I talked to a few friends in Manhattan who had gone to the anti-gun march on Saturday. It turned out that they weren’t truly “anti-gun.” I offered them a point of view to agree with: now that the US has 327 million people we can’t live under laws, such as the Second Amendment, designed for a spread-out country of 3-4 million. If you pack rats into a lab experiment tightly enough they are going to snap so why should they have guns?
But they wouldn’t agree with me! They wanted more bureaucracy. Restrictions on gun ownership that would somehow reduce shootings even as 99% of the guns remained. They were aware that the FBI and local police had ignored tips regarding the Florida school shooter, but they had faith in government bureaucracy to keep them safe.
[I don’t think that they were trying to soften their position to avoid offending me. The folks that I talked to know that I don’t own any guns.]
Readers: what did marchers in your area say they wanted?
Pretty sure the marchers (or Bloomberg & pals who paid for them) first want to ban facts like this: “1993-2013 data shows more guns, less gun violence”.
If the marchers knew what they wanted, they would have march for better teacher quality in the classrooms. But wait, that would be insulting teachers and hurting their feeling.
George A: There are 2.5 million primary and high school teachers in the US. Increasing teacher quality would be like asking that all programmers learn Haskell.
Attention.
What would you want if you were them?
More data points from my parents’ retirement complex on the DC Beltway… the 80somethings had their own march near the building. One woman explained that she didn’t want anything specific on guns but was just protesting “Trump”. Most of the oldsters had signs referencing grandchildren.
Jon: what would I want? Probably http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2018/02/24/if-the-second-amendment-is-incompatible-with-america-today/
I visited Austin this weekend. (It truely is a lovely city) I saw a protester with a sign: “ban assault weapons”. I’m sure the specifics of such a 3 word bill can be left to the courts.
Are 99% of guns capable of rapidly firing multiple rounds, and therefore useful for mass shootings?
Pro Tip: Better to have people think you have a gun than go on the internet and say you don’t own any.
And the very next day, on 60 Minutes [1], our marchers got a crash course SexEd from a porn star.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/stormy-daniels-describes-her-alleged-affair-with-donald-trump-60-minutes-interview/
I propose to push through legislations for traffic-violation-correlated people control: using surveillance-video-based traffic law enforcement (to avoid selective and often biased human-based traffic law enforcement), anyone with more than 3 traffic violations (speeding, change lanes without turning signals, etc.) will be banned to own firearms. Heck, they should be banned to drive as well, only allowing them to buy self-driving cars or use Uber (further contributing to the economy). Of course they could be offered to have their firearms back, e.g., by agreeing to be trained to reserve police officer’s standard at their own dime. The outcome? Likely reducing gun-related deaths by 5000/yr; byproduct? Likely reducing traffic-related deaths by 20000/yr, billions of $ saved from loss prevention, and tens of billions of $$ positive economic impact.
I have to go ask my sister-in-law…
Or I can wait to bring up the topic at the dinner table next Sunday.
I have yet to understand if Americans don’t ask for normal* gun laws, because they really want to keep some guns, or because they think you need to control the withdrawal, and push it bit by bit.
I’d posit it’s the first option, but not because they love guns, but because gun ownership is so ingrained into the culture.
It really is a case where The Onion headline makes a perfect good case: only country in the world where this happens keeps asking why (or something to this effect). As a European who has lived in the USA (but only MA), I share my continent-mates’ incredulity.
Why is it that Americans want to keep dying to bullets? In five years, more Americans die as result of gun homicides than those in the whole Vietnam war (If you count suicides, you don’t even need two years). Why is that Americans love guns so much? And don’t give me the second amendment crap – especially when you’re giving all your data to Facebook – if the government wanted to come after you, it’s not your guns that would save you. And if it’s for safety, we’ll, if guns make a country safe, then the USA should be the safest country in the wal.
The truth is, people love their guns, and for a vocal group, the deaths are an unfortunate but necessary side effect. And this vocal group has been so vocal that people don’t even dare (or perhaps just consider), the total banning of weapons (as in
European countries).
