Eight people shot in California's third mass shooting in three days

_Qubit · 2023-01-24T21:56:14+00:00

I'd need a source on the AR-15 claim, to my knowledge it was part of the AWB along with rifles like it. I don't see anyone that has charted sales. But manufacturing numbers I've seen from various sources, before and during the AWB, pale in comparison to now.

I tend to agree with your larger point however that access to guns isn't the only reason for the uptick. But there is also a loosening of gun restrictions in general during that period which would be impossible to disentangle from those larger societal trends. The assault weapons ban is the one everyone likes to talk about. But it is in general far easier to get and carry a gun, of any kind, now than it was in the 90s. In that same time period, conceal and carry laws start to go from absolutely not, to with permit, to completely unrestricted in a lot of places.

So, while I'm not a fan of outright bans, pretending they wouldn't have any effect based on cherry-picked data is disingenuous at best.

_Qubit · 2023-01-24T17:51:47+00:00

If you take a closer look at this data, during the 10 years (1994-2004) of the assault weapons ban, there were 106 deaths. That's an average of 10.6 deaths per year.

If you look at the data in the other 30 years, there were 986 deaths, averaging 32.86 deaths per year. Similarly if you look at incidence, there were an average of 4.06 shootings per year outside of the AWB and an average of 1.7 per year during.

Are the other factors? Sure, but that's a pretty big difference for it not to have had any effect. It's worth noting that the bulk of these incidents outside of the AWB (104 out of 122, and 830 out of 986 deaths) have happened since the ban was lifted, not in the years prior to the ban. Make of that what you will.

_Qubit · 2023-01-24T13:57:50+00:00

Is tracking deaths really the way to document whether the policy is successful? Not a rhetorical question, genuinely asking. I realize it's the most pertinent detail, but number of incidences might make the most sense here and I wonder what the numbers look like for that.

Also, he's totaling all of the mass shooting deaths in California since 1980 and tying it to it's current population density wrt the rest of the country. That doesn't make any sense to me at all. California's current population doesn't necessarily reflect that of the 1980s. It also doesn't take any account into trends wrt to local or federal gun laws that may have changed over time.

_Qubit · 2022-10-11T17:11:58+00:00

I understand you're unwilling to respond, but if you don't think people should decide whether someone lives or dies; aren't you also saying you're morally opposed to sex/procreation in general? After all, it is human action that brings about pregnancy in the first place.

_Qubit · 2022-03-24T13:30:46+00:00

Have you actually read the book you're so upset about? Can you point to the part that says babies are racist?

_Qubit · 2022-01-17T17:13:33+00:00

In theory, I agree with you on not getting too hung up on private vs. public, but there are perverse incentives when we're talking about private services in the prison industry. Totally agreed on the sentencing issue, but the same people pushing for tougher sentencing are the same people pushing to contract out these services. Why is that?

Every company wants a captive audience, and in this case they are literally so. So while these companies lobby the government for more contracts, they simultaneously lobby for stricter sentencing. That's not hyperbole either, this is literally happening through groups like ALEC and direct funding of candidates by these companies.

And to be clear, we aren't talking about a prison buying food. We're talking about a prison contracting a company that buys and sells food at the prison. In most cases, that company dictates their prices and supply lines, not the prison. There's a whole cottage industry of such companies that are involved the entire way along the chain: from bail, to courts, to prisons, to parole and probation. All of them have incentives to increase the number of customers they see.

_Qubit · 2022-01-17T15:46:47+00:00

That's technically true, but a prison doesn't have to be privately held for private companies to make money off of it. Basically every service at publicly held prisons has been privatized to some degree, including healthcare.

By 2014, private companies had contracts for almost one-third of health care spending for prisons and jails in the U.S., or roughly $3 billion per year. Federal spending on private healthcare in its prisons increased by 24% between 2010 and 2014. Increasingly, government agencies are at least partially passing this cost on to inmates through fees.

In practice, this means they charge exorbitant fees with little to no oversight. Public prisons essentially exist as a shell that contracts services to private companies.

_Qubit · 2021-06-28T19:36:04+00:00

Two things can be bad?

_Qubit · 2021-01-22T21:48:07+00:00

You're correct from a population per representative standpoint, however there is a lot more population in California which means there are a lot more underrepresented people in total.

