Guns in America

[Campitor]

Clubs are the least invasive, most effective option that I see, which is why I say feasible. Aren't a lot of gun nuts already IN gun clubs? I've held various range memberships and participated in various IDPA matches already, and I'm not even that active. Then you've got militias, survivalist groups, the NRA, etc. Gun nuts have a strong tendency to band together, a gun club makes mandatory what many people are already doing. I mean how many people who own guns haven't had a range membership or nra membership? I'd imagine they're in the minority already.

Augustus - I completely understand the merit of your proposal but being part of gun club would constitute an ongoing expense and burden in order to enjoy a privilege guaranteed in our Constitution. Gun club requirements would most likely be struck down as unconstitutional.

[Riggerjack]

It is worth noting that with many different forms of gun control in different jurisdictions all over the country, we have many examples of how that works out. What works, what doesn't.

Given all this day and history, with some going back over a century, (Sullivan act of 1911), the NYT chose a almost new law in a nearby state that hasn't been around long enough to make a significant difference.

This, by itself, should tell you everything you need to know about the effectiveness of gun grabbers and their utopian fantasies. If they could point to an unqualified success, they would.

[BRUTE]

Feasible in the sense that I only really see 2 practical solutions to massacres

or just do nothing. because statistically, massacres are not a real problem. doing nothing about a non-problem is a very practical solution that has worked well so far. brute wishes a similar solution had been employed after 9/11.

[Riggerjack]

@ ffj, that is also true. True for the same reason that the NRA doesn't feed comments to the NYT.

Remember where we were in 96, the assault weapons ban and Brady had just passed in 94, and this is the first election after the 94 mid terms that I described above. There was a push to get federal funding to "study" gun violence.

So the red team defunded federal funding of gun violence. Not because the CDC was likely to conclusively prove the link between gun control and crime prevention, that doesn't exist, if it did, they would already have it. But because the red team ran on the "contract with America" that was supposed to cut frivolous spending, and why give the blue team free talking points? They already showed how much respect they had for truth and accuracy when they passed the above bills. Give Clinton his due, he may not have been much of a human being (or maybe he was, I never met him), but he was a world class politician. The man could push legislation. Given the climate, cutting funding was an expedient solution to keep the CDC or any other agency from generating the numbers the blue team wanted. It has worked since.

I think I have made clear that the numbers from both sides are cooked. This was an effort to keep the federal government from doing the same.

Now some of you may think I'm being paranoid. To you I ask why the political appointee i linked to above in Connecticut chose to break out murders from suicide, but recombine them for firearms deaths? Was he afraid people who put the effort into finding the tables couldn't do simple addition? Would two more columns have made the charts oversized and unwieldy? Or was it because that was the politically expedient solution to a question he didn't want to be asked? I don't blame him, it's not a stretch for a political appointee. If I had his job, and the guy who appointed me stuck his face on a gun control bill, I would make sure my reports weren't designed to embarrass him, either.

It's bad enough for both sides to cook the books, we don't need to pay taxes to pay the government to do it too.

[BRUTE]

You're pitting millions of years of instinct - protecting offspring - against statistics and logic. This whole debate is basically framed around that instinct.

there seem to be tons of humans who also don't care enough about massacres to do something (or rather, anything). brute is unsure if they are following logic or the millions of years old instinct of gun nuttery, but in this case, he is on their side.

[7Wannabe5]

1)Observe-
a) intermittent appearance of individual with extreme poor mental health likely exacerbated by widespread social dysfunction
b) technology that is over 100 years old (4 human generations) and readily available in one form or another
c) vulnerable community artificially confined to small area
d) moderately high likelihood that individual with poor mental health is currently or formerly member of vulnerable community
e) decision makers located outside of vulnerable community-sharp division of opinion on issue
i) technology protects vulnerable
ii) technology harms vulnerable

4) Apply self-regulation and accept feedback
8)Integrate rather than segregate

First Attempt at Systems Level Solution:

In American elementary schools there is a long tradition of a group known as the Safety Patrol. Responsible volunteers in the 5 or 6th grade leave class early at the end of the day, don bright orange belt/sashes and conduct younger children safely across traffic intersections. Automobile pedestrian deaths occur at the rate of 1.6 deaths per hour in the U.S., so this is not a nominal responsibility.

My suggestion is that the safety patrol tradition be greatly expanded and integrated across age groups in community schools, in conjunction with wide-spread instruction on self-defense, and conflict-resolution committee (student population version of U.N or town council.) The safety patrol is kind of like sports because it attracts a good many very high-functioning students, as well as a number of students who although not overall high-functioning have a strong natural tendency towards dominant boundary-protection guardian functioning, so fairly high likelihood that most members of the overall school community would be only 1 degree of social separation (known) to some member of an expanded open-to-all-who-wish-to-volunteer-patrol. This patrol would, of course, be unarmed, but could also be trained in various aspects of defensive technology. Adult members of the wider community would also be integrated into the solution in functional mesh. For instance, the lieutenant mayor of the city would meet weekly with the members of the conflict-resolution committee, and a representative of the local police force would be directly linked with senior student safety patrol representatives. The conflict resolution committee would contain some students who would never want to be on active patrol and vice-versa, but there would be a significant high-functioning level of overlap consisting of the portion of the school population who function well in sports and academics. Also integration across the elementary/middle and high school levels would have to be much more than token, but could be well-integrated with significant cross-age tutoring initiative. A 17 year old football player volunteers in one of the kindergartens I teach, and almost every little boy in the class idolizes him. The manner in which our school (and daycare!) system segregates children into strict age groups is absolutely alien to natural human functioning and contributes to the peer pressure which contributes to the mental health problems.

