Stray bullet kills English astrophysicist visiting United States | Hacker News Reader

Stray bullet kills English astrophysicist visiting United States

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125 pointsbaybal2315 comments

> The shooting happened early Sunday morning

> the sound of more than 30 gunshots coming from an apartment complex directly behind Shepards

> The shooting appeared to be a random act involving individuals participating in the reckless discharge of firearms

How can this happen and keep happening?

It is not only about the number of weapons around in the US: the households with weapons in the US are 42% (2017 data), 37.9% in Finland, 16.6% in New Zealand, 28,6% in Switzerland (2005 data). But stuff like that in the US is in the tenfold to hundredfold when compared to similar episodes in any other country that is not bloody poor or a war zone.

Why is that?

data: gunpolicy.org

RIP

Thirty shots fired is not random. This isn't kids shooting at bottles in the backyard.

Feels like details here are being omitted.

If thirty shots can be fired in your neighborhood without an immediate and massive police response, you should move immediately.

define immediate. it takes seconds to fire thirty rounds. it takes minutes for police to respond to anything

Ten to twenty minutes, and closing down the whole 1+ mile area, like it was a terrorist attack.

That would be the case in a civilized city/country. Else, it appears as if 30 gunshot rounds is like routine in that place, so it's a kind of shithole.

In the west coast city I lived in last year, it wasn’t uncommon (more than once per week easily) for people to drive around in trucks at night (or even in the day sometimes) and just unload magazines into the sky for no apparent reason. In any other country I’ve ever visited, this would result in a huge news response condemning the act along with a significant police response. I never even saw most of these on the news or saw any significant police response.

In some Arab countries this is a normal day time activity often done during weddings.

Well we don't need the police to scoop up the bullets out of the air. If they can get there within 20 minutes, and find a pile of shell casings and dudes with warm guns in their posession, and sulphur smoke in the air, maybe they can do something as a deterrent to future cases, such as presenting all of them to the DA with a nice bow on top.

When seconds count police are minutes away.

the police were already responding to the gunfire as the girlfriend was calling 911

If you expect police to do anything to help you, you'd probably have to move into the whitehouse.

30 is not that much if someone nearby is doing target practice. They're going to get someone killed some day, but the police don't care.

"They're going to get someone killed some day..."

Most of the time - no. Most farms I know of have a good backstop, consistent with any "official" gun range.

There's kinds of farms. The kind nearby is the kind someone buys because they're rich enough to own a farm without caring about paying for it with the farm. A farm for someone who can't bridge the gap between their self-identification as a working-class conservative and the amount of money they have.

I checked the particular neighborhood in the article, and it's all single-family homes, so probably someone in their backyard goofing off. A neighbor in a similar place liked to run around shooting squirrels with a pistol. The police never showed up. It was an awkward, anxious few years before he moved out. He also liked to shoot bottle rockets without regard for direction. I got buzzed a few times.

Georgia is a land of contrasts.

From the article:

> Shepard, whose apartment is in the Atlanta suburb of Brookhaven, who told the television station that the couple woke up on Jan 16 to the sound of more than 30 gunshots coming from an apartment complex directly behind Shepards.

Seems pretty clear that this wasn't a case of someone target shooting with an insufficient backstop.

Pretty sure the comment i was responding to mentioned people on farms (not related to the article), but is now edited.

The edit came before your comment, but you must have had the page open already. The downside of HN being one of the last remaining major web 1.0 sites that doesn't change everything right under your efforts to interact with it.

This happened in Atlanta (technically Brookhaven). The police were looking for the source of gunfire reported at the 3600 block of Buford Highway [0] and the 911 call related to the shooting came from the 3100 block of Clairmont Rd.

There are some single family homes in the area, but it's not low density suburbs or a rural area.

As I said in another comment, this sort of thing is unfortunately not uncommon in Atlanta. My wife is an attorney and has worked on several lawsuits arsing from stray bullets hitting people inside in their apartments. For whatever reason, knuckleheads go out in the parking lot or the nearby wooded area and shoot off their guns. Tragically and inevitably someone gets hurt or killed.

[0] https://www.google.com/maps/place/3600+Buford+Hwy+NE,+Atlant...

[1] https://www.google.com/maps/place/3100+Clairmont+Rd,+Atlanta...

Pretty sure the comment I was responding to mentioned people on farms (not related to the article), but is now edited.

As someone living in a relatively poor state, thirty shots is just another normal night.

The police doesn’t do shit.

What are these people aiming at?

> If thirty shots can be fired in your neighborhood without an immediate and massive police response, you should move immediately.

rephrasing: if thirty shots can be fired and nothing ever changes and the same things keep happening again and again, you should move ASAP, I agree.

You should move abroad to a more civilized country.

EDIT: this happened a month ago.

https://www.ansa.it/english/news/general_news/2021/12/03/col...

USA is no country for civilized people.

TBF some of them are dangerous even outside of their borders

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/05/world/europe/americans-mu...

In 2021 the whole EU (population 448 millions) registered ~3.5k homicides.

USA (population 332 millions)? > 20k (+29% compared to 2020, during a pandemic, while in the rest of the World homicide stats went down considerably)

I was going to reply that this sort of thing isn't all that uncommon here in Atlanta. Then I clicked the link and saw this this happened in Brookhaven, which is formerly a neighborhood of Atlanta proper. <sigh>

Quote from TFA: "Police were in the vicinity pursuing reports of gunfire when the 911 call from Shepard came in."

How else would you keep the house prices from skyrocketing /s

Because cowboys and rap music and manifest destiny.

But seriously, you don't have to look that far. Canada's gun ownership and gun crime rates are also puzzling to compare with America's.

It's because of the NRA, which is a trade group of gun companies preventing regulation, and high ownership due to lack of regulation. The high ownership is there goal, a gun costs hundreds of dollars on the low end, and it's an 11-figure market.

Canadian gun ownership and gun laws are not comparable to the US. They have 1/3 the guns and 1/3 the gun crime per capita compared to the US, and ownership is more highly regulated.

Isn’t NRA more of a white Americans thing, while these kind of shootings are more gang-related?

Even better for the NRA. Fear of the Other helps the NRA drive more gun sales.

It sounds more like people were recklessly popping rounds off for fun than anything gang-related.

Well they do have 5 million members, so I don't think it's necessarily accurate to call it a "trade group of gun companies". They may be a significant part of the organization but there are a significant number of individuals who are part of it.

>They have 1/3 the guns and 1/3 the gun crime per capita compared to the US, and ownership is more highly regulated.

My quick stat check shows double the households with guns[1] but 6X the rate of gun deaths[2].

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Figure-One-Percentage-of...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm...

I’d bet there are very few handguns in Finland, mostly bolt action hunting rifles.

According to the wiki, out of 1.5 million registered firearms there are about 225000 handguns.

Though there could be as much as a million weapons from WWII.

>Why is that?

Many americans like to kill and die by gunfire, and consider it their constitutional right. That's why. And many of those opposing them, still agree to treat the Constitution as some holy scripture - they might differ on the interpretation of the gun related law, but they wont go out and say "who cares if the Constitution gave you the right, it's 2022 and it's just a piece of paper, let's change it anyway".

So in that sense, they reinforce their opponents argument (which is based on their interpretation + the Constitution, by upholding the second part, and thus keeping it at the level of a debate of interpretation).

And why do US citizens like to kill and be killed by gunfire? It's not only because of lots of weapons.

I know! We are all just sitting around waiting to kill or be killed and every year and unfortunately 99.9994% of us are disappointed that we didn’t get to kill or be killed.

I'm so sorry to hear that, better luck next time! :D

> Many americans like to kill and die by gunfire, and consider it their constitutional right

How does this sarcastic, mocking comment contribute to any kind of rational discussion? You have no idea what you're talking about.

>How does this sarcastic, mocking comment contribute to any kind of rational discussion?

That's part of the whole point. That selling guns to civilians, and treating them as a hobby and point of pride to own at home, considering it some "right" to carry (or even "open carry") them, and them a necessity for protection from "the bad guys" (and especially the kinds of automatic guns allowed and routinely sold), should not be part of any rational discussion.

In fact, in saner countries, it isn't.

>You have no idea what you're talking about.

Please, enlighten me then, because your comment thus far has less informational content than mine had, and doesn't even state a position (without any argument would do to) to make up for it. It's pure personal insult.

Changes to the constitution are called amendments and constitutional amendments are, by design, almost impossible.

https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution/artic...

So, if as a politician you want to amend the constitution it needs to be that figurative hill you are willing to die on, everything else be damned, and have sufficient leverage to ensure other politicians don’t have to suffer your early career death.

Why can't we have "well-regulated" gun clubs that allow anyone to own any kind of weapon, tank or whatever? Edit: on the premises. That fits the letter and spirit of the second amendment.

And then have reasonable gun laws outside of those militias? It sucks having to worry about getting shot in a city in America.

> But stuff like that in the US is in the tenfold to hundredfold when compared to similar episodes in any other country that is not bloody poor or a war zone.

I think the US has an unhealthy obsession with guns that I haven't noticed with other countries. This encourages US residents to acquire/carry guns to make a political point about the second amendment or their rights as opposed to any practical need, leading to way more guns out there than actually necessary for hunting/self-defense/sport.

In other countries you mention, I'm pretty sure guns are something people acquire when they have a legitimate need for them (even if just recreational shooting) but otherwise are a fairly trivial item with no "culture" nor politics associated with it - people don't obtain/carry them just to prove a point about the second amendment or their rights.

Thanks for bringing good arguments to the discussion.

> I think the US has an unhealthy obsession with guns that I haven't noticed with other countries

Where do you think this obsession comes from?

