Regarding my call for police to not hire anyone less than, oh 28 years old, a reader writes:
Not really true. The average age of the shooter for all mass shootings over the last 40 years is about 33. It is more true for school mass shootings where the average age of the shooter is only 22. More interesting when you look at the fact that 9 of the 20 total school shooters (in the 19 shootings that occurred) were 18 years of age or less. And even more so when we realize that 7 of the 20 were less than 18, and not entitled to own any gun at all, and thus no amount of laws would have stopped them. These 20 shooters, over that 40 year timespan, killed a total of 197 students and adults. 41 of those deaths occurred at the two college shootings, and the remaining 156 at elementary through high schools. Just some data to ponder as you wonder what would actually change things.
Oh, and of course that means that there have been a total of 807 deaths in non school mass shootings over that 40 year timeframe. And yes, that includes Vegas and Pulse – it includes all of them.
My bold, and emphasizes where I think the reasoning goes off the rails for the general case of prohibiting selling guns to, or owning guns, those less than 28 years old. The problem with the reasoning at this juncture is that the reader is holding a dependent variable constant, and that variable is the number of available guns. The variable is dependent on the existence, or not, of the proposed law.
Because these murderous minors are stealing these guns, or even buying them via loopholes or unmonitored sales environments, it’s necessary to consider that the universe of accessible guns to these minors will decrease if the general proposal were to be enacted, because some, and possibly even most of those guns that can be stolen, begged, or bought by the minors are available because their owners, although not minors, are still under 28, which is not only a legal stricture of impact to the argument at hand, but also, often, indicative of foolishness in their firearms management.
Scientifically speaking, they’re just not wired, yet, to make good decisions. The brain hasn’t matured.
By removing firearms from those not ready to privately manage them properly, I think those minors who want to buy and use firearms in the commission of an atrocity would find it more difficult to gain possession of them. The farther they have to go afield in search of their desired weapons, the more likely they stumble across an informant or even a law enforcement agent. This sort of thing happens with bombs from time to time, and the materials for making bombs are regulated. We just don’t hear of bombs being used to kill very often, as they are difficult to use safely.
And then if we can cure the madness of permitting private ownership of weapons of war, that’ll make it even harder to have a massacre.
None of these are a guarantee, just as putting guards around schools isn’t a guarantee. It becomes a question of which hurdles are effective and make sense in the greater context. We need to soberly determine how to slow down these people.
