Why do Non-Americans (not residing in the US) care about our gun laws? I doubt that it really affects them.
Why do Americans care about starving children in Africa?
Decent people care about human suffering even if it doesn’t directly affected them. Most of the foreign caring I see about US gun laws seems centered around the harms created by easy access to firearms.
Non-Americans also care about the jacked-up US health “system”, poor American public education, and so forth. Do you only have opinions about things that directly affect you.
As a Canadian, I generally hear about US guns as a tool to point out our general superiority. “Hey man, at we’re not crazy like in the states.” “Those nutters, shoot each other non-stop.” “We have laws based on reason not insanity…unlike those yanks” etc… We do the same for your health care and (much less often) in terms of Gay marriage; always in the same vain.
Trust me, its merely to point and chuckle (oh ‘those crazy Americans’), no more no less.
What are the basic gun laws in Canada?
We comment because we can’t believe it, it’s like a crazy soap opera.
I’m not sure they care for those reasons. Or maybe just another thing to criticize America about.
Because Americans keep talking about it, at length, nonstop.
Hint: we don’t really give a damn if Donald Trump becomes president either. But you keep talking about it.
Good answer.
I see Trump stories on BBC News virtually every day.
Almost nothing about other countries’ laws affect foreigners. I’m not sure why you think US gun laws are unusual in this regard; they are weird, and therefore noteworthy. Why do Americans care about Saudi Arabia’s driving laws?
Yes you do. Perhaps not you personally, but global you. British news outlets pay more attention to US elections than they do anyone else’s. That’s not surprising; our presidents are constantly dragging you into wars and crashing your economy and the presidents of Suriname usually aren’t.
To paraphrase Bill Bryson, can the man on the UK high street name the Taoiseach? Probably not, and Ireland is right there. But he knows who Obama is, and probably could name at least a half-dozen presidential candidates.
I know that there’s some of that “we may have our problems, but at least we’re not them” triumpalism. But also, to some extent, American politicians bring other countries like Canada into their arguments about gun control and health care.
In American right-wing talk, you hear stuff like, “Australia really tightened up their gun laws and gun crime went up dramatically because the criminals knew everyone was unarmed”, and “In Canada, it takes a million years for to get any health care service because they have communist medicine”. It’s no wonder the targeted countries speak up to that.
I’ve had adult students in Korea who would take some English classes right before a business trip to the States. About all the news they hear about us involves guns and lurid crime. One man told me he was frankly terrified to visit America. I asked him why, and he replied “Gangsters.”
I doubt that even an average American man on the streets could name 6 candidates. “Trump, Clinton, that black doctor guy, ummm and a bunch of other guys. Oh yeah and that other lady too”
What could they say about Canada? ‘The Rockies just too beautiful’ ‘Water to clean?’ ‘Air just too fresh/crisp?’ ‘Too much abundance of Maple (in both syrup and raw tree form)?’ 
For me (in the UK), it’s a sadness.
I read about school shootings, accidental home deaths and other gun-related violence in the US and I wish it didn’t happen.
In so many ways, the US is a great country.
For example, it’s got a huge amount for tourist to visit - and I personally have made great American friends on my trips to Las Vegas.
Yet there are a couple of areas where I feel the US lets itself down - health care and guns being the main ones.
I realise there is a lengthy history of personal gun use in the US; that it’s enshrined in the Constitution and that there is a powerful lobby as well.
But I hope that some way can be found to improve things.
I also think it is an also exclamation of surprise that a country which is, on the face of it, so very similar to us in the UK can be so alien.
Guns, health care, prison population, death penalty and political religiosity.
These are not minor cultural quirks either. All of these are so remarkably different to what we experience here in the UK and yet in myriad other ways the USA is clearly in the same ballpark as us.
Yeah, but then you guys have spotted dick, black pudding and toad in the hole, which while perhaps not as egregious are still just…wrong. 
I hear what you guys are saying, but one thing that’s always struck me is how my friends in the UK are so horrified by our gun death rate per 100k (10 per 100k) while being so unconcerned by their own for alcohol (14 deaths per 100k). I guess it’s all what you are used to…in addition, it’s what you are bombarded with on the news and on message boards that sticks out as the the real threat, and people are just seriously bad at risk analysis. You are more likely to be killed in the UK in a drunk driving accident than you are to be murdered in the US by a gun based on probability…in fact, in our country of over 300 million people, we actually only have 4000 more deaths from gun murders a year than deaths from drunk drivers in the UK (8,416 drunk driver deaths in the UK verse 12,575 gun murders total in the US for the same year)…and this in a country of 64 million verse 318 million.
That’s 8416 alcohol-related deaths in total, not drunk-driving deaths.
Yup, you are right. Ok, let me rephrase…you are more likely to die from alcohol in the UK than be murdered by a gun in the US.