1. In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong.
2. Don't trust anonymous sources.
3. Don't trust stories that cite another news outlet as the source of the information.
4. There's almost never a second shooter.
5. Pay attention to the language the media uses.
• “We are getting reports”… could mean anything.
• “We are seeking confirmation”… means they don’t have it.
• “[News outlet] has learned”… means it has a scoop or is going out on limb.
6. Look for news outlets close to the incident.
7. Compare multiple sources.
8. Big news brings out the fakers. And photoshoppers.
9. Beware reflexive retweeting. Some of this is on you.
This isn't limited to the immediate aftermath either. I recently learned that almost everything I thought I knew about the Columbine shooting was actually not true. The narrative of a shooting quickly takes on a life of its own.
Sure, let me first say though that there's so much misinformation surrounding that particular event that I'm not really willing to 100% trust anything at this point. I'm always ready to find out what I think I know about the event is actually wrong. That being said here were the major things I used to think were true that I don't anymore:
- The shooters were not in The Trenchcoat Mafia (TCM). TCM was a thing that some of their classmates used to refer to themselves. Dylan and Eric were never closely associated with it. The coats they wore during the shooting weren't even trenchcoats, they were dusters.
- They weren't outcasts, and the shooting was revenge against the popular kids. They weren't the most popular kids in school either but that had fairly normal social lives, went to parties on the weekend. If I recall correctly prom had been a few weeks before the shooting and both had gone, with dates.
- The infamous exchange in which they asked a classmate if she believed in god and then shot her when she responded "yes" never happened.
We complain a lot about the quality of modern news reporting, but I think a large part of it is that we are just more aware now due to the prevalence of the internet and huge numbers of sources. Back in the old days, there was plenty of misinformation, but we just didn't get as worked up about it. Our standards now are higher and we tear apart even small inaccuracies.
I've never seen anything mentioning that so it seems dubious to me. But it looks like there was a motion filed in court claiming this [0]. Not sure what ever came of it, but I assumed Google would turn up more if it had been confirmed.
Theres a book called Columbine by Dave Cullen that came out a few years ago. He also has some articles you can find online about the shooting, all very well researched as far as I can tell.
The narrative right after the shooting was that 2 loner goth kids did a horrible thing to get revenge on their bullies.
However they had a circle of friends, and were more focused on becoming infamous than killing anyone in particular. It wasn't an impulsive attack; they planned for a very long time and wanted to outdo Timothy McVeigh
This aligns with what I recall of the post-Columbine fallout - having grown up some of my childhood within a couple miles of Columbine. Thanks for the book reference, admittedly I’ve not followed up much on the event given the area impact, but it definitely seems like a worthwhile read all this time later.
The same is true for almost every subject intended to generate massive response, and less is more for news crews - less actual details allows them to push required/desired narrative to the listening crowd. Sometimes it's borderline disgusting (
Possibly. It is pet peeve of mine, so I could not resist. The chance that someone get called either of those things goes up the moment he is caught hacking, stealing, shooting the school or otherwise acting like an asshole. It has no relation to his actual personality nor skills nor intelligence.
This is crazy and I hope everyone is OK. Its worth pointing out that Snapchat's heat map is pretty useful for getting insights in situations like these.
That's one of the common complaints of snapchat. I'd bet most people that even use snapchat don't even know how to get to this feature in the app. It was released some time last year without much press (I think they did a self-snap story about it) and even took me a couple tries to figure out how to get there when I knew about it. There's literally no way of knowing that view exists without just knowing it or accidentally triggering it, and I didn't even know there was a web interface for it.
Not to cast aspersions; I think many of us make use of dark humor to get through the worst times.
If the cacophony current information age may push for a interest in regaining precise language, both as a way imposing a sense of shared consciousness and communicative skill, as a way to regain a sense of meaning and order within. I sincerely hope some of the media embrace similar ideals as something other than an experiment or side project.
Is it okay for everyone to be posting snapchat screenshots to twitter while the shooter is still active? Doesn't that put police officers in danger by pointing out their locations?
Per a SWAT officer - his team has not been activated, which means the situation is under control. Apparently an attempted murder/suicide. Female shooter. 10-20 shots fired and multiple people being treated for gunshot wounds. No news as to what happened to the shooter.
I'd suggest everyone reading exercise extreme caution with unverified information like this. There are already widespread conflicting reports of female vs. male, wearing body armor vs. not, etc. etc.
Don't doubt for a second that 4Chan and the like are eagerly spreading disinformation as we speak. You don't know the source of this information. Wait for official information before forwarding anything.
Honestly, it's times like this that make me incredibly fucking sad for the future of humanity. It's bad enough that there are people dealing with a tragic and imminent situation, but to then immediately make this about yourself is absolutely loathsome.
Also, the comments on the live YouTube broadcast of 'they deserved it' or 'serves them right' or 'what now, NRA' are fucking repulsive. Seriously, I don't know how to fix this problem, but it makes me so incredibly angry to realize just how few people can empathize with the plight of others.
I think that under the circumstances links/citations are required. False rumours are rampant and it's too easy to contribute to their spread (even unwittingly).
> Do you expect the SWAT agent to stop and write a blog post so this person can cite it?!
The poster (most likely) did not talk directly to the SWAT agent. I was asking for a link to the poster's source containing the SWAT agent's account.
> Unless you have reason to suspect this three-year-old account is suddenly spreading harmful lies, this is as credible as anything else we're hearing.
I don't doubt the poster's good intent, but well-meaning people are just as effective a conduit for the spread of disinformation as the malicious (indeed, they can be even more effective).
This three-year-old account might believe this to be absolutely true, because they were told it by someone they trust. And that person was told it by someone they trust. And so on, through dozens of people if not more, and all it takes is one person in the chain to start exaggerating/fabricating information and everyone is forwarding false information.
> this is as credible as anything else we're hearing.
You're right there. And that's the point: nothing we are hearing is credible. Treat it as such.
To be clear, this is an extreme circumstance where people hunting for an explanation could easily gravitate toward misinformation is a uniquely destructive way. So, sure, I don't have a reason to suspect OP is a liar; I have a reason to suspect that all information right now is likely untrue unless confirmed otherwise.
How does it affect anyone's lives if this is a rumor or true? The situation will unfold exactly the same whether it is live updated on HN or not. I'm inclined to believe that OP at least is acting in good faith, because their username looks like a real name, they claim to be an engineer at Netflix, and have a long unrelated post history. Maybe they are honest, but got bad information, or maybe it is true information. But still, who cares? Getting information 1 hour earlier will only satisfy some gossip desire and not actually affect your lives.
Every comment ever posted on HN is an excuse for other users to argue about epistemology. Even your question is likely to become an argument about how we can be certain of the net harm caused by misinformation after shootings, with citations about that. HN culture is terrified of false beliefs even when it doesn't matter, so it's no surprise most of the comments are about the fear of false beliefs when it might matter.
San Bruno police just held a mini press briefing, indicated that their is one person dead with a gunshot wound that seems to be self-inflicted that would appear to be the shooter; but certainly was a lot less willing to commit to that as a fact than you (or some other news sources, even before the briefing) are.
Reporting on the specific activities of police during a shooter event is generally considered bad form. Please don’t share information about where and/or how police are/aren’t deployed in realtime.
Too soon for info, too soon to say anything of substance. It might be better if this were not here at all until more is known. In a vacuum, online, things tend to devolve.
Wow, gotta love the journalist asking him for an interview when he was still barricaded and hiding: https://twitter.com/NadineatABC/status/981261561057759232. That's not even bottom-feeding anymore, I don't think there's a word for whatever that is.
Wow, great to see how responsible Salon is being with their ad network, after they decided to inflict cryptocurrency-mining malware on their visitors who use ad-blockers. It's like the Forbes thing, but stupider.
salon.com should be considered a compromised site that is unsafe to visit.
It's a pretty uncharitable read of the situation to say she wants an interview while he is hiding. She's leaving him a message to get back to her, presumably at a safer time.
And while it's pretty grim to see the process at work, journalists need to report news somehow. This is how we all end up with detailed news reports to read.
But the fact is, he is hiding and tweeted about it. Therefore Twitter is one of his possible information venues. And she spams it with a vulture-like request instead of leaving the line clear for assistance...
> But the fact is, he is hiding and tweeted about it. Therefore Twitter is one of his possible information venues.
Yes. And if you send out information via a venue like Twitter, you might expect responses that are a norm for Twitter.
> And she spams it
@'ing someone alone doth not spam make, particularly on a medium like Twitter where the default expectation is that you have a broad audience and some of them are going to talk back to you when you tweet.
Characterizing that as "spam" is no more accurate than calling a reply on HN spam.
> with a fucking vulture-like request
The gratuitous profanity and vivid imagery associated with the aspersion here do both add a certain punch, but they're even more empty than the charge of spam.
> instead of leaving the line clear for assistance...
Twitter @'s & DMs are solidly asynchronous. "Line clear" doesn't apply. And if you're going to argue "well, sifting & skipping input takes precious time & attention," feel free, I guess, because you're simply arguing that an open Twitter account is the wrong medium for reaching out to people in an emergency.
