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You would think people would figure it out


HeroofTime55

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Coming off the heels of a tragic school shooting, the Gun Control debate is in full swing. Another school shot up, another pile of young bodies. And I am just wondering, when people are going to learn?

Where do these mass shootings always occur folks? Why is it always a school?

Simply, because there are no responsible adults who are allowed to be armed.

Imagine if someone in the principal's office was armed. The lives of 20 innocent children might have been saved.

"But Hero, what about the shooting in Aurora?"

Aurora has restrictive gun control laws that contributed to allowing Holmes to conduct his violent act unopposed.

"But what about the recent shooting in Oregon?"

Only two people died in Oregon. Why? Because the shooter was stopped by an armed civilian with a concealed carry permit. You won't hear that on the news, though.

It's a simple fact: Gun Control costs lives. People need to stop making emotional decisions and instead examine the facts rationally.

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It's a simple fact: Gun Control costs lives. People need to stop making emotional decisions and instead examine the facts rationally.

Then how do you explain the significantly lower rate of gun homicides in countries such as Australia or Great Britain, two countries with some of the most restrictive gun laws in the world?

Also, guns enable impulse killing; the more guns there are, the more likely that domestic issues will result in a homicide.

A Swiss study showed that following the increased number of weapons per person in the country, domestic violence resulting in death has drastically increased, and they believe the two are connected.

Edit/

"To conquer a nation, first disarm its citizens" - Adolf Hitler.

Bowww, Godwins law. I think we can call this discussion over, with victory going to the gun control advocates.

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I watched two news stories the other night back to back. Both with madmen that entered a school and tried to mass kill students, one in china and the other in America.

The only real difference was the weapon, in one case two semi-automatic handguns and the other a knife.

Even though the knife wielding madman managed to stab 20 odd students all lived.

I think it made me really realise the problem a society creates and it allows high end firearms to be owned like sporting toys.

I love shooting but even I can admit that I cannot see a place in society for civilians to be armed with semi-automatic weapons be they hand guns or rifles. Go hunting or target shooting all you want but do it with bolt action rifles or double barrel shot guns. They both do the job but neither allow for masacre style scenes very easy.

The cold hard truth is that there simply are types of firearms that should never be in hands of ma and pa suberbanites. I'd be getting rid of all handguns (let local shooting ranges own ones you can borrow for a session at a range if you want but they keep them), all semi-automatic weapons, all pump action and lever action types as well. Reduce it all down to the most basic slow reload types so even if someone looses their !@#$ they are limited greatly by the damage they could inflict. Hell imagine if the batman shooter rocked up with a double barrel shot gun. He'd have killed a couple people max before he fumbled around and got tackled mid reload.

Just my 2 cents.

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You didn't address what happened in Oregon. Are the numbers harder to fit into your assertions?

Guns are tools, and should be used responsibly. I am the last person who is going to claim that selling guns in Wal-Mart is a good idea. Firearm ownership should go hand-in-hand with a comprehensive education program on their proper use.

Guns require responsibility, and guns should be kept away from the irresponsible. It's something we do and something that can always be improved. However, we should not disarm the responsible, and we definitely should not declare that "only the government is responsible." Do you guys really believe that giving the American government that kind of power is a good idea?

The core of Gun Rights is that it preserves our ability, as citizens of a free country, to openly and violently revolt against a tyrannical government. Neutering the ability of the people to effectively fight back against the government goes against the very core of the Second Amendment.

He who gives up his freedom for safety, will discover that he is left with neither.

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The reason we dont allow civilians to own RPG's/Landmines/Fully auto assult rifles/grenades etc is the same reason I think society should also ban semi-automatic weapons from civilians hands.

There is now and always has been a line in the sand for what Americans deam ok to mass own. I beleive that line needs to be looked at again closer for exactly the same reasons it was in the past.

