Posted on 12/24/2012 5:45:24 PM PST by umgud
According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report for 2011, there were 12.664 total homicides. 8,583 of those murders were committed with firearms, a number that has been trending down for years. In 2011 there were 3 mass shootings that produced 19 deaths and many more injured. The FBI defines mass murder as four or more murders occurring during a particular event with no cooling-off period between the murders. We have had 61 mass murders in the last 30 years (since 1982). In 2012, we have had a banner year with 6 mass murder events totaling 63 deaths.
Our latest mass shooting at Sandy Hook has the nation calling for action to deal with mass murders in particular and gun crime in general. I’d like to use the above statistics to put our challenge in perspective as we wrestle with how to best deal with it.
First, I’d like to separate mass murderers from all other murderers. They specifically distinguish themselves by killing 4 or more people in a single event. In 2012, out of a population of some 313 million, 6 people chose to become mass murderers. Statistically, that is the proverbial spec on the end of the needle in a really huge hay stack.
I can’t conceive of a way to profile and predict who the next 6 shooters might be, but to this end, it gets harder. Many, if not most of these mass shooters, while both mentally defective and evil, have never been adjudicated mentally defective or have criminal histories that would prohibit them from owning firearms. This includes Adam Lanza (our latest shooter), James Holmes, the CO movie theater shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan (Ft Hood shooter), Jared Loughner (shot Gabby Giffords) and Seung-Hui Choi who killed 32 at Virginia Tech.
Regarding mass shooters, I am hard pressed to think of any meaningful or reasonable way to stop them or mitigate their actions. As horrific as their acts are, I’m not comfortable passing laws or applying actions against 313 million people in the false hope of affecting 6 madmen bent on mayhem. There are however, two constants associated with most or all these mass shootings; Gun-free zones and hi-cap magazines. Not all mass murders are at school, but these tug on our hearts the most. James Holmes chose a movie theater that banned guns too. Regarding schools, I believe that more people should have the ability to carry weapons. I won’t here, debate who that should be, but I will say a single security guard probably isn’t sufficient.
Hi-cap mags? It would make many people happy to see them banned, but reality says there are already millions in circulation and it would be decades, if ever that such a ban would have any effect. BTW, hi-cap mags can be made by almost any person with a little bit of metal working skills.
Now let’s move on to the other 8,500+ firearm homicides. I’ll be brief. We can easily drive this number down because it’s a criminal management problem and criminal management solutions are the remedy that will work here. BTW, let me say something here about hi-cap mags and so-called assault weapons. These 8,500 murders produced less than 4 deaths per shooting, probably most being one per shooting. I don’t know how many of these shooters used so-called assault weapons or hi-cap mags, but they offered no advantage here as only 3 or less people were killed per event, so a total ban on these wouldn’t change the 8,500 number one bit. We could go back to 6 shot revolvers and kill this many people. Yeah, I know some will say they are lousy shots and have to spray lots of ammo to kill just 3.
Let me sum up my positions here. BTW, my main goal isn’t to go over possible solutions. It is to put the big picture in perspective.
I hate to be a killjoy (I know, a poor choice of words), but I’m not sure we can put into place actions to stop mass murderers that will work.
As to garden variety gun crime, I’m of the opinion that most gun laws are directed at law abiding citizens as criminals don’t obey those laws anyway. Drive down any Martin Luther King Blvd and you can bet a large percentage of the people you see are carrying concealed weapons........ without permits. Gun control is kinda like trying to solve drunk driving by making it harder for sober people to own cars.
Uh...... that was profound. Thanks.
I was happy to see our local school remain in session Friday in the face of a flood of threats around the state. They said they didn’t believe the threats were credible and wouldn’t reward bad behavior.
I hear nothing from any of the Governors of the States to suggest they intend to do anything to solve the Washingtonian problem.
The apparatchiks in DC intend to steal every last dime from those outside the Beltway, and there isn't a damn thing we can do about it until the non communist American States form coalitions and rebel.
We should start a War on Mass Shootings and form the Mass Shooting Enforcement Administration and name a czar of Mass Shootings and blah blah blah.
Something like 1.1 million abortions in the US a year?
For example, shortly after the attack in Connecticut an off duty police officer at a theater in Texas prevented another mass shooting by using his firearm.
The difference between a murder, and mass murder in almost every case is the presence of armed people that the shooter did not expect to be there - namely citizens with concealed carry weapons.
