DogofWar1

We'd end up re-electing about 80% of our officials, and the 20% we kicked out would change parties with new votes of no confidence about every 6 months. "Mass shooting!? No confidence in President Obama!" "Market bubble? No confidence in President Romney!" "A report about how China is totally beating us in X Sector! No confidence in President Kaine!" "That report was false!? No confidence in President Ryan!" Meanwhile, no progress happens because everyone still loves their Congressperson and partisanship prevents anything from happening.

Ah true. I suppose then there's two questions. What is the UK's procedure for another referendum killing the first? I imagine calling for another one is procedural, and could be done as quickly as politically feasible, which seems unlikely right now, but if outrage over the economic consequences (and NHS promise) is strong enough, maybe the pushback will prevent leaving. And then if they do file for exit via Article 50, what is the likelihood that if they attempted re-entry in a couple years, it'd go smoothly? My understanding is that entry into the EU requires negotiating a lot of policies, in something like 35 policy areas. Unless the EU falls into complete turmoil (which is a possibility, but unsure how likely), how likely is it that the EU would extract some major concessions?

Question. If the UK decided they messed up, could they seek re-entry? I imagine yes, but after how long? What kind of concessions would they have to make?

Relevant: https://www.instagram.com/p/BG_n6oAioFO/

I don't know much about Boris Johnson or other "Leave" leaders, but from the statements I've heard from them, their quotes, etc., they seem articulate at the very least. That is in stark contrast to Trump's flailing narcissism. He is so absurd in everything he does, that the bar for people to buy in to what he's selling, I think, is higher. There are certainly some events that could push him upwards, but I don't think his arguments alone, in the present climate, with his mannerisms, will carry him to victory. I wonder if the German theater shooting changed anyone's mind yesterday. Early on, reports of 25 people dead with some rumors/reports of ties to ISIS or refugees might have increased fear across the UK. Obviously, initial reports are now known to have been somewhat hyperbolic, but by the time full details emerged, I imagine much of the UK had already voted.

I would love to see polls of the different areas of the UK on the question of stay or leave taken between, say, next Monday and next Friday, after the market tumble has happened. What are the odds of significant buyer's remorse? Pretty high I'd imagine.

Wikipedia has some good comparisons. Agh, dang it, the chart didn't translate well. *grumble grumble manually grumble grumble* Total Firearm Related Deaths per 100,000 people (US data for 2014, Germany for 2012): US: 10.54 GER: 1.01 Homicides: US: 3.43 GER: .07 Suicides: US: 6.69 GER: .84 Unintentional: US: .18 GER: .01 Undetermined: US: .08 GER: .08 And this goes with the mass shooting rate information where, controlling for population, mass shootings are about 5.5X more common in the US than in Germany.

It mostly has. Between 2000 and 2014, Germany had 6 mass shootings to the US' 133. Germany has approximately 1/4th the population of Germany, so controlling for population, Germany still had 5.5 times as many mass shootings as the US. Further, Germany's mass shooting fatality rate was 1/3rd of the US' per 100,000 people. This shooting is sad and terrible. It also does not change the fact that Germany has been much safer, and is still much safer, than the US, in regards to mass shootings. Germany certainly has stricter laws, definitely, but there are still plenty of guns around, it is estimated there are about 45 million guns in Germany. They are not not-present. Indeed, the fact that gun ownership is still pretty widespread in Germany AND they've had success should probably serve as something of a blueprint for us, with changes to account for our Constitution. In light of this new shooting, Germany will likely move to fill in the gaps that allowed it, and we would do well to consider whatever reform comes to pass from them, while obviously making sure it works/fits within our Constitutional framework.

Firearms are the most lethal method via which to attempts suicide, around 85% effective. 71% of suicide attempts occur within one hour of the suicidal impulse. 90% of people who attempt suicide and fail do not attempt again. There is not really evidence that substitution of methods would occur consistently, people tend to attempt suicide with what's around, and the more they think about it or have to work at it, the less likely they are to carry out an attempt. However, let's assume 100% substitution with jumping. Jumping is actually only about 33% as effective as firearms, and jumping is actually one of the most lethal methods available aside from firearms. That is, for every three gun suicide attempts you replace with a jump attempt, you save 2 people. If we substitute with cutting or overdose, the number of people saved increases dramatically even further. It's needlessly callous to ignore gun suicides. Context is important, different aspects of the gun violence problem require different solutions (though there will undoubtedly be overlap), what we do for mass shootings will differ from what we do for domestic violence shootings, for example. But in the absence of data suggesting perfect substitution, guns as a method of suicide become a vector to limit gun deaths, and deaths overall for that matter. As such, gun suicides ought to be included. They should be included with context, but still included.

