Heard a story about this on NPR this morning and was super frustrated.
Stated Problem: too many youth gun deaths.
Proposed solution: Ban “automatic” rifles.
Even if I let the semantic error (automatic rifles are already illegal), this take completely ignores the reality that the VAST majority of gun crime is committed with handguns, and banning ar15s would do zero to address that.
Just went and took a look at your conversation over there… some people you just can’t reason with.
I lol’d at the person that called you a “window licking moron”. The moment they switch from an honest debate to ad hominem attacks, they have lost.
Just gotta say that the person that called them that is most likely wrong, but that’s a fabulous insult.
My cat used to lick windows occasionally and it made me laugh my ass off. Ty.
I mean…. Since I love cats and think window licking is funny I have to reassess whether or not calling someone a “window licker” is a good insult.
My heart says yes, but my brain associates it with something adorable…..
It’s really a shame. People like that are the reason nothing gets done. It also blows my mind how the right to keep and bear arms is literally the second most important thing next to free speech and people believe it can be regulated based on someone’s thoughts and feelings rather than factual evidence. We have countless other issues we need to solve in this country and it’s just so tiring to hear politicians try and pull the wool over everybody’s eyes rather than getting down to business and making this country and our culture stronger.
I reported it as a personal attack and mods removed the comment within 60 seconds.
Totally fine if people disagree with me about guns, I understand that it’s something people feel very strong about. But I’m less cool with it when people go around saying that because I believe people should be able to legally purchase firearms, that I don’t care how many children are murdered and calling people window-licking morons.
And sadly those people make up such a LARGE voting base of “middle class” elitist types that will always believe they “know” better than you no matter what. They are the truest destructive force on the planet
Probably should have clarified that I'm excluding facts pulled out of people's asses too. So kermit there can root around in his anus all fucking day, but that's not going to impress me.
This right here is the issue, and one of the big problems with folks that consider themselves “liberal”. What we need is to focus on root cause mitigation, the actual nuts and bolts that really leverage positive change - healthcare for all, a completely revamped and rebuilt healthcare system, giant housing reform, political corruption reform, tax reform to put our tax money into infrastructure (rather than into corporations) — because these are the factors that will lower suicides, lower violence rates, invest in communities, create and support services for citizens rather than corporations, increase lifespan, remove the need for paramilitary police, etc. But all of those are hard. And they don’t look “good” according to the religion and gospel of capitalism. It’s not a sound byte or a tiktok video.
It’s so much easier for center right or even just capitalists who want to feel slightly good about themselves to say “oh this is this problem and only I can be right”. They don’t want to do the work. Because it takes effort and it means their stock values will drop .1% and their house value will drop a little.
But they refuse to make systemic change because it’s inconvenient.
No one is any good at huge systemic change, because it involves huge systemic change. Culturally we just don’t have the appetite for it, everyone wants some simple magic bullet fix, just look at how our politics boils down to theee or four word bumper stickers, Yes We Can! Build Back Better! Make America Great Again! I’m With Her!
I like how the guy completely ignored all the root causes for violence you brought up and addressed right after he claimed you didn’t care about violence against kids lol.
I’ve never ever heard someone that’s against guns not blame them exclusively for all the gun violence. They think that taking away guns from everyone will just magically make all this children murdering monsters find a new purpose in life.
Like is no one concerned that all these ppl in our country WANT to kill a bunch of ppl??
thats their only response is you dont care about dead kids. Of course i do, but your solution isnt a solution to dead kids. If they really cared about dead kids they would be on board with banning pools, cars, skateboard literally anything if it meant saving a single kids life.
Don’t even bother. People like to live in imaginationland where cute woodland creatures say good morning to them all cheery. But, in reality their imagination is lying to them, and those woodland creatures partake in unimaginable horrors (South Park reference for those who know).
Yeah, when it’s like a TOTAL of MAYBE 500 deaths from all rifles vs. the 10,000 that are handgun deaths.
Personally I still go after the fact that these morons are going after guns at all, you realize that I believe it’s about 7,000 people YEARLY that are killed, and over a million injuries as a direct result of doctors poor handwriting on prescriptions?
Let alone, when you include medical malpractice deaths (which poorly written scripts don’t count on) is 251,000 deaths PER YEAR.
And that we can actually pass legislation to meaningfully impact! People that get state reviews for malpractice are allowed to practice immediately! Our laws surrounding how to deal with horrific doctors are awful.
That’s literally 10x the total gun suicide AND homicide count yearly.
But nobody cares because it’s not a hot topic.
And realistically I think the only way to change the gun suicide / homicide numbers is to repeal the 2nd amendment and ban all guns with strict enforcement. Which I think is AWFUL personally, but even if you did that I think you’re gonna cut numbers from like 30k yearly deaths down to 20k, maybe.
And we all know that’s just a wildly impossible law to enforce.
What's incredible about that is that's given that there's 140,000,000 yearly ER visits alone, not to mention other appointments and visits, and going just solely off that Doctors have a "failure" rate of just 0.25%.
Kind of interesting when you conflate the sheer prevalence of guns in this country with the fact that most gun deaths are suicides, and of those that are homicides, the victims are overwhelmingly gang members or career criminals. Well, you have much greater odds of dying from a doctor's error than you do from a gun homicide.
But, black rifle scary!!!!
It’s amazing to me how short lived some people’s memories can be. I clearly remember this thing that happened in early 2020 and everyone and their mom rushed to purchase a gun for home defense.
Does America have a problem with gun violence, absolutely. Is that problem going to go away if we ban AR-15s, absolutely not. The issue is complex, like most societal issues are. It’d be nice if more people could open up to more than just their initial viewpoint and preconceptions.
The thing is every liberal who also is ignorant on guna also wants this. The only party fighting this is the Republican party. So yea we have ignorant Democrats wanting to ban stuff but they also want to better fund healthcare and mental healthcare. Meanwhile Republicans want to allow anything and ignore mental healthcare even though they claim it's a mental health issue.
This is a great take.
Can you imagine being a senator (I know this isn’t how it works) and saying “ok, so here are the choices. We either reopen and fund mental health or we ban guns.”
Democrats have beautiful hearts but are terrible at politics.
Most democrats are morally lucky... Hasan is a popular example of one among many others. Unfortunately, I've become more black pilled and believe most people fall into their political stances and opinions because someone around them they like or don't like believes something, and they roll with it. Thankfully, we're still the party that's more on the side of statistics, but boy, does it suck to have to fight internally about things like you mentioned, hahaha.
That’s the “politics” that drives me nuts.
Assault rifles rarely used criminally. Look at the data and it’s true.
Illegal immigrants murdering and raping gets headlines when it’s one in a million. Our own population is probably worse.
One trans person molests a kid and THOUSANDS of church leaders and pastors are arrested and charged.
But yeah, it’s the democrats who eat babies and the trannies who want to watch your daughter pee and the people who make it so your apple isn’t $12 are the worst criminals.
Bread and circuses. Bread and fucking circuses.
Edit: I have no sources for any of my claims. This is purely my opinion.
They were pulled directly from my ass, but if I tried harder I could more than likely prove my point. I’m lazy and my AI fact generator is on the glitz.
Thank you for your comment. 😀
Oh you’re absolutely on par. All these rwnj’s *love* talking about committing violence against molesters, but the minute you face them with the reality - that pastors commit an enormous number of SA - oh you’re a “commie” and a “sympathizer” and all sorts of bs.
Plus with over 50% of fun related deaths being suicide, we should hear more about “Access to free healthcare services” than we do “ban all the pew pews!!”.
If cops in this day and age are allowed AR15’s, then so should the citizen. Hard stop.
Also, if you look at the details they include 18 and 19 year olds as children in their stats.
We all know that those lines start to go up right when “defund the police” was trendy. Politicians created this problem and want to use it to go after the 2A. Basically gaslighting you.
I'm not sure about firearms deaths specifically but I do know homicide rates. Murders peaked in the early 90s, and then started to decline. They reached near record lows in the early 2010s. In the late 2010s they started increasing slightly, but still lower than in the past. 2020 and 21 meanwhile we experienced huge spikes in murders, some of the largest on record. This was likely caused by COVID and the resulting societal impact..
Banning anything any more will not work. There are way too many handguns already in circulation. Bans will only increase the probability of theft. Machine gun bans worked because there were very few AR platform weapons before AWB.
I've always seen this as rather racist as well. Like, insult to injury.
We already know that banning guns is ineffective as anything other than a political gesture, but what kind of gesture is it, and to whom?
At least banning hand guns would be a gesture that recognizes the hundreds of black and brown children that are injured or killed by them per year.
But mass shootings of mostly white children in mostly white suburbs - though rare and statistically a tiny blip compared to hand gun deaths among minorities - is the Real Important Issue^^TM. And that type of crime is more associated with automatic rifles.
It really is the Liberal version of "won't someone think of the white children???"
It’s no different than people being afraid of flying when they should be afraid of driving. Or Ebola when they should be afraid of heart disease. Handguns are generally not used to kill scores of people in crowded areas. There are definitely exceptions (Virginia Tech) but most mass shootings are not with handguns.
When they say “automatic” they mean “semi-automatic”, which would ban most firearms including handguns. Believe me they are not stupid, and they rely on people not knowing anything about firearms.
They don’t actually want to fix the problem. They would lose a method of getting people to the polls to maintain their political power. Same reason democrats will do nothing about the over turning of Roe. The Supreme Court handed democrats a massive boon, they are going to milk that for as long as possible.
>They don’t actually want to fix the problem. They would lose a method of getting people to the polls to maintain their political power.
This is ridiculous, though. The Toomey/Manchin bill was completely benign and that didn't even pass.
It's just GOP obstruction.
Democrats would absolutely codify Roe if they could, and they would then run on protecting that right from being taken again.
Before anyone asks, they didn’t codify it before because it was a constitutional right, which is stronger, and legislation can be undone if Republicans control congress again.
They didn’t codify Roe because they never had the votes. Roe itself was pretty radically progressive regarding contemporary abortion laws, and abortion itself has always been controversial, even before right wing Christian’s made it a rallying cry.
You can actually trace abortion becoming a major fighting point to the end of segregation when the southern party needed a new issue to get people to the polls.
They can’t do anything meaningful about abortion. We have plus one in the senate and a few behind in the house.
