Lawyer dies after his hidden gun goes off during MRI scan - "A lawyer was accidentally shot by his own gun after he failed to remove it before going into hospital MRI scanning room. Leandro Mathias de Novaes took his mother for a scan at Laboratorio Cura in São Paulo, Brazil... The 40-year-old is said to have failed to tell hospital workers that he had a gun on him after being told to remove all metal objects before entering the scanning room. The magnetic field from the MRI scanner pulled the pro-gun lawyer’s weapon was pulled from his waistband and went off, shooting him in the tummy... As well as working as a lawyer, the victim also shared pro-gun content for his 12,000 followers on TikTok and Instagram."
Firearm availability and homicide rates across 26 high-income countries - "Across developed countries, where guns are more available, there are more homicides."
Weird. We're told that criminals will always be able to get guns so there's no point regulating them
Household Firearm Ownership Levels and Homicide Rates Across U.S. Regions and States, 1988-1997 - "in areas where household firearm ownership rates were higher, a disproportionately large number of people died from homicide"
So much for more guns, less crime
Firearm Availability and Homicide: A Review of the Literature - "The available evidence is quite consistent. The few case control studies suggest that households with firearms are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide. International cross-sectional studies of high-income countries find that in countries with more firearms, both men and women are at higher risk for homicide, particularly firearm homicide. The strongest evidence came from cross-sectional analyses of United States regions and States. In summation, places with higher levels of gun ownership are places with higher homicide rates. Most studies, cross sectional or time series, international or domestic, are consistent with the hypothesis that higher levels of gun prevalence substantially increase the homicide rate"
Is There a Link Between Mental Health and Mass Shootings? - "The reality is that people with mental illness account for a very small proportion of perpetrators of mass shootings in the U.S., says Ragy Girgis, MD, associate professor of clinical psychiatry in the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. In 2021, Dr. Girgis, an expert in severe mental illness, and colleagues from Columbia’s Center of Prevention and Evaluation authored the first report on mass shootings using the Columbia Mass Murder Database (CMMD), which examined the relationship between serious mental illness and mass shootings... The public tends to link serious mental illnesses, like schizophrenia or psychotic disorders, with violence and mass shootings. But serious mental illness—specifically psychosis—is not a key factor in most mass shootings or other types of mass murder. Approximately 5% of mass shootings are related to severe mental illness"
Highest murder rates in the U.S. - The most deadly cities - "Here are murder rates in 65 major U.S. cities (cities with greater than 100,000 residents) for 2019
1. St. Louis, Missouri
2. Baltimore, Maryland
3. Birmingham, Alabama
4. Detroit, Michigan
5. Dayton, Ohio
6. Baton Rouge, Louisiana
7. New Orleans, Louisiana
8. Kansas City, Missouri
9. Memphis, Tennessee
10. Cleveland, Ohio"
Gun nuts keep claiming that it's the cities with the strictest gun control which have the highest gun crime, which proves that gun control is useless. But Guns & Ammo rates these states (in terms of laxness for gun control): Missouri - 17, Maryland - 44, Alabama - 16, Michigan - 25, Ohio - 22, Louisiana - 26, Tennessee - 12. So we can see that it's not the states with the strictest gun control that have the cities with the highest murders
Meme - "Mental illness, culture, indifference, inhuamnity, fame, evil
The GUN MAGAZINE"
I interpret this as excuses gun nuts give for gun violence because they want to pretend the guns aren't the problem
State gun laws, gun ownership, and mass shootings in the US: cross sectional time series - "States with more permissive gun laws and greater gun ownership had higher rates of mass shootings, and a growing divide appears to be emerging between restrictive and permissive states."
One gun nut first claimed that the war on drugs explained most gun murders, then when I showed him that the murder rate had fallen since it started, claimed this showed more guns lead to fewer murders. When I presented him with data showing a correlation between gun ownership and gun homicides he claimed it was useless, since it included suicides, self-defence, justified police killings and accidents. Besides being provably wrong about suicides, he was pretending murder wasn't correlated with homicide. But anyway, I showed him this as well as the definition of homicide and he ignored this study and still insisted that suicides were in the homicide data
Firearm Ownership and Violent Crime in the U.S. An Ecologic Study - "The findings do not support the hypothesis that higher population firearm ownership rates reduce firearm-associated criminal perpetration. On the contrary, evidence shows that states with higher levels of firearm ownership have an increased risk for violent crimes perpetrated with a firearm. Public health stakeholders should consider the outcomes associated with private firearm ownership."
