All this is quite wonderful and Shooter supports mandatory military service. If Shooter was in charge no one could vote or hold public office until they had done their military service.

The one problem is that pesky 2nd amendment. What seems to work for Switzerland just won't work in America, will it, because we got that 2nd amendment.

 

Gun deaths drive historic spike in child mortality rates
2023/04/19
Published
2023/04/19 05:35 (EDT)
Updated
2023/04/19 20:50 (EDT)

Megan Varner/Getty Images North America/TNS
After decades of steady improvement, the death rate of America’s children and teens shot up between 2019 and 2021 — and COVID-19 wasn’t the reason.

Gun-related deaths represented the largest share of the increase — by far.

According to an analysis of the most recent death certificate data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, published last month in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the mortality rate among children ages 1 to 19 rose by 11% between 2019 and 2020, and by an additional 8% between 2020 and 2021.

It marks the first time in recent memory that child death rates have risen substantially, Dr. Steven Woolf, a professor of population health and health equity at Virginia Commonwealth University and lead author of the study, said in an interview with Stateline.

And it’s the biggest increase in U.S. child mortality in more than 50 years, according to the study.

“We’ve made tremendous progress in treating childhood diseases and preventing a wide range of childhood accidents,” Woolf said. “But all of those improvements, and all of that progress and all of those medical advances are now being offset by four things: homicide, suicide, drug overdoses and car crashes.

“That really tells us how many children are dying from these preventable causes — these are manmade pathogens, not biological.”

According to the Pew Research Center, which also analyzed the CDC death data, the number of children and teens under 18 who died from guns spiked by 50% between 2019 and 2021. (The Pew Charitable Trusts funds the research center and Stateline.)

A Stateline analysis of provisional CDC mortality data for 2022 shows that child and teen mortality rates stayed roughly the same as in 2021, indicating the steep rise could signal a longer-term trend.

Both the American Medical Association and Pew Research Center reports highlight a crisis that worries parents.

A poll published this month by the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that 25% of parents of children under 18 said they worry “every day” (12%) or “almost every day” (13%) about themselves or someone they love becoming a victim of gun violence.

Although most of the increased deaths during the pandemic years were among older children ages 10 to 19, deaths among younger children ages 1 to 9 also jumped by more than 8%. Infants were the only group that did not experience a higher mortality rate, according to the American Medical Association analysis.

Woolf noted in the Stateline interview that national trends are a composite of trends in the 50 states, and that prior to the pandemic, state policies such as seat belt and helmet requirements and gun safety laws already had created stark differences in the rate of preventable child deaths.

Because state policies and access to mental health and medical care play a major role in preventing child deaths, Woolf said, the likelihood that a child will reach adulthood varies widely depending on where they live.

Montana had the highest child death rate in 2021 at 28 per 100,000 children, followed by Mississippi, Louisiana, Wyoming, Alabama, Missouri, New Mexico, South Carolina, Oklahoma and Georgia.

Massachusetts had the lowest child mortality rate at two per 100,000, followed by New Jersey, New York, Maine, Delaware, Alaska, Connecticut, Maryland, Utah and California, according to a Stateline analysis of CDC death certificate data.

Mental health crisis
While the number of lives lost to COVID-19 among middle-aged and older Americans was massive, the virus was responsible for only 2% of all childhood deaths during the pandemic years.

But the pandemic may have exacerbated the climb in child death rates in other ways. Loneliness resulting from school closures and quarantines, as well as the grief of losing parents and other loved ones and the economic losses caused by the pandemic, had a profound effect on children’s mental health, experts say. The shutdown of most health care and mental health services during the pandemic also may have affected child mortality, Woolf said.

The biggest increases in deaths among children 1 to 19 during that time were from homicide and suicide, with gun-related deaths making up the largest share, according to Woolf. A rise in deaths from opioid overdoses and car crashes also contributed to the sharp rise in overall child mortality rates.

Of the total number of child and teen deaths by guns during the period, 60% were homicides, 32% were by suicide, 5% were accidents and 3% were undetermined or involved law enforcement, according to the Pew Research Center.

“This increase in all-cause pediatric mortality has ominous implications,” Woolf and his co-authors wrote. “A nation that begins losing its most cherished population — its children — faces a crisis like no other.”

Other causes
Dr. Frederick Rivara, professor of pediatrics and epidemiology at the University of Washington, and co-author of the American Medical Association analysis, said, “No one knows for sure what’s responsible for the increase in teen deaths from car crashes, but many speculate that the increased use of mobile phones has contributed.

“Young people are particularly prone to use phones while driving, and being on your phone increases the risk of motor vehicle crashes even with hands-off [settings on the phone],” he said.

To lower the risk of a crash, Rivara suggested, parents of teen drivers can install cameras in their cars or apps on their teens’ cell phones to monitor their child’s driving. In addition, some services will turn off all phone activity once the car reaches driving speed, he said.

In addition to cell phones, the problem of drunk driving is still with us, Rivara said. But he noted that research indicates that marijuana use probably is not a big contributor to motor vehicle crashes.

While using cell phones may be the reason for more teen motor vehicle accidents, many experts speculate that the social media apps on those phones are a root cause for the current child mental health crisis.

