In our media’s continued quest to scapegoat guns for the violent tendencies of mankind, CNN brings us this piece of emotive manipulation disguised as journalism.

One nation, under gun violence: America tops 100 mass shootings in 2023

“The US has surpassed 100 mass shootings in 2023, a disturbing milestone that underscores the grave cost of inaction in Washington and state legislatures across the country.” CNN opens.

We already have serious problems just a single sentence in. If you’ve been paying attention there has been anything but inaction across the country. State legislatures are trying to ban guns and blame owners for things they did not do, several bills have been moving with startling momentum in many state legislatures. Just this morning I see headlines from Washington, Michigan, Colorado, Florida, and a Federal DoJ funding post, all aimed at ‘gun violence’ prevention.

In parallel time, the courts (both state and federal) have been examining several lawsuits under the Bruen standards. It already appears Illinois’ recently enacted Assault Weapon Ban is going to be shut down in its inception, as counties across the state declared they would not enforce it and their own courts have declared it will probably not stand scrutiny and review. Seven other Assault Weapon Bans and corresponding magazine bans are on borrowed time, even as Biden declares boldly that a Federal ban will come back and that it is somehow his moral imperative. That’s easy and safe for him to say, with the House in Republican hands he has a scapegoat.

Nobody ask too loudly why, when he controlled both chambers, all he could get done was the BSCA yet somehow controlling one chamber will allow an assault weapon ban to pass.

This alleged inaction falls in the face of evidence. It also ignores vast swaths of information we see out of the criminal activity reports from ATF and FBI. We continue to not want to say the real problem out loud, because there is no easy solution to it. Because it isn’t an ‘it’, it isn’t one problem.

The solution from gun controllers remains some variation of ‘we blame the AR-15 for existing’.

America reached the grim number by the first week of March – record time, according to data from the Gun Violence Archive, which, like CNN, defines a mass shooting as one in which at least four people are shot, excluding the shooter.

Isn’t it interesting that CNN and GVA have their own definition. The FBI uses four or more people murdered to describe as mass killing, notice it is independent of method, but I’m certain the more inclusive definition isn’t in the hope that intellectual dishonesty and praying upon people’s preconceived notions of what a mass shooting is will paint a less than honest mental picture. This broad definition couldn’t be looking to make each of those 105 shootings (as of March 7th) associate in reader’s minds as an Uvalde or Pulse type event instead of a downtown Chicago gunfight.

Three of these were Chicago by the way.

That couldn’t possibly be CNN’s intent with using a far more inclusive definition of mass shooting, one that excludes contextual circumstances, right? What could happen if context were to be added and we suddenly had to sort that number?

Well, you end up with a report more along the lines of the FBI’s Active Shooter Incidents in the United States, which for 2021 (our most violent recent year) lists only 61 active shooter incidents.

Or even Mass-Shootings.info’s listing of 638 mass shootings for that violent year and they are using the same, more permissive, definition as GVA.

Context though, both sources offer more context than CNN’s scree.

The active shooter incident research in this report is valid as of March 25, 2022. If additional incidents meeting FBI criteria are identified after the publication of this document, every effort will be made to factor those incidents into future reporting. When evaluating shooting incidents to determine if they met the FBI’s active shooter definition, researchers considered for inclusion:
• Shootings in public places
• Shootings occurring at more than one location
• Shootings where the shooter’s actions were not
the result of another criminal act
• Shootings resulting in a mass killing (4)
• Shootings indicating apparent spontaneity by
the shooter
• Shootings where the shooter appeared to
methodically search for potential victims
• Shootings that appeared focused on injury to
people, not buildings or objects

This report does not encompass all gun-related shootings. A gun-related incident was excluded if research established it was the result of:
• Self-defense
• Gang violence
• Drug violence
• Contained residential or domestic disputes
• Controlled barricade/hostage situations
• Crossfire as a byproduct of another ongoing
criminal act
• An action that appeared not to have put other
people in peril

Also before we get too concerned about 100 ‘mass shootings‘ so far this year, how does that compare to any other year?

Well, according to mass-shootings.info, by March 1st last year, 2022, we had 80 mass shootings. By the end of the month we had 133. In 2021 we had 74 by the 1st of March and 121 by the end of the month. 2020, pre-riot and pre-pandemic fatigue stresses as it kicked off mid-march, we only had 57 at the start and 83 by the end of the month. The summer of 2020 was then brutal. The comparatively idyllic year of 2019 had 50 at the beginning and had only reach 71 by the end of March. Reaching 100 in March has happened the last two years too. I won’t be so crass as to point out those are both Biden years, as is the current year, while 19 and 20 were Trump, as I don’t think who’s in the chair matters as much as the local, national, and global events and the government responses. What will truly be telling is where we see the totals by the end of April as an indication of how violent the summer will become?

Let’s add two items to this less than informative CNN quagmire, First, how many of each year’s mass shootings have no known suspect?

