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Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this. There are over 300 million people here, a few hundred die per year in mass shootings (whic

Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this. There are over 300 million people here, a few hundred die per year in mass shootings (which includes targeted ones, and I doubt you'd be a target). They are a problem, but they are massively over-reported (based strictly on mortality). Not living in the US because of "gun culture" is unreasonable and irrational. It is falling prey to what is essentially fear-mongering (as far as that decision is concerned).

mpweiher 9y ago
> a few hundred die per year in mass shootings More than 30 thousand per year die due to guns. American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home.
- matte_black 9y ago
  Half those deaths are suicides.
  - res0nat0r 9y ago
    That still doesn't make the gun violence problem in the USA any better.
    - thousandautumns 9y ago
      It makes the risk of being shot by someone else a lot less than it appears to be when you use raw gun death statistics.
    - matte_black 9y ago
      It makes it exactly twice as better than the original statistic.
      - res0nat0r 9y ago
        Except the fact that gun homicides are still above and beyond every other first world country by far. https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/in...
        matte_black 9y ago
        But still at a level most people can live with.
        tpush 9y ago
        Except the people who died, that is.
  - x14 9y ago
    2/3
  - lopmotr 9y ago
    Non-suicidal people don't believe they'd kill themselves. But they still do later in life. Any of us might become mentally ill and do it one-day, making that statistic pretty relevant.
    - matte_black 9y ago
      That’s a personal problem though, not a problem for society at large.
      - mercer 9y ago
        How do you make that distinction? Serious question.
- patrickmay 9y ago
  Two-thirds of those are suicides and most of the rest are inner city gang violence based in the war on drugs.
  - soperj 9y ago
    so still 10000 to 15000 (depends on who's stat i'm going by here). That's a small city wiped off the map every single year.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Homicide statistics are rather incomplete, but they don't really paint a picture where "most" are obviously explained by "inner city gang violence": https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_11_murder_circumstances_by_weapon_2015.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
  - patrickmay 9y ago
    80% of the remainder are gang related: http://jpfo.org/articles-assd03/gun-stats-perspective.htm http://jpfo.org/articles-assd03/gun-stats-perspective.htm
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      The CDC document they link doesn't seem to make any statements about gang vs non gang homicides. I've read/searched for a couple minutes (the word "gang" doesn't appear in the pdf).
- DINKDINK 9y ago
  Americans are more likely to die in car accidents than be shot. Don't confuse the lurid with the empirical.
  - watwut 9y ago
    Americans drive awful lot. Americans are more likely to be shot then citizens of pretty much any other western country and also of quite a few non-western countries.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    Actually: Assault by gun: 1 in 370 Riding inside a car, van or truck: 1 in 536 http://www.businessinsider.de/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-2018-2?r=US&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.de/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-2... "Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than many leading causes of death combined"
    - DtnB 9y ago
      you left out: "Motor Vehicle Crash 1 in 102" http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...
      - mpweiher 9y ago
        Motor vehicle ≠ car.
        DtnB 9y ago
        and passenger doesn't equal all car accidents.
    - DINKDINK 9y ago
      >Riding inside a car, van or truck: My claim was a car accident not strictly, riding as a passenger. I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive and provide the mortality rates from all vehicle related deaths: "Any motor vehicle incident 1 in 114" So yes, Americans are 3 times more likely to die in a car accident than by a gun. For Americans, use your own life experience: How many people do you know who have died in or by cars vs gun violence. Which one is fear mongered more? Assuming you have 400 friends/acquaintances the probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a car accident ~ 3%[1]. The probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a gun accident is 47% [2] Center for Disease Control has more comprehensive figures: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm [1] (113/114)^400 [2] (535/536)^400
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  The others have already gotten to the suicide point but if you'd like to know more you can read this article, which actually breaks down the numbers behind that 30,000. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-bad-way-to-understand-gun-violence/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-ba...
  - soperj 9y ago
    Thanks.
  - ctvo 9y ago
    186 Asians (19,437,463 estimated total) die to gun violence a year according to this chart. And the majority in the US, whites (232,943,055 estimated total), 3,049 die a year due to gun violence. In a country of 327,421,076 (estimated). I used those two demographics because of their representation in tech (and thus this site). Use those numbers to draw your own conclusions while living outside of the US.
- bluedino 9y ago
  Maybe if you’re a 19 year old black male in Chicago, but not a 35 year old Asian software developer in Palo alto
- BookmarkSaver 9y ago
  You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner who isn't involved in a criminal enterprise has next to no chance of dying by gunshot. >American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home. This is absolutely untrue and a completely asinine thing to say, revealing your own unexamined biases.
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    > You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner A non car-owner who never leaves the house is unlikely to die in a traffic accident.
alexchamberlain 9y ago
The BBC put some numbers on this a couple of years back. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604 > The number of gun murders per capita in the US in 2012 - the most recent year for comparable statistics - was nearly 30 times that in the UK, at 2.9 per 100,000 compared with just 0.1.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  That's a pretty textbook example of cherry-picked data. Why did they look at "gun murders per capita" specifically instead of just "murders per capita"? I don't know about you but I don't particularly care about how I get murdered just if I get murdered. If you look instead at murders per capita the US is still very high at 4.88 vs. the UK's 0.92 but clearly not "30 times higher" either.
- BookmarkSaver 9y ago
  Yes, but 30x a tiny number is still tiny. That isn't a reasonable way to determine "danger", it's a statistical fallacy. Like, the difference in traffic deaths between the US and UK is 10.6 to 2.9 per capita, which is under 4x. But the actual lethality difference is massive. It pretty much completely swamps the difference in gun murders (I'm treating this as a naive comparison to prove a point, not trying to dig into the particulars of these stats), but I don't here people making sanctimonious posts about an absolute hard-line refusal to moving to the US due exclusively to the dangerous driving culture. It's just psychological biases at play.
- freedomben 9y ago
  What about overall murder rate? How about murders with a different weapon like knives? Those seem like important statistics to have for a true comparison, but strangely is missing from the article you linked...
- drak0n1c 9y ago
  The UK and parts of Europe have suffered mass killings and terrorism with higher casualty rates per capita than mass killings in the US. Still, they are statistically tiny and do not automatically imply that it is not worth living in the UK or EU.
ljm 9y ago
It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way. In fact, I feel it's more likely to entrench his point of view because you're telling him he needs a better reason than that. And I can understand his point because it's not necessarily about the fear of getting shot up in a nightclub, at least for me it's the very prevalent attitude that guns are a natural right and they take priority over much greater humanitarian concerns that inflict the country, to the point of it being fetishistic. It's the gun culture, not the gun crime. And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it?
- BookmarkSaver 9y ago
  >It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way How? It is literally not even close to something to worry about unless, as I posted elsewhere, you either own a gun (accidental deaths), are suicidal, or are involved in criminal activities. Similarly, the difference in deaths like traffic accidents between countries is so much more massive than the firearm homicide rate that it is absolutely insane to list that as a hard-line criteria. It is not reasonable or rational to be scared of guns in the US unless you are actually involved in sketchy situations or own one yourself. >And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it? Only from a psychological perspective. If you are actually concerned with your statistical likelihood of death, this is exactly what you should be interested in. Lurid stories from a country that has a third of a billion people is a completely irrational basis for such a decision.
  - ljm 9y ago
    I'm not a woman so I have literally nothing to worry about as a man wanting to live in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, except that nobody would argue with me if I said I don't want to live there because I disagree with their cultural attitude towards women. What you're trying to tell me is that it's not valid for someone to consider US culture as it pertains to guns as a reason for wanting to live there or not, because I'm statistically unlikely to be involved in gun crime. The statistical likelihood of being a victim is totally irrelevant, we're talking about the compatibility of cultural values. And on that basis it is totally fair and rational to refuse to move somewhere that fundamentally opposes your own values. It's a matter of integrity and what's important to you, and nobody has the right to tell anyone whether those values are better or worse (or more/less rational) than your own. Crime is practically a given anywhere so on that basis you're absolutely correct. It's totally irrational to think that prolific reports of crime in the news is a good reason to think you're gonna get shot or stabbed when you walk down the street. Which is why I'm focusing so heavily on the cultural aspect.
billjings 9y ago
> Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this. This is getting to be less and less the case. Some anecdata: * A good friend of mine worked at the UPS in SF where a mass shooting occurred * I almost took a job at the YT San Bruno office * Luke Woodham killed two students at a high school in my hometown There are a lot of mass shooting events, and the number of people caught in their emotional orbit is only increasing. How many people were in the crowd at Las Vegas, for heaven's sake?

