Saw this list this morning. Striking and a gut punch to see it in print.
Mall
Home
Office
Airport
Church
Concert
Daycare
Hospital
Nightclub
Newsroom
Post office
Restaurant
Pre-school
High school
Military base
Street corner
Political event
Middle school
College campus
Elementary school
Video game tournament
Enough.
Add to the above Chicago on a Weekend
It’s hard to tell in advance which 100,000 guns will be used shoot somebody over the next 12 months. Yours are not somehow immune. Most of those are owned by people with “no desire.”
Plus, knives and hammers have useful purposes other than killing. Guns are made for killing. Let’s not pretend they are equal in their danger.
then please tell me, roycroftmom what is the easy answer to what I thought was a hard one to answer? What is the effective and legal strategy to stop these criminal acts? 300 other countries don’t have our Constitution.
What we should be most concerned about are random or “stranger” killings. (For instance, I do not care about suicide, or intra-family killings, acquaintance killings, or drug deals gone bad - I’ll take my chances with myself, my family, my friends and my business partners.)
The numbers are likely quite small, although there are of course substantial questions about many killings - particularly unsolved ones. Here are some recent FBI stats (all murders are included, not just gun killings):
My guess is that fewer than 2,000 (at the very most) random or “stranger” gun murders a year take place in the United States, implying that the chance of being killed in this manner is smaller than 1 in 150,000. As much gun crime is highly concentrated geographically, no doubt the overwhelming majority of people in the US face much lower odds, perhaps an order of magnitude lower.
Sure, no murder is “acceptable,” but we should understand the true scope of the probem before getting too emotional. Plenty of people remember when automobile deaths were over 50,000 per year, and even today are ~35,000.
Like it or not, the US is not Europe. By agreement, our rights are preexisting, and not granted by government. While plenty of people think the benefits of gun ownership are outweighed by the detriments, plenty disagree. In any event, rights are not subject to a mere vote anyway, and there can be no higher right than that of self defense.
BTW, I would welcome any better estimates of numbers than the very rough ones I’ve offered. This is also a useful article for thinking about the scope of the problem: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/nyregion/killed-by-a-stranger-a-rare-event-but-a-rising-fear.html
These were his ‘friends’ or at least ‘business associates.’ This was not a random shooting, it was a targeted group because of something, real or imagined, that they’d done to him.
This can’t be blamed on Florida as the guns were purchased in Maryland. I did see that some at the event were surprised that there wasn’t more security in the restaurant, but do we all want to go through security every time we go into a Pizza place?
I like Iceland’s answer to gun ownershipa third of the country are gun owners but the have not had a shooting since 2007.
It’s a 13 month process to get a gun starting with a medical exam, an interview with the chief of police a psychology test, a written test and finally target practice.
The constitution does frequently have amendments added to it and nothing can’t be changed if their is a will to do so, I could emphasize the ‘well regulated’ part which Iceland clearly has.
I’m scared and just want to feel safe going to school, concerts, church or the movies. These are not high risk activities and I should be safe doing them.
There have been amendments to the Constitution before.
The Iceland 13 month period with lots of testing sounds wonderful as a starting point.
@coralbrook
This is the iceland link.
I mentioned that S is professionally engaged in a certain video game. This is his career.
As a group, they are super intense and somewhat non social people. And they are from all
over the globe. S spends most nights, all night, working with males and females from India and
China. This group is not a “normal” group of young people. I believe there is a lot of social anxiety,
over attention ADD, and higher than normal intelligence.
S is married with a child and doing well. He could have been an engineer or whatever.
But this has been his obsession for a good decade. He is terrible at communicating as many
gamers are. Their safe world exists with their on line friends and competitions.
I am sad this happened but truly think we will see more with this subset.
The list above leaves off trains and subway.
The latest information on the shooter is that he had psychiatric problems and had been in and out of mental institutions as a kid (at least twice).
Once again, as with so many other young male mass shootings, anti-depressants appear to have been involved. Reports are that he had been on meds (including anti-psychotics) as young as 12 years old. I don’t know whether he purchased the gun legally, but of course all the psychiatric history would have been hidden by the privacy laws on any background check.
No problem with the idea that we can amend the Constitution to limit the preexisting right to self defense, which includes the right to bear arms (many people mistakenly believe that the Second Amendment is the source of gun rights), but this is an extremely high hurdle to clear.
There really haven’t been any substantive amendments in almost a hundred years (the 1964 poll tax amendment basically just reflected the Civil Rights legislation of the time).
We could also change the medical privacy laws, which would be conceptually simpler than amending the Constitution, and that might reduce some of these tragedies in the future.
I tilt toward agreeing that medical privacy and gun ownership needs to change. This is a young man who should never have been allowed to purchase a gun. Killing himself would have been sad but killing other people is a tragedy that short of Katz obtsining a gun illegally should have been mitigated by his ability to purchase a gun legally. We are not protecting the mentally ill more than we are protecting the rest of society. It is difficult to reconcile those thoughts with my strong feelings about personal liberties but there are undeniable themes to these shootings and the shooters. The back story on this young man should not come as a surprise to anyone,
Unlikely general HIPAA privacy laws will loosen. Only possibility would be more strident mandatory reporting of involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations, especially where a threat to others is involved. Otherwise things could backfire, with fewer individuals seeking help voluntarily if their privacy was affected. That said, the Duty to Warn, when a person makes a direct threat to an identified individual, should be broadened.
Although I am not an attorney, I believe that legally, American citizens are allowed to change/try to change our Constitution. But I don’t think wording in it that we don’t like can merely be disregarded legally.
Where is the outrage over Chicago on most weekends?
@eyemamom
Why just chose Chicago?
Chicago is actually number 10 on deaths per capita in the US, it’s behind, St. Louis, New Orleans, Baltimore, Cleveland, Kansas City, Las Vegas, Detroit, Newark, New Jersey and Memphis.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/pictures/murder-map-deadliest-u-s-cities/
I feel safe walking in Chicago and although it’s sad the violence Chicago experiences, I don’t fear it as I don’t live a high risk lifestyle. I do fear ordinary things in my low risk lifestyle like going to concerts and movies as I should be safe there.
What I’m most concerned with is suicides and non-stranger killings, because there are more of them.
I stay connected to several advocacy groups for mentally ill people and their families, and it’s believed that HIPAA privacy laws WILL be changed to give more information to family members and other concerned parties. I hope so! We’ve been fortunate that our son has always signed a waiver to allow medical professionals to talk to us, but that could change at any time. If it did, the staff at his apartment complex couldn’t even speak to us.