Perhaps "loose" could be debated, but something like this would likely not happen in most European countries:

http://www.snopes.com/info/news/uzi.asp

And this kind of thing is much rarer:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/20/us/fsu-incident/index.html...

I'm from the US and know quite well how things work.

I'll also add this link, as I think it's an excellent, and nuanced view that a lot of people elsewhere don't know about or see:

http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2008/04/gun...

It's not likely to happen in the US either, but sometimes unlikely things happen. That shooting instructor died because he was stupid. If he were smarter, he would have known not to give a kid a gun that even adults have difficulty shooting. And a single article of someone doing something stupid does not a picture of an entire culture paint. And US does not have a monopoly on stupidity, or shootings.

Statistics:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-re...

> And US does not have a monopoly on stupidity

No, it doesn't. That's a universal thing.

Yep, those are all 9 year olds accidentally killing shooting instructors. The neighborhood gun range is the head of a river of blood flowing through our streets.

It's an extremely narrow, decontextualized view of the situation. It's far more important to ask why people are violent than with what tool they perpetrate that violence. I would say our issue is not guns, it's our "War on Drugs" and our relative proximity to all of those nearly-failed-states in Central- and South America that rank higher than us in those categories that are the center for production of those drugs, and the cartels that control them.

This specific example is surely meant to represent the wider range of accidents involving guns and children [1], and through that the yet more general issue of gun safety overall.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/29/us/children-and-guns-the-h..., for instance

> It's far more important to ask why people are violent than with what tool they perpetrate that violence.

Well the former question is certainly a good one. Maybe you're right that it's the most important one.

However, tools matter too - a gun is a way more efficient way of killing a lot of people quickly than a knife is. Both are far more lethal than Kinder Surprise eggs.

Further to the _more efficient way_ point, they're also far quicker, so a very brief murderous impulse has more chance of being followed through with.

That's a very odd table. Did you notice that if you sort by Homicide, nearly all the top 20 are in the Americas?

Its only 75 "countries and dependencies" in a world of something like 190 countries (not counting dependencies).

I suspect that the weighting toward the Americas isn't that the Americas are more violent, but that the Americas happened to host the countries in the intersection of higher gun homicide rates and sufficient stability to collect and report meaningful statistics.