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I am defining it as "failed to do what it was proposed for by its proposers, namely stopping mass shootings from recurring".
Hungerford saw a ban on SLRs and various other firearms as the sole response. Some years later, Dunblane happened. A ban on pistols was brought in there as the sole response (and in fact, there investigations were classified under the Official Secrets Act and were to have been sealed for a century; it took over a decade to find out the details). Some years later, Cumbria happened. Two attempts to prevent these incidents with a ban, two failures.
Well, I think we see this quite differently. And I should point out, I am actually undecided on a complete ban on firearms. I enjoy target shooting, though I don't get to do it as often as I would like and I don't own any firearms myself.
What I would draw from your examples above is this: First, the ban put in place after Hungerford had the effect that SLRs/ assault rifle type weapons became harder (or impossible?) to obtain legally. Dunblane was carried out with pistols, not assault rifles. After Dunblane access to pistol was massively restricted, then we have Cumbria. it is worth noting that the shooter in the Cumbria murders used neither an assault rifle, not a pistol. He used a .22 rifle and a shotgun, the interesting difference between these weapons and assault rifles and pistols is it is relatively easy to legally obtain .22 rifles and shotguns.
I would suggest that whether these bans were a success or failure would depend on how one defines success or failure. If one defines success or failure as stopping all gun related crime, then it is probably reasonable to say they failed. However, I don't think that is a reasonable definition for success in this context. I am not sure what the intent of the legislators was, and I don't have time to check Hansard to find out, but I am sure it probably wasn't an end to all firearm related offences or deaths.
Let me ask you a couple of questions:
1) Do you think the ban on self-loading rifles / assault rifles in the wake of the Hungerford mass shooting has either:
A) Prevented further mass shootings using SLRs / assault rifles.
Reduced the occurrence of mass shootings using SLRs / assault rifles.
C) Had no effect on the number of mass shooting in the UK using SLRs / assault rifles.
2) Do you think the ban on pistols in the wake of the Dunblane mass shooting has either:
A) Prevented further mass shootings using pistols. Reduced the occurrence of mass shootings using pistols.
C) Had no effect on the number of mass shooting in the UK using pistols.
I don't know the circumstances of Monash, so I can't comment on it specifically. I would say, again, that whilst it might be nice to be able to completely stop certain behaviours or events, realistically that is never going to happen. All one can really hope to do is to try to reduce the number of occurrences and lethality.Similarly, Port Arthur saw a ban used as the sole measure after the shooting; Monash happened some years later (Monash doesn't get classed by some as a mass shooting because only two people died; but seven were shot so the main justification for not calling it a mass shooting is dependant on luck and the skill of the medics involved and the technical proficiency of the shooter, which absolutely stinks as a logical argument).
You can't actually know this. And realistically, the same is true of your examples above. You can try to guess and you can use trends to try to come up with a possible answer, but at the end of the day, you can't actually know. I would allow that for the UK and Austrailian bans the statistics might be more relevant, but in the Irish context, I think this is a very bad example for you to try to use. First, all you know is that; there was a ban, people still got killed. You don't actually know how effective that ban was on stopping paramilitary killings, you can't possibly know that there would not have been any additional deaths without the ban. Also, you are ignoring the non-direct effects of the ban in this context. Whilst the paramilitaries obviously were still able to access weaponry, you can't say it wasn't more difficult. The ban also affecting how the paramilitaries handled their weapons. They had to hide them, they had to move then around. Getting caught with them was a serious offense. All of these little, small, indirect effects added to the burden of trying to use these weapons. Did it stop paramilitary killing? No. Did it make life a little bit more difficult for those paramilitaries? Certainly.The Irish example is materially different; here we saw a rise in paramilitary terrorism and we introduced (illegally, as it transpired) a ban on the vast majority of firearms to prevent it (this was explicitly stated at the time). History does rather show that as a measure brought in to prevent terrorist attacks, it did not succeed.It's pretty important to note something here; there's more than one form of gun control. We have seen this specific one fail repeatedly. But we have seen others succeed repeatedly. In both the UK and Australia and also in New Zealand, funding a directed police programme to combat gun crime had dramatic, visible, provable positive results (that's also highlighted in the peer reviewed studies I linked to above). And in Australia, they showed that funding social programmes had a very positive effect on suicide rates (as in, they reduced them). And the details from Hungerford and especially Dunblane also give us methods that would have prevented those atrocities and which are not merely practical and economic, but which in some cases are actually legal requirements that for some reason were abandoned.
