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I aplogise if this has been posted; but I just heard it, and had to check out the maths for myself.



US gun deaths 2014-Today (so 50 months) = 58,614

Vietnam War US Casualties (so 234 months) = 58,220




Source for Vietman:

https://www.archives.gov/research/military/vietnam-war/casualty-statistics

Source for domestic: http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ & http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/past-tolls

2018 = 1,859

2017 = 15,590

2016 = 15,094

2015 = 13,515

2014 = 12,556

Total = 58,614
Click to expand...
 
ragerancher said:
Guns don't kill people, people kill people. Therefore the proliferation of guns should not be hindered.

Nuclear weapons don't kill people, people kill people. Therefore the proliferation of nuclear weapons should not be hindered.

So, who is in favour of the unhindered proliferation of nuclear weapons worldwide?
Click to expand...
Correction:
Guns don't kill people. People who say that "guns don't kill people" kill people.
 
Apart from maybe some farmers, the odd sportsman and a very few others no citizens need a gun. There is no rational reason for a sane (and especially an insane) person to ever be carrying one.

The problem's cultural. That can't be fixed overnight, but the first step has to be tightening laws to make guns much more difficult to come by and restricting the type and quantity of weapons that an individual can access. If the politicians don't have the balls to drive that, well there's a saying that only idiots expect a different outcome from keeping doing the same thing.
 
Old Hooker said:
Apart from maybe some farmers, the odd sportsman and a very few others no citizens need a gun. There is no rational reason for a sane (and especially an insane) person to ever be carrying one.

The problem's cultural. That can't be fixed overnight, but the first step has to be tightening laws to make guns much more difficult to come by and restricting the type and quantity of weapons that an individual can access. If the politicians don't have the balls to drive that, well there's a saying that only idiots expect a different outcome from keeping doing the same thing.
Click to expand...



No chance of that. Trump didn't mention gun control once in his speech. He's completely shifted the narrative to mental illness. Defies belief.
 
MarkyH said:
Gareth, we get what you are trying to say, but you can't dispute than guns have potential to do more damage than a knife in scenarios like what happened this week.. Hence why most of us believe the US should change the constitution...

OR, as you mention Connecticut, change the laws so it makes it really difficult to get guns (isn't that what we are all saying). Yes they need better support for mental illness but sometimes that person has never seen anyone for help before they head into Asda to buy a gun. Yes its a US mentality, no we can't get rid of all guns tomorrow, but making it harder to get guns (LIKE IN YOUR EXAMPLE) surely makes sense?

Either that, or stop making bullets ;)
Click to expand...

Never denied that for a second, but then again bombs can do more damage than guns. Do we then outlaw the components that can be made to make bombs? Do we ban the sale of acids in case the seller thinks you are going to chuck it in somebody's face?

It's up to the USA to change this, not some relative nobodies on Social Media. The buck stops with them and with Donald Trump as POTUS.

Related to what Tallshort has said, I've been on shoots in Welshpool (Clay Pigeon) and thoroughly enjoyed it. If both me and him (I presume Tallshort is male?) can handle a deadly weapon in a safe fashion then we're obviously doing something right.

Why not ask the people who have these guns in the USA why they need them in as great an amount? As a means of defence, I can understand a woman carrying (under Open Carry) a gun in order to prevent her from being raped if she is walking alone late after dark, but to stockpile the amount and types of guns that they do...

Nevertheless, I still maintain that even if guns are banned in the USA, following outcries, that it is only going to lead to further problems down the line. Cartels will sell them illegally, the Dark Web will profit (as it does with other banned products - see Silk Road and others for instance).

More stringent checks and Mental Health profiling before selling a Gun may well be a step in the right direction, and education has a role to play as well.

People who are normal, happy and well-adjusted do not suddenly start shooting other people, there has to be some kind of underlying issue or (pardon the expression) 'trigger point'. Sure, there's plenty of people that I don't like in the world, but I'm not exactly going to send them to meet their maker with an AK-47.