[George the original one]

Wow... Trump can't understand that giving guns to a subset of teachers (gun-adept teachers) means "giving guns to teachers". It's as bad as his getting hung up on the inauguration crowd size.

[George the original one]

Today's revelation about the Florida high school armed deputy is that he was present, but took a defensive position outside the school behind a pillar and thus never had an opportunity to engage the shooter. After investigation, the Sheriff suspended the deputy at which time the deputy resigned. Deputy's salary last year was over $100k.

[George the original one]

So here's what I think needs to happen before guns are increased in schools:

Teachers should have a means to silently summon remote aid. Use mobile tracking technology inside the school and on school grounds. This will allow first responders to actually respond to threats rather than hide behind pillars outside the school.

Classrooms need a second door, alarmed. That door should be one-way, allowing only egress. This is already standard practice for shop classrooms & theatres to meet fire code, so extending the fire code for classrooms in new construction is straight-forward. Definitely more complicated & expensive to retrofit existing buildings.

[BRUTE]

Expecting the parent voting block to sit idly by because statistically their kid is not likely to get mown down by some angsty teenager is probably a losing argument.

brute would call it a strategy, not an argument. brute is happy to utilize this strategy (again) and see how it plays out.

[Riggerjack]

@7w5,

Yeah, we could do that, and I think it would help.

But, your solution requires community members to take on new responsibilities, commit more time, do more work. But gun control is sold as a service.

Gun control promises:
"It won't cost you anything!" All the costs are always borne by firearms owners.

"Someone else will make the sacrifice." It's not like gun control is being sold to gun owners.

"Someone else will do all the work." Any additional work, be it serializing magazines, processing paperwork, or confiscating firearms, it is work to be done by The Authorities and gun owners.

If gun control delivered on any of their promises, they would tout that success endlessly. They don't. Instead, they sell gun control as a service to non gun people. Who cares if it's expensive/ineffective/time consuming? It's all sacrificing someone else's time/money/safety.

All that is a much easier sell than the 7w5 plan, if for no other reason than to avoid any personal sacrifice.

[ThisDinosaur]

Today's revelation about the Florida high school armed deputy is that he was present, but took a defensive position outside the school

This could be used as evidence on either side. It could be used to show that an armed good guy wouldn't prevent this. Or it could be used to argue an armed teacher on the inside, with his life in danger, would have had skin in the game and start shooting back.

I saw someone arguing that, while most teachers are anti-gun progressives, some are retired police and veterans. So those individuals should be encouraged to concealed carry instead of discouraged as they are now.

[IlliniDave]

I hadn't seen that but it's a third type failure on the part of armed government authorities in this one instance. I would agree that hiring armed security who cower outside when they are needed won't solve anything. Definitely have to find people willing to fight to protect children and trained to do it effectively. That's why an idea limited to having a few teachers carry a gun doesn't strike me as a high probability of success solution, although integrated with full-time security pros it could be a last line of defense.

[Kriegsspiel]

I saw that today about the deputy. What was striking was how quickly the department threw him under the bus. Something seems off about this story and I just can't place what it is just yet. That's just my gut reaction, it's just not protocol for the sheriff to publicly call this guy a coward.

It will be interesting to see more details and what becomes of this.

NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch called the sheriff out on not acting on 39 different tips on the shooter. If it's true that the sheriff bungled something, maybe he's trying to deflect attention?

[Riggerjack]

There was a school shooting. It doesn't matter who did what right or wrong, it happened. Expect a new sheriff, mayor, dog catcher. Nobody comes out of this clean. Many will be looking for new jobs or new communities after this is out of the news cycle.

If I could think of a feasible plan to stop these school shootings, I would shout it from the rooftops. But I think this is just a part of life in America, now.

Until we are willing to address schools in an entirely different light, redesign the system from the ground up, to make better citizens, I think we are stuck here. I noticed nobody shoots up Montessori or Waldorf Schools.

[ZAFCorrection]

If someone armed with a gun walks up to you with intent to kill and you are on day 10,000 of "no one tried to kill me lately," it doesn't matter if you have the auto-kill particle cannon 3000 holstered. There is a good chance you are going to die. Second, since school shootings are driving the debate, it is implicit (and occasionally explicit) in the argument that even a trivially small number of deaths to gun violence is too many, and arguing about what to do about it is accepting that assumption. So in order to have any chance of driving this number from basically zero to literally zero using the "arm the teachers" paradigm, schools are going to need significant retrofitting for physical controls as well as armed responders. That is going to incur significant costs as well as likely introduce unintended negative consequences (e.g. "my school is now a bunker").

