> Some 6,464 deaths involved children between 5 to 14 years of age, amounting to 340 deaths annually on average. A further 32,478 children between 15 to 18 years old died, or 2,050 per year on average between 1999 and 2017.
> Of these children, 61 percent were killed in an assault involving a firearm, while 32 percent died by suicide. A further 5 percent died in an accident. The death was undetermined in 2 percent of cases.
It seems misleading to me to include suicide counts in a headline that says “shot dead”.
Removing suicides, this comes out to 1625 per year. Approximately 900,000 people in total die in the US per year.
What they are describing as an epidemic is in reality 340 deaths per year of under-14s.
For reference, approximately 450 people per year die of acetaminophen (tylenol) poisoning in the US.
Why would we remove suicide? If these children didn't have access to guns the majority of these CHILDREN would still be alive today. Everyone deserve the chance to make foolish mistakes as a child.
Suicide deaths by children don't change unless you also ban train tracks, highways, ropes, tall things... and maybe just store people in padded boxes until they are not children.
The amount of freedom you'd have to take from society is huge.
Perhaps there is also a right to die. If life is torture, and you keep a person alive, then you are torturing them.
Arguing that children "Have a right to die"? This is not something I agree with.
Obviously banning all that other stuff would be ridiculous and no one is proposing that. There is not much freedom lost by keeping gins out of the hands of children though...
That’s still more than the combined 1,144 on-duty police officers and military personnel cited in the article. So even if you don’t count suicide by gun as a death by gun violence (which is debatable), it still wouldn’t invalidate the headline.
The main way to reduce deaths by suicide is to restrict access to means and methods, especially those which have high lethality. Guns are 1) very lethal 2) irresponsibly stored in many US homes. It's a valid suicide prevention measure to tell people to store their guns correctly.
> In the United States, seven people per hour die a violent death. More than 19,000 people were victims of homicide and almost 45,000 people died by suicide in 2016 alone.
> To help find ways to prevent violent deaths, we need to know the facts. The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) links information about the “who, when, where, and how” from data on violent deaths and provides insights about “why” they occurred.
> NVDRS is the only state-based surveillance (reporting) system that pools more than 600 unique data elements from multiple sources into a usable, anonymous database. NVDRS covers all types of violent deaths – including homicides and suicides – in all settings for all age groups.
No, you are the one arguing in bad faith, and you may not even realize it. You've convinced yourself that one particular form of deaths caused by guns "doesn't count" for some reason. You don't get to pick and choose which gun deaths count! Other people in this same thread are insinuating that gang-related gun deaths also "don't count". Both denials are frankly ridiculous to anyone not blinded by ideology.
If everyone lived in padded rooms in government run asylums we would all be "safer".
The founders wanted the population to have irrefutable rights to have weapons of war in order to prevent rule-by-force which was everywhere in their time. Rule by force is everywhere today too and with current leadership trends it is not hard to believe that it could be attempted here again.
In the UK they talk about knives in quite similar ways to how we talk about guns in the US which leads me to think that the problem isn't the tool.
Weapons are power. Power is often used irresponsibly. You can try to eliminate the power or you can try to eliminate the irresponsibility, but it's not so complicated to do the former.
Much of the unprecedented world peace comes from the influence and policies of the US, and much of the stability of the US comes from citizens' power afforded by its fundamental law.
The existence of weapons in a population also serves as a deterrence and a check against more criminal activity bleeding out into the general population as a whole.
A part of the reason you see so much mass shooting activity in gun free areas is the general likelihood that you won’t encounter someone else with a firearm immediately. Same reason gang activity tends to concentrate instead of fan out.
The trend that bothers me in western society is the almost gleeful willingness to having rights stripped from us that were hard fought for. All for the illusion of safety and civility. As if simply silencing people or disarming people makes the original problem go away instead of just hiding it. It’s unsettling.
>The existence of weapons in a population also serves as a deterrence and a check against more criminal activity bleeding out into the general population as a whole.
You hear this quite a lot. It seems it could be provably true or false, has anyone tried?
> In the UK they talk about knives in quite similar ways to how we talk about guns in the US which leads me to think that the problem isn't the tool.
No. We're in the middle of a knife crime epidemic, and this is seeing calls to more strictly enforce the ban on sales of knives, or to change the law to prevent pointy knives[1] being sold. The rate of knife crime is seen as a public health emergency and is seen as being deserving of action to tackle it. Our discussion is quite different to the US discussion.
This is so severe you will have heard about it in the US.