I don't necessarily disagree with much of this. Gun crime, like many things in society, is a complex problem with no quick fix and certainly no single thing that can solve it. It certainly needs a multipronged solution but one of those prongs has to be reducing access to weapons in the first place.
Agreed.TL;DR - one method doesn't work. We have many, many others, many of which have strong evidence proving they do work. We ought to be using them (in Ireland, we already do for quite a few of them btw).
MrP0 -
In both cases, D. It made another mass shooting more likely by not learning the causal factors in those events and addressing them, and took the topic out of the national debate by "doing something".Let me ask you a couple of questions:
1) Do you think the ban on self-loading rifles / assault rifles in the wake of the Hungerford mass shooting has either:
A) Prevented further mass shootings using SLRs / assault rifles. Reduced the occurrence of mass shootings using SLRs / assault rifles.
C) Had no effect on the number of mass shooting in the UK using SLRs / assault rifles.
2) Do you think the ban on pistols in the wake of the Dunblane mass shooting has either:
A) Prevented further mass shootings using pistols. Reduced the occurrence of mass shootings using pistols.
C) Had no effect on the number of mass shooting in the UK using pistols.
For example, after Hungerford it emerged that Ryan had been disciplined at work for showing up armed, and that he had been shooting at his neighbours for some weeks beforehand with an air rifle. Had either of those incidents been made known to police, they were more than sufficient grounds to pull his licence and confiscate his firearms. After Dunblane (a decade later thanks to the scottish police sealing the records for 100 years under the official secrets act), it emerged that Hamilton had been caught breaking the firearms act in 1976 and not prosecuted, that he'd been the subject of several complaints over the intervening years, that he'd been kicked out of every shooting club he had been a member of and was being kicked out of the one he cited on his last firearms licence application (but that that was never checked), and that the licence was granted over the strenuous written objections of the detective who interviewed Hamilton for the renewal and those of the local childrens protection officer, both of whom said Hamilton was untrustworthy and should not have firearms (and that's a mild paraphrasing, their actual words were far stronger).
In both cases, the existing law was sufficient to prevent the shootings, but it wasn't applied. But this was ignored in favour of a ban (in the case of Dunblane, the legislation process was also compromised by the ongoing election at the time, with both sides anxious to get favourable press coverage).
Monash university, 2002. Seven people shot, two died. There's a (rather intellectually dishonest) argument that it's not a mass shooting because though luck, good medical care and the shooter missing, more of those shot did not die; but in every respect other than that it matched the definition of a mass shooting.I don't know the circumstances of Monash, so I can't comment on it specifically.
And again, there are many ways to do that other than bans which have been tried and found to be successful, including in Australia and New Zealand and the UK. But every time a ban is tried, it has not had the intended effect. After Hungerford, the ban was not bought in to prevent a recurrence with one specific kind of firearm; it was brought in to stop further mass shootings. It failed. The same is true after Dunblane, and Port Arthur.I would say, again, that whilst it might be nice to be able to completely stop certain behaviours or events, realistically that is never going to happen. All one can really hope to do is to try to reduce the number of occurrences and lethality.
The question is: is the priority to address the problem of gun crime and mass shootings; or is the priority to ban private ownership of guns? Because there's an unstated assumption that those are the same thing, but the data from observing attempts in the real world has repeatedly shown that they are not.
That's a metaphysics argument.You can't actually know this.
