People who are pro-gun, how do you interpret the stark difference in the number of mass shootings between America vs countries with gun restrictions?
People who are pro-gun, how do you interpret the stark difference in the number of mass shootings between America vs countries with gun restrictions?
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I am generally pro gun. I own several guns which I have used to harvest animals to feed my family.
I don’t believe that everyone should own guns.
I also believe that’s the gun isn’t the problem. It’s a tool like a knife or a car that can do damage if used for such.
Do a root cause analysis: people hurt others when they feel helpless, hopeless, stuck, or backed into a corner.
Why do people WANT to hurt each other? Why do they feel this is necessary? Understanding that, we’ll understand why people hurt each other.
It’s not as simple as “more guns=more violence”. It’s “more desire to hurt = more guns”.
None of these are answers per se. I think that if the US spent more time caring for each other than competing with each other, we’d see fewer hurt feelings, fewer feelings of hopelessness, and by extension fewer shootings
Pro gun doesn’t mean that we can’t improve the system and it doesn’t mean that we can’t have any restrictions.
We had way less gun control in the 1900’s than we do now and school shootings were unheard of before columbine. My grandpa used to keep his shotgun in his locker because he would go hunting after school. I’m more interested in discussing why that changed rather than comparing two countries with completely different cultures.
Guns make it easier, yes, but have almost nothing to do with the motivation of the broken individuals that would do such a thing. The US is really bad at taking care of our citizens and their mental health.
I don’t think most other countries hate their own people as much as Americans do
Pro gun doesn’t mean I don’t believe there should be restrictions. There are just more restrictions in other countries. America is too open.
There are countries with high rates of gun ownership that have very low crime rates. There are many places in the USA like that as well. The reason for the high gun crime rate in American cities is due to *something else*.
I would like to see somebody’s plan to get guns out of the inner cities. And stop gun smuggling across the border. If they actually came up with a plan, instead of just ignoring it and pretending it is not a problem, then we can talk about it. I’m not holding my breath.
You do know the large majority of mass shooting are gang related? In cities with some of the strictest gun laws in the nation. I highly doubt any of these gangs even give damn about laws and gun laws least of all. Wyoming has probably per capita more guns per person than most other states in the U.S. How many mass shootings have we had? Ask yourself where most of these mass shootings occur.
Oh well one, we have a gigantic mass of uncountable firearms that outnumbers the entire population. Most guns can’t be concretely be tied to a single owner due to the (fortunate) absence of a centralised federal registry. Those countries with stricter gun laws (and really every other country in general) don’t have as many firearms
Two, I blame a media industry that is run by shithead journalists with no understanding of ethics who sensationalize the shit out of incidents like mass shootings. I’m not saying that massacres didn’t happen before and I’m not saying nobody sensationalized crime in the past, but the journalists in this country figured out mass shootings get attention, and whether they understand this or not, they’re fueling the notoriety that the twisted, depraved, and murderous desire.
It’s weird. In my parents’ homeland, there’s a lot of poor people, there’s a long-standing dual insurgency, and there are guns (though not to the same extent as the US). At the same time, there really ain’t much in extreme cases of indiscriminate violence to the same degree as America. There’s certainly violence, but a lot of the violence is pretty discriminate and often political and/or religious in nature. There is absolutely a cultural factor involved
I will say though, hyper-focusing on mass shootings is kind of counterproductive when most firearms homicide in America is generally not in the form of mass shootings, but in those 1-2 casualty incidents that get covered by local news affiliates
The media intentionally misrepresents the reality of gun violence in America to scare people who think emotionally rather than rationally into supporting gun bans. I would much prefer to live in a society where everybody is allowed to own a firearm rather than just the notoriously corrupt police.
Out of control governments have killed orders of magnitude more people than mass shooters ever will. Giving up our hard check against the first to stop the second would be foolish.
Take away the gang related masa shootings, then compare how many we have in relation to population. We have the third highest population in the world, with China being first and India being second. China is…well China where you can be holocausted while the world watches for not being Chinese enough. Then there’s India, where there’s so many people packed into such small areas that pretty much everyone is poor.
But the US? We have the population, “freedom”, and general wealth that even average citizens can own things that a lot of countries couldn’t even dream of looking at without being rich. Throw in the crime and mental health issues that come with massive populations, and you have plenty of people slipping through the cracks that shouldn’t even be allowed to be on the streets, let alone own a firearm.
Take the guns away from the law abiding citizens here, and I guarantee you’ll have martial law in under five years because the criminals now have free reign to take what they want, and kill who they want. Why? There are a LOT more criminals than poorly trained police.
The thing is other countries have gun violence, but what sets America apart is indiscriminate gun violence. Place that I live has a lot of guns, and majority are unregistered. But we have had maybe one instance of indiscriminate premeditated gun violence in the last 30 years. Everything else is either criminals shooting at eachother, or people having a fight/longstanding grudge and someone pulling a gun.
The only logical conclusion is that access to firearms might be a contributing factor but not the root cause of the issue.
