Well, there is a huge difference between Europe and the US/Mexico: most people don't have guns. You will rarely see anybody with a weapon here. If you get attacked, it will be with fists, sometime a knife. Having the possibility that somebody pulls a gun on you is crazy to me, like something that should only happen in a movie.
Mexican gun control laws are far stricter than anything in Europe. You can get years in prison for even a single unauthorized bullet.
Mexico is a case study of how gun control can lead to an increase in danger for the population. Gun control can be nice in "civilized" places, but in Mexico, even the police are on the take. Justice in Mexico consists of avoiding the "Justice System" at all costs.
I lived a year in Chapala and even there we had cartel shootouts where police were among the bad guys. If you are a potential victim of violence, the police are the last people you'd usually call. It's often every man for himself -- so that results in nearly every house having high walls, razor wire fences, bars on every window, "alarm dogs" on rooftops.
My wife if from Guadalajara and we spend a lot of time there but it isn't Texas. In Texas, a home invasion is often met by a bullet from the homeowner, in Mexico you just better hope your wall is harder to climb than your neighbor's.
That being said, Mexico IS a great place -- but it's great because of the culture and people -- the government on the other hand, is a disgrace. The odds of it every changing are slim to none because part of Hispanic culture is a sense of fatalism and "it's God's will" kind of thinking. Mexican Catholism bears a huge blame -- there's a conditioned helplessness. Not to mention the cartels are among the Church's biggest benefactors! This isn't the thinking necessarily among the more cosmopolitan Mexicans, but that represents a minuscule minority. However, even among the educated, there a overriding sense of pessimism -- starting a business in Mexico is quixotic -- as soon as you get some income, everyone starts chipping away at it trying to get their share.
I can't speak on the relationship between the Church and the cartels specifically, but many of the wealthiest narcos are significant social benefactors in their home regions. It's a brilliant strategy - it legitimizes their organization in the eyes of the citizenry, by addressing real needs that the state has failed to fulfill, and in so doing simultaneously delegitimizes the state.
For example in Sinaloa, El Chapo's home state, he's regarded by many as a "Robin Hood" figure because he's built schools, churches, hospitals and more in impoverished mountain villages that receive little to no aid from the state. In return, he was for years able to move freely and conduct his business with impunity from Sinaloa, without having to worry about locals betraying him.
Living in the Netherlands, I know that people with bad intentions most likely have guns.
Even in my small hometown, a citizen that owned a spy equipment store got shot up in daylight in front of his home.
Other example would be people getting robbed in their house with guns (not daily, but it happens).
There are plenty of other examples... I cannot say I feel 100% save most of the time.
It might not make you feel better, but Holland's gun death per 100,000 is in the 0.5's compared to the U.S.'s 10's and Mexico's 10's.
You're 20 times more likely to get killed by a gun in the US or Mexico.
Note that in the whole of Holland there are 50 gun homicides per year, so you were actually pretty unlucky to experience that. Your experience is exceptional and not a common occurrence, especially as I assume most Holland murders are not widely reported spouse killings, etc.
Mexico had 18,398 gun homicides in 2011, for comparison, Holland, 60, US, 11,068.
The US has roughly 110 guns per 100,000 people and 4.5 gun homicides per 100,000 people.
Mexico has over 20 gun homicides per 100,000 people and about 18 guns per 100,000 people.
Canada has 2 gun murders per 100,000 people and 31 guns per 100,000 people.
Mexico: each gun is responsible for 1.11 murders
US: each gun is responsible for .04 murders
Canada: each gun is responsible for .07 murders.
Interestingly, the Bahamas has 30 gun murders per 100,000 and about 4 guns per 100,000. That's 7.5 murders per gun.
France has 2.8 gun murders per 100k and 31 guns per 100,000. Which makes each gun responsible for .09 murders -- slightly higher than both the US and Canada, despite far stricter laws.
The U.K. Has .23 gun murders and 6.6 guns -- so .35 murders per gun.
