4.88/0.66 gives me 7.39(393939…). Were you dividing by the average of the countries you listed?
Other countries don’t have legislative bodies bought and paid for by the NRA.
So, the incident confirms the value of the Second Amendment?
Has the White House determined yet whether the shooter was antifa or communist?
Cite for the part I’ve reddened? What I’ve read is:
- Suicides are much more likely to be successful when a gun is available
- Violence is much more likely to be fatal when a gun is involved
- Mad killers are much more likely to kill large numbers when a gun is available.
Surely for “as high as any” it’d be compared to the highest on that list (I think Australia, at 0.98) which is ~4.9, which close enough to “4 times” for government work.
Correct, It was perhaps clumsy wording on my part** Nava.** in my effort to be charitable. (I could have gone for the average and it would look worse)
You’re correct, but I’d also point out that there are different attitudes toward violence. Americans still embrace a culture of violence. We see it in our movies and music. We’re a culture of bullies. We bully other nations. The rich and powerful bully the rest. We would rather imprison people in violent facilities than educate them, and would rather execute the condemned than rehabilitate them. We worship our military and seem proud of our military prowess, and it definitely influences public opinion on how to choose to deal hostile states or just states who oppose our national interests. America lives by the sword. And each day, hundreds of people die by the same sword.
Guns in and of themselves aren’t responsible for violence in America - it’s our mindset. However, guns are the ultimate representation of that mentality and they’re even an extension of it. America was settled, and resettled again and again as we moved Westward, an accomplishment made possible largely through bad intentions and violence to reinforce them. American Indians were ultimately outgunned. Mexicans in the Southwest were ultimately outgunned. Black Freedmen in the South had their rights to own guns taken away and White Southerners established and reinforced racial apartheid and White supremacy with the barrels of many guns. Guns represent power. For those who feel like they have no voice, no power, guns give them power they don’t otherwise possess. To a mass shooter, it gives them the power to play God.
In most other countries people don’t even need to be able to read to come up with those conclusions.
Are you a city-dweller?
There are plenty of Americans who use them for hunting and for sport. And as for defence, don’t forget that in many parts of the US there are snakes. If you’re going where there are snakes, it makes sense to carry a gun to shoot the buggers. And then there are cougars and wolves and foxes. If you’re a livestock farmer, you don’t want anything attacking your livestock.
I’m a UK city dweller, but I have no problem with our system allowing for farmers, gamekeepers, people who shoot game and people who engage in competitive shooting sports to have guns: the kind and number of guns they need for the purposes in question, kept in regularly inspected security conditions when not in use, and no more than that. And the people themselves have to be mentally fit to be allowed a gun: the only times that’s broken down (two or three times in the last thirty years) it was clearly a case of the local police being slack in spotting the signs of an individual going off the rails.
I suspect that one major difference is in the concept of hunting: with us, all land is owned by someone, and you don’t have a general right to hunt, any more than you have a general right to do anything else on someone else’s property. So if you want a gun to hunt with you have to show whose land you’re hunting over, and for what, that you have the landowner’s permission and the right gun for the game you’re hunting -
and no more than that. Game shooting is primarily a commercial enterprise tightly controlled by the landowners. For farmers needing guns to protect livestock from vermin, there’s not usually a problem to get a licence for the appropriate number of shotguns - but, again, no more than that.
What we don’t allow is the personal self-defence argument, nor do we allow anybody to use any of the obviously acceptable reasons for a gun to go out and buy just anything they like, and more than they could ever reasonably need.
Several of the people I know who have hunting licenses and would tell you they use their guns for “hunting” include “hunting animals on my farm which don’t belong to me”. They don’t call it defense, whether the animal is rabbit or boar.
Some African countries have high overall homicide rates and low gun homicide rates. It isn’t impossible in principle to kill someone with a knife, just more difficult.
That’s the case now, but it didn’t used to be. The most common for reason for owning a gun in America used to be (by self-report) “hunting”, but now it’s “self defence”. (Interest in hunting has dropped, while hysteria about crime/terrorism and guns as a cultural identity marker have risen). Needless to say I don’t see this as a good thing, but it didn’t used to be the case.
It’s also worth pointing out that America’s gun problem is really a handgun problem, and the kind of guns people use for sporting purposes tend to be quite different. People tend (surprisingly to me) not to use rifles or shotguns to commit murders to any great degree. I remember seeing the murder statistics for Chicago in 2011 broken down by “weapon”, and while of course the vast majority of murders were done by handgun, less than five involved rifles or shotguns. More people were killed with fists than with rifles or shotguns.
Because guns are uniquely designed to enable the shooter to kill and injure large numbers of people in a short time, often from a distance.
