December 19, 2012
10 myths about the Connecticut shootings
From Spiked:
One of the most striking aspects of the horrific tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, is the wild inaccuracy in much of the reporting. As Peter Preston in the Observer noted, it was not only the number of casualties that wavered, but also the name of the killer, the details of the death of the mother (whether it was at home or in front of her class), and, significantly, the type of weapon the killer used (at first, the weapons were identified as two 9mm pistols – later reports noted that it was a semi-automatic rifle). But confusion over the details was nothing compared with the ridiculous myths and stories propagated as facts in relation to more general issues surrounding the tragedy at Sandy Hook school. Here are some myths we should challenge.
1. School shootings are a regular occurrence in the United States
School shootings are incredibly rare and, statistically, children are safer at school than they are at home, and they are far more likely to be killed by their parents than by anyone else. According to Gary Kleck, a child is more likely to be struck by lightning at school than a bullet. To put it in perspective, the homicide rate at primary schools in the UK – that nation most favoured by gun-control activists - is slightly higher than that in the United States, lest anyone thinks that school violence is endemic to the US. The fact that we have all heard of school shootings does not mean that there is much danger at all of them occurring.
2. Gun controls would have prevented such killings
Former UK home secretary Jack Straw, speaking after the Connecticut killings, said there is no doubt that tighter gun control laws would make school shootings less likely. ‘The more you tighten the law, the more you reduce the risk’, he said, taking credit for the lack of school shootings in the UK since he brought in legislation after the Dunblane massacre of 1996. Taking credit for the lack of incredibly rare incidents is hubris indeed. Had he put forward legislation concerning fatal elephant attacks, would he similarly take credit for the fact that the UK has been free of elephant attacks since the 1990s?
More here.
Posted by Azra Raza at 07:18 AM | Permalink
Comments
Yuill's article would carry more weight if his assertions and references to events were backed up with verifications from the public record. Simply stating, for example, that there are "slightly" more school shootings in the UK is worthless without a link to some sort of verification. (He obviously knows how to do it.) His piece ends up sounding as contrived and inaccurate as those he criticizes.
Exposing "myths" requires more than opinion.
Posted by: leftover | Dec 19, 2012 8:18:04 AM
Some inconvenient facts Mr Yuill chose to ignore:
According to a 2010 survey there were 309 million guns in this country of 314 million people.
Sales of guns have been increasing dramatically at most sporting goods stores and gun shows. This hardly represents a "decline in gun culture." I don't know -- do other countries have gun shows where virtually every make and manufacture of gun is available?
If you go back to the day the Mayflower landed, it doesn't look like there have been many school shootings in the US but we are talking about a phenomenon that started in the late 20th century. Time frame is everything here.
Concern about gun violence is not limited to what has happened in schools and colleges. There have been 61 mass shootings in work places, shopping malls, a theater, etc, in the last 20 years or so.
10,000+ people die of gun shot wounds every year in the US. Mr Yuill doesn't provide statistics for other countries which do not even come close.
Posted by: Larry | Dec 19, 2012 8:20:54 AM
10 Reasons why the article cited is crap.
1. School shootings are incredibly rare
True, but that doesn't mean they should be tolerated.
2. The children in Newtown were shot multiple times by a rifle; no legislation proposed in the US today proposes taking rifles away.
He had multiple 30-round magazines. Laws have been proposed restricting them.
3. Walter Seifert, a 42-year-old schizophrenic, killed eight students and two teachers with a home-made flame thrower
If all of the school killings in the US were done by flamethrowers, we'd be have a debate about them.
4. The homicide rate at primary schools in England is slightly higher than in the US
Selective statistics. Not all gun-fueled mass murders stake place in primary schools.
5. True, but more complex that he alleges. The outliers are special cases: Switzerland has a citizen militia, & Israel has strict gun laws (screening, multi-level evaluation, one-gun/person).
6. The second amendment.
There are many scholarly articles showing that the interpretation of the 2nd amendment has changed over time.
7. Ownership of firearms is at or near all-time lows
Selective statistics. The number of total firearms is increasing, the number of households with firearms is decreasing. Gun owners increasingly have more than one weapon.