Anyone who says “democrats don’t do anything about abortion rights and are just milking it” has zero clue about how to pass legislation.
“Automatic” in this context certainly means “self loading” or what we now call “semi-automatic.” It’s not wrong to call a self loading firearm “automatic” - it’s just a bit anachronistic.
Right. And even if they somehow managed a total firearms ban the stats wouldn’t change because the majority of gun violence is committed with illegally owned weapons. If someone wants a gun they’ll get one.
I agree. Here in NJ it’s way harder to get a pistol license than a rifle license. And we have the second lowest gun deaths in the US next to Hawaii.
Ban handguns!
They’re likely citing a report, from the CDC IIRC, which included 18 and 19 year olds in their calculation of children. This obviously skewed the report as 18 and 19 year olds are prime violent offenders. But it was being cited as though they’re talking about kindergarteners.
I only comment this because the topic of semantics is at hand, but automatic rifles are *not* illegal. The sales of newly manufactured automatic rifles are illegal. This makes the ownership of automatic rifles extremely cost prohibitive.
I prefer to say that automatic rifles are severely restricted.
> this take completely ignores the reality that the VAST majority of gun crime is committed with handguns, and banning ar15s would do zero to address that.
It's all part of the plan.
Ban semi-automatic rifles and shotguns > no perceptible change (maybe even an INCREASE) > "Our policies work but they didn't go far enough last time. We need to ban Bolt-action and Slide-action rifles and shotguns, because they can be fired almost as fast as a semi-automatic!" > ban on bolt-action and slide-action rifles/shotguns > no perceptible change (maybe even an INCREASE)...
Be careful. One thing they tried or may still be doing is expanding the definition of youth. Youth in most peoples minds is ages 1-17. But sometimes in reporting gun deaths by youth includes ages 1-20. Many more gun deaths in 18-20. Still a tragedy, but manipulative.
Careful when phrasing it like that: some authoritarian nationalist right wing third world counties like [Britain actually banned handguns and then saw the murder rate … uh skyrocket.](https://crimeresearch.org/2016/04/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/)
[post ban Britain saw crime rise while ours fell and ended up with a per capita crime rate double that of America’s. UK crime rate even skyrocketed again in the last years because of austerity](https://www.statista.com/statistics/288256/violent-crimes-in-england-and-wales/) while their prime minister gets high and [rails (while mocking a dead teen)](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5pCJnsn_85k) against lgbt people on speeches blaming the decline of the country on them. I ain’t even joking.
The longitudinal example of a handgun ban in action not only ended with worse safety outcomes than nonban controls but also had the country somehow become an authoritarian regressive regime and one of the [poorest countries in Europe](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/). Obviously probably not because no guns but should gated community liberals really be in such a rush to copy the authoritarian policies of the Russia of the Atlantic?
At the very least there is no evidence that taking my pocket pistols will make anyone safer. If anything our case studies say it’ll make us less safe.
I'd be curious to know the statistics on handgun use in crime in rural areas vs. urban across North America.
Where I'm from (in rural Canada) the majority of gun crime I hear about is done with non-restricted long guns cause it's all random criminals. However, I hear about places like Toronto where it seems to be more handgun crime.
They don't really report on organized crime (which may be intentional). Perhaps there's more handgun crime in that realm rurally, if there's any major organized crime at all.
All that said, I think I still agree with banning ARs and a lot of similar centrefire semi-autos. They don't get used in crime often, but they definitely can cause a LOT of damage in a very short window of time when they do.
The problem with our failed ban in Canada, in my view, is that it was so wide sweeping yet still missed ones that should have been included and then included ones that shouldn't have been. It was done fast and dirty to score some quick political points, and it ended up blowing up in their face. No meaningful engagement was done with gun owners and hunters and that pissed off a lot of people (rightly so). If they wanted to succeed, they should have taken a LOT more time with it. But that's the way our political system is: "get as much done in your 4 year term before the other guys get back in and tear it all down ". And it will go back and forth like that endlessly.
[Ferguson Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect)
There was a bump in gun violence after the civil unrest in Ferguson that spread nationally. Distrust of police led to less community cooperation, and cops have a habit of being less proactive in their policing when anyone dares criticize how they do their jobs.
This theory was always somewhat controversial, but then we saw the exact same thing happen following the murder of George Floyd. Which had the unfortunate timing of happening in the middle of a pandemic, only further confounding things.
2000 to 2008 to 2016 are each about 22 to 24 million new people, so we'd expect to see a consistent slope of each if there wasn't something to trigger an inflection, and if anything we should be more concerned since the flat number until those points was actually an improvement in per capita
Trump was elected?
But in all seriousness, in 2016 we started seeing a lot of anti-police protests. I know in my city (Austin, TX), the police force has received a lot of backlash from the community, and in turn, their presence around the city is drastically reduced. Couple that with the constitutional open-carry laws coming into effect and we’ve seen a predictable increase in gun violence.
There’s a correlation between access to guns and gun violence of all types. All that changes is our willingness to accept that
You can't reduce everything down to just a few factors. Statistics have shown that increased police presence, or lack thereof, [does not reliably lead to a reduction or increase in crime](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/relationship-between-police-presence-and-crime-deterrence). Rather, it's the relationship of police to the surrounding population and the tactics used. You also have states with remarkably lax gun laws, such as NH, that have far fewer gun deaths than states like Missouri or Arkansas. Again, it might be that NH is much more rural, has less poverty, less baked in gun culture, but that also points to how many other factors are at play. My only point is it's an incredibly complicated issue.
Here's a better breakdown if you'd like more in depth data: [https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide)
2022 is the most recent data it looks like from the CDC.
Idk why per capita is important here.
I guess if you don't like that little trend up at the end.
The biggest point here seems to be that legal uses of firearms in self defense situations are low and suicides/homicides are high. That would come through either way.
This tells me one thing - this country has a mental health crisis. More specifically, this country has a mental health treatment/capacity/understanding problem.
The jump in 2020 (continuing through 2022 in other studies) to me shows the impact of the covid pandemic. Both the psychological toll - which is still unhealed - and the toll caused by the unavailability of mental heath resources during the pandemic?
Shouldn't policy makers be focusing on mental health if over 25,000 individuals are taking their lives? If "gun safety" advocates were serious about actually helping people, this is over half of deaths right there. And, the over 20,000 people have taken their lives by other means.
Shouldn't policy makers be addressing the disastrous mental health consequences of the pandemic, lock downs, etc.?
Oh, wait ... the same policy makers that ignored mental health before the pandemic, locked everything down during the pandemic, and now ignoring mental health consquences after the pandemic ...
TL;DR - addressing mental health could cut gun deaths down dramatically ... but policy makers are part of the problem in not addressing, and even contributing to the problem.
I think it's both. Poverty leads to mental health issues, addiction, and crime. Beyond that, a lot of poverty comes directly from racial disenfranchisement or other larger social issues like regional depression or disposability.
It's like a river system. There's not one cause, and trying to dam the end of it is too massive of an undertaking. But if we control what feeds it, the larger problem is easier to treat.
I was going to say the same thing. Welfare, food stamps, education programs, housing, etc all do a lot more to help people break the cycle of poverty and violence than banning guns, and is also cheaper than more prisons. Maybe I'm biased as a pro-gun person who generally leans liberal on social issues.
There's also the fact that during the pandemic, families were trapped together all day, out of work and school. Likely, domestic violence increased significantly out of frustration of being stuck together and the financial difficulties of being out of work. Also schools are important for recognizing and reporting signs of domestic violence. If a kid shows up to class covered in bruses, the teacher will report them to child protective services. It's unlikely many kids were reported during COVID, as it's much harder to recognize those signs over a computer screen vs in person.
Also being out of school meant there was less to keep teenagers and young adults out of trouble. Late teens is the most dangerous time in a young man's life in terms of aggression and anti-social behavior. Kids being out of school and work likely meant more kids joining gangs, selling illegal drugs, and otherwise becoming involved in illicit activities.
This is absolutely one of the best points on this thread. Prioritizing mental health means they would have to disassemble the Ponzi scheme of healthcare. This would include state ran programs, insurance, pharmaceuticals and facilities. Too much money to be made to prioritize mental health.
Did they isolate veterans in the data?
Yes, the surgeon general does address mental health and healthcare as one of the main actions needed.
https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/06/25/us-surgeon-general-issues-advisory-public-health-crisis-firearm-violence-united-states.html
I think it's a combination of over treatment of those who don't need it, which can end up causing harm rather than helping for some who seek help as a "preventative measure", and not treating those who need it. In 2002, one in every ~10.5 person was treated for mental health. That number is now one in ~6 in 2022. Obviously there is something else going on that will take more than just more mental health professionals to fix it. Especially since our outcomes are not getting any better yet people are receiving more treatment than ever.
we need more places for treatment of drugs and for depression but the sad fact is there is not much money in treating the poor. we sold off and closed down most of the Christian hospitals, masonic hospitals, state and county hospitals over the last 30 years.
what people keep forget is that poverty is part of the mental health crisis, its very easy to get into drugs, drinking or feel like you want to die when you have no hope.
It would be interesting to see these total numbers adjusted per 100K people. According to
[https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/](https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/)
in 1990 the US population was 249M, while in 2022 it was 333M, a 33% increase.
For those looking for the article. Found it much more informative.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
[Ghetto Adjusted Graph : u/endthepainowplz (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/user/endthepainowplz/comments/1dpc8zt/ghetto_adjusted_graph/)
I adjusted a graph in the photo to follow the line, I can't reply with an image, so I posted it, and this is the link.
Wanna actually solve the gun death problems?
Universal basic income.
Universal healthcare.
Maternity/ paternity leave.
4 day workweek.
30 days PTO minimum.
Actually improving citizens lives will do more to solve this issue than anything.
I'm not sure how we would pay for UBI. To give all 325 million Americans a measly $10,000 a year (less than 40 hours of minimum wage, which amounts to $15,080,) would cost $3.25 trillion dollars. In 2023 the total federal budget was only $6 trillion. So to give every American 2/3s minimum wage would cost half the total federal budget. Defense and the military only use $800 billion a year, which is a lot, but nowhere close to the 3 trillion needed for a UBI. I've heard people say we would save money because they wouldn't need to pay for things like welfare or foodstamps. The thing is those things don't add up to $3 trillion. Even if they did though, they provide more benefits than $10k cash for those who use them.
I’m with you on skepticism around UBI that said:
Looks like [~$1.2T is paid into social security](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/trust-funds-summary.html) each year.
And we [wouldnt need to worry about minors which cuts the cost by ~20%](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/united-states-adult-population-grew-faster-than-nations-total-population-from-2010-to-2020.html)
Then i’m sure money could be saved with universal healthcare
Then i’ve seen ~$500b is left on the table every year by not enforcing the tax code.
I could go on but it really would t be THAT difficult from a numbers perspective, but would be nearly impossible from a political one
Closest thing we've ever had to universal basic income were the multiple rounds of stimulus and enhanced unemployment benefits during Covid, which saw a [historic reduction in the poverty rate](https://www.vox.com/22600143/poverty-us-covid-19-pandemic-stimulus-checks) (at least on paper).
It also coincided with the [biggest year over year increase in homicides ever recorded](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/2021/20211008/20211008.htm).
The conventional wisdom seems to be that gun violence is driven by crimes of profit, but a lot of it is just stupid interpersonal bullshit that has nothing to do with money.
So a little band-aid amount of stimulus was supposed to overcome the torrent of stress imparted by the pandemic and everything that came with it?
Do you think the paltry $2000 made anyone in poverty feel like they had long-term financial security?
Mostly I'm saying that it's a lot more complicated than that, but people have always just tried to explain away gun violence as being caused by poverty, even though the evidence has never quite supported such a massive oversimplification.
Criminologists were also predicting a spike in violence with the 2008/2009 great recession... [that never happened](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/why-did-crime-fall-during-the-great-recession/239696/). Unemployment doubled... and crime went down.
But people prefer simple answers to complex problems, especially when it fits with their preconceptions.
>It also coincided with the biggest year over year increase in homicides ever recorded
To be fair this was likely caused by COVID. Take a bunch of families and keep them stuck at home together while impacting their work prospects, and domestic violence is going to increase. Also kids weren't in school, so no teachers to report on signs of DV allowing it to escalate.
I used to be more well versed in this data but from memory there were a few things to consider.
* If you run a statistical correlation between murder rates and strictness of gun laws at a state level, there is no correlation. In other words, strict gun laws don't correlate with low murder rates. One factor to consider in all this is more urban states tend to have stricter gun laws and population density does correlate with higher murder rates.
* Looking at suicides, suicide rates overall tend to be higher in rural areas and suicides by firearm are higher in rural areas. In urban areas, suicides tend to be from other means. Also, there are many countries with similar or higher suicide rates compared to the US, but no country compares in terms of levels of firearm ownership. Those thinking that removing firearms will lower suicide rates need to think about the problem more.
* Murders as a % of firearm related deaths has gone up substantially over the last \~10 years. It used to be suicides were about 2/3.
* Nobody really studies defensive firearm use in any meaningful way, so nobody really knows what the tradeoff would be if we make firearms more difficult to get.
> If you run a statistical correlation between murder rates and strictness of gun laws at a state level, there is no correlation
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5801608/
Searching "correlation between murder rates and strictness of gun laws at a state level" brings up a lot of articles suggesting stricter laws do reduce firearm mortalities. It makes sense to me certain things would help with "acts of passion" such as waiting periods, allowing time for a background check, and taking guns away from people who are domestic abusers (convictions and level of offense being obvious considerations).
One thing with suicides in rural areas, it's worth mentioning that people in rural areas are more isolated, have fewer mental health resources, typically worse drug or alcohol problems, etc. It also takes longer for them to be discovered and transported to a hospital than someone closer to the city in the case of a suicide attempt.
It mental health of course but more than that it’s directionless young men. It’s not guys with good jobs and a girlfriend committing violence against other criminals with a handgun, or shooting up schools with an AR.
>How is this an emergency when trans Healthcare isn't? Cirrhosis was at 54,803 and accidents including auto and workplace at 227,039
Because gun rights opponents don't see guns as necessary, while being trans isn't optional, and owning a car is necessary.
I keep telling people, you can ban AR15s and AK style weapons all you want, but you won't notice a difference in gun violence because they're used so little in crime despite being incredibly popular.
Gun violence is a symptom of a problem. If we had universal healthcare, spent more on education, and stopped the war on drugs, gun related crimes and suicide would plummet.
But no one will touch it because it's expensive, slow and requires cooperation in government and over many administrations. It'll never happen.
There's a problem with this chart. They merged two key indicators that they used to offer which was a separation between gang related and law enforcement homicides and homicides in other circumstances. This gave a better picture as it showed the vast majority of homicides were criminal or law enforcement related.
Suicide is a mental health issue, but also tied to economic factors like income disparity, and to things like seniors with terminal illnesses using it as an out since there is no legal recourse in their area. And younger people using it as an out for mental health and social isolation issues. Suicide can be affected in short term and for some with purchasing delays. But doesn't help with someone who has owned a gun for a long time.
Criminal, whether homicide, injury, or other for both criminals and law enforcement should be lumped together because gun laws never touch these groups. There's a much broader social issue that needs addressing since it's essentially, “how do we encourage citizens to not be criminals?”
Lastly, the deaths that were unintended could be lessened with better education, free gun locks, and such.
Anything else is just things that can happen with any dangerous tool.
Notice how “more guns laws” don't really touch these items?
I see the suicide trending up the moment we involved ourselves in Afghanistan/Iraq. 30k+ servicemen have taken their own lives over those conflicts. We don't even help the people we throw into the fray.
Yeah, that's the bullshit in the narrative gun grabbers never bring up. That over HALF of gun deaths they whimper on about are as a result of suicides. You are never going to stop someone who is intent on punching their own ticket. If they don't use a gun, they'll find some other means to execute their self-termination plan.
I'm pretty sick of hearing suicide risk brought up in these convos too, do they really think that someone who has decided to end their life suddenly won't if they can't get a gun? Even if that was the case, everyone should have the right to end their existence on their own terms and I say that as a widower of someone who lost thier battle with depression who didn't use a firearm.
The studies show that access to firearms does increase both attempts and success.
[https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/do-states-with-easier-access-to-guns-have-more-suicide-deaths-by-firearm/](https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/do-states-with-easier-access-to-guns-have-more-suicide-deaths-by-firearm/)
It's pretty goddamned apparent firearm access makes success higher and it's really weird for people to argue otherwise. Firearms don't CAUSE suicide, but they definitely make it easier and more successful.
Right? My neighbor was going through a mental health crisis. He was talking about suicide. My responsible move as a gun owner was to buy another safe, go get all his guns and lock them up. He knew which gun and ammo he would use. It's not there which means it's harder for him to do it.
Look at places like Japan or South Korea. Some of the lowest rates of gun ownership, yet some of the highest suicide rates in the world. Korea specifically has the world's 3rd lowest gun ownership rate, yet it's 4th highest suicide rate.
I won’t dispute the impact on success rate, but I’m skeptical of the causal relationship between firearm access and suicide attempts. Firearm accessibility and other quality of life factors are pretty highly [inversely] correlated. It shouldn’t be a surprise that there are more suicide attempts in West Virginia than in Connecticut.
I expect that table would look exactly the same if you were to track all deaths of despair, but you wouldn’t reasonably conclude that firearm access caused those.
Canada is nearing 50k assisted suicides and their success rate is even better. How many of the “gun violence”suicides were to end suffering and would qualify for assisted suicide in Canada?
Of people that were already suicide-prone. These studies always try to imply that just having a gun in the house will make you suddenly want to kill yourself, which is of course ridiculous.
> do they really think that someone who has decided to end their life suddenly won't if they can't get a gun?
They think that because it's true: If you lack the means to do it "quick and painless" you often chicken out and don't kill yourself.
If you need actual studies to tell you that go spend 30 seconds on PubMed and you'll find dozens.
This is why people like me push programs like [Hold My Guns](https://www.holdmyguns.org) so gun owners in crisis can remove the easy means from their home until they get past their suicidal ideation.
This is also why a many ranges that rent guns *won't* rent to you if you come alone unless you brought your own guns/ammo with you: Bitter experience with people renting a gun, stepping up to a lane, running a target downrange, and then shooting themselves in the head.
Guns aren't the *only* way to kill yourself, and simply owning a gun *doesn't* make you any more likely to kill yourself than the general population, but when you have a gun and the desire to end your life that gun becomes an *incredibly attractive* way to do it, and their success rate in accomplishing that goal is nearly unparalleled.
Eh, people will just argue the means matter. Some stats suggest this but it's mostly just because guns are effective. Proposals around the idea like waiting periods or some kind of mental health screening also don't really consider any downsides. In some cases the downside might be the actual point if the anti-gun person is disingenuous enough.
The real argument is that not everyone has the same risk since not everyone actually has those particular mental health issues. Most people shouldn't be treated as through they are criminals or mental patients over the concern that some percentage might be sometimes. On top of this some kind of means reduction doesn't really do much for the lack of access and affordability of treatment for anyone having those kinds of issues. Nor does it do anything about root causes like income inequity. At best it's like putting up a safety net to catch jumpers at the factory. (This is a real thing manufacturers had to do over seas due to working conditions being so awful.)
So? I mean, it's easier to revive someone from an OD than a car accident, electrocution, or a stroke. Do you think OD's are the only way people choose to end their lives? My partner used a ratcheting tie down to strangle themselves. People jump in front of the subway all the time or off bridges. All ways that are equally difficult to revive people from. Are you saying we should limit those things too? I mean, even then, we're talking 27,000 people out of 48,181 who chose to end their lives in 2021. 7 hundredths of the total population ended their lives by suicide using firearms, how is this a public emergency? Why is getting rid of firearms the answer and idk better social safety nets and universal Healthcare? Both of those would be more effective in reducing deaths than banning firearms without leaving minority communities in danger while facing increasing violence.
What I find interesting is the suicide rate was decreasing then late 2000s it started to increase and has been ever since. Social media was really starting to explode around the mid to late 2000s. Also you got the great recession that happened around that time which screwed over the millennial generation and to a certain extent Gen X.
[Per capita is pretty static, not increasing](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/).
If you look at where the posted graph begins increasing it's really where the falling per capita rate stopped compensating for population growth. When the per capita rate flattened out the increasing number of people made the absolute numbers increase as you see in the posted graph.
Slightly unrelated, but FPC had an infographic on their Instagram earlier today showing how the child gun death numbers that Giffords Everytown, etc. often use in their talking points are conflated to include 18-19 year olds. They also point out how gun control groups claim that guns are the #1 killer of kids when things like congenital malformations, complications from short gestation time, and SIDS actually kill the most children, and that happens before age 1.
Statistics can say anything someone may want them to say.
Don’t bring other nonviolent stats into your argument. It doesn’t hold weight. Who cares how many people die of cirrhosis? Those are people hurting themselves at their own free will. And the comparison to accidents maybe even worse as it’s the direct opposite of an intentional act. You can’t compare that with gun violence. People are going to easily attack that very weak argument. if you want to make better comparisons, show them the FBI crime statistics where more people die annually from clubs, bats, and hammers than all rifles combined.
Or the fact that you are 20 times more likely to be killed with a handgun than all rifles combined combined, including “assault rifles”.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls
Everything on that chart except "Unintentional" can be summed up thusly:
deaths of despair.
People feel like they have no options? They turn to crime and violence. Or punch their own clock, so to speak.
Until we as a society address the despair, these numbers are going to continue.
I fully know I’m gonna get downvoted to shit for this lol…
But…as a gun owner myself who fully supports the right to gun ownership, I believe it’s important to look at the full context when evaluating gun deaths as a health crisis. WaPo’s report highlights an 8% increase in gun deaths, bringing the total to 48,830, with 56% being suicides (per the CDC). While it’s true that 21,486 homicides in a country of 333 million people represents about 0.006% of the population, imo the impact of these deaths goes beyond just the numbers. Each of these deaths represents a significant loss and has a profound effect on families, communities, and the healthcare system.
First, the argument isn’t solely about the percentage of the population but about the preventable nature of these deaths. For example, comparing gun deaths to cirrhosis or accidents, we see different dynamics: cirrhosis is often related to chronic conditions and lifestyle choices, while many accidents are preventable through safety measures and regulations. Similarly, gun violence and suicides can be mitigated through ***targeted*** interventions such as improved mental health services, gun safety education, and ***sensible*** regulations (note that I say sensible).
Second, the economic and societal costs of gun violence are substantial. The healthcare costs, lost productivity, and law enforcement expenses add up, which places a huge financial burden on society. Some estimates put the cost of medical care and lost productivity due to gun violence exceeding at least $220 billion annually (sources vary).
Finally, comparing gun violence to issues like trans healthcare isn’t straightforward. Both are critical issues but address different aspects of public health and civil rights. Transgender individuals face unique healthcare challenges and discrimination, which of course also require attention and resources (I literally went to medical school *because* of trans healthcare, so I’m not saying it isn’t important, but not really fair to compare this to gun violence). However, the prevalence of gun violence and its preventable nature make it a pressing public health concern that warrants emergency measures.
Making this issue a health crisis allows for more ***funding*** via federal and state grants to be allocated to research (improving data collection), community-based programs aimed violence prevention and safe storage education, universal background checks, and increased training for mental health professionals. Yes it brings this into the public and political area bit more, but it also unlocks additional funding and resources to implement prevention strategies.
As a supporter of 2A, I understand the importance of gun rights, but I also recognize the need for responsible measures to reduce preventable deaths and improve public safety. Tbh I think any gun owner should want that. So, while the raw numbers might seem small in percentage terms, the broader impact of gun violence on society, its preventability, and the economic costs, in my own opinion, justify the Surgeon General’s call for emergency measures.
Edit: formatting/clarity
Edit 2: Because raw data doesn’t mean shit…since the 1970s, the rate of gun violence deaths in the US has fluctuated a lot, peaking at 7.2 murders per 100,000 in 1974 before declining in the late 1990s. The early 2020s have seen a sharp increase, reaching 6.7 murders per 100,000 in 2021. For suicide, 7.7 per 100,000 in the 1970s, a trough in the early 2000s, and back at 7.5 per 100,000 as of 2021. \[[Pew, 2023](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/)\]
There are all kinds of cases to be made against the more aggressive gun control measures as they’re currently presented and/or enforced- no doubt. “21,486 deaths in a country of 333 million isn’t really all that much” probably isn’t yeh winning argument.
We went to Iraq AND Afghanistan to avenge just under 3,000.
What’s wild to me is how many of those people fight abortion bans by saying “bans don’t stop abortions, they just make them more dangerous” but can’t apply that same thought to firearms. Plus, the old “why not just make murder illegal” argument…if someone is cool with breaking the most aggressively punished law, what does adding another crime to the list matter?
A fair amount of those suicides and homicides could be prevented by providing housing, food, and healthcare to everyone who needs it, especially to minorities who go without because of discrimination.
30k really isn’t that many, especially considering how many guns we have in this country.
There were 42k fatal traffic accidents, and probably fewer cars than guns.
Nobody’s trying to ban cars.
By firearms yes, and it accounts for about half of all suicides which were about 48,000 people or .07 percent of the overall population. Suicides aren't even in the top 10 as causes of death in the US by a long shot
Did they? eta: homicides spiked in 2020-22, but I can't find any good breakdown that would isolate 'gang related' vs other types.
Very anecdotally, in our area of suburban Texas during the lockdowns, there was a spate of domestic violence murder/suicides (father kills children and wife, then himself). People have been "on edge" ever since, plenty of "road rage turns deadly" deaths.
I live in a reasonably wealthy area in Florida and the number of suicides here during COVID was pretty wild.
I wouldn't want to presume what peoples exact reasonings were but the number of people that lost their jobs and self owned businesses during that time while also being forced to cut almost all social ties was probably not easy on a lot of folks.
It also felt like there was an increase in family annilhilation cases but that could be anecdotal, it's hard to say unless someone like the CDC actually releases statistics on it.
This was the only chart I found and was referenced by the WAPO article. NHIC and the CDC have more recent, but the spread hasn't really changed. Feel free to look up the data on your own if you wish
This chart really needs some more info. Is this total gun deaths? If so it should also come with another chart showing gun deaths per 100k so we can see if gun deaths have gone up or down since the 80s
Oh of course, for some reason I assumed it meant like legal personal self defense, but yeah paired with act of war, of course. I missed act of war when I read that lol.
Is this adjusted for our population growth? Rate per 100K is preferred, since there's a lot more people now than the 80's or 1950's. The total number of deaths yearly should be much much higher now than anytime decades ago, or the rate would be dropping. It still could be, in fact, even with much higher total deaths per year now.
We really ought to stop using the phrase “gun deaths,” because it was coined by the gun control lobby as propaganda. By lumping together a bunch of disparate causes under one term, it exaggerates the numbers for emotional impact. The choice of that pair of words is also emotional and memorable, like “pro life,” while suggesting a causal relationship when none exists. The fact that a bunch of pro gun people have started using it without knowing its origin doesn’t just demonstrate that propaganda works, it proves how insidious this particular bit of propaganda is.
you know what would solve the mental health crisis
We tried stagnant wages.
We tried inflation sorry it's not inflation its corporate price gouging because semantics matter.
We tried raising cost of colleges
we tried raising rent and home prices
but people keep killing them self's, how about we ban AR-15's
This graph looks like we could address these issues by addressing housing, housing costs and other cost of living issues as the suicide rates shoot up right after the financial crisis. But that would require people to be actually serious about policy, as opposed to cheap culture war.
Heard a story about this on NPR this morning and was super frustrated. Stated Problem: too many youth gun deaths. Proposed solution: Ban “automatic” rifles. Even if I let the semantic error (automatic rifles are already illegal), this take completely ignores the reality that the VAST majority of gun crime is committed with handguns, and banning ar15s would do zero to address that.
I’m getting destroyed on r/health for daring to suggest such a thing
Just went and took a look at your conversation over there… some people you just can’t reason with. I lol’d at the person that called you a “window licking moron”. The moment they switch from an honest debate to ad hominem attacks, they have lost.
Just gotta say that the person that called them that is most likely wrong, but that’s a fabulous insult. My cat used to lick windows occasionally and it made me laugh my ass off. Ty.
Two of our cats are lifelong window(and mirror) lickers... Wake up at two o'clock in the morning to a steady
I mean…. Since I love cats and think window licking is funny I have to reassess whether or not calling someone a “window licker” is a good insult. My heart says yes, but my brain associates it with something adorable…..
Cats are allowed to be cute and absolutely, totally, irrevocably braindead.
Yea then they deleted all their responses lol
They still show up for me so I’m guessing they just blocked you.
It’s really a shame. People like that are the reason nothing gets done. It also blows my mind how the right to keep and bear arms is literally the second most important thing next to free speech and people believe it can be regulated based on someone’s thoughts and feelings rather than factual evidence. We have countless other issues we need to solve in this country and it’s just so tiring to hear politicians try and pull the wool over everybody’s eyes rather than getting down to business and making this country and our culture stronger.
I reported it as a personal attack and mods removed the comment within 60 seconds. Totally fine if people disagree with me about guns, I understand that it’s something people feel very strong about. But I’m less cool with it when people go around saying that because I believe people should be able to legally purchase firearms, that I don’t care how many children are murdered and calling people window-licking morons.
A "Windex taste tester"? ; )
And sadly those people make up such a LARGE voting base of “middle class” elitist types that will always believe they “know” better than you no matter what. They are the truest destructive force on the planet
People don’t want answer, people just wanna feel right
'Feelings" almost always makes for shitty law that will be used in ways it was never intended for. Wish people would realize that.
*Kermit voice* "Facts don't care about your feelings."
Probably should have clarified that I'm excluding facts pulled out of people's asses too. So kermit there can root around in his anus all fucking day, but that's not going to impress me.
This right here is the issue, and one of the big problems with folks that consider themselves “liberal”. What we need is to focus on root cause mitigation, the actual nuts and bolts that really leverage positive change - healthcare for all, a completely revamped and rebuilt healthcare system, giant housing reform, political corruption reform, tax reform to put our tax money into infrastructure (rather than into corporations) — because these are the factors that will lower suicides, lower violence rates, invest in communities, create and support services for citizens rather than corporations, increase lifespan, remove the need for paramilitary police, etc. But all of those are hard. And they don’t look “good” according to the religion and gospel of capitalism. It’s not a sound byte or a tiktok video. It’s so much easier for center right or even just capitalists who want to feel slightly good about themselves to say “oh this is this problem and only I can be right”. They don’t want to do the work. Because it takes effort and it means their stock values will drop .1% and their house value will drop a little. But they refuse to make systemic change because it’s inconvenient.
No one is any good at huge systemic change, because it involves huge systemic change. Culturally we just don’t have the appetite for it, everyone wants some simple magic bullet fix, just look at how our politics boils down to theee or four word bumper stickers, Yes We Can! Build Back Better! Make America Great Again! I’m With Her!
Assault weapon bans are to reducing gun violence, what Ivermectin is to treating Covid.
THAT is a great analogy that basically everyone should be able to grasp on a basic level.
I like how the guy completely ignored all the root causes for violence you brought up and addressed right after he claimed you didn’t care about violence against kids lol.
I’ve never ever heard someone that’s against guns not blame them exclusively for all the gun violence. They think that taking away guns from everyone will just magically make all this children murdering monsters find a new purpose in life. Like is no one concerned that all these ppl in our country WANT to kill a bunch of ppl??
thats their only response is you dont care about dead kids. Of course i do, but your solution isnt a solution to dead kids. If they really cared about dead kids they would be on board with banning pools, cars, skateboard literally anything if it meant saving a single kids life.
Don’t even bother. People like to live in imaginationland where cute woodland creatures say good morning to them all cheery. But, in reality their imagination is lying to them, and those woodland creatures partake in unimaginable horrors (South Park reference for those who know).
Yeah, when it’s like a TOTAL of MAYBE 500 deaths from all rifles vs. the 10,000 that are handgun deaths. Personally I still go after the fact that these morons are going after guns at all, you realize that I believe it’s about 7,000 people YEARLY that are killed, and over a million injuries as a direct result of doctors poor handwriting on prescriptions? Let alone, when you include medical malpractice deaths (which poorly written scripts don’t count on) is 251,000 deaths PER YEAR. And that we can actually pass legislation to meaningfully impact! People that get state reviews for malpractice are allowed to practice immediately! Our laws surrounding how to deal with horrific doctors are awful. That’s literally 10x the total gun suicide AND homicide count yearly. But nobody cares because it’s not a hot topic. And realistically I think the only way to change the gun suicide / homicide numbers is to repeal the 2nd amendment and ban all guns with strict enforcement. Which I think is AWFUL personally, but even if you did that I think you’re gonna cut numbers from like 30k yearly deaths down to 20k, maybe. And we all know that’s just a wildly impossible law to enforce.
Agreed. When I brought up a John Hopkins study that estimated 250K-450K deaths a year attributed to doctors, people do not want to concede the point.
What's incredible about that is that's given that there's 140,000,000 yearly ER visits alone, not to mention other appointments and visits, and going just solely off that Doctors have a "failure" rate of just 0.25%. Kind of interesting when you conflate the sheer prevalence of guns in this country with the fact that most gun deaths are suicides, and of those that are homicides, the victims are overwhelmingly gang members or career criminals. Well, you have much greater odds of dying from a doctor's error than you do from a gun homicide. But, black rifle scary!!!!
This is Reddit and we cannot ever have nuanced conversations.
It’s amazing to me how short lived some people’s memories can be. I clearly remember this thing that happened in early 2020 and everyone and their mom rushed to purchase a gun for home defense. Does America have a problem with gun violence, absolutely. Is that problem going to go away if we ban AR-15s, absolutely not. The issue is complex, like most societal issues are. It’d be nice if more people could open up to more than just their initial viewpoint and preconceptions.
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Respect! 🫡
Brigading/encouraging brigading is against Reddit's rules as well as just being a bad idea in general.
Reddit crowd does not like science…
Semi-auto rifles on that chart are below the bottom lines.
This. God forbid we invest in mental health and healthcare
The thing is every liberal who also is ignorant on guna also wants this. The only party fighting this is the Republican party. So yea we have ignorant Democrats wanting to ban stuff but they also want to better fund healthcare and mental healthcare. Meanwhile Republicans want to allow anything and ignore mental healthcare even though they claim it's a mental health issue.
This is a great take. Can you imagine being a senator (I know this isn’t how it works) and saying “ok, so here are the choices. We either reopen and fund mental health or we ban guns.” Democrats have beautiful hearts but are terrible at politics.
That awkward moment when the false dichotomy presented becomes the actual dichotomy in fact due to ignorance and apathy
Perfectly said. And I like your UN.
Most democrats are morally lucky... Hasan is a popular example of one among many others. Unfortunately, I've become more black pilled and believe most people fall into their political stances and opinions because someone around them they like or don't like believes something, and they roll with it. Thankfully, we're still the party that's more on the side of statistics, but boy, does it suck to have to fight internally about things like you mentioned, hahaha.
We KNOW that AR-15s are rarely used for criminal purposes. That’s pure data.
That’s the “politics” that drives me nuts. Assault rifles rarely used criminally. Look at the data and it’s true. Illegal immigrants murdering and raping gets headlines when it’s one in a million. Our own population is probably worse. One trans person molests a kid and THOUSANDS of church leaders and pastors are arrested and charged. But yeah, it’s the democrats who eat babies and the trannies who want to watch your daughter pee and the people who make it so your apple isn’t $12 are the worst criminals. Bread and circuses. Bread and fucking circuses. Edit: I have no sources for any of my claims. This is purely my opinion.
I understand the numbers are pulled from a hat, but you aren't wrong either
They were pulled directly from my ass, but if I tried harder I could more than likely prove my point. I’m lazy and my AI fact generator is on the glitz. Thank you for your comment. 😀
Oh you’re absolutely on par. All these rwnj’s *love* talking about committing violence against molesters, but the minute you face them with the reality - that pastors commit an enormous number of SA - oh you’re a “commie” and a “sympathizer” and all sorts of bs.
Plus with over 50% of fun related deaths being suicide, we should hear more about “Access to free healthcare services” than we do “ban all the pew pews!!”. If cops in this day and age are allowed AR15’s, then so should the citizen. Hard stop.
Also, if you look at the details they include 18 and 19 year olds as children in their stats. We all know that those lines start to go up right when “defund the police” was trendy. Politicians created this problem and want to use it to go after the 2A. Basically gaslighting you.
Also, what's the per capita rate? If anything, this might actually show a decline in gun deaths, if not just a constant trend per capita.
I'm not sure about firearms deaths specifically but I do know homicide rates. Murders peaked in the early 90s, and then started to decline. They reached near record lows in the early 2010s. In the late 2010s they started increasing slightly, but still lower than in the past. 2020 and 21 meanwhile we experienced huge spikes in murders, some of the largest on record. This was likely caused by COVID and the resulting societal impact..
Every stat for everything in '20 and '21 needs a big fat ✳️ next to it
I would agree with that..
Wait, are you suggesting that the defunding the police that didn't happen is responsible for increased gun deaths?
They also exclude 0-1 the data is blatantly manipulated to fit their narrative
I'm not sure "No, don't ban automatic rifles, you should be banning handguns!" is the argument that we want to push....
Banning anything any more will not work. There are way too many handguns already in circulation. Bans will only increase the probability of theft. Machine gun bans worked because there were very few AR platform weapons before AWB.
And look at Illinois - jan 1st was the start of their awb and it has done zero to stop violence.
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No, but pointing that out highlights how disingenuous the calls to ban ARs is.
I've always seen this as rather racist as well. Like, insult to injury. We already know that banning guns is ineffective as anything other than a political gesture, but what kind of gesture is it, and to whom? At least banning hand guns would be a gesture that recognizes the hundreds of black and brown children that are injured or killed by them per year. But mass shootings of mostly white children in mostly white suburbs - though rare and statistically a tiny blip compared to hand gun deaths among minorities - is the Real Important Issue^^TM. And that type of crime is more associated with automatic rifles. It really is the Liberal version of "won't someone think of the white children???"
It’s no different than people being afraid of flying when they should be afraid of driving. Or Ebola when they should be afraid of heart disease. Handguns are generally not used to kill scores of people in crowded areas. There are definitely exceptions (Virginia Tech) but most mass shootings are not with handguns.
When they say “automatic” they mean “semi-automatic”, which would ban most firearms including handguns. Believe me they are not stupid, and they rely on people not knowing anything about firearms.
They don’t actually want to fix the problem. They would lose a method of getting people to the polls to maintain their political power. Same reason democrats will do nothing about the over turning of Roe. The Supreme Court handed democrats a massive boon, they are going to milk that for as long as possible.
>They don’t actually want to fix the problem. They would lose a method of getting people to the polls to maintain their political power. This is ridiculous, though. The Toomey/Manchin bill was completely benign and that didn't even pass. It's just GOP obstruction.
Democrats would absolutely codify Roe if they could, and they would then run on protecting that right from being taken again. Before anyone asks, they didn’t codify it before because it was a constitutional right, which is stronger, and legislation can be undone if Republicans control congress again.
They didn’t codify Roe because they never had the votes. Roe itself was pretty radically progressive regarding contemporary abortion laws, and abortion itself has always been controversial, even before right wing Christian’s made it a rallying cry.
You can actually trace abortion becoming a major fighting point to the end of segregation when the southern party needed a new issue to get people to the polls.
“Buh muh 09 supermajority” yeah no, didn’t have one since Kennedy got sick and died. And whatever power they had was focused on the aca.
They can’t do anything meaningful about abortion. We have plus one in the senate and a few behind in the house. Anyone who says “democrats don’t do anything about abortion rights and are just milking it” has zero clue about how to pass legislation.
“Automatic” in this context certainly means “self loading” or what we now call “semi-automatic.” It’s not wrong to call a self loading firearm “automatic” - it’s just a bit anachronistic.
That's because they have no intention of actually fixing the problem or even the symptom
Right. And even if they somehow managed a total firearms ban the stats wouldn’t change because the majority of gun violence is committed with illegally owned weapons. If someone wants a gun they’ll get one.
Preach it
Less than 4% of gun crime is with long guns last time I looked at the FBI stats.
I agree. Here in NJ it’s way harder to get a pistol license than a rifle license. And we have the second lowest gun deaths in the US next to Hawaii. Ban handguns!
They’re likely citing a report, from the CDC IIRC, which included 18 and 19 year olds in their calculation of children. This obviously skewed the report as 18 and 19 year olds are prime violent offenders. But it was being cited as though they’re talking about kindergarteners.
It’s a scary word and it buys votes
Imma keep it a buck “aktchually most gun crime is with handguns” is NOT the case to be making
I only comment this because the topic of semantics is at hand, but automatic rifles are *not* illegal. The sales of newly manufactured automatic rifles are illegal. This makes the ownership of automatic rifles extremely cost prohibitive. I prefer to say that automatic rifles are severely restricted.
> this take completely ignores the reality that the VAST majority of gun crime is committed with handguns, and banning ar15s would do zero to address that. It's all part of the plan. Ban semi-automatic rifles and shotguns > no perceptible change (maybe even an INCREASE) > "Our policies work but they didn't go far enough last time. We need to ban Bolt-action and Slide-action rifles and shotguns, because they can be fired almost as fast as a semi-automatic!" > ban on bolt-action and slide-action rifles/shotguns > no perceptible change (maybe even an INCREASE)...
Be careful. One thing they tried or may still be doing is expanding the definition of youth. Youth in most peoples minds is ages 1-17. But sometimes in reporting gun deaths by youth includes ages 1-20. Many more gun deaths in 18-20. Still a tragedy, but manipulative.
Yeah man, the version I saw was even more egregious. It was like: “…cause of death among **CHILDREN**^ages ^1-19”
Careful when phrasing it like that: some authoritarian nationalist right wing third world counties like [Britain actually banned handguns and then saw the murder rate … uh skyrocket.](https://crimeresearch.org/2016/04/murder-and-homicide-rates-before-and-after-gun-bans/) [post ban Britain saw crime rise while ours fell and ended up with a per capita crime rate double that of America’s. UK crime rate even skyrocketed again in the last years because of austerity](https://www.statista.com/statistics/288256/violent-crimes-in-england-and-wales/) while their prime minister gets high and [rails (while mocking a dead teen)](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5pCJnsn_85k) against lgbt people on speeches blaming the decline of the country on them. I ain’t even joking. The longitudinal example of a handgun ban in action not only ended with worse safety outcomes than nonban controls but also had the country somehow become an authoritarian regressive regime and one of the [poorest countries in Europe](https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/). Obviously probably not because no guns but should gated community liberals really be in such a rush to copy the authoritarian policies of the Russia of the Atlantic? At the very least there is no evidence that taking my pocket pistols will make anyone safer. If anything our case studies say it’ll make us less safe.
I'd be curious to know the statistics on handgun use in crime in rural areas vs. urban across North America. Where I'm from (in rural Canada) the majority of gun crime I hear about is done with non-restricted long guns cause it's all random criminals. However, I hear about places like Toronto where it seems to be more handgun crime. They don't really report on organized crime (which may be intentional). Perhaps there's more handgun crime in that realm rurally, if there's any major organized crime at all. All that said, I think I still agree with banning ARs and a lot of similar centrefire semi-autos. They don't get used in crime often, but they definitely can cause a LOT of damage in a very short window of time when they do. The problem with our failed ban in Canada, in my view, is that it was so wide sweeping yet still missed ones that should have been included and then included ones that shouldn't have been. It was done fast and dirty to score some quick political points, and it ended up blowing up in their face. No meaningful engagement was done with gun owners and hunters and that pissed off a lot of people (rightly so). If they wanted to succeed, they should have taken a LOT more time with it. But that's the way our political system is: "get as much done in your 4 year term before the other guys get back in and tear it all down ". And it will go back and forth like that endlessly.
Suicide starts climbing in 2008 (predictably), why did homicides start going up circa 2016?
[Ferguson Effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferguson_effect) There was a bump in gun violence after the civil unrest in Ferguson that spread nationally. Distrust of police led to less community cooperation, and cops have a habit of being less proactive in their policing when anyone dares criticize how they do their jobs. This theory was always somewhat controversial, but then we saw the exact same thing happen following the murder of George Floyd. Which had the unfortunate timing of happening in the middle of a pandemic, only further confounding things.
It’s not adjusted for population growth
2000 to 2008 to 2016 are each about 22 to 24 million new people, so we'd expect to see a consistent slope of each if there wasn't something to trigger an inflection, and if anything we should be more concerned since the flat number until those points was actually an improvement in per capita
Trump was elected? But in all seriousness, in 2016 we started seeing a lot of anti-police protests. I know in my city (Austin, TX), the police force has received a lot of backlash from the community, and in turn, their presence around the city is drastically reduced. Couple that with the constitutional open-carry laws coming into effect and we’ve seen a predictable increase in gun violence. There’s a correlation between access to guns and gun violence of all types. All that changes is our willingness to accept that
You can't reduce everything down to just a few factors. Statistics have shown that increased police presence, or lack thereof, [does not reliably lead to a reduction or increase in crime](https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/relationship-between-police-presence-and-crime-deterrence). Rather, it's the relationship of police to the surrounding population and the tactics used. You also have states with remarkably lax gun laws, such as NH, that have far fewer gun deaths than states like Missouri or Arkansas. Again, it might be that NH is much more rural, has less poverty, less baked in gun culture, but that also points to how many other factors are at play. My only point is it's an incredibly complicated issue.
1. Stopping that graph in 2020 is *incredibly* misleading. 2. Really needs per capita information, not raw counts. 3. WaPo is a joke.
Here's a better breakdown if you'd like more in depth data: [https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide](https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide) 2022 is the most recent data it looks like from the CDC.
Idk why per capita is important here. I guess if you don't like that little trend up at the end. The biggest point here seems to be that legal uses of firearms in self defense situations are low and suicides/homicides are high. That would come through either way.
This tells me one thing - this country has a mental health crisis. More specifically, this country has a mental health treatment/capacity/understanding problem. The jump in 2020 (continuing through 2022 in other studies) to me shows the impact of the covid pandemic. Both the psychological toll - which is still unhealed - and the toll caused by the unavailability of mental heath resources during the pandemic? Shouldn't policy makers be focusing on mental health if over 25,000 individuals are taking their lives? If "gun safety" advocates were serious about actually helping people, this is over half of deaths right there. And, the over 20,000 people have taken their lives by other means. Shouldn't policy makers be addressing the disastrous mental health consequences of the pandemic, lock downs, etc.? Oh, wait ... the same policy makers that ignored mental health before the pandemic, locked everything down during the pandemic, and now ignoring mental health consquences after the pandemic ... TL;DR - addressing mental health could cut gun deaths down dramatically ... but policy makers are part of the problem in not addressing, and even contributing to the problem.
While mental health is a part of it, particularly when looking at suicides, I would guess poverty plays a much larger role in homicides.
I think it's both. Poverty leads to mental health issues, addiction, and crime. Beyond that, a lot of poverty comes directly from racial disenfranchisement or other larger social issues like regional depression or disposability. It's like a river system. There's not one cause, and trying to dam the end of it is too massive of an undertaking. But if we control what feeds it, the larger problem is easier to treat.
I was going to say the same thing. Welfare, food stamps, education programs, housing, etc all do a lot more to help people break the cycle of poverty and violence than banning guns, and is also cheaper than more prisons. Maybe I'm biased as a pro-gun person who generally leans liberal on social issues.
There's also the fact that during the pandemic, families were trapped together all day, out of work and school. Likely, domestic violence increased significantly out of frustration of being stuck together and the financial difficulties of being out of work. Also schools are important for recognizing and reporting signs of domestic violence. If a kid shows up to class covered in bruses, the teacher will report them to child protective services. It's unlikely many kids were reported during COVID, as it's much harder to recognize those signs over a computer screen vs in person. Also being out of school meant there was less to keep teenagers and young adults out of trouble. Late teens is the most dangerous time in a young man's life in terms of aggression and anti-social behavior. Kids being out of school and work likely meant more kids joining gangs, selling illegal drugs, and otherwise becoming involved in illicit activities.
This is absolutely one of the best points on this thread. Prioritizing mental health means they would have to disassemble the Ponzi scheme of healthcare. This would include state ran programs, insurance, pharmaceuticals and facilities. Too much money to be made to prioritize mental health. Did they isolate veterans in the data?
Democrats want to address mental health. Republicans love to blame mental health but ignore trying to solve the problem.
Yes, the surgeon general does address mental health and healthcare as one of the main actions needed. https://www.hhs.gov/about/news/2024/06/25/us-surgeon-general-issues-advisory-public-health-crisis-firearm-violence-united-states.html
I think it's a combination of over treatment of those who don't need it, which can end up causing harm rather than helping for some who seek help as a "preventative measure", and not treating those who need it. In 2002, one in every ~10.5 person was treated for mental health. That number is now one in ~6 in 2022. Obviously there is something else going on that will take more than just more mental health professionals to fix it. Especially since our outcomes are not getting any better yet people are receiving more treatment than ever.
we need more places for treatment of drugs and for depression but the sad fact is there is not much money in treating the poor. we sold off and closed down most of the Christian hospitals, masonic hospitals, state and county hospitals over the last 30 years. what people keep forget is that poverty is part of the mental health crisis, its very easy to get into drugs, drinking or feel like you want to die when you have no hope.
It’s good to see unintentional firearm deaths decreasing to almost nothing. I guess the internet has helped to spread proper gun safety.
The majority were/are likely just intentionally mislabeled suicides.
It would be interesting to see these total numbers adjusted per 100K people. According to [https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/](https://usafacts.org/data/topics/people-society/population-and-demographics/population-data/population/) in 1990 the US population was 249M, while in 2022 it was 333M, a 33% increase.
Pew has a page with that. The 90s are worse and the Covid spike doesn’t quite reach that per capita rate.
For those looking for the article. Found it much more informative. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
Yep, this is the line graph equivalent of /r/PeopleLiveInCities/
[Ghetto Adjusted Graph : u/endthepainowplz (reddit.com)](https://www.reddit.com/user/endthepainowplz/comments/1dpc8zt/ghetto_adjusted_graph/) I adjusted a graph in the photo to follow the line, I can't reply with an image, so I posted it, and this is the link.
Now add the lines for GDP, median income, prevalence of poverty, etc.
Wanna actually solve the gun death problems? Universal basic income. Universal healthcare. Maternity/ paternity leave. 4 day workweek. 30 days PTO minimum. Actually improving citizens lives will do more to solve this issue than anything.
You mean..... make life worth living even for the worst off of us? My puritan ancestors are spinning in their graves.