Real mass shootings are much rarer than people think. Anti gun groups have spent years presenting statistics dishonestly, for instance they use a low number like ‘any shooting incident where 3 or more people are involved’, so that they can say stuff like “there have been 600 mass shootings this year”. It’s dishonest presentation because that big number is actually driven mostly by small scale gang shootouts, but they know the term “mass shooting” makes most people think of something like sandy hook or vegas where some psycho goes into a public place with a rifle and indiscriminatly massacres a ton of people. So they are using one problem to make people think a different problem is way worse than it is. In reality as a normal person that “600 mass shootings this year” propaganda means nothing, you don’t have to worry about 99% of them as long as you don’t join a gang, which is entirely under your own control. The real mass shootings where some lunatic goes and randomly massacres a bunch of people in public are a beyond lottery odds statistical anomaly that that I don’t worry about for the same reason I don’t fear getting randomly hit by lightning.
Imagine not being able to drive your car because someone in a different state ran over a couple citizens
Because mass shootings and whatnot were very rare and virtually unheard of until the last 20 years or so
Throughout a majority of the 1900s you barely heard anything of the sort going down and gun restrictions were almost non-existent
Now gun restrictions are getting more and more intense yet things like school shootings and terrorist attacks are becoming more and more popular and the story is the same every time they were either stolen from somebody else or obtain through illegal trafficking. Usually done so by someone who seemed intent on hurting people to the point where I truly believe that even without the gun this person would have found some other way to cause Mass amounts of damage. As has been proven in places like Paris where people not having guns for terrorist attacks instead just started driving cars through crowds of people
There’s also the fact that most people don’t weight the statistics due to population. Yes America is going to have more gun crime than somewhere like the UK that’s because we could literally fit the entirety of the UK inside Texas.
There’s also no weighting for location. Say for example somewhere like New York with a lot of people is going to have significantly more gun crime than the middle of nowhere fucking Montana. But inevitably whenever people talk about crime statistics in the US they treat it like it’s another one of those small countries where all this stuff is happening all over the place and that’s just not true
Violent people are going to be violent taking away their tools for violence only makes them seek out other tools for violence and there are a lot more ways to cause Mass damage than a gun
America has gun restrictions. Schools that have armed their teachers have 0, (ZERO) shootings. Almost every teacher is armed, and many of the staff and the children feel much safer and protected.
A lack of strong social safety nets in the US, lack of quality mental health care, and a media that sensationalizes the shooter. When you see coverage of a shooting the shooters picture is blasted all over the place, their “grievances” are discussed etc inspiring copy cats.
We dont care to talk to people like you, because you have your opinion and will not change it, no matter what.
Depends on what you mean by pro gun. I’ve had guns and been around guns my whole life and have no issues with them.
The problem here is definitely access to guns. We need to stop pretending it’s something else. Not everyone should be able to get quick and easy access to firearms.
“When you outlaw guns only outlaws have guns” ignores the fact that significantly fewer outlaws will have guns, and the “good guy with a gun” is a complete right-wing fantasy.
That seems like the wrong question. Countries with gun restrictions are going to have fewer mass SHOOTINGS because there are no guns. However, you don’t need guns to engage in mass KILLINGS. Remember Rwanda?
Firearm education and mental health issues. If having a guns a right the government needs to step in and provide adequate training and screening in schools. We actually use to do this but it went away like home ec and so many other courses that teach you how to interact with our world and government. Taxs need to be thought in school, balancing a check book abd money management, basic cooking skills. School needs to get its shit together on math read science and history but ot also needs to teach required life skills people aren’t getting at home. Especially since children now have less stable home situations. It’s not like the 70s where having one parent around all the time is normal.
I don’t care if there is a difference. No matter how many shootings there are, it will never become right to respond with unjust laws that take rights from millions of innocent people. Freedom is more important than safety.
This isn’t your question—what you mean to ask is: do the other country’s low number of mass shooting result from temperament, character, culture or lack of access to guns. I believe the answer is a combination of the first three, but what you are intending to suggest with regard to America is if there were more gun laws, the mood, ideology and perspective of America wouldn’t permit mass shooters. Simply put: the people who would commit a mass shooting would ignore gun laws, so why should the state not allow humans self-defense?
There is absolutely zero difference in making this comparison and saying something like “there are substantially more koala attacks in Australia than America”. We (Americans) have a shitload of guns. We also have a shitload of ammo. Additionally and often overlooked is how we have a shot lid of gun laws and restrictions! None of these things have anything to do with the big issue.
That’s my interpretation.
The number of shootings is still statistically insignificant for the size of our population. We have had more than one per day so far this year. So what? Covid deaths were much more significant and most people blew those off. Gun deaths are microscopic in number and I just don’t care really.
I love how when white peoples shoot people, it’s “mental health”..but when black people shoot people, “they’re thugs and criminals.”
Shows the hypocrisy in America. 🙄
Population.
We don’t care
absent parents, gangs and social media.
Just to play devil’s advocate here.. there’s plenty of countries (Canada being one) with comparable gun laws to the US that don’t have a mass shooting problem.
America is fundamentally a more violent society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#/media/File:20201023_UNODC_Intentional_homicides_by_country_-_highest_rates_and_most_populous_countries.png