US versus the rest

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Much worse than terrorism..

At least two Little League lineups worth of children are shot in America every day. Three die, on average. Most are boys, and a disproportionate number are black. These are the findings of a significant new study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a federal agency that has come under fierce criticism for largely abandoning gun-related research more than two decades ago.

The authors of the study, which is slated to appear in the July issue of Pediatrics, estimate that an average of 1,297 children ages 0 to 17 die each year from a firearm injury. Another 5,790 children show up in a hospital emergency department to be treated for a firearm-related injury. Gun homicides among children 17 or under have declined 36 percent since 2007, but gun suicides have increased 60 percent, the study found..

19 children are shot in America every day - Business Insider

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Comment not necessary..

An ad the National Rifle Association is using as a recruiting tool on its Facebook page stops just short of openly declaring war on the mainstream media and anti-Trump progressives. In the one-minute spot, conservative media personality and NRA spokesperson Dana Loesch says progressives “bully and terrorize the law abiding,” adding that “the only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom is to fight the violence of lies with the clenched first of truth.” Here’s the video, followed by a full transcript.

NRA recruiting video stops just short of calling for violence against anti-Trump progressives

Little inconvenient fact: guns kill several orders of magnitude more people in the US compared to terrorism.

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Keep America safe! As it turns out, cops kill more people than terrorists, not to mention guns..

Police officers in the US shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people a year, according to the Washington Post’s database — far more than other developed countries like the UK, Australia, Japan, and Germany, where police officers might go an entire year without killing more than a dozen people or even anyone at all.

For example, an analysis by the Guardian found that “US police kill more in days than other countries do in years.” Between 1992 and 2011, Australian police shot and killed 94 people. In 2015, US police shot and killed 97 people just in March. These differences are not explained by population, since the US is about 14 times as populous as Australia but, based on the Guardian’s count, has hundreds of times the fatal police shootings.

One explanation for this disparity is that violent crime is much more common in the US, putting police in more situations in which the use of force is necessary. As data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development shows, the US homicide rate throughout the 2000s was nearly four times the rate of Canada, more than four times that of the UK, nearly six times that of Australia, and more than 10 times that of Germany.

But why does the US have a much higher violent crime rate than other countries? One explanation: Americans are much more likely to own guns than their peers around the world. This means that conflicts — not just between police and civilians but between civilians — are more likely to escalate into deadly, violent encounters.

The research bears this out: More guns lead to more gun violence. Reviews of the evidence, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. One review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives. For police in particular, one study found that every 10 percent increase in firearm ownership correlated with 10 additional officers killed at the state level over a 15-year period.

Minneapolis police shot an unarmed woman in her pajamas. It took days to give an explanation. - Vox

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Do prisons work? Not so much, at least not in the US, another difference with the Nordic countries (where it should be much higher as they lock up only the biggest criminals):

AAmerican correctional facilities are known for high recidivism rates. Nationally, 76 percent of all inmates end up back in jail within five years. Other developed countries have much lower numbers — Nordic countries have recidivism rates between 20 and 30 percent..

76% of all inmates end up back in jail within 5 years. Here’s how I broke the cycle. - Vox

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From the 1970s until just a few years ago, “tough on crime” policies such as militarized policing, severe sentencing laws and eliminating services like prison education defined our approach to criminal justice.  Officials in both parties championed these approaches despite evidence showing they were ineffective, created untenable costs and eviscerated communities. Too frequently, policy decisions were based on emotion and political whims instead of evidence and outcomes. The result has been huge social and economic costs, particularly for communities of color.

We need a long-term plan for reducing reincarcerations | TheHill

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Still not convinced that US gun policies are crazy after today?

The 64-year-old from Mesquite, Nevada, targeted concertgoers at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival at about 10 p.m. PDT on Sunday. The police say Paddock had been in his hotel room since Thursday. Video and pictures from the festival captured the chaos and increasing panic as extended bursts of rifle fire rang out. "Not an avid gun guy at all," Eric Paddock,  Stephen's brother told CBS News. "Where the hell did he get automatic weapons? He has no military background," said Paddock. 