He had no cope for this
Waco siege - Wikipedia - "The Waco siege, also known as the Waco massacre, was the law enforcement siege of the compound that belonged to the religious cult Branch Davidians. It was carried out by the U.S. federal government, Texas state law enforcement, and the U.S. military, between February 28 and April 19, 1993. The Branch Davidians were led by David Koresh and were headquartered at Mount Carmel Center ranch in the community of Axtell, Texas, 13 miles (21 kilometers) northeast of Waco. Suspecting the group, who had licenses to manufacture and sell weapons, of stockpiling illegal weapons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) obtained a search warrant for the compound and arrest warrants for Koresh as well as a select few of the group's members. The incident began when the ATF attempted to serve a search and arrest warrant on the ranch"
Ruby Ridge - Wikipedia - "Ruby Ridge was the site of an eleven-day siege in 1992 in Boundary County, Idaho, near Naples. It began on August 21, when deputies of the United States Marshals Service (USMS) initiated action to apprehend and arrest Randy Weaver under a bench warrant after his failure to appear on firearms charges. Weaver refused to surrender, and members of his immediate family, and family friend Kevin Harris, resisted as well."
One pro-gun person who claimed all gun laws went against the second amendment claimed Waco and Ruby Ridge were examples of militas resisting a tyrannical government. How odd that the resistance only happened when there was a raid, rather than being pro-active. And how strange that there were only 2 examples despite decades of unconstitutional tyranny
The epidemiology of self-defense gun use: Evidence from the National Crime Victimization Surveys 2007–2011 - "Compared to other protective actions, the National Crime Victimization Surveys provide little evidence that SDGU is uniquely beneficial in reducing the likelihood of injury or property loss."
Some gun nuts object that this doesn't explicitly ask about defensive gun use. But I looked at the questionnaire, and it asked respondents to describe the incident. So presumably there's a conspiracy among respondents to suppress defensive gun use
Effects of Concealed-Carry Laws on Violent Crime - "There is supportive evidence that shall-issue concealed-carry laws may increase total and firearm homicides. Evidence for the effect of permitless-carry laws on total homicides is inconclusive. Evidence that shall-issue concealed-carry laws may increase violent crime is limited."
Some gun nuts claim that this doesn't matter, because freedom is scary. I hope their neighbours exercise their freedom to own nuclear bombs
Meme - "We don't dial 911 *rifle*
*Old woman clutches heart*
SORRY GRANDMA... *aims rifle*"
Meme - "GUNS AREN'T THE PROBLEM. PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM."
"THEN WHY DO YOU WANT THE PROBLEM TO HAVE GUNS?"
The effects of gun control on crime: Evidence from Brazil - "In 2003 Brazil enacted strict gun control legislation which banned the carrying of concealed weapons and made it much harder to buy a gun. The legislation also included the promise of a future referendum on prohibiting the sale of all firearms (which did not pass in the end). In this interview, Rodrigo Schneider discusses his work examining the effects of the legislation on crime and homicide. The most conservative estimates suggest a drop in gun-related homicides of 12.2% one year after the law came into effect, representing 4,400 lives spared in 2004. Robbery, which is often at gun point in Brazil, decreased by 15%"
Guns, Crime and Brazil’s Tumbling Murder Rate - WSJ - "John Lott Jr. suggests that loosening gun restrictions in Brazil has led to a precipitous drop in the murder rate. This headline and story imply a causative relationship between the Bolsonaro policy changes and the drop in homicides. Reforms made prior to President Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency (such as better law-enforcement coordination) are much more likely to be the cause of the decline in the past 20 years. In fact, the biggest declines in the murder rate occurred before Mr. Bolsonaro reached office. Research in Population Health Metrics persuasively finds that much of the decline before 2017 can be attributed to weapons-collections programs begun in 2003. The parts of the country that removed guns from the streets in these collection programs actually saw fewer firearms deaths. To suggest that dropping homicide rates from the past few years can be attributed to Mr. Bolsonaro’s gun policies belies nearly 20 years of evidence to the contrary."
"According to various press reports, some of the Brazilian states have instituted a comprehensive program of police reforms including better data collection, crime mapping, police training and coordination of military and civil forces. Policy focuses on violent criminal gangs. Also, restrictions on late-night sales of alcohol are being used. In short, Brazil is using policies known to work."
Meme - "Please somebody help me. I think I'm going crazy. It's embarrassing but I might hurt somebody please why won't anybody help me!?"
