Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this. There are over 300 million people here, a few hundred die per year in mass shootings (which includes targeted ones, and I doubt you'd be a target). They are a problem, but they are massively over-reported (based strictly on mortality).
Not living in the US because of "gun culture" is unreasonable and irrational. It is falling prey to what is essentially fear-mongering (as far as that decision is concerned).
> The number of gun murders per capita in the US in 2012 - the most recent year for comparable statistics - was nearly 30 times that in the UK, at 2.9 per 100,000 compared with just 0.1.
Yes, but 30x a tiny number is still tiny. That isn't a reasonable way to determine "danger", it's a statistical fallacy.
Like, the difference in traffic deaths between the US and UK is 10.6 to 2.9 per capita, which is under 4x. But the actual lethality difference is massive. It pretty much completely swamps the difference in gun murders (I'm treating this as a naive comparison to prove a point, not trying to dig into the particulars of these stats), but I don't here people making sanctimonious posts about an absolute hard-line refusal to moving to the US due exclusively to the dangerous driving culture.
That's a pretty textbook example of cherry-picked data.
Why did they look at "gun murders per capita" specifically instead of just "murders per capita"? I don't know about you but I don't particularly care about how I get murdered just if I get murdered.
If you look instead at murders per capita the US is still very high at 4.88 vs. the UK's 0.92 but clearly not "30 times higher" either.
The UK and parts of Europe have suffered mass killings and terrorism with higher casualty rates per capita than mass killings in the US. Still, they are statistically tiny and do not automatically imply that it is not worth living in the UK or EU.
It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way. In fact, I feel it's more likely to entrench his point of view because you're telling him he needs a better reason than that. And I can understand his point because it's not necessarily about the fear of getting shot up in a nightclub, at least for me it's the very prevalent attitude that guns are a natural right and they take priority over much greater humanitarian concerns that inflict the country, to the point of it being fetishistic. It's the gun culture, not the gun crime.
And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it?
>It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way
How? It is literally not even close to something to worry about unless, as I posted elsewhere, you either own a gun (accidental deaths), are suicidal, or are involved in criminal activities.
Similarly, the difference in deaths like traffic accidents between countries is so much more massive than the firearm homicide rate that it is absolutely insane to list that as a hard-line criteria.
It is not reasonable or rational to be scared of guns in the US unless you are actually involved in sketchy situations or own one yourself.
>And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it?
Only from a psychological perspective. If you are actually concerned with your statistical likelihood of death, this is exactly what you should be interested in. Lurid stories from a country that has a third of a billion people is a completely irrational basis for such a decision.
I'm not a woman so I have literally nothing to worry about as a man wanting to live in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, except that nobody would argue with me if I said I don't want to live there because I disagree with their cultural attitude towards women.
What you're trying to tell me is that it's not valid for someone to consider US culture as it pertains to guns as a reason for wanting to live there or not, because I'm statistically unlikely to be involved in gun crime. The statistical likelihood of being a victim is totally irrelevant, we're talking about the compatibility of cultural values.
And on that basis it is totally fair and rational to refuse to move somewhere that fundamentally opposes your own values. It's a matter of integrity and what's important to you, and nobody has the right to tell anyone whether those values are better or worse (or more/less rational) than your own.
Crime is practically a given anywhere so on that basis you're absolutely correct. It's totally irrational to think that prolific reports of crime in the news is a good reason to think you're gonna get shot or stabbed when you walk down the street. Which is why I'm focusing so heavily on the cultural aspect.
>What you're trying to tell me is that it's not valid for someone to consider US culture as it pertains to guns as a reason for wanting to live there or not, because I'm statistically unlikely to be involved in gun crime. The statistical likelihood of being a victim is totally irrelevant, we're talking about the compatibility of cultural values.
Well, his post is hidden now, but he seemed exclusively concerned with the danger, not the actual culture.
The CDC document they link doesn't seem to make any statements about gang vs non gang homicides. I've read/searched for a couple minutes (the word "gang" doesn't appear in the pdf).
I'm English but have lived in California for half my life.
London now has a higher murder rate than NYC, which gives a different perspective.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-43610936
I've never owned a gun but I respect the second amendment which seems to have been cleverly crafted primarily to give the citizens options to overthrow a future oppressive government.
I find the whole pressure to 'ban guns' sinister in Trump's America...
Why wouldn't you include stabbings? Are you suggesting that murder is better if it's done by knife than by gun?
Of course you're going to get lower gun homicide rates by banning them. You'd get lower knife homicide rates by banning knifes (I think it's time to consider an assault-knife ban), but aren't you "fixing" the wrong problem? Shouldn't we be trying to stop murder?
So what is to be gained then by pointing out that gun crime is much higher in a nation where they are legal than in one where they are not? Unless you view gun ownership in and of itself as a bad thing, then it's a useless statistic. You're not reducing crime/murder by banning guns, you're just changing the weapon. That hardly seems like justification for violating somebody's rights (in the US, it is a Constitutionally guaranteed right).
That it's not "sinister" (as you said) to want gun control when the gun homicide rate is 30x that of the U.K. Why are you trying to equate knives with guns all of a sudden?
London now has a higher murder rate than NYC, which gives a different perspective.
Does it, though? The homicide rate in NYC has dropped hugely in the last couple of decades (an order of magnitude!); it's still much higher than London's when you look beyond a timeframe of two or three months. Meanwhile other large cities in the US, including LA, fare much worse than either London or NYC.
