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Comment by lockhouse | Hacker News Reader

I have to disagree with one point you made. Despite what the media would have you believe, gun violence in America is not random. The vast majority of it is gang related or suicide. We don’t have a gun problem, we have an inner city crime problem and a mental health problem, both probably fueled largely by the other problems you mentioned, such as our work culture and lack of social safety nets.

Another point I’d like to make is that modern European lifestyles exist partly due to American military hegemony, which has allowed European nations to redirect their defense spending to social programs.

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There are mass shootings almost every day, and they do not seem to be limited to 'an inner city crime problem'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

This sounds like a random Chinese person justifying the status quo by saying "The vast majority of people are never jailed, and people are jailed only if they keep talking about things they shouldn't. We don't have a dictatorship problem, we just have a lot of people who don't understand when to keep their mouth shut."

America absolutely has a horrible gun violence problem. Saying you are less likely to be shot as long as you avoid certain parts of the country doesn't cut it.

> Another point I’d like to make is that modern European lifestyles exist partly due to American military hegemony, which has allowed European nations to redirect their defense spending to social programs.

I agree with you on your main point, but I'm not sure this one holds. Per NATO, defense spending is supposed to be around 2% of GDP, with most European countries spending 1-1.5% [1]. This is while the average European country spends ~20-25% of GDP on social services [2]. So if the US were to defund the military to 2% and leave Europe to their own devices, the budget shortfall would be a small portion of the amount European countries currently spend on all social programs.

--- [1]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/584088/defense-expenditu... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_social_we...

That Wikipedia article you specify shows that U.S. already spends 18-20%, and then when you scroll down further to the Total Net Social spending, it rises to 30%, which places U.S. #2 in social spending as % of GDP already.

You may have an "inner city crime problem" but that does not mean you don't have a gun problem. It absolutely is both.

The way you said “you” implies you’re not from the United States. Gun violence is one of those areas where nearly all American media surrounding it is heavily biased. Politicians seize on this every time to push gun control measures which usually have nothing to do with the specifics of the incident, such as pushing for universal background checks when the gun used was legally purchased by one of their parents and improperly secured, or pushing for an “assault rifle” ban when the weapon was a handgun. This makes it painfully obvious that most of these gun control measures are really just intended to disarm the opposition to future authoritarian plans. The Second Amendment wasn’t put into the Bill of Rights just so some backwoods hicks could go deer hunting.

I am not American, but I have a master's in American history. I stand by what I said.

In the 1960s, there were 20 incidents of shootings at a school.

In the 1990s, there were 99.

In the 2010s, there were 261.

So far in the 2020s, there have been 139, so we're on pace to set a new record for school shootings in the US.

Crazy that all these schools were in the inner city and they were all the result of mental health issues. Also wild that other countries with income disparities the same or worse than ours and other countries with significant mental health challenges in their populace don't have the gun violence stats that we have.

I wonder why.

I see Americans make this comment a lot. Putting aside whether or not it is true that it enables higher domestic social spending, the comment never seems to come with the realisation that many Europeans deride the “need” for higher defence spending. This is due to Europeans’ perception that American military adventurism is what creates the instability from which Europe requires American protection in the first place.

Many Europeans will say: “America, please stop bombing the mideast or continuously expanding NATO; this will stop creating problems that result in you demanding we spend more.”

In other words, many Americans presuppose the validity of their military adventurism and assume Europeans agree with it, and thus think they should want to participate in funding the defence of blowback from it.

By contrast, many Europeans would rather America did not try to play global policeman, or if it’s going to do so, then happily accept paying for European defence as the price of Pax Americana / US hegemony.

> many Europeans deride the “need” for higher defence spending. This is due to Europeans’ perception that American military adventurism is what creates the instability from which Europe requires American protection in the first place.

Right, European countries thought that, then the War in Ukraine happened. Germany, France, and other European nations have all increased their military budgets [1], indicating that they were, unfortunately, wrong. It's clear now that we still live in a world where conquest is still on the forefront of many dictator's minds.

And that's disregarding Europe's own adventures in other countries; just look at France's parlays into Mali or Mauritania, Greece and Turkey, or Italy and their actions in the Mediterranean.

--- [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/24/defence-spendi...

I would agree that the worldview of Europe is changing, given the sharp reality of its defences being tested.

Europe is of course (to state the extremely obvious) no stranger to its own imperial adventures. We might do well to stop that if we don’t want to trigger refugee flows and other outcomes we don’t want.

I don’t completely disagree with you and in fact would have said the same a few years ago, but you can see the aggressiveness of Russia and China when they feel they can get away with it. The US backing of Ukraine is instrumental to their ability to maintain their defense and the US Navy is perhaps the only thing stopping China from launch a full out invasion of Taiwan.

I think if the EU were to increase military spending there may be more pressure domestically in the US to pull back on military spending. A bit of a chicken and egg situation I suppose as there is no need until the US defense spending is curtailed.

Quite, and the reality of the Russian invasion of Ukraine certainly trumps armchair rhetoric on this topic. I would only add that (until recently) many Europeans would have questioned whether their aggression exists in a vacuum (“are we provoking them?”). But that sort of navel gazing vanishes when artillery is fired in your direction.

There was a deep-seated aversion to rearmament owing to the memory of the Second World War, which is fading away, cajoled by events in Ukraine.

> America [...] please stop continuously expanding NATO

Many Eastern Europeans would probably have very different thoughts.

Like I said, views are changing in light of events, but let’s not pretend this was the settled majority view since 1945 or 1990. That’s the point: there has been a presumption by America that their view is the only view over the long term, leading to European perceptions that the US takes an arrogant view of their defence spending.

> Like I said, views are changing in light of events

In some countries however has been the dominant view in Poland and the Baltic states at the very least for the several decades.

Possibly in Czechia too?

That's not entirely true though, at least (living here) it doesn't seem that way. It seems that barely a week goes by without some rando running amok with another shooting in a local mall or in a school somewhere in the state and these people are then deemed "mentally ill" and nothing happens to stop it happening again.

There sure must be a lot of mentally ill people in the USA...

As for the last point, the US does not have military bases overseas for any reason other than self-interest. It is a lot easier to project power around the world when you have a permanent base in the nearby neighbourhood - there is no altruism involved. The US chooses to do that, and makes arrangements with foreign governments, and should indeed bear that cost, although if you could possibly prevent your WAGs from driving on the wrong side of the road, killing the locals, and fleeing the country in future, we'd appreciate that.

And one last point I'd make is that I don't believe that it matters whether it's suicide, or gang-based, or black-on-black, or "mentally ill", or any other way in which Americans slice and dice the statistics to try and make them more palatable. It's still dead people. And that is truly awful.

> not have military bases overseas for any reason other than self-interest

Which is fine as long as it's also in interest of the host country to have the American base in their territory.

Sure, I wasn't suggesting otherwise - I just think it's disingenuous (despite any downvotes) to try and ascribe American military bases overseas as anything other than pure self-interest.

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