2019: 58%

2020: 75%

2021: 64%

2022 (through part of July): 55%

How could that be? These are mass shootings, crazy people shooting at innocent bystanders because of their access to ‘assault weapons’ and ‘high capacity’ magazines, right? How could we not know who these mass killer monsters are?

NOTE: Per ATF 77.7% of crime guns are traditional handguns or traditional revolvers. That figure excludes all rifle caliber handguns, no AR pistols in 5.56 or Dracos in 7.62

Second, how many people die in mass shootings on average?

Well if we use this inclusive definition of mass shooting, the average number of people killed is… 1. 1.02 to be exact, for 2021. The average varies between a high of 1.19 in 2019, which had far fewer shootings, to 0.85 in 2020 and was 1.11 for the info listed for 2022. If I take the three years I have complete data for, 2019-2021, I have 1674 ‘mass shootings’ and 1678 people killed for a fairly accurate average death toll of… one… 1.002 to be precise. That takes into account our two most violent recent years.

Back to the FBI’s active shooter report. Only 61 incidents in 2021, the worst year under discussion, qualified as Active Shooter Incidents compared to the 638 ‘mass shootings’ reported elsewhere under the more inclusive definition for that year. This is a dramatic disparity in two titles that evoke, by design, the same mental picture in a reader.

‘Mass Shooting’ is becoming an increasingly meaningless term, encompassing nearly any event with any motivation that injures a few people. Gang violence, drug violence, domestic violence, associated criminality from a robbery, burglary, or carjacking that results in a shootout or shooting, all fall under this large amorphous umbrella term of ‘mass shooting’ and that is a problem for legislatures trying to claim the problem, as in singular, is out of control and then solve it, again singular.

They can’t. It isn’t a singular problem. It isn’t even a closely associated series of problems. It’s just a common method of injury. A robbery and a domestic dispute are very different problems.

When we are removing motivation as a grounding context for these events we are dangerously overgeneralizing. Organizations in politics and the media do this in order to make sure the number is engaging enough, it needs to be high enough to garner attention. But if we then try to solve for the overgeneralized and non-contextualized number, with multiple disparate motives, we end up with terrible solutions that don’t do anything and get stuck in the cycle of we have to ‘do more’ to stop ‘gun violence’.

Hence the President’s recent executive order and buck passage to congress, knowing full well the House of Representatives won’t and can’t give the president the gun bans he wants.

We need to stop with the ‘gun violence’ moniker and start looking at gang violence, domestic violence, extremist violence, and suicide as separate and distinct issues with separate and distinct motives. We cannot allow the commonality of method of injury to ascribe a commonality of motive. We also need to give up the quixotic quest of somehow simultaneously “respecting the 2nd Amendment” while meaningfully impacting the available methods of injury in any of these events.

But this is CNN, so nah.

“Americans are tired of fearing if they or their families will be the next victims of a mass shooting. Our children are tired of being told to ‘run, hide, and fight,’” said Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, an organization seeking to mitigate gun violence in the US.

Americans are tired of a lot of things, Kris. I’m sure Florida and the Gulf Coast are tired of hurricanes. Being tired of a threat that their fellow man has always presented to them or their families, to be the next victims in one of the rare mass shootings that they might be at risk of being near, is just another risk of life. They’re also worried about car accidents, home accidents, Russia, fentanyl, their bills in a weird economic time where a lot of sector resets are occurring, banks collapsing, and a dozen of a dozen other things. Listing one more thing that they are tired of, in a tone suggesting it is the most pressing thing on their mind, is just using the obvious decontextualized threat to bolster the credibility of your particular comments.

The truth is that this issue is fairly low on anyone’s daily priority list when scale and context are added. There isn’t much they can do about it and they are rare events.

“bUt TheY HApPen EvERRYDayY, KEITH!“

Any number of other horrible and preventable deaths happen daily, and we have to place them all into this limited time and space to worry about them. So they end up getting ranked.

Death in any shooting, to say nothing of the more limited number of mass shootings, is a Low Probability/High Impact event. Those tend to be scariest to think about but not of that great a risk because risk accounts for probability.

“These regular, uniquely American tragedies] 6 killed in shooting at Hamburg, Germany [must be a call to action for our political leaders. We need decisive change to US gun laws and regulations. The cost of political inaction on preventing gun violence is increasingly, tragically clear,” Brown said.

Can we stop with the “uniquely American” idiocy… There is a war in Europe with 100,000-250,000 dead in a year, it has wiped towns from existence and is forming the basis for near peer conflict going forward. Don’t try and pretend that the massive overindulgence in the umbrella term ‘gun violence’ shouldn’t include war when it does include suicide. People shooting at each other on purpose isn’t ‘gun violence’ because there are a lot of them and they formed teams? That doesn’t feel fair from sources that will count a stray bullet accidently passing through a school zone as a school shooting.

There have been horrific European mass shootings. Looking at Central or South America for 5 seconds and perspective changes yet again, there was just a high profile abduction of 4 Americans, with 2 murdered, just across the border, the cartel even sent an apology note. Let’s cut the shit. Stop allowing this nebulous utopia filter to point to how it ‘should be’ without all the context of how it got that way.