In about twenty minutes, the Las Vegas shooter killed 58 people and injured 500 more, from a distance where none of his victims could see him or try to stop him.
He couldn’t have done that with a club, or poison, a knife, a car, a cliff, a baseball bat, etc.
You’re right, the victims are just as dead. That’s not the point. The point is that guns enable a person to kill and injure a large number of people in a very short time, unlike all the other things you mention, except for a bomb.
Bombs and guns are instruments for killing. They get special attention.
Or should, in a sensible country.
I honestly think if you gave everyone in the UK a gun, we should shortly be the worst nation in the world for gun homicide - we would jump into first place. We’re a highly urbanised country, and there’s a lot of momentary stupidity like road rage that would probably escalate to murder if a gun was easily available to everyone in the heat of the moment.
All of that might be true but “movies and music” are of questionable relevance. We Canadians get that same cultural exposure you do (in fact, given the number of Canadians who are working in entertainment in the U.S., arguably your pop culture is really our pop culture to some degree, exported) and we’re not as violent as you.
I partly blame the “honor” culture, left over from some southern antebellum mindset where any insult, no matter how trivial, justifies a violent response. Somebody made a joke at your expense? Pistols at dawn! Somebody looked at your woman? Kill him! You’ve been “dissed”? Start popping caps!
It is a cultural thing.
In the UK, unless you are farmer or gamekeeper shooting foxes raiding your chicken coop in the countryside, there is no reason why a member of the public should own a gun.
There are some sportsmen who own guns, but they are confined to specialist clubs. The mass shooting incidents we have had in the past are still vivid reminders of what happens when some crazy individual decides to take out their grievance on society. Hungerford, Dunblane, Cumbria. These were not crime ridden ghettos, but peaceful country towns in England and the victims wholly innocent members of the public.
You can get 5 years in prison for possession of an unauthorized firearm in the UK. You have to be a pretty serious criminal to get access to an unlicensed gun. There are regular amnesties for the public to hand in any firearm anonymously.
There is also a general confidence in the police that they should handle anything to do with firearms and then they only wear them at times of high threat.
Having said that, shooting still go on between drug gangs. Some firearms are smuggled in from Eastern Europe. Supposedly deactivated weapons are reactivated. It helps that the UK is an island there are thorough border checks for firearms. Getting one mail-order from the US will have the police at your door.
If the police hear of anyone with a weapon in public it would prompt a swift reaction and an armed response team would descend on the area very quickly. The sight of weapon is very rare and would prompt most people to immediately call the police. So the solution in the UK is prohibition and it has been largely successful, it has wide public support.
However, you don’t need guns to kill a lot of people and this has been seen in recent terrorist attacks using vehicles and knives. In London a lot of the major landmarks and bridges now have protection barriers nstalled to prevent attacks using vehicles. Heaven knows how bad it would be if every crazy could get hold of the sort firepower that is commonly available in the US. There would be carnage.
I am not sure there is an answer in any other country that can help the US with its problem. Given that changing the Constitution and Firearms Prohibition are pretty much non-starters at a federal level. Other countries that have stable, developed political and legal systems for resolving disputes, simply do not have a problem with state having a monopoly on lethal force. Most nation states have some sort of unresolved consitutional issue and this one seems peculiar to the US.
However, the US is a very decentralised nation and lots of solutions are possible.
Would a gun free zone work at a local level?
Presumably places schools and other public places have rules banning the carrying of firearms? How does it work?
Could that be extended to a wider gun free zone if security could be garanteed by law officers?
What was the UK like before gun control was passed? People killing each other over whether the milk goes in first or second? No, the murder rate back then in 1920 was about one eight the murder rate in the US and the murder rate now is one fifth the US rate.
In the UK there were 213 murders by stabbing, in the US there were 1,567. Was that caused by the number of knives in the US? There were 7 poisonings in the UK in the US there were 69. Is that because of more poisons in the US? There were 33 people in the UK beaten to death without a weapon, 660 in the US. Do people in the US have harder fists and feet? Five people burned to death in the UK, 71 in the US. Are there more matches in the US? 24 people strangled or asphyxiated and 185 in the US. Are there more garrotes in the US?
The US is a much more violent and homicidal country than the UK and has been for recorded history.
I don’t mind a rancher packing the appropriate firearm to take care of wolves, snakes, etc. But that firearm is not an assault rifle.
Gun laws vary widely in the US and do not appear to cause the variance in homicide rates. For example, in the State of Illinois Cook County had in 2014 a murder rate of 9 per one hundred thousand people. Neighboring Dupage County had a rate of 1 per one hundred thousand people.
The state with the loosest gun laws, Utah, has a murder rate of 1.8 per 100,000 people and the state with the tightest gun laws, California, has a murder rate of 4.8 per 100,000.