The suggestion of metal detectors is laughable. You’d need to put one at the entrance of everyone’s home for that to be remotely effective. The solution is to ban guns, full stop. And then slowly start to address the rotten national psyche that has led to where we are today.
This is one of the worst attempts at an unbiased analysis of the issue that I've ever come across. Nothing of value can be garnered from this article.
Clearly Albania, a country with per capita GDP less than a tenth of the US is not a suitable comparison. No attempt has been made to account for income as a confounding variable.
The figures for Norway are predominantly driven by a single data point over the period compared to 67 mass shooting in the US over that same period. Surely this should be mentioned to allow for a proper interpretation of the data?
What about France, Switzerland, Finland? They're all above the US, and don't have low GDP per capita (although I'm not sure why we're supposed to associate poor countries with more shootings).
I'm actually ok with banning guns, but I very much dislike this reductionist mentality "these problems only affect Americans". As other commenters have pointed out, mass shootings happen everywhere, and acting like Americans are somehow special really bypasses a lot of problems.
Sure, and again I'm somewhat on the side of banning or very-heavily-regulating guns.
I think it's a little unfair to take the US as a whole for this; the population of the US is 5x the population of England, and it's not a big homogeneous blob. Mass shootings don't typically happen in places like NYC, because there are much stricter gun laws.
> As other commenters have pointed out, mass shootings happen everywhere, and acting like Americans are somehow special really bypasses a lot of problems.
Not at this frequency! Truthfully - do you believe that mass shootings happen nearly _every day_ in other countries? No statistic I have ever read has supported that conclusion.
The US has a pretty large population, about 4x the population of Germany, 5x the population of England, 12x the population of Australia, and about 50x the population of Ireland, etc. By that virtue alone we are going to have more mass shootings. I don't have the statistics for China or India's mass shootings, but those would be more fair to compare in the shear numbers department.
I definitely think our gun laws are stupid, I would support legislation to curtail or completely eliminate guns, but it's not like the US just has one generic kind of person; a big and diverse population is going to bring a lot of really cool and awesome people (many of whom move to big cities like NY or Chicago, which is why I like the US), but also a bunch of xenophobic idiots that also really like guns.
What struck me about the El Paso shooter's manifesto was just how poor his rhetoric and reasoning is. Perhaps we should better teach writing, philosophy, and rhetoric in schools and not just focus on STEM. Or at least stats courses better so that one can look at statistics around demographic change and know that it doesn't imply there is a conspiracy afoot.
We're far passed the point where banning guns would be effective. There are almost as many guns in America as there are people. It would be like trying to ban cars, or phones, or air conditioners. The numbers just don't work.
There are logistical problems with that solution as well if we're being honest. How are you going to locate all however many hundred million firearms there are in the US? Even if it's just banning some weapons. How are you going to locate them all?
Even if you could, these terrorists would just use truck bombs.
As far as solutions go, the best option available in our current situation is probably to let our counter-terrorism operatives actually operate. At least up to now, they've been operating with kid gloves with respect to domestic terrorists.
Didn't the gun ban in Australia work pretty well? I know the US has a lot more guns (even per capita) than Australia did, but if we started the process couldn't we conceivably curtail the spread of guns?
I disagree about banning guns. There are other weapons mass murders could use. Anthrax in the mail and homemade bombs have both been used in US history. We cannot reasonably prohibit access to all dangerous materials. Even a large SUV can be used to kill/injury several people.
I think the biggest gains come from focusing on mental health. I see this is just one symptom of a much larger mental health crisis in the US. Other symptoms include high depression rates, high anxiety rates and high addiction rates.
The Netherlands has strict gun control and still has mass shootings. The last one a couple of months ago was with an illegally obtained AR-15. Four dead. Gun control did nothing to stop that.
You need to fix the rotten mentality that has corrupted many American brains. That's the reason we have so few mass shootings in Europe. Quality of life is much better, for starters.
[...] one but may have stopped many others where the difficulty in obtaining a firearm was the difference between an angry post on Facebook/Twitter/Livejournal and 9 dead in under a minute.
> The Netherlands has strict gun control and still has mass shootings.
I can think of two in my lifetime. The one you mentioned in Utrecht, and the Alphen aan den Rijn one in 2011. Even accounting for population size it's nowhere near the severity/frequency of the US.
> Gun control did nothing to stop that.
Gun control obviously isn't going to stop every attack. That doesn't mean it can't prevent many of them.
