RE: Come and Take It!
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Judging by your reaction to my explanation of Russian gun laws, I'd say you call those "common sense," so what does the following data tell you?
From 1990 until 2022, the "intentional homicide rate" (which is different from "murder rate" for strictly legalistic reasons) in Russia spiked from 14 to 33 per 100,000 people in 1994, then dipped down to 23 in 1998 before going back up and spiking again at 31 in 2002, and it has declined every single year since then. According to the Russian government (NOT a reliable source of information), the murder rate in 2022 was 3.7 per 100,000 people. However, according to independent studies, it was 12 per 100,000 people back in 2014 (the most recent year I was able to get an independent study from), at a time when the Russian government reported only 8 per 100,000 people. In other words, despite Russia's gun restrictions and relatively low rate of firearm ownership (approximately 9%), the murder rate is either comparable to or roughly double that of the US. The only source of information in English that contradicts the trend and reports an increase in 2022 is a single article in The Moscow Times, which claimed that Kommersant reported 296 additional murder cases from 2021. That same article mentioned that this data conflicts with official reports from the MVD (Ministry of Internal Affairs). Feel free to read the report for yourself, but it's all in Russian.
The last time that the Russian government confiscated civilian-owned weapons en masse was in 1941, not to combat gun crime or put down a rebellion, but to supply the woefully under-equipped Red Army. In fact, to the best of my knowledge (and as before, @apnigrich can fact-check me), Russian gun laws, at least those with respect to what citizens are allowed to own, have remained virtually unchanged since 1924, the year that Iosif Stalin took over.
Granted, comparing data from only three countries isn't statistically significant, but the point is that I'm completely unconvinced that getting rid of guns would do anything for the US, even if people complied with a confiscation order (which is exactly what a mandatory buyback is). Curiously, when looking up this information, the same independent study reported that although the murder rate in Russia is more than double that of the US, the rate of rape is 17 times higher in the US than in Russia. I know that's not relevant, but I thought that was interesting.
17 times?!?!? That is... extreme.
I wonder if means rape happens less often, or if rape is less reported in Russia.
33 people murdered for every 100,000 people is absolutely huge. Very brutal.
This data tells me there are a number of factors at play; poverty, education, police response, resources, access to weapons, etc etc. Common sense gun regulations aren't the only piece of the puzzle... but I do think they are an important piece.
The US does have a precedent for this... in 1994 they passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act that lasted for 10 years and only applied to the purchase of new semi-automatic rifles during that time (weapons already owned were not affected).
Source
You can see that when there were fewer mass shootings in the US between 1994 and 2004, and then a rise in mass shootings from 2005 to 2017.
I'm not an expert and I might be completely wrong, maybe common sense gun laws would not impact the USA in any way, but to me this problem seems big enough to try something to solve the problem. If the concern is that common sense gun regulations will do absolutely nothing, then do the same thing as in 1994 and have the act automatically expire... but at the moment the problem just seems to be getting continually worse, so the US needs to try something.
Oh bugger, here we go again.
The term "mass shooting" has been dishonestly re-defined to artificially inflate the rate and scare people, when the reality is that the overall violent crime rate has remained on a downward trend since 1981 in the US, as I believe @jacobtothe has already pointed out. What I mean is that, as violent crime (including gun crime) drops, the number of victims in a single event to categorise it as a "mass shooting" has also dropped. This is bog-standard statistical deception. As of 2013 per the FBI's criteria, the threshhold is 4 people being shot (not killed, simply shot; all four could survive and the event will still be called a "mass shooting" by the current definition), and the media reports on as many such events as possible in order to fearmonger with such headlines as "there have been more mass shootings than days in 2023". As much as I hate the idea of the government having a monopoly on the media, credit where credit is due, Russian state media such as RT doesn't do that... still, take everything they say with a
pinchfistful of salt.I wonder how many "mass shootings" were related to inner-city gang activity, which is usually committed with stolen guns by those who already have criminal records and are not allowed to own them under US law already (one of the demands I keep hearing is "universal background checks," which the US already does). Seriously, I have no idea, I'm left to wonder simply because of how many times "the shooter was known to law enforcement".
I think that's incorrect. Only 14 states have background checks on firearms (Source). As far as I understand, it's pretty easy to purchase guns at expos and gun shows is the some states without there being any record that you now own a firearm. Of course, the US has open borders between states, so there's nothing stopping someone from bringing a firearm into a state with background checks without anyone knowing.
I'm sure the majority of mass shootings occur between gangs... but to me the high number of school shootings, where kids are being murdered in their classrooms is the first problem to try and solve.
The media definitely tries to get as many clicks and views as possible, there's no denying that... but I think most Americans would not know how many mass shootings there have been in the US.
Apparently there has been 466 in 2023 (Source) but I've personally only heard about 10 of those.
Whenever you buy a firearm from a retailer, you are buying from a federal firearm license holder. You must fill out a federal form and pass a NICS background check in order for the sale to proceed. This is nationwide and has been in place for decades. It has a lot of false positives, too, in spite of technological progress.
Requirements for private sales have been added by some states, but this is not progress, it is overreach. A gun is just another object free people own freely.
In any emergency, the people there are the real first responders. The solution is simple. Instead of victim disarmament zones, allow teachers to carry a concealed weapon if they wish. Set a simple training standard. Defensive firearm courses abound. The risk/reward ration for violence dramatically shifts. When a citizen stops a shooting, the average casualties are a tiny fraction of when people must wait for the cops... if they even do their job in the first place.
Because my previous responses were so long, I never got to address the issue of economics, which I should, because @aussieninja does bring up a perfectly valid point, and that's the connection between crime and poverty. Economic downturn is the single largest correlating factor when looking at violent crime data. This is just as true for Russia as it is for the US. I don't have any data for violent crime in Russia prior to 1990, but I'm told it was relatively low until 1986... from civilians, anyway, whereas state-perpetrated violent crime was extremely high, just ask my maternal grandfather. Oh, wait, you can't, because he "fell off a train." Sure, comrade trashca- I mean commissar, was that before or after you shot him in the back of the head?
Anyway, the high murder rate in Russia in 1990 correlates to the economic situation, which was bad. Very bad. Between 1989 and 1990, the inflation rate was a whopping 2600%. The 1990s were no better, and the economic situation didn't begin to improve until Vladimir Putin implemented his own economic reforms and the country finally started to rebuild. The economic situation has continually improved, and the violent crime has continually dropped. I've seen it firsthand, because the last time I visited my hometown of St. Petersburg was in 2007, and other than the well-maintained tourist attractions such as Peterhof Palace, much of the city looked like it hadn't been touched since the siege was lifted in 1944. Okay, slight exaggeration, point being it was a wreck. However, @tatdt lives there, and she routinely shares pictures of the city. I recognise some of the locations, and they look nothing like when I was there. The city has changed a lot in the past 16 years, and everything I've seen so far looks like it's for the better.
Furthermore, where the crime is committed and who is committing it is the same in Russia as it is in the US: the inner cities. In Russia, this is gopnik territory, which most people avoid as much as possible. It's a fair assumption that drugs are also involved, and drug laws are just as ineffective there as they are almost everywhere else.
The bottom line is that the data shows a strong connection between economic prosperity and low violent crime. Since we know that free markets are more prosperous than command economies, I don't think it's much of a stretch to conclude that freeing the market would eliminate most violent crime.