> They noted with interest that it appears Oakland’s gunfire was at least twice as deadly as Washington’s gunfire. Although the researchers couldn’t come up with the reasons behind this difference (Were Washington’s gunmen poor shots? Did victims in Oakland get to the hospital more slowly?), the difference points to how measuring gun violence with homicides is problematic.
This is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right. The problematic thing is the implicit shifting of the question to "how to reduce gun violence" from "how to reduce harm" in the first place. Nobody is going to prefer the city that has half as many gunshots but twice as many fatalities.
The interesting thing about numbers like this is the unexplained difference. If you can explain it then maybe Oakland can do what Washington has been doing and fewer people will die -- even if that thing has nothing to do specifically with gun violence, like improving emergency response time.
Some people might, if those fatalities were preferentially "intended targets" as that dramatically reduces the potential for harm to innocent bystanders.
This is kind of the point. The fatalities-per-gunshot ratio is quite irrelevant. What matters is the number of injuries or fatalities.
If hypothetically giving out automatic weapons caused there to be more gunshots because every time there was a gun battle many more shots were fired, but it reduced the total number of shooting victims because now dealers are much more wary about starting a gun battle, then you could make the argument for giving out automatic weapons. Because what matters is the actual harm.
But if all it did was increase the number of gunshots by a lot and the number of injuries by a little then it's clearly a bad thing. Because what matters is still the actual harm.
The cynic in me says the DC police response is faster and more trigger happy. We all remember what happened when a bunch of cops went after two guys with a six-shooter outside of Boston a few years ago (spoiler: orders of magnitude more than six shots were fired, nobody died from the bullets).
Because it's its own category of violence. Like any other category, it's not a matter of 'deserving', but rather just a statistic category so we can discuss and analyze it. What a strange question.
Why do we discuss it a lot? Because it's one of the most obvious issues in the US, compared to other advanced countries. We have shootings every day in many major urban centers, we have school shootings periodically, which people find especially awful...
And because there's a lot of political debate around it, and it's at the forefront of many political elections and campaigns.
It's a huge deal, and it's very dire; get caught up on this.
The question is more why do we treat assault and homicide where a firearm is involved differently from other instances of assault and homicide? Dead is dead, no matter the manner in which it happened.
If that's a serious question you'll be pleased to know it has a very simple answer - to those with a political agenda, no technique is below exploitation to gain command of the emotions of the people.
Because they're very different things. But even if they weren't, it's not really a useful question - assuming the desired result is to reduce gun violence. See above comment again:
"Because it's its own category of violence. Like any other category, it's not a matter of 'deserving', but rather just a statistic category so we can discuss and analyze it."
As a counterpoint, why do pro gun-control people always assume that violence would cease without guns? Guns do not motivate people to commit crime, only give them the means to.
People in general are pretty clever. If you take away someone's means to do something without addressing what motivated them to do that thing, they're likely going to figure out a way to do it anyway. (See: censorship, DRM, drug prohibition)
We do not assume that violence would cease without guns. We just know that there would be less violence. And since we're not gun enthusiasts, it's a bit less violence at no cost to us. And at not too much costs to gun enthusiasts.
Pro-gun control people don't assume that violence would cease without guns. Guns are designed and intended to be a force multiplier - one person with a gun can kill far more people far more easily than they could without a gun. Rather, pro gun-control people simply argue that a society without guns or with fewer guns is less violent than a society with more of them, and that the violence is more localized and easier to contain, for that reason.
Anti-gun control people actually agree with pro-gun control people on this point when they describe gun control as a means of a tyrannical state to pacify the populace, because, they warn, the lack of an armed populace makes it more difficult to commit violence against the state. This is a rationale codified into modern interpretations of the Second Amendment.
By extension, a populace less able to commit violence against the state is equally less able to commit violence against itself.
