He’s very good.
There is a good archive of his articles here. Fred Reed Archive - The Unz Review
And here.
I’d have never heard of him if not for the latter.
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I saw a discussion on Reddit today that, while surprisingly taken in somewhat good faith on both sides, I opted not to join. Generally main-page Reddit leans fairly left, and as a result most of the discussion is done in bad faith. There’s a lot of “America dumb” and “Pro private gun ownership = pro school shooting” type posts that are a waste of time to engage in. This post had some of that, but a lot of the posts were reasonable in discussing private firearm ownership in America vs. other countries and the amount of school shootings and massacres these places experience.
I wanted to engage some of the posters here on the topic. I think our smaller community lends itself to more reasonable discussion, rather than “gotcha” points for likes.
The topic was on the Dunblane massacre of 1996. According to the post, it was the only school shooting in UK’s history. An equivalency was drawn to Australias Port Arthur massacre. As the story goes, these events took place, drastic gun control measures were implemented, and these places have not experienced a massacre like those events since. I haven’t spent much time looking into whether or not those claims are true, but, a cursory search and my own memory suggests that it’s a fairly accurate claim.
I personally believe in private firearm ownership, and I also believe that school shootings and massacres are a blight on our society. It’s hard to ignore that we have a far greater occurrence of these events than other 1st world nations.
I’m aware that the gun control measures implemented by other nations haven’t done much to curb violet crime stats. Getting stabbed in the UK and getting shot by someone in Chicago are closer in nature than something like the Vegas massacre. I don’t think our gun violence stats do a great job in that distinction.
I think most of the proposed gun laws and control measures in our country are silly. The rationale backing them is often misguided, arbitrary, or downright dishonest. IMO stricter regulations will not have much impact on those with a predilection towards breaking laws in the first place. With all that said, it seems that most school shootings/massacres are carried out by folks who are committing their first felony and last felony. That always strikes me, since I am pro ownership, but if we had laws like UK and Australia maybe this would not be a thing.
On the flip side of the coin, I’m aware that criminals will do criminal things. That includes the black market purchase of firearms, of which there are enough to make any government confiscation measures basically meaningless insofar as reducing overall gun crime. Only law abiders will be impacted by that. Would that have an impact on the amount of large scale shootings we experience though? Maybe, but hard to say without having experienced it.
I generally dance around my views on this topic in most conversations, because I find they too often and too quickly devolve into shit-fests. People are quick to demonize pro-2a individuals like I mentioned earlier, but equally bad are folks on the other side who say absurd things like “those lives are the cost of doing business” as it relates to firearm ownership. That is an unacceptable line of thinking in my opinion. It doesn’t sound so out of left field to believe the citizenry has a right to be armed, and that mass murder is a bad and immoral thing. Feels that way sometimes in discussion though.
The Swiss are allowed private firearm ownership similar to us. A much smaller population in number to be sure, but they don’t experience mass murdering events like we do. Is it simply a numbers game, or is this a cultural thing? When pressed, my explanation for why we experience this is not simply access to firearms, but that there is a sickness in our culture that is pushing people to commit these acts. The citizenry has owned firearms since the country was founded, but these mass casualty events seem to be a more recent trend. I’m 32, so I can only actually remember back to the 90s but from what I understand this type of thing didn’t start until then.
I realize my post is getting a bit rambly, so I’ll wrap it up here. I’d be curious to hear from some other posters on this matter, but I also needed the catharsis of getting these thoughts out of my head this morning.
@twojarslave @Bauber @idaho @Uncle_Gabby @BrickHead
Of course anyone is free to engage but the folks above were the handful that popped into my head.
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I think the first big school shooting in the US was Columbine, in 1999, but there were other mass shootings before that. At one point, there were several mass shootings at post offices, which spawned the term going postal.
As I understand it, there have been best standards and practices about how to secure schools since ‘99 that have not been put into effect. Of all the things we spend our monopoly money on, I would think hardening the schools would be a bi-partisan no-brainer. But here we are.
The “Fix NICS” conversation has been going on for a while, and there have also been a mixed bag of red flag laws passed around the country, some of which I find troubling. But as I recall, one of the recent mass shooters (hard to keep up) lived in an area where there were red flag laws in place but local authorities did not use the tools available to them.
So when government agencies demand more “tools” (always money and power) to do their job, and they still don’t do their job, I swing more libertarian anarchist. I would love to see whatever civil officials failed to do their duty in that case sued/prosecuted into oblivion. But we live in a hopelessly corrupt society where the only people held responsible are always the lowest peons on the totem pole.
That’s my rant, for now.
