Chicago Tribune and it is unfailingly depressing.
I used to skim read the physical Tribune (there were hundreds of pages) every Sunday lunchtime, my favourite time of the week during my two years in Detroit. I was able to chill out in a fine Mongolian restaurant, where the white guy frying my food wore a green T shirt declaring: “Proud to be an Irish Mongolian”, and read about part of the weekly slaughter 250 miles to the west (as if downtown Detroit, 20 miles to the east, was not bad enough).
I dimly recall 57 casualties one particularly bad Chicago weekend – 11 dead, 46 wounded, from late Friday to late Sunday.
And the mayor of Chicago’s response to this violence is decreeing that she won’t grant personal interviews to any reporters that aren’t black or brown. WTF. We see her priorities.
The most expeditious way to do which is to jail as many black Americans as possible. I am not sure how many you’d have to jail but it could be most of them.
Absolutely not. What is needed is help for the black American community to stand up to thugs and violence, to spike the tumour within. It cannot be imposed from outside. It needs leaders who can build the community forwards as successes and winners, not as victims dependent on external largesse.
Wouldn’t removing the criminal element plaguing the black community be a better solution? Would you suggest any white community stand up to thugs with guns? This is a law enforcement issue. Remove the criminals so peaceful non-criminals can live unmolested by thugs.
In my rural county, the crime rate is low. A major reason is that would-be criminals are quite aware that the large majority of people out here are gun owners. People occasionally ask me what my home defense gun is. I reply: “Which room?”
I would almost feel sorry for the drug addict who makes the mistake of thinking that we are sitting ducks. I hope it never happens, and I have little fear that it will, but if it did, my biggest problem would be cleaning the rug. LOL
“And in the meantime, whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives.”
yes. In democrat run cities. Gun crime in the US doesn’t happen all over. While it’s sad to see it explode in blue cities, most Americans simply aren’t affected by it – it doesn’t happen where they live. There may be plenty of guns around them but not much crime committed with them.
Cities like NY and San Francisco and Minneapolis really should ask themselves why they are covered up with crime while other cities are not. What is it that they are doing differently that leads to high gun crime rates?
‘What is it that they are doing differently that leads to high gun crime rates?’
They are voting for Democrats.
Well yes and the people who commit gun crime get a vote. They may just be out voting the people who don’t want to live in crime ridden cities. People like that just tend to leave if they cannot afford the security or gated community.
Life is so simple is it not. Vote Republican and everything gets better! You can’t be that naive can you??
It got better in NYC when they voted in a Republican mayor. Now they have a democratic mayor and guess what????.
“Whatever it is.” Hmmm; has anything happened since this time last year that might have contributed to the spike? Couldn’t have anything to do with months of rioting, a ‘defund’ movement, DA’s refusing to prosecute, eliminating bail, or a thousand other things done by the elected class, almost all of those being Dems.
I have seen that widely discussed. Crime has rocketed in US cities that have defunded the police. Further the escalating violence in certain US cities (we know which ones!) has resulted in more people buying guns to protect themselves.
Interesting article. The byline is “Nobody wants to tell the true story of gun crime in America.” Even the author of this article confines herself to describing the phenomenon and how America’s political camps manage to talk past each other. Unravelling the causes of gun violence would require a much longer article, I’m sure.
America is hopelessly divided. Gun violence is just one in a long list of important topics the left and right can’t meaningfully discuss. Biden might succeed in partially restricting gun ownership, and if the republicans are reelected they’ll try to dismantle his reforms. Nothing will truly change until America finds common ground as a society again.
“America is hopelessly divided. Gun violence is just one in a long list of important topics the left and right can’t meaningfully discuss”
if you mean divided in the sense that only part of the population bears the brunt of gun crime, yes. But I have to disagree when you say the gun violence is not discussed in the US. Gun violence is continually discussed in the US. I think we could agree that people don’t necessarily agree on solutions but we cannot say that it isn’t discussed.
One place we could start would be in looking at US cities that do not have a lot of gun crime and determine what they are doing that’s different from cities like SF, NY and Minneapolis. It would not take Biden to help these cities, they have the power to tackle gun crime themselves just like every US city with little gun crime. In addition, Biden can’t dispense with the 2nd amendment,
That is an interesting idea. Can you give a list of large American cities with little gun crime? My guess would be that they are too different from SF, NY and Minneapolis in terms of economic situation, wealth, and racial mix, for the difference to be transferable. But it would be worth looking at.
The ones with low levels of gun crime tend to be those that are run by Republicans. Of the top 20 most violent cities, 18 are run by Democrats. The solution is to stop voting Democrat because the inevitable consequence of their belief system is high levels of crime.
And there are no other differences to note between high- and low-violene cities? Size? Wealth and wealth distribution? Racial composition? Economy? Presence of ghettoes?
Absolutely there are differences. San Francisco, Washington DC, and NYC are the three wealthiest cities (highest cost of living) in the US, and are among the worst (with Chicago, Detroit) for crime. Why? These are also the cities with the widest income gap between rich and poor. And these are deeply Progressive cesspools. The policies of the decades of Democratic government have created the conditions – including wealth gap – that produce unrest. High taxes drive out the middle class, and over-regulation drives out small businesses, leaving behind the rich who are insulated from the problems, and the poor who can’t get out. And the Donkey politicians are stoking the racial and economic divide on a daily basis. BLM and antifa, that are both anti-democratic, anti-liberty, violent organizations, are not merely permitted but abetted by the local Donkeys. And with no viable opposition, these fools have no incentive to resolve problems. So the people get the government and crime they deserve.
Best way to cut crime: end the war on drugs.
Tell me more: What are the biggest low-violence cities in the US, and how do they look? What are the chances to make NYC or DC more like them? It would be useful to have a working example of how to do it, for comparison.
We already have a working example – NYC under Rudy Giuliani vs Bill de Blasio. It’s not like we don’t know what works and what doesn’t. We know that letting criminals roam the streets invites crime. We know that not prosecuting lesser crimes leads criminals to commit greater crimes. We know that stop and frisk works. We know who commits gun crime – its not middle aged women. It’s young men. When you see case after case of young men with criminal histories miles long, someone isn’t doing their job. You don’t see this in more peaceful cities where people expect to live unmolested by gun crime.
Peaceful cities where people expect to live unmolested do not have lots of young men with long criminal records. That is undoubtedly true. It is less obvious how to get rid of those young men, once they are there – or better how to stop producing so many of them in the first place.
It takes more than one example without controls to establish what works – how did the crime rate change in other cities that had neither Giuliani nor de Blasio?
“That is undoubtedly true. It is less obvious how to get rid of those young men, once they are there”
It is much tougher to commit additional gun crimes from prison. It seems like repeatedly allowing them to commit crime after crime may not be the best way to handle things.
Since you specifically asked about NYC, I gave you an example of how to lower violent crime and make the city more livable in NYC.
I actually did some work, and checked out the stats. If you order US cities by violent crime, Washington is 24th, LA 32nd, San Fransisco 37th, New york 59th, The highest rate of violent crime is in St Louis , Detroit, Baltimore, Memphis, Kansas City, Milwaukee, and Cleveland, all of which are indeed Democrat.
Of the 20 biggest cities, the lowest violence is in Austin, San Jose, and San Diego, all of which also have Democrat mayors.
The biggest cities with Republican mayors are Jacksonvile (52nd in violence), Fort Worth (57th in violence) and Oklahoma City (30th in violence), all doing worse than New York,
I do not know enough about the US to make this into a coherent story, but it looks like it might be a bit more complicated than just ‘Democrats=violence’.
Culture plays the biggest role. When you look at places with low educational attainment, high rates of single parenting, long-term unemployment and intergenerational poverty you see high rates of gun violence, whether it’s Appalachia or the inner city. I lived in a heavily armed yet very safe city in Texas and also lived near an incredibly violent neighborhood in Chicago with strict gun laws. The cultural elements above were present in the latter and not the former.
Sounds right. Thanks.
Blimey! Someone on this site did some research, instead of just parroting their prejudices. Thank you!
Rasmus, look by racial makeup, there you will find your answer.
OK, My top seven violent cities are all in the top 25/100 for black population percentage. Next, however, you get Stockton, Albuquerque, Indianapolis, Oakland,San Bernardino and Anchorage, before you get to Nashville, New Orleans, and Minneapolis.
I wont even think about making conclusions about race in the US.
Until this year the mayor of San Diego was a Republican.
“The biggest cities with Republican mayors are Jacksonvile (52nd in violence), Fort Worth (57th in violence) and Oklahoma City (30th in violence), all doing worse than New York,”
in 2020, there were 178 murders in Jacksonville vs 436 in NYC, so NYC is worse. In 3020, Ft Worth had 112 murders compared to 436 in NYC, so NYC is worse.
Come on! Jacksonville has ca. 900 000 inhabitants, and NYC has 8.6 million. Do you really not understand why you get more crime committed in a city with a nine times larger population?
And do you really not understand the population demographics?
Hmm. Someone skipped his arithmetic lessons. LOL
Someone did – but is it me or Annette?
