Canadian students express support their U.S. counterparts with solidarity rallies

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

Again in Canada semi automatics are not as available -- and out mass shootings not as common or deadly.

Semi-automatic rifles are quite available but pistols and certian rifles are not.  I just bought this last month at a gas station. I showed my firearms licence, paid, walked away with it. They didn't even record my information.  Looks like this  (sorry for the size)

For all intents and purposes it's identical to an AR15, just easier to get.  Price tag also creeps up towards $3000 which probably explains why one of them haven't been used in a crime in Canada since they came out in 2006.

Pistols on the other hand are harder. Looking at the recent mass shootings in Canada you'll see pistols however you won't see AR15s, which are the same class legally speaking.

 

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We agree that availability is an issue --and shooters will use the fastest most firepower. While a machine gun is potential lethal to the shooter, these are not well trained people and even if the shooter dies, that does not mean bullets spraying will not also kill others.

This is one of my arguments about how semi-automatic rifles are more dangerous than slower firing rifles. What they might lack in accuracy they may make up for in volume of bullets. 

That said Las Vegas shooter used 24 guns, mostly semi-auto rifles, and killed 58 people (and injuring 422 from gunfire).  The Virgina Tech shooter killed 32 people with a handgun.  This is a good comparason between volume of bullets to accurate aimed shooting.  Ammunition played a role in the Virgina Tech shooting too I think.

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A trained person may not want a machine gun in close quarters but some random killer might - and the body count may still be higher even if they are at greater risk. I disagree that machine guns are less deadly -- I think they are so deadly that they endanger the shooter so we disagree there.

  I've seen a lot of skin left on red hot machinegun barrels (persons hand, neck sometimes).  Hands also can get pretty mangled when someone is trying to load MGs or fix them when they jam.

Maybe we could agree that not just the type of firearm but other factors come in to play when it comes to these multitudes of shootings.

One point I'll mention about semi-autos. Higher rate of fire than non-semi autos (obviously) but in a large number of instances the shooter stopped or was stopped because his gun jammed. Semi-autos can and do often jam and can be hard to fix if someone isn't trained. non semi-autos like revolvers, pump action, bolt action, seldom if ever jam.

 

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As for the warnign signs -- these are usually seen after the fact.

I think they're seen before the fact. In most cases of shooters it's discovered there's warning signs from anti-social and violent behavior to peers classmates family members admitting they thought something was wrong but didn;t act on it. or, they acted on it and were ignored by authorities.

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The biggest warning sign: shitloads of semi automatic guns in the populaiton -- will -- by the numbers mean many deaths. But the US does not want to take account of that. Reducing the number of guns reduces the number of people they ahve to worry about using them and the number they have to consider warning signs from.

I'll look for the article and stats but guns in the states have doubled since the 90s (estimated 400 million plus guns) and the numbers indicated gun related crime was down from the 90s figures. Bigger population, double the guns, gun violence down.  I'll see if I can back that up though.

NorthReport wrote:

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/03/14/us/school-walkout.html?referer=https://news.google.ca/

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After a handful of students expressed some interest, the school decided to hold an assembly at 10 a.m. to talk about school safety measures and the value of being kind to one another.

This seems like the most beneficial thing out of the thousands of walkouts.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

This circular argument is getting tiresome. Why not build on what is said and go forward? But no you have to circle back as if other things were never said.

Then stop replying.

 

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Semi automatics are clearly preferred your little side argument about handguns ignoring the fact that the ones used tend to be semi automatics is defelction. Your suggestion that they are some how better bnecuase they might jam is a cruel joke steeped in blood.

Compare the last 10 mass shootings in Canada.  Your suggestion that I was suggesting they're somehow better is putting words in my mouth. I pointed out semi-autos are more prone to jamming (fact) and a number of mass shootings ended due to the shooters gun jamming (fact).

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Hand guns over long guns becuase they are easier to conceal. semi automatics over others becuase they shoot faster. Come on it is not rocket science.

I've said the same.

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As for your gun violence stats here are some charts in this article- That's a poor argument.