And stop stressing I live in a country that went through this 15 years ago... I was a pissed gun owner at the time too but I get it now. We never got taken over by Aussie-Hitler 2.0 or anything... and you find that you no longer have to defend yourself from gun wielding mad men when they too loose firearm access. And trust me eventually they do. In the end it becomes a small minority that cling onto illegal firearm makes and they are more and more expensive due to supply/demand and average thugs loose access and resort to knives etc for macco effect.

Americans love their guns and I'd never suggest you disarm everyone just swap the semi-auto AR15 for a bolt action hunting rifle. If you cant kill what you need to kill with that then you probably shouldn't be trying to kill it in the first place.

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I think a more interesting consideration beyond the issue at hand is to consider why these debates are never resolved and why the body of statistical evidence is so ambiguous. The obvious answer is that the relationship between guns and gun related homicide is more complex than simple causality. As far as I am concerned pointing to specific historical examples where armed citizens have been effective bulwarks to carnage or to crime conditions in various countries are meaningless exercises as they attempt to reduce the relationship to a one dimensional shadow of its former intricate self. Instead we need to acknowledge that a much more robust form of analysis is necessary (performed by computers) and that more data is required to really get a complete picture of the problem. If we want a positive outcome the answer is more experimentation with varying degrees of liberality and prohibition under a variety of cultural conditions - not less and not default to one position or the other. It is an open problem, and a single school massacre, abortive mall attack, or legal regime doesn't prove a rule- they are merely additional elements to consider in a much wider collection.

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The reason we dont allow civilians to own RPG's/Landmines/Fully auto assult rifles/grenades etc is the same reason I think society should also ban semi-automatic weapons from civilians hands.

There is now and always has been a line in the sand for what Americans deam ok to mass own. I beleive that line needs to be looked at again closer for exactly the same reasons it was in the past.

And stop stressing I live in a country that went through this 15 years ago... I was a pissed gun owner at the time too but I get it now. We never got taken over by Aussie-Hitler 2.0 or anything... and you find that you no longer have to defend yourself from gun wielding mad men when they too loose firearm access. And trust me eventually they do. In the end it becomes a small minority that cling onto illegal firearm makes and they are more and more expensive due to supply/demand and average thugs loose access and resort to knives etc for macco effect.

Americans love their guns and I'd never suggest you disarm everyone just swap the semi-auto AR15 for a bolt action hunting rifle. If you cant kill what you need to kill with that then you probably shouldn't be trying to kill it in the first place.

Yeah man, enjoy your internet censorship btw.

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I think a more interesting consideration beyond the issue at hand is to consider why these debates are never resolved and why the body of statistical evidence is so ambiguous.

They never get resolved as polititans are 99% focused on getting elected and 1% focused on what they really feel is right. Pro-Guns gets you elected in America just like anti-refugee gets you elected in australia. Both are sad realities.

And the statistical evidence is overwhelming. America sadly suffers about as many gun related deaths a week as countries like the UK or Australia do a year. Hell most UK police officers no longer even need to carry guns... something which I find crazy. The Aussie police were in the paper just the other day asking if they could get a handfull of AR15 style rifles spread across the entire country for critical response units. Something your average US suburban block probably already has stored in their cupboards. Come on man that must paint a picture for you.

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Bowww, Godwins law. I think we can call this discussion over, with victory going to the gun control advocates.

"Good people don't need laws to tell them to behave resposibly while bad people will always find a way around the laws" -Plato

Just because I use Nazis or Hitler in my arguments does not make them any less valid.

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"Good people don't need laws to tell them to behave resposibly while bad people will always find a way around the laws" -Plato

The argument that bad people wont follow the laws and thus we need guns to protect ourselves from the bad people has already been tested in other countries with results to show. Refer to the UK or Australia for working case studdies. You dont need to fear the unknown this has been done elsewhere so you can see the results for better or worse already. The main question is do you want to go down that road or not?

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They never get resolved as polititans are 99% focused on getting elected and 1% focused on what they really feel is right. Pro-Guns gets you elected in America just like anti-refugee gets you elected in australia. Both are sad realities.

