Contributors

Wednesday, October 07, 2015

A New Way to Tackle Gun Deaths

Nicholas Kristof has a great piece up about how we need to start thinking outside of the box on tackling gun deaths in this country. The stark reality of more Americans dying from gun deaths since 1970 than in all the wars we have ever fought in needs to be addressed and his ideas are sound.

The best one is engaging the CDC more to deal with this problem. They do on a whole host of other major causes of death so why not guns? If Americans were being killed at the average of 92 a day by ISIL or Al Qaeda, we would be acting immediately.

The fact that we aren't makes this problem a national disgrace.

1 comment:

Larry said...

Some interesting points, but not many. Australia is a favorite of gun-banners (or mostly-banners), but if you examine their murder rates (with or without guns), they were on a steady and almost straight-line decline (or as close to straight-line as any crime statistic is likely to be) from 1970 to present. The great gun ban of 1996 isn't discernable above the noise level of the already steady decline. As far as preventing mass murders, for what I would argue are largely cultural reasons, mass murders were always rare in 20th Century Oz. If the idiot last week hadn't decided to attack a police station with his illegal firearm, Australia might have had another bad one in spite of the ban.

What America has is a violence problem. When 50% of murders are committed by a small part of 13% of the population, something is desperately wrong with part of that 13%. Something that WASN'T so f***** up 50 years ago. A large part is due to the completely failed War on Drugs, which has been as successful as the War on Alcohol was in the 1920's (which only succeeded in giving rise to Organized Crime as we know it today).

I think Mr. Kristof is fooling himself. Correlation is not causation. British suicides peaked during the Great Depression, and fell sharply during WWII, exactly as they had during WWI. It plateaued for a couple decades, then dropped again, then has plateaued again. I suspect the change from coal gas to natural gas (ironically, thank Maggie Thatcher for that, not British Labor Party or the unions) was merely coincidental with other changes. Someone who wants to die will find a way. Just look at Japan.

The CDC can't do anything regarding firearms, and as long as we have a 2nd Amendment and a non-rubber-stamp Supreme Court, neither can Congress to any great extent. Common criminals (by far the largest number of killers) won't turn in their guns. The handful of mass killers have mostly bought their guns legally and passed background checks to do so. Unless you want to create a Department of Pre-Crime, what do you propose? I mean, beyond mandatory psychological screening of the American populace, none of whom would ever lie convincingly for 15-20 minutes, unless you plan on vastly increasing the number of psychologists (never mind the resultant entirely predictable drop in what level of quality there is now), what is there? I know, the resident bloggers feel that anyone wanting a firearm is at best borderline sane, but probably not, but that will never stand in this country. Given the extremely low levels of compliance with NY and CT's recent registration laws, what makes you or Mr. Kristof think that a national version (assuming it passed the Supreme Court) would do any better? I don't thin even coercion on the level of the Stasi would work. You would see a spike in "gun crime" that would make the rates of 1993 look bad, let alone today's historic lows. Push hard enough, and I think you'd be likely to see something not seen since April 19, 1775, when the government set out on a gun control mission. That would be something I would never want to see, by the way. It would be a complete and utter disaster for the nation. But I can see some people on BOTH SIDES hoping for such a miserable outcome, because in their foolishness, they believe that once the gloves come off, quick victory would be theirs. In 1775, that led to over 7 years of desperate struggle (even without large parts of British forces being at best ambivalent, at worst mutinous over the situation), and more years to recover. It would be at least as bad today.