The USA is 3rd out of 193 countries in the world for murders. 

If you remove Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, St Louis and New Orleans guess what. The USA drops to 189th out of 193 for murder rate in the world.   All 5 of those cities have the strictest of gun control.   Start there.

If the school is sanctioning this is it really a walk out?  Some school that can't apparently even afford to heat their classes are having tons of money thrown at them to pay for busses and shit. Can the schools keep the left over cash and pay for heat?

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You said . . . The USA is 3rd out of 193 countries in the world for murders.

According to Wikipedia, in terms of gun deaths per 100K, the U.S. is actually 12th.

The socialist utopia of Venezuela is second with almost SIX TIMES the gun deaths per capita, but to be fair, most of those are surely disgruntled U.S. citizens or some such.

Interestingly, this table separates suicides from homicides.  In the U.S., suicides seem to outnumber homicides by about 2:1.

In Venezuela, homicides seem to outnumber suicides by nearly 80:1.

Cuba, FWIW, is barely even a blip!  Clearly they either have way better gun laws, or they're just more chill.

cco wrote:

Paladin's "statistics" are, of course, bullshit, but it's interesting to break down the probable source.

 

Oh of course they are. You caught me trying to trick all ya'all into buying guns. Changing someones mind here on firearms will really validate my life, no joke.

In other news firearms, including AR15s, are flying off the shelf in Canada. One gunstore in the sleepy town of Harrowsmith Ontario sold 430 AR15s alone last week.  The 2 guns (so far) being moved from the Restricted to Prohibited class this summer are also being sold in abundence. People who can afford them are buying 2 or 3 (at least of the cheaper version) and selling them to other firearm owners who can't afford them at discounted costs, or, trading for other unused firearms.

I've learned it sounds like their old and new owners will be given special licenses that not only let them buy, sell and shoot these prohibited guns but also access other prohibited guns. I'm not sure all the details yet but actual assault rifles that the military use and machineguns are in the same prohibited list.  

In Canada you can legally buy rocket launchers, grenade launchers and semi-automatic versions of machineguns, like the ones American soldiers iconically used in Vietnam.  The new "Common sense gun laws" are smoke and mirrors to distract you from the shit show that's going on with the Liberals while begging for votes among Canadians who don't look too deep into stats, like that "explosive increase in firearms deaths since 2013" sleigh of hand.

I don't know much about American gun statistics and less about Canadian gun statistics. I do know that neither side is entirely honest about suicides in the context of gun policy. The anti-gun side tends to quitely include the suicides, which are usually much more than the homoicides, while the pro-gun side tends to say "well yeah it's 3 deaths by gun per 100000 but two thirds of that is suicides so they don't count." But even a quick study will show that some people who consider suicide will change their mind if it can't be done easily/takes too long. For a person considering suicide, they are more likely to act on it, and more likely to be successful, if they have access to a gun. I recall an anecdote about how suicides fell in the 1900's (I think I remember the 50's but that sounds late) when wood-burning stoves were eliminated from common usage - because it became much harder to commit suicide by smoke inhalation. Same situation. As an aside, it's a pretty fun rhetorical trap for gun advocates who also complain about male suicide rates - especially since men who commit suicide are much more likely to use a gun rather than women.

Anyway, what should be completely obvious in the gun control debate is that gun policy has very little influence on violent crime. There is very little correlation, if any, between legal status of guns and rate of gun violence. Rather, there is a strong correlation between socioeconomic conditions particularly with respect to employment opportunties and ability to move into the middle class (ie intergenerational inequality) and gun violence. I think we can all agree that basically all gun violence, and in particular both suicides and mass shootings, are commited by people (generally men) who don't feel they have a future. The problem there isn't really the gun or the gun policy.

The gun policy debate is a largely irrelevant smokescreen designed so that neoliberal governments don't have to acknowledge or address the underlying social, cultural, and economic issues facing young people today.

Paladin1 wrote:

Oh of course they are. You caught me trying to trick all ya'all into buying guns. Changing someones mind here on firearms will really validate my life, no joke.