Suicide rates in children ages 10-19 started rising in 2007 — just as social media began to gain traction — and by 2019, had increased by 70%, according to the American Medical Association study. The CDC reported that emergency department visits for suspected suicide attempts among girls ages 12 to 17 jumped 51% during February and March 2021; among boys the same age, the increase was 3.7%.

In addition to social media and other pressures on young people, Rivara said, a shortage of mental health services likely contributes to the rise in child suicides.

“We have a mental health system that doesn’t really work very well,” he said. “It’s hard to get kids in to see someone, particularly kids that only have Medicaid. And hospitals only have a limited number of beds dedicated to psychiatric patients.”

The increase in child drug overdose deaths may also be tied to the nation’s shortage of mental health services.

Primarily due to counterfeit pills containing the deadly opioid fentanyl, overdose deaths among 10- to 19-year-olds more than doubled from mid-2019 to mid-2021, according to the CDC. In approximately 41% of those deaths, the CDC reported evidence of mental health conditions.

When compared with positive longevity trends elsewhere in the world, a recent New York Times opinion piece pointed out that 1 in 25 American 5-year-olds won’t survive until age 40. That death rate is about four times as high as in other wealthy nations.


https://nordot.app/1021353815707402240?c=592622757532812385

 

just gotta love people tossing "facts" about like nuggets of truth.
Figures never lie, but liars figure.
Note that nowhere in the article are any hard numbers used; it's all percentages.
Shall we look at some hard numbers?
Children under age 18 total about 74 MILLION in the United States.
In 2020 less than 9,000 died from gun shot.
More children under 18 die as a result of other accidents, as in car accidents, drug abuse and disease.
Data Finder - Health, United States (cdc.gov)
The Major Causes of Death in Children and Adolescents in the United States | NEJM

Now.
Understand that the death of any child, for any reason is a tragedy.
But understand also that focusing on gun death, when it is not the leading cause of death, is a political agenda driven issue.
And when the "facts" are so carefully crafted to avoid giving a complete and accurate picture of the issue (deaths in children) one can only suspect evil intent.

 

So, are you being obtuse or did you not get the point?

"Understand that the death of any child, for any reason is a tragedy.
But understand also that focusing on gun death, when it is not the leading cause of death, is a political agenda driven issue.
And when the "facts" are so carefully crafted to avoid giving a complete and accurate picture of the issue (deaths in children) one can only suspect evil intent.​

 

Tell us, Oh Suspicious One, what EVIL intent do you read in the cards?

 

There is no reason the average person needs to have a AR15 style rifle. They were designed for one purpose, to take human life. Unless you have been in combat and seen what they can do, you are just running your mouth. I'm a combat vet from Vietnam. Taking a life changes you for ever. I read an article where some politician said it was their favorite for pheasant hunting. I never saw or heard of bird shot for a AR15.

 

Inspired by another thread, I asked ChatGPT a question...

How can America overcome its gun crime epidemic?

This was the reply:


Gun violence is a complex issue with no simple solution. However, there are several steps that America can take to reduce the incidence of gun violence and prevent tragedies from occurring.

1. Strengthen Gun Control Laws: One of the primary reasons for gun violence in America is the lack of stringent gun control laws. The government can pass legislation that will require background checks for all gun purchases, ban assault weapons, limit the number of firearms an individual can own, and restrict gun ownership for individuals with a history of violence or mental illness.
   
   
2. Increase Mental Health Services: Many perpetrators of gun violence suffer from mental health issues. Providing adequate mental health services can help identify individuals who may be at risk of harming themselves or others and provide the support they need.
   
   
3. Provide Resources to Law Enforcement: Law enforcement agencies require resources such as training, personnel, and equipment to combat gun violence effectively. Providing these resources will help law enforcement agencies to prevent gun violence from occurring and apprehend those who commit these crimes.
   
   
4. Focus on Education: Education is an essential tool in reducing gun violence. Schools and communities can provide education about gun safety, conflict resolution, and violence prevention to children, youth, and adults.
   
   
5. Engage in Community Outreach: Community outreach programs can help identify individuals who may be at risk of committing gun violence and provide them with the support they need. These programs can also help build relationships between law enforcement agencies and the community they serve.
   
   
6. Encourage Responsible Gun Ownership: Gun owners have a responsibility to store and handle their firearms safely. Promoting responsible gun ownership practices can help reduce accidents and prevent firearms from getting into the wrong hands.
   

It is important to remember that addressing gun violence in America will require a comprehensive approach that involves multiple stakeholders, including policymakers, law enforcement, mental health professionals, educators, and the community at large. By working together, we can make progress towards reducing gun violence and creating safer communities for all.

 

Say magic happens, and the Republicans implode, and in 2024 there is a major swing to the Democrats, so much so that the 2A is revoked, and proper gun reform introduced.

With the High Court still stacked with idiots who are removing gun laws - do they have the power to stop such reform?

 

Guns don't kill people, husbands that come home early do.
-Larry the cable guy

 

anyway i think like someone had already mentioned above. there is no "solution for now", since the issue goes around training, mental health, (look , in the 60s 70s and 80s and 90s (i think the 80s and 90s the "right wing militia domestic separatist" thing appear to happen yeah? what about today ? such thing , or a remote off-the-grid community can live sustainable with knowm-modern-techniques and each ones minding their own businesses but if they "see someone from elsewhere, they give the everyone a tip" ...