In post WW2 history we only had two mass shootings and the Moluccan train hijacking in 1975 and 1977.
Don’t forget everything that isn’t covered by the media. In 2018 we had 527 registered shooting incidents. In the last 18 months we had 44 gun related deaths. In 2018 the police seized 76 automatic weapons such as the AR-15.
For a country with strict gun control that’s a lot.
Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined."
Yes, the US has a problem with gun violence, mass shootings, and suicides. No, it isn't unique to the US, and gun ownership isn't correlated (at least with the murders and mass shootings).
"The US ranks 58th in attack rate and 62st in murder
rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia are major European countries with at
least 45% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States.
The rates in Pakistan and India are respectively 555% and 76% higher than the US
rate."
> The solution is to ban guns, full stop.
Similarly inaccurate:
"Lankford’s claim that higher rates of gun ownership are
associated with more mass public shooters completely disappears when this more
complete data on mass public shooters is used"
The terrorists and the crazies in the 20th century seemed to prefer bombs for causing mass panic. There haven't been many bombings in the past 20yr except by "professional" terrorist organizations. Seems like shootings are more popular now.
That said, I haven't been keeping a list so I may be wrong.
After 9/11 and the Oklahoma City bombing, it became harder to get the materials for bombs. Bullets did not become harder to obtain in the same way. So the method of choice for causing mass panic moved to shooting.
And so after someone gets their way with a national gun ban (and somehow magically that makes the guns go away), people will switch to UHaul. Or arson.
The sheer amount of guns owned by American civilians compared with the rest of the world is staggering, and, maybe not so coincidentally, so is the amount of gun related homicide. [0] The fact remains that even you in your comment called it a problem. Guns and gun ownership are the common denominator when it comes to mass shootings, and very little, if anything, is being done about it.
That's true when you're looking at a statistic like guns per capita [0]. When you're talking about number of registered guns, however, the only state with more guns than California is Texas, which falls at number 3 on the list of states with the most mass shootings [1].
I do still believe that having more guns around does tend to lead to more mass shootings, along with other forms of gun related homicide.
Your link 0 is absolutely ludicrous. That 21 guns per capita in Texas would mean ~600 million guns in Texas ALONE out of the ~400 million total in the US.
And you're right that these things should be counted per capita, but that still doesn't explain how Texas has a far higher gun ownership rate, 30% less population than California.... And HALF the mass shootings.
Just to clarify because my link 0 "guns per capita" was a bit misleading. It's actually per 1,000 people, not 1. Link to more original source [0].
Quick maths: 21 guns p/capita divided by 1,000 people = 0.021 * 28 million (pop of Texas) = ~588,000 guns.
Your observation about Texas is very interesting, and I don't have an answer for that. Texas might have, historically, a better gun culture? In any case, having half the mass shootings as another state is still a number greater than zero, which remains the ultimate goal.
> Just to clarify because my link 0 "guns per capita" was a bit misleading. It's actually per 1,000 people, not 1. Link to more original source [0].
Ahhh, registered guns per 1000 people. That makes a bit more sense, but is still probably not all that useful, as the vast majority of guns in the US are unregistered. AFAICT this is just counting NFA-registered weapons, such as fully automatic guns, destructive devices, short-barreled rifles, suppressors, etc.
> In any case, having half the mass shootings as another state is still a number greater than zero, which remains the ultimate goal.
Ah, but it does provide a hint that the number of guns might not be the primary determining factor.
> Texas might have, historically, a better gun culture?
My guess would also involve "Texas's gun culture hasn't been killed off by state laws", as in California.
Guns are part of the problem, but not even close to the entire solution. And guns are so ingrained in American lifestyle that they're not going away.
I like the fact that common factors are being found. Maybe flags can be raised and preventative actions taken, including temporarily moving guns out of reach of the at-risk individual.
The gist of it is that people without future/community think jihad can be their community and their life work... Guess what, it also applies to people thinking you need to be a warrior for the "suppressed white race"..
I'll preface the following statement by saying that I'm not being racist, I'm just stating a fact. But it's clear that blacks and native americans have been "suppressed" and impoverished, and "people without futures" or whatever for a long, long time. Again, not a knock against native americans or blacks, just outlining reality.
Here's the thing though, to my recollection, I don't recall either group engaging in mass shootings of everyone else with the frequency we're seeing nowadays. There's something else going on here. Some added dimension that we're not considering.
These may be the common things, but none of them is particularly discoverable, predictive and actionable. And indeed, the advice the article presents later amounts to more policing.
