In the weeks running up to the massacre, black men desperately tried to purchase firearms to defend themselves with. Remington purposefully gave them the run around so that they couldn’t buy guns, as they legally should have been able to, leading to their deaths. Remington knew what was going to happen, but they decided they cared about their reputation more than black people’s lives.
I think we should resurrect some old school name-damning punishment for those that perpetrated this massacre. Their grave sites should be smashed, and their remains cast into an anonymous pit. It’s too late to give them the capital punishment they deserved, but we can damn their name and memory for all ages.
Dave Chapelle has an interesting take/joke on gun control: get everyone who can legally buy a gun to buy one. If the people you don't like (outgroup / different race) also benefit from the same "freedoms" you hold dear, some thinking will start to happen.
Not really a joke, that’s actual history. Reagan signed a gun control bill into California law in direct response to the black panthers protesting under arms.
Ronald Reagan signed anti gun bills as president too.
He was generally more pro gun control than history remembers him for. For instance, he signed the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 1986 which severely restricted multiple categories of firearms ownership for everyone nationwide (not just minorities).
Mass shootings are headline grabbing, but the majority of homicides are interpersonal conflicts that escalate. If everyone had guns, there's no way it would not result in more gun deaths.
Taken together, that means that there were 44,000 gun abuses out of 400,000,000 in circulation which is annual abuse rate of 0.011%.
Inversely, that means that the annual non-abuse rate, or the safe responsible use rate is 99.989%. If I remember correctly from my statistics 101 class, 99.99% is considered "statistically perfect".
It's a pretty well known stat that violent crimes in the US have been steadily declining since 1990 all while gun ownership has been steadily increasing.
I’m having a hard time telling whether you’re arguing in good faith, so this will be my last comment on the matter. Obviously there are macro forces driving down violent crime rates across the developed world. You are once again arguing against a point no one has made.
Comparing area-to-area, lots of guns to fewer guns, over the same time period, the correlations are clear both within the US and internationally.
> The number of guns per capita per country was a strong and independent predictor of firearm-related death in a given country, whereas the predictive power of the mental illness burden was of borderline significance in a multivariable model. Regardless of exact cause and effect, however, the current study debunks the widely quoted hypothesis that guns make a nation safer
I’ll look at those links in detail but I’ll be shocked if they are any different than anything else I’ve read on the matter where word games tend to be played to frame the information to support a point of view.
All I will say is on the last quote that you posted: guns per capita as a predictor of firearm related death in a country.
Of course it is. Just as cars per capita are a predictor of automobile related deaths. The greater presence of anything the more often it will be involved than places where it’s not.
I always find this to be such an interesting peek into the minds of others. The ability to love who you like is freedom. The ability to ingest whatever substance you like is freedom. Neither of these freedoms statistically put others in danger. One of these things is not like the other.
You have the right to self defense but the 'freedom' to own something which can kill or maim dozens of others has to be balanced against the overall good of society. I find this viewpoint and willingness to sacrifice lives for this particular 'freedom' to be a little sociopathic.
It’s pretty simple. Every person who is bigger and stronger than another is something who can maim or kill another.
Firearms simply level the playing field.
Domestic violence against women is a thing because men are almost always bigger and stronger than women, meaning without access to a weapon every woman is potentially vulnerable to the violence of a man.
>Domestic violence against women is a thing because men are almost always bigger and stronger than women, meaning without access to a weapon every woman is potentially vulnerable to the violence of a man.
Sadly, it often turns out that firearms are often turned against women in a household:
It is, but how different would any of those situations have turned out without a firearm with a violent man usually twice the size of the woman at risk?
Studies have shown that the more 'detached' one is from the actual act of violence, the easier that violence is to commit. All you have to do is look at domestic violence homicides in other similar countries to see that introducing guns to domestic disturbances is a recipe for people going to the morgue instead of the hospital.
Domestic violence against men from women is also sky high but wildly underreported. The highest rates of domestic violence are between lesbian couples.
Violence has less to do with size than willingness, exposure, snd skill.
Firearms do level the playing field, but only for skill and skill. This is why even though women benefit more from owning a gun, they very rare carry one. Most simply aren’t willing to engage. They would rather run away. This is of course the correct choice if you are unwilling to use a gun. Carrying one without will is worse than being unarmed.
What you're saying is a slippery slope argument subject to whoever determines what items put others in danger.
