We know what is different but we refuse to address it. I understand that many people feel the second amendment is very important, but we at least have to have the intellectual honesty to admit that shootings like this are a consequence of it. We might decide we are willing, as a society, to accept that risk, but we can’t pretend it isn’t there.
Americans have 101 guns per 100 citizens. Finns have 34.2 guns per 100 citizens. Icelanders have 30.3 guns per 100 citizens.
America has 110x the murder rate than Finland has. America has 13,000x the murder rate Iceland has.
Whatever the cause is, 3x the guns ≠ 110x the murder rate (or 13,000x the murder rate).
A more interesting comparison might be to examine countries with similar murder rates to the U.S., regardless of arbitrary "developing or not developing" boxes, and ask what the two countries have in common. For instance, countries with similar murder rates to the U.S. include:
• Burundi (1.2 guns per 100 residents)
• Cuba (4.8 guns per 100 residents)
• Kazakhstan (1.3 guns per 100 residents)
• Kyrgyzstan (0.9 guns per 100 residents)
• Latvia (19 guns per 100 residents)
• Niger (0.7 guns per 100 residents)
• Rwanda (0.6 guns per 100 residents)
• Somalia (9.1 guns per 100 residents)
• Turkey (12.5 guns per 100 residents)
• Turkmenistan (3.8 guns per 100 residents)
• Ukraine (6.6 guns per 100 residents)
What about the U.S. makes it more like these countries, murder-rate-wise, than more developed countries with higher gun ownership, like Finland or Iceland (both of which have far and away higher gun ownership than all the countries on that list)?
I am from Ukraine originally. Poverty is the reason there. So yeah let’s have that proper safety net instead.
But when we are talking about this, let’s break it down a bit between different types of violence where guns are used: police shooting suspects, gang violence, run of the mill murder, and acts of terrorism. You don’t believe that the police are shooting suspects because the officers are poor, do you? Or that the Vegas shooter was poor? Or the Sandy Hook one? Gang violence is a result of poverty, but terror attacks (the US likes to call these mass shootings when the suspect is white and/or Christian), are not.
I think it is time to repeal the second amendment. It clearly failed to create an organized militia that could stand up to an oppressive government. The US police force alone is enough to suppress any rebellion by the civilians, and if aided by the military, no militia could stand up to it. You can have gun ownership without the second amendment. Individual laws could grant access to weapons. But it is time to switch from a loophole that lets us have all the guns unless specifically disallowed by a law to a denied first, allowed second system.
Do I hear you ask about all the criminals that would keep their guns anyways, and only the law abiding citizens would be left unarmed? I will buy that argument the day it’s applied across the board to drugs and abortions.
I would go further to say that the second amendment failed so miserably that if you shoot a police officer in self defense (such as in the case of the article), it is game over for you. You either won’t see the light of day again or be put to death. They’ve essentially made acting against the establishment _so illegal_ you’d be crazy to even try.
By merely being engaged by a police officer, you’re dead.
Even with all the technology police + military has. I don't think it would be an easy win if the gun owning population decided to revolt. There would be millions of deaths. The government may end up on top, but the consequences would be dire.
Not an American. Canadian here. I actually wish we had American gun laws, even with their consequences.
See, I want to send my kids to school and be reasonably sure that some idiot can’t go down the street, buy a couple of rifles, and murder them and their classmates. Being able to go to the gun range once in a while and post on /r/guns is sorta secondary to that. Different priorities I guess.
Edit: and funnily enough the above scenario doesn’t happen in the developed world, except in the US, where it happens multiple times a year. Here we don’t tolerate things like weed, or abortions, or refugees because the societal price for those is too high, but mass child murder is cool because otherwise how would we prove our manliness?
> See, I want to send my kids to school and be reasonably sure that some idiot can’t go down the street, buy a couple of rifles, and murder them and their classmates.
Everybody does. Let's not be disingenuous, though: the chances one of our children dies from a gunshot wound at school is incredibly small.
By my counts, 4 students have been killed at school shootings this year. 4 students out of ~50 million kids at over 130,00 schools. Consider also there are over 350 million firearms in the US.
People only care about it because of _guns_.
<soapbox>
Nobody seems to care much about the ~30,000 firearm deaths in the US each year.