Man i don't think such places exist today.... what is highlighted is the mental health and firearm availability


These things don't change "overnight" or in some 2 years.. It took decades to create "this scenario". I am aware that, some people had speculated in the past, how exactly these decades we are would be. At least some think tanks like; Hoover , Stanford. (What the "The De-population Bomb" book, written in the '70s by Paul Ehrlich gives an accurate prediction... if you have the time and patience to read studies conducted 50 years ago and "being alive" (i think) at the moment, makes sense, too many people getting old, or getting retired. Somehow, there's "more people consuming than producing" "a huge increase of young adult unemployed" "many cities without job opportunities" (either because the cost of living has exploded and for small businesses the best scenario sometimes is to stop the operation or sell the company


On the other hand, there's no one hiring, things are becoming "too autonomous" and blah blah blah.

In the 80s, 90s how were things? and how are things now? "things" can be a broad array of information such as : how did we live? how did our neighbors lived? how was life in general... was it violent? which were the 10 most violent cities in the world in the last decades? the majority of those, do not have "gun rights" so that means that a lot more people die "by accidental discharge? or maybe not having read those rules about firearms?" Here you can start to "see" like, regardless of gun control, mental evaluation, stricter laws etc etc . There will ALWAYS be someone willing to sell a firearm without any concern as to "whom" and "why" is it going for

Even in poor communities, where there's no state (except on raids lol) nah that its not funny.. i meant , EVEN criminals ask "why do you want to buy/rent" (yeah there's people who "lend weapons per hour / day / reason) because any fool knows "where to start looking for" according to the ammunition used, the distance/gunwounds - tell a lot of useful info in cases: whether the "suspect" had experience handling weapons or disproportionatelly used or misused. etc etc


Ok, so in 1776 lets imagine that was impossible to "conceal a pistol" (yeah flintlocks... that took more time loading than firing)


Ah so we're talking about muskets and such, then it's interesting that it should have been mentioned "what differentiates an assault/offensive weapon from a "defensive" one? - HAHA believe me, there are people with facts to explain "a defensive granade range of explosion differentiates from an offensive one because bla bla bla" (Defensive granade? "yeah like, if you are under fire and need to break sight to retreat , why would you a throw a granade to make the guys shooting at you duck, while at the same time you could be hit by shrapnel even at 30, 50 meters? that is why its important to know which type of grenade blablablabla ".... and then there after we threw the grenade and hit the targets as we walked away from the range, one of the guys simply fell on the ground and died.. shrapnel hit him, i think not even he knew" - so yeah, if the Military industrial complex spent a bit of time thinking that, beyond contracts, comporations, armies etc there are people... maybe they would specify clearly tiny details like this (the offensive/grenade story stuff) There are people who think AR-15 stands for "assault rifle"... lol, its ArmaLite Rifle , an assault carbine? full-auto? semi-auto?


If there is no room for interpretation, we can interpret anything. so i can throw a huge expensive cellphone in someone's head , what weapon did i use? an "assault cellphone?" oh poor old blind lady, she attempted to commit homicide by hitting me with an "assault seeing stick?" . So yes, i interpret that its clear as day the govt knows that its "too late" to correct this now, and "it would be easier if for the sake of everyone, we ban firearms altogether and anyone caught with a firearm will be treated as "internal arm smuggling or military/state-owned property theft" (i dunno which is worse)

 

Usual darkride liberal whine.
You can have Shooters 2nd amendment when you pry it out of his cold dead hands.
Stay in your lane, dude, you do not understand America or it's constitution well enough to be entitled to blow your hot air on us.

 

Listen up, genius.
Shooter has never and will never be a member of the NRA, subscribe to it's agenda, or support blindly anyone's stance "just because'.
It is a disgusting cop out to blame the NRA and "most repubs" anytime anyone raises the 2nd amendment.
The 2nd amendment, like every other part of the constitution, is not to be lightly dismissed or taken lightly.
It is the law of America, it is the foundation upon which this country was built.
It is the great experiment and it has stood the test of time to become the gold standard upon which government can be modeled.
To so cavalierly dismiss it because you find it inconvenient to your blather about guns is offensive to anyone who understands.

You can bitch about guns, and wring your hands every time someone is shot, and whine about the lack of gun control, but do not dismiss the constitution just because it irritates you, this 2nd amendment.

Suck it up, buttercup, and for once make your case without blaming someone or something else because the world isn't meeting your expectations.

 

There are two things rapidly coming together. One the insanity of constantly promoting guns and especially assault weapons and the constant unrelenting fear hate and anger being pumped out by the right wing false propaganda noise machine. Which creates a nation of heavily armed paranoid trigger happy people. To the point where even making an honest mistake can be a death sentence.



America's gun culture is empowering people to shoot others, even when they're not a threat

1.1k
Grace Eliza Goodwin
Sat, April 22, 2023 at 5:45 AM MDT



"Stand your ground" laws are coming under scrutiny after a pair of shootings.Siriphngs He Mgx N Phe Chr / EyeEm / Getty Images

• 
  Recent shootings of people over innocent mistakes have re-ignited scrutiny of self-defense laws.
  
