School shooters and shooter drills and statistics

Flavio Bartmann points to this opinion piece by John Tierney, “Sorrow and Precaution, Not Hysteria,” subtitled, “School shootings are horrific and heartbreaking, but they remain statistically rare,” in which Tierney argues that “Children do need to be better protected from criminals, and there might be ways to make schools safer, but students don’t need the active-shooter drills now conducted in over 95 percent of the nation’s schools . . .”

I agree with Tierney here. These shooter drills seem ridiculous, and indeed I could well believe that shooter drills could actually increase the rate of shootings by making the whole thing seem so exciting. I guess any such effect would be very small, though, given that kids can already play all those shooter video games.

I have just one more thought, which has to do with the distinction between school shootings as a danger (in a statistical sense) and school shootings as a source of evidence (in a statistical sense).

When I was a kid, there were not school shootings like there are today. Something has changed. More guns, more dangerous guns, more willingness to use them, whatever it is, there’s been a change. I think it makes sense to be concerned about school shootings, even if “the annual odds that an American child will die in a mass shooting at school are nearly 10 million to 1, about the odds of being killed by lightning or of dying in an earthquake,” because it’s something new and scary. Now, you might want to argue that, given the ready availability of high-powered guns, school shootings are inevitable and so there’s no point in worrying about them, or you might even argue that the positive benefits of weapons proliferation outweigh the costs of kids dying in school shootings, but in any case I think it’s legitimate to be concerned that these shootings are happening at all.

Again, though, I agree with Tierney that absolute rates matter. We should be much more concerned about everyday child abuse, which is happening all over the place even while it is trivialized by some entertainers and figures in the news.

115 thoughts on “School shooters and shooter drills and statistics

  1. More guns, more dangerous guns, more willingness to use them, whatever it is, there’s been a change.

    Antidepressants? I’ve personally seen the delusion and rage those can trigger in a friend. Families should probably keep a close eye on anyone taking those, and of course keep them away from weapons. It is not a trivial decision to start taking those drugs, it can ruin your life.

  2. The actual current risk of dying or being injured in a school shooting vs other risks is certainly relevant to many policy issues. But the current rate is still limited by it being data at a point in time. As you suggest, these things were even rarer in the past. Is there a trend towards this increasing? If so, would it be appropriate to take actions now before the risk becomes much greater? I don’t assume I know the answer to that question, but I believe that question is important. It could well be more efficient to spend resources preventing falls in playgrounds than trying to prevent school shootings based on today’s data, but the policy question is essentially dynamic in nature which limits the role played by today’s statistics.

  3. There are lots of precautions against lightning strikes (lightning rods, not allowed in the pool, kids told not to play outside during a storm) and earthquakes (building codes, etc), so it makes sense to have countermeasures against school shootings. Better anti-gun laws would be a lot more effective than active shooter drills, however.

    • I think the earthquakes are not a good comparison, because the deaths from earthquakes are very far from being both temporally and spatially equidistributed. As far as I know, there are no earthquake related building codes here in Michigan. The purpose of lightening rods is, IMHO, to prevent damage to structures and subsequent collapse and fire.

      • Three earthquakes this year: https://earthquaketrack.com/p/united-states/michigan/recent
        Yet Michigan uses the international building code which has earthquake risk rating for different places and corresponding different standards for construction.
        Presumably fire and building collapse are risks to people.

        So we do all kinds of things to reduce risk, but based on risk and the level of harm but also the effectiveness of the prevention measure and whether it does more harm than good.

  4. ““the annual odds that an American child will die in a mass shooting at school are nearly 10 million to 1, about the odds of being killed by lightning or of dying in an earthquake”

    Never quite understood the above argument. The externalities of a shooting event–or any other terror event–are also pretty darn relevant. Entire communities are impacted to various degrees. Less so for lightning strikes. In addition to the event rate, we also need to consider the number of people impacted, their resulting quality-of-life, and the duration of the impact.

    • exactly. By a purely probabilistic point of view, I guess 9/11 was no big deal either. After all, 200x more people die every year from Heart Disease than did in 9/11!

      Terror, by its very definition, is an “irrational”–but inarguably human–response to these sorts of attacks. Every kid who’s gone to school in the past 20 years has spent some time thinking about what they’d do if they heard gunshots down the hallway. I know I personally always look for the nearest exit at concert halls because of the ISIS Paris shootings too.

      Though from a purely probabilistic point of view, I definitely agree with you too that this argument could be extended to downplaying any event governed by a Poisson process, which we ignore at our peril.

    • I think another distinction is that the shootings seem preventable. Or at least it seems they should be. That’s primarily what makes mitigation seem more salient as an issue.

  5. Is there any good quality research on school shootings, or even murder rates more generally?

    I haven’t searched for this for a few years, but everything I did find on this topic was badly analysed on dodgy data and dodgy modelling to support a pre-conceived opinion (which comes down to “its because of guns” or “its because there aren’t enough guns”). Maybe some of these answers are obvious to Americans or gun owners (I am neither), but usually there is any mixture of these points and questions being completely ignored.

    * What is a school shooting? Its clear that someone walking into a school with a gun and shooting a bunch of 15 years olds is, but I’ve seen people include anything that happens outside a school at any time – in some cases including people the middle of the night on a Saturday but on the same street as a school (which is obviously closed). Depending on how far a net you cast, this can affect the results enormously.
    * Assuming that its violence happening because its a school rather than violence that just so happens to take place in a school, and the perpetrator could have shot the victim anywhere but found school most convenient (i.e. is the school the target or is it a particular person in the school). There is also some selection bias here, because there can’t be many places in America where nobody near you has a gun and if you’ve already decided to kill a bunch of people then a school is the obvious place to do it and not get hurt.
    * Just modelling the output against one predictor, which can usually be explained by a few causes. The neighbourhoods with higher gun ownership rates have a higher general murder rate – this can be explained by people seeing more violent crime, buying a gun to protect themselves, and then the violence escalating to murders OR being around guns makes people more violent (or maybe a bit of both).
    * What motivates people to do this? Is it suicide where they think they might as well take some people with them, gang related, general mental health conditions?
    * No testing or consideration of whether their chosen intervention, like the drills or more restrictive gun laws, will actually help.

    I also think that people frame it as an ethical problem, decide it has an easy answer and then extend that easy answer to the other parts. Its unethical to walk into a school and shoot a bunch of unarmed children, but it doesn’t automatically follow that understanding why it happens or preventing it is easy.

    • Its good to know that decades ago the US banned organizations which take federal funds from researching firearms violence. So its no surprise that what research does happen in the USA is usually partisan. I won’t say any more.

        • “But in 1996, Congress passed an amendment to the Omnibus Consolidated Appropriations Bill. The bill modification, commonly known as the Dickey Amendment, prohibited the use of federal funds to “advocate or promote gun control,” leading to the elimination of all CDC funding to conduct firearm-related research — having a lasting impact still limiting what we know today about gun violence.”

          This gives away the bias evident here. Studying gun violence can be done without promoting gun control. This is just an excuse. The piece is transparently wrong.

          There is a lot of work over the years by John Lott. I think his early work when he was a professor was peer reviewed. If you look online however, you will see a vast smear campaign against him by the media. This is why most people don’t want to publish anything on this subject. You know you can’t win no matter how the research turns out.

        • dpy6629: researchers in the USA are so scared that they will be punished under this law that in practice they avoid all research on firearms violence which could have policy implications. So most of the research that does happen in the USA is done by advocacy organizations.

          Some state governments also chose not to collect data which would be useful for assessing firearms violence.

        • dpy6629
          Here we go again. This time I will not engage further with you – but since you mention Lott and the ever-present conspiracy against all views you hold,
          https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/02/05/justin-grimmer-vs-the-hoover-institution-commenters/
          Lott’s work was one of the central pieces addressed in the discussed study. Yes, Lott has quite a reputation. What you see as “a lot of work” and early work which was “peer reviewed” doesn’t impress me much. I guess since he published a lot of work, we should excuse the errors, which should be excused because naturally someone who publishes a lot will make lots of errors. What you see as a “smear campaign” I see as the research community holding its members to some kind of standards. Before anyone accepts Lott’s work as evidence, they would be well advised to look into some of that smear campaign.

        • Dale, I meant the smear campaign in the media and by activist organizations such as Media Matters. I haven’t followed Lott in quite a while and it’s irrelevant to my life. But his body of work kind of contradicts somewhat the claim that there isn’t much research out there. There should be a lot more of course.

          There is a lot that can be done such as hardening schools, hiring security guards, arming those teachers who are already trained gun owners, etc.

    • Good point, we need more research. It’s such a politicized topic, no one wants to get slimed or even canceled for doing a good study.

      Just anecdotes but it has been pointed out that several of the recent school shooters were also heavy marijuana users. There is plenty of evidence from Europe that in young men and boys, habitual use leads to mental health problems. This fact has not really been reported much by the US media.

      It’s also true that depression and mental illness are rising rapidly among young people, especially young women. In the current climate where imaginary problems are dealt with and real problems denied, this is not being dealt with.

      I also think its true that gun free zones are where these people do their crimes because they know no one will immediately shoot them before they can do much damage. There are quite a few cases where lawful gun owners have taken out mass shooters quickly. In the vast majority of America, i.e., outside New York and California, you would be surprised at how many people carry guns for self defense and are well trained in how to be effective in stopping bad guys.