2) sometimes experienced psychological problems, maybe as a result of 1)
3) sometimes had some reason to become angry (before the mass-shooting, such as getting fired)
4) sometimes explore/study other mass-shootings before committing one themselves
5) had the means to carry out this crime
Ok, with a bit of flexibility (other than point 5) that could describe every last one of my coworkers, for none of which there is any chance whatsoever they'll ever commit a mass-shooting. The idea is ludicrous.
> that could describe every last one of my coworkers, for none of which there is any chance whatsoever they'll ever commit a mass-shooting.
Something I've noticed after mass shootings: newspapers will interview the friends and family of the shooters. And they'll frequently say things like (paraphrased) "I never could have imagined <shooter> doing this thing, they were always such a <nice person|quiet boy|sweetiepie|etc>."
You're saying something similar - just in advance. The truth is that while there are often red flags, at our core we don't consider each other to be capable of cold-blooded murder. Until it happens.
My point is that the described "warning signs" are not red flags, unless you think that 30% of the population is just waiting to commit mass murder next time they get cut off at a red light.
But - given the data we have available - the only conclusion left is yes. Yes, there are more people than we’d like to admit that are capable of these horrible acts. Given the frequency of gun violence here, it’s very difficult to draw another conclusion.
At least a majority of mass shooters seem have been on antidepressants at some point, and quite a few were receiving some form of treatment.
Why this won’t be popularized more is likely political reasons, SSRIs improve patient outcomes in nearly all cases, why allow controversy over SSRIs when it may be a factor in such a small handful of cases per year?
I understand it's just an essay, but if their goal is "to find new, data-driven pathways for preventing such shootings" they need to add more data/evidence.
I'm finding the mental health angle less and less convincing. People are capable of doing these things in their right mind. Is the manifesto a part of the "social contagion"? Treating this as solely a product of mental illness minimizes it. Plenty of people experience abuse and trauma at a young age and don't murder dozens.
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's irrelevant, not at all. But the ideology can't be ignored, it can't be separated from the act as if it's interchangeable.
>> practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.
>> most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives.
In other words, they talk to other people about their plans and grievances beforehand, so there is an opportunity for intervention.
As a rhetorical question, I wonder what would occur if someone came up with the idea that gun possession should be restricted to women for safety reasons.
Number of mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and August 2019, by shooter's race and ethnicity
White 64
Black 19
Latino 10
...
Comparisons to population percentage, etc.
Female shooters are rare, but exist. " Women accounted for nine of 251 active shootings in the United States — or roughly 3.6 percent — between 2000 and 2017, according to the FBI."
The US is approx 73% white. All other factors being equal, I'd expect roughly 70% of the shooters to be white people. 64 a lot of shootings, but in context it's not surprising.
Black folks are around 12-14%, concentrated mostly in the south or big cities. 19% is a little high but still within a roughly corresponding population size.
The Latino population is roughly 16%, estimated to be 30% by around 2050. The real question is why the Latinos have less shootings, proportionally, than the other groups; my best guess is something loosely related to the "Hispanic Paradox" which is basically that Hispanic populations do better in terms of health outcomes and other health-related metrics than other poor, non-white Minorities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox
77 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 143 ms ] threadThe suggestion of metal detectors is laughable. You’d need to put one at the entrance of everyone’s home for that to be remotely effective. The solution is to ban guns, full stop. And then slowly start to address the rotten national psyche that has led to where we are today.
Clearly Albania, a country with per capita GDP less than a tenth of the US is not a suitable comparison. No attempt has been made to account for income as a confounding variable.
The figures for Norway are predominantly driven by a single data point over the period compared to 67 mass shooting in the US over that same period. Surely this should be mentioned to allow for a proper interpretation of the data?
It would only further support a gun ban.
They happen every week in the US.
I think it's a little unfair to take the US as a whole for this; the population of the US is 5x the population of England, and it's not a big homogeneous blob. Mass shootings don't typically happen in places like NYC, because there are much stricter gun laws.
Not at this frequency! Truthfully - do you believe that mass shootings happen nearly _every day_ in other countries? No statistic I have ever read has supported that conclusion.
I definitely think our gun laws are stupid, I would support legislation to curtail or completely eliminate guns, but it's not like the US just has one generic kind of person; a big and diverse population is going to bring a lot of really cool and awesome people (many of whom move to big cities like NY or Chicago, which is why I like the US), but also a bunch of xenophobic idiots that also really like guns.
