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Easy: school shootings, together with politician denial about the causes of this, guns, and lack of regulation for who owns them, make owning guns easier than getting a driver's license.
Super sad, but here we are.
The police kills more people every year than the amount of people killed in mass shootings since 1983. They also repeatedly ignore reports of people who go on to commit school shootings.
You should look into common sense pig control. I think that would save more lives than just being hysterical about AR-15s.
2024
Police- 1270
Mass shootings- 500ish (actually a down year)
While I agree we need police reform, let's be accurate.
Both problems need extensive work.
Mass shootings are likely now what we all imagine. I think most of us are imagining the left side of this chart. And I'd say the leftmost three sources are hardly conservative. :)
Yeah, the "high schooler shoots up a school" or "crazy guy shoots up a mall" school shootings are incredibly rare. The majority of "mass shootings" are gang related violence. And even if you include all the instances and assumed you were equally likely to be involved in any of them (you aren't), it would still be incredibly unlikely for you to ever be involved in such a situation.
Gun deaths in general are not what most people imagine they are. 2/3 of them are suicides. Of the remaining 1/3, they will almost certainly be perpatrated by someone the victim had a pre-existing relationship with.
Not to say that gun violence is not a problem. But the view some of the lunatics on this site seem to have - that going out to eat lunch in America is more dangerous than living in Gaza - is just completely false.
We're mostly agreed. But suicides and "gang violence" and "man shoots family" shouldn't be discounted, but OTOH, they don't count as random, and random is what most people fear. Gun violence isn't random. Vehicular death is random, at about the same rate. And we don't talk about that.
Always said, America doesn't have a gun problem. We have a culture problem.
Oh whoop, wrong. There's been only 14 deaths. Which one of these are actual mass shootings and not something the FBI defines as one but the media doesn't? Like a bunch of gangbangers shooting at each other, wounding nobody, and causing a stampede that results in people twisting their ankles? That's considered a mass shooting by the FBI.
I pulled the numbers straight from here. Since 1983, 1176 people were killed in mass shootings.
Also, implying that the "mass shooting problem" requires "extensive work" is not good optics. All that America needs to do is suppress extremist right wing bullshit and mass shootings will cease to exist. Controlling the police on the other hand would require a lot more political power and a lot of reforms, but it would both reduce the amount of deaths AND curb down mass shootings at the same time because literally every single mass shooter only got to commit it because the cops didn't care.
1: Your source uses FBI data.
2: The criteria is clearly spelled out in your own source, and it changed in 2013 to be more strict.
3: Our mass shooting problem definitely requires extensive work.
4: Extremist violence does account for the vast majority, and right wing is the vast majority of extremist violence, especially if you count religious extremists. However, the abundance of guns certainly adds more since we are not the most extreme religious country, nor do we have the most percentage of right-wing idealologically aligned people.
5: Forcing cops to care has never worked because, according to SCOTUS, they're not required to do their job, even while on shift and present. Also, the most red flag sign of gun violence is domestic abuse, which most cops do on the regular, as well as right wing extremist ideation, which most cops engage in already. We'd be better off firing the domestic abusers and domestic terrorists that make up the majority and hiring social workers for most roles.
Switzerland has more guns per capita.
27.6 per 100 people vs US, which is 120.5. Where are you sourcing that from?
Abundance of guns does not indicate that the country is more prone to violence, though. Switzerland has significantly laxer laws on who can own a gun than over 20 US states, EVERYONE is obligated to own a fully automatic SG550 from their military service, and a vibrant gun culture, and yet, no one's going around shooting people. It's a result of right wing extremism, decades of propaganda running on people's TVs, toxic right wing gun culture that is not countered by responsible gun culture from the left because liberals hate guns (and only because it became a problem for them after school shootings became common), and the refusal of government to address those issues. To add to that, white liberals literally take over ANY gun control talk and make it about their white feelings. That's exactly what's happening here with you. Despite minorities being the lead in support for gun control, we literally do NOT ever get to talk about our experiences. The only thing that matters in gun control discussions is white liberals putting their feelings and their feelings ONLY in the table, and advocating for assault weapon bans (which wouldn't matter), universal background checks (that already exist) and "common sense gun control" (which they change the definition every time to suit what they think). And liberal politicians also add fuel to the fire by EXCLUDING COPS FROM CERTAIN BANS and giving them more and more budget to "fight crime" every year.
There is no such thing as a "mass shooting problem" because it literally kills less people per year than GETTING STRUCK BY LIGHTNING. The media turns every single one of those into a spectacle and that's why the majority of people think it's such a problem. Police violence, on the other hand, is NOT statistically insignificant, and especially not for POC. After the assassination of the UHC CEO, the media literally turned every other time a CEO died into just a damn footnote, BECAUSE THEY DID NOT WANT COPYCATS. The media can stop making those mass shootings a spectacle, but they won't, because IT GIVES THEM MONEY.
The gun control movement has a HUGE problem with white supremacy, including from people who THINK they're not being racist, and then proceed to support liberal politicians with tough on crime policies who give 12 gorillion dollars to the cops of big cities so they can purchase MRAPs, IFVs, fully automatic rifles and tons of other shit they don't fucking need. And the SCOTUS ruling doesn't matter, just get yourselves a SCOTUS that would rule cops have an obligation to help and investigate everything.
Please listen to us. Common sense cop control WILL solve all of this shit you mentioned without ever touching gun laws.
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I'll try and do a better response later when I have some time.
In an ideal world we could replace SCOTUS members who, for example, lied under oath to congress. That would allow a lot of problems that seem impossible to solve to be pretty easily solved. I think the US is an example of a cascading system of measures to make it hard to undo the rot. For example: We need better rulings on cops, so we need a better supreme court, so we need to pack the court or get rid of the fascists on it, so we need a majority progressive congress, so we need campaign finance reform, so we need more people to vote, so we need laws against electioneering... I mean there are things that could be done that ate lynch pins for huge progress, but the system is certainly stacked against us. Not a reason to give up, but it explains a lot of the nihilism generally in our culture.
On a brighter note, apparently our casual friendliness with strangers is unusual elsewhere. So we've got that going for us, which is nice
French here: had to work with an American girl who was doing her internship in my company: absolutely. Same for an English teacher at my university during my studies: very nice. Americans people are very friendly and nice people.
That was my first thought too.