Thanks for the info and graphics. I hang my head with shame and embarrassment that our country has normalized these shootings. Other countries do it differently and effectively. Yet we are too arrogant and too full of our own bullshit and gun lobby propaganda that we refuse to learn from others.
These murders are OWNED by the people who make unlimited gun ownership a political football. It's NOT a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of money over mercy.
And nobody is saying we should take away everyone's guns. But there ARE sensible laws and procedures that could reduce this carnage. Refusing to participate in such common sense regulations makes one COMPLICIT.
For now, we are America the Bloody and we looking pretty fracking stupid to most of the world.
Northeastern states, which tend to have much stronger gun control measures like background checks and secure storage laws, had one-fifth the loss in life expectancy https://tsaco.bmj.com/content/7/1/e000766
As a teacher who has been in a school with an active shooter, (not a drill), shielding children in a closet for several hours until police arrived and disarmed the shooter, I can say it is not something you ever”get over.” Those who support leaving the laws “as is” may feel differently when it happens at their child’s school or community. I have lost many students (and some colleagues) over the years to senseless gun violence and it is a hurt we carry as we deal with all
the other stressors in schools. Parents, educators, students and elected officials need to all come to the table and listen to each other, and to those who used to think “we just need to enforce the laws we already have” until they lost a child or loved one. This is also contributing to the teacher shortage. Low pay, non-supportive admin/parents, and school safety. These visuals are alarming, Jeremy. They are also a wake-up call.
I agree that that stat is suggestive of causality. But it can't really prove anything causal. Northeastern states benefit from a longstanding culture of lower violence dating back to colonial times, and their populations are increasingly made up of upwardly mobile immigrants (both domestic and international) who crush much of the rest of the country on most other stats. too. For example, motor vehicle deaths are much lower in the northeast, but that's just correlation with gun laws, not causal.
And then there's Illinois and New Mexico, which have gun control laws that similar to the Northeast or approaching that regions' but high murder rates. And Texas, which is fairly permissive but low violence (probably again partially immigration).
Anything that can fire multiple rounds in a few seconds is for military use only.
That would be a beginning. It would take a very long time to get the machines of needless death out of the hands of Americans. But ya got to start sometime. Offer buybacks, incentives.
Do something serious. Learn from New Zealand, Australia, UK.
"Start with a ban on weapons that are designed to kill people"
Is there really a strong technical distinction here? From what I understand, the vast majority of existing guns and rifles, including hunting rifles, are semi-automatic, and fully automatic weapons are already restricted.
On the "bullets designed to explode and shred flesh" thing, I'm not sure it can be neatly framed as more or less gun control, particularly in mass shooting contexts, because to some extent these sorts of bullets are used because they are less likely to ricochet and pass through targets, which limits collateral damage. And in hunting terms, human flesh isn't particularly different from deer flesh.
But back to the first point, there are some more concerns or difficulties. The first is that once you figure out the sorts of weapons that you want to ban, enforcement is not something we are particularly good at. Far too many ex-felons and others who aren't supposed to have guns carry guns, and I'm not sure we actually have the political will to lock up the people necessary to even enforce existing laws. And in any case the last people to comply will be people who intend to use them illegally.
The second is that the vast majority of shootings, and probably even school shootings, are done with handguns, and those seem like the last things that will be banned.
Anyways, just my thoughts and I don't necessarily have much better ideas. Personally I might try to move towards much stricter enforcement of the gun laws we already have + more mental health screening requirements + more involuntary commitments of mentally unhealthy people + longer prison sentences for repeat offenders. But that's just me.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'd be excited if we started with your last sentence. And maybe more of the recent cases where parents are held responsible for their weapons and have working knowledge of their kids threats to others.
The CDC states that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death, which encompasses various causes, with motor vehicle accidents being the most significant. According to the CDC, firearm deaths are not classified as a single category; instead, they fall into subcategories of homicides and suicides, with a few also categorized as accidental deaths. This is important because there are large differences by race. The short generalized version that people don't want to hear is that Black males shoot each other, while white males shoot themselves.