*ATF gives man rifle and goes back to talking to the CIA, FBI [?] and another Federal agency*"
The same people who keep going on about how the government is incompetent and can't do anything right also go on about elaborate government conspiracy theories
Meme - "I carry a small gun to compensate for my huge pecker."
Meme - "Someone:puts 1mm of their toe on someone's property
Americans: *Rick Astley* "You know the rules, it's time to die""
Opinion: Signs that we’ve finally reached a tipping point on guns - "The once-powerful NRA is mired in scandal following years of lavish spending (it’s also legally questionable, according to the New York attorney general, though the group has rejected that allegation). Nearly a million members have walked away since 2018. The NRA is now in a fight for survival amid lines of credit that appear to be maxed out and internal battles over the group’s future. Meanwhile, Democrats — once wary of mentioning gun control at all — have finally rediscovered their voice... Gun control activists got there by adopting an approach Republicans successfully deployed over the past four decades: Instead of focusing solely on federal reforms, gun safety advocates have invested heavily in influencing state and local policy. Everytown credits at least 51 pieces of state-level gun safety legislation passed in 2022 to their state-by-state strategy. During the same cycle, Moms Demand Action says it elected 125 gun reform candidates to office at every level of government. After a full generation suffering under the ever-present threat of domestic mass murder, the American people might finally have reached a breaking point. Seventy-one percent of US adults want stricter gun laws, according to a recent AP-NORC poll. Over the summer, an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found that 59% of American adults think it’s more important to control gun violence than to protect gun rights (35%) — “its highest point in nearly a decade.” These figures have surely factored into Democrats new assertiveness on gun control... Even Republican voters part company with the GOP on the subject: An AP-NORC poll conducted last year found that nearly half of self-identified Republican voters supported passing tougher gun laws. “Republicans look completely unreasonable when they won’t even discuss background checks, gun safety measures like storage or red flag laws,” Del Percio warned. “Republicans running in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan, all big Second Amendment states, all lost. Republicans have to learn that you can be for the Second Amendment and also for background checks.”
If every kid carried rocks, would playgrounds be safer? - "A graphic circulating on the Internet reads, "A kid on the playground throws a rock at another kid. The teacher gives rocks to all of the kids since only a good kid with a rock can stop a bad kid with a rock.""
I've seen gun nuts unironically agree
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, ‘This violence has to stop’ - "‘You heard in the clip a 12 year old boy saying, you know, I don't know, it'll be me. You know, he told me, no matter how well-behaved I am, if I go out on the street I don't know what's going to happen to me, you know. He said you know as I become a man, as I become an older boy he was worried that he might be a target… vulnerable teenagers get groomed, people equip them with, you know, knives and other other things and then they all start carrying knives and it becomes more of a trend'"
Weird. I thought if criminals know their victims are likely to be armed, they're not going to attack them. So everyone carrying knives can only be a good thing
How Often Are Guns Used For Self-Defense? - "In their National Self-Defense Survey, published in 1995, Kleck and Gertz extrapolated that figure to the entire adult population of 200 million, concluding that Americans use guns for self-defense as often as 2.1 to 2.5 million times a year. Researchers have found several issues with Kleck’s estimates. While the adult population in the United States in 1993 was around 200 million people, not all of them owned guns — only about 42 percent did. So extrapolating the survey results to the entire adult population yields an overestimate. David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, who first addressed “extreme overestimates” of DGUs 25 years ago, pointed out problems with Kleck’s math in 1997:
Guns were reportedly used by defenders for self-defense in approximately 845,000 burglaries. From sophisticated victimization surveys, however, we know that there were fewer than six million burglaries in the year of the survey and in only 22 percent of those cases was someone certainly at home (1.3 million burglaries). Since only 42 percent of U.S. households own firearms, and since the victims in two thirds of the occupied dwellings were asleep, the 2.5 million figure requires us to believe that burglary victims use their guns in self-defense more than 100 percent of the time...