Really, both pro and anti gun-control people want a safe and secure society (excepting of course the lunatic and criminal fringe) but they disagree as to the role of guns in providing that safety and security. Unfortunately, it's become kind of a matter of religion for each side, so discussions which aren't fraught with hyperbole, strawmen and willful ignorance are difficult to have.
You've largely got the lay of the land correct. I'd add:
These two "religions" are irreconcilable; the pro-gun control group has, since at least the '70s when I started closely following this and being an anti-gun control activist, made it crystal clear that many of them will not be satisfied until they've taken all of our guns (or nearly so, e.g. the over and under shotgun class like Biden, what e.g. the U.K. has devolved to at the same time they've reversed the trend since the 13th Century of decreasing interpersonal violence). In return, we've made it clear that we know our 20th Century history, if they get very far in this, we'll kill them, wholesale and retail. No common ground possible there.
Second, this is part of a larger cultural war. We need look no further than now President Obama saying in 2008:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Third, there have been some major changes in gun owning demographics, purposes and the like, part of what some call Gun Culture 2.0, and it really started becoming a thing post-9/11, when the Federal government made it clear we were on our own. The other part is a rapidly graying society as the Baby Boomers reached middle age and now retirement age. For whatever reasons, a very large fraction of them are turning to guns for self-protection, e.g. the vast majority of people in my 2008 Missouri CCW class were obviously middle aged or older.
There's also been some massive changes on the ground: starting in 1987, "shall issue" or better concealed carry regimes have swept the nation, such that they hold in all but 7 states, and cover 72.6% of the population. Issued licences are now growing by more than a million per year, the numbers are astounding, and on a percentage basis have reached 5-10% of the population in shall issue states.
In the same period, "Constitutional Carry", i.e. no permit required, went from 1 state, Vermont (which simply never restricted it post-Civil War) to 10, with 2 being added in the last month or so, and perhaps more to come this year. That's now 7.2% of the above percentage. See this with nice graphs here: http://onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com/2016/04/every-picture-t... (although I'd add that DC, MD, and NJ are de facto no issue states (for a demonstrated serious need, MD may issue for the duration of the threat), even if the law allows it; also, many local units of CA, MA and NY are de facto shall issue or thereabouts).
un-nuanced observers talk about it because it's likely largest subset of murders in the U.S. - angenda driven (anti-gun) observers like to talk about it because they can frame a problem in such a way that leads people to the outcome they want - I.e. The obvious solution to ending gun violence is limiting access to guns, and they don't have to address the much more complex problem of violence (for example: if a spouse kills her partner with a gun, and we want to reduce gun violence, we limit access to the gun, but will that spouse just substitute a knife for the gun?)
Put another way - if you could snap your fingers and make every gun in the u.s. Disappear, you would solve the gun violence problem, and undoubtedly reduce the incedence of violent crime, but not completely, and then the question becomes by how much? Which is not easy to answer - especially if we were to translate that to a real world hypothetical
I don't think anyone claims that reducing guns would eliminate violence. That is a strawman.
There does seem to be reasonable evidence from other countries that reduced accessed to guns (and certain types of guns in particular) does have an impact.
Guns just make it ridiculously easy to kill a lot of people in a hurry. It takes a lot more strength and determination to plunge a knife into someone (perhaps several times) when compared to pulling a trigger.
I can't think of many forms that happen to be performed by a mechanism designed and manufactured, by man, for one purpose: to kill? Protected by a nation who appears to love God. Who apparently said Thou Shalt Not Kill?
"ShotSpotter, the company behind a technology that listens for gunfire's acoustic signature and reports it to authorities."
Yet another company spamming for yet another surveillance device.
tl;dr Statistically acceptable and verifiable measures(homicides, suicides, gunshot injuries) of gun violence are not shocking enough - we should replace them with counts of every potential gun shot fired.
"potential gun shot" = e.g., truck backfiring, dumpster lid dropping, slamming door, car collision, gunshot, etc.
Any stats available on how many "loud bangs" occur in a city each day?
