The study President Obama ordered the Center for disease control and other agencies to "immediately begin identifying the most pressing firearm related violence research problems". So far I have only read the summary and a few pages of the report itself. http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=18319&page=R1 A few facts reported seemed pretty obvious like alcohol use significantly increases chances of firearm related injuries or death. Some things were a little more surprising however: “Between the years 2000-2010 firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States,” (pg14) Some other significantly contributing factors were poverty, drug use, and lack of education. To me these facts support my own opinion that we should be more focused on raising up a generation of well educated, emotionally healthy people. Not that reducing violence(gun or otherwise), drug use, and poverty aren't important, I just think the best way to combat these problems is not necessarily to focus on them directly and separately.
But people who are not well educated and way too emotional cannot seem to be more focused on raising up a generation of well educated, emotionally healthy people.
The guy who just killed twelve people at a Naval Yard bought, legally, a Joe Biden approved walnut-stocked twelve-gauge pump-action shotgun (despite numerous media sources who quickly and falsely asserted that he used an AR-15), after passing a criminal background check, and shot up a bunch of people in a gun-free zone. Shortly before all this happened, he had called the police with paranoid delusions about microwave mind control and they lacked the knowledge, funding, background, or legal ability to do anything about it. Yeah, the problem wasn't background checks, it wasn't particular weapons available to the public, and it wasn't a lack of "gun-free zones." It's a totally broken mental health system. (For gang crime, substitute "social network and job training" for "mental health system").
Where did you hear that Mitlov? Not to try to derail the thread this early but that seems like an unnecessarily detailed description of the gun. Surely "a gun was used" would suffice?
That's how the news originally reported it, that the shooter used an AR-15. Prior to this event and after the Sandy Hook shooting when they were trying to come up with something for gun regulation, Joe Biden was interviewed saying "you don't need an assault weapon (AR-15), a shotgun will be fine." The media spun it like the shooter had an AR-15, but he had a shotgun. It really doesn't matter what kind of weapon it is (pistols, shotgun, assault wpn) but people get so spun up in it that laws and regulations that won't contribute to solving the problem are made, instead of focusing on the real issues, which is why this is relevant.
Where did I hear it? The FBI released pictures of it as well as video of the shooter moving through the building with it. Why does it matter? Because for a year now, a large faction of politicians have tried (successfully in many states, unsuccessfully at a national level) to ban popular types of rifles and handguns arguing that the legal sale of certain types of hardware are a primary issue in mass-shootings, that people can do things with an evil polymer adjustable-stock AR-15 that they couldn't do with a traditional-looking shotgun (VP Biden was very heavy on the shotgun-versus-AR-15 angle), etc. The fact that the latest massacre happened with a Remington 870 (a very traditional, immensely-popular pump-action shotgun) undermines this whole "the availability of AR-15s is to blame" angle that Bloomberg/Obama/etc are pushing. But whether you're talking about the Gabbie Giffords shooter, the Aurora theater shooter, the Sandy Hook shooter, or now the Naval Yard shooter, you're talking about very serious mental health issues in a country with almost no public mental health support. It's the same untreated-mental-illness problem that caused the Unabomber to go on a seventeen-year terror spree with bombings. The primary public provider of mental health care in the US is the prison system. If someone's family doesn't arrange for private care, that person is generally left to their own devices until they commit a crime.
Firearms are not the problem. The US has a socio-cultural problem that just happens to express itself via guns because guns are just everywhere in the US. Take away the guns and you get an upswing in knife crime. What would be a solution is to try and identify the underlying cause for that pent up aggression and desperation. But that won't happen any time soon because that's just leftist socialist crap and the real soution is to arm everyone with a handgun.
Cheers guys. The suicide statistic always depresses me. I don't really agree with guns causing violence, I agree with Count it seems to be something to do with American culture rather than firearms, but I do think access to guns make preventable suicides more likely to occur. Pepple might hesitate over a wrist slash or hanging up a noose, but a shotgun in your mouth seems a lot easier to do on impulse
Keep in mind that the suicide rate in the US is not actually higher than in the UK, and is notably lower than it is in continental Europe and in East Asia. It's just that Americans who have decided to end their lives tend to favor one particular methodology (which, let's face it, is a more comfortable way to go than most other ways), whereas people in other countries use a multitude of other mechanisms. But since the overall suicide rate in the US is as low or lower than most of the rest of the developed world, I don't think it should be the focus when talking about societal ills in the USA that need to be addressed. Suicide rate in the USA: 12.0 per 100,000 Suicide rate in the UK: 11.8 per 100,000 Suicide rate in France: 14.7 per 100,000 Suicide rate in Finland: 16.1 per 100,000 Suicide rate in Belgium: 17.0 per 100,000 Suicide rate in Russia: 20.2 per 100,000 Suicide rate in Japan: 21.7 per 100,000 Suicide rate in China: 22.0 per 100,000 Suicide rate in South Korea: 31.7 per 100,000 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_suicide_rate When people talk about 2/3s of US firearms deaths being suicides, you get the idea that the US has a suicide epidemic, and that's simply not true.