> but otherwise are a fairly trivial item with no "culture" nor politics associated with it

Why would that reduce their risk? Flipping the question: why would this gun culture bring to more guns being actually fired? (for recklessness, violence, whatever stupid reason)

Different societies have different thresholds and criteria for what problems can be solved with violence or the threat of violence.

We can see this manifest in the use of violence by the state authorities. E.g. if state applies capital punishment to certain crimes then this reinforces the idea that violence is a solution to problems.

Whether the state holds this position because the society does or vice versa or some mixture of the two I'm not sure.

So in your opinion the US are a more violent society than most around the developed world?

For gun violence, murder, and rape, yes I think it's pretty clear cut for the US as a whole.

I would hazard a guess that there are large parts of the US where violence is more comparable to, say, the average Canadian levels.

> Where do you think this obsession comes from?

American action movies? Call of Duty?

My money would be on a lack of social cohesion, where people tend to not care much about their neighbors or society as a whole. Guns aren't themselves the problem, they just highlight the disease at the core of american culture.

Other countries have more history and culture and religion that bind them together. Being a young country of immigrants the US doesn't have those qualities.

If you don't feel part of the wider culture then you don't care about those people.

> lack of social cohesion, where people tend to not care much about their neighbors or society as a whole

Thanks, that's a really good point.

Which factors in your opinion influence this lack of social cohesion more? Social inequalities, racial, religious, educational?

Thanks. I think here in the West we have turned our backs on religion, and are now seeing the fallout from that. Religion not only defines a culture's moral code, but produces all sorts of additional glue binding people together. I'm am atheist but appreciate the benefits of Christianity for example, as that's what I grew up with and have continued with Christian traditions.

Celebrating Christmas is an obvious example here.

I'm not sure what the answer for the US is? Forcing everyone to church? As a kid I hated Sunday mass. As an adult I'm glad i went through that.

I found this:

> The United States has a religious makeup that’s broadly similar to that of many Western European countries. Most people on both sides of the Atlantic say they are Christian, for example. At the same time, substantial shares in the U.S. and Europe say they are religiously unaffiliated: Roughly a quarter of the American adult population identify as “nones” (23%), similar to the shares in Germany (24%), the United Kingdom (23%) and other Western European countries.

> At that point, however, the similarities end: U.S. adults – both Christian and unaffiliated – are considerably more religious than their European counterparts by a variety of other measures, according to an analysis of data from Pew Research Center’s 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study in the U.S. and a 2017 survey of Western Europeans. For instance, about two-thirds of U.S. Christians pray daily (68%), compared with a median of just 18% of Christians across 15 surveyed countries in Europe, including 6% in Britain, 9% in Germany, 12% in Denmark and 38% in the Netherlands.

Also to my perception US citizens always seemed much more religious than Europens.

I grew up in Norway. During my childhood I never once saw a live gun in Norway. It was a shock visiting other countries in Europe and seeing armed police.

Norway is one of the most secular countries in the developed world today. The US is often used in Norway as an example of religion taken to the extreme, and it's often mocked.

Norway also has quite easy access to guns, yet the amount of gun violence is a tiny fraction of the US.

I think it’s much more political than that. Every other country also watches action movies and plays Call of Duty.

Thanks for the feedback... But did you read the rest of my comment?

> Where do you think this obsession comes from?

The following is anecdotal. My grandparents grew up in the rural west with guns because they needed them for legitimate protection from animals. They were never gun obsessed. Their children grew up naturally learning how to shoot guns, but none of them are gun obsessed except for my father. What is the difference between my father and his siblings? He is a doctor and the military paid for his medical school. His obsession with guns was a direct result of his service in the military. My cousins, whose parents did not serve in the military, are not gun obsessed. Most of my siblings are.

The USA has an obscenely huge military. I think our gun obsession culture is a direct result of so many people and their parents having served in the military. For some reason, the USA military engenders more of a gun obsession/culture than other countries militaries. Maybe it is the combination of the 2nd amendment and military service.

A counter point, I grew up in a country where military service is compulsory.

From my experience, having to carry an assult rifle night and day for months is very effective in curing childish notions about guns .

I don't think the point is about how many people actually perform military duty, but about how the US military culture works in practice.

Switzerland for example has a heavily compulsory military duty but IMHO a less violent, less patriotic, less indoctrinated and less glorified military culture.

It is a culture thing, just not millitary culture.

Even if gun obsession is a cultural thing, how that translates to gun violence? And to gun recklessness?

Not an American but for whatever it's worth:

* American society is deeply mistrustful of itself.

* Firearms are freely available

Everything else follows.

Guns being a political statement means more people will get guns to make that political statement. This translates into more guns being around that could cause accidents (which I believe this one is) or would escalate already violent situations to a deadly level.

How can "firing 30+ rounds on a Sunday morning in a residential area" be an accident?

It is like saying that driving a truck on a crowded street on LSD and killing somebody is an accident.

An accident in the sense that I don't believe their objective was to kill. They were stupid and reckless, but if they actually wanted to kill people there are much better ways than firing rounds towards a forest and hoping to get "lucky" and hit someone.

As someone once in the military, I never cared much about guns. When I got out, I got one just to feel safe from all the idiots with guns. For example, I got in a friends car once and opened the glove box to put something in it. I found a gun pointing right at me. I carefully picked it up and cleared it. It was loaded with the safety off. I chewed him a new asshole and we weren’t friends after that (not my doing, but they didn’t appreciate my verbiage after accidentally threatening my life).

Part of the problem is like me, getting one just to protect yourself from everyone else that has one.

Thanks, even if anecdotal it is a really good point. The US military is something that highly differentiate them from almost if not all other developed countries.

That's one of the best answers I got this far from under my comment, you're lead running for my totally worthless medal :)

The 'obsession' comes from the 2nd amendment which has no equal in other countries.

> Where do you think this obsession comes from?

"2A issues" have been, AFAIK, a hot political issue for at least a few decades. The right is generally "pro-gun"; we may also ascribe to the right (not to exclude the left from the same, but it seems less relevant here) a general enthusiasm for openly contrarian signaling and behavior. Another good example is "rolling coal"—maybe I just don't understand the appeal, but to me it seems like a totally pointless and destructive exercise that can be traced directly back to their hatred of environmentalist policy. The popularity of hybrid cars and cyclists as targets for "coal rolling" supports this.

I'd say their "obsession" with guns is coming from a similar place. To a lot of these people, guns are much more political and social symbols than they are tools. The same urges that make them drive around in lifted trucks covered in Trump flags compel them not just to buy and shoot guns, but also to decorate them with political slogans and symbology, to conspicuously and (often) trollishly display them, to argue vehemently against any policy that can possibly be classified as "gun control", and so on.

Thanks!

Even if gun obsession is a cultural thing, how that translates to gun violence? And to gun recklessness?

> gun violence

In some cases (e.g. the recent murder of Ahmaud Arbery), I think it comes directly from attitudes ingrained in right-wing gun culture and associated spheres. The murderers had been socialized to believe they were completely in the right to pursue, detain, and ultimately murder a man on no basis beyond their own (frankly) unhinged, malignant racism.

In other cases, I think it is less directly political and more a result of certain socioeconomic issues, organized crime paradigms, and the general availability of guns.

> gun recklessness

This is speculation, but I think subcultures that glorify guns and (sometimes hypothetical) gun violence are less likely to treat guns with the appropriate care and respect. It's not a sober mindset, and often these people seem to have a very clear idea of who they imagine they might shoot with their guns (yes, people, not animals) and very little empathy for them.

Even putting aside how toxic that mindset is by itself, the fact that your gun may just as easily kill you, a loved one, or an innocent bystander is a very sober fact, and not very compatible with said mindset. For instance, I don't think the kind of person who e.g. has the words "You're Fucked" milled on the inside of his AR-15's ejection cover^[1] is particularly concerned with minimizing violent outcomes.

Please note that I'm not saying all right-wing gun owners are like this. There are many, even those whose politics I may vehemently disagree with, who are perfectly responsible and sober gun owners.

^[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shooting_of_Daniel_Shaver

Thanks a lot again for taking the time to fuel this discussion!

After reading and rereading all comments here I'll try to generalize those findings.

Once the number of weapons starts growing without proper control you hit a first threshold that ticks weapon deaths: two groups begin being significant, those that are armed and stupid and those that are armed and violent.

If the number of weapons keeps growing you reach a second threshold, that boosts weapon related deaths by a lot: the group of people that are armed and violent and stupid starts being significant, a really dangerous subgroup.

You can keep boosting this argument adding other kinds of people: desperate, psychos, stressed.

Probably arming too much people that are stupid, desperate, violent and stressed... you end up with a big mess, like in some hotspots around some US cities.

>> but otherwise are a fairly trivial item with no "culture" nor politics associated with it

>Why would that reduce their risk? Flipping the question: why would this gun culture bring to more guns being actually fired? (for recklessness, violence, whatever stupid reason)

Availability, if nothing else. See also: Tide Pods

> Where do you think this obsession comes from?

I responded to another comment but I feel it would be relevant here too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30050462

> Where do you think this obsession comes from?

The US is a society founded by colonists who needed guns to protect themselves against the people they were enslaving and the people whose land they were stealing.

For Switzerland I also imagine a lot of assault rifles just lying around from mandatory service

So how comes that "lots of assault rifles lying around" mean nothing in Switzerland but mean mass shootings and random firing in the backyard in the US?

I would assume the Swiss have received the necessary firing weapon training (which surely comes with a lot of safety measures drilling) which could have an impact.

I would also assume that the Swiss don't just allow anyone to join the military and thereby obtain an assault rifle, but that there is some psychological screening, that would prevent an unstable person from joining the military.