Researchers consider the NCVS to be more reliable than randomized telephone surveys because respondents are asked screening questions that help weed out false reports, something that typically isn’t done with telephone polling. Kleck, who is now retired, argues that respondents underreport DGUs because they fear the authorities. In some states, pointing a weapon at someone can lead to an arrest. Even if they’re eventually cleared, “you’ve lost thousands of dollars in legal fees, had your reputation ruined, maybe had your picture and name and the newspaper,” he said. The NCVS is confidential, but some gun owners may not trust that their answers won’t be passed on to the authorities, Kleck says. “They’re really unlikely to put themselves in legal peril by reporting that they wielded a deadly weapon, and pointed it at another human being. It’s a lot easier for people to report ‘I was a crime victim,’ period.” Hemenway says that he’s never heard of a criminal case arising from the National Crime Victimization Survey. Ultimately, he says, most defensive gun uses happen during arguments, when tempers flare and guns are nearby. Some researchers find fault with both the low- and the high-end estimates... If we’re going by NCVS data, DGUs do not outnumber gun crimes. There are seven times as many gun crimes (484,800) as there are instances of defensive gun use (70,040) each year, according to the survey. Leading researchers back that up. The Harvard Injury Control Center has found that guns are used far more often to intimidate others than in self-defense... Another reason DGU overestimates are repeated across decades is because most studies on the topic are more than 20 years old. In interviews, both Kleck and Hemenway say they consider the science to be settled. Kleck hasn’t repeated his telephone survey in nearly 30 years, while Hemenway points to the NCVS as a current barometer of defensive gun use. But both men concede that the true number of DGUs will probably never be known. “What we do know for sure,” Hemenway said, “is that having a gun in your house increases suicides, it increases gun accidents, and it increases homicides, at least of women in the house. And we can’t find any benefit from it.”"
School Shootings: Horrific but Statistically Rare - "Contrary to what you’ve heard from Biden and the media, school massacres like the one in Uvalde are exceptionally rare events. They actually occurred more often in the 1990s than recently—but back then, there wasn’t an army of satellite trucks competing around the clock to chronicle the horror. “There is not an epidemic of mass shootings,” says James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University who has been tracking these events for decades and helps keep the AP/USA Today/Northeastern Mass Killing database. “What’s increasing and is out of control is the epidemic of fear.” As Fox notes, 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. Those are also about the same odds that any American will die in a mass public shooting like the recent one in Buffalo... Surveys show that half of Americans worry about being the victim of a mass shooting, and a third of them avoid going to certain places and events because of this fear. More than 60 percent of parents worry that their child will be killed in a mass shooting at school. 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, and which are associated with higher levels of depression, stress and anxiety. Nor do children and parents need to hear the deceptive statistics promoted by the press and the White House’s fearmonger-in-chief. “Why are we willing to live with this carnage?” Biden asked in his speech after the Uvalde killings, portraying them as the continuation of a decade of ceaseless slaughter by citing the “900 incidents of gunfire” on school grounds since 2012. But few students died in these incidents, which typically occurred outside the school building and often involved non-students going there after school hours. When Fox totals the number of students killed by any sort of gunfire at school in the past decade, including the victims in Uvalde, it works out to 10 deaths per year—among more than 50 million students. “Hundreds of children die every year in drowning accidents,” he says. “We need lifeguards at pools more than armed guards at schools.” Journalists are similarly deceptive when they call Uvalde the 27th “school shooting” of this year, or classify the spree in Buffalo as one of the hundreds of “mass shootings” in America annually. But these “mass shootings” typically don’t result in more than one death, if that, and the ones with multiple fatalities typically involve family disputes at home, gang conflict, or other criminal activity like drug dealing or robbery. They’re not random attacks like that in Buffalo, which meets Fox’s criteria for a “mass public shooting”: one in a public place with at least four fatalities and not related to domestic violence, gang conflict, or other crimes. On average, a half dozen of these occur annually. Mass public shootings at schools are much rarer: a total of 12 in the past 34 years."
Since school shootings were more common in the 90s, media contagion is at best an incomplete explanation
Since the left tells us that since it's more likely to die in a bathtub than by terrorism, it's racist to be worried about terrorism, what does this say about being worried about dying in a mass shooting?
