Nothing is controversial about this data and it’s really not a slam-dunk to use it as a method of refuting a more nuanced conversation about gun violence. His first pivot is a rather dramatic and overly-emotional one:
“On average, around Ten students are killed per year by gunfire at school. Fourteen times more kill themselves, on purpose, with guns at home. Willingly leveraging the tragic deaths of the latter group to push policy about the former group is disgustingly disrespectful behavior. Everyone should stop doing it. Especially when the policies being pushed have no efficacy.”
No one is actually doing this…
This is one of the most common things media does. I find it over and over. We pick apart Vox doing it here:
Let’s start with an obvious reason why not. Since 2012, most deadly mass shootings with 5+ deaths have been carried out with an AR-15 or similar military style rifle, usually with high capacity magazines. This is demonstrably true and should tell us something about the reason why this weapon is consistently at the crime scenes in Aurora, Orlando, Sutherland Springs, San Diego, Parkland, El Paso, etc.
They’re doing it because they’re copycats driven by the media.
There’s solid science on this. Mass shootings are a media driven social contagion. CNN’s “mass shooter scoreboard” does more to incite mass shooters than the entire NRA has ever done.
If they cared about killing the most people, they’d switch to pistols.
Almost no one commits suicide with an AR-15. It may be possible, but for obvious reasons it is incredibly awkward to use a rifle with this design to kill oneself. The most common firearm used in suicide is a handgun. So to even talk about the subject of mass shootings and suicide is to approach almost entirely different firearms and gun policy to begin with. This is like being concerned about the number of highway fatalities involving a motorcycle but then focusing on four wheeler deaths.
You can kill yourself with any gun. You can commit mass murder with any semi auto gun. The only time the features of an AR-15 come into play to provide you ANY advantage, would be in medium to long range gun fights with other armed opponents. The only way an AR-15 ban makes any sense would be if we had an outbreak of too many medium to long range gunfights with police. Which we don’t have. Any gun can kill kids. Any semi auto gun can kill lots of kids.
Every gun owner knows this. Every gun owner knows that even if you could magically evaporate AR-15s, which you can’t, but pretend you could, they’d just use pistols and kill more people with them.
Campbell has again ignored the possible goal of ameliorating gun homicide, particularly mass shootings. He decided early in the essay that because most gun deaths result from suicide, we shouldn’t concern ourselves with gun homicide at all.
I’ve got over a dozen gun related articles up, browse them.
There’s at least one logical error Campbell commits here. Did you spot it? Campbell uses the word “forced” to imply that committing suicide is inevitable and whether or not there is a gun in the home, suicide is equally likely because another method must result.
You didn’t even read the article you’re responding to.
And we’re done here.
