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.
Those seem like important statistics to have for a true comparison, but strangely is missing from the article you linked...
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.
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://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/in...
https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
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"
http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...
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...
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
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?
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
Guns make killing far easier than weapons like knives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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?