8 years ago
13
Here’s What The World Thinks About The American Response To The Oregon Massacre
Countries like Australia have dealt with large mass shootings, tightened up their gun laws in response and virtually eliminated the problem. The American response has been to do nothing.
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"The American response has been to do nothing. " I see no changes coming. :(
America is well and truly fucked, it's way too late to implement gun control considering there are hundreds of millions of guns in circulation - and those are the ones that are legal.
Realistically the only way to stop tragedies like the Oregon massacre is to repeal the second amendment - I sadly don't see that happening any time soon.
Even if we repeal it, there's no way to guarantee all guns will be collected through reasonable programs such as buy-backs. People, even usually law-abiding citizens, would hide away their guns and nothing short of door to door searches would cause any real impact on our gun population. Honestly, with the way police raids have been going now a days with just drug busts, imagine how much more violent they'd be when they KNOW the person has a gun!
I'm not a gun nut, but realistically, history has shown such bans to be ineffective, expensive, and that they turn normal citizens into criminals.
And yet we have multiple examples of governments accomplishing that task without turning the majority of its citizens into criminals. Mostly what they've done is reduce the gun-related crimes being committed and made people less afraid of getting hit by a stray bullet.
It's sad that we hear more arguments for how this can't be done than discussion about how we might solve the problem.
Everything history class has told me about prohibition made it sound ineffective and criminalizing. Everything I see on the news about the drug war makes it sound even more pointless than prohibition. The only example of gun-laws being productive that I know of is in Australia, and the US is an entirely different monster from Australia as /u/moe excellently described here.
Those two go hand in hand. If someone suggests a solution (such as banning guns) the "argument" of how it can't be done is a proper discussion response. Unfortunately, no one wants to come up with a different solution other than banning guns so naturally the response is people agreeing or disagreeing with that.
So once again, it works everywhere but here. American Exceptionalism rears it's ugly head.
Comparing gun control to drug prohibition is amazingly dishonest. Taking too many drugs is likely to kill you; playing with too many guns likely to kill you and those around you.
As far as I know, the US is the only place in the situation of having an extremely high gun population and gun-per-citizen rate. As far as I know, Australia is the only country that had to even curb back it's gun population. That's not everywhere, and if there are indeed other notable countries that have successfully done the same thing, anti-gun advocates are doing their argument a disservice by not including them in their evidence. Also, it's not American Exceptionalism if the US is the only country in a particular situation, which as I said, as far as I know, it is.
If you're comparing it morally, yes certainly. But I'm not. Prohibition of any kind is expensive, not particularly effective, and not widely obeyed. If you can find an example of otherwise, I'd love to know.
Australia, the UK, Germany and in fact most of the industrialized world have banned or otherwise strictly controlled guns. We may have the most gun ownership, but we also have the largest body of law enforcement; such things tend to scale. Most of the countries that don't ban guns like Switzerland typically don't have as much of a problem because military service is mandatory and they receive comprehensive training on how to use their weapon and respect it. Perhaps that should be our solution if we can't get rid of them?
Whether or not a law is popular has no bearing on whether or not it's necessary. The US is the only industrialized nation that has a problem with mass shootings. Making excuses for why the problem can't be solved doesn't provoke any sympathy.
To someone who lives outside the US this does seem like a kind of insanity. It was incomprehensible to me that after Sandyhook -all those little school kids- nothing was done. So now it's not surprising with subsequent massacres that nothing happens to change things. From the outside, the right to gun ownership in America appears more important than innocent people's lives. To the rest of the world this looks like utter madness.
This will sound cold but a body count of 487 people over fourteen years is virtually a non problem. The hype and drama queens have taken this question beyond reason and into a great national hissy fit. These things are terrible, but making them more important than they actually are creates another whole set of problems including that people want to take away rights and, no matter how bad you think these rights are, the loss of one right often leads to the rights of others. Take your head out from under the covers and understand that the U.S. is a safe country. Your chances of being a victim of violent crime or any crime at all is right up there with winning the lottery. If you are murdered it's much more likely to be by a friend or family member than some crazed loner. We now have a situation where children who point a finger and go "bang" are arrested, hand cuffed and taken away. It seems to me there is more madness in our response to this than in the shootings themselves.
There are far more deaths attributed to guns in the US than just mass shootings, it's that mass shootings tend to provoke more media attention. If highlighting 487 deaths will help address the other three hundred thousand from the last decade then that's a good thing.
I still say that compared to the number of Americans this is a non-problem and that the hysteria is worse than the violence.
Thousands of Americans dying every year when they don't have to is a non-problem? I have a huge problem with this.