And the statistical evidence is overwhelming. America sadly suffers about as many gun related deaths a week as countries like the UK or Australia do a year. Hell most UK police officers no longer even need to carry guns... something which I find crazy. The Aussie police were in the paper just the other day asking if they could get a handfull of AR15 style rifles spread across the entire country for critical response units. Something your average US suburban block probably already has stored in their cupboards. Come on man that must paint a picture for you.

I couldn't really care less what politicians do or what their motivations are- your first point has nothing to do with the matter at hand, nor the ambiguous nature of the evidence. As for your second point lovely, the UK and Australia have restrictive gun control and have peaceful societies, pointing this out proves nothing. The relationship between firearm ownership and violent crime is not simple causality, its a non-linear and dynamic relationship which factors in not just quantity of guns owned, but also demographic factors, the cultural backdrop, existing criminality, economic conditions, prohibitive drug regimes, micro-political elements and so on and so forth. Just as it would be absurd to say gun related deaths in iraq are in any way related to their stance on gun control, it is similarly absurd to imply that america's problem with murder is singularly a function of its liberal stance on firearms. That is a completely bankrupt position, and the fact that people even think something like that is anything more than sophistry is a glaring indication of just how superficial western and especially american political discourse is.

That being said to what ambiguity do I refer? When the first 1968 Gun Control Act was passed by the English Parliament Homicides were 6 per million people. After this the high was 1995 when Homicides were at 13 per million. In 1997 they passed another gun control act and homicides per million was at 11, in 2001 it was 15, in 2003 it was also 15. In 2002 in spite of 34 years of gun control in england there was a school shooting. For that year the uncorrected homicide rate per million was 18. In 1987 there was a large gun related massacre. In 1996 there was a school shooting. In 2010 there was another shooting spree. My point being England may be overall a pretty peaceful society but its laws have not spared it sprees like this one, nor have they actually reduced population neutral homicide rates. That doesn't mean gun control isn't necessarily a good thing for other reasons, nor a non-factor in reducing crime- it just means the role played by guns and by gun control laws is at this time not fully understood and generally unclear. Also FYI on the british laws, the pre 1997 laws allowed for gun ownership with very restrictive licensing, post 1997 laws required surrender of almost all firearms to authorities.

Another interesting case study is washington DC. Washington DC is quite interesting because it highlights ambiguity as to what the impact of gun control or its removal entailed. Of course in the US homicides are measured in per 100,000 not per million but I would argue that causes for this nation wide phenomenon extend far beyond simple gun ownership as even pre-gun ban England (when their laws were similar to ours) was never nearly as violent as the United States. Moreover there are many areas in the US (higher-middle income/educated demographic centers) where homicides can be measured on comparable scales to England and Australia. That being said in 1976 when Washington DC passed its handgun ban the homicide rate per 100,000 was 29. After the ban the local maxes were 1980 (35), 1992 (80), 1994 (77), and 1996 (75). After this violent plateau in the 1990s homicides dropped without any clear relation to the 34 year old laws to a low of 30 per 100,000 in 2005. In 2007 the 1976 law was struck down by the supreme court and homicide rates continued to drop. Again the drop in homicide clearly has nothing to do with the repeal of the gun laws, but it also clearly has nothing to do with their presence as homicide spiked despite the law. The results of this experiment were inconclusive and again this is just another case where the role played by a prohibitive firearm regime is unclear. As a general reference point during this period the nationwide high of homicides per 100,000 was 10 in 1972, 1980 and 1994.

Another interesting case is Chicago. In 1981 they outlawed handguns, at this point the rate was 29 per 100,000. Immediately after the ban there was a drop in homicides to 22 per 100,000. After this there was a spike in 1991 through 1995 of 34 and 35 homicides per 100,000. After the 90's Chicago followed the national trend and saw a reduction in crime. The results here clearly have nothing to do with gun control and in fact there is a much more compelling case (freakonomics) that the drop in crime is related to the legalization of abortion in the US. Again ambiguous. One other interesting statistic from Chicago though is the percentage of murders committed with a gun, from 1991 to 2007 the percentage has steadily increased not decreased despite the handgun ban.

