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Of course a country with more firearms is going to have more firearm-related deaths. The same is true for automobiles or bridges or baseball bats. The relevant question is what the overall death rate is.

For instance, Japan, per capita, has fewer firearms-related suicides than the US, but it has more suicides. I’d be willing to bet it has more train-related suicides than the US. Does this mean Japan’s suicide rate would go down if they had fewer trains and more guns? No, it just means that suicidal Japanese use the tools that are available to them, as do suicidal Americans.

Britain has very low rates of gun violence. But it has increasing rates of knife violence. Is this because Brits have too much access to knives? Or is it because violent people use the tools that are available to them? Britain is cracking down on knives, but even if they make it nigh-impossible to peacefully chop vegetables in your own kitchen, British criminals will just switch to screwdrivers or cricket bats or the Millwall Brick. But hey, at least you won’t have any more British toddlers getting hurt by playing with kitchen knives.

> I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like. Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.

Americans a century ago were just as well armed as today (perhaps more so) and had none of that nonsense. It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.

>It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.

my mom (born 1961) described her high school parking lot as exactly this. she described it as sort of a "clique"/social strata thing, like, guys I associate with wearing heavy Carhartt work coats to school every day and jeans with a clear indentation of a chew can (despite being under 18), would've been the kinds of guys who would proudly leave their sometimes multiple hunting firearms in gun racks in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot, which nobody had any issue with at all.

1991, the year I was born, someone held up a class at the same high school with a sawed-off shotgun. nobody was hurt but he discharged a few shells into a wall. last I checked you could still see how rough the buckshot-riddled concrete wall still is, despite having been painted over. (interestingly, this story never made national news...)

I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.

>I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.

This is what you get when everyone at every level feels compelled to "do something".

I went to school in the 90s and two kids shot up their high school. They murdered 12 students and one teacher. It was called the "Columbine massacre" after the name of the school, Columbine high school in Colorado.

sometime in 7th grade, in the 03-04 school year, our student counselor came into our class one day and gave a presentation about something along the lines of identifying signs of school shooter-types in your fellow classmates, or something. she said "I know you're going to say 'awesome,' but the Columbine shooters had made a level of their school in a video game, and they used it to practice their shooting before they did it." (everyone predictably whispered "dude, awesome.") despite being ostensibly too young, I was a huge DOOM fan at the time, and I was quite knowledgeable about the Columbine incident because it fascinated me. so I raised my hand and told the student counselor that this was false and merely an urban myth—one could go online and find "the Harris WADs" quite easily, and it was pretty well-known among anyone who had a passing interest in the WAD scene that none of these maps, in fact, resembled a school, much less that particular high school, in any way. she made me sit in the hall.

Yeah, when I was in highschool (mid 90’s) the principal told us to bring our guns to the office and he’d hold on to them rather than leaving them in the truck. Then we’d pick them up at the end of the day and go hunting. No one even thought that was strange. Now I have to make sure I don’t drive on school property when I have a gun in my car when I go pick my kids up. Park off campus and walk.

>It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.

My grandmother's high school had an elective class where they would even shoot at the school.

It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.

My Silent Generation father grew up in a city, which quickly turned rural at its edges, and it was routine to keep your hunting long gun in your locker to save a trip back home for hunting before or after school. Antonin Scalia mentioned carrying his .22 target rifle on the NYC city subways to and from practice.

The vast majority of Americans do have a feeling of society without perpetual danger and violence. Gun violence is only a real concern in a handful of cities like Detroit and Baltimore. Now we should do more to improve safety in those cities, and our society has let those places down. But for everyone else those cities might as well be in another country. In my city most years the murder rate is literally zero.

If you read the distorted stories in the news media you'll get a completely unrealistic impression of how most Americans actually live.

I live in San Diego and two people were just shot on the same block as my house. One of them died and he was exactly my age. It's where I do regular walks, next to a nearby Pokemon gym.

"I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like."

I don't feel paranoia. Maybe most people are fine except people who consume too much fear-driven media?

I mean, it's not like paranoid people are only paranoid about guns. They are paranoid about everything.

>They are paranoid about everything.

And once you (start paying the Dane-geld) give into that paranoia, that paranoia never goes away (get rid of the Dane); it just gets larger and larger.

The end state for the nations that sacrifice themselves to paranoia is that other nations that have managed to control their paranoid impulses take over the ones that can't, but that takes a while and generally leaves those conquered worse off than before. That said, inactions have consequences.

> murder is merely a small fraction of gun deaths.

You must mean the others are suicides. Why not say so?

> The multiplier for all firearm-related deaths between the US and EU average for example is around 12X, more than an order of magnitude [1].

Ah, because by not saying so you can make up this 12X figure, by comparing firearm suicides in Europe where in many cases there is marginal civilian gun ownership with firearm suicide in the US where there is widespread civilian gun ownership.

Of course this is a flawed comparison, because Americans don’t commit suicide at 12x the rate of Europeans, they just happen to use guns rather than other methods.

The giveaway that your comparison is deliberately misleading is that you don’t mention suicide. You intentionally hide how you get to this 12x figure.

The Switzerland outlier is explained by a culture of safe handling.

The swiss are not an outlier.

Czech republic is shall issue, and almost everyone has concealed carry permits.

Homicide rate is 0.9.

Excellent information. Do you have a reliable source for that?

Which part?

Czechs have a half-millennia old, entrenched gun tradition, with amusingly even stronger protection on gun ownership than even Americans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic

The only times this was suspended was during German and Russian occupations.

Homicide rates is easily accessible public information, from various sources including world bank and the UN?

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5

Year by year chart: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CZE/czech-republic/cri...

Their gun culture is certainly an outlier in Europe, compared to even the Swiss. Very permissive, and yet murder rates are essentially on par with entirely gun-less Asian countries vaunted for their "safety".

This is great - such a strong datapoint that culture is the factor and not guns. Similar to the datapoint Japan provides about suicides.

>I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like.

We don't perpetually feel like we're in danger or feel paranoid.

>Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.

You are describing most of the US.

"I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like."

And I wish you could better grasp just how big and diverse America is. :) There are parts with terrible problems that make for scary headlines, but those parts are not in any way representative of very large swaths of the country. Where I live there is essentially zero violence (of any kind). We don't live with perpetual feelings of danger or paranoia - heck, we often forget to lock our doors at night.

> I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like.

Do you think having fire drills and extinguishers is "a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia"?

> Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.

Maybe try to do something against bullying? It might seem a bit harsh but having been on the receiving end of that, it's hard to find empathy for those people that panic once the victims start fighting back.

Along your line of thought, I think with the threat of earthquakes, floods, hurricanes, tornados, car crashes, plane crashes, hackers, identity theft, terrorism, etc, anyone who wishes to live with a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia can freely do so, there's no need to pick firearms in particular.

> I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like.

Me too, but that will never happen. Consider America's past: armed revolution, native genocide, violent [secret] coups with foreign governments, murder of its' own citizens by "peace officers", it goes on and on... It's not a peaceful place with a peaceful history, so I don't think your wish is too realistic. That said...you did say "wish", and I wish it also.

Comparing the relatively densely populated, ethnically homogenous, lower income inequality E.U. states to the U.S. does not make for an equal comparison. Simply look at how the bulk of firearm homicides are restricted to perhaps a hundred or so ZIP codes nationwide to see the disparity. See Chicago for example. [0]

[0] https://heyjackass.com/