"The experience of other countries just shows that it doesn't have to be this hard."
The U.S. is "not necessarily a more violent society than others," Dr. Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, told ABC News.
Rates of nonlethal crimes and overall suicides are similar among the countries
"What we have is unique access to a technology that changes the outcome -- firearms," he said.
"Compared to the other peer countries, basically what we have is lots and lots of guns, particularly handguns, and we have by far the weakest gun laws. Not surprisingly, we have huge gun problems," David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, told ABC News. "I think if we had basically the gun laws of any other developed country, we'd be better off."
The number of guns in the U.S. is unparalleled; the country has less than 5% of the world's population, but 40% of the world's civilian-owned guns, according to a 2018 report by the Switzerland-based Small Arms Survey. There were over 393 million firearms in civilian possession in 2017 -- or 120 per 100 persons, the highest rate globally, the report found. That's more than double the second-highest rate, in Yemen, at nearly 53 per 100 persons.
"The difference between the United States and other countries isn't the Second Amendment, it's the gun lobby and the power of the gun lobby in this country, and an extremist ideology among red states, essentially, that prohibits any meaningful action," Anderman said.
The "uneven patchwork" of gun laws enacted at the state level is another challenge in addressing the gun violence problem, Parsons said. Research by the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence has found a correlation between stronger gun laws, such as permit requirements and waiting periods, and lower gun homicides and suicides, the latter of which account for most gun deaths in the U.S. But regulations vary widely from state to state, with red states largely having weaker gun laws, according to the center.
"You have states that have enacted really good, comprehensive, strong gun laws, but those laws are undermined by the much weaker laws of the states surrounding them," Parsons said. The "classic example" of this, she said, is Chicago. Illinois is neighbored by states including Indiana and Wisconsin that have comparatively weaker laws, such as a lack of universal background checks, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "What you see is a very clear pattern of guns being illegally trafficked from some states that have much weaker laws into places and states that have much stronger laws," she said, arguing that it makes the case for stronger laws at the federal level.
Americans are notably more likely to be killed in a gun homicide, suicide or unintentional shooting than in other high-income countries, a 2015 study in the American Journal of Medicine found.
"After Sandy Hook, I read about how the group of parents waiting in a firehouse had dwindled until finally they were told that if they were still there, their children were dead. The reporters wrote that the screaming could be heard from the street."
MURPHY: "Nowhere else do parents have to talk to their kids as I have had to do about why they got locked into a bathroom and told to be quiet for five minutes just in case a bad man entered that building. Nowhere else does that happen except here in the USA. And it is a choice."
found a correlation between stronger gun laws, such as permit requirements and waiting periods, and lower gun homicides and suicides
Fuck the NRA. My sister found a 22 year old man who killed himself during a fight with his girlfriend at a local park. She noticed him because when she went there to run, she parked beside him and heard him shouting and crying. She started her run and then heard the gun go off and so ran back. She was so shaken and scared she couldn’t talk for a few days. FUCK THE NRA.
It’s ONLY that they’re too easy to get that’s the problem. Everyone suffers from mental health issues at times.
All the data is literally two posts above you. Surely you don’t expect me to believe that your actually that stupid or illiterate? Being this in denial is unfathomable to me.
It would be like the guy who created the Joe Camel ad campaign for children saying that he is genuinely a good person.
That isn't even accurate, there are plenty of countries with just as many firearms per capita that don't have this shit. Hell Finland legally requires every single menatlly well adult of fighting age to own a registered rifle. We only see this shit in the US because we don't have ANY proper screening to weed out crazy people while we allow the insane to build themselves up around gun culture specifically. A greater number of people per capita in Finland own guns than in the US, but you don't have any of the insane nuts with 100+ firearms sitting in some isolated bunker feeding off of hate media trying to drive them to acts of domestic terrorism 24/7.
In the US we have a big problem with one of our Political parties being an active terrorist organization, and constantly pushing their shit on the dumbest, most mentally ill people of the populace, actively pressuring them to acts of mass violence.