When kids in the USA (as MarkN describes them) are some of the least happy and least optimistic in the West (along with England, weirdly enough) and have to jump through so many hoops in order to be accepted then that needs to be looked at. Going back to Big Pharma, I think it was the BBC's Panorama programme which mentioned that if a 12 year old ever felt sad/lonely/confused that they could be made to take Prozac? We've all been 12 and gone through puberty - highs/lows etc. are commonplace with this biological change. Yet kids are prescribed drugs which can cause them psychological harm just so that Glaxo, Bayer etc. can profit from them.

Depression/Sadness/Anger (Motive) + Weapon (Means) = Tragedy (Result)

Let's not forget that parts of the UK had (and indeed some still have) issues with Gun Crime and shootings and fatalities similarly shocked communities in East London. Intervention, education and programmes designed at encouraging youngsters (some of whom were vulnerable and at risk of joining gangs) away from a life of crime have been a great success here. It gives these youngsters a sense of belonging and purpose, and if they can gain skills to further their lives and careers then it's a major achievement all round.
 
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I suppose there's a warped logic in saying that anyone who commits a mass shooting must have mental health issues by definition. But that's scarcely the point.
 
The_Blindside said:
Gareth you're comparing USA - population 330 million with Canada (population 36 million) and Switzerland 8 million. You're just not comparing like with like when it comes to civilian fatalities from shootings in those countries with vastly different population sizes - guns/type of guns and deaths per 10000.
Click to expand...

Also, vastly different people in terms of behaviour/psyche as well.
 
main-qimg-121795c9f271cba46405f7857270c7ad
 
Pinched from Reddit:

  • Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world's guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American 1

  • Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people. Yemen has the world's second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.

  • If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues 2 EDIT : This was misleading - The published paper reads

    Perhaps most importantly, the 1-year population attributable risk of violence associated with serious mental illness alone was found to be only 4% in the ECA surveys. Attributable risk takes into account both the magnitude of risk and the number of people in the risk category within the population.

  • America's gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries. Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. 3

  • A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

  • In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun. By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.

  • The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.

  • Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States. Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
 
From yesterday's edition of The New Yorker:

'In newsrooms across the country, there is, by now, a formula that editors follow for mass shootings. They order up a "lede-all," a story that wraps together all of the important news; a "scene" piece, which is usually a narrative account of what it was like on the ground; a story about the victims; and, finally, as details emerge, a portrait of the shooter. These shooter profiles often follow a familiar path as well, about warning signs, disturbing behavior, and concerns about mental health. In Parkland, Florida, where a gunman killed seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday afternoon, the details that have come out about the alleged shooter, Nikolas Cruz, a nineteen-year-old former student at the school, have so far failed to deviate from this pattern.

People who knew Cruz have described him as troubled and obsessed with guns. "Honestly, a lot of people were saying it was going to be him," Eddie Bonilla, a former classmate, told the CBS affiliate in Miami. "A lot of kids threw jokes around like that, saying that he's the one to shoot up the school, but it turns out everyone predicted it. It's crazy." Helen Pasciolla, who lived across the street from the Cruz family, until they moved out, about a year ago, told the Times that Nikolas's mother, who died late last year, had struggled to handle both him and his brother, Zachary, and that she had called the police about them. "I think she wanted to scare them a little bit," Pasciolla said. School administrators were alarmed enough about Cruz that they expelled him. "There were problems with him last year threatening students, and I guess he was asked to leave campus," Jim Gard, a math teacher at Stoneman Douglas, said to the Miami Herald. Beam Furr, the Broward County mayor, related to media outlets that Cruz had been receiving mental-health treatment but stopped going. "We missed the signs," Furr said. "We should have seen some of the signs." On Wednesday morning, President Trump seized on the same notion: "So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior. Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!"

