The Unknown Why in the Aurora Killings. The Surprising History of Gun Control, School Shooting Myths, and More. Why We Won’t Stop Mass Killings: We Like Them Too Much | Econ201. Forgive me if I’ve already offended you with the title of this piece, but I’m an economist. As such, I tend to weigh up the costs and benefits of just about anything when trying to figure out what it means for society.
And when it comes to mass killings, my analysis suggests we have some reason for introspection. Because of the inescapable reach of media, mass killings affect virtually everyone. While the victims and the ones who loved them suffer terribly, the rest of us may feel a combination of many emotions: grief (through empathy), fear, disbelief, curiosity, fascination, and even a thrill at seeing the commotion caused by what happened.
Each horrific event puts us on a new emotional binge. After shootings like the one in Newtown, the media descend excitedly on the crime scene, and the public tunes in to see and hear the latest details. Later on, the media produce articles and programs eulogizing the dead. So how is the balance sheet looking so far? Gun-death tally: Every American gun death since Newtown Sandy Hook shooting (INTERACTIVE) The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by. So Slate is collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete (click here to see why, and to learn more about @GunDeaths, the Twitter user who helped us create this interactive).
But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. Update, Dec. 31, 2013: After a year of gun deaths, Slate is retiring this project. Click a marker below to filter incidents by that location. . © OpenStreetMap contributors Any Age Group Adult Teen Child Matched Deaths: 12,042 or more between Newtown and Dec. 31, 2013 Fetching latest data Show Methodology Each person under 13 years of age is designated "child"; from 13 to 17: "teen"; 18 and older: "adult. " The same icons used to represent males is also used to represent individuals of unknown gender. —Dan Kois, senior editor, Slate. American Gun Culture - The Christian Science Monitor. Gorilla Sales Skyrocket After Latest Gorilla Attack.
SAN DIEGO—Following the events of last week, in which a crazed western lowland gorilla ruthlessly murdered 21 people in a local shopping plaza after escaping from the San Diego Zoo, sources across the country confirmed Thursday that national gorilla sales have since skyrocketed. “After seeing yet another deranged gorilla just burst into a public place and start killing people, I decided I need to make sure something like that never happens to me,” said 34-year-old Atlanta resident Nick Keller, shortly after purchasing a 350-pound mountain gorilla from his local gorilla store.
“It just gives me peace of mind knowing that if I’m ever in that situation, I won’t have to just watch helplessly as my torso is ripped in half and my face is chewed off. I’ll be able to use my gorilla to defend myself.” “Law enforcement and animal control can only get there so quickly,” Keller added. “And you never know when you’ll need to use a gorilla to save your life.”
Area Woman Decides Not To Post Facebook Status That Would Have Tipped Gun Control Debate. AURORA, IL—The contentious debate on gun control will continue unresolved after local woman Theresa Delacroix opted Friday not to post an anti-gun message on Facebook, an opinion experts agreed would have tipped the scales toward a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s firearm laws. “There’s already so much chatter about the gun issue floating around on the Internet, I really didn’t see the point of throwing my two cents into the mix,” said Delacroix, 29, whose unposted status update “No more Newtowns—the time has come for action” would have completely swayed the tide of public opinion, pushing the government to end the gun-show loophole and adopt a permanent ban on assault weapons. “Some of my friends are pro-gun, and I didn’t want to stir things up. Besides, it probably wouldn’t have done much good anyway.” Had Delacroix voiced her opinion, experts said it could have been as powerful as an Atlanta man’s 2007 decision to affix a “U.S.
Out of Iraq Now!” The line outside Miami gun show January 2013. Guns and the second amendment. Follow us omnivore Guns and the Second Amendment May 20 2013 1:00PM Edward J. Erler (CSU-San Bernardino): The Second Amendment as an Expression of First Principles . Aimee Elizabeth Kaloyares (Southern): Annie Get Your Gun ? Advertisement top of page. How to Think About Guns: A New Freakonomics Radio Podcast. [MUSIC: The Wintermarket; “Thank You There Will Be No Encore” (from The Ballad of Artie Fufkin)] Stephen J. DUBNER: Steve Levitt is my Freakonomics friend and co-author.
He’s an economist, at the University of Chicago. One topic he’s studied for lot of years, from a lot of angles, is crime. He’s tried to figure out which of many potential factors have a big impact on crime rates. More police and more prisons? Levitt and I were working together, in Texas, on the day back in December that a 20-year-old guy in Connecticut named Adam Lanza killed his mother, then shot up an elementary school, killing 20 little kids and six adults, and finally shot himself.
[MUSIC: Sonogram; “Fell Through Mirrors” (from Cubists)] As horrific as that was, as incomprehensibly sad, Steve Levitt, given everything he knows about crime, he wasn’t all that surprised. DUBNER: So you are more surprised when there isn’t as much mayhem in the world as there is the opportunity for mayhem to occur? Battle lines over today's debates over violence issues were drawn centuries ago. Last December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in debates about gun control.