Sweden has 1.47 murders per 100k with 31.6 guns for a rate of .047 murders per gun.
Nicaragua has 4.68 murders with 7.7 guns -- each gun is part of 1.65 murders.
Jamaica: 31 murders/8 guns.
Denmark: 1.28/12 guns
Israel: 2.09/7.3 guns
Brazil: 21.2/8 guns
Australia: .93/21.7 guns
My point: gun ownership does not correlate to gun murder rates -- in fact one could make a case that increased gun ownership could actually reduce gun murder rates.
Despite having more guns per capita than most countries, the overall US murder rate ranks 108 out of 218, with Honduras topping the list (incidentally Honduras has 67 murders and 6.2 guns per 100,000)
I think you're making the argument that with more guns, countries tend to have fewer gun deaths per gun. This makes sense, casually. However, I doubt that anyone cares about the number of gun murders per gun, but rather the total number of gun murders, which is (please correct me if wrong) still correlated with more guns.
Also, I see that you've focused the discussion on gun murders, which is fine, but we should note that decreased gun ownership does lead to far fewer gun deaths, mostly by reducing suicides.
Does it matter what weapon the murder/suicide was committed with?
Yes, fewer guns mean fewer gun deaths -- but does it mean fewer deaths in general?
If fewer people own Honda Civics, then fewer people will die in Honda Civic accidents. But that dip in Honda Civic deaths would likely be absorbed into deaths by all other car models, such that the overall death rate remains the same.
Around 265 million guns ("more than one gun for every American adult") and an estimate of 55 million gun owners in the US. Interestingly, some 7.7m gun owners make up for half of all guns.
Guns are mostly concentrated in Southern/Midwest states. Most people do not own guns in the North and coastal states. Besides people living in the sticks, I don't even know anyone who owns a gun in the New York State city I live. I'm 36 and I've never shot a gun before! http://reverbpress.com/politics/firearms-per-capita-by-state...
Guns are a solution in the right hands, that's what the founders believed, and if these stats are correct it proves that they can be used responsibly if society is stable enough. I think we're approaching a time though when guns will be a net negative, but by then, the USA will cease to exist as we know it today.
All you've done is the old trick of twisting data until it supports what you desperately want to be true because you like owning a gun. Remember, there are far more ways that the data shows you're wrong than support you.
Like climate change deniers, the only scientists that support lesser gun laws are the ones that the NRA pay for. Your congress even defunded independent research as the "wrong" result for the lobbyists kept coming out, more gun control, much less death.
> You're 20 times more likely to get killed by a gun in the US
This is very misleading because this audience is primarily middle class/rich white/asians employed in the tech industry.
There are 2 primary factors in homicide rates. Be poor or be a certain race. If you are not either of those things, your chances of being murdered in the US is very low.
*edit 3 factors -- men. Women don't get murdered often.
How is it misleading? Are all Holland's gun killings well-heeled white techies? Why wouldn't those same factors apply in Holland? I haven't looked at stats but I'd take an educated guess that the economic/ethnic divides also apply in Holland.
You've also made the same mistake as another commentator (I admit I wasn't clear), my first figures are total gun deaths, including self-harm. A significant percentage of those deaths are white men killing themselves with guns. As I understand it, a figure that only partially translates into other forms of suicides in countries or states with better gun control (basically, less guns = less suicides, other methods need more preparation and so are caught in time or fail). A brief google seems to support that:
Proportionally speaking, the factors probably hold, the cold, hard, truth is that as a white techie you're still much more likely to die by a gun in America or Mexico than in Holland.
Your own state department warns about Mexico:
U.S. citizens have been the victims of violent crimes, including homicide, kidnapping, carjacking, and robbery in various Mexican states
You can search for US citizen deaths in foreign countries:
There are 4 factors.. emergency services and doctors. Fast responders, can save a gunshot victim from becoming a thread to officials via statistics, and allow him to have a happy vegetative state existence ever after.
