You seem to think that eliminating guns will somehow eliminate mass shootings. However, there is zero correlation to the number of legal gun ownerships with the number of homicides. In fact, here are some statistics for you:

At present, a little more than half of all Americans own the sum total of about 320 million guns, 36% of which are handguns, but fewer than 100,000 of these guns are used in violent crimes. And, as it happens, where gun ownership per capita increases, violent crime is known to decrease. In other words, Caucasians tend to own more guns than African Americans, middle aged folks own more guns than young people, wealthy people own more guns than poor people, rural families own more guns than urbanites --> But the exact opposite is true for violent behavior (i.e., African Americans tend to be more violent than Caucasians, young people more violent than middle aged people, poor people more violent than wealthy people, and urbanites more violent than rural people). So gun ownership tends increase where violence is the least. This is, in large part, due to the cultural divide in the U.S. around gun ownership whereby most gun owners own guns for recreational sports (including the Southern Caucasian rural hunting culture, the likes of which aren't found in Australia or the UK or Europe, etc.); and about half of gun owners own guns for self-defense (usually as the result of living in a dangerous environment). Most of the widespread gun ownership in the U.S. predates any gun control legislation and gun ownership tends to generally rise as a response to an increase in violent crime (not the other way around).

There were about 350,000 crimes in 2009 in which a gun was present (but may not have been used), 24% of robberies, 5% of assaults, and about 66% of homicides. By contrast, guns are used as self-defense as many as 2 and a half million times every year (according to criminologist Gary Kleck at Florida State University), thereby decreasing the potential loss of life or property (i.e., those with guns are less likely to be injured in a violent crime than those who use another defensive strategy or simply comply).

Interestingly, violent crimes tend to decrease in those areas where there have been highly publicized instances of victims arming themselves or defending themselves against violent criminals. (In the UK, where guns are virtually banned, 43% of home burglaries occur when people are in the home, whereas only 9% of home burglaries in the U.S. occur when people are in the home, presumably as a result of criminals' fear of being shot by the homeowner.) In short, gun ownership reduces the likelihood of harm.

So, for example, Boston has the strictest gun control and the most school shootings. The federal ban on assault weapons from '94-'04 did not impact amount and severity of school shootings. The worst mass homicide in a school in the U.S. took place in Michigan in 1927, killing 38 children. The perpetrator used (illegal) bombs, not guns in this case.

1/3 of legal gun owners obtain their guns (a total of about 200,000 guns) privately, outside the reach of government regulation. So, it's likely that gun-related crimes will increase if the general population is unarmed.

Out of a sample of 943 felon handgun owners, 44% had obtained the gun privately, 32% stole it, 9% rented/borrowed it, and 16% bought it from a retailer. (Note retail gun sales is the only area that gun control legislation can affect, since existing laws have failed to control for illegal activity. Stricter legislation would likely therefore change the statistics of how felon handgun owners obtain the gun towards less legal, more violent ways.) Less than 3% obtain guns on the 'black market' (probably due, in part, to how many legal guns are already easily obtained).

600,000 guns are stolen every year and millions of guns circulate among criminals (outside the reach of the regulators), so the elimination of all new handgun purchases/sales, the guns would still be in the hands of the criminals (and few others).

The common gun controls have been shown to have no effect on the reduction of violent crime, however, according to the Dept. of Justice, states with right-to-carry laws have a 30% lower homicide rate and a 46% lower robbery rate. A 2003 CDC report found no conclusive evidence that gun control laws reduced gun violence. This conclusion was echoed in an exhaustive National Academy of Sciences study a year later.

General gun ownership has no net positive effect on total violence rates.

Of almost 200,000 CCP holders in Florida, only 8 were revoked as a result of a crime.

The high-water mark of mass killings in the U.S. was back in 1929, and has not increased since then. In fact, it's declined from 42 incidents in 1990 to 26 from 2000-2012. Until recently, the worst school shootings took place in the UK or Germany. The murder rate and violent crime in the U.S. is less than half of what it was in the late 1980s (the reason for which is most certainly multimodal and multifaceted).

Regarding Gun-Free Zones, many mass shooters select their venues because there are signs there explicitly banning concealed handguns (i.e., where the likelihood is higher that interference will be minimal). "With just one single exception, the attack on congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tuscon in 2011, every public shooting since at least 1950 in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry guns," says John Lott.

In any case, do we have any evidence to believe that the regulators (presumably the police in this instance) will be competent, honest, righteous, just, and moral enough to take away the guns from private citizens, when a study has shown that private owners are convicted of firearms violations at the same rate as police officers? How will you enforce the regulation and/or remove the guns from those who resist turning over their guns? Do the police not need guns to get those with the guns to turn over their guns? Does this then not presume that "gun control" is essentially an aim for only the government (i.e., the centralized political elite and their minions) to have guns at the exclusion of everyone else? Is the government so reliable, honest, moral, virtuous, and forward thinking as to ensure that the intentions of gun control legislation go exactly as planned?

