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Comment by fasterik | Hacker News Reader

I see a few issues with your argument. Just because something has underlying social factors doesn't mean that it shouldn't also be treated with drugs and therapy. The latest wave of psychedelic research is not simply pushing a prescription drug; all of the research on MDMA, psilocybin, etc. is finding that these drugs work within a clinical setting paired with therapy. Also, I wasn't able to find a source saying that PTSD is less prevalent outside of the US. I found one study [1] that says that treatment seeking is higher in high-income countries. However, this doesn't imply that the US has higher rates than Europe, for example. It could also be the case that the disorder is just as prevalent or higher in lower income populations without access to mental healthcare.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6034513/

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I think his argument is that the US should focus on trying to solve the underlying issues, either first or at least concurrently

A good starting place might be the inability to afford the very treatments and medications being studied by a large portion of the population.

I would also revoke all the mandatory reporting and other reporting laws for therapists, and remove the ability for government to use therapy/medical records for considering licensing or security clearances. These are barriers that keep people that need therapy most from seeking it.

PTSD can be caused by literally any traumatic, life-threatening situation. How is the US supposed to "solve" that?

There are ways to mitigate, but not eliminate, the presence of traumatic situations. Whether that is the purview of government perhaps is another question.

I suspect war and bad family environment are a massive source of trauma of US persons; the path to mitigating the former at least facially is a bit more obvious.

erm... reduce the number of traumatic, life-threatening situations by taking away the guns? Get your police force under control and stop trying to control peoples minds and bodies could be a good start?

I am fairly skeptical of the claim that banning guns would significantly reduce gun violence. People who commit the most gun violence crimes (criminals) will find a way to get guns regardless of the laws.

I live in a country where it's very hard to get weapons legally, yet almost every drug bust in the news also contains a significant amount of confiscated firearms.

FGC-9; everybody in Europe who wants a gun can trivially have it within a week without interacting with the criminal element or buying regulated components. That goes for modern ammunition too.

This past week in the US there have been several stories about people who were shot after ringing a doorbell or pulling into someone's driveway. Reducing the number of guns means that these people would not be able to enact this type of senseless violence.

It would also certainly cut down on the numbers of toddlers shooting their siblings.

Does the number of people getting shot by their toddler siblings or after ringing a doorbell make up a significant percentage of total gun violence?

If not, then banning guns would be, in software terms, a premature optimization.

Why does it have to be a significant percentage of the total? It's still contributing to avoidable life-changing trauma for the people involved.

It has to be a significant part of the total because it’s being used as an argument against introducing new treatments for PTSD.

I read it to be less against pharmaceutical treatments and more in support of preventative social measures.

It’s not clear that the two aren’t one and the same. MDMA treatments for PTSD are not ongoing medications. Generally they are just 3 sessions of assisted therapy producing a huge reduction in symptoms.

If we can reduce the level of trauma and fear in society, we can reduce associated behaviors.

Because all laws and bans are tradeoffs. By banning something that doesn't have a significant effect you might be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

How many lives are saved and traumas avoided through people's ability to defend themselves with guns? If that number is higher than the number of toddler accidents, gun ban would effectively cause an increase in PTSD and deaths.

P.S.: just to clarify, by "significant" I mean significant in a statistical sense of not being insignificant (very close to zero, noise-level), not "majority".

That's a fair point. I took the premise to be that there was already a higher trauma rate in the US based on the fact that there is so apparently so much medication given out for trauma related issues compared to other countries. This had been suggested above but I didn't look into it further.

> How many lives are saved and traumas avoided through people's ability to defend themselves with guns

Self defence with guns sounds pretty traumatising for all involved to be fair.

I'm not a psychologist, but intuitively, most trauma seem to have an element of helplessness in them. Being able to defend yourself and your loved ones with guns would therefore cause less trauma than having to wait for police to come, or just being hurt/seeing a loved one hurt/murdered in front of you.

Still, we're stepping deep into the speculation area here, so I won't stand behind this argument very strongly.

Don't forget the community is the person who is being defended against. Using lethal force against someone has wide consequences.

The act of committing violence against another person with a weapon itself is traumatic. Most people can't simply turn off their instinct for empathy and kill another person in cold blood simply because the other is an "enemy," and not suffer psychological consequences, possibly even PTSD. Even police officers, professional killers that they are, have to go through mandatory counseling and assessment after a shooting.

