DogofWar1

And cutting the exact amount from their budgets that they previously used to study the root causes of the public health issue of gun violence. The Congress made it very clear what rules the CDC had to follow if they didn't want to see more of their funding cut away; no more studies on the root causes of gun violence. Today, "studies" by the government involving guns are really more of counting the bodies.

Citation needed that the CDC was/is biased. Even the legislator who spearheaded the CDC ban says he regrets it, and that studies should have been going on all this time. I doubt he would have said that if he truly felt the CDC was pushing a biased agenda. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jay-dickey-gun-violence-research-amendment_561333d7e4b022a4ce5f45bf As for the ATF, take funding away from an organization such that it's funding level is equivalent to what it was decades ago with almost no growth for inflation, then impose restrictions on it so that the most efficient manner of doing its job is prohibited, and see what happens to how it works. It's one of the most absurd but oft-used tactics to kill agencies/projects people don't like, that is, make it almost impossible for the project to get done by slashing funding increasing restrictions and responsibilities, then complain about how badly they do their job (and then, if applicable, how much better private enterprise could do said job, see: Education).

Fair enough, except that the NRA actively works to limit the capabilities of the agencies responsible for enforcement. http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/atf-gun-laws-nra Hmmm...the NRA guts enforcement mechanisms for existing gun laws, pushes a ban on any research that could make their pet issue look bad (except for their handpicked "experts"), and uses political intimidation tactics to keep new laws from coming about when the problems become extremely obvious.

Cities can get gun bans passed for the same reasons why some municipalities can get public ISPs built; while special interests can strongly influence the Congress (535 people), and even state legislatures (50x several hundred), they can't make their money stretch far enough to influence even at the local level. There are just too many people, and it's too tough to counter local political views which put those people into office. That's why the NRA (and ISPs) deal with it in a different way. ISPs got states to pass laws banning municipally-owned broadband. The NRA used the courts to get bans of firearms overturned (biding their time until the most opportune moment, as Predicto explained in his history lesson).

The fastest path to making positive progress on gun homicides might be first to address special interest political funding, which seems counter-intuitive since overturning/constitutionally amending Citizens United seems harder than simply passing a piece of legislature, but that's where we're at.

This is, unfortunately, a key reason to be suspicious of Lott's studies, on top of all the other stuff. Money has largely dried up for studies, except apparently from a few select places that conveniently back the talking points the NRA advances. Could be coincidence, but likely isn't. I don't really buy the "they should have done something while they were in power," bit. Democrats only had a supermajority for a short time frame, during which we also happened to be in the midst of a recession. Any attempt to act on guns would have been savaged from a variety of angles. Moreover, you'd have needed perfect uniformity from Democrats during that small window to change things. Problem is, fast forward to 2013 when someone DID attempt to get a new assault weapons ban passed, and 15 Democrats voted against it. Now, part of that is likely due to the bill not being the best written, but I guarantee some of those 15 votes could not be recaptured on any gun control issue. This means hitting 60 was effectively impossible, which would have been required in order to bring about change during the short supermajority time frame. It's frankly a little silly of Boehner. He comes out shortly after stepping down and chastises the far right for thinking that the majority party can just magically do anything it wants, explaining that procedure bars them from doing most of those things, but then immediately turns around and criticizes Democrats on guns for failing to do what he just told the far right it was impossible to do?

This thread is unfortunately the gun debate in a nutshell. The two sides are too far apart, and there's not enough data for one side to definitively discredit the other. The result is inaction. Hindsight being 20/20, the former Congressman who spearheaded the ban on research for the CDC has regrets. http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/jay-dickey-regrets-amendment

