These tragedies happen every few months in the USA, but are incredibly rare in places like Scandinavia, the UK, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand. What are they doing that prevents massacres, and how can those same policies be implemented here?
They make it much harder to own semiautomatic, high capacity firearms.
“How to implement them” is, regrettably, a difficult political question.
Another factor is, simply, society’s attitude to guns. It seems to me, from postings here on the SDMB and from comments in the US media, that the US population has a much different attitude towards gun ownership than is the case in other countries. That’s my impression, as a neighbour looking over the fence and listening to your conversations.
For instance, you’ve put guns into your Constitution. No other country has that kind of constitutional protection, so far as I know (I asked that some years ago in a thread and the answer seemed to be that the US is unique).
That has two effects: it makes it more difficult for US governments to regulate guns (in Canada, a government can regulate guns just as easily as cars), and it also creates a strong popular argument that “Guns are good!” (you don’t provide constitutional protection unless it’s for something that has high social value).
Y’all kinda already have so many guns in circulation that I can’t see there’s any legislation that’s likely to make a dent, to be honest.
Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted in some ways. Many people have built personal arsenals now, how can you undo a thing like that?
boffking, this is an obvious I-know-what-answer-I-want-to-hear question.
Anyway, they don’t have the Second Amendment, obviously.
This a million times. I know several not-American people who own multiple guns, but only one of them views them the way many Americans seem to, as something which symbolizes both personal freedoms and national pride (well, in his case, not the national pride part). The rest are police, military or hunters and only carry when their job requires it or they are planning on shooting something (be it clay pigeons or actual live animals). Well, I guess the artillery commander doesn’t properly own the guns, but he also doesn’t store them at home.
The one guy who likes to flaunt his ownership of a handgun and who snerks loudly, calling the rest of us “wimps” and “cowards” when a mass shooting comes up and most people’s reaction includes a high degree of confusion (specially at the idea that the way to stop mass shootings is “more guns”)… he’s a 5’4" bully whose reaction to someone knowing something he does not is to get waaaaay too close barking “show me! show me!” (if you do show him he backs up to “well, I don’t like it!”). Makes me think of a badly-trained yappy dog.
I would just add that, under the axiom,“An armed society is a polite society,” it seems to follow that when there are mass shootings in another country, they are much more rude events. I bet that gunmen in Europe don’t even say please and thank you when shooting toddlers in churches.
I doubt guns are the issue anyway. Look at places like Switzerland and Israel where firearms are commonplace. The guy could probably have killed just as many by driving his car into the church.
And let’s not forget that someone nearby with a firearm stepped up and stopped the incident from becoming much worse. How long did it take law enforcement to get there?
How did he stop it from becoming worse? The gunman had already shot everybody in the church.
You are reminding me of the Ali G episode when he asked a security consultant how to defend against someone hijacking a train and plowing it into the White House.
Why do you have to be so pessimistic? The score is Bad Guys 26, Good Guys 1. It wasn’t a shutout.
I think the theory is that he was prevented from going on and shooting additional people at other location(s). I don’t think anyone can really know what his precise plans were after he left the church but it’s certainly a reasonable possibility that he might have murdered additional people if the armed citizen hadn’t intervened.
Or to phrase it another way: firearms didn’t stop the actual mass shooting, but firearms are speculated to have perhaps stopped a hypothetical mass shooting that is supposed to possibly occur at some later time.
Like you, I’m not sure why people aren’t celebrating this conjecture.
It is not likely that policy is what is causing the difference in mass shootings. Mass shootings affect many different countries with many different laws. Finland has gun laws that mandate registration of every gun and a license for every gun owner that has the reason for having a gun. Sport and hunting are valid reasons and self defense is not. Yet despite these laws there have been mass shootings in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2012, and 2016. Finland has 1.7% of the population of the US. Norway suffered the worst gun massacre in recent history, and there was a panel which recommended changing the gun laws. These recommendations were never passed and the country has not suffered any mass shootings since. The UK has not had any mass shootings since the 2010 Cumbria shootings and there were no changes in policy after that. After the Port Arthur massacre Australia massively changed its gun laws and has not had any mass shootings since. New Zealand changed its gun laws not nearly as drastically after a mass shooting and has not had any since. Canada passed new gun laws after the Ecole PolyTecnique massacre but still had mass shootings in 2005, 2006, 2012, three in 2014, and 2016. The US has 9 times as many people as Canada.
Can I point out that the US has 321 million people, the combined Scandinavian countries are just 21 million (and they’ve had some shootings), New Zealand only 4.6 million, Australia 24 million…
Not necessarily fair comparisons there.
Guns aren’t the problem, mother-in-laws are.
A lot of other countries believe in universal health care, including mental health care. The U.S. doesn’t.
The US has 9.5 times the gun homicide rate per capita that Canada does. 11 times Finland, 22 times Australia, 33 times New Zealand, 36 times Norway, 60 times the UK.
Blah blah blah, not “mass shootings.” Given that they’re more rare it’s inevitable that anomalies will occur and countries that have far less gun violence will have disproportionate mass shootings. It’s also completely missing the whole point.
Which is why people point out those kinds of statistics.
If ever two issues were linked those must surely be mental health provision and gun deaths.
The problem with this theory is that many a mentally ill person doesn’t *want *treatment.
Suppose someone is sadistic, violently hates people, and salivates at the thought of killing people. Which is more likely - that such a person will think, of his or her own accord, “Time to find some victims to kill,” or, “I am a sick, diseased person and need to go seek out some professional treatment over the course of many counseling sessions?”