8. Whatever the owners are using them for must be legitimate.
There are ways to allow these "legitimate" uses (e.g., guns belong to a shooting range) without having them available. The Sandy Hook weapons were "legitimate", i.e., owned legally by the shooter's mother.
9. Most Americans do not wish to ban weapons.
Misleading. The debate is about control, not banning all weapons.
10. If only teachers were armed, the Newtown massacre would never have occurred.
True. Clever trick to leave you with the feeling he's made a reasonable argument.
Posted by: Ross | Dec 19, 2012 9:01:01 AM
While these debunkings may be true for school shootings, specifically, it does not dispell arguments for gun control given gun violence in general.
Posted by: André Levy | Dec 19, 2012 9:12:33 AM
Yes, school shootings are incredibly rare. But handgun shootings in crimes committed in this country are ubiquitous. Gun control is essential. This article could have been ordered up by the NRA.
Posted by: Olavi Valo | Dec 19, 2012 9:33:35 AM
Finding contrary evidence to Yuill's NRA puff piece took a few seconds.
" In region- and state-level analyses, a robust association between rates of household firearm ownership and homicide was found. Regionally, the association exists for victims aged 5 to 14 years and those 35 years and older. At the state level, the association exists for every age group over age 5, even after controlling for poverty, urbanization, unemployment, alcohol consumption, and nonlethal violent crime."
Am J Public Health. 2002 December; 92(12): 1988–1993. Rates of Household Firearm Ownership and Homicide Across US Regions and States, 1988–1997
Posted by: Don | Dec 19, 2012 10:16:08 AM
Zero Tolerance policies have already turned many public schools into places resembling prisons:
http://www.thewaronkids.com/?id=about
Posted by: Louise Gordon | Dec 19, 2012 10:51:09 AM
Interesting article, and in all honesty it makes some good points. Yet I finished it with the impression that these arguments against gun-control or gun-bans were lawyered to me.
How is it that a child has a greater chance of being struck by lightening in a school? I don't recall reading of a single such case, let along a few, or paralleling the number of school-deaths from guns, hundreds.
That oddity of an example aside, the fact that other countries with similar gun ownership statistics as the US do not have similar numbers of gun-related deaths, does not take away from the fact that a grotesque number of murders in the US involve guns. The article never attempts to answer the question of why the US is so much more homicidal than other countries. And fine, one can argue that this is a different point altogether. Yet without addressing the matter of why these atrocities happen, everything else is just blabber and the illusion of discussing what's important. Children are being killed by guns. Let's take guns out of the equation and take it from there.
The US is a society pumped full of fear on a daily basis, and the value placed on attention grabbing swells the need for lonely individuals to use violence as a final stab (no pun intended) at fame. Again, what's so controversial and painful about simply taking guns out of the equation, even for a few years as a temporary prohibition.
If just half the resources of the war on drugs would be used for a war on guns, the US would be far less violent. That being said it has many problems to address, but why allow deadly weapons in an already problem-ridden and aggressive society?
Posted by: Louis | Dec 19, 2012 11:29:04 AM
"As noted, the homicide rate at primary schools in England is slightly higher than in the US, though the figures are so low that the Newtown shootings will undoubtedly skew them."
In other words, he's included Dunblane but not Newton.
Posted by: Rasper | Dec 19, 2012 11:47:43 AM
The US murder rate by firearm is 2.97. The England and Wales rate is 0.07. So an American is 43 times more likely to be shot to death than a Brit.
And unlike the article, I have a reference:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/2...
Spike is a magazine for articles that can't get published elsewhere. This one is pretty typical.
Posted by: Rasper | Dec 19, 2012 11:53:52 AM
Sorry. That's the rate per 100K population, of course.
Posted by: Rasper | Dec 19, 2012 11:55:40 AM
Sorry. Let's try all that again.
The US murder rate by firearm is 2.97 per 100,000 population. The England and Wales rate is 0.07, meaning that an American is 40 times more likely to be shot to death than a Brit.
And unlike the article, I have a reference:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/2...
Slate is a magazine for articles that can't get published elsewhere. This one is pretty typical.
