However, the fact that these are extremely rare occurrences needs to be noted. Gun control has a lot more factors that are probably much more important than the rare issue of mass shootings.

To put it in perspective, doctors' sloppy handwriting kills roughly 7,000 people annually. That's far more than combined spree shooting victims. Certainly mandating doctors to type out all communication would be much easier than the herculean task of ridding the US of guns.

And the broader gun control issue has other issues and data that would need to be examined. Unfortunately, we don't have particularly good data regarding guns in the US due to the effective ban on government funded gun data (thanks NRA!).

Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion?

For example, a study in the 1990s found between 800,000 to 2.4 million defensive gun uses annually (Kleck & Gertz). And apparently while in the UK roughly half of all burglaries are when homeowners are present, in the US it's only 13%. There's also some data that suggests increases in crime rates in the years after gun bans, but the data comes from strong pro-gun sources and I'm a bit skeptical as to the validity.

Basically the data I could find regarding general gun control is spurious at best. We need better data on the pros and cons of gun ownership, and our decisions should be driven from that data and not anecdotal or tragic but extremely uncommon (statistically) events. So in my opinion, the rallying cry when national attention is on guns should not be taking head conjecture from all sides, but rather a national plea for better data so we can have an informed opinion on the issue.

If we/"the NRA" had any faith that researchers like Kleck would get some of this funding, we might go for that. But with the formal US medical establishment, i.e. the CDC, AMA, NEJM et. al. cheering on fraudulent research that concludes "a gun owner is 43 times more likely to kill a family member than an intruder", which score "success" for gun owners only as killing an intruder, which is not by itself even legal....

(It can be legal to threaten or use deadly force to stop an intruder, but intentionally using it to kill an intruder is illegal.)

The CDC, at least, needs to focus on its official mission; the Ebola outbreak and multiple lab safety screwups shows that it's been living on past glory and really needs to refocus.

This is a false alternative. There's nothing forcing us to solve just 1 of these problems.

> Personally, I'd like to see the first step in gun control being federal funding directed toward research. Do guns (concealed carry, etc) actually deter other forms of violent crime? How many homeowners have used guns in self defense during a home invasion?

Another question that should be asked to be fair - do gun ownership among general population encourages criminals to take guns with them when they perform crime? Does the presence of a gun increase probabililty of a crime turning violent/deadly?

My expectation: gun ownership makes crimes slightly less frequent (higher barrier to entry), at the cost of making it much more common for the crime to turn violent/deadly to someone.

The real discussion is the everyday issue regarding guns. And you're probably correct with your assumptions. Here in the US, we have 4x the homicide rate as, say, the UK, where gun ownership is very low.

And our violent crimes is probably only about 60-70% of their rate.

BUT, if we look at per capita rates for that, it means here we have about 3 more people killed out of 100,000 each year, but they have about 200-300 people beaten, raped, etc each year out of 100,000.

Again, crime rate comparisons are a very inexact and difficult thing to do well, but my numbers for this come from a rebuttal of a pro-gun sound-byte, so I'm hoping they're a bit on the conservative side: http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checkin...

Personally, I'm lucky to not know anyone who has been shot dead by a criminal. (I do know someone who was shot dead by police while drunk though - but police gun ownership is not at all on the discussion table in the US). I do know two people who were beaten and left brain damaged, and one that was raped in front of her kids during a home invasion with a knife-welding assailant. Now, I've mostly lived in areas in the US that were the least gun friendly (NYC and CA), so maybe people in other areas would have different stats. But certainly even here in the US, violent crimes are around 100x more common than homicides, and a reduction of 30-40% there would improve a greater quantity of lives than a 4-fold reduction in homicides. (The net quality of a trade-off is extremely debatable. And a debate we should be having.)

Still, I'd love to see better and more trustworthy data at a greater scale than what's currently available before I throw my weight behind one side or another. I can argue either side because both have valid points. But I find myself at a loss for which I ultimately agree with, as I simply don't have enough information to make an educated decision. And as someone that actually actively looks for the data, if I can't figure it out, I have a hard time listening to self-assured opinions on the matter (of which there are plenty on both sides).

This is a complex issue that needs sophisticated analysis, but that's not at all the attention it gets as long as the only time it's discussed is in the context of a knee jerk reaction to a 1 out of 7,000,000 occurrence.

P.S. I bring up the ways violent crime has reached the people around me not to try and sway with an appeal to anecdotes, but simply to add the human element to the generic "violent crime" term. We have the human element of gun violence constantly put before us in the media, but the crimes people survive (though often scarred and broken) simply don't get the same attention. These are often serious matters and at 100x an already 4x inflated homicide rate, they are the issues I find myself more worried about than guns.

Not living in the US presumably subjects you to position bias. Those who live in countries where gun rights are strong tend to favor gun rights. Those who live in countries where gun control is strong tend to favor gun control. This is true of most things, as the moral compasses of most are drawn from what is currently normative to their existing environment. This is true of most places in which socio-political biases are codified into law, whether regarding religion, gay rights, whatever; Change in these areas tends to come slowly if at all.