What we know is: the trend in gun crime in New Zealand and Australia was in decline before the gun ban in Australia and that declining trend continued at the same rate after the gun ban. It had no effect on the overall gun crime problem; and we know it failed to prevent further mass shootings because of Monash. We also know that the trend in gun crime in the UK went significantly (in the "statistically significant" sense of that word) upwards after the gun bans there, and did not come back down after any subsequent legislation.
We also know that in all of those cases, the decline in gun crime happened after the police in those countries were directed to address the problem and funded to do so.
Which means that we know of one method which has not worked despite several trials and we know of another which has worked in all three countries where it was trialled. I find it very hard to accept the ethics of continuing to try an approach that has failed repeatedly when we know of one that works and the price of failure is so tragic, even if that failed approach seems so intuitive.0 -
You mention intellectual dishonesty a little later in your reply, some might say you are displaying some with this poor attempt a trying to avoid answering two simple questions. I have noted your suggestion of D, but would suggest that even if we allow D to be the correct answers a, b or still would still be valid. So which is it A+D, B+D or C+D?In both cases, D. It made another mass shooting more likely by not learning the causal factors in those events and addressing them, and took the topic out of the national debate by "doing something".
Interesting. And I do take your point, there were clearly opportunities to intervene and possibly prevent this mass shooting, but it also begs the question; how likely to do you think it would have been for him to turn up armed at work if the current restrictions on firearms had been in place?For example, after Hungerford it emerged that Ryan had been disciplined at work for showing up armed, and that he had been shooting at his neighbours for some weeks beforehand with an air rifle. Had either of those incidents been made known to police, they were more than sufficient grounds to pull his licence and confiscate his firearms.
Again, good points, but there are always going to be mistakes. There are always going to be lapses in policy and judgement. Anmd realistically, there probably isn't anything we can do about that. SO another question for you: Which do you think has more potential for harm, a) a lapse in policy or judgement, exactly as you mention above, where there is easy access to pistols, SLRs and high capacity semi or fully automatic shotguns or,After Dunblane (a decade later thanks to the scottish police sealing the records for 100 years under the official secrets act), it emerged that Hamilton had been caught breaking the firearms act in 1976 and not prosecuted, that he'd been the subject of several complaints over the intervening years, that he'd been kicked out of every shooting club he had been a member of and was being kicked out of the one he cited on his last firearms licence application (but that that was never checked), and that the licence was granted over the strenuous written objections of the detective who interviewed Hamilton for the renewal and those of the local childrens protection officer, both of whom said Hamilton was untrustworthy and should not have firearms (and that's a mild paraphrasing, their actual words were far stronger).
In both cases, the existing law was sufficient to prevent the shootings, but it wasn't applied. But this was ignored in favour of a ban (in the case of Dunblane, the legislation process was also compromised by the ongoing election at the time, with both sides anxious to get favourable press coverage). where you have the same lapse, but access to these weapons is heavily restricted?
I would agree with you that there is an element of intellectual dishonesty in this response, and I would certainly consider this to be a mass shooting. What kind of weapons were used? Were they less lethal than might otherwise have been used? I do appreciate that all weapon are, or can be, lethal, but i am sure you will agree that some weapons are more lethal than others... Is it possible that, in addition to the quick reactions of medical staff, so few people died because the injuries were less serious?Monash university, 2002. Seven people shot, two died. There's a (rather intellectually dishonest) argument that it's not a mass shooting because though luck, good medical care and the shooter missing, more of those shot did not die; but in every respect other than that it matched the definition of a mass shooting.