Meanwhile, in the US such a person just walks up to the gun shop and buys a firing weapon.

Because in Switzerland people have guns to defend the state from invaders. In the US people have guns to defend themselves (from the state or other people).

Also in Switzerland people store their military service gun but they don’t have bullets.

I believe they don't get to keep the rifle personally anymore. I would doubt there are many assault rifle nor semi-auto versions in the civilian population.

I agree they have been politicized. I wonder if that has anything to do with the political fight over gun regulations that seems to be unique to the US, or at least have a unique level of divisiveness. It seemed that my grandparents generation viewed guns as just a normal tool, but also didn't have as much active legislation, news coverage, etc. It seems, in my view, it's mostly the increasing disconnect between the urban and rural areas.

There’s definitely a fight over gun rights in the US more than other countries. It’s a positive feedback loop: gun-related violence prompts for more restrictions which in turn prompts people to acquire (and carry) guns in defiance despite not having other, more practical (self-defense, recreational shooting, hunting, etc) to do so and in turn cause more gun violence, intentionally (escalating confrontations to deadly shootouts that would otherwise be resolved without deadly force) or accidents like this one seems to be.

It doesn’t help that guns are also a political weapon - whenever a party wants to introduce gun restrictions, the other can use this as an advantage to secure votes (supported by pro-gun organisations such as the NRA). This of course isn’t limited to guns per-se but guns happen to be there and have a cult-like following often defying rationality - a perfect tool for politicians to take advantage of.

I’m not sure what a good solution to this would be. In my mind, the right to bear arms is already meaningless - my understanding is the the original purpose of the second amendment was to allow people to be armed to defend themselves against an abusive government - as using these arms to defend yourself against abusive law enforcement is already outlawed and can only result in life imprisonment at best and death (as in by deadly force used by police) at worst.

In this case (assuming my understanding of 2A is correct) I believe a solution might be to forcefully restrict gun ownership. There’s definitely going to be turmoil and collateral damage (I believe guns can be owned and recreationally enjoyed responsibly without harming anyone and it would be a shame to let that go) but the advantages of having less guns around might pay off in the end.

Theoretically, if the government became abusive enough, factions of law enforcement and military would take sides. Not that I see a civil war as being likely, although some experts see signs pointing to the possibility. It's certainly an interesting topic to research - a 1st world government abusive enough to cause the people to fight, and would they actually fight or would it be resolved through succession etc.

https://www.businessinsider.com/us-close-to-violent-conflict...

I totally agree that reducing weapons around should reduce weapon related violence, and also weapon related anything.

But why does a gun in the US kill more than that same gun in almost any developed county by an N factor?

Is this also a cultural factor? Or maybe social or political?

Or maybe there is a threshold over which weapon violence rises with a higher exponential in relation to weapon ownership?

For example over a certain threshold you end up having a significant number of armed individuals that are poor, desperate and armed which boosts potentially lethal criminality. Or stupid and violent armed people.

Or maybe: over a certain threshold you have too many people that are simply both armed and stupid. Occam's razor point towards this one IMHO.

I think you're right.

I've lived almost my whole life in rural areas, and have owned guns almost my whole life. With my brothers, father, grandfather, etc. Most of my friends own guns. I have never known anyone who shot somebody (with the unfortunate exception of suicide.)

I guess it's an urban thing.

I was mostly talking about the different views on guns. But it does seem that certain crimes occur at a higher rate in one area or the other.

https://www.ncjrs.gov/ovc_archives/ncvrw/2017/images/en_artw...

> I guess it's an urban thing.

It's probably an EDC thing:

* https://twitter.com/well_regulated_

In rural areas I think long guns are generally more useful, whereas in the non-rural, (sub)urban areas it's pistols that are carried about. Every time a gun is handled there is some probability of an ND, and the larger the number of guns, the more often the dice will roll for that ND.

Adding to that is that some people have no right/business owning a firearm in the first place because they lack self control and/or have psychological/emotional issues that need to be looked at:

* https://www.cbs17.com/news/local-news/wake-county-news/1-dea...

* Via: https://twitter.com/Well_Regulated_/status/14799401563460485...

There needs to be some kind a filter about ownership, even if it's as simple a one day course learning gun safety:

* http://www.firearmstraining.ca/actsprove.htm

* https://www.bulletproofset.ca/page8/page12/prove.html

The folks with absolutely zero discipline will be unlikely to bother with that course.

"In rural areas I think long guns are generally more useful, whereas in the non-rural, (sub)urban areas it's pistols that are carried about."

It's generally pistols that are carried in either setting. My state has has carry license (effectively only covers pistols) numbers at the county level. The number of licenses are much higher in rural areas. This also matches with the higher rural ownership numbers.

"Every time a gun is handled there is some probability of an ND, and the larger the number of guns, the more often the dice will roll for that ND."

True. The real question is what level of probability is acceptable. I would expect this to be a highly opinionated. My own view is that AD/ND happens so infrequently, and even more rarely hits someone other than the carrier (usually shooting themselves in the foot/leg), that it's a non-issue compared to many other daily activities that carry risk.

"There needs to be some kind a filter about ownership, even if it's as simple a one day course learning gun safety...

The folks with absolutely zero discipline will be unlikely to bother with that course."

We could teach it in schools. That's supposed to be the purpose of schools - educating society to be a fully capable responsible member of society. Whether that's with safety issues, self sufficiency, financial literacy, etc, it seems we are doing a poor job. The benefit to teaching everyone is that people who are non-owners may come across a situation where a gun is present.

This article is the best explanation I've read;

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/19/charle...

Old wild west myth never ceased, the myth of the hard wild frontier, where everyone must defend by himself. And civil war, I guess USA never really made peace with itself after civil war, primarily because it's a federation of states.

It’s because of gun culture in the US.

Its the second amendment.

It’s because of an inner city gang culture. It’s primarily just one specific demographic in the US that glorifies gang violence and shooting. If we eliminate this demographic culture, the gun violence issue will be solved.

Because, in some senses, the US is bloody poor and is a war zone.

Many state/city governments are captured by a certain party. They openly encourage criminals in an effort to destabilize the country enough to become the ruling party for good. So some ethnicities are forced to study, work hard, pay for the festivities, and get punished for as much as a speeding ticket. Others are given welfare and get to burn down cities. It happened many times before in history (Russia 1917, Germany in the 30s).

I lived in a bad area of town growing up. Lots of shootings outside. In fact the very first week we moved into that house there was a MAJOR shoot out. My entire family lying flat on the living room floor - face kissing the ground. Someone asked if they should call the cops or not. "Shhhhh, be quiet don't move" We laid on the floor like that for a long time. Kids all outside later watching the cops pick up bullet casings...

Fast-forward 15 years - bringing my wife over to the same family house. Me, "uh-oh, they're shooting again, get on the floor". My wife looking around, everyone on the floor "Oh, you're not joking?!"

It's not a new problem and it's not a good way to live.

Switzerland has a high rate of gun possession because it has mandatory military service and people take their weapons home with them.

And though many households may have a gun, they don't have ammunition. In the event they need to use the gun for military service, the canton will distribute ammunition from the arsenal.

Aside from service weapons, it is possible to simply buy a personal weapon and ammunition for it but firearms are much more regulated. You are never permitted to carry a loaded firearm in public for example (aside from a few permitted purposes like a security guard with a permit), only an unloaded firearm that you are transporting (and the police aren't going to buy any bullshit like "I'm transporting this gun to the protest").

So comparing the US to Switzerland just doesn't make sense. Sure there are guns but the rules and culture around them are completely different. It's not impossible in Switzerland but it's close.

Plus, the whole economic situation in Switzerland is different. There isn't such a huge part of the population living on the street or just barely scraping by. There isn't a whole lot of violent crime in general, let alone gun violence.

Swiss have guns because they trust their government

Americans have guns because they distrust their government

The concept of a collaborative governing body does not exist in the US, everything about the governance concept employed in the Swiss system would be a culture shock to Americans

If you discharge a gun in most European cities, I believe police will respond and will make sure you don't get an opportunity to do that again. I think many times if a gun is involved it results in a pretty serious response, potentially directly the local equivalent of SWAT. I'm pretty sure 30 gunshots from an apartment complex would be a full SWAT response.

As soon as a gun comes into play, police take it extremely seriously.

It seems like in some US cities not much is going to happen unless and until someone actually dies.

Nobody comments on the 20 minutes waiting for the ambulance ? In a city ?

In France, when I helped an old lady who had slipped on ice, the emergency services were on site in less than 5 minutes, with all the competences and material to provide life saving interventions. And this was just normal.

Why does it look normal in the US to have to wait 20 minutes after having called for a gunfire, and only for a transport ambulance ?

That's indeed a terrible response time

I live in the Atlanta metropolitan area. When my son had his first seizure 911 did not even pick up.

I know in our case, when an emergency happens, people panick, and keep trying to call 911; I have to wonder if that makes the phone lines backed up even more.

They called back over 10 minutes later ( I believe; I don't recall the exact number of minutes ).

Had to give up and get a neighbor to rush us to the hospital. As an American, it really does feel like the wheels are falling off of the bus so to speak.

I don’t have the facts but it would make some sense for emergency response medics to wait until Police have declared the area safe. Might have been a factor.

It takes 5 minutes for the ambulance to arrive and 15 minutes to check that your insurance is gonna pay for it.

Sorry, but EMS doesn’t work this way.

Of course it doesn't. It was a joke.

Considering all of the lovely armchair analysis and assumption from non us citizens about the US on this thread, I thought I would just state it so some random European HN reader doesn't make yet another incorrect assumption about the US from a stray comment.

