Although I also don’t have exact statistics to hand, so I can’t be certain. However, I couldn’t disagree more with Alison. I thought it was a great article.

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because it talks about just how fundamentally fucked-up the notion is that we fix gun violence by arming more people, and the notion of “an armed society is a polite society.” Yeah, TOO polite. Free speech partly means not having to always be polite, and not having to walk on tip-toe around everyone with what you say – which is what we’d have to do in a society where everyone was armed.

I also like the point about stigmatizing the mentally-ill, because even if there were a stronger link between mental illness and murder, I think the real problem are largely the people who are not getting diagnoses and treatment. Going to a psychiatrist and getting on medication – if you’re an adult – requires some acknowledgement that something is wrong, most of the time. To me, the real problem are the people who have serious mental health issues but insist that they couldn’t be anything but normal.

I’m also getting really sick of seeing discussions online where people pat themselves on the back for being neurotypical, from people who buy hook, line and sinker into baseless conspiracy theories about vaccines causing autism or whatever. I think there’s a much greater threat from people with no diagnosable mental illness who are under the “influence” of political or religious extremism (as a lot of conspiracy-theory groups are) – or, as Rachel pointed out in this article, drugs – than there are from the mentally ill. “Under the Banner of Heaven” from one of the recent Things I Read That I Love posts is a good examination of this.

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And you’ve still yet to demonstrate why even “responsible” gun owners need to own semi-automatic weapons. If your purpose for owning a gun is to hunt, or to scare away a burglar, a hunting rifle should be sufficient.

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That being said, after Winnenden more than 130,000 weapons were voluntarily handed over to the authorities and then destroyed – so the culture back home is certainly very, very different…

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What makes you think that? I don’t know that the situations parallel at all. The cocaine to drug addition path goes “someone owns cocaine, whose ostensible purpose is to consume for personal pleasure. they use that cocaine for its intended use. when they use too much, they become addicted, which harms themselves most directly, and society or other people indirectly.” The gun ownership to violence path goes “someone owns a gun, whose ostensible purpose is to either display on the wall like a teacup, shoot inanimate targets, or kill animals with. they use that gun for not its sanctioned purpose, and instead for killing other human beings. This harms other human beings most directly, and themselves and society indirectly. There is neither a quantity nor physical addiction factor involved.”
While comparisons don’t have to be identical on every point, I think the differences between these two things undermine the conclusion you’re trying to draw.

The rest of the points you make are reasonable, even if I don’t agree with them, but I think this conclusion isn’t sound at all.

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Furthermore, take these two studies: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090930121512.htm (results finding that people owning guns are 4.5 times more likely to be shot during an assault) and http://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-center-for-gun-policy-and-research/publications/WhitePaper102512_CGPR.pdf (if you like really long reads, finding, among other things, that restricting high risk individuals from owning guns is helpful)

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In regards to the main article ‘mass shootings are rare events’ Does an average of 2 a year really count as ‘very rare’?

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