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The love of guns in the United States has been well documented, as have multiple mass shootings across the country such as those in Orlando, San Bernardino, Newtown, and Virginia. The ease of access to guns in American society comes at a shocking cost.
As of September 2016, almost 11,000 people have been killed as a result of gun violence. Despite this high death toll, mass shootings in America show no sign of disappearing.
The Stateside obsession with guns can appear baffling to UK observers unfamiliar with its origins. So just how did this gun culture become so deep-rooted in the American psyche?
BBC source: Why Are Americans so Obsessed with Guns?
Wikipedia: Gun politics in the United States
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Why Are Americans So Obsessed With Guns?
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 10 2017, @03:39AM
> So why discuss a factor that is responsible for a bit over 4% of gun deaths rather than a factor which is responsible for quite a bit more gun deaths (including some of those mass shootings)?
Well, we as a nation have utterly lost our collective shit over terrorists that have killed about 200 civilians over the last 15 years out of more than 210,000 murders.
If less than 0.1% of murders is worth trillion dollar expenditures and constant weekly, if not daily, news coverage, that 4% is surely worth discussing.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday January 12 2017, @03:43AM
Well, we as a nation have utterly lost our collective shit over terrorists that have killed about 200 civilians over the last 15 years out of more than 210,000 murders.
While I agree that it's an overreaction, we need to remember that low probability risks are the huge problem with modern societies (with terrorism being unusual in having so many parties, both government and terrorists themselves trying to make it look worse than it is, a high rate of terrorism/paramilitary activity is a genuine problem (for example, Iraq and Algeria of recent times had a much higher murder rate than the US), and you're deliberately excluding 9/11 which by itself would add another 3k people (and is far larger than any mass shooting in the US).
You don't want terrorism to get bad enough to justify the cost or to spur paramilitary vigilantism. But most of what's going on now is rather irrelevant to terrorism, such as the TSA gropefest or Bearcat armored vehicles for cops.