“Did you know that in the United States ambulances will not take you to the hospital unless you have insurance if you have an accident? OMG, yes! I read it on HN!”

It's not like there isn't a grain of truth in it though. You don't have to look far to find people in financial emergencies because the ambulance provider didn't take their insurance or to find people with significant injuries begging a friend to take them to the hospital rather than phoning an ambulance because they are uninsured.

The US perverse infatuation with healthcare as a business is kind of horrifying to those non-US citizens. If poking fun at it is what it takes to effect change then hurrah for the power of humour!

> You don't have to look far to find people in financial emergencies because the ambulance provider didn't take their insurance or to find people with significant injuries begging a friend to take them to the hospital rather than phoning an ambulance because they are uninsured.

That is a wholly different situation where the patient is making the decision because of a lack of insurance instead of the EMS provider.

And…it’s generally because of ignorance that folks make that decision. They base it on rumor and assumption, where in many cases a simple phone call or two is all it takes to get those large charges decreased significantly. An ambulance provider has zero benefit to them in intentionally creating a bad debt account that will ultimately default.

Owner of a local (UK) Indian restaurant recently went home for a holiday. Came back in a neck brace with terrible bruising, so of course I asked him what happened, he said his car came off the road and rolled into a ditch. He was trapped and thought he would drown. Fortunately for him, lots of people came running and dragged the car (with him still inside) out of the ditch, got him to hospital.

The kicker was he said (he's a quiet, older, straight talker) "Thank God it didn't happen in the UK, if it had I would be dead."

Strange. So that person claims that india, where according to his statement no emergency services rushed to his aid, is better than the uk? Why move to the uk then?

He's from Bangladesh, and he didn't say anything to me about emergency services (not sure where you got his statement from, possibly some news story I'm not aware of?).

Why was that the kicker?

According to this[0], average in US is 7 minutes, and this takes into account that rural response times are slower.

[0] https://medicalnewsbulletin.com/response-time-emergency-medi...

Perhaps one of the reasons is that we pay EMTs $15/hr.

I was talking to a couple of them in a bar the other day, who told me this.

Told me about getting stabbed, attacked, shot and other stuff they have to deal with. For $15/hr.

Both of them were looking for other jobs.

That's fast, right? In my experience, police and paramedics are quite slow in response to gunshots, with the exception of affluent neighborhoods.

Brookhaven is quite affluent.

Unless they are faster than the speed of sound.

Suburb of a city. For France, I found https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_medical_services_in_...:

“Current response time targets are for the responder to arrive at the scene within 10 minutes for 80% of responses, and within 15 minutes for 95% of responses”

Reading https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamasurgery/article-abstrac..., the USA is a bit worse (table 1 shows the 90th percentile to be at 14 minutes in the suburbs). I would guesstimate that’s at least partly because of lower population density.

⇒ 20 minutes could just be an outlier. It also could be that some neighborhoods get disproportionately many high end outliers or that those numbers changed since 2015 (that’s were the data in the 2017 paper is from), though.

Omicron is placing pressure on health and emergency services at every level. It has been widely reported: https://www.ajc.com/news/investigations/georgia-ems-crews-ne.... It is not normal, but EMS staff are under higher workloads (daily hospitalizations are near all time highs https://www.ajc.com/news/coronavirus-georgia-covid-dashboard...) while dealing with increased attrition and sick leave.

And here I thought 20 minutes was pretty good.

US healthcare is a mess.

I was one time an interpreter for Seattle fire dept and went on calls in an ambulance. Between the moment we got call and arrival, it was like around 6 minutes and 5 other cars arrived at the same location. IIRC Seattle emergency med service renders the highest out of the hospital survival rate in the States.

I would imagine the time to respond would vary widly by location, especially with covid raging.

1) The US homicide/violent crime rate has been much higher than most/all of the rest of the developed world for many decades at least.

2) But since the early 1990s violent crime had been consistently declining, which got to the point the decline was taken as almost a baked-in feature of national discourse.

3) Since a blip up in 2015 the homicide rate plateaued, and then jumped by an unprecedented 30% starting ~summer 2020. This sort of spike didn't happen in ~any other countries during this time.

These are the (mostly) uncontested facts, but the debate seems very confused to me because people will point to one or another structural factor as "the reason" for so many American murders, without specifying whether they're referring to 1 or 3 or explaining how that accords with 2 also being true.

My assumption is any holistic explanation that encompasses 1/2/3 will not be monocausal, but it's primarily the dramatic recent spike that's causing public attention and concern, and longstanding structural factors don't seem well-suited to explaining a huge overnight jump in murders after a reversion from a decades-long decline.

1) The US approach to multiculturalism, drugs, mental health, and social safety nets has been different from most of the rest of the developed world since the mid-20th century.

3) I wonder what happened culturally and economically from early to mid 2020. Quite mysterious.

2) Economic prosperity, increased surveillance, and simply learning that there are better ways to engage in the drug trade than murdering people over street corner turf, probably contributed to the decrease in violent crime. There was an article a while back about how gangs in LA had essentially transformed themselves in the past few decades—less standing out on street corners, more delivery/pick-up kinds of operations; I can't find a link right now. They still do some of the same stuff, but there's less of it. Also, if you buy the environmental lead explanation or abortion explanation, those are available too.

2020 was when the “defund the police” movement has started in the US.

That isn't the cause of the increased homicide rate. The homicide rate will drop as we finally start coming out of the pandemic and it becomes endemic and less deadly. People were cooped up too long. With all the mental health issues in the US and lack of help with that it was bound to happen with all the stress.

Gun violence is not evenly distributed across the country, even after you account for population density. We have plenty of statistics and we know what the differences are but because those numbers show a very inconvenient truth, we instead some up with all kinds red herrings and tangents to try to explain it away, while also promoting look-busy solutions that don't address the actual source of the problem, which once again, is extremely unevenly distributed.

> those numbers show a very inconvenient truth

Could you be plain about the point you’re making here?

Their point seems to be that everyone knows their point and no one can say it.

Or that there's no point saying it because addressing it would require unpopular trade-offs. Like extending the welfare state or tightening gun control. Not even worth debating. Nobody likes to be told that they can't both have their cake and eat it too.

It sounds like they're talking about the socioeconomic factors behind the violence. I believe there's a book called American Homicide that covers them in detail.

The extremely basic overly simplified summary I have is that people who don't have hope or think they've been cheated have less incentive to work within the broken system.

https://news.northeastern.edu/2020/01/06/can-gun-violence-be...

Very charitable that "socioeconomic" would be their choice of taboo conversations.

Not necessarily. Some people misinterpret socioeconomic to be someone being covertly racist, sexist, classist, etc. Statistically, specific groups are responsible for a majority of the violence (an obvious one is males). Some groups are disproportionately affected by the underlying socioeconomic issues.

It's reasonable that some people don't want to talk about these issues since it makes them an easy target to be misunderstood and called a bigot.

this is heart breaking. just a while ago there was a child shot while being driven down 880 in the bay area when some people were shooting at each other while driving. he wasn't even on the same side of the highway.

these kinds of incidents shouldn't be possible.

The pain the parents must be feeling is unimaginable and will never heal. This is an example of failure of society -- you give up freedoms to gain securities, but then these securities aren't delivered and you are left upset why the system has failed you, but you have not the freedom to do anything about it.

The funny thing is, that in the United States we give up the day to day security of living in a society with fewer guns and much less gun violence because of the freedom citizens have to own guns.

I am not saying it really feasible to change the approach in the United States, but it's not really honest to claim that widespread firearms ownership does not have costs. The simple way to think about it is that it decreases the marginal cost, and increases the impact, of many things like suicides, and senseless rampages.

You can say guns don't kill people, people kill people. But people without guns cannot knife the passenger of another vehicle on the highway or stab 15 people to death within a couple minutes.

I’m not making a commentary on guns, but there are lots of ways that people can be insanely stupid and reckless and end innocent bystanders lives. Talking about highways made me think of this one immediately: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Interstate_75_rock-thro...

That's really missing the point.

Is it? I always felt that whole argument was reductive. It seems obvious that for the most part people kill people, and that guns make that easier/worse. Why belabor that point?

> Is it?

Yes.

> Why belabor that point?

Why appear to not understand it?

The gun factor makes it so much easier to wound and kill multiple people with outcomes that are order(s) of magnitude worse that just that alone overshadows any "people kill people" fundaments in the equation.

If you're not allowed (or it's made legally risky enough) to shoot lethal projectiles around, near instantly, and to targets who are merely within a line of sight or just close by then your ability to harm and kill multiple people are heavily bounded by your ability to physically chase and catch individuals. It takes time to exert violence so even if you manage to attack one person the others will use the time for fleeing away. You really have to be busy if you try to implement even a fraction of a mass shooting with a knife.

Similarly, knives, fists, batons, and axes keep the damage very local. Even if the astrophysicist's neighbour had stabbed some poor soul thirty times in an adjacent apartment the tragedy would have been mostly contained in the crime scene. Bullets fly far and they fly through, expanding the potential crime scene like what just happened there.

Guns turn any situation into a whole another level of danger which is the reason most sane countries have regulated gun accessibility, penalised gun usage, and implemented emergency and judicial response to the point where most criminals don't want to use or carry guns because doing so turns minor risks into show-stopping ones. It could be argued that criminals might often be stupid but even criminals aren't that stupid.

> If you're not allowed (or it's made legally risky enough) to shoot lethal projectiles around…

I’m quite certain that you’re not allowed to do this, so you’re setting up a straw man here.

