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Biden renews call for assault weapons ban after ‘tragic and senseless’ spate of July 4 shootings
(www.independent.co.uk)
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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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I know that's not 100% mass shootings, but that's still a stunningly bleak number. Rounding up from the .97 that's five human lives every hour of 2023 up to July.
It's bad, but after watching over a million Americans die of COVID while (seemingly) half or more of the country refused to take - or often even acknowledge - the most basic of preventative measures... Well, I just don't know any longer.
Shootings are far less deadly, and that's a much more murky subject as there are plenty of justifiable reasons to own a gun. You also have to wonder how many deaths are Darwin Awards, or justified self defense... It's just an incredibly complicated subject compared to "hey guys, let's wear masks."
Those numbers are intentionally misleading, they are using people that killed themselves to prop up the numbers. It's disgusting.
Explain why they don’t count as gun deaths please.
Gun deaths aren’t the number that’s important. Homicides are
If one of my family or friends shot themself or was shot due to the negligence of a "responsible gun owner", I would consider that important.
Accidents are different than intentional suicide.
Does it matter that Kurt contain shot himself in the head any more than layne Staley OD’d on heroin? No, it doesn’t.
Take the shotgun away and contain would just find another way to kill himself
I'd say that the immediate effectiveness of a shotgun blast to the head means that suicide by firearm is harder to save someone from than from an overdose. Narcan is ineffective against buckshot.
You’re missing the point. He wanted to die. He will find a way. You can ‘save’ him only so many times before he succeeds.
Also, if someone wants to die, who are you to tell them they aren’t allowed?
If Cobain was saved from an overdose and received the help he needed, who knows what could have happened? A talented influential musician and an outspoken supporter of gay rights might still be with us. Instead he had access to a shotgun.
What’s important isn’t up to you to decide. A gun death is a gun death. They ALL count.
I think the main reason that some people are against counting suicides and accidental deaths is because it puts the lie to the narrative of the responsible gun owner.
Every time someone shoots themself in the head, or a toddler shoots a sibling, it's because of an irresponsible gun owner. Usually an irresponsible gun owner that considered themself to be a responsible gun owner.
And every gun owner considers themself to be a responsible gun owner.
Personally, as someone who thinks guns can be dangerous to everyone in anyone's hands (even the most experienced and safe can have a heart attack or find themselves in some other situation where being safe with their gun might suddenly be lower on the priority list than others around you might like it to be), I don't like including suicides in that stat because it makes it easier to disqualify.
It's just the way our minds work. If one has a position they believe in and some conflicting information comes up, unless they want to believe otherwise, they'll latch on to any angle they can to disqualify it.
Including suicides makes the stat very easy to disqualify. They can be painful but they aren't scary and don't seem random when they aren't close to home, plus that whole line of thought that they'd just find another way if they didn't have guns.
Though, also personally, I don't see why accidental gun deaths should be disqualified. If anything, they are worse than deliberate murders and assaults, because that "find another way" argument applies to deliberate attacks but doesn't to accidental shootings. Accidental shootings are 100% "the only reason anyone died here was because there was a gun present".
Suicide is not what first comes to mind when someone talks about gun violence or shootings. Nobody said they don't count - just that it's misleading.
It isn’t misleading at all. A gun death is a gun death to anyone who doesn’t have a bias.
Bias? The point is that you're not as likely to just be randomly shot at the street as those statistics might make it to seem.
I think in the US a lot of murders probably get classified as suicides, accidents, and self defense to avoid launching an expensive, dangerous investigation, so I would also say that suicides are overreported.
Is there any evidence to support this, or is it just what you think?
Proof? no, if there were proof our data would simply have to be better than it is. Are there a lot of statistical and geographical tendencies working against this data that are easily pointed out, yes.
The biggest ones: suicides usually occur in places where the body will be discovered and people who commit suicide tend to want to be found.
