Guns in America

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George the original one
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Re: Guns in America

Post by George the original one »

Mass shootings, particularly school shootings, are always planned in advance by a person/group bent on completing their action. The perpetrators consider how to work around security and resistance. The perpetrators often glorify going down in a blaze of glory.

This is why turning schools into armed camps is not going to be particularly successful. If the perpetrators are intent on acting, then they'll figure out that a bomb might be more effective than a gun and knowledge of bomb-making is "out there" for any junior high student to replicate. Has been "out there" since at least WWII, when the US army published field training manuals which made their way into private hands. I know we could order the manuals out of the Loompanics catalog (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loompanics) and from Paladin Press (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paladin_Press) in the '70s and had high school friends who did so.

In 1980-81, my freshman year at Oregon State University, one acquaintance liked building his own firecrackers and eventually got in trouble for making a rather large one that left a crater in the concrete at the center of the quad dormitory. If he'd been a disenfranchised nut case like the school shooters, he certainly had the capacity to do damage that would not have been prevented by armed guards at a school.

Thus, as jennypenny alluded to, reducing mass shootings will require a different approach for resolution.

IlliniDave
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Re: Guns in America

Post by IlliniDave »

George the original one wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 12:26 pm
Mass shootings, particularly school shootings, are always planned in advance by a person/group bent on completing their action. The perpetrators consider how to work around security and resistance. The perpetrators often glorify going down in a blaze of glory.
Better they go down in a blaze of glory unsuccessfully trying to get inside a school than by their own hand once inside and tired of shooting kids. These aren't spec ops soldiers doing the attacking.

I don't think bombing has the same visceral appeal to these particular individuals because it is not personal enough. But that's a great argument against banning guns! :)

I think ultimately you are right (and jp) this is a pyschological problem, not a gun problem, at its core. But until/unless that nut is cracked I'd prefer these guys face trained professional fighters prior to waltzing straight into a school to shoot at my grandchildren. And I do believe it would deter some of them. Of course, that may just move the crime scenes to other places where kids gather, but it protects the biggest predictable concentration of them.

ducknalddon
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Re: Guns in America

Post by ducknalddon »

Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:13 am
Firearms are an egalitarian force in our society. They empower the little guy. The people with power have to factor in that the guy they want to push, may have a surprising amount of push back.
Can you give an example of where an armed insurrection has pushed back against the state in recent history. It seems to me the state will always reply with far more force than you can raise.

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Sclass
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Re: Guns in America

Post by Sclass »

rube wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:52 am
. Wouldn't that fact alone be sufficient to think about how people in other countries like Canada behave with guns and why this is so different from the USA?
Source data: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of ... death_rate
I think you can dig this out of your data. It’s in there. Long arms.

We have a lot of pistol violence in the US. I don’t think Canada has a lot of handguns. Although we see these massacres going down with AR15 rifles and high capacity mags taped together I believe the majority of gun violence in the US is handgun.

I think Obama actually said this while showing a statistic that most killings in Chicago were five shot .38 revolvers. How’s that for banning semi auto? These guys are knocking each other off with simple wheel guns.

This is a tough problem. I don’t think there are any real answers. Japan? Not gonna happen in the USA in my lifetime. So even total prohibition isn’t a solution.

I’m not up on the stats but I feel something has changed. Gun massacres happened in my childhood but not like now. Is it the availability of media? Political agenda? Crap mental care? Maybe we should be looking at more than the guns.

Edit - a Canadian buddy once told me the US won its independence with a gun, Canada won it with a pen and paper when I asked this question. :lol:

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Sclass
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Re: Guns in America

Post by Sclass »

ducknalddon wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:19 pm
Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:13 am
Firearms are an egalitarian force in our society. They empower the little guy. The people with power have to factor in that the guy they want to push, may have a surprising amount of push back.
Can you give an example of where an armed insurrection has pushed back against the state in recent history. It seems to me the state will always reply with far more force than you can raise.
Iraq.

George the original one
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Re: Guns in America

Post by George the original one »

IlliniDave wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 12:52 pm
I think ultimately you are right (and jp) this is a pyschological problem, not a gun problem, at its core. But until/unless that nut is cracked I'd prefer these guys face trained professional fighters prior to waltzing straight into a school to shoot at my grandchildren.
Unintended consequences...

What is the required ratio of trained staff per school and number of students? How much are you willing to pay in increased taxes for the required number of trained staff in a public school?

We on this forum increasingly have attacked schools as being assembly-lines or being prison-like and thus irrelevant for real learning, what message does it send when you have an increasing number of armed guards? Are students more or less likely to become disenfranchised?