> Guns turn any situation into a whole another level of danger which is the reason most sane countries have regulated gun accessibility, penalised gun usage, and implemented emergency and judicial response to the point where most criminals don't want to use or carry guns because doing so turns minor risks into show-stopping ones. It could be argued that criminals might often be stupid but even criminals aren't that stupid.

It’s possible that the guns in this case were illegal, and I’m quite sure there are steep penalties for being caught with such weapons. Many criminals are that stupid (case in point: firing guns randomly).

The reason this is reductive is because the argument you are making seems to be “more gun control would have solved this”. I’m not at all opposed to gun control, I just think this is probably more complicated and I’d like to understand exactly why it helps. E.g. why is the problem 10x what it is in Canada, but gun ownership is nowhere near 10x?

> It seems obvious that for the most part people kill people, and that guns make that easier/worse. Why belabor that point?

Because it’s disingenuous to say “guns don’t kill people” if they increase death rate by a factor of 100x. Your rock throwing example killed two people over a span of months. Guns sadly kill dozens in minutes pretty regularly.

Interestingly very few of the people claiming “guns don’t kill people” think we should allow private ownership of atomic weapons, even though the same logic applies.

I didn’t say the things that are reading into my words and quoting. No sane person would dispute that guns kill people in pure mechanical terms, I just don’t think reinforcing or debating that point is helpful in diagnosing the root causes of gun violence or the right policies, just as debating “cars kill people” would provide any meaningful advancement in traffic safety.

What is the point of wading into the gun debate pushing NRA propaganda if you believe it’s not a valuable thing to discuss?

“Hey, I’m not saying anything about guns killing people, but let me argue against it for a minute.”

> …I just don’t think reinforcing or debating that point is helpful in diagnosing the root causes of gun violence or the right policies, just as debating “cars kill people” would provide any meaningful advancement in traffic safety.

Discussions about cars killing people have absolutely shaped traffic policy. All manner of safety features are now mandatory to reduce the number of people cars kill. Drinking and driving laws have rolled out worldwide to reduce deaths from cars. We require licenses to drive because incompetent drivers kill people with their cars.

If you want to draw a line between the danger from cars and the danger from guns, the obvious conclusion is a lot more regulation around gun ownership.

Also we probably wouldn't have like 60 people killed and an additional 411 people wounded such as with Las Vegas. Or the Pulse Nightclub with 49 people dead and 53 wounded. Each by 1 person.

There were an additional 456 wounded in Las Vegas in the stampede, too.

The guy hit ~470 people with actual gunfire. On his own.

Innocent bystanders can be stabbed in knife attacks. Can and does happen

When's the last time a single knife attacker killed 60 and stabbed another 411? In a span of ten minutes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Las_Vegas_shooting

Never said knives were less dangerous than guns just that an assailant swinging a knife can do damage, but if your argument is that if get rid of guns we can get rid of mass killings, then may I direct your attention to the 86 people who were killed by a truck.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack

We regulate trucks more heavily than we regulate guns in the US, and the cost/benefit analysis is substantially different.

Truck driving has a minimum age, a licensing requirement, registration of the vehicle, often annual inspections of it, etc., in part because we recognize their potential for danger in the wrong hands. Very much not the case for gun use.

Thirty gunshots is about the same amount that the whole Finnish police discharge in one year countrywide. And those police gunshots are investigated individually as for whether each shot was deemed legal.

There are plenty of videos on youtube with people putting projectiles through drywall [0] and it turns out even the "wimpy" rounds like 22lr go right through multiple layers with ease. The practical lesson is to "hit the deck" when the bullets start flying, just like in combat.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsBKwzssfwU

Somehow I think the practical lesson should be about more than learning to take cover when a gunfight breaks out. I'd like to think there is a better discussion to be had about how to prevent this from happening.

What discussion is there to be had?

Every country other than the US already knows how to solve this.

I think you ought to qualify that some. Many countries have much higher rates of deaths by firearm (intentional or not) than the United States.

Not all of them have solved it, no. But the United States is the only place I’m aware of that pretends the presence of firearms is a good thing.

The practical lesson here is to not visit the US if you can avoid it.

I convinced myself after I left I wouldn't come back. Unfortunately, the money was too good.

That’s a pretty ridiculous lesson to learn. These things are exceptionally rare. Sure, it happens way too often relative to other countries, but it’s still just so rare that it’s not a real concern.

This makes it sound like the US is in a state of constant warfare. While this may be accurate, it does make one wonder why citizens of a country supposedly in peacetime should constantly be watching out for and dodging bullets.

People are incredibly poor at risk estimation. Just having a gun in your home for self-defense is a net negative, because of the risk of accidents and how much easier it becomes to commit suicide.

But for a lot of folks, their gun ownership is tied up in their perception of what it means to be a man. Protecting your family and all that. It's terribly toxic.

What’s toxic is having somebody breaking into your house and not being able to do anything about it except call the police who might or might not show up in the next 15 minutes. What’s toxic is when only criminals have guns and you cannot protect yourself with equal force.

That's exactly my point. For the average person, it's not a net win to have that gun around. The chance you'll be the victim of a random occupied home invasion is VERY VERY small.

I agree with you, however:

I’m not willing to give up my individual freedom to protect my family for the benefit of the group. If you are, cool.

Also, my eyebrows are raised at the idea that protecting your family is toxic in your OG comment. Come again?

I protect my family by making the world a better place/supporting structural solutions to problems. Not by pretending I'm going to be a hero by shooting someone that just wants stuff. Unfortunately for a lot of folks on the right, they do think that's what'll happen.

What will actually happen is something like this: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/texas-toddler-gun-car-sh...

In the worst cases, people's gun collections become a significant contributor to their ego. See also: lifted trucks.

Thanks for your input. How do you know somebody crashing through your window just wants stuff? What if they can kidnap your wife / hold somebody hostage to get even more stuff. Is that a risk you’re willing to take?

Agreed with your point on ego, it is sad. I would just add that responsible gun owners keep their guns locked up at all times especially with children in the house. Can’t say everybody is responsible but the benefit is worth the risk from an individual level IMO

Look at the Mexicans. They have absolutely no way to protect themselves from criminals. No rights to own guns. No functioning police force. No functioning government. They just live in fear and constantly get fucked.

Is the solution to Mexico's situation to arm everyone in greater quantities? Is the US suffering from those levels of crime? What's the likelihood that a random person will experience a home invasion/kidnapping scenario in the US?

Now what's the risk of kids finding the guns in the house and accidentally discharging them? What's the risk of increased suicides? Someone firing a gun because they got into an emotionally heated argument?

There are many factors. It's not clear-cut. If we followed your reasoning, we would never step outside the house, because a drunk driver might crash into and kill us at any moment while we're walking outside.

Lots of questions there :) I would say all of the concerns in your second paragraph are thought provoking. My personal view is that this is acceptable collateral damage for our individual rights guaranteed in our constitution. I think the rights of the individual are more important than a slightly less violent society on average, because there is some personal agency to protect yourself and your family.

Regarding your first point, according to my Mexican friend the solution is most definitely NOT to arm all Mexicans. I’m not sure what the solution is but I know if I ever live in Mexico I’m obtaining a gun for protection. Fun fact gun rights are enshrined in the Mexican constitution as a right of the people but surprise as government's tend to do they have taken that power away from the people.

I don’t see how my logic is related to drunk drivers possibly killing me. I’m not paranoid about possibilities but check the LA news about how many homeless people break into people’s houses / stab people. If I lived in rural America I wouldn’t be worried but if you live in a rough neighborhood you have to be prepared because the cops aren’t going to come quick enough to save your life if needed.

The second amendment & what it's become since it was penned goes a long way towards explaining it.

As a Canadian who moved to the United States this is something that I worry about all the time. That putting myself into this situation might just randomly lead to some random violent event happening to me. I remember that within a month of moving here about a block from me there was reports of someone driving their car down the sidewalk. Just last month someone was high on something, climbed up on the top of the Castro theatre, and started throwing cinder blocks down on people. While that's not really the riskiest situation it kind of summarizes some things that seem "normal" in the US that I would never dream might happen where I am from.

FWIW, people drive down sidewalks in Canada too (famously in 2018). While on average the U.S. may have more violence than Canada, it’s certainly not correct say that it is “normal” in the U.S. and you would never dream of it in Canada. To frame it another way: I imagine that the safer neighborhoods in the U.S. are still safer than danger neighborhoods in Canada. The U.S. is also 10x the size of Canada, so you expect 10x as many bad things happening. (I’m also a Canadian living in the U.S. and it bugs me a bit when Canadians romanticize Canada in this way. Your perception is probably much more related to the specific places you lived in Canada and live now and the US.)

This sounded like the start of a joke. Unfortunately it's just a cruel reality.

in America, perhaps.

> I held him for another 20 minutes while we waited for the ambulance, she said. And while we were waiting, there were more gunshots fired.

> No arrests were made.

Bumping into downstairs neighbors in the elevator will be awkward for some time.

Probably not an elevator: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Brookhaven,+GA/@33.877765,...

> The shooting appeared to be a random act involving individuals participating in the reckless discharge of firearms.

While the second amendment arms US citizens and for reason, simultaneously, the punishment should be 100x greater than it is today for any gun violence of any kind that isn't pure self defense. Whether it's this or school shooters, a serious public example needs to be made that is strong enough to send a chilling effect to stop this horrendous behavior.

I feel so sorry for him and his loved ones.

> the punishment should be 100x greater than it is today for any gun violence of any kind that isn't pure self defense

Even capital punishment for the shooter will not give that man his live back. If the USA was not so obsessed with owning weapons he would be alive, thou.

> to send a chilling effect

The USA puts more people in prison that any other developed country, by much. Vengeance does not stop bullets, removing weapons from the streets do.