How many deaths have caused us to have this national conversation? In a population of 60 million people. Have a guess.
> As in previous years, the most common method of killing for both male and female victims was by a knife or other sharp instrument, with 213 such homicides (37% of the total) recorded in the year ending March 2016 (Appendix Table 2.03). Although the absolute number of homicides committed by knives or sharp instruments has risen from 186 in the previous year, the proportion of homicides committed by this method remains similar (36% for the year ending March 2015).
>We're in the middle of a knife crime epidemic, and this is seeing calls to more strictly enforce the ban on sales of knives, or to change the law to prevent pointy knives[1] being sold.
Replace knife with gun and you have the exact conversation in America. This is what I mean. (I am not talking about the response but the subject and degree of concern about it)
Take away a weapon and people will find something else. Focusing on access to the weapon and not what leads people to kill perpetuates the problem.
My thesis restated. Too many people are blaming the tools people use to empower them to kill, not enough people are talking about the motivations of people who kill and how to help prevent the motives.
If you want people to kill each other less you have to create a more just, open society. You have to alienate people less and make sure everyone can have hope. You have to understand people who hate and empathize with them instead of demonizing them.
You also have to make policy that is driven by thought and reason instead of party-ism, instead of fear, instead of intuitive emotion.
It's somewhat demeaning and antagonistic to accuse downvoters of being offended without some line of reasoning given. My guess is that the implication of your parent post is that the article is wrong to compare those numbers. Since there's nothing else in the curt reply, it seems to ignore the disturbing facts of the matter - a wrongness perhaps greater, in some readers' opinions, than the clickbaity headline, which is at least defensible in that it illustrates that child gun deaths have surpassed some arbitrary value, i.e. the numbers are large and rising (supposedly - I'm comparing the implied message of the headline to the implied message of your parent post, not commenting on the actual numbers on child gun deaths).
"It's somewhat demeaning and antagonistic to accuse downvoters of being offended without some line of reasoning given."
Nobody accused downvoters of being offended. The comment was addressed to everybody, and wasn't an accusation.
The issue I had with the headline is that it does not appear to be referring to "some arbitrary value", yet it is. Which is why it seemed appropriate to point out what that arbitrary value is.
These are statistics quoted to support an unstated but easily assumed conclusion instead of a search for truth.
Very few people actually care about finding optimums and cause and effect relationships. Publishing compelling results or results that support emotionally derived positions isn't helpful.
Approximately 35% of the gun deaths are black male youth being shot — which indicates the statistic is likely skewed heavily by gang violence. (Using their numbers: 86% of 41%.)
It seems disingenuous to portray this as an epidemic of “school children” being shot, when the reality is we’re witnessing the effects of gangs fighting, utilizing their child soldiers — and more broadly, a cultural failure in American inner cities.
I can’t seem to find their data, but I’d wager 50% of those deaths are gang related, and from a handful of metro areas.
We don’t have a gun problem: we have an urban culture problem.
The point here is that an awful lot of white people don't see gang violence as the fault of the police, of society, or of white people. You can say of course that is mistaken, but clearly there hasn't been a compelling story that has penetrated peoples' minds that links the violence with the ultimate responsibility. Changing people's beliefs usually seems well-nigh impossible, but shaming them without trying to convince them they are wrong seems even more pointless to me.
When different people have radically divergent views of reality, shouldn't something be done to figure out who is ignorant or delusional? If not discussion, then what?
> is a dead gang member less of a loss of life than some other person?
We should understand the source of something, if we want to change it: the solution to highly concentrated violence by a particular subculture isn’t to restrict the rights of a properly behaving majority — it’s to address the cultural roots of the problem in that sub community.
There’s also an opportunity cost to political battles, and I have to seriously ask myself if the urban community wouldn’t have been better served spending the political capital on something that actually helps, rather than battling over general gun rights with uninvolved people. We can look at London or many other cities for an example of how a culture of gangs and violence merely leads to knife and other crime — the fix cannot be a restriction on self-defense and must be around revitalizing those neighborhoods while breaking the cultural continuity of such maladaptive organizations. (Edit: it’s actually often their baizuo neighbors arguing against guns — which may explain why the political capital wasn’t spent on a real solution.)
Which is why it’s not a gun problem: the existence of guns in the US transforms its massive gang problem from one in which gangs prey on the public at large, as they do in Europe and now Australia with their increased rates of robbery, home invasions, etc. into a problem of gang members shooting each other at high rates.
This is good: criminals locked into battle with each other and safely contained from preying on the public should be preferred to them feeling free to prey on people at large.
