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fapangel · 6 years

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Unless the US resorted to an all out nuclear attack, there is no way that we could be certain of taking out all of NK's nuclear weapons. Any such all out attack would result in many millions of casualties in both North Korea and South Korea and almost certainly in Japan, China and Russia. Due to the fact that those US nukes would have to be detonated on the ground, in order to destroy widespread and deeply buried underground fortifications, as airbursts wouldn't be effective against deep bunkers

the resulting radioactive fallout would be particularly nasty and widespread. Not only would all of Japan (With a population of 130 million) be at risk for lethal levels of fallout, so would all of the West Coast of the USA (Alaska, Washington State, Oregon and California), as well as the coastal areas of western Canada and Mexico. Additionally, all of the Pacific fisheries would become poisoned due to the fallout and would be rendered toxic and unusable for decades to come.

Then there is the issue of sparking off a direct nuclear conflict with China and Russia. Once again, the simple reality is that the USA does not have conventional weapons that are capable of taking out all of the NK military/nuclear fortifications in one single surgical strike.

Without diving into a full argument in favor of counter-force strike, allow me to illustrate just how incorrect these misconceptions are. This isn’t your fault - everything you typed I have seen expressed, verbatim, by journalists, academics, and other people who should damn well know better.

You have been lied to, deliberately and consistently.

Lie #1:

US nukes would have to be detonated on the ground, in order to destroy widespread and deeply buried underground fortifications, as airbursts wouldn't be effective against deep bunkers

Not if the B-61-12 is used, the latest modification of the B-61 nuclear freefall bomb to make it a precision-guided, earth-penetrating, low-yield bunker buster. The precision guidance (GPS/inertial) alone makes it far more effective, as doubling the accuracy of a weapon increases its destructive potential eightfold (a simple consequence of the inverse-square law.) The earth-penetrating ability increases the “shock coupling,” i.e. the kinetic energy transferred to the earth (to collapse deep bunkers like an “earthquake bomb” does,) and of course, the low yield greatly reduces the collateral damage and fallout effects. The only publicly disclosed data on the Mod-12 puts the maximum yield at 50 kilotons, but based on prior configurations of the B-61s “physics package,” the weapon probably has a variable yield ranging from 0.3kt to 50kt. On its lowest setting, the bomb will only have a yield of three hundred tons. A sub-kiloton yield. Especially at such low yields, the earth-penetrating nature of the weapon is likely to reduce fallout, especially when hitting hard rock (less loose soil to be blown into the air; only rock actually vaporized by the very small nuclear fireball would be put into the air.) This is hard to gauge, as no declassified equations exist for working out fallout from a shallow sub-surface detonation. In fact, the excellent nukemap.com cannot calculate fallout even for a surface burst, as its equations only cover detonations of a kiloton or over.

It should be noted that the B-61-12 is in qualification testing as we speak - the weapon is finished, and given the urgency of the current crisis, could reasonably be rushed into service in low numbers.

Lie #2:

Then there is the issue of sparking off a direct nuclear conflict with China and Russia.

Even ignoring the existence of the B-61-12 described above, this claim completely ignores the bomber-based leg of the American nuclear triad, which still operates the AGM-86 Air Launched Cruise Missile (variable yield of 5-150 kilotons) and the B-83 freefall bomb (variable yield up to 1.2 megatons,) both delivered by the B-52 strategic bomber - some of which are based on Guam (and have been since the early days of the Cold War.) The B-52 has had an unescorted deep-nuclear-strike penetration mission ever since the AGM-28 Hound Dog debeuted in 1960, a massive nuclear-armed cruise missile designed to simply vaporize SAM sites and entire Soviet fighter bases so the B-52s could reach their targets and deliver their heavy freefall bombs. The modern incarnation of this would involve B-52s carrying ALCMs or B-83s internally, and carrying MALD-J decoys and/or JASSM-ER stealth cruise missiles on their external pylons to jam, confuse, and outright destroy North Korea’s painfully antiquated air defense network before moving in to deliver their nuclear strikes. And this is without escort or assistance from fighter-bombers and/or OECM aircraft based in Japan, Okinawa or South Korea, which they would have.

It is possible - though extremely unlikely - that Russia or China would panic and assume that a low number of incoming ICBMs/SLBMs from America’s direction were actually aimed at them, and decide to commit suicide by launching a massive retaliatory attack even before the tracks of incoming warheads had been “firmed up” by radar (even though China doesn’t have a “launch-on-warning” policy.) It is not possible that they will interpret lumbering Cold-War era bomber aircraft a legitimate nuclear threat to their very capable, modern, and dense IADS - even the ALCM is a dated, non-stealth design. Even if they should construe these aircraft as “attacking them,” by sheer dint of their numbers and possible kiloton yield per aircraft alone it’d qualify as a tactical useage of nuclear weapons, not a strategic one demanding immediate massive retaliation.

There is absolutely no credible argument for the employment of tactical nuclear warheads against North Korea leading to a full-on strategic nuclear exchange between Russia/China and the United States, and anyone telling you such is a lying bastard trying to play on your emotions to avoid making a real argument.

Lie #3:

Once again, the simple reality is that the USA does not have conventional weapons that are capable of taking out all of the NK military/nuclear fortifications in one single surgical strike.

The hell we don’t.