      • I wager you would be surprised how many of those people would be ineffective or worse in the vast majority of situations. It’s hard enough for law enforcement officers who train for this stuff professionally!! Did you watch any of the body camera footage from Nashville or the interview with the officer who took down the shooter? He was obviously in a post traumatic state still AND had performed heroically and accurately. This isn’t something your average joe/Jane is equipped to deal with.

        • Law enforcement officers are generally looked down on by gun enthusiasts because they’re objectively terrible shots. Police officers at gun ranges routinely perform well below avg in terms of accuracy and speed. They have a lot to do, and training for gun battles is a small part of it. The vast majority of police officers never draw their weapon much less fire it on the job outside training. The training they tend to get is something like firing 100 rounds at a range once a year. There are at least several million american gun enthusiasts who fire 100-500 rounds a *week* at their local tactical shooting range (ie. with barricades and targets behind partial cover and etc etc). In general citizens perform substantially better than police officers in these situations, also because they know they don’t have qualified immunity. Citizens have an easier job too, it’s not “attack the attacker” it’s “defend from cover”. When citizens are involved in defensive shootings, they generally end quickly and with much fewer shots fired than police and fewer stray bullets causing casualties. There are reports on defensive gun use regularly posted to r/dgu https://www.reddit.com/r/dgu/

      • Yes, I agree that most people won’t be very good with self-defense of any kind. But you would be surprised at how many gun owners train regularly and are very proficient. Often times criminals are too stoned or lazy to train. Equipment makes a difference. Providing state of the art equipment might give the good guys an advantage.

      • Another thing to bear in mind is that those officers were at a tactical disadvantage. They had to clear the school without necessarily knowing where the assailant was located. A teacher who locks his classroom door has a big tactical advantage. The assailant must come through the door and the teacher can hide behind a desk and rest the firearm on the top. Makes a huge difference in accuracy. The first thing you learn in firearms training is do not try to clear your house if there is a breakin. Wait in your room and hide behind your bed so you can see the top of the stairs. Have a plan so everyone in the family knows what to do. These things don’t take a lot of time to think through or to train people to do.

  6. When I say mass shootings in the following, I am referring to cases when a perpetrator goes to a public place, like a school, and shoots a large number of people without a direct motive connecting the victim to the perpetrator.

    In general, I have trouble thinking of explanations that explain both of these two seeming paradoxes?

    1. Why have these mass shootings increased simultaneously with a decrease in general violent crime including gun crime?
    2. Why is it localized to the United States and maybe one or two other nations?

    • Gun homicides (by definition, a “crime”) have increased over the past 20 years, so I’m not sure I agree with point #1. Point #2 is hotly debated, of course, by it’s hard to ignore the gun ownership rates and lack of regulations in the US relative to other nations (some other countries have very high gun ownership rates, but appear to have much more stringent regulations concerning the sale, storage, use, etc.). I’m sure some people will provide a variety of sources regarding the data, but I guess I don’t really see any paradox here.

        • On that graph, homicides look like they decreased until around 2000, leveled off from 2000-2013 and have been increasing since. I wouldn’t characterize that as gun crime decreasing (of course, this is just homicides, not all gun crime).

        • Also, I have analyzed data from the Gun Violence Archive (which seems to have the best data that I have seen) – limited by the fact that the data starts with 2014 – and gun incidents (both accidental and non-accidental) increased from 2014 through 2017. I haven’t updated the data since, but the Pew data would certainly suggest that it has increased since 2017.

        • On that graph, homicides look like they decreased until around 2000, leveled off from 2000-2013 and have been increasing since.

          I don’t think you can really tell, it shows ~1/100k fluctuations without any uncertainty and is “age-adjusted”. So for all we know homicides did the opposite and its an age adjustment artifact. Actually, I wonder how much covid messed with the standard pop.

        • somebody
          Interesting database – new to me. And, some of the worst graphical displays I’ve ever seen! (love those pie charts)

    • The important thing to realize is that school shootings are a form of suicide more than they are violent crime. In other words, the motivation is similar to suicide, the perpetrators are people with suicidal thoughts, the risk factors are similar. People who study the perpetrators or interview the perpetrators family consistently see suicide + lashing out at a society that makes them suicidal is what these things are.

      Examples of studies and discussions about this https://jaapl.org/content/jaapl/36/4/544.full.pdf

      https://www.mprnews.org/story/2023/04/06/how-reframing-mass-shootings-as-suicide-could-help-prevent-them

      https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/suicide-prevention-could-prevent-mass-shootings/

      In general violent crime increases dramatically (exponentially) with increasing income inequality and decreasing economic welfare (GDP/capita). On the other hand, suicide is affected by different social issues. In fact, increasing income inequality can sometimes lead to lowered suicide, perhaps this relates to career growth prospects (younger people will have lower income, but if they have growth prospects will eventually have higher income at later stages in life). The overall result is that there’s an optimum level of income inequality that minimizes crime + suicide, which is approximately similar to what you see in many countries in Europe… GINI index about 0.3 to 0.35 or so. The US has income inequality in the 0.45 type range. Also US income inequality doesn’t seem to be related to growth in income prospects through life, as most of the poorer half of the country stagnate in wages throughout their life. Growth only comes for upper income groups.

      Then add in other issues related to bad outcomes among poor people or young people in the US, and you have a recipe for despair.

      School shooting rates linearly correlate extremely well with male suicide rates in the US. Male suicide rates have been trending upwards for 20 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_in_the_United_States

  7. “These shooter drills seem ridiculous, and indeed I could well believe that shooter drills could actually increase the rate of shootings by making the whole thing seem so exciting”

    I… seriously doubt this.

    I don’t care much for the lock-down drills either, though, as far as I can tell, far more school children have been killed recently in shootings than in, say, school building fires (which, even when they happen and lead to emergency calls seem to pretty modest), but people don’t seem to get upset about still having fire drills.

    • Agreed, except for your point about “I…seriously doubt this.” I can easily believe that the attention on school shootings might inspire (strange word for it) some kids to think more about bringing and using guns in school than if there was less media attention on this.

      • To outsiders, maybe, I could be convinced. But it seemed like Andrew’s implication was that it would seem exciting to the kids involved. My experience is that, as long as they’ve become aware of what the drills are for, this is not an exciting thing for them. Of course, I’m drawing conclusions from my own biased sample (while commenting on a stats blog no less), so, who knows?

        • Its only going to affect the people who are bullied or ignored and want revenge and to be the centre of attention or the person with all the power for a few minutes, or who are suffering from other mental health conditions with no other outlet. If those drills make the shooter seem special and make the moment exhilarating compared to a boring life where you are trodden on by everyone then it will have an impact on a small rate.

          School shootings in the US are still very rare – 46 shootings in 2022 from 115,000 schools – so to account for half of them, drills only need to tip 23 people over the edge in a country with millions of schoolchildren.

  8. I have some statistical evidence to judge which areas are more likely to get lighting or earthquakes than the others. As for school shootings (mass or targeted), I have no statistical evidence to judge which schools (or even school districts) are more likely to experience those shootings. However, even if I could make the judgement, that alone wouldn’t decide to which school I send my 6th grader.

    When I was a high school exchange student in San Diego (1981-1982), there was a shooting at the school’s parking lot. A student in one gang group shot and killed a student in the other gang group. The school had multiple gang groups by race-nationality, and they were battling in many ways, e.g., two guys opposing on the long open corridor and gesturing against each other (a bit like a distant dance battle with obscene gestures). In my young mind full of violent imagination (from some classic Westerns before Street Fighter), the shooting wasn’t surprising as a reality, though it was shocking and scary personally. There were no school assemblies or trainings afterwards. In fact, I think the school managed to bury it as a non-school incident or something. To be honest, this event didn’t affect my mental, emotional, or physical wellbeing for the school year. Meanwhile, I was super happily surprised when I learned one of the students got accepted by MIT! From the same school in the same year! She might have come across Andrew while she was at MIT…

  9. I’m far from convinced school shootings reflect something about greater availability of guns. Indeed, it doesn’t seem like mass school shootings are particularly correlated with gun crime in an area.

    Another explanation is that there is more opportunity for social alienation (for kids and adults). That with fewer stay at home parents, more divorce etc.

  10. My concern about paying attention to school shootings is that it seems to focus attention on the wrong problem. If you look at gun deaths in the US it’s almost all handguns (95% with a few more percent by shotguns and hunting rifles). But school shootings often push focus on things like assault rifles (and it’s not even clear these bans even help 2ith school shootings).

    • I agree. It’s all part of the standard idiotic syllogism:
      1. Something must be done.
      2. This is something we can do.
      3. There we must do this.

      Interestingly enough, (2) has proven problematic without any change in the devotion to the syllogism.

    • Yes Peter, focusing on “assault” rifles which no one can define is a distraction. Non-assault guns are just as deadly and often use more powerful rounds to boot.

  11. School shootings mostly involve semi-automatic rifles with big magazines, and these weren’t available when I was young. But, that was when the NRA was mostly concerned with gun safety and people thought the 2nd Amendment had to do with militias.

    • The federal government sold the M1 carbine to huge numbers of people in the US through the mail from the 1950s onwards. They cost less than an AR-15 inflation adjusted.

  12. School shootings, wrong place/misidentification shootings, road rage shootings, birthday celebration shootings, high school party shootings, mass shootings….
    The list goes on. All small numbers individually, but in the aggregate? Suicides remain the biggest category, even compared with the aggregate. And the causes are certainly not guns, at least not solely guns since somebody has to pull the trigger (unless its a movie set, apparently).

