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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2024
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Something definitely broke in society around that time though, and "access to guns" only describes an outlet or mechanism, and not the underlying problem.
Pre-1968, civilians could buy full auto machineguns. At one point in the 1930s the Sears catalog would send a full auto Tommy Gun straight to your house via mail order with no background check. And yet in those eras the idea of a grand spectacle suicide/homicide event would have been absolutely unthinkable, even among the most disposessed in society.
The root problem is something more like cultural narcissm, for lack of a better word.
The concept of a deep cynical anti-hero move like publicly murdering pseudo-random aquaintances is a relatively modern problem. Maybe we need to do a better job suppressing "main character vibes" and narcissism, the acting out and sociopathy that is prevalent now.
Ummmm...
https://www.historynet.com/how-1930s-american-gang-violence-paved-the-way-for-gun-control/
I mean nobody was talking about gang violence here.
I thought we were talking about gun violence. Gang related or not it was a thing in the 30s.
No? The conversation was (and still is) centered around school shootings.
I literally quoted what I was replying to. "Schools" is not mentioned.
I mean gang violence is usually not a grand spectacle event, so it has nothing to do with the text you're quoted.
Are you serious? There are "icons" from that era known for their violence and "spectacle".
Bonnie & Clyde; Baby face Nelson; Al Capone; John Dillenger; Machine Gun Kelly (before his singing career)
FFS - MACHINE GUN KELLY!
These people were horrible and killed a lot of non-gang members.
"Newsreels from the period chronicled the violence. In one from 1931, footage shot in New York shows walls along a city street pockmarked with bullet holes, and the children caught in the crossfire of gang warfare."
Yes I'm not saying there was zero violence in society. There were things like Al Capone's St. Valentines Day Massacre, Bonnie and Clyde, the Kansas City Union Station shootout, etc. but these were extreme outliers in society at large and were international news because of it.
What is relatively new is the concept of an average student or worker becoming disgruntled and deciding to mass murder peers in a singular incident, usually with some grandiose manifesto attached to it.
School shootings in particular are a "new thing" - I'll grant that. But in general gun violence in the US is definitely not a new thing.
EDIT: Also - schools shooting today are actually still "extreme outliers" on the order of the gang violence of the '30s. They're far more common than they should be, but they're still pretty rare given the number of schools in the US.
for every school shooting there's like 5 "school lockdown because of unidentified person on campus"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_School_disaster
People could also buy dynamite pretty easy, this was a 1927 school killing.
Crazy finds a way, however the frequency uptick these days is bonkers. Regardless of the device used to kill, I (with no evidence) think a lot of general community fracture has occurred over the last decades, people now have internet echo chambers reinforcing stupid ideas at a much higher accessibility, and foreign actors manipulating the general public. The local communities are more distanced as people choose their online pockets.
Can't downplay the firearm aspect though. The AR-15 is ridiculously easy to shoot with no formal training and easy to hit a tight grouping at 20 yards the first time you pick it up. Other firearms require more skill and training to be remotely as effective. This drops the barrier to entry so low that any asslarper can pick one up and go murder a ton of people.
Honestly that is every rifle ever made, 20yd is 60ft, the max effective range of the AR with 5.56 is about 600m or 1968.5ft. The AR and its common caliber are far from the best rifle at distance, 6mmARC for example you can push out to 1,000yd. Iirc the longest sniper kill so far on record was 1mi with .338 lapua. 60ft is honestly pistol distances, at this point you'd have to basically ban all rifles. Even .22lr can go 200yd accurately out of a rifle.
Population density has increased dramatically, more people in constant contact = more conflict with opportunities to escalate.
We should let people out in the middle of Alaska carry GAU-10s if they want, and if you live in a city you shouldn't be allowed to carry a handgun.
It's a question of risk assessment, crazy people have a rough normal distribution, but are significantly more dangerous when armed in dense population centers.
There's precedence for this, as most towns in the Old West would require people to check in their guns when they arrived.
If you can carry a GAU-8 Avenger, which is traditionally mounted in an A-10 Warthog, no one is going to stop you.
Damn, I conflated the two numbers. I am shame.
No worries, the air guard base near me flies A-10s, so I see them all the time & nerd out about them a little.
Physics might. No one else could.
I am heavy weapons guy
No, I am heavy weapons guy
Slight correction, between '30-'68 you could still get full auto thompsons mailed to you at 12yo (if you had the dough, of course). The GCA of 1968 is what gave us the background checks, and they became instant in the 90s thanks to the internet. Full auto wasn't banned (yes yes I know "technically it isn't banned.." yeah it basically is) until 1986.
And high profile murders did happen but it was mostly stuff like the Valentines Day Massacre, the SLA killing the first black superintendent, Kennedy, Lennon, y'know, not school shootings.
That said I agree with your assessment.
OK this is not true. Firstly I seriously, SERIOUSLY doubt that Sears ever did that in the 1930s. I looked up the Sears-Roebuck catelogs from 1897 to 1926 (as much as I could find online) and I learned some surprising things.
Firstly, prior to WW1, the Sears-Roebuck catalog absolutely DID sell firearms, including handguns, to anyone with no questions asked. The handgun section in the 1912 catalog was quite exciting to look at if you are the type of person who likes old school handguns. Ammunition was also sold without any requirements other than money.
And besides handguns, the rifles and shotguns section was also quite good for just about everything that a North American sport shooter/hunter would want.
But after 1912? People started complaining that many criminals were using the catalog to get handguns and it was starting to worry people (in the 1910s and 1920s the crime rate was starting to rise rapidly) and so in 1918 handguns were no longer available for 'just cash'. They started selling handguns to only people who proved that they were legally permitted to own and carry a handgun, and you needed to provide a signed letter from a local sheriff or mayor or other authority figure that knew you, and by 1922 the handgun section shrunk to a single page and after that Sears no longer sold handguns.
The long gun section, however, remained as is. So yes, if you wanted a rifle or shotgun (even a semi-auto rifle or shotgun, which were around back then and sold by the catalog) you could buy it no questions asked.
The first federal gun law in the US wasn't the NFA in 1934. It was earlier in 1927 that forbade mail-order handguns.
The National Firearms Act in 1934 very strictly controlled fully-automatic guns. There was no way, NO WAY, any seller could find a 'mail-order' loophole to bypass it.