My calculation is simple:
Jacksonville: 178 murders, 900 000 inhabitants, ca. 200 murders per million people
NYC: 436 murders, 8 600 000 people, ca. 50 murders per million people.
Conclusion, Jacksonville is about four times more violent than NYC, by this count. If I got it wrong, or you have a better calculation, could you please tell me?
I think that it is important to establish the proper causal links: the large income gaps cause violence, or violence causes poverty, or (as it is very likely), it is a circular connection. What can break the cycle? By cultural norms, good education, honesty (If you can face it, you can fix it) – but Democrats are more concerned about the image of minorities than to tackle honestly the deep seated cultural problems.
There are Black conservative leaders who speak up, and therefore marginalized. I am talking about Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Candace Owens, etc.
To what extent is income gap causative or merely relational? Income gaps may correlate with crime, but some percent of people with low incomes are there because of unsavory tendencies. The income gap argument is often used as an explanation, but I doubt its validity.
This is true of so many statistical analyses. People are very keen to assume that correlation means causation, but forget that it can run in both directions, or that the apparent link may be caused by a third factor (like the famous ‘ice cream causes drowning’ example).
I doubt it (gun crime) is caused by any income gap, but rather the lack of opportunity in many of these communities. When whole industries have been gutted or displaced, leaving every member of a family with no work, with not having the resources to leave, the only options are some form of the dole or crime.
Those would all be caused by Democrats’ obsession with race as well.
Cause and effect?
Is there a bias here though since most US cities are Democrat-run? Not criticising your point. I’d just be interested to know
If you look at NYC, when it was run by a Republican, crime fell, including violent crime, under democratic leadership as it is today, violent crime is sky rocketing.
Of course, it’s all about Rep Vs Dems. Explains everything, doesn’t it?
“My guess would be that they are too different from SF, NY and Minneapolis in terms of economic situation, wealth, and racial mix, for the difference to be transferable.”
You seem to be making the case that guns are not the problem. That poverty makes people commit gun crime? That would be tough to prove since millions and millions of poor people don’t commit crimes. How do you see race fitting in? Since you brought these up, you must believe they have some bearing.
Getting rid of guns would certainly help. People would still be violent, but you kill fewer people, and a lot fewer innocent bystanders, if the violent are limited to using knives or fire extinguishers instead of firearms.
For the rest, you hear it from other debaters. Violence is a lot larger in big cities, and even in particular neighbourhoods. I am sure there are a lot of differences here, wealth, race, culture, family structures, social capital, attitudes, job opportunities, education, drug use, housing, you name it. What happens depends on all those things, and they all interact. It makes no sense to pretend that there is only one single cause, or that a single set of policies would work the same everywhere. Whatever policies work to provide low crime in Honolulu or Stockholm, there is no reason to think that they would work the same in St Louis.
”Getting rid of guns would certainly help.”
I agree that getting rid of illegal guns would but since gun crime isn’t generally committed with legal guns, how would that help?
“Whatever policies work to provide low crime in Honolulu or Stockholm, there is no reason to think that they would work the same in St Louis.”
on the contrary, locking up anyone who commits a gun crime works no matter where you do it.
Jennifer (above) quoted her very peaceful and heavily armed community. Only one murder in living memory – the wife who came home to her hsuband shagging a neighbour and shot them both. Just possibly, might three people have been much better off if the returning wife had not had a firearm to hand?
For the rest, I continue to think you are dreaming if you think you can keep criminals disarmed while legal guns are easily available everywhere.
Yes, you think that because you believe that criminals are buying legal guns from legal gun owners. And they aren’t. If you want to buy a gun illegally, you would do that somewhere there are a lot of illegal guns. Like Chicago.
Like Jennifer I live in a very peaceful community and lots of people here own guns. Since we already have almost no gun crime, forcing people who are not committing gun crime to give up their legal guns would not do a thing. And because there is no supply of illegal guns available here, young urban men don’t come here to buy them. They know quite well where to obtain one. In fact, we all know where they’re getting them.
All of the info is available. If you actually care, go check the numbers for Chicago, and then compare them to San Antonio.
Violent crimes per year per 100 000 people:
Chicago: 1099
Houston 1095
San Antonio: 708
New York: 539
San Diego: 367
All five are large cities with Democrat mayors, I believe.
What was I supposed to conclude?
‘Biden might succeed in partially restricting gun ownership,..’
Yes, among the law abiding. The criminals, meanwhile, will have all the guns the want, and the Democrat DAs etc will fail to prosecute them and/or put them back on the streets with ‘no cash bail’. Thus the number of killings will continue to increase. That’s the Dumbocrats for you.
This begs the question, why is it that the criminals will have all the guns they want? Could it have something to do with the fact that the country is awash with guns? Could it be that a serious (properly determined, crisis level, massive use of state resources à la vaccine rollout) attempt to do something about this would be the single biggest thing you could do to reduce gun violence?
Yes, but that would require going after the black market for guns instead of tightening background checks, as illegal handguns are used in the vast majority of gun homicides. We are indeed awash in guns available from the back of a van. When Democrats start talking about cracking down on this illegal market I will take their gun control rhetoric seriously, but I’m not holding my breath because that would require jailing a good number of their voting base.
If you have 400 million guns and 300 million people, and the law abiding aren’t allowed to own them, only criminals will.
Not to worry – once currency becomes digital and your phone is your wallet every second of your life will be tracked, every cent you spend, and crime will become very hard, in the nu-Police state you crave.
“why is it that the criminals will have all the guns they want?”
well, it’s because other criminals are willing to sell them illegal guns. You may be making a common mistake in thinking that all guns in the US start life as legal guns that are then sold by legal gun owners to criminals. But there’s no evidence for this. It isn’t legal gun owners selling guns to criminals, it’s other criminals doing so.
The Left like restrictions, the Right prefers proper education, but as long as the Left pushes Critical Race Theory, do you think real unity can happen? Ben Shapiro was right that the Overton Window needs to be pushed to the center, because the entire press is left leaning (Tim Groseclose, Left Turn) and it alienates a large portion of the population.
Why should a Republican give up his right to own a weapon, when Democrats, Antifa and BLM creates chaos in the country? Perhaps folks in Europe cannot comprehend that some people actually care for their lives and do not wish to die by the hands of anarchists.
Americans look with dismay at the grooming gangs in Europe (especially Britain), where Pakistani men raped and traumatized British women for decades and the brave men of Britain didn’t move a finger. The police was more afraid of being labelled racist. This is the level of abnormality!
Plus,in Britain the criminals seem able to obtain guns yet the rest of the population are just evulnerable. Soft policing, preference for monitoring people on the internet and light sentencing of violent crime all contribute to growing violent crime. Knife crime and even machete attacks now occur. Huge immigration has also broken down community relations and trust particularly in cities as studies have shown .
It’s difficult to know really when crims have real guns or not. One hears rumours… but by their very nature even legal gun owners are discreet about it and Illegal gun owners must be massively so.
I suspect it’s a case of knowing people who know people, if I had the power to order a police raid of their homes I doubt I’d find a gun there – it’s somewhere close by they can get their hands on it but still deniable.
Soft policing is a large part of it too, basically the police don’t get brave with people who’ll fight back – they’ll turn up later camera crews in tow protesting “injustice” or crying racism about how they were “unjustly targeted”.
I understand what you are saying, and am grateful the UK doesn’t have what looks like an unsolvable problem to me. I also take the point about the abuse of young girls in some cities; the police didn’t react properly, thanks to perceived public opinion, but the left-wing opinion creators eventually had to retreat, and the police now deal with such problems, although that’s not to say the same fear of being labelled racist isn’t even more pronounced elsewhere since the current ridiculous copying of BLM ballooned here one year ago.
While reading the article, the situation which came to mind as being most similar in the UK is the waxing and waning of ‘stop and search’. In its absence, use of knives (with regular murders) increases and hits the headlines, followed by demands for action. On re-imposition, violent crimes reduce, only to be followed by a campaign of criticism utilising statistics, because it tends to affect young males of colour disproportionately.
This is greatly propagated by parts of the media, including, extraordinarily, the national public service broadcaster. The statistics are, of course, selective, omitting consideration of the local areas and cultures affected, or the activities occurring. Such disproportions also tend to apply to convicted perpetrators, another useful statistic, and to victims, too; not so useful.
Of course care must be taken to expunge racial prejudice from within a police force, but anyone opposing ‘stop and search’ either wishes to carry a weapon, has an ulterior political motive, or is being fooled. I’d also add that encouraging negative feelings towards the police doesn’t help to increase non-white recruitment to the police, or to reduce the idea that they themselves are being stereotyped, or ‘profiled’.
This American owns 16 guns, somewhere north of 30,000 rounds of ammo, and 22 long knives, a couple of which I carry on my belt (one at a time), on the other side from the concealed handgun.
“What are you so afraid of?”
“To be perfectly candid, not too much.” LOL
‘They’ll blame progressive lawmakers for empowering criminals to offend with no fear of arrest, from Chesa Boudin in property crime-plagued San Francisco to Jacob Frey in violence-ridden Minneapolis.’
