The US are basically obsessed with guns and illusory freedoms that actually mean many people live their lives in fear. Some freedom.
As the gun lobby fund politicians nine times as much as the gun control lobby, this will not change, regardless of the rights or the wrongs.
No one will stop criminals getting guns. But crazies are not criminals, they are crazies. The Virgina killer would have probably been ripped off, even killed by a criminal gun supplier, or been too afraid to contact one.
As for arguments concerning the Constitution, it's all dumb.
- First, you CAN change it, otherwise black people and women could not vote. It is NOT tablets of stone from god, okay?
- Second, to most students of English, the clause on gun ownership is linked to a millita at a time when they did not anticipate a standing army, so is as relevent as buggy whips today.
- Third, it is talking about single-shot muzzle loaders, not semi-automatics or assault weapons; I think if those men who signed the Constitution were alive today they would not write the law that way in the face of 30,000 dead a year and spree killers.
- Four, the bleating noise that American's need guns to pwotec themselves fwom the govewnment is pathetic (although given your government is understandable); Eastern Europe freed itself from Communism without mass gun ownership - are Americans cowards that need guns to stand up to despots? Burger-eating surrender monkeys unless they have guns? I don't think so but this is the logical conclusion of some arguments in favour of the status quo.
- Five, when Americans HAVE had the chance to use guns to protect themsleves from the government, where's the NRA? Where's the gun owners? Hiding whilst students get shot at Ohio U, that's where.
- Six, the police were apparently delayed in stopping the carnage by citizens going in with guns; more students died because of amateur gun freaks showing-off than would have otherwise.
I love the 'facts' presented, which;
- combine suicide with homicide to make gun ownership appear less risky to people other than the owner than it is
- classify a part of a country that has had civil unrest for decades as a country in its own right (Northern Ireland) to further distort the statistics and make gun ownership seem less risky to people other than the owner
- amusingly distort things further by ignoring most deaths in the USA are caused by HANDGUNS but counting all guns everywhere as equal
I congratulate the complier of the table and/or those who have cluelessly spread such statistical tripe for such a manifest disregard of facts and such determination to compare apples to elephants.
Sadly, you're (the US) &ucked. There is no way short of a door-to-door army search to reduce gun ownership to levels seen in most civilised countries, and if you did that the gun-nuts would die with a self-rightous cry of "I told you so".
There is one truth; as a society, America is disproportionately violent. There are countries with similarly slack gun laws and comparable GDP/capita and far fewer gun deaths, but they have far far lower levels of social inequality than the USA, and thus far less disadvantaged people who might turn to violence to redress things. As social inequality is getting worse (the US is moving away from European norms and towards, say, Brazil, as far as social inequality goes), the violence is unlikely to get better. If you create a social model where dog eats dog, this is what happens.
It is this inequality, and desensitisitaion to gun violence after decades of it that ensures the 32 students are far from the last who die like this, and those who die at the hands of the disenfranchised underclass will continue to die, and the deaths will change nothing due to politicians being in the pockets of the NRA.
heathen
The koreans in general have a bad attitude about the US
Racist.