    But it is hard to ignore the mass availability of guns as a contributing factor to all of these. Sure media attention exaggerates what the data says, but there is data (try the Gun Violence Archive) and it hardly diminishes the role of guns as a contributing factor. No, correlation is not causation, but in this case the data is supplemented by a physical mechanism. When you get infuriated, it is easier to kill people with a gun in your hand than many other methods of violence.

    • It’s much harder to get firearms now compared to say 1950’s to 1970’s. You could order a surplus M1 carbine from the US govt through the mail with no background check in 1960 and hundreds of thousands or millions of people did. People in the 50’s and 60’s would carry their rifles to school for shooting competitions, some of them on the NY subway if I remember correctly.

      The idea it is so much easier to get guns now than in the past is really not the case. Nor is it correct that the guns are more deadly. Handguns in 9mm are still the main gun used to commit crimes. The US M1911 semiautomatic handgun was designed in … get this… the year 1911. Semi-auto handguns have been around in large numbers continuously and with large magazines available, for over 100 years. The Virginia Tech shooting was carried out with 2 handguns, and was one of the worst school shootings on record, top 2 or 3 I think.

      Total number of firearms in civilian hands is extremely weakly related to violent gun crime rate when looked at across states in the US, if at all. Suicide on the other hand, yes, if you own a gun and have suicidal thoughts thats a bad combination. Unfortunately in many states they’ve actually made it a felony to do the right thing, which would be to give your firearms to a trusted friend to hold. in CA, NJ, MA, etc that’s pretty much felony straight to jail for example.

      After decades of abusive policies pressing down on the economic welfare of poor groups in the US is it so hard to understand that suicide is way up and school shootings correlate basically perfectly with male suicide and are themselves a form of suicide? After decades of failed drug wars is it so hard to understand that violent gun crime in the US is primarily drug turf wars?

      The US has a social welfare issue, and the outlet valve here in the US is violence committed with guns. Reduce the social welfare problems and the violence will go down.

    • Anonymous is right about this. Purchasing a firearm is a complex process and you have to pass a Federal background check. How did Hunter Biden pass? He clearly lied on the form about being a habitual user of illegal drugs. In many jurisdictions there are other restrictions. In Washington, the local police/sheriff has to agree to any semi-automatic weapons purchase. You also have to complete a training course. The only exception is private transactions within a state which I think are largely unregulated.

      • Yes, it was easier to get a gun when I was young — I bought a deer rifle in 1953, when I was 12, with no questions asked. However, private transactions within a state includes sales at gun shows, where a lot of guns get sold. And, yes, there have been semi-automatic hunting rifles for a long time — the guy who taught me to hunt had one that was old back then — but neither they nor M1s carried that many cartridges, and they were slow to reload; not like an assault rifle.

        • M1 came with a 15 round magazine standard, and a 30 round magazine was definitely available. You could buy 20+ round extended magazines for semiauto handguns in the 20s and 30’s no problem, especially in 38 super auto caliber. The Thompson “tommy gun” invented in 1918 had a standard 20 or 30 round box mag, or 50 or 100 round drum mag.

          The vast majority of public shootings involve people pulling a trigger on average less than once every 2 or 3 seconds, and it takes 2-3 seconds to change a magazine in pretty much any semiauto.

          Gary Kleck analyzes the average rate of fire and number of casualties here https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1525107116674926 and concludes that large capacity vs many 10 round magazines isn’t an issue that hinders or helps these perpetrators. The only case that would really qualify as different was the Las Vegas shooting.

          In terms of number of shots fired, most public shootings could be committed with 2 revolvers and no reloads (ie. 12 shots). The number of deaths is virtually independent of the type of firearm used, the histogram of number of casualties looks the same whether plotted as “had handgun” or “had rifle” or “had shotgun”. 93% of all incidents had less than 34 casualties which is the number of rounds you could fire from two glock 17 pistols without reloading at all. (Based on FBI data)

          The outliers exist of course, but there are outliers like Virginia Tech (entirely handguns) as well as shootings like Parkland or wherever committed with rifles.

          All of these public shootings with rifles could be committed with a Mini-14 which has never been subject to any of the ban attempts and is legal out of the box in CA or other “ban” states with no restrictions because it doesn’t have a “pistol grip” or a “forward pistol grip” or “adjustable stock” or any of those “features” which are transparently targeting the one kind of rifle and not the other.

          The thing that’s different isn’t the availability of AR-15s etc, it’s that the Columbine shooters explicitly attempted to and succeeded in creating a “scoreboard”. Their efforts originally, with bombs, were supposed to kill 300+ people so that they would forever be the “high score”. The sick twisted people who follow them and the scoring system and who get enormous quantities of media play create a self perpetuating situation, just like suicides and serial killings in the 70’s and 80’s. These people follow a “script”, and the script has been all over the media, and one part of it is to use a semi-auto rifle which definitely enhances the “terror” factor.

        • My Remington 7400 hunting rifle is semi-automatic, with a piston action that I think is more reliable than direct gas impingement and has a 10 round magazine, a classic pistol grip integrated into the wooden stock. You can get them in a wide range of calibers ranging from 243 up to 7mm Rem mag. Changing magazines is no harder than for an AR type platform. Pump actions can be as rapid fire as a semi-auto for someone who has trained with one.

          Two things I would admit that has gotten a lot more deadly is ammunition and aiming devices. Much of this has been driven by the US military. Once the Army makes a big order, there is a big proliferation for the civilian market. Ammo is a lot more deadly than it was 60 years ago.

    • anonymous: A hundred years ago, typical civilian handguns in the USA were revolvers and single-stack semi-automatics in something like .32 ACP. Revolvers are hard to reload quickly under stress. The Mausers, Lugers, and Colt Governments were relatively rare (and had smaller ammunition capacity than modern handguns). The few handguns with a capacity of more than 10 rounds were bulky, rare, and often unreliable (and mostly not very powerful).

      Today the most common US civilian handguns are double-stack semi-automatics in 9 mm Parabellum with twice the ammunition capacity shooting rounds with several times the energy. They often have accessories which make them more accurate.

      • I would argue modern most modern self-defense firearms are much less deadly than the standby’s of 80 years ago.

        The most common caliber in 1911 pistols was and is 45 ACP which is much more powerful and deadly than the 9 mm that is by far the most common round for modern semiautomatic pistols. 9 mm is used currently because the ammo is lighter and the guns are lighter and easier to conceal. Look, its no fun to get hit by a 9 mm slug, but its a cake walk compared to a modern hunting round or a 45 ACP.

        As I mentioned above, semi-automatic hunting rifles have been around for at least 60 years and are chambered in very powerful rounds designed to kill quickly even a large moose. So called “assault rifles” are most often chambered in 223 Remington or 308 Winchester, the former typically has a 55 grain bullet, 3 times lighter than a typical 30-06 round. Muzzle velocity is also lower for the typical AR round, so typical energy’s for an AR are 4 times lower than typical hunting rounds. The only advantage of the typical AR is ease of attaching auxilliary aids such as lights, lasers, etc. and the lighter recoil. They are a lot less deadly though.

        • dpy6629: the cult of the .45 ACP gets people who write for gun magazines very excited, but I don’t know any professional firearms user outside the USA who takes it seriously. Moreover, its use in the early 20th century was very limited outside the military and government service even in the USA: if someone went to a gun shop in Paris or Cleveland and wanted a handgun for self defense, the dealers would try to set them up with a Browning or a revolver. After all, the Colt Government was big and heavy and expensive!

          And many 9 mm Parabellum rounds today have more powerful loadings and heavier bullets than the original cartridge.

          If you want to learn more, Hans-Christian Vortisch can point you to the books you should read.

        • I agree with Vagans, the 9mm is plenty effective as a handgun particularly with current loads.

          Sean is right that historically people couldn’t afford the somewhat fancier larger semi-autos but they were available, and so were pump action shotguns and lever action rifles and lots of other kinds of firearms suitable for carrying out public shootings. For a long time the most deadly *school* shooting was the UT Austin tower shooting perpetrated by a man with primarily a bolt action rifle in 1966. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_by_death_toll

          it’s still listed as the 4th worst. The highest casualty count still is the virginia tech event perpetrated with a single 9mm pistol and a single 22LR pistol. VT is also the 3rd worst “public shooting”.

          Technology has not been a major factor in school shootings. the major factor is social issues and the “scoreboard” in essence created by the extreme psychopath that was one of the Columbine killers who wanted to “glorify” himself as the worst mass killer ever (fortunately his bombs failed to work) https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2004/04/at-last-we-know-why-the-columbine-killers-did-it.html

          As Fivethirtyeight wrote, we know how to prevent school shootings… deal with issues that lead people to be suicidal, and deal with the “media contagion” which is well known in suicides in general and particularly in mass public shooting type suicides.

          https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/weve-known-how-to-prevent-a-school-shooting-for-more-than-20-years/

    • > The idea it is so much easier to get guns now than in the past is really not the case.

      That are the rates of guns in the hands of citizens in those two time periods?

      • There’s no registry of guns generally so it’s hard to know precisely how many guns there are but it’s widely thought to be between 1 and 2 guns per person in the US since maybe as early as 1776 continuously. Surveys quoted here show a relatively steady percentage of households having at least one gun, maybe even a slow decline though likely more a decline in honest answers than decline in actual ownership.

        https://www.pewpewtactical.com/gun-ownership-through-the-years/

        Ownership of the AR-15 particularly has increased a bunch since the patent expired in 1977 and then mfg ramped up production during the so called “ban” which was probably the most effective advertising campaign ever. At no time during the “ban” were ar-15s illegal, they just needed different grips basically. That period drove a huge amount of technology development specifically for that rifle as well as other modern modular rifles and carbines. Once the ban ended the interest driven by the ban and by the large number of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars who had experience with them made it the most popular rifle style in the US.

