BTW, in geographical area, yes you do.
IN terms of population, the US is dwarfed by the EU, never mind the whole of Europe. 312 million vs 502 million.
Which to me makes it sound like there should be more of them in the EU …
Yet weirdly the middle classes seem to be pushing gravad lax (I seem to hear it mentioned a lot on American TV at least). Never understood that, the stuff is foul.
Not from my experience. Maybe Manhattan or the densest parts of Chicagoland, but take for example Miami:
if you look at a road map, you see all these dots: Miami, Miami Beach, Fort Lauderdale, Coral Gables… it looks like they’re separate cities. Administratively, they are, but if you get a closer map (say, Google maps at about 50% of the bar), you see that it’s a single conurbation (sp?). A population the size of Madrid or Barcelona’s metropolitan areas, but spread out on an area about the size of Spain’s biggest province, because it’s all little houses, little houses, little houses…
LA, Dallas, Houston… the same. Many American cities have a few supertallbuildings downtown, a downtown area where buildings may have 3-4 floors, but the majority of the urban area is little houses. In Spain’s or Italy’s cities, to see an area of little houses you have to move out of the metropolitan area’s main city, and sometimes (for example in Bilbao) you move from 10-storey housing to fields with cows.
I’m not making any claims at all. I’m reporting information that can be easily verified from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports and Census Data.
Some people murder. Wikipedia has a grim List of Massacres. Lots of these people are outside the US.
On 4 July, 1976, and easy date for an American to remember, a French farmer went nuts and killed a number of villagers using only a single shot shotgun. It is not exactly the number of type of weapons, but that has to be a factor, murder comes from a murderous heart.
Gun control is :
- Respecting firearms - They are tools, not toys.
- Making sure your target is indeed your target. And there is nothing else in the line of fire.
- Making a clean kill with one shot
Having an inflated ego, a short fuse, and/or no morals AND a gun is probably a bad idea. MOST gun owners are responsible, law abiding, and generally good citizens.
As for school shootings, a pattern of bullying starts the slow fuse of rage. Administration and public indifference fuels it. Lack of support or therapy fails to defuse it. Glamorization of vigilante “justice” sparks the idea of 'getting even" …
Then something really minor sets it all in motion.
Workplace violence? In the US our identity and self worth are too often tied to our jobs. Getting fired, suddenly or 'unfairly", takes all that away. Folks with poor self esteem and self control then decide to they were “wronged” and take out their frustrations upon their ex-boss and coworkers.
Either perp could (and a few have) do their mayhem with a car, too. Should we start a movement to ban those? - They’re bad for the environment, anyway.
As for criminals, they’ll still manage to get guns anyway. A disarmed populace will just make their pickings easier.
The last paragraph disappeared from my post? It should have concluded:
You actually want to SOLVE the problem? De-stigmatize seeking mental health care (right now it’s not just social either, you can actually be denied a job - they don’t care WHY you went), and punish the bullies and turds in the school AND the workplace.
Want a feel good band-aid that does absolutely nothing to solve the problem? Seek more gun laws. :smack:
As has been pointed out to you - the UK has never had lax gun laws. Both sides had to go to great lengths to get guns.. Initially the provisional ira armed itself from old caches from previous campaigns, mainly ww2 stuff.
But then US money (NORAID) enabled them to buy US guns - the iconic Armalite.
The Libya stepped in to help out.
Protestant paramilitaries and security forces overlapped but South Africa Armscor helpfully sold them a bunch of PLO weapons got from the Israeli’s.
I don’t know why some people find it hard to conceive that the UK has never been a gun-toting society. Guns have always been very strictly controlled and after Dunblane tightened up to the extent that it is practically impossible to legally own a hand gun outside of club membership.
That’s why there’s such a demand for converted starting pistols among gang types.
We can hand wave your claims away because you have not the faintest idea what you are talking about.
Why gun control laws don’t work:
- They only affect law abiding citizens.
- it doesn’t address demand. Smuggling them into just about anywhere is actually pretty easy if you put your mind to it. Think about how well the war on drugs has worked. Or prohibition.
- If you can’t buy one, you can build one - firearm, propellant and projectile - With basic hand tools, unrelated and untraceable bits, a few simple chemicals, and a basic plan easily downloaded from the net. Access to a basic lathe and drill press makes things even easier.
Pipe bombs are even easier yet. Or plastic bottle ones for that matter… If somebody is bent upon mayhem, there’s lots of ways around gun laws more of the same will barely slow anybody down
Come to the Mid-Atlantic area sometime, and try to figure out where the DC Metro Area ends and the Baltimore Metro Area begins, or figure out where the Baltimore area ends and the Philly Metro Area area begins. It’s more difficult than it sounds and there are borderlands areas that could be considered both. The 19th century mill town of Laurel, MD can arguably be considered now to be both a DC suburb and a Baltimore suburb. True, there are some rural or semirural areas here and there, but you are never in the “sticks” and there are developments that have sprouted up all over the place.