They don't care that 2/3 of them are suicides, usually of middle-aged men.
They don't care that most of the remainder are usually in poor areas (often because of the US' long history of racism) and often gang-related.
They only care about the sensational (and very tragic) 0.0001% of deaths.
It annoys me to no end because it's proof they don't care about gun deaths. No, they just care about tear-jerking cable news stories. It's gross and disingenuous.
I lived next door to Sandy Hook when it happened. A relative of mine was a student in their school system and for a while I didn’t know if she was alive or dead. My town and towns around it have events every year honoring each person that died in the shooting. Yeah it’s a little close to home both figuratively and literally.
And I never said anything about not caring about other gun deaths. I don’t have a magical scale to weigh lives, and say which gun deaths are more meaningful objectively, but my solution to most of these is exactly the same: repeal the second amendment. Don’t let suicidal middle aged men buy guns. Don’t let legally owned guns become illegally owned guns. Don’t pawn them, privately sell them, hide them, find them, etc. Don’t put them in the hands of 12 year olds, or 50 year olds. What does seem true to me is that you almost never see a story where the gun made a difference and a life was saved. The NRA loooooves to talk about self defense the reason to sacrifice the poor, the defenseless, and the sick every damn year. Yet there is no damn evidence for this.
Also yes sure you can say schools are “safe” because it might not happen at yours. Add churches, malls, movie theaters, concerts, etc. and the picture gets a lot bleaker.
This experiment with guns has clearly failed. Arming a bunch of civilians and glorifying gun culture to the point of fetishism turns out leads to a not insignificant amount of death, a good chunk of which is innocent bystanders. So we can spend another year or ten or 100 pretending that this is a good idea or we can repeal the second amendment and start over. I am willing to bet that mayhem and pandemonium won’t happen and instead we would learn that not having a bunch of people armed to the teeth is a good idea.
This is blatantly incorrect. From the Violence Policy Center:
"Using the NCVS numbers, for the three-year period 2012 through 2014, the total number of self-protective behaviors involving a firearm by victims of attempted or completed violent crimes or property crimes totaled only 263,500."[0]
In other words, about 87,000 defensive uses of a firearm per year. This is up from the VPC's previous numbers, which totaled ~67,000[1].
> Also yes sure you can say schools are “safe” because it might not happen at yours.
They're "safe" because 4 deaths out of 50 million is safe. Similarly so with the other venues.
I will say, though, I respect your position on gun control much more than the folks who think we'll solve our gun death issue by banning characteristics of firearms (i.e., "assault weapon" bans).
That's fair, but as easily dismissed as the 4 in 50 million number: from http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable16.pdf it's clear that only in 0.9% of cases was the victim offering resistance using a gun. From what I can tell the outcomes of such resistance have not been compiled to see if offering resistance using a firearm made things better or worse for the victim.
In other words, personal firearms made very little difference in preventing crime. "The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun" is therefore at best a stretch.
I will grant you that the media does sensationalize mass shootings over someone defending themselves from a criminal. Sensationalizing mass shootings is possibly one of the reasons there are so many of them. I am not a huge fan of Malcom Gladwell, but he did describe school shootings specifically as spreading in an epidemic-like fashion: after Columbine they were given so much attention that it sort of self-perpetuated. But the fact remains that if I am being mugged in a dark alley, I am most likely safer if I simply hand over my wallet and phone, then cancel my credit cards when I get home, than if I try to resist.
> I will say, though, I respect your position on gun control much more than the folks who think we'll solve our gun death issue by banning characteristics of firearms (i.e., "assault weapon" bans).
I appreciate that. I don't believe that the problem is scary looking rifles. The problem is first and foremost hand guns which are responsible for most firearm-related deaths. At the same time, mass shootings are a US-specific problem that I do believe comes from two sources: easy access to firearms AND fetishizing guns. As a society we can't change the latter. By definition it's the very rare outliers who go on mass killing sprees. You can't just teach them to not do it. So the solution is to control the former: gun control. You can take incremental measures like stricter background checks, but people will still slip by that. That's the thing about a sociopath: they know exactly how to get around rules and restrictions. But I am in favor of just starting over: repeal the second amendment, remove as many guns as possible from the society, bring that 101 guns per 100 people down to 1.1 guns per 100 people. Then see if there is an actual need to introduce them back into society. My guess: you won't see a strong need beyond the cries of a few enthusiasts.