I would say firearms aren't going anywhere in the US, but if we could get the Black firearm homicide rate down to the white rate and the white firearm suicide rate down to the Black rate, which would seem doable as there is no reason why these rates should be so different, we would go a long way to dealing with firearm issues. These are two different cultural problems that need to be addressed differently, and both exist under current laws, so in theory laws don't need to be changed.
I strongly agree with you that the tendency of many authors to lump Homicide and Suicide firearms deaths together obscures more than it illuminated. Suicide and homicide are very different social trends, and the degrees that they are modified by access to guns can be very, very different.
Fwiw - the CDC also categories and labels causes of deaths in several overlapping ways, so the classification Jeremy used isn't invalid. It's just one of many ways the CDC uses to present the data.
"1 in 25 American five-year olds will not reach their 40th birthday now due to gun violence."
The link simply says 1 in 25 will not reach 40 for any reason, not just gun violence.
Fwiw, I queried the CDC's Cause of Death Database on deaths by gun violence (murder + suicide + accidental + unclear) and the correct number seems to be 1 in 200.
Hey thanks as always for the thoughtful read. Yes you are right that this sentence overstates the significance of guns in driving that stat, so I've updated it with a caveat. I was drawing as well from this article and the JAMA research linked in that piece which draws the connections to early childhood death and gun violence https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/deaths-life-expectancy-guns-children.html but a big driver of that is also opioids and non-gun death suicides
This is just an extraordinary series of confusions of correlation with causality. As numerous authors who actually know something about the subject have pointed out, there is no way to stop the very few extraordinarily deranged individuals from trying to become active shooters. Dealing with them does not take a whole lot of sociological, mumbo-jumbo, it takes armed individuals at the school capable of responding in the first 30 seconds with deadly force. Alternatively, it takes someone or a group with enough courage or just common sense to run toward the attacker rather than cowering until they are shot.
For a different analysis based on detailed of every instance of Active shooters in schools and churches, see The First Thirty Seconds by Ed Monk. With armed citizens present, less than 10 victims died. When there was no one at the scene, the typical toll was 40 or more. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FG1L2VFQ?ref=yb_qv_ov_kndl_dp_rw
There are 115,171 total schools of any type in the United States. If you were to post a police officer at every one, you’d need more than that many dedicated to the job, for proper redundancy.
Right now, there are about 45% of these campuses covered by a School Resource Officer (SRO), so you’d have to roughly double the number, paid for by already strapped states and localities who are now on the fence for even more formerly-federal programs and funds. That’s not going to happen.
And even if it did, it wouldn’t be enough to fit your criteria: an armed agent able to respond within 30 seconds. You’d need many times that number of officers, especially for larger school buildings. Are we talking up to 500,000 SROs here?
And even if you did have a whole squad of police, does even that (impractical and probably impossible outcome) even fix the situation? Not as we’ve seen in many notorious incidences where dozens or hundreds of heavily armed police officers can’t or won’t respond quickly and decisively to active shooters!
Yes, but what about the teachers and other staff? Well, aside from the obvious fact that most teachers don’t want to be strapped up in the classroom and serve as the first line of defense in an active shooter situation, you have all sorts of other liabilities and risks that would introduce. Starting with: what if a student got access to one of those weapons? It would certainly happen, as it does in other scenarios with armed agents—and there are several notable examples of students murdering teachers. Another contingency: what if it’s the teacher or other staff who are the potential shooter? Infinitesimally rare today, but workplace shootings by employees certainly are not.
If we’re going to talk about realistic solutions, let’s start by asking obvious questions about proposals to prevent shootings with “good guys with guns.”
I suggest you take a look at the chapter in the first 30 seconds on what he calls bogeyman. He first points out that there is no way to guarantee, absolute safety, but there is a way to reduce the amount of harm. That is not school resource officers, he documents clearly how school resource officers weren’t able to get to the shooter in time to present massive casualties, even though they were in the school. He also points out that SRO’s have left their weapons behind on several occasions, and that concealed carry by personnel with training, largely obviates your worries. He also documents that in cases where the good guy with a gun neutralize the shooter before they were more than a couple of injuries, None of your fears were realized. The armed citizen hit his target, injured, no bystanders, and was finished and holstered long before Police arrived. so I agree with you about the inadequacy of relying on SRO’s or even worse, distant police officers. But the record is that armed citizens do their job and save lives.
