I can't say with certainty that guns increase violence. I'm not convinced there is irrefutable data one way or the other, as you suggested pgg. But I wonder how the volume of deaths at Columbine, Seattle, the Beltway sniper, etc. would have occurred in the absence of firearms. Pipe bomb? I'm not so sure.
Of all the reasons to argue against private ownership of weapons, I believe that mass shootings are the least valid. (Although by preying on our fears of random events, they do make a strong emotional argument)
First consider the overall risk. These events are so rare and random that the individual risk of becoming involved in one of these shootings is infinitesimally small.
Overall in this country, there is an average of 10 to 20 murders across campuses in any given year," he said. "Compare that to over 1,000 suicides and about 1,500 deaths from binge drinking and drug overdoses."
So while they are sad when they occur, school shootings are "very few and far between, and very unpredictable," Fox said. This suggests that authorities can do greater good by focusing on the prevention of suicide and substance abuse than trying to guard against a campus killer.
Because they are so rare and so dramatic, they do get a lot of media coverage, but statistically speaking the overall effect is negligible. This does bolster your hypothesis A/B argument (hope you don't mind me calling it that). If my risk of being involved in a mass shooting is so small that it is insignificant then the non-zero risk of accidental or negligent discharge of my concealed weapon becomes a much more significant problem.
But to the question of volume.
The
worst school massacre occurred May 18, 1927 in Bath Township, Michigan. Andrew Kehoe, unhappy with the property taxes used to fund the school, planted a bomb at the school and on his car. Total toll, 45 dead (including Kehoe, 38 schoolchildren, and 4 other adults) and 58 injured. The total toll equals Viginia Tech and Columbine combined.
Oklahoma city bombing, of course, has to be considered given that the toll was 168.
The
coordinated bombings of the Madrid Trains in 2004 led to a toll of 191 dead and over 1800 wounded.
Of course explosives are more highly regulated than firearms, so with the unavailability of explosives, those with murderous intent turn to the next available tool, firearms. So the question becomes, if we remove firearms in addition to explosives, how successful are mass attacks?
02/18/03 - Daegu, South Korea -
Arson on a subway 198 dead 147 injured.
06/08/01 - Osaka, Japan -
Stabbing- 8 dead, 15 wounded
03/23/10 - Nanping, Fujian, China -
Stabbing - 8 dead
11/25/04 - Ruzhou, Henan, China -
Stabbing - 9 dead
03/02/09 - Mazhon, Guangdong, China -
Stabbing - 2 dead, 3 injured
04-28-10 - Leizhou, Guangdong, China -
Stabbing - 18 injured
10/10/08 - Seoul, South Korea -
Stabbing and Arson 6 dead, 7 wounded
05/26/2006 - Berlin, Germany -
Train Station Stabbing - No deaths, 41 injured including 28 who were stabbed.
06/08/08 - Tokyo, Japan (Akihabara district) -
Man runs truck into crowd then starts stabbing 7 dead (3 by car 4 from stabbing) 10 injured
03/26/08 - Sitka, Alaska -
Stabbing - 4 dead
Of course Beltway sniper is a separate category of mass killings as the crime was spread out over many days. I think a better comparison for that would be the body counts of serial killers like Ridgeway, Dahmer, Bundy, and Gacy. In this comparison, the use of firearms by Muhammad and Malvo were highly inefficient. They don't crack the top 50 for serial killings.
To ward off any argument of non-validity I will state here that the above has no statistical significance whatsoever. It merely stands to point out that non-gun mass killings can and have occurred with similar lethality to mass killings where guns were selected.
Now while we are primarily talking about whether or not the actual presence of guns has an effect on total violent crime not whether gun control laws prevent violent crime, in large part one can be substituted for another. In that vein, consider that three of the five worst school shootings in the world occurred in Germany and one in Scotland, two countries with the toughest gun laws in the world. Only one (Columbine) occurred in America. Mass shootings are not a phenomenon that are isolated to the US or to countries where gun laws are significantly less restrictive.
In my mind, a gun is a legal, easily transported, easily concealed, efficient means to target and kill multiple people. It requires little preparation compared to bombs. If these deaths weren't at the hands of a gun-wielding individual, I am finding a hard time understanding exactly how they would occur at that volume. On an smaller scale, living in a city with a renowned trauma center, I struggle to believe that a night which presents a dozen gunshots would be replaced by a dozen knife wounds, or that those injures would be as fatal.
Nice discussion.
From a tactical standpoint a firearm is not an efficient way to kill multiple individuals. Handguns are particularly inefficient. Firearms are primarily personal defense weapons that can be used in an offensive capacity. From a defensive standpoint, it is a great equalizer, allowing weaker individuals to exert similar force as stronger individuals. What they do offer is the ability to distance yourself from the area where you are exerting force and avoid non-firearm based defensive strategies and the ability to carry out an attack with little pre-planning as compared to arson or explosives (although that attack will be no where near as effective as one in which pre-planning occurred).
If you completely removed guns from the hands of gangbangers, you absolutely would see the injuries replaced with knife wounds although you would eliminate the drive-by aspect. Knife wounds can be just as devastating especially if the assailant takes some time to train with knives. I suspect that if guns were not available to them, the gang bangers would take the time to figure out how knife fighting techniques can be made more efficient. One only has to look at England, Canada, and the recent increases in knife violence in NY to see the effect of replacing one tool with another.
- pod