*as in most western developed countries
Francisco: I think that a big part of this is that murders in the U.S. are not randomly distributed. Some cities in the U.S. are as dangerous as the most dangerous countries on the planet. Many suburban neighborhoods, on the other hand, are quite safe. It is upsetting that Baltimore, Detroit, and New Orleans have a lot of murders, but it is not an urgent issue if you don’t live in one of these cities (and perhaps even not urgent if you DO live in one of these cities, but not in one of the neighborhoods where violence is common).
Asking “Why doesn’t someone who lives in a suburb of Minneapolis demand action because there are a lot of murders in the bad neighborhoods of Baltimore?” is analogous to asking “Why doesn’t someone in a safe neighborhood of Austin, Texas think it is urgent to address the high murder rate in Honduras or El Salvador?”
Suppose that we split up the U.S. into 10 different countries. Two of them (US-A and US-B) would contain cities such as Baltimore and St. Louis and have crazy high crime rates. Two of them (US-C and US-D) would consist of suburban and rural Americans with jobs that kept them busy 40+ hours/week. Would you expect the residents of US-C and US-D to care about bad stuff that was happening in US-A and US-B? Presumably not, since Americans don’t care about crime that happens in Venezuela, Honduras, South Africa, or El Salvador. Why, then, do you expect people to care simply because US-A through US-D are all nominally under the same political umbrella (“United by Trump”!)?
Tiago: What percentage of guns in the U.S. are semi-automatic like the one used in the recent Florida shooting? There is a debate about this in https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-of-guns-in-the-US-are-semiautomatics but it seems to be the majority.
Yes, indeed, distribution varies widely. One of the reasons I hate comparing the US as a whole to other, much smaller, less demographically diverse countries. Two sources of data (yeah, Foxnews, but mainstream media does not typically report data like this :-):
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/04/26/us-murders-concentrated-in-5-percent-counties.html
“… 68 percent of killings occurring in just 5 percent of the nation’s counties. The homicides also tend to be concentrated to relatively small pockets of those counties,…”
and
https://www.citylab.com/equity/2012/12/geography-us-gun-violence/4171/
“Moroz finds a close relationship between city unemployment and murder by gun (and has some nice scatter-graphs to show it). The correlation between city unemployment at the overall rate of gun deaths is considerable (.55), and the correlation between it and gun-related murders is even higher (.72).”
It’s the media on how it reports about gun shooting but ignore other facts: “On an average day 96 Americans are killed with guns” [1].
When you have a mass shooting, it becomes a national news, but the daily local shooting that exceed mass shooting never make it to the national news. What’s more, most American are lazy to look this up or bother to understand the issue.
For example, most American don’t know that more people die from car accident, daily vs. gun shooting [2].
[1] https://everytownresearch.org/gun-violence-by-the-numbers/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year
As it seems with most topics, those that hold the data have agendas to promote.
To your question – Marchers are marching because bad things are happening and something needs to be done. Who can rest easily with complacency on their conscience?
They want to not get shot at, but don’t realize that’s all they need to ask for. It isn’t necessary for them to suggest how Congress and state legislatures need to go about making it happen. They just need to demonstrate sufficient resolve to ask, and continue asking, until it happens, voting people with the right mindset into office as needed.
The ones I heard interviewed were embarrassingly incoherent. I began to wonder if some of them even could explain how they made it to high school.
philg: what you say makes total sense.
Yet:
– why do Californians and North Dakotans care about opiate deaths that mostly target Floridians or those from New Hampshire?
– why did some white folk care for civil rights of southern blacks?
– why did northern states care for the plight of the slaves in the south?
– why did Americans care to volunteer to die helping Europeans against the nazis?
– why does the country care about the water or air quality of towns thousands of miles away?
– why would heterosexual people (a majority) care about same-sex marriage that affects only a small minority?
The answer is that no one cares (cared) until they do. The reason(s) for this change is hard to pinpoint, but it most likely is related to the moment when the problem of others begins to collectively be perceived as their own – for both selfless and selfish reasons, either directly or indirectly, and from inner motivations or external imposition. We, collectively, answer the question: is it for my/our best interest?