Here's the thing, what exactly is a violation of due process with regards to firearm limitations is kind of up in the air. There's presently a circuit split, actually, on the standard of review, Intermediate vs. Strict. All of the Circuits save the 4th that have taken up the question of "which standard are gun control laws held to" have said intermediate, the 4th meanwhile said Strict. Under intermediate scrutiny, I imagine many gun control laws would pass Constitutional muster and not be considered a violation of due process. Heller left the door open on the question of whether gun ownership was a fundamental right or not. It did say that outright gun bans don't pass any level of scrutiny, but there's a lot of grey area between "everything related to firearms is a fundamental right" and "gun ban." Presumably, most circuits would probably hold the view that outright bans are subject to strict scrutiny and will consistently fail to meet that standard (as per Heller), but lesser restrictions (probably things like wait times, certain hardware limitations, possibly even limited bans of certain classes of weapons) probably would survive under intermediate scrutiny. The 4th Circuit differs from this in that anything interfering with ownership of a firearm would fall under strict scrutiny, as firearm ownership is a fundamental right under the 4th Circuit's reasoning. I'm unsure if, from a practical standpoint, something like a waiting period would fall under this, but it might. Anyways, whether using a "reasonable suspicion of terrorist activity" standard for denying ownership of a firearm can survive Constitutional muster and not be violative of due process probably ends up in front of a Circuit Court pretty quickly, and eventually, I would think, in front of the Supreme Court. And what happens there probably depends on 1) who wins in 2016 and 2) what the law actually does. And I might have gotten a wire crossed somewhere in my legal reasoning, if one of the other con law peeps we have around here can come in and correct me on this if something is wrong, that'd be much appreciated.

I don't really see the point of Conryn's bill. It seemingly is superfluous, unless you assume the FBI isn't doing its job of actually bringing in people for whom they have probable cause. I mean, if a government agency has probable cause that a person is a terrorist on hand, such that they can provide it within 3 days of an attempted purchase, that person probably should have been arrested already. It's kind of comedic actually, in a way. Gun shop owner: "Hey, so this dude got flagged, you have probable cause against him?" FBI: "oooooooOOOh yeah. Dude is 100% certified terrorist. Trips to ISIS hotbeds, contact on interwebs with radicals, thank you NSA, heck, guy even tweeted out 'Death to America.' So yeah, totally a terrorist." GSO: "So...you gonna arrest him? Should I hold him at gunpoint or something, you know, until you get here?" FBI: "Nah. We're lettin' him have a long leash, boys will be boys, after all. But no guns." Basically, I can sort of see how Conryn's plan is a "step" forward, but it seems more like marching in place, quite frankly. As for Grassley's, my understanding is that his bill would have made it harder to get a mental health flag for someone on a background check, with an added system to contest a flag. The second part I'm fine with, depending on the details, but the first part seems to be going in the wrong direction. But on the whole, I'm hopeful Susan Collins, who is supposedly working on her own proposal, will pull together the best ideas from across the political spectrum and put forth something 60 senators can live with. From the limited speculation I've seen on her proposal, it sound pretty close to Feinstein's "reasonable suspicion" idea, but might be more constrained in time frame than "previous five years" for investigation. We'll see. I'm okay with a limited pulling out of justified homicides and certain types of accidents, but suicides, or at least the vast majority of suicides should stay in. Suicide attempts are actually pretty rarely successful, something like 1 in 25 to 1 in 33 attempts are successful, so we're talking 3-4% of all suicide attempts actually work. Compare that with the firearm suicide attempt success rate, which is something like 85% or 87%. Thoughts of suicide are generally fleeting, and if not, they are often identified, so most people who attempt suicide are one attempt and then either better on their own, or get help. Not all, but most. People attempt suicide with what's around them, and what's easiest to use. The more steps involved in the process of committing suicide, the more someone thinks about it, and the more likely they are to reconsider. People in society attempt suicide. It's an unfortunate fact. They attempt it with what is perceived to be the quickest, most available option, usually. In a heavily armed society, that means attempts via guns, and more successful suicide attempts. This isn't to say we lump all the numbers together and find a one-size-fits-all solution, that doesn't exist. A good measure for the reduction of mass shootings will differ heavily from one tackling domestic shootings, which will both differ from gang violence, which will all differ from suicides. But not including suicides is problematic, and leaves a huge number of deaths unaddressed. They should be counted among "gun deaths," we just need to remember that they present a separate set of challenges compared to other forms of gun violence.

