2016 U.S. Presidential Elections: The Circus Is In Full Swing
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I think America is just generally fond of violence, or well fond-er than Europe. It's not the gun laws, some Euro countries have very benevolent gun laws and high gun ownership too, yet have much lower rates of gun crime. Maybe it's their lack of experience with industrial warfare an destruction on their own territory. Maybe they're just a younger culture and their hormones are still flowing. I don't know. It's not just literal physical violence, they also have a general air of forcefulness around them and that kind of a cult of action and being busy. Part of it could be that Americans constantly have obscene wealth hanged in front of their faces, whether in the media or in real life and are told that at least upper middle class lifestyle is in their reach, if they dare take it. While we Euros tend to more like, uhm, know our station in lifeYes, these are quite some generalizations and I don't really have a chiseled point here, so I'm just going to power through it and keep typing.
Gun laws definitely have a lot to do with it. In Europe even the most gun liberal countries (e.g., Switzerland, which gets brought up a lot here) have some kind of system in place to ensure that 1) People who buy a gun are trained to use it properly, and 2) People go through a psych evaluation before being given a gun. In the US all you have to do is go to a grocery store like Walmart. That is something I will never get used to. "Ah, yes, I need some eggs. And milk. And a loaf of bread. Oh, add a glock to that will ya.". As far as I know the US is the only "democratic" country where psychopaths can legally buy a gun.
There is truth in what you say, and I agree that racism is only part of the equation. Still, it's there, and I find the willingness of American police to cover for their own dirty cops very disturbing.
hey that's a neat summary of it.
Rams
@kurczak
Sounds like you're right if that's what Beau meant. I just can't believe that someone is able to overlook the ability for a person and his friends to just spam complaints to have an officer booted (which is why I like my more generous interpretation).
? You obviously have a wealth of experience and insights. Thanks for sharing them.
My sister works for the public prosecution and she reports really messed up **** even here in quiet Netherlands. I sometimes worry for her mental health just by virtue of her having to read about the graphic things that she has told me about.
This is why I am confused by the cries to defund the police. I don't know how the flow of money works with regard to the police, but surely you want to invest into the police being trained to use force appropriately and to be able to become psychologically more resilient to ****ed ****, which can't be cheap. Mental check-ups must already exist, maybe they're not sophisticated enough, or not effective at all? I think in most professions the psychological aspects are usually neglected, especially in jobs and offices that have been in existence for so long that the people there have come to believe that their job or office doesn't really need spooky, sensitive words healing.
(OK this is my last post. Best of luck, love you all.)
Sounds like you're right if that's what Beau meant. I just can't believe that someone is able to overlook the ability for a person and his friends to just spam complaints to have an officer booted (which is why I like my more generous interpretation).
? You obviously have a wealth of experience and insights. Thanks for sharing them.
My sister works for the public prosecution and she reports really messed up **** even here in quiet Netherlands. I sometimes worry for her mental health just by virtue of her having to read about the graphic things that she has told me about.
This is why I am confused by the cries to defund the police. I don't know how the flow of money works with regard to the police, but surely you want to invest into the police being trained to use force appropriately and to be able to become psychologically more resilient to ****ed ****, which can't be cheap. Mental check-ups must already exist, maybe they're not sophisticated enough, or not effective at all? I think in most professions the psychological aspects are usually neglected, especially in jobs and offices that have been in existence for so long that the people there have come to believe that their job or office doesn't really need spooky, sensitive words healing.
(OK this is my last post. Best of luck, love you all.)
Come on, man. That is only true in select parts of the US (good luck getting a gun legally in NYC or the LA county) and there is basically no correlation between how strict the local gun laws are or how common legal gun ownership is on one hand and gun violence rates on the other. The image of a deranged lunatic buying kalashnikovs in a grocery store and then going on a spree is not representative of what gun violence in the US is. The vast, vast majority of the guns used for criminal purposes are a) handguns and b) stolen. You could argue that common legal ownership makes them it easy to steal them, sell them on the street and shoot people illicitly with them, but then why isn't that happening in Switzerland or Norway or Finland.
