Chaos in USA

[PHXPhlyer]

My two cents...
Half of gun violence with respect to mass shootings is due to gangs.
The other half seems to be to be related to mental illness, as seems to be the case with the shooter at Michigan State University last night. He was said to be suicidal and offed himself after shooting eight students.
If they don't do themselves in they seem to attempt "Suicide by cop".

PP

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

But, why so many gangs?

And, how does the mental illness argument explain the almost total lack of mass shootings before the 1980s?
Mental health diagnosis and care were a lot worse then.

The deepest underlying cause of gun violence?

22 shot in Chicago this weekend, 4 killed.

https://abc7chicago.com/chicago-shootin ... /12807537/

There are 33 schools in Chicago where not a single student is proficient in math. Not one.
I counted them myself. Seems like the journalist wasn't up to it

https://wirepoints.org/not-a-single-stu ... irepoints/

They probably don't even do physics. This is, I suspect, mainly why they are such bad shots, especially since most shootings are from less than 15 feet.

p.s. I'd love to know the justification for spending over $6 million per year on a school that has not one student proficient in either English or Math (and, presumably, nothing else either).

[John Hill]

What qualities and/or characteristics do all the American shooters have in common? There must be something that can be identified and addressed so as to effectively bear on this issue.

[boing]

The children run wild because there is a total lack of "at home" parental control, no school discipline and a culture of accepting no responsibility to gain an education. The whole system is based on raising spineless spoilt brats who are assured that whatever goes wrong in their life is always someone else's fault and they should find an obliging woke shoulder to cry on the owner of which will be only too happy to confirm that everything is societies fault. I know because we have a whole new generation of these kids in our extended relatives. Then we wonder why these kids can't cope when they hit the real World.

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[boing]

John,
I'm not going to use my time getting the numbers yet again but if you remove the suicides, gang activity and criminal on criminal acts from the count the US gun death rate is not inordinately out of line. The gun death rates are also basically an urban problem.

In 45 years in the US I have never had any close contact be killed by a gun, accidentally or otherwise. 15 miles away in downtown is very different, I would not go there at night without a darned good reason.

As a matter of interest the closest person I know of that was killed with a gun was a friend of a friend of mine who I had never met. He drove behind his local fire station, phoned the emergency number to tell them where he was and what he was doing and then shot himself in his car.

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[John Hill]

So, aside from suicides, gangs and criminal on criminal gun killings the gun death rate is not inordinately out of line. Hmmmmm, what about those school shootings we hear about?

[boing]

Numerically the school shootings add low numbers to the count. Any violent death is, of course, terrible but people are people and people under certain conditions, and the US supplies those conditions, do bad things. I think the US is probably beyond the stage where it can reform socially sufficiently to avoid future problems. Inequality in health care, worsening social responsibility, disregard of education etc. are all going to take their toll.


.

[John Hill]

What do you think about reports that guns are the leading cause of death among US children and teenagers?

[boing]

USA Facts report and NHTSA.

Firearm deaths include all deaths involving guns, such as homicide, suicide, and accidents. More people in the US die from suicide involving a firearm than homicides or accidents.

There were a total of 45,222 firearm deaths in the US in 2020, an increase of 14% or 5,155 firearm deaths from 2019.

NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020.

You find the rest of the facts for yourself but, clearly, if you subtract 30% off the firearms deaths to allow for suicide and gang violence then that would record 43,000 traffic related deaths and around 30,000 firearm deaths. Check the latest CDC data which for some reason is not presently available.

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[John Hill]

Nah, I do not care about subtracting anything, I am just saddened that more children and teenagers in the USA die a gun death than any other cause of death in that country.

[boing]

You have just repeated a generally discredited claim. Proof?

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[John Hill]

Just one example:-

FROM THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS| TECHNICAL REPORT| NOVEMBER 28 2022
Firearm-Related Injuries and Deaths in Children and Youth

Discredited by whom?

[boing]

The report you cite contains the following line.

Firearms are the leading cause of death in children and youth 0 to 24 years of age in the United States.

If you are going to allow 24 year olds to be called children then you include the whole range of gang-bangers, drug dealers and petty criminals in the community - no wonder the numbers are high.

Substantial disparities in firearm injuries and deaths exist by age, sex, race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation and gender identity and for deaths related to legal intervention.

Ah, so the numbers include those shot by police presumably in the commission of a crime.

And what do you know? This graph from the report shows negligible (although still too many) deaths below age 10, an increasing number between ages of 15 to 19 and a much higher rate for the 20 to 24 year olds Ahhh, Yes those 20 to 24 year old children !!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is a load of rubbish cherry-picked to prove a case for the easily convinced turnips.

[John Hill]

I wonder why the police find it necessary to shoot so many young people!

[boing]

Stupid question if I may say so - quite obviously it is because the perp. was armed and almost certainly did not get his weapon legally like the rest of us. The point, which you are trying to obscure, is that the people who are dying of gun violence are not "children' as the bleeding hearts would suggest by their misleading statistics but hardened criminals or drug users fighting each other or robbing innocent people to pay for their next dose. It is only my rough opinion but "children" are between 2 and 16, young people as you say are between 17 and 19 and anyone over that age is an adult in years of life even if they have the brains or imagination of an immature teenager and when you are an adult you pay the consequences for your actions.

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[John Hill]

Stupid question if I may say so - quite obviously it is because the perp. was armed and almost certainly did not get his weapon legally like the rest of us. .

So all these young(ish) scrotes have guns but I am sure you can argue that guns are not the principal factor in the cause of gun deaths of young, and youngish, americans.

You know the cause of your problem but you do not have the guts to face it.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

I looked at the cases in Baltimore of police killings, in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray.
It's not easy to investigate much of what goes on, no matter which "side" of the argument you may be on, as the records are not comprehensive and certainly not cross-referenced. I had to go through each case for a few years individually.
Essentially, in the wake of the prosecution of 6 police officers for Freddie's death, all of which resulted in Not Guilty verdicts or case dismissals, the police officers in Baltimore stopped all pro-active policing. The police shootings of young people have stopped. The shootings of young people by other young people jumped by 50% immediately, and have stayed there ever since. 95% of the victims are black. We don't know most of the perps, since the clearance rate is classified but widely estimated at under 25%, but those who are convicted are also 95% black.
In the cases I looked at, in almost all of them the victim was armed with a lethal weapon within lethal range, and had showed intent to use it. In over 2/3 of those cases, the victim had fired first. Even if one assumes that in every case where the police killed someone who was subsequently found not to have a weapon (this is the easiest stat to study) it was an illegal killing, the increased number of young people shot by other young people is about 400 times higher than the number of young people who might have been killed unlawfully by the police. That does not allow for victims of police killings where the victim disposed of a lethal weapon without the police knowing (there are videoed cases where this has happened), or where the victim was simulating a lethal weapon (say, by a weapon-like projection in a pocket, also video'ed cases of this), or where the victim ignored all police orders and reached for a place where a street weapon is normally concealed.

So, whatever you think of police killings in Baltimore, those young people are 400x worse off without the police.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

What qualities and/or characteristics do all the American shooters have in common?

1) They all live in States with the most restrictive gun laws.

The States where there have been zero mass killings have the least restrictive gun laws in the US, e.g. Wyoming, Vermont.

2) Almost exclusively, they shoot up places where there is a gun ban.

The Colorado 'Batman" movie shooter drove past 7 other cinemas and entered the only one in the area with a gun ban.

[John Hill]

Ha ha, you just cannot admit to the cause of the problems!

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

As usual, you give up on logical arguments because you've lost them, and resort to rhetoric.