The loss of 17 lives in the school shooting in Parklands, Florida in February really upset me. I am not sure if it was the tragic loss of innocent life or imagining being in the shoes of their parents and not knowing how I would cope.
In the days that followed, there was a glimmer of hope that some good may come from the tragedy. One of the parents, Andrew Pollack did a great job of focusing us all of making the schools safe. The politicians in Florida led by Gov Rick Scott all gave a little and found they could compromise to take at least a small step in the better direction. Trump had parents, families and other stakeholders to the White House and actively engaged with them on how to make schools safer.
So why am I feeling sad now?
It seems the whole process has become bogged down in a battle between the left and the right. They trade insults and focused grouped one liners trying to win cheap political points. In the meantime, the rest of us are just hunkered down in the middle wishing they would get on with making the schools safer.
The gun sales that exploded Obama (check out this graph) had dropped with the election of Trump. So much so that the gun manufacturer Remington that was founded in 1816 filed for bankruptcy, Smith & Wesson stock price dropped by half, and many gun sellers were reporting sales down by 10% to 25% over the prior year.
Since the Gun Control lobby kicked into high gear after the Parkland school shooting the media is reporting "Gun Sales Soar, Set Record in March Amid Push for New Gun-Control Measures":
"Sales of semi-auto rifles, especially AR and AK platforms, have more than doubled in sales since the Florida shooting and subsequent media coverage of possible pending legislation," Rex McClanahan, owner of one of the biggest online gun dealers, Bud's Gun Shop, told the Washington Free Beacon at the end of February.
So if the Gun Control's purpose over the last couple of months was to reduce the number of guns - then they failed badly. So please change tactics to produce positive outcomes in terms of safety for all.
To the NRA, a gun may not kill people by itself. We do not need to be told over and over that it needs a person hanging on to the end of it to kill someone. What we need is to see less gun deaths. Show us you care and find a way to move the gun deaths rate down - because what has been done over the past 15 years has not worked.
because what has been done over the past 15 years has not worked
actually it's worked very well.
Your information is wrong..
Could be - but that graph is for violent crime, which includes more then gun deaths.
Nobody wants innocents to die.
I wanted to point you over to here, as the gunpolicy.org stats are incorrect.
https://steemit.com/informationwar/@truthforce/we-fear-that-which-we-do-not-understand-so-let-s-learn-more-about-gun-statistics
https://steemit.com/informationwar/@truthforce/gun-statistics-let-s-talk-facts-logic-context-epidsode-1
I am not so sure the gunpolicy.org stats are at odds with what the links you pointed to me are saying.
Around the time of the Parkland's shooting I spent a lot of time going through the gunpolicy.org stats and came away with the view that gun control is going to stop these mass killings. I summed up my feeling this way:
"I have lived in countries that have tough gun laws like Australia and the UK. I have also lived in countries with lax guns laws like the USA. Even within the USA, gun laws vary significantly from state to state - and I have lived in some states with tough gun laws and some with lax guns laws.
When I see a school shooting like just happened in Florida or hear about the gun deaths in Chicago every week - my heart screams impose the Australian Solution or the UK solution and stop all this killing.
But my head tells me, those solutions simply will not work here in the USA. "
The real paradox is gun control may not make people safer, there are real downsides.
Your excellent post brings some of those downsides into clearer focus showing "guns being used over 47x more often to defend a life than to take one." and "guns are used 5.7 or 3.4 times (using Kleck or Clinton respectively) more often to defend against a crime than to commit one. "
Gunpolicy.org also shows why suicide by gun needs to be excluded when thinking about school safety. While many more Americans commit suicide with a gun compared to Australia and the UK - the overall suicide rate is about the same i.e. they find alternate methods in Australia and the UK.
In many ways - the problem is not the stats. The problem is often the bias of the person interpreting them. Too often stats are used to support an agenda instead of to find a solution.
And Dana Loesch rightly called out the hypocrisy of CNN and the mainstream media in this video.
This is what makes me sad - it is so easy to wrapped up in the rights and wrongs of gun ownership and/or gun control - and before you know it nobody is focusing on the problem at hand - our schools are not safe.
Andrew Pollack taught me that when he tore Chris Wallace apart of Fox News Sunday .
Sorry this reply turned out to be almost as long as War and Peace - I am just really frustrated because it feels like efforts to make schools safe has stalled and may soon be thrown in the dust bin of history - till the next tragedy.
