At the risk of pointing out the obvious, the US has more people, period, than many other countries.
I’m not sure if you’ve read any other comments in this thread. You don’t seem to be aware of the context of my comment at all. If I were you, I’d start again from the OP.
China’s recent attempts to maintain zero covid have gone disastrously. The Chinese government would rather the world not see that, yet thousands of videos have been shared on social media of draconian policies and awful quarantine conditions.
Yet, where are the videos of shootings, heck any videos of guns owned by civilians? If there are thousands of videos of events happening in a few cities over the last few months how many videos of years of gun violence should there be?
I know it’s a popular meme that “sneaky China can’t be trusted” but there are limits to what even the Chinese government could hide. This is something I’ve tried to get across to you for years.
But anyway, your point here goes beyond China to a worldwide conspiracy to make America look bad. Ridiculous doesn’t even begin to cover it.
The US also has the most serial killers. Mass shootings are dramatic but, ultimately, if you’re killing 6 people in a few minutes or killing them over the course of decades, either way it’s an indicator that you’ve gone wrong in the head.
Which brings us to the matter that counting things in terms of mass shootings is an arbitrary method for comparison between countries. If, for example, crazy people in France drive cars through crowds, crazy people in Germany poison the town well, and crazy people in the UK set off bombs, then sure it will look like those countries are peaceful slices of heaven when compared on the “mass shooting scale”, all the while you might have more people getting slaughtered by crazies in those places (per capita) than are murdered by American crazies, here. Arbitrarily including some weapons of murder in the count and disregarding others is not reasonable for a proper comparison. As it stands, that comparison is, effectively, impossible to make because the world has sort of decided that it’s okay to drive a dump truck through 30 people but it’s a travesty if you shoot 6 people to death. We don’t keep the metrics that we should be keeping.
The real metric should be “compulsive murder count by people suffering mental illness”. The mechanism of the murder - gun, bomb, poison, truck, etc. - is largely going to come down to the societal norm. Likewise, the given justification for the murder - “God made me do it”, “Lizard people must be stopped”, “The Quickening will be mine!”, etc. - is also going to come down to random, societal influences.
That all said, the US probably does have a higher compulsive murder count by people suffering mental illness than many other countries. Personally, I would expect this to come from a few different things:
- The rules for forcible hospitalization and medicating are more open in non-American countries. Dangerous-seeming people are more likely to be institutionalized and treated, against their will.
- Universal healthcare is available in all non-American countries. People who feel themselves going nuts are able to seek out and get - for free - psychiatric care and attention.
- US media and the entertainment industry advertise mass shootings and serial killers prolifically. While it may be that it doesn’t matter so much whether a person goes on a rampage with a gun, strangulates people one by one over decades, sets off a bomb, or whatever, there seems to be a large cross-over with spree killers, at least, and suicidal thoughts. Where those individuals might have, usually, gone off into the woods and killed themselves, there’s a non-zero chance that the sheer amount of publicity around mass murder - especially with guns - helps to guide a small percentage of those with suicidal thoughts towards spree killings. Reducing this exposure, theoretically, could reduce the number of occurrences.
The US has a society that is more psychopathic/sociopathic than other countries’ societies. Here, you learn very early in life that you can and should take whatever you’re able from anybody you can scam or overpower (physically or otherwise) and you are lauded for it.
We make TV ads about people getting the best of other people or making a fool out of them (often a “friend” or parent or spouse) and we consider these funny.
Our society demands that we win at all costs–no matter what damage that causes to others. We are steeped in this foul poison from birth.
It’s one thing to value individualism, it’s quite another to have very little compassion or empathy for others. In fact it’s sociopathic.
Yes exactly 100% definitely this. There are plenty of people like that in other countries, and you’ll hear about the horrible things they do. But its not 20 people shot dead, its “young man kills best friend with knife” or some such.
But not mass deaths, as the riots in India and the bombings elsewhere show.
A bomb is easier to make at home than a gun.
This may be another reason we have so many-
Hate & violence sites, like 4chan, etc. We need to shut those down.
Than all but 2 other nations.
Oddly, you don;t need a gun to kill lots of people in a short time.
Please, don’t be ridiculous. We know China censors it’s news, that is not some weird conspiracy theory. And we know the USA is the 3rd most populous nation, that is not some weird conspiracy theory.
Thus, we would expect to have more of most neuroses , etc than any other nations, except India. That is math, not some weird conspiracy theory. 
[
Exactly.
True.
But far far harder than walking into a shop and buying a gun.
There is one reason and one reason alone why these events are basically unique to America (as in they happen in other countries but are epoch defining events, rather than “Tuesday”). That America makes it uniquely easy to access weapons that can kill huge numbers of people in a very short amount of time.
Yeah, a random psychopath can in theory make a bomb capable of killing 8 people and wounding dozens more, but its really hard and a more likely outcome is blowing off their fingers. In America they don’t need to.
Gonna ask for a cite on this. You mean number of deaths or number of events? Because we have a mass shooting event, on average, more than once a day in this country.
As far as I know, no other nation per capita has anything like that happen near as frequently.
Due to a weird definition of “mass shooting”- I don’t consider a gang drug shoot-out a mass shooting.