In a way it is even more disturbing that the police would shoot at an armed man who is not doing anything provocative than shooting an unarmed person- on the one hand he is dressed in all that camouflage gear and carrying a gun openly, which to my mind is hardly a reassuring look from the point of view of a police officer whose role there is to quell any dangerous behaviour, so in that sense he should not be complaining about getting shot (whatever the legality of it, he is basically dressed like a paramilitary, and if you turn up to such a situation without being very sure the police know of your intentions beforehand, what the heck are they supposed to presume upon seeing you?).
But the very fact that he is armed should be their cue to act with caution towards him and take logical action- if his gun is loaded, who is to say he wouldn't react in anger, fear or shock and shoot at the police, or even civilians if he was confused as to who had fired that round at him? It is completely irresponsible behaviour by the police. Presumably they didn't think he was an immediate danger with his gun, so why shoot at him? They are firing injurious but not necessarily incapacitating rounds (evidently, because he is up and about, fully conscious) at a man whose weapon is presumably loaded with live ammunition. So I assume the police are just seeing anyone remotely not looking subservient and shooting rubber bullets at them.
It is not easy to understand what is going on with gun violence in the US from an objective point of view, mostly because research on that particular topic was unfunded for a very long time (that changed recently https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03882-w, but it's going to be a while before we see any results of that change). From the data that it is available, most states are very permissive (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...h-mental-illness-are-able-to-obtain-guns.html has some interesting maps). There are some exceptions like those that you mention, but all that means is that people go out of state to get guns (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/most-guns-used-in-new-york-state-crimes-come-from-out-of-state/).
Regarding the countries that you mention, Switzerland emphasizes gun safety through training and psych evaluations for everyone who buys a gun. In Norway you need to have a specific and documented reason to have a gun. In Finland you need a license to have a gun. I can about guarantee it, if you dig in a little deeper and look at the specific regulations, all the countries that are touted as permissive for what concerns firearms actually have some form of control over it. Except for the US, where in most states you can legally get a gun without a background check (but you won't be able to rent an apartment without a background check, I think that the contrast between the two is hilarious).
That doesn't really address my point though. It's not important that most guns used in NY are out-of-state. Quantitatively, American gun violence is mostly related to organized crime in large cities. The cases of mentally ill reclusive wankers who just one day snap and shoot out a school or a mall, tragic and absurd as they are, are not what makes the US gun violence stand out statistically.
The gangs and whatnot don't go shopping legitimately to Vermont or NH and then use them in NY. They are first of all looking for guns that cannot be legally traced to them at all, i.e. stolen guns. The guns are stolen and it so happens that they are stolen out of state, because that makes them even harder to trace for law enforcement.
Therefore, you can still have a fairly strict legal requirements - mental health and background checks, x hours of mandatory training, it won't really matter as long as:
a) people like guns and want to have them. Because most people are mentally healthy etc, so they will pass the requirements (like they do in Norway or Switzerland) and the guns will be out there . AND
b) there is demand from organized crime for street guns, resulting in common gun theft.
So you can either ban guns altogether or miraculously convince Americans not to want to own them, drastically reducing the number of guns in circulation. Which let's face it is completely unrealistic given, well, the entire American political culture. But even, just banning things doesn't make them disappear, especially if you have a gigantically porous border with a country like Mexico. If it were that easy, the war on drugs would have been won decades ago.
Or you can address the organized crime and the reasons why the richest country on the planet has places like Baltimore, Detroit or St. Louis etc.
The gangs and whatnot don't go shopping legitimately to Vermont or NH and then use them in NY. They are first of all looking for guns that cannot be legally traced to them at all, i.e. stolen guns. The guns are stolen and it so happens that they are stolen out of state, because that makes them even harder to trace for law enforcement.
Therefore, you can still have a fairly strict legal requirements - mental health and background checks, x hours of mandatory training, it won't really matter as long as:
a) people like guns and want to have them. Because most people are mentally healthy etc, so they will pass the requirements (like they do in Norway or Switzerland) and the guns will be out there . AND
b) there is demand from organized crime for street guns, resulting in common gun theft.
So you can either ban guns altogether or miraculously convince Americans not to want to own them, drastically reducing the number of guns in circulation. Which let's face it is completely unrealistic given, well, the entire American political culture. But even, just banning things doesn't make them disappear, especially if you have a gigantically porous border with a country like Mexico. If it were that easy, the war on drugs would have been won decades ago.
Or you can address the organized crime and the reasons why the richest country on the planet has places like Baltimore, Detroit or St. Louis etc.