Well that’s because the progressive law makers are to blame for this state off affairs. They have so much blood on their hands that it defies all belief. They are evil. Another interesting fact is that, apparently, no member of the NRA has ever been responsible for a mass shooting. If true, this is something the MSM will never tell you.
It is all a great conspiracy, the Bilderberg Group‘, The Davos Group, the Donor Class.
Try reading ‘The Creature From Jekyll Island.’
You are just a serf to the global masters, and they use their left and Right to fight amongst them selves to stop the people from unifying and getting rid of them, as they have for thousands of years.
That’s frankly depressing: 4 or more people killed or wounded sounds awful. I’m glad to have been born in the UK. Britain must sound like Utopia to US folk where even our police don’t carry guns on patrol.
It’s the suicides too which seem to get dwarfed in discussions: it must be too easy to pull a gun out of a bedside cabinet in a moment of depression or hopelessness and end it all in second.
Depends on where in Britain, much like it depends on where in the US.
Hello Annette, there were only 12 shooting deaths in London in 2019. In 2014 there were only 4. London homicides are most from knife crime: knives can’t really be banned.
Peter, just wait – it is Coming! You will find the crime grows exponentionally with the EU shifting culture, OR, and this more likely, the combination of digital currency tracking every single penny, and facial recognition and GPS data makes it a Distopia of epic porportions where freedom is gone and you are basically ‘Pets’ of the elites, fed, kept healthy and crime free, given your drugs, TV, AI, VR, and welcome to the Matrix.
Yes,London is a violent city, that was my point. According to the BBC 2020 was the sixth year in a row where violent deaths topped 100.
also the number of people one person kill with a knife in, say, 60 seconds, is much fewer than with a gun.
Well you completely ignored his point about suicide though, which accounts for almost two thirds of American deaths by gun. This problem doesn’t exist anywhere in the UK and in the US I’m not sure if it’s limited to Democrat run cities.
Suicide is fairly common in Japan, unlike guns. Maybe it’s not the object.
It’s not the object but it’s much easier to commit suicide if you have a gun compared to not having one. That’s undeniable and statistics in the US reflect that.
Japan has almost no private gun ownership and yet has a very high suicide rate. So it’s not the gun.
I agreed it’s not the object so I don’t know why you felt the need to make that terrible point. You ignored the other point that I made again, did you even read it?
Suicide doesn’t exist in the UK?
Can’t you just go and comment on some American site
Sure. And I do.
You are deliverately misunderstanding him or you have been drinking!
Most Americans aren’t affected by gun crime. I live in South Carolina in a nice lake community that is heavily armed and there hasn’t been a shooting in a decade. That one ten years ago was a domestic. A woman walked in on her husband sleeping with the neighbor and shot him. So I guess it’s more correct to say my neighborhood is safe providing you don’t have an affair. My husband lived in London and then Marlow in his 20’s and experienced the same level of gun crime, none, that he does here in the States. The only difference is that here the neighbors are all armed. It’s not the guns it’s the culture.
Regarding suicides you are sadly correct. It’s much easier to act on impulse and successfully kill yourself when you own a firearm.
and are largely ineffective. They don’t really prevent or solve crime, they mostly just add up statistics on it.
How does the police carrying guns prevent crime? The only way this could be possible, is if you had such a large armed police presence that potential criminals were deterred from committing crimes. It’s uncertain if it would even work, it certainly is not desirable if you want to live in free society.
I am from London, 40 years in USA, and NO UK is NOT a Utopia! It is dreary, the people are rightly more afraid of crime than Americans outside of the crime neighborhoods (it is safer in 90% of USA than it is in UK). Every thing you do is regulated, there is no freedom except to do the dreary thing –
UK is great to visit, but I would hate to live there. I am there a lot and after 3 weeks I am ready to leave, the entire society is claustrophobic, it is like living in a series of stacked rat cages.
Very interesting comment. I’ve enjoyed my dozen or so visits to the UK, especially when we get out of London, a city with all four cheeks sucked in. I wouldn’t want to live in the UK either, but would honestly say that this is because, in my extensive travels both internally and internationally, I find the U.S., or at least my corner of it, and lots of the rest, to be paradise.
Yes, the vast majority of this country is very safe. Stay away from the central cities, and the Mexican border, and there’ll be no problems. The very safest areas happen to be the same areas where legal gun ownership is most common. Imagine that.
I know, I know. I just called the U.S. “paradise,” as if there’s nothing wrong anywhere. That’s not even remotely the case, but I come by my view honestly and through experience. Europe and Asia are great places to travel, but I do like coming home.
And in the UK there are areas that unarmed police simply won’t enter.
I think there is a common problem across many western countries in that the laws created by their elected governments require some basic level of enforcement.
However, certain contrarian, and i think incompetent, local leaders have realised they have the autonomous influence to decide which laws to enforce. This is done under the guise of community priorities or other such nonsense.
For a politician this a perfect scenario, they create the crisis that they can spend 4 years or more grabbing headlines about. While quietly behind the scenes their snouts are firmly in the trough of public spending and their true loyalties to corporate entities, and not the people they have sworn to serve, remains quietly hidden.
I think the governments should be forced into a moratorium on new laws until the ones we already have are being enforced.
The Left is out to Destroy the West, it has been their goal since Marx became a thing with the Wiemar Intellectuals. ‘Frankfurt School’ and all that.
Exactly. Chicago (or Illinois) has pretty much the strictest gun laws in the US. But those laws are not enforced because the politicians don’t want to upset certain communities. The inevitable result is hundreds of corpses every year.
IL’s gun laws aren’t as strict as you think. Too strict IMO, but most of New England, some of the mid-Atlantic, California, and Hawaii are far more restrictive.
The truth is that once suicides are stripped out along with inner city gang warfare, this is far less of an issue than people like to pretend it is. Millions legally own guns. If the problem was metal objects springing to life and harming people, you’d know it.
whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives. What? There is no whatever. There has been the rioting that followed the Floyd incident which led to dozens of murders, and there have been dozens more in the wake of the “defund” movement. The vast majority of the victims are black, as is the vast majority of assailants. This has mostly served to expose BLM as a farce that was built on a lie.
Black people account for 25% of the cases in which cops kill civilians. UNARMED blacks, of unarmed people of any color, is a far smaller raw number. And in case someone is thinking of “well, but blacks are only 13% of the population,” keep in mind they also commit half the homicides, usually against other black folks.
As of 2018 (the latest year for which I have the complete data from the Centers for Disease Control, which records deaths from all causes), for every non-Hispanic white male murdered with a gun, 15 non-Hispanic black men were murdered with a gun. According to the FBI, which compiles the data from around the country, 89% of all murders are committed within racial groups. The conclusion should be obvious.
Canada’s large metropolitan areas are now seeing a rise in gun crime similar to US cities. It’s almost always related to ethnic gang violence. Illegal unregistered guns are easily smuggled in from the US when two countries share the world’s longest undefended border.
Of course there’s much gnashing of teeth and faux outrage from the usual suspects but the only solution they can think of is a ban on legal ownership of hand-guns which already happens to be severely restricted.
If politicians and community leaders haven’t got the intestinal fortitude to call out the criminal element then I’d rather they just say nothing instead of virtue posing nonsense laws that only affect people that were law-abiding in the first place.
As long as being branded with the Scarlet R is considered to be the one unredeemable sin a politician can commit, worse than any other financial or policy fail, there’ll never be progress on this issue.
I’m surprised by your statement that background checks are a good idea; Federal law already requires a dealer to perform a background check when transferring a firearm.
When laws are proposed which target criminals, I’ll listen. Until then, it’s all politics.
Most guns used in mass shootings are purchased legally originally. Some are re-sold illegally. But the notion that we can stop mass shootings by controlling gun access is simply idiotic.
The issue is anger control, not gun control.
The uproar over ‘ghost guns’ is a red herring. I defy anyone to buy a gun kit on line and assemble a fully functional weapon with no serial number. Such kits always are missing one irreplaceable piece – the lower receiver. This crucial part does have a serial number, is reported to the ATF, and can only be obtained through a Federal Firearms Licensee after a background check. I also take issue with suicides being lumped in with criminal gun violence. If someone is determined to kill themselves, they will do so with or without a gun. Suicide is not a crime; only attempted suicide is. Even law enforcement recognizes that there is no point in having a crime where the perpetrator is dead once it happens.
Emotional soundbites are, I’m afraid, a particular talent of the left. As a European, I too was shocked when I found out that two thirds of all gun deaths in the US were suicides. The left never tell you that bit. Europe is a dead, echoing hell. There is literally no life here because all the great questions have been decided and history has concluded, at least if you listen to the MSM. The supposed parties of the right have completely internalized the values of the left and never argue about ideas or political philosophy. Left-right arguments in Europe consists of bickering about a penny or two off or on taxes here and there. It looked like the Republicans in the US were going down that road too, at least until Trump exploded onto the scene. It’s still too early to tell for sure what long term effect he’s had, but it’s encouraging to see younger Republicans getting right into the Democrats faces and fighting them for every inch of ground. Keep that up. We’re literally back where we were in the 1930s now, with America the beacon, the only hope left.
