Of the 15070 murders that happened in 2016 where we know what weapon was used to kill, 11004 were committed with firearms. Over 70% were committed with handguns and 30% with long guns (or unknown kind of gun).
“Guns don’t kill, people do!” is the NRA talking point. But the numbers are clear: People with guns kill a lot more people than people without guns. Sure, you can hit someone over the head with a big rock or a hammer and kill them. But only 472 people managed to do so in 2016. Sure, you can poison someone. But only 11 people were murdered with poison in 2016. Guns just are super effective at killing people. In fact, the only other method of killing people that broke the four digit mark was murder by knife, which killed 1604 people in 2016 — a significantly smaller number than 11004. (Which, BTW, is why I don’t complain when cops kill someone who’s coming at them with a knife — it’s a deadly weapon, albeit only 1/10th as deadly as a gun in the big picture).
So what’s the NRA response to the reality that people with guns kill a lot more people than people without guns?
[CRICKETS].
So it goes. It isn’t as if anything’s going to be done. I almost didn’t even bother posting about the 19 year old MAGAt who murdered 17 people at Parkland High School in Florida, including fourteen students. Because what’s the point? It’s not as if anything’s going to be done. This uniquely deadly weapon, the gun, will still be widely available to any looney who decides to kill someone, regardless of whatever I post.
So fuck it. I’m going to watch videos of Chloe Kim pulling off back-to-back 1080’s.
She reminds me of a friend of mine, who is also short and Asian and a snowboarder, albeit somewhat older (in her late 50’s). If they’d had snowboarding in the Olympics thirty years ago, I like to think that my friend would have been up there… as it is, she’s slowed down a bit in her late 50’s, as have all of us. She still snowboards though… heckuva lot better than I ever did, or ever will.
– Badtux the Fact-based Penguin
Arguing gun control in the U.S. is like arguing climate change: It’s far too late to do anything about it, but it’s nice to have the moral high ground AND logic on your side in a debate.
But, yeah. Too late. I suspect climate change will actually fix the problem of gun control in the U.S. because it will bring about the end of the U.S. Then, there’ll just be a gun control problem in the Northern Crazy Wildlands.
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What do you call a mentally disturbed man without a gun? Mentally disturbed.
What do you call a mentally disturbed man with a gun? Killer.
Kill away America, kill away.
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So what is going to be the deep psychological effect on generations of SovokAmerikan kids growing up in a nation where they have the notion that they could die immediately and unpredictably in a massacre? Especially when they’re at school? (Including university) Since Columbine in 1999, there’s an entire birth-to-adult pipeline of children who’ve grown up with that reality always in the background. Another factor in why Amerika is so fucked.
We’ve seen the quotes from survivors of the latest Florida murderspree saying “Everyone pegged this guy as someone who’d be the one to shoot up the school.” A new thing to write in high school yearbooks for graduating class members — “Most likely to spree-ceed!” Evaluate your classmates — who’s going to be the one to snap and slaughter? I can imagine the bullying taunts now — “Hey Johnny, nobody likes you because you’re a freak who’s going to come in with a gun and shoot people.” Which WILL make some of those Johnnies more prone to do that…
Schools now have mass shooting drills along with fire drills. Good on ’em for that, I suppose. Best to be prepared for likely emergencies. It DOES plant the thought virus in childrens’ heads that this is the new normal. One of the times I was in the U.S. last year I was supposed to meet my daughter for something at the university where she works, and she texted to say she would be delayed because there was a lockdown due to reports of a guy with a gun on campus. (There was, but nobody got shot in that one.) She treated it as though it was another form of traffic jam, an imposition, but nothing that was worth discussing at length later. Meanwhile, she and her BF were talking about buying pistols for themselves, for protection. And she’s been on antidepressants to prevent recurrences of the unprovoked and inexplicable panic attacks she’s had once or twice. So many Amerikids on psych meds now…
I reckon that paranoia, phobia and generalised anxiety are going to be way up across Amerikan society. That’s gonna play out in all sorts of bad ways. Lower economic productivity from messed-up people (compared to what it might have been in a sane society), higher expenses due to the need for security guards, metal detectors, waiting lines for bag inspections, plus the overall lessening of happiness in a screwed-up nation. Mad!
Lots of other countries are warped by fear, of course. Living in Iraq or other states that have failed due to U.S. invasions, kids have to keep in mind that any car they walk past could blow them to bits if it has a bomb in it that goes off at that exact moment, f’rinstance. In swathes of Africa where there are chaotic rebellions, young people need to worry about crazed men coming to rape, kidnap or kill them. But these are Third World shithole places. The United States was not one of them when I was growing up. (At least not for middle-class whitefella yoofs like me.) But now, welcome to the 3d Wld Club, Murka.
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Perhaps that’s the new jobs program for dealing with the collapse of retail employment and the collapse of manufacturing employment — move all these people into security. Mostly security theater, of course, since little of what is proposed woulda actually stopped something like this, but still. Security theater is still employment. Just ask all those TSA galoots who are doing security theater to stop attacks that will never happen again.
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