There are frequent mass shootings in the US, we see them in the news. No one pretends this doesn’t happen in other countries. But it certainly doesn’t happen frequently – it is a rarity. And when it does, the whole world knows. Unlike the US, where it is so frequent… well, only the most despicable crimes get shown on world news.
But gun crime doesn’t stop with mass shootings, there are plenty of gun crimes in the US even without mass shootings. The tragedy is that guns are so prevalent, and attitudes to guns are so lax, that no one sees the problem.
If you have never lived outside the States, you will never know that life without guns isn’t just possible… it is desirable. Most of the world don’t live in daily fear of being mowed down in a mall or a school. So arguing about datasets is just arguing about lighting arrangements on a ship that is sinking… it doesn’t describe much at all. It’s cherry picking your data set at best.
Solutions: Society as a whole has to decide that it’s time to restrict gun ownership, that it’s important to educate people into valuing human life and that a gun is NOT a solution to a problem. In the dataset I looked at, the US in terms of gun violence was about the same ranking as Somalia, Eritrea and Ethiopia (which had just finished fighting a civil war) along with other war-torn countries. But there isn’t a war going on there, is there? Yeah, I thought not.