The USA has literally more than one mass shooting1 per day. It has reached the point where these don’t even reach the news any longer unless there’s some special angle to make them “interesting”. The reaction to this, from an outsider perspective, should be “maybe we should do something about the proliferation of freely available guns”. The reaction to this, again from an outsider perspective, seems to be rather “OMG I BETTER BUY MORE GUNS!!!111oneoneoneeleventy!”
What gives? How come the USA has not yet figured out that doubling down on the strategy that led to the nation having a shocking murder rate for the developed world is not a working solution?
What is it about the USA and guns that makes you tolerate this state when you’ve got a culturally-similar nation to the north of you that, despite your cultural problems being imported, still doesn’t have your kill rate?
1 Defined as a shooting event in which at least 4 people other than the shooter are injured or killed.
I’m of the opinion that guns have existed in the US since its inception but the issues we’ve had with mass shootings seem to be a fairly recent thing maybe in the past 30 years or so. This leads me to believe that the issue we currently have is due to some other root cause.
I’m sure that if we were to get rid of every gun in the US we would see a reduction in gun violence but I don’t believe it would have any impact on overall violence because the root cause of all our violence is elsewhere.
I don’t have a good solution to our problem but I’d start with raising the standard of living for our citizens by providing universal healthcare and doing something about unchecked capitalism that seems to benefit only the rich at the expense of everyone else.
Edit: Ranked choice voting would help as well so we’re not stuck in this shitty two-party deadlock.
They’ve been a thing for FAR longer than 30 years. There has been more of them recently, but much of that is due to better technology reducing the costs of ownership and increasing the availability of the kinds of weapons really suited to killing large numbers more efficiently. Factor in the face-heel turn of the NRA in the '70s and you’ve got one Hell of a toxic stew, yes, but the ingredients for this sickness are well over a hundred years old. There’s something in the American psyche that says guns are the solutions to all problems: domestic and foreign.
I’m aware that mass shootings have existed long before the 90’s but my understanding is that the frequency has increased significantly in recent decades. Maybe it’s due to better record-keeping or changing criteria used to define mass shootings. I’m not a data scientist. It certainly feels like they’ve become more frequent since the 90’s.
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4 or more killed is the actual definition of a mass murder. 4 or more injured or killed by a shooting sounds like a perfectly reasonable definition for a mass shooting.
Don’t like the terminology? How 'bout you stop shooting each other so much? Or is that too much to ask?