The Oregon shooting

[AgedGrunt]

The frustrating thing about this fetishization of guns alot of america has

That isn't a lot of America. Like any country, we have our stereotypes and the redneck jackoff gun owner is your Groundskeeper Willy. What we do have is a strong, passionate type of people who fight for gun rights, which every American has. The thing is they do it with more intensity than we can find for any other right. I wish we were that motivated to fight for the fourth amendment but for many reasons it doesn't happen. No surprise privacy is dead, our rights are violated and so are we.

I don't think that makes guns our fetish, I think it shows a stronger connection between people and gun rights because guns are something you can own and hold in your hands. I think there's a more powerless feeling with privacy rights because of how powerful and invasive our government, ISPs and technology have become, and privacy isn't something you can hold in your hand and shout "from my cold, dead hands." There was no fight for privacy; it was just taken from us.

The constitution is a great historical document to be proud of, but its not a religious text.

I think religious text can be like law, which is sacred but to some degree open to interpretation. There's definitely not an absolute belief in the second amendment; we have a lot of regulation and don't allow all firearms to all people, and Americans against more gun control mostly feel what we have is fair enough.

Spoiler

Simply put, guns kill people, no really they do, cant be arsed with a semantic argument. If you dont care about that and would prefer to still let toddlers and mental patients have easy access to them then fair play just don't moan when folks get shot.

I encourage you to research gun laws in the US as they are anything but lax. In my state I need to apply for a permit with state police, who perform a background check. Yes, background checks are a thing here, despite what all the talk is about. There are ideas about "expansion", but as I've argued repeatedly these mass shooters are consistently people who were not red flagged at the time(s) of acquiring guns because they were neither criminals nor mentally ill. Even if we flagged everyone who leaves a mean comment on a Facebook post, how are we supposed to watch a few million people and make sure they have no access to a gun? That's pretty much impossible in a country full of them.

Similar argument to the other side, if you hate guns then vote in a fucker who will not listen to the gun lobbyists or you know stand yourselves.

We've had Obama for years. He hates guns; they and gun lobbyists (such as the NRA) are #1 on his shit list because it's the single issue he and liberal Democrats lose nearly every time. They paint this as political extremism yet these are the people who politicize the issue and are driven to increase gun laws for purely political reasons. There's a reason this is a political fight and that we're not talking about violence and mental health, and that's squarely on the shoulders of our petty leaders. They're not elected to pick fights and turn people against each other to advance their positions, they're supposed to be helping us.

this recent post at Shakesville includes a small list of notably misogynistic mass shooters, complete with links.

The link set me down on the front page of the blog. I took a look around anyway and quickly determined that Melissa McEwan is made of weapons-grade stupidity. It's the kind of stupidity that takes effort to enrich and develop and use on her enemies. I'd quote some of it but will just say that I don't doubt there are shootings where the guys have sex issues, it's just not significant to the gun violence issue as a whole. Even as examples it's misleading to direct the discussion toward males and sexism.

I'm saying it's how our culture tends to see how gender works, and says how it's supposed to work. You can't point at any one thing and say "this is the cause", but you can point at trends and say "this is an example".

The problem I have with it is that we're either left with blaming social development of males, masculinity itself or condemning art for being a bad influence. There's nothing good that can come out of this, but I think it's most important to understand that gender issues have always been around and so have means for men to harm women. It doesn't add up that males are suddenly taking up arms and taking on women.

 

[Thaluikhain]

The problem I have with it is that we're either left with blaming social development of males, masculinity itself or condemning art for being a bad influence. There's nothing good that can come out of this, but I think it's most important to understand that gender issues have always been around and so have means for men to harm women. It doesn't add up that males are suddenly taking up arms and taking on women.

Suddenly? Violence against women by men is a new thing?

EDIT: Another link to a similar post about a similar misogynistic attack (this time a stabbing in the UK) with a similar list.

 

[AgedGrunt]

Suddenly? Violence against women by men is a new thing?

That's not what I said. The crisis of active shootings in the US is what's been relatively sudden.

EDIT: Another link to a similar post about a similar misogynistic attack (this time a stabbing in the UK) with a similar list.

I don't see how a stabbing in the UK is related to shootings and gun control in the US, unless you're continuing the argument about "toxic masculinity", maybe suggesting it's behind misogynist violence that, in the US, rises to the level of American males gunning down their women, because America.

Let's put it this way: if a city sees a rising trend in gun violence, are women likely to see a rise in violence against them, or is violence against women its own kind of violence that would not be affected by overall trends? People cite the statistics of gun violence all the time, so why wouldn't there be the man-on-woman shootings in the US you're been talking about? This is something that's affecting all Americans.

