This is no meant as a glib or antagonising question, forgive me if it comes across as particularly stupid.
Has anyone done any research on the numbers killed by lone crazies in the US vs numbers killed by crazies of a particular mindset in Europe and Turkey? I’m just wondering whether the defiance of gun owners (particularly those guns which are obviously not for hunting or self defence, but assault) in the face overwhelming evidence could be - in any way - compared with the policy of letting into Europe many people of whom some may be linked to Daesh?
As a European I have a strong sense that allowing assault rifles to be openly and legally sold is wrong, as some are used for mass murder, and an ‘American’ issue. Could some Americans see the allowing of millions of Middle Eastern and North African people into Europe in a similar way?
I’m not sure if there is any sort of logical point here, or I’m just emotionally reacting to another mass murder in Europe. I’m not calling for the repatriation of millions of Muslims, and/or to close Europe’s borders to any more. Just as banning the sale of assault rifles in the US would likely have little effect on the intentions of psychopaths, also would the banning of Muslims have little effect on those who were determined to wreak havoc on innocents. I put this to some colleagues tonight, who work in many countries inside and out of Europe, and no one had a reply. It may be because it’s a stupid thought or maybe they hadn’t thought about it until I raised it.
Most of the mass shootings in the US are not motivated by politics or religion. Most are just crazy people doing crazy shit (Colombine, Newtown, CT, etc).
Availability of firearms aside, America is a bit different from Europe culturally. I’m pretty sure our mental health care system isn’t as good as Europe. We also seem to have a strong culture of narcissism, overindulgence and independence. Which means, IMHO, the US is far more likely to produce angry loners who fill their heads up with fantastical nonsense, grab a few high powered weapons and then rampage before anyone realizes their weird loner neighbor was a crazed kill murder maniac.
But what Europe does seem to have is a major issue integrating immigrants into their populations.
The best proxy that I can think of for this data would be to try and find if statistics exist for those sent to a mental institution as punishment for a crime, by country. But I doubt that you will be able to find a breakout which specifies their actual crime, if you can even find that data.
But it’s probably not a horrible assumption to make that of those committed, the ratio of crimes that they committed will be fairly consistent from one country to another. So if you compare the number of homicides in a country to the number of people committed to legal care by the legal system, that will probably be a pretty good indicator of whether the prevalence of preventative care in the EU, or what-have-you, is able to reduce the number of homicides caused by crazy people. If there is something in those countries which helps to prevent unstable people from lashing out, then there should be fewer individuals committed to an institution compared to total homicides.
That won’t tell you whether European crazies are more or less capable of killing people, though. But given that higher rates of gun ownership seem to reduce homicide rates overall, and even the relationship between gun ownership and gun homicides is very tricky to pull out of the data, so it wouldn’t seem that guns enable people to kill a larger number of individuals than other means, like arson, bombs, poison, knives, trucks, frying pans, etc. Bombs may be a bit tricky for your average unstable person to build. But most other means (like arson) are pretty straightforward (and possibly more effective).
Europe’s mental health care systems aren’t as good as we’d like, either. We have many of the same difficulties: a lack of physical diagnostic tools, social views of mental illness as a weakness (leading to people being less likely to see a head doctor than a back doctor), and then there may be coverage issues. Adolescence-onset schizophrenia and similar diagnosis appear to be a pretty big source of “nutso going on a rampage”, either against their own family or at school. But what we do have is that difference in mindset about how weapons are viewed and which objects are we more likely to think of if you say “weapon”: our nutsos are more likely to grab a knife, even if they have guns available; we’ve had a few with crossbows or swords.
Daniel Amen’s got some really cool TED talks about using physical diagnostic tools (brain scans)