Meet the AGM-158 JASSM (Joint Air-to-Surface-Standoff Missile), a fully stealthed air-launched cruise missile that also has an ER variant (a full 600nm range) and a penetrating warhead variant for hardened targets.

The B-1B “Lancer” can carry 24 of these weapons in its internal bomb-bays. The B-1B is an intercontinental capable bomber (with suitable tanker support.) 1/3rd of the currently active US fleet (20 aircraft) can thus deliver 480 of these weapons - in a non-stop round trip direct from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas, as they have done many times in sorties to Afghanistan and Iraq.

Estimates of DPRK Transporter-Erector-Launcher numbers range from 150 to 300. Even if every single one was located inside its own dispersal bunker, the JASSM would be more than capable of destroying it, as their penetration ability is enhanced by the ability to conduct a guided attack (i.e. a 90-degree dive with full engine power to enhance the kinetic penetration prior to detonation.) This is indeed the worst case scenario, as any TELs located in large facilities under mountains can be interdicted simply by collapsing the tunnel entrances with similar weaponry - a TEL cannot fire a ballistic missile though a hundred feet of solid rock, after all. This vulnerability is almost certainly why the DPRK is observably building individual dispersal bunkers in close proximity to probable (and in one case, identified) under-mountain SRBM facilities.

Note I have not touched on the TLAM-D Tomahawk and its Tactical Tomahawk Penetrator Variant warhead (which put those neat holes in the hardened shelters at Shayrat AFB,) which is carried in copious numbers by the warships of 7th fleet (and by the four converted Ohio-class boomers, each mustering a staggering 154 weapons, for a total of 616 Tomahawk missiles deliverable with complete surprise,) nor the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber (capable of delivering a pair of the uniquely powerful 30,000 pound GBU-57 “MOP” bunker-busters, among other weapons,) or B-52s (both capable of inter-continental attacks as well,) or utilizing F-35s and F-22s in the strike role (with the F-22 lobbing Small Diameter Bombs, themselves capable bunker-busters in their own right,) nor any of the tactical fighter-bomber assets already in-theater, including US Air Force F-16s and F-15s in South Korea, or Navy/Marine Hornet/Super Hornets in Japan and Okinawa, all of them capable of delivering standoff cruise missiles and the JSOW glide-bomb with either a submunition or BROACH penetrating warhead.

Even if one assumes utilization of in-theater airpower is limited by the need to hide preparations from espionage, it is foolish to claim that the United States does not have an overwhelming capacity to deliver ordinance in a SURPRISE, surgical attack, even against extensively hardened targets. The only real limit on the United States’s ability in this regard is locating the targets, but given the massive superiority in ISR assets deployed to the peninsula - including U-2S spy planes and RQ-170 stealth drones capable of operating in DPRK airspace with relative impunity, combined with the relatively compact dimensions of the Korean peninsula, this is hardly an insurmountable obstacle.

And then there is the simple fact we needn’t intercept every single missile launcher and/or WMD warhead before launch, as South Korea and Japan will both be defended by a tested, multi-layered ABM shield. South Korea is covered by the SM-3 (late exoatmospheric intercept), THAAD (very high altitude endo-atmospheric intercept,) the SM-2ER/SM-6 (mid-atmospheric terminal intercept) and Patriot PAC-3 MSE/ERINT (medium to low altitude terminal intercept.) Japan won’t benefit from THAAD, but has several of its own destroyers armed with the SM-3 and can thus provide more for its own defense - and North Korea has far fewer MRBM/IRBMs capable of ranging Japan in the first place, and they’re larger, easier-to-find targets to begin with, making it very unlikely they’ll preserve enough assets through the initial strike to overwhelm even our limited ABM capacity as it currently stands.

It Is All Bullshit, My Friend

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Much, much, much more goes into planning a war than just this; there’s logistics, turnaround time, the need for redundancy (multiple weapon strikes for a single target, weapon duds, necessary re-strikes, Bomb Damage Assessment, the difficulty of coordinating Time on Target, communicating with/preparing one’s allies without telegraphing the blow, and so on,) but that just goes to show the most basic claims against counter-force strike that you’ve been fed by the media and the academics outright ignore known, tested military capabilities. This goes beyond saying “we can’t find TELs because we couldn’t do it 27 years ago in Desert Storm.” It requires ignoring seventeen years of hunting down elusive enemies in the mountainous and heavily-tunneled terrain of Afghanistan. This level of ignorance is willful and deliberate. When the existence of entire classes of weaponry and indeed, the staggeringly vast power-projection/deep strike ability of the United States is flatly and out-right ignored, one may well ask if a deliberate attempt to influence public opinion via lies (of omission or otherwise) is underway.

None of this means that I am right, of course - that argument will have to stand on its own merits. But I can assure you that the arguments you’ve been fed are laughably, blatantly wrong.

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mastcomm · 4 years

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Chaos as Militants Overran Airfield, Killing 3 Americans in Kenya

WASHINGTON — Armed with rifles and explosives, about a dozen Shabab fighters destroyed an American surveillance plane as it was taking off and ignited an hourslong gunfight earlier this month on a sprawling military base in Kenya that houses United States troops. By the time the Shabab were done, portions of the airfield were burning and three Americans were dead.

Surprised by the attack, American commandos took around an hour to respond. Many of the local Kenyan forces, assigned to defend the base, hid in the grass while other American troops and support staff were corralled into tents, with little protection, to wait out the battle. It would require hours to evacuate one of the wounded to a military hospital in Djibouti, roughly 1,500 miles away.

