Well because here you can get treatment for your mental and physical illness without ending up in debt for the rest of your life
Hahahahaha! Mental illness treatment? In Canada? Got insurance to cover that or years to wait?
This part is no better than the USA (and surprise surprise, it's mostly privatized!)
The German police uses less bullets every year than the average policeman in the US.
Yes you read that right, the entire German police, all of them.
The UK and Canada have similar occurrences, but not in the vast number as the United States. We all understand the access to firearms is the problem.
Except for all the people trying to deflect blame from firearms by blaming mental illness. Without any will to actually address mental illness, of course.
Why not both?
I don't think it's a mental health problem per se - I think American society is sick.
And I don't mean sick as in "something happened to you all" - I mean sick as in "you all willingly participate in it together"
There are plenty of other countries with guns who don't have the same kinds of mass killings the USA does.
The problem as I see it is that so many Americans are just so fucking emotional about everything.
Everything's a drama, or a story that needs to be be told, of a journey, or an underdog, or revenge, or a protector. Are musical montage. "I just have to tell you where I have come from" - "you just need ro know my roots"
Every disagreement is a fascist or a communist.
Nothing just "is".
Everything has to have bullshit emotional content and context.
The trouble is none of you will ever see yourselves as part of the problem.
You're in a narcissistic trap.
Liberals are 100% certain that "it's the guns" and get absolutely high saying it.
But it's not the guns. Canada has guns.
Loads of other countries have guns.
You're all fucking hysterical.
TL;DR: it is the guns, but it isn't just the guns. It isn't any one thing and it isn't not any one thing.
it IS the guns. It's hard / difficult to massacre with knives.
it IS mental health too.
Canada, Australia, UK, etc have horrifically underfunded and backed up mental health care systems - but yes, still far better than anything in the USA.
Which brings me to:
And yeah, I've gone off from your main point of "the USA is too emotionally extreme". This is... not wrong, but I want to argue overly simplistic. I (and others) have described the USA not as one country, but 50 or so (I'm not sold on the Dakota twins) countries that are loosely bound by their xenophobia of everyone else more than anything else. The country wasn't founded on a love of the USA, but the hatred of the UK.
I mean, the UK isn't really that much different. Remember Northern Ireland and Great Britain? Scotland and England? If they had guns like the USA had guns.. woo.
So, America being a drama, etc? You're not wrong. It's an ideology that was instilled at birth, and raised by capitalism - money from engagement, and emotionally trapped people are engaged. It's a society/system created, used and trapped by itself.
And guns are what turns that bubbling cauldron into massacres.
And massacres make the emotional drama cauldron bubble more.
Get rid of guns, you get rid of a lot of stress and drama. You don't solve all problems, but you solve one that is repeating and feeding the drama machine.
Sell the guns to South America/ Israel / wherever they want to ruin next, and use the money to fund affordable housing or something. Solved two birds with one stone!
PS: I'd love to see the USA fundamentally change in one big way: a stronger, standardised federal government. For example, let states do state elections however they want. But if you're voting in a federal election, it should be the same forms, same design, same level of access everywhere in the country. If you can drive freely between states, driving rules and tests should be standardised (they basically are, rural vs city aside). Education? Anything which affects and creates a level playing field across the country, ie. federally, should be standardized. If a state wants to charge sales tax, and another doesn't - that's fine! That's local.
In the same vein, remove weird voted-in positions, like judges and sheriffs. Emotional, populist,partisan involvement in roles that are supposed to be neutral and balanced is insane.
And the guns aren't helping.
Youre not entirely wrong, but I gotta say how funny it is to see a post complaining about how everyone blows each other's positions way up fisish by saying American liberals want to take away all guns. I'm sure you can find an American liberal that says that, but they're in a massive minority. Most of us would be very happy with Canada's level of gun control. You have to take a gun safety class and pass a safty test for any gun, with an extra class and test and a license for hand guns and assault rifles.
Canada also has a system for helping people with mental health problems that doesn't bankrupt the person.
Im pretty sure that's exactly what the Democrats have been asking for for the last 30 odd years.
On the other hand, guns don't kill a lot of people in most european countries (even the ones with very little gun control)
I don't think any European country comes close to the level of lack of gun control in the US though
I mean sure, the US has almost no gun control, but in austria for example you don't even need a permit for a lot of lethal weapons.
I think it's really a culture problem, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't regulate guns a bit
well... it is a mental health problem. Plus culture. Switzerland has guns and just as many people with mental health problems as the rest of the 'developed' world, but almost 0 shootings.
Canada, too. We have a FUCK ton of guns.
We just can't open carry them (or own handguns), so it's not in our pockets next to our phone. When it's at home locked in your hunting case, it's off your mind, and you don't think about pulling it out when people piss you off.
Because of this, we also don't have people feeling the need to buy guns to defend themselves against other people with guns in their pockets next to their phone.
Everybody knows that sane, law abiding citizens become mass murderers the moment they hold a gun in their hands.
Yes, limiting access to the tools of murder will decrease murders caused by those same tools, but it does nothing to eliminate the murderous intentions of those people.
If we truly care about people's well being we should be doing both, reduce the risk of senseless shootings and massacres (gun control) and assist those with murderous intentions and other mental health issues who, believe it or not, are also victims of our sick culture and so-called societies.