I also support the hunting exception. I am not a hunter myself, but I know that lots of people derive their livelihood from it. But weapons used for hunting are significantly different than you'd use for self defense. You don't need a huge quick reload magazine to take down a deer for example, because deer by their nature will bolt shortly after hearing the first shot. You won't be able to unload into one unless you are spot lighting the. You can make hand guns used for hunting boar or bear highly reflective orange. Again, quick reload is likely not necessary for these guns.
I looked into bow hunting for a bit, and the funny thing is that the advice I got in one of the classes was to always zip tie your bowstrings when leaving the hunting area so that if a rangers stops you, you can show that you aren't actively using your bow. But you can carry a loaded pistol with the safety off at your hip while doing this and the ranger can't do a thing about it because the pistol is protected by the second amendment. A bit ironic, I think.
I'm not entirely sure what you mean by your first sentence. Even if only 0.9% of cases involved resistance with a firearm, it still totals over 87,000 a year which is nearly 3x the rate of _all_ firearm deaths. It's over 9x the rate of firearm homicides.
I'm not sure how you square
> the outcomes of such resistance have not been compiled to see if offering resistance using a firearm made things better or worse for the victim.
and
> But the fact remains that if I am being mugged in a dark alley, I am most likely safer if I simply hand over my wallet and phone...than if I try to resist.
> So the solution is to control the former: gun control.
I have some ideas for this :-) It's another pet-peeve of mine: lots of gun control is never run by gun owners first. While there's an obvious conflict of interest, it also means those implementing it lack a whole lot of context and insight that only gun owners can provide.
> But weapons used for hunting are significantly different than you'd use for self defense.
Sorta. A shotgun used for hunting would make a fine home defense firearm. AR-15s can be used just fine for hunting and home defense. Although, a deer hunting rifle (bolt action, scope, etc.) probably wouldn't be a great choice. (Additionally, usually hunters are limited to 3 cartridges in their rifle, but that wouldn't make much sense for home defense.)
> the advice I got in one of the classes was to always zip tie your bowstrings when leaving the hunting area so that if a rangers stops you, you can show that you aren't actively using your bow.
I wonder if this is similar to how it's illegal to have loaded long guns inside vehicles (in most states...)
You say 60k deaths from guns is bad, but 4 kids not involved with guns is ok. I say the 87k uses of guns in resisting an attacker (where there is no documented outcome and it is possible that quite a few of the outcomes do add to the 60k deaths) is not a big number as compared to all crimes where a gun could have been used in defense (hence 0.9% is a low number).
I see your point about how gun experts, which could also include gun owners, should at least be included in deciding policy. As a counter example I will posit that gun owners have failed to put forth any meaningful policy changes. The second amendment still failed to created a well regulated militia, gun deaths are still rampant, mass shootings are still a mostly US problem in the developed world, and the NRA which is supported by most gun owners still is pushing for less gun control.
I think most reasonable people will agree that things like hunting can be treated separately from other uses of firearms by civilians. If there is more nuance to this, we can talk about that. But gun control debate often gets lost in nuance. Who cares about bump stocks when you can buy the AR-15 to attach it to without doing many or any background checks? Who cares about the rate of fire or magazine size when you can go to your pawn shop, buy a 22 and blow your brains out in the parking lot? Repeal the second amendment, give a 30 year cooling off period, then start with new legislation, with data from the past 30 years.
(I hope you don't mind me quoting parts of your comment—it helps me categorize stuff.)
> You say 60k deaths from guns is bad
Well, 30k. And I'm not saying the 4 deaths are okay, I'm saying it's not an epidemic and, statistically, schools are safe. But, I'm still not sure how that part of your comment logically proves much.
> As a counter example I will posit that gun owners have failed to put forth any meaningful policy changes...pushing for less control.
I'd suggest that gun owners have always had to play catch-up. For example, consider the '94 AWB. It was rammed through as a halfway, last-minute measure that pitted gun owners against each other and has left a bad taste in many of their mouths. The general feeling is if they give an inch, "the other side" will take a mile. It's evident if you compare and contrast the positions groups like GOA and NRA take on bills.