Also, as long as you are not a felon and do not intend to sell them, it has been perfectly legal to make your own unregistered firearms. Most 3D printed firearms are rather useless given that you need a metal barrel to make it reliable. 3D printed furniture are popular. Of course CNC machining has been a thing for over 50 years and CAD/CAM is common place these days. MIM is also a thing but I personally hate MIM parts. Things might start get a bit interesting with improvements to metallic 3D printing. Currently it is rather cost prohibitive and the accuracy is only within a couple thousandths of a inch, not bad for most parts and receivers, but unacceptable for barrels. However, with improved precision, lowering costs, more widespread industrial use, and the promise of electrochemical rifling, it may soon become easy for amateurs to easily manufacture their own reliable firearms. I seriously doubt this will change much in the United States, but things might get rather interesting in other countries.
As a side note, the usual know nothing idiots were shocked about home manufactured firearms because as a culture war issue, you are not required to know a damn thing about what you are saying. One particularly useless member of the Washington Post called it “gunsplaining.” “How dare you use actual knowledge and facts to show I have no idea what I am talking about!?”
“whatever it is that’s causing Americans to kill each other at a nearly 20% greater rate than they were at this time in 2020 will continue to cost lives.”
It’s the media. They distort stories to create racialist rage and hate. They cropped out all the non-white police around the white officer with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, because they wanted a narrative of white police killing blacks. They don’t care about police killings as a non-racial issue, and they don’t care about all the people who die as a result of their actions.
I’m a USA citizen. I used to be on the left, but am now right-of-center.
Here is a truth: The USA DOES NOT HAVE a gun problem.
Here is a truth: Many persons in the USA have ANGER PROBLEMS.
In the last few years, most massacres have occurred with legally purchased guns. In many cases, the guns were purchased a long period before the shooting.
What we do see is 1) young men (mostly) who 2) were humiliated and 3) use the weapon to “get back” from the humiliation.
Take the shooting in San Jose. The shooter was a guy who hated his job. He probably had been humiliated there. In the USA, blue collar culture often includes a “roasting” or “toasting” element, in which routine kidding is used to establish camaraderie. Of course, if you don’t get the joke, having some guy tell you something on the toasting side can be taken wrong. I think the killer in SJ took stuff wrong.
I see killers as those in the Culture of Honor. In this Culture, if you are humiliated, you recover your honor by a duel or other feat of arms. I see much of the killers in that way.
As the article notes, a large proportion of the killings involve young BLACK men in the Inner City Culture of Honor.
What we do see is 1) young men (mostly) who 2) were humiliated and 3) use the weapon to “get back” from the humiliation. I’m also in the US and there are too few people who are unwilling to call out what you posted for what it is – a culture problem. When homicide is seen as a reasonable response to one’s embarrassment, there is no law that can stop that.
A man of gun crimes committed screams the truth, but people don’t want to hear it. I’d suggest that simply ending the drug war would have the single biggest impact of any move, but govt won’t do that. There’s too much money and power involved, and if some inner city children get caught in the crossfire, they are the eggs in the proverbial omelet.
What does “ending the drug war” mean? Please be specific.
Some suspect the recent shooting in London of a loud and obnoxious BLM activist (a video of her getting in a black mans face freely offering violence can be found on YT) was possibly due to her disrespecting one of more of the gang who shot her. “As the article notes, a large proportion of the killings involve young BLACK men in the Inner City Culture of Honor.” also rings true in the UK, usually with knives and machete’s, but also with illegal firearms.
‘… were virtually all people of colour’. Wow; congratulations to you for digging up this news-breaking announcement. Perhaps you should wean yourself off CNN and indeed all MSM. Had you done so a long time ago you’d have realised that black-on-black killings in the USA are nothing new in the world. Not reporting them is not new either.
If the US authorities are incapable of arresting and charging the black Police Lieutenant who shot & killed Ms Ashli Babbitt in the Capitol Building itself what hope is there?
Clemenceau’s* statement, made of over a century ago that the “ US had gone from barbarism to decadence without the normal interval of civilisation “ still holds true.
(* Georges Clemenceau, Prime Minister of France, 1906-9 & 1917-20.)
Today in Florida a “Ghost” mass shooting took place outside a rap concert. I doubt we will hear much more about it. Wrong sort of perpetrators.
I am so appreciative of Unherd. Serious issues treated seriously. I am tired of policy being formed by cheap theatrical headlines. We need to dig deep. Guns terrify me but I understand it is a second amendment right. I also know that in parts of our country kids grow up with guns. A friend’s husband, from Montana, had gun safety training as part of his high school curriculum.
Most issues are nuanced. In LA we have a horrific homeless problem. Our council person, Harvard trained I believe, treats all homeless the same in her email missives complaining about the lack of housing. I’ve repeatedly written asking why those who have low paying jobs and can’t afford rent are treated the same as someone else who is drug addicted and most likely, without a credible recovery program, will never live a productive life again. If you go to the hospital they don’t treat heart disease the same as someone with cancer. There is some overlap but there are different protocols. Lumping it all together ends up with poor outcomes.
I have a history with guns, both as a longstanding gun control advocate and more recently (2013 or so) having changed my mind and gone the other way.
I give you credit for your honest statement, “guns terrify me.” I think quite strongly that if you went to a firing range you would quickly overcome your terror, but I do not say that in a disparaging or condescending way. Rather, it reflects my own experience, and stories I’ve heard from reliable and honest gunner friends. It’s very much against my personal code to urge anyone to arm themselves, and by recommeding a couple hours at a range I am not trying to tell you to become a gun owner — only suggesting it as a way to overcome your fear.
If nothing else, you’ll be surprised at the warm welcome you’ll get, especially if you omit any politics and forthrightly acknowledge your ignorance and fear of guns. The fact that you went there anyway is going to be greeted positively. There are classes, and trainers supplied by the Nat’l Rifle Assn., whose main function (by a long shot — look up their budget) is training and gun safety. You can learn a whole lot from these certified instructors.
People legally own guns for four overlapping reasons: personal protection, hunting, target shooting, and collecting. I’m in three categories, not being a hunter. My prime reason is target shooting, which is a recreation. Perish the thought, but shooting is fun. To me, personal protection turns out to be a side benefit; where I live, there are wild animals in close proximity.
The only wild animals I haven’t seen here are antelope, grizzly bears, polar bears, and wolves. Which means I regularly see black bears, cougars (aka mountain lions), HUGE bobcats, coyotes, elk, wild turkeys, and deer. A note about Bambi, who has enjoyed great public relations courtesy of Wal Disney. In truth, Bambi is a graceful animal that carries ticks and bacteria, and who kills more Americans than any other wild animal.
So my “personal protection” is just as likely to involve a wild animal, or certain dogs, the latter being FAR less cautious than wild animals when it comes to attacking people. I carry a sidearm on my property just in case I need it, such as this morning when I inadvertently flushed out a big buck that likes to bed down underneath my barn. If push comes to shove, I hope this or that potentially dangerous animal is as terrified by guns as you are.
dltd.
I’m also glad you are not here.
dltd.
“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”
Orwell
But we soon forget, and then after a suitable pause of say fifty years, charge them with murder.*
As recently happened to former members of the Parachute Regiment in Belfast.
(* Shooting dead an IRA terrorist in the Markets area of Belfast in 1971.)
The same Parachute Regiment who also shot dead unarmed civilians in Ballymurphy, Derry and the Shankill Road?
Same Regiment different Battalion.
Gun bans worked in Australia. Only Americans believe they are the greatest country in the world. The rest of the world is so grateful they don’t have their warped gun loving culture.
I think the culture here in the US is VERY different from Australia. As always, comparing countries does really mean much – there’s more to the story than the prevalence of guns. I suppose you could look at the increase in knife killings in the UK. Violent people will always find a way to kill each other.
Btw – are you aware of how few people are killed outside of large, urban areas? The weekend total of gun deaths will be ZERO in my town. And I can pretty much guarantee almost everyone here has guns in their houses or on their person.
I’m far from being a gun fan, but growing up in the UK half urban, half rural, I frequently encountered shotguns in the countryside, but I got the impression it was chiefly towns and cities where they were used for crime – though even there, chiefly for scaring rather than shooting anyone. That began to change around 1990, with cocaine arriving big time, and with it huge amounts of illegal money to be kept or stolen.
congratulations for spotting the connection between drugs and guns. Anytime govt bans something, the key result is that something becomes more expensive and more dangerous to acquire. Eliminating the drug war would have the single greatest effect in lowering gun violence than any other action. Which, of course, means we’re not going to do it.
I’m no follower of Milton Friedman, but I tend to go along with with his views on drug legalisation: “I see America with half the number of prisons, half the number of prisoners, ten thousand fewer homicides a year, inner cities in which there’s a chance for these poor people to live without being afraid for their lives, citizens who might be respectable who are now addicts not being subject to becoming criminals in order to get their drug, being able to get drugs for which they’re sure of the quality.” Exactly how we should go about it I don’t know, but the war on drugs has been nothing but disastrous for all concerned.