Well, they deal with some specifics in the article, just haven't been able to post until now. Still perhaps broad, but with some guides on it. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/ ...which links to http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/11/jared-loughner-mass-shootings-mental-illness Then there was a 2001 study that found a smaller percent, http://www.psmag.com/health-and-behavior/actually-know-connections-mental-illness-mass-shootings-gun-violence-83103 THIS IS THE QUOTE, BUT THE QUOTE BOX REFUSES TO WORK FOR THIS ONE: A 2001 study looked specifically at 34 adolescent mass murderers, all male. 70 percent were described as a loner. 61.5 percent had problems with substance abuse. 48 percent had preoccupations with weapons; 43.5 percent had been victims of bullying. Only 23 percent had a documented psychiatric history of any kind―which means three out of four did not. THIS IS THE END OF THE QUOTE BOX ...but the rub is in the documented history bit. That and the 15 year difference (20 shootings per year average 1999 to 2003, compared to 31 in 2014 and 32 so far in 2015, the makeup of shooters may have changed). If a person wasn't previously documented as having mental health issues, they wouldn't show up, but plenty of people fly below the radar, and testing on dead shooters (as many die during their incidents) is tough if not impossible, so I would suspect the 23% number is low, while the 60% number might be high. Chalk it up as another reason for more non-stigmatized and comprehensive mental healthcare in the US; we'd get data on this stuff that is missing at present.

I've been looking for numbers on that, Kilmer, and I've seen 60% of mass shooters showed some signs of mental defects. I'm gonna keep looking. It's worth mentioning that the mentally ill are also twice as likely to be victims of physical violence, for context purposes.

Mental health is something of a deflection/non-issue for general gun homicide issues. Something like only 5% of gun violence is performed by mentally ill people. For gun homicides generally, improvement of mental health won't do too much. That being said, on the sub-issue of mass shootings, mental health is very much a large issue. A comprehensive addressing of gun violence in this country will then have to deal with mental health, but it cannot be the only solution, indeed, it would be only a small part of the solution. To that end, it might make the most sense to attempt to address mental healthcare generally, as opposed to specifically for the purpose of reducing mass shootings, as the reduction in mass shootings from a better mental health system would likely come anyway, BUT, to then address the gun violence issue via other means.

Well, behavioral changes do occur in people, and some of these, sadly take stable, reasonable people, and make them less so. Lots of mental illnesses do not appear until adulthood. It's terribly sad to see a successful business person just utterly implode due to a mental illness starting in their late 20's, but it happens. Sometimes it might be less drastic, but no less dangerous. The people who were lured in by Manson likely were, for the most part, reasonably balanced human beings, but maybe they were susceptible to whatever advances he made, and the result was significant change in personality, and ultimately, actions. If a person buys Sudafed a couple times a year, that's normal. If they buy it 50 times in a month, something changed. A gun owner who buys maybe a gun every three years over a 12 year span suddenly buying 5 guns in a month? You know, no need to no-knock warrant the guy or interrogate his grandma, but, you know, maybe just check in on him. See if he's still okay in the head. I think some legitimately believe that, but there's another portion that also is seriously and deathly concerned that the US government is about to become a totalitarian regime, and the only thing stopping that is unfettered gun ownership. The response to Jade Helm 15 was basically that whole thing in a nutshell. There is a serious concern that anything that involves the federal government in gun control, no matter how logical or obvious that thing is, is a precursor to a federal takeover and enslavement via the government. I wish I was joking.

Criminal justice reform advocates have been pushing for that for quite a while. Mental illness is relatively common among repeat offenders and certain classes of first time offenders. Problem is, that kind of stuff is blocked by hard-on-crime advocates, since a mental evaluation of incompetent is viewed as an "out," which leads to one of two things, either basic evaluations are discounted in court to ensure that people still get punished, or the mental health system post-evaluation is terrible, as bad or worse than prison, and treatment is almost always an after thought. Some attorneys I worked for (in VA) discussed how an insanity defense and evaluation is really a last resort, even if the client is legitimately mentally incompetent, because they ship you off to a facility that is basically impossible to get out of.