  
• Gun violence experts said US gun culture is empowering people to "shoot first, ask questions later."
  
  
• Our culture of individualism, fear, and self-preservation is intertwined with our policies, experts told Insider.
  

They each made simple mistakes.

But for the Black teen who rang the wrong doorbell, the young woman who pulled into the wrong driveway, and the cheerleader who got into the wrong car, those mistakes became life-threatening, and in one case, deadly.

A series of wrong-place shootings have reignited debate about the prevalence of gun violence, "stand your ground" laws, and America's firearms culture.


On April 13, an elderly homeowner in Kansas City, Missouri, shot Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager, in the head after Yarl rang the home's doorbell.

Just days later, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was fatally shot by a homeowner after the car she was riding in pulled into the wrong driveway in a rural part of New York.

And this week, two cheerleaders were shot after one of them mistakenly climbed into the wrong car in a Texas parking lot.

The shocking incidents are a larger symptom of a distinctly American culture that empowers people to open fire, even when there's no real threat, gun violence experts say.


'Ready to shoot at any given moment'
In the US, guns are discussed primarily as a tool for self-defense against criminals, intruders, or threats.

"Most people are buying guns nowadays for personal protection," Dave Workman, a gun rights advocate and spokesperson for the Second Amendment Foundation, told Insider. "The reason they're doing that is for self-defense and defense of their families."

But some gun violence experts and gun control advocates said the way guns are marketed is in part responsible for fueling an ideology of self-preservation mixed with fear.

"If [gun owners] are being told repeatedly by the gun industry that the reason why they need their firearm is to be ready to shoot at any given moment, then that's the mentality that they have in having the firearm," Christian Heyne, the VP of Policy and Programs at the Brady Campaign, a gun control advocacy nonprofit, told Insider.

Other experts say that America's culture of rugged individualism influences how guns are sold and, in turn, how Americans think about gun ownership.

"The individualism allows the marketing, and the marketing promotes the individualism," Gary Slutkin, an epidemiologist who studies violence as contagion and founded Cure Violence Global, told Insider. "The fear accelerates the buying of weapons. And as more people buy weapons, other people feel that they need weapons."

Where gun culture and gun policy combine
That gun culture is inextricably intertwined with our gun policies, according to Heyne.

"Stand your ground" laws — which exist in about 30 states, according to The New York Times — operate on the principle that a person has the right to use deadly force to defend themself against a threat.

But "stand your ground" laws largely remove the obligation of the gun owner to retreat if possible, according to the Times.

"Certainly we're seeing a horrifying trend with how certain states are describing and discussing self-defense," Heyne said. "What is terrifying is the fact that now we have corrupted and upended that idea of self-defense in certain states with these 'shoot-first' laws, where now people are emboldened and empowered to shoot first and ask questions later."

The recent shootings of Gillis and Yarl have sparked new scrutiny of these laws. But in those cases, both Missouri and New York law enforcement determined the homeowners' actions went beyond what is protected by self-defense laws.

Both homeowners were charged in the shootings of Gillis and Yarl, and the Texas man who shot the cheerleaders is in police custody.

It's not yet clear what defense the accused shooters will argue in court. Still, advocates and experts said it's time to re-examine the laws and the larger culture around self-defense.


The main problem? People aren't very good at accurately evaluating real threats.

"This is the natural outcome of 'stand your ground' laws," Jonathan Metzl, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University who studies gun control, told Insider. "When we tell people that anytime they perceive a threat, they can fire their guns and that they have social and legal protection to do so, you see that people misinterpret everyday situations as threats. And then they kill people."

Jack McDevitt, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Northeastern University, says that from the point of view of a criminologist, these laws are "not effective."

"They empower people to say, this is your property. You can protect it in any way you want. And that should never be the case," McDevitt told Insider.

"Obviously people should have the right to defend themselves, but they have to be able to assess the level of threat. And it's not just having somebody pull into the driveway to turn around or having somebody come up on their porch because they're at the wrong house," McDevitt said, adding, "They feel like they're empowered to act violently in a situation that may not call for that."

The Giffords Law Center cites research from the JAMA Internal Medicine journal that found that the rate of firearm homicide increased 32% and the overall homicide rate increased 24% after "stand your ground" laws were enacted in Florida.

But, gun rights advocates like Workman believe that our laws should not change and the rights of responsible gun owners should not be restricted just because of high-profile incidents of individual gun owners using their weapons incorrectly.

"The oldest human right is the right of self-preservation," Workman said. "And that hasn't changed. You have the absolute right to defend your own life or the life of a loved one against threat of serious bodily injury or death."

Workman disagreed that US gun culture is encouraging fear of outside threats; he believes it's more of a "culture of preparedness."

He pointed to incidents of gun owners stopping violence, including a man who shot and killed a gunman after he opened fire in an Indiana mall last year.

"Any place that you might happen to be where an incident unfolds that places you in jeopardy, or the people with you in jeopardy, that I think raises the alarm that maybe I should be prepared for the worst possible scenario," Workman said.

Still, many experts say America's culture needs to change alongside its laws.

"Violence in the US is a uniquely dangerous epidemic, which is now predictably showing up in new lethal situations, such as those of Mr. Yarl and Ms. Gillis," Slutkin told Insider. "We will see more of this and more of other forms as this epidemic grows."

