I asked a young friend if he thought that America’s gun laws, including perhaps the Constitution, should be changed in response to the recent Charleston church shooting. Given the human bias towards action I was surprised that he responded “No, if you take away guns from people like that they will just find another even more destructive weapon.” A ghoulish speculation followed concerning the possibility that if Dylan Roof hadn’t a handgun he would have visited the same web sites as the Tsarnaev brothers and brought a pressure cooker bomb to a church potluck.
[Separately, this article reveals that Dylan Roof had been, in his 21 years, already supporting the twin pillars of the American legal industry: custody litigation and drug law enforcement.]
What do readers think? What, if anything, can we learn from this sad event?
Would these cowardly acts of gun violence still occur if the presumption was that most ordinary citizens were armed and carried their firearms with them as a matter of course, as it was back in the frontier days of our nation?
By the way, gun violence is actually down, way down from the 1980s: see point #3 of this article: http://www.ijreview.com/2015/06/347840-5-reasons-obamas-statement-on-the-charleston-shooting-is-highly-misleading/
Peter: Statistics should never be allowed to interfere with the voicing of a sincere emotion and desire!
We shouldn’t be basing gun laws on statistically uncommon events. If we do, we need to consider both sides and at least consider how many of these happen where all guns are banned and how few happen where at least licensed carry is legal.
Yes, let’s consider how many gun deaths occur where there are lots of guns, like the US, versus the number in other countries where there aren’t so many guns.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/06/18/you-have-to-see-how-many-more-people-are-killed-by-guns-in-america-to-really-believe-it/
Very astute answer. For example, in Austria today: http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/20/europe/austria-graz-car-hits-crowd/index.html
“Three people have died and dozens more are injured after a man drove into a crowd — on purpose, the local government says — Saturday in the Austrian city of Graz.
The 26-year-old male driver intentionally used his vehicle as a weapon, the Graz City Council said in a statement.”
If people are serious in their desire to reduce the murder rate in the United States (including murders committed with firearms), they would have more success if they tackled the root causes of most murders like poverty, illegal drug trade, domestic violence and alienation. (Alienation being a major factor contributing to all of these mass murders with firearms by this young adults that so many people are now so concerned about.)
Yes, the United States is a very wealthy nation in total, but its wealth is very unevenly distributed (and becoming more so). Many areas of United States are suffer from great poverty and it’s no coincidence that the murder rates of those areas of the U.S. are similar to the murder rates of third world countries.
The murder rate in the upper middle class and wealthier communities of the U.S. are as low as those found in the wealthier areas of Europe. Reduce the root causes of violent crimes and you’ll reduce the amount of violence committed with guns in the United States.
In countries where guns are difficult to get, mass killings are often done thru knife attacks or by use of flammable liquids to set buildings, buses, etc. on fire, etc.
The real danger of guns is that thousands of young black men use them to kill thousands of other young black men every year, often over drug disputes, minor perceived insults, etc.. But this doesn’t seem to excite anyone. Apparently it’s perfectly OK if you are murdered by a member of your own race, but to be murdered by a white person, esp. a cop, is a grievous insult.
If the number of guns in the US was comparable to other western countries ( zero handguns for civilians, zero automatics, no semi-automatics, rifles need a license) then there would almost certainly be a huge drop in the murder rate (and probably the suicide rate too).
However there is zero chance that this will happen any time soon (lets say the next 50 years) so it isn’t worth worrying about.
Murders by a crazy person are tragic and shocking, but if were to prioritize political action based on public harm, we should first address deaths from drug overdoses. This problem has quietly ballooned to where there are now 46 death per day (42k/yr) nationally from drug overdoses, 50% them from prescription drugs.
First step? Legalize Narcan/Naloxone, an opiate reversal drug that saves the lives of people who have overdosed but is only legal in 17 states.
Easy access to guns isn’t the root cause of these mass shootings by young men. The root issue is mental illness and the completely insufficient mental health care for the mentally ill, including the wisdom to make it required when the person can’t think straight for themselves. In some cases, this means care in a mental health hospital, not in the community.
See this book for a history of how the US systematically dismantled health care system for the mentally ill, back in the Kennedy era: http://www.amazon.com/American-Psychosis-Government-Destroyed-Treatment-ebook/dp/B00DW70FAI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1434864700&sr=1-1&keywords=american+psychosis
Izzie L., your first paragraph is laughable. When was the last time you saw a mass killing by one person using knives? Perhaps the most recent mass killing with knives was the 2014 Kunming attack. There 8 attackers managed to kill 29 people, so an average of 3.6 kills per attacker. How many more would they kill if they had guns? The notion that people would still kill each other at the same rate if guns were removed from the equation is totally idiotic.
