Month: December 2012

Will Oremus explains Australia's sweeping 1996 gun control law, which banned semi-automatic and automatic firearms after a mass shooting in Tasmania that resulted in 35 deaths and 23 injuries:

At the heart of the push was a massive buyback of more than 600,000 semi-automatic shotguns and rifles, or about one-fifth of all firearms in circulation in Australia. The country’s new gun laws prohibited private sales, required that all weapons be individually registered to their owners, and required that gun buyers present a “genuine reason” for needing each weapon at the time of the purchase. (Self-defense did not count.) In the wake of the tragedy, polls showed public support for these measures at upwards of 90 percent.

Dylan Mathews goes through the available research on the law's effects:

It seems reasonably clear [that] the gun buyback led to a large decline in suicides, and weaker but real evidence that it reduced homicides as well. Such a buyback isn’t in the cards in the U.S. anytime soon — an equivalent buyback here would entail the destruction of 40 million guns …

Joyner proposes one way to limit gun violence:

One intriguing possibility is mandating some technological solution to make it harder for people other than the registered owner to fire the gun. Various “smart gun” technologies exist or are in the works which rely on RFID chips and biometric devices; cruder devices, which rely on complicated rings to activate the trigger, have been available for decades. If effectively implemented, they could conceivably greatly reduce the number of crimes committed with stolen weapons, including cases such as this one where a teenager steals a weapon from a parent. They’d also, presumably, cut down on gun suicides and accidental shooting deaths of children.

One good omen: Senator Joe Manchin – the same Joe Manchin who shot the cap-and-trade bill with a rifle – wants saner gun laws:

On the other hand, Chait doubts that much of any significance will be done:

I fully share the utter emotional devastation that is naturally metastasizing into broad hopes of political reform. It is natural to think that the emotional magnitude of the massacre must therefore have some proportion to its magnitude as a political event. But this is just as untrue as the comforting fallacy that every great tragedy must do some good. Some things have changed since Friday, but most have not.

The first obstacle still standing is that the vast bulk of American gun violence would not be stopped by banning military-style weapons, but would require not only halting the sale but probably also confiscating regular handguns. (Rifles of all kinds accounted for just 323 of the 12,664 murders victims last year.) Such a step would run into a wall of massive opposition from the public, which opposes a general handgun ban by about a three to one margin, but also the Supreme Court, which has interpreted the Second Amendment not as the preservation of militias but as a right to private gun ownership, and has thus struck down handgun bans.

I share Jon's realism on this. Which is why we may perhaps have a more productive conversation if we focus on mental illness and the need for more resources to understand and treat it.

Dish alum Zack Beauchamp finds reason to believe it does:

Scholars Richard Florida and Charlotta Mellander recently studied state-to-state variation in gun homicide levels. They found that "[f]irearm deaths are significantly lower in states with stricter gun control legislation." This is backed up by research on local gun control efforts and cross-border gun violence.

Josh Marshall asks for counter-evidence:

There have been a number of ‘studies’ I’ve seen purporting to substantiate the claim that widespread gun ownership will actually reduce violence. But the ones I’ve seen either come from disgraced amateurs or think tank hacks with zero peer review. Are there any methodologically sound, peer-reviewed studies which show anything like this?

Ron Fournier talks to his 15-year-old Aspie son about the possibility that Adam Lanza may have had the syndrome:

“If you meet somebody with Asperger’s,” he said, “you’ve only met one person with Asperger’s.” Tyler’s point is worth us all noting: Don’t overgeneralize. Don’t stigmatize in a rush to explain inexplicable evil. Autism didn’t cause this tragedy: Asperger’s is a blip on the far-reaching autism spectrum and no two cases are the same. Just as no “typical” person deserves to be tar-brushed with the evil acts of another, Aspies don’t deserve the bad press they’re getting.

Tyler’s form of autism makes it difficult for him to relate to people – to read social cues and easily express empathy. He is not prone to violence nor is he “missing something in the brain,” as so-called autism experts are claiming in the wake of the Connecticut tragedy. He is a gentle, loving 15-year-old who, like millions of others on the spectrum, is destined for a happy, successful life: college, marriage, a career and kids – whatever he wants.

Adam Martin adds:

“There really is no clear association between Asperger’s and violent behavior,” psychologist Elizabeth Laugeson, an assistant clinical professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, told the Associated Press. Another psychologist, Eric Butter of Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, explained that aggressive behavior such as pushing, shoving, or shouting occurs with higher frequency among people with autism. “But we are not talking about the kind of planned and intentional type of violence we have seen at Newtown.”

Emily Willingham, also a parent of an Aspie, points out that missing social cues is nowhere near the same thing as being a sociopath, and that “autistic people are far more likely to have violence done against them than to do violence to others.”

(Photo: Will Gilbertsen, 11 years old, has Asperger Syndrome. His mother Kathleen Atmore is a neuropsychiatrist who specializes in therapy for autistic youth. She recently pulled him out of public school when he was being teased and said he wanted to die. He will start private school for children with Asperger Syndrome, which includes deficiency in emotional and social skills. By Carol Guzy/The Washington Post/Getty Images.)