More Mass Shootings than Days in 2023
Some depressing stats.
Via NBC News: The U.S. has had at least 39 mass shootings in just 24 days so far this year, data shows
NPR this morning stated that the number of mass shootings in the US this year to date was “over forty” which stands to reason given that the chart above was for earlier this week.
Recognizing both the political barriers and public policy complexities surrounding this issue, it is simply alarming that we have insufficient desire to attempt to address this problem in any serious way. Instead, we are going in the opposite direction, such as the state of my residence making it legal to carrying a concealed weapon without a permit. That we treat firearms with less regulatory controls than we do automobiles is, well, tragically absurd.
I have also noted that, as usual, reporting on complex issues is just too simplistic. For example,
Those figures mark a historically quick start for mass shootings this year, with more mass shootings recorded so far this month than in any January over the past decade, according to the archive, which has kept records since 2014. This is despite Congress having passed the most sweeping federal gun control law in 30 years last year, enhancing background checks and encouraging states to pass so-called red flag laws, among other provisions.
Well, first “the most sweeping federal gun control law in 30 years” is still not all that sweeping. And second, it was passed “last year” meaning is it kind of early to assess impacts. But the real issue is simply that the laws that have been passed are anemic.
I find the reporting a problem because it makes it sounds like all efforts are in vain, which makes further attempts in the future harder to obtain because, well, what’s the point? I got a similar vibe from some reporting I heard on the California shootings, as they noted that that California has some of the toughest gun laws in the country, but without really any definition of how tough (or, perhaps, not so tough) those laws are, let alone the whole federalism issue (i.e., one state may have tougher laws than a neighboring state).
Of course, the truly depressing part of all of this is that there is an utter lack of national consensus that anything of substance should be done about this problem. (But at least Congress can have a fight over whether we should pay the bills we have already incurred, with people from the Thelma and Louise faction of the GOP being willing to dive the economy off a cliff by asking for things they do not understand. Governance!).
Why does this problem persist?
Humans are the only species that allows the weakest and dumbest amongst us to lead.
I thought an armed society was supposed to be a polite society?
Steve
@steve:
It is. After roughly 80% of the members of that society have been killed off.
@steve:
Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed. The proposition won’t be fairly tested as long as so many people still fail to carry a gun to go to Walgreens.
@steve: Where are all the good guys with guns?
Was reminded by some blogger this morning of the Onion headline: No Way to Stop this Says Only Nation Where It Occurs.
We’ve tried doing nothing for several decades, and now we’re all out of ideas….
Have all the right-wingers deserted us? Is there no one to assert that these aren’t really “mass shootings” because reasons? That some old lady defended her house with a gun? That the police in all these cases were allowed to be armed, as is Nancy Pelosi? That the only thing that can stop a bad six year old with a gun is a good six year old with a gun?
Are they getting demoralized? Or have they just figured out that their side is going to keep anything from ever stopping this, so they’re not wasting their digital breath?
@wr:
You know, I don’t know if I even saw an expression of thoughts and prayers.
@Sleeping Dog: Oh, I told my MAGA “Representative” Greg Steube that he was in my thoughts and prayers after he fell off his ladder.
Accepting the reality there is currently no possibility of getting meaningful gun laws passed, IMO a public service education campaign which focuses on the fact that having a firearm is statistically far more likely to ruin your life than it is to save it would be more effective than pointing to the mass shootings. The gun culture feeds on fear of others, particularly those who would “takeRgunz”.
@Tony W: I’ve got an idea! If we raise the death threshold for how we define mass shootings, the number will automatically go down. If we raise the threshold high enough, we can eliminate mass shootings altogether!
@wr:
Sure, fine.
This does use a definition that is not particularly useful. Specifically, there’s no idea of whether these are increasing or decreasing since they’ve only been measured for a few years (like all gun violence, I suspect they have been decreasing for the last three decades). It confounds drug deals gone wrong with what most of us think of a mass shooting — a spree killing like we had last week. I think we are better off, in general, focusing on murders full stop, which appear to be coming down again after their brief rise in 2020-2021. But that doesn’t stoke terror the way context-free stats do.
Another mass-shooting-gun-control post, how fun.
I’ll just ask the usual question:
What law or policy, had it been enacted, would have prevented any or all of these mass shootings?
@Andy: This, of course, a false question. It is like asking what part of the traffic code, if amended, would have prevented a specific traffic accident.
It is impossible to look at the rest of the world and then conclude that our gun laws are adequate if the goal is fewer deaths by firearms.
@Andy: If there were fewer guns, there would be fewer gun deaths.
If we required financial responsibility for the use of one’s weapons, there would be fewer irresponsibly stored guns, and fewer gun deaths.
If we required registration of every firearm in America, and mandatory reporting of any lost or stolen weapons, and mandatory confiscation of any unregistered weapons, there would be fewer guns in the hands of bad guys, and fewer gun deaths.
If we allowed red flag laws so that we can do welfare checks on people amassing large arsenals, there would be fewer nuts with multiple semi-automatic weapons, and fewer gun deaths.
There are multiple things we can do, none of which violate the spirit or text of the constitution – yet we refuse to do any of them.
@Steven L. Taylor:
It’s not a false question at all. If one thinks that there are legal and policy actions that would prevent or reduce the number of mass shootings, then one needs to evaluate whether – in fact – those legal and policy actions would prevent or reduce actual mass shootings. Hand-waving generalities about guns doesn’t come close to doing that.
The details matter, and analyzing mass shootings is essential to developing a policy to prevent or reduce them. So yes, it is like looking at a car accident or traffic code. If we see, for example, that a certain intersection has a lot of accidents and fatalities, we examine why that is, which may highlight specific measures to address that problem.
That is what needs to be done with mass shootings – they should be investigated more like NTSB airline crashes. You would need to determine exactly what happened and why to know if there was anything that could have been done to prevent it. Strangely, no one does this, especially the people who are convinced “common sense” gun control is the answer.
@Tony W:
Yes, those are all ideas that have been widely discussed. How many mass shootings would have been prevented if all those were in place?
And just to be clear, I’m not against further gun control measures, or even repealing the 2nd amendment if the country as a whole supports that – I’m pretty ambivalent about guns generally. But I think it’s entirely reasonable to demand some evidence that policy proposals have some efficacy in terms of their supposed goals.
@Andy:
However unrealistic it may be that such laws have any chance of being enacted here, the comparative lack of mass shootings in a large number of other nations that have strict gun laws is evidence.