Realistically, your argument isn't to lessen trauma, but to simply normalize it. Which is exactly what American culture already does.

> Realistically, your argument isn't to lessen trauma, but to simply normalize it. Which is exactly what American culture already does

No, actually, my argument is that killing or injuring a person in self-defense is less traumatic than being helpless while getting assaulted.

Besides, trauma is relative - "normalizing" trauma is another way of saying "being desensitised" - which is exactly the process therapy itself employs to help people relieve the effects of it.

There's also different levels of trauma involved in the kind of assault you're likelyt to come up against. Being held up at gunpoint is something I can't imagine happening in my life.

Oddly, I've once had a dream that I was being held at gunpoint.

A person unknown to me was holding a submachine gun, and I could literally feel the muscles tensing in my stomach, where the gun was pointed at, anticipating the pain of a bullet. It was one of the most uncomfortable and frightening things I've felt in my life, so much that I still remember the dream quite vividly.

I assume being held at gunpoint in real life would be even more frightening.

How do I protect my toddler from all the criminals who keep their guns? Call the police and wait 15 minutes?

If I was having my toddler threatened by criminals on a regular basis, I'd have to question my life choices.

Living in an area with high crime rate does not necessarily reflect person's life choices.

None of the above "gun violence"/"senseless violence" things given as reasons for gun control happen to my family on a regular basis either. By your logic I should question the choice of gun control .

The notion that taking away legal guns from legal gun owners will somehow reduce illegal violence is about as absurd as outlawing drugs. People who want to do illegal drugs have had zero problems acquiring them, despite near infinite resources plowed into stopping them by governments at all levels.

Most people gleefully chant "The war on drugs has failed"...yet, "The war on guns" will somehow succeed?

This does stand in contrast to other nations not having the problem to the degree that we do.

And... really, any other evidence. It is illegal for you to build and detonate a bomb in the city. Not shockingly, we have few incidents of this happening. Far fewer than random gun violence in places you are allowed to carry guns.

Heck, just set realistic goals here. We make it illegal to drive without a seatbelt, and have largely succeeded in getting folks to wear a belt while in a car. Something far far easier to just not do than the active "seek out an illegal gun" idea that you posit would continue to be a thing.

We control fireworks more readily than we do guns. Again, no surprise that we have far fewer counts of incidents with fireworks. And again, also no surprise it isn't zero.

> It is illegal for you to build and detonate a bomb in the city

It is illegal to kill someone, even without a gun, under most circumstances. Perhaps we should make it double-illegal?

> Far fewer than random gun violence in places you are allowed to carry guns

This is false. Most gun violence does not occur from legal gun owners, or in places allowing concealed or overt carry.

No, most gun violence occurs with illegal guns by people committing crimes.

There is no realistic way for you or anyone to take away all of the illegal guns in America. Therefore, any proposed gun ban solely impacts legal gun owners - which statistically are not the problem. It sure sounds good though...

You really don't seem to be arguing in good faith. If it is already "illegal to kill someone" and we shouldn't "make it double-illegal", then we don't need vehicular manslaughter laws, either. For that matter, why have any of the regulations on safely operating anything. After all, it would be illegal for the worst case already? Why restrict sales of ingredients that can make meth? Why regulate anything?

And how is it false that we have more random gun violence than bombing? I can list, this week, more than 1 place where a legal gun owner killed someone. It is famously in the news right now. When is the last time we had a random bomb in a city here?

I haven't even proposed taking away all guns. Nobody gives a shit about most hunting weapons. Nor do they care about any properly held weapons with responsible care and protections.

> Nobody gives a shit about most hunting weapons

And here's the issue then. What anti-gun advocates argue are weapons not good for hunting is misguided. Additionally, it doesn't matter if a gun was designed to hunt or not - the gun is an inanimate object.

People like to discuss banning AR-15's all day, failing to realize just how many similar-but-not-AR-15's model rifles exist out there, most of which fire the same cartridge too. No, but that one particular model is the problem because it says "AR-15" on the side (most don't even say that btw).

California already tried this and failed. California banned certain model rifles by name. Famously it banned "Colt AR-15" rifles... well guess what, people just bought S&W AR-15's instead. Ban the word "AR-15" and people will just buy "AR-16"s, or "NOT-15"s, or whatever. It's an impossible thing to ban.