How many car accident deaths every year?
If you stopped all Mass Shootings, there would be more Mass Bombings.
If you stopped all Mass Bombings, there would be more Mass Arson.
If you stopped all Mass Arson, there would be more Mass Vehicular Homicide.
If you stopped all Vehicular Homicide, there would be more Mass Poisonings.
If you stopped all Mass Poisonings, there would be more....
http://www.ssristories.com/index.php?p=school
http://vaccineliberationarmy.com/fox-news-school-shootings-caused-by-teens-on-anti-depressants/
We CAN mitigate it by NOT allowing these ZOMBIE drugs to be handed out like gumdrops -
These drugs are off the table for discussing because too m any pols have lucrative stocks in these billion of dollars a year mind-destroying drugs. WAKE UP PEOPLE.
http://vaccineliberationarmy.com/fox-news-school-shootings-caused-by-teens-on-anti-depressants/
http://www.ssristories.com/index.php?p=school
go to youTube and search the subject. Seeple. Turn off “Idol” and “Dancing with the Stars” for one night and educate yourselves. How many years has this information been available! But we let them get away with ignoring it and with continued destruction of peoples lives - both the perpetrators, their families and the victims.
A sleeping public bears guilt too.
This is it, Chuckles — you have hit the nail on the head.
Dads, if they’re even THERE, aren’t really all there anymore. They’re at: sporting games, or watching them on TV, on the golf course, at work ... — or they’re with their new girlfriend ...mostly at work for 12 hrs straight (my own husband included)
Don’t even get started on the moms. Most have to work now —and kids are shuffled to daycare from 6 weeks of age and up, then after school care programs, then home alone once when reach a certain age, with video games and other rot to fill their time.
When I tell most women I stayed home with my kids for 15 years, I get the rolley eyes and the old “I could never do that ...I’d be bored out of my mind,” thing.
Screens are raising the kids ... and now I-phones. Their minds are warped. And you’re right ...they don’t know how to do a damn thing. It’s cultural all right — it’s just plain horribly bad parenting endemic in our society.
Defense preparedness, is a major part of every individual's every day life on earth.
It always has been. It always will be.
Leftist, liberal, progressive, nationalizing socialist wishful, magical thinking, will not change that.
Rather, leftist, liberal, progressive, nationalizing socialist wishful, magical thinking, will produce what it has always produced:
a police state that puts people in cages, whether the cage is barbed wire or the cage is barbed political accusations spewing from the pulpits of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, Alinsky, Obama and Holder et al, and the leftist/liberal "media" propaganda organs
... collectively known in the pained memories of the victims of socialism, as "The Ministry of Truth."
In which mystical contrivance by the present-day intellectuals not yet arrested by that police state - TO THEIR SURPRISE - we are told, on up until we meet such dogmaticians in the concentration camps or enroute to some ditch, that *their* definition of "work" makes you free.
Within the confines of the nationalizing socialist nutshell, aka your cage.
The Poles of communist post WW-II Poland will tell you exactly that, how you would be told what to think, what to eat, what to say, what you could express, and more, and you *did* as you were told, or the police state came to collect you for a time set by the state, regardless of any "law."
The entire 20th century proved that nationlizing socialism is the path to police state control over life and liberty, during which long passage, tens of millions of people --- including millions of children.
Millions of children disposed of by "social cleansing" that the eggheads of "modernity's" socialism, now lust to impose upon millions of Americans who have committed no crimes.
If you think that "cleansing" is restricted to your race or your religion, you are mistaken.
The nationalizing socialists want to strip away your ability to build a foundation of individual freedom; they want to scrub away your courage; they want to erase your will to resist.
They want to cleanse any instinct of yours to be free, and especially any notion you may have that some power greater than the state, will support you in your efforts.
Every person who ever for even a brief moment dreamed of being free from the tyranny of nationalizing socialism, knows this to be true.
The left, the liberal media, Nina Totenberg and Chris Matthews and Piers Morgan ... all want you to forget it.
You may be scared right now, but after the initial shock has worn off, you will find the courage to resist the nationalizing socialist police state.
Now let’s move on to the other 8,500+ firearm homicides.
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Of those deaths what were the percentages ( victim and assailant) in terms of race: White, Asian, Black, American Indian?
I bet, I bet, I bet, that one particular demographic is responsible for most of the mayhem.
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