GC, I agree that the easy access to guns is not the root cause of these shootings. However, if there was no easy access to guns, it would be much harder to have shootings, and killing with less sophisticated weapons is more difficult. If there was a more advanced weapon where the attacker need only press a button on their computer, then I am sure the kill rate would be even higher.
Violent crazies are just violent crazies and will perform violent crazy acts by whatever means available. Why are there thousands of documented acid attacks against women? Does any one think there is rhyme or reason or anything to be learned? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_throwing . No, just a lot of mental defectives who need to be removed from the public’s presence.
Tiago, look up Happy Land fire (no guns, one attacker, 87 dead) and Daegu subway fire (no guns, one attacker, 192 dead).
I’m glad to see that the community of Charleston chose the path of forgiveness and healing rather than listening to the Obama or his operatives in the media with their divisive cries of racism and gun control.
As I have said, Gun Free zones and laws forbidding or restricting law abiding citizens from owning or carry certain kinds of weapons in certain places is completely futile in stopping crime or preventing gun massacres. In a society where you have 350 million guns in private circulation — more than 1 per unit population — gun control legislation will only frustrate the lawful citizen, prevent effective self defense and create unhindered massacres. Why? Because the mass murderer, the robber, the gang banger, the terrorist or anyone intent of causing grievous harm will not obey those laws. Because they will also have plenty of access — legal or illegal — to weapons. Gun Control is an all or nothing proposition. If you want gun control you MUST start with amending the constitution, formulate some way to actually confiscate the 350 million guns already out there and create an air tight border capable of preventing guns from ever getting in in any significant quantity. Regardless of your philosophical persuasion, I think you should understand that the majority of Americans — basically everyone other than raving liberals (including those at Harvard) — basically support the 2nd Amendment and the right to bear arms. So good luck getting a majority much less the 2/3rds majority you need to even think about amending the constitution. You also need ratification by 3/4ths of the states and in the current landscape you can’t get there because there is no way some 20~22 of the mid-west and southern states will come along. In fact the fastest way for you to band guns in the USA will be for the Northeastern states and the west coast to secede from the Union and write their own constitution.
But lets say you succeed. How do you plan to confiscate 350 million guns when many of those gun owners probably won’t comply — either rebelling openly or hiding their weapons secretly. I’ll say a 70~80% compliance rate is extremely optimistic. That still leaves 70~105 million guns now all in the hands of law breakers. Are you any safer? Finally you must then contend with the reality that we can’t even keep drugs and illegals out. What makes you think we can keep guns out? If and when you do actually succeed, the USA will probably look like a maximum security prison. Is that what you want?
An easier way to prevent what happens n Charleston is to increase the odds that 1 or 2 of those in the church actually shoots back!
The real danger of guns is that thousands of young black men use them to kill thousands of other young black men every year, often over drug disputes, minor perceived insults, etc.. But this doesn’t seem to excite anyone. Apparently it’s perfectly OK if you are murdered by a member of your own race, but to be murdered by a white person, esp. a cop, is a grievous insult.
Every sentence of this paragraph is wrong. How can “the real danger” of guns be confined to only some of the crimes that they’re used to commit? Also, it’s absurd to assume that murders the families of murder victims don’t care about their deaths or that they or the police or people in their communities consider their deaths to be “perfectly OK”.
Philg: ‘Given the human bias towards action I was surprised that he responded ‘No, if you take away guns from people like that they will just find another even more destructive weapon.’
Not necessarily a statement based on facts.
There’s a lot more use of guns than the Charleston shooting
People are often lazy. If there isn’t an easy way to do something, they just might not do it. It appears there maybe fewer suicides (a large proportion of gun deaths) with fewer guns.
It seems that part of the motivation of events like the Charleston shooting is notoriety. If “more distractive weapons” were not much more difficult to obtain, one might guess that you’d already see more use of them.
Colin: “Very astute answer. For example, in Austria today:”
Except that example contradicts the “astute answer”.
Cars are much easier to obtain or prevalent than guns. If cars were “more destructive”, we’d see more use in this way of them.
In China, there are mass knifings and mass-automobile-runovers. Lack of gun ownership doesn’t prevent mass killings.
As always, the responsibility lies with the individual who chooses to commit the crime.