It apparently doesn't matter than handguns kill the most people... those scary black AR-15's we see on movies are clearly the problem. After all, the bullet explodes and ruins the meat!

The anti-gun debate is not grounded in facts or reality - which is why anti-gun proponents make no headway (thankfully).

> And how is it false that we have more random gun violence than bombing?

People rarely seek to indiscriminately kill or maim large numbers of people - which is what a bomb does. Your mass shootings are super rare events.

Not long ago, bombs were going off with a near cadence all across the US, mostly from political extremists. Why did the bombing stop? Was it because we made bombs illegal? Of course not, blowing people and buildings up was already illegal.

You should research Weather Underground[1]...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

Nobody is hunting with handguns or high powered rifles with high capacity magazines. Back when I did bird hunt, the entire community would jump on any fool that fired more than the allowed shells in a gun in rapid fire. It is obvious when it happens, and hilarious with how regulated guns actually are in hunting communities.

So, I reiterate. Nobody gives a shit about those. They are instead trotted out as a straw man to silence regulation of weapons.

I'm a little confused by your angle at this point, honest. Gun regulation should go after high capacity items and hand guns. After that, reckless regard to care and storage of munitions. Could probably move to control of the ammunition, as I can think of frightening few reasons for folks to have hollow point or incendiary rounds? Unsure that would make any real impact. Controlling handguns, though, is clearly something that should be done. It sounds like you agree there? Why sideline it with talking about how people are talking about AR-15s inaccurately? You literally brought that into this conversation.

If you want to know why bombing has gotten less, btw. It almost certainly went with more regulation of the ingredients that go into bombs. If you buy a lot of the ingredients that go into TNT, expect you will be rightfully checked up on.

> high powered rifles with high capacity magazines

And you'd be wrong with this assertion again, because the definition of "high powered" and "high capacity" are vastly different for your anti-gun advocates versus reality.

A .223 Remington cartridge is not "high powered". A 20 round magazine was what the gun was designed for, making that the standard capacity magazine, not 10 rounds like some advocate for.

A .50 BMG could be considered "high powered" - and it's banned in California. However, in California you can purchase .416 Barret, which is even more effective at range than .50 BMG - and it's perfectly legal. Make sense out of that one...

> frightening few reasons for folks to have hollow point or incendiary rounds

This is a statement made out of ignorance. It's all about the energy transferred into the target. A HP bullet is designed to transfer as much energy into the target as possible to prevent over-penetration (where you shoot someone through a wall accidentally, for instance) and can be considered a safety-feature for defense. You really do not want a reality where people are forced to use FMJ for self defense...

> If you buy a lot of the ingredients that go into TNT, expect you will be rightfully checked up on.

Look up how to make Anfo. It's not difficult, and the components are not regulated. The use, however, is regulated, ie. it's illegal to make a bomb and blow people up.

> Back when I did bird hunt, the entire community would jump on any fool that fired more than the allowed shells in a gun in rapid fire

Sport hunting is akin to golf. There are rules for etiquette and "fairness" reasons, even if that seems silly to an outsider. Additionally, at an established gun range, few allow rapid fire unless you are a member. This is for safety reasons, nothing else. Joe walking in off the street with zero firearms training should not be mag-dumping for obvious reasons.

> Nobody is hunting with handguns

There's an entire community of folks who do just that.

We cannot have productive conversations about gun control until anti-gun advocates educate themselves and refrain from abusing and redefining established words.

I'm not wrong, you are just looking to nitpick your way to success here. You are the one poisoning the conversation with supposed mistakes and nitpicks. I could as easily nitpick that arsenic is perfectly fine to feed to people, so that we should not have laws against poisoning.

The statement on hollow and incendiary isn't ignorance, it is somewhat flat disbelief that it is typically successful at the things you put forth. I'm well aware of the reasons to try and use them. That said, I'm also well aware that that is never what is accomplished with them. Though, again, I had a question mark on that sentence as I really don't care too much about those. They are, for all practical purposes a side show.

And I want you to reread the "that is for safety reasons, nothing else." What the flying fuck do you think we are talking about? Gun safety regulation. Fucking period.

It's a lot like arguing with a child about why the sky is blue. Facts and realities don't apply.

Your comments about HP bullets, and particularly incendiary munitions (lol) are absurd and uninformed. But it doesn't matter, you will not educate yourself on the topic no matter how wrong you may be, and therefore we cannot have a productive conversation regarding gun control.

