Salon: U.S. votes against U.N. resolution condemning death penalty for LGBT people; is this who we are?

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council approved a resolution condemning the use of the death penalty in a discriminatory manner such as consensual same-sex relations. Along with 13 other nations, the United States voted against it. Instead, the U.S. sided with allies such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Qatar, Japan and the United Arab Emirates. Bangladesh, China and India also voted against the measure, which still passed along a 27-13 margin.

"The resolution asked countries that have not yet abolished the death penalty to ensure that it is not 'applied arbitrarily or in a discriminatory manner' and that it is not applied against persons with mental or intellectual disabilities and persons below 18 years of age at the time of the commission of the crime, as well as pregnant women," according to the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Intersex Association (ILGA). [...]

LGBT rights activists criticized President Donald Trump's administration and U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Nikki Haley, for not supporting the resolution. Yet, don't go thinking this stance is anything new or localized to the 45th president's administration. The U.S. has never voted to support any U.N. measure that condemns the death penalty in any way. The Obama administration did abstain from a similar vote in 2014, according to BuzzFeed News, though that one did not contain provisions for LGBT individuals.

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CityLab: Where the Catalonian Crisis Came From

The shocking violence in Barcelona on Sunday makes the politics behind Catalonia’s separatist movement even harder to parse. Helmeted police in riot gear disrupted polling places, beat citizens attempting to vote, and left an incredible 893 people injured—all in the name of halting a referendum on Catalonian independence that national laws deemed to be illegal. [...]

Catalan elites, however, have never quite got a slice of the national political pie that corresponds with their economic power. The autonomy written into Spain’s national system means that the region gets considerable say in its own affairs—the regional government, called the Generalitat de Catalunya, has substantial (and sometimes absolute) local jurisdiction in many areas. Still, the lion’s share of national institutional influence has always remained fiercely guarded in Madrid. In times of prosperity, this led to tension, but since the financial crisis of 2008, the post-Franco pact has truly been coming unstuck. With Spain continuing to flounder economically, people are losing faith in the central state’s ability to solve their problems. [...]

This being the 21st century, there’s still more to it than that. The independence push is also a vessel through which Catalonia’s citizens voice their disaffection with wider problems affecting people across Spain, such as falling living standards and appalling youth unemployment. Faced with a vote for change—any change—people have mobilized, although independence has never quite gained majority support: Pre-referendum data from the Generalitat itself showed a mere 41 percent for independence. It’s not entirely coincidental that the movement has grown during the era of Brexit, another referendum that was partly a vehicle for frustrations that lay beyond the question being directly posed to electorates.  [...]

It would be extremely wrong to suggest the somewhat murky motivations behind Catalonia’s referendum means that the leaders of Spain’s national government are in some way the good guys. In fact, the central government has also been accused of using the separatist debate to distract voters from other problems. It has failed to take advantage of numerous opportunities to defuse the situation, in part because anti-Catalan saber-rattling is catnip to a section of its base.

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FiveThirtyEight: Mass Shootings Are A Bad Way To Understand Gun Violence

First, they’re rare, and the people doing the shooting are different. The majority of gun deaths in America aren’t even homicides, let alone caused by mass shootings. Two-thirds of the more than 33,000 gun deaths that take place in the U.S. every year are suicides (click through the graphic below to see how gun deaths break down):

And while people who commit suicide and people who commit mass shootings both tend to be white and male, suicide victims tend to be older. The median age of a mass shooter, according to one report, is 34, with very few over 50. Suicide, however, plagues the elderly as much as it does the middle-aged.

Second, the people killed in mass shootings are different from the majority of homicides. Most gun murder victims are men between the ages of 15 and 34. Sixty-six percent are black. Women — of any race and any age — are far less likely to be murdered by a gun. Unless that gun is part of a mass shooting. There, 50 percent of the people who die are women. And at least 54 percent of mass shootings involve domestic or family violence — with the perpetrator shooting a current or former partner or a relative.

The historical trends for different kinds of gun deaths don’t all follow the same course. While data suggests that the number of mass shootings similar to the Las Vegas event has gone up, particularly since 2000,2 homicide rates have fallen significantly from their 1980 peak and continued on a generally downward trajectory for most of the 21st century. Meanwhile, suicides are way up, with the biggest increases among women. The trends are different because the situations are different and the people are different. Maybe different solutions are warranted, as well.

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FiveThirtyEight: The Mass Shootings Fix

But mass shootings still account for only a small fraction of the roughly 8,000 gun murder incidents in the U.S. each year.1 This suggests that measures aimed at preventing mass shootings would save more lives if they also prevent other kinds of gun death. [...]

In New Zealand, after a man went on a shooting rampage at a neighbor’s house in 1990 and fatally shot 11 people, the country stopped offering lifetime licenses for guns, requiring gun owners to renew their permits every 10 years instead. Military-style weapons were not banned but required a special permit. After a 22-year-old gunman killed 10 students at a hospitality school and then took his own life in 2008, Finland raised the minimum age to own a gun (from 18 to 20) and added requirements to own a handgun (such as two years of supervised target practice and membership in a gun club). Canada and Germany also tightened access to guns after mass shootings within their borders. [...]

Did Australia and Great Britain’s reforms prevent mass shootings? It’s hard to say, simply because mass shootings are relatively rare. In the post-buyback period, Great Britain has had one massacre with guns while Australia has had none. It’s hard to calculate how many would have been expected without a ban. Australia looks more successful in this regard, because it had more frequent mass shootings before the ban (averaging about two mass shootings every three years from 1979 to 1996.3) Mass shootings in Great Britain, prior to the ban, were rarer. Prior to 1996, there hadn’t been a widely covered mass shooting in Britain since 1987. [...]

In parts of Great Britain, there isn’t strong evidence the ban and buyback saved lives. After the new gun law was implemented in 1996, the number of crimes involving guns in England and Wales kept rising through the 1990s, peaking in 2003 and 2004 before subsiding. The post-2004 drop is hard to credit to the buyback and possibly occurred because of an increase in the number of police officers. It’s possible that any effect of the ban, positive or negative, was swamped by other factors affecting gun violence. There has been one notable mass shooting in Great Britain since the law was passed, making it hard to judge whether the law has been a success in that respect.

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Quartz: The cost of US gun violence has finally been calculated—at a minimum of $2.8 billion a year

Researchers from Johns Hopkins University have published a new study in Health Affairs medical journal to “help fill this need.” The study aims to quantify the financial burden of gun violence in the United States by looking at data from 150,930 gun-violence patients who visited emergency rooms between 2006 and 2014.

The annual cost for victims of gun violence is an average of $2.8 billion in emergency-room and inpatient charges alone, the study concluded. If lost wages are factored in, the financial burden rises to $45 billion each year. [...]

Gun shots are a very costly medical expense. The average emergency room visit from a firearm injury costs $5,254 and skyrockets to $95,887 if the patient is admitted overnight. Over the nine years of the study, that amounted to a whopping $22 billion just in inpatient charges. Patients who died during an emergency room visit were charged $11,463 on average and represent 11.7% of total emergency charges in the study. Patients who need outpatient care following a hospital visit, about a third of inpatient gunshot victims, pay even more—about $179,565.

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