IlliniDave
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Re: Guns in America

Post by IlliniDave »

GTOO, I think it would be a function of the campus specifics not the number of students inside, basically as a function of the number of entry points to the areas occupied by students. The HS my daughters went to had only one way inside during school hours, and the first person you saw on the way in was an on-duty police officer. Make that 3 and 2 of them SWAT officers and you're good for any school incident I've heard of. Probably something on the order < $100/student/year for that school.

I haven't been part of any school attacking around here. I even like my job and country okay, and have friends aligned with both political parties. Kids in a lot of places are used to having cops at the school. Some big city schools funnel kids through metal detectors and search bags on the way in as well as have a police presence. Nobody minded it when that stuff was introduced under the guise of keeping drugs away from kids. It isn't a good thing but it is better than some alternatives. I don't see a more sensible interim measure while people sit around and debate why these guys do what they do and how to stop them before they actually do anything. When that problem is solved we can go back to school atmospheres of the 1950s.

Of course the other option is home school, and parents can do whatever makes them feel best in terms of protecting their kids at home.

theanimal
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Re: Guns in America

Post by theanimal »

Many inner city schools in Chicago in high crime areas have metal detectors . It appears from my own largely ignorant vantage point that most, if not all, of the shootings have occurred in suburban middle-upper class environments.

I really don't think much is going to be done about the gun laws. It seems a tragedy happens, each side talks laat each other and forgets about it when a new hot topic comes up in 3 weeks.

Adding metal detectors at schools appears to be a simple solution at first glance. Although that would require people to monitor them. And I'm not sure how it would work on college campuses. Maybe not such a great idea after all...

Kriegsspiel
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Re: Guns in America

Post by Kriegsspiel »

I can't remember the book (Freakanomics, maybe?), but I remember reading about a Pacific island (?) where there was a long term trend where teenagers would strangle themselves with a rope attached to a doorknob. Evidently, some charismatic kids did it first, it "caught on." and it took decades to die out.

I wonder if mass, indiscriminate, school shootings are our doorknob strangling.

daylen
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Re: Guns in America

Post by daylen »

@Kriegsspiel For what it's worth, charisma is probably not a characteristic found in these troubled kids.

BRUTE
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Re: Guns in America

Post by BRUTE »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Thu Feb 15, 2018 9:39 pm
@brute
If you have one tomahawk missile, then the government owns thousands of them, plus some MOABs, bunker busters, long range armed drones and an army of young RiggerJacks behind them. All paid for with your tax dollars. You're back where we started.
right. so citizens should have rights to even more guns.

brute is just confused as to why "not enough firepower no matter what" is an argument against any firepower.

ducknalddon
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Re: Guns in America

Post by ducknalddon »

Sclass wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:33 pm
Iraq.
I should have qualified my question with "and produced a good outcome". :D

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Guns in America

Post by ThisDinosaur »

BRUTE wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:11 pm
right. so citizens should have rights to even more guns.

brute is just confused as to why "not enough firepower no matter what" is an argument against any firepower.
If the justification for gun ownership is "in case the Government comes for me", I'm saying that gun ownership will not protect you if/when that happens. So that specific justification is invalid.
Riggerjack wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:13 am
Firearms empower the little guy. In a world without them, we go back to size, training, and numbers as the determining factors of behavior.
I see the purpose of [Democratic] government as to empower the little guy. The absence of government would be anarchy. Anarchy on its face is equal to absolute freedom. But in reality, anarchy just makes you subservient to whoever has greater "size, training, and numbers." Being governed democratically is choosing the most benign gang of warlords you can.

We are giving up tremendous autonomy to a mob of voters, their elected representatives, and the military and police force that those representatives employ. Anarchy vs. government are two sides of the same coin, or maybe different ends of a spectrum. In both cases, individuals are below an authority. The authority is the better-armed, higher numbered gang than the one you're in. That being said, the primary purpose of any government is to sustain a military and a police force. The military protects us from outsiders while the police force protects us from each other. And the whole rest of the government apparatus is to determine how those two forces should act.

A monopoly on force is the logical outcome of this understanding.

Now, I think there are a lot of problems with that. Because a military, police force, and government is just a bunch of individuals. And individuals are prone to self-serving abuse of power as well as tend to form gangs. So you inevitably end up with corrupt individuals having the monopoly on force. This would justify an armed revolution.

For an armed revolution to be successful, you would need the armed populace to be at least evenly matched in firepower to the government, AND for them all to agree that the time for the revolution has come.

If you have varying sized groups of armed individuals fighting over how to govern each other, you are back to anarchy again.

IlliniDave
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Re: Guns in America

Post by IlliniDave »

Sclass wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:22 pm
We have a lot of pistol violence in the US. I don’t think Canada has a lot of handguns. Although we see these massacres going down with AR15 rifles and high capacity mags taped together I believe the majority of gun violence in the US is handgun.

