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Comment by pc86 | Hacker News Reader

And otherwise insightful comment making the absolutely bizarre connection between long employment notice periods and riots and mass shootings.

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I think for many of us outside the US, your culture of dog eat dog and I owe nothing to nobody except my sacred duty to get rich is the root of your social problems.

It's not American culture, it's that capitalist culture gets traction here first. So... brace yourselves. Maybe with kevlar.

More eloquently: https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/07/25/how-the-west-was-won/

Let me turn that around and suggest that when America finally embrace universal culture, it will understand that arming every random person with an assault rifle with extended magazine is a very, very bad idea.

I agree, but your response has little to do with my comment.

America has its fair share of problems. However, after having lived in several European countries for the better part of a decade, let us not delude ourselves to the myriad of problems, albeit different, that euro countries have.

And they're not better problems either, they're just different.

Wonderful bit of whataboutism! Now please respond to the argument.

lol i wonder where this culture of 'you must respond to my internet comment on my own terms' comes from? 'now please' explain this

Who knows. He's most likely salty that I poured cold reality on his fetishization of Europe. This happened to me a lot when I came back to America as there's a certain group of people who really do think Europe is better than America when the reality on the ground is far from it.

Last I heard, France also had a lot of riots in spite of being a staunchly socialist society.

I'm an American living in France. I get panicked messages from family all the time about this. It's incredible how much American media overstated the gravity of protests in France. Protests happen every weekend. Always registered with the police. But you often have "spoilers" who are just kids looking to break things. In rare cases, it's actually real protesters. And even then, the scope of the "rioting" is limited to one or two blocks maximum.

All the storefronts have insurance so any visible damage is quickly repaired.

I have never seen a riot in Paris and I've been here since 2020. Nor does it interfere with the lives of anyone I know here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests - French people are angry as well and they called themselves "yellow vests", both literally and figuratively, to get noticed. By people like you who don't seem notice.

It’s probably at the root of some of the US’s social problems, but perhaps a bigger factor in the US having loads of mass shootings is ready availability of guns suited to doing mass shootings with.

There have been mass shootings in many European countries, and in most cases they’ve led to heavy crackdowns on the availability of appropriate weapons, after which the mass shootings stop.

This is a massive derail, but mass shootings are an almost uniquely American phenomenon, and they are a policy choice - delivered by a uniquely dysfunctional politics that prizes ideology over actual outcomes. The outcome being protected here is "employers may not fire employees at zero notice", with the symmetry that this also applies to the employee.

More social security means more stable and less violent society, so it is an exaggeration but it is not wrong.

Are we sure it isn't just tied to the number of guns in circulation that mentally unwell people have access to?

Is that not related in a roundabout way?

Part of the reason the US has dismal social security is the same "dog eat dog" hyper individualistic mentality that is also present in people thinking it's their sacred right to own assault rifles and shit.

At least that's my impression from the outside. I never really went to the US to taste it first hand.

stable less violent right up until the revolution ..

For what it's worth, one of the main contributing factors to terroristic activity is lack of economic prospects. Similar enough that it rings true to me. Also, consider that pre-Columbine, the cultural template for mass shootings was someone disgruntled about their workplace.

Hence the US phrase “going postal”.

Correlation is not causation. At least I'd ask you to entertain the thought that the same factors that make a specific individual be without economic prospects also are factors that turn him violent.

Sure, third-variable problem is absolutely appropriate. But I'm not claiming causation here, just saying that drawing the connection is far from absurd.

> riots

Has this person ever been to France or Greece?

> mass shootings

In foreign countries without second amendment rights criminals just ram trucks into people instead. Since no guns are involved, these don't get reported as "mass shootings", not that it would bring any comfort to the victims and their families.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_truck_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Berlin_truck_attack

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Toronto_van_attack

The number of those is tiny compared to the number of mass shootings in America.

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