The brazen assault at Manda Bay, a sleepy seaside base near the Somali border, on Jan. 5, was largely overshadowed by the crisis with Iran after the killing of that country’s most important general two days earlier, and is only now drawing closer scrutiny from Congress and Pentagon officials.

But the storming of an airfield used by the American military so alarmed the Pentagon that it immediately sent about 100 troops from the 101st Airborne Division to establish security at the base. Army Green Berets from Germany also were shuttled to Djibouti, the Pentagon’s major hub in Africa, in case the entire base was in danger of being taken by the Shabab, an East African terrorist group affiliated with Al Qaeda.

“The assault represented a serious security lapse given how much of a target the base was and its location near the border with Somalia,” said Murithi Mutiga, the International Crisis Group’s Horn of Africa project director, based in Nairobi, Kenya.

Many details of the attack remain murky, and the military’s Africa Command has released only scant particulars pending an investigation. But the deaths of the three Americans — one Army soldier and two Pentagon contractors — marked the largest number of United States military-related fatalities in Africa since four soldiers were killed in an ambush in Niger in October 2017. The Kenya attack underscores the American military’s limits on the continent, where a lack of intelligence, along with Manda Bay’s reputation as a quiet and unchallenged locale, allowed a lethal attack.

The deaths also signify a grim expansion of the campaign waged by the United States against the Shabab — often confined to Somalia, but in this case spilling over into Kenya despite an escalating American air campaign in the region. Kenya is a new addition to the list of countries where Americans have been killed in combat since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, joining Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Niger, Somalia, Syria and Yemen.

The attack is raising new and complex questions about the enduring American military mission on the continent, where more than 5,000 troops now serve, especially as the Pentagon weighs the potential withdrawal of hundreds of forces from West Africa to better counter threats from Russia and China. A Pentagon proposal to reduce the American military footprint in Africa drew sharp criticism last week from senior lawmakers of both parties, including Senator Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who is a close adviser to President Trump.

This article is based on interviews with a dozen American military officials or other people who have been briefed on the attack. Several spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss aspects of a security failure that is now under investigation.

Early on the morning of Jan. 5, Dustin Harrison, 47, and Bruce Triplett, 64, two experienced pilots and contractors with L3 Technologies, a Pentagon contractor that helps conduct surveillance and reconnaissance missions around the world, were taxiing their Beechcraft King Air 350 on Manda Bay’s tarmac. They throttled down their engines, according to one person familiar with the attack. The two men reported that they saw animals darting across the runway.

They were wrong. The animals were in fact Shabab fighters, who had infiltrated the base’s outer perimeter — a poorly defended fence line — before heading to the base’s airstrip. As the twin-propeller Beechcraft, loaded with sensors and video equipment for surveillance, began to taxi, the Shabab fighters fired a rocket-propelled grenade into the plane, killing Mr. Harrison and Mr. Triplett. With the plane on fire, a third contractor, badly burned in the rear of the aircraft, crawled out to safety.

The Shabab fighters were not done. In the ensuing chaos, they made quick work of a significant portion of the American fleet of aircraft — a mix of six surveillance aircraft and medical evacuation helicopters on the ground at the time. The Shabab fighters also destroyed a fuel storage area, rendering the airfield next to useless. The attack most likely cost the Pentagon millions of dollars in damages.

Specialist Henry Mayfield Jr., 23, of the Army was in a nearby truck acting as an air traffic controller when he was killed in the gunfight, according to a person familiar with the incident. His colleague inside the truck, another American, escaped and hid in the grass to avoid the insurgents. He was found hours later.

Manda Bay is at the southern edge of an archipelago of American outposts used in the fight against the Shabab in East Africa. It took about eight hours to fly the burned contractor to Djibouti for hospital-level care, according to the person familiar with the attack, underscoring a recurring vulnerability for American personnel spread across the continent. Two American service members were also wounded in the attack.

While parts of the airfield burned and some Americans who were there returned fire, roughly a dozen members of a Marine Special Operations team from Third Marine Raider Battalion based at Camp Lejeune, N.C., led the American counterattack, alongside several of the Kenyan Rangers they had been training and accompanying during their deployment. But since the team was at Camp Simba, an American enclave roughly a mile from the airfield, the insurgents had ample time to disperse.

At the center of the hourslong gun battle is the risky dependence of American forces on their local counterparts, especially when it comes to base security. The battle bore striking similarity to an attack in Afghanistan in March 2019 when Taliban fighters managed to slip onto a sprawling base in southern Helmand Province with help from Afghan troops, and quickly threatened a small American Marine base inside the perimeter of the larger Afghan facility.

At Manda Bay, where American forces have a smaller presence, the troops rely largely on the Kenyans to protect the airfield. “Those forces are typically not as capable as U.S. forces, and are easier for terrorist groups to infiltrate,” said Representative Michael Waltz, a Florida Republican who served in Africa while an Army Green Beret.

The performance of the Kenyan security forces during and after the battle frustrated American officials. At one point, the Kenyans announced that they had captured six of the attackers, but they all turned out to be bystanders and were released.

There are about 200 American soldiers, airmen, sailors and Marines, as well as about 100 Pentagon civilian employees and contractors, in Kenya helping train and assist local forces. A large majority of them work at Manda Bay, according to military officials. But there were not enough Americans to stand perimeter security on the airfield, one Defense Department official said.

