The New Zealand Prime Minister gained (even more) respect from me for this:
“He sought many things from his act of terror but one was notoriety, that is why you will never hear me mention his name,” she said of the gunman. “He is a terrorist. He is a criminal. He is an extremist. But he will, when I speak, be nameless." -- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/19/new-zealand-sh...
She did exactly what he wanted to happen as written in his manifesto, so it doesn't matter that he's nameless.
She gave him everything he wanted, which was more gun control.
For those unaware, the shooter explicitly stated that his goal was to radicalize more people by forcing the government to take their guns. The government complied.
If a terrorist wants you to do what you determine to be the right thing, there is little more you can do except do the right thing, and try not to give them credit encouraging further terrorism. The alternative is known as cutting off your nose to spite your face.
Who determined it was the right thing? The US has had declining gun homicides for 30+ years despite record breaking gun sales. It's hard to square that with the narrative.
Over the last 30 years, there has been a correlation between increasing gun sales and declining gun homicides in the US.
Additionally, not only are gun homicides down per capita over that time frame, they're down in real numbers.
You can ignore this, and claim it was the right thing anyway, but then it advertises to terrorists that violence is an acceptable way to reach your goals. The terrorist was validated and his agenda was hurriedly rolled out.
I haven't been bought or duped, but I'm capable of reading crime stats and gun sale stats and drawing conclusions from the actual raw data I read.
Gun homicides have declined rapidly over the last 30 years. In the same timeframe, gun sales have rapidly increased (along with ammunition, accessories, etc).
If there's no link between gun sales and gun homicides, but in fact an inverse link, then your argument is on extremely shaky ground.
Have you read any other countries gun crime stats?
Last time a school kid showed up at school armed and killed a bunch of classmates here was, ummm, never? I’m pretty sure?
From outside, it seems like that’s a thing that happens every few weeks there.
Kids in Australia do not do “active shooter drills” in school. My sister was horrified when my nieces came home from school in SF and told her about those.
You have no idea. Influence is subtle, indirect and multifaceted.
If you were born in any other country you'd have exceptionally low probability of holding views on gun control you hold. And even if somehow you managed to acquire those views and hold it it would be almost surely due to USA exporting its culture en masse along with all the dumb parts.
Suicides, accidents, necessity for the police to carry guns everywhere and use them liberally, mass shootings and their cultural impact. 'Everything goes' approach to policing because 'they risk they lives everyday'.
There's a lot of factors to consider to evaluate how dumb idea it is exactly. And what you get in exchange for all that additional risk and harm is just extension of childish or at the latest teenage power fantasy way into the adulthood where it does not belong.
You shouldn't trust cherry-picked statistics no more than you trust politicians you don't agree with.
You should just look at what the civilized world outside of USA is doing and with what results.
You acknowledged the statistic is a correlation earlier. There are also many other correlations with lower gun homicides in the US. The causation is the interesting fact, and harder to determine. The argument that increasing gun sales causes lower gun homicides fails some logic and common sense tests, and would need evidence before anyone takes it seriously. Until then, it is seems more likely that other factors that we do have evidence for (eg. lower lead exposure leading to a drop in violent crime across the board) is causing the lowering of gun homicide in the US, despite the fact that gun sales are increasing.
What he wrote was transparent trolling. Reading his intentions out of his writing is a foolish thing to do. Especially when it results in ascribing to him having such a noble goal as gun control.
I have a different take on this because I think it can prevent people from realising how these actions ended up happening and how to stop them. Here in Norway there are people who refuse to name Anders Breivik, who car bombed Oslo and massacred the attendees of a summer camp, many of them children. The argument is that the focus should be on the victims and certainly we never forget them.
But in ignoring the perpetrator we miss an essential part of the story: many of these people were radicalised within our societies and the pathways and narratives involved in that still exist and are largely unchanged. By refusing to acknowledge the perpetrator we are also refusing to acknowledge the factors that led to them committing their acts and refusing to make widespread societal changes to those. I'm not just talking about laws & government actions, but changing the narratives around the causes and being more aware of how people end up being radicalised into action and how we can all try to prevent that, or spot it earlier. By incorrectly labelling these people as aberrations we can ignore the environment these atrocities occur in and become complacent, then shocked when it happens again.
Also consider that whilst they are not named in the mainstream media, they are named and celebrated in media that aligns with their philosophy or grievance. Those most likely to be inspired by their actions are very likely to hear their names and much more.
Personally, I'm in agreement with you in that idolization and martyr-ization of bad people is a real and serious problem. I can also imagine a dystopian future where such policies are taken too far, where all publicly accessible information looks like: Human #6789 perpetrated the event known as "the bowling green massacre". After conviction by confidential courts the individual has been sentenced to death. Do not question why your neighbor hasn't been seen in 5 weeks, please move along.
Unscientific as it might be, I often wonder if this is a strong cause of the mass shootings in the US.
Yes we have a lot of guns, but that's nothing new. We've had a lot of guns for centuries. And yes, gun crime in the US isn't new either, but the sheer scale of it seems to have grown dramatically in the last few decades.
> the sheer scale of it seems to have grown dramatically in the last few decades.
Do you have a reference for this? Because I suspect it is not true. There was certainly a peak in the early 90s, which is on the outside edge of the "last few decades," but there was also a peak in the 70s.
I'm inclined to think so, at least for the subset of mass shootings that excludes gang/drug/domestic violence.
The contagiousness of suicide is backed up by research, and media coverage is a major risk factor (which even has an impact of the method that copycats use to commit suicide). Even if not all mass shooters are suicidal, intuitively it makes sense that there would be the same sort of viral effect.
