Deadly shooting on Oregon college campus

the people with a desire to kill

Between the convulsive emotional response to a single murder and an elusive general theory of murder lies another kind of contemplation: the study of the murderousness of nations.

The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why?

Historians haven’t often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another.

Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen’s research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book “American Homicide” (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time.

Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics.

What was the biggest surprise?

I was surprised that people’s views about the legitimacy of government and about their fellow citizens correlate so strongly with how often they kill unrelated adults—much more strongly than other factors such as guns, poverty, drugs, race, or a permissive justice system.

The predisposition to murder really does appear to be rooted in these feelings and beliefs. Although they seem impossibly remote from murder, they appear to hold the key to understanding why the United States is so homicidal today.

I was also surprised that the patterns of different kinds of homicide were so distinct: that marital homicides, romance homicides, and child homicides follow such different patterns from homicides among unrelated adults.

Only homicides among unrelated persons correlate with feelings and beliefs about government and society.

Ya, but do young people know how to drive a stick? Do they want to? Do we want them to be texting and eating and putting on lipstick AND driving a stick all at the same time?

i didnt realize that anyone even makes a stick shift anymore. what brand car izzat.

In other words, it's far easier to kill with a gun than with a pressure cooker... After all, that's precisely what guns are designed to do: kill people in the most efficient manner possible.

Therefore, gun ownership regulation could lower homicide levels by making killing people more difficult. QED.

Well, most people are lazy, in that they would not chose to do something the hard way if there's a simpler way. If mass murderers are lazy people, it follows that they choose the easiest way to kill people, which is guns, not pressure cookers. Therefore, regulating gun ownership could result in making it more difficult for them to kill people. Works for me.

Tell me what you don't understand here.

your constitutional right to bear nuclear weapons

The Aussies got the memo, and they passed gun laws that resulted in a decrease in violence.

You too can do it.

What right is this?

Actually their repeal of freedom resulted in a five year long crime spree, as both armed and unarmed robbery rates skyrocketed.

Therefore it would happen more often in more competitive societies.

Do you have reasons to believe that the framers wanted nukes excluded from that right? :-)

That's simply no true.

Mass shootings are a regular occurrence in America.

you've come to the core of it

why are Americans so different from other first world citizens

why is the homicide rate so high in America?

Back in 2007, the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy released a study on gun control that received very little media attention – and there’s little wonder as to why. The study essentially obliterates the lie that gun control makes people safe.

3. Gun control only helped crime grow in England

Before gun control in England was passed, the country had little in the way of violent crime. In fact, murder rates were at an all-time low. Control measures were introduced after WW1 but did nothing to stem the growing crime rate that occurred in England after WW2. In fact, they may have made it worse.

This caused Professor Joyce Lee Malcolm of the George Mason School of Law to conclude in her study of English gun law and violent crime: “The peacefulness England used to enjoy was not the result of strict gun laws. When it had no firearms restrictions [nineteenth and early twentieth century] England had little violent crime, while the present extraordinarily stringent gun controls have not stopped the increase in violence or even the increase in armed violence. Armed crime, never a problem in England, has now become one. Handguns are banned but the Kingdom has millions of illegal firearms. Criminals have no trouble finding them and exhibit a new willingness to use them. In the decade after 1957, the use of guns in serious crime increased a hundredfold.”

This trend lines up with an evaluation done by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, who compiled 253 articles, 99 books, 43 government publications and original research done by the organization, that concluded gun control did not reduce violent crime, suicide or accidents where it was implemented. This was later backed up in 2003 by a study done by the CDC.

Furthermore, the gun ban in England was so ineffectual in reducing violent crime that in 2000 England and Wales had Europe’s highest violent crime rate, even surpassing the United States.

People turn to kill other people ALSO because it's easy to do. The harder it is, the less it will happen, and the easier it is, the more it will happen.