And so have had another iincomprehensible school shooting. This only happens here in America and it's clearly because of the prevalence of guns in our country. But it doesn't seem the solution is as simple as 'stricter gun laws'.
I have very strong politics and pride myself on the amount of research I put into them, but i've never known where to stand on this issue. i've been a hunter my whole life and I can understand gun ownership and responsibility, but it's also clearly a massive problem. We've passed gun laws, we've made it strict, but that doesn't solve the issue-- guns will end in the hands of criminals no matter what we do through illegal means and there are legitimate reasons for gun ownership.
But there obviously HAS to be something to stop these things from happening. I find a good amount of merit in the belief that a large part of the blame lies in our countries failings in mental health care, and we absolutely need reform in regards to that. No matter your politics, Reagan's measures against mental institutions dealt a devastating blow the country has not recovered from. Yet that isn't the entire issue. Other countries don't have adequate mental health care either, and they simply don't have these occurrences. The US is unique is its gun problems.
So what does Hubski believe to be the root issue and a potential solution?
I think bans work, but they need to be strictly enforced with a zero tolerance approach. There are plenty of examples of bans working well that pro-gun people like to gloss over or make excuses for. For example, Japan has banned handguns and virtually eliminated shooting deaths. They had 11 total homicides last year by gun. With a population of 130 million, that number is nothing short of astounding.
Pro-gun people will attack the nature of the ban and claim that Americans have more guns than Japan did before they enacted the ban, but that's not a valid excuse. If you made strict laws, over time, we could get down to a similar ownership rate.
There's nothing you can do. Nothing.
Even if you make the selling of guns completely illegal, how will that change anything? There are still tens of millions of guns in circulation in the USA. Many of them are family heirlooms.
The only (impossible) solution now is to buy people's guns off them by having cash-in stations, and that will be only partly affective and painfully expensive. Many will sit tight and refuse to hand them over. What then? You seize people's property? That would shake up the American social fabric so much it just wouldn't work. The political parties would feud over it and if anything you'd see the re-emergence of the Republican party as the governing power in the US for years on end.
The guns are a part of America now, and nothing you can do will change that. Perhaps over the course of decades (perhaps more than a century) you can influence things enough to steer people to a place where they don't see the point of guns any more, and just get rid of them, but that's hardly a quick fix. The guns are, heartbreakingly, here to stay.
Your best bet is education and proper healthcare for mental illnesses.
>Even if you make the selling of guns completely illegal, how will that change anything? There are still tens of millions of guns in circulation in the USA. Many of them are family heirlooms.
It will take a few decades, but the number of guns will go down if they can't be sold, or maintained, or used for practice.
This happened in Europe, which was awash with guns after WW2.
Another aspect which is often forgotten is ammo. How long does ammo stay good for if stored well?
Europe was awash with guns, but there wasn't a culture that owning a gun was a fundamental right. My grandma took my grandad's gun down to the police station and handed it in. My grandad was a bit upset that it was gone, seeing as though it had been a life-saver etc. for so long, but eventually he stopped his strop.
I honestly don't see someone stopping their strop when their SPAS-12 is taken from them because of something someone else did. Mindset is everything.
- Your best bet is education and proper healthcare for mental illnesses.
I don't think that this is a US only problem and strict gun control will not take away all of the problems. It is not a silver bullet. Last year ( Alphen aan de Rijn, 9th of April 2011 ), there was a shooting in the Netherlands (7 deaths). You probable never heard of it since you don't live in Europe. I do think that this is part of the problem. The US is a large country (federation of states), while the EU is a federation of smaller countries. If something happens in the US, we hear it as "a shooting in the US". If something happens in the EU, you hear for example "a shooting in France". In this case, the size of the country does matter.
Anyway, for the little country of the Netherlands it was a huge blow. We have strict gun control and to apply for a license you need to be in perfect mental health. Also, the process of getting a license involves getting a good gun safe and due to bureaucracy you have to wait for at least a year before you have a license. In theory this makes it pretty much impossible for nuts to obtain guns legally, but the guy who went on the killing spree had 5 licenses, even tough he was under treatment at a psychiatrist. As the dutch do when something doesn't go the way we want it, we changed the laws to be even more strict and introduced more moments to check if the holder of the license is sane. (Personally, I think this was a good thing given this situation)
What I am trying to say, if you have a nut who wants to kill somebody, he will find a weapon, be it a gun or a knife, maybe even a chair. You can kill with pretty much anything. However, you should make it as hard as possible to let him obtain a gun, because guns make killing too easy. And I think that the problem of the US is exactly that. If you make gun access too easy, everybody will have a gun and other than making murder easier, you also have social insecurities. You never know who has a gun, so I would personally be very cautious in the US and never feel quite safe. I know that in some parts of the US guns are a necessary evil, but that does not mean that guns should be rampant in the country.
You're right that it's not only a US problem, of course. There are shootings everywhere. But for some reason there are way more shootings in the US. Things are different here with regard to guns.
Here is a great article the Post ran yesterday demonstrating that pretty much unilaterally.
- We've passed gun laws, we've made it strict, but that doesn't solve the issue-- guns will end in the hands of criminals no matter what we do through illegal means and there are legitimate reasons for gun ownership.
