Hoss

Fortunately, people do have much better ideas than you. Where do you get the misinformation that gun related homicide is astronomically higher in the US? Maybe there are some two-bit dictatorships with zero crime because the government is run by the biggest gang (therefore nothing they do is a crime). But amongst the world powers, we're one of, if not the the safest. The declines in homicide rates we've experienced while the rest of the world's has been rising can be attributed to the proliferation of Right to Carry laws in the states while the rest of the world is taking away its subjects means (and rights) to defend themselves.

The reason you have a perception that this happens all the time in the US is because the media latches on to it and repeats it again and again. I thought it was only the US media, but it could be all of them. Blood and tears sell in the media business. How long have they been talking about this now? In all that time, how many thousands of cases of someone stopping a crime with a firearm have you not heard about? Criminologists estimate that guns are used between 200,000 and 2,500,000 times per year in the US to stop a crime. The reason the numbers vary so much is because of how often a shot never has to be fired, which usually doesn't get recorded as a 'gun use'.

I just realized something else, you could be talking about raw numbers instead of rates. You need to look at rates per capita if you're going to do any kind of comparisons. If the US has 100X the population of country Y, of course the raw number of anything, whether it be crime, or newspapers printed will be higher. But they don't mean squat by themselves unless you're a business looking for a bigger market.




-h

__________________
Let us Pray the Pimp's Prayer.
Lord, please pray for the soul of this bitch and guide my pimp hand and make it strong Lord, so that she might learn a hoe's place.

Amen

drychnath

Why use a gun, when you can use a roadside bomb?

__________________
EQ2: Avenger Drychnath Malcherion -AB

Everything is on a great scale upon this continent, the rivers are immense, the climate violent in heat and cold, the prospects magnificent, the thunder and lightning tremendous, the disorders incident to the country make every constitution tremble. Our own blunders here, our misconduct, our losses, our disgraces, our ruin Are On a Great Scale.
-Lord Carlisle

Telpacpaw

This is why I'm glad to be a cheesehead. Most of the gun-toting rampages come from around here.

In the past 5 years or so, I can remember 4 or 5 really good ones. Like when that Hmong shot those 6 or 7 hunters. Fucked up, because they probably all had loaded guns, but goddamn! 6 or 7 people? That's great.

__________________

Meta

Gun deaths per 100,000 population (for the year indicated): Homicide Suicide Other (inc Accident) USA (2001) 3.98 5.92 0.36 Italy (1997) 0.81 1.1 0.07 Switzerland (1998) 0.50 5.8 0.10 Canada (2002) 0.4 2.0 0.04 Finland (2003) 0.35 4.45 0.10 Australia (2001) 0.24 1.34 0.10 France (2001) 0.21 3.4 0.49 England/Wales (2002) 0.15 0.2 0.03 Scotland (2002) 0.06 0.2 0.02 Japan (2002) 0.02 0.04 0 Data taken from Cukier and Sidel (2006) The Global Gun Epidemic. Praeger Security International. Westport.


That's just one example of easy to find data. That's per 100k population. The USA wins by a country mile.



But anyway I allowed my question to stray from the original point and I didn't mean to. The point I was making was purely about the rampages. I know your news coverage of the rest of the world is kinda limited, but I can say hand on heart, in all of my 28 years I have never heard of someone just going postal like that anywhere but in the states.


And the comment from Drychnath, well, you know there's a huge difference between an indiscriminate rampage in a shopping mall/school, and insurgency activity (apart from the end result of course). For a start, the former is indiscriminate, the second, although sometimes hard to really understand, is targeted. A roadside bomb/suicide bomber and other insurgent activity is planned and executed with deliberation. The crowd of people or vehicles it hits are targets. A gun toting rampage is random, with no particular targets.



Don't get me wrong, this isn't an attempt at america bashing. I'm genuinely interested in why this happens over there as it appears to me to be pretty exclusive to the USA.

Edit: whoa that table didn't paste well. I'll tidy it up later when I'm less busy.

__________________

Lamil

notrly

__________________

mafoe

Haha, what a load of bull.

__________________

Morara

I blame Counter-Strike.

__________________