America has a violence problem, not a gun violence problem.
There's no such thing as a gun violence problem. Either the violence is the problem and the method of intiating it is irrelevant, or you don't see violence as a problem.
I am confused... So you don't see a problem about allowing violent people to own guns? Don't you think that is the problem?
Lets say a violent person walks into a mall with a big sharp knife during the day and start attacking people. Lets say that person manages to attack 1 person per 2 minutes for 10 minutes (= to 5 people attacked).
Now lets say this violent man owns a firearm (let's say he owns a Colt M1911,
which is apparently the most popular handgun in the USA), he walks into a mall and starts shooting.
The Colt M1911 can have a 7 in standard-capacity magazine and let's assume he didn't chambered an extra one, so he can empty a clip as fast as he can press the trigger. Which would be an average of 2 shots per second (but that is if he just hold the gun still and keep shooting) so lets say he shots once per 3 seconds (it takes him 21 seconds to empty a clip [7x3=21] and in 1 minute he would be able to shoot 20 times [60 / 3 = 20]) so in 10 minutes he can shoot 200 times, but that is without counting the reload (remember he can only shoot 7 times before reload, which an average person can do in about 5 seconds without rushing, but let's assume that this person is so angry that he takes twice as long to reload, so 10 seconds).
So now we need to subtract those 10 seconds between each 7 shots, so he can unload, reload and start shooting again in 31 seconds (21 seconds to unload one clip and 10 seconds to reload), so in 10 minutes he could shoot a total of 19 times (60 / 31 = 1.93... [1.93 x 10 = 19.3]).
Now that is almost 4 times more potential victims in the same time (and I was quite generous with the times it takes that person to shoot and reload). There is the added benefit of not have to get close to a victim to be able to hit them with a handgun, there is also the benefit of people be more inclined to run than to try and disarm or pin the violent person if he/she is shooting a gun instead of stabbing people, etc.
Also this study shows that there is a higher chance of someone dying if they have been shot than if they were stabbed:
The study, published online ahead of print in the
Annals of Emergency Medicine, examined 4,122 patients taken to eight Level I and Level II adult trauma centers in Philadelphia between January 1, 2003 and December 31, 2007. Of these, 2,961 were transported by EMS and 1,161 by the police. The overall mortality rate was 27.4 percent. Just over three quarters (77.9 percent) of the victims suffered gunshot wounds, and just under a quarter (22.1 percent) suffered stab wounds. The majority of patients in both groups (84.1 percent) had signs of life on delivery to the hospital.
A third of patients with gunshot wounds (33.0 percent) died compared with 7.7 percent of patients with stab wounds.
Notice how that compares similar degrees of injury (Level I and Level II) of both stabbing patients and gunshot patients (so the excuse of "maybe the ones that got shot were in worst shape to begin with due to unknown factors") and still with gunshots a third of patients died while stabbing patients less than 1/10 died.
If the problem with the USA is the violence problem, then don't you think allowing those violent people legal access to firearms would just make the problem 4 times worst (as seen in my theoretical example at the beginning)?
Also there is the the saying "Those who kill others are people who get their guns illegally. So making it harder to acquire legal guns wouldn't do anything to reduce the problem".
Research now shows that far more frequently, perpetrators share one common thread. In
mass shootings, in gun homicide and particularly in much more common gun deaths, the killer is frequently, until that moment, a law-abiding firearm owner pulling the trigger on a
lawfully held gun.
You can read the rest of the article
here and it has all their sources linked.
There is also a NY Times article written last month that is quite interesting and compares the gun deaths of the USA with other countries:
This level of violence makes the United States an extreme outlier when measured against the experience of other advanced countries.
Around the world, those countries have substantially lower rates of deaths from gun homicide. In Germany, being murdered with a gun is as uncommon as being killed by a falling object in the United States. About two people out of every million are killed in a gun homicide. Gun homicides are just as rare in several other European countries, including the Netherlands and Austria. In the United States, two per million is roughly the death rate for hypothermia or plane crashes.
In Poland and England, only about one out of every million people die in gun homicides each year — about as often as an American dies in an agricultural accident or falling from a ladder. In Japan, where gun homicides are even rarer, the likelihood of dying this way is about the same as an American’s chance of being killed by lightning — roughly one in 10 million.