‘In all reality, there were three shooters.’ Oklahomans kill an active shooter, and it’s not as simple as it sounds. - The Washington Post - "police also noted that armed citizens can complicate volatile situations. The first of 57 uniformed police officers arrived just a minute after the initial 911 calls and found a complex scene with multiple armed people and no clear sense of what had happened or who was responsible. “We don’t want people to be vigilantes,” Bo Mathews, a spokesman for the Oklahoma City Police Department, said in a recent interview. “That’s why we have police officers.” Both men did what they believed was right, but that meant they had killed a man they did not know. Whittle wondered whether he was going to jail. Nazario went over ways that the confrontation could have ended differently — perhaps with his own death. They both marveled that amid the chaos, the result was as intended: The attacker was stopped before he could hurt anyone else... the first police officer arrived, yelling at them both to get down. “He doesn’t know how many active shooters there were,” Nazario said. “He could have gotten out of his car and shot me.” As police gained control of the scene, Jabari Giles, father of one of the wounded girls, rushed to the scene. Seeing Whittle and Nazario handcuffed on the ground and a bloodied body that he took to be a victim next to them, he exploded. “Which one of you did it?” Giles shouted. “You f—ing shot my kid, didn’t you!” Giles did not have a gun, but police turned theirs on him and briefly handcuffed him before helping him locate his child... The FBI examined 160 shootings between 2000 and 2013 and found that most of the violence ended when the assailant stopped shooting, committed suicide or fled. Unarmed citizens successfully restrained shooters in 21 of those incidents, according to the FBI. Two attacks stopped when off-duty officers shot and killed the attackers. Five ended in much the way the attack at Louie’s did — when armed civilians, mostly security guards, exchanged fire with the shooters... interventions by “Good Samaritans” also have ended in tragedy. In 2014, husband-and-wife attackers killed two Las Vegas police officers before going into a nearby Walmart and firing a shot in the air. Joseph Wilcox, 31, a civilian with a handgun and a concealed-carry permit, pulled his weapon to confront the male shooter, but the man’s wife shot Wilcox in the chest, killing him. When Prince George’s County police detective Jacai Colson responded to a 2016 attack on a police station in his street clothes, another officer mistook him for a threat and shot him... “How is the officer going to discern who is the Good Samaritan and who is not?” Serpas said. “They don’t have placards on the front of their shirts that say ‘I’m the good guy’ or ‘I’m the bad guy.’ ”... In August 2013, Oklahoma City police officers responding to the sound of gunshots opened fire on a man shooting at a car before realizing he was the owner of a liquor store who had been robbed... “It is what it is,” Whittle said. “You’d better be damn sure that what you are doing is right, because you’ll pay the consequences if you are wrong.”... Nazario, who also grew up with guns, emphasizes the importance of the numerous firearms training courses he has taken. “Not everybody knows what they are doing,” he said... what if Whittle had followed the gunman inside? “Bryan would have entered the front,” Nazario said. “I would have entered the back.” There they would have been, two good guys with guns, face to face. “He could have thought I was the shooter,” Nazario said. Or vice versa. And if Nazario had asked — and Whittle refused — to drop his weapon, Nazario said, “I would have had to take action.”"
Meme - "A toddler has now shot a person every week in America for two years straight. Yes, you read that correctly."
Clearly, the solution is more guns, so people can defend themselves
Under Bolsonaro, gun ownership rose, killings fell, Brazil debates why - The Washington Post - "Much violent crime in Brazil, and homicides in particular, stems from turf battles between the well-armed drug cartels that control favelas, or slums, throughout the country. The victims are predominantly poor young men of color. In 2017, a major war between the country’s two biggest cartels drove gun-related homicides to record levels. But since then, conflict between First Capital Command and Red Command has calmed considerably, said Roberto Uchôa, a former federal police officer and member of the Brazilian Public Security Forum. First Capital Command now dominates São Paulo, Brazil’s most populous state. In Rio de Janeiro, Red Command now clashes mostly with militias run by police, not rival gangs. As a result, the country’s northeast, ground zero for the groups’ 2017 war for new territory, has quieted. Bolsonaro has also reaped the benefits of a decade of investment in policing, said Isabel Figueiredo, also a member of the Brazilian Public Security Forum, a nonprofit research group that has advocated for tougher gun laws. Presidents Dilma Rousseff and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva professionalized local police forces and improved data collection and training, leading to a steady drop in homicides in several states... Brazil’s aging population is also a factor, analysts said... a dozen people interviewed at the gun show by The Washington Post said they appreciated that Brazil continues to place far more restrictions on would-be buyers than the United States does. Brazilians must show proof of income and a residence where the firearms must be located. They must undergo a basic psychological evaluation and register with the police and a shooting club. Brazilians still have more restrictions on carrying guns outside the home. Gun owners are allowed to carry a gun only if they are on their way to a shooting club. Webster said gun homicides and accidental deaths in the United States are tied more closely to carrying than to possession. Another key difference: Guns are roughly three times as expensive in Brazil as in the United States, which makes private ownership primarily an enthusiasm of people with higher incomes. U.S. citizens owned more than 393 million firearms in 2018, or 1.2 per person, according to the Small Arms Survey, a Geneva-based research organization. Brazilians owned 4.4 million in 2021, or 0.02 per person, according to the Security Forum."