Hay Robert – I see the meth business is being taken from your ‘tough guy’ Bikeys by little Chinese thugs who are happy to use guns.
Australia had problem with the people thinking they were sovereign people, so they took all their guns, just as Mossulin*, H* itl*er, Mao, Stalin, and every, single, last, tyrant has done to his people so they can consolidate absolute power. That is why the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution.
Nation wide, and it was the implemented by the ‘Right’ who were voted in again and again. It’s never been raised again as a major issue for voters. As I stated earlier, very different culture in Australia. No mass shootings recorded since the gun ban/gun buy back scheme.
Australia could eliminate auto accident deaths by banning automobiles too.
You can’t ban illegal guns. That’s the problem.
Given how utterly inadequate the UK police are I’d quite like the right to bear arms.
It is easy to get a shotgun permit in UK, I got my application in on the day I was legal age, and got it very soon after. I was already an expert at shooting though, it being in my family, and my father had one, and I had places to shoot…
But in UK if you join a club, say shotgun clay pigeon one, get the required safe, then getting the permit is automatically given. BUT if in the Police interview you say you wish it for self defense you will NEVER get a permit, ever in your lifetime! In USA defense is the grounds for getting one, or getting a concealed carry permit in the states which require one (about half of them) BUT in UK you may NOT own a gun for defense.
POLICE ARE NOT TO DEFEND YOU, this is entirely a misconception. They are there to investigate crime, and try to catch the offender. NO where in their mandate does it say their job is to defend people in their house, or on the street unless they see a crime in progress.
YOUR DEFENSE IS ENTIRELY UP TO YOU. If you are weaker, or not as tough, as a criminal you are utterly at their mercy, and that is not much. As Samuel Colt said of his pistol, it is the great equalizer. If I was a woman I would have a gun, or if not allowed one, would demand that right. That weak are prey to the strong is unjust. A gun in the hand of a woman is more than a match for the most powerful and violent man.
It is much better to be a Pu** y hiding behind your locked car and house door than to be able to take your defense in your own hands.
Slightly off-topic, but still mind-numbingly horrific, have a look at heyjackass.com. Dealing only with Chicago, this site tells you more about the gun problem in America than any news item or article will.
‘The 2nd Amendment I believe has been wrongly interpreted by most Americans‘
The right to defend yourself with firearms must mean ultimately you can kill someone else with firearms if you need to, surely?
Like the bow and arrow was not the gun invented for just one thing? The facility to bring down your prey or your enemy whilst lessening the chances of your own injury or death, with the elements of physical distance, seclusion & surprise. Perfectly logical.
Yes, deterrence comes into it, but if guns are so numerous, so relatively easy to obtain, it stands to reason that the desperate criminal or the mentally ill person will be able use them sooner or later… and so the spiral continues.
Just who are the ‘right-minded’ people who should own them? Responsible hunters, gamekeepers. There is the same mentality in the UK but the subtle difference being it’s a ‘priviledge’ and not a ‘right’ to own a firearm in the UK.
As a UK citizen there is only so much I can or should say about this topic. Obviously it’s tied up so much with North American history and culture.
It’s futile to argue with someone who has only known that culture. I will never forget being told by my brother about an incident in a bar in the US. He got chatting with another guy and I guess debating vigorously but on a humourous and friendly basis. My brother went to the toilet and the same guy came up behind him and stuck a pistol in his head so as ‘finish’ and ‘win’ the ‘argument’. He was no ‘hoodlum’ type. Nice…
dltd.
In the USA, there is something termed the “castle doctrine”. This gives a person the right to defend the “castle”. If you are in your home, and it is invaded, you have the right (in states that have passed the CD) to use deadly force to defend the castle. You sometimes have the right to defend other castles, like your car. The opposite of the CD is the “obligation to retreat”. In this view, if you are invaded, you have the obligation to NOT engage. Not every state has the CD. These are the “red states”, which are the interior states.
Sorry, but that’s not correct.
The so-called “castle doctrine,” in states that have it, isn’t nearly as all-encompassing as you think. On their face, those laws do not give the homeowner the unrestricted right to shoot intruders. They do remove any “duty to retreat,” but the shooter still must show that (s)he had a reasonable fear of imminent death or grave injury for the defense to be legal
Non-gunners are typically unaware of the plethora of regulations, but legal gunners are well aware. I’ve read the occasional story about a questionable “legal” shooting of an intruder, but those the the exceptions that prove the rule.
In my rural county, where the large majority of households are armed, I know of one homeowner who went to prison for shooting an intruder in the back, in his house, as the intruder was trying to flee. And guess what? Our “second amendment sheriff” made the arrest. The “castle doctine” has limits.
I would add that, in my experience, no one is tougher on specious self-defense claims than law-abiding gunners. See, we know the laws, and we know guns. We are typically the very first people to invalidate phony self-defense claims.
It depends a lot on the state.
The root cause of the increased violence is the Cultural Marxist assault on our society. The increased violence is the result of political tools of division. Just as the administration in Washington DC assumed power by blatant disregard for rule of law so it is with the increased violence across America. No rule of law at the border to control illegal immigration, no rule of law in our law enforcement, no rule of law in our judiciary. Even the Supreme court has turned its back on rule of law. The FBI and CIA are political tools used to intimidate, coerce, and kill the political opposition. This violence will continue to increase until we re-establish our most basic rights which is to have our votes counted on election day.
The cause is the withdrawal of police from central cities, and the reluctance of those who remain to aggressively enforce the law. The increase in murder is heavily concentrated in those central cities. In short, you have black criminals killing other black criminals, and terrorizing everyone else. The numbers that the media won’t mention prove it.
I know this is going to sound crazy but this is what I believe is going on you people can tell me you weather you think I’m right or am I wrong. Defund the police has provided communists with Deep Pockets with all the money being divested from the police forces. This money he’s partially going to citizens in the form of cash payments but it’s not free they do have to work for it. This work is more or less harassing certain citizens on a list. A list that was generated before all this went down. They harass, monitor, and ensure their targets never have a single free moment to themselves. The people singled out for this treatment are generally smart, quiet, few friends, and not prone to violent outbursts generally speaking.
Eventually, though, with the RELeNTLSS stalking, ûthe extreme stress levels induced are too much and he snaps. Kills a bunch of folks, cops show up, kill gunman, and the nation takes another step toward comprehensive gun control measuresm
“the two dozen black children killed in incidents of community violence since the start of 2021 don’t seem to matter to anyone”
I thought there were various initiatives in the US, many led by ex-gang members, addressing the issue of gun violence within their communities.
There are countless ‘initiatives’ in the US, the UK and all over the place with regard to such issues. Needless to say, they never work because they are run by lefties (I won’t even call them ‘well meaning’) looking for public money and who don’t really even acknlowledge the concept of crime or the darker sides of human nature. Whenever you see or hear about an ‘initiative’, run for the hills.
The initiatives I’m thinking of are run by hard guys only too well aware of the dark side of our nature. They don’t seem to get any public funding for the most part, and if they are lefties, they’re most certainly not dogmatic lefties driven by ideology – they’re driven by their own past experience of doing exactly what they’re trying to stop. Which isn’t to say their initiatives work – they’re not too sure themselves, merely to say that, contrary to what Rosenfield says, there are people to whom these issues matter deeply, deeply enough for them to often knowingly put themselves in danger by intervening.
There are still plenty of gangs that don’t much care what a few ex-gang members think. Ex-gang members are not the problem. Most of the kids killed are just caught by stray bullets like that 4 year child in NYC awhile ago. Not the intended victim but caught in the crossfire. Life is cheap in some US cities.
Sure, but these ex-gang members do seem to care, and at least they’re trying. They know all too well that it’s often bystanders who get shot, which I gather is something they try to impress upon those still using guns to settle their scores..
It isn’t the ex-gang members committing gun crime. I don’t think there’s much evidence that gangs are unaware that their actions cause people to lose their lives. Your mistake is assuming that they care.
New news cycle, new politics cycle, new “initiatives” , same outcomes.
NRA members know exactly how to interpret 2A. And I have read that not a single member of the NRA has ever been responsible for a mass shooting. The fact is that those responsible for the vast majority of the killings are urban dwellers who, for the most part, could not even spell the word ‘constitution’.
I don’t understand the resistance to background checks. I would have thought it was in the interests of mentally stable and non criminal gun owners to keep guns out of the hands of the unstable and criminally inclined.
As for the manufacturers and distributers, surely better to sell fewer guns to people more likely to use them responsibly, than all the guns you like up to the point that something so bad happens there is an unstoppable public insurgence in favour of abolishing them altogether.
I don’t understand the resistance to background checks. why should I have to ask permission in order to exercise a constitutional right? Doing so makes it sound more like a privilege than a right.
Fair enough. Don’t get me wrong, I wish we were more like you – I mean ‘you’ as in those of you prepared to stand upright and defend personal liberty. Over here we seem to have just lain down and accepted that it is our fate to be trodden on. It is absolutely sickening.