Hmmm, are you sure? Are you sure the intention was to stop, outright, all further mass shootings? Whilst governments can do some silly things, there are generally some fairly clever people knocking around, and i doubt any of then thought they could eradicate mass shootings or mass killings. make them harder? Yes. Improve survivability? Yes. Get rid of completely? I seriously doubt. I have an exam tomorrow, and I am already doing enough procrastination, but over the weekend I will have a dig around Hansard anmd read the debates of the legislative amendments. That should tell us what the intention of the legislation was. I would be really, really surprised if it was to end all mass shootings.And again, there are many ways to do that other than bans which have been tried and found to be successful, including in Australia and New Zealand and the UK. But every time a ban is tried, it has not had the intended effect. After Hungerford, the ban was not bought in to prevent a recurrence with one specific kind of firearm; it was brought in to stop further mass shootings. It failed. The same is true after Dunblane, and Port Arthur.
I don't think there is a priority to ban private ownership of guns, but i that is not an unreasonable part of trying to reduce the occurrence and effectiveness of mass shootings.The question is: is the priority to address the problem of gun crime and mass shootings; or is the priority to ban private ownership of guns? Because there's an unstated assumption that those are the same thing, but the data from observing attempts in the real world has repeatedly shown that they are not.
I would also take issue with the argument that these bans don't address gun crime. That there is still gun crime does not necessarily prove that the bans are ineffective. We have a ban on murder, but there is still murder. Should we make murder legal because the ban on murder obviously doesn't work?
I presume you have more than Monash...? What was the annual mass shooting rarte before and after the ban?That's a metaphysics argument.
What we know is: the trend in gun crime in New Zealand and Australia was in decline before the gun ban in Australia and that declining trend continued at the same rate after the gun ban. It had no effect on the overall gun crime problem; and it failed to prevent further mass shootings because of Monash.
I would be willing to allow that increased police action contributed to the decline in gun crime if you will allow that restricted access to guns reduces the availability of guns. Both seem fairly obvious.We also know that the trend in gun crime in the UK went significantly (in the "statistically significant" sense of that word) upwards after the gun bans there, and did not come back down after any subsequent legislation.
We also know that in all of those cases, the decline in gun crime happened after the police in those countries were directed to address the problem and funded to do so.
I do take issue with "failed repeatedly". Perhaps you might answer the questions I asked you in my last post?Which means that we know of one method which has not worked despite several trials and we know of another which has worked in all three countries where it was trialled. I find it very hard to accept the ethics of continuing to try an approach that has failed repeatedly when we know of one that works and the price of failure is so tragic, even if that failed approach seems so intuitive.
MrP0 -
The reason I say D is twofold : 1) D is the more worrying point for me because a law that doesn't fix a problem is more harmful than no law at all in cases like this (because they give a false sense of security and divert attention away from the problem); and 2) in both cases option C is not the justification originally advanced for those laws, which was that they would prevent mass shootings. Not "prevent mass shootings using these specific classes of firearm". You can't make up criteria for judging the success of a law after it has passed, that would render any such evaluation utterly meaningless.You mention intellectual dishonesty a little later in your reply, some might say you are displaying some with this poor attempt a trying to avoid answering two simple questions. I have noted your suggestion of D, but would suggest that even if we allow D to be the correct answers a, b or still would still be valid. So which is it A+D, B+D or C+D?
Very likely; he wasn't armed with the rifle he used in the shooting in the event that led to the disciplinary hearing, he turned up on the job site wearing a large hunting knife and a pistol.Interesting. And I do take your point, there were clearly opportunities to intervene and possibly prevent this mass shooting, but it also begs the question; how likely to do you think it would have been for him to turn up armed at work if the current restrictions on firearms had been in place?