        • You seem very authoritative about all of this. A quick Google returned the following – although I have no idea about the accuracy:

          > According to the Congressional Research Service, there are roughly twice as many guns per capita in the United States as there were in 1968: more than 300 million guns in all. Gun sales have increased in recent years.Jan 5, 2016

          https://www.npr.org/2016/01/05/462017461/guns-in-america-by-the-numbers#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Congressional%20Research,have%20increased%20in%20recent%20years.

          Given the difficult of measuring “ownership” given the large number of people who have guns illegally, it does seem to me that rates of manufacture (and understanding that the rates of guns per capita reflect a cumulative figure to some extent) is probably am indicative measure.

          Of course, that doesn’t address the rates of gun possession over times spans going back hundreds of yeas – but that seems to me like a bit of a red herring anyway as so many other societal factors have changed its like introducing many other confounders to examine the causal relationship between number of guns and fun violence.

        • What seems clear (as clear as it can get, given the number of illegal guns and increasing reluctance to answer surveys honestly) are a few salient “facts”
          Households with guns has been relatively stable over time (at least since WWII), with some periods of sizable changes (decreases in the 1990s associated with the assault ban) and increases in the 1970s.
          Gun ownership per capita has increased significantly, perhaps threefold in that time frame.
          Gun purchases (legal, and probably illegal) have increased markedly in the past 5 years.
          Gun ownership varies (and always has) a lot geographically (by state, by urban/rural, by income, by race)
          Gun violence also varies a log ( by the same dimensions)
          We can quibble about exact dates and certainly about causes, but these stylized facts seem clear to me. By the way, I grew up in New York City in the 1950s and never saw a gun anywhere, certainly not in public and certainly not on the subways.

          I think these facts make it especially difficult to analyze the relationship between gun ownership and gun violence. I certainly think that any analysis based on averages is quite susceptible to presenting a misleading picture. This is a ripe setting for forking paths, exacerbated by the absence of good data cited by a number of people. I don’t have a clear picture – but I am suspicious of anyone that thinks they do.

        • It is very hard to measure gun ownership in the US. One particular issue is that it is now possible without too much sophistication to print the frame of a Glock clone or even a 1911 clone, or to print the “lower receiver” of an AR-15. By ATF rulings, it is the lower receiver/frame that constitutes the gun. If you print a lower receiver you have manufactured a gun, even though it’s just a lump of plastic. You would have to buy a barrel and slide and firing pin and trigger mechanism and etc to make it a functional gun. A lot of people have bought legally lower receivers for AR 15 rifles. They cost $50-100 and count as a gun, but you can’t fire anything out of them until you buy the parts to assemble it into a functioning weapon. There are also so called “80%” lowers. These are forged aluminum lowers for AR-15 rifles that haven’t had all the holes drilled. So you can in your garage shop use a drill press to drill several holes in precise locations and it’s now a gun. Once more it’s not functional until you assemble the additional parts such as barrel/bolt carrier group, upper receiver, and all the trigger assembly and stock and etc.

          The popularity of these things is very high because they let people get a customized result. For example there are many different calibers available for AR-15 rifles, the 5.56 NATO is the standard, but there are calibers like 6.5Grendel or .50Beowulf both of which have hunting uses and there are calibers like 300 blackout that have lower velocity and are better at being suppressed (to reduce noise) etc. Suppressors are desirable for enthusiasts because they reduce risk of hearing loss, particularly among people who fire hundreds of rounds a month in competitions etc.

          In addition to the manufactured / printed issue, there’s the inherited issue. A Japanese Arisaka brought home by a marine in WWII after the war was never registered, noone ever knew it existed, and it’s still functional. How many of those are there? Or sporterized Mauser bolt actions, or over under shotguns? Or Winchester lever action rifles from the 1800s etc etc.

          What we know is that about 30-50% of households have firearms, how many is much harder to figure out, but is more or less irrelevant. A collector with 48 is no more dangerous than a utilitarian guy with one pistol and one rifle. You can’t wield 48 guns. So households being fairly constant is more of a relevant statistic

          All this is to say that the uncertainty in the number of guns in the US is high, but it’s a lot.

        • Dale. Australia has a relatively strict licensing scheme. They did a big forced gun buyout in 1996. After that crime increased for several years, until their economic miracle kicked in and they tripled their PPP GDP/Capita between 2002-2010 or so. Throughout that whole time registered guns increased. Bayesian dynamic time series models I’ve fit show a clear strong negative coefficient for derivative wrt time of GDP/Capita and GDP per Capita. It shows a less clear but definitely strongly biased negative relationship between guns and violent crime (crime decreased while guns increased) and gun owner count. Also derivatives of those things. In particular the rapid buyback decreasing guns was associated with a relatively steep increase in homicide and assault if there’s causation presumably it’s due to perception of less risk on the part of perpetrators.

          Meanwhile, a few years before the ban gun suicides began declining, and there was really no change in that trend after the ban, however while gun suicide was declining hanging suicide was about 1-1 displacing it. The sum of gun and hanging suicide actually increased through time after the ban. Suicide overall decreased in Australia but it is entirely due to a long term trend in reduction of suicide by “gas” which is probably ovens and sitting in a garage with the motor running. After the gun buyback etc there was zero reason to believe it affected suicide.

          The message is pretty clear in the Australia data, crime is caused by economic conditions more than by presence or absence of firearms, but to the extent firearms matter, increasing them seems to reduce crime in the presence of economic prosperity. The pattern of crime increasing exponentially with Gini coefficient is probably the single most robust relationship in all of social sciences and holds across the entire world. Since there’s a clear mechanism how it would work it would be stupid not to think this is causal.

          The US has a definitive economic nonprosperity problem associated with wide variations in outcomes. Our GINI coefficient of .4-.45 or so is likely the deciding factor for why we have much more crime than Canada with Gini of about 0.33. In Europe the Czech republic has a constitutional right to firearms for self defense, they have many fewer guns per Capita but many more concealed weapon carriers than a place like California. Their Gini coefficient is about 0.26, dramatically lowering the expected violent crime. Indeed, they are a very low violent crime country as expected (log homicide rate about 0.0) Austria has more guns than they do, Gini around 0.3, much lower violent crime than the US (log rate about -0.25)

          Brazil has massively higher Gini coefficient of around 0.5 fewer guns than the US by a lot, (about .08 per Capita instead of 1.2) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country and massively higher homicide death rate

          Log homicide rates in the USA are about 1.8 vs about 3 for BRA. All this from graphs I made so numbers just read off the graph approximately

          Gini data is available at the world bank. If I remember correctly my international homicide data is from the UN, suicide data from the WHO and Australia specific data from AU govt.

        • Also, here’s the thing I was thinking of that I read. I’m not a big fan of NY Post, and it’s got one quote from John Lott who I think of as mostly a hack, but I don’t think this is historically inaccurate and it’s backed up by photographs and statements from NY Dept of Ed.

          https://nypost.com/2018/03/31/when-toting-guns-in-high-school-was-cool/

          NY high school kids used to participate in shooting competitions using rifles. It looks like the timeframe was probably more like 1920’s and 1930’s but they’ve got a picture of “the rifle club” posing with rifles in 1947 out of the yearbook for Tottenville HS on Staten Island. Some of the schools had on-site shooting ranges, one on Staten Island, one in Brooklyn, and one in Queens at least. And shooting clubs in schools were a thing where kids would travel to other schools that had ranges to compete. Somehow there was no rash of kids shooting up schools even though they literally brought rifles to school with them in NYC not rural Missouri or West Texas or something.

        • A number of questions/observations/disagreements:
          I can buy the relationship between income inequality and gun violence, but that doesn’t mean that guns don’t contribute to the problem, only that they are not the fundamental cause of the problem. Second, a household with 48 guns cannot use all (or most) of them at once, but that does not mean they are not more dangerous than a household with 1 gun. The question is whether the 48 gun household reveals something else about that household that might be associated with gun violence (I don’t claim to know what that relationship is, but I don’t think we can just dismiss it on the grounds that you can’t use all those guns at once). Third, I grew up in NYC in the 50s, and nobody in my high school had a gun that anybody could see, and we did not have a rifle club. That might have been true in the 20s and 30s, but I’m not sure how relevant that is.

          Fourth, and this is what I get stuck on. Today’s news: “After a Texas family asked a neighbor to stop shooting a gun in his yard because their baby was trying to sleep, he came over and killed 5 people with an AR-15 style rifle, police say.” Further, he was drunk and had a history of shooting from his property. It is a single anecdote (n=1) although there are such cases every day. Clearly this is someone we don’t think should have had a gun or be permitted to use it while drunk and on his neighbors. But what do we attribute it to? Economic deprivation, mental illness, alcohol, all of the above? And what policy would have prevented this? If this person did not have a gun, would these 5 people now be dead? From those of you that believe that more guns are associated with less gun violence, please explain how we can reduce such incidents – or provide evidence that the lives saved by the ubiquity of guns are greater than the lives lost in such incidents. I hear that argument often, but have trouble believing it and haven’t seen evidence to convince me.