What is your source for this? Honest question, because I am struggling with finding reliable and unbiased data on this myself.
I did find this map
An Atlas of American Gun Violence
Seven years. 240,000 shootings. How has gun violence marked your corner of the country?
www.thetrace.org
I think that this is an interesting tool. According to their guided tour feature, many mid sized and smaller cities have a higher rate of violence than big cities. And let's not forget, a lot of them will be accidents which happen because people are not trained and/or don't store their weapons properly (Norway for example has very strict rules on how you must store your firearm).
Another interesting fact is that the majority of people who die from guns in the US are suicides (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States).
Another thing that the Wikipedia article brings to light (and if you don't like Wikipedia we can always go and dig in the sources) is that there is evidence that a large number of guns used in criminal activities was originally bought legally as a straw purchase, and from a surprisingly low number of dealers (again this is data from 1995, since almost all research on the topic effectively was halted in 1996). Then of course they were diverted to criminal activites, thus turning into illegal guns which arguably will mark them as "stolen". But the fact that these weapons were originally so readily available to buy legally definitely made things easier no?
I am not advocating for a gun ban. I don't know of any country that does that, not even Australia (and actually reading regulations for Australia and Norway, the two seem pretty similar). I don't even necessarily think that the government should try to buy back the weapons that are already around. I do however think that some more control on how firearms are sold would benefit everyone in the US. I am also aware that unfortunately it is going to be very difficult to bring people on that boat just because of how the gun culture is, as you say.
And since you brought up the comparison with the war on drugs, I can't help but ask: would you also be OK with heroine and cocaine being as freely available as guns are in the US?
I don't have a particular source. I just, uh, know that
But since you ask, let's look at the list of US mass shootings. Fatalities are ~ tens of people a year. Out of total ~ 10,000 fatalities from gun homicides a year. Gun homicides are obviously a subset of total homicides, where the infamous 13/50 ratio comes into play. But the ratio is more less the same for victims of gun violence too. For example here. This is also supported by the map you posted. If you zoom in on New York, that I live in and know, you can see the dots are concentrated in Harlem, Washington Heights, South Bronx, Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, all very, very black neighborhoods with substantial Hispanic flavor. Even in Staten Island, what relatively few dots there are, are north of I-278, which are the blackest parts of the borough.
I don't have any studies I can post, it's just from living in one of NY's black neighborhoods - it's obviously not black doctors shooting at black teachers or black shopkeepers shooting at black bus drivers. Every shooting I hear about in my neighborhood is related to either drugs or illegal gambling. And the area is not necesaarily some urban hell-scape with crack-babies staggering around unaccompanied. There is ~ 300 people in a block, even if "only" 2% of people are involved in gang life, with the vast majority of 98% people living a completely normal, harmelss life, that's still 6 gangsters just on a block and the likelihood of a violence and other pathological phenomenons jumps up dramatically and the whole block or the whole neighborhood is bad, dangerous, sketchy etc.
Organized crime is essentially a parallel society. It offers economic opportunities (or illusion thereof) where the legitimate society doesn't offer enough of them. It offers conflict resolution, structure, meaning (or illusions thereof) where the legitimate society doesn't offer enough of them. You can kill an entire gang, it's not hard, especially if you're not bothered by rule of law, but if the underlying conditions don't change, a new one will appear sooner or later.
So, to solve the relatively high rate of back gangs, you have to solve the relatively high alienation of black Americans. I'll let you know as soon as I have a solution to the accumulated centuries of the ****show that is American race relations.
But since you ask, let's look at the list of US mass shootings. Fatalities are ~ tens of people a year. Out of total ~ 10,000 fatalities from gun homicides a year. Gun homicides are obviously a subset of total homicides, where the infamous 13/50 ratio comes into play. But the ratio is more less the same for victims of gun violence too. For example here. This is also supported by the map you posted. If you zoom in on New York, that I live in and know, you can see the dots are concentrated in Harlem, Washington Heights, South Bronx, Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights, all very, very black neighborhoods with substantial Hispanic flavor. Even in Staten Island, what relatively few dots there are, are north of I-278, which are the blackest parts of the borough.