Read the original article on Insider

https://www.yahoo.com/news/americas-gun-culture-empowering-people-114500149.html

 

The american hating shit stirrer stirs shit.

 

Let me have the time to address the ignorance that exists in the antigun bullshit that they know nothing about at all. Anon, you claimed to have only used one link yet there are several more that only dug your hole deeper because the describe the exit wounds from a close range "assault" weapon to a handgun which is not capable of long range shots accurately, meaning that they have to be designed to do their jobs in close proximity. But to put that even more to a finite point I will use your own link to prove that point again, "A conventional handgun will typically create a relatively small, round wound that sort of conforms to the size of the bullet," Dr. Michael Shapiro, chief of trauma and critical care surgery at Northwestern Medicine in Illinois, told ABC News. "If it passes through the patient, the exit wound is typically a little bit larger with the skin edges everted a little bit." A direct and complete paste from one of the "experts" that commented. Even they say that a pistol round exits larger than it enters??????? How the fuck can that be??????
Next would be my favorite, He continued, "As a rule, if you can line up the holes, you're likely to see a sort of picture of what organs are in between those two wounds and it gives you a pretty good sense of what you need to be concerned about." AKA the slower moving round creates less pressure and cavitation meaning less fucking damage. OOOPS someone fucked up.
But just to use your link again to make a damn point that should be crystal clear by now, "The size of the bullet doesn't have much do with the damage a firearm can cause compared to the velocity at which a bullet exits"'. Someone here said that exact same thing and was called a liar, wonder who did that and then made it their own damn point?
Now not all semi-auto rifles chambered in the same size as what the military uses are "military style weapons" some are just hunting rifles that never get used for war but then do not all military weapons find their origins as personal use tools to fend oof the wild, hunt for food, or just be something fun for a father and child?
Yes more needs to be done but blaming the weapon and not the killer is why nothing gets done and remember kidds BAN THE ASSAULT RUBBER BANDS BECAUSE THEY KILLED AN INNOCENT WATERMELLON.

 

Welcome to the alternate reality of the anti gun lobby.
Unfortunately, you've crossed paths with the resident genius.
In the future you can expect all manner of insult and illogical logic.
The favorite tactic is diversion;
"The sky is blue"
LOOK AT THE RADIO TOWER ON THE HORIZON
"Not relevant; the sky is blue"
SO YOU REFUSE TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE RADIO TOWER ON THE HORIZON.
"Well, but it's a microwave tower anyway, not a radio tower
YOUR INSULTS ARE ALL YOU'VE GOT
Its fun if you're bored in the first place.

 

Gun Violence Is Actually Worse in Red States. It’s Not Even Close.

683
Colin Woodard
Sun, April 23, 2023 at 5:00 AM MDT




Listen to the southern right talk about violence in America and you’d think New York City was as dangerous as Bakhmut on Ukraine’s eastern front.

In October, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis proclaimed crime in New York City was “out of control” and blamed it on George Soros. Another Sunshine State politico, former president Donald Trump, offered his native city up as a Democrat-run dystopia, one of those places “where the middle class used to flock to live the American dream are now war zones, literal war zones.” In May 2022, hours after 19 children were murdered at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott swatted back suggestions that the state could save lives by implementing tougher gun laws by proclaiming “Chicago and L.A. and New York disprove that thesis.”

In reality, the region the Big Apple comprises most of is far and away the safest part of the U.S. mainland when it comes to gun violence, while the regions Florida and Texas belong to have per capita firearm death rates (homicides and suicides) three to four times higher than New York’s. On a regional basis it’s the southern swath of the country — in cities and rural areas alike — where the rate of deadly gun violence is most acute, regions where Republicans have dominated state governments for decades.

If you grew up in the coal mining region of eastern Pennsylvania your chance of dying of a gunshot is about half that if you grew up in the coalfields of West Virginia, three hundred miles to the southwest. Someone living in the most rural counties of South Carolina is more than three times as likely to be killed by gunshot than someone living in the equally rural counties of New York’s Adirondacks or the impoverished rural counties facing Mexico across the lower reaches of the Rio Grande.

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The reasons for these disparities go beyond modern policy differences and extend back to events that predate not only the American party system but the advent of shotguns, revolvers, ammunition cartridges, breach-loaded rifles and the American republic itself. The geography of gun violence — and public and elite ideas about how it should be addressed — is the result of differences at once regional, cultural and historical. Once you understand how the country was colonized — and by whom — a number of insights into the problem are revealed.

To do so you need to more accurately delineate America’s regional cultures. Forget the U.S. Census divisions, which arbitrarily divide the country into a Northeast, Midwest, South and West using often meaningless state boundaries and a willful ignorance of history. The reason the U.S. has strong regional differences is because our swath of the North American continent was settled by rival colonial projects that had very little in common, often despised one another and spread without regard for today’s state boundaries.

Those colonial projects — Puritan-controlled New England, the Dutch-settled area around what is now New York City; the Quaker-founded Delaware Valley; the Scots-Irish-led upland backcountry of the Appalachians; the West Indies-style slave society in the Deep South; the Spanish project in the southwest and so on — had different ethnographic, religious, economic and ideological characteristics. They were rivals and sometimes enemies, with even the British ones lining up on opposite sides of conflicts like the English Civil War in the 1640s. They settled much of the eastern half and southwestern third of what is now the U.S. in mutually exclusive settlement bands before significant third party in-migration picked up steam in the 1840s.

