Nothing like an impossible task.
How can science be used to study gun violence? As crazy people are idiosyncratic and unpredictable, they are beyond science.
Will CDC be conducting human experiments?
No doubt every study will come with the conclusion that ever-stricter gun laws will be necessary.
dd: “Why the heck do Chicago Democrats allow the gangs to have territory. Why do Chicago Democrats only allow the gangs to have guns….”
Because to the Chicago Democrats, the gangs are a constituency and the law-abiding citizens are a prey species.
What, you never heard of “professional courtesy”?
Chicago would be a good place to study violence. The school system can’t close schools because the kids will have to cross gang boundaries. Why the heck do Chicago Democrats allow the gangs to have territory. Why do Chicago Democrats only allow the gangs to have guns as the gun laws basically stop the innocent people from buying guns in Chicago. The parents have to watch their kids get shot! That is the Obama Way.
Howdy Tucci87
There are important differences between jihadi terror threats, the kind Israel has dealt with since the Haganah had to hide their guns, and the violent eruptions of people like Klebold or Lanza in American schools.
It is true that bad people with guns normally only respond to good people with guns. I am generally in agreement with your positions but we should be realistic about differences between Israel, her citizens and the threats they face, and the US and our very different set of threats.
There are legitimate concerns about DHS and TSA and there’s also this: we haven’t had a jihad attack of the airline hijackings, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, or the Mubai attack class since 9/11. Our jihad incidents inside the US have been bad enough but they’ve been on a much smaller scale and a number have been headed off at the pass.
MT Geoff writes: “Israel has encouraged more of its teachers to go armed because of the systemic terror threat, not because of the rare event of someone acting out mental health problems or their evil inclinations.”
Yeah? And we’re being subjected to TSA gropedowns at airports, train stations, and bus stops for precisely what reason if not “because of the systemic terror threat”?
If there is genuinely a supportable argument for federal victim disarmament – er, “gun control” – in our republic, it can only be the result of perceiving as dreadfully significant these mass slaughters in “gun-free zone” environments where the targets are presented as reliably deprived of the exercise of their unalienable right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.
Ain’t been no mass shootings on firing ranges – where there are so many guns that the average “Liberal” goes into fibrillations at the sight thereof – have there?
If there’s nothing like a “systemic terror threat” in these United States today, let’s zero out the Transportation Security Administration, and the rest of the Heimatsicherheitsdienst in the bargain. No more VIPR Teams, no more “naked body” scanners at the airports, no more overpaid government goons sliding their hands inside little kids’ skivvies (“But my Teddy can’t even say ‘Allahu Akbar!’ honest!”).
The only solution to bad guys with guns is good guys with guns. Law-abiding citizens with firearms are a force for social comity (remember Heinlein? “An armed society is a polite society”) and good civil order.
Disarmed citizens aren’t really citizens at all. At best, they’re subjects; at worst, they’re slaves.
Yes, the number of rounds for magazines is what they think they can get away with. They really want to ban all magazines, but can’t just yet.
Howdy Tucci78
I can note the validity of the “bigger magazines can make killing easier” argument without getting to “so we should ban them.” It is only logical to acknowledge the validity or falsity of any argument in a debate.
I have mixed feelings about routinely arming school staff in the US. There’s logic on both sides and emotion on both sides as well. Israel has encouraged more of its teachers to go armed because of the systemic terror threat, not because of the rare event of someone acting out mental health problems or their evil inclinations. Our methods of predicting a Columbine/Aurora/Tucson shooting are near zero but no one else is doing any better.
Gamecock, I’m inclined to agree with you and Tucci78 on this — still makes sense to acknowledge logical arguments. And I’m sure all three of us see the slope as being very greasy.
Gamecock: “Why ten rounds? Why not 11 or 9? It’s absolutely arbitrary.”
‘Cause ten “sounds about right” to the kinds of idiots who support National Socialist Democrat American Party (NSDAP) politicians.
The way I figure it, if they can’t get outright confiscation, these “Liberal” fascisti might demand even lower magazine capacities, such that you’ll have to reload after every. single. shot.
Liberty
noun, plural lib·er·ties. 1. freedom from arbitrary or despotic government or control
Unless government can state a rational reason for a specific number of rounds for magazines, their ban on magazines is simply TYRANNY.
Why ten rounds? Why not 11 or 9? It’s absolutely arbitrary.
MT Geoff writes: “There is something to the idea that larger magazines have facilitated these tragedies sometimes….”
There’s also a profoundly effective argument in favor of larger magazines, and this has been voiced in particular by the advocates of handgun use for personal protection.
Those who are unfamiliar with the daily carriage of concealed weapons don’t seem even remotely to realize just how inconvenient these “pocket pistols” actually are. In bulk and weight (as well as in the difficulties of maintenance and keeping in practice with them), even the best-designed and most reliable handguns are troublesome, and adding to the burden by legislating against adequate-sized magazines makes the difficulty even greater.
If one has the option of purchasing a handgun with a fifteen-round capacity, why would one ever want to be limited by legislative fiat (or Executive Order) to magazines of ten or fewer rounds? Not only would you have to lug more weight along with you every day, but you’d run the risk of assailants “swarming” you while you’re trying to reload.
Actually, we really do “know how to prevent incidents like Sandy Hook.”
The Israelis have shown us the way. They arm their schoolteachers, and there hasn’t been a mass shooting at an Israeli school since 1974.
Instead of “Gun-Free School Zone” signs, they make it plain that their children are taught in “hard target” venues where an assailant is going to meet up with Allah a helluva lot quicker than he’d hoped.