You could use your exact same argument that cars put other people in danger and we should walk everywhere. Or that it's for the collective good that we never leave our house because doing so increases other people's risk of death.
Safety is a tyrants best friend.
>>You have the right to self defense but the 'freedom' to own something which can kill or maim dozens of others has to be balanced against the overall good of society.
Society exists because men with items that can kill or maim others died to create and defend it.
I find your viewpoint and willingness to sacrifice your freedom in the name of safety.. a little unaware, ungrateful, and privileged.
This current veneer of civilization that you're so privileged to live in exists because of guns and violence and is actually a rarity in the history of humankind.
If you want to learn more about this you can go to the library and ask them for a book on the past 100,000 years of human history.
>You could use your exact same argument that cars put other people in danger and we should walk everywhere. Or that it's for the collective good that we never leave our house because doing so increases other people's risk of death.
Cars are a great example, because we absolutely weigh their costs and benefits. One does not have the 'right' to drive a car. It is a licenced and regulated activity. 18 wheelers are more dangerous than cars, and thus are subject to more restrictive regulation.
>Society exists because men with items that can kill or maim others died to create and defend it.
What you're talking about here is the state's monopoly on sanctioned violence. Guns are a part of that, but not a requirement. There are plenty of 'beat cops' around the world that discharge their duties without relying on firearms.
> Cars are a great example, because we absolutely weigh their costs and benefits.
Exactly. You're SO RIGHT about government weighing the costs and benefits.
Which is why the founding fathers made gun rights the second amendment!
Isn't it great!?
The founding fathers weighed their costs vs benefits and found that the benefits outweighed the costs to such a degree that they deserved a entire amendment.
I'm glad we're in agreement about cost vs benefits.
Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.
>The founding fathers weighed their costs vs benefits and found that the benefits outweighed the costs to such a degree that they deserved a entire amendment.
Right. They weighed the costs and benefits of giving every citizen the right to own a muzzle loading flintlock musket. Such a gun was a tool used to harvest game and defend the homestead.
I doubt they would make the same call today when it comes to semi auto weapons with detachable mags. They are designed to kill as many people in as short of a time as possible.
An era when private citizens owned armadas with cannons and artilly that could level entire cities
Muzzle loaders.
These guys wrote a document that created one of the greatest democracies in the history of humanity, they created a beacon of freedom through out the world that paved the way for one of the greatest improvement in quality of life that humanity has ever seen.
“ After studying over 8,000 reports of government-caused deaths, Rummel estimated that there have been 262 million victims of democide in the last century. According to his figures, six times as many people have died from the actions of people working for governments than have died in battle.”
I don't have the data, but because this idea I'm curious to know what the crime rates are per capita in countries that mandate military training for the entire population. I think Israeli people (both men and women) do mandatory military and combat training - does this translate to a decrease in domestic violence and shootings?
>There’s a reason mass shootings happen in places where a swift armed response isn’t expected.
Most mass shootings take place in the USA, which has the most guns per capita on earth by far, double the #2 country. How many more guns would make a difference?
I don't expect a shooter to be rational, but I do expect them to self preserve when being shot at. That's not rational, that's instinct. Police have repeatedly said ever since Columbine that it is most important to engage a shooter as soon as possible for this exact reason.
>that it is most important to engage a shooter as soon as possible for this exact reason.
"Shooting your way out of an ambush" (i.e. taking initiative when attacked) has been tactical doctrine for literally every armed group, police, military, etc, for decades.
This doesn't make sense to me. Don't most mass shooters go into it expecting to die? If you know you're going to die anyway, what deterrent would armed civilians be?
Glancing at this list of mass shootings, it seems like most end with the shooter committing suicide.
I can’t say for sure what a shooter is thinking, but the shooting of innocent people stops the moment the shooter is on defense. This was a lesson police learned after Columbine.
> There’s a reason mass shootings happen in places where a swift armed response isn’t expected.
Actually, they do, and the reason for it is that in a mass shooting situation, even if you have a gun, you usually have zero idea of what to do with it, and where to shoot back.
Vegas has concealed open carry, and that didn't do a goddamn thing to stop the 2017 massacre.
Also, what do you think the SWAT team responding to a shooting is going to do to you if you are on the scene, with your gun? You may get a chance to surrender and get things cleared up, or just as likely, you may just get shot on sight.
Vegas is interesting because the guy had to become a sniper and had to have a very specific location to do his shootings. Because of all the concealed carry.