          What I can say is that I do not feel safer by having so many people with guns, and I don’t feel safer with concealed carry, and I would not feel like schools are safer if teachers were trained and equipped with guns. Maybe I have too many cognitive biases getting in my way, but there are few feelings I have that are stronger than these.

        • Dale, there are few regression lines flatter than log homicide total vs guns per Capita after controlling for Gini coefficient and GDP/Capita. The guns per Capita coefficient is 0.18 with stderr 0.14 in my simple regression, across international data available.

          There’s no question that drunk guy you mention shouldn’t have had a firearm, and that these questions about how to regulate firearms are good questions. I do think in a world of more income equality and better economic outcomes there are fewer people drunk at home shooting guns.

          48 may be a lot of guns and it is for sure, but it’s not hard to see how perfectly innocent noncriminal activities could lead to that if you understand firearms users.

          A 9mm pistol for personal protection, a second 9mm that is a different size, a rifle for use in home defense and to control feral hogs breeding out of control on a couple acres, a double barreled shotgun to compete in sporting clays competitions, a 22lr rifle for cheap target practice, a pump action shotgun because they’re versatile and inexpensive… Now we are at what 6 firearms. Now suppose the owners father was a collector and they inherited an additional 6, we are at 12. Now suppose it’s a couple and the partner is in a similar situation prior to them meeting, we are at 24 for a household. Nothing untoward here just different guns do different things and they last over 100 years and people can be reluctant to sell them. Add in someone with an interest in gunsmithing and customization and it’d be easy to add another 4-10 customized firearms for special purposes like long range shooting, or cowboy action shooting competitions or collectors who like antiques or historical firearms. These are outliers but they’re not in any way dangerous people. There are also some “prepping for ww3 or civil war 2” types and those guys are likely way more dangerous. So it depends a lot on why they have their large collections and I’d guess the nonthreatening examples are way more common.

          I’d guess the people who own 1-4 firearms are both more common and contain most of the marginal/dangerous people too. If you’re collecting a bunch of firearms it’s likely because you have a pretty good income, time to use and customize them, and relatively few reasons to be angry and or drunk. People with big collections also more likely to have a safe and do proper storage.

          The narrative “it’s the guns” is basically unhelpful because at the margin we have much much better results reducing inequality and reducing things that lead to despair and soforth than we do reducing the number of guns in a saturated environment. Like by orders of magnitude, reduced Gini seems to decrease violence EXPONENTIALLY if you can adjust something at the margin adjusting the exponent in exp(x) is almost always the right one to adjust.

        • Dale, Think of the school teachers key role in school safety from a tactical viewpoint. In the Tennessee school incident, the police were at a big tactical disadvantage. They had to clear the school and may not have known where the shooter was located. A teacher in a classroom knows that any shooter will enter through the door giving him a big tactical advantage. If he hides behind a desk with the gun resting on the top of the desk he’s almost certain to be able to stop the bad guy when he enters, probably before the assailant can fire his gun. The bad guy will not know where the people in the classroom are hiding at first.

          Of course this assumes the teachers who are armed are mentally stable and not prone to violence themselves. I would argue for screening teachers carefully before arming them. And they would need mandatory training from law enforcement.

        • Dale:

          It’s obvious that if there were no guns available there would be less gun violence and it’s obvious that the family you referred to would still be alive.

          “It is a single anecdote (n=1) although there are such cases every day. ”

          No, there aren’t. One anecdote does not justify one myth.

          They might still be alive, too, if they had called the police about his shooting in his front yard instead of confronting a drunk and mentally ill person, or if the police or municipality had made or enforced appropriate laws to deal with the situation.

          A several years ago a person informed me that another person living at their house had a pistol. The family has had trouble in the past and I used to help them out. But after I heard about the gun, I just stopped. I don’t confront people with guns. It’s not worth it.

          The problem in the US is that the 2nd amendment, like it or not, simply doesn’t allow the guns to be banned. I agree with much of your sentiment and mostly share your distaste for guns, but I also view the 2nd amendment as an important check on government power.

        • Anonymous –

          > The narrative “it’s the guns” is basically unhelpful because at the margin we have much much better results reducing inequality and reducing things that lead to despair and soforth than we do reducing the number of guns in a saturated environment

          Stated authoritatively, and imo as an article of faith.

          I’ve seen some good cross-national analysis for years that have pointed to income inequality as being associated with gun violence when there’s control for guns per capita – and I certainly get the logic.

          But methnks your certainty is too strong. Looking cross-narionally, there are so many confounding factors. Your certainty seems unscientific to me.

          That’s not in justification of exteme certainty in the other direction that the number of guns explains the high rate of gun violence in the US, when the statistical support is lacking.

          IMO, this is another situation of decision-making in the face of uncertainty.

          In such a circumstance, I think it becomes a matter of high damage function, perhaps low probability risk mitigation.

          The high levels of gun violence have just enormous cost. If we look at countries with extensive regulation and low rates of gun violence, are they really suffering some cost as a result?

          I don’t see ANY evidence of such. For all the statistical analysis where you can argue that high rates of guns per capita don’t explain high rates of gun violence, can you point to countries with low rates of guns per capita explain high rates of violence? Per capita gun rates may not explain high rates of violence, and sure there are violent countries with low rates of guns per capita – but the arguments of causation strikes me as confirmation bias.

          Perhaps a discussion of “costs” from gun regulation is worthwhile, and clearly getting per capita gun rates in this country dramatically lower would be a tall task given the starting point. But isn’t there a chance of proportional benefit from a relative reduction? Could we really say that the costs would be prohibitive?

          Unfortunately, the issue is politicized and corrupted by the money-backed influence of the gun industry – so our chances of finding out are probably nil.

        • Anonymous
          Lots of guessing in your response. I’d certainly rather reduce inequality than ban guns in order to reduce gun violence. You say we’d have much better results reducing inequality – show me the evidence. First, tell me how we can do that. Next show me that we can pull it off. Then show me how it reduces gun violence. Actually I’ll agree with the last “what if” but the first 2 seem incredibly difficult to achieve, at least in the US. How do you think inequality got where it is today?

          To be clear: I am not saying guns should be outlawed (and haven’t said that in anything I’ve posted). But this resistance to doing anything about gun availability, ownership, and use makes no sense to me. It won’t solve the problem so we shouldn’t do anything strikes me as illogical. Similarly, since other policies (that we either don’t know how to do or are unwilling to do, such as reducing inequality) might be more effective than something like increasing background checks, we shouldn’t do that latter – equally illogical.

          And, to chipmunk – “One anecdote does not justify one myth.”
          Of course, it doesn’t. But unless you’ve been under a rock, today’s incident is a single anecdote, but one that is repeated almost every day. The 6 year old who shot their teacher, the mass shooting at the high school party in Alabama, the mistaken driveway shooting, the wrong doorbell shooting, ………………. (all single incidents, almost an oxymoron)

        • Dale, I just think guns are already quite heavily regulated. The ATF sworn form you have to fill out for interstate purchases asks you if you are a felon, if you are under indictment, have every been adjudged mentally unsound, were dishonorably discharged from the military, are an alien, use illegal drugs, etc., etc. Lying on this form is a felony that only corrupt Biden family members can get away with.

          In Washington state any semi-automatic firearm requires the consent of local law enforcement.

          The ATF is supposed to be enforcing this. That’s when they are not too busy investigating Catholics who like the Latin Rite.

          Exactly how would you change this system?

        • Dale and Joshua,

          Of course no one should just take my word for it. I’m putting out there the results that I’ve got from months of relatively intense data analysis last year, together with a lifetime of following this issue in general. Unfortunately this is a crazily political debate and generally people who participate are smeared and badly abused online, so that’s just the way it is at the moment.

          One thing we should be clear about, the history of 1969-today *is* the history of trying a LOT of gun control. We have background checks that the FBI does, we have bans on various types of weapons, we have states with licensing requirements and where you have to have approval from local law enforcement to purchase weapons and soforth. In the 1950’s John Williams elsewhere in this post says he walked into a store at age 12 and bought a rifle, probably with cash. No-one blinked an eye. So restrictions are way up… gun crime is NOT way down.

          The other thing to be aware of is that multiple consecutive court cases have rapidly nullified many existing or new laws. There is no chance that the CA assault weapons ban will remain on the books, it was the first of its kind in 1989 and the model for the federal ban, it was unconstitutional then, and it has been ruled unconstitutional already by Judge Benitez in about 2019, then went to 9th circuit, put on hold, and remanded to Benitez after the Bruen decision last June. Benitez ordered additional briefing, it was clear that the state didn’t have a leg to stand on, and he is busy writing his ruling. There are about 3 or 4 other cases before him, such as magazine capacity limits and such. There are also similar cases before other judges throughout the country, including Maryland, Illinois, New Jersey, Mass, etc. There has already been a preliminary injunction placed on the CA pistol roster for its unconstitutional “microstamping” requirement. The state really didn’t even try to argue that one. A preliminary injunction was granted yesterday on the Illinois assault weapons ban because it was decided the state was “unlikely” to be able to meet its burden of proof that the law was constitutional. There are about 1000 of these cases out there right now. Whether you like the ideas of these laws or not, they are not going to be able to stay on the books.

          I personally am in favor of for example a swiss style background check system open to everyone. What you basically do is go to a website and apply for a background check using your personal info. Then the check happens and issues you a link that you can go to which gives minimal identifying info about you and whether your check passed or not. You can give that to a firearms dealer or a person-to-person transfer if that’s legal in your state, and they can check that before doing the transfer. This would be an excellent system that most people would use even in personal transfers, and wouldn’t run afoul of constitutionality. Such a thing is not even on the radar in most discussions. I also think enhancing funding for those checks and making consequences for organizations like local law enforcement or military MPs etc that fail to divulge information in a timely manner that would disqualify a purchaser are good ideas.

