Removing guns from law abiding citizens is preferred by one vocal faction, rather than imprisoning criminals who use them in committing crimes (and who usually don't possess their guns legally).
The other faction says that removing guns from law abiding citizens actually increases crime[0].
As the OP said, other countries look on with bemusement at people arguing with a straight face that an anecdote involving one gun owner shooting another gun owner after he'd killed three people with an assault weapon widely and legally available locally proves that a policy of encouraging universal gun ownership is better than alternatives. Not least because some of said countries have four orders of magnitude fewer per capita gun deaths
Sure, we get that changing US gun culture might be a bit more challenging than, say, the UK, where there weren't that many people with handguns to start off with when they were banned, and so it was particularly easy to convince even most criminals carrying wasn't worth the additional penalties. What we find bizarre is that someone buys an assault weapon in the sort of store that's ubiquitous in the US and nonexistent in other countries, walks into a mall with it because local regulations say there's no reason to apprehend somebody entering a mall with assault rifles until they've killed someone, and that event gets chalked up as a win for local gun policy because the casualties were in the single digits this time due to the rare use of a civilian gun against a mass shooter
…who will later be law not abiding when they shoot someone.
People want to prevent violence not punish it more.
I’ve never seen any real claim that people aren’t getting arrested for hurting people, but I’ve seen a lot of people that want to stop the violence before it happens.
That mindset feels reminiscent of the ever-increasing size of vehicles on the road. You avoid the smaller vehicle for fear of being run off the road (or worse) by an oversized truck and so instead of the subcompact you go with the midsize, then crossover, then SUV, ad infinitum.
Also, we’ve already been incarcerating people at an alarming rate.* It seems like there’s something more fundamental being neglected — that’s compelling Americans to use our (abundance of) weapons more readily.
As others have mentioned, we're already one of the leading countries in terms of imprisoning people. You're saying the gun violence problem is therefore because we don't imprison enough people?
What % of the population do you think needs to be imprisoned before we recognize that maybe its guns that are the problem?
As an extremely cynical american, my view is that we don't do anything because guns are a big industry in america, and industry controls our government in all the places that matter.
But my point was more that we only ever talk about gun violence when a very specific type of gun violence occurs, and pointing out the incidents that constitute the bulk of the aggregate number usually gets you called a racist.
The entire US civilian small arms industry is tiny. The largest publicly traded gun company has a stock market capitalization of about 0.05% of Apple. The entire gun industry has an annual revenue of only $70 billion, which doesn't even register as a significant line item in our $20 trillion GDP. Any political influence the industry has is more to do with cultural factors than with size.
I think there's a hint of truth in his supposition though. The gun lobby enjoys significant popular support from the general public who want to buy guns, but they also receive support from the gun industry that want to sell guns. The intersection of these two interests is protecting Americans' right to buy guns from American gun manufactures. In this, the gun lobby has been effective.
However the gun lobby has been generally ineffective and uncaring when it comes to protecting Americans' right to import guns from other countries. Collectors like importing guns, but American gun manufacturers have little interest in that. For instance, the NRA doesn't seem very upset about the Norinco ban, even 20+ years ago when the political/strategic situation between America and China was not on the minds of many. Another example is 922(r) compliance concerning domestic/foreign part counts; notorious among gun collectors as inane, arbitrary and pointless. Yet there doesn't seem to be much drive from the American gun lobby to get this fixed.
It takes very little money to buy your politicians. Tens of thousands of dollars to sway their opinion, a few hundred thousand to buy it outright. The gun companies own a lot of your politicians.
He wants to talk about black on black crime. As opposed to white on white crime which is not talked about as separate issue. Because, most murder by large number are among people who know each other - are friends, family, do business. And those groups tend to have same race.
TIL that people think "black on black crime" has any meaning. I would have thought he wanted to talk about gang violence, which is probably #3 or #4 on the list of gun death causes, behind domestic violence and maybe accidents (with suicides eclipsing both of these).
That's an interesting point, so I did some digging. I'm using 2007 as the reference year, because I can't find any more up-to-date sources on domestic murder.
There were 18,361 total homicides in the US in 2007, 10,129 of which were committed with firearms.
There were 1,975 gang homicides in 2007, or ~10.8% of all homicides [1] I can't find anything contemporaneous, but a 1995 study said that 94%-96% of gang homicides used a firearm. Using the lower number, that would mean 1,857 of those were firearm homicides, or 18.3% of all firearm homicides.
There were 2,340 domestic murders in 2007 [2] (the header says female victims of domestic violence, but that stat is for both genders). [4] says that in 2002 54% of domestic violence homicides were carried out with a firearm, so that would be about 1,264 or ~12.4% of all firearm homicides.
Neither of those numbers is isolated to firearms; I couldn't find any studies specifically scoped to firearms. I also didn't dig very hard into how they get those numbers.
Estimates on accidental deaths put them at ~400 a year. [3]
CDC data for 2007 says there were ~17k suicides with firearms in 2007 (these aren't counted in the homicide numbers above).
Gang violence does seem like it has more firearm homicides than domestic violence, but not by a staggering margin, and it may have flipped since 2007.