> guns should be regulated further

Perhaps they should, perhaps they shouldn't. I have my bias, as I'm sure does everyone engaged in the discussion, but, at the end of the day, the document of the highest possible authority suggests that the citizenry should have access to guns, and the only way to overturn that is by ratifying that document. Thankfully, the document itself offers prescriptive measures for such ratification, but at the end of the day, without a strong enough amount of support throughout the nation and states for such a measure to pass.

At present, such support does not exist, so our politicians play different games on what does or does not constitute "infringement".

In the past, the argument was that it wasn't infringing if the person who wanted to exercise gun rights wasn't a member of a militia. We can prove historically and grammatically that this isn't true, but it took the Supreme Court's agreement for the legislature to accept it.

Then, the argument was that sure, it's an individual right and not limited to those in the militia, but hey, the second amendment says you can keep and bear arms, but it doesn't say where, so instead, the government insists that the right is only applicable to within the home. Have as many guns as you like, and carry them anywhere you want, as long as it's inside your home.

It took Chicago v. McDonald getting that one overturned in 2012 by the Supreme Court.

So, legally speaking, we know that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, disconnected from membership in a militia, and it extends outside the home. To those who favor gun rights, the matter might settled, but to those who favor gun control, it's a challenge to come up with a new rule that doesn't directly contradict those recently affirmed rules by the Supreme Court.

In D.C., the argument is currently that the right to keep and bear arms is only available to those with a heightened need... but what other right in our Constitution merits such a high bar to exercise? Would it be okay to restrict voting only to those harmed by the current administration? Would it be okay to limit speech only to those who can show that they have been victimized?

Anyway, I'm obviously ranting, and there's certainly more of my bias in this post than I intended, so I should shut up. The point, that I'm sure I made poorly, is that the law here says that we can have firearms, and that not even the elected legislature has the power to overturn that without ratifying the Constitution... unless they can come up with something legally clever, or wait until there exists a more favorable court to their cause.

In the past, the argument was that it wasn't infringing if the person who wanted to exercise gun rights wasn't a member of a militia. We can prove historically and grammatically that this isn't true, but it took the Supreme Court's agreement for the legislature to accept it.

I don't see any legislators changing their mind about this, or any laws being passed based on it, although I might have forgotten some state ones. Except for:

Then, the argument was that sure, it's an individual right and not limited to those in the militia, but hey, the second amendment says you can keep and bear arms, but it doesn't say where, so instead, the government insists that the right is only applicable to within the home. Have as many guns as you like, and carry them anywhere you want, as long as it's inside your home.

It took Chicago v. McDonald getting that one overturned in 2012 by the Supreme Court.

Errr, McDonald v. Chicago just applied Heller to the states and specifically Chicago, and further Federal court action, not appealed to the Supreme Courts, enforced a shall issue concealed carry regime on the state ... which I'll note for a blue state is much better balanced between the big cities and "downstate" for it.

Not counting California and Hawaii, where this is still being litigated, every other Federal judicial challenge to a restrictive concealed carry regime has failed, and the Supremes have then denied cert, despite the circuit split. As it stands in the Federal courts, we now have a right to keep arms in our homes, and to bear them there (that was actually an issue litigate in Heller and is elsewhere one, based on so called "safe storage" laws), but not outside our homes.

That's more to rebut the perennial tide of "Well, if you read the second amendment it clearly states that it belongs to a well regulated militia" argument that invariably crops up in lesser discussions on the subject.

"Errr, McDonald v. Chicago just applied Heller to the states and specifically Chicago"

Correct. I crossed it with Moore v. Madigan. It's late, and they're in the same jurisdiction, which I don't live in. Apologies for the error.

"Not counting California and Hawaii, where this is still being litigated, every other Federal judicial challenge to a restrictive concealed carry regime has failed"

And D.C., as Pena v. Lindley is being reheard en banc, and the new panel has stayed their previous injunction on enforcing "good and substantial"... otherwise, yes, agreed.

The question is whether U.S. law (including the constitution) should support gun ownership, which is something completely different.

Congress could not simply pass a law to ban speech because it is protected by the Constitution. To ban free speech, you would have to modify the Constitution. To modify the Constitution, you would have to have much more support for it than currently exists.

I'm sure Petzold and everyone in this thread knows that gun control laws are hard to change -- what you're talking about has nothing to do with the actual question at hand, which is whether they should be changed.

Just because you know everything already doesn't mean that everybody else does. My apologies for trying to be informative.

That is to say - it should be impossible to remove a right that is not granted, but is simply innate.

Who would ever agree to removing the 1st, 4th, 5th, or 6th. No one. So why would they agree to removing the 2nd?

I don't understand what people don't get about the fact that one has an absolute, irremovable, and inalienable right to self-defense.

Which was indeed the purpose of the 18th, which was quite the grand mistake.

Sure. And I have my own opinion on the matter, but I kept it out of my comment for a reason: my opinion isn't particularly important on this matter. I was merely discussing the article and kromem's call for a different analysis.