Unthinking Majority wrote:A country like the US that prioritizes the right to own ultra-portable machines designed to kill people en masse over the right of people to be safe from those machines is filled with god darned morons (well, at least those that support that right).
And then for some insane reason these same Americans don't want to guarantee the right for people to be able to have affordable health care and debt-crippling debt & deductibles when they or their kids are shot and bleeding out in the hospital.
The US has reaped what it has sowed.
Take a gander at the historic murder rates for North Dakota[1] -- throughout the 90s & 2000s, it had a murder rate on par with very developed Western European states (lower than most) and its gun ownership rate is at 47.9%[2]. Notice as well that many of these other states with very high gun ownership are also low crime places, while some of the places famous for urban crime have very low gun ownership rates (New York, California). It is also surprising that the area most famous for crime in the midwest, Illinois (due to Chicago), has the lowest gun ownership rate among its neighbors.
So, ultimately, the average American is living in a place that is suburban, right? The violent reality of urban crime doesn't affect them at all. One of the sad numbers is that blacks make up 13% (roughly) of the US population, but accounted for 51% of murder victims in 2017[3]. Since blacks are more likely to make up the urban poor, this helps to show you where the problem really exists and is largely isolated to.
Let's take the murder number from 2017 -- 15,129. How many of these people were killed in mass shootings that we recognize?
To find this out, I looked at the Wikipedia list for mass shootings in the US in 2017[4]. This would be only news worthy shootings in the US, and not these lists of "250 mass shootings in the US!" where the overwhelming majority are simply events where 3,4+ people were shot at once, and almost always involve criminal elements interacting with each other and nothing about it is random.
I only recognized two of these events: the Las Vegas[5] shooting and the Sutherland church shooting[6]. Some of them I am surprised I do not recognize them because they were very soft targets, such as the Aztec High School shooting[7], but this was perhaps because the body count was very low (2). Many of these other attacks are simply noteworthy incidents of criminal violence that somehow have wikipedia entries. I was surprised, as well, I did not recognize the Plano shooting[8]. Let's count that one, too, because it seems quite random, and has a high body count of 9.
Let's add it up:
2 (Aztec) + 8 (Waco - Gunman excluded) + 26 (Southerland - Gunman excluded) + 58 (Gunman excluded) = 94.
94 / 15,129 (the total number of murders) = 0.6% of murders were from recognizable mass shootings.
Let's say that another 150 people were killed in the mass shootings I never heard of:
244 / 15,129 = 1.6% of homicide victims would have been killed in these sorts of random spree shooting events in 2017.
I doubt there are many people who have that kind of recall, though. I doubt that many people are even victimized in this fashion. The number of people murdered is very small, and it has a disparate impact on specific communities who have close proximity to criminality, and the percent of people who are
randomly murdered is exceedingly low.
You sound like an alarmist when you tell an American that they are going to get murdered by "gun violence" and they have to give up their hunting rifles and hteir sense of security in a world with slow response times and a country with much higher crime than Europe (but not in 99% of neighborhoods)....
It just doesn't match up with what we are concerned with.
[1]
Disaster Center[2]
Business Insider[3]
Statista[4]
2017 US Mass Shootings wiki[5]
2017 Las Vegas Shooting/[6]
Sutherland Springs church shooting[7]
Aztec High Shooting[8]
Plano Shooting