Have you seen the offerings on TV streaming?
But if we’re talking pop fiction, everywhere watches American movies and TV series.
Heck, you could argue many countries have more gun fetish movies, because they watch all the American ones plus their own domestically produced variety.
No argument there.
Look, I’m as big a fan as anyone when it comes to enslaving people who choose to break a law, but doing it to folks who just happen into a certain age and sex seems to me to be a bridge too far…
Yes, and?
Just evidence of the nature of the US gun culture. As Velomont points out above, some, in the US, hold the 2nd amendment to be sanctified. It is a property of their religious belief. Perhaps the gun saturated media becomes toxic in the United States when it combines with the sanctity of the 2nd amendment. When those folks watch TV or play video games they may be having a different experience than the rest of the world.
A constitution sets out the values of a nation. When people draft a constitution, they put in the values that are important to them.
The United States has an armed revolutionary heritage. The Second Amendment proclaims that guns are a good thing, on par with values like free speech and fair trials. In the US, guns are good.
Canada does not have an origin story based in armed revolution. We value free speech and fair trials, plus things like language rights, gender equality and indigenous people. Those are our constitutional good things, even if we don’t always live up to them.
Guns don’t make that list of constitutional good things in Canada.
Wow, this cologne bottle looks like the cylinder of a revolver.
“ Armed with its mechanical, metallic and glamorous contours, the Azzaro Wanted bottle flaunts its masculinity with originality. Its cylindrical shape symbolises a liking for play and a taste for challenge.”
The OP asked about the difference between Canada and the US. I think we can ask what changed from 1970 to 2022 in the US.
I agree this is a problem. And not just guns. We see it in things like the incel community. Young men have not been given the tools to handle their emotions. They feel entitled and ripped off (regardless of whether it is true or not) and become extremely frustrated which can lead to them lashing out.
I’m not sure of a solution. Maybe make attending something like the Boy Scouts mandatory when they are kids and tweens (or even later into their teens). Something that connects them to their community and others around them and also helps teach them to manage their emotions better.
Re-reading, this isn’t quite what I meant to say. This is better:
Like Americans, we value free speech and fair trials, and also things like language rights, gender equality and indigenous peoples’s rights. Those are our constitutional good things, even if we don’t always live up to them.
Guns don’t make that list of constitutional good things in Canada.
Male peole may be in a particular cultural situation that makes them particularly vulnerable, but as a starting point can we please not posit that male people are somehow more fragile and predisposed to go behave like this unless we coddle them in a specific careful way that we don’t have to for the girls.
Well, young men are more predisposed to behaving like this (harming others). It’s in the numbers and it’s not even close.
This is not to say young women are more or less fragile or do not suffer emotional problems. It’s just that young women are much less likely to shoot 10-year-olds (or whoever) as a response to that angst (or whatever you want to call it).
You think no Boy Scout has ever committed a crime? Ted Bundy was a Boy Scout. BTK Killer was, too. So was Tyler Hadley, who at 17 beat his parents to death with a hammer.
I am certainly not suggesting Boy Scouts (or something like it) is a one-stop solution. Far from it.
I am just trying to think what has changed in the last 50 years to get us here. I do think it is a loss of community (at least partly). Not some religious prescription of community. Just knowing your neighbors. Having the kids play together outside and socialize.
Will that solve everything? Certainly not. We had bad things happen 50 years ago too (as you have noted).
But I think it is a place to start.
It might help with certain social issues, but I doubt its importance to mass shootings. That “lack of community” thing is true across the rich world. I’m 43, I’ve lived in at least a dozen places in the UK and I’ve never known any of my neighbours. And my experience in China was that incels were ten a penny*.
The only difference is no guns.
* One China anecdote: I was helping my girlfriend of the time move into a shared apartment. The guy she was going to be sharing with had lived there for 3 years.
Across the road was a massive mall / complex along the river side, beautiful. I asked him how the shops and restaurants are in that complex, and he told me he had never been. My gf told me later that every day he’d come back from work, get on league of legends (or some similar game), and order food in. No-one ever visited and he never went out.
I have had a similar experience with neighbors.
I think this is more applicable to children. They need socialization and must learn to master their emotions.
They aren’t the problem. They are part of the problem.
Sociologists say the two biggest causes are the fact we are failing our young men, and the media’s obsession with school shooting, sometimes almost making the shooter a martyr.
But yes, America’s gun culture is part of the problem, and certainly the easy accessibility of large capacity magazine weapons makes the death count higher.
The Secret Service did a study (wiki) [United States Secret Service](United States Secret Service - Wikipedia) study concluded that schools were placing false hope in physical security, when they should be paying more attention to the pre-attack behaviors of students. Zero-tolerance policies and metal detectors “are unlikely to be helpful,” the Secret Service researchers found. The researchers focused on questions concerning the reliance on SWAT teams when most attacks are over before police arrive, profiling of students who show warning signs in the absence of a definitive profile, expulsion of students for minor infractions when expulsion is the spark that push some to return to school with a gun, buying software not based on school shooting studies to evaluate threats although killers rarely make direct threats, and reliance on metal detectors and police officers in schools when shooters often make no effort to conceal their weapons.[209]
There is no one thing. There is no one easy answer.
He is right. It can’t be just guns, there were lots of guns back before Columbine, (and a teen could maybe get ahold of his dad’s fully auto fire assault rifle in Switzerland). It isn’t just that we are failing our young males- other cultures do also (but to the extent the USA does?), it isn’t just the media- other nations have media that cover such things, (although from what I have seen, they don’t do so obsessively, they don’t use the shootings to make a political point, and they don’t make martyrs out of the shooter). It is the deadly combo here.
If it was just the guns, then why the big spate of school shootings after 1999? You could get a AR15 for forty years before that. Hell you could buy a tommy gun , often by mail for 15 years- and there were no significant school shootings in that period*. But yeah, guns are a significant part of the problem. Just not the only part.
- Before Columbine, there were “school shootings” in the USA, but mostly in colleges and nearly all claiming only 1 or 2 victims. (in 1966 a man killed his wife and mother then took to the Austin College tower and killed 14 more, most of whom were adults , mostly with a bolt action rifle)
Didn’t they determine he had a brain tumor which may have been the cause?
Well you’re right of course, so let me clarify what I am saying.
The current situation in the US is obviously down to a number of factors, including the easy availability of guns (including SMGs) and there being lots of frustrated young men around.
However, frustrated young men is something common worldwide. And you only need one for a mass shooting. Meanwhile gun control works everyday in countries around the world.
So it seems obvious to me which factors seem most promising to focus on.
Access to guns have not caused the problem. Access to guns has exacerbated the problem.
The issue is some young man having a rage problem and they decide they want to make the world pay.
Easy access to guns lets them do that.