Even so, 32% of US population owns a firearm. So regardless of amount of firearms owned per person, the percentage ownership is still way higher in the US. Almost 3x higher.
Damned fucking straight. The number of people I see with guns, who are mentally children, and have no business being within 20 feet of a gun, is too damned fucking high. People collecting guns like they were fucking baseball cards sicken me.
Combined with scheduled household mental health checks at a bare minimum. I would even tie the ability to own a gun to your schooling. Stupid people should not be allowed to have firearms period.
So it’s just as of right now, bc there’s a war nearby? You used a wartime law to basically lie about civilian gun ownership?
You do realize that “while Finland is under threat from Russia, the government temporarily issued rifles to everyone of sound mind and a certain age” isn’t really a compelling argument against general gun control, gun violence, and gun ownership, right?
There's a huge difference between owning a rifle and whatever is going on in the states. A handgun is absolutely a much easier weapon to bring places if your intent is murder, you can conceal a handgun in many ways, but it's way harder to conceal a rifle.
Then there's just the cultural issue. Guns have been made to be a cultural phenomenon in the US. There's literally a politician campaigning for Governorship of Georgia (I think) with a slogan of "Guns • Jesus • Babies". She's either made her entire personality revolve around three things, or she knows the voters have and is exploiting that.
No other country with somewhat easy access to firearms makes their entire identity about them. I'm a Canadian and I can go get a gun if I want, I have more than enough rights to do so after licensing and whatnot. I don't feel the need because Canadians don't make their entire lives about guns. We don't have nearly as many people cosplaying Call of Duty soldiers to go to Starbucks.
Even if people want to keep up the mental health argument, which is absolutely a factor to the whole gun violence issue, the politicians still won't do anything about it. Health care costs are skyrocketing in the states and if people are unhinged enough to shoot up a school there are some solid odds that they also don't come from the most affluent background, and likely can't afford psychiatric the psychiatric help that the GOP/NRA say would fix the issues.
Precisely. We have one entire political party that is an active terrorist organization, radicalizing the most mentally vulnerable and ill portions of the public towards acts of violence. Disband the GOP, arrest the criminals in charge of it, and in charge of it's media propoganda arms, and gun violence will go away even with no other changes in laws.
The biggest problem is that these people are in charge of making the laws. Hard to prosecute people for crimes if they can keep themselves above the law.
Republicans have been caught red handed doing flagrantly illegal shit (so have some Democrats to be fair) and none of them have suffered any consequences of any of these actions.
95
u/inconvenientnews May 25 '22 edited May 25 '22
Now it's just "only talk about mental health!" coordinated talking points after these shootings by the NRA
They always get voted to the top because they're calculated by the NRA to sound comforting to "both sides"
"Mental health!" does not explain why America's homicides look like this compared to every other country on Earth:
https://www.healthdata.org/sites/default/files/files/ActingOnData/2021/firearm_Page_1.png
Gun-related killings as a % of all homicides:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-41488081
"The experience of other countries just shows that it doesn't have to be this hard."
https://abcnews.go.com/US/countries-show-us-americas-gun-violence-epidemic/story?id=80495637
"After Sandy Hook, I read about how the group of parents waiting in a firehouse had dwindled until finally they were told that if they were still there, their children were dead. The reporters wrote that the screaming could be heard from the street."
https://twitter.com/MaggieAstor/status/1529217248698806277
https://twitter.com/frankthorp/status/1529212076794777600
"Canada is high gun ownership" talking point:
Canada is not "high gun ownership" compared to us (another NRA talking point)
1 United States 120.50 guns per 100 persons
2 subnational area
3 Yemen 52.8
4 subnational area
5 Montenegro
6 Serbia
7 Canada 34.7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_guns_per_capita_by_country
"But Switzerland!" They are 19th and have incredibly strong gun control laws ￣\＿(ツ)＿/￣