Well how else do you expect them to get information about what's going on? At least journalists are professionally aware of how to filter such information.
You say this, but there's people recording video and posting on twitter/snapchat. It's not only the journalists. And I think the word you are looking for is morbidity.
The problem is that we are continually in crisis. This is happening multiple times a week. We really need to have a serious discussion and action around the future of guns in our country.
Drug overdoses killed approximately 64,000 people in 2016[1], combined with the 21,000 suicides from firearms, I would argue that perhaps mental health issues are much more serious than firearm issues.
You might be thinking of smoking related deaths, which kill ~480k Americans/yr. Unfortunately even if every American stopped smoking today, the damage is already done and the rate would only bottom out over a period of ~20 years.
Arguably, homicides and suicides highlight very different causes. Only the tool in use is common. These should be treated and studied separately.
To me, these are the 4 major pillars of America's gun situation:
1. Widespread availability of guns. The USA has about 330 million guns, or one gun per American. This is more than the number of dogs + cats in the USA. While many Americans own no guns, those Americans who do own guns, often own several.
2. Unhealthy attitudes toward mental health. Much of the country lives with deep insecurities, mental issues, unhealthy stress, and little access to counseling or psychiatry. Further, many live with memories of their loved ones being ripped from their homes, and would rather hide any mental issue in the fear of losing all agency. And our movies and TV shows and YouTube videos are all too quick to capitalize on these fears.
3. Unhealthy attitudes toward guns.
All the other kids with the pumped up kicks / You better run, better run, outrun my gun - Foster The People, Pumped Up Kicks
Instead of helping each other with our insecurities, we sell each other guns. We glorify guns in our stories - the ultimate god, or the ultimate devil, either way a symbol demanding ultimate respect in the narrative. All the world's a stage, right?
4. Culture of exclusivism and elitism that strokes some egos, while creating toxic situations for everyone else. These are much more subtle and hard to identify - ranging from someone cutting you off in traffic, to someone being unsympathetic online or in person, to the complex financial decisions that happen in the back of our heads when we contemplate a doctor visit. These are the impulse to troll a comment thread or dominate a dinner conversation. These are the very impulses that led to the Pickle Rick fiasco and the impending Trump Wall.
The decisions are not made in a crisis. The crisis is the impetus needed to get people to change their mind, its not like this will result in a law change. It may result in a new proposed law, which will be debated and voted on in due course. It wont be a knee jerk reaction but hopefully someday soon enough people will see one of these events as the start of the end of future mass slayings.
I disagree. The media spotlight around the Stoneman Douglas high school students should be all you need to know. The fact that they have been elevated to a place they don't really belong (in the national spotlight) is to simply push a narrative. This is child abuse, and wrong.
They want to push legislation to restrict the right to own firearms, when it really hasn't been considered that guns themselves might not be the problem.
What makes a "mass shooter"? The gun just makes them a shooter. To fire indiscriminately clearly shows mental issues.
I think it's funny that people are so upset about some high school students voicing their opinions after experiencing a school shooting.
I do agree with the idea that the US needs to fix its mental (and general) healthcare system. It's odd that the majority of the time that argument is used by the same group that wants and has tried to gut any attempts at improving the system.
> I think it's funny that people are so upset about some high school students voicing their opinions after experiencing a school shooting.
Did i direct any anger towards any of the students?
I think you misread me. PAC's are circling them this way and that to push messaging on people. That is undeniable.
That is child abuse. That is wrong. That is why i am upset. (i'll say that all night, i don't care about karma)
Banning firearms in general worked for the UK and Australia, 2 places that have experienced this type of massacre while having a significant number of legally held firearms. Since the firearm bans there has been a huge reduction in these types of incidents. It is entirely possible to do the same in the USA, however it may take longer to remove all weapons simply because you have been so slow to respond to this problem.
Basically when things like this happen and people think that the government are going to take their guns, a certain type of person will buy more guns, just in case. If there is a gun amnesty or ban then these people will not turn in their guns, it will be these guns that are then sold illegally or stolen and will perpetuate the problem for longer.
Banning firearms in general won't work in America. There are already more guns than people in circulation, the right to own them is codified into the Constitution and requires an amendment to fix (and amendments are ridiculously hard to pass), and of course there's the huge section of the population that would probably rather die than let their right to own guns be infringed. Not to mention that we do have a giant border with Mexico to our south that would probably make any attempt to remove all guns from America pointless.
Many of those guns are smuggled out to Latin America (guns for drugs trade), while the rest are owned by an increasingly small segment of the population.
Mexico doesn’t mass produce enough guns to feed the American market in any significant way, and their gun laws are much more strict than ours. It’s the other way around: the bad guys in Mexico get most of our guns from us, the gun shops in the USA with the highest sales are near the border.
Then Mexico should build another wall like the one on it's southern border.
I'm serious, but the reason I have used from your comment is taking your assumptions as true. I'm all for the wall for a different reason; countries must control their borders or the people living there are not sovereign.
I have been to Mexico a few times (it's an awesome place!), right near the border, and much further south, but I did not feel it was a safe place. I know enough people with stories that I would rather not try to tell here. In Mexico, only the criminals and police are armed. Cross the border to the US, and volla, we all are equals. You can watch nearly endless TY* of cartel shootouts in Mexico (on residential streets), that stuff is practically impossible here, the elderly person down the street has weapons capable of hitting a body 200+ meters away. Mexico will be much safer when it's not just the criminals in the general population who can defend themselves.
It's going to be an interesting conversation when it's only US citizens that have DRM-free DMLS systems.
*I didn't check today, but I bet the memory hole is working on that...
So actually a gun ban in the USA would help both Canada and Mexico with their gun problems. In Mexico many of these guns end up in the hands of the cartels who are much more willing to use them than your usual criminals, and whilst they would still probably be able to obtain weapons they would not be able to do so in the same sort of volume and they would also have trouble locating ammunition.
Do Americans love guns that much?? I mean, there are so many other toys to play with.
Does owning a gun cause a nice buzz? Is it a social lubricant that makes everybody at a party happier when you bring it out? Does it have an ancient history that spans across the globe? Does it result in a chemical addiction?
Haven't found a good replacement for alcohol that wasn't more illegal or harmful.
The guns are for the possibility of civil war/social upheaval/violent revolt. At the end of the day, the rule of law is a thin veneer over the force of people with guns. (It is, to a first approximation, just a way of deciding who tells the people with guns what to do.)
To head off the inevitable "but a bunch of rednecks with guns would never be able to stand up to the military!" That's first-world myopia. Look at what happened when, e.g., Bangladesh became independent from Pakistan. A bunch of farmers did not take on the undivided Pakistani army. Instead, after initial skirmishes, part of the Pakistani army broke off and fought for independence alongside the revolutionaries.
> The guns are for the possibility of civil war/social upheaval/violent revolt.
I will never understand Americans' desire to prepare for a tyrannical government, that may with some low probability happen in some unspecified future, but in such a way that it can still be defeated.
When they are simultaneously giving up lots and lots of lifes in violent murder sprees every single year. With absolute certainty and in the present.
> "Do Americans love guns that much?? I mean, there are so many other toys to play with"
- For some of us, they aren't "toys"...your disrespectful tone does nothing to help us debate where the line should be drawn for firearm ownership.
> "Does owning a gun cause a nice buzz? Is it a social lubricant that makes everybody at a party happier when you bring it out? Does it have an ancient history that spans across the globe? Does it result in a chemical addiction?"
- I think your characterization of gun owners and their motivations is shallow and insulting...sure there are your "gun porn" fans that seem to only care about purchasing the latest "tactical" rifle to share pictures of on social media, but many of us who don't live in populated cities, use our rifles and handguns routinely, or at least wouldn't traverse our properties without them on our sides for protection. Turns out predators exist, and the best way to warn off a cougar, coyote, or bear is having protection. I've killed coyotes that would have killed the livestock that feed my family.
Yes. There are many thousands of gun owners who would prefer to kill or be killed than to be disarmed.
Note that this is not a statement of my own stance; it's a statement of my impression of that community after a lifetime of immersion in it.
I have absolutely zero doubt that banning firearms in America would result in far more deaths than it would prevent even with the most optimistic expectation of its efficacy.
It's so difficult to articulate to -some- non-Americans. We are not property of our rulers. The cops aren't going to do it, they don't want just the criminals armed. Same thing for the military. They both joined to preserve our way of life. That's ignoring the fact that they physically cant, it's built into our system. Even replacing the police and military with bluehats would not remotely work. And then there's Gen Z.
The "ban guns" stuff is propaganda for people who are disconnected from the reality of what the United States is. It's weird to see OS advocates miss the connection. They don't realize what side they are on in the war on general purpose printing.
Guns and gun ownership are a deeply ingrained and arguably sacred part of culture for a lot of America. A law to outright ban firearms would not be enforceable. Not now, and probably not even in 100 years from now. Not without a secession or civil war, anyway. Too many people would be very vehemently opposed to it and would genuinely rather be shot and killed by law enforcement than allow their guns to be confiscated. Not even a semi-automatic ban or something like that could ever happen; at least not for many generations.