That means that capital punishment is not enough of a deterrent - same with prison.

Sounds to me like its not possible for such a deterrent to exist, I wonder what solutions other countries have come up with

Gun control and restorative justice approaches seem to be the trick. From the outside it appears a militarised police apparatus isn't working for the US and would be a great target for substantial budget cuts.

Why would you talk about reducing the budget of your current solution before replacing it with something else?

Do you think the situation would not get substantially worse? You could ban guns tomorrow but the type of people who are firing 30 shots in to random houses aren't going lay down their arms.

Because you can then reallocate the funding from the solution that doesn't work (militarised police, mass incarceration) to solutions that do. The police don't prevent people from firing thirty random shots into a house, but decent alternatives to crime - even for those with little or no educational achievements - might. It requires a holistic approach though, with multiple agencies and policies working together, which is a hard transition from targeted intervention, whether that be policing or sticking plasters.

There's a leap of faith involved in making that connection, but it is a small leap once you look at other countries and see how their systems work. The fundamental step is to not make life so awful that desperate people decide a high-stakes life of crime is worth it.

What you do is find the root causes and work on eliminating them. A lot of this stuff is just caused by poverty or mental illness. You can just eliminate those and be done with a large part of the problem.

How would we eliminate poverty?

Universal Basic Income.

You give money to people who don't have it, like we do in Sweden. If they're disabled, get them pension. If they can't get a job, get them education or training. If they don't have a house, get them one.

It's not that mysterious, lots of other countries manage to do it fairly well: You create a minimum standard of living and help anyone that falls below that. A social safety net. If you have no place to live, the government provides you with a relatively good alternative (not homeless shelters – those places are awful). If you don't have enough to eat, the government gives you food or money to buy it. You make sure newborn babies have food and care. You set up a system of laws that make sure companies provide time for parents to take care of their newborns. You make it easy and relatively cheap for parents to find early education options and child care. You give people healthcare so they're healthier as adults. You provide options for mental healthcare to help people avoid violence. All of this stuff raises the quality of life for everyone.

Root causes of this particular incident? The possession of deadly weapons by people who rarely have a legitimate need to have them beyond "MY RIGHTS" and "SECOND AMENDMENT". This has nothing to do with poverty.

I don't think any kind of punishment could effectively deter this because I don't believe this was intentional or that the perpetrator even imagined that the bullet could still kill someone despite the distance and obstacles on the way. Not to mention that as another comment points out, capital punishment is a thing and that still isn't enough to deter murder/etc.

The main problem here is that people have access to and an obsession with deadly weapons. This obsession leads them to acquire those weapons even when they have no legitimate reason to own/carry them. Accidents are bound to happen even with trained users, but typically the risk is worthwhile when you have a legitimate need to own/carry the weapon. When you don't have a legitimate need however, it's just needless risk-taking that will eventually produce situations like this.

> Root causes of this particular incident? The possession of deadly weapons by people who rarely have a legitimate need to have them beyond "MY RIGHTS" and "SECOND AMENDMENT".

This is most certainly not what I or anyone else means by root cause. Guns are just instruments. This is like blaming hammers for building houses. The root cause is that which causes someone to use a gun they have or get a gun they don't have. Having the right to have one is not that cause.

> This has nothing to do with poverty.

You've provided zero evidence or argument for that yet sociologists over deacdes have accumulated masses of evidence that poverty does cause gun violence and countries have responded to this in real life by reducing poverty which in turn actually reduces gun violence.

> The main problem here is that people have access to and an obsession with deadly weapons. This obsession leads them to acquire those weapons even when they have no legitimate reason to own/carry them. Accidents are bound to happen even with trained users, but typically the risk is worthwhile when you have a legitimate need to own/carry the weapon. When you don't have a legitimate need however, it's just needless risk-taking that will eventually produce situations like this.

This is just a litany of assertions with no evidence or argument behind them which happens to contradict all research on the topic and effective policy (in most of Europe).

> The root cause is that which causes someone to use a gun they have or get a gun they don't have.

My argument is that the US has an unhealthy culture around guns that prompts people to acquire/carry them to make a point as opposed to a legitimate need of them for self-defense/etc. This in turn leads to more weapons being out there than necessary and more opportunities for someone to be stupid with them. I don't believe this particular shooter was involved in any kind of legitimate use of a gun during this shooting, and I doubt they had a good, rational reason to have one on them at the time. Rather, they were bored, stupid or under the influence, a gun was within reach and they decided to play with it.

> You've provided zero evidence or argument for that yet sociologists over deacdes have accumulated masses of evidence that poverty does cause gun violence and countries have responded to this in real life by reducing poverty which in turn actually reduces gun violence.

I definitely believe poverty causes intentional shootings. But so far I don't believe this was an intentional shooting (even if the original target was different); this sounds more like idiots negligently discharging a gun many times without thinking about the consequences but there was never an intention to kill or harm, so I'm not sure the usual statistics (which are mainly due to gun-related crime which can definitely correlate with poverty) would apply here.

> This is just a litany of assertions with no evidence or argument behind them which happens to contradict all research on the topic and effective policy (in most of Europe).

Potentially, and you are indeed welcome to disagree. This is just my personal opinion based on noticing an obsession with guns that I haven't seen in other countries that allow guns.

> My argument is that

Its not an argument, it's just an assertion with nothing to back it up.

Anyway, if you do ban guns, you'll just end up with rampant knife crime like the UK. This has all been tried before and we know what works and what doesn't work already. Why not just do what actually works.

RAMPANT!!?

It's really hard to believe that people still write stuff online without doing some basic searching. But here we are...

Here's a couple links to illustrate how RAMPANT knife crime is in the UK:

[1] For the year ending September 2019, there were 221 homicides involving a knife or sharp instrument recorded by the police. This figure is for England and Wales only and it excludes data from Greater Manchester Police (GMP).

[2] Recorded knife crime rose by 7% from just above 41,000 in the year to June 2018 to just above 44,000 in the year to June 2019, knifepoint rapes, robberies and assaults logged by police continued to rise.

I think it's pretty clear that your "rampant" is off BY A LOT. Knife crime in the UK is definitely not something to dismiss but guns (and gun crime and gun accidents) in the US tromp pretty much every other crime statistic in the "modern, civilized" world.

[1] https://www.ons.gov.uk/aboutus/transparencyandgovernance/fre...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_statistics_in_the_United...

Even if we assume that intentional kills will stay as-is and just switch to knives, it'll still be a net positive as accidental kills will be reduced: it's much harder to accidentally kill a bystander with a knife than a gun.

I agree. When people talk about taking away guns from people, I really wonder they understand how emotionally attached some people are to their guns. What I want to work on is figure out why, emotionally, some people really want to own guns and go from there. If people want guns because they're afraid their house will be robbed again, how to help them rebuild trust in their neighbors so they don't have such a strong desire to own a gun.

I wonder if poverty is a contributing factor to property crime

I believe relative poverty, yes.

Exactly. This is the kind of thing that I think will work in combination with other investigative and preventative methods.

While eliminating poverty and mental illness are of course lofty goals we should work to accomplish, they also seem quite difficult in the short to medium term (understatement!) so I don't think it can really be an answer.

I also don't think it's all merely poverty or mental illness; especially (but not exclusively) young adults can make stupid decisions without thinking through the consequences ("lol let's shoot {in the air,at this wall} it'll be fun!") which is even harder to eliminate. Yes, education helps, but everyone driving a car is educated (i.e. has a license) and look at the number of yahoos there.

Reality of the matter is, if you're opposed to gun control then you're making the trade-off that these type of things will happen. If you want to make his trade-off: fair enough! We make loads of trade-offs in society and human lives are often involved in them. What I find frustrating about the entire debate are comments such as this which pretend that this trade-off does not exist.

(For my part, I think it's actually not that important of an issue one way or the other and that the much deeper issue is this paranoid fear of criminals that has taken hold in US culture, and fear that even the most petty of criminals is really a Hannibal Lector who will kill you and your family just for shit 'n giggles. People arming themselves to protect against these imagined monsters is just one symptom among many, such as excessive police violence, mandatory drug testing, locking up more people than China which has literal concentration camps, etc.)

> While eliminating poverty and mental illness are of course lofty goals we should work to accomplish, they also seem quite difficult in the short to medium term (understatement!) so I don't think it can really be an answer.

I don't think so. It's been done plenty of times in Europe. You can do it if you want to.

> I also don't think it's all merely poverty or mental illness

I agree. I think that's just the easiest place to start to knock out a whole hell of a lot of what's going on in the US.

> Reality of the matter is, if you're opposed to gun control then you're making the trade-off that these type of things will happen

Definitely, but they shouldn't be happening at the rate that they are. I think everyone sees that.

(Cool username btw.)

Europe is very far from being free of poverty or mental illness. Is it better than in the US? Sure. But free of it? Far from it.

And yes, we can do it if we want to, but the political reality is that we don't seem to want to. You can think all sort of things about that, but that's just how it is.

And in the US specifically, the political reality is pretty fucked in all sorts of ways (that is my polite opinion) and I'm not expecting any significant movement on this in the foreseeable future.

The poverty rate in Sweden is 1.20% and that's after taking in the most immigrants per capita of any Europen country. We have free health care, which includes mental health care treatment for everyone.

I don't know much about Sweden, but in the Netherlands (my own country) poverty levels are reported at 0.3%, even lower, but this tells a very incomplete story as many people are struggling to make ends meet.

For the record, the U.S. is reported at 1.7% poverty levels; not much above Sweden's levels.

I don't know you or your background, but I think of people who are relatively well off (i.e. programmers and the like) don't quite grasp how much harder everything is if you're working low-income minimum wage jobs. It's perhaps not "poverty" by some measured standard, but it sure isn't easy sailing either.