          I guess I’ve probably said about as much as I can helpfully say so far. Hopefully you and others reading the posts gain some perspective on the debate that is I think different from the usual positions. Hopefully you get the sense that there is a coherent way to try to address violence and gun violence in particular in the US which *does not* require passing laws that are sure to be ruled unconstitutional. It seems to me that’s a good thing! Hey, we tried a lot of gun control, it didn’t help much if at all, we are getting all those laws ripped off the books by court cases, but there’s another way and it’s not about the guns at all.

          Thanks for your time and for everyone keeping this discussion about as civil as I’ve ever seen on the internet.

        • Anonymous –

          This is problematic, imo:

          > Hey, we tried a lot of gun control, it didn’t help much if at all,…

          After

          >> So restrictions are way up… gun crime is NOT way down.

          So your statement was somewhat qualified (not MUCH at all, not WAY down).

          But still…we don’t actually know if the situation wouldn’t be worse absent those restrictions that have nmbeen in effect, and we we don’t no that DIFFERENT restrictions wouldn’t have a more clear-cut benefit.

          I don’t have any problem with you making your arguments and I sure can’t say that they’re obviously wrong. But here’s a level of certainty about the related causality that seems analytically problematic to me.

        • This is a response to your latest post (Anonymous):
          Since you keep referring to your extensive data analysis on this question, let me offer my own. I don’t claim this to be the final word, nor do I claim this to be an ideal analysis – my point is to make it clear that the picture is by no means clear from your extensive analysis. The data I looked at is the Gun Violence Archive for 2014-2017 (there is now more data, but I haven’t had the time to download and analyze it – but what I have covers 225,000 gun incidents, 111,000 gun injuries, and 57,000 gun deaths). I compared that gun violence data with gun ownership data by state – states avoid the myriad complexities with international comparisons (although there are still regulatory differences across states). Taking into account population and population density, there is a fairly strong correlation between the number of gun incidents, injuries, and deaths in relation to total guns owned. Certainly this is only correlation, not proof of causation and certainly this analysis is subject to thousands of forking paths. I am not claiming this analysis to be definitive, only that a reasonable first look at the data casts doubt on claims that there is no relationship between gun ownership and gun violence.

          I don’t think this is the place to debate the data analysis. I’m sure you can critique what I have done – indeed, I can critique it myself. I should certainly update my gun violence data, look more closely at the types of incidents, investigate more clearly the distribution of gun ownership within states, include other factors (age distribution, racial distribution, hunting prevalence, etc.). Like so many areas of statistics, it is possible (and probably expected) that a number of studies could be done on the same basic data and reach quite different conclusions. In addition, we have all the usual issues with data quality (the Archive data I have found to be of high quality, but certainly the gun ownership data is fraught with problems).

          My only point is that your claim

          “Of course no one should just take my word for it. I’m putting out there the results that I’ve got from months of relatively intense data analysis last year, together with a lifetime of following this issue in general”

          should not be interpreted as the final word on what the data shows.

        • Dale, I wish this topic weren’t so fraught with toxicity both online and off. So many people respond with anger and even threats. That’s what has kept me from making my info widely available.

          I wonder what source are you using for guns per Capita in the states? I looked at data related to FBI background checks. The problem is it gives you a potential estimate for the change in the last 20 years but nothing much about the baseline level from which to integrate. Also not all background checks are used for gun sales, so there’s some formula from a researcher that is recommended for converting background checks to estimated sales. I would have to look at what I found to find the reference.

          The gun violence archive is … Mixed. Not bad as a source of raw data. I focused on CDC homicide data. Obviously nonfatal shootings are also really important. Does gun violence archive list an incident in which a home invasion robbery was foiled by a homeowner shooting 4 intruders as a mass shooting? I’m pretty sure it would by their definition right?

          It’s also important to separately analyze say gun homicide and all homicide. This is particularly of interest when it comes to violence against women. Firearms are a huge potential equalizer for a woman being attacked by a much larger and stronger man. If a woman defending herself is listed as a “shooting event” rather than as say “defensive gun use” then that’s not a good situation to my way of thinking. Also if we exchange criminal homicide of a woman by a man beating her to death with justifiable homicide of a man by a woman defending herself the world is a better place even if it could be even better if men would stop doing those things in the first place.

          It’s been half a year now so I dont remember exactly but I think I grabbed the ACS data and calculated a Gini coefficient for each state. That’s very worthwhile to do.

          Also, it’s important to look at timeseries. Gun ownership numbers mostly increase through time, homicides go up and down. Gun purchases can follow trends in homicides giving an apparent correlation which is actually reverse causality: people buy guns when their region experiences more crime. That’s certainly what happened after the unrest in 2020. I definitely saw a lot of states where gun ownership went up for many years while homicides stayed flat or even went down, but then over the last few years homicides have gone up across many regions. It’s complicated as to the causes but it appears to be likely due to changes in policing, changes in economic conditions, changes in policy etc. Gun ownership rose in response. I should revisit that with a dynamic model.

          I don’t claim to have the one true answer, but my analysis is better than anything I’ve seen before, and I’ve looked. There are some truly awful analyses of the Australia data. Even the ones I’ve seen where they try to do a good job fail miserably because they work within the usual NHST testing of linear models of outcomes against covariates rather than a dynamic timeseries approach. My models predicted next year’s data from a linear difference equation based on current data and the result was strikingly good at even predicting fluctuations from year to year not just overall trends.

        • As I said, I don’t think this is an appropriate venue/way to debate the statistical studies – and I don’t have a study I am willing to defend at this point. I did include the Gini coefficient for each state and it did improve the model – it also strengthened the effect of gun ownership with gun incidents/injuries/killings. The Archive data is pretty good – and contains links to the media (no social media included) reports on each incident, so it is possible to mine that data further. That said, parsing the data sources on both gun violence and gun ownership could be an encyclopedia of the complexities associated with data quality.

          My point is solely to contest your statements of apparent certainty that the data suggests that there is no relationship, or an inverse relationship, between gun ownership and gun violence. I’m not saying you are wrong, but I’m not convinced.

        • I don’t think the state level is the way to view this. Using localities or counties would be a better way to analyze the data. Just anecdotally, we know big cities have much more crime than suburbs or rural areas but gun ownership is much lower in most big cities because they have strong gun laws and make it more difficult for law abiding citizens to buy a gun or to get a concealed carry permit.

        • Hi Dale, not trying to debate but would just like to know what sources you found for guns per Capita in US states, because I’d like to incorporate that data source in my own analyses. Thanks.

        • Yes, I’ve seen those. Both seem to be about prevalence in households, rather than number of guns. Both are of interest of course, but I’d expect prevalence in households to have more to do with crime than total gun count. If every current gun owning household suddenly decides the newest technology is worth upgrading to, and buys a new 9mm pistol for example, but they still had an older style pistol before… then risk has changed mostly negligibly. But if 20% of households have firearms and that goes up overnight to 80% it’s clearly indicative of some major changes in risk. By the time you’re at 100% obviously by definition of what it means to be 100% then every household with a psychopath or a criminal would have a gun. So they’re different but related things. I’ll take a look especially at RAND’s dataset since it goes back many years.

  13. IMO the situation is caused by:

    1) the US being constantly involved in wars, which popularizes and creates demand for weapons and “heroifies” them. Maybe Europe could carry it’s share of the load in foreign wars and share in the home-problems too? Just one more way the US carries the load.

    2) the relentless media hype and positive coverage of “shooters” – including the use of the word “shooter” to describe them, as though they are only characters in a video game. The incident in Louisville yet again proves that anyone committing mass murder will have their name and face splashed over the media for weeks afterward, their sobbing parents on TV and their warped manifestos and grievances discussed ad-nauseam

    3) the relentless social movement to disconnect people from responsibility for their own behavior, which gives everyone an excuse. It’s the availability of guns! It’s the social groups in high school! It’s the pressure of the job! It’s the mental illness! When, really, it’s none of these things. It’s just people who are so selfish and – frankly – stupid, that they think killing innocent people is worth it for the buzz they get out of it.

    Really what we should do from here on out is use every means possible to apprehend these people alive and put them through a relentless gauntlet of trials and media where they’re forced to face the consequences their actions in public and suffer the public scorn that comes with it. My guess is that having to face that would change the “morning after” picture in many potential shooters’ minds, from being dead and not having to face the consequences to being alive and forced to endure the consequences for a life time.

    • Mostly well said. I don’t see point 1 though as obvious. One could point to Switzerland and Israel where the public is often armed but where these crimes are rare.

    • 3) the relentless social movement to disconnect people from responsibility for their own behavior, which gives everyone an excuse. It’s the availability of guns! It’s the social groups in high school! It’s the pressure of the job! It’s the mental illness! When, really, it’s none of these things. It’s just people who are so selfish and – frankly – stupid, that they think killing innocent people is worth it for the buzz they get out of it.

      Really what we should do from here on out is use every means possible to apprehend these people alive and put them through a relentless gauntlet of trials and media where they’re forced to face the consequences their actions in public and suffer the public scorn that comes with it. My guess is that having to face that would change the “morning after” picture in many potential shooters’ minds, from being dead and not having to face the consequences to being alive and forced to endure the consequences for a life time.