Not everyone feels this way, but more than enough people do to make a universal ban completely infeasible. The question right now is if there can even be any federal legislation passed to address issues like gun access to the mentally unstable and people on watchlists, let alone high-capacity magazines or gun modifications or a ban on certain classes of firearms.
They are an important tool in America's system of checks and balances: Guns are not for shooting deer; guns are for shooting politicians.
The 2nd Amendment is very clear; in fact, it's probably the clearest portion of the entire Constitution:
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."
In order to protect the freedom of each state from the imposition of some tyranny, it must be possible to gather groups of patriots who are armed with the highest quality equipment; therefore, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.
America was born out of armed revolution against a tyrannical government, and Americans are taught that they must be wary of enemies both foreign and domestic. To Americans, the government is at best a dangerous servant, and at worst a tyrannical master.
The gun is known as "The Great Equalizer" for a reason. To restrict gun ownership is to transfer even more power from the weak (the individual) to the strong (the State); that is anathema to those who understand what it actually means to be an American.
Plus you are choosing one example were prohibition failed, what about when it works, particularly with regard to guns and reducing the incidence of mass shootigs? You choose to ignore the real world evidence that shows it works because it doesn't fit with your political stance.
I don't mind, but be honest with yourself that that is what you are doing.
Australian here. We didn't "ban firearms", we regulated them. I can get a license for a centrefire bolt-action rifle in about a month by filling in some paperwork and buying a safe, and unlicensed I'm allowed to shoot under the supervision of a license holder. There's a small-bore rifle range a 10 minute bike ride from my house and practically every farmer in the country owns a rifle or shotgun for pest control and a .22 for the kids.
It's important not to overstate what our actual laws are. We have provisions for agriculture, sport, hunting, security guards, etc. and these provisions are not very hard to navigate.
Fun fact: after Australia enacted gun control and gun buybacks in 1996, murder rates in Australia went down slower than in the U.S. over that same period.
Australia, a country of 20M people, had 354 homicides (not just firearm related) in 1996, down to 282 ten years later.
In 1997, it had a rate of 1.733:100,000, and by 2007, 1.2.
In 1997, the US had a rate of 6.678:100,000, and by 2007, 5.7.
We had a lot more room for improvement. And you're still nearly five times more likely to be murdered in the US than Australia.
But hey, it says a whole lot about the narrative you'd like to push when you want to focus on that delta. "America got safer faster! (Just ignore the fact it was very far worse and still far less safe!)".
I think you're likely to find the homicide rate asymptotically approaches zero, and as such it would be hard for Australia to improve at the same rate as the US. I'm not sure what correlation you can show to "firearm control doesn't work" from that.
You’ve got the burden of proof wrong. Before limiting citizens’ freedoms, you need evidence that gun control works. Pointing to places like Australia, which already had dramatically lower homicide rates, then saw rates drop more slowly than in the US over that time, doesn’t help prove that point. Gun control can’t be the reason homicides are so low in Australia compared to the US; it was already dramatically lower.
Your argument is "relative to Australia, the US actually got safer", where "safer" is an expression of velocity change, rather than any declaration. Given that we're not talking about firearm homicide rates, but generally, then this is at best disingenuous.
But hey, let's talk firearm homicides.
In the US, 1997, firearm homicides were 6.24:100,000, and in 20145, 3.5:100,000, a 44 per cent reduction.
In Australia, 1997, firearm homicides were 0.56:100,000, and in 2016, 0.18:100,000, a 67 per cent reduction.
Looking at gun homicides only puts cases where gun homicides are simply replaced by homicides with a different weapon in the "win" column. That makes no sense (unless you want to make gun control look artificially better).
But access to the firearms is the civil right you were arguing about. It's futile. Either way, as a percentage, homicides in Australia went down after the gun buyback, more than in the US, either by firearm or not.
Literally the only thing that the US did better in is "more, absolute" reduction in homicide (firearm and other).
Your initial precedent, that gun control made things relatively -worse- in Australia is only borne out by the most contorted perspective on numbers, and not anything relative or comparable between the two.
> But access to the firearms is the civil right you were arguing about.
Right. So when a gun ban causes gang members to kill each other with knives instead, you've taken away everyone's civil rights without actually preventing any deaths. Which is why the only intellectually honest thing to do is to look at all homicides.
> Either way, as a percentage, homicides in Australia went down after the gun buyback, more than in the US, either by firearm or not.
The comparison is highly sensitive to the choice of begin/end date. For example, if you look at the 5-year impact of Australia's gun buyback (1997-2002), the U.S. rate went down about 18% while the Australia rate actually went up 10%.
It did not. From 1997, the first full year the law was in force, to 2002 (five years later), Australia's homicide rate went up 10%. It went down 14% in the U.S. over that time. It wasn't until 2002 that there was a sustained period of decline in Australian homicide rates. But the mandatory gun buyback was complete by September 1997! And the long-term drop in homicides starting in 2002 coincided with a sustained increase in firearms imports: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/firearm_im....
So what you're supposed to believe is that a gun confiscation that was over by 1997 was responsible for a long-term decline in homicides that did not start until 2002, which coincided with a sustained period of guns per capita returning toward pre-confiscation levels.
A ten percent increase in homicides in the US is notable. The same in a population The size of the above falls within the realm of statistically significant.
You're really drawing conclusions the data doesn't support.
You’re the one trying to use this data to prove that the gun confiscation had an effect on homicides. If now you’re saying that there was no statistically significant change in homicide rates five years after the government destroyed over 600,000 guns, then you’re severely undermining your point.
The gun buyback isn’t something you’d expect to have a delayed impact on homicides. Certain weapons were banned, they were confiscated, and the program was over by 1997. Those guns could not be used to kill people. The number of guns started to go back up right after, as well.
That is based on severe cherry picking of data - just one month (February 2018) and small absolute numbers (11 vs 15). On longer sampling intervals the rate is still quite a bit higher in NY:
Numbers may agree, but the psychological factor also needs to be taken into account.
If you embed fear into peoples heart that their kids or family might get killed because of someone else when they are most vulnerable (schools, work place - places where we think we are safe) it is a different ball game.
If you see shootings in airports or malls, it ruins it for everyone.
Source: an immigrant from a country where bombings in city centres were part of daily life at some point.
You're falling for the media hysteria. Control for population and demographics and the US has lower gun homicide rates than many European countries. In fact the lowest gun homicide rates are in the midwest where gun ownership is highest.
Midwest states have lower gun homicide rates than the many European countries despite having the highest gun ownership rates in the US.
The mass shootings that get media attention are a drop in the bucket compared to daily inner city gang violence that jacks up US gun stats. And taking guns from law abiding citizens isn't going to stop gangs from shooting each other.
There is not a single U.S. state midwestern or otherwise that has a lower per capita gun homicide rate than that average. The two lowest are Vermont (0.3) and New Hampshire (0.4), neither of which are in the midwest. The closest midwestern state is North Dakota at (0.6) The data also shows there are plenty of midwestern states with per capita gun homicide rates well above 1. Your claim is incorrect.
You should be comparing per-capita total homicide rate, not per-capita gun homicide rate. Having people die differently is not typically considered an improvement! Indeed, it would often be worse, since a shooting is less awful than many alternative ways to die.
Not all homicides are premeditated. So it's not always gun or something worse, sometimes it's gun or be alive. Also, that gun is the better death is again not a certainty.
The midwest state with the lowest gun homicide rate (North Dakota with 0.6 gun homicides per 100,000 people) isn't even less than the European country with the highest rate of gun homicides (Portugal with 0.5 gun homicides per 100,000 people).
Most likely he doesn't say this because he doesn't believe this. The obvious interpretation is that he believes that some US cities have a serious problem with violent gangs. Why would you want to assume that "inner city gang violence" is code for "black people"?
Because it is. We can kid ourselves all we like, but we all know this is where it is going. It takes just a brief detour to 4chan to know where people’s minds are at and where people’s theories are headed. It’s been a slippery slope toward explicit racism ever since Trump came on the scene and we can keep sliding down the slope or we can acknowledge it.
So the US has a lower rate when you conveniently exclude a segment? Is that because you think suicide doesn't count because it's self inflicted? Would it surprise you to know many people who attempt suicide and survive later regret it, and many suicides could have been averted if a firearm wasn't readily available. I know a lot of people think someone who wants to kill them self can do so no matter what, but that simply isn't the case.
Sort by homicide (which is what you were getting at in your original comment). US has 3.5 per 100.000 people. First European country is Montenegro which has 2.42 per 100.000, then Cyprus with 1.05. For example France is 0.21, Germany 0.07, Poland 0.04.
Stay safe people! You life matters, don't listen to those vile political trolls that couldn't contain themselves to inject their own agenda into this tragedy.
But basically, it's a law enforcement term for someone looking to randomly kill as many people as possible, without a specific victim. So, no need for hysterics – it's just a police term.
Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable and this sort of mistaken memory is to be expected. Wonder what that guy actually saw - just a bulky person or law enforcement or just repeating what someone else mistakenly thought they saw.
Pretty incredible to see people making jokes in response to the tweet literally in real time. Journalists trying to get him to call them and give updates. Our society is completely fucked.
While a lot of it is people trolling or just being antisocial, it's worth noting that a lot of people joke about tragedy as a way of coping with it. 'Gallows humor' and whatnot. So my default assumption is not that the person is a sociopath, but that they are attempting to cope, and don't necessarily have the EQ to know what the time and place for that response is.
I'd accept that from a nervous survivor who makes an off-color joke, but making fun of someone else's tragedy while it's happening to them is not a coping mechanism, it's being an asshole.
Even gallows humor requires some amount of time to pass before it's socially acceptable.
> Even gallows humor requires some amount of time to pass before it's socially acceptable.
No, that doesn't work for gallows humor. Gallows humor requires that you be on the (at least metaphorical) gallows. Making fun of someone else who is in a desperate or hopeless situation when you are safely on the sidelines isn't gallows humor.
While situations like this definitely magnify the bad in our society, I think there is also some bit of good (however small) that can be witnessed, such as the dedication of first responders, the outpouring of support and love from the community etc
> When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping."
Definition of an active shooter: "an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area; in most cases, active shooters use firearms(s) [sic] and there is no pattern or method to their selection of victims."
Maybe more importantly, uniformed people with guns. In an active shooter situation, people in plain clothes are all suspects and suspects holding guns get shot.
Myself and coworkers joke about our "armory" of weapons ready to combat a shooter. However, we're not stupid enough to actually do that. We know the police that would show up within seconds would see us as targets as well.
America's obsession with credentials at its finest... these people are allowed to have guns because we say so, but no one else! (except those pesky criminals and shooters who don't abide by laws)
America has a pretty big obsession with thinking that they would be the hero in this situation if only they were there and had a gun.
The average gun owner (hell, the average police officer probably) is in no way prepared for an active shooting situation. It's a fantasy to think you'd be the one to stop it.
Bear in mind that after the recent Florida school shooting, the President of the United States declared that if he were there, he would have, despite being unarmed, physically overpowered the shooter and saved the day. If that is not worrying enough, half of the country believed him when he said that.
This is a man who got out of his limo to confront a mugger in Manhattan. (old news articles cover it) I think that this is evidence enough to suggest that yes, he actually would do it.
Good for Trump that he said that. He has an imposing physique, and he might just have impressed the disturbed kid enough to put down his gun. (Ten years ago there was a school shooting in Germany where a teacher did stop a student that way.)
But we must respect the decision of the policeman in Florida who found himself outgunned not to confront the shooter, first responders are trained not to be heroes and to keep their life first priority.
Oh, man. Having known a bunch of CCW holders who also carry their guns with them at all times, I would be far more scared of those guys in this situation, full stop.
They talk tough, but I have zero confidence in their ability to add the good kind of violence to a violent situation. Sooooooo overconfident, smh.
It has nothing to do with being the hero. People who are a good law abiding citizens should not be denied the right to own firearms because some people misbehave.
This is just a result of America’s individualist society. If we were collectivists we would ban guns for the good of society. But we’re not, and we never will be. We’re rugged individualists, for better or worse, and some people actively vote for things that make their lives worse just to uphold that value. It’s what America was built on. I don’t see a problem with it. It’s just a different way of life.
The same Americans were perfectly ok with draconian sentences for marijuana and other drugs. The same America is imprisoning most people among all countries oftentimes for surprisingly long time. You can get arrested for jaywalking or loitering, both of them being unimaginable to me. You have to keep your hands on wheel when cop stops you, lest cop can shoot you. Meanwhile, I can keep my hands where I want when cops stop me in a car.
I am not sure individualism and freedom are good enough explanations.
Very few Western countries actually ban guns. Sweden, for example, has 2M registered guns (21 for each 100 persons). Germany has 5.5M. In the Czech Republic you can get a PAR MK3 (local version of the AR15).
To the best of my knowledge in Germany it's mostly long guns for hunting, not handguns. To carry a handgun you'd need a permit and demonstrate your need to be armed.
The current laws in Sweden - the short version is that you need a justified reason (hunting or "shooting club"), you need to pass tests and not have a recent criminal record. Fully automatic weapons are much harder to get permits for than standard ones.
I agree with your observations about the US (as an inhabitant myself), a lot of people forget or deny these points.
I do disagree with your conclusions that it must stay this way, because I feel that on the gun issue, the resulting policies are leading to more guns in unqualified hands and more violence. I think there is space for rugged individualism and sane gun ownership requirements.
I think we're at a middle ground that is worse than either idealistic extreme (zero guns everywhere VS everyone trained and carrying).
Having gun-free zones exist alongside available firearms has repeatedly resulted in mass shooters picking the least armed location. The eventual Pulse shooter scoped out the Disney parks but was discouraged by the guards. The presence of a few qualified people carrying is a deterrent that we shouldn't rule out, and it's not worth staffing police on every block like a police state.
Perhaps a better combination might be legislation for sane gun ownership requirements combined with legislation limiting the proliferation of gun-free zones. That way vetted gun owners wouldn't be unarmed in the places in their community that they care about when they come up against a killer with no regard for rules.
This comment breaks the site guidelines noticeably worse than others in the thread. Please don't post ideological rants here and please edit out the name-calling.
You've done this a ton and we've given you a ton of warnings. Eventually this leads to getting banned, so would you please (re-)read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and use this site as intended from now on?
There is zero name calling in this post. Only contra positions to glittering generalities that try to paint dementedness as handsomeness.
I've received three warnings in the years I've posted hundreds of times. That is not in any rational way a ton. You are the only person who has ever picked on any of my posts. None of the posts you've ever complained about have had more than -2 karma at the time of the complaint and this one was at 0.
Your position amounts to bullying: you are in a position of power, you cite vague guidelines and each time I've asked exactly which guideline and in what manner it's a violation you refused to answer. This is a might makes right tactic. I refuse to accept it as fair, or just, or right. And itself is inconsistent with those same guidelines.
There will only be more challenges to such an absurd coddling of discourse that necessarily arise from highly charged events. There will be more such events. They will be even more ideological. That's why they occur and why people want to talk about them.
When people post nonsense, I have always seen enough downvotes by the community to render such opinions moot by their invisibility. I see no purpose or logic in your claim.
I have never opened a throw away account. This is my only account. All your threat does is tell me that was the actual mistake.
"Nonsensical Ayn Rand crap" and "irrational fearful white bunny rabbit gun nut" count as name calling in the sense that the site guidelines use the term. As for previous warnings, here are some:
That's a rather shocking level of abuse of this site and ignoring of moderation requests. If you don't correct this and abide by the site rules from now on, we're going to ban you. I'm sorry if that feels like bullying; it's routine moderation, and we've already cut you a ton of slack, as the linked comments make clear.
I could have worded it differently, but I think it is important to point out that the rugged individual label does not apply to most Americans who live in cities and follow the herd.
Also this was in a response to a building where I have many friends was attacked by an active shooter.
I own an AR15 and a shotgun. Law enforcement is the right call for rapid response versus someone like myself with limited range time.
I don't care about your credentials; if you have actual training, that's what matters. Your average civilian has almost no training, therefore law enforcement is the preferred response. Can you prove training without credentials? Certainly, but we're not all going to the range together to see who we are and aren't going to trust to respond to active shooters.
It's not just the training in a broad sense - if you're armed with your concealed carry, and you witness a shooting, are you duty-sworn to act?
Put it another way, in that it actually happened: If you're duty sworn to act, and don't, are you partly responsible for further deaths? See: The on-campus resource officer for a recent highschool shooting who did hide.
I for one support a clear division between who is responsible for general civilian safety. I draw the line at buckling my seatbelt and not drinking cleaning product - beyond that, I don't think I should be in charge of making sure I don't get shot, or smashed into by a drunk driver, or ensuring the train I get on doesn't derail. I want my government to take care of that and I'm happy to pay for it.
> the duty to provide public services is owed to the public at large, and, absent a special relationship between the police and an individual, no specific legal duty exists
The country was founded on the notion that all you have is the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. So I rather defend myself.
If you want to “happily pay for” your own protection, you should hire your own bodyguard. I don’t want my taxes to go to your protection just because you want the government to solve all your problems.
"The community is better at self defense than the individual."
- Not sure what this means. My own experience comes from someone abusing someone at a bus. Nobody intervenes. Just a bunch of sheep until I have to say "Stop it". So while the community may be better defending, they don't, and it is up to the individual to secure his / her own protection.
If my family was murdered while I was out, then by definition I cannot defend them. The law system will take care of it presumably, but that is not "defense", it is post-fact "justice."
Unclear what your mutually destruction comment was.
In your first example - why aren't there more assaults on buses? Why wasn't there a gang member on the bus demanding a secondary fare or "protection fee"? Because your taxes pay for a local police department and a federal policing force. I'm not talking about "bystander effect" here, I'm talking about government resources designed to protect the population at whole. Isolated incidents will still happen. The Law, and Government, is about doing as much good as possible.