Posted by: Rasper | Dec 19, 2012 11:59:24 AM
tl;dr: "Eh, it happens. I don't like it, but, y'know, don't get crazy or nuthin'. Stuff like this is just gonna happen. I mean, whaddyagonnado?"
SURVEY SAYS: Bzzzz.
I will not accept this status quo. Not any more. Shouldn't have, before. Appalled that I accepted the status quo before. It says something about me and it says something about us. Time to try something different. Because this isn't working.
Posted by: David | Dec 19, 2012 1:00:14 PM
Every Canadian knows:
1. U.S. healthcare is crazy.
2. U.S. gun policy is crazy.
It amazes me that so many Americans do not realized this. The power of early childhood indoctrination, I guess.
Posted by: Olavi Valo | Dec 19, 2012 2:09:23 PM
I'm surprised this article was posted without some qualification. It's awful. It's as if, I would have thought, there was an article posted supporting the Israeli side without comment. WTF? If I want to read conservative drivel, I know where to find it.
That said, I say all this in light of knowledge of the recent posts by the management of this blog about respectful postings. Just expressing surprise, sans name-calling or other disrespect. Love this place and will continue to.
Posted by: Brad | Dec 19, 2012 3:43:33 PM
This piece is surely not appropriate as this time? "Spiked Online" is an offshoot of a loose organisation of people who have very "libertarian" views. They are, among other things, against gun control. Why not link to the very polite LRB piece by Jenny Turner about the RCP/LM and its ideas so that people can make an informed decision about the ideological bases of this "article"?
Posted by: Royton De'Ath | Dec 19, 2012 5:15:58 PM
I for one am delighted this piece was posted. From what I know of 3Quarks, having been a monthly columnist here, the editors aren't necessarily advocating the content they post; in fact, if that's all they were doing, 3Q might just be a little bit boring and homogenous. They seem to instead look for what is interesting.
And this is interesting, because it sets up 10 "myths" – 10 is an interesting number, the number of commandments and the number of amendments in the Bill of Rights. Presenting these "myths" about the shooting in such an easy, bulleted way allows us to evaluate each one individually on its merits.
In the coming months, each one of us is going to be thinking very carefully about guns in American society. You are going to be confronted by people talking about "myths" all the time. And you will have to decide whether they're true, or false, or even whether they're relevant. And this piece is a valuable testing ground I think.
I do however wish the editors would post "The Weapons Continuum," which grounds arms limitations within the roots of Enlightenment political philosophy.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/the-weapons-continuum/?hp
Posted by: David | Dec 19, 2012 5:38:50 PM
I am pretty sure this got posted here just to get us to debunk it.
Right?
RIGHT?
Posted by: DrunktankDan | Dec 19, 2012 8:10:33 PM
and it wasn't a fucking bushmaster .223 it was an AR 15 clone.
wait was that this article or another one?
Posted by: DrunktankDan | Dec 19, 2012 8:21:05 PM
1. School shootings are a regular occurrence in the United States
“School shootings are incredibly rare and, statistically, children are safer at school than they are at home, and they are far more likely to be killed by their parents than by anyone else. “
“School shootings are incredibly rare” compared to what? Pancreatic cancer is rare. Do you want it? Would you work to avoid it? [See # 4]
“ . . . children . . . are far more likely to be killed by their parents than by anyone else.”
But MY CHILD and 19 others are not likely to be killed by another child’s parent “at home” . .
2. Gun controls would have prevented such killings
“The killer, Adam Lanza, was carrying two handguns, one of which he used to take his own life. But the children and teachers at the school were killed with a Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle.”
The killer had three guns (on him. MANY more were at home.) Do you have three electric shavers? Three hair dryers? Three microwaves or three toasters? Is “gun hoarding” something to be looked at as a problem, perhaps? Could it be a marker for some “problem” about to erupt?
“Four times as many people were killed in the US by knife and twice as many were bludgeoned to death.”
Can I state that these were individual deaths by a single assailant?
Have there been mass bludgeonings where the killer then bludgeoned himself to death to escape retribution? Standing across a plaza and bludgeoning several people to death 30 feet away from a hidden location And those mass stabbings? Maybe in a prison? Oh, please!
