Poll: High schoolers still like their guns, even after Parkland - USA Today - Polidicks

Although there is a link between gun ownership in general and suicide. Though I don't think the assault weapon ban helped at all with that since most people would commit suicide with handguns, not rifles.

But they talk about mass shootings which I've shown haven't changed in frequency, just in number of casualties, and gun violence as well as violent crime overall is trending downwards. The actual rise in both in the 60s/70s seems to be independent of gun ownership rates, and their decline seem to have to do with more policing in the 90s compensating for correlations that rose in the 60/70s like rates of single parent households

fucking it up?

this is vile beyond words.

But the 2nd Amendment is in the Bill of Rights. They can't even get that right.

First off, I said "by sometimes decently over a hundred", so that's not really a hard statistic, I had to encompass the very large variety of incidents across a very large time span into a single phrase, so I mean, if you want what I personally base my statement on, it'd be a fairly moderate curation of the following list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States And then taking into account that I consider "gunned down" to include injuries, the over 100 number does appear, but not as often as I'm thinking you interpreted my post to be. My bad for being a tad misleading there, however if you actually take the time to account for it all, there are a decidedly a few cases where over 100 people have died in a year in what is arguably an entirely preventable event.

Also note that many of those are universities, which skews the statistic fairly significantly. When you adjust for that, the numbers start looking very different. You don't even meet 100 kids in five years. How Many School Shootings Have There Been Since Sandy Hook? | Ti.. All told, since 2013 we counted 6 adults and 35 children killed in these types of school shootings, as well as 12 adults and 92 children injured. About 950 people died due to lawn mower accidents in roughly the same period. You could prevent a tenth of those and save more lives. I can start a list of ways you could save more lives for less money and political capital.

University students are still kids in my eyes, so I consider them kids, especially when it comes to tragic events, but I can see where you're coming from.

Do you have a point?

You seem to think that a poll represents all people under some arbitrary age bracket you yourself have defined, and therefore that makes it okay for you to besmirch the shit out of billions of people just because they're (presumably) younger than you, ignoring the fact you were young once, is my point. I'm calling you a taffer.

"That other factors seem to be at play suggests that there are more causes to the suicide epidemic than easy access to guns." It doesn't disprove the (already confirmed) causal link between gun ownership and higher suicide rates, it just mentions other possible causes as if it would. That's whataboutism. Most phenomenon can and do have several causes. Gun ownership just happens to be one of several causes of suicide. "Serious holes in my argument"? When you mention the AWB as a counterpoint to it I don't think you have a leg to stand on. Who the fuck commits suicide with an "assault weapon"? Why would an AWB prevent someone who has access to a handgun from committing suicide? Gun ownership is one of the causes of high suicide rate, you've already been shown that. Trying to rephrase it as "it just makes it easier" (which is basically the same thing, you've got people committing suicide who wouldn't have had they not had access to a firearm) doesn't change squat, nor does it pokes "holes" in my argument. Trying to curb one of the causes of a problem isn't "political opportunism", it's using the democratic system for its actual purpose. No idea what you're referring to. Well that's funny, there are countries such as China with much worse: Mental healthcare Poverty rates Income inequality ... That also happen to have lower murder rates than the US. So either evidence of inverse correlation doesn't mean a lack of causal link, and thus your point about gun ownership falls apart, or it does, and those factors don't actually have an influence on the amount of violence within a society.

Axel, not to comment on anything else you've said, but Chinese reported crime rates are highly suspect. Surely you can find a country to illustrate the point that doesn't have a history of outright lying about the success of their social programs?