 

[Lightknight]

How about you pick a country more comparable rather than clear outliers. Or, how about you figure out a way to disprove the studies showing the correlation on average rather than pointing out specific samples that don't align with the average?

What's more is that people complain about homicide rates fail to identify that a difference of 00.3% (3 people per 100,000) isn't as tremendous as we're making it out to be. We can use words like "FOUR TIMES" to sounds all scary-like but developed worlds have done a really good job at reducing homicide rates overall.

So I guess you missed me comparing the USA with India's 1.25 billion population first then? Or China, or Indonesia - directly looking at the 4 biggest populations on earth (including the USA obviously!) seeing as your point was supposedly that high populations are highly correlated with crime rates. An average correlation analysis wouldn't be very useful as using all 200-odd countries will cause any regression analysis to rapidly approach zero - there's too much statistical noise, and including third world nations, not to mention including places where there's an active uprising or civil war doesn't seem an entirely sensible comparison.

I agree that the developed world has mostly done a pretty good job of reducing homicide rates, and the US rates have improved when compared with previous decades, but they are still amongst the worst in the developed world. I also think it's disingenuous to talk about the rates as percentages to try to make them less scary, and make the differences appear less significant than they are. The UK has a population a fifth as big as the USA. If you multiply the raw number of murders in the UK by 5 and compare that with the raw numbers for the USA (in order to compare equal populations), then there would have been 3,265 homicides in this inflated UK and 14,827 in the USA - over 4 times the number of dead people. Spin that how you want, it's still 4 times as many dead people.

As I said before, feel free to compare the US with Brazil if you want to feel that it's all just about population size, and you want to feel good about being better than someone, but if we're looking at industrialised, western, first world countries, then it's the USA that's the outlier, not the norm.

Are you aware that those countries are notorious for underreporting? They frequently have low numbers because there are no numbers in a lot of cases. The US has some of the best statistical collections and reporting of any nation. Most things get reported here. But our numbers will only be as good as the ones reported.

Few countries are worse reporters of gun crimes than the U.S., which notably often fails to centrally report and collate officer involved shootings for god's sake. You tried to a common tactic, you were busted, no need to keep going with it.

Got citation?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2014/09/08/how-many-police-shootings-a-year-no-one-knows/

One of the many responses to that problem
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-the-washington-post-is-examining-police-shootings-in-the-us/2015/06/29/f42c10b2-151b-11e5-9518-f9e0a8959f32_story.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police-shootings/

More from the infamous liberal /s Wall Street Journal
http://www.wsj.com/articles/hundreds-of-police-killings-are-uncounted-in-federal-statistics-1417577504

And more resources
http://killedbypolice.net/


So, comment? Thoughts? Any reason why you like to focus on misleading statistics then demand citations? It's making me think you're not going to play honestly here, so maybe you can allay that fear.

Oh, so the articles are saying that because police shootings aren't considered murders that they're not included in the traditional statistics we usually tally?

I'm not sure I really care about those numbers then. If they are murders then they would be included and I do care if police are being shielded from a "murder" charge when they cross the line but if it's some officer that shoots a guy charging him with a knife then it's hard to drum up some sort of metaphysical angst over the dynamics of such a system over legitimate threats to the officer's life. It's fun to fall prey to media sensation stories where we think that every police officer is out murdering children who are playing with airsoft pistols but those are relatively few and even accidental shootings aren't traditionally included in homicide counts anyways. Are other nations recording these shootings differently in their own police force? When I ran a cursory google search I had no problem pulling up numbers on police shootings that were very high. Seems like everyone has access to this data.

Generally speaking, the intention of keeping track of gun use is to account for when it is being used inappropriately. Not just to claim that all human life consumed by guns is inherently bad, because that's not true. Some people deserve whatever they get due to the actions they are taking in that moment. Some guy with a gun to the head of a child deserves to have his lights put out before he pulls the trigger. Not that all these shootings are like that but I certainly support the use of guns to protect appropriately. Are we really dismissing the idea that no one here is debating that criminals have guns when 93% of gun related crimes are committed by people who have acquired their weapons illegally? Do you think, perhaps, the wide ownership of guns in our criminal community could impact whether or not an officer feels the need to protect their life with equivalent force?

To put this in perspective, yes the American police force does kill around 400 people each year. But 150 police officers are also killed every year (ten year average). Every 58 hours an officer is murdered/killed. Praytell, what is the rate of murder of police officers in these other regions? I can easily imagine this to be directly proportional to the number of criminals who own guns. Unlike other larger nations, our wealth is such that our criminals can fairly easily afford these weapons as compared to a criminal in India or China. When the average quality of life is higher, then criminals also experience higher means to enable themselves. With a much larger land mass and larger population we also face a significantly more difficult (if not impossible) task of thwarting any kind of smuggling operation of guns, drugs, and even people.