American forces have used Manda Bay for years. Special Operations units — including Green Berets, Navy SEALs and, more recently, Marine Raiders — have helped train and advise Kenyan Rangers there.

The Kenyan Rangers, alongside their American commando counterparts, often operate in the border region pursuing Shabab fighters. Surveillance aircraft, flying from the airstrip at Manda Bay, watch the border between Somalia and Kenya, a region of unforgiving terrain that has hindered ground operations. In recent months, the border missions against the Shabab have dwindled, and military officials have sought to end the American Special Operations presence at Manda Bay.

Why the base was not better protected is unclear. Surveillance aircraft, much like those destroyed in the attack, are valuable assets, especially in Africa, where extremist groups seek to exploit the vast expanses and porous borders to avoid detection. Even to shuttle a single aircraft from one part of the continent to another often requires approval from a four-star general, and losing a surveillance aircraft, one Defense Department official said, means the loss of hundreds of hours of reconnaissance flights until it is replaced.

The Shabab have typically avoided American outposts and the technological superiority of the American military, instead attacking more exposed Kenyan and Somali troops in the hinterlands.

But that may be changing. On Sept. 30, a suicide bomber detonated a car packed with explosives at the gate of a military airfield in Bale Dogle, Somalia, injuring one American service member.

On Nov. 5, the Shabab released a 52-minute video narrated by the group’s leader, Abu Ubaidah, in which he called for attacks against Americans wherever they are, saying the American public is a legitimate target.

“The recent threats and attacks are likely in part a reaction to the U.S. air campaign against the group,” said Tricia Bacon, a Somali specialist at American University in Washington and a former State Department counterterrorism analyst.

The Pentagon carried out 63 drone strikes in Somalia last year — almost all against Shabab militants, with a few against a branch of the Islamic State. That compares with 47 strikes against the Shabab in 2018. There have already been three strikes in Somalia this year. The air campaign has been shrouded in secrecy, and an investigation by Amnesty International last year reported on evidence that these airstrikes had killed or wounded more than two dozen civilians since 2017.

Since March 2017, the Shabab have launched close to 900 attacks on civilians and hundreds more against United States, Somali and Kenyan troops, the Soufan Center, a research organization for global security issues in New York, said in an analysis last week. An Army Special Forces soldier, Staff Sgt. Alex Conrad, died from wounds he received during a firefight with Shabab fighters in June 2018 in Somalia.

The attack in Kenya came about a week after an explosives-laden truck blew up at a busy intersection in Mogadishu, the Somali capital, killing 82 people. The Shabab also claimed responsibility for that attack.

The group’s strength has ebbed and flowed over the past 15 years, weathering a string of territorial losses, defections and the killing of several high-profile leaders. Even so, the Shabab has proved remarkably resilient, even in the face of an intensified campaign of United States airstrikes against its fighters and facilities, the Soufan analysis said.

It remains unclear how the Shabab fighters made their way onto the Manda Bay base, whether by surprise or a vehicle packed with explosives. According to one American official, the group likely had patiently watched the base and had selected their attack based on the Americans’ well-established patterns. Investigators are looking at the possibility the attackers had help from Kenyan staff on the base, said one person briefed on the inquiry.

American officials said five Shabab fighters were killed. Several others fled, most likely slipping back across the border into Somalia, the officials said.

“This was designed for propaganda, to show they could strike American bases,” said Matt Bryden, the director of Sahan Research, a Nairobi-based think tank. “Their capability to strike in East Africa is growing.”

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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On Thursday, it happened again: another mass shooting. This time, the gunman killed five people at the Capital Gazette offices in Annapolis, Maryland.

Already, the mass shooting has given rise to new calls for gun control laws. Gabrielle Giffords, a former member of Congress who became a major advocate for gun control after an assassination attempt, said in a statement, “Reporters shouldn’t have to hide from gunfire while doing their jobs. A summer intern in the newsroom shouldn’t have to tweet for help. We shouldn’t have to live in a country where our lawmakers refuse to take any action to address this uniquely American crisis that’s causing so much horror and heartbreak on what feels like a daily basis.”

But if this plays out like the aftermath of past mass shootings, from Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 to Las Vegas in 2017, the chances of Congress taking major action on guns is very low.

This has become an American routine: After every mass shooting, the debate over guns and gun violence starts up once again. Maybe some bills get introduced. Critics respond with concerns that the government is trying to take away their guns. The debate stalls. So even as America continues experiencing levels of gun violence unrivaled in the rest of the developed world, nothing happens — no laws are passed by Congress, nothing significant is done to try to prevent the next horror.

So why is it that for all the outrage and mourning with every mass shooting, nothing seems to change? To understand that, it’s important to grasp not just the stunning statistics about gun ownership and gun violence in the United States, but America’s very unique relationship with guns — unlike that of any other developed country — and how it plays out in our politics to ensure, seemingly against all odds, that our culture and laws continue to drive the routine gun violence that marks American life.

No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.)

Javier Zarracina/Vox

To understand why that is, there’s another important statistic: The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world’s second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people.

Max Fisher/Washington Post

Another way of looking at that: Americans make up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world’s privately held firearms.

That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population — as surveys from the Pew Research Center and General Social Survey suggest.

These three basic facts demonstrate America’s unique gun culture. There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.

The research on this is overwhelmingly clear: No matter how you look at the data, more guns mean more gun deaths.

