1y ago

TIL: There are several mass shooting lists for countries other than the US, on Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

List of mass shootings in - Search results - Wikipedia

I want to make it clear that I am in no way, downplaying the alarming amount of shootings that occur in the US. Just that it was engrossing to see so many accounts of mass shootings in other countries, spanning decades.

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The difference is that often times those countries are doing a lot to prevent those mass shootings and the cases where it still happens represents someone who broke several laws to facilitate an act of terrorism, rather than someone who faced next to no legal barriers to anything they did up until they pointed the gun they acquired into a crowd.
In other countries you'll be writing to patch the holes that the shooter exploited, while in the US we're literally facing militant opposition to the idea of there even being a wet paper towel for there to be holes in regarding legal barriers to excessive firearms and ammunition acquisition.
- That's because there are more firearms in civ hands in the USA than there are in all the militaries combined. Unless you plan on going door to door and forcefully taking these firearms (even then, criminals are not going to hand them over) , no amount of laws will stop someone who wants to do harm with one from obtaining one and using it.
  There is a lot of stuff we can do that'll drop our violence overall by helping our society.
  We can start with:
  Single payer healthcare
  Ending the War on Drugs
  Ending Qualified immunity
  Properly funding our schools and not just rich white suburb schools.
  Build more schools and hire more teachers for proper pay so the class room sizes aren't 30-40 kids for one teacher.
  UBI (at least start talking about it) once AI takes over most of the blue collar jobs.
  End for profit prisons
  Enforce the laws already on the books
  Make sure there are safety nets for poor families so the kids don't turn to violence/gangs to survive.
  Increase the minimum wage
  Recreate our mental healthcare so kids don't turn to the internet for support. And to help veterans not end up as a suicide number.
  Actively make a law to solidify Pro-choice rights. More unwanted children does not help our situation.
  Banning Insider Trading for Congress
  Term limits
  Ranked Choice Voting so we can move away from a 2 party system
  
  Literally this entire comment is you forgetting buybacks are a thing that worked incredibly in other countries that did them.
  Or grandfather policies for guns that can be proved to have been bought before regulations went into place.
  Or just subsidizing adequate separated storage for firearms and ammunition.
  Or even something as simple as titling and insuring weapons to close the gunshow loophole.
  
  None of your points have anything to do with guns.
  I think having less guns in the hand of people would mean there’s less gun crime.
  Not being able to open carry ever would help too.
The frequency and death toll of those in other countries isn’t even comparable. The US had more mass shootings last year than any other leading nation did in the entire 21st century so far. Probably more than all of them combined. It’s honestly not even worth trying to compare.
Other countries aren’t perfect, but mass shootings are astoundingly more common/worse in America. To deny that is simply ignoring the facts.
What's scary is the US has to have separate pages for 2023, 2024 etc.
- Apart from that, most non-US articles list one or two mass shootings per year instead of the US rate of one or two per day.
This reminds me of a question I've had for a while, but hopefully isn't too offensive.
Is there a word for the feeling of "relief" that other people/places are going through the same shit I/we are? It's not quite schadenfreude; there's no joy to be had here. Just a sense of togetherness. All my problems aren't uniquely mine, or even uniquely American (even if the degree may differ for certain issues).
- Commiserate? Not quite right, but almost there. I get what you mean, though. Back in wide eyed "the democratic party is wonderful and flawless!" days as a teenager I used to think of Canada as this sort of perfected image of what the US could be. When I found out they had their own shit, and much of it just American shit imported north, I felt terrible knowing others were going through these same battles, but it made me feel less alone, if that makes sense.
- Maybe not quite but being able to share and understand a common misfortune is pretty much what empathy is.
Lol, did you see my comment where I only posted a link to the Canadian mass shooting list because a Canadian said "this only happens in one country":
https://lemm.ee/comment/9277452
- Wow, Canada had two mass shootings in 2019?
  They have like a tenth of America’s population so the US must have had around twenty shootings that year?
  
  For anyone too lazy to look this up, it was 434.

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