They already have. So at the end of the day, this leads either to a conclusion where guns must be banned or citizens must be willing to take some resposibility for their own safety. As others have pointed out, there are already too many firearms to recall.
To be fair, I think both in my reply and yours we are ignoring the incremental gains that all these potential ideas could provide.
Reducing the gun supply won't remove all, or even most, guns from potential bad guys. But it might prevent a few from accessing them. Armed guards guarding every middle school won't prevent gun men from attacking soccer practice, but by dissuading them or forcing them them to change plans a little bit, you might disrupt some percent of schemes. Stricter controls around mental health obviously won't prevent all gun crime, but might prevent some fraction of it. Etc...
So I don't think it's an either / or that forces us to pick just one path.
I cannot believe this half baked, liberal take, on gun violence at schools. Perhaps it would be better in say, the UK or France where they are stabbed to death. There are just to many social problems to white wash and say it is male hormone and access to guns. Let's start by having news media stop publishing school shootings so that children are not incentivized to go out in a blaze of glory. When I was young, schools had gun clubs with no shootings. What has changed?. Another problem is a parent getting medical help for disbandment children. One father made it a mission to try to allow law changes so that he could get despondent children whom they knew would do something bad. NO luck. This is just worked over tripe.
Thanks for the info and graphics. I hang my head with shame and embarrassment that our country has normalized these shootings. Other countries do it differently and effectively. Yet we are too arrogant and too full of our own bullshit and gun lobby propaganda that we refuse to learn from others.
These murders are OWNED by the people who make unlimited gun ownership a political football. It's NOT a liberal or conservative issue. It's an issue of money over mercy.
And nobody is saying we should take away everyone's guns. But there ARE sensible laws and procedures that could reduce this carnage. Refusing to participate in such common sense regulations makes one COMPLICIT.
For now, we are America the Bloody and we looking pretty fracking stupid to most of the world.
"But there ARE sensible laws and procedures"
Genuine question: what do you think would be the most sensible and effective?
Northeastern states, which tend to have much stronger gun control measures like background checks and secure storage laws, had one-fifth the loss in life expectancy https://tsaco.bmj.com/content/7/1/e000766
As a teacher who has been in a school with an active shooter, (not a drill), shielding children in a closet for several hours until police arrived and disarmed the shooter, I can say it is not something you ever”get over.” Those who support leaving the laws “as is” may feel differently when it happens at their child’s school or community. I have lost many students (and some colleagues) over the years to senseless gun violence and it is a hurt we carry as we deal with all
the other stressors in schools. Parents, educators, students and elected officials need to all come to the table and listen to each other, and to those who used to think “we just need to enforce the laws we already have” until they lost a child or loved one. This is also contributing to the teacher shortage. Low pay, non-supportive admin/parents, and school safety. These visuals are alarming, Jeremy. They are also a wake-up call.
I agree that that stat is suggestive of causality. But it can't really prove anything causal. Northeastern states benefit from a longstanding culture of lower violence dating back to colonial times, and their populations are increasingly made up of upwardly mobile immigrants (both domestic and international) who crush much of the rest of the country on most other stats. too. For example, motor vehicle deaths are much lower in the northeast, but that's just correlation with gun laws, not causal.
And then there's Illinois and New Mexico, which have gun control laws that similar to the Northeast or approaching that regions' but high murder rates. And Texas, which is fairly permissive but low violence (probably again partially immigration).
Start with a ban on weapons that are designed to kill people. WMDs. Ban bullets designed to explode and shred flesh.
Hunting rifles. Fine.
Required background checks. Red flags. Required safety training. Required proper storage.
Anything that can fire multiple rounds in a few seconds is for military use only.
That would be a beginning. It would take a very long time to get the machines of needless death out of the hands of Americans. But ya got to start sometime. Offer buybacks, incentives.
Do something serious. Learn from New Zealand, Australia, UK.
"Start with a ban on weapons that are designed to kill people"
Is there really a strong technical distinction here? From what I understand, the vast majority of existing guns and rifles, including hunting rifles, are semi-automatic, and fully automatic weapons are already restricted.
