this post was submitted on 18 Mar 2024
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Sweden and Canada have pretty high rates of gun ownership and don't have this problem. That said American school shootings are not as common as they are made out to be, there has been a lot of statistical fudging to make it look so much worse than it is.
What all three countries do have are problems with gangs and they're only getting worse as poverty drives people to crime. America has it worse because it has more poverty, but we will all catch up soon enough.
My guy, any amount of school shooting is more common than they should be.
Idk how you make shooting students / children out to be much worse than it is. Kinda seems like any stat greater than 0 should be unacceptable and cause for massive societal reevaluation.
Im just gonna point out we as a culture have been dealing with this problem of just random acts of violence for quite awhile, its just that what came before mass shootings is kinda glossed over / forgotten. Before the mass shootings we had bombing campaigns, the una bomber being the most notable. Its just that unless it was really big it rarely got all that much attention and due to how everything was disconnected at the time unless you were the FBI you may not have even noticed it was a thing.
The problem is that the Columbine mass shotting and rise of cameras kinda killed off the mass bombers. Also Columbine happened right when this shift was happening and thusly became the standard for what people do. If it was instead some dudes shooting up a police station I suspect that would have become the norm.
Canada has ~1/4 the firearms per capita compared to the US. My guess is that doesn't matter, as you go over 1 gun/resident the added guns probably don't have much of an impact.
However, most shootings in the US are with handguns (restricted in Canada), and a bunch of high-profile shootings with ARs (prohibited in Canada). Concealed carry is practically never allowed, and open carry isn't either. Safe storage is required, so you can't carry unsecured guns in your car either. Storing loaded firearms is forbidden. Owning firearms for self defense is forbidden by law (using them as such may or may not be, depending on the circumstances).
TL;DR: it's not just how many guns, but also what you're allowed to do with them.
This is the real answer.
When you look at serious violent crime, defining that as robbery, battery, forcible rape, and murder, the rate of serious violent crime is similar in the US and UK (edit - and Australia!). The UK has largely removed firearms from the equation--which is easier, since they're an island, and didn't start with 600M firearms--and it has decreased the murder rate, but their overall violent crime rate is still quite high. Despite nominally having single payer health, the system has been intentionally broken by conservatives, and poverty is pretty significant. You see the same kind of sharp economic divides in the UK that you see in the US.
The predictable result is violence.
Murder isn't the problem, it's a symptom. It's like saying that the awful cough and shortness of breath is your problem, and then thinking that cough syrup (with codeine!, since that's the good shit that works!) is going to fix the underlying pneumonia.
School shootings aren’t a gang problem, and school shootings are way more common in the US than any other developed country.