The problem is, that argument presupposes that the protections that would prevent those last steps would be removed. The SCOTUS has already ruled that flat bans on guns are unconstitutional. I imagine widespread confiscation without cause would be similarly unconstitutional. Basically, the Constitution would have to be altered before the slope becomes slippery, and that would require a huge cultural shift across all states and demographics that almost certainly won't happen any time in the foreseeable future. We can't allow the fear of some extremely remote possibility in the far future to prevent us from making reasonable and measured changes today, especially if those reasonable and measured changes would create significant progress on the issue.

The sad thing is that Popeman's proposals are pretty close to what a lot of people in the gun control lobby have been pushing for. Admittedly they (gun control) often push for more, but there's definitely common ground between responsible gun owners and gun control advocates. Alas, that's where the NRA consistently steps in and stops things. I know Obama said it so it will be ignored by many (not necessarily anyone here, but nationally among gun owners), but it would be in both gun owners' and the general populace's best interests to examine if the NRA is truly representing theor views and ideals.

I don't think we can discount the notion that if guns were treated closer to cars, that there'd be less gun violence. There are a lot of things we do with cars that we don't do with guns. It wouldn't eliminate the issue, but it would probably help, the biggest ones being: - mandatory registration - mandatory training and licensing (could further break that down into a motorcycle license vs. regular license thing with, say, handguns and assault rifles) - stiff penalties for possession without a license I'm not sure that yearly inspections have a corollary, and while health and safety minimum standards would probably translate to "smart gun" requirements, since those aren't widely available and testing for them hasn't really come down enough, can't do that yet. Still, there are things there that can carry over. Definitely an option. One thing I've heard in the past in a similar vein was to tax bullet prices extremely heavily on certain gun models (generally things with big magazines and high rates of fire). There's some potential merit to the concept, though you'd probably have an even tougher time getting something like that through, it combines two sacred cows into one issue, taxes and guns. It also puts more of a burden on the average responsible gun owner, which I think would be somewhat unfair overall.

While I think there's some merit to the idea that people do this to copy others and gain some notoriety in some cases, I don't think we can really completely media blackout these things. We're a representative democracy, and that requires information to reach the people. While withholding information may prevent some, it almost certainly won't prevent as many as we need to (that is, a number that doesn't drop them to zero, since that's unlikely, but drops them as low as reasonably possible), as by depriving the public of information we're addressing a satellite problem, while depriving ourselves of the information needed to address the root problem. If, say, 95% of mass shooters have some sort of mental defect, that's important to know, just as it'd be important to know that only 5% of mass shooters have mental defects. If 98% of school shooters are mentally defective, that helps us to understand one of the root issues (along with guns) and enables us to create legislative solutions tailored to the problem's core. This gets a little future philosophical, but the unfortunate reality is that you have to address the issues of mental health in society at large as well as availability of implements of destruction, or else things are going to get a lot worse. As technology progresses the power of one person increases. Using guns as an example, we've gone from single-shot muskets to fully automatic weapons being available for public consumption. But even in other sectors it's true; a single person can cripple a huge company from a computer; such a thing was unfathomable in the past. As technology progresses, destructive potential of a single person likely continues to increase. If every person can have an A-bomb, how long until someone decides to use theirs. This isn't to say technological progress should be stopped, but rather that progress needs to come responsibly, be distributed responsibly, and wielded responsibly by responsible humans. However, that is tough to do with the manner in which the 2nd Amendment is protected by groups beyond its Constitutional floor.

Well then we should do studies as to what our problems are and do studies on their solutions and try to adapt their solutions to our populace with all its different rules. Except we can't do those studies, because the CDC is blocked from doing them. So all we can do is sit here with our crappy outcomes, while they sit there with their better outcomes, and we just have to look confused and saddened.

Some reject it, unfortunately they also have enough power to make it policy. Meanwhile, people keep dying in droves. Usually that suggest something was off about the rejection of alternative policies.

For a school. A campus certainly would be different, and they generally have their own police forces, which, aside from often being kind of dickish, are mostly fine. The fact that we don't examine what other, less gun violent, countries do is a large part of the problem. We convince ourselves that we found the best way when our outcomes suck and their outcomes are vastly superior. Same thing with internet and medical care, among other things.