From a sociological perspective, it's interesting to note that those in favor of gun control tend to live in relatively safe and wealthy neighborhoods where the danger posed by violent crime is far less than in those neighborhoods where gun ownership is believed to be more acceptable if not necessary. Do they really want to deprive those who are culturally acclimatized to gun-ownership, who may be less fortunate than they are, to have the means to protect themselves (e.g., women who carry guns to protect themselves from assault or rape)? Sounds more like a lack of empathy and understanding of those realities to me.

There are many generational issues worth mentioning here. For example, the rise in gun ownership coincided with the war on drugs and the war on poverty. There are also nearly 24 million combat veterans living in the U.S. and they constitute a significant proportion of the U.S.' prison population as a result of sex offenses or violent crime. Male combat veterans are four times as likely to engage violent crime as non-veteran men; and are 4.4 times more likely to have abused a spouse/partner, and 6.4 times more likely to suffer from PTSD, and 2-3 times more likely to suffer from depression, substance abuse, unemployment, divorce/separation. Vietnam veterans with PTSD tend to have higher rates of childhood abuse (26%) than Vietnam veterans without PTSD (7%). Iraq/Afghanistan vets are 75% more likely to die in car crashes. Sex crimes by active duty soldiers have tripled since 2003. In 2007, 700,000 U.S. children had at least one parent in a warzone. In a July 2010 report, child abuse in Army families was 3 times higher if a parent was deployed in combat. From 2001 - 2011, alcohol use associated with domestic violence in Army families increased by 54%, and child abuse increased by 40%. What effect do you think that's going to have, regardless of "gun controls?"
("The War Comes Home" or as William Golding, the author of Lord of the Flies said, "A spear is a stick sharpened at both ends.")

In addition, families in the U.S. continue to break down. Single parent households have a high correlation to violence among children. In 1965, 93% of all American births were to married women. Today, 41% of all births are to unmarried women (a rate that rises to 53% for women under the age of 30). By age 30, 1/3 of American women have spent time as a single mother (a rate that is halved in European countries like France, Sweden, & Germany). Less than 9% of married couples are in poverty, but more than 40% of single-parent families are in poverty. Much of child poverty would be ameliorated if parents were marrying at 1970s rates. 85% of incarcerated youth grew up without fathers.

Since the implementation of the war on drugs, there's a drug arrest in the U.S. every 19 seconds, 82% of which were for possession alone (destroying homes and families in the process). The Dept. of Justice says that illegal drug market in the U.S. is dominated by 900,000 criminally active gang members affiliated with 20,000 street gangs in more than 2,500 cities, many of which have direct ties to Mexican drug cartels in at least 230 American cities. The drug control spending, however, has grown by 69.7% over the past 9 years. The criminal justice system is so overburdened as a result that nearly four out of every ten murders, and six out of every ten rapes, and nine out of ten burglaries go unsolved (and 90% of the "solved" cases are the result of plea-bargains, resulting in non-definitive guilt). Only 8.5% of federal prisoners have committed violent offenses. 75% of Detroit's state budget can be traced back to the war on drugs.

Point being, a government program is unlikely to solve any issues with regards to guns and the whole notion of gun control legislation is severely misguided in light of all that I've pointed out above. In fact, a lot of the violence is the direct or indirect result of government programs (war on drugs and the war on poverty).

(And, you'll note, I made no mention of the recent spike in the polypharmacy medicating of a significant proportion of American children -- including most of the "school shooters" -- the combinations of which have not been studied, but have -- at least in part -- been correlated to homicidal and/or suicidal behaviors.)

An American urbanite and three Brits can't tell a possum from a ferret or an owl.


>> ^PlayhousePals:

HAHAHAHA!! Loved the pic of the little kid off to the side of the family [we love both our children]. Also, wasn't that a possum [not a ferret] in the pic before? =oD

>> ^entr0py:

>> ^kceaton1:
Utah, used to be the old number one, for insight. BTW, we are also a VERY heavily abstinence leaning state--outside of Salt Lake City, Park City, and Ogden. Some adults I know personally didn't truly know what sex was--fully and all its implications until they were 25 years old, almost seniors in COLLEGE...
Utah. Utah is almost all low to high middle income Caucasian urbanites... It's incredibly homogeneous. But, you could say due to the LDS church's influence this is a special scenario. Yet, in other states religion tends to be one of the highest reasons this subject comes up.
Luckily, my parents taught me early and I had Sex Ed in my health class and knew by 14 the full implications. Utah (our idiotic political carpetbaggers that have carved the state up so they can get these things into the pasture and passed easily due to the higher numbers of their types in office; that are all affiliated with the Tea Party strangely enough--and like Glenn beck...), this year, tried to BAN Sex Ed in its legislature. But the governor was forced to veto the bill due to public outrage (strangely enough, it pissed off a lot of people here). Basically they passed a bill that would have forced abstinence ONLY education even though (I believe) we are number two behind Mississippi.