Now I concede neither Chicago nor Washington represent nationwide bans so conceivably you could just leave the city to purchase a gun, but that requires pre-medition, intent to break the law, and generally the sort of mindset that precludes prohibition from having an individual impact. Just as history has shown that nationwide bans cannot stop the exceptional cases, indeed a city ban cannot accomplish this either, no real surprise there. That being said they highlight other interesting contrasts such as their own homicide rates with the national moving average. What makes these cities special comparable to others, certainly there are more factors in play than just the general liberality of the legal regime?

Here is my source for the last three paragraphs. There are some other interesting things in there such as an account of the Floridian, and Texan legal shift away from prohibition which saw a significant reduction in homicide.

As for Australia, indeed homicides have dropped, and violent crime in general has dropped. Again though Australia was never nearly as violent as the US to begin with, and they haven't exactly banned firearms- on the contrary they simply appear to be somewhat more restrictive (often requiring a probationary period or a 'reason' among which are collecting, hunting, and target practice) comparable to those of the US excluding a general ban on Assault weapons which are not really even the focus of gun related crime to begin with. So again I think the relationship is at best ambiguous.

As I said though, I am not saying there are no good reasons to ban guns, or that conceivably there isn't a relationship between gun liberality and violent crime, I'm just saying those reasons are unclear and that the relationship, assuming there is one, is a lot more complex than the linear function it is often framed as. When we assume gun control is a silver bullet or cure all we simplify what should be a much more holistic approach to the problem of criminality and homicide. I think our tendency to this sort of over reduction has a lot to do with the deficiencies of our political system and the inability of actors to triangulate and balance multiple policy objectives simultaneously. Everything has to be reduced because only such atomic issues can be processed by the system at any one time. The framework of our society also tends to inhibition and inflexibility in problem solving. Perhaps gun control alone does nothing, but maybe gun control with a very invasive police force, or gun control paired with gentrification, or gun control with with an income threshold, or mandatory gun ownership by a particular segment of the population and restriction on another would produce optimal results. The problem is we have already made a decision that most of those alternatives are unacceptable for reasons prior to the effects and now we are saddled with a binary decision: of whether anyone should have guns or not. This I would say is rather foolish.

That being said one could argue that gun control instead of having an independent impact could possibly have a potentiating effect or act as constants in a power function, that is it exacerbates whatever current tendencies there are. If a society is generally non-violent then perhaps gun control will enhance this passivity- by contrast a violent society deprived of legal arms may result in more criminality- this is by no means necessarily a superior model, but my point is we have no good working model to begin with. If we want to make good law then we need a more scientific approach to policy making because what we have now is more akin to the walk of a drunk man, than the movement of a rational being.

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Enjoy the world you live in buddy. Lucky for me my kids can go to a school that isn't surrounded by people that own AR-15 bushmasters, Semi-Auto handguns with extended clips and so forth. Most I need to worry about is the odd rogue Magpie swooping them on the way out the gate.

Oh and home protection is a metal rod... funny hey... but thats really all you need.

There are other options out there mate you just need to be willing to action them and not half ass it like will probably happen in the end.

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Enjoy the world you live in buddy. Lucky for me my kids can go to a school that isn't surrounded by people that own AR-15 bushmasters, Semi-Auto handguns with extended clips and so forth. Most I need to worry about is the odd rogue Magpie swooping them on the way out the gate.

Oh and home protection is a metal rod... funny hey... but thats really all you need.

There are other options out there mate you just need to be willing to action them and not half ass it like will probably happen in the end.

Who are you responding to king wally?