People may not care about helping reduce the crime rates in Honduras or Haiti, but the outpouring of help when, say, a hurricane hits one of those places is very high. Because people can easily relate to some forms of injustice, but not others. Yet perceptions do change. Take the example of same-sex marriage: public activism started in the 1970s, first state to allow it with was MA in 2004 and eleven years later, all 50 states legalised it, some by popular will, others by legislative imposition.
Right now, as you correctly point out, Texas doesn’t care for crime in Honduras, and US-A doesn’t care enough for US-B. One can postulate that part of the work of (some) gun advocates is to maintain this relative perception of problems and make people distance themselves from one another. “Guns don’t kill people, people do” is precisely the embodiment of that idea – if guns killed people, the solution is easy: limit guns. But if people kill people, well then, these people aren’t my people.
This state of affairs will only change when the death of those others is felt as a sort of personal loss. And what is incomprehensible for non-American westerners is that this mindset is almost an exclusive American idiosyncrasy. Especially when it exists to protect a right that most of us consider an obsolete leftover of bygone days.
—
Now, if one is interested in change, how does one go about it? Appeal to reason? Appeal to emotion? Impose the will of some?
One interesting fact is that many gun defenders argue is that it is not a matter of gun availability, it’s a matter of culture. The problem is how does one test this? It’s hard to just remove all guns from one certain community and observe the result (or flood one with guns). And comparing different societies is always difficult.
But we can try: take the UK and Switzerland. They are both highly developed, rich, developed European countries, with rule of law and functioning justice systems.
The UK is a far more violent society than Switzerland. Their murder rate is 1.14 (deaths per 100k inhabitants, now and henceforth)
Switzerland, on the other hand, has a murder rate of 0.70. But Swiss people, to a lesser degree, but with some similarities to the USA, likes their guns. Private ownership is around 24.45 (per 100 people). This leads to about 0.21 gun homicide rate.
The UK on the other hand has a gun homicide rate of 0.05. This likely has to do with the fact that private gun ownership is extremely low at 3.78. None of these numbers include gun suicides, which follow the same trend (these numbers are aggregates from different years, ref. Quora answer based on GunPolicy.org at https://www.quora.com/Why-is-there-so-much-opposition-to-gun-control-in-the-United-States/answer/Chris-Everett/comment/51312311#)
Does gun presence necessarily lead to violence? No. Countries like Germany or Finland have high rates of gun ownership and low overall gun violence. It would be interesting to see these numbers if one “controlling” gun ownership for local gun laws, with some way of weight-averaging gun ownership and overall ease to acquire and maintain guns. But this example is a good one to show that guns exacerbate the inherent violence of a community.
Mark: I, on the contrary, heard very coherent and collected answers. I suppose the sampling wasn’t controlled, so I can’t really say how representative. But hearing some of those young kids talk would make me feel like a proud American, if I were an American. Not being one, I still feel good, as a human being.
PS: in the interviews I heard, there were a couple of parents whose children had been killed through gun violence. It was astounding to me to hear these people, civilians, talking about these people – own family members – being slain like war casualties, all with a seemingly nonchalant normalcy, as if it were just an acceptable part of everyday life.
anon: the plots certainly reveal that the increase in gun ownership in the US is not correlating to an increase in gun homicides, true.
But take this interesting sentence in the body of the article (highlight is mine):
«By 2013 (most recent year available), the gun homicide rate had fallen by nearly 50% to *only* 3.6 homicides per 100,000 population.»
Only 3.6. Only. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate). Except for Montenegro or Cyprus, no European Country has a rate higher than 1 per 100k people, the vast majority below 0.5. It’s 7 times higher in the USA.
Finally, private gun ownership is increasing in total number. But total households with guns is actually decreasing: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/06/29/american-gun-ownership-is-now-at-a-30-year-low/?utm_term=.4b6a689ada4e
Which means, that the number of armed individuals seems to be stable, they just have been stockpiling more weapons. Why not correlate this data with Gun homicide? Then a possible conclusion is that the problem is the number of armed individuals, not the amount of weapons they have.
