, as in the early 90s and sometimes incredibly low, as it did a couple years ago, even down to levels not seen since the early 50s. Trying to make firearms the scapegoat OR solution just distracts from systemic inequities that are the main problem.
Statistics about guns in the house are very misleading, as they only record deaths, so naturally that skews the picture. Most times guns are used, no shots are even fired. A guy broke into a friends house a couple years ago and attacked her, she pointed her shotgun at him and he ran away. No statistics record that, but it happens all the time, I’d love for the CDC to get numbers for that as well as other instances.
Also, the Supreme Court is notoriously home to all sorts of regressive social values, so while I appreciate when it rules in ways that allow for better community defense options, I’m not especially looking towards it as some kind of moral leadership.
It’s up there, in my first response. Here’s the link again:
The title is:
Mass Shootings Are Getting Deadlier, Not More Frequent
Data show that mass public shootings are roughly as common now as they were in the 1980s and ’90s. What has changed? The death toll.
I don’t get why gun owners are so passionate about the issue. I don’t mean that condescendingly: I just don’t understand it. A friend of mine for 40 years, who had linked to this article, unfriended me on FB over guns.
I’m American but living in France and, despite what people say, it’s not that hard to buy hunting rifles here. There’s a gun store in my village, one in a village not far away, and we see hunters and hear rifles and shotguns all the time (we live in the sticks, not in Paris obviously). I see and hear more guns here than I did in the US. But only terrorists seem to be shooting at people. They’re using illegal guns but we know if there were widespread legal guns, the “good guy with a gun theory” it’d most likely be ineffective. Look at the Pulse Nightclub: Florida has very open gun laws and there was one shooter, instead of three like at the Bataclan in Paris (a similar massacre). Yet the result was pretty much the same; the lose gun laws didn’t make any difference. Conversely, Parkland is also in FL and that was a legal semi-automatic rifle.
Why do people who aren’t into target practice or hunting want guns? Why do they resist common-sense controls like banning lead bullets that are poison and that there are perfectly acceptable substitutes for (who would even want to feed their family meat with traces of lead in it)? Why would anybody think they need a semi-automatic rifle? None of this makes sense to me.
Ah, thanks. Your previous link didn’t work for some reason. It’s an interesting article, more or less what I expected. I wish more writing like that would go further and draw connections involving the toxic forms of masculinity that affects white men who are almost always behind such mass shootings.
Congratulations on France! I used to live in Berlin years ago and recently spent some time traveling around the Sigean region near Narbonne doing historical research.
I’m sorry you lost a friend over gun arguments. People tend to get passionate when they feel their safety is at risk. I live in a liberal bubble like a lot of gun control proponents do who never had to distrust that the police would protect them in a dangerous situation. However, I work conducting small arms training with folks from POC and other communities being targeted by the rising tide of fascism in the US, often who live in rural areas where law enforcement is spotty and white nationalists don’t bother living undercover as they do more so in the cities. People used to say they were skeptical of the need for that and would literally say, it’s not like nazis march in the streets anymore. Well, here we are. It’s happening and with endorsement from the highest level of government. Historically in the US it’s rifles that have kept communities safe from domestic terrorism and I cited numerous books that document those struggles.
Also, I’m totally open to regulating the composition of bullets, that’s only a big deal if it were to make ammo so expensive that low income people couldn’t afford it.
I agree with you about the machismo aspect. I think that is the real problem. Guns are not uncommon in France; I haven’t tried but it’s apparently not too cumbersome to get one. Not as easy as the US but not much worse. But they just don’t shoot one another, on purpose, with their guns. There are hunting accidents but a gun is seen as something to shoot a pheasant with, not a person.
That machismo aspect, the defense mentality, is where I think the real problem is. It’s the reason my friend de-friended me; I implicitly challenged his manhood by challenging his guns. The challenge to his guns was a challenge to his Id, provoking a fight or flight response. There are a substantial number of gun owners who respond to that with fight, and their definition of fight is mowing down their perceived persecutors. The closeted gay man murdering the gay nightclub. The secretly bankrupt accountant murdering people outside a casino. The outcasts – often, honestly, because they’re obnoxious and have serious psych problems – mowing down their high school or University.
But they couldn’t do it without the guns. They could go on a knife rampage, and probably kill or injure a few, but look at them – they’re almost all physical and mental weaklings. They’d be quickly overrun, so they turn to guns.
I’m an American in France but I’m also a Jew in France. I know the history here. A small part of my family left Europe to the US and the rest, besides those who went to the UK, vanished into Nazi ovens. The friend who de-friended me said I’m always against guns and always for Israel (which I’m not: I don’t like the occupation but the double-standards and missing historic context are bothersome). But Israel is the ultimate manifestation of what you’re talking about: there is a severely historically oppressed minority armed to the teeth and willing and able to use their weapons; the opinion of their oppressors are neither welcome nor needed. But … wouldn’t it be better if they at least tried to work things out? Arabs did allay with Nazis, they did repeatedly vow to destroy the Jews, they repeatedly launched and lost wars. They still do. But … you’ve seen the videos: is that really the best answer? Is might make right really the solution?
I’m not sure. Maybe it is – my family members were gassed, stripped naked and shot in the back in pits, subject to double standards, lied about… But something tells me there has to be a better way, in this modern time, than a shootout.
Oh, I absolutely agree a shootout is the last thing anyone should want as a problem solving method. It’s that kind of macho regressive mentality that myself and the other armed leftists I work with are trying to strip out of gun culture. It’s actually one of the most interesting aspects to firearms defensive use that they don’t always lead to greater bloodshed, even against the aggressors. I’ve encountered many people personally who used guns to stop violent attacks but in every case, no shots were even fired. Simply realizing that the intended victims were armed stopped the assaults immediately. Even in many of the mass attacks against Black Americans that are documented, there wasn’t mass slaughter of KKK members when those communities defended themselves. Only one lynch mob participant had to be killed before several hundred others ran away during their famous attack on the doctor Ossian Sweet, back in the 20s.
Are you familiar with the Kitat Konenut? It’s a Jewish militia group, mostly in the US. I did an interview with one of their weapons trainers for my magazine years ago, they do a lot of organizing and self defense work in their communities, inspired, of course, by the history you describe. How long have you lived in France? I’m quite envious!
So you’re saying peopl;e are just getting better at shooting to kill? Because if the number of shootings is the same, and the hurt/killed have gone up, then it has to be a skill/resolve issue with the shooter,because the AR15 and the AK47 have been available since 1947 and 1951.
I’m not saying anything of the kind. I’m observing the widely known fact that social violence in the last decades reduced to low levels not seen since the ’40s and ’50s and are only recently rising slightly, obviously unconnected to AR and AK availability. There was a cop at my work yesterday and one of my residents came up, thanking him for his service, since all she saw on the news was shootings, and the officer told her how low level shootings actually had become since the ’80s. But just because such statistics go up and down, doesn’t mean violence isn’t a problem. That’s why my article calls out the economic inequality, institutional racism and toxic masculinity at the root of most American violence. Gun control remains a distraction from such root issues.
So how many of the semi-auto rifles are trafficked to the Cartels in Mexico and how many Mexians have been killed by them?