The London x NYC juxtaposition was from 2018, and but a fleeting moment in time: NYC gang turf wars were in a peaceful, stable period while London's gang turf wars were raging due to the deaths of some major players and the arrival of new ethnic gangs hitting critical mass. In 2019, London racked up 149 homicides, NYC 319. The next year NYC saw 462 murders; a sharp curve upwards while London has stabilized at around 110-130 per year since then.
Incidents like Uvalde are very different from the typical American "mass shooting," which is a young man opening fire into a crowd. This can be a party, a club parking lot after closing, a city street during the summer, or even sometimes a funeral. Interesting enough, gun control advocates I know -- sorry, wait, getting a Luntz update here: gun safety advocates I know have no problem conceding that young men make up the vast majority of gun crimes, but they get extremely uncomfortable once I start trying to get more specific than that. A pity, because the demographic differences are stark and remarkable. You'd think they'd want to understand the problem considering how much they care.
DrEvil » Sat May 28, 2022 11:41 am wrote:if you want an armed population then you also have to accept that shootings like this will happen more often. In other words: you have to be okay with daily mass shootings right now as the price for being able to oppose the government at some hypothetical point in the future.
Think of it as an insurance policy that requires daily human sacrifice to remain valid.
Civilization itself, of course, requires daily human sacrifice. Without question, accepting danger means accepting injury and death, as true for automobiles and firecrackers as it is for firearms. What makes firearms exceptional here is that, while they surely liven up any party you bust them out for, the injuries and deaths they cause are very seldom an unintended side effect: it's a point and click interface for accomplishing exactly that, injury, death. It's not like you were trying to shoot your way to work when a pedestrian stepped in front of your barrel, although essentially that does happen at firing ranges every summer.
Anyhow. Just like the freedom of speech necessitates tolerating horrific people and points of view, the freedom to bear arms comes with a cost many find unacceptable. I have total faith that in the long run they will win out, too, on both counts. This is why technological authoritarianism is so inevitable: popular demand. And once the internet is more controlled and regulated than ever, there will always be new threats to defend informed voters from, always new controls to implement, new restrictions to advocate. We all know what "Let's Go Brandon" really means, so why should such obscenities be allowed in public? In front of children, no less.
In the short term, though, I really wonder. There's a lot of popular support for gun cont...gun safety measures, just like there's a lot of popular support for a radically higher Federal minimum wage and universal health care, both approximately as plausible as serious action on guns! The machinery behind this is eager to amplify outrage and protest pressure, but they're using that to elect Democrats and fundraise for their pet nonprofits. There will always be another election, there will always be another fiscal quarter, so there is little incentive to accomplish anything more substantial than that.
How many dead kids will it take? activists and anguished observers alike ask, again and again and again, for years now. The answer: we're all going to find out together. Stay tuned.
In the long run, even after my cynicism is disproven, America faces decades of mass shootings as the huge national inventory gets drawn down one crime, one confiscation raid, one buyback, one ban at a time. Who knows, maybe events like Uvalde will subside once AR-15s are banned. Events like this won't, though.
And could armed citizens prevent that kind of random violence? Well, yes. It does happen, and in fact it happened just this week in West Virginia, to far less fanfare. So disarming citizens will result in deaths, too. That will be considered an acceptable cost, too, worth the price, a necessary sacrifice.