I'd also posit that defense of one's self _from_ the state is an underlying reason for the 2nd amendment. Considering the massive (over 350 million) number of firearms in the US and entrenched gun culture, I'm of the opinion the amendment is fine in that respect.
> I think most reasonable people will agree that things like hunting can be treated separately from other uses of firearms by civilians.
As it should. I think where we disagree is on the type and scope of difference.
> But gun control debate often gets lost in nuance. Who cares about bump stocks when you can buy the AR-15...[or] buy a 22 and blow your brains out in the parking lot?
Granted, an AR-15 is not necessarily more dangerous than "any old rifle." It's simply a platform that encompasses different calibers, gas systems, etc. But, good gun control could help stymie sales to prohibited persons. Is it any better, though, if instead of purchasing a $200 pawn shop gun the person hangs himself? When I had a family member dealing with that issue we were told that, essentially, those who _want_ to commit suicide _will_. Have we achieved much if we've simply caused those people to change methods?
Anyway, as an aside, I appreciate the dialogue. It's not too often this topic can be discussed without name calling and such or without degrading into "muh rights" versus "think of the children."
On my side of the aisle, the feeling is that gun rights groups take a mile with every opportunity they get. While some states, like Connecticut, have enacted slightly stricter gun control measure, federal laws have been more and more relaxed as the likes of NRA lobby and bully congress. Again, I don’t believe gun owners and especially organizations that represent them have done anything to make me safer in this country. All they managed to accomplish is to stoke the fire around gun ownership to the tune of rising profits for gun manufacturers. Because of that I support the idea that they aren’t responsible actors and should not be a major voice in the debate. Basically self regulation didn’t work.
Again, if we are talking about gun experts, Wayne LaPierre ain’t one.
As far as the second amendment, yes there are a lot of guns in this country. But, I still posit that it failed:
1. We don’t have a well regulated militia. We have a bunch of individuals, often times with poor training.
2. The individual gun owners are not doing anything to keep the State free. There have been no instances where there was even an attempt to form the well regulated militia it talks about.
3. Even if a major threat to the State showed up, within or without, in a modern world hand guns and semi automatic rifles would not stand up to modern military tech. That fight is over before it starts.
Notice that the second amendment does not talk at all about personal safety, hunting, or anything like that. It basically says that for the purposes of having a civil defense force, individuals can own guns. So in my view it doesn’t even apply to most cases of gun ownership.
As for suicide stuff, I am not sure if you are familiar with some of the stats around it, but basically women are more likely to attempt suicide but men have a higher rate of success. The difference is that men tend to use more lethal methods, often times hand guns. In HN terms, guns reduce friction. Of course if someone is determined to commit suicide, they will. But the other thing is that most people are not. They will go through the steps but also look for an off ramp as they do. And the longer the steps, the more chance they have to change their mind. Suicide is a very complex issue with a large number of underlying causes, but I would argue that not having access to a firearm will in some cases give the person extra time to think before they go through with it.
Lastly, as for mass shootings, I would say that schools were safer in 2017 vs 2016, etc. but they aren’t at an acceptable level of safety in absolute terms. As a citizen I want my schools safer than this. Also, check this out http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.....
I also appreciate the dialogue. If only this had any real world effect :)
> federal laws have been more and more relaxed as the likes of NRA lobby and bully congress.
How so? Also, keep in mind the _entire_ gun lobby spends less than Microsoft does each year. It's pitifully small compared to many other lobbying groups.
> Again, if we are talking about gun experts, Wayne LaPierre ain’t one.
Yeah. Although I don't recall bringing him up. :-)
> 1, 2, and 3
1. Sure, perhaps not "well-regulated" (whatever that means), but see #2
2. They are, because see #3
3. Not really. Consider the case of the middle east: two super powers—Russia in the late 70s/80s and the US ever since—haven't been able to "win" their wars in that area for the last 40 or so years. Why? Because ultimately you still need boots on the ground physically controlling the area. Sure, we could use our military prowess to turn the entire thing into a sea of glass, there's _zero_ benefit to that. Which is why we've lost over 4,000 soldiers instead of just bombing the place and calling it good.