And what else is interesting is that the shooter chose an extremely crowded music festival to do his shooting.
A fertilizer bomb or hidden IUD could have just easily killed as many people just like the Boston marathon bombing(which could just as easily had more than one nail bomb).
So should nail bombs also be illegal? Oh yeah they are!
Mass gatherings are always
at risk of mass violence.
Airplanes/airports had the same issue before 9/11. Mass gathering of people and easy ingress of deadly weapons/bombs.
So too schools.
The lesson for mass gatherings is to secure a perimeter and do your best to eliminate deadly items from entering the perimeter.
Its not really a gun specific issue. Its a vulnerable crowd issue.
Remember, slavery itself was normal only 60 years earlier (and was abolished via a civil war, not a popular vote). This massacre, which had the support of many citizens, some businesses, and some government, is still in living memory - there are thousands of Americans alive today who were ~5-13 years old at the time. Ideas take much longer to die than people do. Considering all this, it seems clear that the long tail of evil and hatred in the US will linger for at least many decades more, maybe centuries, but hopefully shrinking the whole way.
The Trail of Tears was seen as a great compromise, at the time: between racists who wanted to exterminate indigenous peoples, and progressives who didn't want the genocide to go ahead. They agreed on a peaceful solution: let 'em starve to death on an exodus from their homeland, instead.
Some blame the wealth of Jewish people for the Holocaust, too. They called themselves Nazis.
Many ultra wealthy individuals did not come from a highly privileged background. Larry Ellison, one of their motivating examples, had essentially no advantage compared to say Bill Gates. Sergey Brin and Warren Buffet certainly had some advantages but they should not be treated the same as the Waltons by any means. Of course, if you take the expected value of privilege of the 1%, you’ll find a high level. So, it seems to me the notion that people treat wealthy individuals separately from the broader group means that people are acting fairly and rationally to some degree. The authors ignore this nuance altogether, assuming that any individual nuance is a fallacy, and the article seems to indicate that their only purpose is to make people ignore individual success stories and to jade people into treating every wealthy person as equally privileged.
> The authors ignore this nuance altogether, assuming that any individual nuance is a fallacy
The authors are talking about the 2,500 billionaries in the world (there are 22,000,000 millionaires in the USA).
It's funny listening to you tolerate lavish wealth for individuals more than groups while criticizing an article that says people tolerate lavish wealth for individuals more than groups.
I think you should go read the list you yourself decided to link more carefully. You will find many more than 4 billionaires who grew up with at most a lower middle class background.
It looks like you're struggling with reading comprehension, so let me make it more clear. The article takes the position that viewing individuals in the billionaire class differently based on their individual story is wrong and provides a means manipulate people into viewing them all homogeneously. I do not "tolerate lavish wealth" or think these people should have so much command over society, that is the subjective word choice of the authors to describe their interpretation of a phenomenon, but I personally do think many of these people who come from very little deserve more respect and success than wealthy scions who, at best, have every advantage, or at worst, do nothing at all with their lives and yet command extreme wealth.
Interestingly, the wealthy who inherited their wealth tend to flaunt it much less (being medially known) than the ones who are "self-made". They probably know why.
That's probably because they have been used to being wealthy since birth and have always being around other wealthy people, so it doesn't register as a special thing as much as someone who transition from non-wealthy with non-wealthy friends to wealthy.
No, I think that deep down they know they don't really deserve the wealth (or at least they understand our society frowns upon privilege, both on left and right). If you are self-made though, you can at least somewhat convince yourself that you deserve it. The exceptions to this are narcissists like Donald Trump.
Id guess only a small percent have this realization. The rest enjoy the privileged life and find a way or another to justify themselves that they deserve it. If I were born into a privileged family I'd probably be the same..
Easy to understand. When you are self-made wealthy you have a lot more pride and ego which can correlate with flaunting wealth.
When you merely inherit wealth and grow up around it all the time, you may wrestle with imposter syndrome and wonder if you still would have been just as wealthy if you didn’t start off that way. Your life may be a struggle to find your way out of the shadow of your ancestors achievements and make your own identity. This creates insecurity. Until you have made your own significant accomplishments you may not be comfortable flaunting your wealth, and even then there is a tendency to try to rewrite history to make it seem like you were less fortunate than you actually were.
analytically what you say makes sense, but in reality individual people have muscles, hair and mental focus -- more of less of those. Look at the outrageous flaunting that goes on in the ghettoes .. or the demure life of a modest family member in a high-scale estate. The exceptions have to define the rules, because, there is no "2.5 children" if you get my drift
Yeah, it seems like they cherry-picked individuals who largely earned their wealth. I would think the bias might be opposite if the individuals they chose instead inherited their wealth.