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Probably both.
I’d add that Switzerland isn’t exactly a poor country. I’m sure their population has an easier access to education and mental healthcare than most.
Countries like Finland or Austria are also allowed private firearm ownership.
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Thanks for the tag. I was once considering starting a thread titled “Theories on the Causes of Mass Shootings,” or better put, “Causes for Mass Shootings.”
I’m off from work this week. So I’m going to try to get back here and post my thoughts tonight or later in the week.
I’ll say this. Americans, both liberals and so-called “conservatives” sure are great at making a society in which mass shootings are inevitable.
I’m surprised they don’t happen even more often.
Thanks for the tag.
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1979, in San Diego. The shooter was a 16 year old girl. She killed two adults and wounded several kids. Prior to the shooting, she was diagnosed as suicidal and suffering from depression. Her father’s response was to gift her a semi auto rifle for Christmas. And this gets to a big part of the problem: adult enablers. Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook killer, was a certified mental case and his mother somehow got the idea that buying him guns would help.
It will always have issues because of whom you are asking to consistently enforce the standards: teachers and administrators. They won’t think like soldiers, cops, secret service members, etc. There is also the trend to keep law enforcement involvement in schools to a minimum, even to zero. So a principal won’t report a kid to the cops for making terrorist threats because it won’t look good. Look at that 6 year old who shot his teacher. Teachers informed the principal several times that he had a gun and she did nothing. First off, why not call the cops directly if you believe he has a gun? Because teachers have been programmed to follow a chain of command that is irrelevant when you are talking about the law. You need permission to call 911? That’s how they have been trained. They even defer decisions about their personal safety to a principal who has her own agenda.
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Those are great points with regard to teachers and their seeming hostility to law enforcement. I think it would take some high profile lawsuits, and draconian legislative action to harden the schools against the will of school administration.
The fact that Texas School Districts have their own police forces strikes me as pure insanity.
I think my initial reaction to this is that this simply shouldn’t be the case. (This is probably what others say as well, I don’t follow the topic closely.) A child shouldn’t have to be surrounded by metal detectors and armed guards in order to safely receive their education.
But maybe that’s just the reality we have to live with.
What is the old saying? Should in one hand, and shit in the other and see which one fills up faster.
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Well there’s a lot to chew on with this post but I think some history is in order to understand that this isn’t a phenomenon unique to the USA. I’m going off of memory for a lot of this but I did spend a lot of time digging into this topic in the '00’s.
It is easy to mix up terms like school shootings, multiple victim public shootings, and mass murder. The most destructive mass murder to take place at a school in the United States was the Bath School Bombing in 1927.
Other countries have school massacres with far, far higher death tolls.
Mass murder is nothing new at all, but the frequency changed in the 2nd half of the 20th century. From roughly 1960 on roughly 1 in 20 million men in developed western countries will act out on mass murderous impulses of some kind. Something has changed, and in the USA at least, it isn’t the availability of firearms. You could buy magazine-fed semi-automatic guns (not unlike AR-15’s) by mail up until 1968, yet the only notable school shooting prior to that was The Texas Clock Tower Massacre.
So what did change? I can’t say for sure, but we can make some observations. Nearly all of these crimes are committed by men. Many, if not most, have neurological problems to begin with. Many, if not most, are on strong psychiatric medication. Many, if not most, are failures at life to one degree or another.
Do I think closing down the insane asylums and limiting involuntary commitment is a factor? Yes, but it doesn’t explain it all.
Do I think the UK and Australia’s backwards and draconian gun laws might have averted some deaths by steering their 1 in 20 million guys to some other form of destruction? Sure, that’s perfectly arguable. Especially considering they have a mostly peaceful and mostly compliant population that exists on an island, which makes getting things like guns into the country a bit more difficult.
In the case of Australia, the problem with claiming that the laws are responsible for stopping a phenomenon that’s only happened once or twice is obvious. Laws work great until someone decides to break it. It is very hard to study exceedingly rare events and draw any kind of society-wide conclusions about it. In Maine you could pass a law banning fully automatic weapons at the state level and 10 years from now claim victory, as no automatic weapons have been used in crimes since the passage of the law. Of course, it only happened once before back in the 30’s or something, but a good politician knows not to point stuff like that out when there is credit to be taken.
My recommendations are to arm any teacher willing to be trained to a high level that will assuage the concerns of most parents. You’re already trusting them with your most precious cargo, why not trust them a little more? I’d be open to asking for military and police veterans to volunteer for this duty as well. Give the retired guys something to do. I’d be open to putting dedicated cops in the schools too. I went to the best public high school in Indiana and we had an armed police officer at the door to our dormitories, 24/7. The only anxiety he caused us is when we wondered if he could smell weed on our clothes or beer on our breath.