Francisco: “why do Californians and North Dakotans care about opiate deaths that mostly target Floridians or those from New Hampshire?” I know that people in California SAY that they care about opiate deaths, but they don’t actually care enough to, for example, work to stop Medicaid from paying for opioids. The interest of physicians, pharmacists, and drug companies in harvesting tax dollars is larger than the interest of voters in stopping opioid overdoses (8X more common than gun homicides). [Also, it doesn’t look as though drug overdose deaths vary as much by locality as gun homicides. California has 11 per 100,000 population. NH has 39 per 100,000 (mostly in January?). Florida has 24 per 100,000, not too different from the U.S. average of 20. See Kaiser Family Foundation stats.]
“why did some white folk care for civil rights of southern blacks?” How many white people in the North cared about blacks in the South? I would say “not too many” considering that the U.S. operated slavery for an entire generation after it had been eliminated in the British Empire. Then it was nearly 100 years after emancipation that Americans were integrated by law (Eisenhower Administration).
Same-sex marriage does not seem to be an example of people sacrificing their private benefit to help strangers. In my home state, for example, it was judges who forced the legalization of same-sex marriage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_Massachusetts ;
Judges and their friends who are still lawyers in practice get paid when citizens sue each other for divorce (a decent Boston-area family law practitioner will earn $1 million per year). So a judge voting to expand the number of people who can sue each other and spend 100 percent (or more!) of their assets on legal fees is a self-interested vote (see http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Massachusetts for the system into which same-sex couples are now included).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Same-sex_marriage_in_the_United_States#History suggests that in the U.S. non-lawyer citizens (who can’t make money when someone sues his or her spouse) affirmatively voted to ban same-sex marriage. It was lawyers (who do make money whenever there is a lawsuit) appointed as judges who imposed same-sex marriage on an unwilling population.
“why did Americans care to volunteer to die helping Europeans against the nazis?” That’s a good question! I didn’t mean to suggest that altruism didn’t exist. There are a handful of heroes and saints among us, though not usually a voting majority!
philg: I’m not saying that there aren’t short- or medium-term interests dictating or preventing these societal changes.
But in the long run, independently of how these changes happened (imposed by law, by popular demand, etc.) we do not usually see these changes being reversed. That means that either people accept them, or whatever was preventing the change, once it happens, no longer seems relevant enough for the majority to fight for the old status quo.
Regarding opiates, yes, you’re right. And I’m not claiming I can predict the future, but I’ll bet the attitude towards opiates will change. The special interests you name are not dissimilar to those of the tobacco industry back in the (not so distant) day. In the late 80’s, only 17% of the public wanted smoking totally banned from Restaurants and Workplaces. In 2010, these numbers were 59% and 44%. [1] Now 57% of Americans say smoking in ALL public places should be illegal. [2] And there were far less people dropping dead from tobacco. First people are against it, then they say they’re for it (just words, no action), then they act. Sometimes it’s just a minority acting, but in some cases, they seem to convince the majority.
Regarding slavery, true, not too many. Humanity has had millennia of slavery, so if you add up all of these, there’s even less, considering the whole picture. Yet things changed. Took a little longer in the USA, sure, and probably some people aren’t still entirely convinced, but you’d find it hard to return to those days, in a widespread fashion (although still some pick cotton to earn their freedom [3]).
Regarding gay marriage, it may be a Judges & Lawyers conspiracy, but the people are buying it:
«Indeed, a September [2013] poll this year found that 85% of Massachusetts voters saw a positive or little to no impact from gay marriages in the commonwealth. In the poll, voters in the state support legalizing gay marriage 60% to 29%.» [4] Nationwide, in 2001, Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 57% to 35%, but in 2017, a majority of Americans (62%) support same-sex marriage, while 32% oppose it. [5] They may not be sacrificing private benefit, but they certainly sacrificed their prior convictions. Heck, you may even see lawyers are doing god’s work! (or the devil’s, depending on your persuasion).