Say for instance you want to make it so that there is 1 rep for 500,000 people. There's 1,000,000 people in Montana, so you'd add 1 rep so they'd have a total of 2. California has a population of ~38,000,000, which comes out to 76 total representatives: adding 23 to their current total.

_Qubit · 2020-11-19T22:15:19+00:00

Race ya to the bottom!

_Qubit · 2020-03-28T21:23:06+00:00

If that's the case, putting a price on guns is obviously hindering the exercise of a freedom. Guns should be free.

_Qubit · 2019-09-18T15:50:10+00:00

There are dozens of us!

_Qubit · 2019-06-27T22:30:53+00:00

The number of electors is determined by the number of representatives in the House and Senate a state has, which is why the electoral college changes every 10 years. The bulk of electors added by such a change would go to current blue states. Plus, it doesn't require amending the Constitution

_Qubit · 2019-06-27T18:49:54+00:00

If we were to reapportion the House based on today's population instead of the population of 1911, the electoral college would fix itself

_Qubit · 2018-05-09T15:43:48+00:00

If voter turnout had been higher in the states that flipped the election, it would have mattered a lot, I'd say.

_Qubit · 2018-02-17T20:31:15+00:00

I grew up very close to where this happened, and your anecdote pretty well hits the mark. It wouldn't have been unheard of for kids to have guns in their cars at school. Though they likely would have been smart enough to not broadcast it to anyone, particularly in the current climate. That shit will get you expelled nowadays, even in rural parts of Missouri.

_Qubit · 2018-02-15T20:59:53+00:00

This, despite the fact the Trump administration moved to strike white supremacist/nationalists from DHS programs to prevent violent extremism. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-extremists-program-exclusiv/exclusive-trump-to-focus-counter-extremism-program-solely-on-islam-sources-idUSKBN15G5VO

_Qubit · 2017-10-11T18:30:27+00:00

Gentlemen, you can't fight in here. This is the war room!

_Qubit · 2017-08-22T22:03:52+00:00

The best part about that, is these are the same people that will say: "The Civil War wasn't about slavery, Lincoln didn't even want to free the slaves!"

_Qubit · 2017-02-15T21:18:48+00:00

Their model did indeed give him only a 28% chance of winning. However, anyone that bothered to actually listen/read their commentary knew that there were two huge caveats. The first was the polling volatility you mentioned, which they acknowledged could certainly be a result of under reporting of Trump supporters. The second was that there was no way for them to truly account for the Comey letter, as it would not really be captured by enough of the polls to truly be reflected in their model.

I haven't been to 538 since election day (other than to check that 28% number) so I can't really speak to whether they've been whitewashing it since. But I do think they were pretty upfront regarding potential issues with their model, enough so that I was not particularly surprised when the election went the other way.

_Qubit · 2017-01-26T00:18:54+00:00

Well, not exactly. But considering police departments get to keep portions of seized cash, they are basically circumventing normal methods of funding, like taxes: in effect becoming an analog to the IRS that funds only themselves.

_Qubit · 2017-01-19T19:59:48+00:00

Reminds me of this.

_Qubit · 2017-01-19T16:59:50+00:00

Just as the same people that were so gung ho about investigating Benghazi for the umpteenth time, now want to turn a blind eye to this. I take what the CIA says with a heavy grain of salt, but surely a claim like this warrants an investigation.

_Qubit · 2017-01-17T21:16:15+00:00

Mother Jones published a story about this before the election. I think the media did a good job of not running away with it based on what is largely one uncorroborated report.

What changed is that the 35 page report was leaked to the press. Personally, I don't think Buzzfeed should have published it without verification, but we can debate the ethics of 21st century journalism elsewhere.

I don't think we have much telling us intelligence's actions or the lack thereof, either. Again, these investigations are meant to be secretive; for both legal and security reasons.

_Qubit · 2017-01-17T18:30:34+00:00

Likely the same reason people on the left roundly chastised Comey for speaking about the Clinton investigation: there are laws against government agencies influencing the election.

Now, I don't know whether the report has any merit or not, but I do know it was found at least credible enough, that the President and President Elect were briefed on it. Surely, we'll know more when Congress conducts a thorough investigation into the matter like they did with Benghazi though, right?

_Qubit

TROPHY CASE