I'm American. What I can say is that pretty much all firearms based murder is rare in the US. Across any demographic in the US, there is a much less than 0.1% chance that you will be murdered by a firearm in the US in any given year. Far more likely to die in a car accident,a nd you have a much larger chance of dying in a household accident. Don't even get me started on heart disease or cancer.
Our problem here in the US is that we overreact to dealing with that <0.1% chance. We make people jump through hoops to get a firearm to even go hunting. We flood our neighborhoods with police who raid homes using grenades and armored personnel carriers. (Usually killing innocents in the process, because, you know, we throw grenades in the windows of some baby's nursery.) And, we have active shooter drills for our children, probably traumatizing some of them for the rest of their lives. The list goes on and on actually.
In America, we pretty much overreact to everything. Which is why you probably hear so many crazy stories about the US. When faced with what we perceive to be a threat, no matter how remote the reality of the threat, we are unable to moderate our responses. In fact, you could argue that we are trained from an early age, via things like active shooter training, NOT to think too deeply about our responses.
Agreed on the overreaction thing. When I explain America to non-Americans, I tell them that most of our weirdest behaviors and practices make sense if you assume everyone's main concern at all times is never to ever be, personally, blamed for or responsible for anything—external costs of bringing about that state of things, be damned.
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I'm American. What I can say is that pretty much all firearms based murder is rare in the US. Across any demographic in the US, there is a much less than 0.1% chance that you will be murdered by a firearm in the US in any given year. Far more likely to die in a car accident,a nd you have a much larger chance of dying in a household accident. Don't even get me started on heart disease or cancer.
Our problem here in the US is that we overreact to dealing with that <0.1% chance. We make people jump through hoops to get a firearm to even go hunting. We flood our neighborhoods with police who raid homes using grenades and armored personnel carriers. (Usually killing innocents in the process, because, you know, we throw grenades in the windows of some baby's nursery.) And, we have active shooter drills for our children, probably traumatizing some of them for the rest of their lives. The list goes on and on actually.
In America, we pretty much overreact to everything. Which is why you probably hear so many crazy stories about the US. When faced with what we perceive to be a threat, no matter how remote the reality of the threat, we are unable to moderate our responses. In fact, you could argue that we are trained from an early age, via things like active shooter training, NOT to think too deeply about our responses.
Agreed on the overreaction thing. When I explain America to non-Americans, I tell them that most of our weirdest behaviors and practices make sense if you assume everyone's main concern at all times is never to ever be, personally, blamed for or responsible for anything—external costs of bringing about that state of things, be damned.