In the process they laid down the institutions, symbols, cultural norms and ideas about freedom, honor and violence that later arrivals would encounter and, by and large, assimilate into. Some states lie entirely or almost entirely within one of these regional cultures, others are split between them, propelling constant and profound disagreements on politics and policy alike in places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, California and Oregon. Places you might not think have much in common, southwestern Pennsylvania and the Texas Hill Country, for instance, are actually at the beginning and end of well documented settlement streams; in their case, one dominated by generations of Scots-Irish and lowland Scots settlers moving to the early 18th century Pennsylvania frontier and later down the Great Wagon Road to settle the upland parts of Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee, and then into the Ozarks, North and central Texas, and southern Oklahoma. Similar colonization movements link Maine and Minnesota, Charleston and Houston, Pennsylvania Dutch Country and central Iowa.

I unpacked this story in detail in my 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, and you can read a summary here. But, in brief, the contemporary U.S. is divided between nine large regions — with populations ranging from 13 to 63 million — and four small enclaves of regional cultures whose centers of gravity lie outside the U.S. For space and clarity, I’m going to set aside the enclaves — parts of the regions I call New France, Spanish Caribbean, First Nation, and Greater Polynesia — but they were included in the research project I’m about to share with you.

Understanding how these historical forces affect policy issues — from gun control to Covid-19 responses — can provide important insights into how to craft interventions that might make us all safer and happier. Building coalitions for gun reform at both the state and federal level would benefit from regionally tailored messaging that acknowledged traditions and attitudes around guns and the appropriate use of deadly violence are much deeper than mere party allegiance. “A famous Scot once said ‘let me make the songs of a nation, and I care not who makes its laws,’ because culture is extremely powerful,” says Carl T. Bogus of Roger Williams University School of Law, who is a second amendment scholar. “Culture drives politics, law and policy. It is amazingly durable, and you have to take it into account.”

I run Nationhood Lab, a project at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, which uses this regional framework to analyze all manner of phenomena where regionalism plays a critical role in understanding what’s going on in America and how one might go about responding to it. We knew decades of scholarship showed there were large regional variations in levels of violence and gun violence and that the dominant values in those regions, encoded in the norms of the region over many generations, likely played a significant role. But nobody had run the data using a meaningful, historically based model of U.S. regions and their boundaries. Working with our data partners Motivf, we used data on homicides and suicides from the Centers for Disease Control for the period 2010 to 2020 and have just released a detailed analysis of what we found. (The CDC data are “smoothed per capita rates,” meaning the CDC has averaged counties with their immediate neighbors to protect victims’ privacy. The data allows us to reliably depict geographical patterns but doesn’t allow us to say the precise rate of a given county.) As expected, the disparities between the regions are stark, but even I was shocked at just how wide the differences were and also by some unexpected revelations.

The Deep South is the most deadly of the large regions at 15.6 per 100,000 residents followed by Greater Appalachia at 13.5. That’s triple and quadruple the rate of New Netherland — the most densely populated part of the continent — which has a rate of 3.8, which is comparable to that of Switzerland. Yankeedom is the next safest at 8.6, which is about half that of Deep South, and Left Coast follows closely behind at 9. El Norte, the Midlands, Tidewater and Far West fall in between.

For gun suicides, which is the most common method, the pattern is similar: New Netherland is the safest big region with a rate of just 1.4 deaths per 100,000, which makes it safer in this respect than Canada, Sweden or Switzerland. Yankeedom and Left Coast are also relatively safe, but Greater Appalachia surges to be the most dangerous with a rate nearly seven times higher than the Big Apple. The Far West becomes a danger zone too, with a rate just slightly better than its libertarian-minded Appalachian counterpart.

When you look at gun homicides alone, the Far West goes from being the second worst of the large regions for suicides to the third safest for homicides, a disparity not seen anyplace else, except to a much lesser degree in Greater Appalachia. New Netherland is once again the safest large region, with a gun homicide rate about a third that of the deadliest region, the Deep South.

We also compared the death rates for all these categories for just white Americans — the only ethno-racial group tracked by the CDC whose numbers were large enough to get accurate results across all regions. (For privacy reasons the agency suppresses county data with low numbers, which wreaks havoc on efforts to calculate rates for less numerous ethno-racial groups.) The pattern was essentially the same, except that Greater Appalachia became a hot spot for homicides.

The data did allow us to do a comparison of white and Black rates among people living in the 466 most urbanized U.S. counties, where 55 percent of all Americans live. In these “big city” counties there was a racial divergence in the regional pattern for homicides, with several regions that are among the safest in the analyses we’ve discussed so far — Yankeedom, Left Coast and the Midlands — becoming the most dangerous for African-Americans. Big urban counties in these regions have Black gun homicide rates that are 23 to 58 percent greater than the big urban counties in the Deep South, 13 to 35 percent greater than those in Greater Appalachia. Propelled by a handful of large metro hot spots — California’s Bay Area, Chicagoland, Detroit and Baltimore metro areas among them — this is the closest the data comes to endorsing Republican talking points on urban gun violence, though other large metros in those same regions have relatively low rates, including Boston, Hartford, Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland. New Netherland, however, remained the safest region for both white and Black Americans.

