To be honest the gun deaths is merely an inevitable by-product of your gun laws, which was the initial subject of the thread.
For gun ownership we have 6.6/100 you have 112/100. The deaths will obviously follow but we find it incredible that you allow such easy access in the first place.
As for alcohol, the best comparison to me would be UK vs somewhere like Norway or Utah but it won’t be anywhere near the 17 times of UK/USA gun ownership or 30 times the UK/USA gun deaths
To the best of my ability to search, Utah appears to have an annual rate of 22.4/100k,
The UK has 14.0/100k but I can’t find a reliable Norwegian figure (I’ll take a guess though that binge drinking probably makes it higher than us regardless of far stricter laws)
There is a point-and-laugh element, though rather grimmer than other Americanisms, but my concern is that the “guns = freedom” idea and other such nonsense will infect my culture, and we’ll get dragged into the depths as well.
Here in Taiwan and also in Japan where ordinary citizens simply can’t own handguns and only tiny percent are licensed to own long guns, people just can’t believe that Americans want to have guns.
Most people don’t know about the particulars of the various gun laws.
Fair enough; not being Mexican, I know nothing about that.
Here in Toronto, though, every time there is a shooting with a handgun, it seems that it came from the US - according to this account, 70% of illegal guns are smuggled in from the US.
I mentioned similar numbers in a previous post (for Ontario, it was 60% of guns seized in crimes came from the US, with another 20% untraceable, so one can extrapolate from that a figure of around 70% of crime guns originating in the US). So no, it’s not just Mexico that is affected.
So when a country is overwhelmingly the major source of illicit gun trafficking to both of its immediate neighbors, even with international border protections, simply because of the sheer volume of its guns and the ease with which they can be obtained, it’s a major cause for concern. That, combined with by far the highest gun fatality rate of any developed country in the world, kind of makes it hard either to (a) argue that there’s no gun problem in the US, or (b) wonder why the rest of the civilized world is just flat-out astonished by the extent of it.
The killing of tens of thousands of people per year. The tragedy of such a slaughter knows no boundaries. This is the primary reason that is far more important to my other reasons.
The spread of the gun cult to people in Canada, leading to political resistance to more effective gun control in Canada.
The smuggling of guns into Canada, leading to deaths in Canada.
Directly, yes, but indirectly, it tells your friends and allies something about the kind of attitudes and priorities that might be influencing your international policy decisions. It also underlines the potential for decision-making gridlock in the political system, which is something else to be taken into account.
Or put it another way, it’s a worry when the sane people in your system can’t prevail over the the peculiar and the paranoid.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
That’s a specious and irrelevant argument. In the final analysis the greatest cause of death is being alive, with a mortality rate of 100%. But we still put up with it, because we feel it’s worth it. For the same reason we drive even though there’s a risk of traffic accidents, or eat (within reason) foods that may not be good for us. But, as I mentioned before, after several children suffered serious injuries over the years from sharp-pointed lawn darts, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission banned them entirely in 1988, and after another child suffered a brain injury, re-issued the ban in 1997 along with a directive to destroy any that might be in anyone’s possession.
The operative principle here is clear. There is always a tradeoff between risk and utility. The thing that constantly amazes outsiders is where Americans draw that risk-utility balance with guns – in a way that no other civilized country has chosen to do, for no discernible benefit that anyone has ever been able to fathom, and with consequent disastrous results. To mistake this as moralizing or a Quixotic attempt to change the values that are so stridently asserted by the NRA and its ilk is really missing the point. It’s just plain and simple astonishment.
[/QUOTE]
It’s funny…you say my argument is ‘specious and irrelevant’ and then proceed to make it again in the second paragraph anyway, even if it means something different to you than to me. Well, that and toss in a strawman about the NRA which I have never made, just to seal the deal I guess.
At any rate, I think some of the concerns that have been raised about guns illegally coming in across the border are certainly valid. They are the same concerns that Americans have about drugs coming in illegally, in fact (or during prohibition how literally boatloads of Canadian alcohol came into the US). Mexico has similar issues to Canada in this regard, since while illegal drugs come in to the US from Mexico, illegal (in Mexico) guns travel from the US south. So, it’s certainly a concern for Canadians and Mexicans.
Well, that and toss in a strawman about the NRA which I have never made, just to seal the deal I guess.