This one speaks for itself.
California’s rate of gun deaths has declined by 10% since 2005, even as the national rate has climbed in recent years. And Texas and Florida? Their rates of gun deaths have climbed 28% and 37% respectively. California now has one of the 10 lowest rates of gun deaths in the nation. Texas and Florida are headed in the wrong direction.
It’s too bad that data and evidence are irrelevant to what the Republicans will do.
The red line is when Republicans ended the national assault weapons ban. pic.twitter.com/5tB3RvEkzs
— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) May 27, 2022
Cool.
Expected Maryland to be higher considering the carnage the local news loves to report in Baltimore.
As if we needed another reason to avoid Wyoming.
With Wyoming, observes the mildly deranged penguin, continuing to come down bottoms, perhaps we have finally located one of poopyhead’s secret underwater volcano bases? (I point out to her Wyoming is not known for vast expanses of deep water, nor active volcanoes. She takes away my Brie and continues…) It’s not too far from Morris, so even absent a hypersonic underground railway, Tardis, or other logical means of transport, Perfessor poopyhead can relocate their quickly for whatever reason, whenever desired or necessary. With the few humans committing suicide by car & shooty mcshootfaces, etc., and alleged-police on the lookout for uppity others, the Perhessor could easily enter unnoticed. Release a few zillion spiders every now then, and non-discovery is plausible; a kraken or ten would be so laughed-at even the clewed-in conspiracy mongers would miss the obvious. “From my secret underwater volcano base somewhere in Wyoming, I shall…(whatever it is poopyhead is trying to accomplish).”
Bloody hell. I’m going to Syria this year for holidays. It looks safer than anywhere in the USA.
Florida doesn’t look so bad comparatively speaking but we’re on the uptick.
Nick Fish on Twitter did a survey and found that the states that has the highest rate of gun violence also has the highest rate of church attendance. Check it out.
https://twitter.com/nicholasrfish/status/1530296954558853121
compare Trump vote fraction in 2020:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2020_U.S._presidential_election_margins.svg
@5, “Florida doesn’t look so bad”
Alligator food is not counted as gunshot victims.
</snark>Now, now… over half those gun deaths are suicides, and a good proportion is oopsies at home or at events. So not all are murders.
Oopsies at home?!
That is what you call it when a small child finds an improperly secured gun and proceeds to shoot someone?
In my highly regulated state that’s called failing at multiple rules of basic gun safety. (And nobody can buy any type of gun without first getting a gun safety certification).
Perhaps in your highly-regulated state those in gun-owning households have a lower chance of being shot compared to those in non-gun-owning households, Tethys, but I doubt it.
(And yes, ‘oopsies’ was litotes)
Walter Solomon@1 Violent crime in Baltimore is a serious problem, though homicides “are heavily concentrated within a small number of high-poverty neighborhoods.” I lived there for over 6 years in the 90s. I would have expected homicides to peak during the so-called crack epidemic, but I see it’s worse now. So that part isn’t an exaggeration even if news is sensationalized.
The simple explanation is that Maryland is more than just Baltimore. Over 6 million people live in the state, roughly ten times the population of Baltimore. There are affluent suburbs and rural areas. There are also parts of Baltimore that I remember as fairly safe and upscale such as Roland Park–which suggests that the bad parts must be really terrible.
I’m not knocking Baltimore. There’s a lot I liked about it. I just wish it was doing better than it was.
I dunno. Seems to me a lot of people don’t grok that a handgun is quite specifically a tool to conveniently kill people at a distance. That’s its function, that’s its purpose.
It’s (ahem) raisin date.
Sounds a bit different when expressed as “when a small child finds an improperly secured killing tool”.
Why again keep killing tools at home, properly-secured or otherwise?
For safety?
—
I mean, sure, one can go to a gun-range and shoot at a target. Such fun!
Just not the same thing to shoot a paintball gun or suchlike, it has to be a real explosive propelling a real lump of metal at lethal speeds.
Because otherwise, less fun, less boom.
(the rationalisation on the basis of sport)
@12- PaulBC
I was in the Baltimore area off and on around 1987-88. I mostly stayed in Glen Burnie, but hung out with recently met black friends in the Brooklyn area. They told me horror stories of East Baltimore. I mostly felt safe where they lived. It was a transformative experience. There was some shooting from a car around their street one night during a block party. But that was a one-off thing in all the time I spent there. And I realized my experiences differed from theirs a bit.
I was a bit of a novelty as a white guy into hiphop. Years later “The Wire” reminded me of being around Baltimore, but I never experienced the stuff in that show. We did drink 40s though. My friends thought Miami bass really weird stuff, but turned me on to Eric B and Public Enemy. Fair exchange.