Now consider if the US government turned on its citizens or if the US were attacked by another state. You'd end up with the same thing as the middle east, except for the US has many more firearms and, in case #1, the US government would be fractured: plenty of soldiers and police would not want to take the government's side. That's what plenty of people think about wrt "militia."
> Notice that the second amendment does not talk at all about personal safety...my view it doesn’t even apply to most cases of gun ownership.
This is part of the long debate about the 2nd amendment. You can reach different conclusions depending on how you interpret it. When it was written, firearm ownership was simply an assumed right. People owned guns and could protect themselves with them. Depending on how you parse the 2nd amendment's text you can reach different conclusions. That one comma could make a world of difference (historical details about gun ownership notwithstanding).
> but I would argue that not having access to a firearm will in some cases give the person extra time to think before they go through with it.
And so it seems the question is then: are there better ways that don't trample gun rights, and if not, is losing the gun rights worth the extra time it buys some individuals?
(As an aside, I'm not incredibly familiar with suicide, I just know what I was told by doctors when I had a close family member "go through" it, for lack of a better term.)
> As a citizen I want my schools safer than this.
I do too, but at 4 per 50 million (1 per 12.5 million) I'd consider it safer for my kids to attend school than, say, swim in pools or drive a car—both of which are considered routine and "safe" events.
Interesting link! I've always wondered what would happen to the rates of mass killings and such (the "high profile" incidents) if we'd focus on it less. It seems the 24/7 news stories only seem to inflame tensions and normalize it, increasing the propensity of it happening again and spreading fear of what is an otherwise rare occurrence (see: right-wing folk and terrorist attacks).
> Depending on how you parse the 2nd amendment's text you can reach different conclusions. That one comma could make a world of difference (historical details about gun ownership notwithstanding).
And herein lies the crux. We are staking up to 30k lives a year on a comma. Also, historical context is important in that when the second amendment was written, a group of people with muskets could take on a government force. That's not the case anymore. Police now drive tanks and come at you wearing body armor. I agree that if there was a full scale uprising, with say all the liberals arming themselves to the teeth and going up against Trump's administration in a rebellion, the police and military might be at best divided on the issue. But still, there is no well regulated militia that currently exists.
So my point is that why not re-write the damn thing, taking into account modern tech and modern way of life? The second amendment is held as nearly holy by some, but at one point it was just written down on paper by a few people. It's not exactly a stellar piece of legislature that is above all scrutiny and reproach.
> We are staking up to 30k lives a year on a comma.
Well, 2/3 of those might be taken with other (possibly "worse," like suicide by cop or ODing) means. But, regardless. I understand what you mean.
> That's not the case anymore.
Sure it is, because ...
> Police now drive tanks and come at you wearing body armor.
... anybody can buy body armor. Hell, you can even own tanks in the US. And, like we've seen with the middle east, a guerilla group doesn't need body armor and tanks to stall and protect themselves from the world's largest super power.
> So my point is that why not re-write the damn thing, taking into account modern tech and modern way of life? The second amendment is held as nearly holy by some, but at one point it was just written down on paper by a few people. It's not exactly a stellar piece of legislature that is above all scrutiny and reproach.
To me, that sorta defeats the entire purpose of the US experiment. I believe a lot of our successes have to do with how seriously we take the constitution. Sure, we've trampled over it from time-to-time (e.g., slavery, women's suffrage, etc.) but a lot of the ideas that went into it are just as prevalent in the US as they were 240-some years ago. In fact, some of those ideas have helped the least fortunate and minority groups. Minor edits are one thing, but complete rewrites usually don't go as planned. And having 240-some years of history simply makes parts of it that much stronger. Unfortunately, humans are more complicated than software. :-)
Side note: I'm checking out your family fortune app. It should work fine for just one person, right?
Well in at least several states wearing body armor is illegal. Same with driving a tank. The US has the largest and best equipped military in the world. And unlike the Middle East, I don’t think the US government would hesitate to act against any attempt to secede. Take for example Texas, a state which still believes it never joined the United States, and one that is heavily armed. Do you really think Texas could revel and secede?