      Armed gunmen are being shot by law enforcement or themselves because the goddamned snowflakes have made personal consequences too low.

      I don’t really have much of a take here, just commenting so more people read this incredible, incredible comment.

      “Mostly well said” – Haha!

      Oh jesus.

      • “Armed gunmen are being shot by law enforcement or themselves because the goddamned snowflakes have made personal consequences too low.”

        That’s your claim, not mine.

        It’s obvious that armed gunman are being shot by law enforcement because they pose an obvious and immediate threat to the public. But your so biased in your views and angry that I point out how your lack of knowledge frequently undermines your claims that you try to put these silly words in my mouth.

        • Since you apparently need it spelled out for you, your theory and proposal is ludicrous because:

          1. The consequences one faces for this behavior generally are and always has been death
          2. It was even more explicitly so in the past when the death penalty was legal almost everywhere
          3. Death has generally been considered to be the harshest consequence we can administer
          4. It’s beyond difficult to capture an armed gunman alive without increasing the risk of them shooting more people
          5. It’s nearly impossible to prevent an armed gunman from shooting themselves

          At no point did I even remotely suggest law enforcement should not take the armed gunmen down, one way or another. Not sure where that’s coming from, pretty interesting rant

        • “At no point did I even remotely suggest law enforcement should not take the armed gunmen down, one way or another. Not sure where that’s coming from, pretty interesting rant”

          Hey!! You lied about what I said, so I lied about what you said. Coming through yet? But I give you credit for your most recent comment since you did actually try to come up with some reasons for why you disagreed with my original comment.

          1) why do you think these people go on rampages when they know they’ll be killed in the end? Death isn’t a punishment to them. Its obviously part of the objective. It allows them to commit an atrocity and never face the suffering they caused. What if the news was three years of showing some poor loser sitting in cuffs and an orange jumpsuit during h/h trial facing the family of h/h victims? Do you think that would be appealing to someone who’s trying to commit suicide?

          2) lots of things are difficult but we learn how to do them anyway. How much memory did the Apollo computers have, something like 120kb? Yet we landed on the moon with that.

          3) Mass shooters are a very small proportion even of gun violence in the US.

          4) Overall, “gun violence” isn’t a national problem. It’s *overwhelmingly* a *black problem*. Despite being less than 14% of the US population, in 2020 blacks comprised 55% of murder victims – that’s nearly 4x their relative proportion of the population.

          Hey wait!!! Lets compare the arguments about legality / illegality of guns to the arguments about legality / illegality of drugs!

          Has making drugs illegal stopped people from dying of drug overdoses? Yet many people arguing that we must take away guns to stop the violence are the same people arguing just the opposite about drugs: they claim making them legal will make no one want to take them. Why doesn’t that work with guns?

          The arguments might be exact parallels except for one difference: unlike drugs, guns have a legitimate purpose: self defense.

        • Again, I’m going to suggest you read through your original comment because I’m pretty sure you forgot what this is all about in the first place again.

          What if the news was three years of showing some poor loser sitting in cuffs and an orange jumpsuit during h/h trial facing the family of h/h victims? Do you think that would be appealing to someone who’s trying to commit suicide?

          Well, first of all, many of them, particularly ones with manifestos, would love to be in the news regardless, and just want the attention. But what does that have to do with your weird rant about personal responsibility, and what does that have to do with things changing over time? Remember, the original point was about what’s changed, and you claimed to have a possible explanation. Being taken alive was even less likely in the past!

          lots of things are difficult but we learn how to do them anyway. How much memory did the Apollo computers have, something like 120kb? Yet we landed on the moon with that.

          Well, you’re the one who made the proposal. It’s already official policy to take them alive if possible. If feasibility doesn’t matter and we don’t need an actual plan, I can do way better than your suggestion; we should arrest them before they start shooting, since they already have a bunch of guns on school property.

          Mass shooters are a very small proportion even of gun violence in the US.

          Uh, yeah, but that’s the topic here. You were talking about it first, then I responded to you.

          Overall, “gun violence” isn’t a national problem. It’s *overwhelmingly* a *black problem*. Despite being less than 14% of the US population, in 2020 blacks comprised 55% of murder victims – that’s nearly 4x their relative proportion of the population.

          Uh, what does this have to do with anything? I kind of feel like you just wanted to say that.

          Nonetheless, I’m not sure you know what the word overwhelmingly means. Black people are disproportionately represented, but that does not make it overwhelmingly a black problem. If you cut the gun homicide rate in half (remove all black victims/perpetrators), it’s still dramatically higher than the other OECD countries (Western Europe, Australia, South Korea).

          Has making drugs illegal stopped people from dying of drug overdoses? Yet many people arguing that we must take away guns to stop the violence are the same people arguing just the opposite about drugs: they claim making them legal will make no one want to take them. Why doesn’t that work with guns?

          Well, I didn’t bring up gun control in this thread, or advocate it anywhere, so I don’t really know why you’re bringing it up. But nobody makes the claim that making them illegal will make no one want to take them, and if they do they’re an idiot. But the claim I usually see is the opposite; that making them illegal won’t make people not take them, because they’re addicted and they often start on drugs they’re legally prescribed.

          The arguments might be exact parallels except for one difference: unlike drugs, guns have a legitimate purpose: self defense.

          This is a dizzyingly stupid claim. What exactly do you think drugs are? What do you think fentanyl was invented for?

  14. I’m voting for the very significant increase in depression and suicidal ideation among young people. Most people don’t realize how dramatic the increase has been in recent years. It’s particularly troubling in young women.

  15. I agree with the general points made by others that gang disputes dominate gun crime, that there are underlying reasons why people try to kill themselves and others. But I’m going to go on somewhat of a tangent and discuss differences across countries rather than differences across time.

    Something that’s often missed in discussions of gun control is that guns are manufactured physical objects, with steel and lead, moving interchangeable parts, and chemicals. So guns need to be made in a factory with a long supply chain, and unlike with, say, drugs, such operations are difficult to conceal. If there weren’t millions of citizens buying guns legally, the factories could not make millions of guns for criminals. So a large population of illegal guns in the hands of criminals requires a large legal market for guns to launder from.

    My point is that responsible gun ownership, licensing requirements, and the like aside, the large base of legal gun ownership is a prerequisite for the volume of gun crime by non-legitimate gun owners. And this fact is borne out in cross national comparisons–in many countries that don’t share a land border with the United States, there are much fewer illegal guns available to gangsters, and low level gangsters don’t even carry guns, only knives. Notably in Japan, Shinzo Abe’s assassin even found it easier to create a makeshift weapon from tape and batteries than to buy a gun.

    Another point that’s missed is the high lethality of gun violence compared to knife crime. While it’s not exactly hard to kill someone with a knife, stabbings, as a matter of medical fact, are much more survivable than shootings. A knife goes in, it goes out, it hits something vital or it doesn’t. A bullet goes in at speed and the kinetic energy is traumatically absorbed by your body, ballooning outwards, the bullet potentially fragments, and the lead seeps into your bloodstream.

    https://penntoday.upenn.edu/news/survival-rates-similar-gunshot-stabbing-victims-whether-brought-hospital-police-or-ems-penn-med

    A third of patients with gunshot wounds (33.0 percent) died compared with 7.7 percent of patients with stab wounds.

    I still believe that there are root causes (gang violence, gang formation, mental health) that are independently actionable. And some places (e.g. Glasgow, Scotland circa mid 2000s) are capable of producing urban U.S. levels of fatal violent crime with only knives. But I cannot escape the conclusion that a drastic reduction in the size of the U.S. market for guns would probably result in a drastic reduction in violent crime fatalities. This is disturbing to someone with my general belief that people should be allowed to do what they want by default so long as they are not personally offending others’ rights, and that guns are super cool and badass.

    No this does not explain the differences across time, my only point is that pretending gun availability is not related to violent crime fatalities is unhelpful.

    • “So a large population of illegal guns in the hands of criminals requires a large legal market for guns to launder from.”

      Perhaps but in the real world, there will always be sources for criminals to get guns. Most countries on earth have firearms manufacturing, especially Russia and China who sell guns to many many other countries and organizations, some of them terrorists who would be more than willing to sell them to American gangs.

      • Yes the number will not go to zero. But because of the supply reduction and cost of smuggling, especially across multiple borders and overseas, the cost of acquiring guns will shoot up. Only high ranking enforcers, will have guns, and most minor disputes will be resolved with knives, resulting in fewer overall casualties and fewer uninvolved catching strays.

        • Certainly for the US, our border is completely open and the cost of smuggling anything is close to zero. We cannot even control narcotics smuggling and these drugs have no lawful or beneficial purpose. Firearms have legal and legitimate purposes. I don’t think the current status quo is going to change dramatically except that SCOTUS will continue to overrule laws like New York’s. Hopefully they will do that for Washington state. 27 states are now constitutional carry states.

    • It’s important to realize just how much you’d have to change the US gun ownership to bring it down to levels like Japan. There are something like 400M guns in the US, if not more, including 3D printed ones for example. There are something like 300k in Japan. So you’d have to confiscate 99.9% of them.

      • Yes, I don’t know if gun control like that is realistic. The toothpaste may be out of the tube; I just don’t like people pretending the guns have nothing to do with it. There exist countries with “violent cultures” with drug problems and robust streetfighting cultures, both organized and impromptu, but no guns, and it seems to work out pretty well for them by comparison.

