It doesn't seem like the FEE article citing CPRC and the NPR article disagree very much. But it's true that some people will trust the NPR one much more, so that's valuable.
Edit: I mean, the numbers in the articles aren't necessarily the same, but the idea that the US could be better and could be worse is present in both.
I appreciate your detailed response, but can you explain why per capita is hiding rather than revealing? To me it only makes sense to look at per capita. If you didn't, and said the US had way more shootings than Norway, I'd say, "yeah, duh, the US has a lot more people so of course it will have more." You have to compare to the population or else it's all meaningless. Maybe you mean something else and I'm misunderstanding.
I was familiar with the one Norway shooting and how that's an outlier, but I don't think the article's argument rests that strongly on that one data point.
Does Lemmy have post tags or flair or whatever it's called?
I'd really prefer we stay hung up on the Constitution. Lotta good stuff in there about not trampling your citizens and such...
That might be one reason why some warned against using it, but I definitely had teachers in middle school and high school that explicitly said not to use it because it could be changed by anyone including people who could be wrong or lying.
In a sense it is a monopoly, just a very narrow one. The first step to identifying a monopoly is identifying the relevant market, and that is quite hard to do, actually.
Yeah. I think what these people mean usually is that the phrase "separation of church and state" isn't in the Constitution, which is true. They heard that somewhere and repeat it. Maybe that West Wing episode where Charlie does a bit about it.
The US is unique both in gun laws and in gun deaths.
Gun laws, yes. Gun deaths, not as much The US does have a lot, I won't argue with that, but I would not say it's unique.
Gun crimes are committed by a very small portion of gun owners, so the statistics aren't so simple. It's like minnows and whales in sales. The issue is that if someone wanting to commit a crime is choosing not to because they worry their victim might turn out to have a gun and shoot them in defense, and then you remove that deterrent you end up with more crime. The number of guns randomly distributed would seem to correlate with increased violence and crime, but the distribution matters a lot. If you double the number of guns but somehow limited them only to the least criminal and most responsible, you'd probably actually decrease crime despite the number of guns going up. So whether a 90% decrease amongst good gun owners with 10% decrease amongst bad gun owners is actually a net positive, I'm honestly not sure.
you have to register your car with the government
Only to drive on public roads. You can own one and drive it around on your own property with no registration or a license at age 13 if you want. It's not a perfect analogy.
I do live in the US, and there's never been a mass shooting where I live, either. The US is a very large place. Things vary quite a bit from place to place. A shooting totally could happen near me, I'm just saying the size of the US and its large population does make them look like a more common thing than they actually are sometimes.
I agree that public indiscriminate mass shooters probably are not deterred by the thought of someone else having a gun and shooting them to stop them. In fact that may be what they want a lot of times. Public mass shootings are a very small portion of gun deaths, though, even in the US. There are some lists of shootings that include things that don't really belong. Gang violence is the one most often cited, if 3 people from one gang and 2 from another shoot at each other over a dispute, that's technically a mass shooting by many definitions, even though its not really contributing to anyone else's safety.