Your family is de-facto defended from murder because it is harder to commit murder and get away with it when the FBI exists, generating criminal investigation resources and distributing them among local police detectives. Your taxes pay for this and are protecting you right now. The very existence of a justice system is preventing crime. Not all crime, obviously, but a great deal. The remainder is more a socioeconomic failure of this country than a justice system failure (or, a justice system failure in that the war on drugs is policy failure enforced by the justice system).
Mutually assured destruction is more a macro-comment. Why aren't hordes of Russian barbarians coming over the hill? Because the US exerts its sovereignty within its borders. Why doesn't an organized community (government) challenge that? Because both communities would be vaporized.
Since we're on the subject, your taxes are a much cheaper way to get clean water, medicine that you are guaranteed actually contains the active ingredients you're looking for, food that won't poison you, and ensure that the city upriver doesn't dump toxic waste into the river. If you wanted to "take care of those problems yourself," you'd be running around like a headless chicken. Communitize, instead.
Agree, but edge case. Maybe you're armed, maybe you have the training, and maybe you're not going to panic. Can't base sound policy at scale on the stars aligning.
What range training features people who are bent on killing _actively shooting back_ at you?
_You_ don't want to harm anyone else, you only want to protect yourself (and possibly others). They have no such compunction.
Being able to put a few downrange with a Glock is not an active shooter situation, and honestly, as a first responder, most people in such situations find themselves vomiting, urinating in terror (and reasonably so).
I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.
However, overall, it would be terrible policy because such a proliferation of arms in public would result in all kinds of extra mass shootings, suicides, homicides, accidents, etc. that would cause more deaths than any reduction in the lethality of a given mass shooting.
I grew up with gun culture. I was taught you don't pull a gun unless you are genuinely ready to kill someone. If you aren't prepared, both logistically and psychologically, to actually kill someone, this goes very bad places.
The idea that we just need to arm everyone pretty much guarantees that most people won't actually meet that standard. It goes all kinds of bad places.
The other thing is you don't find your way to a more peaceful civil climate by escalating the violence. That's so very much "Going to war to protect the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity."
We need to be fostering a more civil climate where Americans are better cared for. That's the real solution here. We need to be fixing healthcare and housing and the extremes of poverty in this country that are appalling for a first world country.
And I think that most of the discussions of gun violence overlook that larger reality and see it is as not relevant. But there are reasons people go postal here, and it isn't because a side effect of gun ownership is insanity.
> I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.
I don't think you've thought this through. You hear one, then two gun shots coming from two different people in a plaza with a bunch of people. Who's the real attacker?
Say you actually witnessed it, what about the 50 other people around you who now see you brandishing and firing a gun? Are you now the threat?
If everyone is shooting back at everyone else, the death toll will be WAY higher than just ducking and hiding with only one shooter. The real threat is clear in this scenario. The police know who to take down.
> I tend to think that mass shootings would turn out better if everyone was armed. It is so much harder to kill a lot of people if someone is shooting back at you.
It's probably much easier, if you count the deaths you cause and not just those from bullets you fire. When there is one person shooting, there are myriad reports from eyewitnesses with different numbers and descriptions of the shooters. When you've got multiple people shooting you are going to have multiple people perceiving who started the shooting differently.
Nobody has ever successfully used a shooting situation with victims as an opportunity to convince other people to own and carry firearms when going to school, work, or church.
All it does is piss people off, make gun enthusiasts look bad, and start up flamewars online.
If you want to convince other people of the merits of gun ownership, the time and place to do that is offline, with friends, at your favorite range or other safe shooting area.
If only America were actually obsessed with credentials on this one...
But before playing into your hand further: It doesn't seem odd that most people are not mentally/physically capable of dealing properly with an active shooter/combat situation and therefor don't feel that they would/should be the person to deal with it. Gonna make the bold assumption that most people's job descriptions don't involve annual firearm training, and they would therefor feel more comfortable with police dealing with these sort of situations. Which is the point other sane humans are trying to make before you deride the conversation for douchery.
Actually no, most shooters do not own their guns legally. Only 18% of guns used in crimes were legally owned. Although your claim may be the case for mass shooters, a tiny minority of all perpetrators of gun homicide. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/07/27/new-e...
It's hard to see minor details like that from high up in an ivory tower.
Lower income urban voters tend to be split on gun control depending on the type. There's little support there for anything that would make it more costly or time consuming for someone without a record of violent crime to buy a firearm.
Consider, though, those living outside major population centers, where the police response time can be on the order of 10 to 30 (or more) minutes and there's an active shooter situation. There's very little that can be done to mitigate damage done by the shooter or prevent him from escaping in that span of time.
Well they not only have a gun. They have something far more important: body armor. Even a completely untrained SWAT member is going to be more successfull than a random citizen with a gun.
The big edge the SWAT guys have is armor and shields, and sometimes armored vehicles, along with enough tactical training to use them. This lets them survive getting close enough to do something. Regular cops have guns too, but that's not enough. The Parkland shooting had an armed sheriff's deputy in the school, but he wasn't armored up to take on someone with an assault rifle.
"If it was common knowledge that there was a non-trivial number of armed people at the location in question this probably wouldn't be happening" would be more appropriate.
People committing violence choose soft targets over hard ones when they can.
We have individual murders, but our last big mass shooting was in the 90s. USA has one every day. Your comment seems to deliberately misinterpret the situation.
Please don't take HN threads on generic ideological or national tangents. Those inevitably lead to generic ideological and national spats, as demonstrated below. All such discussions are much the same, and they're what we're trying to avoid here,
You don't have to live here, but it bothers me that you feel so free to say that on HN. If you want to pick out a specific thing to object to, you can always find a dealbreaking reason to "never live in X country." This is true of any country.
I'm not saying it isn't a problem. But I'm 52 years old and my father was career military and my ex was career military and I have lived all over the US. I have never seen anyone shot.
I have had friends in middle eastern countries that marveled at my willingness to go grocery shopping alone at 2am as a woman. They couldn't believe that was safe and legal and I wasn't scared to leave the house by myself at that hour.
I have read all kinds of horrifying things about a great many countries. Every country has problems. There are no perfect countries.
And it seems to me that talking trash about the US while this incident is still live is just not exactly sympathetic pro social behavior. There are better times and places to hash out the fact that the US has a problem. I don't think guns per se are The Problem. But this is just not really the discussion where I want to debate the details with people.
Living in those types of places shouldn't be the benchmark for living in a first world country. I'm not saying that where I'm living is perfect, far from it. I'm saying that despite the fact that I could make far more money in the U.S as a programmer, I couldn't live there because I wouldn't want to live somewhere that continues to allow this to happen.
I can't reply to you anymore unfortunately but:
Where's the right place? when is the right time? I'm not trying to make this about me, I'm trying to understand a completely foreign concept to me. Unprovoked mass shootings seem to be a very regular occurrence for years now, and yet until the recent one in Parkland there doesn't seem to be an appetite for change.
Statistically, you are more likely to die from a mass murderer in Western Europe than in the USA. In both places the chances are vanishingly small and people can still live without fear.
What does "allowing to happen" mean? Why are the US & EU complicit in the cases of mass killers? Criminal justice is post-facto, and unfortunately any sort of preventative measures (profiling, banning, surveilling) infringe on human rights.
HN is a site devoted to tech, right now the tech world is dominated by US companies. Therefore many non-US based readers of HN will be devs or work in the tech industry and could have the opportunity to move from safe countries in the EU to work in the US. In the same way that the GP wouldn't choose to move to the United States most people would not choose to move to the middle East for their career due to the risks. The GP has simply indicated that the risk of being shot in the US is too high for them. Now you have lived there and have never seen anybody who has been shot. I live in the UK and I have never seen anybody who has been shot either. But if we look at the overall statistics, you are much more likely to be involved in a gun related incident than I am.
I think you are taking it personally as someone disliking your country when in fact it is a rational response for someone to want to expose themselves to less danger. In the same way that you would not move to Egypt for a better paying job because, as a woman, you would be much more likely to experience sexual harassment and/or sexual violence there than you would in the US.
And where else would this be discussed, everyone says "don't politicise" these events, but if you dont talk about it now when do you discuss it? Brought up next week and we will be in the aftermath of a different tragedy or some other crisis. These events need to be addressed when they happen, otherwise nothing will be done.
I think it's deeply ignorant, maybe even delusional, to say/think access to guns, and the "gun nut" cultural resistance to making formalized, standardized, rigorous access to guns harder than easy, aren't a significant part of the problem. And that's because there is no other demonstrated factor that distinguishes the U.S. from other countries: we don't have more mental illness than other countries, we don't have fewer instigators of irrational anger.
Right after Parkland, a teenage cousin of mine initially did not want to go to the (voluntary) student walkout. Why? He told me his school in San Francisco gets numerous shooter threats. It's that common. And he felt being in a protest with a bunch of people clumped together made a very good target for another shooting.
