I don’t know about school shootings, but guns are banned in Puerto Rico and the island has 4 times the homicide rate of the US and 6 times the homicide rate of India. Pakistan has way more guns than most Latin American countries but much lower homicide rates.
Homicide rates in the new world have been vastly higher than in Europe and Asia for hundreds of years, long before modern gun control. At the turn of the 20th century, the homicide rate in the US was 10x higher than the UK: https://quod.lib.umich.edu/h/humfig/images/11217607.0002.206...
Pop quiz: from the chart of homicide rates in the UK, tell me when the major gun control legislation happened.
and i do believe that this idea doesn't fly in the USA. The culture doesn't allow it. Gun control in the USA can, and will, only ever go as far as checks and registries. It will forever remain a place where anyone, after passing checks, will be able to acquire a gun.
There are countries with large gun ownership rates too - finland comes to mind. Those countries have good education, social safety net, healthcare, and other societal support, such that people don't become deranged or fall into crime (as easily).
Of course, having some gun control laws will help - i am all for a complete registry of guns (which doesn't exist in the US - and fuck those who are against it). But it's not a panacea. Effort and political capital spent on trying to get gun control means effort not spent on social progress, which is a deeper root cause of the problem.
India has zero to no gun violence. Sure, there's a lot of petty crime, and there are enough murders happening - and the last thing we want is to arm those murderers with guns.
Your sentence seems to argue that the (much higher) degree of free speech enjoyed by Americans is owing to civilian gun ownership, which I don't think is true (though I don't have the data at hand to back up my claim).
>There are hundreds of millions of americans. These mass shooting events are insignifigant in the grand scheme of things
It's not just the number of people who get shot - it's this idea that a road rage incident _can_ potentially end in you getting shot, if the other person is deranged enough. Not to mention the amount of American tax dollars that go into ensuring that the police out-gun the civilians.
"A 2022 report from the University of Washington revealing that, while the US had more than four firearm homicides per 100,000 people in 2019, Japan had almost zero. Comparing high-income countries in the World Bank with the rate of firearm homicide per 100,000 people, the US had 4.2, Australia had 0.18 and Japan 0.02, the report found."
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/08/abe-shooting-w...
In my opinion, of all the things that count towards a society being considered more civilised than another, not shooting each other is right up there.
The fact is quantity matters in such cases. Having 1 incidence vs 10 or 20 is a huge difference.