As far as the constitution goes, I do think the rest of it is rather workable. Except the second amendment. It is the single most vaguely worded and most misapplied portion of it. It’s like if you wrote a piece of code that ran all the systems in all the hospitals in a country, and did a fantastic job of it, except it picked out randomly about 30k people a year and killed them because of an edge case and a bit of undefined behavior. Would you fix that bug or would you just point out that because overall the system is better than most we shouldn’t worry? We clearly set the precedent that the constitution can be too vague and in one case outright wrong. I say the second amendment is a bad amendment and has been for at least the past 50 years.
Yup the app will work great for just one person! Thanks for checking it out.
> Do you really think Texas could revel and secede?
Not Texas alone, but the 2A doesn't exist so Texas can secede. And it wasn't was I was referring to, anyway. It exists, among other reasons, to ensure the US government won't become authoritarian. If the US did decide to consolidate power (à la the 1930s) it would be met with an armed resistance. Sure, there would be a power imbalance. But simply based on sheer numbers it'd be a nearly insurmountable task for the US government to quash it.
> It is the single most vaguely worded and most misapplied portion of it.
Okay, I'm just gonna be maybe a little too pedantic here, but that sounds too subjective to me. Plenty of folks might argue the right to privacy found in Roe v. Wade is more misapplied. And plenty of folks seem to think the 1st amendment gives, for example, racists too large of a platform and that platform has, both directly and indirectly, caused suffering to millions of minority groups.
> It’s like if you wrote a piece of code that ran all the systems in all the hospitals in a country...
That sort of presupposes the only way to fix the software is to scrap the entire thing. What if it were possible to add some bug fixes in other parts of the program? (Which is kinda what I've alluded to before—I think we could fix a lot of the 30,000 number without having to scrap the entire thing.)
> Yup the app will work great for just one person! Thanks for checking it out.
Sweet! I've been looking for a simple app that I don't have to connect my bank account to, unlike, say, Mint.
> That sort of presupposes the only way to fix the software is to scrap the entire thing. What if it were possible to add some bug fixes in other parts of the program? (Which is kinda what I've alluded to before—I think we could fix a lot of the 30,000 number without having to scrap the entire thing.)
I am proposing scrapping this single sentence amendment. Or rather not scrapping it but adding a new amendment that is significantly more clear. Something like "Except where allowed by a law passed by congress, citizens shall not have the right to own firearms." Or something significantly longer and better. Then after that's passed, let's enact some specific laws that allow it.
And awesome. Let me know if you want me to shoot you a promo code for the ad-free version of the app.
Apparently the USA is behind Norway, Finland, and Switzerland in mass shooting deaths per 100k population [1]. For typical gun related homocides it is most certainly correlated with poverty and education.
In USA, the measure "number of mass shootings per year" doesn't have real outliers, it has a reasonable number every year. In Norway, it's different, you get a streak of zeroes, followed by a 1.
The comparison is bogus, because you can make the numbers arbitrarily high by subdividing into tiny areas and then conveniently ignoring all the places where they are zero.
Why not subdivide further and claim that Buskerud is a veritable warzone, compared to the whole of USA on average?
Sure, but that doesn't solve the original problem which is that you picked small population countries with number of shootings too low to do meaningful statistical analysis your way because any rare event will have an outsized effect.
There are however plenty of European countries with populations large enough to avoid this problem (Germany, France, Italy, UK...).
Which year is this for? The Finland numbers don't seem right at all.
Neither do the Norway ones.
The numbers are in fact so wrong that one has to seriously question the motivations of the author, it seems like this is a propaganda piece with made up numbers designed to make the US appear slightly less terrible.
The number from Norway is from a single mass shooting in 2011 where a man shot children trapped on an island. There have never been anything like that before or later. He killed more people than the total number of murder victims in an average year.
Here is how you can get a gun in the Iceland[1]:
" all automatic and semi-automatic rifles and most handguns are banned for public use in Iceland.
People who hold a gun license can buy semi-automatic shotguns, bolt-action rifles, single-shot rifles and double-barrel rifles to hunt with but all rifles over 8 millimeters in caliber are banned in Iceland, although with a special permit to hunt large animals abroad, such as elephants or African cape buffalos.
It is also possible to obtain a special collector’s license for handguns and sports associations practicing marksmanship can apply for a license to use small indoor 22 caliber handguns as used in the Olympics.