I was gonna say, having heard a gunshot as well as the other stated things that could sound like gunshots, I think gunshots are categorically louder and more identifiable. That said, I'm not a gun expert so I could be wrong for different types of guns, etc.
I bet if you were given six months and high quality recordings of different types of gunfire you could figure out how to do it algorithmically.
It's all about having a large enough corpus of input, both of the type you're looking for and the type you're looking to exclude. This is an undergraduate level problem to solve.
I would be very surprised if you could figure out a way to reliably discriminate between the sound of a gunshot and the sound of a car backfiring given that they're basically the same thing (that is, the sound of a gas rapidly expanding in a metal tube).
Yeah, well you'd be wrong. Anyone who's spent time around guns would instantly recognize the difference, and training a computer to do the same thing isn't even hard, it just takes a lot of patient work.
The most important difference here is a gun is pushing a projectile out and a car isn't.
Differentiating between cap guns, starter pistols and fireworks might be a little more hazy, but it's still not the same thing as a backfiring car.
Sure that's the case when you're firing guns and backfiring cars across an open field from whatever you're measuring sound with but sounds tend to get screwed up when distance, obstructions and white noise are added.
Lots of differences that can be pulled out algorithmically. Gunshots are much sharper, as they're mechanical/aerodynamic rather than chemical, and are linear rather than point sources. Receivers placed across the city will record differently dopplered shockwaves based on how close they are to being in line with the bullet's trajectory. If you really wanted to, I bet that you could go around the city after installation and set off firecrackers in a grid to map out the city's acoustics, then reconstruct bullet trajectory down to thirty or forty meters. Which'd be pretty cool.
Of course, all that goes away in the case of subsonic rounds. Then your only real difference is that a gun propellant is going to have a much faster velocity than the gunpowder in fireworks and the explosion is going to be rather better contained. You'll probably still be able to differentiate, but I'm not sure how effectively, especially over long distances.
> Of course, all that goes away in the case of subsonic rounds.
I'm pretty sure that presents a problem. Many handgun rounds have subsonic muzzle velocities, and most are subsonic within 50 feet. And according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports[1], almost half of all murders are committed with handguns. Rifles are used in around 2-3%. (For comparison, 5-6% of murders are committed with bare hands.) Those numbers underestimate the ratio of rounds fired by handguns vs rifles, as being shot with a rifle is far more likely to result in death than being shot with a handgun. If the victim doesn't die, they won't show up in those FBI stats.
> The more telling number about gun violence might be “shots fired.” And now, thanks to broader adoption of new technologies, it is getting easier to show just how common gun violence is in America.
I happened to be working with a dispatcher in a 9-11 call center on the night the bin Laden raid was announced. Over the course of a couple hours, we fielded hundreds of "shots fired" calls, which mostly turned out to be people lighting off fireworks (sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that's more reckless than violent).
If "gun violence" had been measured by these reports, the raw stats would suggest that the entire city had spontaneously erupted into a warzone, and then spontaneously returned to normal, all for no reason and without a single injury or death.
My point is that the author is advocating collecting statistics in a way that equates gang shootouts and backfiring cars as equal incidents of gun violence. The system is guaranteed to generate lots false positives, which will be used to bolster support for more surveillance and gun control. Not only is it _not_ a better way to measure gun violence, it's a proposition so fundamentally flawed that it borders on insanity.
Totally. I live within the city limits, but a somewhat rural area. On Sept 1st every year (when dove season starts), I hear multiple shot gun shots per second (yes per second) from about 5am - 9am for several days.
> sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that's more reckless than violent
Seeing as it can lead to fatalities to bystanders [1], I would be fine calling it "violent". [EDIT: "potentially violent" being perhaps a better term].
In my opinion, this is why at last gun education would be a good bipartisan way to reduce gun accidents (if not gun crime). If a police dispatcher does not think that firing into the air is serious problem and can kill people, that in itself is a big problem.