I just want to say, this isn't strictly true. We've banned certain specific kinds of weapons in the past (while not banning others), we've passed "gun laws" -- a recent example I can think of is this one -- but you'll notice that the act, well-meant as it may have been, expired in 2004. And it only had to do with semis.
Diving into US gun control legislation research is vomit-inducing -- here and here for a couple more resources -- and the overwhelming conclusion to be drawn is this: we are not strict on guns in this country. Not at all. This is the opposite of what you said. Take the Firearm Owners Protection Act. It's basically a wholehearted defense of free guns in this country, as based on the thoroughly outdated Second Amendment. (And I mean, read the name of the damn law.)
- No matter your politics, Reagan's measures against mental institutions dealt a devastating blow the country has not recovered from.
Yeah, I agree. He is responsible for this, however, which includes background checks. (Considering he took a bullet from a gun bought at a pawn shop and fired by an insane man who was not background checked at all, I guess it fits.) There was also this, which might be considered slightly "preventive."
The bottom line is that the NRA is one of the two most powerful independent lobbyists in the country, and any time it starts to lose an argument it can cite the Bill of Rights. Until one of those two things changes, nothing meaningful about our gun legislation will change.
There are a couple of really good West Wing episodes about this, incidentally.
Actually rereading my own text I don't agree with it. I should have really stated more clearly that I know we aren't strict. We should be more strict, most definitely. I just don't know if that's enough in this country. We have a serious perception problem as well.
I really need to watch West Wing. I keep getting reminded of that.
We do have a perception problem; I think that ties into the fact that this country was "built" on guns. We have a gun culture and a gun tradition that goes back to before we were a country. The Second Amendment is ... well, second. The founders considered guns the next most important thing after freedom of expression. And that made quite a bit of sense in 1789. Now it's beyond outdated -- it and some other anachronisms in the Constitution are seriously hurting the US.
Yes. Which is ... well, it's odd that this didn't occur to anyone when the Constitution was created. Like, we are setting up a sacred document that is relevant now but who knows what it will mean in 200 years. But at the time we needed something.
It was probably a simple oversight. After studying the Constitution so extensively, they seem up space for elasticity and change everywhere. Perhaps they didn't expect guns to change as they did. Mass production and global availability also weren't factors in their world.
I think I'm going to spend tomorrow taking an in-depth look at the Magna Carta and trying to find/not find parallels.
EDIT: turns out the Brits have been able to largely slice and dice the MC to fit the times. But it took them several hundred years.
The Brits have a really cool system based mostly on precedent and intentionally don't have a central constitution. I took a class comparing their, Japan's, and our own constitutional systems. At first when hearing of Britain's system from an American perspective, it's incomprehensible. We've been entirely conditioned to believe that everything their system is based on will fail. We can't understand not having central documents without there being rampant corruption or solid written rules to dictate things. Every aspect of their politics is what we're told is wrong. I suppose it makes sense as it's what our ancestors intentionally left, but still being so opposed to it 200 years later is astounding.
In 2010 there was a man in China who stabbed 28 children in a kindergarten. This was followed by 8 other copycat attacks over the next year, people killing children with knives, hammers, a cleaver, an axe, or a box cutters. I agree that it's not a matter of guns per se, but it is ridiculously easy to get a gun in the U.S. and culture glorifies gun ownership and usage.
Further, if the man in Connecticut had a knife instead of an automatic weapon, many fewer families would be shattered right now.
I live in Norway, which has one of the lowest gun murder rates per capita. There are about 5 gun murders per year, and yes Norway is small (5 million people) but the rate in the USA is 2000 times higher with a population 60 times greater. Gun ownership in Norway is 31 guns per 100 people, compared to 88 guns per 100 people in the US.
It will be interesting to see what comes of this, but I am pessimistic that anything will change. It will take a big grassroots upheaval of the people demanding change in order to give politicians the backbone to do anything.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_%282010...
Mass murders always get people talking, but the fact is that we could never have another mass murder in this country and it wouldn't affect the gun violence statistics even slightly. From Wikipedia:
- In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm. There were 52,447 deliberate and 23,237 accidental non-fatal gunshot injuries in the United States during 2000. The majority of gun-related deaths in the United States are suicides, with 17,352 (55.6%) of the total 31,224 firearm-related deaths in 2007 due to suicide, while 12,632 (40.5%) were homicide deaths.
People care about sensationalism, they don't care about gun violence. They just mistake their sensationalist bloodlust for an anti-violence position. 27 or so people were murdered in this incident, but we average 34 gun murders, and 143 intentional gun woundings every single day. If people actually cared about violence they would have this "outrage" every day.
I think a fair amount of us do, but the media playing up these incidents makes it an appropriate time to be able to bring it to the people's attention. That's another piece of the puzzle: our media perceptions. The US media is so warped and inaccurately and disproportionately displayed coupled with Americans reliance on it and its infalliability that if we aren't seeing and hearing about the outrage over this every day it simply doesn't exist in the eyes of the general population.
Also those are always astounding numbers to me. 34 gun murders per day in America as opposed to the stats someone posted below of Japan's 11 gun murders per year.