I'm dubious about that. In fact, here's the first data I came across with a google search. Check out page 15. Utah is way below average and among the lowest in the country for every year they have data, going back to the 80s. In 2005 we were number 45 out of 50 in teen pregnancies.
But then again we're not an abstinence only state. If republicans manage to change that, as they nearly did, I guess we'll have a good case study.


Strange I'll have to check that out. Of course, I'm COMPLETELY basing everything I'm saying off of what a KSL report said pre-veto (of the 2012 Utah legislature's "Abstinence Only" Bill). Perhaps they had their data misconstrued and presented it the wrong way. I'll post the KSL story if I can find it in their history; then look at our information and statistics and then see what they may have possible misread and thought it was us, for some reason--they specifically said the previous cycle year to this study; so I'm confused to.

Thanks for catching that for me @entr0py, I appreciate that sort of thing.

So I admit I may be wrong, sorry if I am! I'll release another, "I'm sorry", later when I have better detail of why I got bad reporting.

>> ^kceaton1:

Utah, used to be the old number one, for insight. BTW, we are also a VERY heavily abstinence leaning state--outside of Salt Lake City, Park City, and Ogden. Some adults I know personally didn't truly know what sex was--fully and all its implications until they were 25 years old, almost seniors in COLLEGE...
Utah. Utah is almost all low to high middle income Caucasian urbanites... It's incredibly homogeneous. But, you could say due to the LDS church's influence this is a special scenario. Yet, in other states religion tends to be one of the highest reasons this subject comes up.
Luckily, my parents taught me early and I had Sex Ed in my health class and knew by 14 the full implications. Utah (our idiotic political carpetbaggers that have carved the state up so they can get these things into the pasture and passed easily due to the higher numbers of their types in office; that are all affiliated with the Tea Party strangely enough--and like Glenn beck...), this year, tried to BAN Sex Ed in its legislature. But the governor was forced to veto the bill due to public outrage (strangely enough, it pissed off a lot of people here). Basically they passed a bill that would have forced abstinence ONLY education even though (I believe) we are number two behind Mississippi.


I'm dubious about that. In fact, here's the first data I came across with a google search. Check out page 15. Utah is way below average and among the lowest in the country for every year they have data, going back to the 80s. In 2005 we were number 45 out of 50 in teen pregnancies.

But then again we're not an abstinence only state. If republicans manage to change that, as they nearly did, I guess we'll have a good case study.

>> ^dag:

I'm all for sex ed, but correlation is not causation - as is quickly skimmed over by Cenk, ethnicity, income etc would play a much larger role than just a few crppy high school health classes.



Utah, used to be the old number one, for insight. BTW, we are also a VERY heavily abstinence leaning state--outside of Salt Lake City, Park City, and Ogden. Some adults I know personally didn't truly know what sex was--fully and all its implications until they were 25 years old, almost seniors in COLLEGE...

Utah. Utah is almost all low to high middle income Caucasian urbanites... It's incredibly homogeneous. But, you could say due to the LDS church's influence this is a special scenario. Yet, in other states religion tends to be one of the highest reasons this subject comes up.

Luckily, my parents taught me early and I had Sex Ed in my health class and knew by 14 the full implications. Utah (our idiotic political carpetbaggers that have carved the state up so they can get these things into the pasture and passed easily due to the higher numbers of their types in office; that are all affiliated with the Tea Party strangely enough--and like Glenn beck...), this year, tried to BAN Sex Ed in its legislature. But the governor was forced to veto the bill due to *public* outrage (strangely enough, it pissed off a lot of people here). Basically they passed a bill that would have forced abstinence ONLY education even though (I believe) we are number two behind Mississippi.

>> ^demon_ix:
Most of the violence against protesters comes from the Basij, as I understand, which is a sort of government-sponsored militia. An army without government responsibility.


From what little I understand, they are basically poor working class, indoctrinated into believing they are in a class/morality war with the more affluent urbanites. There is a few hundred thousand of em IIRC, generally outfitted with motorbikes and clubs.

The thing about America is that it is a very geographically mobile society, with many of its citizens changing location so often that it is impossible for them to identify with a single state, let alone a town. Not to mention we are linked by a shared language and (until recently) a shared, monolithic media culture.

I cannot agree with the statement that most Americans identify more with their state than their country (especially urbanites). I speak also from my own personal feelings and those I know (who consider themselves American far more than they do Floridian).

^ Your map simply shows that urbanites are liberals, and suburbanites and small town folk are generally conservatives. So you're saying that conservatives are ignorant, lesser people than liberals then? How very unbiased of you. -.-

"I just think its funny that theres a lot of earth loving hippie types at the burning man..."

I never saw that many. You're confusing hippies for well-to-do urbanites in 100 degree desert freak wear. However, this year is host to the ridiculous "Green Man" theme. Completely contradicts the principles of consumption and debauchery that attract most attendees.