The data suppression issue prevented us from calculating the regional rates for just rural counties, but a glance at a map of the CDC’s smoothed county rates indicates rural Yankeedom, El Norte and the Midlands are very safe (even in terms of suicide), while rural areas of Greater Appalachia, Tidewater and (especially) Deep South are quite dangerous.

So what’s behind the stark contrasts between the regions?

In a classic 1993 study of the geographic gap in violence, the social psychologist Richard Nisbett of the University of Michigan, noted the regions initially “settled by sober Puritans, Quakers and Dutch farmer-artisans” — that is, Yankeedom, the Midlands and New Netherland — were organized around a yeoman agricultural economy that rewarded “quiet, cooperative citizenship, with each individual being capable of uniting for the common good.”

Much of the South, he wrote, was settled by “swashbuckling Cavaliers of noble or landed gentry status, who took their values . . . from the knightly, medieval standards of manly honor and virtue” (by which he meant Tidewater and the Deep South) or by Scots and Scots-Irish borderlanders (the Greater Appalachian colonists) who hailed from one of the most lawless parts of Europe and relied on “an economy based on herding,” where one’s wealth is tied up in livestock, which are far more vulnerable to theft than grain crops.

These southern cultures developed what anthropologists call a “culture of honor tradition” in which males treasure their honor and believed it can be diminished if an insult, slight or wrong were ignored. “In an honor culture you have to be vigilant about people impugning your reputation and part of that is to show that you can’t be pushed around,” says University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign psychologist Dov Cohen, who conducted a series of experiments with Nisbett demonstrating the persistence of these quick-to-insult characteristics in university students. White male students from the southern regions lashed out in anger at insults and slights that those from northern ones ignored or laughed off. “Arguments over pocket change or popsicles in these Southern cultures can result in people getting killed, but what’s at stake isn’t the popsicle, it’s personal honor.”

Pauline Grosjean, an economist at Australia’s University of New South Wales, has found strong statistical relationships between the presence of Scots-Irish settlers in the 1790 census and contemporary homicide rates, but only in Southern areas “where the institutional environment was weak” — which is the case in almost the entirety of Greater Appalachia. She further noted that in areas where Scots-Irish were dominant, settlers of other ethnic origins — Dutch, French and German — were also more violent, suggesting that they had acculturated to Appalachian norms. The effect was strongest for white offenders and persisted even when controlling for poverty, inequality, demographics and education.

In these same regions this aggressive proclivity is coupled with the violent legacy of having been slave societies. Before 1865, enslaved people were kept in check through the threat and application of violence including whippings, torture and often gruesome executions. For nearly a century thereafter, similar measures were used by the Ku Klux Klan, off-duty law enforcement and thousands of ordinary white citizens to enforce a racial caste system. The Monroe and Florence Work Today project mapped every lynching and deadly race riot in the U.S. between 1848 and 1964 and found over 90 percent of the incidents occurred in those three regions or El Norte, where Deep Southern “Anglos” enforced a caste system on the region’s Hispanic majority. In places with a legacy of lynching — which is only now starting to pass out of living memory — University at Albany sociologist Steven Messner and two colleagues found a significant increase of one type of homicide for their 1986-1995 study period, the argument-related killing of Blacks by whites, that isn’t explained by other factors.

Those regions — plus Tidewater and the Far West — are also those where capital punishment is fully embraced. The states they control account for more than 95 percent of the 1,597 executions in the United States since 1976. And they’ve also most enthusiastically embraced “stand-your-ground” laws, which waive a person’s obligation to try and retreat from a threatening situation before resorting to deadly force. Of the 30 states that have such laws, only two, New Hampshire and Michigan, are within Yankeedom, and only two others — Pennsylvania and Illinois — are controlled by a Yankee-Midlands majority. By contrast, every one of the Deep South or Greater Appalachia-dominated states has passed such a law, and almost all the other states with similar laws are in the Far West.

By contrast, the Yankee and Midland cultural legacies featured factors that dampened deadly violence by individuals. The Puritan founders of Yankeedom promoted self-doubt and self-restraint, and their Unitarian and Congregational spiritual descendants believed vengeance would not receive the approval of an all-knowing God (though there were plenty of loopholes permitting the mistreatment of indigenous people and others regarded as being outside the community.) This region was the center of the 19th-century death penalty reform movement, which began eliminating capital punishment for burglary, robbery, sodomy and other nonlethal crimes, and today none of the states it controls permit executions save New Hampshire, which hasn’t killed a person since 1939. The Midlands were founded by pacifist Quakers and attracted likeminded emigrants who set the cultural tone. “Mennonites, Amish, the Harmonists of Western Pennsylvania, the Moravians in Bethlehem and a lot of German Lutheran pietists came who were part of a tradition which sees violence as being completely incompatible with Christian fellowship,” says Joseph Slaughter, an assistant professor at Wesleyan University’s religion department who co-directs the school’s Center for the Study of Guns and Society.