We use men with guns to protect everything we value on this planet. Everything, that is, except for our children in public schools. Chances are most schools will have a history or PE teacher or two who will answer the call and take the responsibility seriously. Chances are there’s someone in most communities who can make things better than they are now.
I’d be willing to bet that banks cause troubled men far more grief than schools, yet the former is never targeted by any of the 1 in 20 million men. Maybe there’s other reasons for that, but maybe it could be that even a half-asleep, out-of-shape bored guy with a gun is a bigger deterrent than a gun-free school zone sign.
I don’t think there are any set of gun control laws that would put a dent in school shootings in the USA, let alone broader violence. You can’t uninvent centuries-old technology, you can’t confiscate what you don’t know about and people still respond to incentives. Even if the government decided to round up all guns and ban them entirely, that will just further incentivize black market sales on the 100’s of millions of now highly valuable guns, while the government ineptly attempts to carry out a theoretical confiscation policy.
If they were serious about confiscation, it will almost certainly involve a lot more Wacos. How many more is anyone’s guess.
Short of waking up in a perfect world where guns don’t exist anymore and nobody knows how to get guns, this is a problem that can only be solved one troubled man at a time. What was it about our society and culture before 1960 that resulted in troubled men doing something other than going on shooting sprees?
Your guess is as good as mine, but to circle back to a sense of historical and present-day perspective, we can at least be thankful that we don’t have a Boko Haram level problem with violence in schools.
Mass shootings by lone rampage killers end one of two ways. The man commits suicide or a responsible member of the gun culture takes him out.
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Yeah, I’m aware of the saying. I wasn’t saying my take was the correct one. It’s just my initial reaction. I’ve never given the topic much thought.
But really though, does it seem reasonable? That children living in supposedly the greatest nation on earth need to guarded while at school? There’s no other solution? Just deal with it and say it’s just the way things are? I don’t think it had to be a concern for most Americans for a couple hundred years, did it?
Right, and guns were incredibly common during those hundreds of years. My grandfather and many of his classmates used to carry firearms to school, incase they came across a squirrel or rabbit for thr stew pot on the way home. But now the problem is suddenly the guns?
Another saying you may have heard is, “the perfect is the enemy of the good.” But since we can’t have a gun free utopia, lets just do nothing and keep complaining about it.
This would require accountability which most folks seeking political or bureaucratic positions seem to want nothing to do with. Leave that for everyone else to deal with. Appreciate your input man.
Poverty is certainly a factor here if we’re discussing general gun crime or violent crime. I think the line blurs a bit when we get into mass shooter type situations, but I’ve admittedly not looked into the economic resources of the people doing those things.
No problem man, appreciate you posting on it. I think we’re in simultaneous agreement and disagreement on both sides of our American coin contributing to an environment that feeds a mass shooting problem. I don’t think the average liberal or conservative American does anything of note to push people to take an extreme action, but I think the liberals and conservatives that stand to profit off a divided America do.
Thanks for the contribution man. Something I’ve mentioned in these discussions is how events like this are increasing in frequency as more and more people are living their lives online. Obviously this extends to parenting as well. I think people my age are realizing that parking their kids in front of screens is a bad way to raise them, but that course correction will take some time.
Thanks for your input man, knew you’d come in with some degree of history on this one. I’ll have to respond in more detail later on.
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I don’t think it is a direct factor at all, but like I speculated, the fact that a bigger percentage of the population may have access to education and mental care could be a factor.
I dunno if that is the case, could be interesting to compare.
EDIT: This might provide some insight as to how the Swiss go about mental care. I only skimmed through it, will read it more attentively later.
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I didn’t say that. I don’t have a problem with guns, generally. I’m just asking if there is no solution short of putting metal detectors and armed guards in schools. If guns aren’t the problem, then how does one address the actual problem? Is there any way to prevent shootings, or are we at the point where all we can hope for is to react, like by installing the above mentioned security measures?
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I can’t wrap my head around your framing. You are implying that armed guards and other security measures are bad things. I mean, children are under threat, and have been for decades, and you don’t want armed guards? Jesus Christ.
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We protect our bank with armed guards, our politicians with armed guards, etc.
Sorry, but regardless children (THE MOST VALUABLE RESOURCE ON THIS PLANET) should be protected with more than what stupid fucking politicians or money is protected with.
Just my 2 cents.
I will have much more to follow on this topic this weekend.
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