Same thing applies Mexico -- if you're not involved in the drug trade or law enforcement, your odds of getting killed are almost nil.
Mexico welcomes over 20M tourists a year from all over and almost all make it back home safely.
I have to say, you are really over exaggerating. Gun violence is just not a reality you have to be worried about here. Amsterdam is nothing like any US city where I've lived(in terms of violence on a daily basis), and The Netherlands as a whole is extremely safe.
Here you can see the gun death rate in The Netherlands per 100k inhabitants is 0.58, but there's some areas in the US where the rate is quite comparable.
What really sets things apart is the suicide rate, most deaths by guns in the US are by suicide, but there's counties in the US where there's easy access to guns and the overall death rate is lower than the Dutch gun violence + non-gun suicides.
So in a lot of cases it's not that just having guns makes everything hyper-violent. It's just that if people feel like killing themselves they'll use the best available instrument available to them.
Conflating that with general gun safety as it pertains to you feeling safe walking around Amsterdam, but not in a comparable town in the US, is silly.
I'm sorry, but the lowest group for that US graphic you linked is higher than the number of the Netherlands (0.58 gun deaths, 0.29 of which are homicides, both per 100k). The lowest groups are 2-7 and 0.5-1.4, respectively, both of which are significantly higher than the value for the Netherlands. In fact, your link shows the exact opposite of what you claim: there isn't a single county in the US that has lower gun death or gun homicide ratio than the entirety of the Netherlands. That's an exaggeration, too (there isn't data for all counties), but it doesn't diminish the point that you're by far less likely to get shot in the Netherlands than in a comparable US city.
You're misreading the graph[1]. The 2-7 grouping is all gun deaths, homicides, suicides, and accidental deaths.
If you hover over individual blue counties you can see the breakdown by homicide and suicide rate for some of them.
E.g. Washington, NY has a gun homicide rate of 0.46, gun suicide rate of 5.14. Meanwhile The Netherlands has a gun homicide rate of 0.29, gun suicide rate of 0.28, but an overall homicide rate of 0.7[2], and an overall suicide rate of 8.2, while the US has a suicide rate of 12.1.
Does The Netherlands still come out better? Am I cherry-picking by comparing county-level statistics v.s. entire countries? Yes and yes.
But for the point I'm making it doesn't matter. The point is that there's a common misunderstanding, particularly among mainland Europeans, that the mere availability of guns in the US results in a drastic increase in the homicide rate.
This is simply not supported by the data. What the data does show is that if you're going to kill yourself or others you're likely to use the best tool for the task, whether that's a gun or a knife.
Does the ease of availability of guns in the US make it easier to kill people, and cause some murders that otherwise wouldn't have happened? Yeah, but it's hard to tease that out of the data, it also prevents some murders.
What we do see from the data[2] is that there's lots of countries with much more restrictive gun policies that have higher homicide rates than the US, and furthermore the occurrences of gun-related homicides in the US don't at all map to whether the area has more liberal access to guns, but whether there's a general crime & poverty problem there.
Lithuania has a significantly higher homicide rate than the US, 5.5 v.s. the US's 3.9, but just 1% of homicides there are gun crimes[3].
However I've never heard anyone say to my Lithuanian friends that they were lucky to get out because of the obscene murder rate there, but I've heard my fellow Europeans make comments like that to some of my American friends when it comes to gun crimes.
Pretty sure I'm not. The 0.58/100k figure for the Netherlands includes all gun deaths, too. Washington, NY, has a population of <64k people. Yet its gun homicide rate is still 58% higher than that of the Netherlands. And that's for a county that you picked to show that the situation in the US supposedly isn't as bad as I think.
The fact remains that the US have a gun homicide rate of 3.43/100k, compared to the Netherlands' 0.29/100k (12x), Germany's 0.07/100k (49x), France's 0.21/100k (16x), the UK's 0.06/100k (57x), or Spain's 0.15/100k (23x). That's an order of magnitude difference for all of these countries, with two major EU nations (they haven't left yet! :P) at about 50x fewer gun homicides than the US! Only three EU countries—Italy, Portugal, and Greece—have less than 10x fewer gun homicides, at 0.35, 0.42, and 0.53 per 100k, respectively, or in relative terms: 9.8x, 8x, 6.5x fewer. How is that not a "drastic increase"?