They don’t seem to be inclined to collect basic immigration data either.
The EU doesn’t seem to be that picky. They report the non-European population of Europe as 3-4%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Europe#Other_data
In fact it appears that the homicide rate in the United States for all ethnic groups is lower than the areas of the world than originated from and the homicide rate in the United States is lower than world homicide rate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_rate
People create the illusion that the United States is unusually violent by cherry picking the countries they compare it against. The fact of the matter is that for all our firearms, the U.S. is not an unusually violent country.
I can think of many incidents in other countries. Until the Norway massacre the worst single case happened in Australia, IIRC. Finland had two really had ones in a span of a couple of years just a few years ago.
The wildness is that you want to break it down within demographics in the US (Americans of European descent) but do not do so for Europeans (Europeans of European descent). You are not comparing like with like and when challenged demanded proof from me that it would make a difference.
Clue: it isn’t up to me to provide the truth. I’m just pointing out that you are making a pointless, one sided comparison that does nothing to help the discussion.
“Lax” is subjective. The laws before Dunblane and Hungerford were certainly lax in comparison to the laws the UK has now, but not lax in comparison to the US.
For the record, I’m British and was born in 1974. OK, I was an early teen when Hungerford happened but I remember it and the discussion about the laws afterwards. I was in my mid twenties when Dunblane happened. I am well aware of what went on and how the law was changed.
What goes really well with gun control laws is strict and harsh sentencing for if a gun was used, like they have in the UK. Someone burgling your house will not have a gun because, frankly, he’ll go from in trouble to utterly up shit creak if he is caught.
Then again, you could say that gun control laws are not simply the laws to do with who can own a gun, but also to do with how society deals with those that use them.
One thing that has not been mentioned is that because the US is so big geographically it is harder to get the police close to people. It makes more sense to have a gun in the US for home defense because police have to cover more square miles and are therefore likelier to be further away if a citizen needed them. In a small, dense country like the UK it is easier for cops to be closer to citizens who are being threatened. This leads to a culture of gun ownership in the US versus no similar culture in the UK. All policies involve tradeoffs, so the US is choosing less overall crime and more mass shootings, while the UK chooses less mass shooting and much more overall crime. Different cultures have different priorities the US and the UK have gun laws that reflect their citizen’s different preferences. It is like explaining why people in the UK love Marmite and people in the US love ranch dressing, it is just a matter of different tastes and cultures.
Since I found a statistic that non-European immigrants in Europe are 3-4% percent of the population. For your argument to valid you would have to assume that the homicide rate for non-Europeans living in Europe is at least 10 times higher than it is for Europeans.
I also pointed out that U.S. homicide rate is below the world average and that any argument that the U.S. has a high rate of homicide is arrived at by cherry picking your data.
Fair enough. It was just an initial impression from the numbers. Probably not worth a second thought.
If you want to change the laws of society it should only be done in response to societal needs or problems. Something I agreed with after the Norwegian massacre was an article I read that said Norway’s legal response should essentially be nothing at all. The PM and the King should attend funerals and mourn with the country.
Norway is a happy, healthy, prosperous country with a low crime rate. There should not be any legal response to an aberration like Brievik.
That’s the way I feel about spree shootings in the United States, in a country as large as the U.S., they are so uncommon as to essentially be irrelevant.
The 30,000+ deaths each year from non-spree killing discharges of firearms are more worthy of discussion when it comes to changing policy. (17k are suicides though, which arguably are a different problem entirely.) I mostly do not desire to limit private ownership of firearms, though. Although I do believe in licensing and mandatory education simply because growing up in the stix I knew a few people growing up who literally played with guns like toys and accidentally killed themselves.
I knew a guy who used to, as a party trick, put an empty revolver to his temple and pull the trigger to freak people out. About 15 years ago (I hadn’t seen him since my early 20s), I heard he pulled that trick at a party while really drunk and found out it wasn’t actually unloaded. Well, I guess his brain found out when a .38 round turned it into mush.
I don’t know that education/licensing fix that kind of stupid but maybe if they start at an early age they could.
Unfortunately I’m essentially in opposition to most gun regulations proposed because we’ve got an intractable divide in this country. Pro-gun people refuse any regulation and anti-gun people want to use regulation as a backdoor means of prohibiting any meaningful private ownership, it’s unfortunate.
Homicide rate or gun-related homicide rate?
Because only one of those is relevant to a discussion about shootings in the US: