Strong gun regulations have a couple of orders of magnitude impact on one type of gun violence, but you think that’s irrelevant and off-topic to whether strong gun regulations would have an impact on another form of gun violence?

How could that make any sense?

> I think you're basically ignoring my point

You didn’t clarify that by “everything that’s happening” as the preface to your suggestion that gun control is pointless you specifically meant “political assassination and no other gun deaths”. It’s reasonable that someone would see you say that gun regulation wouldn’t have an effect on gun deaths and think that you were talking about gun deaths generally.

It would actually be bizarre for a reader to read “everything that’s happening” and think “the person that wrote this is referring to the first shooting at a school today and specifically excluding the second shooting at a school today”

> The point is - gun control won’t stop political violence. Perpetrators will use other means at their disposal.

Technically true. But gun control means political violence will have to engage much closer and is less likely to be as deadly. Do we want more or less death+maiming in our political violence?

Why cannot it be both? You definitely have a gun problem, and also a mental health problem. And you even have a mentality problem by thinking that gun is fine on you just to be safe, which is quite acceptable thought over there - the reaction of Americans vs Europeans to the fact that somebody has a gun on them in a friendly group is quite stark. But you have also a stochastic terrorism problem, a grifter problem, an inequality problem, an almost zero social net problem, many monopoly problems. All of these exaggerate your murder problem.

And you clearly have a “too few people want to solve these” problem. Most of you even voted to the person who campaigned that he wants to make these worse.

This won’t be solved, and will it be made worse in America for the next decade for sure.

I think the fact that this wasn't a mass shooting makes it even worse.

I can't tell if your comment is serious. Did you know that if everyone lived in a 7x7 cell they couldn't leave there'd be no drunk driving deaths too?

That source is so unreliable that you may want to check those "claims" yourself, by hand:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Washington_Times#Controver...

Likely better source that disproves the "claims" in the article above, since perp demographics are in line with the male demographics of the US:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S...

> But the vast majority of those 604 shootings are from gang members with many prior arrests shooting each other.

You are just blindly asserting this. Do you have any sources?

> The U.S. averages one to two mass shootings per day, with the specific rate varying by year and definition. Organizations like the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) define a mass shooting as an incident where at least four people are shot and either killed or injured, not including the shooter. For example, the GVA reported the U.S. averaged two mass shootings per day in the first half of 2023, with a record-breaking number in 2021.

Here is an Axios article where Gemini is getting its information from:

> https://www.axios.com/2023/07/31/us-mass-shooting-2-every-da...

The data is available at: https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/

We are at 300 so far this year. You can click on mass shootings and get an enumerated list for this year with incidents and sources, I'm not sure if you can go back to other years also:

https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/reports/mass-shooting

You could sample some of the incidents and see if they are being honest or not.

Honest question: why would you even post a comment like that when searching online for the answer takes like 10 seconds?

The fact that you want to go with your feels and that you have the balls to degrade someone else who was actually correct is really what says everything we need to know:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_th...

FWIW your "reasonable definition" of mass shooter requiring the victims to be unknown by the shooter seems totally unreasonable to me, and it's not used by any organization that actually tracks these things (the Wikipedia article gives a list of definitions, none of them conforming to yours).

When I lived in Baltimore, mass shootings were a regular occurrence. And that was just one medium sized city.

The vast majority of mass shootings don't make national news, because they happen in high poverty areas. It's not just the inner city, there are parts of rural America that are also quite violent.

It makes the news when someone who "shouldn't be killed" gets killed.

Not believing facts because you don’t want to believe them? Says everything we need to know.

It's OK to criticize the source of the info (LLMs routinely make things up). But it would be been easy for you to verify the info as well.

The definition of mass shooting has been contested for a long time. The WaPo database and the FBI database used different definitions.

IIRC, the difference lies in how many people are involved versus how many people are killed.

"Doesn’t pass the sniff test" usually means "I haven’t looked at the data." The U.S. has averaged ~2 mass shootings a day for years. It feels unreal because it is — but that's life in America.

Meanwhile, overshadowed by the Kirk shooting, an almost mass shooting also occurred:

3 Students, Including Attacker, Shot at Colorado High School, Authorities Say

  Three students, including a shooting suspect, were critically injured in a shooting at a suburban high school in Colorado on Wednesday afternoon, the authorities said.

That's just one below a common mass shooting definition threshold.

It's telling that event, leading news in any other country, will likely get buried below the Kirk shooting as "just another day in the USofA".

You've arrived at something important intuitively.

The majority of "mass shootings" are gang related. Just from gang members with many prior felony's shooting each other (and maybe innocents getting hit in the process sometimes)

This is kept from you purposefully.

New regulation: no private citizens can possess guns, and police must account for every bullet and firearm.

Granted, this decreases access for everyone. But I'd argue sane people would not demand private gun ownership in today's environment.

This seems tenuous and directionally wrong based on priors. What evidence do you have for this?

That would only be true in a world where every single human is able to regulate their angry emotions immediately. But that is so far away from human nature...

>strong internal investigatory services in order to root these plots out before they happen

Who will necessarily be so strong they'll be capable of pulling such things off to serve their own ends.

It's an intractable problem all the way down.

> So... if anything, this is the exact situation stricter gun laws wouldn't really prevent. Which would be the targeted assassination of a societal figure by a determined ideologue or partisan or mole.

My point isn't that outlawing guns would stop every possible scenario. Rather it would make killings of all kinds far less likely, which is a win for everyone--even hate-spewing pundits.

Well, you wouldn't be able to reproduce such a long-range kill with a shabbily constructed firearm. You would have to be up close, which would be harder to do.

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I'm not from the US so I only have an outsider's view of the culture, and FWIW I'm also not from Australia although I have emigrated here now.

Australia seemed to have a deeper relationship with guns previously, that stemmed partially out of necessity (farming etc), but there are also a lot of parallels with US culture here – the American dream, being a colony hundreds of years ago, etc, some focus on personal rights and freedoms, being a federation of states, etc. I don't think it was as deep a relationship as the US, but coming from the UK it seemed that Australia had a very different view than the UK.

Australia turned this all around. The culture shifted, and people realised that for the greater good it was something they needed to get past, and they did.

Maybe there's hope for US gun control yet, although the turning point for Australia was a (single) mass shooting. Maybe the US needs a much bigger turning point. I'm a little surprised that the Las Vegas shooting a while ago didn't provide that.

A lot of stuff would not happen if it took a little more effort. Giving people some extra time to second guess themselves is a big deal.

Worst take today. The 2nd amendment was the SECOND thing the founders put in for a reason. They just got done fighting a war against the government with WEAPONS OF WAR. It was written specifically to enable fighting against tyrannical government, which is VASTLY worse than all mass shooters combined.

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Is it guns that keep governments honest and responsive to the populace? Or is it a culture of trust, honesty, and non-violence?

Yemen is in second place for guns per person. How responsive is their government to the people?

Suicide would be more rare if guns didn't make it so easy.

> The Obama CDC study on gun control concluded that guns are used to stop far more crimes than they are used for in crimes.

Citation please. NCVS data puts defensive gun use around 70K instances per year while OJP.gov data puts firearm crimes in the 400K range.

Or run over by a van.

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let's kindly remember patriot act was bush's baby

neocons love to use disaster to further their deep state dreams.

Seatbelts don't need to save every life in an accident to be worth requiring.

I am personally concerned that I may be the victim of genocide, and far more people have died from genocide perpetrated by governments than by school shootings. I’m not trying to be dense, I’m simply saying that history of demonstrated this. I’m also concerned that I will be the victim of violent crime and I’ve also had to defend myself from violent criminals in the past. Have you had any of these experiences? I’m curious to hear your thoughts if you’ve ever feared for your life in this way? Call me selfish, but I personally don’t want to be hurt. Thank you for your response.

