That is very sad, but it was not murder.
^Technically true, but how incredibly pathetic that we have such easy access to guns in the US that 2 year olds are able to accidentally kill their relatives.
Accidents happen. People run over family members with their cars. It is tragic but humans are not perfect. We will never be 100% safe. That incident was probably one in a billion.
A quick Google search finds in the last 6 months alone:
May-2 year old shoots mother in Louisville
May-AZ 2 year shoots self in face after finding gun under a pillow in his home
May-VA 2 year old dies after shooting self while visiting family friends
January-2 year old dies after shooting himself with dad’s gun
January-Pinellas Cty 2 year old dies after shooting himself in chest with gun found in glove compartment of parents’ car
Dec-Idaho 2 year old kills mother with gun found in her purse
Forget about all the 3 and 4 year olds accidentally shooting other kids or the 2 years old being hit by stray bullets or accidentally shot by their siblings.
There are some terrible parents out there. People should not own guns if they are not willing to safeguard their children from them. I can only imagine how their family’s lives have been ruined.
Comparing murder rates is singularly unhelpful because legal definitions of murder vary so widely from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In most U.S. jurisdictions, murder requires “malice aforethought,” but what counts as malice aforethought varies by state. “Manslaughter” or “reckless homicide” or “negligent homicide”–i.e., criminally culpable killings with the use of guns-- aren’t considered (or reported as) murder in most U.S. jurisdictions, but the definitions of these also vary. Some U.S. states embrace the “castle doctrine” under which a homeowner is legally entitled to kill any uninvited home invader, or sometimes more broadly, any person whom the killer deems to pose a physical threat; in other jurisdictions those killings would be murder. In Texas, any property owner is legally entitled to kill any person to prevent a theft of the killer’s property; in most U.S. jurisdictions and most countries, that would be considered murder. Some foreign jurisdictions don’t require anything like “malice aforethought” and treat any wrongful killing as murder. At the other extreme, some foreign nations deem the killing of a girl or woman who engages in sex outside of marriage–sometimes even in the context of rape–to be a legally justifiable “honor killing,” and not murder. As a result of all this, interjurisdictional comparisons of “murder” rates are pretty much just hogwash. More meaningful are homicide rates, which include murder, other legally punishable homicides, and legally justifiable homicides, washing out all the legal line-drawing problems. More meaningful still are per capita (or per 100,000 population) gun-related death rates, which include not just homicides but also suicides and accidental gun deaths–the “collateral damage,” if you will, of the prevalence of gun ownership. Easy access to guns tends to increase death rates by suicide, because the technology is so effective at killing and so close at hand. Other cultural factors also influence suicide rates, but in the U.S.successful suicides tend to be more prevalent in states where guns are more commonly available. And accidental gun deaths are also closely tied to the ready accessibility of guns. You may say these “don’t count” because suicides are self-inflicted and accidental gun deaths are “just accidents,” but in my book, any preventable loss of human life is a tragedy, and worthy of our concern.
Vladenschlutte thought he refuted my earlier statements about gun death rates by pointing to statistics on murder rates. To which I reply, that’s both a non-sequitur and pretty much just meaningless data, because it’s comparing apples to oranges to pears to bananas.
Gun murder numbers may not provide complete information, but they are not meaningless. Gun murder is what this thread is about. People can reduce their risk of death by gun suicide and accident by not owning a gun. They want to know whether adding gun control measures would have stopped this killer. So information about non-suicide and non-negligent homocide, including murder is relevant.
Again, because of widely varying legal definitions of murder, interjurisdictional comparisons of murder rates are pretty much just junk. The FBI uses a broader measure, “murder and nonnegligent manslaughter,” which avoids some of the definitional variation. According to the FBI’s “Crime in the United States 2013,” the national rate of murder and nonnegligent manslaughter in 2013 was 4.5 per 100,000 population. The states with murder/manslaughter rates above the national average were mostly states with high rates of gun ownership and weak or non-existent gun control laws, e.g., Louisiana 10.8, more than double the national average (44.1% of households own guns); Alabama 7.2 (51.7%); Mississippi 6.5 (55.3%); Michigan 6.4 (38.4%); South Carolina 6.2 (42.3%); Missouri 6.1 (41.7%). (The national average rate of gun ownership is around 35%).