I was browsing the ShotSpotter website, and they have a paper that talks specifically about celebratory gunfire. [2]
> I would say "violence" requires a certain intent, whereas firing shots into the air is merely ridiculously stupid and reckless.
I think (and this is where I probably differ from other people) that the discharge of a death-dealing weapon that is far deadlier than a gun or a knife implies at least a potential for violence. I guess I wouldn't go so far as to classify a death from it as actual violent crime though, which seems to be what you are driving at.
To explain this analogy a bit, if a drunk person is running down the street swinging a chainsaw for purposes of "celebrating" New Year, do you think he will be reported to the police as potentially violent? Why should drunks firing guns be different?
Not necessarily. People who are drunk are not always aware of their actions. His vision and judgement could be very impaired depending upon how drunk he is.
My point is that the author is advocating collecting statistics in a way that equates gang shootouts and backfiring cars as equal incidents of gun violence.
You've identified a problem with using human reports as a means to measure the number of shots fired, whereas the author suggests that some abstract "shots fired" count would be a better measure than homicides and injuries.
The author doesn't propose a suggested methodology for how to do so, but the metrics that he presents are from ShotSpotter deployments. These sorts of systems are designed to identify gunfire in particular, and so are presumably more reliable than monitoring 911 traffic.
Note that he identifies a number of other weaknesses with ShotSpotter-based data -- doesn't pick up indoor shots very well, and is of limited nationwide coverage, for example.
I remember that day. My best friend and I got the last two 100rd boxes of 12ga bird shot on the shelf and forgot earplugs. 10/10 was worth it, I hope the EPA never measures a certain part of his property for lead content.
What's the cheapest device one could build that isn't a firearm, but could reproduce the sound of a gunshot with enough fidelity to fool this thing? Bonus if it can do a nice AK-47 machine gun sound or something like that.
Assume that the device requires electricity. It probably should be wifi-connected, so that if you can get it close enough to a Starbucks or something, you can control it remotely. Should ideally be small and unobtrusive so that it's not easily spotted. Shouldn't need any refillable fuels.
Would be fun to put the plans up on the net so that many people would build and field these.
It's important to measure "gun violence" that apparently harms no one, because otherwise we wouldn't be able to claim the level of "gun violence" is high enough to justify Gun Control Measure X.
56 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 99.0 ms ] threadThis is posing the question wrong. If some area has half as many fatalities per gunshot, they're clearly doing something right. The problematic thing is the implicit shifting of the question to "how to reduce gun violence" from "how to reduce harm" in the first place. Nobody is going to prefer the city that has half as many gunshots but twice as many fatalities.
The interesting thing about numbers like this is the unexplained difference. If you can explain it then maybe Oakland can do what Washington has been doing and fewer people will die -- even if that thing has nothing to do specifically with gun violence, like improving emergency response time.
Not necessarily, I'd imagine easy availability of fully-automatic weapons would lower your fatalities-per-gunshot ratio but not be a good thing.
If hypothetically giving out automatic weapons caused there to be more gunshots because every time there was a gun battle many more shots were fired, but it reduced the total number of shooting victims because now dealers are much more wary about starting a gun battle, then you could make the argument for giving out automatic weapons. Because what matters is the actual harm.
But if all it did was increase the number of gunshots by a lot and the number of injuries by a little then it's clearly a bad thing. Because what matters is still the actual harm.
Why do we discuss it a lot? Because it's one of the most obvious issues in the US, compared to other advanced countries. We have shootings every day in many major urban centers, we have school shootings periodically, which people find especially awful...
And because there's a lot of political debate around it, and it's at the forefront of many political elections and campaigns.
It's a huge deal, and it's very dire; get caught up on this.
Do they think people would replace guns with knives? What makes them think that people wouldn't just give up?
People in general are pretty clever. If you take away someone's means to do something without addressing what motivated them to do that thing, they're likely going to figure out a way to do it anyway. (See: censorship, DRM, drug prohibition)
At least this is how I feel.
Remember that taking away guns reduces crime.