The "I fired a gun once, and now I'm an expert" crowd is exhausting. You've spent hundreds of words here, in public, clearly demonstrating your staggeringly poor command of this topic.

And gun control advocates always ask, why has no progress been made? Because the conversation is not being held from a rational position.

I find your insistence that you are the rational one laughable, at best. Pedantic, to the extreme, I would give you. Rational? Nope. Children desperately hanging on to their toys. Everyone's health be damned.

On the off chance you come back to this. I would like to apologize for how rude I think I was to the end there. You are clearly prepared with talking points, and this is not a conversation I want to devote too much time to. That is no reason for me to be rude when I am engaged. Apologies.

I don't know what you're considering "high powered", but hunting rifles actually tend to be on the larger caliber side of things. If you're shooting a large mammal, using something like a 22 is just unnecessary cruelty. You want a round that will kill as fast as possible, so .338 in, .30-06 or 7.62 mm are the calibers of choice. If you're talking about .50 BMG as "high powered", then lucky for you, "high powered" rifles are almost never used in crime. They're just too expensive. In the few cases that they were used, I can't find a case where the "high powered" nature of it was actually relevant.

And I have the exact opposite point of view with regard to HP rounds. If we're talking handguns, we're talking self defense, and in self defense situations, the only rounds you want are hollow point. Because they're designed to flatten out on impact, they go through a lot fewer walls, ceilings, and home invaders, making the shooter far less likely to accidentally over-penetrate into their family or neighbors. Using full metal jacket for home defense is putting everybody else at excessive risk.

Incendiary rounds are for fun, and little else. They look scary, but they don't really have any real effect.

This kind of illustrates one of the big issues with firearms discourse in the US: people who like having guns tend to know a lot about them, and take for granted that people have that same knowledge, neglecting the fact that there's a whole other group of people who know next to nothing about them. Then the people who know next to nothing about firearms propose gun legislation which is just baffling to anyone who knows anything about guns, like banning specific models of firearm, or certain ergonomic features, or banning silencers/suppressors (this isn't Goldeneye, they just make it less hearing damagingly loud to shoot).

I'm almost swayed by the animal cruelty argument, at the same time, the best hunters I know are all bow hunters. Such that, yes, it will be harder; but hunting isn't supposed to be easy.

Guns are largely fun for most that have them. Little else. Such that I don't think that changes things.

I should note that I've probably owned more guns than makes sense. Had friends with desert eagles. There is basically no reason for any high school age kid to have access to the kind of crap I had access to. It isn't so much ignorance as flat disregard for the bullshit reasons so many pro gun folks put forth. Including here. Your "need this for self defense" is a large part of the reason folks "need them for self defense." It is circular at best, and you can only make it work by poisoning the conversation with pulling in hunting.

So, please, play the scenario out. You take away all the legal guns... now what? Violence ends? Right? Right?

What's the plan for taking away all the illegal guns? What's the plan to protect citizens that are now disarmed?

Why don't we just focus on taking away all the illegal guns? Oh, right... we have been... for 89 years - yet there's more illegal guns on the streets today than in 1934. What a shock...

Kind of like how there's more drugs readily available to average citizens than before the "war on drugs" started. It's literally an impossible task... have you seen the homemade guns in countries with outright bans? Or worse, illegally imported automatic firearms. Regular Joe - no gun. Criminal Joe, full auto!

People like to point at Prohibition as evidence an outright ban of Drugs can never work. Yet, it's different with guns somehow?

You're looking at an infected wound and deciding the appropriate treatment is duct tape.

Why duct tape? Because you haven't bothered to even learn rudimentary medical knowledge but are a self-proclaimed expert. Duct tape holds things together, so why not? Banning guns means no gun violence, right? Why don't we just make it illegal to hurt or kill people? It's already illegal? Ok, make it double-illegal, that'll show them!

At what point did I propose taking away "all legal guns?"

I have put forth regulating all guns. But, it doesn't take an active imagination to see that regulation is not a total banning/taking away. We still have cats, after all.

Edit: leaving cats, for obvious reasons. I meant cars.

Way more people are run down by cars while crossing the street, but the media has decided to get hysterical over a blue moon.

Top two causes of under-18 death in the US are guns and cars.