States with tighter gun regulations and low rates of gun ownership generally fell below the national average in murder/manslaughter per 100,000 population: Hawaii 1.5 (6.7% own guns); Massachusetts 2.0 (12.6%); Connecticut 2.3 (16.7%); Rhode Island 2.9 (12.8%); New York 3.3 (18%). But it’s by no means a straight-line correlation. New Jersey (12.3% gun ownership) and California (21.3%) fall well below the national average in gun ownership and have some of the strictest gun control laws in the nation, but fell right around the national average in murder/manslaughter per 100,000 (and 4.5 and 4.6 respectively), while Oregon and Washington, around the national average with 39.8% and 33.1% owning guns respectively, had some of the lowest murder/manslaughter rates at 2.0 and 2.3 per 100,000 respectively. And Maryland, with only 21.3% owning guns and strict gun control laws, was actually above the national average in murder/manslaughter at 6.4. Generally, however, more guns correlate with more murder/manslaughter, and fewer guns correlate with less murder/manslaughter.
Here’s a link to the FBI data:
https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/crime-in-the-u.s.-2013/tables/4tabledatadecoverviewpdf/table_4_crime_in_the_united_states_by_region_geographic_division_and_state_2012-2013.xls
Of course, correlation isn’t causation; it could be that gun ownership rates are higher in high murder/manslaughter jurisdictions precisely because people are fearful. Also, some of the variation in murder/manslaughter rates might reflect variation in the availability and quality of emergency room care; after all, it’s not murder or manslaughter unless the victim dies. Some researchers have pointed to improvements in emergency room care as a leading cause of the long-term national decline in murder rates, and for that reason some argue that gun-related injury rates are actually a more sensitive indicator of gun violence than are gun deaths or gun murders/manslaughters.
Well, some people can. The child who dies by an accidental gunshot while playing with a parent’s gun has that decision made for them by someone else. As does the suicide-prone teenager who knows a parent keeps a gun in the house.
Parents who keep guns in a manner that they are easily accessible to children of any age (and this includes teenagers) are as irresponsible as parents who keep their schedule 2 drugs on the kitchen counter or bathroom cabinet.
When my husband was a little boy - maybe 5 or so - he was playing at his neighbor’s house. The neighbor’s family had a gun and the two little boys started playing with it. Long story short, H fired a shot that went through a different neighbor’s kitchen window, passed through the beehive hairdo of the mother who was cooking in her kitchen. The police came; I don’t know if the neighbors were charged with leaving a weapon loose, this is the 1960’s after all. But still. Can you imagine the trauma if this woman had been only a few inches away from where she was and was hurt or killed? Insane.
I own a number of shotguns. They are stored in a gun safe in our home. I have the only keys. Shells are stored separately. They are only used for hunting or target shooting. I have no intention (or hope) of using them for self-defense as the safe is in an obscure location in the house. On the other hand, we live in a very safe area.
I consider myself a responsible gun owner. I never thought it was that difficult.
Tunisia has very restrictive gun ownership laws; therefore, you shouldn’t expect spectacular gun attacks there…
I get the point you’re trying to make, but…
Have not read this whole thread, so please forgive me if I am repeating. On the day of the Newtown massacre, a man attacked children at a school in China, stabbing them with a knife. All survived. And, as somebody mentioned earlier, Australia, with a similar gun culture, passed a very unpopular gun control law which pretty much eliminated mass shootings. The Daily Show did a brilliant series in this: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOKWcH1zBl2kfnCwyyZWk5MW28lgaNa7L
And now gun violence has marred the Pride event in San Francisco (and no, the shooter wasn’t a participant, but someone having an argument on the fringes of the event). Luckily, it doesn’t sound like the victim was badly hurt, but come on. This was a day of joy and celebration. Did one of those beloved guns have to be brought to THAT? My God.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/28/us/san-francisco-gay-pride-shots-fired/
So it turns out the answer to the thread question is yes.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/11/us/background-check-flaw-let-dylann-roof-buy-gun-fbi-says.html
@bclintonk:
An interesting post, and I think it highlights some things. For example,Maryland’s figures are undoubtedly skewed by Baltimore, which tells you there are cultural and economic factors, too. Baltimore has the problem a lot of cities have, most of the crimes committed by gun are done with illegal guns that were bought legally in other states, especially surrounding ones, that have lax gun purchase laws. Some states with very high gun ownership rates, like Montana and Wyoming, also are relatively unpopulated, and population density affect crime (since crime requires proximity, unless it is hacking:).