There is a rather large difference in severity between "mistake" and "ignoring the written reports of the officer you sent to interview the applicant and the local child prevention officer citing twenty years of suspicious behaviour". Police officers do not routinely write the kind of report that we're talking about here. To quote it for context:Again, good points, but there are always going to be mistakes.During the course of my investigation I discovered that Hamilton was no stranger to controversy and similar investigations had been undertaken by this and Strathclyde Police Forces in the past. Hamilton also features in local criminal Intelligence files. Throughout my investigation I met and spoke with Hamilton on a number of occasions. It is as a result of the impressions left with me by this man that I feel compelled to make this report. I have recently discovered that Hamilton possesses a firearms certificate … This concerns me. I am firmly of the opinion that Hamilton is an unsavoury character and an unstable personality. … I would contend that Mr. Hamilton will be a risk to children whenever he has access to them and that he appears to me to be an unsuitable person to possess a firearms certificate in view of the number of occasions he has come to the adverse attention of the police and his apparent instability. The Procurator-Fiscal at Stirling has not yet decided on whether or not he will proceed with the case against Hamilton but at the moment it appears in all likelihood that he will not. I respectfully request that serious consideration is given to withdrawing this man’s firearms certificate as a precautionary measure as it is my opinion that he is a scheming, devious and deceitful individual who is not to be trusted.
You could classify the failure to do the background checks properly as a mistake, that would be fair, but it would also suggest that more funding and more training and more manpower for the police was the better solution because that would address a known causal factor.
Firstly, I don't agree. We've been studying the causes of mistakes in every field of human endeavour for centuries, and we know of several ways to reduce them; from domain-specific ones through to more general ways like having sufficient manpower to do the job instead of overloading workers.Anmd realistically, there probably isn't anything we can do about that.
Secondly, if you feel we cannot stop mistakes and lapses of judgement in the police on this large a scale, why do you believe they would be able to enforce a ban correctly? Or that the legislation governing that ban would be written correctly (I ask that with a personal bias - fifteen years of studying Irish firearms legislation being written has left me with a very, very low opinion of the ability of our legislative process to pass good laws that deal with things that have any degree of technical complexity).
That question is assuming that those "heavy restrictions" are somehow not subject to the mistakes and lapses we're talking about.SO another question for you: Which do you think has more potential for harm, a) a lapse in policy or judgement, exactly as you mention above, where there is easy access to pistols, SLRs and high capacity semi or fully automatic shotguns or, where you have the same lapse, but access to these weapons is heavily restricted?
To give a domestic example, some years ago a target shooter here was sent the incorrect pistol through a mistake on the part of the retailer (who was on the continent) and instead of the legal semiautomatic pistol he ordered, he received a (highly illegal under EU law) fully automatic pistol. He took it to the Garda station and told them what had happened. They checked the serial numbers, which matched his application and sent him on his way. It took actual work on his part over a week for them to rectify the situation.
So when you talk about mistakes and lapses, you have to understand that they undermine the entire legislative system and not just individual parts selectively; and as such can render all your legal protections useless. There are more technical examples, but the salient point is that if your defence against these shootings is a system that can be undermined by mistakes and lapses that you're not addressing (or, as above, think fundamentally can't be addressed), then your defence is flawed.
Also, as a side point, the "easy access" you're referring to did not exist in that jurisdiction before the shootings. There was a firearms act in place which was not dissimilar from ours (in fact, ours *was* the UK firearms act until 1925 and our firearms act was a direct copy of most of the prior UK act, with one or two changes which seem to have been made primarily so that we would not have an identical firearms act). Firearms were not uncontrolled items before the shootings and then fully controlled afterwards. As I said earlier, the problem was not the law as it existed on the statute books at the time of the shootings; but that that law had not been enforced correctly.
A centerfire pistol was used (he was carrying five more in holsters but was prevented from using them). Two people died. Four more would have except for good medical care and the shooter not being an accurate shot (a fifth received minor injuries which wouldn't have been life-threatening). For me, that's "lethal", and it's virtually a binary measure. Had he not been physically stopped, he had the capability to have killed many more people.What kind of weapons were used? Were they less lethal than might otherwise have been used?
As a side point - he was physically stopped because he walked into the classroom and stood on a desk while surrounded by people, one of whom was a trained martial artist. If he had stood at the door of the room and opened fire, the number of people harmed could have been horrifically higher. Relying on someone being able to physically stop a shooter like that would be a serious mistake.