Looking at individuals adds detail and concreteness that makes it difficult to hate on or criticise. Bezos, Musk, Gates, even Thiel etc are just as human as we are. We could have done the things they did, but we didn't. Our children could do they things they did. They may be arrogant, unethical, they might jump through loopholes, etc, but they're just like us in that way too. We do the same on smaller scales.
Looking at a group removes the humanity from what we're looking at, makes it abstract. And abstractions are easy to hate. They don't exist in reality, they are not a reflection of ourselves. It's very easy to hate or throw stones at an abstraction.
It's possible to hate the abstraction and love the people in the abstraction at the same time. This is not self-contradictory.
From the names mentioned, I wonder if the individuals they picked were biased toward people who "the man in the street" might plausibly see as the creators of important and socially valuable things. Vs. wealthy folks who increased prices of vital drugs by 50X, or "looted & flipped" good companies, or just received huge compensation packages for mediocre (or worse) corporate leadership. A quick text search does not find "Sackler" in either the article, or the HN discussion. Nor "Enron". Nor...
So it's pretty easy to hate on criminals or jackasses, and they do get hated on already, even if they're rich. And we throw them in prison if at all possible under the current laws.
The premise of the article seems to be the disconnect between the feelings the public has for group vs its constituents, when the feeling is positive for each constituent but negative for the group.
Bad billionaires aren't in the group, and I'd argue that people do hate on groups even when they love each and every individual member.
> Government officials, nonprofits, journalists and others seeking to make people care about the issue
So their goal is to manipulate public opinion more effectively. This approach is backfiring, causing more and more people to lose faith in social science in general.
The focus should be on enlightening, not convincing. If real personal stories don't lead readers to the same conclusions, perhaps the premise is incorrect. People are smart enough to see through over simplified explanations.
A quick perusal of American history shows that in fact it’s much easier to politically suppress the wealth of a group than it is to suppress the wealth of an individual. We have a long history of redlining, and basically no history of appropriating the wealth of our richest citizens.
Heck, to this very day, having pictures of black people up in your home will suppress its assessed value. If anything turning off the mechanism by which minorities’ wealth is held down is really hard.
> We have a long history of redlining, and basically no history of appropriating the wealth of our richest citizens.
First, our entire system in the US is designed to protect three things: life, liberty and property. The system is built to allow people own property and deliberately make it difficult to take property away. That is why injustice in the American system is often suppression (you can't own that) instead of confiscation (we're taking it from you).
Disagree. If anything else there are more roadblocks setup to protect wealthy individuals. Even talking about raising their taxes marginally causes what can be charitably described as an institutional freak out.
At no point has “well, we can expropriate the wealth of billionaires if we need to” been an opinion anywhere other than the far left, and that group really doesn’t hold a lot of power here.
> The fact that it's not an opinion, doesn't mean it's not an option.
Yes, and making me dictator for life is an option, but it isn't going to happen now is it? Lots of things are an option, but we must grapple with both the probability of them happening, and the historical incidence at which similar events occurred.
In general if you're making the argument that A is easier than B, and B keeps happening at a much higher rate than A, then you're probably missing some very important detail to explain that difference. America, and the world really, has a long history of suppressing and extracting the wealth of large groups. Peasants, slaves, tenant farmers, sharecroppers, lower level laborers, and demographic minorities today have all had their wealth suppressed and extracted for the sake of someone else. Meanwhile the wealth of those elites being expropriated and given to the masses are extremely rare events[0]; much more common is elites overthrowing other elites to expropriate their wealth personally.
For my part, I think you're overly focused on the mechanical aspects of confiscation rather than the political ones. Yes, if you get the political systems in alignment it is mechanically very easy to take Bezo's wealth; just take his bank accounts or hit him with a wrench until he authorizes a foreign transfer. But actually getting that political system in alignment to do that is extremely difficult; often even getting people like Bezos to pay the same tax rate as the rest of us is too big a political lift.