Glad you agree with me, by posting an article that shows my point exactly
Unlike the US, Switzerland strictly regulates who can buy a gun, so while I’m sure Switzerland has the same number of psychopaths* as the US they are not able to get hold of guns, so they have far fewer mass shootings.
- You could argue that due to large number of billionaires who choose to reside in Switerland for tax and finance reasons their rate is higher, but thats a side track I don’t want to get into
What does that even matter for the purposes of this thread, which is about causes of these mass attacks?
The OP was hypothesizing an unusual number of psychopaths. But, if as you seem to be suggesting, we don’t have an unusual number of these, then are you suggesting the prevalence of weapons is responsible for the number of attacks?
We seem, maybe, to have slightly more per capita, and IMHO that is due to our health system. No UHC, and closing all the mental institutions. made people like the Highland park shooter get away with his dangerous threats until after the deed was done.
But yes, sure, the wide availability of guns does make it easier for them to kill more when they “snap”. Mind you, car ramming, bombs, machetes and such do plenty of lethal damage.
So, more guns does not make more psychopaths- poor health care means we can’t treat them earlier. More guns means we have more instances when we do not treat them. Guns do not cause them. Guns enable them.
- I posted two articles. Ignoring the existence of one doesn’t actually make it go away.
- Switzerland performs better than countries who have lower total (per capita) gun ownership. Given that gun technology doesn’t feasibly exist to restrict usage of the gun to the person who was granted ownership, we would expect the sheer presence to facilitate greater usage by relatives, thieves, visitors, etc. by their simple presence. Those people aren’t vetted. But we don’t see more gun homicides in Switzerland, even though there’s a much higher probability that a crazy person can get access to a gun there through physical proximity - and that’s before considering the question of how effective vetting can really be? While there are certainly lots of people who signal their danger to the world earlier, there are also many who lose their job, get a divorce, discover an addiction, have their hormones go haywire, etc. and spontaneously start to behave nutty. So we would, again, expect that the sheer presence of guns in Switzerland would cause the country to have a higher rate of gun murder and mass shootings than countries with no or fewer guns, because vetting is not perfect. That’s not what we see.
We don’t need to wonder. We can just look at the numbers. Switzerland has better gun laws than the US so it has a fewer gun deaths, but it still has much more (including mass shootings) than other European countries that have much stricter gun laws than either.
So I mean maybe there is just a coincidental relationship between strict gun laws and lack of psychopaths in a society (where the US has more psychopaths than Switzerland but Switzerland has more than Germany or France, despite being incredibly similar to both those countries in most aspects of society other than gun laws). Or maybe the difference is how easy it is to get a gun?
Doesn’t support your case. Yeah an individual can kill a lot people with a car in a short amount of time, probably a lot easier than with a bomb or a knife, but its still far harder than with an assault rifle. As demonstrated by the list at the bottom of that article. That world wide list of car ramming attacks for all time looks like the list of mass shootings in the US, for like a maybe a year? maybe a bad 6-8 week period?
This isn’t the thing that we were debating though. I was pointing out the ridiculousness of your claim that other countries may have as many, or more, mass killings than the US but all of them manage to keep it hush hush.
We know China censors news yes, however I was pointing out the ridiculousness of your specific claim.
Plus, it’s not only China, your claim requires a worldwide conspiracy.
Why?
Because, believe it or not, when people talk about America’s homicide, gun violence and mass shooting numbers they usually refer to per capita numbers.
So this whole tangent you’re on about America being the number 3 country for population and as long as you can think of some ad hoc theory about hidden spree killings in China and India you’ve explained away America’s gun problems…is pretty sad really.
Yes, if you go to this interesting Bloomberg article, it breaks down gun deaths per country in various ways. The chart for gun deaths for developed economies, per 100,000, shows a stark difference between the US and the rest of the countries on that list. (I don’t know if there’s any way to copy it to here?)
(For me, the significance of comparing to developed economies is that one assumes that they are the countries that have similar mental stressors as in the
US.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2022-us-gun-violence-world-comparison/
Thanks for linking that.
And some of the graphs are even more stunning when viewed in context.
For example, even allowing for the fact that poor countries tend to have more homicides, we see that all of the very worst countries for gun violence are…poor (-ish) countries close to the United States.
Mexico, Honduras, Colombia, Guetamala…countries that are the destination for a massive illegal trade in American-manufactured weapons.
But no, it can’t be guns that are the problem.
I said nothing whatsoever like that. Only China. I did not claim India or any other nation be be hiding their stats. Just China. Got that?
I made no such claim.
Yes, the USA has the 3rd largest population, yes? They we would expect, just by math alone, for the USA to have more Psychopaths than any other nation that India. Are you math challenged? . Or do you see conspiracy theories everywhere?
I am sorry, I can not find the term “per capita” in the OP. Nor are we just talking about gun violence and mass shooting. We were talking about all sorts of killings and similar bad shit.
Cherrypicked and thus worthless stats.
This is not just another gun control thread. And I resent the attempts to turn it into one. This is about Psychopaths , and indeed those Psychopaths who resort to gun violence.
Did you also note that of those “developed nations” (the UN rejects any such identification, there is no agreed upon list) that the USA is also the only one without UHC? Maybe mental health is the problem.