The Daily Mail quoted Paddock's brother Eric as saying he and his mother were "in shock" and "dumbfounded" after finding out about the shooting. According to the Daily Mail, Eric Paddock described his brother as a normal guy who must have "snapped."

Las Vegas shooting: What we know about gunman Stephen Paddock - Business Insider

This is a country where someone with no military background at all can hide in a hotel room with 10 automatic rifles and kill 58 people and wound 500, and counting. 

He "just snapped." 

Well, people just snap in other countries, but at least most of them do not have access to this kind of insane weaponry. 

And if you think this is an exception, it's only an exception because of the scale of it. On a smaller scale, this happens multiple times a day in the US where 88 people a day die because of gun violence. You should see the documentary Requiem for the Death about average gun violence in the spring of 2014, it's heartbreaking, full of stupid accidents and people who "just snapped" and then killed their loved ones. 

Keep America safe, yea right..

[Admin]

Let's see shall we..

The incident marked the 273rd mass shooting in 2017, according to nonprofit Gun Violence Archive. To put this into perspective, we are 275 days into the year, which means the US has had nearly as many mass shootings as days in 2017. There is no broadly accepted definition of a mass shooting. Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings in the US, defines a mass shooting as a single incident in which four or more people are "shot and/or killed," not including the shooter, at the same general time and location.

Las Vegas shooting: How many mass shootings have there been in 2017? - Business Insider

Similar crime rates, much more deadly, simply because much more crime involves guns in the US:

A landmark 1997 study actually tried to answer this question. Its findings — which scholars say still hold up — are that America doesn't really have a significantly higher rate of crime compared to similar countries. But that crime is much likelier to be lethal: American criminals just kill more people than do their counterparts in other developed countries. And guns appear to be a big part of what makes this difference.

The seminal work here is a 1999 book by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins, called Crime Is Not the Problem. Zimring and Hawkins set out to examine what was, at the time, the conventional wisdom: that America had a uniquely terrible crime problem, one without any parallel in other developed democracies.

They found, pretty definitively, that the conventional wisdom was wrong. "Rates of common property crimes in the United States are comparable to those reported in many other Western industrial nations, but rates of lethal violence in the United States are much higher," they write. "Violence is not a crime problem."

America doesn’t have more crime than other rich countries. It just has more guns. - Vox

Gun control works:

A 2016 study, published in the academic journal Epidemiologic Reviews, seeks to resolve this problem. It systematically reviewed the evidence from around the world on gun laws and gun violence, looking to see if the best studies come to similar conclusions. It was the first such study to look at the international research in this way. The authors are careful to note that their findings do not conclusively prove that gun restrictions reduce gun deaths. However, they did find a compelling trend whereby new restrictions on gun purchasing and ownership tended to be followed by a decline in gun deaths. "Across countries, instead of seeing an increase in the homicide rate, we saw a reduction," Julian Santaella-Tenorio, a doctoral student in epidemiology at Columbia University and the study's lead author, told me in an interview shortly after publication.

A huge international study of gun control finds strong evidence that it actually works - Vox

It is worth considering, as one data point in the pool of evidence about what sorts of gun control policies do and do not work, the experience of Australia. Between October 1996 and September 1997, Australia responded to its own gun violence problem with a solution that was both straightforward and severe: It collected roughly 650,000 privately held guns. It was one of the largest mandatory gun buyback programs in recent history. And it worked. That does not mean that something even remotely similar would work in the US — they are, needless to say, different countries — but it is worth at least looking at their experience.

Australia confiscated 650,000 guns. Murders and suicides plummeted. - Vox

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And let's not forget this:

As the nation reels over the Las Vegas massacre, which left more than 50 people dead in one of the deadliest mass shootings in American history, House Republicans are poised to pass legislation that would make it easier to buy gun silencers, which gun control advocates say could make mass shootings even deadlier. The provision, the Hearing Protection Act, included in a larger bipartisan legislative package called the Sportsmen Heritage and Recreational Enhancement Act, would remove gun noise suppressors, or silencers, from the list of items regulated under the National Firearms Act of 1934, making them substantially easier to buy.

