I can't agree with this stance at all. US shootings and crimes will not be stopped or declined by stronger invasions of privacy and increased searches. US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net.
Over and over and over again throughout history, harsher law enforcement and invasion of personal privacy has failed to appreciably reduce crime or violence or murder. At best you merely create divisions in society between the privileged and the desperate that hides the problems from the privileged and wealthy so they can ignore it until eventually it boils over because the privileged and wealthy members of society are shielded from actually seeing the systemic problems that everyone else is dealing with.
Don't forget the massive illegal drug industry that has to DIY the kind of business-dispute settling violence that normal industries use court ordered state violence for.
That alone accounts of a huge amount of our violence.
I think HN User potato3732842's comment was probably true back in the 90's.
But now, yes, the nature of threats to US citizens have changed. There has obviously been a decrease in the whole drug and gang violence side because of interdiction and enforcement. Meanwhile a massive expansion of the whole "school or workplace shooter" thing. Law enforcement has not changed to effectively meet this threat yet, so it seems like it's happening with impunity. Just as in the 90's law enforcement had not changed to meet the drug violence threat yet, so drug violence seemed like it happened with impunity back then.
We just need for law enforcement to increase the pace at which they adapt to meet new threats.
Mexico has some of the most stringent gun laws in the world. They also have more than four times the murder rate of the US. So while it's technically true that Mexicans have guns, this is more along the lines of "people inclined to violate the law against murder have no qualms about violating the law against unlawful possession of a firearm" rather than that it's easy to lawfully acquire a firearm in Mexico.
Practically anyone can own a shotgun in the UK, which also has restrictive gun laws. There has only ever been one school shooting (and the guy responsible owned his weapons completely legally).
What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help.
> What I'm saying is that gun control won't solve the problem, but it will help.
I still don't get how this is supposed to work.
It seems like there are two main categories of shootings. The first is the ones that most often make the news, i.e. school shootings. But the people who do this are typically people who snap rather than career criminals, and then they would pass the background check etc. Also, these are in practice a small minority of shooting deaths.
The second is gang violence. This is where you really get the high body counts. But it's also where gun laws aren't going to be followed, and then you get the same result as you do in Mexico, i.e. stringent laws that do nothing because drug cartels are already operating a criminal smuggling operation and don't give a crap about following gun laws.
The best argument I've heard in favor of "gun control" reducing fatalities is something like, if you make it inconvenient for normal people to have guns then fewer of them will do it and you get fewer accidents. But then there are any number of alternative ways to get a similar result, like subsidizing gun safes or training etc., which don't require you to fight the people you're otherwise intending to purposely inconvenience.
I am happy to inform you that the United States also does not have school shootings on an "almost daily basis". Not trying to be pedantic here, but gross exaggerations misrepresent the issue.
> GVA has reported 971 cases of school shootings across the United States in 2024, with many of them having no victims or injuries. The database has tracked 112 school shootings in which a victim was injured or killed.
Somewhere between ~3/day and ~0.3/day, depending what you count. Close enough.
USA Today's reporting is wrong. There are not 971 cases of school shootings. There are about that many "school incidents". Some of those incidents, like the one listed below, are where police responded to a report of someone with a gun and never found the person or gun.
Yes I have. An altercation between two people in a parking lot is different than a school shooting.
Have you looked at the other items listed where there are victims? Multiple times I see that it was an altercation in a dorm room of a college. Sorry, I would consider that an altercation in a residence, not a school shooting. Here's another one that a kid shot himself in the leg and it's counted as a school shooting.
Ah. I now understand why school shooting numbers that people are quoting are so very high as of late.
Shit like Columbine is a school shooting. Shit like that is a shooting that happened to happen at school. If the assailant had used a knife, would you be calling it a "school stabbing"? If you would, then I disagree with that characterization, too.
For lots of folks, the term "school shooting" is strongly associated with the notion that a massacre happened... and not at all with the notion that some folks got into a heated argument, and one of them decided to attack the other with a weapon.
Based on this: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42552320> many things classified as "school shooting" are not what any reasonable person would think of when they hear the term.
A kid shooting HIMSELF in the leg? Yes, it meets an extremely literal definition, but it would be incredibly stupid to -say- lock down a campus because of that.
Issues of what constitutes a "school shooting" aside, my personal experience with GVA is that their database contains duplicate incidents and they will not actually correct those errors when pointed out.
They appear to have correctly filtered out the "Non-Shooting Incident" sort of results from it (which your picks appear to mostly be) to arrive at the ~900 numbers.
I've also been looking at the export, but I don't see any way to filter down to "Shooting incidents". Just sampling the first 10, 10% of 2000 is looking like way less.
Were you able to find a way to validate the 900 number?
Depends how you define school shooting as well. Click around on https://www.chds.us/sssc/data-map/ . There are numerous incidents like "Teacher killed himself in classroom after school hours" "Shots fired in the evening, no one injured".
Also, if you go into that data a total of 260 Students were fatally wounded by a firearm from 1970 to 2022 during the school day.