The gun homicide rate in Europe is drastically lower than in the US. That's non-debatable, the data shows it beyond any doubt. So is total homicide rate, albeit by a smaller margin, as per your link, with the US at 3.9, two to four times higher than most EU countries. Singling out Lithuania is misleading.
I'm not going to go into whether access to guns increases suicide rates due to opportunity, that's another discussion. Let's stick with the homicides here.
The "glad you got out of that hellhole" comments you note could be due to movies and TV shows. There is a lot of gun violence in US productions, it's not hard to see how that could create an association for people who haven't lived there.
This reply is correctly refuting an argument that I'm not making. If I was saying that the gun homicide rate anywhere in the EU & the US was comparable I'd be wrong, as you say it's off by orders of magnitude.
What I am saying is that comparing homicides by weapon type ignores the big picture, which is who cares in the end whether you're killed by a gun, a knife, or bludgeoned to death? You're going to be just as dead.
The availability of guns in the US means that when there's a homicide or a suicide it's vastly more likely to involve a gun than in the EU, but people focus on that statistic and assume that magically taking away the guns would drastically improve the situation.
That's not supported by the data. The people of Lithuania, which for some in the US would match some ideal they have of restrictive gun laws, manage to kill each other at a higher overall rate than pepole in the US, even though they have gun restrictions to the point where only 1% of those homicides involve a gun.
So yes, if you look at the US by firearm related death rate[1] alone it looks like a 3rd world hellhole. But comparing countries by death rate by specific implement makes no sense. Instead you have to look at the overall homicide rate[2] and the overall suicide rate[3].
Once you do that, several countries in Europe look worse when it comes to homicides, and the US is exceeded by the likes of France when it comes to overall suicide rates.
Again you single out Lithuania, completely ignoring that most European countries have a homicide rate that is 2–4x lower than that in the US. Let's just check a few: France 1.2, Germany 0.9, UK 0.9, Italy 0.8, Spain 0.7, Poland 0.7, Austria 0.5, Switzerland 0.5, Netherlands 0.7, Belgium 1.8, United States 3.9.
How do you look at this data and conclude "yup, the EU is just as bad as the US"? Instead you focus on the Baltic states and the Balkans, which is not what people commonly have in mind when you refer to Europe.
And no, we're still not talking about suicides. They are completely orthogonal to homicides. Stop injecting them into the discussion.
I'm not concluding that "the EU is just as bad as the US", and really, I can't see how you could possibly come to that conclusion after reading my comments.
Yes, on average pretty much any part of the EU is better when it comes to homicide statistics. All I've been pointing out that from looking at the homicide & gun death statistics in the US you can't conclude that guns are important variable driving those statistics.
> we're [..] not talking about suicides [...]
> Stop injecting them into the discussion.
You're the one who started injecting suicides into the discussion. In your earlier comment[1] you said, in response to a graph[2] I posted that included non-suicide numbers, which is the part I was citing, that the "lowest groups are 2-7". Those numbers include gun suicides, whereas I wasn't talking about that at all but the other data on the page which shows gun homicide statistics similar to the Dutch 0.58.
But since you muddied the water by bringing up these unrelated suicide numbers, I started to itemize the suicide & the non-suicide you were conflating them with, and now a few comments later you're complaining about my discussing something you brought up in the first place.
Man, I have to ask if you even read past the first sentence of my comment... Yes, I'm sure that the homicide rate of Rotterdam may be higher than some podunk midwestern town. What I said though, is that I feel safer living in Amsterdam over some of the US cities where I have also lived. Your statistics show that ALL of these cities(DC, Philly, NYC, SF, and LA) are objectively more dangerous to live in than Amsterdam.
