I'm not saying it isn't a problem. But I'm 52 years old and my father was career military and my ex was career military and I have lived all over the US. I have never seen anyone shot.
I have had friends in middle eastern countries that marveled at my willingness to go grocery shopping alone at 2am as a woman. They couldn't believe that was safe and legal and I wasn't scared to leave the house by myself at that hour.
I have read all kinds of horrifying things about a great many countries. Every country has problems. There are no perfect countries.
And it seems to me that talking trash about the US while this incident is still live is just not exactly sympathetic pro social behavior. There are better times and places to hash out the fact that the US has a problem. I don't think guns per se are The Problem. But this is just not really the discussion where I want to debate the details with people.
What does "allowing to happen" mean? Why are the US & EU complicit in the cases of mass killers? Criminal justice is post-facto, and unfortunately any sort of preventative measures (profiling, banning, surveilling) infringe on human rights.
I think you are taking it personally as someone disliking your country when in fact it is a rational response for someone to want to expose themselves to less danger. In the same way that you would not move to Egypt for a better paying job because, as a woman, you would be much more likely to experience sexual harassment and/or sexual violence there than you would in the US.
And where else would this be discussed, everyone says "don't politicise" these events, but if you dont talk about it now when do you discuss it? Brought up next week and we will be in the aftermath of a different tragedy or some other crisis. These events need to be addressed when they happen, otherwise nothing will be done.
Yet, isn't the freedom to say what they think a core tenant of what it means to live in the us? Why would this bother you?
>And it seems to me that talking trash about the US while this incident is still live is just not exactly sympathetic pro social behavior.
Saying you don't want to live someplace because of a perceived issue, isn't trash talking.
>There are better times and places to hash out the fact that the US has a problem.
When is it time to hash this out then?
Right after Parkland, a teenage cousin of mine initially did not want to go to the (voluntary) student walkout. Why? He told me his school in San Francisco gets numerous shooter threats. It's that common. And he felt being in a protest with a bunch of people clumped together made a very good target for another shooting.
This level of fear proves there is an inadequate balance between 1st and 2nd amendments. In effect, the 2nd amendment is being used to abridge free speech through fear. And I absolutely think gun nuts love this, it's exactly what they want, to shut down rational debate and conversation.
I probably shouldn't have replied to any of the replies to me. We all make our mistakes.
Freedom to express one's opinion is not a uniquely American value, especially on the internet. You're free to be bothered, but it's invalid to criticize someone for commenting about why US gun culture makes living in the States a non-starter.
I cannot fathom how anyone can mistake such comments as evidence of civilized behavior.
Given that the US is affected by gun-related violence unlike essentially any other developed nation, it's completely reasonable to bring the American gun fetish up anytime there's a shooting, to draw attention to it and to (hopefully) enact change which can prevent these kinds of tragedies in the future.
The only winning move is not to play.
My apologies for the failure on my end.
Actually, scratch that - I can. Until we cracked down on guns in the 90s we had massacre after massacre. I think I forgot how it was because we’ve not had one since the Port Arthur massacre.
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.
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.
It's just psychological biases at play.
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.
Those seem like important statistics to have for a true comparison, but strangely is missing from the article you linked...
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?
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.
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.
Well, his post is hidden now, but he seemed exclusively concerned with the danger, not the actual culture.
More than 30 thousand per year die due to guns. American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home.
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
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...
>The Met Police has launched 44 murder investigations in 2018, 31 of which have been as a result of stabbings.
If you look at gun homicide rate, then the U.S. has 30 times the homicide rate of the U.K.: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604
Do you still say a 30x gun homicide rate a "sinister" reason to 'ban guns'?
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?
Nobody is promoting murder here so why would you even ask that?
Guns make killing far easier than weapons like knives.
I'm not equating guns and knives at all. My entire point is about what we are measuring, and what we are trying to prevent.
>I find the whole pressure to 'ban guns' sinister in Trump's America...
Edit: yes, you appear to be quoting olivermarks
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.
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...
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.
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...
The Swiss are all armed for the same reason
'the long-standing practice of a militia organization of the Swiss Army in which soldiers' service rifles are stored privately at home' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Switzerland
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.
Assault by gun: 1 in 370
Riding inside a car, van or truck: 1 in 536
"Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than many leading causes of death combined"
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]
Center for Disease Control has more comprehensive figures: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm
[1] (113/114)^400
[2] (535/536)^400
And the comment I replied to specifically talked about car accidents.
I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive...
http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
>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.
A non car-owner who never leaves the house is unlikely to die in a traffic accident.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/in...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-ba...
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.
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?
The US is a wonderful place in most ways. We have 300 million guns over here, and typically around 9k gun murders per year, almost all of which are unrelated to "gun culture" and instead driven by drug prohibition.
There are 7-9 cities which have been ravaged by our idiotic policies of drug prohibition. In those places, you'll find a murder rate similar to Russia. For the most part, these are still wonderful places to visit - you can walk around Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit and meet peaceful, friendly, happy, well-adjusted people for days. The only top-tier danger city in the US which I find to have little redeeming value is Washington DC - I find that place cringey, self-righteous, and terrifying.