Nice bit of research. Have I missed something because this table says the opposite? US rates are higher, 12.0 versus 11.8 average. Not that it's a competition or anything.
.2 is probably not statistically relevant. They could both fluctuate over time and that .2 could just be part of the statistical "noise".
Point taken, although I don't put too much stock in it being only a tad higher than the UK's. Our understanding and treatment of mental health is...lacking to say the least. It was just how I felt though, I hadn't actually bothered to look it up since it was ridiculously early in the morning. The bolded bit though, again just my perspective, I've never taken that statistic to mean the US has a suicide problem. I've always thought that statistic was used more to say "we don't have a gun crime problem, most of the deaths in that number you see are suicides."
Sorry to go off topic but whoa!! What is happening in Greenland??!!! 108/100,00 per year? One in 5 expects to try to commit suicide in their lifetime!! I did notice that hangings were slightly above the shootings (46% v 37%) so who knows what is going on.... It can't be that bad in Greenland, can it?? LFD
I meant "not actually materially higher." The US and the UK rates are basically, for all intents and purposes, the same. These numbers were meant to correct the perception that Americans were just committing suicide left and right because of the availability of firearms. The US has two-thirds the suicide rate of continental Europe and one-half to one-third the suicide rate of East Asia. We've got one of the lowest suicide rates in the industrialized world.
We DO have a godawful mental health care system. But where that really shows itself to be a problem is with conditions that require inpatient care, like psychoses and schizophrenia. There are simply no resources for people who have those serious conditions that need high levels of treatment. Depression is a very different condition though. With depression, inpatient or institutionalized care rarely is needed, counseling is pretty widely available (particularly if you include amateur counseling by religious organizations and the like), and anti-depressant drugs are easy to get prescriptions for. So while our system is undeniably poor, where you really see the consequences for that are with psychotic or schizophrenic individuals, not people with depression. The Unabomber and most of these mass-shooters have had untreated psychoses or schizophrenia (a couple of the recent mass-shooters have had political or religious motivations, but for the most part they're the exception). And yes, the suicide rate thing is meant to show that the US firearms problem is not as bad as the media has made it out to be. Americans are three times more likely to be killed in a motor vehicle accident than a firearms homicide, and you don't see an international debate about our transportation systems.
There is evidence, though, that taking away an easy means of suicide does reduce suicides. From Psychology Today: Link: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/struck-living/201012/can-obstacle-prevent-suicide How do you jump from "two thirds of gun deaths are suicides" to "the US has a suicide epidemic"? I think you're building a straw man here.
Gun advocates love to make this comparison, but it's a weak point. Guns are weapons designed to kill people, whereas cars are vehicles that occasionally kill people by accident in the course of their essential intended function. And by the way, people are trying to make transportation systems safer all the time.
Actually there's a significant portion of the domestic gun industry that designs and markets for hunting, recreation and competition. And of course self defense is a valid application, although presenting it as simply "killing people" doesn't exactly highlight that. I have to say, the presence of violence (especially with guns) doesn't exactly make me less inclined to carry. When people are no longer violent, then I'll be happily unprepared for violence. If firearms could feasibly be removed from the US entirely, that's a workable solution from a safety standpoint, but they can't. With our large, porous borders, it's hard enough trying to get a handle on the things we've already banned. And that's not even considering the number of weapons already here, how many would be withheld from a "collection", and how many incidents it would cause. Waco went downhill pretty quickly, partially because the authorities played into the cultists' apocalyptic New World Order perceptions by sieging the place, and there's a strong parallel there to the far right's perceptions of government as a whole with regards to the gun issue. If only a small percent actually acted out violently, it'd still be a mess. Since it's not feasible to reliably deny weapons from the violent elements in our society, I can't see many of the reasonable elements being willing to disarm. We could definitely do with better background checks and better enforcement of existing regulations coupled with societal improvements. I just don't see guns to be the problem. Sure they're a contributing factor, but not one that can reliably or rightly be removed in our case.
According to that same CDC study that started this thread, firearms are used more frequently in the US to stop crimes than to commit crimes. Guns are tools that can kill, but their function is not to "murder innocent people." They can and are more frequently used for a lawful purpose than an unlawful purpose. Your argument about cars is "even though some deaths are associated with cars, we shouldn't take them away because they have other important benefits in society." This CDC study reveals the same is true of firearms*. Because they are frequently and successfully used to stop/prevent crimes ("used" includes holding a perpetrator at gunpoint until police arrive, not solelyl cases where a perpetrator is shot), taking guns away from the general populace is depriving the populace has other negative effects (i.e., taking away a widespread method of crime deterrence/defense). *Slate, a liberal news magazine with a very strong anti-gun editorial bias (just saying that so you don't think I'm quoting an NRA pamphlet to you), summarizing that portion of the CDC study as follows: http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._deaths_and_self_defense_findings_from_a.html