I should have said I was refering to the link you had in your post from a month ago.
The gun deaths per 100,000 may be correct, but when you take out suicides it is something more like 3.5 out of 100,000 for gun homocides(not the 10 out of 100,000 the gun policy shows is for total gun deaths).
I agree. You are right.
I love graphs and these paint a clear story.
The one on rate of deaths from gun homicide shows from 2,000 to 2010 it stayed between 3.6 and 3.8 per thousand. My understanding is that it has not dropped significantly between 2010 and now (happy to be proven wrong though).
Anyway that shows why I believe there has been little progress over the past 15 years.
This is America - we can solve the school safety problem.
There was a spike due to the Ferguson effect but I think the 2017 numbers will show that trend ending, look at what happened from 1993 to 2010 in terms of laws and gun numbers. The correlations suggest we need more guns and fewer gun permits.
If people really wanted to end school violence they would seek to do away with brick and mortar schools which are anachronistic in so many ways.
You made me reach for my dictionary with "anachronistic" and I am still not sure I understand its meaning :-(
Lets hope for a repeat of the 1993 to 2000 trend in homicide deaths per thousand - if we could do that we would have the problem solved. And when you look at the links @mtnmeadowmomma posted in this thread - it would seem there are some promising targets to make a big dent in those numbers.
It means "outdated" something from an earlier time period, the only way to significantly bring down gun homicides at this point would be to legalize drugs since drug prohibition is the cause of the bulk of them. But they don't have their kids out marching against that.
I think there are lots of reasons to legalize drugs. Helping people survive their addiction till they can kick it and reducing overall crime. Reducing gun homicides would be a big bonus.
without a few gang infested neighborhoods America's gun homicide rate is on par with Canada or the other white European countries we are randomly compared to. Those gangs only exist due to drug prohibition.
We could easily solve the problem of people going on killing sprees in zones where there are no cops/people who can respond, we put in cops and incentives for good guys with guns to help.
In the medieval days knights and guards roamed the country side/roads/bridges/highways/forests/markets/towns/castles to make sure there was order kept. We are still the same humans who evolved over millions of years, we still need guards and people who will protect us. Something like 4% of the population is Mentally Unstable, it only takes a few per cent of that 4% to do something. Only way to protect against it is to literally kill all unstable babies in the womb with abortions, or perfect eugenics and kill people who have Mentally Unstable babies. Since those aren't good options and are not moral, we need to protect eachother.
I agree with some things about not letting mentally unstable people get a gun, but when you do that you blanket take away the rights of 4% of people, of which 99.999% of that 4% will never do anything wrong.
A very interesting way to explain. Nice Job:
"In the medieval days knights and guards roamed the country side/roads/bridges/highways/forests/markets/towns/castles to make sure there was order kept. We are still the same humans who evolved over millions of years, we still need guards and people who will protect us."
But what id 4% of those "knights and guards" are mentally unstable:-(
We are never going to be able to identify all the people who are mentally unstable and are also dangerous. Mental breakdowns happen at different stages of life, some happen slowly, others are triggered suddenly. It does not mean we should not try and do a better job - but I agree we should not view it as the silver bullet.
You might find these (long) articles interesting reading. There are ways to bring the numbers down, and politicians are ignoring them.
I think the last section in this one has some really good points, and check out the link within it for the Yale study on Chicago. It boils down to a small network of "high risk people" aka "criminals" driving most of the violence.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/jan/09/special-report-fixing-gun-violence-in-america
This next one highlights a program called Ceasefire that DOES work to reduce gun deaths in urban areas. But the Obama administration largely passed over this in favor of pushing its own agenda. Also,
Could it be that reducing gun deaths runs counter to a bigger agenda--those inner city numbers are needed to keep the picture looking dismal and justify the ongoing push for gun control?
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-the-gun-control-debate-ignores-black-lives
These articles are great - the data in The Guardian article is amazing.
I have read about things simialr to Ceasefire - I think maybe in Oakland or Stockton. I want to see if I can find them again before I reply - a job for tomorrow.
Thanks for posting these links - they provide a roadmap to an effective way forward.
