What's different?

[MadHound]

When I was a kid, guns were much more ubiquitous than they are now. Instead of concealed carry, people would open carry. At the high school I went to(in the late seventies), it was common for the deer hunters in the school to bring their guns to school, hung up in the window of their trucks. Hell, that was a common site year round for many, if not most of the pickups had loaded gun racks in their back window.

Guns were easily available, much more available than now. No background checks, no paperwork, just walk into a store, find the gun you like and buy it.

Kids couldn't buy a gun, but they could buy ammunition. Hell, we even had a sporting goods store in town whose motto was "Liquor, Guns and Ammo". We laughed, thinking it a good joke, but the truth was you could indeed buy liquor, guns and ammo there, all at the same time.

And the thing was, we were safe. There were no Columbines, no Aurora's, the only mass shooting that anybody knew of happened in 1966 at the University of Texas. Nobody blamed that on guns, just on the guy's own mental instability.

Now, even though we've increased gun regulation greatly, these mass shooting are becoming ever more commonplace.

So what's different? Why isn't increased gun regulation preventing these mass shootings?

[OneGrassRoot]

1. Good question

I think many of us are pondering the same thing, as well as whether or not the culture has changed drastically in terms of glorifying violence.

I fear the whole "15 minutes of fame" thing is involved, exacerbating or triggering psychoses of some sort. We're seeing more and more young people filming their violent actions, and posting it for the world to see. Sure, that enables them to be caught and charged, but the fact that they actively seek to be exhibitionists with their violence is really disturbing.

And the desensitization through various means which results in people filming others' suffering and pain yet not putting down the camera/phone to help is another sign of a new sickness evolving, imho.

No doubt there are many, many factors involved, but I do hope we as a society discuss it more.

[Whiskeytide]

22. All you had to say was...

..."the culture has changed drastically in terms of glorifying violence". Although almost every post in this thread raises some legitimate points. Probably a combination of all.

When I was a kid, my friends and I regularly re-enacted the D-Day invasion, Pickett's Charge, Bunker Hill and countless other battles from a dozen different wars. We shot each other up all the time - with toy guns. I had a BB gun at age 9, and my first shotgun at 12. But my friends and I understood the difference between play and reality. It would have been absurd to us to even imagine using real guns on real people. Somehow, that distinction isn't automatically there anymore.

[spin]

2. Our society has changed ...

Our modern lifestyle puts a lot of pressure on individuals and some crack under the strain.

I'm not sure what the solution is.

[Robb]

3. Not enough deer tags to go around.

And the demonification of heavy drinking?

[sadbear]

4. What kind of guns were readily available back then?

Perhaps that's the difference.

[MadHound]

6. Oh, assault weapons were available back then,

And pretty much every type of gun that you can legally purchase today. Hell, Sears carried a full line of guns, and banks and other businesses gave guns away as promotions.

[Chorophyll]

13. Not where I grew up in the early 80s.

I live in New York. There are still gun shops all over the state, but banks only gave away toasters. And while my high school had a very small rifle team, the rifles were kept locked up someplace. Sensible, I think.

[MadHound]

15. Well, it probably varies by region,

But here in the Midwest, guns were considered a vital tool, especially out on the farm. In fact they still are.

But as the graph I posted below shows, gun owership by household has declined dramatically over the past forty years. More people owned guns forty years ago, but there weren't these mass killings that have become so common.

So what has changed between now and then, what is different?

[Reasonable_Argument]

7. Well

In the past you could order a firearm through the mail, no background checks required at all. Many of the same types of weapons available today were available then. At one point in time you could buy fully automatic weapons without jumping through all the hoops that exist today. So no, that's not the difference.

[Lurks Often]

10. Pretty much the same kinds

The M-16/AR-15 was designed in 1957 and was available for civilian sales in 1963 and while I can go into technical engineering details that would bore you to tears, in layman's terms the AR-15 works like any other semi automatic gun, one pull of the trigger = one shot.

30 round magazines have been around since WWI and 50, 70 & 100 round drums have been around since about 1930.

I don't think violence in movies has changed, although the violence is more graphic then in the 50's and early 60's

FBI statistics have violent crime at a 20 year low.

I think the era of 24/7 news and internet forums has made us all hyper aware of these tragic incidents which makes them seem more prevalent then the actual numbers indicate.

[HughBeaumont]

5. Funding for mental health care went off the cliff with Reagone, never to return?

Health care in general is far out of reach of the average citizen because America's hatred for the Middle East supercedes it's need for bettering it's citizenry?

That's usually what I blame for more than a few of society's ills.

[turtlerescue1]

9. Yep, agreed.

[Chorophyll]

14. Yup. Those issues sure haven't helped. nt

[HopeHoops]

8. About half of us had 4-6" Buck knives on our belts. Weapons were for pussies (pardon the term)

When we fought, we used our fists. Pulling a weapon was a sign of cowardice. Most of us had them, but we had them for practical purposes not for fighting.

[enough]

11. This is a very interesting observation. It doesn't jibe at all with my experience as a kid

growing up in the '50's in a rural area of southeastern PA. The area is mostly suburban now, but rural back then. There was certainly hunting, but not the ubiqiitous presence of guns.

Maybe what you are describing is a regional pattern? I would be really interested to hear what other DUers have experienced along these lines. Also it would be useful to know what the statistics are on per-capita gun ownership between then and now.