This level of fear proves there is an inadequate balance between 1st and 2nd amendments. In effect, the 2nd amendment is being used to abridge free speech through fear. And I absolutely think gun nuts love this, it's exactly what they want, to shut down rational debate and conversation.
Then maybe you are completely unfamiliar with the military culture of showing respect for those who have suffered and died and being sensitive to the survivors left behind.
At this point, I intend to bow out of the conversation. I feel a great many people have missed my point and arguing it isn't going to accomplish anything good.
I probably shouldn't have replied to any of the replies to me. We all make our mistakes.
> it bothers me that you feel so free to say that on HN.
Freedom to express one's opinion is not a uniquely American value, especially on the internet. You're free to be bothered, but it's invalid to criticize someone for commenting about why US gun culture makes living in the States a non-starter.
The first rule of being a decent human being is to not walk up to someone who has just had something terrible happen to them and gloatingly say something like "He he, there's your problem. It's your fault this is happening to you. Glad I and my neighbors are so much more civilized."
I cannot fathom how anyone can mistake such comments as evidence of civilized behavior.
But nobody's walking up to the victims and saying this. HN is an open -- and international -- forum for discussion.
Given that the US is affected by gun-related violence unlike essentially any other developed nation, it's completely reasonable to bring the American gun fetish up anytime there's a shooting, to draw attention to it and to (hopefully) enact change which can prevent these kinds of tragedies in the future.
I understand your averse reaction to the root comment in this context (and posted a moderation reply above), but the site guidelines do ask "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize," and this surely isn't the strongest plausible interpretation.
Nor was that the framing of my initial reply. As stated elsewhere, I probably should not have replied to any of the replies to me. It's a bit like the telephone game where each reply perverts the original intent a little bit more.
It’s bad that in Australia our police beat up pensioners, I cannot imagine how bad things would be here if we had a free-wheeling gun culture.
Actually, scratch that - I can. Until we cracked down on guns in the 90s we had massacre after massacre. I think I forgot how it was because we’ve not had one since the Port Arthur massacre.
Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this. There are over 300 million people here, a few hundred die per year in mass shootings (which includes targeted ones, and I doubt you'd be a target). They are a problem, but they are massively over-reported (based strictly on mortality).
Not living in the US because of "gun culture" is unreasonable and irrational. It is falling prey to what is essentially fear-mongering (as far as that decision is concerned).
> The number of gun murders per capita in the US in 2012 - the most recent year for comparable statistics - was nearly 30 times that in the UK, at 2.9 per 100,000 compared with just 0.1.
Yes, but 30x a tiny number is still tiny. That isn't a reasonable way to determine "danger", it's a statistical fallacy.
Like, the difference in traffic deaths between the US and UK is 10.6 to 2.9 per capita, which is under 4x. But the actual lethality difference is massive. It pretty much completely swamps the difference in gun murders (I'm treating this as a naive comparison to prove a point, not trying to dig into the particulars of these stats), but I don't here people making sanctimonious posts about an absolute hard-line refusal to moving to the US due exclusively to the dangerous driving culture.
That's a pretty textbook example of cherry-picked data.
Why did they look at "gun murders per capita" specifically instead of just "murders per capita"? I don't know about you but I don't particularly care about how I get murdered just if I get murdered.
If you look instead at murders per capita the US is still very high at 4.88 vs. the UK's 0.92 but clearly not "30 times higher" either.
The UK and parts of Europe have suffered mass killings and terrorism with higher casualty rates per capita than mass killings in the US. Still, they are statistically tiny and do not automatically imply that it is not worth living in the UK or EU.
It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way. In fact, I feel it's more likely to entrench his point of view because you're telling him he needs a better reason than that. And I can understand his point because it's not necessarily about the fear of getting shot up in a nightclub, at least for me it's the very prevalent attitude that guns are a natural right and they take priority over much greater humanitarian concerns that inflict the country, to the point of it being fetishistic. It's the gun culture, not the gun crime.
And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it?
>It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way
How? It is literally not even close to something to worry about unless, as I posted elsewhere, you either own a gun (accidental deaths), are suicidal, or are involved in criminal activities.
Similarly, the difference in deaths like traffic accidents between countries is so much more massive than the firearm homicide rate that it is absolutely insane to list that as a hard-line criteria.
It is not reasonable or rational to be scared of guns in the US unless you are actually involved in sketchy situations or own one yourself.
>And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it?
Only from a psychological perspective. If you are actually concerned with your statistical likelihood of death, this is exactly what you should be interested in. Lurid stories from a country that has a third of a billion people is a completely irrational basis for such a decision.
I'm not a woman so I have literally nothing to worry about as a man wanting to live in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, except that nobody would argue with me if I said I don't want to live there because I disagree with their cultural attitude towards women.
What you're trying to tell me is that it's not valid for someone to consider US culture as it pertains to guns as a reason for wanting to live there or not, because I'm statistically unlikely to be involved in gun crime. The statistical likelihood of being a victim is totally irrelevant, we're talking about the compatibility of cultural values.
And on that basis it is totally fair and rational to refuse to move somewhere that fundamentally opposes your own values. It's a matter of integrity and what's important to you, and nobody has the right to tell anyone whether those values are better or worse (or more/less rational) than your own.
Crime is practically a given anywhere so on that basis you're absolutely correct. It's totally irrational to think that prolific reports of crime in the news is a good reason to think you're gonna get shot or stabbed when you walk down the street. Which is why I'm focusing so heavily on the cultural aspect.
>What you're trying to tell me is that it's not valid for someone to consider US culture as it pertains to guns as a reason for wanting to live there or not, because I'm statistically unlikely to be involved in gun crime. The statistical likelihood of being a victim is totally irrelevant, we're talking about the compatibility of cultural values.
Well, his post is hidden now, but he seemed exclusively concerned with the danger, not the actual culture.
The CDC document they link doesn't seem to make any statements about gang vs non gang homicides. I've read/searched for a couple minutes (the word "gang" doesn't appear in the pdf).
I'm English but have lived in California for half my life.
London now has a higher murder rate than NYC, which gives a different perspective.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43610936
I've never owned a gun but I respect the second amendment which seems to have been cleverly crafted primarily to give the citizens options to overthrow a future oppressive government.
I find the whole pressure to 'ban guns' sinister in Trump's America...
Why wouldn't you include stabbings? Are you suggesting that murder is better if it's done by knife than by gun?
Of course you're going to get lower gun homicide rates by banning them. You'd get lower knife homicide rates by banning knifes (I think it's time to consider an assault-knife ban), but aren't you "fixing" the wrong problem? Shouldn't we be trying to stop murder?
So what is to be gained then by pointing out that gun crime is much higher in a nation where they are legal than in one where they are not? Unless you view gun ownership in and of itself as a bad thing, then it's a useless statistic. You're not reducing crime/murder by banning guns, you're just changing the weapon. That hardly seems like justification for violating somebody's rights (in the US, it is a Constitutionally guaranteed right).
That it's not "sinister" (as you said) to want gun control when the gun homicide rate is 30x that of the U.K. Why are you trying to equate knives with guns all of a sudden?
London now has a higher murder rate than NYC, which gives a different perspective.
Does it, though? The homicide rate in NYC has dropped hugely in the last couple of decades (an order of magnitude!); it's still much higher than London's when you look beyond a timeframe of two or three months. Meanwhile other large cities in the US, including LA, fare much worse than either London or NYC.
The issue that I see here: Yes, I believe that the second amendment was primarily intended to help overthrow an out-of-control government. It was authored in a time where memories of the Revolution were fresh. Muskets, bayonets, and cannon were the weapons they had in mind, and a lot of the country was close to frontier wilderness.
Now, there is no militia to speak of. The federal government and its assets span the width of the continent. It's hard to imagine how civilian guns would help overthrow that. Obviously, things would come down to guerrilla warfare. 231 years have changed the situation a lot. The assumptions that were made then don't really apply...and the interpretation of the amendment, and the discussion around it, have shifted in that time, as well.
> Now, there is no militia to speak of. The federal government and its assets span the width of the continent. It's hard to imagine how civilian guns would help overthrow that. Obviously, things would come down to guerrilla warfare. 231 years have changed the situation a lot. The assumptions that were made then don't really apply...and the interpretation of the amendment, and the discussion around it, have shifted in that time, as well.
..
I used to think that too, but I think the assumptions made then still do apply. We have a heavily militarized police and an increasingly oppressive surveillance state. It's a grim thought but surrendering the ability to rise up en masse has happened before and not ended well...
I guess I wasn't clear about the assumptions that I'm talking about. The power balance between citizens and government has shifted drastically in favor of the government, and there isn't any citizen-controlled, organized force. The police are militarized, and I'd expect them to be on the side of enforcing the status quo.
My point was that I think that maintaining citizens' gun rights wouldn't be sufficient to allow the people to overthrow the government, giving its overwhelming advantage in resources.