If this is accurate, the odds of being fatally shot as a student during school hours is extremely low, about 1 in 10,000,000 over the span of this data collection. Higher odds than winning a powerball jackpot, but, in context, an extremely rare event.
It wouldn't be a stretch to hypothesize that the administrators forcing students through metal detectors, doing active shooter drills, etc, are doing more net harm than the thing that they are attempting to defend against (as a purely utilitarian calculation).
It really depends on the definition of "school shooting". If you mean the type that makes national headlines where someone shoots a bunch of random people, then no it's not daily
If by "school shooting" you include all the people shot in or right next to schools, then yea it's almost daily (or at least every couple days or so). That includes fights escalating to guns, targeted shootings of single people due to whatever revenge.
Swiss also… everywhere. And the laws are not so different in the USA as the rest of the world as often portrayed. Also the violence all around the world is more uniform than many think or want to admit (if counted relative to people count) But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere while a shooting, say in Germany, will not be covered as much. Just in south germany (BW) there are a couple of people killed per week, but that is covered only occasionally, when at all, by very local newspapers.
> But a shooting in USA will be displayed everywhere...
No, it won't. Unless it's a very large or very notable one (school w/multiple deaths, lots of deaths, politician, etc.), it'll be a line item on the day's evening news for the local TV station. We have 10k+ a year, not "a couple per week". I don't even hear of most of the ~50/year that happen in my fairly small city.
> In 2017, compared to 22 other high-income nations, the U.S. gun-related homicide rate was 25 times higher. Although the US has half the population of the other 22 nations combined, among those 22 nations studied, the U.S. had 82 percent of gun deaths, 90 percent of all women killed with guns, 91 percent of children under 14 and 92 percent of young people between ages 15 and 24 killed with guns, with guns being the leading cause of death for children.
Blanket black-and-white statements about what will or won’t ‘solve’ gun violence can only exist in oversimplified worlds that conflate causes, catalysts, prerequisites, cultural influences, economics, etc. If anybody is expecting one sphere of concern— e.g socioeconomic equality, bans, mental health treatment, draconian sentences for violent crimes, etc.— to essentially resolve the issue to the exclusion of all others, then nothing will ever look like it’s going to work because it’s not one problem. It’s not even one symptom. Street gang violence, criminal cartel violence, and mass killings by extremists are serious problems with very different root causes that express themselves in very different ways. It’s also totally disingenuous to say their having a common tool is inconsequential, or that the same approach to addressing that makes sense everywhere, or that taking away the rights of people with different values is an inconsequential concern. You can’t solve all problems at once, and dismissing one approach out-of-hand because you can cite problems it won’t solve and assert all sorts of assumed negative effects without any evidence is nothing more than avoidance.
>US's high crime problems boil down to poor socioeconomic factors. Poverty, desperation, lack of economic mobility and opportunity, draconian law enforcement, poor social services and safety net.
Source? This doesn't pass the sniff test. First, US's poverty rate isn't the lowest, but is below many lower income countries that also have lower homicide rates. The figures for poverty rates take into account PPP, so it's not a matter of "Americans are richer in absolute dollars but poorer in relative dollars". Second, looking at the data, the correlation between income inequality is all over the place. For instance Malaysia is only marginally lower than the US in terms of income inequality, but is almost an order of magnitude lower in homicide rate. Trinidad and Tobago has even lower income inequality, but has almost an order of magnitude more.
That study doesn't have any mention of controls in the abstract. Therefore it can't prove a casual link. For instance, it could be the case that rich people with the means flee more violent areas, and/or that less violent people are more successful in life, which allows them resources to escape violent areas, and that's responsible for the correlation, rather than "socioeconomic factors" making people more violent.
Lol I'm trying to help you help yourself. I'm not doing all the work for you. I've seen enough studies to convince me but don't have them handy. I could tell you to go read American Homicide and others to understand the historical trends. You're arguing that they aren't related. Do you have studies proving your side? Just saying they aren't related isn't actual proof. Your argument must also meet a burden of proof as absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. I've provided a study. Care to provide a counter?
Looks like maybe the stats were added later in an edit, as I didn't see them. Comparing stats from separate countries is terrible. This has no control for any of the other possible factors associated. Those aren't studies, but just random stats. I at least offered a study. I didn't offer any "flak", but a starting point for you with a source.
>Comparing stats from separate countries is terrible. This has no control for any of the other possible factors associated. Those aren't studies, but just random stats. I at least offered a study.
Comparing between countries is "terrible" because "there's no control for any of the other possible factors associated", but the study you offered which also seemingly has no controls is fine... because "starting point"?
It would be nice to have better screening tools, but that doesn’t mean a company should get to lie about what their products are capable of and how they work.
Ironically, millimeter wave imagers, that are legitimately capable of finding hidden weapons pretty much anywhere, isn’t deployed outside airports because of the cost and the huge backlash that anything that has the resolution to accurately distinguish a gun can also image your private parts quite well. Evolv wants you to think they can have comparable accuracy with higher throughput and lower cost, but I’ll bet every airport in the country would have them if those claims were true. So instead Evolv preys on nervous leaders who want some protection in large public gatherings but aren’t knowledgeable about security.