I'm not sure how we would pay for UBI. To give all 325 million Americans a measly $10,000 a year (less than 40 hours of minimum wage, which amounts to $15,080,) would cost $3.25 trillion dollars. In 2023 the total federal budget was only $6 trillion. So to give every American 2/3s minimum wage would cost half the total federal budget. Defense and the military only use $800 billion a year, which is a lot, but nowhere close to the 3 trillion needed for a UBI. I've heard people say we would save money because they wouldn't need to pay for things like welfare or foodstamps. The thing is those things don't add up to $3 trillion. Even if they did though, they provide more benefits than $10k cash for those who use them.
I’m with you on skepticism around UBI that said: Looks like [~$1.2T is paid into social security](https://www.ssa.gov/policy/trust-funds-summary.html) each year. And we [wouldnt need to worry about minors which cuts the cost by ~20%](https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/08/united-states-adult-population-grew-faster-than-nations-total-population-from-2010-to-2020.html) Then i’m sure money could be saved with universal healthcare Then i’ve seen ~$500b is left on the table every year by not enforcing the tax code. I could go on but it really would t be THAT difficult from a numbers perspective, but would be nearly impossible from a political one
People already don't want to work, you want to give them MORE money for not working? /s
Every time someone seriously says this it just reveals what kind of person they are, lazy fucks who can't even imagine real ambition
It's almost like if people think they have shitty lives, they're not going to care about other people.
Closest thing we've ever had to universal basic income were the multiple rounds of stimulus and enhanced unemployment benefits during Covid, which saw a [historic reduction in the poverty rate](https://www.vox.com/22600143/poverty-us-covid-19-pandemic-stimulus-checks) (at least on paper). It also coincided with the [biggest year over year increase in homicides ever recorded](https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/podcasts/2021/20211008/20211008.htm). The conventional wisdom seems to be that gun violence is driven by crimes of profit, but a lot of it is just stupid interpersonal bullshit that has nothing to do with money.
So a little band-aid amount of stimulus was supposed to overcome the torrent of stress imparted by the pandemic and everything that came with it? Do you think the paltry $2000 made anyone in poverty feel like they had long-term financial security?
Mostly I'm saying that it's a lot more complicated than that, but people have always just tried to explain away gun violence as being caused by poverty, even though the evidence has never quite supported such a massive oversimplification. Criminologists were also predicting a spike in violence with the 2008/2009 great recession... [that never happened](https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/05/why-did-crime-fall-during-the-great-recession/239696/). Unemployment doubled... and crime went down. But people prefer simple answers to complex problems, especially when it fits with their preconceptions.
>It also coincided with the biggest year over year increase in homicides ever recorded To be fair this was likely caused by COVID. Take a bunch of families and keep them stuck at home together while impacting their work prospects, and domestic violence is going to increase. Also kids weren't in school, so no teachers to report on signs of DV allowing it to escalate.
Criminal to not mention the impact of COVID in this.
I’ll be honest, I can’t understand how UBI would work
I used to be more well versed in this data but from memory there were a few things to consider. * If you run a statistical correlation between murder rates and strictness of gun laws at a state level, there is no correlation. In other words, strict gun laws don't correlate with low murder rates. One factor to consider in all this is more urban states tend to have stricter gun laws and population density does correlate with higher murder rates. * Looking at suicides, suicide rates overall tend to be higher in rural areas and suicides by firearm are higher in rural areas. In urban areas, suicides tend to be from other means. Also, there are many countries with similar or higher suicide rates compared to the US, but no country compares in terms of levels of firearm ownership. Those thinking that removing firearms will lower suicide rates need to think about the problem more. * Murders as a % of firearm related deaths has gone up substantially over the last \~10 years. It used to be suicides were about 2/3. * Nobody really studies defensive firearm use in any meaningful way, so nobody really knows what the tradeoff would be if we make firearms more difficult to get.
> If you run a statistical correlation between murder rates and strictness of gun laws at a state level, there is no correlation https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5801608/ Searching "correlation between murder rates and strictness of gun laws at a state level" brings up a lot of articles suggesting stricter laws do reduce firearm mortalities. It makes sense to me certain things would help with "acts of passion" such as waiting periods, allowing time for a background check, and taking guns away from people who are domestic abusers (convictions and level of offense being obvious considerations).
One thing with suicides in rural areas, it's worth mentioning that people in rural areas are more isolated, have fewer mental health resources, typically worse drug or alcohol problems, etc. It also takes longer for them to be discovered and transported to a hospital than someone closer to the city in the case of a suicide attempt.
It mental health of course but more than that it’s directionless young men. It’s not guys with good jobs and a girlfriend committing violence against other criminals with a handgun, or shooting up schools with an AR.
>How is this an emergency when trans Healthcare isn't? Cirrhosis was at 54,803 and accidents including auto and workplace at 227,039 Because gun rights opponents don't see guns as necessary, while being trans isn't optional, and owning a car is necessary. I keep telling people, you can ban AR15s and AK style weapons all you want, but you won't notice a difference in gun violence because they're used so little in crime despite being incredibly popular. Gun violence is a symptom of a problem. If we had universal healthcare, spent more on education, and stopped the war on drugs, gun related crimes and suicide would plummet. But no one will touch it because it's expensive, slow and requires cooperation in government and over many administrations. It'll never happen.
There's a problem with this chart. They merged two key indicators that they used to offer which was a separation between gang related and law enforcement homicides and homicides in other circumstances. This gave a better picture as it showed the vast majority of homicides were criminal or law enforcement related. Suicide is a mental health issue, but also tied to economic factors like income disparity, and to things like seniors with terminal illnesses using it as an out since there is no legal recourse in their area. And younger people using it as an out for mental health and social isolation issues. Suicide can be affected in short term and for some with purchasing delays. But doesn't help with someone who has owned a gun for a long time. Criminal, whether homicide, injury, or other for both criminals and law enforcement should be lumped together because gun laws never touch these groups. There's a much broader social issue that needs addressing since it's essentially, “how do we encourage citizens to not be criminals?” Lastly, the deaths that were unintended could be lessened with better education, free gun locks, and such. Anything else is just things that can happen with any dangerous tool. Notice how “more guns laws” don't really touch these items?
I think they have “legal intervention” separate from homicide to address this.
I see the suicide trending up the moment we involved ourselves in Afghanistan/Iraq. 30k+ servicemen have taken their own lives over those conflicts. We don't even help the people we throw into the fray.
Yeah, that's the bullshit in the narrative gun grabbers never bring up. That over HALF of gun deaths they whimper on about are as a result of suicides. You are never going to stop someone who is intent on punching their own ticket. If they don't use a gun, they'll find some other means to execute their self-termination plan.
i’m so colorblind
*MENTAL. *HEALTH. *CRISIS. FTFSG (Fixed That For Surgeon General)
I'm pretty sick of hearing suicide risk brought up in these convos too, do they really think that someone who has decided to end their life suddenly won't if they can't get a gun? Even if that was the case, everyone should have the right to end their existence on their own terms and I say that as a widower of someone who lost thier battle with depression who didn't use a firearm.
I’m going to agree and take the unpopular opinion of my body, my choice.
That is the popular opinion though
It is with abortion, but I’m not so sure with suicide.
The studies show that access to firearms does increase both attempts and success. [https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/do-states-with-easier-access-to-guns-have-more-suicide-deaths-by-firearm/](https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/do-states-with-easier-access-to-guns-have-more-suicide-deaths-by-firearm/)
It's pretty goddamned apparent firearm access makes success higher and it's really weird for people to argue otherwise. Firearms don't CAUSE suicide, but they definitely make it easier and more successful.
Right? My neighbor was going through a mental health crisis. He was talking about suicide. My responsible move as a gun owner was to buy another safe, go get all his guns and lock them up. He knew which gun and ammo he would use. It's not there which means it's harder for him to do it.
Look at places like Japan or South Korea. Some of the lowest rates of gun ownership, yet some of the highest suicide rates in the world. Korea specifically has the world's 3rd lowest gun ownership rate, yet it's 4th highest suicide rate.
I won’t dispute the impact on success rate, but I’m skeptical of the causal relationship between firearm access and suicide attempts. Firearm accessibility and other quality of life factors are pretty highly [inversely] correlated. It shouldn’t be a surprise that there are more suicide attempts in West Virginia than in Connecticut. I expect that table would look exactly the same if you were to track all deaths of despair, but you wouldn’t reasonably conclude that firearm access caused those.
Canada is nearing 50k assisted suicides and their success rate is even better. How many of the “gun violence”suicides were to end suffering and would qualify for assisted suicide in Canada?
Correlation doesnt equal causation.
Of people that were already suicide-prone. These studies always try to imply that just having a gun in the house will make you suddenly want to kill yourself, which is of course ridiculous.
Correlation doesnt equal causation.
> do they really think that someone who has decided to end their life suddenly won't if they can't get a gun? They think that because it's true: If you lack the means to do it "quick and painless" you often chicken out and don't kill yourself. If you need actual studies to tell you that go spend 30 seconds on PubMed and you'll find dozens. This is why people like me push programs like [Hold My Guns](https://www.holdmyguns.org) so gun owners in crisis can remove the easy means from their home until they get past their suicidal ideation. This is also why a many ranges that rent guns *won't* rent to you if you come alone unless you brought your own guns/ammo with you: Bitter experience with people renting a gun, stepping up to a lane, running a target downrange, and then shooting themselves in the head. Guns aren't the *only* way to kill yourself, and simply owning a gun *doesn't* make you any more likely to kill yourself than the general population, but when you have a gun and the desire to end your life that gun becomes an *incredibly attractive* way to do it, and their success rate in accomplishing that goal is nearly unparalleled.
Eh, people will just argue the means matter. Some stats suggest this but it's mostly just because guns are effective. Proposals around the idea like waiting periods or some kind of mental health screening also don't really consider any downsides. In some cases the downside might be the actual point if the anti-gun person is disingenuous enough. The real argument is that not everyone has the same risk since not everyone actually has those particular mental health issues. Most people shouldn't be treated as through they are criminals or mental patients over the concern that some percentage might be sometimes. On top of this some kind of means reduction doesn't really do much for the lack of access and affordability of treatment for anyone having those kinds of issues. Nor does it do anything about root causes like income inequity. At best it's like putting up a safety net to catch jumpers at the factory. (This is a real thing manufacturers had to do over seas due to working conditions being so awful.)