Nah, we don’t very much need to worry about the murderous intentions, as long as they’re not able to put them into action.
That’s the problem, guns let people turn those intentions into actions very easily.
I would argue that gun control is more immediately actionable and greatly reduces the capability of the mentally disturbed to commit atrocities of such scale at such a common rate.
Long-term? Yes, access to mental health care and a culture that encourages receiving it will help immensely. But that takes time and will ultimately not save nearly as many people as gun control would. We need both, but gun control can happen today.
Call it a mental health problem, a societal health problem, whatever. Unless we accept that wanting to slaughter the people around you is an unfixable natural quirk of some people's human experience, then this cannot be purely a gun control issue.
It's not even like Canada even gives a shit about mental health.
Apparently the Ontario prime minister had heard a out how much people were suffering post pandemic - - - and then cut funding to the point that people could only get 10 sessions with a consoler (not even a psychologist or anything special!)
wtf is a consoler
better be some kind of empathetic stripper
... or anywhere else, except the USA.
It can be surprisingly difficult to get a therapist in the US if you don't have insurance. Honestly, I found the process remarkably frustrating even with insurance.
I don't know what it's like in the other countries listed, but they all have much better healthcare systems than the US, so I imagine it's much easier.
Well there is another thing they all have in common...
They're all dirty commies! At least that's what Fox News told me.
Running statistical analysis on the data now. Preliminary results suggest video games as the main causal effect.
Are you sure it’s not Dungeons and Dragons and that heavy metal music?
Oh, cool - we're pretending there are no other differences between the countries listed, e.g. healthcare, social safety nets, etc. that may or may not have been shown to be an unavoidable majority of the underlying issues.
Gotta enjoy the meme circlejerk though, eh?
I always say that this is more cultural than anything else. Americans tend to be more gung ho and are ammosexuals who worship guns excessively. The Swiss have more guns per capita, they are legally mandated to own guns, but they have practically zero mass shootings unlike the US. I'm not deriding American people themselves, I'm just criticising how they handle and view guns. They can do whatever the heck they want, it's their prerogative, but if one's rights end with another then that's going to be an issue. Just relax with the guns and emulate their Swiss brethrens who are self-disciplined about handling guns. Rights come with responsibilities.
Isn't it interesting that tons of people own guns in America and DON'T shoot people? Or the fact that we had crazy people and assault weapons previously without mass shootings.
Looking at these issues as if they're either-or is ridiculous. Of course you're going to need a multivariate approach. You're not going to get rid of the guns, and you're not going to get rid of crazy people. We need to address gun laws, mental health laws, and societal collapse overall. There's no singular approach that will fix everything.
Well. It's partly a mental health problem, sure. But it's not just that.
We've got a number of things going on that a lot of other countries don't have.
First, guns are a civil right in the US. Multiple SCOTUS rulings in the last 20 years have affirmed that it's an individual civil right, and not a collective one. (Which would be weird, since everything else in the Bill of Rights is about people, rather than the gov't; the power to raise a military was already listed as a power of the gov't in the constitution, so why would the signatories need to also specify that the gov't had the right to arm the army that it had raised?)
Second, the US is one of the few developed countries that has extremely poor social safety networks. We have a low individual and corporate tax rate (again, as far as developed countries go), so we can't pay for the kind of social services that other countries take for granted. We have comparatively high rates of poverty and a far larger economic inequality gap than most other developed countries.
Third, we have a declining public education system; we've been cutting public education, and putting more money towards selective schools, like charter and magnet schools (and, in some places, public funding for religious schooling), which decreases the quality of education. This shitty education system means that comparatively fewer people--and disproportionately black and Latino people--don't have access to goo education, which limits their career prospects.
Fourth, we have a terrible, broken criminal justice system. We focus on punishment rather than rehabilitation, and people that go to prison often find that their opportunities are sharply limited when they get out, likely trapping them in a continued cycle of poverty.
The latter three things contribute to fairly high rates of violent crimes. The first factor makes crime much more lethal.
The truth is that the rate violent crime in the US is on par with violent crime in the UK or Australia (violent crime referring to forcible rape, assault/battery, robbery, and murder), with Australia having a quite high reported rate of forcible rape, the UK having a quite high rate of battery, and the US dwarfing their murder rates.
In regards to spree-killers, there's not a single profile. The US Secret Service has looked at some thigns that are risk factors, but spree killers are so comparatively rare, and have such widely varied motives, that there's nothing that they can draw definite conclusions on. When I say that these events are rare, what I mean is that commonly reported figures that claim daily mass shootings aren't looking at spree killers, but are looking at ordinary crime--robberies, assaults--involving multiple injuries, rather than an active shooter that's trying to kill as many people as possible. A running gunfight between gang member that sees 2 people killed and ten people shot isn't what most people think of when they thing "mass shooting"; they're thinking of something like the Mandelay Bay massacre in 2017, Pulse Nightclub, or Newtown, CT. Some of the people that are spree killers do have a real mental illness; the Aurora, CO murderer is schizophrenic. Many do not.
There's not a quick, easy answer, because this wasn't something that happened overnight. The idea that we've never had mass murderers prior to Columbine HS is just factually wrong, and Columbine has been 30 years ago now.
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