It’s only “uniquely American” if compared against smaller, homogenous, high income countries… Which strangely enough resemble the small, homogenous, high income regions of the United States.

Weird.

The lower income non-homogeneous regions tend to be the more violent and turbulent ones in these ‘developed’ nations. Much like the United States.

Weird.

But following passage of last year’s bipartisan gun safety law, there’s been little political momentum in the divided Congress for more gun safety legislation, even as the rate of mass shootings has picked up.

We, once again, have to reiterate the fact that ‘mass shooting’, as CNN and GVA are referencing it, is a near meaningless term. It encompasses too many disparate motives to be useful. There is also the growing perception of bias in the media coverage of mass shooting events and perpetrators, so much so that it has become a viral meme series.

Aside: Are we saying Biden’s ‘ground breaking historic bipartisan law’ didn’t do anything? It sounds like that’s what we’re saying. The fact the executive order yesterday included an audit on it seems to suggest the evidence is lacking. Remember when it was the biggest thing since the 1993 AWB and ‘God willing, it will save a lot of lives’? Doesn’t appear to be doing that, does it? Maybe it was a dumb piece of legislation, made up to sound like it was doing something, while actually effectively doing nothing, so that the political and fundraising situations would continue. Can’t be the ruling party and not show the demanding moms and mayors something is getting done, but we can’t ever claim we’ve done all there is to do otherwise we’ll lose their money and votes.

Back to the data. Who perpetrates mass shootings?

That might generate a negative stereotypical bias if we were to keep blaming a generalized overly broad demographic for everything though.

What if we begin to factor in motive?

The smaller slivers are,

• Light Blue: Shooting at Police, 1%
• Dark Blue: Disgruntled Employee, 1%
• Green: Robbery, 1%
• Black: Random Shooting, 1%
• Tiny White/Grey Sliver: Other, .47%

Motives make this complex, a series of very different problems instead of a single simpler one that can be used for political lev… I mean… a single problem source that needs solving for the good of the people of this nation by just banning the so ascribed extra most dangerous guns. It’s common sense, they said so.

We wouldn’t want to make this confusing, lets just not talk about demographic or motivational information… mostly. Right, CNN? We can talk about it if it is scary enough or if they’re whi… I mean if the story warrants the coverage based on the details.

“Although fatal and nonfatal firearm injuries are growing, no real legislative response has followed acts of gun violence in support of individuals or the communities in which they live. And there is scant proof that prevention measures, such as active shooter drills, have reduced actual harm,” Mark S. Kaplan, a professor of social welfare at UCLA, told CNN.

Growing? Or are they simply up over a very specific period of recent time, like a crisis of global scale where the government said both, “Good luck, we don’t want to catch it.” and “You can have a little mostly peaceful city burning, as a treat.” at roughly the same time? The monumental stress of a worldwide plague and the government shutting down people’s lives and livelihoods wouldn’t factor into your calculus as a mitigating circumstance, now would it?

Of course not, no context for ‘mass shootings’ so no context for deaths and injuries being up either. No attempt at ascertaining why they might be up, just an assurance that we know guns are involved. These are gun deaths and gun injuries.

We need a law against gun bad things.

The more ardent followers of lawmakers are consumed with idea that everything can just have a law passed to make it better. Then it will just be better, because the law said so. We have ample proof that isn’t the case, and numerous instances with mountains of evidence were a law meant to ‘make things better’ had the opposite effect and made things worse while eroding public trust. Then we needed other laws, or judicial or prosecutorial discretion, to even it out and make things fair, or rather ‘equitable’ as is the parlance of today. Because fair isn’t fair enough, equality under the law isn’t equal enough.

But sure, despite that mountain range of problems, lets force Congress to make up some extra law about making the highly illegal thing more illegal. That should work. We won’t then have to equity check that law too and compound the problems from second and third order effects.

How well are laws working at stopping violence again?

Podcaster and husband murdered by crazed fan despite warning authorities she was in danger

Fantastic… Protection orders still protecting.

Now as to the ‘scant proof’ that drills work and ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ is just something people are tired of hearing and depressed about. There is ‘scant proof’ because these events are thankfully rare. There is scant proof that nuclear bombing drills during the cold war would reduce harm too, especially considering we were never bombed. Probably plenty of proof that they caused some mental trauma though.

Please, show me the recent event where a drill was run properly, with a low rate of errors, and that didn’t help. Show me anywhere this has been implemented in a serious manner. I don’t mean that the administrative types are going to tell me they take it seriously, I mean that in an objective sense the drills and plan have been scrutinized by experts and deemed strong. Show me the place where a drill was done, done properly, and failed to prevent or reduce injury and loss of life.

Can’t?

Can’t produce any data on that to compare? We can’t compare solidly drilled venues with haphazardly unprepared ones? We can’t control for circumstances beyond venue control? Then we really can’t take ‘scant proof’ to mean anything then, can we?