You know, for all the claims about how violent Chicago (and the state) is, it’s still a lighter shade than Indiana.
Even my Mennonite relatives own guns, though generally more in the range of .22s and hunting rifles than handguns.
Besides occasional hunting, they are generally used to quickly and humanely put down the various animals that routinely get severely injured on farms. Deer and combines do not mix well.
I know a few people who own handguns for sharpshooting, and lots of hunters and outdoors types who own guns which they keep locked up very securely. I’ve lived with guns in my home my whole life, but few of them were ever used for anything. A gun without ammunition is quite safe. I personally don’t own any but past spouse had several that were inherited and rather valuable. They were kept in a locked cabinet, unloaded and well secured.
Another thing you notice on that chart is cheetolini’s term increasing the incidences a lot. The ascendancy of unchecked dangerous bullshit fed into dangerous people’s aggression, who knew?
I always feel uneasy when my state, California, appears to be doing something right. Wow, I had no idea.
@17 G.A.S.
Always remember how thug punkass Trump told cops how to deal with “thugs” (racist code).
https://youtu.be/1eVPKpBKGCE
https://danieldefense.com/delta5pro-16inch-308-varmint.html
This is what the company that sold TWO AR-15s to a teenager call a hunting rifle.
https://danieldefense.com/media/catalog/product/cache/57787b00c9d0d809fcf82071201be77f/p/d/pdw_pistol_300blk_l_02-088-22070-047_1.jpg
This is what they call a pistol.
Everything comes complete with a high capacity Murder TM magazine.
woozy@18 California gets a lot of grief from the rest of the US, but we do a lot of things right. We have an enormous, diversified economy including tech, entertainment, manufacturing, and agriculture. We set national environmental standards. We have great universities, and we’re the receiving end of the brain drain from many nations.
Bad stuff: We have a housing crisis largely of our own making. Our public schools are underfunded due to Prop 13. My school district is great because the parents are affluent, pay an extra parcel tax, and contribute to a foundation, but that’s not how public eduction should work. We’re faced with serious longterm drought conditions.
It’s still where I’d most like to be in the US and I’m just happy I can afford it. After that, there are places in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic I’d consider. The rest? Forget it.
They have no trouble inventing creative and convoluted controls on abortion, but guns are just too hard.
These recent events have moved parts of my beliefs closer to “adoption not abortion”; I don’t think states like Florida or Texas need to be aborted but maybe they can be put for adoption by any willing sucker.
Shootings aren’t a sign America is ‘broken’. It’s working exactly as intended. As intended by the gun industry*: fear and extremism increase sales, so school shootings are good for business – note how the latest was immediately used to call for more guns. The industry won’t be satisfied until every preschooler is armed – and even then, they’ll be campaigning for the right to arm bears.
*And allies in the media, the sellers of “prep” supplies, etc.
@24, lotharloo well how much did we pay for Alaska? What is it in todays dollars? Also could we sell Florida for at least that much? It’s sinking into the ocean anyway. I’m in favor of selling it off.
@lotharloo #24:
I don’t think Mexico wants Texas back, and Spain has a “you annexed it, you broke it” policy towards Florida.
That long term drought problem in California is looking more and more like it will last a few thousand years.
It is part of climate change, what happens when you almost double CO2 in a century.
It isn’t just California either, the entire Colorado river basin is having the same problem.
California doesn’t have a water problem though.
It has 15 million too many people.
It is what the GOP claims is a horrible place that everyone from the Third World and the Flyover Red states keeps moving to.
I really like that there isn’t much of a winter that doesn’t last too long.
As predicted and they do this after every mass shooting, the GOP and gun industry is claiming that the solution to gun violence is…more guns.
They have been trying that solution for decades and it hasn’t worked yet.
The media is now saying what we concluded yesterday.
The Uvalde police totally didn’t follow normal procedures for an active shooter in a school.
(Yeah, these happen often enough that there is a protocol now.)
A few minutes online outlines the standard procedures.
You open the door and neutralize (shoot and kill) the shooter unless they surrender, which sometimes happens.
There are a lot of ways to go in by destroying the door, battering rams, halligan pry bars, etc..
In this case, the solution was easier. Get the key from the janitor or whoever, and open the door.
The police don’t have to risk their lives here.
They will be in body armor, helmets, etc.. They will have bullet proof shields and ballistic blankets. Flash bang grenades and tear gas. It will be dangerous but not that dangerous.
This is in fact, what the Border Patrol team did and it worked.
Probabilities.
The fact remains that there is absolutely nowhere you can have even a minimal expectation of safety from, “gunplay,” in this country outside of halls of congress, copshops, and NRA love-ins.