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I think that was me collectively throwing my hands in the air and exiting the thread. Sorry, I think this whole story just got to me having two kids the same age as those that were masacred the other day. To think of a grown man shooting my kid 11 odd times with a AR-15 is just a little too much. I don't know how you could look one of those parents in the eye with a straight face and explain why a civilian needs a semi-auto AR-15 with 30 round mag. Is there anything you can say? At least a child killed in a car accident you can conceed cars are a vital element of society and we need them to function. But high end firearms leave me scratching my head. And trust me I love guns and would freakin love to own a AR-15 but I'm also man enough to know I'd rather them out of my country then in. Sadly not everyone would be as responsible with one as myself and I'll be happy to pay the price of not owning one to concede the benifit of never having to run into one in anger.

You raise a lot of points and I was going to debate with you but I think I'm best just leaving it at that. I really hope the US sits down and works something out that leaves you all a lot safer. At the end of the day when a little kid ends up dead you need to stop and realise that compromise is essential.

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Fair enough King Wally. I suppose my response to that would just be, the loss of life is what they would call in economics a sunk cost; so in the sense that it is a loss it shouldn't have any bearing on future decisions, and in the sense that it represents historical data it needs to be considered in light of the full body in which it is a part. As human beings we can all shed tears in mourning the dead, but as decision makers those who decide our fate are obliged to be more than human. In confronting the question of the future we must be focused on minimizing harm and producing optimal social conditions, not avenging the dead or honoring them with adjustments to law. People will always die and such tragedies will never realistically be eliminated from the space of possibility- a more realizable objective is to simply minimize the scope and impact of violent crime at which point we can be satisfied we have done all that we can. Simply put one horrible event is not a motivation for change, only a trend is, and even when that trend is clear the question then is "what change?".

That being said, no I wouldn't tell a parent of one of those kids this, but because it is crass not because it isn't true. Who knows what the impact of an AR-15 ban would have been, maybe those kids wouldn't have died, but maybe 30 other productive educated adults would have somewhere else in the US over multiple other events. The question of if anyone 'needs' one is immaterial to the question of what the impact of not having AR-15's scattered amidst the population is. If societies are anything they are complex organisms almost as capricious and counter intuitive as the weather. Until that relationship is understood and until we actually endeavor to understand that relationship any action by the state would be nothing short of gross negligence on the part of the responsible authorities.

That is the essence of my position and I think it is really analogically related to all of policy making here in the US (and really the west in general). We are a blind intoxicated people behind the controls of a very large piece of heavy machinery that just happens to be located in the center of a bustling metropolis. We're infantile enough to think what we're doing is simple and we are myopic enough not to see the mayhem we wrought.

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To be fair both the mentally disturbed and enraged are inevitable byproducts of civilization. Just as it is unproductive to blame a storm for the damage it causes, to be surprised when one of these little apes, born into a world it is ill suited to, boils over in frustration is also rather silly. Either way though we don't know what the answer is quite yet, in fact I imagine there is no definitive answer on gun control and that different approaches must be taken for differing societies.

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>blaming the AR-15 and not the guy pulling the trigger

I blame both.

The deranged sicko and the society that offered him such ability to commit evil... in this case the AR-15 that legally resided in his house. You can NEVER stop sicko's in your society you can only ever limit their damage.

Unfortunetly when you decide on what is ok for society to own you not only green light it for the good responsible folk you also green light it for the madmen, the drug induced, the suicidal, the broken minds of the family seperation scene that just lost all access to their kids, the normally stable individual that for some reason stopped taking their meds this month, every fragile person in the society is now potentially armed with assault style and concealable weapons. Unfortunetly when planning these things you need to do so not asuming ideal conditions but instead asuming worst case scenario for gun owners.

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I like how "responsible adults" is absent from your list of "who has guns."

The idea is to put as many guns into the hands of the right people, the responsible people. Yes, there will always be madmen. And they will always do evil, no matter what they might have access to. The idea is that you empower good men to stop their evil.

And guns do just that. It's not just theory. Every 13 seconds, a crime is stopped because the would-be victim was armed - In most instances, not a single shot is even fired.