This is apparent when you look at state-by-state data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) within the United States, as this chart from Mother Jones demonstrates:

Mother Jones

And it’s clear when you look at the data for gun ownership and gun deaths (including homicides and suicides) across developed nations, as this other chart based on data from researcher Josh Tewksbury shows:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America’s unusual levels of gun violence — particularly mental illness. But people with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And Michael Stone, a psychiatrist at Columbia University who maintains a database of mass shooters, wrote in a 2015 analysis that only 52 out of the 235 killers in the database, or about 22 percent, were mentally ill. “The mentally ill should not bear the burden of being regarded as the ‘chief’ perpetrators of mass murder,” Stone concluded. Other research has backed this up.

Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from a shooting.

But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. While a few people in some cases may use a gun to successfully defend themselves or others, the proliferation of guns appears to cause far more violence than it prevents.

Multiple simulations have also demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.

This video, from ABC News, shows one such simulation, in which people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they’re shot:

[embedded content]

The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates, meanwhile, is well established. Reviews of the evidence, compiled by the Harvard School of Public Health’s Injury Control Research Center, have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths. Researchers have found this to be true not just with homicides, but also with suicides, domestic violence, and even violence against police.

For example, a 2013 study, led by a Boston University School of Public Health researcher, found that, after controlling for multiple variables, each percentage point increase in gun ownership correlated with a roughly 0.9 percent rise in the firearm homicide rate.

As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

“A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”

Javier Zarracina/Vox

Guns are not the only contributor to violence. (Other factors include, for example, poverty, urbanization, and alcohol consumption.) But when researchers control for other confounding variables, they have found time and time again that America’s high levels of gun ownership are a major reason the US is so much worse in terms of gun violence than its developed peers.

To deal with its problem, America will have to not only make guns less accessible, but likely reduce the number of guns in the US as well.

The research also speaks to this point: A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.

But even with the outrage over gun massacres, the sense that enough is enough, and the clear evidence that the problem is America’s high gun ownership rates, there hasn’t been significant legislation to help solve the problem.

If you ask Americans how they feel about specific gun control measures, they will often say that they support them. According to Pew Research Center surveys, most people in the US support universal background checks, a federal database to track gun sales, bans on assault-style weapons, and bans on high-capacity magazines.

So why don’t these measures ever get turned into law? That’s because they run into another political issue: Americans, increasingly in recent years, tend to support the abstract idea of the right to own guns.

This is part of how gun control opponents are able to kill even legislation that would introduce the most popular measures, such as background checks that include private sales (which have upwards of 80 percent support, according to Pew): They’re able to portray the law as contrary to the right to own guns, and galvanize a backlash against it.

This kind of problem isn’t unique to guns. For example, although many Americans say they don’t like Obamacare, most of them do in fact like the specific policies in the health care law. The problem is these specific policies have been masked by rhetoric about a “government takeover of health care” and “death panels.” Since most Americans don’t have time to verify these claims, especially when they involve a massive bill with lots of moving parts, enough end up believing in the catchphrases and scary arguments to stop the legislation from moving forward.

Of course, it’s also the case that some Americans simply oppose any gun control laws. And while this group is generally outnumbered by those who support gun control, the opponents tend to be much more passionate about the issue than the supporters — and they’re backed by a very powerful political lobby.

The single most powerful political organization when it comes to guns is, undoubtedly, the National Rifle Association (NRA). The NRA has an enormous stranglehold over conservative politics in America, and that development is more recent than you might think.

The NRA was, for much of its early history, more of a sporting club than a serious political force against gun control, and even supported some gun restrictions. In 1934, NRA president Karl Frederick was quoted as saying, “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.”

A 1977 revolt within the organization changed everything. As crime rose in the 1960s and ’70s, calls for more gun control grew as well. NRA members worried new restrictions on guns would keep coming after the historic 1968 law — eventually ending, they feared, with the government’s seizure of all firearms in America. So members mobilized, installing a hard-liner known as Harlon Carter in the leadership, forever changing the NRA into the gun lobby we know today.

This foundation story is crucial for understanding why the NRA is near-categorically opposed to the regulation of private firearms. It fears that popular and seemingly common-sense regulations, such as banning assault-style weapons or a federal database of gun purchases, are not really about saving lives but are in fact a potential first step toward ending all private gun ownership in America, which the NRA views — wrongly, in the minds of some legal experts — as a violation of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.

So any time there’s an attempt to impose new forms of gun control, the NRA rallies gun owners and other opponents of gun control to kill these bills. These gun owners make up a minority of the population: anywhere from around 30 to around 40 percent of households, depending on which survey one uses. But that population is a large and active enough constituency, particularly within the Republican base, to make many legislators fear that a poor grade from the NRA will end their careers.

As a result, conservative media and politicians take the NRA’s support — especially the coveted A-to-F ratings the organization gives out — very seriously. Politicians will go to sometimes absurd length to show their support for gun rights. In 2015, for example, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) starred in a video, from IJ Review, in which he cooked bacon with — this is not a joke — a machine gun.

[embedded content]

Although several campaigns have popped up over the years to try to counteract the NRA, none have come close to capturing the kind of influential hold that the organization has.

Kristin Goss, author of The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know, previously told me this might be changing. She argued that newer gun control groups like Everytown for Gun Safety and Americans for Responsible Solutions are much more organized, are better funded, and have more grassroots support than gun control groups have had in her decades covering this issue. As a result, Democrats at the state and federal levels seem much more willing to discuss gun control.

