Sorry, I derped in the middle of writing that post, I was working and got distracted.
I meant to say ‘Americans say they own guns to protect themselves from robbers or home invaders, but in Canada those people don’t have guns anyway!’
This page has stats on robbery and weapons in Canada. Between 1999-2008 robbery with a weapon declined, 2% of all robbery victims required medical attention and homicides from robbery were ~3% of all total homicides.
I admit that I have no stats on how many of those victims have firearms, only anecdotal data from living in Canada.
American here. The US is, truly, saturated with guns and has been for the entirety of it’s history. In some rural areas, you can pretty much assume that everyone and their little sister has a gun. Saying you can’t have a gun to some people is like saying you can’t go to the church of your choice or can’t publish your own newspaper - it’s unthinkable treachery against the foundations of American values.
People even carry openly in Suburbia. I’ve walked into fast food restaurants and someone was just casually there with a pistol on his hip, and nobody acted as if they really cared.
The scandanavian suicide thing is entirely explained by the amount of sunlight they get, as far as I know. There’s a very strong correlation between lattitude and depression and suicide.
The allegedly high Scandinavian suicide rate is a complete Urban Myth. See for example here, but examples abound. I thought this legend had died out back in the 1980s. The link also debunks the “sunshine” aspect.
Those numbers look approximately proportional to the amount of urbanisation/population density. Which would kinda make sense - heap people on top of each other, and it increases their tendency (or opportunity) to kill one another. A problem with the utopian notion of arcologies, I reckon.
Collecting basic demographic data is perfectly legal in France (both the government and private companies do it all the time), what’s not done is collecting racial data.
Spain had a random shooting just last week (one pregnant woman dead; her due-this-week son saved by EMTs who performed an emergency cesarean; another woman badly wounded; both this woman and the baby are already at home), but in general mass violence (terrorism aside) is likely to involve knives/blunt weapons. In those cases involving guns, the shooter was either a cop or a hunter, that is, someone who would normally have guns - it’s not someone saying “ok, I’m going to kill that bitch, so I need a gun”. After all, most people here have no idea how to use a gun, but anybody knows how to use a hammer or a pair of seamstress’ scissors.
The most common cause of murder appears to be “noticing that your man is a piece of shit and leaving him”, followed by “teenager whose developing mental illness has gone unheeded for years and who at one point decides his family is better off dead (the two cases I can think of involved low-income families and a youngest sibling with a major physical and mental disability)” and by “teenagers (involved in gangs or not) who really, really aren’t right inna head (often some sort of racists or supremacists)”.
Last year (2010) 54 American police officers were shot and killed in the line of duty, with another 15 unlawfully killed (e.g run over).
By comparision in the UK 15 officers have died unlawfully (so not limited to shootings, most were stabbings or being run over) in the last 10 years.
As with the US, most gun crime is in inner cities, and is often linked to drugs/gang activity.
We’ve had three serious spree shootings since I’ve been alive (Hungerford, Dunblane and Whitehaven), and the fact I can name them without looking them up shows how rare they are.
Would most Americans be able to identify all spree shootings over the last 30yrs in the USA? I guess on a individual state basis this might be easier, bearing in mind the size of America.
WHY do we have more? I don’t think it’s the guns themselves - they are just handy tools.
We have a society with very low empathy that’s been desensitized via glorified imitation violence. Movies, video games…
We have a society where bullies don’t get punished very often, and petty cruelties are swept under the rug or otherwise accepted as somehow ‘normal’. Worse yet, we often blame the victims for it happening.
We have a society where seeking help from mental health professionals is sneered at as being ‘weak’.
We have a society where, even if you WANT help, if you don’t have cash in hand, there’s a year to 18 month waiting list, unless you’re “in crisis”… then it’s often STILL a month.
We have a lot of “copy cats” who crave their 15 minutes of fame, but don’t even have Paris Hilton’s miniscule level of talent.
We also have a country bigger than all the European nations combined. So a larger number of these types of things should probably be expected.
Probably could come up with more lots more reasons, if I really thought about it
Or maybe the lax gun laws allowed both sides to be armed during “The Troubles”. I don’t think you can really hand wave that away like you seem to want to.
Might not be a very tight correlation, however, it perhaps depends how you calculate it
The US has a lot of land, but it’s my impression that the densely- populated parts are very dense by comparison to the densely populated parts of the other countries.
I was going for broad cultural recognition, since people do always bring up lutefisk.
But there’s a simple rule I go by: if it’s fish-based and comes from latitudes north of Denmark, it’s safe to assume I don’t even want to be in the same room as it*.
This is the culture that unleashed Hàkarl onto an innocent, unsuspecting world you understand. It’s like they figured it was totally unfair that durian doesn’t grow so far up north and set out to remedy that deficiency with mad science and/or sorcery. Or tried to make cheese out of fish. Either way, it’s just wrong and revolting and WHY?!
*itself a subset of my broader fish diet rule: “don’t”.