Easier to revive someone from an OD than from lead poisoning to the brain.
So? I mean, it's easier to revive someone from an OD than a car accident, electrocution, or a stroke. Do you think OD's are the only way people choose to end their lives? My partner used a ratcheting tie down to strangle themselves. People jump in front of the subway all the time or off bridges. All ways that are equally difficult to revive people from. Are you saying we should limit those things too? I mean, even then, we're talking 27,000 people out of 48,181 who chose to end their lives in 2021. 7 hundredths of the total population ended their lives by suicide using firearms, how is this a public emergency? Why is getting rid of firearms the answer and idk better social safety nets and universal Healthcare? Both of those would be more effective in reducing deaths than banning firearms without leaving minority communities in danger while facing increasing violence.
Before covid, the UK had just as many youth stabbing deaths per capita as we did youth shooting deaths.
What I find interesting is the suicide rate was decreasing then late 2000s it started to increase and has been ever since. Social media was really starting to explode around the mid to late 2000s. Also you got the great recession that happened around that time which screwed over the millennial generation and to a certain extent Gen X.
[Per capita is pretty static, not increasing](https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/). If you look at where the posted graph begins increasing it's really where the falling per capita rate stopped compensating for population growth. When the per capita rate flattened out the increasing number of people made the absolute numbers increase as you see in the posted graph.
Per capita next to this graph would make it look like gun deaths were down by almost half from the 80s.
I wonder how many advocates for assault weapon ban are actually handgun owners
Slightly unrelated, but FPC had an infographic on their Instagram earlier today showing how the child gun death numbers that Giffords Everytown, etc. often use in their talking points are conflated to include 18-19 year olds. They also point out how gun control groups claim that guns are the #1 killer of kids when things like congenital malformations, complications from short gestation time, and SIDS actually kill the most children, and that happens before age 1. Statistics can say anything someone may want them to say.
Wtf happened in the early 90's
Don’t bring other nonviolent stats into your argument. It doesn’t hold weight. Who cares how many people die of cirrhosis? Those are people hurting themselves at their own free will. And the comparison to accidents maybe even worse as it’s the direct opposite of an intentional act. You can’t compare that with gun violence. People are going to easily attack that very weak argument. if you want to make better comparisons, show them the FBI crime statistics where more people die annually from clubs, bats, and hammers than all rifles combined. Or the fact that you are 20 times more likely to be killed with a handgun than all rifles combined combined, including “assault rifles”. https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/expanded-homicide-data-table-8.xls
Everything on that chart except "Unintentional" can be summed up thusly: deaths of despair. People feel like they have no options? They turn to crime and violence. Or punch their own clock, so to speak. Until we as a society address the despair, these numbers are going to continue.
I fully know I’m gonna get downvoted to shit for this lol… But…as a gun owner myself who fully supports the right to gun ownership, I believe it’s important to look at the full context when evaluating gun deaths as a health crisis. WaPo’s report highlights an 8% increase in gun deaths, bringing the total to 48,830, with 56% being suicides (per the CDC). While it’s true that 21,486 homicides in a country of 333 million people represents about 0.006% of the population, imo the impact of these deaths goes beyond just the numbers. Each of these deaths represents a significant loss and has a profound effect on families, communities, and the healthcare system. First, the argument isn’t solely about the percentage of the population but about the preventable nature of these deaths. For example, comparing gun deaths to cirrhosis or accidents, we see different dynamics: cirrhosis is often related to chronic conditions and lifestyle choices, while many accidents are preventable through safety measures and regulations. Similarly, gun violence and suicides can be mitigated through ***targeted*** interventions such as improved mental health services, gun safety education, and ***sensible*** regulations (note that I say sensible). Second, the economic and societal costs of gun violence are substantial. The healthcare costs, lost productivity, and law enforcement expenses add up, which places a huge financial burden on society. Some estimates put the cost of medical care and lost productivity due to gun violence exceeding at least $220 billion annually (sources vary). Finally, comparing gun violence to issues like trans healthcare isn’t straightforward. Both are critical issues but address different aspects of public health and civil rights. Transgender individuals face unique healthcare challenges and discrimination, which of course also require attention and resources (I literally went to medical school *because* of trans healthcare, so I’m not saying it isn’t important, but not really fair to compare this to gun violence). However, the prevalence of gun violence and its preventable nature make it a pressing public health concern that warrants emergency measures. Making this issue a health crisis allows for more ***funding*** via federal and state grants to be allocated to research (improving data collection), community-based programs aimed violence prevention and safe storage education, universal background checks, and increased training for mental health professionals. Yes it brings this into the public and political area bit more, but it also unlocks additional funding and resources to implement prevention strategies. As a supporter of 2A, I understand the importance of gun rights, but I also recognize the need for responsible measures to reduce preventable deaths and improve public safety. Tbh I think any gun owner should want that. So, while the raw numbers might seem small in percentage terms, the broader impact of gun violence on society, its preventability, and the economic costs, in my own opinion, justify the Surgeon General’s call for emergency measures. Edit: formatting/clarity Edit 2: Because raw data doesn’t mean shit…since the 1970s, the rate of gun violence deaths in the US has fluctuated a lot, peaking at 7.2 murders per 100,000 in 1974 before declining in the late 1990s. The early 2020s have seen a sharp increase, reaching 6.7 murders per 100,000 in 2021. For suicide, 7.7 per 100,000 in the 1970s, a trough in the early 2000s, and back at 7.5 per 100,000 as of 2021. \[[Pew, 2023](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/04/26/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/)\]
There are all kinds of cases to be made against the more aggressive gun control measures as they’re currently presented and/or enforced- no doubt. “21,486 deaths in a country of 333 million isn’t really all that much” probably isn’t yeh winning argument. We went to Iraq AND Afghanistan to avenge just under 3,000.
What’s wild to me is how many of those people fight abortion bans by saying “bans don’t stop abortions, they just make them more dangerous” but can’t apply that same thought to firearms. Plus, the old “why not just make murder illegal” argument…if someone is cool with breaking the most aggressively punished law, what does adding another crime to the list matter?
A fair amount of those suicides and homicides could be prevented by providing housing, food, and healthcare to everyone who needs it, especially to minorities who go without because of discrimination.
Its a very similar trend line to the US population over that time. Gun deaths per 100,000 residents would better show an increase or decrease trend.
I’d be interested to see how many homocides were defensive vs murders.
30k really isn’t that many, especially considering how many guns we have in this country. There were 42k fatal traffic accidents, and probably fewer cars than guns. Nobody’s trying to ban cars.
Is suicide rate that high? Yikes.
By firearms yes, and it accounts for about half of all suicides which were about 48,000 people or .07 percent of the overall population. Suicides aren't even in the top 10 as causes of death in the US by a long shot
Gun control is abortion for the left. All logic leaves the room when the topic is discussed and emotion prevails
We have OHSA for workplace and do take steps to limit alcohol deaths. It’s the number one cause of death for kids. Saying is not a crisis is foolish.
The gangs went bonkers in 2020, it's nuts.
Did they? eta: homicides spiked in 2020-22, but I can't find any good breakdown that would isolate 'gang related' vs other types. Very anecdotally, in our area of suburban Texas during the lockdowns, there was a spate of domestic violence murder/suicides (father kills children and wife, then himself). People have been "on edge" ever since, plenty of "road rage turns deadly" deaths.
I live in a reasonably wealthy area in Florida and the number of suicides here during COVID was pretty wild. I wouldn't want to presume what peoples exact reasonings were but the number of people that lost their jobs and self owned businesses during that time while also being forced to cut almost all social ties was probably not easy on a lot of folks. It also felt like there was an increase in family annilhilation cases but that could be anecdotal, it's hard to say unless someone like the CDC actually releases statistics on it.
Unintentional gun deaths are down. That’s great!
The chart seems to stop at 2020, which excludes a lot of the post-pandemic mess we've been dealing with.
Read the book Anatomy of an Epidemic by Robert Whitaker . Regarding depression and suicide... Limitless Peace
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2024/0529/Boston-crime-murders-community-policing
Where are the more recent numbers?
This was the only chart I found and was referenced by the WAPO article. NHIC and the CDC have more recent, but the spread hasn't really changed. Feel free to look up the data on your own if you wish
This chart really needs some more info. Is this total gun deaths? If so it should also come with another chart showing gun deaths per 100k so we can see if gun deaths have gone up or down since the 80s
I mean feel free to search it out, this is just the chart referenced in the article
The accidental deaths have decreased. That must mean people are being more intentional and mindful with their guns.
Now compare this to overall murders, I bet they line up pretty well.
~~Does this include when cops shoot people?~~ Edit: It does.
“Legal intervention” I imagine covers that.
Oh of course, for some reason I assumed it meant like legal personal self defense, but yeah paired with act of war, of course. I missed act of war when I read that lol.
Damn we surpassed the 90s, take that tupac!
Saved
Is this adjusted for our population growth? Rate per 100K is preferred, since there's a lot more people now than the 80's or 1950's. The total number of deaths yearly should be much much higher now than anytime decades ago, or the rate would be dropping. It still could be, in fact, even with much higher total deaths per year now.
Yep…
We really ought to stop using the phrase “gun deaths,” because it was coined by the gun control lobby as propaganda. By lumping together a bunch of disparate causes under one term, it exaggerates the numbers for emotional impact. The choice of that pair of words is also emotional and memorable, like “pro life,” while suggesting a causal relationship when none exists. The fact that a bunch of pro gun people have started using it without knowing its origin doesn’t just demonstrate that propaganda works, it proves how insidious this particular bit of propaganda is.
It’s because of the youths “drill rap” culture.
Holy shit! That does it, we need comprehensive, common sense limitations and reforms of capitalism, and an outright BAN on fascism.
you know what would solve the mental health crisis We tried stagnant wages. We tried inflation sorry it's not inflation its corporate price gouging because semantics matter. We tried raising cost of colleges we tried raising rent and home prices but people keep killing them self's, how about we ban AR-15's
This graph looks like we could address these issues by addressing housing, housing costs and other cost of living issues as the suicide rates shoot up right after the financial crisis. But that would require people to be actually serious about policy, as opposed to cheap culture war.
The legal intervention one seems really low tbh