There are guns available in many other countries, but you rarely, if ever, hear about people going on a shooting rampage during peacetime in countries other than the US.
Why is that?
I would venture that the OP isn’t entirely accurate.
Dunblane and Hungerford in the UK instantly spring to mind.
[emphasis added]
Probably because mass shootings in places nobody knows aren’t interesting news.
They also happen in other places, as you can see here.
Every society has its neuroses. Gun culture is the US’s.
That’s just a handful of incidents in nearly 20 years.
One of them is a knife attack and Beslan!!!, please…
The answer is so easy and obvious but a lot of Americans just don’t want to hear it.
The percentage of cases of people running amok in other countries could well be just as high as in the US.
The fact that they can’t easily lay their hands on a gun and pick the next best thing, like a knife or something, keeps the casualties down and not that newsworthy.
To be fair, he did say ‘rarely’, although guns are certainly not freely available in the UK.
Dunblane was the most recent UK school shooting. On the BBC news, it was said there have been 20 US school shootings since Dunblane.
From your link:
So, there have been 6 cases worldwide since 1989 (I’m not counting Beslan, because it was an act of terrorism, and not some nutcase going on a rampage for no good reason)
On the other hand, we have this list for US school shootings
So, that’s 19 cases since 1997 !
I think there is a large quantitative difference between US mass shootings and ones that happen outside the US.
Thank you, glee. My out-of-date knowledge having been successfully updated, I will now duck out of this thread.
The Port Arthur Massacre, the Hoddle Street Massacre and the Queen St Massacre made for a bloody ten years in Australian History.
Because of easy access to guns in the US.
Australia’s gun laws ended up the way they are now as a direct result of the Port Arthur Massacre in 1996.
New Zealand also enacted changes to their gun laws in 1992 as a result of the Aramoana Massacre.
Mass shootings aren’t unknown outside the US, unfortunately. 
What’s funny is shooters in mass shootings tend to elaborately plan their attacks, weeks if not months in advance. People who are that dead set on doing something like that will get guns regardless of their legality. There is no country on this earth where, if you really want a rifle, you can’t get one.
I don’t want to get into a huge gun control debate; but I think one type of crime that gun control simply can’t prevent is specifically this kind of mass shooting. Where often times the perpetrator plans it long in advance. You can make the argument that without a gun handy, it’s harder for someone “in a rage” to do this. But unbelievably, many of these massacres aren’t carried out by someone like that, but by someone who has coldly and elaborately planned the killing (the Port Arthur killer was wealthy and had planned the attack for a long time–with his resources and his intent what honestly makes you think he’d be unable to get access to a rifle with more restrictive gun laws?)
Many many of the mass shootings already involve people who are breaking Federal gun law–which shows a big problem. You can prohibit minors from buying guns, or even prohibit the purchase and sale of certain types of weapon–but somehow minors are still getting guns, and people are still getting prohibited weapons.
It’s just like drugs, you can ban them all you want, but as long as there’s people out there willing to smuggle them and sell them, you can’t really stop a determined criminal from getting one. The U.S. has guns, period. Laws can make the ownership of guns illegal but it can’t make the guns disappear, and that’s the crux of the problem. We invented guns, pandora’s box is open and you can hand wring all you want about how they are the greatest evil ever, but you still can’t get rid of them–it’d be like trying to get rid of bread or beer.
Sure, but if the bar is lower, more people can jump over it, and more easily - and I think that’s pretty much all there is to it.
I am drawing attention to this slaughter that happened in 2004, from the article Siam Sam posted.
This is leaving out all the child soldiers who die in various strifes in more than one country, yet the U.S. is the one with the sickness of “gun culture”?! :dubious:
What are Australia’s gun laws at the moment?
That was 10 years ago. Nothing since then? Did the new gun laws have anything to do with that?
That was 15 years ago. Anything since then?
Agreed, but they do happen much more frequently in the US. Is the ubiquity of guns the only reason?
If people in all countries had the same easy access to guns as Americans do, would those countries witness the same level of mass shootings?
“Bowling for Columbine” mentioned that Canadians have a lot of guns (IIRC), and also, I think that most people in Switzerland have guns at home. Yet I don’t think there have been many Swiss or Canadian mass shootings.
BTW, “Bowling for Columbine” brought up a lot of good questions but didn’t provide much of a hypothesis about what is causing the situation in the US. The points it made were, IIRC: other countries have access to guns too, like Canada, and other countries had a bloody history too, like European countries, and other countries’ kids play violent video games, like Japan, and yet no other country has the same number of gun deaths per year. Maybe the answer is that the US is the only country to exhibit all of those traits.
Yup, there are pears all over the world, yet the US is the one with the sickness of “apple culture”. :dubious:
Beslan was a terrorist operation, not a random nutter with a gun.
People in any country can “snap” and go on a killing spree. It isn’t unique to the U.S. I am saying gun culture encompasses more than “the right to own and bear arms”, it also covers the idea that putting a gun in the hand of a child, so they can fight a war for you is a good one. There is more than one flavor of gun culture, and to say the U.S. is the only one that is afflicted with a variety of the illness is rather biased.
So what do you think explains the small number of mass shootings in other countries vs the US?
Is it just a cultural thing? And if so, what part of the culture is causing this?
Do you think that the following is possible though: If someone has a lot of guns that he plays with, does target practice with, and is very comfortable with, maybe that person is more likely to come up with a plan to go on a shooting rampage than someone who has never touched a gun and is not comfortable with them?
Even if someone in any country can get their hands on a gun, is it possible that the fact that they are not as familiar with them in their day-to-day lives makes it less likely that they will come up with a plan to go on a shooting spree?
Those things happen during war. I mentioned in the OP that I wanted to find out about peacetime shooting rampages.
Why do people, during peacetime, decide to go into a classroom and slowly kill people one by one, especially when most of those people did nothing to them?
And why does this event happen more in the US than other countries?