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sc94597 on 26 May 2022
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Hiku said:

sc94597 said:

There is estimated to be about 400-600 million guns in the U.S. The majority of them are probably semi-automatic weapons at this point. That is a gun to person ratio of between 1.2 and 1.8. 

Controlling the supply of guns is just not logistically possible at this point. 

It would be easier to: 

  1. Work on reducing wealth-inequality and eliminate homelessness and poverty. 
  2. Pay to have a school psychiatrist evaluate every student and have free-at-the-point of use mental healthcare for everyone in primary and secondary school (at least, ideally for everyone.) 
  3. Reconstruct social clubs that allow people to form physical connections beyond their family and in which a person is more likely to be de-radicalized or re-adjusted to society. Historically local churches did this, but the U.S population is secularizing. Right now the problem is that young people in the U.S experience what Durkheim called Anomie. This is either because rules are too rigid and alienate them or because there is no normative structure at all. 
  4. Reconstruct the education systems so that students don't feel alienated. See: Ferrer movement and Francisco Ferrer as an ideal model. 
  5. Decriminalize all drugs and other non-violent "crimes." 
  6. Aggressively dox and put maximal social pressure on fascists and other hyper-nationalists. 
  7. #6 but for Incels and other radical misogynists. 

Introducing every point on this list would be easier (and likely have a greater effect on shootings) than reducing the supply of guns in the U.S. Solving these problems would also solve many other social problems in the U.S as well. 

I just want to point out that this is very unlikely to be inherently tied to just the amount of guns in USA.
Because if we compare USA's 1.2 gun ratio to any other developed nation, let's say England's 0.46 ratio, you'll quickly see that this isn't even comparable by statistics. It's just not a frequent problem elsewhere.

There is obviously a correlation between more guns and more gun deaths.
But the main difference between USA and many other developed nations on this list to me is gun accessibility and gun culture.

It's not just a coincidence that so many Americans decide to take to guns when they want to hurt people. Or that so few do that in countries where there are many guns in circulation, but the guns are also primarily out of sight, out of mind.

In USA, guns are very normalized. They're brought into the mainstream, and people consider them a right. They're taught how important they were hundreds of years ago when the first amendment was written, but the most powerful guns at the time were muskets that required 20 seconds to reload each bullet.

The first amendment did not foresee the kind of powerful weapons we have today. But I digress.

As an outsider, I was stunned at seeing literal war/army commercials during Superbowl, looking like Call of Duty trailers.

Because I've lived in countries where I've never even seen a gun, they not only don't come to mind when I get pissed, but I wouldn't even know how or where to get one.
The gun used in the Sandy Hook massacre costs 32 000 on the Australian black market. It costs a measly 200 USD with home delivery shipping straight to your door in the US.

The difference here is already apparent.
If they don't have 32K, that can deter a would-be shooter. And even if they do have that amount of money, they risk getting set up by a cop pretending to be a black market arms dealer, etc. Because that is part of the process of getting rid of guns, which I'll get into below.

Other countries have figured this out.

I don't imagine this shooter would have been able to obtain the two AR-15's he purchased legally from Daniel Defense, if they used Japan's system for example.
(And not to go off on a tangent, but no one needs an AR-15 for defense.)

"Friends and relatives have said that Ramos was bullied, cut his own face, fired a BB gun at random people and egged cars in the years leading up to the deadly attack."


Regarding getting rid of guns in the country, it would be a long process, and no country is fully free from them. But the first step would be sensible gun laws.
Which politicians constantly refuse to enact, because gun lobbyists pay them millions.

Ban the more dangerous weapons (unless you need them for hunting or something and can prove it, etc), which will relegate them to the black market, which absolutely can deter would-be shooters.


Now when it comes to cars/knives etc, I'll take my chances against a car or a knife any day over a gun, outside of some very specific scenarios.
And if you want to murder a specific group of people, such as classmates, it's all the more difficult to accomplish the same results with a car or a knife.

My point wasn't that the amount of guns correlate with shootings proportionally. My point is that it is much harder to create a shortage of guns when there already is nearly a 2:1 ratio of gun : persons. Also the U.K's gun:person ratio is .05:1 not .5:1. So even if we stop the production and sale of all new guns there would still be a thriving black market, and it becomes much less likely that you'll see prices on the order of $32,000 in the U.S like you do in Australia. Prices are going to go up, but not that high. $32,000 is about how much a fully-automatic weapon costs right now on the non-black market, and there are only about 600,000 of those circulating. There are about 50 million AR-15 style rifles and about 300 million semi-automatic guns (including handguns) comparatively. The scale of the problem is just so much larger and requires a much more aggressive response than a few buyback programs and fines. And while mass-shooters might be deterred, most gun violence in the U.S isn't in the form of mass-shootings, but organized-crime relating shootings. Organized criminals aren't going to be deterred, and actually benefit from a thriving black market in weapons. So we might solve the 1% of gun deaths that happen in mass shootings, but make the 50% of gun deaths that happen in organized crime worse if a thriving black market is created. 

There are also many other differences between the U.S and other developed countries besides this issue. The fact that there is no universal healthcare, the fact that many states are underfunding schools, the fact that children are more likely to deal with homelessness or other severe poverty that will traumatize them, the fact that parents are struggling with economic problems to such an extent that it is hard for them to pay attention to the needs of their children, the fact that there is severe racial hatred and a still ever-present racial caste system, the misogynistic incel movement that is present among adolescent men who are bullied, the fact that there is little trust between government and the citizens, the militarization and aggressive police forces that aren't trusted, the opioid epidemic, mass-incarceration and felonization, etc. The U.S is indeed exceptional, but quite often in bad ways that makes solving a problem like this very difficult. 

You cite Japan. Japan had strict gun control laws before even the Meiji Restoration. These laws were pretty much extensions of their strict sword-control laws. Mass ownership of weapons never caught on in Japan because it couldn't. Pandora's box wasn't opened in Japan like it has been opened in the U.S. 

So yes, we can try to reduce the number of weapons in the long term (say, 20+ years), but in the short to medium term are we just going to do nothing else? All of the other recommendations I provided could be implemented much more quickly and would have much of the same effect as reducing gun supply. 

Last edited by sc94597 - on 26 May 2022