We do know this though, drills properly done in other nearly innumerable similar emergency contexts do save lives and reduce injury. AEDs, fire, counter ambush, heart attack, stroke, heat injury, shock, evacuations, all go better and smoother when drilled competently. We know that in all these scenarios having some serious prior preparation dramatically shortens the necessary response curve to reduce and/or prevent injury and loss of life. SWAT teams drill. Fireteams drill. Medical teams drill. Hospitals drill. The military drills. Why would we then make the counter assumption when it comes to an active shooter, especially when active shooter incidents account for less than 10% of mass shootings (2021) and we therefore have very little data to say?

Absence of data is not evidence of the opposing conclusion and when we start highlighting the contextual inconsistencies all the suppositions being pushed by CNN here start looking really half-assed. Remember too, ‘Run, Hide, Fight’ isn’t a drill. Its an emergency response philosophy, a basic premise, that can be used to form drills.

Its just noise and all it says is they don’t like guns. That is it. That is the punchline.

“There are real solutions and tools – including bans on the sale of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines – available now that can make a difference, but only if our elected officials act to implement them,” he added.

Because of course he did, all evidence to the contrary discarded. Here are the real solutions and tools to ‘make a difference’ but just… don’t ask too many complex questions like ‘…how?’ and just trust.

Remember when 77.7% of crime guns were regular handguns? I remember. But by all means let us keep demonizing the AR.

Yet America’s relationship to gun ownership is unique, and its gun culture is a global outlier, complicating legislative efforts.

Our relationship to gun ownership is unique but our culture isn’t an outlier. Our culture is decidedly westernized as a whole, but with a number of subcultures and their tendencies toward status and ego intermixed. Westernized gun culture overwhelming sees arms as defensive tools to be treated with respect. This attitude is pervasive among gun owners in Europe too. But we have several subcultures that see weapons as status symbols and tools of projection. No, not the liberal memes obsessed creepily with genitals, I’m talking actual cultural status.

We saw a lot of it in the Middle East. We see it in Latin America. We see it in various forms from various cliques in the US too. That you are armed and what you are armed with is an active factor in the authority you wield. The ATF referenced that in their report that Glock possession has status.

‘Polite’ gun owners have this too, but to a much more hobbyist degree. The man with the fanciest rifle isn’t in charge in a literal sense but does “flex” hardest.

Gun culture isn’t “complicating” legislative efforts, unless you mean to call literally being against the Constitution and Bill of Rights to do what they are trying to do “complicating”. We keep wasting a ton of taxpayer funded time arguing about the semantics of personal arms because that is ultimately more politically lucrative than the more obvious answer of “We can’t ‘law’ this away, sorry. And the true practical solutions all violate the ever-living-hell out of civil rights.”

Anti-gunners admitting that particular 800lb gorilla into the room and they lose an obvious and easy way to politic. They can’t do that. They won’t. Both for selfish and practical reasons.

There are about 120 guns for every 100 Americans, according to the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. No other nation has more civilian guns than people. And about 44% of US adults live in a household with a gun, and about one-third own one personally, according to a November 2020 Gallup survey.

We need to get working on making that majority of adults own one or more personally and kick up the training industry a notch so that the majority of adults have also taken a good class. But that’s just my opinion.

Almost a third of US adults believe there would be less crime if more people owned guns, according to an April 2021 Pew survey. However, multiple studies show that where people have easy access to firearms, gun-related deaths tend to be more frequent, including by suicide, homicide and unintentional injuries.

Again, we are under contextualizing. Deliberate obfuscation of information, allegedly for the ease of audience consumption, that actually dismantles the narrative being pushed if we dig into it further. More guns = less crime is just as oversimplified as the more guns = more crime.

On suicide for instance, we don’t filter by cultural attitudes toward suicide, or age of the population under scrutiny, we just say suicides = gun violence deaths. Both of those matter dramatically by the way.

Here’s a HEAT map of US Suicides. Note the areas in red. Note the volumes.

Now here is the same timeframe and demographic breakdown for homicides.

Weird. Its almost like they are a vastly different problem series and maybe lumping them into a category as generic as ‘gun violence’ is asinine.

Meanwhile, mass shootings continue to drive demand for more guns.

I’m sure the government telling everyone they were on their own during the riots and pandemic closures had nothing to with it. Its the mass shootings. Totally.

Now don’t get me wrong, the mass shooting is a factor from a certain point of view. But it is the comically predictable political response, from one side at least, to mass shootings that triggers the demand. The immediate call for banning popular guns that make up a minority of criminal firearm misuses with zero regard for how impossible that is, that is what triggers people to buy them when its immediately after a shooting. It is a contrarian response to an absurd declaration. If the government didn’t have a history of immediately calling for the banning of guns in rushed partisan bursts of stupidity like clockwork, do you believe there would be such notable purchase spikes?

It is, then, perhaps unsurprising that the US has more deaths from gun violence than any other developed country per capita. The rate in the US is eight times greater than in Canada, which has the seventh highest rate of gun ownership in the world; 22 times higher than in the European Union and 23 times greater than in Australia, according to Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation data from 2019.