Another flash point occurred this July, when George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the proper use of deadly force. The gun debate was refreshed in September by the shooting deaths of twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard, apparently at the hands of an IT contractor who was mentally ill. Such episodes remind Americans that our country as a whole is marked by staggering levels of deadly violence. What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. The nations are constituted as follows: YANKEEDOM. Political language: "Gun safety" versus "gun control"
Dorner manhunt: Lawyer calls shootings of paper carriers 'unacceptable' An attorney representing two women who were delivering newspapers when they were shot by police during a massive manhunt for an ex-LAPD officer called the incident "unacceptable," saying his clients looked nothing like the suspect. Emma Hernandez, 71, was delivering the Los Angeles Times with her daughter, Margie Carranza, 47, in the 19500 block of Redbeam Avenue in Torrance on Thursday morning when Los Angeles police detectives apparently mistook their pickup for that of Christopher Dorner, the 33-year-old fugitive suspected of killing three people and injuring two others.
Hernandez, who attorney Glen T. Jonas said was shot twice in the back, was in stable condition late Thursday. Carranza received stitches on her finger. PHOTOS: Manhunt for ex-LAPD officer Officials seeking Dorner describe him as black, 6 feet tall and weighing 270 pounds. "We trust that the LAPD will step up and do the right thing and acknowledge that what they did was unacceptable, and we'll deal with it," Jonas said. The Freedom of an Armed Society. Is it True Armed Civilians Have Never Stopped a Mass Shooting? In response to last week's massacre in Connecticut, Mother Jones has put together a "study" on mass shootings that makes a pretty bold claim: In the wake of the slaughters this summer at a Colorado movie theater and a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, we set out to track mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years. We identified and analyzed 62 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun.
There are a couple of major problems here with arguing that armed civilians don't stop mass shootings. One is that when armed civilians are present, they often stop mass shootings before they can become mass shootings. One of the criteria Mother Jones used to define mass shootings is that "the shooter took the lives of at least four people. " So then, consider the following: These are just a few examples of mass shootings being prevented.
10 Pro-Gun Myths, Shot Down. By cutting off federal funding for research and stymieing data collection and sharing, the National Rifle Association has tried to do to the study of gun violence what climate deniers have done to the science of global warming. No wonder: When it comes to hard numbers, some of the gun lobby's favorite arguments are full of holes. (This article has been updated.) Myth #1: They're coming for your guns. Fact-check: With as many as 310 million privately owned guns in America, it's clear there's no practical way to round them all up (never mind that no one in Washington is proposing this). Yet if you fantasize about rifle-toting citizens facing down the government, you'll rest easy knowing that America's roughly 70 to 80 million gun owners already have the feds and cops outgunned by a factor of around 79 to 1. Sources: Congressional Research Service, Small Arms Survey Myth #2: Guns don't kill people—people kill people.
Myth #3: An armed society is a polite society. Myth #7: Guns make women safer. Why the 'Citizen Militia' Theory Is the Worst Pro-Gun Argument Ever - Mark Nuckols. Two out of three Americans see the Second Amendment as a safeguard against tyranny. What? A detail of the Minutemen statue in Lexington, Massachusetts (Tim Grafft/Massachusetts Office of Travel and Tourism/Flickr) The notion that an individual right to bear arms guarantees the American people against government tyranny is of course an old one. Given its apparent validation in the Second Amendment of the Constitution itself, it's not surprising that the notion has survived in some way through to the 21st century. Given its defiance of history and common sense, though, what should be surprising is that it's survived to remain so widespread. If America experienced a widespread political uprising today, it would bear little resemblance to Lexington and Concord in 1775, with well-disciplined minutemen assembling on the town square to defend liberty against the redcoats.
There is, we all know, a Second Amendment right to gun ownership. "Bloody Kansas" provides a valuable historical contrast. Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm - Newsweek and The Daily Beast. Karl Marx summed up Communism as “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” This is a good, pithy saying, which, in practice, has succeeded in bringing, upon those under its sway, misery, poverty, rape, torture, slavery, and death. For the saying implies but does not name the effective agency of its supposed utopia. The agency is called “The State,” and the motto, fleshed out, for the benefit of the easily confused must read “The State will take from each according to his ability: the State will give to each according to his needs.”
“Needs and abilities” are, of course, subjective. So the operative statement may be reduced to “the State shall take, the State shall give.” All of us have had dealings with the State, and have found, to our chagrin, or, indeed, terror, that we were not dealing with well-meaning public servants or even with ideologues but with overworked, harried bureaucrats. Healthy government, as that based upon our Constitution, is strife.
Q. A.