I don't have any studies I can post, it's just from living in one of NY's black neighborhoods - it's obviously not black doctors shooting at black teachers or black shopkeepers shooting at black bus drivers. Every shooting I hear about in my neighborhood is related to either drugs or illegal gambling. And the area is not necesaarily some urban hell-scape with crack-babies staggering around unaccompanied. There is ~ 300 people in a block, even if "only" 2% of people are involved in gang life, with the vast majority of 98% people living a completely normal, harmelss life, that's still 6 gangsters just on a block and the likelihood of a violence and other pathological phenomenons jumps up dramatically and the whole block or the whole neighborhood is bad, dangerous, sketchy etc.
Organized crime is essentially a parallel society. It offers economic opportunities (or illusion thereof) where the legitimate society doesn't offer enough of them. It offers conflict resolution, structure, meaning (or illusions thereof) where the legitimate society doesn't offer enough of them. You can kill an entire gang, it's not hard, especially if you're not bothered by rule of law, but if the underlying conditions don't change, a new one will appear sooner or later.
So, to solve the relatively high rate of back gangs, you have to solve the relatively high alienation of black Americans. I'll let you know as soon as I have a solution to the accumulated centuries of the ****show that is American race relations.
Yes, but it's exclusively distributed by the government and by applying for a license to purchase them you waive your rights to government-funded healthcare and become an automatic organ donor.
Right, I forgot that part. No I would not be ok with that. There is legitimate use of guns. More importantly, you can own a gun and function perfectly in the society. The overwhelming majority of gun owners do.
There are no functioning heroin addicts and it is (next to) impossible to do heroin casually. You will become not just useless, but an active harm to the society. Cocaine is not as much of a shortcut to doom as heroin. There is a relevant % of people who can really do it casually, say once in x months and nothing bad happens. And even if one does develop a habit, one can get away with it and still function for a while. Some people last longer, some shorter, but eventually everyone either quits it, or goes broke and paranoid, or dies. I guess I could imagine some sort of very regulated legalization of cocaine, but it's still playing with fire. Definitely no heroin.
There are no functioning heroin addicts and it is (next to) impossible to do heroin casually. You will become not just useless, but an active harm to the society. Cocaine is not as much of a shortcut to doom as heroin. There is a relevant % of people who can really do it casually, say once in x months and nothing bad happens. And even if one does develop a habit, one can get away with it and still function for a while. Some people last longer, some shorter, but eventually everyone either quits it, or goes broke and paranoid, or dies. I guess I could imagine some sort of very regulated legalization of cocaine, but it's still playing with fire. Definitely no heroin.
Evgeny Kuznetsov on cocaIne thinks he's a bird.
Can't say how dangerous it might be till he actually leaves the ground.
I don't have a particular source. I just, uh, know that
Ok, but you can't "just know" something like that. Perhaps that is the commonly accepted perception, but that does not necessarily mean that it is the truth. And your personal experience definitely allows you to make observations related to the specific area where you live, but you can't generalize to the rest of the country based on that.
And here is some data, and I like seeing data, thank you for sharing. In fact I am just a little bit obsessed with data, in case you were wondering. The list of mass shootings does seem to roughly follow the outline of places where gun violence is more concentrated, which I would not have necessarily expected myself given the random nature of mass shootings (but then, I guess you can't mass shoot anyone if you live in the middle of nowhere, and places with higher population will naturally have more shooting episodes). Things get a little more interesting if you consider firearm death rates per capita (or rather, per 100000 population, as shown here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearm_death_rates_in_the_United_States_by_state). If we look at the table, Maryland "won" first place in that competition for 2016, and one could argue that Baltimore contributed to that, but second is Alaska. Then come Alabama, Lousiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma. New York is at the bottom. I don't know that I necessarily see a strong correlation between states with big cities and rate of death by firearms from this table. It's also interesting that in the 2013 rates that are below, Maryland is at the bottom, so there seems to be a high variability year by year.
There is no denying that gangs and organized crime are a problem, and I respect your personal experience. I still think that firearms being easy to obtain is not helping with that, but I agree that gangs would not magically disappear if we could make all guns vanish with a snap of a finger. I will say, I did briefly consider moving to NYC for a job in the past myself, then changed my mind rapidly when I saw how much I would have had to pay for rent there. I can only imagine (actually, I can't) how someone who, say, works in a grocery store can even survive. I saw some statistics that show a median income of 25k in a place where the median rent for an apartment is over 2000 a month. Maybe if we want to start fixing some of the problems in big cities we could start from putting limits on how high rent can go for a certain property.
