The NRA owns Trump as well.

[3db]

This is an emotional issue- children are being killed for no good reason and when it happens, the number of dead is sickening. It's nothing anyone should have to deal with.

Why are you arguing with me then? You're being circular in your approach.

 

[Swerd]

That's some pretty good cypherin'- getting all of that from a survey of 4000 gun owners.

That survey involved 4,000 people, 78% of whom did not own a gun. Most surveys make use of numbers much less than 4,000, and yes, they can arrive at useful conclusions. Most political preference surveys during election years involve roughly 1,000 people, and they can provide useful info within a sampling error of 3%. It's important that the people be selected as randomly as possible, and that all statistical analyses be done correctly. This particular survey was used anonymously collected responses from an online questionnaire. Because that introduced some possibility of non-randomness, it was extended to include 4,000 responses, much more than usual.

You sound like you dispute the findings. These people know their business with surveys and statistics, and I'm going to guess that they know this better than you.

 

[panteragstk]

How about the sane ones snapping after the fact? Annual psych testing? 6 Month? Every month?

Good point. No real way to do that, but that same person could murder their spouse/kids/random person with something else.

Crazy folks determined to do damage will find a way. If only taking guns out of the equation solved the problem...sadly that is only a piece of the problem.

 

[panteragstk]

Actually, I think the real problem is we have a very poor handle on what "crazy" is (at least from the standpoint of safe gun ownership). The best tests we have are very time consuming and must be delivered by people with the proper training, but are still no gold standard. Attempting to test the entire population is an expensive proposition.

Also, "crazy" can be fluid!

Let's consider the guy who did the shooting in Las Vegas (IIRC) he was in his late 50's. Would he have failed a test in his early life - he lived decades before contriving a plot to murder people? How often do you give such a test? All gun owners annually?

How can any of us be certain we could not go crazy? I know seemingly stable people who came back from war unable to re-connect with their wife and kids who they had absolutely adored before. I'm not so confident that the right set of experiences/circumstances would not put anyone at risk. Some of us are more stable than others, but we may all have our breaking point!

Could we really have identified the people who have gone postal before they went postal? If so how much before they went postal?

To properly address an issue, you need to address it on the points you actually can have some accuracy with. I don't think our ability to measure/prevent "crazy" is one of them.

Unfortunately, "crazy" is an unmanageable method for attacking the mass shootings we are seeing.

I guess I should have chosen wording better, but I do agree with you. There isn't any fool proof way of identifying these people. Even if we did, there's nothing stopping people from gifting guns to them.

I personally have never purchased a gun, but I own three and am keeping my brother-in-law's for him for a bit. That's about 16 guns total. Nobody knows I have them (until now...) and what if I'm a "crazy" person? Can't do anything about me possessing them. I don't actually have any ammo for them so no chance of anything happening with my kids unless they figure out how to smack themselves in the face with them or something. Even then they are stored securely.

That's one of the things nobody mentions when it comes to gun control. There are SO many in circulation that it'd be damn near impossible to get them out of people's hands because we have no clue who has any. Some of mine are probably 80 plus years old. No serial number to be found on them. I have to think a lot of people have been gifted guns by their parents/grandparents and nothing is going to stop that.

 

[Irvrobinson]

what if I'm a "crazy" person?

Looking at your avatar, one does wonder...

 

[highfigh]

That survey involved 4,000 people, 78% of whom did not own a gun. Most surveys make use of numbers much less than 4,000, and yes, they can arrive at useful conclusions. Most political preference surveys during election years involve roughly 1,000 people, and they can provide useful info within a sampling error of 3%. It's important that the people be selected as randomly as possible, and that all statistical analyses be done correctly. This particular survey was used anonymously collected responses from an online questionnaire. Because that introduced some possibility of non-randomness, it was extended to include 4,000 responses, much more than usual.

You sound like you dispute the findings. These people know their business with surveys and statistics, and I'm going to guess that they know this better than you.

Surveys can show whatever they want- if they took the same survey at the DNC or RNC conventions and it had questions about how many guns people own, one side would say "too many! and the other would probably quote Sen Lindsay Graham, who answered the question with "Probably more than I need, but not as many as I want". Did tehy show the margin of error?

Personally, I would like an actual count- might be a good way to get them out of the hands of criminals for a while.

 

[mtrycrafts]

That's some pretty good cypherin'- getting all of that from a survey of 4000 gun owners.

If adults make up 35% of the US population and we use the estimate of around 325 Million people, 3%=3,412,500 and with the estimate of 265 Million guns, that means this 3% owns about 39 guns. Think about that average. Does it seem reasonable, at all?

...

Just a quick Google:
Population
Persons under 5 years, percent, April 1, 2010 6.5%
Persons under 18 years, percent, July 1, 2016, (V2016) 22.8%
Persons under 18 years, percent, April 1, 2010 24.0%
Persons 65 years and over, percent, July 1, 2016, (V2016) 15.2%
59 more rows
U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: UNITED STATES

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217

It seems that the population over 18, as that is the age for rifle ownership, is about 70%

 

[mtrycrafts]

Getting back on topic with who the NRA owns - it appears my own Lt. Governor is now threatening one of our states' largest employers with extortion...

https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/27/589047224/georgias-lt-gov-threatens-to-kill-tax-break-for-delta-airlines-amid-nra-spat

Yes, saw this bit of news. Biting the hand that feeds the state.
Clear thinking

 

[mtrycrafts]

Good point. No real way to do that, but that same person could murder their spouse/kids/random person with something else.

Crazy folks determined to do damage will find a way. If only taking guns out of the equation solved the problem...sadly that is only a piece of the problem.