Possible, but that would have been because of where the shots hit (the kind of firearms banned by the Australian ban would not have been so powerful as to render a shot to the knee more lethal, for example).Is it possible that, in addition to the quick reactions of medical staff, so few people died because the injuries were less serious?
Given the context at the time, yes, I'm certain that is how the various bills were presented to the public. If you're asking whether the politicians involved, away from the press, thought there wasn't a realistic chance the law could work and had an ulterior motive for presenting them, I can't comment; but if that was the case, then I'm not sure you can use their personal motivations to gauge the law's success in any meaningful way anyway because you're hip-deep in speculation by that point. Certainly the 1997 Firearms Amendment Act (post Dunblane) could have been said to be a success in that it assisted Tony Blair's election campaign; but I doubt you could readily prove that was it's original goal, and ostensibly it was introduced on the foot of the Snowdrop petition and was therefore meant to prevent all further mass shootings.Hmmm, are you sure? Are you sure the intention was to stop, outright, all further mass shootings?
And because the studies and data show that this approach has not worked, I would disagree with that and I would argue that we would be better served by using proven methods while researching the problem to find more effective methods. Bringing in measures that present in the media as solving the problem is only good for the career of the politician presenting them. It actively does a disservice to the general public.I don't think there is a priority to ban private ownership of guns, but i that is not an unreasonable part of trying to reduce the occurrence and effectiveness of mass shootings.
No, but the lack of any measurable affect on the gun crime rates does. If the rate is in decline and the law fails to change that rate of decline, then you cannot merely say it worked, you would have to make a strong case, which nobody has done for the Australian case. And in the UK, the rates rose after the bans (significantly and for a significant period of time), rather than fall, and again, nobody has provided any case to indicate that this is not a failure of the ban to affect gun crime rates (I don't think you can prove the ban caused the rise, but you can show it failed to slow, stop or reverse it).I would also take issue with the argument that these bans don't address gun crime. That there is still gun crime does not necessarily prove that the bans are ineffective.
The mass shooting rate? Did you mean the gun crime rate or did you actually mean the rate at which mass shootings occurred? The latter is not going to give you enough data points to get a meaningful rate (from 1980 onwards, it'll be mostly 0 with a few years where it's 1 and then there'll be 1987 where it's 4 and then 1996 when it's 2). The events were (thankfully) too infrequent for a year to be a useful timebase. Which is why the gun crime rate was used in the studies. The mass shootings tend to get treated as discrete events instead of as a continuous rate.I presume you have more than Monash...? What was the annual mass shooting rarte before and after the ban?
The second one seems obvious but isn't actually true, and Ireland proved that. We restricted access to firearms severely in 1972 (in fact, we resorted to illegal measures to do so); and yet the availability of guns to criminals was unaffected (it should be noted that had we done nothing to the law in '72, the kind of firearms being sourced by the criminals would still have been illegal to own here and the same legal mechanisms to prevent their acquisition would have been in place). And today, we have very strongly worded laws that ban the kind of firearms which are being nevertheless used by criminals on a depressingly regular basis in Dublin.I would be willing to allow that increased police action contributed to the decline in gun crime if you will allow that restricted access to guns reduces the availability of guns. Both seem fairly obvious.
It should also be noted that while the US is a very bad source of data (because of the lack of reliable data collection going on there), they have tried various bans and other access restriction mechanisms at federal and state levels with little to no success in curbing their problems with mass shootings. It doesn't help, I suspect, that many of these laws get drafted without regard to the technical details involved (which is a problem in every jurisdiction; for example, in Ireland thanks to a lack of regard to technical details and completely inadvertently, paintball is illegal with a penalty of up to seven years imprisonment for anyone who was charged and convicted of having a paintball marker or being involved in running a paintball field). Details in these kinds of laws are critical, but there's almost a stigma attached to noting the details (even knowing what the details are is a fast way to be afforded the title of "gun nut"), which is yet another problem to add to the list.0 -
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