Because better than deterrents, based in punishment, is to create a non violent society. That can be accomplished by regulating weapons, reducing poverty and exclusion, better education, etc.

Punishment is very limited as an education tool. It has some uses, but positive incentives complement it and, in the end, are more powerful.

"Why don't we just create a utopian society instead" is never a good argument.

Less violent societies with less encarcellation rates than the USA exist. That is the minimum that the USA should aspire to.

There's a huge gap between the US and utopia. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Fully agreed!

I'm not sure how to reconcile your choice to downplay deterrents with a claim that regulation is the way forward. Regulation without disincentives is meaningless, isn't it?

To my mind, the US has a violence problem and guns much more so than a gun violence problem.

Focusing specifically on murder by guns, California and Texas, who are largely similar in murder rates are also largely similar in murder-by-gun rates despite having regulatory environments that are about as far apart as you can get in the United States. I'm not taking a position here, and I understand there might be compounding factors (like both states being border states); but it does make me wonder if what has been effective in other cultures will be effective in the United States.

I think your points about reducing poverty and providing for education are on point. Generally speaking, states that I consider "poor" states and regions within states that are generally depressed seem to have higher gun-murder rates. They also seem to have generally more violence. These are things we should focus on anyway (and would probably also help with gun-suicide and gun-related accidents).

In the US, I think both sides in this argument are generally disingenuous. Speaking very broadly... Gun control advocates manipulate statistics and call any death by gun "gun violence" as if there is no distinction between a suicide victim and a murderer. They also don't separate out legal versus illegal gun access in the use of gun murder, which I think is meaningful if you're talking about adding more laws/regulations. Some are at least honest enough to state they want to restrict all private gun ownership. Again, broadly speaking, they push laws that are about restricting legitimate gun ownership rather than promoting responsible gun ownership. On the flip side, gun control opponents oppose any change in law and while they acknowledge that there are differences in types of gun-related deaths, they aren't any more nuanced in their views about it and generally don't seem to acknowledge that non-murder gun deaths are also a problem we need to work on.

I'd much rather see everyone gather around responsible gun ownership for those that want it. (And I do think that more severe punishment would be useful in reducing accidents and maybe suicides, even though I think it wouldn't do anything for murders.)

This has turned into a bit of a ramble I suppose, but I'm just generally wondering what you think the path forward should be, why you think such a path would work in the United States specifically, and how regulations work if deterrents don't work.

> Gun control advocates manipulate statistics and call any death by gun "gun violence" as if there is no distinction between a suicide victim and a murderer.

I would be happy if we could avoid that kind of death and the pain that their family and friends suffer. So, they are different by definition, but both are avoidable and should be reduced as much as possible.

> responsible gun ownership

That's an oxymoron. The most responsible is to not own guns. Guns are not toys. Buy a PlayStation if you want to shoot something. VR is also getting better.

> how regulations work if deterrents don't work.

Deterrents are just one of the tools. In combination with reducing gun advertising, and concienciation campaigns on the dangers of weapons, it could cause a great improvement. Mental illness treatmeants, better general education, etc. also help.

>> responsible gun ownership

> That's an oxymoron. The most responsible is to not own guns. Guns are not toys. Buy a PlayStation if you want to shoot something. VR is also getting better.

Your two first statements cannot both be true. The latter statement ("most") implies a continuum, the former a binary condition. It is also unclear to me if you mean private gun ownership or any gun ownership (such as organizational ownership: police, army, etc.). Regardless, I'm not sure your statements are meaningful in a world in which both violence and knowledge of guns exist. And, even if so, I think only dedicated pacifists could hold such a view without cognitive dissonance.

Regardless, the opposite of not owning a gun is not "I own a gun because I see it as a toy."

> Deterrents are just one of the tools. In combination with reducing gun advertising, and concienciation campaigns on the dangers of weapons, it could cause a great improvement. Mental illness treatmeants, better general education, etc. also help.

Most of those things are not gun regulations. I agree that those things would help. However, my question was about the inherent conflict between your claims regarding deterrence and regulation.

In general, people assume they won't get caught. This means there is in most cases no deterring effect from any punishment. The human mind simply does not work that way.

There is however an effect from people being basically lazy and doing things that make sense only in the spur of the moment, without thinking things through. If getting a gun meant a headache inducing amount of work and waiting time, only people who really want a gun would have one.

This is basically the situation in the rest of the world. There are guns, and criminals that want one have no problem getting one on the black market. But even so, most criminals don't get a gun, because the day to day situation simply doesn't give you exposure to them.

Correct

No, that means that the idea that deterrents are constructed on is flawed. The fact of the matter is that no matter what "the people" opt to do, is that state forces in America are reactionary and not preventative - innocent until proven guilty.

These people aren't even doing the mental accounting where Z disincentivizes X if it isn't plainly obvious. The most responsible and humane thing to do is to ask why are they able to skip that gap. I think what you'll find is that they're victims to society in many cases - removed from opportunities through any number of institutional or economic processes. E.g. criminal record, or living in an economically depressed area (which itself has many widespread effect). In other cases they're possessed of a genuinely destructive pathology. And in any of these cases they're probably poor. This shit occurs when people are poor. Stop making poor people and violence goes down to the point where pathologically violent or otherwise unstable people are the baseline.

That capital punishment is not a deterrent simply goes to show that there a fatal (ha) flaw in the justification for it, leaving behind all the usual worries about executing innocents, giving the state the power to kill those it wants to or even the cost.

Either some criminals are not in a state of mind where any rational cost-benefit calculation is happening at all, or a considered cost-benefit calculation puts their own life below the perceived benefit of the act (maybe religiously motivated attacks, say). Alternatively they truly think they won't get caught, which, depending on the crime, place and competence might be the most rational reason.

There is nothing that you can do so to deter these "irrational" crimes by just twiddling knobs on the sentence harshness generator.

There are too many guns out there now and no one has the political will to reduce them, just like climate change/carbon taxes.

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Well, the reason has been debated endlessly so we should skip the debate here.

What we can try to figure out is how to make it more difficult for people who commit crimes with a gun to get away with the crime.

It's unlikely we will ever catch the person who committed this crime, for example.

More technology might help. Machine learning, cameras, ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator

It always confuses me how people quote the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution to end the argument without further discussion, as if it's impossible to - you know - amend the constitution somehow, if one wanted to.

If people want to keep guns for their own reasons, they're allowed to have those reasons and should argue them. But the fact that the constitution was once amended to allow them to is not, by itself, a reason to keep doing so. That's just circular reasoning.

The thing I never understood is why the jurisprudence puts more emphasis on the "right to bear arms" part than in the "a well regulated militia" part.

there's a lot which has been written on the subject, from all perspectives.

you can find whatever explanation will satisfy your political leanings.

I simply quoted it for completeness.

Feel free to debate it endlessly or amend the Constitution, etc. We have a lot of pre-existing material.

In the meantime, I’m simply trying to have a discussion on using technology to lessen an immediate problem where we should be able to get a little more consensus.

> as if it's impossible to - you know - amend the constitution somehow, if one wanted to

in the real world, where everyone has to live, the constitution isn't seeing amendment any time soon on any subject, and the 2nd certainly isn't being removed.

suggesting that it's somehow a plausible option is isn't a productive use of your life, or anyone else's.

I'm not saying that amending the constitution is a plausible option, I'm saying that "because the constitution says so" isn't a plausible argument because despite the implausibility it is actually possible to amend it - as evidenced by the fact that it has been amended before in at least 2 different ways.

The Second Amendment isn't like other amendments. It's deeply and intrinsically embedded in the cultural and political identity of half the country, which makes the 2/3rds majority required to even hold a Constitutional Convention impossible, because those states will never vote to touch the Second Amendment. It has a multi-million dollar industrial lobby, all of the police, all of the military, and one of two effective political parties behind it. It's written in such a way that it justifies itself as existentially necessary, so that even attempting to amend or repeal it legally is certain to lead to civil war - a war millions of Americans have been stockpiling arms in anticipation of ever since the last one ended. Any Senator or Congressperson bringing it up is committing career suicide, and should they succeed, they'll have to spend the rest of their life avoiding open windows.

And then there's the problem of what to do with all of the guns already in the country. No one is confiscating them without a fight, regardless of what the law says.

So yes, it's technically possible in the same way open-heart surgery on yourself with a ballpoint pen is technically possible. Practically speaking, though, it means a lot of pain and a lot of bloodshed, and it's easier to regulate around it because at least then the US doesn't turn into Northern Ireland.

This is little more than a band-aid, which will almost inevitably be decried as prejudiced - rightly so. It does not treat the root cause and increases institutional control in a realm where measures are becoming increasingly draconian to scratch out crime. Why increase surveillance, institute predictive crime models, and so on while crippling human rights when it's well within the realm of possibility to actually provide a curative modality over the long run without further compromising privacy?

What if your brand of extremism gets you pinned as a probable criminal? How would you like that? Your search history and your playlist parsed into an AI, the way you move spells criminal. No due process. Would that be good for you?

I like how we just went full Minority Report.

No where did I imply that.

"Machine learning, cameras, ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_policing

Even if your proposition isn't initially designed as such, it will almost inevitably trend towards that. Tweaks to optimize sensitivity turn into increasingly thorough surveillance, suddenly the scope grows. Parkinson's law. Viola, our quaint police state is amplified into some chimeric synthesis of 1984 and some other jackbooted caricature. You can find these trends elsewhere, y'know, basically anything the government is allowed to touch. The old adage "Give them an inch and they'll take a mile."

Call it slippery slope all you want, it's happened time and time again.

