Here we go again...
this post was submitted on 26 Oct 2023
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As an outsider it seems absolutely weird that the US as a country seems to have accepted people getting shot by other regular people daily as normal.
Oprah Winfrey once said, everybody gets a gun, you get a gun, you get a gun, we all get a gun.
😔
Actual regular people haven't accepted it as normal. Fascists in our country continue to hamstring any efforts to fix the situation because they want the rest of us to keep being reminded that the fascists can and will murder us at will. Standard issue stochastic terrorism.
My kids' school recently had an active shooter drill like we used to do fire drills when I was a kid. They said they all had hiding spots to go to and they thought it was pretty scary. They're in elementary school. It's definitely not normal that instead of doing something about the guns we have to teach kids to hide from gunmen because that's just a legit possibility now.
I had those a decade+ ago when I was in school
I had these in middle school... Which would have been the late 1990's...
It's definitely normal... I'm not sure what the person you responded to is going on about.
Well maybe my school was the outlier that didn't have active shooter drills but that makes it even worse that it's been 30+ years and nothing has changed. It should NOT be normal to have to prepare elementary kids to hide from an active shooter in their school.
Uh? 2023-(late)1990s... = ~25... Please god don't make me older than I am... I just can't take that today.
But it has, MORE schools do it now. So it's even MORE normal now.
This is a different statement than before. I agree that it should not have to be a normal thing... But unfortunately that's what it is. But it's not gun policies that make this the normal. If we want to talk specifically about school shootings... It doesn't seem that legislation on gun bans alone have made any difference. https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/school-shootings-by-state
California is by far the worst state for school shootings, and has what amounts to the strictest laws in all of the USA.
I was in high school in the early 90s, we never had active ahooter drills, we just had the occasional lockdown due to gang wars...
Do gangs operate without guns where you live?
Lockdown is different from a drill. It's as of I said we never had fire drills, but the school burned down a couple times.
Ah fair enough.
Could be by location. Never had them in a small new england town, but I believe I did in San Diego
My middle school was literally a small New England town...
It is entirely possible that the timelines for their introductions were different.
Also it is only more worrying that the problem is left unadressed since 25 years. Again nothing should be normal about school children having to learn how to hide from someone with a gun trying to kill as many of them as possible.
The US truly seems like a failed state from the outside.
Unaddressed is a bit harsh. Maybe not fully addressed to how we would like, but measures have been attempted in the last quarter century
And what EU country is rolling in success right now?
If you're going to walk into a conversation and the only thing you have to add is "The US truly seems like a failed state from the outside." You're not actually going to further that conversation at all.
What is unaddressed? What problem do you think exists here? Every time I see this argument it's always stupidly phrased. The UK has lower rates therefore it must be gun control...
Look at the intentional homicide rates.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Notice something? It's South America that's completely fucked. If we ban guns in the US... nothing stops that shit from proliferating into the USA on the southern border. Our issues are more handled with better border controls and increase mental welfare. Most violence that happens here is gang violence.
But for one moment let's look at this list. Notice the British Virgin Islands place on this list... Very similar controls to Britain proper... but has a 2 point higher rate than the USA...
The issue of school shootings, and other acts of violence with the sole intent to kill random people. These things happen about once in a decade in most western countries.
In the US they happen all the fucking time. Especially that people go out of their way to murder a bunch of elementary kids is something happening extremely rarely in other countries.Not so in the US.
In no point did i argue about the particular reasons or solutions, but it is evident that the US is really fucked up in this regard.
Uhh... I already addressed this... The link, if you had read it shows homicide rates per country. Sort by rate, look where your country is compared to the USA... then compared to some other "western" countries. Sort by Region/Subregion... Allow yourself to think about why the US might have problems. The US does have higher rates... The EU itself is surrounded
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_Kingdom
Not only are mass shootings common...
Correct, and I never said you did. I said that the argument I always hear from people who make claims like the USA is fucked up is bullshit. Showing an example of a country over here that's ruled by Britain with British law, doing significantly worse than the USA does. Almost like it's different over here. Probably because the EU is buffered from the third world countries... while the USA is definitely not.
It's really not. But see, you never elaborated on what is "unaddressed" either. So there's no way to further this discussion is there?
