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by bko 1491 days ago
I never found this argument convincing. There are many differences between Australia and the US. It's like saying "American does X and is wealthy and relatively not corrupt, Mexico should just do X". This is the whole "bring democracy to the Middle East" argument repackaged.
1 comments
cuteboy19 1491 days ago
This whole thread is a just list of people eliminating confounding variables

> Social media

>> All countries have that

> Violent video games

>> All other countries have that

> Media reporting on violence

>> All other countries have that

> Mental illness

>> Other countries have it worse

> Lack of Religion

>> Some other countries have that

At some point we are left with just one variable that is different from these other countries

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bko 1491 days ago
US is 59th in murder rate. A lot of these countries have all those things + restrictive gun laws. You can't have a theory and just arbitrarily section off over 50% of countries and test your theory on that subset

https://www.factsinstitute.com/ranking/countries-by-murder-r...

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cuteboy19 1491 days ago
The other 58 are either extremely poor or in an actual war/insurgency. I don't deny that poverty and war cause violence but the US does not have those variables
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justanorherhack 1491 days ago
Lots of other countries have firearms and don’t have school shootings. Switzerland and Israel come to mind.
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nothingisbad 1491 days ago
Per wikipedia[0], the US has an estimated 120 guns per 100 citizens. Switzerland, the number is 27.6, Israel the number is 6.7.

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

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mrguyorama 1491 days ago
Both those countries require everyone to experience military service, where such a gun is used as a tool to kill. There's much less of a "gun culture" in those countries because guns aren't cool, everyone has used one, everyone is familiar, everyone understands what they are for, namely protection of the country as a whole.

If the alternative to making guns much harder to access is to conscript everyone in the country for a few years to try and beat the gun culture out of them, good freakin luck

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