In every state, the buyer of a new gun must pass a federal background check. Look up “Form 4471.” The background check debate is about private sales of used guns. That’s mostly (but not entirely) a state-level issue, and states vary.
If I, a resident of WA State, which has a private sale background check law, were to travel to Idaho, which has no such requirement, to buy a gun, this is a violation of both state and federal law. The seller can easily be criminally liable too, if he knows that I’m not an Idaho resident, or should have known.
The reason for resistance to those private-sale checks is that, together with the required new gun checks, they make de facto gun registration a reality. Once the guns are registered, it becomes a lot easier to confiscate them. That’s where the push-back comes from.
None of this has any discernible impact on criminals who illegally obtain and possess guns. The overwhelming majority of guns obtained by criminals are stolen and/or traded without regard to any laws. Background checks affect only those who care about the laws.
Thanks for the explanation. As a UK citizen it makes no practical difference to me, but I was curious about the resistance. Now I am better informed.
Over here the only people who have rifles are criminals and specially licensed police. Some country people have licensed shotguns, but it is much harder to get a firearms certificate.
I’m interested a little because I grew up with guns and learned to use a small bore rifle from an early age. It makes me unusual for a Uk citizen. I imagine most of my friends and acquaintances would not share my appreciation for firearms, but there is something a bit special about a well made gun. I used to have the use of a bolt action Winchester rifle, as well as a semi-automatic, and I have fond memories of both.
Something else. The “progressives” here make a lot of noise about “internet gun sales.” The minute the seller puts that gun into the mail, it must be shipped to a dealer that’s been federally licensed; most people shorten this to “FFL,” for federal firearms license.
Before the buyer can take possession, (s)he must fill out Form 4471 (the background check form), and this applies whether the gun is used or new. I have bought four guns this way, so I know. Three were new, and one was used. Form 4471 for all four of those purchases.
As for shotguns, my spouse’s Winchester 37 single-shot 12ga has a special place for me. When we were married six years ago, we took it to a country road and I fired three blasts to celebrate. And thus my love affair with firearms began.
Don’t you mean Form 4473, the firearms transaction form?
Yes. 4471 was my mistake. Thanks for the correction.
In 1952, my father bought me a beautiful BSA .22 rifle (we lived in Ireland). He was a professional soldier (commanding a battalion which landed on Gold beach on D-Day), and thought that education about a firearm was important; ‘never, never, never point a gun at someone, even if you are certain that it is unloaded’. Keep it clean it. Keep it secure. Shoot straight. Be aware of where the bullet will land, etc..
When we moved back to the UK, he was compelled to obtain a licence, but it was the start of decades of struggle with police and later, ‘firearms officers’ (retired policemen), first by him, and later by me. I gave up about 10 years ago, and transferred it to a gun dealer for destruction, a sad day for me, as it was a reminder of my father. It was never a threat to anyone.
Incidentally, rifles are not useful to a criminal, especially a .22.
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It sounds brutal but when the US civilian population famously has more guns than the US military it seems that America has passed the point of no return when it comes to gun ownership and control.
Basically it is simply going to have to live with these almost daily shootings.
Mass shootings aren’t anything like a regular occurrence elsewhere in the world because gun ownership, and far more specifically unregistered gun ownership isn’t endemic in those countries, and that’s even those with comparatively high rates of ownership.
To put this into perspective, according to the Small Arms Survey in 2017, the US has over 120 small arms for every 100 US citizens, almost twice that of the next highest The Falkland Islands where gun ownership counted as 62 per 100 citizens and where 1700 guns are registered and an estimated 300 aren’t.
Contrast that with the vastly more populous US, and when you factor in the vast complexities and inequalities of American society compared to others and you see, from that study at least, that there are around 1.1m registered firearms in the US as opposed to an estimated 392m unregistered weapons.
A gargantuan number which makes up 45% of the world’s entire estimated civilian held firearms total incidentally.
Even if these estimates are ‘out’, ‘way out’ even, those are pretty shocking statistics, so I’d pity and admire the politician who wants to put his or her name to trying to get this particular toxic toothpaste back in its tube.
Switzerland has fewer guns per 1000 than the us by a factor of about 5 The US has 12 deaths per 100,000 whilst the Swiss have 7 so it’s clearly more complicated than just the number of guns per head of population. If that were the case then Switzerland would have about 2-3 deaths per 100,000 not 7. My suspicion is that it’s less about gun ownership and more about culture.
Funnily enough, Switzerland is the goto example for the NRA.
They too studiously ignore the point that the vast majority of civilian guns are registered, the polar opposite of the US.
Never mind the comparative homogeneity and entirely different social and economic culture that so obviously prevails in Switzerland.
Their gun deaths per 100000 are 3 not 7 by the way.
Nevertheless it stands to reason that any country that has guns in any abundance is far more likely to see more deaths, either inflicted or self-inflicted, by them as a result.
I’m not arguing for or against guns here, merely stating the fact that the US state getting its hands back on that many unregistered firearms or even a fraction of them is pie in the sky now and fraught with major problems.
They too studiously ignore the point that the vast majority of civilian guns are registered, the polar opposite of the US. That’s going to require a citation. Law-abiding people have this of being, well, law-abiding, meaning that if they are required to register a gun, they will do so. Anyone buying from a federally licensed firearms dealer has a registered weapon, and those dealers do not cut corners with their licenses.
This argument is a straw man either way. Registration does not stop a person from using a gun to harm someone else. It’s funny how so many of you get agitated over pieces of metal, but say nothing about those who would misuse them.
The citation comes from the 2017 Small Arms Survey as already stated in the OP.
Again, as I’ve already said in different words above, it’s up to you how much of a pinch of salt you choose to take it with, but that rather misses the point given the disproportionately huge amounts of unregistered guns there are in the US.
Straw man indeed.
‘It’s funny how so many of you get agitated over pieces of metal, but say nothing about those who would misuse them’.
Funnily enough, I’m not making a moral judgement here and I’m not talking about the traceable, legally held guns of law-abiding citizens, but the overwhelming majority of the ones that aren’t and which you, much like the NRA, are either choosing to pretend don’t exist or apparently have no bearing on the situation.
As I have already said, I have no axe to grind about firearms per se, the US is where it is.
I never said unregistered guns don’t exist, just that they are not the majority. But let’s say all of them are unregistered. So what?
If I have to ask govt permission in order to exercise a right, then it’s not a right anymore. Should we have to register with some authority before exercising first amendment rights, too?
‘I never said unregistered guns don’t exist, just that they are not the majority.’
Well, the figures suggest otherwise with knobs on, but I’m only quoting a survey.
‘Should we have to register with some authority before exercising first amendment rights, too?’
For those presumably like you for whom the centuries old US Constitution always supersedes everything else including your elected government then apparently not, but that’s your business. I’m not American.
The thrust of my argument is that hundreds of millions of unregistered guns undeniably existing amidst a civilian populace is more likely to have negative consequences than positive ones on it.
The fact that there are over 1m legally registered ones doesn’t change that I’m afraid.
“The thrust of my argument is that hundreds of millions of unregistered guns undeniably existing amidst a civilian populace is more likely to have negative consequences than positive ones on it.”
Perhaps a PR campaign to convince criminals to register their guns then?
Perish the thought that you might be being flippant there Annette but again I can only reiterate what I have already said.
I’m clearly not the first to identify this as a major problem if not THE problem at the heart of this, and it’s difficult to see a simple solution that wouldn’t spawn further, possibly greater problems, if not impossible.
Hence my reluctant suggestion in my original post that the US is just going to have to acquiesce to these shootings just as it has long grown used to all the usual ‘woe is me’, ‘serious questions need to be asked here’ conspicuous hand wringing, the Second Amendment fetishists and those who seek to score cheap political ‘whataboutery’ points each time one of the more notable such events happens.
Yes, I was being flippant because somehow it has escaped your notice that gun crime in the US is not caused by legal, registered guns. You’re not identifying the problem, you’re identifying the non-problem.
Americans would love to get rid of unregistered, illegal guns. Getting rid of legal, registered ones would do absolutely zero.
‘Getting rid of legal, registered ones would do absolutely zero’
Eighty three of the mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and April 2021 involved weapons which were obtained legally; a clear majority. Only 16 incidents involved guns that were obtained illegally.
Nearly 75% of the mass shooters studied by the FBI legally purchased or possessed the firearm used in the crime.
Granted mass shootings are only a small fraction of the overall death toll associated with firearms in the US, but those figures still tell a story.
Now maybe these people would have got their guns illegally if they’d been unable to access them legally. Who knows? It’s a counterfactual hypothesis, but what is clear is that having access to the world’s largest pool of firearms, be they legal or illegal, particularly when you have murder in mind, means logically that a gun is far more likely to be involved.
Which brings me back to the point which I have been making ad nauseam all along which is that these guns aren’t going anywhere anytime soon, least of all the illegal ones, hence these multiple gun deaths are an immutable fact of life in America in much the same way as traffic deaths are due to the ubiquity of ‘the pieces of metal’ involved in both cases.