Ok, let me rephrase it slightly. I'm not arguing that big cities magically make people criminal. I'm definitely not arguing that black Americans are innately more violent than other Americans or that they have a natural propensity for forming gangs.
I am arguing
1) that American gun violence which is excessive relative to the rest of the developed world is more than anything else attributable to gang violence
2) that gang violence and existence of gangs in the first place is a symptom of people being unable to get what they want from life through participation in legal and legitimate society, either because they are excluded from it or because there just isn't one around.
3) that in America this typically, but not exclusively, but probably most visibly happens to black Americans in large cities, where they have been historically boxed into certain neighborhoods through (reverse) red-lining and block-busting and discriminated against in labor market. It had happened to other groups before and the response was similar. There was a time when Irish, Italian and Jewish gangs were very common. These groups have been since (almost) entirely integrated/assimilated and their gangs have disappeared or gone semi-legit and abandoned the in-your-face street presence and the violence that comes with it. It's not about the size of the city per se, just like it isn't about race per se. Baton Rouge or Birmingham have just ~ 200k yet have a much bigger crime problem than New York with almost 10 million population.
New York is actually a poster child for its huge crime rates drop that happened in the 90s and early 2000s, dropping to even under 10% of what they had been in late 70s and 80s (without any significant demographic change, if anything % of whites decreased in favor of Hispanics) and the current homicide rate of 3.x is incredibly low for an American city that big and that diverse. (for reference, London has 1.x and Baltimore 55 and Chicago, the third largest US city with a similar demographic profile to NY, has 24) Still the violent crime that keeps happening in New York, happens disproportionately in black neighborhoods, i.e. those with most gang presence. Apparently, shocking as it may sound, African-Americans are still not fully integrated into the American society.
I agree that the overall availability makes it all the more easier to steal guns or pull some sort of scams where a front buys legal weapons and then they get "unfortunately" and "inexplicably" stolen.
Alaska is curious. I wish I had an explanation, but I have no idea what's going on up there.
I am arguing
1) that American gun violence which is excessive relative to the rest of the developed world is more than anything else attributable to gang violence
2) that gang violence and existence of gangs in the first place is a symptom of people being unable to get what they want from life through participation in legal and legitimate society, either because they are excluded from it or because there just isn't one around.
3) that in America this typically, but not exclusively, but probably most visibly happens to black Americans in large cities, where they have been historically boxed into certain neighborhoods through (reverse) red-lining and block-busting and discriminated against in labor market. It had happened to other groups before and the response was similar. There was a time when Irish, Italian and Jewish gangs were very common. These groups have been since (almost) entirely integrated/assimilated and their gangs have disappeared or gone semi-legit and abandoned the in-your-face street presence and the violence that comes with it. It's not about the size of the city per se, just like it isn't about race per se. Baton Rouge or Birmingham have just ~ 200k yet have a much bigger crime problem than New York with almost 10 million population.
New York is actually a poster child for its huge crime rates drop that happened in the 90s and early 2000s, dropping to even under 10% of what they had been in late 70s and 80s (without any significant demographic change, if anything % of whites decreased in favor of Hispanics) and the current homicide rate of 3.x is incredibly low for an American city that big and that diverse. (for reference, London has 1.x and Baltimore 55 and Chicago, the third largest US city with a similar demographic profile to NY, has 24) Still the violent crime that keeps happening in New York, happens disproportionately in black neighborhoods, i.e. those with most gang presence. Apparently, shocking as it may sound, African-Americans are still not fully integrated into the American society.
I agree that the overall availability makes it all the more easier to steal guns or pull some sort of scams where a front buys legal weapons and then they get "unfortunately" and "inexplicably" stolen.
Alaska is curious. I wish I had an explanation, but I have no idea what's going on up there.
I suspect that suicides play a big role here. It is a known problem for northern countries, Scandinavian countries in Europe have it too (and I would imagine that the American health care system can only make it worse in Alaska).
Even with 10-day waiting period, suicide by gun risk surges after purchase
The risk of suicide by firearm jumps 100-fold during the first month after purchasing a handgun, even if the buyer is subject to a 10-day waiting period, according to results from the largest long-term analysis of gun ownership in the United States.
www.reuters.com
Dallas, but I will move to Austin in a couple of months. So yeah I guess I am smack in the middle of gunville