“They are not the most efficient means of taking the lives of children in a school and nor are they the only ones. The so-called Bath School disaster is the name given to three bombings by a 55-year-old school-board treasurer, enraged at tax rises, in Bath Township, Michigan, on 18 May 1927, which killed 38 young children, two teachers, four other adults and the bomber himself. At least 58 people were injured. Most of the victims were children between seven and 14 years of age.”
Yes, and 12 years later the Nazi’s killed 6 million people with gas, railroad cars and mass complicity. Your point is?
“The awful truth is that, where there is a will so warped as to kill children, there is a way.”
And where there is a will to warp common sense, someone will pay you to print it. Remember that mass complicity!
4. These killings speak of a malaise peculiar to the US
“Dani Garavelli, in a particularly odious column in the Scotsman, noted: ‘There are disturbed individuals in every culture. But for all the gun-lobby rhetoric, one fact is unassailable. Only one country experiences spree shootings on a gut-wrenchingly regular basis, the same country which arms its citizens with abandon.’ Wrong.”
No, actually it is worse than that:
“Since the Columbine High School shooting in 1999, there have been 31 school shootings in the United States and only 14 in the rest of the world combined.”
http://o.canada.com/2012/12/14/interactive-mass-shootings-around-the-world-since-1996/
See the map. Look at the picture which speaks ten thousand words Feel really, really sick about your vile self-serving screed.
“There is no direct causal link between gun ownership and homicide rates.“
Here is a direct statistical relationship. If there are no guns, there will be no deaths by shooting. The over 300 million guns owned in America are not all in the hands of four confused men in Idaho. Notice the killers are men? All your examples are men. Could this mean anything? Remember the cowboys? John Wayne? The gun as the first mass-produced penis extension? Any cow-women? (OK, Annie Oakley. Didn’t kill anyone.) No other countinent “won its freedom” with a gun. Native Americans and Buffalo can tell you that. [See # 8] Guns are tragically in our cultural DNA and are a mutation that will destroy us.
6. The Second Amendment is outdated and meant something totally different
You are not a Constitutional Scholar.
7. Americans are increasingly arming themselves
Just Google the number of refutations to this statement.
8. Guns have no valid purpose in society
Does my private nuclear reactor’s byproduct affect my neighbors’ quality of life? Things are different now. Few Buffalo in my garden. We killed most of them already. How many guns do you need before you really look like a nut case? And who am I to judge? I am a member of the “society” to whom you appeal above.
9. The gun lobby is too powerful
“Rather than admitting that most Americans, outside of the urban elite, do not wish to ban weapons, it is the impossibly wealthy and powerful NRA that must be preventing the ‘sensible’ suggestions like banning high-power rifles from getting through.”
“Urban elite”? “Urban elite”? You are referring to ranchers in Wyoming as being other than urban or elite? What group are you so curiously trying to finger?
“Underlying such sentiments is cultural snobbery, . . .”
Well, yes, I’d say so. “Urban elite”?
10. If only teachers were armed, the Newtown massacre would never have occurred
If only teachers were armed they would not need to be. Same with nuns. Got it?
“Children ages 5 to 14 in America are 13 times as likely to be murdered with guns as children in other industrialized countries, according to David Hemenway, a public health specialist at Harvard who has written an excellent book on gun violence.”
Posted by: Chris Gudmann | Dec 19, 2012 10:01:51 PM
In Australia, after an horrific mass shooting, the conservative (yes that's right, conservative) Howard government brought in strict gun control and buy backs of fire arms. Gun related deaths plummetted, and there have been no mass shootings here since.
By the way I didn't vote for Howard, but I agree with his policy in this case, and his guts to stand up to the gun lobby.
Posted by: Georg | Dec 20, 2012 12:02:22 AM
"If guns are criminalized only criminals will have guns"
But is this a bad thing? In Japan, guns are criminalized and only criminals have guns. They had 11 gun murders in 2008. The U.S. had 12,000.
Posted by: Olavi Valo | Dec 20, 2012 10:01:05 AM
It's very strange to me how Australia can take effective action on gun control and the U.S. can't. What makes the U.S. so different?
Posted by: Olavi Valo | Dec 20, 2012 3:11:34 PM
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