        • It’s unrealistic, extremely so. It involves destroying something like 40% of the *worlds* firearms.

          my own feeling on how gun ownership affects thing is related to a saturation curve model. Let’s say there are around 1.2 guns per capita in the US. There are around say 15000 gun homicides a year in the US, suggesting there are on the order of 15k violent gun criminals in the US in any given year, out of 335M people (criminality rate around 4.5e-5 or 4.5 per 100k). Reduced access to guns will result in reduced gun homicides when those 15k people have difficulty finding a gun. Right now 0.35 households have a gun, if 0.01 households had a gun it would take ~ 100 breakins to find one to steal for example. Those households have on average more than 1 gun, maybe 3-4, so if you break in and find a gun you can arm 3-4 criminals. To reduce the per capita guns down to .01 households requires removing (1 – .01/.35) = 97% of the current households from having a gun. If you assume 335M/2 households or so, .01 of them have a gun, and 3 guns in those households (say one pistol one rifle one shotgun) you’re talking about taking the ~ 400M guns in the US and cutting them down to 5M or so. Or removing 99% of the guns in the US. There are around 5M guns sold in the US **EVERY YEAR** and you want to get it down to 5M total owned? Note that at 5M/335M = .015 per capita that’s still 5 times more than Japan which has .003 per capita according to the wikipedia data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country

          I could imagine cutting household gun ownership in half over decades by concerted political effort without starting Civil War 2. I can not imagine cutting household gun ownership by 99% without the bloodiest war this earth has seen in modern times. Can you imagine? How are you going to do that? First thing you’re going to have to do is repeal the 2nd Amendement, which will take 67% of the congress and 75% of states to ratify. That isn’t going to happen. Then, if you somehow subvert that by some underhanded means you’ve triggered a civil war and you can count on tens of millions of people dead within a couple years.

          Even if there were political will to repeal the 2A how would you carry out the removal?

          Once you start to think about it “if gun control like that is realistic” isn’t a question at all. The question might be something like, could you cut firearms ownership by half over the next 50 years? Yeah, you might be able to, but even doing that is almost guaranteed to be politically lopsided and primarily targeted at poor black people and liberal urban neighborhoods and such. The crazy right wing will be armed to the teeth. And it will have ZERO effect on availability to those criminals who by now are basically easily printing glock clones at home and adding in metal parts like barrels and slides which are virtually unregulated (treated as replacement/repair parts essentially). You can’t eliminate Glock factories without eliminating essentially police, military, and other state usage. So, no, it’s just not going to happen at all even close.

          In the last few of years, 2020-2023, there’s been a DRAMATIC swing in gun ownership demographics. It’s something close to half of firearms sold in 2020-2021 were to first time owners who are female, or black or other minorities

          https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-are-nearly-half-of-new-gun-buyers-study-finds-11631792761

          Almost every violent gun crime is committed by a male perpetrator. When I by hand went through and read and transcribed every event in the FBI “active shooter incident” PDF (a traumatic process let me tell you) it was essentially 100% male, something like 2 or 3 females I remember.

          Women are much more likely to be victims rather than perpetrators. There is a theory that owning a weapon in the home makes women more susceptible to violence. But this is because the weapon was almost always owned by an abusive male. Independent women with firearms are protecting themselves at rates that we haven’t seen before. The result is likely to make violence against women **harder** for men to perpetrate. We’ve already seen women defensive gun usage rise a fair amount. I don’t think anyone would say it would have been better if the woman hadn’t been armed in this incident https://www.wvnstv.com/digital-desk/whats-trending/charleston-police-woman-stops-gunman-at-party/ so we have to weigh reduced firearms by both the reduced chance for crime but also the reduced chance for defense. As pointed out above, you can read about defensive gun use multiple times daily at the reddit r/dgu subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/dgu/

          The cat was out of the bag easily back in World War One era. The proper way to think about this in my opinion is it’s not a gun problem, it’s a societal problem of violence, economics, mental health, and soforth. Stop making so many people want to commit suicide, and you’ll get way fewer school shootings. Stop making people live in oppressive poverty they can’t escape from because of poverty-trap type policies and monopolistic collusion and soforth, and they’ll do less crime.

        • It’s odd that you mention Japan, a country that is not comparable to the US in any significant way. They have a very homogenous very socially conservative culture, almost no immigration, and low crime rates.

  16. I looked up muzzle energy for some common rounds on Horandy’s web site. Muzzle energy is a good proxy for how damaging they are.

    9 mm Lugar is 281-380 ft. lbs. depending on load
    45ACP is 333-494 ft. lbs.
    357 magnum is 487-645 ft. lbs.
    w223 Remington is 1243-1430 ft. lbs. (most AR15’s are chambered in this round)
    308 Winchester is 2344-3054 ft. lbs. (Currently the military’s sniper round)
    30-06 Springfield is 2023-3210 ft. lbs. (This was the military infantry round for decades)
    338 Winchester Magnum is 3897-4077 ft. lbs.

    You can see there is a wide range of loads available but generally marksmanship (a difficult skill to acquire) and level of training are by far the biggest determinants of success in the field, not the type of gun or caliber of ammo.

  17. Anecdata: one of my grandparents ran a small store in a small town in Pennsylvania, circa 1900-1940. He owned one gun, a five-shot .32 caliber revolver. He never shot it at anyone as far as I know. That was the only gun I ever saw in my family, although one uncle (a dentist) liked to hunt and kept hunting dogs so he must have had shotguns but I never saw one when we visited. Another uncle owned a farm and had a CO2 pellet rifle for varmints but no actual guns that I ever saw. In my small-town experience, car crashes killed more people than guns. (There were no seatbelts when I was growing up.) One teenager killed his estranged girlfriend with a .22 rifle when they were juniors at my high school. He hid in a shack in some woods but was caught and sentenced to 20 years. There was also a deer-hunting accidental shooting that killed a man. So two gun deaths in a town of about 144 people (1960 census) over the 20 years I lived there.

    We watched Walter Cronkite every weeknight at 6 PM and I don’t recall hearing much about shootings except for the Kennedy assassination, and then Jack Ruby shooting Oswald. As mentioned above, it seems like hardly a month goes by without hearing about one now.

    My suggestion (worth less than you paid for it) would be to develop effective stun guns that work over a reasonable distance, say 30-40 meters, and are accurate and easy to use, with training, and won’t do permanent injury. Then offer some tax incentives or something for people to trade in regular guns for them. Make all kinds of different fancy versions of them to tempt gun collectors. Restrict police and security people to use only those stun guns. I envision a soft, blunt projectile which distributes impact force, with a small needle which transmits an anesthetic. The needle penetrates, the rest of the projectile does not. Probably not practical, but I can dream.

    • The stun gun idea might work but you must make sure they are as reliable as firearms, which are usually very very reliable. Firearms allow you to stand off further if needed. Trying to stop an attacker in a mall for example might require this. You don’t want to charge a crazy shooter in these cases to get close enough to stun him. If there are multiple bad guys you would need the stun gun to not take time to recharge etc.

      Growing up in small town America in the 1960’s almost every household had at least one gun. My Dad had a Remington pump action shotgun and a single shot 22. As a teenager I bought a semi-automatic 22 rifle and my brother and I used them quite a bit including several hours searching in vain for the elusive squirrel. No waiting period or back ground check for the 22 rifle. I think I was maybe 14 at the time. People are just wrong when they claim that firearms have gotten easier to get legally in the 21st Century. Obviously wrong and easy to find out too.

      What I think may be more true is that people are a lot wealthier today and can afford more and higher quality firearms and ammo. Modern ammo is often a lot deadlier than the standard cup and core lead bullets from the 1950’s era.

    • Also, Dad stored the shotgun (unloaded of course) in his closet with the ammo right next to it. No lock, trigger lock, etc. We stored the 22’s on a wooden gun rack in our bedroom that I built in shop class. No locks, etc. My oh my how times have changed.

      So far as I was aware very few people actually carried handguns on their person though.

  18. I grew up in the ‘burbs of a major western city in the late 70s. A kid from my elem school seriously injured himself while shooting at cars with a .22 from the top of a power pole. I think he was in 8th grade then. Another kid blew his brains out a few years later while trying to blow up a mailbox with a home-made bomb. Lots of people were into hunting. Highways roadsides in the national forest were parking lots on opening day. And today, if you go into the National Forest near the city anywhere that shooting is allowed, there’s a good chance you’ll hear gunfire.

    Among my in-laws from the rural part of the state, when I was growing up all men and boys hunted and owned firearms except my grandfather, but I’m sure he had owned rifles and shotguns in the past. I don’t think he hunted more than a few times, just socially, but he sold guns at his store (as well as hardware, appliances and groceries) and sent everyone in the family Remington calendars every year.

  19. BTW for Dale’s benefit the shooter in the Texas incident he brought up was an illegal migrant from Mexico who had been previously deported at least 3 times. He would have been ineligible to buy a firearm because he couldn’t pass the background check. Perhaps he brought his AR with him when he walked across the border from that paradise of Mexico, a wholly owned subsidiary of the cartels who specialize in bigger weapons like machine guns, etc. Or maybe he bought it from one of the cartel members who have come North to expand their turf.

    When we have an atmosphere of lawlessness, laws are simply ignored and not enforced. Gun laws are no exception.

  20. Do we can add less than two functioning neurons to: lack of intelligence, not knowing what they’re talking about, lying, etc., to David’s characterizations of those who disagee with him.

    It’s interesting how David’s thinking doesn’t differ across subject or blog. It’s always the same mixture of fundamental attribution error, confirmation bias, and dualistic Manicheaism

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