Vox has again done a good job of reminding us of the gun facts:
Although America’s political debate about guns tends to focus on grisly mass shootings and murders, a majority of gun-related deaths in the US are suicides. As Dylan Matthews explained for Vox, this is actually one of the most compelling reasons for reducing access to guns — there is a lot of research that shows greater access to guns dramatically increases the risk of suicide.
Guns are much deadlier than alternatives like cutting and
poison. Just stalling an attempt or making it less
likely to result in death makes a huge difference.
“Time is really key to preventing suicide in a suicidal person,” Harkavy-Friedman said. “First, the crisis won’t last, so it will seem less dire and less hopeless with time. Second, it opens the opportunity for someone to help or for the suicidal person to reach out to someone to help. That’s why limiting access to lethal means is so powerful.”The most interesting story about gun suicide prevention comes from the Israeli military. They had a military suicide problem. Most of it was when their soldiers went home on the weekends. They decided to not let them take their weapons with them. Result a 40% drop in gun suicides.
Think of that. If there is one place in the world you might think you would need a gun to protect yourself from a terrorist, yet the Israeli military decided their soldiers were safer (from themselves) without their guns!
Its also ironic that most of the gun suicides are not "poor" Blacks or Hispanics. They have relatively low rates. Its the middle aged White less educated population that is committing suicide by gun, along with alcohol, and drugs. The very population that is the heart of Trump's support. Blacks and Hispanics look around and see their lives improving. Middle aged Whites look around them and see everything deteriorating.
There have always been people who committed suicide for one reason or another. I think what is new is the bloody-minded self-focused nihilism that causes them to take as many others as they can with them. I am thinking of events such as the Las Vegas massacre, and Germanwings flight 9525 in March of 2015 in which a pilot committed suicide and took all on board with him. Unfortunately this feeds on itself and I'm sure inspires copycat events. I don't know what the answer to that is; I don't think it is possible to impose a news gag on these sorts of things.
ReplyDeleteThe Vox charts and graphs form a wonderful trove of meditation starters. And they can almost be kept up to date as we move forward, but I am having a problem with the definition of "mass shooting." The definition is, shootings in which four or more people were shot at. But hay-ell, the same day as the Las Vegas exercise of the Second Amendment, three were killed and two more wounded in Lawrence, Kansas, and it didn't make my local paper. How can something be a mass shooting if nobody hears about it? So I say, let's define mass shootings as 10 or more dead. That will have the added advantage of making us more competitive with Europe in law enforcement. Since the American people, through their elected and bought representatives, have chosen to offer up 30,000 of their fellow citizens, mostly randomly chosen, to the great Moloch of Amendment II each year, we should stop pretending to be surprised at what our choice hath wrought.
ReplyDeleteThat is one point.
The second point is this: In addition to obvious suicides by gunfire, we have the phenomenon of someone who has decided to die and take a bunch of people with him. This is known as suicide-by-cop. Even if the shooter kills himself, he is counting on the first responders to finish him off it he balks at the last minute.
ReplyDeleteI used to think the problem was guns. Now I think it isn't. It's the gun culture. The founding events involved Minutemen with their flintlocks and Winchesters, the "gun that won the West." To honor the forebears who made this country what it is is to honor gun- slingers. Other countries got their identity as spearpoint, or with halberds, maces and crossbows. None really look cool in this day and age. All are difficult to commit suicide with. None of them inconvenienced a Red Coat or created a dead Injun. And none is as deadly as quickly as a gun. We bear the burden of having anchored our civilization on a sweet and easy weapon. Of course we also bear the burden of a well-financed institution designed to keep gun-makers rich. Lots of burdens there.
Everybody in my family owns a gun for hunting. Hell, I got my dad's shotgun by default, though I have no ammo. I was told it was worth a few thousand bucks, but I don't like the idea of selling it to a collector or a private gun purveyor I don't know. I also don't want to give it to the cops because it's worth money. During the riots if the 1960s, the neighbor tried to get dad to take the shotgun to a guy who knew a guy who could get it sawed off for him. Dad thought the neighbor was nuts.
ReplyDeleteIn our family, guns were locked up in one place, ammo in another. If you showed an interest in hunting, Grampa took you out for target practice, and you weren't allowed to hunt until he was satisfied with your aim and your "woodsmanship," that is, you could tell a deer from a cow from a person.
But in a tense situation, even somebody as careful as Grampa could go haywire. I was staying with my grandparents one night when some drunken kids came around, banging on the doors and windows. We went unto the living room while Grampa ran from window to window to see what was up. He was agitated, he didn't want to turn on the lights, and he was running around with a loaded rifle.
My Gramma and I sat in the couch. "He's going to trip and blow his fool head off," she whispered. I said he should call the cops if he was that nervous. She agreed.