In this sense, the people portraying a culture problem as a gun problem are doing a serious wrong — they’re like a doctor going around stealing blood on behalf of suicide victims, because they’re willing to inflict harm on many unrelated people to protect a few criminals from self-harm.
I find it completely unethical — and to lie about this gang violence, pretending it’s innocent child deaths, simply underscores the moral bankruptcy with which anti-gun advocates operate.
You want bad people to shoot each other so they'll be distracted and not notice the juicy targets for theft? The article says that 61% of the firearm deaths involving kids were assaults. Do kids warrant that chaos because they're part of a "broken culture"?
Is this the right price tag for what we have today?
> Of these children, 61 percent were killed in an assault involving a firearm, while 32 percent died by suicide. A further 5 percent died in an accident. The death was undetermined in 2 percent of cases.
And does it really have to be said that means interact with intent? Like, knife vs gun actually matters, and that guns matter even in suicide risk? Would as many people have died in the New Zealand Mosque shooting (50), the Las Vegas shooting (59), or that Pulse night club shooting (49)?
> The article says that 61% of the firearm deaths involving kids were assaults. Do kids warrant that chaos because they're part of a "broken culture"?
What fraction of that is a member of one gang shooting a member of another gang? In my previous reading of FBI analysis of gun crime, the answer is “almost all of them”.
My objection is what you did right here: portraying one gang member shooting another as a child just caught in a conflict.
> knife vs gun actually matters
Yes — and it matters in the case you refuse to accept, self-defense. A gun lets a woman shoot a rapist, a frail man shoot an attacker, and an elderly person shoot a home invader. Each of these actual differences in guns versus knives decreases the rate at which gang members can prey on the public, and we see that in the crime rates of the US versus other countries. Guns prevent on the order of millions of crimes in the US, because of their effect on reducing crime like robberies and break-ins. Criminals prefer unarmed victims.
What banning guns doesn’t do, and we’ve seen this in other metros, is decrease the rate of gang violence by very much: they kill each other with knives just fine in London.
So you’re proposing a feel-good solution: it increases the rate at which non-gang members are harmed, it doesn’t do much for actual gang violence, and it relies on you telling emotionally manipulative lies — like the one above, where you misrepresented the victims of gang violence as simply innocent bystanders when the bulk seem to be other gang members.
I absolutely think we should do something about that violence — like increased policing, reinvestment in the area, redevelopment of infrastructure to spur the local area economy, etc. I just don’t think a feel good solution which seems based on misrepresenting facts is useful.
Happy, economically prosperous people don’t kill people.
My gut says the real problem is police corruption. But that's only my prejudice. One reason why I feel like this though, is because I read in the news that police are offended about something and threaten to stop enforcement in an area. This strongly implies to me that it is a standard procedure in cases where it is not stated and publicized as such.
There are 1.4 million active duty members of the US military. There are about 0.8 million police officers "with general arrest powers". There are around 82 million children in the US.
So what the headline is saying, is that being a police officer or a soldier appears to be less than 37 times as dangerous as being a child.
The implication appears to be that this is startlingly low, but how dangerous do people think being a police officer should be, in a world that operated according to reasonable expectations? Would 40 times as dangerous be enough?
Being in a police force of military involves having guns. Kids should not have them, as far as I know. So, for me event 40x time is very high, I would expect outliers - 500x+.
Also, we could compare results to other countries, where kids are not legally allowed weapons as well. I was wondering what similar rates are in Canada, but my search skills failed me.
15 to 18 year olds tend to obtain a lot of things they should not have, not only guns but other things that are illegal for them, like porn and alcohol, and things that are illegal for anyone to possess, like drugs.
I assume you mean "40x is very low". However, I would ask you, doesn't it make sense that in a society where kids are less likely to be shot, police would also be less likely to be shot? In which case, the ratio might not go up.
47 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 119 ms ] thread> Of these children, 61 percent were killed in an assault involving a firearm, while 32 percent died by suicide. A further 5 percent died in an accident. The death was undetermined in 2 percent of cases.
It seems misleading to me to include suicide counts in a headline that says “shot dead”.
Removing suicides, this comes out to 1625 per year. Approximately 900,000 people in total die in the US per year.
What they are describing as an epidemic is in reality 340 deaths per year of under-14s.
For reference, approximately 450 people per year die of acetaminophen (tylenol) poisoning in the US.
The amount of freedom you'd have to take from society is huge.
Perhaps there is also a right to die. If life is torture, and you keep a person alive, then you are torturing them.