I disagree with this pretty strongly because something like 87% of suicides attempted via firearm succeed, versus something like 13% for other methods. Those number might not be exactly right, but I remember being surprised at the massive gap. That is, if you took away guns, there are actually a whole lot of people that want, at some point, to kill themselves, and ultimately won't. The reasoning, I recall, was that suicide attempts usually are more really cries for help in dark times, and usually don't last particularly long if they get appropriate attention. Person loses their job, for example. A week after they attempt suicide, they've got interviews for a new job and feel fine. But guns succeed much more efficiently, there are rarely 2nd chances, so those moments of weakness become extremely deadly.

Illegal purchases are a whole other can of worms; an underfunded can of worms owned by the ATF. I know a lot of people have a lot of bad feelings about ATF, some of it justified. But ultimately tracking down illegal purchases and transfers is very hard, and even harder with an underfunded agency tasked with it (whether it's the ATF or we give those duties to someone else). It would probably also help to create a mechanism for registering private purchases and transfers (closing the poorly named gun show loophole).

The reaction to the Jade Helm 15 exercises was similarly alarming. Even more alarming was the way that certain officials legitimized the conspiracy theorists (and by certain officials I mean Greg Abbott, who we might remember as the moron who posted the tweet about reaping what you sow a couple days ago). Heck, and then in the aftermath of JH15, after it was done and nothing happened, I saw some out there declaring victory, that JH15 was totally a plan to take guns and impose martial law in Texas, but it was stopped because of national attention the theorists brought to it. And they've already started on Jade Helm 16 theories! http://www.thecommonsenseshow.com/2016/03/30/jade-helm-16-is-training-to-withhold-food-from-the-american-people/

Haha, more or less this. I wasn't suggesting background checks couldn't potentially be improved and work, but one of the baseline legislative changes sought are usually universal background checks. If that means universal implementation of the present system, it's still got holes. I think it can definitely be improved, but unlike in some other cases, we cannot simply point to background checks as a potential solution, it has to be background checks+. Similarly, there have been, and will be in the future, instances where a "good guy" stops a "bad guy." But it is, as you say, not foolproof. The problem with the latter though, I think, is that we can go too far. I understand and appreciate people wanting a tool with which to defend themselves. But once we've opened that right to the general public, well, we've opened it to the general public. You are responsible, but nobody knows if the next guy is. And the more people it's open to, the greater the likelihood of irresponsible use. But that's a little separate from my original point, which was, yes, primarily, my hope from this is that it will spark discussion on solutions, with some humbling from both sides in recognizing that neither side is foolproof. Yes, we play the odds on every action, realized and potential, so technically this individual case means little in the grand scheme of the debate, it's anecdotal no matter how raw, but the balanced nature of it and lack of a "gotcha! If only [insert X] had happened" thing helps here, since it most certainly WILL shape policy debates to some extent.

That is positive Jumbo. I was wondering if this shooting might actually tip the needle towards some set of reforms, even if they are not huge changes. This case does expose some of the solutions on both sides as being non-solutions. Background check didn't get him, demerit to gun control side. Multiple trained individuals with firearms (good guys with guns) didn't get him, demerit to NRA side. Certainly, one could keep running towards the edge (go further than background checks, add more good guys with guns, etc.), but I was hopeful that a dispelling of some usual tropes might push people to examine solutions outside of them and possibly find some common ground. I will say that I think the dispelling does more harm to the pro-NRA side, the "good guy with gun" argument extends as a central pillar through a number of possible NRA solutions (end gun free zones, allow civilians to carry, significant numbers of armed guards, etc.), while "universal background checks" is only one tool (usually a first step) in the gun control bucket, follow-ups like psych evals, waiting periods, etc., are less existentially tied to the success of background checks. The form mentioned with 15 questions that 3 in 10 fail seems like a good starting point for compromise.

The knowingly part is in line with most states with regards to knowingly allowing people with revoked/suspended/no licenses to operate one's car. I think that's a good starting point, though personally I'd like the burden to fall a little more on the transferor to verify. To what extent one faces penalties can be discussed, I think a reasonable compromise might be a civil penalty, not a criminal one (this would, in a way, sort of mirror how your insurance, if you lend your car to an unlicensed driver and they act badly, can basically escape liability and foot you with the bill). Thus, there's no criminal liability pass-through, nor any criminal penalties that could lead to jail-time or loss of right to own a gun. Civil penalties would be a reasonable deterrent on their own.