We finally persuaded him to get on the horn to the sheriff, whom he told to "make sure your guys come with lights flashing because I'm loaded for bear."
The cops came, said they'd picked up the miscreants, talked Grampa down, unloaded his gun for him, and then Gramma couldn't sleep so we stayed up the rest of the night gabbing while Grampa snored.
In recent years, there have been several incidents in Detroit where people knocking on doors for help have been blasted by homeowners like Grampa. And there are countless domestic murder-suicides reported on the local news that happen on what seems to be a weekly basis.
We seem to be living at a time when there are an awful lot of unstable and trigger-quick suspicious people around who have a gun within reach.
Raber told me that in Germany, you can own guns, but you have to store them at the police station and check them out if you want to use them.
After that exciting night with Grampa and as incidents of individuals plugging people out of rage and fear rise, I don't think that's a bad idea.
When I was a boy back in PA, I hunted with my dad on my grandparent's tenant farm. The dairy farm was posted with NO HUNTING and NO TRESPASSING signs which meant only my uncles could hunt there.
DeleteIn the beginning I was my dad's dog. I would walk out ahead of dad uphill so that the pheasants and rabbits ran down hill past my father with his gun. This was in the wooded areas of the farm away from the fields for grazing and hay, etc.
When I became 12 or whatever the legal age for hunting with a gun, dad taught me how to shoot. Supposedly I shot a rabbit. I was always rather skeptical that it was my gun rather than dads. Never asked him about that as I got older. I figured if it was his bullet I would just let him think that I was not the wiser.
I never went deer hunting with dad and my uncle. I suspect Mom may have discouraged dad from getting me into that more dangerous form of hunting off the farm.
Mom had dad buy a pistol (he traded in his hunting rifles for it) and had him teach her how to shoot up at the cabin.
When mom died (ten years before dad) he asked me what he should do about the gun. I basically told him he was getting older, hard of hearing and did not want to get himself in a "grampa' situation like described above.
I suspect dad may have realized that I was really concerned about the possibility of him becoming depressed after mom's death. Dad made sure to tell me a few visits later that he had sold the pistol.
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DeleteI think this article gets at the root of the problem: from USA Today
Delete"The argument over gun control isn't merely about safety. It's about identity. The gun has transcended its function as a weapon to become a powerful cultural marker. It can signal what kind of person you are, and often to which tribe you belong."
Katherine, I think that's right. It's also why you see some people in Michigan flying Confederate flags as a symbol of skepticism about the federal government and what they see as prevailing left wing ideas.
DeleteI own five guns. They are not the center of my life as a human being or a citizen. Some or maybe all of them should be made illegal. If so, I will turn them in to the cops AFTER I run a tungsten carbide grinding wheel through the chambers so it doesn't join a cop's private collection or an overmilitarized police arsenal.
ReplyDeleteI qualified with the M1 (Garand) -- which shows how old I am -- and the M1 carbine at Fort Hood, Texas. That is not exactly like getting your first taste of weaponry in the North Woods. I associate guns with heat and dust. I also protected a few payrolls in Germany with a .45 caliber officer's weapon, which some idiot thought I would be able to figure out how to use if I needed it. We didn't lose a single payroll.
ReplyDeleteMy subsequent brushes with manliness involved pistols and tin cans and skeet, at which my wife is so much better I hesitate to mention it. Once on a cruise, a guy who had been noisily telling everyone of the wonders he could do, insisted on being first to blast skeet off the stern of the ship. Having gone 0 for 8, he pronounced the weapon defective. My wife then stepped up and nailed 7 or 8. We heard no more from Mr. The Greatest for the rest of the cruise. Some things are so sweet you treasure them forever.
He never heard of Annie Oakley, I guess.
Delete"We're not going to talk about that today." That was Trump's answer when asked about guns, without which mass shootings would not be possible. I guess four days is too close to the event. But if that's the case, according to the Vox chart of 355 mass shootings in 336 days there were only two brief windows in February and one each in March, April, July and August when we didn't have a shooting so recent as to make thinking about guns impolite. The NRA couldn't have said it better. And now that I know that politicians' "thoughts" that go out to the victims at times like this are a meaningless dodge, maybe I can be excused for also doubting the prayers that "go out" with the thoughts.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI just read that the Vegas shooter's 90 year old mother is still living. That would be about the worst thing that could happen to a mother, to find out that her child did something like that. I hope maybe she isn't mentally sharp enough to understand anymore, and they just don't tell her. One of the few times when dementia would be a blessing.
ReplyDeleteLatest lunacy. The shooter tried to buy tracer ammo at a Phoenix gun show. He couldn't, not due to laws or restrictions but because the dealer didn't have any. He could have directed fire into the crowd like aiming a water hose.
ReplyDeleteA blog like yours should be earning much money from adsense.::’;’ 5.7x28 ammo for sale
ReplyDelete