But supporters of gun control face a huge obstacle: far more passionate opponents. As Republican strategist Grover Norquist said in 2000, “The question is intensity versus preference. You can always get a certain percentage to say they are in favor of some gun controls. But are they going to vote on their ‘control’ position?” Probably not, Norquist suggested, “but for that 4-5 percent who care about guns, they will vote on this.”

What’s behind that passion? Goss, who’s also a political scientist at Duke University, suggested that it’s a sense of tangible loss — gun owners feel like the government is going to take their guns and rights. In comparison, gun control advocates are motivated by more abstract notions of reducing gun violence — although, Goss noted, the victims of mass shootings and their families have begun putting a face on these policies by engaging more actively in advocacy work, which could make the gun control movement feel more relatable. (See: #NeverAgain.)

There is an exception at the state level, where legislatures have passed laws imposing (and relaxing) restrictions on guns. In the past few years, for instance, Washington state and Oregon passed laws ensuring all guns have to go through background checks, including those sold between individuals. “There’s a lot more going on than Congress,” Goss said. “In blue states, gun laws are getting stricter. And in red states, in some cases, the gun laws are getting looser.”

But state laws aren’t enough. Since people can cross state lines to purchase guns under laxer rules, the weaker federal standards make it easy for someone to simply travel to a state with looser gun laws to obtain a firearm and ship it to another state. This is such a common occurrence that the gun shipment route from the South, where gun laws are fairly loose, to New York, where gun laws are strict, has earned the name “the Iron Pipeline.” But it also happens all across the country, from New York to Chicago to California. Only a federal law could address this issue — by setting a floor on how loose gun laws can be in every state. And until such a federal law is passed, there will always be a massive loophole to any state gun control law.

Yet the NRA’s influence and its army of supporters push many of America’s legislators, particularly at the federal level and red states, away from gun control measures — even though some countries that passed these policies have seen a lot of success with them.

In 1996, a 28-year-old man walked into a cafe in Port Arthur, Australia, ate lunch, pulled a semiautomatic rifle out of his bag, and opened fire on the crowd, killing 35 people and wounding 23 more. It was the worst mass shooting in Australia’s history.

Australian lawmakers responded with legislation that, among other provisions, banned certain types of firearms, such as automatic and semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. The Australian government confiscated 650,000 of these guns through a mandatory gun buyback program, in which it purchased the firearms from gun owners. It established a registry of all guns owned in the country and required a permit for all new firearm purchases. (This is much further than bills typically proposed in the US, which almost never make a serious attempt to immediately reduce the number of guns in the country.)

The result: Australia’s firearm homicide rate dropped by about 42 percent in the seven years after the law passed, and its firearm suicide rate fell by 57 percent, according to one review of the evidence by Harvard researchers.

It’s difficult to know for sure how much of the drop in homicides and suicides was caused specifically by the gun buyback program and other legal changes. Australia’s gun deaths, for one, were already declining before the law passed. But researchers David Hemenway and Mary Vriniotis argue that the gun buyback program very likely played a role: “First, the drop in firearm deaths was largest among the type of firearms most affected by the buyback. Second, firearm deaths in states with higher buyback rates per capita fell proportionately more than in states with lower buyback rates.”

One study of the program, by Australian researchers, found that buying back 3,500 guns per 100,000 people correlated with up to a 50 percent drop in firearm homicides, and a 74 percent drop in gun suicides. As Dylan Matthews noted for Vox, the drop in homicides wasn’t statistically significant because Australia has a pretty low number of murders already. But the drop in suicides most definitely was — and the results are striking:

Javier Zarracina/Vox

One other fact, noted by Hemenway and Vriniotis in 2011: “While 13 gun massacres (the killing of 4 or more people at one time) occurred in Australia in the 18 years before the [Australia gun control law], resulting in more than one hundred deaths, in the 14 following years (and up to the present), there were no gun massacres.”

Depending on which definition of a mass shooting one uses, there are anywhere from a dozen to hundreds of mass shootings in the US each year. These events are, it goes without saying, devastating tragedies for the nation and, primarily, the victims and their families.

Yet other, less-covered kinds of gun violence kill far more Americans than even these mass shootings. Under a broad definition of mass shooting, these incidents killed fewer than 500 people in the US in 2016. That represents less than 2 percent of the nearly 39,000 gun deaths that year — most of which were suicides, not homicides.

Preventing suicides isn’t something we typically include in discussions of gun control, but other countries’ experiences show it can save lives. In Israel, where military service is mandatory for much of the population, policymakers realized that an alarming number of soldiers killed themselves when they went home over the weekend. So Israeli officials, as part of their solution, decided to try forcing the soldiers to keep their guns at the base when they went home. It worked: A study from Israeli researchers found that suicides among Israeli soldiers dropped by 40 percent.

So while politicians often lean on mass shootings to call for gun control, the problem goes far beyond those incidents. Though it’s hard to fault them for trying; mass shootings, after all, force Americans to confront the toll of our gun laws and gun culture.

But it seems that we as a nation just aren’t willing to look, or else don’t sufficiently mind what we see, when these events occur. Even the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut — in which a gunman killed 20 young children, six school personnel, and himself — catalyzed no significant change at the federal level and most states. Since then, there have been, by some estimates, more than 1,600 mass shootings. And there is every reason to believe there will be more to come.