Anti-gun control people actually agree with pro-gun control people on this point when they describe gun control as a means of a tyrannical state to pacify the populace, because, they warn, the lack of an armed populace makes it more difficult to commit violence against the state. This is a rationale codified into modern interpretations of the Second Amendment.
By extension, a populace less able to commit violence against the state is equally less able to commit violence against itself.
Really, both pro and anti gun-control people want a safe and secure society (excepting of course the lunatic and criminal fringe) but they disagree as to the role of guns in providing that safety and security. Unfortunately, it's become kind of a matter of religion for each side, so discussions which aren't fraught with hyperbole, strawmen and willful ignorance are difficult to have.
These two "religions" are irreconcilable; the pro-gun control group has, since at least the '70s when I started closely following this and being an anti-gun control activist, made it crystal clear that many of them will not be satisfied until they've taken all of our guns (or nearly so, e.g. the over and under shotgun class like Biden, what e.g. the U.K. has devolved to at the same time they've reversed the trend since the 13th Century of decreasing interpersonal violence). In return, we've made it clear that we know our 20th Century history, if they get very far in this, we'll kill them, wholesale and retail. No common ground possible there.
Second, this is part of a larger cultural war. We need look no further than now President Obama saying in 2008:
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Third, there have been some major changes in gun owning demographics, purposes and the like, part of what some call Gun Culture 2.0, and it really started becoming a thing post-9/11, when the Federal government made it clear we were on our own. The other part is a rapidly graying society as the Baby Boomers reached middle age and now retirement age. For whatever reasons, a very large fraction of them are turning to guns for self-protection, e.g. the vast majority of people in my 2008 Missouri CCW class were obviously middle aged or older.
There's also been some massive changes on the ground: starting in 1987, "shall issue" or better concealed carry regimes have swept the nation, such that they hold in all but 7 states, and cover 72.6% of the population. Issued licences are now growing by more than a million per year, the numbers are astounding, and on a percentage basis have reached 5-10% of the population in shall issue states.
In the same period, "Constitutional Carry", i.e. no permit required, went from 1 state, Vermont (which simply never restricted it post-Civil War) to 10, with 2 being added in the last month or so, and perhaps more to come this year. That's now 7.2% of the above percentage. See this with nice graphs here: http://onlygunsandmoney.blogspot.com/2016/04/every-picture-t... (although I'd add that DC, MD, and NJ are de facto no issue states (for a demonstrated serious need, MD may issue for the duration of the threat), even if the law allows it; also, many local units of CA, MA and NY are de facto shall issue or thereabouts).
Put another way - if you could snap your fingers and make every gun in the u.s. Disappear, you would solve the gun violence problem, and undoubtedly reduce the incedence of violent crime, but not completely, and then the question becomes by how much? Which is not easy to answer - especially if we were to translate that to a real world hypothetical
There does seem to be reasonable evidence from other countries that reduced accessed to guns (and certain types of guns in particular) does have an impact.
Guns just make it ridiculously easy to kill a lot of people in a hurry. It takes a lot more strength and determination to plunge a knife into someone (perhaps several times) when compared to pulling a trigger.
I can't think of many forms that happen to be performed by a mechanism designed and manufactured, by man, for one purpose: to kill? Protected by a nation who appears to love God. Who apparently said Thou Shalt Not Kill?
Utter hypocrites. The lot of them.
Yet another company spamming for yet another surveillance device.
tl;dr Statistically acceptable and verifiable measures(homicides, suicides, gunshot injuries) of gun violence are not shocking enough - we should replace them with counts of every potential gun shot fired.
"potential gun shot" = e.g., truck backfiring, dumpster lid dropping, slamming door, car collision, gunshot, etc.
Any stats available on how many "loud bangs" occur in a city each day?
It's all about having a large enough corpus of input, both of the type you're looking for and the type you're looking to exclude. This is an undergraduate level problem to solve.
The most important difference here is a gun is pushing a projectile out and a car isn't.