You cannot use overall homicide rates as an indicator for mass shootings.Of course a high homicide rate is a problem in itself, vut it is a different quality, when two drug gangs shoot each other up over a deal gone wrong than someone just running into a school killing two dozen kids
Good think the source is specifically mass shootings?
And yes you can treat one countries overall homicide rates as relevant to anothers... Just because you lower gun related incidents doesn't mean that it actually affected much of anything when those numbers simply transfer to other forms of homicide. Rates in general have been going down overtime in all "western" countries... at effectively the same rates... Gun laws have not made any significant effect as far as I've ever seen.
Except EVERY source cited against anything I've ever said has ALWAYS been "well theres 600+ mass shootings in the USA this year"... when there's like 20 that are actually school related. And yeah 20 is bad and sad... but when other countries have 1 or 2 and we're 10x+ bigger than those countries... it's literally on PAR per capita.
Well my coubtry has about one school shooting every 7-10 years and we have 84 Million people
So either Turkey or Germany.
I will assume Germany...
As of 2021 has an intentional homicide rate of 0.8 currently... (https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/DEU/germany/murder-homicide-rate random quick google)
We see a blip UP in 1995 and a leveling out starting around 2008... and a jump in 2016... and a downward trend again.
Which is basically the same as the USA.. https://www.statista.com/statistics/187592/death-rate-from-homicide-in-the-us-since-1950/ (random quick google)
The trend has been downwards at a slow pace everywhere... (lets ignore the covid timeframe overall... That's a different issue and we all know that it is). None of it lines up with ANY restrictions on guns. So if banning things doesn't trend the line down more than the overall world is already trending down... Then overall homicide didn't change outside of the typical trend. It stands to reason that banning the guns in that case didn't save any lives... Just shifted the deaths to other forms of death, and only took away your right to have guns...
All data taken from Wikipedia.
The US compared to the UK has had ~13.6 more shootings and ~29.4 more injured/dead in the last 23 years.
The population in the US is ~5 times bigger than in the UK. I would not call that it’s literally on PAR per capita, I would call that a whole lot more.
UK population: 66,971,411
Mass shootings:
US population: 333,287,557 (~5 times more than in the UK)
Mass shootings:
I cannot find similar data from Europe as a whole.
Sources:
United_States (Wikipedia)
List of mass shootings in the United States (Wikipedia)
United Kingdom (Wikipedia)
List of mass shootings in the United Kingdom (Wikipedia)
My friend's daughter is in elementary school and an active shooter came into the school. Nobody died, but later he bought her a bulletproof backpack designed for AR-15 rounds (223). But the backpack was so heavy she couldn't carry books in it. So instead he opted for handgun rounds protection, which isn't ideal but it's something.
As an American, I think the moment I said "which one" when asked if I had heard about the mass shooting in wherever it was I can't even remember now, that was when I realized how fucked our gun policies are.
What else is there to do but accept it? It isn't like our politicians have the will to do anything about it. Peaceful protest falls on deaf ears. The gun crazies would gladly die in a blaze of glory rather than be disarmed. The country is awash in guns and ammunition. So please do tell, oh wise outsider, what the hell a normal person is supposed to do about it?
Peaceful protests? There are less peaceful protests for gun control than shootings. Maybe start there.
But I agree the US seems beyond screwed in that regard. NRA is too powerful, the two party system is stuck on the far right and society is divided into extremist views by propaganda and social media.
So maybe leave the country? That's what I'd do I think.
There are fewer protests these days because people are catching on that they don't accomplish dick. As to leaving, people have families. Not just their immediate family but think aunts, uncles, cousins. It's not trivial to leave all that behind and move somewhere where you know no one and have no support structure, and maybe you don't even speak the language. And to even consider it, you've got to have the time and money to expend on moving, and your destination country has to agree to let you in. It's not a simple undertaking.
It's not simple at all, I absolutely agree. And leaving family behind sucks. On the other hand I know several people who left Europe and moved to Australia and Canada for example. It can work even though it won't be easy for everyone involved. But if the alternative is having my kids get shot at school I'd still try. Plus all the social security that's missing in the US would probably make other countries more attractive to me too.
That's fair. I'd probably be a lot more motivated to leave if I had kids to think about.
You shouldn't be surprised. It's caused by the same bad actors who are responsible for most of the ways in which the US is an outlier vs its so-called peer democracies.