On the "bullets designed to explode and shred flesh" thing, I'm not sure it can be neatly framed as more or less gun control, particularly in mass shooting contexts, because to some extent these sorts of bullets are used because they are less likely to ricochet and pass through targets, which limits collateral damage. And in hunting terms, human flesh isn't particularly different from deer flesh.
But back to the first point, there are some more concerns or difficulties. The first is that once you figure out the sorts of weapons that you want to ban, enforcement is not something we are particularly good at. Far too many ex-felons and others who aren't supposed to have guns carry guns, and I'm not sure we actually have the political will to lock up the people necessary to even enforce existing laws. And in any case the last people to comply will be people who intend to use them illegally.
The second is that the vast majority of shootings, and probably even school shootings, are done with handguns, and those seem like the last things that will be banned.
Anyways, just my thoughts and I don't necessarily have much better ideas. Personally I might try to move towards much stricter enforcement of the gun laws we already have + more mental health screening requirements + more involuntary commitments of mentally unhealthy people + longer prison sentences for repeat offenders. But that's just me.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I'd be excited if we started with your last sentence. And maybe more of the recent cases where parents are held responsible for their weapons and have working knowledge of their kids threats to others.
The CDC states that unintentional injuries are the leading cause of death, which encompasses various causes, with motor vehicle accidents being the most significant. According to the CDC, firearm deaths are not classified as a single category; instead, they fall into subcategories of homicides and suicides, with a few also categorized as accidental deaths. This is important because there are large differences by race. The short generalized version that people don't want to hear is that Black males shoot each other, while white males shoot themselves.
2023 Data here: https://briefedbydata.substack.com/p/demographics-and-firearm-deaths
2016-2020 Data here: https://briefedbydata.substack.com/p/child-firearm-deaths-and-other-gun
I would say firearms aren't going anywhere in the US, but if we could get the Black firearm homicide rate down to the white rate and the white firearm suicide rate down to the Black rate, which would seem doable as there is no reason why these rates should be so different, we would go a long way to dealing with firearm issues. These are two different cultural problems that need to be addressed differently, and both exist under current laws, so in theory laws don't need to be changed.
I strongly agree with you that the tendency of many authors to lump Homicide and Suicide firearms deaths together obscures more than it illuminated. Suicide and homicide are very different social trends, and the degrees that they are modified by access to guns can be very, very different.
Fwiw - the CDC also categories and labels causes of deaths in several overlapping ways, so the classification Jeremy used isn't invalid. It's just one of many ways the CDC uses to present the data.
Thanks for sharing
Of course. Thanks for the note Shaun
"1 in 25 American five-year olds will not reach their 40th birthday now due to gun violence."
The link simply says 1 in 25 will not reach 40 for any reason, not just gun violence.
Fwiw, I queried the CDC's Cause of Death Database on deaths by gun violence (murder + suicide + accidental + unclear) and the correct number seems to be 1 in 200.
Hey thanks as always for the thoughtful read. Yes you are right that this sentence overstates the significance of guns in driving that stat, so I've updated it with a caveat. I was drawing as well from this article and the JAMA research linked in that piece which draws the connections to early childhood death and gun violence https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/06/opinion/deaths-life-expectancy-guns-children.html but a big driver of that is also opioids and non-gun death suicides
This is just an extraordinary series of confusions of correlation with causality. As numerous authors who actually know something about the subject have pointed out, there is no way to stop the very few extraordinarily deranged individuals from trying to become active shooters. Dealing with them does not take a whole lot of sociological, mumbo-jumbo, it takes armed individuals at the school capable of responding in the first 30 seconds with deadly force. Alternatively, it takes someone or a group with enough courage or just common sense to run toward the attacker rather than cowering until they are shot.
The evidence is incredibly clear that "the only thing that stops a bad guy with the gun is a good guy with the gun" is wrong. Here is a report from the Department of Justice and another from the NYTimes that proves this pretty clearly. https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/presence-armed-school-officials-and-fatal-and-nonfatal-gunshot
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/06/22/us/shootings-police-response-uvalde-buffalo.html
For a different analysis based on detailed of every instance of Active shooters in schools and churches, see The First Thirty Seconds by Ed Monk. With armed citizens present, less than 10 victims died. When there was no one at the scene, the typical toll was 40 or more. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FG1L2VFQ?ref=yb_qv_ov_kndl_dp_rw
How about this - what nation or state has successfully implemented this model?