There it is. Deaths from ‘gun violence’ which include suicides and shouldn’t. The third largest country in the world with by far the most gun ownership has firearms rank high as a leading method of injury, shocking. Nice praise Canada for their more peaceful peacefulness since they have guns too, but they aren’t crazy like the US. Let’s not reference the ongoing legal fights about that though, including the natives demanding special treatment on weapons from the rest of the Canadians, and their own crop of failures to prevent mass shootings.

Also,

The US ranks 86th in the world for murder rate. Georgia, a European nation but apparently not a ‘developed’ one, has a small fraction of our firearm ownership and a higher murder rate.

Here are the 25 countries with the lowest gun ownership rates. They all have less than 1/100th, and as low as 1/1000th, of the US firearm ownership rate. Only 10 of these 25 have lower murder rates. Many of them have murder rates not just higher, but orders of magnitude higher than the US.

For Singapore and Japan, who have the matching and lowest murder rates of the list here, these two nations might just have a few other factors contributing to their very low rates of both murder and firearm ownership. Like being islands. Like being of primarily one national and cultural background. Like having impressive economies. Like having to navigate the geopolitics of post-WWII Asia.

Strangely, it might not be the guns.

Even with all our guns, and this being a “uniquely American” problem, and being the 3rd largest nation in the world by population we still only rank 14th for total murders. You’d think we’d at least be, I don’t know 3rd, and with that whole “uniquely American” thing we should be first, right?

“Well its the suicides and access to guns!“

Okay. The US ranked 31st in suicides (2019) and 1st in gun ownership with over 400,000,000 guns. A gun is used in a US suicide a little over 50% of the time. South Korea, a large and economically prosperous nation, is ranked 12th in suicides, approximately 46% higher rate than the United States, and with only 79,000 guns for a nation of 50,000,000, an ownership rate about 600 times lower than the US.

Weird.

Maybe. It. Isn’t. The. Guns.

“For gun violence survivors, this is an incredibly painful milestone to mark, and it arrives earlier and earlier each year,” said Liz Dunning, a spokesperson for Brady whose mother was shot and killed while answering the door of her home in 2003. “But survivors are increasingly taking action, and demanding our lawmakers stand up to the corporate gun industry and take comprehensive steps to reduce the recent influx of mass shootings.”

Again. Context. You should try it CNN.

We are once more dealing with a series of complicated factors. One, we are only looking at the very recent past in this CNN piece. Two, we broadened the definition of what a ‘mass shooting’ constitutes and it is in conflict with itself because of its broad nature. Three, we have an overly broad definition of ‘gun violence’, which includes suicides and even accidents in their totals, and media sources who are purposely vague by the inclusion of these. Why say 11,000 people were murdered in the United States when you can say 30,000 people died at the end of a gun and roll two very different problems together to make your stat number scarier.

Gun violence activism has become a central plank of Democratic politics, with President Joe Biden repeatedly lamenting Congress’ inability to pass “common sense” measures after multiple mass shootings this year.

You should be questioning why that is. You really should. Especially with that ‘standing up to the corporate gun industry’ schtick.

This industry doesn’t even rank top 20 of who spends money in D.C. Imagine thinking there is some manner of financial strangle hold on Congress with the money spread looking like that.

Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Florida, the first member of Generation Z elected to Congress, centered his 2022 campaign on ending gun violence in the US, finding support among young voters who grew up as part of the “mass shooting generation,” as he calls it.

Young kid espouses unrealistic utopian goals without grounding in realism. Water also still comprised of primarily of hydrogen and oxygen.

Listen, mass shootings have gotten worse. That is true.

Why?

Theory: They have become a recognized outlet for the disenfranchised loners or isolated extremist groups to vent their rage to a national and international audience. We did that. We give them this platform. We did that with our wall-to-wall 24/7 media circus, with our blind reactionary panic, with our perverse idolatry of these murderers. We promise these unhinged individuals and screw loose groups fame and immortality beyond celebrity athlete, A-list actor, or uber-rich socialite status, and all they have to do is kill enough people they already hate or care nothing for?

Weird that it keeps happening, right?

“We’ve seen these things and been wondering our whole lives as young people, in high school, middle school and elementary school, why? Why is this happening?

The world is way more whacked than we led you to believe, kid. Your parents lied to you to protect you from the garbage things humanity does to itself throughout its history. You weren’t ready to know.

Why have we not fixed this?

Oh naïve child, you cannot fix it. Especially with something so mundane as a law against it. This violence is already against the law, it has been for millennia.

And now we’re at a place where we can vote and we can run, and we’re going to do it,” Frost said when he won the Democratic nomination.

Cool, but you won’t fix it either. Instead you’ll probably learn to keep running on the promise of fixing it because that pays your bills. Welcome to politics.

Last year’s bipartisan gun safety bill – which garnered the support of 14 Republicans in the House and 15 in the Senate – represented the most significant new federal legislation to address gun violence since the expired 10-year assault weapons ban of 1994.

