Political Memes

Well because here you can get treatment for your mental and physical illness without ending up in debt for the rest of your life

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.

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.

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.

On the other hand, guns don't kill a lot of people in most european countries (even the ones with very little gun control)

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.

... or anywhere else, except the USA.

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!)

Well there is another thing they all have in common...

They're all dirty commies! At least that's what Fox News told me.

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.

Running statistical analysis on the data now. Preliminary results suggest video games as the main causal effect.

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.

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.

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.

As a non American I can't see a simple solution to the problem, guns are already abundant so banning them won't magically make them disappear, attempting to sieze them would probably cause a dark stain (ala Boston massacre) in the countries history and you've got to deal with the fact that the USA only exists because they had the fire power to make it so which is ingrained in a lot of people.

I wish there was a magical solution but I fear its a choice between a slow, turbulent transition or a quick, brutal, bloody change.