Let me guess: Within 12 hours the NRA will issue a statement, demanding that every 8-year old should be equipped with a semi-automatic gun in order to properly defend herself.

Tragic yet all too familiar and predictable

Wild, wild West

If the girl had a gun too then she could have defended herself and this tragedy wouldn't have happened.

Or we could now be looking at two dead children.

I suspect that would be a better way of looking at it.

But "guns don't kill people etc"

Undoubtedly. I was being sarcastic.

What I wrote seems to be the usual type of answer given by the pro-gun lobby that frequent this forum.

You mean, its true that vacines don't cause autism. It's the people who inject the vaccines?

This deep piece of scientific thinking should silence the anti-vaxxers for a while.

When will the Lancet buy my story?

Waiting for the owner of the gun to be arrested. There is no reason an eleven year old kid should have had access to it. Half of Americans are too stupid and irresponsible to be allowed to own firearms. That combined with a culture that perpetuates the idea that we can solve our problems with guns (the 'stocking up on ammo' mentality) leads to tragedies like this. When will we ever learn?

The right to bear arms is intrinsically tied to the right to self-defense and self-preservation. When these things happen, it doesn't convince gun owners to relinquish their weapons. Instead, it reinforces their reasons for having guns in the first place. In fact, some schools are now considering whether teachers should be armed.

I don't see the right to bear arms ever being relinquished in the US. They can try to apply some symbolic law or bureaucracy to curtail some kinds of purchase, but it won't really stop people from getting a hold of guns and owning them.

Technically this doesn't count as it's not a mass shooting.

Besides, I don't think it's fair to use this incident against the drugs argument. The age range should be narrow enough so those involved can be expected to know what they're doing.

I don't know if that's been said before here, and I don't know how acceptable this is going to be, but maybe this is Darwin at work.

I mean if Americans argue in the ways they argue about guns, and it is an intrinsic part of their culture, then they should just own it, accept that people are going to be dying en masse, and the rest of the world should just let them kill each other.

In some ways, two of the GOP front-runners are already saying that "things happen" because they're not going to argue that guns are a problem, so if they really want to say that, then by all means let them shoot each other in what seems an endless Mexican stand-off... I'm sorry to say this, but each time I have a discussion about the US, its problems, and how the people are addressing them I just lose faith to them, in the same way I've completely lost faith to my fellow Greeks.

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Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool

It would be Darwinism if these shootings were taking place in gun clubs, but they're not.

It would be Darwinism if the numbers killed were statistically relevant, but they're not.

I expect many more people are killed by SUVs than by guns, but you don't get the same kneejerk reaction there.

Not really, DM.

For one, evolutionary changes take many generations to express a new phenomenon and make it a fairly common trait among a given population.

Two, it may be an inverse selection. Though those expressing the phenomenon often die, this selection only works in a positive way (reduces the population share of those afflicted) if they are less than, say, 10% (threshold value is subject to how many innocent die, on average, vs how many killers die. 10% requires less than 10% of the population afflicted to make it a positive selection).


About 30k gun deaths annually (11-12k in shootings and accidents, 18-20k in suicides) vs 32-33k road deaths.

Since SUVs are only a subset they most probably kill considerably less. And in most cases road deaths are not intentional.

It's not quite Darwinian, as the Oregon shooter was an unfit pencil-necked geek who could not find a girlfriend. In fact, he offed himself. Behind it is a story of self-victimisation, and a lust for vengeance against humanity. Its more a story of of a collapse of moral standards, or simply evil.

Let's put these numbers at the scale of CH: US is 40x more populous than CH.
In CH that would be 14 and 50 respectively.

Fortunately teenagers don't die at this rate in CH - last year there were in total 41 people killed in CH. But regarding small children quite a few die every year in family disputes.

If in CH people were killed at the US rate, this would be about 350, and about 25 would have been killed by the Police alone.

Yeah true, if the answer was so easy that it is was just one thing we would've had this wrapped up years ago. America does realise there is a problem. It's why we are talking about it all the time, for years and years.

We don't know how to deal with it is the problem. It's like obesity. It's a systematic issue not just because there are more Burger Kings today then there was before.

See one problem is there is a well funded lobby v. common sense. Common sense doesn't have a lobby. True there are groups that try, but nothing as powerful as the NRA, which basically also reps a large part of conservative society. That vote. People who are actually using those guns to kill each other are probably not very often registered NRA members, and probably don't vote that much either.

It's like the poor and so called illegals, they can't really afford a representative voice, so they are easily picked on by more powerful groups. The NRA represents voters who are swift at the polls. You need an anti gun lobby that has the same with their voters. Which normally would be Dems...pot smoking city slickers who talk alot about voting and and equal rights but forget to actually ever express their voice unless a total wack job runs on the right...even still GW was elected twice.

The problem with gun control is it is premised on passing laws that prohibit sales and ownership of guns by certain people. But the only people who would adhere to such laws are law-abiding citizens. Criminals and psychos do not follow laws, so renders the passing of any such laws moot. I don't believe NRA members typically commit violent crimes.

So it is a nice sentiment, somewhat naive, but not realistically applicable.

It somehow is, since the society rules that guns are permitted, so people without guns are "unfit" and therefore are going to get out of the pool.

Take this as their logic:
You need guns to defend yourself from people, and you need to defend yourself from people, because everybody is out to get you and kill you. So everybody please have guns so you can defend yourself (!). Now everyone has guns so everyone needs more guns to protect themselves from everyone that already has guns.

This is insane to people from outside the US, in the same way that many Switzerlanding things are insane to non-Swiss, many Greek things are insane to non-Greeks and so on and so forth.
However to the Americans it makes sense and they will defend it as a part of their way of life.

They seem to like people like Trump, who seems to be expressing a significant amount of people with (what to many of us seems like) crazy talk, and they don't have any problem justifying military expeditions and spending billions over billions of dollars because of a potential threat and refusing to see that they have tangible threats to human life among them everyday.

And they do so because threat to life is not a threat to the way of life. There is no other way I can justify them justifying whatever is happening over there.


What I'm trying to say (probably rather unsuccessfully) is that what seems logical and "fit" and whatever to us, does not matter. What matters is the sum product of the Americans, their beliefs, and the power that they can exert. If the people that want their guns are so many and have so many power that the NRA can lobby all they like and no politician will dare touch gun-control, then that is what the US collectively want.

So let them have it, let them kill each other like savages, and to people that don't like it, I'm sorry but you seem to be stuck. Just duck for cover and do what you can to survive...



Of course this is an exaggeration and I'm just trying to say that since the Americans prefer the 'Murica way of life and will see the world in the way that they like, maybe we should just...

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Nothing is fool-proof to a sufficiently talented fool

Here the raw numbers.
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/d...ent.139172.xls
I could not find numbers for children and teens.


One observation I get from the above: The number given in http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417...states-america
also includes attempted homicides
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/d...ment.21929.xls
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/d...ent.192809.pdf
http://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/portal/d...ment.83618.pdf

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On Strike - ChatGPT knows more than I, so use it (or doesn't it?)