There are 115,171 total schools of any type in the United States. If you were to post a police officer at every one, you’d need more than that many dedicated to the job, for proper redundancy.
Right now, there are about 45% of these campuses covered by a School Resource Officer (SRO), so you’d have to roughly double the number, paid for by already strapped states and localities who are now on the fence for even more formerly-federal programs and funds. That’s not going to happen.
And even if it did, it wouldn’t be enough to fit your criteria: an armed agent able to respond within 30 seconds. You’d need many times that number of officers, especially for larger school buildings. Are we talking up to 500,000 SROs here?
And even if you did have a whole squad of police, does even that (impractical and probably impossible outcome) even fix the situation? Not as we’ve seen in many notorious incidences where dozens or hundreds of heavily armed police officers can’t or won’t respond quickly and decisively to active shooters!
Yes, but what about the teachers and other staff? Well, aside from the obvious fact that most teachers don’t want to be strapped up in the classroom and serve as the first line of defense in an active shooter situation, you have all sorts of other liabilities and risks that would introduce. Starting with: what if a student got access to one of those weapons? It would certainly happen, as it does in other scenarios with armed agents—and there are several notable examples of students murdering teachers. Another contingency: what if it’s the teacher or other staff who are the potential shooter? Infinitesimally rare today, but workplace shootings by employees certainly are not.
If we’re going to talk about realistic solutions, let’s start by asking obvious questions about proposals to prevent shootings with “good guys with guns.”
I suggest you take a look at the chapter in the first 30 seconds on what he calls bogeyman. He first points out that there is no way to guarantee, absolute safety, but there is a way to reduce the amount of harm. That is not school resource officers, he documents clearly how school resource officers weren’t able to get to the shooter in time to present massive casualties, even though they were in the school. He also points out that SRO’s have left their weapons behind on several occasions, and that concealed carry by personnel with training, largely obviates your worries. He also documents that in cases where the good guy with a gun neutralize the shooter before they were more than a couple of injuries, None of your fears were realized. The armed citizen hit his target, injured, no bystanders, and was finished and holstered long before Police arrived. so I agree with you about the inadequacy of relying on SRO’s or even worse, distant police officers. But the record is that armed citizens do their job and save lives.
And what do you do when potential gunmen move on to the next softest target(s)? Sports practices, mall food courts, church groups, etc...?
They already have. So at the end of the day, this leads either to a conclusion where guns must be banned or citizens must be willing to take some resposibility for their own safety. As others have pointed out, there are already too many firearms to recall.
To be fair, I think both in my reply and yours we are ignoring the incremental gains that all these potential ideas could provide.
Reducing the gun supply won't remove all, or even most, guns from potential bad guys. But it might prevent a few from accessing them. Armed guards guarding every middle school won't prevent gun men from attacking soccer practice, but by dissuading them or forcing them them to change plans a little bit, you might disrupt some percent of schemes. Stricter controls around mental health obviously won't prevent all gun crime, but might prevent some fraction of it. Etc...
So I don't think it's an either / or that forces us to pick just one path.
"it takes someone or a group with enough courage or just common sense to run toward the attacker rather than cowering until they are shot"
Yeah why can't our middle schoolers be more like trained combat veteran marines!
I cannot believe this half baked, liberal take, on gun violence at schools. Perhaps it would be better in say, the UK or France where they are stabbed to death. There are just to many social problems to white wash and say it is male hormone and access to guns. Let's start by having news media stop publishing school shootings so that children are not incentivized to go out in a blaze of glory. When I was young, schools had gun clubs with no shootings. What has changed?. Another problem is a parent getting medical help for disbandment children. One father made it a mission to try to allow law changes so that he could get despondent children whom they knew would do something bad. NO luck. This is just worked over tripe.
I'll see your gun clubs and raise you rifle racks in pickups, with rifles (or shotguns) in them, on the student parking lot of my H.S.
You'r on