Right, but there can be barriers. And logically the more potential harm something can do the more barriers there would be and the stronger the enforcement would be. And the more effort/resources it takes to surmount those barriers, or the more risk that is carried in surmounting those barriers, the less likely someone is to get around the barriers or even try. Can't stop everyone, some people would go to the ends of the Earth to get a firearm illegally; but if that's what it took, I guarantee you that probably 99% of people wouldn't even try. I'm not opposed to having a trained security guard on the premises, armed with various implements and with a strong understanding of the use of force continuum. That's useful for non-gun related violence. If the football team's 275 pound offensive tackle decides to start punching people because someone made a your mom joke, you might need something more than physical restraints (though certainly far less than a gun, probably something in the middle like pepper spray or a taser). That being said, odds are good that with sufficient reasonable restrictions, significant armed presence in schools wouldn't be necessary. http://qz.com/37015/how-school-killings-in-the-us-stack-up-against-36-other-countries-put-together/ A minor security presence would probably be more than enough.

Right, but the potential harm is much smaller, except in some wacky scenarios. A 16 year old getting into his dad's liquor cabinet and doing shots with some friends isn't going to kill 12 people. The more dangerous the implement, logically, the more restrictions on use there are that become reasonable. Liquor for example, is fine with fairly minor precautions, if any; maybe a cabinet with key lock if even that. Compare that to the precautions taken for the guns in your story, locked in a safe with only the owner and maybe a couple other very trusted confidants knowing the combination.

I don't think the "all or nothing" approach makes sense when we haven't tried solutions in between, especially ones that are on the gun control side of the middle line. Start with background checks, waiting periods, and some sort of change to the gunshow loophole that makes it less of a loophole. Get the CDC to start doing more studies, both before and after those changes. After that, as CDC studies come in, policy changes will likely be suggested from those studies, but they are likely to consist of some of the following: - reduction in automatic and semi-automatic weapon availability. Maybe not an outright ban, but extra licensing, training, and storage protections required - mental health screening at point of purchase/transfer, or some reasonably small time beforehand - require training and licenses from said training - require safe storage procedures (enforcement would be difficult pre-crime, but it would like be like seatbelts, if evidence of poor storage procedures violating laws are present in the aftermath of a crime where the home was legally investigated, it could be used as criminal evidence and the gun owner charged) - require all transfers/sales between non-merchants to be witnessed by a licensed vendor/merchant/official, with the licensed individual certifying that the transferring and transferred to individuals both are trained and responsible gun owners - increase penalties for carrying unlicensed firearms - increase penalties for the sale of an unlicensed firearm even more. If you sell a gun illegally, you should be in jail for a long time. among other things. None of these would stop a responsible gun owner from owning firearms and enjoying their use. It might help to reduce the number of times people who would do harm can get their hands on firearms.

I have a lot of thoughts, and potential solutions bouncing around in my head, but there's one thing that must, must, MUST be done, ASAP, is to kickstart CDC research into gun violence studies. This whole Congress blocking the CDC from doing gun violence studies because they're afraid of what those studies will find thing, it needs to end immediately, and the CDC needs to be given the funding and leeway to start feverishly researching the roots of these things. http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/gop-gun-violence-cdc-study-charleston-south-carolina-119384 The fact that the NRA has managed to push the Congress (mainly the GOP) into banning CDC research on the topic is truly terrifying. There's a huge problem in America with gun violence, and special interests are making sure we're too "dumb" to be able to put forward even potential solutions.

Poor James Blake. Liked his tennis a lot. The recent Ahmed arrest has some very questionable conduct as well, both from the administrators and the police. Saw this on facebook and it does raise a fair number of questions about the response.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_exception While police generally still need "probable cause" the bar on that is extremely low, and very easy to manipulate. Guy accidentally touched the center line? Probable cause to check vehicle for "alcohol."