President says ‘epidemic of gun violence is tearing our communities apart’ after mass shootings in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Baltimore and Chicago
President says ‘epidemic of gun violence is tearing our communities apart’ after mass shootings in Philadelphia, Fort Worth, Baltimore and Chicago
I know that’s not 100% mass shootings, but that’s still a stunningly bleak number. Rounding up from the .97 that’s five human lives every hour of 2023 up to July.
Those numbers are intentionally misleading, they are using people that killed themselves to prop up the numbers. It’s disgusting.
Explain why they don’t count as gun deaths please.
Suicide is not what first comes to mind when someone talks about gun violence or shootings. Nobody said they don’t count - just that it’s misleading.
I think in the US a lot of murders probably get classified as suicides, accidents, and self defense to avoid launching an expensive, dangerous investigation, so I would also say that suicides are overreported.
Is there any evidence to support this, or is it just what you think?
Proof? no, if there were proof our data would simply have to be better than it is. Are there a lot of statistical and geographical tendencies working against this data that are easily pointed out, yes.
The biggest ones: suicides usually occur in places where the body will be discovered and people who commit suicide tend to want to be found.
Homocides tend to be covered up more often or occur in more remote locations; lots of unsolved homocides end up as missing persons, especially in less dense areas. A few are staged as suicides or accidents.
So there’s absolutely a tendency for the data to skew in certain directions. This isn’t even addressing more chaotic problems liks a lack a lack of qualified coroners, incentives to not charge police who just riddle people with bullets, etc.
To be clear I can’t stand the carnage and think it’s one of the country’s biggest faults. That being said, I’m not sure how what you’ve presented shows suicides as over reported. Suicide in a place likely to be found results in more accurate counting of suicide not extra deaths counted as suicide. Homicides being counted as missing persons doesn’t over count suicide, it under counts homicide. Police shootings actually likely under count suicide since no police shooting is going to be labeled “suicide by cop”. The qualified coroner thing is actually pretty crazy and a lot of places require little or no actual pathology knowledge, so who knows.
All this to say when we boil these tragedies down to numbers, when the discussion is assault weapons bans, suicides probably don’t belong in the discussion. Disproportionally few suicides are committed with guns targeted by assault weapons bans. That doesn’t remove suicide from the gun deaths discussion at all. If I might offer an unsubstantiated opinion of my own, I believe suicidal people are probably more likely to benefit from mental health intervention than the serial killers who are mass shooters. (Which is the only acceptable solution to the right, not that they’re willing to pay for it.) Those a-hole attention whores ARE increasingly using guns that would likely be targeted in an AWB, and they’re doing it because it helps grab the headline and gets the president to talk about how terrible what you did was. In the meanwhile this is going to remain political fodder for politicians and cannon fodder for the rest of us.
And those shouldn’t count? Do you have any idea how much easy access to guns increases suicides? Many, many suicidal people would still be alive without the easy access to guns in the US. It’s one of the easiest and painless ways to kill yourself.
Things like suicide are far more related to a lack mental healthcare and the stigma around getting help than weather or not people are allowed to own firearms. Not everyone has those kinds of problems. An assault weapons ban is certainly unrelated to those seeking self-harm and most crime.
a gun makes it incredibly easy to end someone, including yourself. It takes the killing out of killing and I can promise you that makes a massive difference to the number of both killings and suicides.
So we ban pain killers too? Cleaning chemicals? Rat poison?
The gun didn’t make you kill yourself. Not getting help killed you. Stop chasing the guns, they aren’t the the problem. The problem is that so many people see them as a solution and they need help.
I am so tired of seeing this braindead take being used as any sort of “gotcha”.
try to travel a bit, see the world.
How much of that is suicide?
Is there an acceptable figure?
Try the other way around: how much gun control would impact in the total suicide number?
This article is about assault weapon bans, which are not exactly the go-to for suicide.
This is the sad reality. Gun violence is generally committed by sick people. Similarly, I saw this chart a few years back on Australian gun/knife violence. The plots are mirrored. Violence is sort of static.
It’s much more likely to survive a stabbing than to survive a shooting.
I don’t recall the origin of that or whether that’s the exact wording but the general idea at least has stuck with me.
If you run away from a guy with a knife, you have to outrun the knife-wielder. If you run away from a guy with a gun, you have to outrun the bullet.
It’s bad, but after watching over a million Americans die of COVID while (seemingly) half or more of the country refused to take - or often even acknowledge - the most basic of preventative measures… Well, I just don’t know any longer.
Shootings are far less deadly, and that’s a much more murky subject as there are plenty of justifiable reasons to own a gun. You also have to wonder how many deaths are Darwin Awards, or justified self defense… It’s just an incredibly complicated subject compared to “hey guys, let’s wear masks.”