Kind of sounds like you're arguing their "terrible but not an epidemic". It would be nice to live in a society where you didn't have to dig into the stats to determine how much gun violence is actually happening, and instead the answer was little to none.
While the U.S. murder rate did increase somewhat in the COVID years, it is still significantly below its peak in the early '90s. Pre-COVID, it was only about half what it was.
So your point is that it is not that bad because it really only happen once every couple days? I mean, let's say it happens once a month or once a year. Is it worth it? Are guns preventing more deaths than they are causing?
Statistics didn't help them any less than it helps the people accidentally killed by firearms in the US. Those people are dead too. And there are more of them. And it's just as senseless. Honestly wtf.
First off, I wasn't in the least presenting it as an actual alternative. I was putting the spree shooting issue in context (much like the terrorism vs falling TVs statistics). Personally, as someone that's rather data driven, I hate when statistically rare issues get WAY more attention than more prevalent and pressing issues. The gun control issues really shouldn't revolve around mass shootings any more than the issue around national nutrition should revolve around nut allergies. It'd be insane if the country was arguing banning peanuts after someone dies from a nut allergy. But we do the same with guns now.
The real discussion is the everyday issue regarding guns. And you're probably correct with your assumptions. Here in the US, we have 4x the homicide rate as, say, the UK, where gun ownership is very low.
And our violent crimes is probably only about 60-70% of their rate.
BUT, if we look at per capita rates for that, it means here we have about 3 more people killed out of 100,000 each year, but they have about 200-300 people beaten, raped, etc each year out of 100,000.
Again, crime rate comparisons are a very inexact and difficult thing to do well, but my numbers for this come from a rebuttal of a pro-gun sound-byte, so I'm hoping they're a bit on the conservative side: http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checkin...
Personally, I'm lucky to not know anyone who has been shot dead by a criminal. (I do know someone who was shot dead by police while drunk though - but police gun ownership is not at all on the discussion table in the US). I do know two people who were beaten and left brain damaged, and one that was raped in front of her kids during a home invasion with a knife-welding assailant. Now, I've mostly lived in areas in the US that were the least gun friendly (NYC and CA), so maybe people in other areas would have different stats. But certainly even here in the US, violent crimes are around 100x more common than homicides, and a reduction of 30-40% there would improve a greater quantity of lives than a 4-fold reduction in homicides. (The net quality of a trade-off is extremely debatable. And a debate we should be having.)
Still, I'd love to see better and more trustworthy data at a greater scale than what's currently available before I throw my weight behind one side or another. I can argue either side because both have valid points. But I find myself at a loss for which I ultimately agree with, as I simply don't have enough information to make an educated decision. And as someone that actually actively looks for the data, if I can't figure it out, I have a hard time listening to self-assured opinions on the matter (of which there are plenty on both sides).
This is a complex issue that needs sophisticated analysis, but that's not at all the attention it gets as long as the only time it's discussed is in the context of a knee jerk reaction to a 1 out of 7,000,000 occurrence.
P.S. I bring up the ways violent crime has reached the people around me not to try and sway with an appeal to anecdotes, but simply to add the human element to the generic "violent crime" term. We have the human element of gun violence constantly put before us in the media, but the crimes people survive (though often scarred and broken) simply don't get the same attention. These are often serious matters and at 100x an already 4x inflated homicide rate, they are the issues I find myself more worried about than guns.
Gun violence is not evenly distributed across the country, even after you account for population density. We have plenty of statistics and we know what the differences are but because those numbers show a very inconvenient truth, we instead some up with all kinds red herrings and tangents to try to explain it away, while also promoting look-busy solutions that don't address the actual source of the problem, which once again, is extremely unevenly distributed.
Also keep in mind that gun violence is down dramatically[0]. So the problem isn't really that gun violence is increasing but rather public knowledge of it has.
I see that you have a hard time following an argument and the rhetorical techniques I used. I will break it down.
I compared the rate of school shooting deaths to suicide deaths for the purpose of pointing out the outsized amount of resources the issue takes up.
You claimed that it is wrong to analyze gun violence statistically.
I, for the purpose of demonstrating the absurdity of such an assertion, analyzed gun violence using a non-statistical and binary approach.
You then took exception to me conceding your point for the purpose of argument and using said non-statistical approach by then bringing statistics back into the mix and arguing that the frequency of gun violence is much higher in the US than other places.
So, which is it? Can we, or can we not use statistics to analyze gun violence? If we can, then we can compare the statistics across regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts and show that gun violence can be affected in degree by those factors. If we cannot, then we cannot show that regulation is effective, since gun violence still happens in highly varied regulatory regimes and social, economic, and cultural contexts.
I would argue that statistics is an appropriate approach since, in my opinion, it allows us to come to a better reckoning of reality. Ultimately, your view is up to you. But you can't have your cake and eat it too here - you have to either admit that the use of statistics is appropriate, or that aforementioned factors are irrelevant to gun violence occurring. They are simply mutually incompatible views.
Huh? The data here isn’t for one day, it’s for three days. Further, population differences will massively inflate absolute numbers. You’re making it seem like US is ~1,600x UK when in fact per capita it’s ~61x [1]. Yes, this is still a lot and terrible, but you’re making it seem two orders of magnitude worse.
Isolated events are like the weather, a general trend is the climate. There are 12000 gun-related homicides in the US every year. Per capita, the US is the 7th worst in the entire world.
There isn't any first-world country with the number and frequencies of mass shootings or gun-related homicides the US does. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, which are a bigger problem of preventable acts of despair. Murder is entirely different. 54% of mass shooting are family-related. Roughly 40000 gun deaths in the US per year.
I'm not forgetting, I'm just not bothering to dig deeper.
My point is that the vast majority of the crazy homicide rate in the USA can be attributed to the existence of large minority populations with huge problems of all sorts. I am not aware of any other Western country with similar demographic issues. Once you sort out that, the portion of the US homicide problem that is explainable by the prevalence of guns is nowhere close to what most non-Americans naively assume it to be.
If someone had access to statistics on comparative homicide rates only among the majority ethnic group in different countries, I'd gladly look at it. It frankly seems hard for me to believe that US whites score so well on that score given the size and diversity of the circumstances of the white population. But no matter what the answers are, you're going to have a hard time coming up with objective, unarguable evidence saying that guns are more than a tiny fraction of the problem in the USA.
I'm just going to note that in the responses, there are people saying that gun control advocates are abusing statistics when they ignore gang violence ("because it happens in high gun control areas") and when they include it ("because they can't tell the difference between a hand gun and assault rifle"), and of course it's not like you're being totally honest either: actual public health researchers who aren't some dude on medium repeatedly come to the opposite conclusion [0].
Rather than two events which, however horrible, are an anomaly.
How many mass shootings per year over the last decade? Two decades? And so on?
It's like those who pointed to Australia banning guns after the Port Arthur massacre:
"Homicides went up three per cent the next year! Gun control doesn't work!"
1. "Homicides" encapsulated other methods than "with a gun", and most importantly,
2. Whilst there are 17,000 homicides a year in the US for which a three per cent rise represents over five hundred more deaths, the conveniently omitted fact was that that same three per cent rise in Australia meant that deaths went from 94 to 96, in other words, an anomaly.
I don't want to argue that we aren't far behind of other countries, but the last stat I saw was that Americans had a 1 in 11,000 chance of dying in a mass shooting (stats are higher for general assault, 1 in 315)[0].
Is this terrible? Yes. Should we do everything we can to reduce this number, given that we seem to have the largest problem? Absolutely. Does gun violence have the potential to get blown out of proportion when there are many other items that are a leading cause of death? Possibly
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