Two contrasting sources (both provided by Matthew) give the same answer about the efficacy of prayer:

https://twitter.com/TheTweetOfGod/status/672174167832170496

I can’t help but think that the headline below, from yesterday’s Daily News is—perhaps unintentionally—a slap in the face of theists. It implies that either God let the shootings take place, or he’s leaving us on our own to solve the problem. Either way, it reflects a view of a god who’s neither omnipotent or omnibenevolent, though perhaps that’s a bit too much exegesis for a newspaper headline.

Today’s New York Times has two op-eds on the San Bernardino tragedy, both decrying the lack of gun control in the U.S. “The horror in San Bernardino“, the main piece (by the whole editorial board), includes this

Yet, even as grief fills communities randomly victimized by mass shootings, the sales of weapons grow ever higher. Holiday shoppers set a record for Black Friday gun sales last week. They left the Federal Bureau of Investigation processing 185,345 firearm background checks, the most ever in a single day, topping the Black Friday gun buying binge after the shooting massacre of 26 people at a school in Newtown, Conn., three years ago.

. . . Congress has allowed the domestic gun industry to use assorted loopholes to sell arsenals that are used against innocent Americans who cannot hide. Without firm action, violent criminals will keep terrorizing communities and the nation, inflicting mass death and damage across the land.

The Republicans, of course, are saying these shootings reflect a need for better mental healthcare, but that party is largely responsible for dismantling the mental-healthcare system and putting many seriously ill people back on the street. And really, the line between a disaffected shooter and someone who’s mentally ill is nebulous. You can’t define shooters like those in San Bernardino as mentally ill, because that’s simply tautological. Many people who would not fall into the mental healthcare safety net because they lack a diagnosable condition—including terrorists, those who grab a gun in a moment of anger, or those who (apparently like the California shooters) are simply plotting revenge—would not be helped by expanding our psychiatric outreach.

And those who pin the uniquely American problem of mass shootings on mental illness alone must explain why American is unique in harboring so many mentally ill people. I refuse to believe that a surfeit of such people is the root cause of these tragedies. Somewhere in there is the unconscionable “freedom” of Americans to own guns.

Of  course we should give people greater access to mental healthcare, but that would mean raising taxes, which is a no-no. But one thing that’s less costly, and perhaps more efficacious, is restricting gun ownership. “Smart guns”, which can be fired only by the owner, or restricting gun ownership to hunters or members of gun clubs, would go a long way toward solving the problem. Remember that many guns used in the commission of crimes are legally owned guns that have been stolen. What we need are far fewer legally owned guns.

Nicholas Kristof’s piece, “On guns, we’re not even trying” is (at last) something he wrote that doesn’t make me cringe. He first adduces the frightening statistics:

So far this year, the United States has averaged more than one mass shooting a day, according to the ShootingTracker website, counting cases of four or more people shot. And now we have the attack on Wednesday in San Bernardino, Calif., that killed at least 14 people.

It’s too soon to know exactly what happened in San Bernardino, but just in the last four years, more people have died in the United States from guns (including suicides and accidents) than Americans have died in the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq combined. When one person dies in America every 16 minutes from a gun, we urgently need to talk about remedies.

He then proposes three solutions: universal background checks (40% of guns are legally bought without such checks), banning people under 21 from owning guns, and curbing the ability of people on the terrorism watch list to buy guns (yes, they can: more than 2,000 such weapons were bought last year.) These are minimal solutions, but don’t go far enough.

It’s unthinkable in the present political climate to envision serious restrictions on guns, but remember, it was once unthinkable to give civil rights to blacks or legal marriage to gay couples. What we need is a change in public opinion, and it’s sad that the only way that change might happen is for far more people to be murdered. And even that won’t help, for America’s in the grip of gun madness.

Kristof ends on a clever note: asking Republicans to heed their #2 god:

. . . Ronald Reagan, hailed by Republicans in every other context, favored gun regulations, including mandatory waiting periods for purchases.

“Every year, an average of 9,200 Americans are murdered by handguns,”Reagan wrote in a New York Times op-ed in 1991 backing gun restrictions. “This level of violence must be stopped.”

He added that if tighter gun regulations “were to result in a reduction of only 10 or 15 percent of those numbers (and it could be a good deal greater), it would be well worth making it the law of the land.”

Republicans, listen to your sainted leader.

The numbers adduced by Reagan have of course increased since then—they’ve tripled. Here’s a figure from PolitiFact, which gives some caveats in the associated article, but in general the numbers below are pretty close to the mark (that site adds 27 to the terrorist-caused deaths and nearly 22,000 to the total Americans killed by guns). Their ratio of Americans killed by guns to Americans killed by terrorism is 4,250 to 1. Which is the greater problem?

Finally, Grania has sent us a timeline for mass murders in the U.S., showing the nearly exponential increase over time. This is from Mother Jones, which quotes statistics from the Harvard School of Public Health:

As the article notes:

Rather than simply tallying the yearly number of mass shootings, Harvard researchers Amy Cohen, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller determined that their frequency is best measured by tracking the time between each incident. This method, they explain, is most effective for detecting meaningful shifts in relatively small sets of data, such as the 69 mass shootings we documented. Their analysis of the data shows that from 1982 to 2011, mass shootings occurred every 200 days on average. Since late 2011, they found, mass shootings have occurred at triple that rate—every 64 days on average. (For more details on their analytical method, see this related piece.)