coughFort Hoodcough
http://boston.com/community/blogs/crime_punishment/2011/01/mass_murder_--_unpredictable_a.html
According to that article 20 mass shootings a year has been the number for a long time.
307,006,550 million Americans makes that basically meaningless.
But it does sell media.
I think it is a side effect of our national character. As has been noted, other countries have even high rates of gun ownership. What they don’t have is this paired with a frontier spirit and a highly individualist worldview. The European countries mentioned are more communitarian in attitude.
This has good consequences, such as a high level of entrepreneurship. It also has bad consequences. America has always been a violent country and will probably be one with or without guns.
Duh, and yet you dont even have your own word for it.
Of course, another factor is simple mathematics - the US has 5-6 times the population of most other Western countries, so (even if all other things were equal) you can expect 5-6 times as much of anything (from impromptu street dances to gun crime incidents).
Not really. That just demonstrates that there’s no way for a single community to do so. There’s no way for a single small region to get rid of guns when they are surrounded by a sea of them.
Really, I’ve never bought that. I see no evidence that the various states of America are more different from each other than the different provinces of other countries are different from each other. I’ve always gotten the impression that foreigners generally see their own provinces as vastly different from each other, just as Americans generally see their states.
And politically speaking America has a very narrow spectrum. There’s a far right and the relatively moderate right and not much else is tolerated.
And there was another one today, down in Seal Beach, south of Los Angeles. Spurned lover shot up his girlfriend’s workplace. From what I have heard in the early reports, everyone knew the guy wasn’t right in the head, so it wasn’t like they didn’t have a heads-up.
Whatever valid point you had to make was blunted by your unnecessary hostility. The United States has had a stable and continuous form of government that has lasted for 224 years. (Okay, there was a minor hiccup in the 1860s.) Read the Bill of Rights and tell me none of it is relevant today because it was written more than two centuries ago. In truth, the U.S. Constitution is a living document that is reinterpreted and amended on a regular basis.
SenorBeef has a point. Anyone who depends on the news for their views are going to have distorted view of reality. The news will cover the one plane that crashed rather than the million that arrived safely at their destination. News, by it’s nature covers the unusual, not the commonplace.
Also their seems to be some obsession with the instruments of violence rather than the violence itself. A more valid view is to view homicide rates as a whole.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_rate
The homicide rate in the U.S. is around 4.8/100000. For the Americas is general it is 15.5/100000.
Now for Europe in general, the rate is 3.5/100000, which is quite a bit lower than the U.S., but the rate among Americans of European descent, is around 2.4/100000 which is lower still. In spite of access to firearms, people of European descent living in the U.S. don’t seem to be more homicidal than people still living in European.
It seems to me that this indicates that the violence itself that is the problem rather than the tools people choose to use to act on their violent impulses.
Not to mention enough knives for all of their pockets and cup holders.
Dublane obviously being not a particularly good example as it was as a reaction to this (and Hungerford) that the UK brought in their very strict gun laws.
And then there was a fourteen year gap between Dunblane and then next massacre in the UK. Which, compared to the rate of them in the likes of the US, could be used as an argument to say the gun control laws worked.
I think most mass shootings wouldn’t happen if not for the extensive news coverage of them. Every malcontent young man knows that if he shoots a bunch of people, he will become famous. Everyone will hear his grievances, they will read his bad poetry, and his face will be on the cover of Time Magazine. I think it started with Columbine and since then, most of them have probably been copycat crimes to a certain degree.
Stop trying to apply objective cost-benefit analysis to policy questions. Can’t you see this is an outrage, and we must do something?
So you want armed guards on every street corner?
If you’re going to do that, what’s the rate amongst Europeans of European descent?
Wow yeah Fatty Moore is way off on that. Canada’s gun laws are more restrictive than the US, heck we even have laws that restrict replica’s. Carry permits are almost unheard of and ownership is also more restricted than the US.
I would also question the US gun numbers. 2007 numbers were:
US - 89/100 people (high but not 200/100)
Can - 31/100 people
I think that most serial killers are American as well – possibly due to media fascination spreading the knowledge of it as a ‘thing which can be done’ – so you could argue that it’s at least partially due to the same factor.
But I’m sure the guns help.
Statistics show that there’s no correlation between gun ownership and ones likelihood to commit murder (though there is a correlation between gun ownership and percentage of murders committed using a gun). Either spree killers are so rare as to not affect the metrics or just the same as every other form of murder, the killer finds a different weapon – poison in the local water supply, a bomb, etc. – I couldn’t say.
What’s the population of Norway vs the population of the United States? This website might help you find the answer: www.wikipedia.org.
An interesting question, but in Europe is apparently difficult to get crime statistics broken down by ethnic group. In France, it is illegal to collect even basic demographic data. Do you have any statistics that people of non-European descent in Europe are numerous and homicidal enough to decrease the homicide rate by over 1/3rd if they are excluded from the data?
Perhaps we could get drugs off the streets if they were prohibited, not just in this town and that county hither and you, but nationwide… oh, wait…