Thanks for an interesting post.

[MadHound]

12. Don't have per capita,

But in 1973 a bit over fifty percent of households owned a gun. Today, it is much less than that.


This comes from aThink Progress piece written in March of this year.

[OneGrassRoot]

16. Is there more of a disgust and intolerance of THE OTHER?

I was thinking about this some more. Of course, so many of my observations about the decline of civility (and increase in violence) leads me back to hate radio and how it foments hatred of "the other."

OBVIOUSLY we've had horrific violence in this country steeped in racism and bigotry for a long, long time.

And that remains...hell, it's increasing once again since the election of President Obama.

Yet has that expanded to be a general vibe of anger and hatred? Is there is an undercurrent of anger about many things (again, obviously economic inequality, lack of healthcare, etc) that is resulting in these senseless acts of violence?

Anger, competition, rugged individualism being pounded into our collective psyche at the expense of empathy and compassion?

[Kaleva]

17. I remember when kids could take guns to school during bird and deer hunting season.

The boys would turn in their guns and ammo to the principal when they got to school and he kept them in his office. After school was let out, the principal would give the guns and ammo back to the boys who then went hunting as they walked home.

But back then, you could smoke on the bus too as long as the bus driver was smoking.

[MadHound]

18. We didn't even have to turn them in.

Just unload them, and lock the truck. And hell, we could have a gun in the vehicle anytime of the year, not just during hunting season.

[Kaleva]

20. I was pretty young back then but the older boys had to show the bus driver the guns were unloaded...

before he let them on the bus.

[MadHound]

21. Oh, we didn't have guns on buses,

You had to bring your own vehicle to transport them.

[sinkingfeeling]

19. Because society is much sicker now. We love us violence and glorify death &

destruction.

[1-Old-Man]

23. What has changed is the near omnipresence of gun violence in popular culture

I blame it on television, which was really just starting to come into it power over people's thinking in the 1960s. Violence brought viewers and viewers sold advertising time so we became soaked in violence such that it has become a cultural norm. All guns do is make it easy for any coward to become a long-distance killer, other than that they aren't much different than a mace or a knife.

[JHB]

24. Fear, and marketing to preserve fear past its cause

Graph from: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/20/america-is-a-violent-country/

The graph below shows assault deaths from 1960 to ~2010, comparing the US with other OEDC countries. Larger version and version with break-out of the various countries are at the link.

That sharp rise in the 60s and 70s created fear. Fear sold (think of the whole vigilante movie genre of the 70s), and the NRA and its sponsors marketed that fear for politics and to pump sales.

Even though the real numbers are back down to early-60s levels and falling, that marketing campaign is bent on keeping it 1977 in peoples' minds.

[ieoeja]

25. It is as clear as black and white.

During the Civil Rights movement, the police tended to terrorize the Black community. So organizations like the Black Panthers were formed to protect the populace. And legislation was passed to make them illegal. Many of these organizations turned into criminal gangs. Other gangs grew up in response.

Kids grew up watching adults arm themselves and using inflamatory speech about how they would defend themselves. Adults understood that much of what they said was hyperbolic. The kids didn't. So a generations of inner city kids grew up believing the literal words justifying lethal self defense for just about anything.

When I moved to Chicago in '85, school shootings were so common that they did not merit a front page story in the local newspapers. Recently, a kid was killed a couple blocks after he left school, and it made the national news. Things have dramatically improved in that time.

If you live in Chicago.


The White community response to the Assault Weapons Ban somewhat mirrors the Black community response to police terrorism. For two decades we have been bombarded with hyperbolic rhetoric about the need to defend ourselves. We went from reasonable self defense to Castle Laws to Stand Your Ground. And you don't just pass those laws out of thin air. You have to justify them. So decades of White kids have now grown up hearing that they have every right to use lethal self defense for just about anything.

So now mass shootings by White people with White victims are becoming commonplace. It isn't the laws. It is the Gun Rights arguments that have changed the psychology.


I have seen DUers argue for the right to kill with incredibly small justification. We saw it in many of the Zimmerman threads where people literally argued that, if Martin threw a single punch at Zimmerman, then it was prefectly reasonable for Z to kill him. That is fucking insane. But apparently normal.

As long as that attitude is accepted as normal, expect the killings to continue.

[OneGrassRoot]

26. That is a brilliant commentary.

Thank you very much for sharing that.

[malthaussen]

27. Population increase

First, I doubt there is a single cause for increases in mass shootings. A number of good points are made upthread, which for the most part are qualitative assessments, not quantitative.

I'll offer a quantitative explanation: as population increases, the absolute number of murderous psychopaths necessary increases along with it. That is not, however, fully satisfactory, since while population has doubled in my lifetime, the number of mass shootings has increased exponentially. At this point, we need to refer to the infamous rat population studies that show rats becoming nastier as population increases, but even here we run across the problem that the US is hardly as crowded as the experimental cages.

My speculation (clearly marked as such: it's quite possible somebody has studied this, but if so, I'm unaware of the study) is that as population increases, the absolute number of murderous psychopaths doesn't just increase proportionally, but there is a higher incidence of murderous psychopaths as a percentage of the population.

Funny thing about the U. Texas shooting in 66 -- only about a year before the incident, Sci-Fi author Harlan Ellison penned a story about a similar kind of senseless rampage. It was rejected on the grounds that something like that would never happen.

-- Mal