In my case, the criminals physically left because I had a firearm. That week the police response time was anywhere from three hours to three days. This was in Portland, Oregon and our car had been stolen three times before, my girlfriend‘s bike was also stolen and my car was broken into three times, my other car was totaled by a drunk driver without any repercussions. We left Portland shortly after meeting a British person who had been kidnapped and forced to withdraw money from ATMs.

I would love to live in a world where everybody has what they want but we don’t live in that world. That being said there is no excuse for somebody taking something that does not belong to them. I was deeply hurt by these experiences and forever changed in the way that I think and act. I learned that sometimes when I told people about the things that had happened to us, I felt that that person had sympathy for the criminals and no sympathy for me. I learned that it is a fact that police cannot be everywhere, they cannot react instantly, and even if they can react sometimes they won’t for political reasons. I still think of the time where I was sucker punched by some man on the street for no reason which is what initially lead me to purchase a firearm for self-defense. I can’t fix society, but I can protect myself and my loved ones.

There aren't any other solutions that empower the individual. The problem is when the police are underfunded and don't show up, or the judiciary continually lets dangerous individuals out on bail. We should be able to rely on the system, but it's not hard to see why people want firearms when the system fails.

An armed person won't stop a genocide, but an armed populace might.

A general strike did not work in the past against most communist governments and it is much less likely to ever work in the future, anywhere.

In all the countries of the Eastern Europe where the communist governments were removed, this was possible only due to traitors inside the communist top layer, who had reached the conclusion that their chiefs are too incompetent, so it will be more profitable for themselves to remove all the figures well known to the public and to convert themselves into capitalist businessmen, ensuring the surviving of their power in another form.

For a general strike to exist, it must be coordinated. There must exist someone who must say "Let's do this" and everybody else must start the strike.

This is impossible under a competent tyrannical government. A half of century ago it was impossible because every company, institution or school was infiltrated with informants, who would report immediately any kind of criticism against the government, then the reported person would disappear, e.g. by being interned in a mental health institution. If somehow a strike succeeded to start in a single place, that place would be instantly isolated, with no communications, then nobody outside would learn what has happened, except perhaps many years later, and the strikers would disappear.

Nowadays, this has become much simpler, because the government no longer needs a huge number of loyal human snitches (which had to be redundant, as none of them could be trusted), it can use electronic surveillance monitored by AI.

As someone who has worked all over the world with several different cultures and types of people, including in war zones, saying “the rest of the world shakes their head” is an extremely broad generalization. Different countries have very different experiences with guns, governments, and resistance. I'm sure you have your own perspective that is valuable, but speaking for “the rest of the world” comes across as dismissive and small minded, rather than engaging with the point that was made.

No, we don't. Don't speak for the rest of the world, for not everyone lives in your country, let alone in your bubble.

I think your "offense" Is downright naive, if not moronic. You should know how difficult politics are, and what you are asking for, the civilians, the military, just sitting down to "protest" is not only an imaginative fantasy, but I would also wager downright impossible.

I don’t think everyone in the entire world disagrees and I think many people in the world do agree with my point of view . I also think it would be more constructive for people who disagree to disagree respectfully rather than shake their head in disapproval - with the understanding that two rational actors can arrive at different and reasonable conclusions because they value parameters differently. I work with statistics and probability every day. It’s my understanding that certain assumptions and modeling were made in the statistics so that the probabilities may not apply to me in general. I also think that governments may not act generally tyrannically, but specifically tyrannically and target certain groups, and may even have the popular support of most people in the country like what’s happening with the Uyghurs in China right now. In this case a general strike wouldn’t be useful at all because the majority of people in the country would be happy and productive.

I hate to say this - but having known refugees from a tyrannical government, I have to shake my head at this. If a population tried a general strike against a truly tyrannical government, pretty soon that government will start bringing out gunmen. Like in Ukraine in 2014. Sometimes it will work out, but not without sacrifice.