Given an active shooter threats, what is the solution if not a good guy with a gun?

I fail to understand why this should make the lack of US action on gun control any more justifiable.

Per your linked article:

> But then comes the adjustment the viral chart skips entirely: when Ritchie controls for population, expressing both figures as rates per 100,000 people, the picture shifts. "Gun deaths in the US are now slightly larger than European heat death rates," she wrote.

> I think this comparison is a bit silly," she wrote, "but sympathize with the overall sentiment." Fewer gun deaths in America would not make European heat deaths acceptable, or vice versa. What the data is actually showing, she argued, is something simpler: status quo bias. "Both places take the status quo as a given"—a high-mortality situation in one domain that each society would never accept in another.

>The European heat death figures are based on modeled "excess deaths"—a standard epidemiological approach that tries to capture everyone who died earlier than they would have in cooler conditions, including from cardiovascular disease, stroke, and respiratory failure, which casts a wide net. "But the US number," Ritchie wrote, "isn't based on this type of modeling; it's based on heat deaths recorded on death certificates." That's a far narrower count which only captures cases where a physician specifically wrote heat as the cause of death. The result is that the two figures being compared are not measuring the same thing. "If you used death certificate figures for Europe," Ritchie wrote, "they'd be far lower."

Just citing it because some people don't even seem to read the article they just linked.

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People don’t evaluate risks based on stats. They do it based on vibes. We do have a disproportionate amount of gun violence for a developed nation but statistically it’s still a very low risk.

I recall pointing this out back during the post 9/11 terror panic. The odds of dying in a terrorist attack were still phenomenally low even after 9/11. It would have taken a relentless stream of constant 9/11 scale attacks to even approach automobile or drug overdose deaths.

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> Even Australia, the poster child for instituting draconian restrictions

It has certainly always been painted that way, particularly in US media driven by NRA framings.

An alternative description might be that Australia simply (almost but not quite) made gun regulation uniform across all states and territories.

At the time of the Port Arthur massacre all the states with larger populations had gun regulation, much like they had car and truck regulations - paperwork on ownership, licencing, etc.

Two relatively low population states, Queensland and Tasmania, had no regulation and territories had zero to mixed regulation.

Following a then world record lone shooter event in Tasmania the public pretty much overwhelmingly supported uniform regulation across the country- which meant imposing much the same laws as were then current in Western Australia on the alternative reality of Queensland.

Much of the buy back went towards buying back old guns and unused extra just in case guns that owners decided weren't actually worth formally licencing and paying annual fees (like a car rego) for.

The result of near uniform gun regulation across the country, all sales tracked, etc. was a decrease in gun incidents and two decades of near zero mass shooting events.

> So clearly that isn't the answer.

Quite an assertion.

What Australia is doing works by one measure that matters: number of people killed by a gun. In 2024 the gun murder rates were:

US: 4.5 per 100,000

AU: 0.09 per 100,000

Ratio: 50

Source: https://www.ussc.edu.au/by-the-numbers-stark-contrast-in-aus...

Australia didn't confiscate vast numbers of guns by violence. It introduced a buyback scheme, which a lot of gun owners took up. The buyback was "an offer they couldn't refuse" for classes of firearms that were banned, but once it was done it meant it was more tractable to keep firearms in check. The big thing is did was reduce the number of households that contained a firearm even if some of the remaining (paranoid?) license holders increased their number of guns.

Source: https://www.sydney.edu.au/news-opinion/news/2021/04/28/new-g...

Interpreting the Second Amendment in a sane way might be a start. Its wording seems clear to me: it establishes the need for a well-regulated militia as necessary to the security of the state, and grants the right to bear arms in that context. No aspect of the current situation is "well-regulated", nor are citizens, apart from a tiny number of fringe groups, organized into militias, and those that are could scarcely be called well-regulated.

However, the current intpretation seems to be solely in terms of the end of that sentence, "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed", with no context at all, and I think in a way that has a quite different meaning to what was intended.

And yet, when you come down to it, the right of the people to bear arms is not absolute and is "infringed" all the time in that sense; you don't allow automatic weapons to be used without special licenses, you don't allow small children to buy guns, you don't allow felons to own them. So it seems that the right to bear arms is not totally unrestricted; it's just a matter of where you draw the line, and I think the first part of the 2A is clear about the context in which that line was meant to be drawn.

I don't have any issue with an armed citizenry for national defense. Look at the Swiss; they are legally required to be armed, but in a highly regulated fashion, exactly so they have a citizen army ready to roll at any time.

This seems to me to be what the founders had in mind, not a free-for-all in which guns are available to all in an uncontrolled way.

The two statements are not inherently contradictory.

Removing / reducing / "doing something about guns" may well be hard, and it is beyond fascinating to many of us that majority of people / politicians / entities in USA do not want to do it.

In fact, I would say two statements are even complementary - your statement that doing something about guns in usa is hard, is because / as a result of original post that (bewilderingly) most Americans don't want to do it.

(Somehow, turning children schools into dystopian fortresses with metal detectors and armed teachers and security guards and turn stiles and gun drills, pervasive surveillance and trigger-twitchy responses and now drones, is... More freedomy? Liberty, Fuck Yeah? Dunno...)

The Supreme Court likes to play games with words and disregards precedent. Expand the court and shove "well-regulated militia" down their throats. Problem solved.

A top seller in Libya, Somali, Iraq, and that one particular first-world country which our lawyers from that country advise us to refrain from naming! Buy one today!

Having to think of schools as “soft targets” in a first world country is absolutely wild.

They should give every student a gun at this point (/s because I feel like someone would agree with me).

Edit: everyone should also wear a bulletproof vest at minimum. Desks should be equipped with reactive armor to defend against anti-tank warheads. A Phalanx C-RAM will be installed on the roof next to the AC units.

Wtf world do we live in that this sentence exists.

There are school shootings and they’re certainly awful. Similarly, people sometimes get struck by lightning, and this is awful too. But if your goal is to prevent deaths, rather than to focus on the things that make for the most lurid news stories, then there are boring things like road safety that loom much larger in the numbers than they do in the public imagination. Here are some numbers on causes of death for children and adolescents in the US, reported by the CDC:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6637963/

Figures for deaths from school shootings are harder to come by, since it seems like all the sources are trying to push some political narrative or other, but the highest numbers I could find were in the low double digits per year (on average). Preventing those doesn’t strike me as a high-priority use of limited death-prevention resources.

The people deploying them know how to make money off people's fears and the "we have to do something" mentality.

Right; if I were a properly humble intellectual, I would be writing things like "whether the pepper spray drones will be effective or not, I don't know", rather than calling them out as a cockamamie idea that will obviously backfire.

It's all pretty absurd, of course. Then we are calculating that the shooter will be outnumbered, which won't guarantee that there are no casualties on the defending side.

I'm saying that's what stems from accepting that there are going to be shooters with easy access to guns, such that we're not gonna do anything about that.

Proud American here, I don't think your comment is particularly helpful. Better can be very subjective and a country is not going to better in every single aspect; the other country will certainly have some aspects where they will be "better".

> Our country is better than yours because of the constitution

Well, thank you twice:

* first for confirming my criticism that Americans venerate their constitution blindly

* second for staying in your country and not coming to mine

The article mentions that, in Georgia, funding for these came from the state budget and even quotes a state legislator on the committee on the education appropriations committee.

It also mentions that the effort is "spearheaded" (whatever that means) by the state legislature in Florida.

yeah, no, i get the grift.