I shared an image via Facebook last night, as it caught my attention and disturbed me. Sharing the image is an action that probably means a lot more than you’d immediately think and this was reflected by the level of feedback that I got on Facebook from different people.
Here’s the image, which is from the Brady Campaign site, which has some pretty damning statistics on gun related deaths.
The Brady Campaign isn’t about banning guns, it’s about improving the legislation in the US to stop guns being made too accessible to people with a penchant for violence. They’ve also got a counter on their site which is pretty scary. On average 270 people are shot in the US every single day!
Ireland has very strict gun control laws, as do many countries in Europe. That doesn’t mean that people don’t get shot, or get their hands on weapons illegally. And of course you don’t need a gun to kill someone – you can do it with your bare hands..
Personally I enjoy shooting, though I only get to do that when I’m in the US and I have no issue with people owning guns.
The thing is, as the National Council of Sciences in the US has pointed out, neither side in the gun “debate” there has produced any statistical studies into the relative merits of the 2nd amendment that could be accepted by an objective third party. Hence the quotation marks around “debate” – both sides there are so deeply entrenched that any real debate is no longer possible.
That said, this latest atrocity was committed by a person who appears to have been an intelligent, quiet chap studying for his PhD in neuroscience, who had a peer group, who would have been in regular contact with a supervisor, who had just presented to an academic conference (which is not something you can easily do when socially maladjusted), who came from a good home in a place with strict gun control laws (he wasn’t from Colorado, but California), and despite all of this, he just seems to have gotten up one day, strapped on body armour, armed himself with tear gas (forget the guns, where did he get the tear gas?) and firearms, booby-trapped his house so much that the bomb squad are still trying to get in there a day later, and drove to the cinema to kill people.
Maybe I have a bias against first-order solutions, but I don’t think “lets ban guns” is a policy that would prevent that kind of out-of-the-blue insanity. I think the problem here is something a lot deeper, a lot messier, a lot harder to deal with, and one which will never see debate in the light of day because the moment you even offer the opinion that perhaps the tool isn’t the problem, you’re automatically typecast in the role of “gun-loving NRA nutcase” and if you offer another opinion, you’re typecast as “gun-hating Brady nutcase”. It it wasn’t so tragic, the irony would almost be funny…
@Mark
To be honest I wasn’t even thinking specifically of the shooting in Colorado when I posted this – thanks for the details
Michele
The issue should be violence, not firearms violence. I knew a woman who was widowed when a drunk beat her husband to death with a pool cue. I lived in Palo Alto when a computer scientist was beaten to death by a Samoan gang. I had just left a store in northwest Portland, Oregon, when a woman staggered past, fell on the checkout counter, and died from a cut throat. When I lived in Palo Alto a gang of privileged youth set a homeless woman on fire, and residents insisted that these youth deserved minor punishment since they were “not a danger to the community.”
I think that the focus on firearms has stopped us from any intelligent conversation n violence. Scandinavia recently had a mass shooting far worse than any in the US – and the largest non-terrorist mass murder in US history was done with regular gasoline at the Happy Land Dance Club in the Bronx where 87 people died.
Instead of stigmatizing the mentally ill, firearms, racial groups, genders, or whatever we really need to get serious about finding the root causes of violence.
That image is *very* questionable when it comes to statistics. So much so that it lacks any significant sense of meaning.
First of all, it isn’t done per capita; second of all, it doesn’t break the statistics up into urban and rural; third of all, it doesn’t mark the strength of the gun control laws in said country, nor whether the police forces in those countries are armed or not.
These are actually critical points. If you break it down by that, Finland isn’t bottom, but near the top of gun fatalities. Finland has comparatively lax gun control laws. OTOH, Germany has extremely strict gun control laws, to the degree that you can’t even show animated blood or people being shot in video games, yet its deaths by gunshot are four times per capita higher than the England and Wales.
The US has some serious problems when it comes to attitudes towards weapons, but presenting statistics like this does not help.