In the list you can easily see that the U.S. has the highest firearm related death rate of any OECD country. In fact it is almost 100 times higher than Germany for homicides.
Why compare the US to Europe? The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia. It has the homicide rate you would expect if you averaged the homicide rates for these continents - roughly 5 per 100,000, which is the global average.
People have this schizophrenic notion that the US should have the demographics of Brazil but the homicide rate of Sweden, and that aint gonna happen no matter what kind of gun control laws you pass. Same thing for measures of corruption, etc.
So you have nations with very low homicide rates, like Bangladesh, versus nations with high homicide rates, like Nigeria or Brazil or Jamaica. And the gun control laws don't seem to make much of a difference in comparison to ethnicity. Looking at Europe, you have wide variations in gun ownership rates but a fairly low homicide rate across the board. Looking at US states, again wide variations of gun ownership rates not well correlated to homicide rates. So stop pretending that the high homicide rates in the US, which are accounted for in urban centers are because of loose gun control laws in DC or Chicago. The US has exactly the homicide rate you'd expect just by using WHO intentional homicide rates per continent and comparing that to US demographics.
> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.
Yes. Everyone knows African Americans have more in common with Africans than Americans. Asian Americans are a monolith, and so is Asia. And Latin Americans speak Latin. Sigh.
Yeah, this reads kind of like an early-1900s scientist going on about skull shapes. There are cultural reasons why "We ain't Europe" is true, but they can't be broken down to percentages of ethnicities.
Why wouldn't we compare the US to other places with similar GDP per capita?
> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.
I'm not sure if you're trying to claim that people commit violent crimes at different rates based on their genetic makeup, or if you're you trying to claim that multicultural societies lead to more violent crime, but both claims are preposterous.
London and Singapore are giant multicultural melting pots, and tremendously safe. Even New York City is safer than many major European cities. (Really, look it up.)
Violent crime in city is the result of poor drug policy more than anything, not the city's ethnic demographics, nor gun laws.
GDP is a bad predictor of living conditions. Consider also that most EU police will never be victims of assault, let alone with a weapon like a knife or a gun. With or without guns, there is a higher tendency for violence in some places in the US, even though it's been decreasing steadily.
I think violent crime is more a result of large economic inequality, and the US loves to breed poverty. Brazil, for example, is also a country with a lot of economic inequality. And economic inequality can be the result of having many different ethnicities, combined with racism.
The test here would be to compare the violent crime rate in cities with high ethnic diversity and high economic inequality, with cities with high diversity but low inequality. Or low diversity but high inequality.
It's an important factor to consider. Just because you copy, say, the legislative system of Switzerland isn't going to give you Swiss outcomes. There was a story about some Latin American nations trying to copy Swedish style practices and it turned out an absolute disaster. In Japan, if you leave a cell phone in a coffee shop, you can come back hours later and it will be given to you. In Russia, not so much. In the 80s there was an effort -- the early shoots of globalism -- of trying to "industrialize" west Africa by trying to import Western European-style management and business practices, and all of these projects failed, and some resulted in large debt loads being carried. One wonders what could have happened if they just let Africa be Africa and develop its own industries with its own practices at its own pace. You are not going to get English property rights or rule of law, but you will get something that actually works in the local environment, which is more important, IMO.
Because we want to compare the US to places that people find comparable and desirable and, gosh, maybe even slightly superior, rather than places that people find to be totally undesirable.
We also would like to compare the US to places that might have statisitical similarity. A good example of this is Canada: lots of people claim cause/effect in the US for laws about underage drinking, yet Canada had a similar decrease in underage drinking without changing any of their laws. This contradicts those who claim that public policy changes were responsible.
In addition, European countries help show that sometimes there are other solutions than just "more guns". And, what some of the fallout from BLM changes is showing is that disarming initial responders rather than always just sending in armed police seems to result in positive results to the system.
We look to Europe because sometimes they are exemplars and that while maybe we shouldn't blindly just do what they do, perhaps we might want to think about and emulate what they do right.
Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips firearm-related homicide or accidents).
I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between milli- and micro-.
I'm still waiting for doctors to have to wait ten days for multiparty approval on their decision to proceed with a procedure predicated on an obvious misread of the patient's chart.
Until that day, gun control advocates have the blood of 590 Americans on their hands, every day, for choosing their Cause Célèbre to be something that kills far, far fewer people than a much, much bigger problem.
Reminder that any policy advocacy position that comes from any standpoint other than holistic harm prevention has one goal, and one goal only: power and control.
edit: HN hivemind apparently believes I am factually incorrect. Approximately 24k Americans die annually via firearms[1], whereas approximately 250k Americans die annually via preventable medical errors[2].
> Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as
> many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-
> gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips
> firearm-related homicide or accidents).
This is quite a jump from guns to medical errors and I think this is comparing apples and oranges. It seems absurd to me only fix "burning" issues because then only mediocrity can be reached. It's better to fix root causes. That said, I wonder how many of these errors happen because both medical personal and patients are under extreme stress due to a bad financial situation, a dangerous neighborhood etc.
Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?
> Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?
> I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between mill- and micro
Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.
Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem. And I already addressed the charting defects.
My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle, and you are indirectly responsible for allowing more people to die than if you had made a more factually-aligned choice. Gun control advocates are, therefore, obviously driven by a desire to control others, and not by any serious intention to save lives.
A decision to advocate for gun control is a conscious decision to NOT advocate ( per limited hours/resources tradeoffs ) for cancer treatment research, dietary policy improvements, medical error prevention, traffic safety research funding, environmental policy, Alzheimer's research, or any number of things that will save more lives.
It's rational to assume that the motivation is something other than actually saving human life. Control and power, being common and time-tested motivations of humans, seems to be a reasonable first assumption.
> Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem.
But the cause of that problem isn't even arguably “there is no required testing to verify they nurses can do the task appropriately”, since there is, in fact, required testing that includes that within it's scope.
So the idea that Congress enacting a new requirement on that would be parallel to it's initial adoption of a background check requirement for guns but for a more pressing problem is not defensible.
The fact that Congress has also repeatedly recently adopted (not merely discussed) new rules designed to address things that are actually empirically contributors to avoidable medical errors also demonstrates that the implication that that is being neglected while gun control is being discussed is also false.
> My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle
If you assume that every advocate is equally effective in all issues, and that the targets of that advocacy are equally easily moved on all issues, and that the effect of policy change that would be acheived by the same movement of decision-makers is proportional to the scale of the problem being addressed, then this is a defensible position. But none of those are reasonable assumptions.
Speaking for myself, I downvoted not because you are factually wrong. I downvoted because your entire argument is whataboutism. It is irrelevant to the topic being discussed, and makes the entire debate worse for its presence.
Each state has different firearm availability and laws.
Some states have very liberal gun laws, including automatic or semi-automatic weapons and concealed carry. Others have very strict laws, and with limited types of guns available and a loaded gun in a car or concealing a handgun would involve jail time.
I have a strong suspicion that firearm deaths are related to crime which is related to wealth inequality. Of which US does extremely badly compared to most developed countries.
People become criminals when there's few other options
And, if it holds (cite please because I really don't believe the top parent), it probably only holds in the US in gun ownership areas that are predominantly non-minority. And probably only to certain levels of gun ownership.
Once you start getting enough gun ownership, you start getting the "Who's the bad guy?" problem when there are conflicts. And the cops won't be terribly restrained if the gun owners aren't white.
In the list you can easily see that the U.S. has the highest firearm related death rate of any OECD country. In fact it is almost 100 times higher than Germany for homicides.