>rather than the woeful lack of mental health care and easy access to guns
Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.
Well, California leads the pack on mass school shootings with the toughest gun laws around, and it is the 28th lowest in rank in mental health ranking in 2022 per this reference which weighs 15 factors:
Interestingly, a small percentage of violent crime is directly attributed to mental health issues. Most self harm.
The definition of "mass shooting" leads to discrepancies like 20 vs. 600 for 2020 depending on which agencies definition is used. By number it looks bad for the US even if per capita compared to other countries. But more than half of all gun deaths in the US are suicides, and mass shootings are less than 0.5 or 0.2 percent of all homicides depending on which span of years you use.
I am a less of a gun control advocate than one for mental health access and prophylactic measures. Gun control is a red herring. The genie is out of the bottle. Bad people will procure guns or make them from parts or scratch. Not that hard really given the demand and money available to do it by drug cartels and other criminal organizations. Politicians keep saying "Guns are the number one killer of kids in the US". Based on a NEJM study that defines "kids" as 1 to 19 years of age. 18 and 19-year-olds are adults. Most deaths involving guns occur in the 17 to 19-year-old span are typically gang related. It also includes suicides ("In 2021, 54% of all gun-related deaths in the U.S. were suicides (26,328), while 43% were murders (20,958), according to the CDC.") and citizens defending themselves with guns and being successful at it along with the police shootings in self defense.
Suicides still occur in relatively large numbers in countries with few guns in the hands of their citizens. They just use another method.
You underestimate the amount of guns that would be made to meet the demand once all free and legal means are shutdown. Have you ever heard of a zip gun? Kids were making these from door bolts decades ago when they couldn't get their hands on a gun.
I just can’t understand the US’ rationalisation of the current state of gun regulation being ok. So only 21,000 of the year’s gun deaths were murders… here in the UK where we cracked down on firearms after the first instance of a school shooting there 35 murders with a firearm in 2021.
And I just can't understand how people use one cause for an effect: London is in the top 10 surveilled cities in the world after China, and UK laws like Section 60 allows stop and search without suspicion. Yeah, it's gun control that lowered the murders in the UK, and I am sure you are good with the UK turning into a real version of Orwell's 1984.
Statistics need context. The term "mass shooting" is defined differently by different agencies/organizations in the US as well as all over the world.
England also has the highest rate of tornadoes per land area in the world, but nobody would think they were at risk for being harmed by a tornado in England vs. the US.
That the definition changes only affects arguments about the type of gun. Low-count definitions correlate assault-style rifles that California has tried to ban. High-count definitions correlate with handguns.
You started with school shootings, singling out California. Texas is by far more prone to mass shootings and I wager statistically equal to California per-capita.
Hawaii has nearly-as-strict gun laws as California but incomparably lower violence by any measure. It’s a better example of your argument. The linked mental health web site ranks it at 7.
On the other hand, the death toll in undisputed mass shootings has skyrocketed since the defeat of the assault weapons ban.
the Hawaii example imo just shows that gun laws work better when they are broadly implimented. to get a gun to Hawaii you need to fly somewhere to buy it. to get one to California, you can just drive to Nevada
More causes than an assault weapons ban. The harm of the COVID lockdowns, Zooming classes, social unrest and division over some real and some social media-induced idiocy, decline of the family, mental health issues, lax criminal prosecution, riots called 'peaceful demonstration', etc. I met a 24-year-old the other day and told them I was in Saudi Arabia and they asked me, "What's that? I never heard of that." I am raising a second set of children. My older children did great, even through some of this idiocy. I am very vigilent with my younger children. I have had a gun since I was eleven years old, and I grew up in Brooklyn, NY. I learned to shoot and handle firearms with respect and safety and shot competitively against the likes of West Point and other military schools and organizations. If you want strict gun control, highest camera surveillance, and police stop and search without suspicion, move to China or England (in the top 10 after China). I'll keep my right to bear arms. I don't keep a gun ready for home protection. I could get it ready in a relatively short time in case of societal upheaval or disorder, if needed, to protect my family. Better to have it than to not have it in those circumstances. 54% of all gun violence deaths are suicides. Another portion are police shooting criminals for self-defense or citizens protecting themselves against criminals. And most younger homicides occur in the 17 to 19-year-old age group due to gang violence. Mass shootings are horrific by their very nature, but not the norm. Stabbing deaths and injuries are more common in Europe than in the Americas[1]. And this is rising. China has no right to have firearms, but they do not share stabbings data. It is estimated to be high based on some news and data released, but cannot be verified.