> So instead Evolv preys on nervous leaders who want some protection in large public gatherings but aren’t knowledgeable about security.
That's certainly consistent with their email list. I have no idea how I got on it, but I was on it for a while about church security, and it was constant "webinar" reminders (I assume, sales pitch without having to actually interact with people one-on-one) about how you might have people "bringing guns into" your church without knowing it, etc.
It would have been interesting tech to play with. I figure that a quarter of the church on any given Sunday was carrying in some definition of "concealed" or another (ranging from "Dude, I can read the serial number on your gun through your shirt..." to "I'm certain there are people carrying that I would never expect to be carrying and will never know unless there's a reason it needs to come out").
In at least some parts of the USA there is probably a fair overlap between people who carry any time they leave their house and people who go to church every Sunday.
You're trying to disprove the political slogan, which is obviously rhetoric. "The only way to X is Y" is generally going to be false because absolutist statements in general are going to be false.
The real question is, for example, does prohibiting school staff from having firearms make it better or worse? Which is pretty hard to measure when there is a federal law against it. But a point in favor of "better" is that senseless mass shootings tend to happen disproportionately in schools and other places where the shooter knows nobody else is allowed to be armed.
> The real question is, for example, does prohibiting school staff from having firearms make it better or worse? Which is pretty hard to measure when there is a federal law against it.
Federal law forbids unauthorized individuals from possessing firearms at schools. All it requires is the state authorize it.
> According to the Texas Association of School Boards, "school districts can grant written permission for anyone, including designated employees, to carry firearms on campus" under Texas Penal Code 46.03, but the law does not lay out standards for training. The only thing a school employee needs in order to carry a firearm on campus is a license to carry, which requires a background check and a proficiency demonstration. Otherwise, individual districts determine the amount and type of additional requirements, which can include active-shooter training courses and psychological evaluations.
It's entirely legal to arm teachers under Federal law. (I don't think it's a good idea; I've met enough teachers.)
> It's entirely legal to arm teachers under Federal law.
Apparently it still requires the state to explicitly authorize it, and states allowing teachers to do this is a relatively recent development. So now we get to find out if it works, e.g. if school shootings in Texas go up or down relative to the trend in states that don't do this.
That's what I was thinking. States can and do authorize others, such as people with carry permits too. So it can be a lot of people, and it's my understanding this has been going on for decades in many states.
Yes it has, unless your definition of "stop" is limitd to "after people have been killed", and your definition of "only" is limited by current public policy in the US.
Sure sure, the "one neat trick" for getting around the bill of rights by deputizing the private sector to do things that only get recognized as rights violations if it's the government doing it.
Gun and weapon detection is still useful to stop shootings and stabbings that arise out of fights, where one member may suddenly present and use a previously concealed weapon.
Agreed that the usefulness against a crazed gunman is less clear, although crazies do not always have a rational plan. If the weapon was concealed in a backpack or something the security may be able to tackle them before they access it. If they’re carrying it in an easily accessible, concealed holster, that’s less effective and they might be able to draw and use it after being detected.
> Gun and weapon detection is still useful to stop shootings and stabbings that arise out of fights, where one member may suddenly present and use a previously concealed weapon.
Which might be a reasonable thing to aim for? It was mentioned up thread there's >100 school shootings/yr. The vast, vast majority (>>90%) of those are not the "crazy person randomly shoots up school" type, but rather the "two people in a fight / two groups in a fight / targeted revenge on single person".
Of course the downside with the latter is that simply weapons checking at the school won't stop it from happening right before / after school, or otherwise outside of school.
I'm still sad about having so many scanners preventing things like pocketknives in public spaces though. I generally carry a pocketknife with me everywhere I go, and there have been a number of times where I just haven't even thought about the fact it's on me when I end up going to a sporting event. They're pretty useful things; I probably use mine a few times a day.
Luckily some venues are nice about checking it with security, but still a pain to have to remember to go back and pick it up when leaving.
Wouldn't it be nice of people would just quit shooting and stabbing each other at things like sporting events :(
You can make the scanner a condition of entry. Disclose that it’s happening and it’s a deterrent. Better for crazy people to do crazy at the front door.
(C) crazed gunman neutralized by good guy with gun. In this case it was 3 minutes after the fact (Median Police Response Time to Active Shooter Attacks) rather than immediately as there were no available Good Guys with Guns due to gun policies.
I would never ever choose to be involved in an active shooter situation but if I were I’d surely want to be armed rather than not.
Well the "good guy with a gun" argument presumes the good guy is willing to use his gun and probably risk his own life doing it. This would happen more easily if he's already inside and under direct threat by the bad guy(s).
A cop outside is not obligated or expected to put his own life at risk. He's expected to show up for work tomorrow.
I do not agree with the second at all. Law Enforcement are both obligated and expected to put their own life at risk protecting the public. That said they are also expected to show up for work tomorrow! It’s a sad day when they don’t.
Please don't go off into political flamewar tangents on articles on less political topics. We can talk about whether or not a technology is effective and how much manufacturers should be allowed to overstate claims without getting into unnecessary political strife that degrades HN.