To obtain a gun license people must attend a course and pass a test at the police station. They also have to pass a medical examination where they are specifically asked about their mental health. The gun license is issued by the respective District Commissioner."
Legal firearms in Finland must be registered and licensed on a per-gun basis[2]
Do you the see the problem? In the US, the second amendment makes it extremely hard to make sure that bad actors (a small percentage of the population) don't get a gun. In the countries you mentioned, they have an effective of preventing this from happening.
These kind of comparisons are so dishonest, at least you used Finland and Iceland instead of Germany and Switzerland, but the basic flaw still remains: Did you actually compare the gun regulations in place [0] instead of just comparing raw numbers of guns in circulation?
Because it's exactly those proper gun regulations which allow these countries to have many guns, without irresponsible owners constantly getting innocents killed and police being forced to treat everybody they encounter as a potentially armed suspect. That's also the reason why not every police officer in Iceland needs to carry a gun [1].
Case in point: Neither Finland nor Iceland has "open carry", they actually require you to have a reason for wanting to get a permit. In Iceland, applicants have to go through a government course to show they are actually responsible and able enough to own a firearm. In Finland, each individual gun is registered with its own permit.
Contrast that with the situation in the US: There is no federal gun regulation, each state makes its own laws, which leads to lots of loopholes (buying guns at gun shows) and ultimately leads to a flood of unregulated guns getting into the hands of people who lack the training and responsibility to own such a "tool".
Additionally many of these "high ownership, barely any shootings" countries put in place peer control by demanding that gun owners actually state a reason for wanting to own a gun. This entails either regular participation in organized shooting sports or in actual hunting clubs.
Nobody there gets a gun "just because" as getting a legal permit entails quite a bit of work, effort, and responsibility on the side of the applicant. Which is the exact opposite sentiment of that present in the US.
As dukeflukem said below, Iceland and Finland probably have very different aspects driving up gun ownership (rural populations hunting, vs self-defense).
An issue with the provided list is that these countries are all relatively poor. As for something that stood out for this list for me: inequality. i.e.: with the exception of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, all the Gini coefficients are above 35% (with the US (41%) being most similar to Turkey/Turkmenistan/Ukraine (41%/43%/41%). Compare that to Iceland and Finland (26%, 27%)
America doesn't have much in common with those countries listed. They are much poorer countries where law and order isn't upheld as well as the US.
I think the key is not just gun ownership rates but WHO is owning the gun and WHY. The Iceland and Finland examples make me think cold countries with higher rural populations and hunting as a sport or necessity.
OTOH in USA perhaps more ordinary people buy guns for self defence purposes with the intent to shoot a person not an animal.
Edit: weird I can now see the reply button for that comment I didn't before. Apologies
The second amendment is irrelevant, as employers (eg the police) can simply prohibit carrying a gun as a condition of employment. How many meter maids get shot?
I don't see much of a plausible argument that lack of gun control makes American police more trigger happy. And I say that as someone with no particular stake in gun rights. America doesn't have that high a murder rate, it just has a high rate of killings by cops. Lack of training, poor training and overall problematic police-culture seem to be the main offenders.
Easy access to guns in this country means it’s plausible that anyone the police encounter may be armed. As a result all the police also have guns and are reasonably concerned about being shot themselves – especially in tense situations. That’s a pretty direct connection from more guns in the public to more heavily armed, twitchier police.
There’s more connection to excessive traffic stops than to gun ownership.
Guns are definately a problem, but a bigger problem is the idea that we Officers at high risk so that they can be gloried toll collectors. If you cut traffic stops by 80% and used cameras for speed enforcement, you’d dramatically reduce Officer shootings and attacks on officers.
Train them to be EMTs and paramedics instead. The police and public should not be afraid of each other.
3x france 4x UK. The USA has a high murder rate; ok.. not as high as Iraq, but by the standards of developed nations, high. Put it this way, more than 10k people a year are murdered in the USA that would not be should the murder rate be the same as the UK's.
I think there's at least a plausible argument to be had. A lot of bad guys get guns through holes in gun control, getting a gun out of state, etc. If it were harder for the wrong people to get guns, maybe there wouldn't be such a need for a militarized police force, or at least officers might not fear for their lives during stressful situations.
That said, I'm a believer in the second amendment -- I just think there's definitely an argument to be had.