We’ve seen it all from yoga classes to Christmas parties.
Lee Greenwood, the voice of reason?
Lee Greenwood says playing NRA convention would be seen as ‘endorsement’ of Texas school shooting weapon
To be fair to all those murder-by-gun states, the rates are high because of critical race theory, LBQT, and not as many people attending church these days. Oh, and illegal immigrants.
Nope, fuck him.
All of those performers were willing (if the price is right) to play for that small, obscure, exclusive crowd of shitheads. So fuck them. What changed in the aftermath of the shooting is that so many of their other fans would actually hear about it and be horrified. This is just them trying to cover their own asses — nothing principled about it.
But if you heard about someone else who simply refused to do it in the fist place, even though it meant a nice paycheck and exposure with a room full of very powerful people, then that would actually mean they stand for something.
Reginald Selkirk@31 Anyone who agreed to perform for the NRA in the first place is a complete asshole (and yes, I mean you Don McLean, but that isn’t exactly breaking news). Backing out now is entirely meaningless.
And seriously fuck Lee Greenwood anyway. Fuck him in the 80s when his idiotic video came out. Fuck him during the first Gulf War. Fuck him after 9/11. Fuck him during Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Fuck him at a Trump campaign rally. And his little dog too (because any dog that would associate with that asshole doesn’t deserve mercy).
Lee Greenwood is a big part of the problem of what has happened to the US. He’s the musical accompaniment to Reaganism and the replacement of civic involvement with “patriotism.” He’d be more honest if he did play for the NRA. Maybe they ought start having pop-up NRA concerts at the site of mass shootings. I’m sure Ted Nugent would be game.
“I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I can buy an AR-15 faster than I can buy a barbecue grill and I won’t forget all the kids, teachers, moviegoers, church congregations, mall shoppers…”
“I’m proud to be an American, where at least I know I can buy an AR-15 faster than I can buy a barbecue grill
I was listening to a bit of country music (involuntary) and realized that we’re such a stupid and decadent culture that musicians put on absurd vocal manipulations designed to make them sound like uneducated fucking stupid hicks. I mean, seriously, what the fuck? Imagine if the british developed a musical genre of performing in the artistic tradition of Boris Johnson, and other recording artists started playing in suit.
Ray Ceeya@20 and 21, yeah, the Daniel Defense Delta 5 is a classic example of the gun business in the US heavily moving in the “combat” direction. They could have offered that rifle with the kind of wooden stock and so on common to bolt action hunting rifles, but that wouldn’t be “cool” enough for their buyers. Instead it’s a bolt action hunting rifle that looks like it’s an assault rifle.
The pistol is a trend that’s grown in recent years. The National Firearms Act of 1934 defines a short barreled rifle as any rifle with a barrel length under 16 inches. A gun subject to the Act has to be registered with the federal government, and you have to pay a 200 buck tax to buy one.(This hasn’t changed since 1934, when 200 bucks was the equivalent of more than 4000 bucks in 2022 dollars.)
But there’s a loophole. If a gun doesn’t have a buttstock it isn’t considered a short barreled rifle no matter what barrel length it has. It’s a pistol. There have been semi automatic pistol versions of submachine guns sold for decades(ie the KG99/TEC9 “assault pistol”), but recently someone realised an AR15 version is also considered a pistol under the law, and a bunch of makers have jumped on the bandwagon. So you can buy a compact gun that fires rifle rounds without registration or a tax.
I’m surprised Florida isn’t redder.
@26
not sinking actually but being swallowed by the sea.
Ray Ceeya@26 I post this a lot, but seriously Bug’s Bunny was onto something here.
In Australia, the USA and Canada indigenous children were ripped from their families and placed in schools which were really just labor camps designed to remove their native identity. Families were permanently destroyed by this process and many of the children who died from their harsh treatment were buried in unmarked graves. In Australia these children are referred to as the “Stolen Generations”. America now has a new stolen generation, those children who are murdered in mass shootings in their schools.
The following was posted as a comment to an article on The Register…
I own a musket for home defense, since that’s what the founding fathers intended. Four ruffians break into my house. “What the devil?” As I grab my powdered wig and Kentucky rifle. Blow a golf ball sized hole through the first man, he’s dead on the spot. Draw my pistol on the second man, miss him entirely because it’s smoothbore and nails the neighbors dog. I have to resort to the cannon mounted at the top of the stairs loaded with grape shot, “Tally ho lads” the grape shot shreds two men in the blast, the sound and extra shrapnel set off car alarms. Fix bayonet and charge the last terrified rapscallion. He Bleeds out waiting on the police to arrive since triangular bayonet wounds are impossible to stitch up. Just as the founding fathers intended.