In fact the hundreds of millions of illegal guns in circulation are effectively used, in part, to justify the need for legal ones by the gun lobby, so when you say,
‘Americans would love to get rid of unregistered, illegal guns.’
As well they might but, given the scale of the problem, it just ain’t gonna happen is it.
Thanks for the baseless lecture. It’s only to be expected from a “progressive” who doesn’t know anything about the subject.
Yep, I am a second amendment “fetishist,” as any “progressive” who thinks they’ll take mine will learn, painfully.
You know nothing about gun “registration” in the United States. Of course, being the “progressive” that you are, utter ignorance is no barrier to your self-righteous lecture.
Iron Law: You can always tell a “progressive,” but you can never tell a “progressive” a single thing. They think they know it all. LOL
Bless you. Wouldn’t be the fella in the headline photo, would ya?
I think your flailing, desperate repeated replies tell their own story, nevermind the lack of further responses from the other two posters.
Being ‘progressive’ has got nothing to do with it by the way, it’s called being realistic.
Still, I’m sure it would make things much simpler for you if I fitted your own simplistic looping narrative.
A dark fantasy world that plays endlessly inside your own head where you singlehandedly save the world from the wicked ‘progressives’ with your trusty ‘piece’ possibly?
Go back and read what I wrote rather than reflexively frothing at the mouth and thinking you’re the next Charlton ‘cold dead hand’ Heston eh.
As shown by the almost universal supports for the killing of Ms Ashli Babbitt by most if not all, ‘Democrats’
She was guilty on three counts:
1: Being a White woman.
2: Being a US Airforce veteran.
3: Being a supporter of Mr Trump.
As such she had forfeited her right to exist, and was thus slaughtered in the Holy of Holies, the Capitol, by a black ‘avenger’.*
Consummatum est.
(*In this particular case by a Lieutenant in the fabled, Capitol Police, the US’s answer to the Praetorian Guard.)
Broadly speaking, one life lost through pointless rage-driven gunfire is a life too many, and in terms of life-years lost, many victims are young, meaning that this US love affair has gone too far. After Dunblane we in Scotland said ‘enough is enough’ – sure you can kill people many ways, but guns make it easy for any punk with an attitude problem and a skinful of liquor to go rogue.
Whatever. Know this: 90 million American gun owners will keep them. Woe betide anyone who tries to take them.
The only question to ask when there is a publicized “mass shooting event” is this:
Was it a false-flag attack — a real attack carried out by the government in which there are real victims? Or was it a hoax attack — an attack carried out by the government in which everything is staged and no one is killed?
Here are the 17 characteristics of a hoax attack:
1. Coordinated speeches by politicians, entertainers, and news celebrities immediately after the “shooting” demanding more gun control;
2. Coordinated speeches by politicians, entertainers, and news celebrities immediately after the “shooting” demanding more censorship of “hate speech”;
3. Interviews with strangely calm “relatives” of the “victims” that quickly turn into emotional appeals for more gun control;
4. A “manifesto” by the “shooter” promoting ideas that the international corporate elite wants to discredit;
5. Recently-created social media accounts by the “shooter” containing posts and photographs promoting ideas that the international corporate elite wants to discredit;
6. A cute victim who becomes the face of the “tragedy”;
7. A designated hero who rushes at or tackles the “shooter”; fearlessly leads people to safety; or shields his wife, child, or girlfriend from the “shooter”;
8. Perfectly lit and composed photographs of people fleeing from the “shooter” or hiding from the “shooter”;
9. Prayer circles, flower drops, and candlelight vigils for the “victims” within hours of the “shooting”;
10. Extreme discrepancies in eyewitness accounts that cannot be reconciled — vast differences in the number of shooters, number of shots fired, length of time of the shooting, length of time before the arrival of the police, length of time before the shooting stopped after the arrival of the police, etc.;
11. Statements from family members of the “shooter” within a day or two of the “shooting” validating the official narrative in its entirety — accepting without question the guilt of their son/grandson/nephew, condemning his actions, and denouncing the ideology of his “manifesto”;
12. Awkward, inconsistent updates on the medical status of the “victims” by doctors and hospital spokesmen;
13. Interviews with “gravely injured” victims who recover in a few days, show virtually no sign of injury, and almost immediately begin talking about gun control;
14. Strangely festive “remembrances” or “memorials” to the “victims” featuring “butterfly releases” or “dove releases”;
15. News reports that there was an “active shooter drill” scheduled near the location of the “shooting” around the time of the event;
16. Witnesses who — by amazing coincidence — were also present at a previous “mass shooting event”; and
17. When the script calls for the “shooter” to be captured, the “shooter” is apprehended without incident and makes a complete confession.
The official narrative presented by the government and the corporate media is useful only in that it tells us what didn’t happen. . .
Blame guns, blame scary sounding *assault rifles* (sorry Libs, that isn’t what AR in AR-15 stands for). A vast majority of weapons are 1 bullet for 1 trigger pull (semi-automatic), regardless of magazine capacity.
… a reasonably cared for revolver manufactured 100 years ago will still work. Ban all you want, pass all the laws you want, it has zero effect (see: Chicago).
The only shred of hope is to stop the manufacture of ammunition, because guns don’t kill people, it is the hunk of metal that comes flying out of a gun at a high rate of speed that does the damage.
Words of wisdom from 50 years ago:
Gloria: Daddy, did you know that sixty-five percent of the people murdered in this country in the last ten years were killed by handguns?
Archie Bunker: Would it make you feel any better, little girl, if they was pushed out of windows?
Murder by defenestration requires both parties being in the same room, and the window being a considerable height above ground. Knives and many other weapons also require close physical proximity. Guns are subject to none of these restraints on their lethality.
That probably doesn’t make the families of knife crime victims feel better. The truth is that you can kill with just about anything, a car, an airplane, a knife, you can even beat someone to death. We cannot eliminate every possible weapons someone could use.
The weapon isn’t the problem, as evidenced by millions of Americans who own guns without committing gun crime. The problem is the person wielding it with intent to kill.
Another asinine comment by this logic why make possessing anything illegal.
“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.”
Sure. But guns… help…
You don’t often hear the ‘Guns don’t kill’ brigade saying ‘Drugs don’t kill, people sometimes kill themselves with drugs.’
It’s easier to kill another person with a gun than with drugs. Suicide is a different matter.
Most US gun deaths are suicides.
Drugs don’t kill. They are inanimate objects that only kill if you take them just like guns only kill if you fire them. Cars only kill if you drive them. Parked on the side of the road they kill absolutely no one.
How else do you think many millions of Americans own guns without killing anyone?
Why is a person safer in North Dakota, filled with legally-held guns, than in seriously anti-gun NYC or Chicago or D.C., or London?
The illegal guns may be more of a problem (suicides are more frequent among legal gun holders; are accidental shootings, eg toddlers, cleaning?), but I guess it’s a lot easier to acquire them in a country awash with guns than one where most people don’t own any and aren’t allowed to.
Accidental gun deaths have always been very rare, but they’ve gotten much rarer in the last 25 years. In fact, no category of accidental deaths (you can check the data from the Centers for Disease Control if you don’t believe me) has seen any material progress in the past quarter-century — except for accidental gun deaths, which have declined by about 60%.
You might ask why.
Gun ownership used to be primarily motivated by hunting. Today, the #1 reason people buy a gun is for personal protection. Hunting is more dangerous by its nature, with groups of hunters splitting up in the field, and occasionally shooting each other. These accidents are rare enough to be considered bizarre, such as when a deer hunter in a tree stand drops his rifle, hitting a rock, causing it to fire and kill him.
People with guns for personal protection are much more likely to confine their use of them to firing ranges. Guess what? Ranges are extremely conscious of liability, and thus have tight rules and a range master to enforce them. The rules are based on protocols developed by the Evil National Rifle Association, and their application at ranges has reduced gun accidents to nearly the vanishing point.
Those would be facts. Whether you choose to accept them is another matter.
The anti-gun forces will often fixate on gun accidents involving children. These are tragic for sure, but consider that for every accidental gun death, between 10 and 13 kids under 15 years of age (the ratio changes depending on the year, and the magnitude of the yearly changes is exaggerated because the absolute numbers are so low) drown, mostly in swimming pools.
Four or five kids die in fires for every accidental gun death, and about 25 kids die in car accidents. Those are facts, easily checkable through the CDC’s annual causes of death report.
Because there are fewer criminals committing gun crimes.
I lived in Japan for a few years. If someone asked me, “Why do you think Japan is so clean, safe, orderly, and prosperous?” I would likely answer, “Probably has something to do with the fact that it’s full of Japanese people.”
North Dakota is safer than NYC, Chicago, DC, or London because it’s full of North Dakotan people.
I am now leaving UnHerd. Most people on this site are part of the right wing Herd, not thinking or caring people whose political affiliation does not affect their thought processes. I am disgusted.