This, too, is a familiar trope—that somehow, if the authorities had only been aware of worrisome signs about a future mass shooter's mental health, the tragedy could have been averted. But this theory is contradicted not just by the facts in Parkland and in previous mass shootings but by America's gun laws. The reality is that, in most states, law-enforcement officials often can do nothing to prevent even an obviously troubled person from buying guns, let alone take steps to confiscate guns that the person might already own.

On Thursday morning, the A.T.F. agent in charge of South Florida said at a news conference that Cruz had legally purchased the AR-15 assault-style rifle used in the shooting. Federal gun laws only bar people from buying guns under very specific criteria, such as felony convictions, domestic-violence misdemeanors, dishonorable discharge from the military, and other disqualifiers. When it comes to mental health, only people who have been involuntarily committed––a relatively high bar––are banned from buying guns under federal law. A few states imposed tighter restrictions on gun purchases because of mental health—including New York, California, and Maryland—after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, in December, 2012. Florida, typically considered a strongly pro-gun state, also tightened its laws to bar people who have voluntarily committed themselves to a mental-health facility from buying guns.

But what could the police have done if, as Trump suggested, they had been fully alerted to the warning signs about Cruz? Could they have taken away Cruz's semi-automatic rifle? This would seem in keeping with basic public safety. But there is a thicket of challenges confronting the authorities when it comes to keeping guns away from people suffering from mental illness. In 2013, after the Sandy Hook shooting, when I was an investigative reporter at the Times, I spent time going through records in several jurisdictions across the country that detailed gun-related interactions between the police and people with mental-health issues. Among the places I examined was Arapahoe County, in Colorado, where twelve people were killed in a shooting in a movie theatre in Aurora, in 2012. It was extremely unusual, I found, for the sheriff's department to confiscate weapons in these types of situations, and, when it did, almost all were soon returned to their owners. I asked Grayson Robinson, then the Arapahoe County sheriff, what his deputies would do if they encountered someone on the street with a gun acting irrationally or suicidal. He told me that they might take away the gun temporarily, for safekeeping, but that they would have no right to confiscate other weapons that the person owned, or even to hold onto the gun if the owner wanted it back. "We understand property rights," he told me. "We would return those weapons to him upon his request."

In Florida, under a state law known as the Baker Act, the police can send people considered a danger to themselves or others for an involuntary psychiatric evaluation and hold them for up to seventy-two hours. But, in 2009, Bill McCollum, a Republican and then the state's attorney general, issued an advisory opinion saying that, "in the absence of an arrest and criminal charge," law-enforcement officials did not have the authority to hold onto weapons confiscated from people in such situations.

On Thursday morning, Trump delivered a televised speech on the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas. He vowed to focus on mental health; he did not mention gun control. Yet these issues are intertwined. Lately, gun-control advocates have been pushing for states to adopt the use of gun-violence restraining orders—also known as extreme risk protection orders. These are legal instruments that function like domestic-violence protection orders, allowing family members or legal authorities to petition a court to temporarily prohibit someone from possessing a firearm. In recent years, California, Washington, and Oregon have enacted such measures, joining Connecticut, which has had a tool like this since the late nineteen-nineties. More than a dozen states have introduced similar legislation this year, Josh Horwitz, the executive director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, told me. "In a situation like this, where the person seems to be a substantial risk to himself or others, you're worried about something happening, could be a suicide, could be a shooting like this," he said. "Let's take a time-out. Take the guns out of his hands."

Makes sense. But that hasn't usually been enough, in the past, for politicians to agree, particularly when it comes to guns. It's much easier to bemoan the missed signs.'

As the above states, opportunities to intervene were missed. The Gun laws do not help, but had this guy got the help that he needed maybe just maybe this could have all been avoided. Why did he stop going to sessions aimed at treating and improving his mental health? - in the UK, this would have been acted on immediately! The 'thicket of challenges' mentioned also need looking at and maybe belts need tightening if Sheriff's/Law Enforcement have any good reason not to return weapons to people whom could be considered dangerous.