Arguing that children "Have a right to die"? This is not something I agree with.
Obviously banning all that other stuff would be ridiculous and no one is proposing that. There is not much freedom lost by keeping gins out of the hands of children though...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_police_office...
The main way to reduce deaths by suicide is to restrict access to means and methods, especially those which have high lethality. Guns are 1) very lethal 2) irresponsibly stored in many US homes. It's a valid suicide prevention measure to tell people to store their guns correctly.
Here's the link to the CDC, clearly showing they see suicide as violence: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/datasources/nvdrs/ind...
> In the United States, seven people per hour die a violent death. More than 19,000 people were victims of homicide and almost 45,000 people died by suicide in 2016 alone.
> To help find ways to prevent violent deaths, we need to know the facts. The National Violent Death Reporting System (NVDRS) links information about the “who, when, where, and how” from data on violent deaths and provides insights about “why” they occurred.
> NVDRS is the only state-based surveillance (reporting) system that pools more than 600 unique data elements from multiple sources into a usable, anonymous database. NVDRS covers all types of violent deaths – including homicides and suicides – in all settings for all age groups.
Statistics are hard when you're really trying to make an argument and discussion of what gets included is very important.
The founders wanted the population to have irrefutable rights to have weapons of war in order to prevent rule-by-force which was everywhere in their time. Rule by force is everywhere today too and with current leadership trends it is not hard to believe that it could be attempted here again.
In the UK they talk about knives in quite similar ways to how we talk about guns in the US which leads me to think that the problem isn't the tool.
Weapons are power. Power is often used irresponsibly. You can try to eliminate the power or you can try to eliminate the irresponsibility, but it's not so complicated to do the former.
Much of the unprecedented world peace comes from the influence and policies of the US, and much of the stability of the US comes from citizens' power afforded by its fundamental law.
A part of the reason you see so much mass shooting activity in gun free areas is the general likelihood that you won’t encounter someone else with a firearm immediately. Same reason gang activity tends to concentrate instead of fan out.
The trend that bothers me in western society is the almost gleeful willingness to having rights stripped from us that were hard fought for. All for the illusion of safety and civility. As if simply silencing people or disarming people makes the original problem go away instead of just hiding it. It’s unsettling.
You hear this quite a lot. It seems it could be provably true or false, has anyone tried?
No. We're in the middle of a knife crime epidemic, and this is seeing calls to more strictly enforce the ban on sales of knives, or to change the law to prevent pointy knives[1] being sold. The rate of knife crime is seen as a public health emergency and is seen as being deserving of action to tackle it. Our discussion is quite different to the US discussion.
This is so severe you will have heard about it in the US.
How many deaths have caused us to have this national conversation? In a population of 60 million people. Have a guess.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeand...
> 5. What methods of killing are used?
> As in previous years, the most common method of killing for both male and female victims was by a knife or other sharp instrument, with 213 such homicides (37% of the total) recorded in the year ending March 2016 (Appendix Table 2.03). Although the absolute number of homicides committed by knives or sharp instruments has risen from 186 in the previous year, the proportion of homicides committed by this method remains similar (36% for the year ending March 2015).
[1] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8101032.stm
Replace knife with gun and you have the exact conversation in America. This is what I mean. (I am not talking about the response but the subject and degree of concern about it)
Take away a weapon and people will find something else. Focusing on access to the weapon and not what leads people to kill perpetuates the problem.
My thesis restated. Too many people are blaming the tools people use to empower them to kill, not enough people are talking about the motivations of people who kill and how to help prevent the motives.
If you want people to kill each other less you have to create a more just, open society. You have to alienate people less and make sure everyone can have hope. You have to understand people who hate and empathize with them instead of demonizing them.
You also have to make policy that is driven by thought and reason instead of party-ism, instead of fear, instead of intuitive emotion.
.3% are police officers.
.4% are active duty military.
Nobody accused downvoters of being offended. The comment was addressed to everybody, and wasn't an accusation.
The issue I had with the headline is that it does not appear to be referring to "some arbitrary value", yet it is. Which is why it seemed appropriate to point out what that arbitrary value is.
Very few people actually care about finding optimums and cause and effect relationships. Publishing compelling results or results that support emotionally derived positions isn't helpful.
I think I've seen too many of these. My brain starts to say "Are they trying to manipulate me?"
Mind reading + ad hominem
You should probably not criticize the quality of other people's critical thinking.
It seems disingenuous to portray this as an epidemic of “school children” being shot, when the reality is we’re witnessing the effects of gangs fighting, utilizing their child soldiers — and more broadly, a cultural failure in American inner cities.