In all other places in the US (more than 99.99% by land mass), we have a murder rate similar to Western Europe.
I think we're a pretty good example of how to be armed and remain peaceful.
Things are fine here. Making these sorts of generalizations based on a minuscule number of high-profile data points is exactly the problem with American public policy in the first place.
The problem with statistics is when you become one.
If you work at an office or startup, I recommend purchasing a fire extinguisher style 1-5 pound pepper spray due to the increased range and capacity. [2]
A note of warning though: I have sprayed myself on the arm with the weaker of the two, the Fox Labs spray - mind you, outside with good breeze. Just a spritz. Well, my arm pretty much burned for two days straight and if I went inside, it was hard to breath due to the constant smell. It would not rinse off my arm with water or milk.
If you have poor accuracy, go with the fogger style. Stream style pepper sprays have longer range but are harder to hit vitals and create a barrier. Fog pepper spray can pretty much be sprayed to create a wall of pepper that no one will able to go through without being blinded and severely impaired. So it can be used to prevent an attacker from heading towards you, even if you can't reach the attacker.
I am not saying pepper spray is better than a gun but it requires almost no training and can save your life if used properly. Every office should have some along with a fire extinguisher.
http://www.businessinsider.de/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-2...
You wanted statistics, you got statistics.
If you lived your life entirely trying to avoid things with an incredibly minor chance of happening to you, you would stop living life. You a much higher chance of dying in a car accident, choking to death on your food, or in a bike related accident. Yet I drive, eat, and ride my bike.
What's the point?
Pretty much by definition, something that makes the news isn’t something you should worry about. If it happened often enough to be a serious threat then it wouldn’t be newsworthy. (E.g. car crashes.)
And the fact that "2 people killed" doesn't count as a mass shooting is weird.
I’ll never live in Europe because I don’t want to be blown up by some terrorists entering the country as refugees.
I’ll never live in Africa because I’ll get a disease and die without healthcare.
I’ll never live in Australia because there’s too many creatures that can kill you.
I’ll never live in Asia because of oppressive or unstable governments.
I’ll never live in Antarctica because the weather is too harsh and days too long.
http://www.businessinsider.com/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-...
Gun violence is far, far ahead of riding a bicycle. And no I don't particularly care if the bullet that kills me is part of a single shooting or a mass shooting.
It says Assault by gun - 1 in 315
Bicycling - 1 in 4030
So cycling is 10x safer.
Is this terrible? Yes. Should we do everything we can to reduce this number, given that we seem to have the largest problem? Absolutely. Does gun violence have the potential to get blown out of proportion when there are many other items that are a leading cause of death? Possibly
[0]: https://amp.businessinsider.com/images/5a860c28d0307219008b4...
According to the CDC National Center for Health Statistics:
Cause of death Deaths per 100,000, 2015
Unintentional poisoning deaths 14.8
Motor vehicle traffic deaths 11.7
Unintentional fall deaths 10.4
Firearm homicides 4.0
Of course, these numbers should all be reduced however we can. But the high visibility of gun violence overshadows the tragic toll of many other dangers.
I didn't have to search far, news from today https://news.sky.com/story/teenage-girl-shot-dead-in-north-l...
Gun homicides ~ 1/10th.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c...
I don't want to get into a massive debate about the "best" places to live but I will say that a great deal of perception of America is because America is the best in the world at marketing. You can also call it "propaganda" if you'd like, I wouldn't be able to argue against the term well.
North Korean propaganda looks like ridiculous phrases riddled with too many adverbs. American propaganda is a long history of tweaking the facts just right, as well as having control over one of the top 3 movie industries (Bollywood and Chinese films may get more viewers, but nobody can top Hollywood in global reach).
And slow down the nuclear arms race, stop terrorism and world hunger.
We have to provide food and shelter for the homeless, and oppose racial discrimination and promote civil rights, while also promoting equal rights for women.
We have to encourage a return to traditional moral values. Most importantly, we have to promote general social concern, and less materialism in young people.
This whole thread shouldn’t be on HN in the first place, there’s no solid information, and the trolls are already sharpening their fangs.
I have plenty to say on the gun debate, but HN isn't the place to bring most of that it up. Where the gun culture (note, OP said 'culture', so it has nothing to do with the legality per se) DOES intersect the HN topics, however, seems like something that shouldn't be ignored just because it's a political issue. Ideally your political issues are important issues - outright avoiding discussion of them is not helpful, even if discussion requires more effort towards civility and open-mindedness on everyone's parts.
I could have said "car" and "driving" instead and it would have been far more likely.
Additionally, the gun deaths statistic is cherry picked. Two-thirds of those gun deaths are from suicide. Also, the overwhelming majority of those who die in gun related homicides are poor minorities, highly concentrated in poor communities, and tend to occur between people who know each other, rather than random deaths.
Does America have a gun violence problem? Yes. Are guns a reason to be concerned for the average American, or someone like yourself who would move here? Not even remotely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_accidents_and_incident...