I'm sure you are trying to dispel something you see as a common myth, but maybe you should try having a conversation instead of giving a sermon.
People with bad intentions most likely don't have guns in the UK. Some people with bad intentions will, but they're the people who're risking everything in the first place, not the people who'll get a couple of years if they're caught.
You are less likely to attack someone if there is the risk that person has a gun. Just like you are less likely to speed in your car if there's a cop driving next to you.
> You are less likely to attack someone if there is the risk that person has a gun.
I don't believe that. I think that the calculus of whether to attack someone skips the "is the victim armed?" question. You just make sure to bring overwhelming force, e.g. bring a gun to a (probable) gun fight or a knife to a fist fight.
But what do I know. I'm just an European wuss, who has fire a handgun exactly once.
My wife was attacked and she was caring a gun. People who attack people are fundamentally not good at risk reward cost benefit analysis.
The deal is if you carry, which I did for years, you have to maintain above normal situational awareness. You have to be able to get space. Cops can do this because they arrive after the fact and get to enter the situation with the appropriate threat posture. If I have a gun and I get into an altercation the moment i'm in physical contact with the other person the gun doesn't matter. The long and the short of it is if you can be prepared and have "the drop" on someone a gun is a great way to protect yourself. That is why I feel the shotgun at home is a good idea concealed carry an overall liability.
Source. I lived in the 14th most dangerous neighborhood in the us for 15 years and carried a gun most of the time.
This presumes criminals think this through. Largely criminals exist because they didn't or couldn't think it through. If they must have money to feed their child or their addiction they will attempt to mug someone, they might pick the lowest risk target or the first target. Let's not presume these people have lots of options, if that were true most wouldn't be criminals.
A search on his name brings up Dutch results that badly Google translate into English, but it seems (from what I can decipher from a translation) police suspect he may have been shot after being suspected of passing on info related to another criminal investigation.
Yes, British firearms law changed after the Dunblane massacre [1] to outlaw handguns. The Hungerford massacre [2] in the 80s caused the outlawing of semi-automatics. I live in rural England, and many friends and neighbours have shotguns and hunting rifles. I was surprised to discover that a couple of the rifle owners use silencers too. Silencers do have a legitimate application; they confuse the directional hearing of the prey, so a hunter can get off a second or third shot at deer before they start running.
It seems that for the first time in generations, the US is looking at loosening restrictions on guns. There has even been a law introduced to remove silencers from the NFA, which would cause them to be treated much like guns in and of themselves as opposed to how they are treated now.
Most people who are into doing criminal things actually have guns here in Europe. Our open borders allow people to drive a trunk full of guns from Turkish border directly to Berlin, and they regularly catch guys doing that.
Only the people who get attacked don't have any guns, and they get fucked up.
> Most people who are into doing criminal things actually have guns here in Europe.
Speaking for the western part: no they don't. No even close to the majority of criminals have guns (I don't dispute that they have easy access, though). You'll be hard pressed to find street robberies at gun point in Germany, France and the northern countries.
You'll be hard pressed to find street robberies at gun point in Eastern Europe too. Subjectively, it is much safer to walk on the streets of Warsaw, than Berlin.
My brother live in frankfurt and even in the worst part in the city, with people injecting heroin in the street, you never get even bothered by anybody.
In France you hear about guns, but I lived in 8 different cities there, and I never been near any gun attack. None of my friends or relatives either.
If you have gun here, people look at you in a strange way.
Everytime me or my bro got in trouble, it was fist fighting. I got a knife once. Some of my friends got messed up. Fist again. In france, the UK, germany, Italy and spain.
I don't say there are no guns. I'm saying that it's not even of the same scale of occurrences than in the US.
> Only the people who get attacked don't have any guns, and > they get fucked up.
If you fail to take regular firearm training, combat training or to acquire the necessary mindset for a gunfight under live threat, then you are even more fucked if you try to use that gun you are carrying to make you feel safer...