You're welcome. I firmly believe in "fixing" things at the local level as much as possible and by working to change the behavior of the people most at risk for committing violence. Taking away a tool without addressing the motivations just leads to different tools being used, as the UK has been recently illustrating. I feel like the calls for nationwide gun control are akin to putting a whole body cast on someone with a broken ankle--the measures necessary in a place like Oakland or New Orleans simply aren't needed or applicable elsewhere.
So really gun violence is kind of a two-pronged issue. You have the "ignored" and bigger side of it perpetrated by (mostly) urban black men killing each other, and then you have the "sensationalized" though actually rarer side of it in mass shootings. I would be very interested for somebody to do a similar data study on the mass shooters and identify all the common factors: bullying, mood altering drugs, whatever it is that's causing them to snap.
It's really thought provoking to read those kind of articles and realize that maybe instead of doubling down on the failed approaches (gun free zones, banning certain things), the answer could be trying a whole new approach--especially one that has already been proven to work! The thing though is that those programs require long term commitment and consistency; you almost need modern day missionaries who dedicate their lives to the cause, with people to support them. For people who impatiently demand an instant "feel good" fix, slow and steady isn't acceptable. For people who are just using the numbers to further their agenda, actually fixing the problem isn't acceptable either.
I really like that Guardian article. Do you mind if I do a post about it?
My concern with programs like Ceasefire was are they scalable? Or do they rely on a special, highly dedicated group of people to make it successful? In the sense, are they unicorns? I think you explain that concern really well when you say:
"those programs require long term commitment and consistency; you almost need modern day missionaries who dedicate their lives to the cause, with people to support them. For people who impatiently demand an instant "feel good" fix, slow and steady isn't acceptable. For people who are just using the numbers to further their agenda, actually fixing the problem isn't acceptable either."
I think you make a lot of sense.
Thank you!! Oh yes, post away and spread the word! :)
I absolutely think those programs have to have "a special, highly dedicated group of people" in order to succeed, since they've got examples where a successfully running program floundered after the person running it left. I think people with that kind of heart are more readily available than unicorns, but they're still very rare...and finding people for the job who are in it for the mission and not the money would be crucial.
What do you think the best way to find those people is?
It might sound crazy but...asking around. I think there are a lot more people already quietly doing the best they can to help, if not with actual gun violence, then with the factors that contribute to it.
In the article about Ceasefire, it mentions "community leaders" and it was a group of pastors who went to the White House to appeal for extra help with it. I remember in Pensacola years ago there was a pastor downtown (smack in the poorest neighborhoods) who was singlehandedly and voluntarily running a food pantry, mentoring the youth and providing them a haven to help keep them off the streets and out of trouble. If I recall correctly he was letting kids come to the church after school so they'd have a safe place to hang out and do homework till their parents got home. No fanfare, no outside assistance. That's the kind of person you want, just IMHO.
I'm sure the local police in every community also know "who's who" and probably could point to the people who have influence, for good or bad. Ask them.
And obviously not all community leaders are religious, but that's just an easy place to start. If you look at "Returning the Favor" run by Mike Rowe on facebook, he kicked off that whole show by first making a post asking people to nominate "do-gooders" and the response was overwhelming. I remember reading the comments on that "asking around" post and being simply amazed by what people will do for no other reason than out of the goodness of their hearts. Just in the last month he's featured a woman who is employing former convicts to keep them from recidivism, a woman who is helping street kids, and a man who runs a "bully rehab" effort that includes empowering victims. All groups of people with that "higher risk" of becoming a tragic statistic.
It’s more of a social moral compass issue than anything imho. Come on it’s like fish in a barrel. WTH? It’s a coward move. But kids are taught to be cowards by society. You can’t stand up for yourself- unless you are the bully and by that time it’s screw the consequences. What is the school going to do after years of moving schools and districts. They DONT segregate council suspend DEAL with troubled students because society as a whole doesn’t deal with them. These kids have little to non parental influence. I’m not talking about raising them like a fking crop people. People ignore the bad person, the crazy person, the outspoken person, the ashat that causes scenes at gas stations, coffee shops Walmart-it’s mockery. Everything is fine with US society right? Because these extremes KIDS are going to for revenge, attention is not a symptom of society?
"social moral compass"
It is certainly part of it.
An assumption that killing innocent people is always wrong no argument or reason, no matter how deeply believable, can not make it right. No religion in the world approves the attempted murder of innocent people; there is no tolerant belief in the killing of our brothers in the world.