Whataboutism would be using someone's hypocrisy to justify my own position. That's not happening here I'm just clarifying whether we're settling on the suicide epidemic as the case for gun control after conceding the debate on mass shootings and general gun violence in the country. It has nothing to do with the march and is not addressed by the solutions and demands coming out of its momentum. It's also just not a reason to enact gun control at all. It's a poor argument because guns are not a significant causal factor of suicide, that's not what studies actually show and my charts below give greater context. We have a correlation, however we can also correlate household gun ownership with substance abuse (like alcohol or opioid abuse). This is because we are talking about red state rural country where gun ownership is much higher than cities, but this doesn't mean gun culture causes substance abuse. The cause of the recent woes of these areas like the opioid epidemic is likely socioeconomic in nature. Also, Japan is the actual case study for the modern suicide epidemic yet has strict gun control laws including on pistols. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Suicide-deaths-per-100000-trend.jpg en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States#Rates_compared_to_other_countries As I've said and as this chart suggests, if we're going to talk about the modern suicide rate guns have very little to do with it and it's going to be a discussion about a general social dysfunction or decline in communities. The above chart doesn't suggest much of a causal relationship between gun prevalence and suicide rate on the international level. The correlation is also weak here in the US: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4762249/bin/mxv01301.jpg Household firearm ownership rate and firearm violence in the United States, 1993–2013. Gray bars show household gun ownership rate; diamonds show firearm suicide deaths per 100,000 persons; triangles show firearm homicide deaths per 100,000 persons; and circles show nonfatal firearm victimizations per 1,000 persons aged ≥12 years. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4762249/ Household gun ownership rates remained stable from 1993-96, however the suicide rate was in a downward trend. There was an increase in gun ownership from 2002-2004, probably related to anxiety over the expiration and possible renewal of the AWB, but it caused no change in the suicide rate other than slight decline. 2010 and 2012 gun ownership rates are lower than 2008, yet the suicide rate steadily climbs from 2008 onwards. The debate and march is about mass shootings in the US being made possible by civilian access to military-style weapons. If you're trying to argue separately that America's exceptional prevalence of gun culture is responsible for its suicide rate, the data above does not suggest that. We're not much of an outlier and the correlation is weak and inconsistent. Like I said, we can also correlate gun ownership to alcohol abuse but it'd be hard to argue it's a significant causal factor. I think we all know red state woes are much more socioeconomic, nobody says gun culture is causing the opioid epidemic although obviously they overlap as a trend. No it isn't. First of all there isn't even a debate, it's a whole lot of aesthetics. Secondly, the data does not support the amount of focus this issue is getting. That's why you and I are talking suicide and not gun violence or mass shootings, the latter two spiked despite comparatively little change in gun ownership rates since the 1970s. They also either declined or didn't change in frequency despite increase in gun permits and number of guns per person since the 90s. On top of that, there's no reason to believe the AWB and its expiration affected either gun violence or mass shooting rates. Here's my citations for that again [1] [2] (page 1-3, 91) [3] We've settled on suicide because that's the only place you have anything empirical. However, this is a correlation and not a significant causal factor of suicide based on the above charts. There's no reason to believe gun control would halt the climbing rate of suicide just based on the the post-2008 trends alone and it's not really a reason to be eroding rights anyway. You can only really pitch that with murder, not suicide. The gap between the facts and the momentum is best explained by political polarization and moral panic powering most of this, it's inseparable from Trump's election and the midterms. We should judge the clamor for gun control as irrational and tribal in nature as anti-immigrant sentiment, both are proxy issues for a bigger cultural struggle during a time of change. This is why the discussions about guns since Parkland hasn't been a debate at all, it's about accusing politicians of being bought out, protest aesthetics and media blitz, and otherwise a flawed attempt at claiming this is the final straw that broke the camel's back and we need to do something about folk-y American backwardsness that's holding us back in the globalized era. It's just a post-truth ideological battle in a time the media feels popular red state discontent is manifesting as a threat to progress It's a false equivalency though. China is 91% Han Chinese with an authoritarian state, it's a homogeneous dictatorship that performs Hanification to help pacify troublesome minority regions like Xinjiang, whereas the American murder rate is compounded by the drug trade, race, and ghettoization of minorities in inner cities where by the way gun ownership is less prevalent (28% vs 59% in rural areas, source: Section 3) and of course tends to have more for gun control laws. The issue of suicide and mass shooting is separate since we're talking about different parts of the country and there isn't much proof that gun ownership is a causal factor of historical change in either for these areas, since their change over time is independent of or weakly correlated with change in gun ownership rates. The factors I listed are the only things to have changed for those parts of the country and are better explanations than changes in gun prevalence, I think it's largely socioeconomic. As I've shown, the correlation between the two with guns is weak and our suicide rates are not that high despite America having like 5% of the world's population but 42% of its civilian gun ownership. Mass shooting frequency spiked in the 80s/90s independent of a stable household gun ownership rate dating back to the early 70s, and the AWB or its expiration has had no real effect on mass shootings like I cited above. I just don't see where you have a case for gun control on suicide, mass shooting, or general gun violence.