The issue that I see here: Yes, I believe that the second amendment was primarily intended to help overthrow an out-of-control government. It was authored in a time where memories of the Revolution were fresh. Muskets, bayonets, and cannon were the weapons they had in mind, and a lot of the country was close to frontier wilderness.
Now, there is no militia to speak of. The federal government and its assets span the width of the continent. It's hard to imagine how civilian guns would help overthrow that. Obviously, things would come down to guerrilla warfare. 231 years have changed the situation a lot. The assumptions that were made then don't really apply...and the interpretation of the amendment, and the discussion around it, have shifted in that time, as well.
> Now, there is no militia to speak of. The federal government and its assets span the width of the continent. It's hard to imagine how civilian guns would help overthrow that. Obviously, things would come down to guerrilla warfare. 231 years have changed the situation a lot. The assumptions that were made then don't really apply...and the interpretation of the amendment, and the discussion around it, have shifted in that time, as well.
..
I used to think that too, but I think the assumptions made then still do apply. We have a heavily militarized police and an increasingly oppressive surveillance state. It's a grim thought but surrendering the ability to rise up en masse has happened before and not ended well...
I guess I wasn't clear about the assumptions that I'm talking about. The power balance between citizens and government has shifted drastically in favor of the government, and there isn't any citizen-controlled, organized force. The police are militarized, and I'd expect them to be on the side of enforcing the status quo.
My point was that I think that maintaining citizens' gun rights wouldn't be sufficient to allow the people to overthrow the government, giving its overwhelming advantage in resources.
> My point was that I think that maintaining citizens' gun rights wouldn't be sufficient to allow the people to overthrow the government
Nor was that the intent. Gun rights were viewed as a necessarya sufficient condition for that; the sufficient condition was the dependency of the government on the citizen militia to enforce its will; the Constitution presupposed (but did not mandate, which led to this presupposition becoming invalid) the absence of large permanent standing armies and permanent professional paramilitary police forces at the federal and state level, and they both federal and state government would be dependent on mobilizing the armed citizenry to deal with internal threats to order and external security threats.
The guaranty of liberty wasn't “the people have smallarms to fight the government's armies of professional troops with the weapons of large scale warfare”, it was “the government may have stockpiles of weapons of large scale warfare, but absent mobilizing the armed citizenry can't actually effectively employ them and has very few troops to do anything”. The envisioned asymmetry in effective power was the reverse of what it is now, with or without gun rights.
> The US constitution was framed expressly to overthrow the colonial rulers and keep them out...
No, it wasn't, throwing out the colonial rulers was done under the Articles of Confederation.
The US Constitution was framed several years after that effort was completed, to deal with the problem that that the government under the AoC was too weak to get anything done outside of the imminent life-or-death struggle of the Revolution.
...the federal government, yeah. The mistake was extending it to the states instead of letting their own constitutions say what should happen in their jurisdiction.
My claim was a car accident not strictly, riding as a passenger. I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive and provide the mortality rates from all vehicle related deaths:
"Any motor vehicle incident 1 in 114"
So yes, Americans are 3 times more likely to die in a car accident than by a gun. For Americans, use your own life experience: How many people do you know who have died in or by cars vs gun violence. Which one is fear mongered more?
Assuming you have 400 friends/acquaintances the probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a car accident ~ 3%[1]. The probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a gun accident is 47% [2]
You keep posting this source, but I am extremely skeptical, considering that since 2010, gun related homicides in the US has consistently ranged between 8000 and 13000 per year, where the number of people to die in automobile accidents in the US typically hovers between 30,000 to 40,000. Also, given that Business Insider is essentially a blog site at this point, I don't see how they arrived at those numbers.
They're posting death rates of being a passenger not dying because of exposure to cars (passenger, driver, pedestrian etc). They should retract their position or they're being deceptive.
Our government has regulations and conducts research to minimize car accident fatalities. As a result, cars today are much safer than 10 or 20 years ago. There's no reason we can't do something similar with guns.
Americans drive awful lot. Americans are more likely to be shot then citizens of pretty much any other western country and also of quite a few non-western countries.
You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner who isn't involved in a criminal enterprise has next to no chance of dying by gunshot.
>American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home.
This is absolutely untrue and a completely asinine thing to say, revealing your own unexamined biases.
Non-suicidal people don't believe they'd kill themselves. But they still do later in life. Any of us might become mentally ill and do it one-day, making that statistic pretty relevant.
The others have already gotten to the suicide point but if you'd like to know more you can read this article, which actually breaks down the numbers behind that 30,000.
186 Asians (19,437,463 estimated total) die to gun violence a year according to this chart. And the majority in the US, whites (232,943,055 estimated total), 3,049 die a year due to gun violence.
In a country of 327,421,076 (estimated).
I used those two demographics because of their representation in tech (and thus this site).
Use those numbers to draw your own conclusions while living outside of the US.
> Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this.
This is getting to be less and less the case. Some anecdata:
* A good friend of mine worked at the UPS in SF where a mass shooting occurred
* I almost took a job at the YT San Bruno office
* Luke Woodham killed two students at a high school in my hometown
There are a lot of mass shooting events, and the number of people caught in their emotional orbit is only increasing. How many people were in the crowd at Las Vegas, for heaven's sake?
Not living in the US because of "gun culture" is unreasonable and irrational. It is falling prey to what is essentially fear-mongering (as far as that decision is concerned).