/semi-coherent rambling
I agree there are lots of differences between countries, and not everything is guaranteed to work. But the system literally failed in Texas, so why are people so opposed to trying SOMETHING? Let's see if a few small changes move us in the right direction!
No one said we're taking your guns. No one. If people would stop hugging their guns like teddy bears, we could talk. Anyone says "regulate" and people act like the 1st step is kicking down the door and forcibly taking your guns followed by a slow castration.
And as we've said numerous times in this thread, the whole "Let's just try something" is going to end up being an endless dance. The current system failed due to a procedural error, not an error in design. No new system is going to fix that.
Then why are they getting my tax money via SS?
Statistically, 100% of people who shoot people intentionally and not in self defense or in military/police service have a mental issue. Thus, I would say it's reasonable to assume that if you have certain mental issues, you don't get access to guns. The article didn't say all mental issues are affected by the law, just ones that are bad enough that these people literally can't take care of themselves without assistance.
We use stats to make preemptive decisions all the time.
Because giving people benefits has a much lower bar set than taking away their constitutional rights. Should they also have their kids taken away? I mean, apparently they're all dangerous, so that should be a given, shouldn't it? Or should an actual trial take place on an individual basis, and due process be done?
Could you point out exactly what is harsh about Australia's current gun laws?
Whatever adjective you want to use is fine, Australia has much tougher gun laws than the US. Despite these tougher laws, the gap between the two in violent crime has remained constant. Why is it that the US has decreased at the same rate as Australia despite having much laxer gun laws?
No, not overnight. It would be quite surprising if over a 15 - 20 year period gun crime rates didn't significantly increase in all countries though.
If gun crime is what you're concerned with, sure. If overall crime is more what you're worried about, I don't think so.
Agreed, gun controls and regulation are a piece of the solution - not the whole solution.
There has been more than a mass shooting a day in the US for more than half a decade. That's a lot. Per 100,000 people . . . US numbers still seem abnormally high:
Yes the US numbers are high. My point is they are made to seem artificially higher by our population. For example your 1/day statistic. If Australia had the same rate as the US, it'd be 36/year instead of 365. 3 a month vs every day. That's a HUGE difference when it comes to perception, yet is the exact same per population.
France had an incident in 2016 where 86 people were killed and over 400 were injured. Scaling for population that's the equivalent of 430 people being killed and over 2000 being injured in the US. Which one sounds worse? They had an incident in 2015 where 130 were killed and 350 were injured. In US numbers that would be 650 killed and 1750 injured. Or you could also say the US could have had 5 of those tragedies each of those years, and still be at the same level as France. Yet 5 per year sounds, well, 5 times worse than the 1 France had. The US could have had 4 tragedies of 100 deaths and 400 injured in 2016, and yet they would have been less severe on a population basis than France's 1 incident. Which country do you think the news would say is more dangerous though?
Absolute numbers matter in how people perceive things. The US is 5-10x bigger than virtually every country it's compared to, so the problem is magnified by a factor of 5-10 when they are compared using absolute numbers.
I'd also argue that defining "mass shooting" as anywhere where 4 people are injured by a gun is misleading. It's not that the info isn't valuable, but "mass shooting" conjures up a certain image in people's heads, and usually it's not a gang fight, convenience store robbery, or domestic argument.
There's also the fact that so many comparisons focus on gun violence, when we should be looking at overall violence. If one neighborhood near me has 2 gun murders in the last 10 years, and that's all, and the other neighborhood near me has 100 baseball bat murders every 6 months, I'd be inclined to take my walks in the first neighborhood, despite the infinitely higher rate of gun violence. Again, these stats are used for marketing. The US having 10000x as many gun deaths as Australia sounds way better than saying we have 5x as many homicides.
I don't think that any single piece of legislation in the US is likely to cause crime rate to massively drop. I don't think that anyone in this thread has made that claim. Gun control is a small, but important part of the solution to gun violence.
I agree with your comment, that there could be knock-on effects by banning the mentally ill from holding guns. These are valid concerns and should be studied before implementing any legislation (although my suspicion is that the lack of public education deters far more people from seeking help for mental illness than any potential weapons prohibition).
The problem with Senator Grassley's comment is that mental illness is difficult to gauge. Clinical psychology is a pseudo-science and asking ten different professionals will yield widely varying opinions. Honest question for you. . . do you really believe that there is a good reason for the diagnosed mentally ill to legally own and use firearms? Even if they don't show signs of violent intent . . . given the current suicide rate with guns I'd think that there should be significant reason to pause and consider what's best for society.
So clinical psychology is pseudoscience, yet we should give them veto power to constitutional rights? What?
Due process is a big deal in America. We have a court system for a reason. Letting a psychologist make a unilateral decision on someone's constitutional rights is a really big deal.
As for whether there's a good reason for them to own a gun, I'd say the same reasons as anyone else, and reason doesn't matter. If there is a good reason to deny them that right, let the court system do it, not a single pseudoscientist. Again, this doesn't get around people not seeking help for their illness because of fear either.