> My point was that I think that maintaining citizens' gun rights wouldn't be sufficient to allow the people to overthrow the government
Nor was that the intent. Gun rights were viewed as a necessarya sufficient condition for that; the sufficient condition was the dependency of the government on the citizen militia to enforce its will; the Constitution presupposed (but did not mandate, which led to this presupposition becoming invalid) the absence of large permanent standing armies and permanent professional paramilitary police forces at the federal and state level, and they both federal and state government would be dependent on mobilizing the armed citizenry to deal with internal threats to order and external security threats.
The guaranty of liberty wasn't “the people have smallarms to fight the government's armies of professional troops with the weapons of large scale warfare”, it was “the government may have stockpiles of weapons of large scale warfare, but absent mobilizing the armed citizenry can't actually effectively employ them and has very few troops to do anything”. The envisioned asymmetry in effective power was the reverse of what it is now, with or without gun rights.
> The US constitution was framed expressly to overthrow the colonial rulers and keep them out...
No, it wasn't, throwing out the colonial rulers was done under the Articles of Confederation.
The US Constitution was framed several years after that effort was completed, to deal with the problem that that the government under the AoC was too weak to get anything done outside of the imminent life-or-death struggle of the Revolution.
...the federal government, yeah. The mistake was extending it to the states instead of letting their own constitutions say what should happen in their jurisdiction.
My claim was a car accident not strictly, riding as a passenger. I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive and provide the mortality rates from all vehicle related deaths:
"Any motor vehicle incident 1 in 114"
So yes, Americans are 3 times more likely to die in a car accident than by a gun. For Americans, use your own life experience: How many people do you know who have died in or by cars vs gun violence. Which one is fear mongered more?
Assuming you have 400 friends/acquaintances the probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a car accident ~ 3%[1]. The probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a gun accident is 47% [2]
You keep posting this source, but I am extremely skeptical, considering that since 2010, gun related homicides in the US has consistently ranged between 8000 and 13000 per year, where the number of people to die in automobile accidents in the US typically hovers between 30,000 to 40,000. Also, given that Business Insider is essentially a blog site at this point, I don't see how they arrived at those numbers.
They're posting death rates of being a passenger not dying because of exposure to cars (passenger, driver, pedestrian etc). They should retract their position or they're being deceptive.
Our government has regulations and conducts research to minimize car accident fatalities. As a result, cars today are much safer than 10 or 20 years ago. There's no reason we can't do something similar with guns.
Americans drive awful lot. Americans are more likely to be shot then citizens of pretty much any other western country and also of quite a few non-western countries.
You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner who isn't involved in a criminal enterprise has next to no chance of dying by gunshot.
>American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home.
This is absolutely untrue and a completely asinine thing to say, revealing your own unexamined biases.
Non-suicidal people don't believe they'd kill themselves. But they still do later in life. Any of us might become mentally ill and do it one-day, making that statistic pretty relevant.
The others have already gotten to the suicide point but if you'd like to know more you can read this article, which actually breaks down the numbers behind that 30,000.
186 Asians (19,437,463 estimated total) die to gun violence a year according to this chart. And the majority in the US, whites (232,943,055 estimated total), 3,049 die a year due to gun violence.
In a country of 327,421,076 (estimated).
I used those two demographics because of their representation in tech (and thus this site).
Use those numbers to draw your own conclusions while living outside of the US.
> Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this.
This is getting to be less and less the case. Some anecdata:
* A good friend of mine worked at the UPS in SF where a mass shooting occurred
* I almost took a job at the YT San Bruno office
* Luke Woodham killed two students at a high school in my hometown
There are a lot of mass shooting events, and the number of people caught in their emotional orbit is only increasing. How many people were in the crowd at Las Vegas, for heaven's sake?
Listen, I love traveling, including to places with more draconian gun laws. I don't advocate US gun laws in Germany or France, and I don't advocate European-style gun laws in the US. It's nice to have that sort of heterogeneity in the world.
The US is a wonderful place in most ways. We have 300 million guns over here, and typically around 9k gun murders per year, almost all of which are unrelated to "gun culture" and instead driven by drug prohibition.
There are 7-9 cities which have been ravaged by our idiotic policies of drug prohibition. In those places, you'll find a murder rate similar to Russia. For the most part, these are still wonderful places to visit - you can walk around Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit and meet peaceful, friendly, happy, well-adjusted people for days. The only top-tier danger city in the US which I find to have little redeeming value is Washington DC - I find that place cringey, self-righteous, and terrifying.
In all other places in the US (more than 99.99% by land mass), we have a murder rate similar to Western Europe.
I think we're a pretty good example of how to be armed and remain peaceful.
Things are fine here. Making these sorts of generalizations based on a minuscule number of high-profile data points is exactly the problem with American public policy in the first place.
I don't carry a gun but I almost always carry a fog style pepper spray on me. I used to use Fox Labs but UDAP made an even stronger pepper spray, pretty much the strongest legal to carry, self defense pepper spray. UDAP is famous for their bear spray line. [1]
If you work at an office or startup, I recommend purchasing a fire extinguisher style 1-5 pound pepper spray due to the increased range and capacity. [2]
A note of warning though: I have sprayed myself on the arm with the weaker of the two, the Fox Labs spray - mind you, outside with good breeze. Just a spritz. Well, my arm pretty much burned for two days straight and if I went inside, it was hard to breath due to the constant smell. It would not rinse off my arm with water or milk.
If you have poor accuracy, go with the fogger style. Stream style pepper sprays have longer range but are harder to hit vitals and create a barrier. Fog pepper spray can pretty much be sprayed to create a wall of pepper that no one will able to go through without being blinded and severely impaired. So it can be used to prevent an attacker from heading towards you, even if you can't reach the attacker.
I am not saying pepper spray is better than a gun but it requires almost no training and can save your life if used properly. Every office should have some along with a fire extinguisher.
The problem with statistics is that people like to ignore them in when they don't support their narrative.
If you lived your life entirely trying to avoid things with an incredibly minor chance of happening to you, you would stop living life. You a much higher chance of dying in a car accident, choking to death on your food, or in a bike related accident. Yet I drive, eat, and ride my bike.
Total umbrella statement applicable to anything, ranging from fortunate events (e.g. winning a lottery) to unfortunate events (e.g. crashing your car).
The chances of something like this happening to you are pretty small. It’s much more likely that you’ll be killed in a car crash or similar.
Pretty much by definition, something that makes the news isn’t something you should worry about. If it happened often enough to be a serious threat then it wouldn’t be newsworthy. (E.g. car crashes.)
But mass shootings don't make the US news. There are very many shootings of two or more people (and weirdly that doesn't count as mass) that make maybe a paragraph or two in a local paper.
Headline reads: "Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than many leading causes of death combined"
Gun violence is far, far ahead of riding a bicycle. And no I don't particularly care if the bullet that kills me is part of a single shooting or a mass shooting.
I don't want to argue that we aren't far behind of other countries, but the last stat I saw was that Americans had a 1 in 11,000 chance of dying in a mass shooting (stats are higher for general assault, 1 in 315)[0].
Is this terrible? Yes. Should we do everything we can to reduce this number, given that we seem to have the largest problem? Absolutely. Does gun violence have the potential to get blown out of proportion when there are many other items that are a leading cause of death? Possibly
How do you feel about car culture in the US? Or the dangers of falling or getting poisoned? Because each of these claims over twice as many lives as firearm homicides.
According to the CDC National Center for Health Statistics:
Cause of death Deaths per 100,000, 2015
Unintentional poisoning deaths 14.8
Motor vehicle traffic deaths 11.7
Unintentional fall deaths 10.4
Firearm homicides 4.0
Of course, these numbers should all be reduced however we can. But the high visibility of gun violence overshadows the tragic toll of many other dangers.
San Francisco is supposed to be one of the right places, but we hoist a lot of the rest of the country's problems here as well. For example, I suspect our homeless problem wouldn't be nearly at what it is if other states didn't literally bus their homeless and insane to us.
I don't want to get into a massive debate about the "best" places to live but I will say that a great deal of perception of America is because America is the best in the world at marketing. You can also call it "propaganda" if you'd like, I wouldn't be able to argue against the term well.
North Korean propaganda looks like ridiculous phrases riddled with too many adverbs. American propaganda is a long history of tweaking the facts just right, as well as having control over one of the top 3 movie industries (Bollywood and Chinese films may get more viewers, but nobody can top Hollywood in global reach).
That's cool its part of our culture if you don't like our culture then luckily you're still mostly free in the rest of the world to move around and not be in the US.
There are a lot more important problems than guns we have to worry about. Well, we have to end apartheid for one.
And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger.
We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women.
We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values.
Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern, and less materialism in young people.
Oh good, I was worried that an ongoing tragedy wouldn’t turn into a predictable political discussion quickly enough. It’s important that we speculate wildly and inject our own politics into this right away. There are internet points on the line after all!
This whole thread shouldn’t be on HN in the first place, there’s no solid information, and the trolls are already sharpening their fangs.
To be honest, someone saying "I would make a better salary as a programmer in the US, but I won't go because of X" is topical to HN (Even if X is a false statement, heck, even if 'I won't go because' is a false statement, because in all cases it's being said, and that's relevant in a country that is simultaneously debating a programmer shortage, H1-B visas, and how these impact our industry.
