This is not factual. The Lankford study generally cited has been shown to ignore most non-US mass shootings.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3238736
Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined."
Data available: https://crimeresearch.org/data/
Yes, the US has a problem with gun violence, mass shootings, and suicides. No, it isn't unique to the US, and gun ownership isn't correlated (at least with the murders and mass shootings).
"The US ranks 58th in attack rate and 62st in murder rate. Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Russia are major European countries with at least 45% higher rates of murder from mass public shootings than the United States. The rates in Pakistan and India are respectively 555% and 76% higher than the US rate."
> The solution is to ban guns, full stop.
Similarly inaccurate:
"Lankford’s claim that higher rates of gun ownership are associated with more mass public shooters completely disappears when this more complete data on mass public shooters is used"
Not at this frequency! Truthfully - do you believe that mass shootings happen nearly _every day_ in other countries? No statistic I have ever read has supported that conclusion.
I definitely think our gun laws are stupid, I would support legislation to curtail or completely eliminate guns, but it's not like the US just has one generic kind of person; a big and diverse population is going to bring a lot of really cool and awesome people (many of whom move to big cities like NY or Chicago, which is why I like the US), but also a bunch of xenophobic idiots that also really like guns.
They happen every week in the US.
I think it's a little unfair to take the US as a whole for this; the population of the US is 5x the population of England, and it's not a big homogeneous blob. Mass shootings don't typically happen in places like NYC, because there are much stricter gun laws.
It would only further support a gun ban.
There are logistical problems with that solution as well if we're being honest. How are you going to locate all however many hundred million firearms there are in the US? Even if it's just banning some weapons. How are you going to locate them all?
Even if you could, these terrorists would just use truck bombs.
As far as solutions go, the best option available in our current situation is probably to let our counter-terrorism operatives actually operate. At least up to now, they've been operating with kid gloves with respect to domestic terrorists.
Clearly Albania, a country with per capita GDP less than a tenth of the US is not a suitable comparison. No attempt has been made to account for income as a confounding variable.
The figures for Norway are predominantly driven by a single data point over the period compared to 67 mass shooting in the US over that same period. Surely this should be mentioned to allow for a proper interpretation of the data?
You need to fix the rotten mentality that has corrupted many American brains. That's the reason we have so few mass shootings in Europe. Quality of life is much better, for starters.
[...] one but may have stopped many others where the difficulty in obtaining a firearm was the difference between an angry post on Facebook/Twitter/Livejournal and 9 dead in under a minute.
I can think of two in my lifetime. The one you mentioned in Utrecht, and the Alphen aan den Rijn one in 2011. Even accounting for population size it's nowhere near the severity/frequency of the US.
> Gun control did nothing to stop that.
Gun control obviously isn't going to stop every attack. That doesn't mean it can't prevent many of them.
Don’t forget everything that isn’t covered by the media. In 2018 we had 527 registered shooting incidents. In the last 18 months we had 44 gun related deaths. In 2018 the police seized 76 automatic weapons such as the AR-15.
For a country with strict gun control that’s a lot.
I think the biggest gains come from focusing on mental health. I see this is just one symptom of a much larger mental health crisis in the US. Other symptoms include high depression rates, high anxiety rates and high addiction rates.
The suggestion of metal detectors is laughable. You’d need to put one at the entrance of everyone’s home for that to be remotely effective. The solution is to ban guns, full stop. And then slowly start to address the rotten national psyche that has led to where we are today.