Well, at least, most likely, we would not have mass killing? One would assault, I would think, a person with a weapon less than a gun, no? And perhaps more survivable that a .223 injury.

 

[mtrycrafts]

...
Personally, I would like an actual count- ...

Yes, I like 100% surveys. You could exclude the newborn infants.

 

[Swerd]

Surveys can show whatever they want- if they took the same survey at the DNC or RNC conventions…

Personally, I would like an actual count- might be a good way to get them out of the hands of criminals for a while.

Surveys by any political party would and should be suspected of having an axe to grind. However, urged by the NRA, the GOP has enacted laws preventing any US government agency from collecting any data on gun ownership or paying for others to do that work. As a result, the only ones doing such research are academics with private sources of funds.

The data of the survey I mentioned above was widely discussed in newspapers in September 2016 after it was first presented at a scientific conference. The best summary I could find was published by The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/19/us-gun-ownership-survey

After peer review, this study was published in October 2017.

In PDF format:
https://www.rsfjournal.org/doi/pdf/10.7758/RSF.2017.3.5.02

In web page format:
https://www.rsfjournal.org/doi/full/10.7758/RSF.2017.3.5.02

I urge those interested to read the paper as it's the first real data on US gun ownership published in over 20 years.

If you find reading it all is just a bit "above your pay grade", do what I plan on doing. Read the introduction, look at all the figures & tables, and read the discussion & conclusions. While I can nod my head intelligently at statistics and it's analysis, I don't pretend to be a statistician. The people who wrote this paper make their living at it.

 

[TheWarrior]

Yes, saw this bit of news. Biting the hand that feeds the state.
Clear thinking

That is clear thinking. And the NRA is clearly trying to see just how precisely they can bend the law through their influence.

 

[eljr]

We keep hearing more calls from gun rights activists for improved access to mental healthcare lately, to help avoid/reduce mass shootings. Improved access will likely require government funding, which (please forgive my stereotyping) I doubt the typical right-leaning gun rights proponents will be keen on. Strikes me as disingenuous...am I wrong?

The entire mental health issue is BS as it relates to gun deaths. Only 5% of gun deaths are by way of a mentally ill person.

 

[panteragstk]

The entire mental health issue is BS as it relates to gun deaths. Only 5% of gun deaths are by way of a mentally ill person.

Got a link with that info?

That and how do we determine if someone is mentally ill if they've never had that diagnosis before and are shot by themselves or police before they can be diagnosed? I would think a mass shooter would be considered mentally ill in a lot of cases. I get that some people are just evil, but they would have to have some sort of personality disorder right?

 

[eljr]

Got a link with that info?

That and how do we determine if someone is mentally ill if they've never had that diagnosis before and are shot by themselves or police before they can be diagnosed? I would think a mass shooter would be considered mentally ill in a lot of cases. I get that some people are just evil, but they would have to have some sort of personality disorder right?

I have read that stat many times. Here is something I quickly googled, not from an agenda driven site, that shows it to be less. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099

 

[mtrycrafts]

I have read that stat many times. Here is something I quickly googled, not from an agenda driven site, that shows it to be less. https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/pdf/10.5555/appi.books.9781615371099

Of course they are biased. Psychiatry.

No, really, thanks for the link.
Yes, it is a shame that the government is banning such research by government agencies. After all, they are no banning other areas of large deaths. Why guns?

 

[Swerd]

… Only 5% of gun deaths are by way of a mentally ill person.

5% of what? How do you define death by a mentally ill person? Does that include suicide? Most of the mass shootings we've had, more than likely by mentally ill people, also involved suicide of the shooter. If you count only the mass-shooting-related deaths, that might be 5% of the total.

The paper I linked above says in 2015 there were 22,018 suicides by gun out of a total of 36,252 gun-related deaths in the USA. That's 61% – far more than the 13,463 homicides (37%).

"In 2015, 36,252 people died of a firearm-related injury in the United States, approximately the same number of deaths as occurred in motor vehicle crashes. The same year, more than eighty thousand people were non-fatally injured (CDC 2017). The distribution of firearm deaths in 2015 is typical of the distribution over the past several decades: the majority of firearm deaths were suicides (22,018), followed by homicides (13,463) and then unintentional firearm injuries (fewer than one thousand)."​

Clearly, the biggest problem is not mass shootings, but gun-related suicides.

Although I agree that the NRA's mental health argument is BS, a smoke screen meant to distract the opposition, the mental health issue is highly related to gun deaths. I don't know how many people among those 22,018 suicides were mentally ill, but I would guess it would be quite a few, as many as 100%. Where in the constitution does it say the government may not regulate sales and manufacture of the weapon of choice for mentally ill people to commit suicide?

 

[mtrycrafts]

.... Where in the constitution does it say the government may not regulate sales and manufacture of the weapon of choice for mentally ill people to commit suicide?

Or, what can and cannot be regulated or outright banned.

 

[highfigh]

Just a quick Google:
Population
Persons under 5 years, percent, April 1, 2010 6.5%
Persons under 18 years, percent, July 1, 2016, (V2016) 22.8%
Persons under 18 years, percent, April 1, 2010 24.0%
Persons 65 years and over, percent, July 1, 2016, (V2016) 15.2%
59 more rows
U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: UNITED STATES

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045217

It seems that the population over 18, as that is the age for rifle ownership, is about 70%

I found what looks like the same census info- sure would be good to see 18 and older, rather than under 18, under 65, etc.

 

[highfigh]

The entire mental health issue is BS as it relates to gun deaths. Only 5% of gun deaths are by way of a mentally ill person.

Who would do something like this if they were sane? I guess well-adjusted is another issue, but either can be a factor. Happy people just don't do this.