There are logistical problems with that solution as well if we're being honest. How are you going to locate all however many hundred million firearms there are in the US? Even if it's just banning some weapons. How are you going to locate them all?
Even if you could, these terrorists would just use truck bombs.
As far as solutions go, the best option available in our current situation is probably to let our counter-terrorism operatives actually operate. At least up to now, they've been operating with kid gloves with respect to domestic terrorists.
I think the biggest gains come from focusing on mental health. I see this is just one symptom of a much larger mental health crisis in the US. Other symptoms include high depression rates, high anxiety rates and high addiction rates.
You need to fix the rotten mentality that has corrupted many American brains. That's the reason we have so few mass shootings in Europe. Quality of life is much better, for starters.
[...] one but may have stopped many others where the difficulty in obtaining a firearm was the difference between an angry post on Facebook/Twitter/Livejournal and 9 dead in under a minute.
I can think of two in my lifetime. The one you mentioned in Utrecht, and the Alphen aan den Rijn one in 2011. Even accounting for population size it's nowhere near the severity/frequency of the US.
> Gun control did nothing to stop that.
Gun control obviously isn't going to stop every attack. That doesn't mean it can't prevent many of them.
Don’t forget everything that isn’t covered by the media. In 2018 we had 527 registered shooting incidents. In the last 18 months we had 44 gun related deaths. In 2018 the police seized 76 automatic weapons such as the AR-15.
For a country with strict gun control that’s a lot.
This is not factual. The Lankford study generally cited has been shown to ignore most non-US mass shootings.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736
Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined."
Data available: https://crimeresearch.org/data/
Yes, the US has a problem with gun violence, mass shootings, and suicides. No, it isn't unique to the US, and gun ownership isn't correlated (at least with the murders and mass shootings).
"The US ranks 58th in attack rate and 62st in murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia are major European countries with at least 45% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States. The rates in Pakistan and India are respectively 555% and 76% higher than the US rate."
> The solution is to ban guns, full stop.
Similarly inaccurate:
"Lankford’s claim that higher rates of gun ownership are associated with more mass public shooters completely disappears when this more complete data on mass public shooters is used"
Why is this just becoming a problem recently?
The terrorists and the crazies in the 20th century seemed to prefer bombs for causing mass panic. There haven't been many bombings in the past 20yr except by "professional" terrorist organizations. Seems like shootings are more popular now.
That said, I haven't been keeping a list so I may be wrong.
[0] - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081
The relationship you're proposing (more gun owners means more mass shootings) doesn't seem to hold within the US.
I do still believe that having more guns around does tend to lead to more mass shootings, along with other forms of gun related homicide.
[0] - https://www.thoughtco.com/gun-owners-percentage-of-state-pop... [1] - https://www.statista.com/statistics/811541/mass-shootings-in...
And you're right that these things should be counted per capita, but that still doesn't explain how Texas has a far higher gun ownership rate, 30% less population than California.... And HALF the mass shootings.
Quick maths: 21 guns p/capita divided by 1,000 people = 0.021 * 28 million (pop of Texas) = ~588,000 guns.
Your observation about Texas is very interesting, and I don't have an answer for that. Texas might have, historically, a better gun culture? In any case, having half the mass shootings as another state is still a number greater than zero, which remains the ultimate goal.
[0] - https://huntingmark.com/gun-ownership-stats/#_ftn1%20
Ahhh, registered guns per 1000 people. That makes a bit more sense, but is still probably not all that useful, as the vast majority of guns in the US are unregistered. AFAICT this is just counting NFA-registered weapons, such as fully automatic guns, destructive devices, short-barreled rifles, suppressors, etc.
> In any case, having half the mass shootings as another state is still a number greater than zero, which remains the ultimate goal.
Ah, but it does provide a hint that the number of guns might not be the primary determining factor.
> Texas might have, historically, a better gun culture?
My guess would also involve "Texas's gun culture hasn't been killed off by state laws", as in California.
e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Running_amok
I like the fact that common factors are being found. Maybe flags can be raised and preventative actions taken, including temporarily moving guns out of reach of the at-risk individual.
then neither are the mass shootings. that's that.
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2018/09/20/us/maryland-shooting/index.ht...
[2] https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/04/us/who-is-nasim-aghdam-youtub...
[3] https://www.cnn.com/2015/12/03/us/syed-farook-tashfeen-malik...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goleta_postal_facility_shootin...
The gist of it is that people without future/community think jihad can be their community and their life work... Guess what, it also applies to people thinking you need to be a warrior for the "suppressed white race"..
