[throwaway7312]

Do we know what it is?

You seem quite confident.

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)?

We know it's not guns. So what's the cause?

[IgorPartola]

> We know it's not guns. So what's the cause?

You misspelled “I want to believe it’s not guns.”

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.

[dclowd9901]

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.

[throwaway30yo]

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.

[IgorPartola]

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?

[barsonme]

> 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.

</soapbox>

[IgorPartola]

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.

[barsonme]

> Yet there is no damn evidence for this.

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).

[0]: http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable16.pdf

[1]: http://www.vpc.org/studies/justifiable15.pdf

[dkns]

That's 4 more students dying in school shootings more than in Europe for example.

[barsonme]

You miss my point.

[davemp]

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.

[1]: https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/sTbiw2S8fHl89qyY6AXbohcKkv...

[samastur]

When number of shootings is 1, you are not actually doing useful statistics. It can easily be an aberration.

[davemp]

Mass shootings are almost by definition outliers

[PeterisP]

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.

[davemp]

Norway has __considerably__ lower population than the USA. There has to be normalization or your comparison is just bogus.

[ryanlol]

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.

[qw]

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.

[ryanlol]

I'm well aware, but they still don't make sense in the context unless this is supposed to be a cherry picked list of worst years for each country.

I'm still not sure which events the Finland one refers to.

[m55au]

It lists the mass shootings between 2000 and 2014. Take a look at https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jan/05/obama-gun-co... for more information.

The Finland events are obviously Jokela and Kauhajoki.

[davemp]

The data appear to be correct. Maybe you’ve ingested to much propaganda to believe these numbers.

I’m always skeptical of statistics about highly politicized issues as the interpretations and sampling can be very irresponsible/biased.

[ryanlol]

The data is for a really arbitrary timespan, why 2000-2014?

It’s clearly missing data, Finland for example had more than two mass shootings during those years.

The numbers look bad because they are bad, they may however be bad for different reasons than I originally suggested.

[davemp]

It’s old I think.

I might try to dig up some more recent stuff.

[thro1237]

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.

[1]http://icelandreview.com/stuff/ask-ir/2011/02/10/what-kind-g... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Finland

[freeflight]

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2015/02/18...

[throwaway181986]

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%)

[eberkund]

It's possible that the relationship between the number of guns per citizen and gun deaths is non-linear.