More importantly, you have to look deeper into some of the states with relatively low gun crime rates and ownership and so forth, and that has to do with how hard it is to get a gun. Many of the states with low gun crime rates also have strict regulation of gun ownership. In NJ you need permits to buy guns, that require a thorough background check (which has been in place for a long time, and it isn’t the background check done at gun stores these days by federal law, it is pretty intense), and you also have to have permits to own the guns and carry them.One of the biggest effects of this is gun owners can’t play fast and loose, if they decide to raise cash and sell their guns in the black market, and that gun gets traced back to them, they can’t just say “must of lost it” as goes on in other states. Put it this way, most of the guns pulled off the streets that are illegal were not bought in NJ, they were bought in the lax states legally, and there is nothing they can do to the shop owner or the person who purchased them.
Okay, so what about the SC shooting? It is very, very hard in any individual shooting, to say if gun laws would have stopped the crime. At the very least, in this case, it would have made it a lot harder for the scumbag who did this to get a gun, he would have had to have sought out the black market and probably paid a lot more for the gun, perhaps too expensive for him to afford.
In some ways, prohibition holds some lessons. Prohibition didn’t work, and neither will banning weapons, and like prohibition, guns have very real issues around them, much as drinking did. Like with guns, the arguments about issues like alcoholism and the ills of drinking were about ‘it is the person drinking’, with guns we hear is it people killing people. Yet with the issues prior to prohibition are in some ways similar to with guns. Before prohibition, there was little regulation of alcohol, bars could stay open 24 hours a day, you could have 10 bars within a 2 block radius, alcohol content itself was not regulated, and there was no such thing as liquor license or holding the owners of bars and such accountable if they let someone drink themselves sick or dead, and so forth. What came with the end of prohibition was regulation, that regulated opening hours, how many bars could exist, age for liquor sales, and holding bar owners accountable via a liquor license, and it worked.
It is much the same way with guns, I think people have a right to own guns, but we also need common regulations, that have responsibility with ownership. There needs to be better background testing and wait periods to purchase guns, and there needs to be national laws requiring that guns be registered and that registered gun owners held accountable with what happens with their guns. If you buy booze, and you allow someone to drink themselves to death in your home, you can be held accountable, or if they drive drunk; if you serve underage kids, you can be held acountable. But in many states, you can buy guns, and then do what you want with them, sell them illegally, and there are no consequences, once you buy it, you and the gun dealer are off the hook in some places. Likewise, there should be a discussion about what kinds of weapons should be allowed, things like refire rates and reload capability should be regulated for the civilian market, the way we limit automatic weapon ownership.
Will it stop all such killing? No, it won’t, a determined person or a hardened criminal will find way to buy guns. On the other hand, it will reduce ‘casual’ access to guns, it will make it harder for the black market to get guns, raising the price, and it also will stop someone who gets a bug up their ass, and can buy a gun with a cursory background check on the spot. Have a waiting period, and the guy who has gone unhinged or is pissed off, in a rage, has time to cool off.
I also have heard the arguments about how you can kill with a knife, how you can kill with explosives, or with a bat. The thing that differentiates a knife from a gun is with a knife, when you stab someone it is up close and personal as opposed to a gun that is done from a distance. More importantly, someone using a knife knows the people they are trying to hurt have the ability to defend themselves, move away, maybe pick up something as a shield, that isn’t true with a gun, so the fatality rate with a knife is much less, not to mention that someone pissed off enough to use a gun might hesitate stabbing someone, seeing the look in the person’s eyes as they die, hearing the gurgle if you hit a lung and forth.(The late Christopher Lee , who was part of the LRDP/SAS and special ops during WWII, said that in doing knife scenes in movies, he was careful to make sure that the scene was real, and that shooting someone was very, very different than knifing them, and he had done a lot of both)
Absolutely not. Criminals are not known for their adherence to existing gun laws.
No.
The answer is literally that we already have sufficient laws that should’ve stopped this. So we need to enforce the laws we have and stop rushing to try to pass more legislation when it isn’t needed.