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From military weapon to cultural symbol: how the AR-15 has defined the US gun debate
(www.theguardian.com)
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this post was submitted on 01 Nov 2023
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Well, hey, I'm glad you asked!
Let's start with something that should be obvious, but isn't: mass murders are a tiny percentage of all the murders in the US annually. Seriously. If you remove ordinary crime (e.g., gang violence, robberies, fight at a party, etc.) and domestic violence from the mass shootings, you end up with a total of about 100 people killed in 2022, out of a total of 19,200 murders (assuming I'm reading the most recent numbers correctly), or about .5% of all murders.
Murder rates are, in turn, dwarfed by suicides; there are typically 2-3x as many completed suicides as there are murders of all types.
When you look at murder rates broken down by weapon type, rifles account for approximately 5% of gun homicides. (Although 32% of the firearm homicides don't specify what kind of firearm is used, it seems likely that it roughly approximates the other numbers.) So it's clear that rifles--including AR-15 rifles--are not the primary driver of gun homicide numbers, or even a particularly large one.
So, given that gun deaths are suicides, and most gun homicides are some subset of ordinary crime (rather than mass-murder/active shooter events), the greatest effects are going to be seen in measures that reduce crimes in general.
So, if you really want to reduce the overall death rate, the first and biggest thing to do would be to have some form of national healthcare that is able to quickly and efficiently get help to people that are suicidal.
If you want to reduce the murder rate, then you need to look at things that drive crime. I suspect that you'd get large reductions by focusing on significant reductions in income inequalities, elimination of poverty, national healthcare (including access to mental healthcare), education reform (esp. elimination of private/home/selective schooling, and properly funding public schools), criminal justice and policing reform, and housing that costs less than 25% of a single adult's take-home pay. Most ordinary crime is from desperation or hopelessness, and violence is a result of that ordinary crime. Beyond that, you'd need to look at ways of reducing or eliminating systemic racism and misogyny, as both are underlying motivators for racially- and gender-motivated crime. (Which partially goes back to public education.)
In order to prevent violence before it happens, without trampling on civil rights, we need to make society more equitable and just for everyone, and we need a strongly progressive tax system to pay for it, with the highest marginal tax rates going back to pre-Nixon levels.
Yes, I've heard this one before. "It doesn't happen that often so we don't need to do anything about it." That's a classic.
And the best part is people who like guns don't even vote for better mental health care or improved education or anything that will actually reduce gun deaths. They just vote against any restrictions on gun ownership.
Republicans are generally against any kind of gov't intervention to correct underlying causalities, that much is true. OTOH, Dems say they support fixing underlying issues, but even states with Democratic supermajorities are unwilling to address systemic problems, and simply go after banning guns. Take housing issues, for instance; it's a plank of the nat'l Democratic party that there should be affordable housing available to everyone. But when majority Democratic cities try to approve affordable housing, Democrats turn up in opposition to it, because NIMBY. Dems say that they want to do certain things, things that would be good for everyone, but then they can't get support in their own party to actually do those things. Republicans just don't give a fuck about helping people. Despite the base of Dems favoring reducing funding for law enforcement and being in favor of criminal justice reform, the party as a whole keeps increasing funding for cops without doing shit for social programs. Hey, here's another example - my former city, Chicago, has been overwhelmingly Democratic for something like 40 years. My former therapist in Chicago had worked with a community mental health program, helping people with chronic homelessness etc., until funding was cut for the programs, and he lost his job. Who cut the funding? Democrats. Who cut the funding in Chicago for violence prevention/intervention programs that were showing significant reduction in violent crime? Democrats. Who kept voting to move money away from public schools to charter and magnet schools in Chicago? Yet again: Democrats.
So don't give me that shit about Republicans being the only ones voting against actually fixing problems.