Original Source -> America’s gun problem, explained

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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positivepsychologyinterventions · 7 years

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Want to Die? Call 911 & Hold a Closed Multi-Purpose Tool

You would think that university police would have such great mental health training — given that they are dealing with a population of young adults exploring limits, learning about themselves, and one of the groups at the greatest risk for a first-episode incident of mental illness.

Apparently not at Georgia Tech. This is a school where I would never send my child, given the most recent incident of a person with mental illness being killed — rather than being counseled — in mid September. One second of poor judgment on an officer’s part, and suddenly an entire life is snuffed out. Not because a criminal was threatening anyone (other than himself) with harm. But simply because the man — Scout Schultz — had a mental illness.

The Associated Press has the sad story:

Police shot and killed Scout Schultz late Saturday night [September 16, 2017] after the 21-year-old student called 911 to report an armed and possibly intoxicated suspicious person, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation has said.

The GBI has said an officer responding to a 911 call about 11:17 p.m. Saturday shot Schultz as the student advanced on officers with a knife and refused commands to put down the knife. Stewart said Monday that the GBI confirmed to him that Schultz was holding a multipurpose tool and that the knife blade was not out.

Schultz was the one who called 911, GBI spokeswoman Nelly Miles said in an emailed statement Monday.

“In the call, Shultz describes the person as a white male, with long blonde hair, white T-shirt and blue jeans who is possibly intoxicated, holding a knife and possibly armed with a gun on his hip,” Miles said, adding that three suicide notes were found in Schultz’s dorm room.

Investigators recovered a multi-purpose tool at the scene but didn’t find any guns, Miles said.

So… You respond to the scene of a 911 call only to find the person who made the call is the person who is in distress and need of assistance. Empathy. Compassion. And is in no danger to the responding officers, given that the multi-purpose tool he’s holding is closed.

Instead of providing those things, the ridiculously short-sighted, narrow-minded Georgia Tech campus police responded by shooting the person dead. Would you send your child to a school where, if he or she suffered from mental illness, you might lose your child to a trigger-happy campus police officer?

Flanked by Schultz’s parents Monday morning, Stewart said the officer who shot Schultz overreacted. Schultz was having a breakdown and was suicidal but if the officer had used non-lethal force rather than shooting, Schultz could have received treatment and gotten better, Stewart said. […]

Georgia Tech police don’t carry stun guns, but are equipped with pepper spray, a spokesman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

So on a college campus police are happy to carry deadly guns but not non-lethal stun guns? Sure, that makes sense, Georgia Tech.

Lynne Schultz [the victim’s mother] told the Journal-Constitution over the weekend that her oldest child had struggled with depression and attempted suicide two years ago using a belt as a noose.

After that, Scout Schultz went through counseling, William Schultz said. Scout Schultz spent this past summer at home and there were no obvious problems when school resumed last month, the elder Schultz said.

Way to go, Georgia Tech!

I am just so speechless as to how or why such an incident can still happen, when our understanding of mental illness has advanced so greatly in the past few decades. Millions of police officers have undergone mental health crisis training and learned how to de-escalate situations such as this. You would think that Georgia Tech’s police officers would be among such a group of people — but apparently not all of them.

I do want to acknowledge that it was a single officer — Tyler Beck — who was responsible for this reprehensible crime against a person with a mental illness. The other officers who responded to the call apparently acted professionally and within the expectations and standards of professional police conduct in trying to help a person with mental illness.

Sadly, it only takes one bad apple to sour you off the whole bunch.

Police would do well to distance themselves from individual officers who seemingly can’t or won’t abide by de-escalation procedures in situations of this nature. Instead of defending every officer’s actions, we need to recognize that sometimes an officer makes a poor judgment call — and they should be held accountable for such poor judgment.

Because if we can’t trust public safety to, well, take care of the safety of the public — which includes all people, even those with mental illness — then we’ve come to a sad crossroads in modern society. And especially on a university campus, where one would expect such professionals to be of the highest caliber, with the greatest training to help those they are sworn to protect — the very students of Georgia Tech.

Georgia Tech horribly failed Scout Schultz, and it should be ashamed of itself for the unprofessional conduct of one its officers.1

Read the original article: 3 arrested during protest at Georgia Tech after vigil

Washington Post: Audio released of 911 call by Georgia Tech student killed by police

Footnotes:

And it’s craven and cowardly that Georgia Tech is failing to publicly identify the officer who murdered Schultz. Because he was apparently brandishing only a closed multi-purpose tool.

from World of Psychology http://ift.tt/2hAF15D via IFTTT

#IFTTT #World of Psychology

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psychotherapyconsultants · 7 years

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Want to Die? Call 911 & Hold a Closed Multi-Purpose Tool

The Associated Press has the sad story:

Schultz was the one who called 911, GBI spokeswoman Nelly Miles said in an emailed statement Monday.

Investigators recovered a multi-purpose tool at the scene but didn’t find any guns, Miles said.

Georgia Tech police don’t carry stun guns, but are equipped with pepper spray, a spokesman told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

So on a college campus police are happy to carry deadly guns but not non-lethal stun guns? Sure, that makes sense, Georgia Tech.

Lynne Schultz [the victim’s mother] told the Journal-Constitution over the weekend that her oldest child had struggled with depression and attempted suicide two years ago using a belt as a noose.