Those stats call “children” 19 years old and younger.

So all those 18 and 19 year old “children” gang bangers are included in the statistic.

And? Other countries don't have this problem.

Your response was irrelevant to my point, but ok.

I was speaking specifically of people getting shot for something like knocking on the door of the wrong house. That's a tiny minority of gun-related deaths and not something anyone really needs to worry about any more than they worry about getting in their car or crossing the street every day.

The more barriers to entry the less likely someone is to buy a gun on impulse or "just to have." When they're not common on the street it's not needed to carry one for defence either.

You say that drugs busts etc. outside the US will often have guns involved. Yes, criminals can still find ways to get them but ordinary people won't be bothered with this.

The Netherlands for example has Europe's biggest port in Rotterdam and sees an incredible amount of drug-related smuggling. It has 3.9 guns per 100,000 people (107th in the world) while the US has 88.8 (1st in the world).

The rate of murder is 73 times more than the Netherlands.

Sources here: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Netherland...

Look at the murder rate: https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Crime/Violen...

See how high the US then see how far you have to scroll down before you start seeing European countries appearing there.

Sources for more control leading to reduced homicides and guns on crime scenes:

1. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/hicrc/firearms-research/guns-an...

2. https://injuryprevention.bmj.com/content/7/3/184

>The rate of murder is 73 times more than the Netherlands.

No the absolute number is 73x, the rate is like 8x.

Since you've cherry picked a European state, I will now cherry pick the state New Hampshire.

Murder rate New Hampshire: 0.9 / 100k [0] Murder rate Netherlands: ~0.6 / 100k [1]

Also bear in mind the expected murder chance of the average person from the Netherlands dropped into the US is not expected to be anything like the US average murder rate. The US is not nearly as demographically homogenous as the Netherlands and someone with Dutch heritage experiences much closer to Dutch murder rates in the US.

[0] https://247wallst.com/state/how-the-murder-rate-in-new-hamps...

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5?location...

Apologies for the mix up with the rate. 8x is still on the side of my argument though.

I cherry picked the Netherlands because of the large amount of drug trade there. Every other country in Europe compared favorably to the United States.

From what I can see there is a similar level of diversity in the Netherlands and the US. In both countries around 30% of people are born abroad. In the US around 72% are white and in the NL around 76% are ethnically Dutch. In Rotterdam in particular around half of the population was born to Non-Dutch parents.

1. https://www.indexmundi.com/united_states/demographics_profil...

2. https://www.indexmundi.com/netherlands/demographics_profile....

3. https://www.coe.int/en/web/interculturalcities/rotterdam

Murder rates have been going down in all developed nations, regardless of the gun ownership statistics.

Even being gun regulation advocate, I cannot accept the premise that banning guns will do much to reduce murder rates.

But the homicide rate is still significantly higher where there is lax gun control right?

No, actually.

Vermont has allowed people to carry a concealed weapons without a license - literally buy a handgun, stick it in your pants - and has had a consistently lower murder rate than Washington DC which banned handguns until recently.

I meant more in comparison to other nations in Europe for example. It's difficult to compare individual states within the US because of how guns travel across state lines.

https://www.publichealth.columbia.edu/news/state-gun-laws-ma...

Czech Republic has very liberal gun laws, you can get a concealed carry permit with less effort than some US states and the murder rate is 0.72 per 100,000.

That's fair.

Disclaimer: I live in The Netherlands.

My high-school friend was killed on holiday shortly after takeoff when a Buk 9M38 surface-to-air missile shot the plane down, killing 196 Dutch civilians.

A famous crime reporter got shot in the street for covering a story about a high ranking drug lord.

A news outlet got shot with a bazooka.

So lets do some statistics:

How many American civilians in the past 10 years have been killed with a surface-to-air-missle, adjusted for population? Zero. 196 for The Netherlands.

How many crime reporters got killed in that period? Five for the US, two for The Netherlands.

How many news outlets got shot with a bazooka? I can't find any, but please correct me. One in The Netherlands.

The thing with statistics is. You can make up anything you want to frame a certain view.

I see your point but that incident didn't happen in a any way that can be tied to the regulatory measures that different states take, whereas gun crime can, so it feels like something of an apples and oranges comparison to me.

Want to say as an aside from the discussion that I'm sorry to hear about your friend and I hope that you got all the support you deserved during that time and since.

