It's interesting that your horrifying experience with guns happened in California, which has the strictest gun laws in the country.
There are parts of the U.S. that have high rates of gun violence: Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and others. These are almost all cities where gun control is very strict. The people who are perpetrating the gun violence somehow find ways around the laws (who knew criminals didn't follow laws?) Then you have Texas, which has the slackest gun regulation of any state in the country and extremely low rates of gun violence, comparatively. (Except at the border with Mexico, where there is a lot of cartel violence.)
I might be wrong, but it seems to me that perhaps you did not read the entire article. Maybe you missed the part where I cited a recent study showing that American concealed carry permit holders are one of the least likely demographics in the country to commit a crime? Or it's possible that you already had your mind made up on the subject before reading the article.
I know I won't convince you of anything, but I will say that I have lived among people who own and carry guns all my life, and have never encountered any gun violence or even irresponsible use of guns. But every one of them is trained and ready to defend themselves and others, in the event that someone with bad intentions produces a gun in their presence.
Also, lest you start to feel too safe in your northern clime, insulated from all the out of control gun violence to the south, I feel the duty to remind you that one out of every 15 Canadian adults owns a gun.
I know that--but we don't have a gun culture. And one in 15 isn't too bad considering the most gun owners in Canada are our First Nations communities who still hunt. Unlike Americans, we don't carry guns to protect ourselves against our neighbours or because we think our own government will turn on us. Guns in Canada are used to hunt animals be it for food or sport. And our gun laws are pretty tough--federal laws severely restrict the ability of civilians to transport restricted or prohibited (grandfathered) firearms in public. Of course, things are changing in Canada and gun crimes, once pretty rare, are becoming more common.
See, that's the thing that doesn't make sense to me. You are relieved that it is illegal to transport weapons in Canada (so that Canadians can't use their guns for self defense), and that Canada doesn't have a gun culture like the US (although my article demonstrates that American gun culture is really a bunch of nice people who are highly competent and safe with their weapons). You say that 1 in 15 Canadians owning guns "isn't that bad", but then you say that gun crimes in Canada were once rare but are now becoming more common.
...Given that it is very illegal to transport weapons of any kind in public in your country, what exactly is the connection between legal gun ownership and gun crime in Canada? Apparently there are some people who are willing to flout the rules on transport, if gun crime is on the rise.
And what about in the United States? What exactly do you believe is the connection between American gun culture (as I described in the article) and areas that experience high rates of gun crime?
What about other countries that have very strict gun laws? Have the laws in France and Germany prevented any terrorist attacks, do you think? What about Brazil, where guns are almost completely illegal, yet they have one of the highest gun crime rates in the world, with 60,000 murders per year? Or what about Venezuela, where guns are not allowed, yet the capital of Caracas is "the most murderous city outside a warzone in the world"?
Carrying a gun for self defense seems to be a frightening idea to many people. They sometimes mask their fear in pity, by saying things like "I just feel so sorry for anyone who feels like they have to carry a gun all the time." That's funny. Would they feel sorry for someone who kept a fire extinguisher in his home, or a first aid kit in the car? Probably not. See, the real reason people are scared of guns is because they're scared of criminals and perhaps terrorists, but they subconsciously attach their fear to the gun itself. After all, criminals are completely unpredictable and unpreventable. But you can ban guns! It worked in Europe and Australia! ...or did it?
The best medicine for fear of guns is learning how to shoot. Learning to shoot is like learning to swim. It's fun to practice, but it'll save your life--and the lives of others--in an emergency.
The Guardian:
"No other developed country in the world has anywhere near the same rate of gun violence as America. The US has nearly six times the gun homicide rate as Canada, more than seven times as Sweden, and nearly 16 times as Germany, according to UN data compiled by the Guardian. (These gun deaths are a big reason America has a much higher overall homicide rate, which includes non-gun deaths, than other developed nations.
The US has by far the highest number of privately owned guns in the world. Estimated in 2007, the number of civilian-owned firearms in the US was 88.8 guns per 100 people, meaning there was almost one privately owned gun per American and more than one per American adult. The world's second-ranked country was Yemen, a quasi-failed state torn by civil war, where there were 54.8 guns per 100 people. Another way of looking at that: Americans make up about 4.43 percent of the world's population, yet own roughly 42 percent of all the world's privately held firearms.
That does not, however, mean that every American adult actually owns guns. In fact, gun ownership is concentrated among a minority of the US population — as surveys from the Pew Research Center and General Social Survey suggest.
There is a very strong correlation between gun ownership and gun violence — a relationship that researchers argue is at least partly causal. And American gun ownership is beyond anything else in the world. At the same time, these guns are concentrated among a passionate minority, who are typically the loudest critics against any form of gun control and who scare legislators into voting against such measures.
Opponents of gun control tend to point to other factors to explain America's unusual gun violence: mental illness, for example. Jonathan Metzl, a mental health expert at Vanderbilt University, told me that this is just not the case. People with mental illnesses are more likely to be victims, not perpetrators, of violence. And while it's true that an extraordinary amount of mass shooters (up to 60 percent) have some kind of psychiatric or psychological symptoms, Metzl points out that other factors are much better predictors of gun violence: substance abuse, poverty, history of violence, and, yes, access to guns.
Another argument you sometimes hear is that these shootings would happen less frequently if even more people had guns, thus enabling them to defend themselves from the shooting.
But, again, the data shows this is simply not true. High gun ownership rates do not reduce gun deaths, but rather tend to coincide with increases in gun deaths. And multiple simulations have demonstrated that most people, if placed in an active shooter situation while armed, will not be able to stop the situation, and may in fact do little more than get themselves killed in the process.
The relationship between gun ownership rates and gun violence rates is well established. Reviews of the evidence by the Harvard School of Public Health's Injury Control Research Center have consistently found that when controlling for variables such as socioeconomic factors and other crime, places with more guns have more gun deaths."
You can read the rest of this article and view a very interesting video showing, in a simulation, that people repeatedly fail to shoot an active shooter before they're shot. Link: http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america
Let's just agree to disagree. As far as I'm concerned, every child who is killed at the hands of another child, every woman shot by an abusive partner, every colleague gunned down by a revengeful employee--all or nearly all could have been prevented.
Not California--Washington State. We were about halfway to Seattle.
And yes, hard to convince me as I think the biggest issue is cultural. The idea of wanting or needing to carry a gun for self-protection is completely foreign to me. I was born in Vancouver but raised in a small pastoral community on Vancouver Island. I'm back in the city and even though Vancouver has some crime, I've always found it to be very safe. I understand that there are many people who own and carry guns responsibly but there are too many who don't. Every time I hear about a child shooting a sibling or schoolmate, I just shudder. My cousins in Boston tell me that their kids practice "shooter drills" beginning in kindergarten. They're taught what to do in the event of a school shooting... I mean, holy Jesus. How is this okay? (And yes, I know guns don't kill people, people kill people--but they do it a lot easier with a semi-automatic rifle!).
The thing is, semi-automatic rifles are already here in abundance, and it would be impossible at this point to get them out of the hands of criminals. So the best thing we can do to protect ourselves from criminals with guns is for ordinary people to have guns.
You see, that's exactly it. I can't understand how people can tolerate living like that--needing to have guns in order to protect yourselves from everyone else. Americans treat this as normal...but it's not, at least not to many other people in the world. And in the middle of a crisis or shooting incident, how are the good guys supposed to know which are the bad guys when EVERYONE is carrying a gun, when everyone could potentially have been the shooter. In any case, not trying to convince anyone of anything. Just counting my blessings that I don't live in the US.