Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[pbrower2a]

(12-02-2018, 05:22 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote:

(12-01-2018, 03:52 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Here is the source of the opt-cited stat of a 37% reduction in mass shootings during the ban from 1994-2004:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk...1a66397e54

For his 2016 book “Rampage Nation,” Klarevas collected data on every gun massacre — which he defines as six or more people shot and killed — for the 50 years before 2016. His aim was to see whether there was any change in the number of gun massacres while the 10-year federal ban on assault weapons was in place.

He calls the results “staggering.” Compared with the 10-year period before the ban, the number of gun massacres during the ban period fell by 37 percent, and the number of people dying from gun massacres fell by 43 percent. But after the ban lapsed in 2004, the numbers shot up again — an astonishing 183 percent increase in massacres and a 239 percent increase in massacre deaths.

Klarevas says that the key provision of the assault weapons bill was a ban on high-capacity magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds. “We have found that when large capacity mags are regulated, you get drastic drops in both the incidence of gun massacres and the fatality rate of gun massacres.”

The opinion is shared among many researchers who study gun violence for a living. In 2016, for instance, the New York Times asked 32 gun policy experts to rate the effectiveness of a variety of policy changes to prevent mass shootings. The roster of experts included violence prevention researchers like Harvard's David Hemenway, as well as more ideologically driven gun rights advocates like John Lott.

On a scale of effectiveness ranging from 1 (not effective) to 10 (highly effective), the expert panel gave an average score of 6.8 to both an assault weapons ban and a ban on high-capacity magazines, the highest ratings among the nearly 30 policies surveyed.

The killers in recent incidents like Las Vegas, Orlando and Sutherland Springs were each able to walk into a gun shop in the days and months before their attacks, and legally purchase their assault weapons and magazines after passing a standard background check. Under an assault weapons ban, that wouldn't be possible.



My comment: Does "prohibition" work? Yes, various degrees of prohibition can have some effect in the matters related to the ban, according to many researchers, though not according to all.

Well, if you were to simply look at the charts you presented and take nothing else into account as far as social/cultural changes then one could/would see it/view it your way pretty easily.

So what are the "social/cultural" changes?

Massacre weapons are for military use, and not civilian use. Wiping out an SS detachment or a Vietcong platoon is a legitimate objective at times in war. Soldiers are under rigid discipline with prescribed rules of engagement. Someone who wants to wipe out a second-grade classroom, his workplace, a movie theater, or a restaurant operates with no rules in place or in contempt for the normal decencies.

Maybe we need to find aggressive ways of approaching and treating people who might be dangerous. Anorexia in males is far rarer than in females, but several of the male shooters seem anorexic. Maybe the combination of anorexia and testosterone is particularly dangerous. So if one is to have a firearm, one had better be certifiably fit, mentally and physically. Maybe there is something to the "lean and hungry look".