This is indeed the danger of ANY platform for informed debate – that a feedback spiral occurs due to low level ‘bullying” so that eventually a homogeneous group end up in an echo chamber- which functions to inform a steadily decreasing group from the edge of a platforms ‘mainstream’. I rather think that the sites moderators should pay attention to this phenomenon lest Unherd degenerates. A reason that I am withholding membership to see what transpires. Generally I agree with much of what is discussed here and am learning a lot- however we need more diversity of informed opinion that is encouraged rather than multiple ‘downthumbed’ and sometimes rather brutally challenged ! After what point is there preaching to the converted ??
That sounds like code for ‘stop people expressing opinions I don’t approve of’.
The cry of ‘bully!’ is so often the cry of the person who opts for persecution status to get his own way that it is immediately suspect.
You probably include me among the ‘right wing herd’. The irony is that if I could have lived anywhere, at any time, it would probably have been Denmark in, say, the 1980s, which was a very high-tax, high-trust and ‘social democratic’ country. I have also lived much of my adult life in the Netherlands partly because it is not too dissimilar to Denmark and one can cycle everywhere.
Pointing out that the vast majority of gun crime in the US takes place among the black and Hispanic communities in 15 or 20 cities is not a ‘right wing’ view, it is a fact. And ignoring that fact will not make the problem go away, as we have seen over the last 50 or so years.
You also fail to understand that a very small ‘right wing herd’ congregates here because we have been banned from forums such as the Guardian for expressing views that do not align with the liberal media’s group think.
Ain’t that the truth. Nothing stays the same, but I cannot help but mourn the passing of the Guardian of old.
They evidently don’t know how bad things are at this new Guardian. I suppose anything can become normal eventually.
Funnily enough I have just had a drink with relatively leftie-type who used to work for the Guardian Media Group or whatever it’s called. And even he can no longer stomach its twisted narrative.
I’ve heard that it is a wretched place to work now.
As far as I can tell it has given up any pretence to be anything other than a conduit for grievance politics.
The atmosphere of censoriousness is reported to be as suffocating and toxic as an old fashioned London smog.
It used to be wonderful, too.
You do knpw you can just read the articles, and ignore the Comments section?
To each his own but it would help to know what you find so uncaring and disgusting. As the article plainly states and many posters have articulated, the vast majority of gun crime takes place in poverty-stricken non-White neighbourhoods. That’s not Breitbart conspiracy spin, so it stands to reason the people that live in and govern those neighbourhoods have some serious work to do and the rest of us need to lend a hand. Again, as stated in the article, many in government and media aren’t helping by making sweeping declarations of nation-wide culpability as if a gun-owning Iowa farmer is just as bad as gangbanger with an unregistered Glock.
Don’t let the door hit you on the way out. Maybe come back when you grow up a little.
um – so how is this not bullying ??????? Kremmy did you know that the number one cause of everything that is wrong with humanity is arrogance ?? It is not a case of being correct or incorrect it is the attitude of aggressiveness/ put down that also creates the opposite effect of what you might be striving for eg wider comprehension. I suspect I would rather have James in a position of power in my world rather than yourself EVEN though you may be better informed.. think about it – it is not all about winning a debate to demonstrate who is the ‘smarter’. That said I do appreciate your knowledge etc.
Ah yes, the GBCW post. Feels good for a couple minutes to blurt out, “Goodbye Cruel World,” and then you realize you’ll have to re-register under a new pseudonym. Trust me, child, this internet veteran has been there. LOL
The author states that the narratives of both Left and Right are biased, presumably equivalent. Yet her own description glaringly misses the make-or-break point of what makes the disarmament argument the clear win: that EVERYBODY shall be disarmed.
Contrary to the narrative of the pro-gun crowd, it is perfectly possible to disarm everybody except a meagre team of police special forces. The world is full of indisputable examples for everyone to see – the UK, Japan, Singapore and others. In these countries, the rare instances where some criminal still manages to use a firearm are quickly dealt with (with universally approved use of deadly force if required) by the aforementioned special forces, which actions are otherwise intensely scrutinized and kept clean of racism, etc.
The truth being skirted by the author is that what perpetuates gun deaths in the sick US culture is not crime itself (which no society was able to fully erradicate), but the infantile egotrip of people who insist that their “right” to own guns must trump society’s right to enjoy a much better reality like that of the UK or Japan.
But alas, for some people the US is “exceptional”, their people are “different” from the rest of humanity and therefore logic must not apply to their citizenry.
Uhu. An engineering solution. People, being like parts of a machine, only need to be marshalled in the right way to crate a perfect society. Does it not occur to you to look at your underlying suppositions before proposing such a solution? Because another way of seeing it is that people are themselves discrete entities, complete in themselves, and not created to serve some notional social entity which, when correctly run, will enrich and make happy all the parts?
I’m sorry to burst your bubble, but yes, there is a right to bear arms and it exists for a reason. The reason is that it is for the individual to decide whether or not he needs — or perhaps just wants — a gun. He can make this decision because he is a grown adult and does not need to give account of himself to someone who supposedly “knows better”. You don’t know anybody who “knows better”, do you? Oh, by the way, I’m not American. I don’t think they are “different” from the rest of humanity. I just like their logic and think it should apply to the rest of us.
Iron Law: You can always tell a “progressive,” but you cannot tell a “progressive” a single thing. They think they know it all. In any case, woe betide the “progressive” who tries to get my firearms.
that EVERYBODY shall be disarmed. That’s been the viewpoint of every dictator in human history. The American experience was made possible BECAUSE OF guns. Without them, the colonists would have been powerless beyond things like dumping tea in a harbor.
The world is full of indisputable examples for everyone to see – the UK, Japan, Singapore and others. Which of those resembles the US in terms of demographics, constitutional rights, or the nature of its founding? It’s a nice collection of straw men, but otherwise, there is no substance to the argument. In the UK, a person can be criminally punished for a mean tweet or a Facebook post that offends someone. Perhaps the appeal to your own authority is misplaced here.
By the way, how’s that “reality” you keep mentioning working out amid the grooming gangs, acid attacks, and assorted other treasures that your import class has brought?
Ah, I see – freedom is a privilege that only exists in the US, then… The rest of the world lives in some sort of cage that only luminars like Alex can “detect”. And Akex is here to teach us all that freedom can only exist with weapons…
See Alex, a delusional and hateful person like yourself is a clear example of why allowing wholesale access to firearms is a disastrous idea. I am very glad we’ll never meet. You can enjoy your “exceptional” country and its dystopian reality all by yourself.
“You can enjoy your “exceptional” country and its dystopian reality all by yourself.”
and 330 million other people, you mean. As to freedom existing only with the ability to defend oneself, well, yes, that’s quite true.
Not sure what you mean by “wholesale access to firearms”.
The only “hateful” person I’m seeing here is you. If you stay away from the “dystopian” U.S. because of guns, both the laughable ignorance and the loss is yours and yours alone. You will not be missed, limey. LOL
There have always been a lot of guns in the US, and there always will be. This is not the problem.
The problem is a small, extremely violent, urban criminal underclass which is responsible for an overwhelming majority of gun murders, mostly against members of their own communities.
Perfectly reasonable, you say. My response is this: Good luck to anyone who tries your preferred scheme.
This is a thoughtful article but it certainly misses a couple of points that are relevant. (1) I used to care for a caiman, a South American alligator. They are about as smart as a bird and he was trained some. You could see that when he dropped his head he had realized that he wasn’t in a life or death fight so he was pretty safe to manage at that point. But, he had those teeth and when you have teeth like that, you’re going to use them. So you never ever got in the way of those teeth. America is absolutely awash in guns now. They are going to get used. (2) What is making the first point worse is that Mr. Trump has amplified the Darwinian principles that Mr. Gingrich introduced to Congressional affairs. Nations and economies thrive when there is law and order. Others thrive when there is chaos. The Law of the Jungle that Mr. Trump has promoted as a replacement for Constitutional law, is known for being red of tooth and claw. Does it surprise you that there is an increase in violence when it has been explicitly promoted so much?
Please stop. There are millions of guns in the hands of law-abiding people. If they were the problem you think they, it would be easily documented. Yet, the bulk of gun crimes occur 1) in inner cities, often involving gang bangers and 2) in places where guns are difficult to come by.
The mayor of Chicago and others like her love to blame “lax laws” in Wisconsin and Indiana, yet neither of those states has her city’s problem. Maybe, just maybe, it’s the inanimate metal object that is at fault, but rather, the person using it.
Fair point
Oh, good lord. America has ALWAYS been “absolutely awash in guns”. And Trump isn’t President anymore. But he was very much a “law and order” President. That was a big part of his appeal. And the economy thrived during his presidency.
This is silly. People shooting people significantly predates the Trump administration, and homicides are up 800% in Portland, Oregon, this year not because of anything that administration did or did not do, but because of what locals with a progressive bent have done or have not done. It’s knives in the UK; it’s guns on the West Side of Chicago. Ignore the facts about who is doing the lion’s share of the killing and you’ve tied your brain behind your back. No matter how one fudges the numbers with definitions, so-called mass shootings remain statistically insignificant. (Meanwhile, could we at least agree that it is criminal to overuse “pivot” and to pretend that “multiple” is an adjective and that it makes a writer sound smart?)