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by GOTO95 968 days ago
Finland would like to disagree - high legal guns per capita, relatively very high illegal guns per capita and zero (0) mass shootings per year. Yeah, we kill each other with knives, axes, shutguns etc, but it's pretty much always people killing people they know, not random mass shootings.
3 comments

This comment made me curious so I looked up some data (sorry for the formatting, I don't know how to do it better):

Guns per 100 people - Finland 2017: 32.49 (total of 1.79 million) [1] - US 2017: 120.5 (total of 393 million) [2]

All gun deaths - Finland 2017: 138 [1] (~77.09 deaths per million guns) - US 2017: 39773 [2] (~101.2 deaths per million guns) <- A bit higher

Mean death rate per million in mass shootings, 2009-2015 [3] - Finland: 0.132 <- A bit higher - US: 0.089

[1] https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/finland [2] https://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/region/united-states [3] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shoo...

The data seems to suggest that the number of deaths and mass shootings sort of tracks with the number of guns, and that Finland isn't particularly better off "per gun".

This.

In the US it’s a multi-faceted issue of mental health, lack of effective enforcement of existing laws, acceptance and promotion of gun and gang culture in music and movies, and the political utility of a continuing problem. Democrats in particular need ongoing crisis and a large dependent population to stay in power - this is why they so visibly pander to the social movement of the moment. They need the “gun issue” to stay present and emotional, they have zero solutions on iffer. Crying “Ban assault weapons!” and then being completely unwilling to define it or describe how they’d enforce it effectively just lays bare their cowardice and intellectual weakness.

What does Finland do in terms of mental health compared to America. IIRC doesn't Finland have high suicide rates compared ?
It doesn't have to be purely about reactive measures to mental health problems. It can also be that a better social safety net means less people need mental health support to begin with.