I was thinking about something like that, a "gun range loophole" in the context of temporary transfers of firearm custody. One of the possible sets of restrictions is that private sales and transfers must be recorded somewhere and registered. I would think temporary transfers (letting friend Joe borrow gun for weekend) would require some sort of quick registration as well, with the goal of making sure all parties have done their due diligence on the other party. Of course, that would prohibit a father letting his son shoot his gun, even at a range, which seems overly harsh. I think to that end, a lifting on limitations on temporary transfers of control within the confines of a gun range would make sense.

Ammunition is a bad choke-point. People make their own, or buy boxes in bulk far too often for a correlation to appear, I suspect. Maybe there's a causal link between "first time purchase" BEING a "bulk purchase" and "mass shootings," but even there I'm unsure we'll see that, since I imagine many young people who grew up with parents making bulk purchases will, themselves, early in their independent lives, make a bulk purchase. Point-of-purchase/transfer and hardware are probably better choke-points to focus on. Question to those who know more about gun manufacturing and modification than I. How hard would it be to create a firearm that could not be modified from semi-automatic to automatic? It seems like that is one of the issues with creating a hardware choke-point, in that the level of skill needed to modify to fully automatic for some weapons is reasonably low. Further, do people manufacture, and how easy is it to manufacture, home-made clips? Like, if a statutory limitation of 6 bullets per clip was implemented, how easily would we expect people to be able to circumvent that?

Yes, but from the facts so far it seems as though the vast majority of the damage occurred in a short time frame at the start. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/us/orlando-shooting-what-we-know-and-dont-know.html

Yeah, I agree. Let's assume we capped magazines at 6 bullets. AR-15 standard magazines are usually 20-30 bullets, right? So 4-6 magazines to get to the same number of bullets as a standard clip. Whatever time frame for changing said clip he has is increased 400-600%. Even if he's well trained and quick, we're talking about going from a couple seconds for a swap to 10-20 seconds, assuming all 4-6 clips are close at hand. If he has to go into a bag, that increases even further. Just spitballing numbers, let's pretend this guy had 100% accuracy, and fired exactly 103 bullets over the course of the shooting. If we assume he had five 20-round clips (we'll spot him the last 3, maybe a handgun he had), and firing rate was semi-automatic, he has to change clips 4 times. With 6 bullet clips, to get to 100 bullets, he'd need 17 clips, 3.4X the number he'd need before. He'd need to change clips 16 times, spending 4 times the amount of time changing clips, and that's assuming all clips are as available as before (unlikely, far more likely he'd need to go into a bag at some point). That's a lot of extra time. Time for the armed guards in the club to respond. Time for people to run or take cover. If the guy has to go into a bag, time perhaps for him to be tackled while he wrestles with the bag. With unlimited time, sure, the damage is unlimited, but that's true of every firearm ever invented. As Buzz says, it wouldn't prevent everything. Consider that "mass shooting" is usually either 4 casualties or 4 fatalities (Mass Shooting Tracker uses casualties, FBI uses fatalities). A 6 bullet clip won't prevent all of those. But it does increase the time frame needed to inflict harm, so a shooting of 9, 14, 50 people, etc., requires significantly more time to carry out. And that probably saves at least some lives.

Indeed Burg. I still feel the first step is to repeal the functional research ban placed on the CDC and to put significant funds back into the hands of researchers. We have to act somewhat quickly on the front too. Many of the researchers who were active in theirs studies prior to the CDC funding drying up for fear of Congressional backlash have left the field, and are approaching retirement age if not already there. There's a generational gap, and any hope of getting good studies quickly lies with the people who studied it before, who can also help fill said gap. If we keep waiting, it will be many many years before a brand new generation can work out the methodological kinks, and get good functional data.

Sure. 20 years ago, would anyone have thought we'd start seeing consumer priced 3D printers at all by 2015? If a technological breakthrough is possible, we ought to assume it will happen. Is such a breakthrough on plastics possible? I don't know, but considering the things possible today that would have been considered sorcery as late as probably 30 years ago, I'm putting my money on "it is," and we should think forward with that mindset. That doesn't necessarily mean implement legislation with an assumption in place, but rather have a plan of action in place should the possibility prove true. If we keep balking at the engineering feats we need to overcome, we'll be quite flat-footed when someone figures it out, and two years later the market is filled with magical 3D printed plastic guns. I would say 6, but otherwise agree, IF such a ban were to be implemented.

Think that's bad? Wait until 3D printers are cheap and people are making plastic automatic weapons left and right.