As an analogy, it was pretty easy mechanically for the French to get rid of their kings. Paris was a city 650,000 strong, overwhelming the ~1,000 Swiss Guard protecting the king at the Tuileries palace and (eventually) executing the king was mechanically simple. After all, how hard can a battle be if you can muster a 16:1 advantage[1]? But while winning that battle was easy, getting to the point where the King was forced back into Paris and the mob was ready to literally kill him took a long long time to happen. The will to do things matters more than anything else.
0 - Not that you'd know that based on the amount of material produced on such events. I would argue that we're still living through the elite panic in reaction to the October Revolution, even the USSR was hardly an "expropriate the wealth of the rich in order to feed the masses" kinda place after Stalin took over.
1 - Actual order of battle for the storming of the Tuileries in 1792 was 20,000 republicans vs. 1,200 royalist guards. Generally military theorists hold up 4:1 as the tipping point where numbers overwhelm no matter the quality of leadership. At 16:1, the Swiss Guard stood no chance even though they were trained soldiers fighting a literal mob.
> In general if you're making the argument that A is easier than B, and B keeps happening at a much higher rate than A, then you're probably missing some very important detail to explain that difference
Visiting a prostitute is way easier than dating, how many people visit prostitutes?
Taking away a candy from a child is really easy, how many people actually do it?
Rich individuals aren't seen as a threat, because they can be easily overpowered with violence
What people see as threats are people who have a following such as politicians, thought leaders or technoutopian cult figures who also happen to be rich.
> Visiting a prostitute is way easier than dating, how many people visit prostitutes?
Ignoring the fact that a partner meets needs beyond sex, I think you're probably underestimating how many people actually pay for sex work. People just tend to not talk about that, because it's both illegal and heavily stigmatized.
> Taking away a candy from a child is really easy, how many people actually do it?
This implies that people treat children nicely because they're not a threat, which is a worrying implication. Personally, I think that people don't steal candy from children because they don't want to hurt children, especially over something as trivial as candy.
> Rich individuals aren't seen as a threat, because they can be easily overpowered with violence
Uhhh, what? Rich people are capable of bringing a huge amount of violence to bear, both in terms of their ability to hire armed citizens to protect them, and their ability to marshal the power of the state directly or indirectly.
I'd highly recommend you read some history about labor organization in the United States. The armed representatives of rich men machine gunning down striking workers is a pretty common occurrence. Rich industrialists also made it de-facto illegal to be a socialist in the United States for most of the 20th century.
And that's direct violence. We can also talk about the ability of the rich to starve people via blacklisting and the undermining of social safety nets.
> What people see as threats are people who have a following such as politicians, thought leaders or technoutopian cult figures who also happen to be rich.
<Insert "They're the same picture" meme here>
Less glib, I think a lot of people see these as part of the same system. Rich people pretty quickly become politically entrenched or weird cult leaders, and the thought leaders are largely subsidized by the rich people that they write on the behalf of.
>>“If you want to change the system,” Gilovich said, “you’ve got to make people think in systemic terms.”
or put another more accurate way, if you want to take money from people, you have a dehumanize them, abstract them away into a caricature instead of an actual human to be empathized with
Maybe we think the rich guy could be leader we could align ourselves with but a whole group is something we wouldn't be likely to join. I wonder what the results would be if you tested whether a participant how deserving a "friend" vs. a "foe" group would be. Maybe it has more to do with group alliance than with individuals.
Then why does the media, such as Pro Publica, focus on wealthy individuals? The top 40 skews the average for sure. Depends on who is included in the group.
I agree that it seems to be the case but I don't get it. Those who have worked hard enough to see cronyism in action (especially when it works against you) know that billionaires did not really earn their money on an even playing field. IMO, it takes far more skill to be a millionaire than a billionaire these days. Being a billionaire is mostly about situational and social factors; proximity to the money printers and politicians.
Without social connections, it's almost impossible to start a successful business nowadays. It's like a miracle when it happens because all the big capital is working against you; the easy-money-machines are constantly sucking away all the talent, all the investors, all the business connections away from you and constantly chipping away at your confidence and that of whoever decides to collaborate with you in spite of all this. The kinds of people who are willing to collaborate with a nobody on such projects genuinely believe that they will fail. They're prepared to work 50 years on something and see it fail completely. They know it's an all-or-nothing deal, the billionaires have turned the economy into an all-or-nothing scheme.
At this stage, I'm satisfied with the idea of success being "would have been a success in a world without manipulation of the monetary system." Maybe a bet you make today will pay off for someone else in 200 years; that will be success.
Although they were massacred throughout history even when they were poor.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_massacre