Someone has been spending a little too much time on Reddit

Oh please. Survey 100 random non-US residents and I’ll eat my hat if the majorly don’t say that US gun policy is absurd.

The typical American argument is that the US is exceptional and that the views of “these damn foreigners” don’t matter.

I on the other hand seldom hear Americans actively argue that US gun policy is looked upon favourably by the worldwide community. This is exactly what you’re doing by implying that a non-US resident speaking against US gun policy holds a certain political persuasion which means that they should be dismissed. The more likely reality: they have a very typical perspective that transcends the US.

Thinking gun policy isn't good is different then dealing with ptsd. That same survey, if you ask how many people have ptsd because of guns in America, maybe you get one,if that.

Foreigner views are readily dismissed because they are based on biased, sensationalized narrative-driven media coverage of rare events. You don't get US small-town local news in the EU, for instance, so have no reference for how many non-violent stories are aired by comparison - or how many stories cover a happy ending of a homeowner defending themselves successfully. You only get the bad stuff.

Imagine if we got week-long, wall-to-wall coverage of nearly every stabbing that took place in the EU... Americans would start to believe you Europeans really need to get that knife situation under control.

The reality is, by the numbers, legal gun owners are rarely involved in illegal violence while using their firearms... and there isn't a darn thing anyone can do to remove guns from illegal gun owners.

Therefore, the issue, as perceived by a foreigner, is usually reduced to irrelevant talking points. It's just unproductive.

Why have the gun laws not changed significantly in the past few decades? Because most Americans do not agree with the sensationalized views pushed by the click/eyeball driven media. It's that simple. So then, as a foreigner, you should consider why that may be... perhaps there is another viewpoint after all?

European media is obsessed with the US and you can quickly tell by talking to anyone from there. If our media covered to the same degree the French torching their cities because they don't want to work, you'd think WW3 is starting.

> Americans would start to believe you Europeans really need to get that knife situation under control.

A lot of Americans unironically do believe that.

I wouldn't be able to find a link, but I recall a Travel StackExchange question a couple years back where a European was asking how to stay safe from gun violence during their vacation to the US. They were terrified they might be randomly shot by a stranger, or pulled over and shot by the police.

Obviously this view of the US is deeply misguided - but this is the problem our sensational media creates. It makes rare events seems commonplace and irrationally freaks people out.

You might be overestimating how many Americans think anything at all about Europe. I suspect that the US is a lot more prevalent in European news than Europe is in US news.

Honestly, facilitate a culture of supportive interconnection between people where we are less afraid to share our deepest selves, even when they are shameful and painful, and more confident that we will receive the open-hearted support we need at a time like that.

So, I do understand why we turn to medication.

Except that it also includes a heavy dose on thinly veiled transphobia. Which is a contributing factor to mental issues and stigma.

[removed]

It's gender dysphoria...

This argument implies that approving MDMA therapy is one of the biggest efforts in the country, consuming huge resources that could go to solving big societal issues.

The obvious counterargument would be that having a real treatment for PTSD and other fear related conditions would likely ameliorate the social issues.

Yes, taking guns away would reduce shootings, but so would helping people who are so fearful they feel the need to shoot someone who isn’t threatening them.

There's something about American culture that facilitates various psychological conditions. The aggressive, over-expressive, utilitarian individualism, the inability to just stay calm and quiet and think in solitude, the emphasis on material wealth and well-being and looking "sexy", the social warriorism and activism on the same issues.

What you're describing is an extreme of American popular culture, which is a small, biased selection of the American population. I'd be interested to know if there's any evidence that these traits are higher in the average American than in other countries. For N=1, I am pretty quiet, calm, spend plenty of time meditating, and don't really care about superficial appearances.

I think America is too vast and diverse to be described that way. Your description doesn't at all describe the no-gaudiness humble-behavior expected in most white, mid-western communities. Utilitarian individualism doesn't at all describe the vast swarth of America's most religious peoples. E.g. The Amish, the Johovah's Witness, Fundamentalists, Mormons, etc.

TV and movies don’t reflect reality.

Where are you getting this from? Movies?

That might explain this constant commentary I see from our European friends describing America with exaggerated stereotypes that bear little resemblance to reality.

I see it too. I suspect non-Americans consume a lot of US media and as a result feel sufficiently educated but they look just as silly and ignorant as Americans who think Europe is a country.

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