Paladin1 wrote:

The USA is 3rd out of 193 countries in the world for murders. 

There were 17,250 murders in the USA in 2016. Wikipedia puts the US at 94th based on that.

Paladin1 wrote:

If you remove Chicago, Detroit, Washington DC, St Louis and New Orleans guess what. The USA drops to 189th out of 193 for murder rate in the world.

From 2016:

Chicago: 765 murders (population 2.705 million)

Detroit: 302 murders (population 672,795)

Washington, DC: 135 murders (population 693,972)

St. Louis: 188 murders (population 315,685)

New Orleans: 175 murders (population 391,495)

Doing the math, removing those 5 cities leaves you with a national murder rate of 15,685. Removing their combined total population of 4,778,947 leaves you with a US of 320.9 million, and a murder rate of 4.887 per 100,000 citizens, putting the US in...exactly the same spot in the rankings (94th place).

Paladin1 wrote:

All 5 of those cities have the strictest of gun control.   Start there.

I mentioned above that Louisiana and Missouri have state preemption of local gun laws; I mistakenly omitted that Michigan and (since 2013) Illinois do too. So the only one of those cities with "the strictest of gun control" is Washington, D.C.

So, to sum up: Your cited numbers on America's murder rate, the 5 cities you claim are responsible for it, America's theoretical murder rate if those cities were removed, and the gun control laws in all but one of those cities are entirely fictional. The cities you cited have famously large African-American populations; you ignored cities like Boston, New York, and San Francisco with strict gun control laws, lower homicide rates, and more diverse populations. If your goal was to "change someone's mind on guns", it indeed seems pretty ineffective, but if it was to falsely imply "The real American gun violence problem is black people", it might have slipped by an inattentive reader.

Would you care to share your source for the original post?

Whatever stats I've been able to find on murder rate by city in the U.S. seem to list at least four of the five cities mentioned above in the top five. 

But what is their black population supposed to mean, in that case?  Did Paladin1 choose them because of their black population, or because of their standing in the "murder list"?  Conversely, should he have included other cities further down the list because they're more white?  What is this complaint?

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If I say "If you take aboriginals out of the picture, Canada would be the safest country in the world", that's both false and coming dangerously close to a policy prescription.

OK.  But if that were the case (Nunavut punches well above its weight) and we removed it, we would, in fact, get a better idea of the real risk of being murdered in Canada.

It may be that the cities with the greatest murder rates are also cities with a significant POC population.  But wouldn't that be a whole 'nother thread?

If they do, in fact, have the highest murder rates, and if we're talking about murder rates, should we exclude them anyway?  Why, if they, in fact, have the highest murder rates?

I'm not asking because I'm hoping to blame it all on POC.  But I've just as much disinterest in calling some cities a "bad data point" so that we don't need to go there.

Studies have shown that suicide is very often done impulsively on the spur of the moment. Here's one meta-study from The New England Journal of Medicine:

Guns and Suicide in the United States; The New England Journal of Medicine; Matthew Miller, M.D., Sc.D., and David Hemenway, Ph.D.; Sept. 4, 2008;

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMp0805923

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Among people who made near-lethal suicide attempts, for example, 24% took less than 5 minutes between the decision to kill themselves and the actual attempt, and 70% took less than 1 hour.

..

There are at least a dozen U.S. case–control studies in the peer-reviewed literature, all of which have found that a gun in the home is associated with an increased risk of suicide. The increase in risk is large, typically 2 to 10 times that in homes without guns, depending on the sample population (e.g., adolescents vs. older adults) and on the way in which the firearms were stored.

...

In our experience, many clinicians who care deeply about preventing suicide are unfamiliar with the evidence linking guns to suicide. Too many seem to believe that anyone who is serious enough about suicide to use a gun would find an equally effective means if a gun were not available. This belief is invalid.

Disgustingly,counter protesters open carrying AR-15's in their MAGA hats and Trump flags showed up at the March For Our Lives protest in an attempt to intimidate these teenagers.

