• Guns are the second leading killer of U.S. kids, after car crashes,
    75 replies, posted
The US really needs to do something about it's gun problem. Literally the only thing holding it back is that for a lot of people, guns are a personality cornerstone for their vapid, empty lives.
Obviously this doesn't apply to every single gun owner. But it sure applies to a lot of them.
I would say the things holding the US back are the deeply entwined issues of rampant abject poverty, stigmatization of basic human behaviors, a culture that makes it social suicide to independently seek help (while also discouraging people from helping each other), and a criminal justice system that's so completely fucked from top to bottom as to make crime a necessary career for many people just to get by - all of these things of which excessive violence, chiefly gun violence, is a side effect. The "gun problem" didn't come from nowhere and it isn't its own neat little issue that can be buttoned up with one piece of legislation.
On the flip side, you recently had a court order that says that the policemen who arrived at the scene of the parkland shooting weren't obliged to protect the children. With something like this in place in america, maybe it's not yet time for people to give up their means of defending themselves in the event of trouble. Cops and schools had no duty to shield students in Parkland shoo..
my opinion on guns has grown a lot over the last few years of conversation in threads like this and I think I finally understand the frustration of hobbyists who play by all the rules. I wish the US would address the reasons why people turn to guns as tools for crime, especially poverty and our worthless prison system like @grenadiac just mentioned. that and a lot more education about guns and safety with owning one. but how do you re-teach people who have only ever known one way of using, owning, loving, or hating guns? I feel like good gun owners are pretty much fucked because of how much work needs to be done to society as a whole in the US to keep their hobby alive.
The textbooks they make kids carry these days could probably stop lower caliber munitions, I shit you not.
Something has to be done. Idk what the fuck it'll be. But something needs to be figured out with this crap. I know outright banning firearms won't work. But there has to be SOMETHING that exists that can make both parties of this whole Pro-gun/Pro-Control Debate agree on. All i want is for that solution to be solved so we can get the rest of America to worry about the much larger and actual problems that are affecting our Nation. A Corruption Administration, The Threats of Climate Change with growing Forest Fires and intensifying Hurricanes, Income inequality becoming like late 1800s "Gilded Age" levels of fucked, an Economy that is becoming more unstable and more likely to go through a crash due to deregulation of the Stock Market and Banks, the growth of Far-right/Alt-right Extremists, Corporate Lobbyism running amok, Poverty becoming the worst its been in the past few decades, the growing Cronyism and Corruption of the GOP, the decline and decay of our Infrastructure, College Loan Debt, and the decline of the quality of Education in Public Schools, Like it frustrates the absolute fuck out of me that this is somehow the forefront of the Political Climate of America. Like this shit should be on the fucking back-burner until we figure out the rest of the shit above.
That's a weird way to spell "88mm flak shell".
It’s because licensing requirements usually involves some form of registration, and there are several examples in this country of local and federal governments using those registration systems to criminalize gun ownership. NY used a registry to confiscate assault weapons, and the federal government defacto banned machine guns by closing the registry for no apparent reason. It would be a good idea if to implement if gun owners had every assurance that the registry wouldn’t be abused for such purposes, but the reality is people can’t trust the government NOT to abuse it. This is why everything advertised as “universal background checks” or “licensing requirements” are vehemently opposed by people familiar with gun control laws. It’s basically a dog whistle for “find out who owns guns now so we can take them away later”. Most places in the United States already do most of those though. Admittedly our background check system is faulty and needs to be fixed, but overall most places already do the following: Prohibit felons or people with violent misdemeanors (such as domestic violence) from owning guns. Prohibit anyone who uses or is addicted to a controlled substance. Have stricter requirements and permits for concealed carry or even simple possession of handguns compared to other firearms (varies by local and state laws). Stricter places like Massachusetts require firearms to be transported while unloaded. In my experience, the only things on that list which have any tangible effect on gun violence are the prohibitions on who is allowed to own guns, but this relies upon the background check system which desperately needs fixing.
I know plenty of people who violate this rule but commit no other crimes, they arm themselves to protect themselves. If these people are still able to get guns, might that have something to do with just how damn many there are? Not to mention I saw just recently someone putting out a notice that their house was broken into and their AR-15 was stolen.
Reposting something I said in a different thread. Most of it was originally Catbarf’s suggestion. What I suggested back then addresses the issue of stolen firearms and gaps in background checks. Also have you reported these persons to law enforcement? If not, you’re contributing to the problem.
So people who are otherwise not breaking any laws, who keep their shit locked up, and who possess CCL, should get their shit confiscated because they take a toke every now and then? Maybe instead I should report the guy who's an alcoholic, smoked meth, and went through rehab because he asked me to 3D print him a gun when he's fully capable of buying a working .22 pistol. Or maybe I should locate and report the dip-shits who drive around shooting at signs, or my dip-shit ex-roommate who thought he could shoot his gun whenever he wanted because he "lived in the country" despite the fact that he was: Firing towards houses Firing without setting up any kind of berm to prevent rounds making it to said houses I think those people are a hell of a lot more part of the problem than the folks who smoke a little of the Devil's electric lettuce, and nothing else.