> Well, California leads the pack on mass school shootings with the toughest gun laws around
If it's not a per-capita statistic, then it's basically just a population map as CA is the most populous state by far. A quick google search shows the top 3 states are CA, TX and FL - ie, the 3 most populous states in the US.
As an ex-Californian, I observed the state transition from high trust, high social cohesion to low trust low social cohesion. Myriad factors involved, over a long time frame.
I’m about as liberal and “woke” as can be, and I agree. If we somehow managed to remove most guns from the US, we would still kill ourselves and each other with bombs, knives, poison, and our enormous vehicles. Driving into crowds seems to be getting more popular, for instance.
Sure Americans would still kill each other without guns, but would they do so to the same degree? Even if the exact same intent exists, if things are harder to do, they won't get done as much. After all, many people have cars in Japan, England, and any other country with strict gun controls, and they don't see the same levels of violence.
If ice cream is 100 paces away from you, you're less likely to eat it than if it's right in front of you. It's basic psychology that the greater the friction to satisfy our impulses, the less likely we are driven by them. It's maddeningly obvious. Similarly if everyone else was eating ice cream. We're social creatures, we emulate what we see others do.
This is the frustrating thing about this topic: it's a discussion about harm reduction, but people don't treat it that way and just throw up their hands and say 'oh it'd be the same without' when the data and logic don't support that.
In decision making parlance, it's a classic perfect is the enemy of the good response. In HN parlance, this is a question of floats not ints. In gamer parlance, this is a question of DPS and AOE, and how much nerfing guns lowers it. I don't know how many more ways we can say it to get through to folks.
But the point is it wouldn't be as easy for an untrained person to kill as many people at once as it is now, and cops wouldn't be as terrified to go up against the killer as they are now when they know an AR is in play.
Mass shootings did not only start happening a few decades ago. The Texas University shooting occurred in '66. That seems to line up with a timeline of surplus cheap, military grade firearms trickling into society.
when my my mom went to the same high school I did, 30 years earlier (70s), kids would leave hunting rifles and shotguns in racks in their unlocked pickup trucks in the school parking lot and nobody gave a shit or felt threatened at all whatsoever. nobody stole these guns and used them to commit crimes, at the school or elsewhere.
> Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.
Except that these drugs are likely used in lots of places in the world, and that large school shootings often is a uniquely American concept.
Not to the same degree. The United States is a major outlier on this. Psychiatric medication, in general, are prescribed at much higher rates than in most other wealthy countries. And not by like 50% more, but like two times or even ten times more, depending on the drug class. In particular, putting children on antidepressants, benzodiazepines, antipsychotics, or stimulants is much less common in most places.
Similarly, among the general population, Americans use some 3x as much benzodiazepines per capita as Canadians. And the Canadians are drug crazed compared to the Australians, who use about half what the Canadians do.
I'm referencing times that I wasn't a part of, but my impression was that mass shootings weren't so popularized until Columbine. Previously, mass shootings were simply not something that crossed people's minds as something they could do. I suspect that now it's "trendy" for mentally deranged people to shoot up a building, but it will eventually pass, just like how there used to be a lot of serial killers in the 80s.
Vegas shooting was done by a(presumably fired) contractor who ran a CIA funded safe house on American soil. They used special munitions only government agencies can buy.
Before the shooting it was accounted (and reported in papers) a homeless woman was shouting (paraphrased) “they’re going to shoot you, you’re all going to die!” The man who did the shooting was a white terrorist and these run government contracted “safe houses” all over America.
The armor piercing rounds. Haig said he sold them personally, though Arizona is the home of America’s most elite thought control programs (also a nest of white terror, gestating in the cul de sac of sheriff Joe’s prisons.)
the populous wants to hold hands and sings together these days. Even cp and lgbt goes to country and western concerts.