The Trump 'brand' is the new Swastika.

Mr. Magoo wrote:

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Studies have shown that suicide is very often done impulsively on the spur of the moment. Here's one meta-study from The New England Journal of Medicine:

OK.  But when progressives talk about assisted suicide, I think most believe that if you don't have the right to end your own life, if that's what you want, then someone else owns your life, not you.

I'm not cheerleading for more suicides, but if we believe that every individual owns their life, and should be free to end it if they wish (see: the debate over assisted suicide) then on what grounds are we supposed to intervene when someone wants to end their life?  Why are we supposed to suddenly see that as a problem?

Again, not shouting "JUMP!" to the person on the bridge.  But is suicide legit, or not legit?

I think committing suicide impulsively on the spur of the moment is not legit. I'm pretty sure that supporters of assisted suicide would oppose people committing suicide impulsively within an hour of the thought crossing their minds. I think that the hurdles for assisted suicide involve a relatively significant length of time; a lot longer than a hangfire.

Marching For the Democrats: Another Farce on Washington?  -  by Ajamu Baraka

https://blackagendareport.com/index.php/marching-democrats-another-farce...

Liberals and Democrat party connected organizations and networks have been quite adept at getting out in front of movements to pre-empt their radical potential and steer them back into the safe arms of liberal conformism. Unfortunately, for the young people who sincerely want to understand and confront gun violence, the opportunism of the Democrats made these students and their pain easy targets to advance the agenda of the Democrat Party that sees this issue as an issue that will advance their electoral agenda..."

Gun suicides are the most common type of gun death by far, in part because using a gun to attempt suicide is so much more lethal than the other major methods of attempting suicide. 

There are over twice as many gun-related suicides than gun-related homicides in the United States.[69] Firearms are the most popular method of suicide due to the lethality of the weapon. 90% of all suicides attempted using a firearm result in a fatality, as opposed to less than 3% of suicide attempts involving cutting or drug-use.[70] The risk of someone attempting suicide is also 4.8 times greater if they are exposed to a firearm on a regular basis; for example, in the home.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_States

 

 

Part of the problem with US gun culture is that it has produced an extremely high rate of death by police shootings. When race is added to the mix the rate becomes astronomical, so suggesting that arming civilians, who have nowhere near the training police receive usually and often have similar biases, is the solution to gun violence is only going to increase the problem.

The racial disparities are well-documented: Compared to other groups, black males are disproportionately stopped, searched, and killed by US law enforcement officials.

But put the US statistics in a global context, and something else becomes clear: The rate of killings by police with firearms in the United States — of anyone — is insanely high compared to other developed countries. ...

Governments in many developed nations, including the United States, do not publish comprehensive data on police killings. There is no international database on police shootings. The FBI statistics that do exist for the United States are known to be flawed.

Media outlets and NGOs have tried to fill the vacuum by building their own databases. To compare eight countries here, we used the latest multiple-year data from governments, NGOs and/or media reports to calculate annual numbers of deaths per capita.

For US data, we used figures from Mapping Police Violence, a widely cited source. Other frequently cited datasets are maintained by the Guardian, the Washington Post, and Killed by Police. 

These numbers show that police shootings of civilians are far more prevalent in the US than in other developed countries. Many blame this stark difference on high levels of gun ownership in the US and limited regulation of firearms purchases. According to the 2013 Global Study on Homicide report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 60 percent of the murders in the US were committed with guns, compared to only 13 percent in Europe. 

https://news.wgbh.org/2017/01/13/news/when-it-comes-police-shootings-us-...

The Guardian comparison of police shooting rates comparing the US with other countries is startling. Some examples of police shooting deaths from the article illustrate this (more data is available in the article):

Canada 25 police shooting deaths/24 years                            California 72 in 2015

England & Wales 55 police shooting deaths/24 years          United States 59/ 24 days

Australia 94 police shooting deaths/ 20 years                        United States 97/ March 2015

Iceland 1 police shooting death/71 years                                  Stockton, California 3 /5 months

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/09/the-counted-police-killi...