Or we can work to eliminate the egregious discrepancies of wellbeing, and give these people something to work for so their risk analytics aren't weighing zero.

"public examples" don't scale.

Your militia is not well regulated.

U.S. still isn't #1 in gun related deaths. While mass shooting and random shootings are terrible terrible things. And because they are terrible terrible things they tend to get a lot of press, 2/3 of gun deaths in the U.S. are suicides.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death...

Happened in an Atlanta suburb. Where were the police? Surely a group of people can't get away with firing off guns near an apartment complex and get away with it?

While I’m uncertain of whether what I’m about to ask is proper due to the nature of these news, it’s something I’ve been asking myself for some time and I’d like to know what thoughtful people think on this matter.

Would banning guns make the USA a more or less violent country?

Not necessarily, Switzerland & Finland also have high gun ownership rates. What needs to be done a real education in terms of firearm handling, more restrictions when it comes to ammunition and get out of the culture that firearms are for republicans, rednecks and hillbillies, and be over with the cult of guns.

do you really think the people firing those guns did it because they didn't know about gravity? or do you think they did it because they didn't care?

I generally agree, I'd much rather create a society that can be trusted with dangerous things than to nerf everything.

>real education in terms of firearm handling

We used to do this as part of physical education in the midwest US. We had a 1-2 week course on gun safety and would shoot shotguns and rifles (no pistols though).

>get out of the culture that firearms are for republicans, rednecks and hillbillies

Agree but this means shushing the people that reject firearms based on that specific association.

>be over with the cult of guns

There isn't just one 'cult of guns' in the US. The vast majority of gun owners are just normal people, but cult-wise there's the tacticool mall operator type with $8K of gear and cringeworthy social media, the Charlton Heston old guard that fondles their Colt single action on Sunday afternoons, the brooding emo outcast that constantly makes vague threats from mom's basement and the hood rats and gang bangers that dgaf about anything.

Statistically its the last two that have had the biggest effect on mass shootings [1] and homicide rates [2], but addressing it head on is super complex and politically dangerous so nothing really gets done.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_S... [2] https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Both the Swiss and the Finns have a compulsory military service.

This is not your average gun safety course. Having so many guns lying around, I would hope one has to go through all the hoops that the Swiss and Finnish gun owners have to, including the initial screening.

In other words, high gun ownership rate is not the problem. The regulation is (or lack thereof).

In the immediate aftermath, or long term?

And to follow up, what's the probability that the US still exists in its current form after the immediate short term?

Even as someone that would support repealing the 2nd amendment entirely in an ideal world, I'm not ignorant of the absolute political shitstorm it'd cause. Civil war round 2 type stuff.

I was thinking more long term. Thinking about the social dynamics that would ensue by having a USA without guns. For example, one argument that is often given in favor of gun ownership is self-defence. By denying guns for the “good guys” only the “bad guys” would have them, because they’d acquire them illegally.

I think the reason why it's so easy to get an illegal gun is because the legal gun market is so large, which supports manufacturers existing in the first place. If tomorrow guns were banned, and we melted down every existing handgun in the US, there wouldn't be anyone left making guns and selling them to civilians on an industrial scale.

Guns being banned also means that every gun, gunshot and associated paraphernalia stands out much more.

A civil / guerilla war would happen - more violent.

Yup it surely would take away a lot of firepower there by reducing violent gun crimes a lot. But not crimes in general

I'm assuming drug rings and other miscreants who are really motivated will always find a way to acquire guns like they do in every country with gun laws.

Less guns, less shootings, less gunshot deaths, it is that simple.

But how to get to less guns in a country like the US, that’s the real puzzle.

This would be a lot more convincing if you included details like a country that isn't in the Americas (this is notable because guns flow from the US to Latin America in a reverse flow from the drugs that flow) that has strong gun laws and lots of gun violence.

I regret I have no direct comment regarding the parent story other than to express sympathy. But as a U.S. resident I couldn't tell you how many times I have walked past my neighbors' blood on the sidewalk, heard gunshots at night, lived in buildings with bullet damage, or been in situation where I suspected a gun might end my life. My experiences should not be possible, yet they continue.

"The Small Arms Survey stated that U.S. civilians alone account for 393 million held firearms. This amounts to "120.5 firearms for every 100 residents."[0]

--mildly upsetting story but it's relevant to my subsequent comment--

When I was 10 years old I would ride my BMX bike into a large vacant lot that had abandon cars that were stripped, riddled with bullet holes, and/or hollowed out by fire. But there were also small dirt mounds that were fun to jump. I paused to watch some kids do jumps when I noticed an angelic looking boy my age pointing a revolver at my head about 15 feet from me. I could tell the hammer was pulled back and I tried to keep calm by telling myself it was a toy.

We did not break eye contact and ~8 seconds into the staring contest I felt my face involuntarily twist into a blend of defenseless smile and tortured expression. That's when he pulled the trigger and the heavy hammer strike sounded confirming it was not a toy. His focused expression then changed into that special satisfied grin unique to sadists and we both resumed looking at the other BMX riders as if nothing had happened. I don't think his friends noticed the incidence or would have cared if they did.

I saw this repeatedly growing up where angelic looking kids commit crimes with impunity. I didn't have that look so I knew if I were ever to say something no one would believe me and perhaps I'd be the one in trouble. You also don't appreciate events like this as a child since everything is normal to child.

At the risk of down votes, the U.S. should come to terms that the ship has sailed regarding meaningful gun control given there are more guns than people. We should teach gun safety practices including hands on training as early as possible in schools. Perhaps by demystifying guns the boy in my story above would have reminded his parents to lock-up there gun, know to treat all guns as loaded, and the criminal penalties his family could face. Perhaps one of his friends would have also have stopped him if we could change the culture.

As a reminder children are curious. Do not ever give your sweet looking child the benefit of the doubt when it comes to firearms. Later today I will ride my dirt bike in there nearby hills where again there are abandoned burned out bullet ridden vehicles, so the above story isn't just in my distant past.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_ownership

Yes, the ship has sailed for gun control in the U.S., and there's not enough support for it anyways, and there's a lot of Democrats who love their guns who won't vote for it, and a lot of Republicans who don't like guns but won't vote Democrat over it.

The angelic-looking psychopath kids are a problem gun control wouldn't solve. That can't be solved with gun control. As a child I too ran into these types, and they had other weapons. Knives, screwdrivers, rocks, slingshots -- you name it, they had it. Parents need to teach children manners and empathy, but people who have to work multiple jobs and have no time to parent their children... won't.

Enforcing existing laws would be a great pace to start. But we've basically decided as a society to minimize police contacts, so that's going to be difficult. Basically, as you surmise, there isn't much that can be done now.

But guns are a tool, aren't they? Guns don't kill people; people kill people.

Seems like you miss a sarcasm indicator.

I'm having a hard time imagining a justification for personal ownership of fully-automatic firearms, especially for hunting.

Pencils are tools and you could kill someone with a pencil. Doesn't happen all that often though.

Pencils don't have their own Constitutional Amendment or multi-million dollar industrial lobby.

I think lobbies and advertising tend to be bad — lobbying obviously, and advertising because it extends ordinary business practices to include artificially increasing demand for products; these "features" of capitalism are allowed—advertising under the guise of "informing" people of availability of products, and lobbying under the guise of keeping politicians informed of issues of genuine public concern—but if we're honest, those corporate activities go far beyond that.

I'm an individual gun rights absolutist, but I'm also fine with restricting those aspects of corporations. There's no point in getting mad about the gun industry's activities in those respects without being even more incensed about the food and pharma industries. Those destroy a lot more healthy life years than the gun industry ever could.

Not much is done, though, because capitalism and because 1A — even though I don't think the 1A inherently applies to corporations, at least not to formally registered ones; nothing about them is an inherent right. In exchange for the power to pool multiple people's resources — capital, tangible property, and labor — under a single authority, once that pool gets sufficiently large, the state imposes requirements that it could never impose on individual natural persons.

Incidentally, nothing in the 2A is specific to firearms. Pencils, when carried or used as weapons, do fall within the meaning of "arms" in the 2nd amendment—they're just not very good compared to kubotons. So do knives, swords, baseball bats, golf clubs, and bows&arrows. None of those are regulated even remotely as much as guns are. Of course, they kill far fewer people, but they're used sometimes. And yet, no specific reporting on them is available: all edged weapons, from folding knives to katanas and broadswords, tend to be lumped together, as are all blunt objects, whether a table lamp or a golf club or baseball bat owned by someone who doesn't play golf or baseball.

I left Atlanta for the Gulf Coast a few months ago. Guns are irrelevant, it's the quality of people that matters. From now on I'll adhere strictly to the creed, "live among people that think like you do" and I will only maintain residence in a conservative geography.

You all need to get out of your echo urban chambers.

Just goes to show, there will be a time when you think you are safe and happy, in a home with the love of your life – and suddenly a bullet blows through a wall and into your heart, and you will know it was never meant to be. Fade to black.

I don't think you would have time to know or feel anything after being shot. If this is a joke, it seems in bad taste to me. Nonetheless what a terrible waste of human life.

Bleeding out gives you plenty of time to know what happened, or if a bone was shattered you will know too.

You will be very lucky if a bullet hits something to make your blood pressure drop too fast. Its not the most common way bullet injury plays out.

Thankfully not something I, a civilian, in a gun-free society have to think about.

How is it a joke? It’s a statement doesn’t even have a punchline.

And most deaths are rarely instantaneous, in fact I feel even getting shot in the brain isn’t instant but rather leaves you alive and bewildered for a few seconds until you die.

Now all of a sudden those physics problems involving shooting a gun while on a train seem a lot more depressing :(

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