That’s because it didn’t do anything. It was safe, harmless enough, mostly meaningless, and only really messed with the rights of the youngest adults who don’t have money yet. I didn’t buy my first rifle until after my 21st birthday. Not because I didn’t want to, I tried on my 18th but I was broke and terrible with money. I never managed to pay off that used M&P15T with EOTech 512.

In practical terms, the BSCA was a super safe way to do practically nothing while claiming to do something meaningful. Remember that made up ‘boyfriend loophole’ we closed? Has that applied to anyone since this got signed? If so, did any of those it did apply to get a gun another way, or act out violently without a gun, thus rendering the closure of the loophole utterly pointless? How many 18-20 year old young adults, with nothing of note on their records, have had their rights delayed or denied by the new system because of their age?

But it failed to ban any weapons and fell far short of what Biden and his party had advocated for – and what polls show Americans want to see.

No, it didn’t ban any weapons. Why? Prohibition was a colossal failure both for alcohol and for firearms. Democrats know that if they actually get it passed, they lose. Again. Big. And that when they do the Republicans will likely overturn the law and permanently stamp out their ability to saber rattle about this as a campaign issue. They don’t want that. The Supreme Court is probably going to shut that door on them anyway, but they want to cash in while they can in the meantime. With the house in Republican hands they can rattle a whole lot from the safety of never having to actually do anything. Those pesky Republicans. Senate can pass bans until they’re blue in the face as well as the political allegiance, the House can sit on them.

Polls of the uninformed and underinformed should not be used as justification for stupid policies. I bet if we took a poll about having US Astronauts go draw a dick on the moon it would get millions of upvotes. Should we do that? Should we leave that to the humors of the public?

Most of the public (66%) favored stricter gun laws, a July 2022 CNN poll found, with more than 4 in 10 saying that recently enacted gun legislation didn’t go far enough to change things.

Wow. Two vague and meaningless sentiments, ‘stricter’ and ‘not far enough’ with no context that those being polled know what they are talking about. Well, I’m convinced we need to do more. I will not elaborate on either ‘stricter’ or ‘ far enough to change things’ or what any bar of success might be. Progress!

Weird that this chart seems to show the pandemic, lockdowns, and riots are almost certainly at fault here. It also has 52 mass shootings for 2021 that my other source, mass-shootings.info, didn’t have but under counted 2020 by 2. Fair, they are using a vague definition.

Now, remember that influx of government money. Remember it in just the right amount for a handgun or a rifle for everyone. Think that might’ve helped fuel millions of new gun owners and that, like in everything, when you give easy access to something suddenly to a massive group who didn’t have it prior, and at no cost to them, some of them will abuse that access? Do we watch the utter failure of Biden’s DoJ to do what Trump and Obama’s were clearly capable of with roughly just as much freedom to purchase firearms, minus the stimulus checks. But that shouldn’t be mentioned, right?

Weird. Maybe it isn’t the guns.

But many Republicans, who now control the US House, have cited a mental health crisis in the US as the reason for America’s gun violence problem, showing little interest in the government trying to regulate access to guns.

Maybe they have a point on the mental health side of things.

Maybe that 2nd Amendment thing in the Bill of Rights and the obvious overdue corrections being done by the Supreme and Federal courts are signaling that they shouldn’t waste their time on this. This political capital acid trip the Democrats want to go on would anger the republican base and moderate gun owners greatly, it didn’t end well in the mid-90’s for ban supporters.

Mental health challenges grew throughout the pandemic and violence increased, but an analysis from researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that guns made those incidences significantly more deadly. Between 2019 and 2021, all of the increase in suicides and most of the increase in homicides was from gun-related incidences. The gun suicide rate increased 10% while the non-gun suicide rate decreased.

Interesting. You hand everyone enough money for a gun, three times, put them under extreme socioeconomic fears by shutting down the economy and telling everyone they need to get a vaccine or they’re literally murdering their family and everyone around them, shut down access to family and friends, increase division by playing up pandemic fears to try and increase compliance, increase division and fears by limiting civil responses to crime and emergencies, increase division and fear with a soft and sometimes encouraging hand to riots and rioters, do little to unite and calm the public during the election giving just enough credence to conspiracy theories that we have an epic tantrum almost-riot in D.C., use that as further divisive material, then slowly watch as all the overactions and lies of the past several years start to come home to roost, and we’re acting surprised that murder and suicide rates went up?

Okay then.

That CNN poll, which was conducted a few weeks after the mass shootings at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, found that 58% of Americans believed stricter gun control laws would reduce the number of gun-related deaths in the country. That was up from 49% in 2019 and similar to the 56% following the 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida.

Wow. It’s almost like you can get the emotively supported answer you want if you ask a dumb vague question right after a horrific incident. I bet the nation would also support “stronger railway regulations” after the Ohio train crash too. Brilliant work CNN. Again, no context on what “stronger regulations” means, just use the positive buzzword and turn of phrase to vaguely promise whatever it is you end up doing will fix the problem.