Homocides tend to be covered up more often or occur in more remote locations; lots of unsolved homocides end up as missing persons, especially in less dense areas. A few are staged as suicides or accidents.
So there's absolutely a tendency for the data to skew in certain directions. This isn't even addressing more chaotic problems liks a lack a lack of qualified coroners, incentives to not charge police who just riddle people with bullets, etc.
To be clear I can't stand the carnage and think it's one of the country's biggest faults. That being said, I'm not sure how what you've presented shows suicides as over reported. Suicide in a place likely to be found results in more accurate counting of suicide not extra deaths counted as suicide. Homicides being counted as missing persons doesn't over count suicide, it under counts homicide. Police shootings actually likely under count suicide since no police shooting is going to be labeled "suicide by cop". The qualified coroner thing is actually pretty crazy and a lot of places require little or no actual pathology knowledge, so who knows.
All this to say when we boil these tragedies down to numbers, when the discussion is assault weapons bans, suicides probably don't belong in the discussion. Disproportionally few suicides are committed with guns targeted by assault weapons bans. That doesn't remove suicide from the gun deaths discussion at all. If I might offer an unsubstantiated opinion of my own, I believe suicidal people are probably more likely to benefit from mental health intervention than the serial killers who are mass shooters. (Which is the only acceptable solution to the right, not that they're willing to pay for it.) Those a-hole attention whores ARE increasingly using guns that would likely be targeted in an AWB, and they're doing it because it helps grab the headline and gets the president to talk about how terrible what you did was. In the meanwhile this is going to remain political fodder for politicians and cannon fodder for the rest of us.
And those shouldn't count? Do you have any idea how much easy access to guns increases suicides? Many, many suicidal people would still be alive without the easy access to guns in the US. It's one of the easiest and painless ways to kill yourself.
Things like suicide are far more related to a lack mental healthcare and the stigma around getting help than weather or not people are allowed to own firearms. Not everyone has those kinds of problems. An assault weapons ban is certainly unrelated to those seeking self-harm and most crime.
Look at suicide rates in England when they switched from coal gas to natural gas. “Sticking your head in the oven” was an incredibly accessible and effective way to kill yourself.
When coal gas was taken away, all suicides dropped.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves-lives/
Why do pro gun Republicans always use mental health as an alternative reason for excessive firearm suicide rates, and then are nowhere to be heard from when someone proposes universal mental health access.
I'm a pro-gun leftist but, yeah, a lack of mental healthcare is an obvious issue when talking about mental health problems. There is absolutely no rational way for you to claim intentional suicide isn't a mental health issue.
If the issue was just guns existing you'd quickly be able to pass any gun laws you wanted due to the lack of gun owners. Plenty of people do not have mental health problems that would require them to be disarmed. No one is getting any treatment just because a gun ban got passed.
What I don't get is why Democrats don't call their bluff and try to create public healthcare options with the stated goal of preventing violence and issues related to mental health.
a gun makes it incredibly easy to end someone, including yourself. It takes the killing out of killing and I can promise you that makes a massive difference to the number of both killings and suicides.
England saw a decrease in suicide rates in the '60s & '70s last century when the levels of carbon monoxide in the natural gas supply were reduced. As a result of this change, people stopped being able to easily commit suicide by sticking their head in the unlit oven and turning it on.
It's not like these people were institutionalized and physically prevented from harming themselves. Making means of suicide too really available seems to allow people to kill themselves who otherwise would not attempt it.
Reducing access to guns- besides the obvious decrease in homicides - will likely cause a noteworthy reduction in suicide, too.
Not sure which part of "if you don't have access to a gun, then you literally can not shoot yourself" isn't connecting in your mind, but it is interesting to me that it's almost like people subconsciously fight themselves to avoid arriving there.
That's the price we pay for freedom.
/s
How much of that is suicide?
That's a fucked up amount of people damn
Shaping up to outpace automobile deaths. Not to imply that our rate of automobile deaths isn't also totally unacceptable, especially compared to peer nations...