@spartanlolz92: Yeah, and their general statistics for gun related homicides per capita is half of that of the US...Breivik was a glitch.
Indeed. Those cases in other countries are outliers because of how extremely rare it happens outside of the US. Yes, a psycho will always get their hands on a gun if they really want to, but the fewer guns in circulation means fewer guns getting into the hands of said psychos. Yes, people can still cause mass murders with tools that aren't guns, but I guarantee it's a hell of a lot harder to successfully stab ten or twenty people in succession in comparison to a gun being involved.
These mass shootings have become almost commonplace in the US; it cannot be denied that this is a big problem.
Or that can be explained by population differences Norway has about 7 million people within its borders the US has 300 million the only nation that comes close to that number of population without it being India or china is mexico in which you cannot own a gun but tell how many violent crimes occur in that nation? yep id say were doing pretty well. gun laws mean nothing to criminals and psychopaths
do not compare norway and the US our number of violent crimes is reasonable for a nation of our size.
For your sake I hope the 92 in your name isn't your birth year because that would just be sad.
Education time: Per capita means that you divide the statistics you've gathered by how many citizens reside in a country. This allows you to compare countries of differente sizes and get a general idea of how prevalent something is. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita Hence, you can compare how common, let's say, shootings are per citizen in each country. Obviously there are more Americans, but they still manage to shoot twice as many percitizen in their whole country as the Norwegians.
@LD50: So what causes the amazing amounts of gun-related deaths and injuries in the US, as opposed in countries with stricter gun control then? I asked this before but was met with silence. Is it gremlins?
I went through a bad couple of years after I got out of university. The stress and anxiety "real life" caused physical symptoms and I was convinced these were going to kill me. Went to CBT and managed to negotiate my sub-conscious into considering that maybe I wasn't going to die right now and at the moment I'm doing good. Stressed as always by work but gotten better at handling it. Regular physical exercise and the occasional cognac keeps me relaxed.
For a college class our group specifically did research into this topic and we came away with two major points:
- Guns do not statistically make situations safer. FBI stats show that once a firearm is shown and both oppoents are armed, the chances someone is shot goes up instead of backing down. FBI stats also show who ever shoots first increases their chances of surviving. Houses with guns have a dramatically higher chance of gun accidents and injuries. Training (military or civilian) seems to weakly influence the situation but is not as effective as just not having weapons around at all.
- Violence and crime seem to be driven by culture not the ease or access of weaponry. Stuff like tightly integrated and homogenous societies tend have lower crime against neighbors but higher against foreigners whether they have spears or firearms.
The conclusions we came up with: If you really want to effect general safety, solving societal problems are far more effective than arming or disarming a city, state, country. To that end I've personally held that a jurisdiction should be free to set the level of access to weapons to whatever level they are comfortable with but they need to realize they aren't making anything safer either way.
This is true. I do believe in making society better so we shouldn't HAVE to use guns. Hell, if we lived in a perfect world we would use guns just for target practice and to shoot explosive stuff at fancy gun shows. However I think education with guns is way important to do at a very early age. You have to make it clear as possible that guns kill people to everyone in a house/family by any means possible other than firing the damn thing and scaring everyone within a mile radius. (Just saying.)
Also Montana is a pretty nice state, and it barely does have any murders happen in it... whether that be because their is only a million people here or that we are a very gun-savy state that takes hunting very seriously I don't know.
But I still think keeping a gun at home and using one to defend yourself is a far better option than letting an asshole get away. I would rather die knowing I stopped a robbery than live and let the guy get away with it. Crime must be punished in my eyes.
You seriously would rather die than let some guy steal your TV?
@Vodun: i can google that information too...what does this information tell us about the validity of gun control?
I was asking what was causing the large amounts of fire-arms related crime. You asked what I based that statement on. I provided statistics. Now I ask again: Since obviously it's not the lack of gun control, what could the cause be then?
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