Differentiating between cap guns, starter pistols and fireworks might be a little more hazy, but it's still not the same thing as a backfiring car.
Have you seen what NASA can do with images?
Of course, all that goes away in the case of subsonic rounds. Then your only real difference is that a gun propellant is going to have a much faster velocity than the gunpowder in fireworks and the explosion is going to be rather better contained. You'll probably still be able to differentiate, but I'm not sure how effectively, especially over long distances.
I'm pretty sure that presents a problem. Many handgun rounds have subsonic muzzle velocities, and most are subsonic within 50 feet. And according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports[1], almost half of all murders are committed with handguns. Rifles are used in around 2-3%. (For comparison, 5-6% of murders are committed with bare hands.) Those numbers underestimate the ratio of rounds fired by handguns vs rifles, as being shot with a rifle is far more likely to result in death than being shot with a handgun. If the victim doesn't die, they won't show up in those FBI stats.
1. FBI Uniform Crime Report on murder weapon type: https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2013/...
I happened to be working with a dispatcher in a 9-11 call center on the night the bin Laden raid was announced. Over the course of a couple hours, we fielded hundreds of "shots fired" calls, which mostly turned out to be people lighting off fireworks (sure, there were probably a few drunks firing into the air, but that's more reckless than violent).
If "gun violence" had been measured by these reports, the raw stats would suggest that the entire city had spontaneously erupted into a warzone, and then spontaneously returned to normal, all for no reason and without a single injury or death.
My point is that the author is advocating collecting statistics in a way that equates gang shootouts and backfiring cars as equal incidents of gun violence. The system is guaranteed to generate lots false positives, which will be used to bolster support for more surveillance and gun control. Not only is it _not_ a better way to measure gun violence, it's a proposition so fundamentally flawed that it borders on insanity.
Seeing as it can lead to fatalities to bystanders [1], I would be fine calling it "violent". [EDIT: "potentially violent" being perhaps a better term].
In my opinion, this is why at last gun education would be a good bipartisan way to reduce gun accidents (if not gun crime). If a police dispatcher does not think that firing into the air is serious problem and can kill people, that in itself is a big problem.
I was browsing the ShotSpotter website, and they have a paper that talks specifically about celebratory gunfire. [2]
[1] http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-14616491
[2] http://www.shotspotter.com/system/content-uploads/MYTHS_abou...
No, I would say "violence" requires a certain intent, whereas firing shots into the air is merely ridiculously stupid and reckless.
I think (and this is where I probably differ from other people) that the discharge of a death-dealing weapon that is far deadlier than a gun or a knife implies at least a potential for violence. I guess I wouldn't go so far as to classify a death from it as actual violent crime though, which seems to be what you are driving at.
To explain this analogy a bit, if a drunk person is running down the street swinging a chainsaw for purposes of "celebrating" New Year, do you think he will be reported to the police as potentially violent? Why should drunks firing guns be different?
You've identified a problem with using human reports as a means to measure the number of shots fired, whereas the author suggests that some abstract "shots fired" count would be a better measure than homicides and injuries.
The author doesn't propose a suggested methodology for how to do so, but the metrics that he presents are from ShotSpotter deployments. These sorts of systems are designed to identify gunfire in particular, and so are presumably more reliable than monitoring 911 traffic.
Note that he identifies a number of other weaknesses with ShotSpotter-based data -- doesn't pick up indoor shots very well, and is of limited nationwide coverage, for example.
More details: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunfire_locator
Assume that the device requires electricity. It probably should be wifi-connected, so that if you can get it close enough to a Starbucks or something, you can control it remotely. Should ideally be small and unobtrusive so that it's not easily spotted. Shouldn't need any refillable fuels.
Would be fun to put the plans up on the net so that many people would build and field these.
https://www.blank-guns-depot.com/blank-firing-guns-store/cat...
What's needed isn't "gun control". You can have that. What you need is "bullet control". (And a sense of humanity).