Way to go, Georgia Tech!

Sadly, it only takes one bad apple to sour you off the whole bunch.

Georgia Tech horribly failed Scout Schultz, and it should be ashamed of itself for the unprofessional conduct of one its officers.1

Read the original article: 3 arrested during protest at Georgia Tech after vigil

Washington Post: Audio released of 911 call by Georgia Tech student killed by police

Footnotes:

And it’s craven and cowardly that Georgia Tech is failing to publicly identify the officer who murdered Schultz. Because he was apparently brandishing only a closed multi-purpose tool.

from World of Psychology https://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2017/10/11/want-to-die-call-911-hold-closed-multi-purpose-tool/

#World of Psychology

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opedguy · 7 years

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Trump’s Blunt Speech to U.N. General Assembly

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), Sept. 19, 2017.--Speaking to the U.N. General Assembly for the first time, 71-year-old Donald Trump got down to brass tacks, exposing the promises and limitations of the United Nations. Trump took North Korea by the horns, warning the world body that if needed the U.S. would “destroy” North Korea to prevent it’s 34-year-old leader Kim Jong-un from threatening the U.S., its allies with nuclear war. Trump told the General Assembly, Kim had a choice either give up his nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles for face the wrath of the U.S. military. “If the righteous many do not confront the wicked few, the evil will triumph,” said Trump, referring to the past menace of Nazism, coming up-to-date with the regimes of North Korea and Iran, both working on developing nuclear weaponss. Trump told South Korea President Moon Jae-in that “appeasment” wouldn’t stop Kim Jong-un.

North Korea’s official KCNA News Agency reported Sept. 13 that it would use nuclear weapons to reduce the U.S. “to ashes and darkness,” “sink” Japan and “wipe out” South Korea. Making repeated nuclear threats against the U.S. and its allies, Trump let the world body know that U.S. patience is growing thin. “Rocket Man is on a suicide mission,” said Trump, referring to Kim’s nickname, for showing his reckless use of ballistic missiles, firing them over Japan whenever he gets the urge. “The United States has great strength and patience, but if it force to defend itself or its allies, we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” Trump told the General Assembly. Unlike other U.N. speeches prone toward political correctness, Trump delivered a stark warning that if U.N. sanctions on North Korea don’t stop his nukes and ballistic missiles, then something else will.

Trump saved some of his harshest language for Iran, telling the world body that the Islamic Republic hides behind democracy but is actually a brutally totalitarian regime, cracking down on its own citizens and sponsoring terrorism around the Middle East. Mentioning Iran’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Houthi rebels in Yemen, Trump signaled he would re-evaluate the P5+1 [U.S., U.K., France, Russia, China and Germany] Iranian Nuke Deal, calling it an embarrassment, the most one-sided deal ever negotiated by the U.S. Trump cited Iran’s role in supplying arms-and-cash to Hexbollah, Hamas and other terror groups in the Middle East. Speaking in plain language, Trump’s warnings-and-promises put on onus on the United Nations to fulfill its mission of collective action to keep the peace. Trump asked the U.N. to end North Korea’s nuke program.

Trump’s critics had plenty of problems with his speech to the General Assembly. Criticizing his overly stern warning to North Korea, Trump hoped to rally the world body to heap more pressure on the hermit kingdom to stop its nukes and ballistic missiles program. Expressing little confidence in the U.N.’s ability to apply strict sanctions on Kim’s regime, the U.N. doesn’t have the means to enforce any of its resolutions, especially calling on Kim to stop his nukes and ballistic missiles program. “We meet at a time of both immense promise and great peril,” Trump told U.N. members, calling on all parties to do more to preserve world peace. Comparing the North Korea crisis into pre-WW II appeasement of Nazi Germany, Trump asked U.N. members states to step up to save the world from another war. Trump didn’t know whether the world body could step up to the challenge.

Concerned about mass casualties on the Korean Peninsula, Defense Secretary James Mattis told reported that the Pentagon had plans to deal with North Korea. Asked whether or not he could avoid mass casualties in Seoul, a city of 25 million, 35 miles from the DMZ, Mattis said he had plans in place without elaborating. When asked by a reporter if he meant “kinetic” action, Mattis admitted it’s under advisement, referring to the most lethal of Pentagon attack strategies AKA “kinetic.” Mattis continues to reinforce the idea Trump’s warnings to North Korea are not idle chatter. When Trump talks of preventing Kim from getting an operation nuke-tipped ICBM he’s not kidding. U.N. sanctions have done next to nothing to stop Kim from developing his nukes and ballistic missiles. Kim’s nuclear threats to the U.S. and its allies have consequences, as witnessed in Trump’s speech.

Criticism has flowed in from the U.N and Capitol Hill on Trump’s blunt speech. China hoped Trump could strike a more conciliatory tone but instead used his first speech as a reality check. Stripped of diplomatic niceties, Trump’s speech offered a stark warning to terrorists and rogue regimes. “The potential of the U.N. is unlimited,” Trump told the General Assembly, while facing limitations from the Security Council where every member wields the veto. When the Security Council approved watered down sanctions Sept. 11, Trump knew that it increased the prospects of war. Without biting sanctions that could bring Kim to the bargaining table, there’s little hope things can be resolved amicably. “Do we love our nations enough to protect their sovereignty and to take ownership in the future,” Trump asked rhetorically, knowing the latest U.N. sanctions made matters worse.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.

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