I can’t seem to find their data, but I’d wager 50% of those deaths are gang related, and from a handful of metro areas.
We don’t have a gun problem: we have an urban culture problem.
Gangs don't check your membership card before killing you.
Even we grant your bizarre dismissal of black lives that don't matter, you've still got 50% left.
I mean, yes that’s true but in a vacuous way that doesn’t address causes or treatments and doesn’t advance the discussion.
> We don’t have a gun problem: we have an urban culture problem.
It can be, and is, both.
We should understand the source of something, if we want to change it: the solution to highly concentrated violence by a particular subculture isn’t to restrict the rights of a properly behaving majority — it’s to address the cultural roots of the problem in that sub community.
There’s also an opportunity cost to political battles, and I have to seriously ask myself if the urban community wouldn’t have been better served spending the political capital on something that actually helps, rather than battling over general gun rights with uninvolved people. We can look at London or many other cities for an example of how a culture of gangs and violence merely leads to knife and other crime — the fix cannot be a restriction on self-defense and must be around revitalizing those neighborhoods while breaking the cultural continuity of such maladaptive organizations. (Edit: it’s actually often their baizuo neighbors arguing against guns — which may explain why the political capital wasn’t spent on a real solution.)
Which is why it’s not a gun problem: the existence of guns in the US transforms its massive gang problem from one in which gangs prey on the public at large, as they do in Europe and now Australia with their increased rates of robbery, home invasions, etc. into a problem of gang members shooting each other at high rates.
This is good: criminals locked into battle with each other and safely contained from preying on the public should be preferred to them feeling free to prey on people at large.
In this sense, the people portraying a culture problem as a gun problem are doing a serious wrong — they’re like a doctor going around stealing blood on behalf of suicide victims, because they’re willing to inflict harm on many unrelated people to protect a few criminals from self-harm.
I find it completely unethical — and to lie about this gang violence, pretending it’s innocent child deaths, simply underscores the moral bankruptcy with which anti-gun advocates operate.
Is this the right price tag for what we have today?
> Of these children, 61 percent were killed in an assault involving a firearm, while 32 percent died by suicide. A further 5 percent died in an accident. The death was undetermined in 2 percent of cases.
And does it really have to be said that means interact with intent? Like, knife vs gun actually matters, and that guns matter even in suicide risk? Would as many people have died in the New Zealand Mosque shooting (50), the Las Vegas shooting (59), or that Pulse night club shooting (49)?
What fraction of that is a member of one gang shooting a member of another gang? In my previous reading of FBI analysis of gun crime, the answer is “almost all of them”.
My objection is what you did right here: portraying one gang member shooting another as a child just caught in a conflict.
> knife vs gun actually matters
Yes — and it matters in the case you refuse to accept, self-defense. A gun lets a woman shoot a rapist, a frail man shoot an attacker, and an elderly person shoot a home invader. Each of these actual differences in guns versus knives decreases the rate at which gang members can prey on the public, and we see that in the crime rates of the US versus other countries. Guns prevent on the order of millions of crimes in the US, because of their effect on reducing crime like robberies and break-ins. Criminals prefer unarmed victims.
What banning guns doesn’t do, and we’ve seen this in other metros, is decrease the rate of gang violence by very much: they kill each other with knives just fine in London.
So you’re proposing a feel-good solution: it increases the rate at which non-gang members are harmed, it doesn’t do much for actual gang violence, and it relies on you telling emotionally manipulative lies — like the one above, where you misrepresented the victims of gang violence as simply innocent bystanders when the bulk seem to be other gang members.
I absolutely think we should do something about that violence — like increased policing, reinvestment in the area, redevelopment of infrastructure to spur the local area economy, etc. I just don’t think a feel good solution which seems based on misrepresenting facts is useful.
Happy, economically prosperous people don’t kill people.
That’s the issue — not guns.
So what the headline is saying, is that being a police officer or a soldier appears to be less than 37 times as dangerous as being a child.
The implication appears to be that this is startlingly low, but how dangerous do people think being a police officer should be, in a world that operated according to reasonable expectations? Would 40 times as dangerous be enough?
Also, we could compare results to other countries, where kids are not legally allowed weapons as well. I was wondering what similar rates are in Canada, but my search skills failed me.
15 to 18 year olds tend to obtain a lot of things they should not have, not only guns but other things that are illegal for them, like porn and alcohol, and things that are illegal for anyone to possess, like drugs.