However, when people are that upset/confused/deranged etc. and they want to harm people they'll use whatever means. If they are that desperate for a gun, even if these are illegal/made illegal, they will find a way of getting them.

Maybe if Cruz's classmates had taken time out to confront him and help him, rather than ridiculing him, he may have turned out a different person. Bullied kids can tend to do daft things as an act of vengeance.

Anyway, it probably won't be long until the next incident.
 
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-...ida-shooting-why-the-nra-wields-so-much-power

How NRA gives US politicians ratings for how pro gun they are. Rubio is an A+ (Excellent voting record on critical NRA issues and vigorously promotes and defends the 2nd amendment) and has gotten over $3m over his career, John McCain - $7m and Chris Murphy Senator of Connecticut (where Sandy Hook mass shooting took place/US equivalent of Dunblane) is rated an F, which is "a true enemy of gun owners' rights". Sickening how much power they wield!!!
 
The_Blindside said:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-...ida-shooting-why-the-nra-wields-so-much-power

How NRA gives US politicians ratings for how pro gun they are. Rubio is an A+ (Excellent voting record on critical NRA issues and vigorously promotes and defends the 2nd amendment) and has gotten over $3m over his career, John McCain - $7m and Chris Murphy Senator of Connecticut (where Sandy Hook mass shooting took place/US equivalent of Dunblane) is rated an F, which is "a true enemy of gun owners' rights". Sickening how much power they wield!!!
Click to expand...

Profits before people. Not surprised in the least.

Didn't DT say that he was going to clampdown on lobbyists as well?

That said, lobbying and bribes is an universal problem - where greed clouds judgment, there will always be issues.
 
TRF_Olyy said:
Pinched from Reddit:

  • Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world's guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American 1

  • Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people. Yemen has the world's second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.

  • If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues 2 EDIT : This was misleading - The published paper reads

    Perhaps most importantly, the 1-year population attributable risk of violence associated with serious mental illness alone was found to be only 4% in the ECA surveys. Attributable risk takes into account both the magnitude of risk and the number of people in the risk category within the population.

  • America's gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries. Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. 3

  • A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.

  • In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun. By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.

  • The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.

  • Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States. Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
Click to expand...
Great post that...The NRA are simply paying off corrupt politicians and its costing tens of thousands of innocent lives

as for the UK whilst we thankfully have almost no gun murders, lets not be complacent. I would also add drug related crime in the UK is massively worse per head than the USA and many other nations. Playing devils advocate how many attacks robberies or murders we see in the UK often in poorer regions with less policing per head or per square mile, how many could have been prevetented by the victim having a gun to protect them? I detest guns Im simply putting across the type of counter arguments you may hear from gun lobbyists
 
Trump now using the tragedy to throw mud at the FBI for the Russia investigation. It really is sickening how low this piece of **** will go.
 
truthteller said:
Great post that...The NRA are simply paying off corrupt politicians and its costing tens of thousands of innocent lives

as for the UK whilst we thankfully have almost no gun murders, lets not be complacent. I would also add drug related crime in the UK is massively worse per head than the USA and many other nations. Playing devils advocate how many attacks robberies or murders we see in the UK often in poorer regions with less policing per head or per square mile, how many could have been prevetented by the victim having a gun to protect them? I detest guns Im simply putting across the type of counter arguments you may hear from gun lobbyists
Click to expand...

We're (thankfully) a different breed here, and also Big Pharma is not able to lobby the UK Government as much as it can in the USA.

Big Pharma in the USA want kids on drugs to combat their disorders, but they don't want the accountability of what it does to these kids that are total confused and deranged. Can't have it both ways, obviously.

Kids should be allowed to be kids - give them their freedom back, which is their birth rite. If one or two kids need extra help, then that needs to be decided between the family and their GP. They should not be there just so Glaxo, Bayer etc. can profit off them.

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/nov/21/children-who-grow-up-on-prescription-drugs-us
 
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