America is indeed an unusually violent country. But we're also an unusually free country, and I prefer to keep it that way. Are there things we can do better? Absolutely. We can strive to keep these tools out of the hands of criminals and madmen, and we can work harder to enforce the laws already on the books. We can increase efforts to educate people about gun safety, and especially in today's society, to reinforce to our children that guns are not toys. There are a thousand things we can do that don't involve giving up our liberty, and it is insane that the first thing some people want to do is just that.

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"Good Responsible Folk" were actually the first group I listed. My point was you cant cap it at that when you choose to arm everyone up. Its an all or nothing choice. The other scarey point I was trying to make was that todays good responsible person is tomorrows potential murder suicide person. People have moments in their life where they crack and they are broken. Enabaling everyone in society such imence power of mass destruction always leaves the door open for that person to make a poor choice. Whereas the same person in a different gun controled environment may settle for kicking some walls in and eventually getting the help they need to live a full life once again as a responsible adult.

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The core of Gun Rights is that it preserves our ability, as citizens of a free country, to openly and violently revolt against a tyrannical government. Neutering the ability of the people to effectively fight back against the government goes against the very core of the Second Amendment.

He who gives up his freedom for safety, will discover that he is left with neither.

The argument that you can overthrow a tyrannical government with gun possession is not realistic in the modern world (at least in the First World). The government will always have better weapons and better trained soldiers than any of the tough talking civilians. Any attempt at rebellion will end in tears

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The argument that you can overthrow a tyrannical government with gun possession is not realistic in the modern world (at least in the First World). The government will always have better weapons and better trained soldiers than any of the tough talking civilians. Any attempt at rebellion will end in tears

The military is pretty much going to ditch the government if the government orders them to shoot their family and friends. This is, of course, becoming less likely with the rise of "professional soldiers," and for that reason we should re-institute the Draft. Yeah, I went there.

Anyway, the big threat is if the government decides to hire mercs like UN "peacekeepers" or Chineese/Russian/North Korean/Iranian/Venezuelan/etc foreign militaries.

Drones are also a little scary.

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I think that violence in a society is a reflection of the values of that society. Our society does not value the individual in a real sense. Sure, people (and especially Americans) love to praise "individual rights," but that's a cop out. It is difficult to get help for mental disease, not just because we have severely stigmatized it, but also because we put up financial and social barriers. We don't prioritize it.

Cure the disease, don't attack the symptoms. Gun control is an authoritarian response to a social problem. We need more hospitals, not more stupid laws telling us what kind of grip we put on our gun, or that our barrel needs to be a half-inch longer.

And by the same standard, militarizing our society is a terrible idea. Once they put armed cops in every school, they'll start finding other uses for those cops. I don't want to be stripped searched every time I pick up my kid from school. That is neither progress nor safety, it is the death of civil society.

-Craig

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Just saw this blog, thought I'd comment even though it's a bit late.

OP: Your Oregon example is just a tiny bit flawed...if you actually read the article you linked, it states quite clearly that the civilian with the concealed carry never actually pulled the trigger, he was afraid he'd miss and hit someone else.

I'm from Australia, the last major shooting incident we had was in 2002. Yep, that's right, 10 years ago. The one before that, the one that led to the first set of really comprehensive firearms restrictions, was in 1996. Civilians are not allowed to own semi-automatic rifles or shotguns, and all other firearms need a legitimate reason, two licenses, and a 28 day cooling off period. Pistols can be no larger than .38 calibre, no more than a ten-round magazine, and there's a minimum size on barrel length to make it harder to conceal guns. It might be because we've never had a massive gun culture in Australia, but the facts speak for themselves. The University of Sydney actually did a study on this, and their results showed that:

Australia’s 1996 gun law reforms were followed by more than a decade free of fatal mass shootings, and accelerated declines in firearm deaths, particularly suicides. Total homicide rates followed the same pattern. Removing large numbers of rapid-firing firearms from civilians may be an effective way of reducing mass shootings, firearm homicides and firearm suicides.

Australia o/

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