But until lawmakers on Capitol Hill reflect this majority, further gun safety legislation appears out of the question as the deadly cycle of violence continues.

Look at this chart of Congress and remember one of the most defining pieces of gun legislation, the assault weapon ban, passing. Then look at how the Democrats lost a nearly 40 year uninterrupted control of both houses after that, in fact it was closer 60 years. From 1935 to 1995 there were only two separated two year periods Democrats didn’t control at least one chamber of congress, it would have been both chambers but for a 6 year period in the Senate. Those majorities were strong too, often between 60 and 70%.

They’ve, briefly, controlled both houses since but haven’t pushed such a sweepingly egregious piece of ‘gun safety legislation’ since then.

Weird.

From the White House

Today, in Monterey Park, California, President Biden will announce an Executive Order with the goal of increasing the number of background checks conducted before firearm sales, moving the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation. The Executive Order will also keep more guns out of dangerous hands by increasing the effective use of “red flag” laws, strengthen efforts to hold the gun industry accountable, and accelerate law enforcement efforts to identify and apprehend the shooters menacing our communities. President Biden is also encouraging the Federal Trade Commission to issue a public report analyzing how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors.

President Biden is traveling to Monterey Park to grieve with the families and community impacted by the mass shooting that claimed 11 lives and injured nine others in January. Monterey Park is part of a growing list of communities all across the country that are forever changed due to gun violence—not only mass shootings, but also daily acts of gun violence that may not make national headlines.

Last year, President Biden signed into the law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the most significant gun violence reduction legislation enacted in nearly 30 years. When celebrating the Act’s passage, he called on Congress to seize the bipartisan momentum and advance additional commonsense steps to reduce gun violence. Again and again, he has called for Congress to act, including by banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, requiring background checks for all gun sales, requiring safe storage of firearms, closing the dating violence restraining order loophole, and repealing gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.

As he continues to call on Congress to act, President Biden will do everything he can to reduce gun violence and save lives. That is why, over the past two years, President Biden has taken more executive action to reduce gun violence than any other president at this point in their presidency.

The President’s new Executive Order to reduce gun violence includes the following additional actions, all of which fall within existing executive authority and outside of the right protected by the Second Amendment:

Keeping guns out of dangerous hands

The Executive Order directs the President’s Cabinet to:

• Increase the number of background checks by ensuring that all background checks required by law are conducted before firearm purchases, moving the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation. A large majority of Americans support background checks and agree it’s common sense to check whether someone is a felon or domestic abuser before allowing them to buy a gun. The President will continue to call on Congress to pass universal background check legislation. In the meantime, he is directing the Attorney General to do everything he can to ensure that firearms sellers who do not realize they are required to run background checks under existing law, or who are willfully violating existing law, become compliant with background check requirements. Specifically, the President is directing the Attorney General to move the U.S. as close to universal background checks as possible without additional legislation by clarifying, as appropriate, the statutory definition of who is “engaged in the business” of dealing in firearms, as updated by the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. This move would mean fewer guns will be sold without background checks, and therefore fewer guns will end up in the hands of felons and domestic abusers. The President is also directing the Attorney General to develop and implement a plan to prevent former federally licensed firearms dealers, whose licenses have been revoked or surrendered, from continuing to engage in the business of dealing in firearms.
• Improve public awareness and increase appropriate use of extreme risk protection (“red flag”) orders and safe storage of firearms. 19 states and the District of Columbia have enacted red flag laws, allowing trusted community members to petition a court to determine whether an individual is dangerous, and then to temporarily remove an individual’s access to firearms. However, these laws are only effective if the public knows when and how to use red flag orders. President Biden is directing members of his Cabinet to encourage effective use of extreme risk protection orders, including by partnering with law enforcement, health care providers, educators, and other community leaders. In addition, President Biden is directing members of his Cabinet to expand existing federal campaigns and other efforts to promote safe storage of firearms.
• Address the loss or theft of firearms during shipping. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) data indicates an over 250% increase in the number of firearms reported as lost or stolen during shipment between federally licensed firearms dealers, from roughly 1,700 in 2018 to more than 6,100 in 2022. President Biden is directing the Secretary of Transportation, in consultation with the Department of Justice, to work to reduce the loss or theft of firearms during shipment and to improve reporting of such losses or thefts, including by engaging with carriers and shippers.

Holding the gun industry accountable

The Executive Order directs the President’s Cabinet to:

• Provide the public and policymakers with more information regarding federally licensed firearms dealers who are violating the law. Gun dealers violating federal law put us all at risk by increasing the likelihood that firearms will fall into dangerous hands. The President is directing the Attorney General to publicly release, to the fullest extent permissible by law, ATF records from the inspection of firearms dealers cited for violation of federal firearm laws. This information will empower the public and policymakers to better understand the problem, and then improve our laws to hold rogue gun dealers accountable.
• Use the Department of Defense’s acquisition of firearms to further firearm and public safety practices. The Department of Defense buys a large number of firearms and other weapons to protect and serve our country. The President is directing the Secretary of Defense to develop and implement principles to further firearm and public safety practices through Department of Defense acquisition of firearms, consistent with applicable law.

