Originally Posted By: rjundi
An armed base would have been less deaths but does not eliminate the possibility of deaths by a shooter. The truth is a well placed shooter could do plenty of damage with better weapons for the task.
I know it makes you guys feel better and justified if everyone is armed. The end reality is people still die.
People are quite adaptive and smart and simply find ways around. It is simple thinking to think being armed is the answer.
I don't get our country at all.
Every angle is simple thinking at best, currently. The issue is too broad to just make simple statements like being armed or disarmed will help prevent stuff from occurring.
Look at china, they've had at least two pretty nasty knife attacks that I'm aware of, in a pretty short while (like since around the time of Newtown). Then go back to the Bath school massacre. Unarmed but crazy will still cause calamity.
But in reasonably established and functional societies where there is greater control, disarmed populations appear to have lower incidences of this kind of effect (note see above about disarmed crazies still doing damage). And a main element of that is that there is a far greater assurance of someone armed with a firearm taking more life, easier, than someone with, say, a knife. It's all about reach and lethality, which is really why guns are popular for anything from hunting to self defense to target shooting, to begin with. The other side of this is that a military base is NOT a cross section of even the USA really. There are far fewer illegals, junkies, and completely disconnected, dis functional people there than a standard cross section of the population. Yes, there certainly are all of those (less the illegals) even in the military, and it is well known that in some military basing areas and the surrounding towns, crime can be high. But overall, communities with high military integration have lower crime rates.
Quote:
So why do these ten neighborhoods have such high crime rates? According to Andrew Schiller, founder and president of NeighborhoodScout, the answer may lie in the demographics of the American military. Military bases tend to have high concentrations of young, single men living together in very close quarters. Schiller has also found similar property crime spikes in other areas -- like college student neighborhoods -- that have large concentrations of single males living together. One possible explanation for these surges in crime rates could be that young men, separated from their parents, wives, families and communities, may feel more temptation to commit certain types of crimes.
Ironically, NeighborhoodScout reports that military neighborhoods as a whole tend to be considerably safer than most of the country. America has 300 neighborhoods in which at least 20% of the population is in the military. In these areas, the median property crime rate is 32 per 1,000 residents, which is 7% below the national average. The violent crime rate is even more striking: at 1.55 crimes per 1,000 residents, it is an impressive 67% lower than the average.
http://www.dailyfinance.com/2009/11/16/most-dangerous-military-towns/
Perhaps it is because of an assumption of armament, training, or willingness, or perhaps it is because, again, it isn't a suitable cross section of America, when professional military personnel are present. So then one has to go back to the aspects of mental health, availability of treatment, use of treatment, etc. to properly assess. And that's far more complex than just saying that being armed or disarmed, military base or elsewhere, is the answer. Unfortunately until were willing and able to make some likely non-PC assessments come out into the open, it will all go nowhere.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013...1993-study-says
Not making a call one way or another on these data, but looking at functional and equivalent countries with similar wealth (forget Honduras and South Africa and places with no analog to the us society and wealth level) and the results are interesting. Again, not making a claim one way or another based upon these, but it would be logical for things like base arming regulations to be made per the best available data they have, which may be something like this:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worl...t-of-the-world/
The comments above I posted about young single male crime rates also aligns to why, perhaps, the firearm rules on bases are what they are, and would also confirm why in other subsections of the USA (eg inner cities) why the crime rate also is so high.