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not saying modern societies produce more saints and heroes, nor that altruism is on the rise. I’m not ascribing gay marriage to a sudden increase in human decency, although human decency may have increased with the whole endeavour. But I view these things as a evolutionary processes, and apparently it seems that societies that “get along” tend to stick around for longer.
[1] – http://news.gallup.com/poll/1717/tobacco-smoking.aspx
[2] – http://news.gallup.com/poll/214373/support-banning-public-smoking-holding-steady.aspx
[3] – https://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/22/as_black_youth_are_locked_up
[4] – http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/10th-anniversary-marriage-equality-ma
[5] – http://www.pewforum.org/fact-sheet/changing-attitudes-on-gay-marriage/
Francisco: Of course the lawyers ARE doing God’s work. Because the end-result of a same-sex divorce is a trial and a decision by a judge, the lawyers by definition are delivering “justice” to their clients (even if the property over which they were fighting had to be liquidated in order to pay the legal fees).
Philip: “If you pack rats into a lab experiment tightly enough they are going to snap so why should they have guns?”
To protect themselves from the ones that have already snapped? 😉
Seriously, I have very mixed reactions over the marches. On the one hand, as someone who grew up during the 60s I’ve wondered why there isn’t more demonstrating? In the 60s people demonstrated about a lot of things… the war, civil rights, the environment, etc. And that had results! But for decades now it seems few people could be bothered. So, I’m happy to see people, especially young people, demonstrating for something that matters to them.
On the other hand, as someone who’s been actively shooting pistols and rifles for 47 years I’m naturally not happy that they’re demonstrating against something I’m engaged in… But overall I’m happy they’re protesting about something that affects their lives.
I think the biggest thing a lot of shooters are worried about is that we already have to deal with a lot of burdensome regulations, and we’re afraid that more ineffectual laws will be passed that we’ll have to deal with, but that won’t solve the crisis of mass shootings. And thus we fear the cycle of still more ineffective regulations, and continuing deaths ad infinitum.
If another assault weapons ban happens (which seems likely) it’s certainly not going to make a difference anytime soon. The AR15 is by far the most popular gun with all the shooters I know. (I have one – it’s the only rifle that you can shoot in the service rifle category of the National Matches that is competitive). It’s popular because it’s relatively inexpensive, can be made extremely accurate, can easily be accessorized (because it’s modular), and shoots very small and therefore inexpensive ammunition. Therefore, there are HUGE numbers of them already out there. And unlike Australia, I think that if the U.S. tried to confiscate them there would be armed resistance. So, we’re stuck with large numbers of assault weapons for at least the next 4 decades, even if you ban them now.
There are probably more effective ways to try to stop the mass shootings.
Paul: I think Tyler Cowen also notes the lack of protests in modern U.S. society compared to the 1960s. He says that this is part of the increasing stasis for Americans. The current generation is less likely to move for a job, protest, etc. See http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/03/31/tyler-cowen-asks-if-we-can-do-big-projects/
Separately, are you sure that the 1960s protests accomplished anything? It took a long time for the U.S. to admit defeat in Vietnam. How much longer could we have dragged out our loss? (to some citizens with rifles very much like the AR-15!) Same question on the environmental protests. Nobody could breathe in LA, for example, so it was obvious that we would need cars with reduced emissions. Other countries have ended up adopting these after their cities got filthy and they didn’t have protest marches. Civil rights? If we draw a trend line of integration from World War II to the present, do we see any change in the rate of integration the coincided with protests? Maybe if anything it was the opposite? Civil unrest in the U.S. cities led to white Americans fleeing to the suburbs.
It’s always difficult/dangerous trying to puzzle out cause vs effect, but I can say that in my family, the protests against the war definitely had an effect. My parents were staunch Republicans, and like many people of the times fully supported the President simply because he was the President. (Even if he was a damn Democrat). Over time they changed their opinion, and I don’t think it was the body count… They had just gone through WW2 as teenagers, and then again Korea, so they were used to large body counts in times of war. I think the campus protests and unrest affected their thinking, and like a lot of middle class white parents shifted them more and more into the anti-war camp. Kent State was probably the last straw for them.