I think Obama actually said this while showing a statistic that most killings in Chicago were five shot .38 revolvers. How’s that for banning semi auto? These guys are knocking each other off with simple wheel guns.
This often gets overlooked but when you remove self-inflicted wounds (typically pistols and I think by themselves make up a majority of "gun violence" incidents in the US) and concentrations of gang-related conflict (e.g., certain areas of Chicago) where, as you note, handguns dominate, from the US "statistics", we look a lot different.

IlliniDave
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Re: Guns in America

Post by IlliniDave »

ThisDinosaur wrote:
Sat Feb 17, 2018 6:55 am
BRUTE wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 11:11 pm
right. so citizens should have rights to even more guns.

brute is just confused as to why "not enough firepower no matter what" is an argument against any firepower.
If the justification for gun ownership is "in case the Government comes for me", I'm saying that gun ownership will not protect you if/when that happens. So that specific justification is invalid.
It isn't strictly about one man versus the entire state. The original intent considered the state (or some other powerful relative few) versus the population as a whole. The calculus is different when armed citizens number in the millions. An aspiring oppressor-by-force would have to be willing to prosecute something akin to the US Civil War.

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jennypenny
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Re: Guns in America

Post by jennypenny »

I posted some links to JBP's comments on gun violence in the JBP thread for those who are into him ... viewtopic.php?f=13&t=9633&p=161665#p161665


re: gun owners vs. the state
When I think back to the hysteria after the election last year and the push to keep Trump from becoming president/remove him from office, I wonder if anti-Trump factions would have been more willing to push the envelope if Trump supporters weren't assumed to be the majority of gun owners in America. There was lots of discussion by Trumpsters regarding what could be done if 'they' tried to remove Trump. In my world, insurrection was often mentioned because Trumpsters felt he had won the election fairly and the cause -- supporting a fairly-elected president of their choosing -- was worth open conflict. It could be that the fear of pissing off the majority of gun owners in the country helped to keep the anti-Trump side (particularly the political arm) from pushing too far too fast and risking widespread violence. If true, it shows how gun ownership can influence politics without a shot being fired.

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Sclass
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Re: Guns in America

Post by Sclass »

ducknalddon wrote:
Sat Feb 17, 2018 3:26 am
Sclass wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:33 pm
Iraq.
I should have qualified my question with "and produced a good outcome". :D
Well, you are right. The insurgents were eventually met with greater force. They got pretty rambunctious for a few years though when everyone turned their backs.

I was a young man during the LA riots. I was pretty far from the epicenter but I knew people in Inglewood. They fortified their positions with junk car barricades and held the lines with their deer rifles. It was an ugly night before the national guard finally showed up. The family friend leading his neighborhood “militia” was a Vietnam vet decorated for for saving his platoon during a surprise night attack. He laughed off the rioters as amateurs and encouraged the neighbors to prepare and create a “gated community” with junk cars. It was a long night.

The show of force encouraged the hooligans to move on to softer targets.

This has absolutely nothing to do with solving school shootings, sorry to go OT.

Kriegsspiel
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Re: Guns in America

Post by Kriegsspiel »

daylen wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 10:52 pm
@Kriegsspiel For what it's worth, charisma is probably not a characteristic found in these troubled kids.
Just because they are complete losers doesn't mean they can't do something that strikes a chord with others.

Kriegsspiel
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Re: Guns in America

Post by Kriegsspiel »

ducknalddon wrote:
Sat Feb 17, 2018 3:26 am
Sclass wrote:
Fri Feb 16, 2018 2:33 pm
Iraq.
I should have qualified my question with "and produced a good outcome". :D
Vietnam. Afghanistan (a few times). Algeria. I'm sure there's more, those were just the first ones I could think of.

ThisDinosaur
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Re: Guns in America

Post by ThisDinosaur »

@ffj, jennypenny, IlliniDave

I agree that it's inarguably a good thing when the government fears it's population a little. And, since jennypenny brought up Jordan Peterson, there's a chaos and Order situation worth considering. Chaos in the form of armed civilians keeps the government from overreaching. But that same chaos puts guns within reach of disturbed individuals.

Seems like part of the problem is framing ownership of guns as a Right. You can't take away rights without Due Process. The existence of rights implies the existence of responsibility (my right to due process = the state's responsibility to give it to me). But mentally deranged people lack "responsibility" in the metaphysical sense. As in, it's not useful to act as if you expect them to behave responsibly. So, then, who's responsible for making AR-15s available to 19yo high school students who are feared by their teachers enough to have FBI files?

Someone upthread was talking about how the UKs system requires, among other things, membership in a club. Which ensures some sort of eusocial behavior.

I'm saying, if we need high capacity, rapid firing rate weapons in the hands of civilians, we should make sure its only the civilians capable of leading a eusocial rebellion.

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