What Colorado did have in abundance was mass shootings.
I may be missing an incident from the 80s or something that moves the numbers a bit in one direction or another, but the basic picture is this:
Killed by a mountain lion in Colorado since 1980: 3 persons
Injured by a mountain lion in Colorado since 1980: 9 persons
(Source:
www.cougarinfo.org)
Killed in a mass shooting in Colorado since 1980: 28 persons
Injured in a mass shooting in Colorado since 1980: 84 persons
(Source: Pulled from Wikipedia, so may be +/- a person or two)
Killed by lightning in Colorado since 1980 (1980-2011): 91 persons
Injured by lightning in Colorado since 1980 (1980-2011): 411 persons.
(Source:
NOAA)
Compare any of the above to Colorado's 161 drunk driving fatalities in just the year 2011 (source: MADD's website).
It may be more fair to say that Colorado has an abundance of hysteria, rather than an abundance of mass shooters or victims.
Australia has not had a single mass shooting since they reformed their gun laws in this way after Port Arthur.
The UK did the same thing, for the same reasons, after the Dunblane Massacre. Like Australia they don't share a thousand mile long porous land border with a third world nation currently in the midst of a literal drug war and are better able to control the importation of illegal firearms and other contraband for this reason. And they had a gun registry before instituting a ban.
. . . and they've still had mass shootings since the post-Dunblane legislation went into place. Fewer than the US, but then the UK has fewer serial killers and such as well, relative to their population. This maybe suggests that just because people are mostly white and talk like us, different nations and cultures are still apples and oranges and what works in one place won't work elsewhere.
As far as guns and the UK and Australia are concerned, the cat was very much still in the bag when they decided to radically restrict access to firearms. There are an estimated 300
million firearms out there in the US, and plenty of folks in Mexico who'd be happy to pack guns in along with their cocaine and heroin if we create a blackmarket for guns.
Without even looking at the ability of persons to now print magazine-ban circumventing magazines on home 3D printers and even fabricate major gun parts on the same, the reality is that the cat is well and truly out of the bag here in the US, the horse left the barn decades ago, and the genie has a restraining order in place against the lamp.
The debate is about stopping mass shooters and we have ample evidence that banning weapons which are high capacity and imposing, regardless of how effective they might be, deescalates and ultimately ends mass shootings.
So there were no mass shootings while the 1994 AWB was in effect?
And there have been no mass shootings where the killer(s) used weapons with legal capacity magazines under the '94 AWB or state level equivalent bans?
If I was trying to argue that line of thinking, I'd not want to scratch my rhetoric too hard lest some facts leak out . . .
Street crime can be addressed in other ways, largely by combating poverty, but the best way to end mass shooting virtually overnight is to get mass shooter's weapons of choice - semi automatics with detachable magazines and large capacity pump actions - out of the hands of everyone but the most qualified.
So now the argument expands, because "high capacity" pump actions are now also terrifying. And hold what? 8 rounds?
Secondly, how will this "virtually overnight" miracle occur when there are literally millions of semi-automatic rifles out there that can accept 15/20/30/whatever round magazines. And let's not even try to wrap our head around how many "high capacity" pump action shotguns (or rifles?) are out there as well.
Confiscation, and potentially triggering a civil war as the nation hashes out what a "Right" as defined by the Bill of Rights really means? That seems a counter productive line of thinking, and Colorado's 278 deaths in the last Civil War (out of a total 1860 population of 34,277) is only a factor of ten worse than the actual body count from mass shooters.
No confiscation? Then the guns will stay in circulation even if someone passed a law saying no more made effective today. So will that actually decrease the number of gun deaths in mass shootings? Maybe slightly, but I'd doubt even that -- the Columbine wonder-twins did not obtain their firearms legally and Adam Lanza obtained his by murdering his mother to get them. Why should we expect future mass killers to color inside the lines because our august and omnipotent elected leaders made a
law?
And let's not even get overly analytical about the "most qualified" aspect of the argument. I'm guessing this person uses "most qualified" to mean "those people I expect to do the nasty, heavy lifting of shepherding the flock and killing the dragons while I keep my genteel, pacifistic hands and concious clean."
By that same logic it's worth noting that without much fuss I can find information on the internet concerning how to concoct street drugs, explosives, and all manner of other socially inappropriate things, not to mention dig a little deeper and find child pornography, pornography involving unwilling adult participants, and that sort of thing. As I pointed out in another thread a while back, children in the US are thousands of times more likely to be sexually abused during their childhood than they are to be the victims of a school shooting.
So if our root concern is an "abundance" of a sort of crime, perhaps restricting internet access and other potentially dangerous or criminal expressions of freedom of speech could more profitably be restricted to the "most qualified" to get more bang for our buck, so to speak, in the never ending quest
to do what is right for the children (sigh) (TM).
Or there is that pesky stat that six times as many people died in one year in Colorado from DUIs as have died in mass shootings in the last 30 years. Let's note that this is in a state that had mandated "low capacity" beer laws on the books for a very long time now, and obviously that's paying off with only 160-odd deaths in a year. Maybe just doing away with alcohol might make the roads safer . . . yeah but we tried that, and the Colorado electorate has spoken on road safety and operating under the influence, obviously, in their recent decision to legalize another intoxicating and impairing substance.
All these arguments boil down to is that many people are afraid of the things that go bump in the night, and in this modern era those things are spree killers and serial killers/rapists/etc-ists. They don't want to take the equally frightening step of taking responsibility for their own safety, they want someone to do that for them. The anti-gun enthusiasm for banning everything after a tragedy is a net gain of zero yardage for the human race since the residents of Heorot hung Grendel's arm over the front door as a talisman and trophy to show that someone had been willing to face their demons down for them and make them unafraid again. It's illogical, animal thinking that you can't really out argue because it is too simplistic, emotional, and irrational.