It's probably better to stick with arguing that the problem is not really a problem worth doing anything about.

[jacob]

"Without loss of generality" (that is, not wasting time looking at irrelevant details), it seems that the US is playing some version of the prisoner's dilemma in which the system has locked-into defection as dominant strategy. It's generally expected that the other guy will defect(be armed and shoot) and therefore one better shoot first.

If the proverbial prisoner (here, any US person) can not figure out a way to somehow coordinate mutual cooperation(*), then the rational choice is the inferior stable strategy in which everybody is armed, shoots first, and pays a heavy price (but not as heavy as shooting last). So here we are. It's the rational outcome of the payoff matrix given by US laws, tradition, and culture.

(*) E.g. via laws, policing, morals, education, etc. all the usual ways a society coordinate cooperation.

Whereas the first world ex. US has mostly achieved collaboration as the dominant strategy by altering the odds and the pay-off matrix basically by making the cost of being armed much higher(**)---this being the only difference as the rest of the world has the same percentages of violent movies, computer games, mental health problems, students, domestic issues, etc. as the US---so mutual cooperation is the preferred strategy.

(**) So you can generally expect that the other person is not armed and therefore would collaborate. Aside from seeing the effect of this in the nearly non-existent mass-shootings elsewhere you also see it in the number of people killed by cops which are far lower than in the US.

[Riggerjack]

@ Jacob

I agree. And most of my gun nut friends agree. Guns are fun, but I would happily turn them in if I was the last gun owner.

The problem is we have never come up with a feasible plan to disarm criminals. The only plan has been to disarm citizens, and hope that after enough time passes, criminals would run out of guns through attrition.

But the genie is out, you can print guns. I can machine a new receiver for an ak-47 from scrap sheet metal with a harbor frieght press, brake, and drill, all the rest of the parts are available online, untracked in any way. I can cast a gun. I can cut off the end of a hydraulic cylinder, drill out a fuse hole, and I have a black powder cannon in under 15 minutes. The only part of a gun that takes any kind of special tooling is the barrel. Barrel rifling goes back centuries, so good luck suppressing that.

So, attrition won't cut it. Guns are fully developed, and part of the culture. There is too much general knowledge out there to suppress. Confiscation of all the guns, would just make all this firearm machining knowledge more valuable.

[jacob]

@Riggerjack - This manufacturing knowledge and tooling is also available in the rest of the world. Enough people are perfectly capable of manufacturing machine guns in bicycle shops for the local resistance if the country gets invaded. Otherwise, it's not something people do in the mass numbers you seem to imply. Because it's highly illegal. Same reason why Americans don't habitually convert their legal semi-autos to full-autos although that knowledge is also there. Making things illegal will not suppress the knowledge, but it will put a damper on the use of that knowledge.

As for criminals, it stands to reason that they will bother less to source an illegal gun (at 8-10x the store-price) if odds are low that their adversaries are unarmed---which is generally the case outside the US. A robbery in Europe or Japan is far less likely to have a lethal outcome for the person being robbed than it does in the US. Seeing how criminals ex-US are less likely to carry, police in other countries are also far less twitchy when engaging criminals which then explains why police kill far more criminals in the US than ex-US.

Now, I don't think laws can change culture. But culture can definitely change laws albeit usually with some kind of lag effect.

[Campitor]

@ Jacob
But the genie is out, you can print guns. I can machine a new receiver for an ak-47 from scrap sheet metal with a harbor frieght press, brake, and drill, all the rest of the parts are available online, untracked in any way. I can cast a gun. I can cut off the end of a hydraulic cylinder, drill out a fuse hole, and I have a black powder cannon in under 15 minutes. The only part of a gun that takes any kind of special tooling is the barrel. Barrel rifling goes back centuries, so good luck suppressing that.

So, attrition won't cut it. Guns are fully developed, and part of the culture. There is too much general knowledge out there to suppress. Confiscation of all the guns, would just make all this firearm machining knowledge more valuable.

@ Rigger

I completely agree.

• https://youtu.be/Fna9WEO6BjE?t=8
• https://youtu.be/FinRqCocwGE?t=259
• https://makezine.com/projects/the-multi ... milldrill/
• https://www.amazon.com/Metal-Lathe-Buil ... 1878087010

If guns can be made in a 3rd world hovel as show in the videos above, I have little reason to believe that a knowledgeable US machinist with access to modern machinery couldn't do the same. Or they can go the DIY route and make their own machine lathes per the instructions provided in the bottom 2 links and start popping out black market guns. I'm sure gun making recipes will be bought and sold on the black market quite readily if a ban is implemented. And gun-bans are a moot point until that 2nd amendment is done away with via ratification by 38 of the 50 states.