In rural parts of Yankeedom — like the northwestern foothills of Maine where I grew up — gun ownership is widespread and hunting with them is a habit and passion many parents instill in their children in childhood. But fetishizing guns is not a part of that tradition. “In Upstate New York where I live there can be a defensive element to having firearms, but the way it’s engrained culturally is as a tool for hunting and other purposes,” says Jaclyn Schildkraut, executive director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s Regional Gun Violence Research Consortium, who formerly lived in Florida. “There are definitely different cultural connotations and purposes for firearms depending on your location in the country.”

If herding and frontier-like environments with weak institutions create more violent societies, why is the Far West so safe with regard to gun homicide and so dangerous for gun suicides? Carolyn Pepper, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Wyoming, is one of the foremost experts on the region’s suicide problem. She says here too the root causes appear to be historical and cultural.

“If your economic development is based on boom-and-bust industries like mineral extraction and mining, people come and go and don’t put down ties,” she notes. “And there’s lower religiosity in most of the region, so that isn’t there to foster social ties or perhaps to provide a moral framework against suicide. Put that together and you have a climate of social isolation coupled with a culture of individualism and stoicism that leads to an inability to ask for help and a stigma against mental health treatment.”

Another association that can’t be dismissed: suicide rates in the region rise with altitude, even when you control for other factors, for reasons that are unclear. But while this pattern has been found in South Korea and Japan, Pepper notes, it doesn’t seem to exist in the Andes, Himalayas or the mountains of Australia, so it would appear unlikely to have a physiological explanation.

As for the Far West’s low gun homicide rate? “I don’t have data,” she says, “but firearms out here are seen as for recreation and defense, not for offense.”

You might wonder how these centuries-old settlement patterns could still be felt so clearly today, given the constant movement of people from one part of the country to another and waves of immigrants who did not arrive sharing the cultural mores of any of these regions. The answer is that these are the dominant cultures newcomers confronted, negotiated with and which their descendants grew up in, surrounded by institutions, laws, customs, symbols, and stories encoding the values of these would-be nations. On top of that, few of the immigrants arriving in the great and transformational late 19th and early 20th century went to the Deep South, Tidewater, or Greater Appalachia, which wound up increasing the differences between the regions on questions of American identity and belonging. And with more recent migration from one part of the country to another, social scientists have found the movers are more likely to share the political attitudes of their destination rather than their point of origin; as they do so they’re furthering what Bill Bishop called “the Big Sort,” whereby people are choosing to live among people who share their views. This also serves to increase the differences between the regions.

Gun policies, I argue, are downstream from culture, so it’s not surprising that the regions with the worst gun problems are the least supportive of restricting access to firearms. A 2011 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans what was more important, protecting gun ownership or controlling it. The Yankee states of New England went for gun control by a margin of 61 to 36, while those in the poll’s “southeast central” region — the Deep South states of Alabama and Mississippi and the Appalachian states of Tennessee and Kentucky — supported gun rights by exactly the same margin. Far Western states backed gun rights by a proportion of 59 to 38. After the Newtown school shooting in 2012, not only Connecticut but also neighboring New York and nearby New Jersey tightened gun laws. By contrast, after the recent shooting at a Nashville Christian school, Tennessee lawmakers ejected two of their (young black, male Democratic) colleagues for protesting for tighter gun controls on the chamber floor. Then the state senate passed a bill to shield gun dealers and manufacturers from lawsuits.

When I turned to New York-area criminologists and gun violence experts, I expected to be told the more restrictive gun policies in New York City and in New York and New Jersey largely explained why New Netherland is so remarkably safe compared to other U.S. regions, including Yankeedom and the Midlands. Instead, they pointed to regional culture.

“New York City is a very diverse place. We see people from different cultural and religious traditions every moment and we just know one another, so it’s harder for people to foment inter-group hatreds,” says Jeffrey Butts, director of the research and evaluation center at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. “Policy has something to do with it, but policy mainly controls the ease to which people can get access to weapons. But after that you have culture, economics, demographics and everything else that influences what they do with those weapons.”


https://www.yahoo.com/news/surprising-geography-gun-violence-110000396.html

 

Just attended ANZAC Day dawn service.

As always, they have 4 soldiers who stand guard around the flag.

They were all carrying what I'll assume was an F88 Austeyr assault rifle (google says it's the ADF's standard weapon). (I would further assume all 4 guns were empty.)

As always, my reaction to seeing such a weapon was physical. It was jarring.

Aside from events like this, the only time most Australians would see a gun is holstered on a police officer's hip. (And not all police officers even carry a gun, some just carry a tazer.)

I am glad to live in Australia, and to feel these reactions.

 

Some special trained British police now carry a assault rifle (which is loaded you can see the rounds with see-through magazine )plus a hand gun .They uprated the firearms because terrorists in some country's were better armed than British police .

 

@darkride
The mere sight of a weapon is ............. "jarring"??
Kay. Sorry. Turn in your man ticket.

What you need to do is, you need to go to one of those state sanctioned firearms instruction places and tell them your problem.
You need to handle a weapon. Learn how to clean and service it. Load it.
Dare we say ...................... fire it?

Now, don't start with anything truly "jarring".
You might start with a BB pistol. Maybe a pellet gun. Work your way up gradually to maybe a .38 or 9 MM.
Be warned. Those guns using gun powder make a big noise. And they can kick. But try. You owe it to yourself. And your family.