I'll preface the following statement by saying that I'm not being racist, I'm just stating a fact. But it's clear that blacks and native americans have been "suppressed" and impoverished, and "people without futures" or whatever for a long, long time. Again, not a knock against native americans or blacks, just outlining reality.
Here's the thing though, to my recollection, I don't recall either group engaging in mass shootings of everyone else with the frequency we're seeing nowadays. There's something else going on here. Some added dimension that we're not considering.
1) experienced violence before, often early
2) sometimes experienced psychological problems, maybe as a result of 1)
3) sometimes had some reason to become angry (before the mass-shooting, such as getting fired)
4) sometimes explore/study other mass-shootings before committing one themselves
5) had the means to carry out this crime
Ok, with a bit of flexibility (other than point 5) that could describe every last one of my coworkers, for none of which there is any chance whatsoever they'll ever commit a mass-shooting. The idea is ludicrous.
Typical psychological social-science "insight".
Something I've noticed after mass shootings: newspapers will interview the friends and family of the shooters. And they'll frequently say things like (paraphrased) "I never could have imagined <shooter> doing this thing, they were always such a <nice person|quiet boy|sweetiepie|etc>."
You're saying something similar - just in advance. The truth is that while there are often red flags, at our core we don't consider each other to be capable of cold-blooded murder. Until it happens.
But - given the data we have available - the only conclusion left is yes. Yes, there are more people than we’d like to admit that are capable of these horrible acts. Given the frequency of gun violence here, it’s very difficult to draw another conclusion.
Why this won’t be popularized more is likely political reasons, SSRIs improve patient outcomes in nearly all cases, why allow controversy over SSRIs when it may be a factor in such a small handful of cases per year?
1) the effects (esp. the long-term effects: permanent depression and suicide)
2) the addiction and dependency they create
3) their association with mental health
4) their abuse within the mental health institutions
The ordering may not be very accurate.
Also please note that depression rarely, if ever, results in violent behavior (other than suicide).
Don't get me wrong, I don't think it's irrelevant, not at all. But the ideology can't be ignored, it can't be separated from the act as if it's interchangeable.
Healthy people don't kill innocent civilians.
It's like, yeah, no. Lots of people have "mental health" issues. (In fact, there is a school of thought that would argue we all do.)
These guys are just Al Qaeda level terrorists.
The longer we ignore that reality, the higher the body count will climb.
>> practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting. Such crises were, in many cases, communicated to others through a marked change in behavior, an expression of suicidal thoughts or plans, or specific threats of violence.
>> most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives.
In other words, they talk to other people about their plans and grievances beforehand, so there is an opportunity for intervention.
1. > ...experienced early childhood trauma and exposure to violence at a young age... often a precursor to mental health concerns
2. > ...practically every mass shooter we studied had reached an identifiable crisis point in the weeks or months leading up to the shooting.
3. > ...most of the shooters had studied the actions of other shooters and sought validation for their motives.
4. > ...the shooters all had the means to carry out their plans.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in...
Number of mass shootings in the United States between 1982 and August 2019, by shooter's race and ethnicity
White 64 Black 19 Latino 10 ...
Comparisons to population percentage, etc.
Female shooters are rare, but exist. " Women accounted for nine of 251 active shootings in the United States — or roughly 3.6 percent — between 2000 and 2017, according to the FBI."
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-fe-female-shooter...
Women experience these same things but, as you've said, tend not to go on murder rampages.
Female is 3.6% according to article I linked above, so some may consider male "nearly all".
White is 57% according to the statistics link I posted above, so white is inaccurate even with "nearly all".
Thus, "nearly all" "male and white" would be wrong and misleading.
The more important question would be, does either of those help identify potential risks? So you should turn the statistics around:
What percentage of males become mass shooters? (0%)
What percentage of whites become mass shooters? (0%)
So, yes, males and whites "tend not to go on murder rampages".
Not particularly helpful.
Of course, the same can probably also be said about their other "things in common", but maybe we can identify something that will help.
Black folks are around 12-14%, concentrated mostly in the south or big cities. 19% is a little high but still within a roughly corresponding population size.
The Latino population is roughly 16%, estimated to be 30% by around 2050. The real question is why the Latinos have less shootings, proportionally, than the other groups; my best guess is something loosely related to the "Hispanic Paradox" which is basically that Hispanic populations do better in terms of health outcomes and other health-related metrics than other poor, non-white Minorities: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic_paradox
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3395354/