I have plenty to say on the gun debate, but HN isn't the place to bring most of that it up. Where the gun culture (note, OP said 'culture', so it has nothing to do with the legality per se) DOES intersect the HN topics, however, seems like something that shouldn't be ignored just because it's a political issue. Ideally your political issues are important issues - outright avoiding discussion of them is not helpful, even if discussion requires more effort towards civility and open-mindedness on everyone's parts.
There’s a significant difference between a discussion on this event when we know the facts, and discussion while it’s ongoing and multiple versions of events are being offered by dozens of sources. The phrase, “Ongoing tragedy” was sort of the key to my post.
Odds of dying in a jet crash are about 1 in 16 million per flight, odds of dying in a mass shooting in the US by living there for one year and doing random things and going random places are within an order of magnitude of that.
I could have said "car" and "driving" instead and it would have been far more likely.
Planes do fall out of the sky every couple months, especially when you consider small planes and non-commercial flights.
Additionally, the gun deaths statistic is cherry picked. Two-thirds of those gun deaths are from suicide. Also, the overwhelming majority of those who die in gun related homicides are poor minorities, highly concentrated in poor communities, and tend to occur between people who know each other, rather than random deaths.
Does America have a gun violence problem? Yes. Are guns a reason to be concerned for the average American, or someone like yourself who would move here? Not even remotely.
Planes absolutely do crash every couple of months, much more if you count private planes. Just like guns, you have to keep away from the "wrong places" to be safe.
Absolutely. Someone's response to a high-stress work environment, an affair of the heart gone wrong, latent psychological issues... the "merely mundane" possibilities that could happen anywhere are still plenty realistic. Shit happens.
I guess I'm not so much speculating as calling on companies like Youtube to hire more protection for their staff. They're really putting themselves out there, and if this is or isn't somehow related to Youtube's business, they are eventually going to get hit. Read the comments on any of the interviews Youtube staff have done, and weep.
My point was more: Youtube is taking remote action on people they don't know that can have life altering effects through their policies. The kind of content Youtube blocks is almost definitely created by at least a few damaged people. Eventually they are going to be the target of violence from such people.
They need to be proactive and realize the risks they place their employees in simply by virtue of their scale and policy choices. And this goes for other similar companies too. Security for employees should be more of a priority than it is - their employees become public figures.
If some gun owner's response to a private corporation changing their rules for a free service they offer is to start shooting people, that's a really strong case for much tighter gun control. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, not really. It's more of a case of mental health issues and how huge corporations have so much influence on the world around us that they making choices as they like has a huge impact on all of us.
Other questions you should ask: was this because of youtube's response to Logan Paul's antics. Was this a secret message he found in Logan Paul's videos? Was the shooter a Logan Paul Stan who did this for LP's attention.
Or don't. Because you're not actually asking helpful questions because you're literally just making this stuff up without ANY factual basis and just injecting your own thoughts into a situation nobody knows anything about currently.
This is not even remotely the same. YouTube policies on gun related content is 100% related to this issue. Simply because you want to be right doesn't mean you are.
You made a wild guess about the cause. Your defense is that we should ask about the cause. This is a non sequitur, as those are two completely different things.
It's called a discussion and definitely not a non sequitur.
"I wonder if it was because of the recent rules changes made by YouTube", "Wouldn't be surprised if it was because of the recent rule changes YouTube made" and "Do you think this was because of the recent rule changes YouTube made?" are equivalent in what they bring to the discussion. The only difference is you choosing to interpret them differently.
There's a substantial difference between "What motivated this?" and "I wouldn't be surprised if this was motivated by {political reason x}.". You're getting hung up on grammatic structure. "Could it have been motivated by {political reason x}?" has the same problem, even though it's phrased as a question. It's the baseless speculation.
I would hesitate before immediately associating the two events, however, just as Remington's recent bankruptcy followed (but was not caused by) the Parkland shootings.
As a US citizen hearing about another mass shooting, I'm honestly not shocked. There will be more next month as well until eventually they will become the "price" of our great "freedom". Sickening.
Edit: Not sure why people are down voting my comment. America has a gun violence problem[1].
Just to put this into perspective, I don't remember the last big mass shooting in Australia. It was just that long ago. I guess this allows us to focus on reducing other forms of violence, like the "one punch can kill" campaign.
We will eventually have another big mass shooting, but if we have only one every 30 years then I'd say we've done the right thing with guns.
I'm not trying to tell your country what to do. Just adding my perspective.
For some context in case anyone is interested: the most recent prominent mass murder in Australia was indeed using a vehicle rather than a gun (6 people in January 2017), but there have been mass shootings in the last 30 years as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_Australia lists more than ten, and there is no particular reason to believe the list is complete.
The most recent prominent mass shooting appears to be the 2014 Sydney hostage crisis.
You're right, and thank you for taking the time to add this extra context. This is why I said "big" mass shooting, even though that extra word seems redundant. It looks like only two people were killed in that Sydney hostage crisis and apparently that's enough to call it a "mass shooting".
Your parent comment used a definition of four people shot.
If you use the number of people killed (excluding the perpetrator), then depending on how medical care goes, the YouTube shooting today might involve 0 deaths. Nonetheless, it reasonably appears to be considered a "mass shooting".
I know next to nothing about today's shooting and was not suggesting today's is a mass shooting. I hope, for the sake of all those involved, that it isn't.
"There doesn't seem to be an official definition for a "mass shooting" in the United States, but according to the Gun Violence Archive, a mass shooting is described as four or more individuals being shot or killed in the same general time and location."
So, that doesn't specifically say that the shootings are by the same person or even related. It would include any given day in Chicago, which had on average 7 shootings per day in 2017[1]. Yet nobody was really holding rallies or protests about that, because it's mostly inner city gang-related shootings, and Chicago is already heavily gun-controlled which doesn't support the narrative that we need more laws regarding guns in order to protect the children.
I find your assumption that my comment was anti-gun in anyway quite telling. I own guns myself. I do have a problem with people using them to kill people. America has a gun violence problem[1].
A guy goes to the doctor with a pencil in his ear. The doctor says, "Why do you have a pencil in your ear?". The guy responds, "To keep away the alligators. See? No alligators anywhere in sight."
My dad was a two time veteran with a purple heart and guns displayed on the wall above his bed, not locked up. Our shitty sliding glass door at the back of the house, a standard feature in the houses of the neighborhood, was never broken into. Anyone that I knew well enough to know if they had had a break in could not say the same.
I'm reasonably sure that word got round the neighborhood that if you valued your hide, Mr. (MyMaidenName)'s house was not a good house to break into.
But, of course, I can't prove that. Maybe it was wild coincidence and we would have been magically safe without guns on the wall, never mind that no one else seemed to be.
Your absurd example doesn't really engage the point in a meaningful, substantive manner. It merely mocks the idea that deterrence is real. It frames it as something crazy people imagine. It isn't remotely a good faith argument.
What an insight. I think we should also cut the ridiculous budget enjoyed by NTSB, because 99.99% of all airplanes currently in service has never crashed.
alright, to the response, how about "I think we should also cut the ridiculous budget enjoyed by NTSB, because 0.01% of all airplanes currently in service have crashed"?
I'd actually argue that aircraft that have crashed are no longer in service and flights that were successful or grounded vs flights involving mechanical failure leading to crashes is probably at a safer percentage than 0.01% (though not certain of said percentage), but I think the general point stands.
I would love a law banning mass institutionalized assemblies, especially offices and public schools, but I don't think there will ever be the political will.
I think you're right. I think we should start with something more sensible, like gun laws that make it harder to acquire firearms that make it easy to kill several people in several seconds.
I didn't intend it as a straw man, but to be facetious.
Rather than this ever-present implication to myopically focus on what happens to be the easiest tool for killing people, perhaps we should be looking at the structures that cause individuals the intense stress and alienation that pushes them to rampage.
In addition to the media that provides the validation and glory for doing so, of course.
Your roundabout hint (?) at an attack on the First Amendment which guarantees freedom of association, freedom of speech, and freedom of the press, also guarantees freedom of religion.
It is very unlikely Congress would ever repeal freedom of religion as expressed in the First Amendment.
I do not mean to condescend, but given your willingness to protect people from violence by preventing them from assembling in the first place, it might be useful for you to think about why the Founding Fathers thought to compose the First Amendment using specifically these words:
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I know the red/blue ignorance clubs have done their best to make people think that support of the rights described in the first and second amendments are mutually exclusive, but I assure you that's not my stance.
It looks like it may have a malicious ad or something. It takes over my entire session and says my bank information has been stolen. It locked up Chrome as well and I had to kill the process myself (on Windows).
I've had problems with malicious ads redirecting me lately. I began to suspect that my phone was infected, but it turns out that this is now a common occurrence:
I don't even understand why governments haven't made a case of this generally speaking. If an ad network allows this kind of behavior, they can be blocked by countries. Sites won't want networks that can't serve traffic in as many countries as possible, so it should solve itself.
And it isn't that far removed from what happened to Podesta or whatever. They could make it a case that it is important to the state.
