Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of American firearms (2015)

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by refurb on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @11:46PM (#31514238)

Canada had a mass shooting in 2020 in Nova Scotia where 23 people were murdered by a guy well known to the police.

The Wikipedia article only covers the major ones, but Canada has a mass shoot pretty regularly too. And if shooting scale by population, you'd expect the US to have 10x as many - all else being equal.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Mass_shootings_in_Can...

Certainly NOT saying it's not a problem, but one needs to put things in perspective if you want to get to the root cause.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by Pxtl on Wednesday May 25, 2022 @11:55PM (#31514314)

Counting articles on Wikipedia isn't exactly scientific. So let's go hard numbers:

US has 10X as many firearms deaths per capita compared to Canada, which implies 100X as absolute value.

https://globalnews.ca/news/2378037/gun-violence-by-the-numbe...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by refurb on Thursday May 26, 2022 @12:18AM (#31514486)

We’re talking mass shootings, not deaths which half are suicides.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by Pxtl on Thursday May 26, 2022 @12:38AM (#31514633)

Firearm homicide was 8X. It's in the same article.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Mental illness, mass shootings, and the politics of Ameri... by refurb on Thursday May 26, 2022 @03:31AM (#31515684)

I thought we were talking about mass shootings?

But murder rates are only 3x the US v Canada.

See the importance of the right statistics?

1000x more firearm deaths, but only 8x more firearm homicides but then 3x more murders.

I would definitely agree the US has a worse murder problem than Canada, but making is purely a gun problem misses the point. Do guns play a role? Sure.

[ Parent | on HN ]