White hate has an erotic desire for the mayhem. These don’t mind collateral damage. Particularly where this true motive will not be suspected.
If you’ve ever wondered how does this whole terror thing work if everyone thinks the assailants are such degenerates?
The devastation is for you. The “purpose” is for someone else. Someone disgruntled, someone proving anyone can be gotten to at any time, someone proving to their like minded that they will go as far as it takes (where others will not go “far enough”), someone sending a coercive message (think the govs will tell you they’re being extorted?)
Terror is a ploy, not a reasonable dialogue. They’re not trying to tell “you” anything, other than the futility that “nothing you can do about it”. That is how submission works.
And I am describing Power here, those of the voices in our heads. Not some actions of a lone gunman.
The woman and the munitions (and the white guy) were all described in various news sources.
The “civilian” run CIA contracted safe houses you may take with grains of salt, yet this is how things have been done for a long while. The CIA actually lost some of their best operatives, assassinated on US soil by this thought control power coup.
Also their navy seals, marine super soldiers, and countless others (who will go on uncounted.)
Whitemanistan America has been the most dangerous place in the world for lawful military assets over the last 6 years.
> mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago
There are instances of people running amok with firearms in the early 20th and 19th centuries:
> On August 13, 1903 [in Winfield, Kansas], 30-year-old Gilbert Twigg, armed with a 12-gauge double-barrelled shotgun, opened fire at a concert, killing six people and wounding at least 25, before killing himself. Three others died in hospitals afterward.
If we allow for clubs and knives alongside firearms, I'm fairly sure the phenomenon has happened since the beginning of time.
It was certainly rarer in the past. High-powered firearms were less common. And I think the very idea was simply less common. I suspect it's a mimetic virus, basically, a type of social contagion. They need to be an angry sociopath to begin with. And then they need the idea planted in their head. And it needs to be re-enforced repeatedly, a chain of thought that becomes inhabited in their minds, until it becomes realized.
The pattern of media coverage, outrage, and social modification in response (metal detectors in schools, etc.) is doing that re-enforcement. A shooter's face will be in the media, they will be the most hated person in their immediate community for the rest of living memory, and they will be the most hated figure nationally for about 15 minutes. The victim community might even be so terrified as to modify the law and policies at schools because of it. If there's any emotion that could sum up the motivation for the average spree killing, it's a generalized revenge on society. Those reactions are rewarding to someone who is seeking revenge; they made their impact.
You mean to say they started a few decades ago, around the time actual high quality guns began hitting mass adoption in the US? Sure, we've always had guns, but it wasn't until after WW2 that actually decent quality guns began filtering down to the masses. Within a couple decades most gun owners had significantly higher quality arms than would have been available just a couple decades before.
WW2 ended 77 years ago. Surplus guns like the M1 carbine (“assault rifle” equivalent) were available mail order, no background check, for $20.
A lot of time and other things changed in culture before mass shootings and crime took off. Television for one, deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill, drug culture, immigration reform, Vietnam war. If you believe that latent school shooting desire was always present, and just lacked a tool, you’d probably see it manifest in some way.
Mental health care, well I’d use a different word than “care”, but the institution system took a lot of crazies off the street. It had a lot of other issues too but it may be time to revisit it instead of just passing out pills to everyone.
As for why we see more mass shootings today I think you need to consider that until the late 90s a shooter wouldn’t get publicity outside of their locale. So copycat shootings didn’t occur. On top of that the insane amount of psychoactive pills we prescribe. And no way to get people off the street early via institutions.
Lastly a general decay in our society, family structures, and communities.
Easy access to guns and lack of mental health care has been a thing in the US for over a century, but curiously mass shootings only started happening a few decades ago, so maybe something else is the cause? Interestingly mass shootings started happening around the time that certain psychiatric medications came into widespread usage, medications for which homicidal ideation is a know but very rare side effect. It makes sense that even if a side effect is super rare, when millions of people start taking the drug you'd expect the rare effect to happen on a regular basis.