House GOP gun silencer bill keeps getting interrupted by mass shootings - Vox

And of course a barrage of right-wingers went after Hillary when she argued this was a stupid idea:

Hillary Clinton took heat Monday for issuing what critics called an “ignorant” and “irrelevant” statement going after the NRA and silencers in the hours after the Las Vegas mass shooting. As details were still emerging about the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history – which killed at least 58 people – the 2016 Democratic presidential nominee took to Twitter to imagine how much deadlier the massacre might have been if silencers had been used. “The crowd fled at the sound of gunshots. Imagine the deaths if the shooter had a silencer, which the NRA wants to make easier to get,” she tweeted, adding: “Our grief isn't enough. We can and must put politics aside, stand up to the NRA, and work together to try to stop this from happening again.”

Hillary Clinton slammed for ‘ignorant’ statement on guns after Las Vegas shooting | Fox News

But in the eight months since Trump took office, more Americans have been killed in attacks by white American men with no connection to Islam than by Muslim terrorists or foreigners.

White American men are a bigger domestic terrorist threat than Muslim foreigners - Vox

Actually, there are roughly 30,000 gun deaths in the US a year (see documentary Requiem for the Death), that is really several orders of magnitude bigger than anything related to terrorism. 
Perhaps we should brand the NRA a terrorist organization...

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It is actually possible to change one's mind, but if it takes this much..

Caleb Keeter, a guitarist with the Josh Abbott Band that performed at the Las Vegas country music festival targeted in a mass shooting on Sunday night, said Monday that he has changed his position on gun control following the attack that left 59 people dead and at least 527 others injured.  "I've been a proponent of the 2nd Amendment my entire life. Until the events of last night. I cannot express how wrong I was," he tweeted on Monday.

"We actually have members of our crew with CHL [concealed handgun licenses], and legal firearms on the bus. They were useless." Keeter said his fellow band members didn't dare take out their weapons in self-defense as bullets rained down on the crowd "for fear police might think we were part of the massacre and shoot us."  "A small group (or one man) laid waste to a city with dedicated, fearless police officers desperately trying to help, because of access to an insane amount of fire power," Keeter wrote. "Enough is enough."

After Las Vegas shooting, Caleb Keeter flips on gun control - Business Insider

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From a (rare) conservative commentator:

Those who say the NRA is a subsidiary of “big gun manufacturers” couldn’t be more wrong. The NRA is a giant, lucrative business on its own. It raked in $345 million in its most recent reported year. It made $33 million in profit. But it paid no tax because it is organized as a “charity.” Chief Executive Wayne LaPierre was paid $5.1 million in total compensation, more than the CEO of gun maker Sturm Ruger RGR, +3.48% . The NRA has tens of millions of dollars in assets, including $5 million held offshore in the Caribbean. Some charity.

After a recent, stupid online argument with NRA trolls, I realized once again that the association’s public voices are, in the main, an unholy alliance of liars, morons and sociopaths. And it’s about time everyone stopped giving them more credit than they deserve.

Did you know that drivers’ licenses were the “thin end of the wedge” of a secret government plot to ban all cars and force us all onto collectivist trains? Of course you didn’t. But that’s the kind of argument the NRA regularly wheels out to oppose any laws at all about who can buy which guns.

Did you know that because a bottle of opioids sitting in a cabinet won’t kill or hurt you, opioids aren’t remotely dangerous in the wrong hands, and that therefore we shouldn’t restrict or regulate their sale? Of course you didn’t. But that, too, is the sort of logic they use about guns.

How about this? Gee, if only everyone at the concert in Las Vegas had been armed, they could have “defended themselves” against the crazy person on the 32nd floor of a nearby hotel. Do you know anyone stupid enough to make an argument like that? Anyone at all?
Of course you don’t. But that’s how the NRA rolls.

Oh, and here’s my favorite: Do you know a single person who said in 2001 that we shouldn’t “politicize” the “tragedy” of 9/11 by passing new laws about airline safety, or new laws about terrorism? Or that we shouldn’t even talk about any new laws following the attacks? Do you know anyone who said anything so utterly moronic, ridiculous and grotesque? 

Of course you don’t. But that’s exactly the kind of thing the NRA says after each shooting massacre. Let’s not “politicize” this “tragedy” by talking about how to prevent it happening again.

After Las Vegas, time for normal gun owners to decide where their loyalties lie: with the NRA, or with the USA - MarketWatch