President Biden is also encouraging the independent Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to issue a public report analyzing how gun manufacturers market firearms to minors and how such manufacturers market firearms to all civilians, including through the use of military imagery.

Additional steps to make our communities safer and support communities impacted by gun violence

The Executive Order will direct the President’s Cabinet to:

• Help catch shooters by accelerating federal law enforcement’s reporting of ballistics data. The National Integrated Ballistics Information Network (NIBIN) allows federal, state, and local law enforcement to match fired cartridge casings to the guns from which they were fired, making it easier for law enforcement to connect multiple crime scenes and catch shooters. In order to maximize NIBIN’s effectiveness, federal, state, and local law enforcement all have an important role to play in ensuring timely submission of ballistics data to NIBIN. Today, the President is directing all federal law enforcement agencies to issue rigorous requirements regarding NIBIN data submission and use of this tool.
• Accelerate and intensify implementation of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA). BSCA is the most significant gun safety legislative accomplishment in nearly 30 years, and the Biden-Harris Administration is treating it as such by making the most of every opportunity it provides to reduce gun violence. President Biden is directing each agency responsible for the law’s implementation to send a report to him, within 60 days, on progress toward full implementation of BSCA and additional steps they will take to maximize the benefits of the law, including by increasing public awareness and use of the resources made available by BSCA.
• Improve federal support for gun violence survivors, victims and survivors’ families, first responders to gun violence, and communities affected by gun violence. When a hurricane overwhelms a community, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) coordinates federal, state, local, and non-profit organizations in order to assess and meet community needs. However, when a mass shooting overwhelms a community, no coordinated U.S. government mechanism exists to meet short- and long-term needs, such as mental health care for grief and trauma, financial assistance (for example, when a family loses the sole breadwinner or when a small business is shut down due to a lengthy shooting investigation), and food (for example, when the Buffalo shooting closed down the only grocery store in the neighborhood). The President is directing members of his Cabinet to develop a proposal for how the federal government can better support communities after a mass shooting, and identify what additional resources or authorities the executive branch would need from Congress to implement this proposal.
• Advance congressional efforts to prevent the proliferation of firearms undetectable by metal detectors. In recent years, we’ve seen the rise of technology that allows guns to be made with polymers and other materials that are increasingly capable of avoiding detection by metal detectors. President Biden is directing the Attorney General to help Congress modernize and make permanent the Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988, which is currently set to expire in December 2023.

Okay… Let’s break this thing down.

“Increase the number of background checks”

How does this help? What exactly do we think our background check system making it as “close to universal” as possible is actually doing? We haven’t changed who is required to do a background check and there isn’t rapid horde of people who have FFLs who just don’t know or understand they need to conduct one for a transfer. This won’t material impact the noncompliance rates in private sales either and those are so low on the priority of overwhelmed police departments that this effectively does nothing.

Remember what the background check pass rate is? 99.57% Doing more checks isn’t going to change the pass rate any more than it is going to deny people who would fail from finding the means to acquire a gun.

“Improve public awareness of ERPOs”

Oh, we’re aware. We’re also aware for the extreme potential for their abuse with little to no recourse for accused.

“Address the loss or theft of firearms during shipping.“

Wow, it only took us three tries to reach something with a little bit of use. Yes, it would be awesome if we could reduce the loss of firearms FFL to FFL on the carriers. I don’t see how we do this based on the sheer volume of people they have to employee and the variety of circumstances that lead to the thefts, but it is the least useless thing so far said in the EO.

Holding the gun industry accountable

This is always fun to listen to.

Provide the public and policymakers with more information regarding federally licensed firearms dealers who are violating the law.

…like how many do it and to what extent? You all don’t care about it that much when felons and other prohibited people do it, why would you care about FFLs? Just more busy work it sounds like.

Use the Department of Defense’s acquisition of firearms to further firearm and public safety practices.

Huh?

No, this one is weird. Almost scary.

The Department of Defense buys a large number of firearms and other weapons to protect and serve our country. The President is directing the Secretary of Defense to develop and implement principles to further firearm and public safety practices through Department of Defense acquisition of firearms, consistent with applicable law.

The SoD doesn’t remember how an M4 or an M17 works half the time, many never really knew in the first place. Firearm illiteracy is rampant in the military. What about the DoD practices with small arms could better inform the public when the circumstances and care of those weapons are vastly different? What about the military buying a lot of guns makes it worth their time to comment on vague firearm and public safety practices? Handling? Are we talking about basic handling? Because the DoD and Joe Public buy guns very differently. A private doesn’t fill out a 4473 and take the M4 or M249 home after their background check clears.

So its a bunch of busy work and buzzwords about acceleration and synergy and wanting to do more background checks. Not audit the background check system for efficacy, just do more of them.

Thanks Joe. Very cool.