They're not. You can own most types of guns freely in Switzerland, indeed every person of able body is given training and their own firearm as part of their collective self-defence against occupation. They put in a law a year or so ago that meant they could no longer keep ammo at home and it must be kept at a state armoury or firing range but that wasn't due to gun violence but rather high numbers of suicides using their government-issued firearm. Germany and Croatia have very lax gun laws but low gun violence, Norway has stricter gun laws but they're somewhat on par with Canadian laws and they have the second highest guns per capita in the world and statistically they had the lowest gun violence (Anders Brevik kinda bodged that up). It's literally a culture thing, the guns aren't the problem it's the people who have access/using them who are.

Well, that was a convenient one for me since I could find decent info about their mental healthcare being lacking, I can't find a reliable indicator of mental health used on a broad enough scale to compare countries with each other. I pulled up a list of countries that have a higher GINI coefficient, lower amount of Guns per Capita, and lower murder rates than the US (GINI = 41, MR = 4.88, GPC = 101%) Turkey (GINI = 41.2, MR = 4.3, GPC = 12.5%) Ghana (GINI = 42.8, MR = 1.7, GPC = 0.4%) Turkmenistan (GINI = 43.2, MR = 4.2, GPC = 3.8%) Mozambique (GINI = 45.6, MR = 3.39, GPC = 5.1%) Malawi (GINI = 46.1, MR = 1.78, GPC = 0.7%) Malaysia (GINI = 46.3, MR = 1.92, GPC = 1.5%) Seychelles (GINI = 46.8, MR = 2.15, GPC = 5.4%) Chile (GINI = 47.7, MR = 3.59, GPC = 10.7%) No data on mental health, though I doubt it's stellar in any of these countries. Then again, any country with a GINI coefficient higher than the US is likely to be corrupt to an extent, so I guess you may be skeptical about those reported murder rates as well. Well, they're more strictly restricted than in the US then? It's also interesting that you mention the Swiss gun suicide issue. After the ban on home-kept ammo was enforced an enduring decline in suicide rates was observed. Hopefully, this should satisfy tempcon's need for direct correlation to consider that a parameter exists. I'm not conceding anything save for the fact that bans that target weapons with specific and irrelevant characteristics (like an AWB) or bans that are limited to the state level are inefficient, so all your arguments about the pointlessness of AWBs are somewhat irrelevant. What I'm arguing is that people's dismissal of the impact weapon proliferation has on rates of violence (self-inflicted or otherwise) is based on flawed arguments that rely on a misconstrued interpretation of correlations. A lack of apparent correlation between two factors in a multiple parameter problem does not show a lack of causality between said factors. That interpretation also ignores any threshold effect that requires that a parameter change be over a certain level to affect the result, even if said parameter is a significant cause. Your point about violence being due in large part to socio-economic factors is not one I disagree with in the slightest. However, your argument that gun proliferation doesn't have an impact on overall violence hinges on the aforementioned flaws, and thus can't be received, just like my use of similar arguments to dismiss societal causes to violence are non-receivable. What I find most disturbing, though, is you claim that there's no causal relationship between gun ownership and suicide rates despite the fact that it's been shown using actual statistical methods. Raw comparison of data like you're doing in your post doesn't change that fact. That other countries have a high suicide rate despite a lack of gun ownership doesn't disprove a causal link between gun ownership and suicide rates, for instance. In fact, what happened in Switzerland does hint at the opposite conclusion. We've already been over actual cases where a reduction in operational firearm availability resulted in a decrease in suicides, so I won't go over that again. I'm really curious about why murder would be a significant enough issue to enact policies, but not suicides, even though they're demonstrably more numerous? If you have such a high standard for evidence regarding the impact of gun ownership on violent behavior, perhaps you should apply the same standards to the causes you consider significant? Could you point me towards studies that prove a causal link (not a correlation) between the socio-economic factors you mentioned and gun violence?

Wrong