I was there in the late ’60s when illicit drug usage took off. The radical expansion was due to money. Without money, the incentive for bringing others in disappears. Ipso facto, usage would dwindle.
Of illicit substances use, Gamecock writes: “That money is the incentive to push drugs. Without it, usage would dwindle.”
There would certainly be less incentive to introduce potentially addictive substances to neophytes (drumming up “business”), but does it really matter whether or not “usage would dwindle”?
Experience in the treatment of patients with substance abuse disorders teaches every physician that there is no hope of getting someone off such self-destructive dependency unless they themselves make the decision to quit, and carry it forward. That goes for Schedule I “controlled dangerous substances” just as it does for alcohol, prescription opioids, and tobacco.
Just get the criminals out of the marketplace by decriminalizing the satisfaction of the drug users’ demands. Leave the “dwindle” job to the drug users and whatever help they can find in controlling their own suicidal stupidity.
Writes Tomlaredo: “Come on down to Laredo, Texas.”
I’ve got a buddy in El Paso who’s been saying the same doggone thing for years. Across the crik in Juarez, lotsa “bangety-bang” and a murder rate resembling the casualties expected in patrol action between two contesting armies in a state of war.
In El Paso? Pretty much what you’d expect in a middlin’-sized town anywhere else in flyover country America.
And private citizens’ gun ownership rates in El Paso are also pretty much what you find in the rest of America’s flyover country, too.
There’s a good deal of data about gun deaths and gun injuries in the US already. Problem for Obama and the Enablers is that the data don’t support their narrative much.
We have more gun deaths by suicide than by accidents and homicides combined. The number of gun suicides is tragic — all suicides are tragic — and some people who kill themselves with an easily available gun might not have completed a suicide without that. Number and character is beyond guessing, though. Those tragic decisions are not a reason for impeding responsible people in the enjoyment of our rights.
We do have serious accidents involving guns and accidental deaths involving guns, as we do with cars and skiiing and walking while drunk and walking while stupid. Most of those would be prevented by the most basic precautions. It’s probably true that a momentary failure with a gun is more likely to cause serious injury or death than a moment of stupid on skis.
A large majority of gun-related homicides, like all types of homicides, involves people who know each other and are involved in dysfunctional activity — criminals fighting over turf, violent domestic relations, parental abuse of children. Many of the offenders in these cases are already felons and already barred by law from having firearms.
The Sandy Hook – Columbine – Giffords type of tragedy is extremely rare. There is something to the idea that larger magazines have facilitated these tragedies sometimes — in particular, Loughner was stopped as he was changing magazines and he missed a lot of shots, so smaller magazines might have mattered. Much less true at Columbine or at Sandy Hook, though, where no one was offering any real resistance. (I know I’m simplifying a bit.)
Bottom line: we simply don’t know how to prevent incidents like Sandy Hook while still protecting the rights of responsible citizens. I’m not going to agree to give up my rights on those terms.
I meant to say US Government supplied weapons in Mexico.
Come on down to Laredo, Texas. On our side of the border, very limited violent crime, with existing gun laws in place. Drive 500 yards into Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, after passing a huge red letter sign saying “FIREARMS PROHIBITED IN MEXICO” and listen to the automatic weapons fire of the drug cartels, the grenades exploding. Then listen to the people ask their government why they have no protection. Yep, CDC, this would be a great place to start your study….heck, you might even find some US supplied firearms in Mexico to complain about.
Government puts the money into illicit drug dealing by making it illicit. Common weeds selling for X dollars an ounce (I have no idea what current prices are).
That money is the incentive to push drugs. Without it, usage would dwindle.
Plus, the government has no authority to ban it. If you think they do, explain the Eighteenth Amendment.
Yeah, I read that hoplophobe whoop-te-do when it was published in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Review (MMWR) almost ten years ago. It was a group grope then and its still an embarrassment in the peer-reviewed literature now.
An honest re-evaluation of even those same limited metrics on firearms-related injuries in these United States will show a continuation of the trending from 1993, which were declining when this report was uttered in 2003.
Frankly, there really is no problem with firearms in this republic which couldn’t be largely resolved with a discontinuation of the federal and state price-support programs for Schedule I psychoactive substances that’s advertised as “the War on Drugs.”
Were not the satisfaction of drug abusers’ appetites for popskull relegated by these idiot laws to criminal purveyors capable of demanding premium prices, the profits to be gotten from drug dealing wouldn’t have these vendors shooting it out with each other to get and keep control of “turf.”
And, of course, drug dealers wouldn’t have the spending power to afford firearms, ammunition, or the clumsy goons they employ as muscle.
The CDC today – naturally – won’t report on that either.
Already been done.
http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/rr5214a2.htm
Our president is a twit.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are an excrescence of the federal Executive Branch, and completely under the command of Michelle’s Metrosexual Meatpuppet, so we can predict with anvil-solid reliability what they’re going to “find” and report, can’t we?
What I’m anticipating is that the CDC won’t examine the epidemiology of gun violence in these United States, which FBI crime statistics show as overwhelmingly a phenomenon of the major urban centers, those with populations of 250,000 and above, all of which invoke some variation on New York City’s gun-banning Sullivan Law and are (therefore) “gun-free zones” insofar as law-abiding citizens are concerned.
What our Indonesian-in-Chief also won’t get from his whipped whelps at the CDC is a reflection of the county-by-county statistics which show convincingly that wherever private firearms ownership is highest per capita we find the lowest rates of violent crime, including everything from murder, armed robbery, and home invasion to spousal abuse.
This is gonna be like expecting NASA GISS to report honestly on “man-made global climate change,” isn’t it?