And this is why this is a problem. You see this and think that it is objective fact. The reality though is that reporting systems vary by country dramatically. Once you start comparing rates between nations, things get complicated. Then you have issues of how you deliver that information. Like, for instance, claiming that firearms are the second leading cause of death. This research pulled data from the CDC and folks claim this research has no objective. Except it does. The CDC already publishes about results and breaks it down in as objective of a fashion as possible. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr67/nvsr67_04.pdf The second leading cause of death for kids is suicide. Generally by suffocation. This has is own flaws, but it was at least written by social scientists. You also can see that rates vary dramatically by age grop and sex. Again social sciences know better than to lump everyone age 0-18 together blindly because you only do that if you want to manipulate statistics. None of the underlying numbers are actually news. Statistics for deaths under 18 are always like this due to the nature of being under 18. Stuff that generally kills you naturally under the age of 18 is largely preventable at this point. That leaves human sources of death as the top contenders. Car crashes, suicides, and homicides are going to generally sit in your top three slots unless you can address some underlying issues with extreme efficiency. Which we won't in the US because we can't even agree that going to the doctor shouldn't bankrupt you, so we sure as hell aren't going to invest in mental health or education like we should.
The whole "stay in your lane" mantra is kind of ridiculous and it looks bad when any side of any argument invokes it.
One problem I find with this study is they didn't go into any real amount of detail surrounding the circumstances of the violence. As a part of my thesis I've been investigating the social aspects of gun violence, and while mental health plays a good party of it much of that can be attributed to the living conditions of those involved. My findings have pointed to great disparities in economic and social situations brought forth heavily by racial discrimination and discriminatory policies of the mid 20th center. The issue lies in poverty, gentrification, lack of economic opportunity, and degraded social ties from the familial disruption which is a symptom of all the above. These are the issues that are cause much of the gun violence we see either America today, and it's a problem only a few really want to tackle. Politicians would much rather throw on band aid feel good measures in "gun control" rather than tackle the much larger issue of racial disparities.
No, it really doesn't. Do you trust medical doctors to publish research on astrophysics? You train for a specific field for a reason. MD's consistently pull this bullshit and are either wrong or intentionally misleading. If they want to do this research, they can, but they need to bring experts in as co-authors.
Just gonna drop this comment from reddit regarding the same piece. https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/1383/540d3c8b-8198-4933-89fa-53ed8f6298e0/image.png https://i.imgur.com/9hgN1iF.png I guess this ties to Unclejimmema's post:
I thought this looked familiar https://twitter.com/nra/status/1060256567914909702?lang=en
'don't publish stuff completely outside your field of expertise, leaning on not-topically-relevant professional credentials to speak from a false position of authority, in service of a political narrative' != 'stay in your lane'
Except things can be done about suicide and unintentional firearm injuries. They're called safety classes, safety laws, and gun permits, and as demonstrated elsewhere in this thread they work.
Gun permits only "work" if by "work" you mean "obviously set the stage for the complete dismantling of the second amendment"
The problem I have with gun safety classes, permits, and the like is that it has demostrably removed firearm access from the poor and working class. In most cases, in the likes of California, it has plainly been used in an attempt to remove guns from poor-whites and people of color for being and I quote some senators name which fades my mind "too uppity"
I'd be 100% behind government paid for classes for perspective gun owners. But that's not going to happen, and like Joey said all that legislation will do is disenfranchise the poor. That was basically the point of the National Firearms Act; make the tax so expensive the poor or middle class can't afford it thus only the rich can have things such as machine guns and shortbarrel rifles. it's not as applicable today as they didn't incorporate inflation into the tax, but when it was enacted in 1934 $200 was more than mosts month wage.
Why wouldn't that happen? Isn't that something that pro-gun groups and Republicans should actually want?
If it meant that everyone would be covered, no one would have to pay a dime, and there would be no blocks at to take the course and checks at all then yeah gun folks would be behind it. Republicans would scoff at it as it means spending government money, not to mention the whole lets bolster the rich thing they'd like to keep going. In the end what does it accomplish though? What can 1 person receive from 8 hours of class time? 12? 36? The issue people seeing this would help alleviate is things such as negligent discharges and improper storage of firearms. That doesn't mean jack all to people who decide to disregard all of it. It's already the law to keep firearms locked away from children, but parents still leave them out. It is already the law to include locks with every single gun sold, but people choose not to use them. The only thing that would change that would be mandatory inspections by local government, which opens the doors to incredibly murky waters regarding the 4th amendment. All of which to prevent a statistically insignificant amount of people from leaving their guns out for children to reach.
Because gun control advocates will never support taxpayers footing the bill for something that they'd rather ban altogether.
Yeah the simplest part is that medical doctors do publish death statistics. You don't need to be a statistician to do so, you just need access to the hard data and enough knowledge about the field to do so objectively. Which I'd imagine 7+ years of medical training and education does.
The number of deaths that occur means nothing if you don't understand the underlying issues that cause them. At face value the study points to guns, without any further explanation as to why. Guns do not motivate one to kill people, as I've already mentioned there are many underlining issues that cause general violence and gun violence in particular in America. Right now the data they have collected is solid, they are true statistics that reflect a horrible trend in our country. It is also data that reflects symptoms of a much larger issue, to pretend that removing guns from the equation would somehow make the underlining issues vanish is incorrect. If you managed to remove every gun in the country you're still going to have poverty, racial discrimination, inaccessibility of jobs, etc. You won't solve the violence, you will only shift the mechanism by which it is committed.
No? But I do trust them to be able to tell whether a death resulted from a gunshot wound and do basic statistics, as is taught in any proper medical curriculum.
The over simplified view of gun violence as being "he died from a gunshot wound" is the kind of mentality preventing anything meaningful actually being brought to the table and enacted. This is just as simple minded as people who parrot "muh guns" when defending their gun rights.
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