The rate of gun violence in the United States is not the highest in the world. In parts of Central America, Africa and the Middle East, the gun death rates are even higher — close to those from heart attacks and lung cancer in the United States. In neighboring Mexico, where a drug war rages, 122 people per million die in a gun homicide, a rate slightly higher than Americans’ death rate from pancreatic cancer. But the countries with those levels of gun violence are not like the United States in many other ways, including G.D.P., life expectancy and education. Among developed democracies, the United States is an outlier.
The full article can be found
here and has nice statistics and graphs comparing the info. it is quite interesting and since it is so recent it contains updated sources.
Another interesting article from last year contains a huge amount of information, and looks at gun ownership, deaths, attacks, etc and uses information from many studies and links to those too. You can find it
here.
Mother Jones
tracked and mapped shooting sprees over the three decades from 1982 to May of last year. They counted "at least 61 mass murders carried out with firearms across the country, with the killings unfolding in 30 states from Massachusetts to Hawaii," they found.
A
Congressional Research Service report published in 2013 counted 78 incidents over roughly the same period, in which 547 were killed. Definitions of mass shootings vary. The report excludes those for whom terrorist ideology or criminal profit was a motivation. The Mother Jones staff limited themselves to indiscriminate killings of at least four people in public places by lone shooters.
In most cases, the Mother Jones staff found, the killers had obtained their weapons legally:
Since they published their analysis, five people were killed in a shooting spree in Las Vegas that authorities said was driven by
anti-government views. In February, a man named Joseph Jesse Aldridge killed seven people in Texas County, Mo., including several of his relatives, before taking his own life. His motivations remain unclear.
What that article shows is actually a contradiction to the "The USA problem is a Violence Problem, not a gun problem".
Apparently the USA is getting less violent with time, but the shootings have been increasing with time:
A report published by the FBI last year, studying active shooting situations between 2000 and 2013, found that these kinds of incidents were happening more and more recently. The first seven years of the study found an average of 6.4 active shootings per year, while the last seven years of the study found that number jumped up to 16.4 incidents per year.
Active shooting incidents are defined by federal agencies as "an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area." (This is different from mass killings, which are episodes where three or more people are killed; while many active shooting incidents wind up being mass killings, more than half of the episodes in the FBI study did not meet that definition.)
Kieran Healy, a sociologist at Duke University, made this
graph of deaths due to assault in the United States and other developed countries. We are a clear outlier -- along with Estonia and Mexico. Yet this country is a far less violent place than it was 40 years ago, with the rate of deaths due to assault declining by roughly half.
As Healy writes, "The most striking features of the data are (1) how much more violent the U.S. is than other OECD countries (except possibly Estonia and Mexico, not shown here), and (2) the degree of change—and recently, decline—there has been in the U.S. time series considered by itself."
And it seems like more guns means more murders:
The Harvard Injury Control Research Center assessed the literature on guns and homicide and found that there's substantial evidence that indicates more guns means more murders.
This holds true whether you're looking at different countries or different states. Citations
here.
In 2011, economist Richard Florida
dove deep into the correlations between gun deaths and other kinds of social indicators. Some of what he found was, perhaps, unexpected: Higher populations, more stress, more immigrants, and more mental illness were not correlated with more deaths from gun violence. But one thing he found was, perhaps, perfectly predictable: States with tighter gun control laws appear to have fewer gun-related deaths. The disclaimer here is that correlation is not causation.
Another article from last month that goes over the gun statistics and numbers and stuff:
http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america
And another from this year too:
http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/01/worldwide-gun-control-policy/423711/
And there are many more that are easily found with any internet search.
After going over this data it is surprising how there are people who just close their eyes and ears and go "Guns are not the problem!"... Well the entire world statistics, the FBI reports, many independent studies, Europol reports, and many other sources seems to prove the opposite.
I think many people that think guns have nothing to do with shootings are thinking with their "heart" and not with their "head" because they are scared of losing something they like/love/enjoy and that overshadows anything else.
Also many people only see the numbers, they are faceless numbers, no empathy needed. But what if they knew some of those people who got killed by guns? What if people they care and love got shot by someone while just walking down the street? What if they took the time to meet and talk to some of the families and friends of gunshot victims. I bet many would change their opinion.
But no! Numbers means nothing and it is all political agenda or the big bad government wants to take the power from the people (as if a farmer or a group of 10 guys armed with their guns could stop the USA's army from doing anything anyway)...