mpweiher 9y ago

> a few hundred die per year in mass shootings More than 30 thousand per year die due to guns. American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home.

matte_black 9y ago
Half those deaths are suicides.
- res0nat0r 9y ago
  That still doesn't make the gun violence problem in the USA any better.
  - thousandautumns 9y ago
    It makes the risk of being shot by someone else a lot less than it appears to be when you use raw gun death statistics.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    It makes it exactly twice as better than the original statistic.
    - res0nat0r 9y ago
      Except the fact that gun homicides are still above and beyond every other first world country by far. https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/03/americas/us-gun-statistics/in...
      - matte_black 9y ago
        But still at a level most people can live with.
        tpush 9y ago
        Except the people who died, that is.
- x14 9y ago
  2/3
- lopmotr 9y ago
  Non-suicidal people don't believe they'd kill themselves. But they still do later in life. Any of us might become mentally ill and do it one-day, making that statistic pretty relevant.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    That’s a personal problem though, not a problem for society at large.
    - mercer 9y ago
      How do you make that distinction? Serious question.
patrickmay 9y ago
Two-thirds of those are suicides and most of the rest are inner city gang violence based in the war on drugs.
- soperj 9y ago
  so still 10000 to 15000 (depends on who's stat i'm going by here). That's a small city wiped off the map every single year.
- maxerickson 9y ago
  Homicide statistics are rather incomplete, but they don't really paint a picture where "most" are obviously explained by "inner city gang violence": https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_11_murder_circumstances_by_weapon_2015.xls https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-...
- patrickmay 9y ago
  80% of the remainder are gang related: http://jpfo.org/articles-assd03/gun-stats-perspective.htm http://jpfo.org/articles-assd03/gun-stats-perspective.htm
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    The CDC document they link doesn't seem to make any statements about gang vs non gang homicides. I've read/searched for a couple minutes (the word "gang" doesn't appear in the pdf).
DINKDINK 9y ago
Americans are more likely to die in car accidents than be shot. Don't confuse the lurid with the empirical.
- watwut 9y ago
  Americans drive awful lot. Americans are more likely to be shot then citizens of pretty much any other western country and also of quite a few non-western countries.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  Actually: Assault by gun: 1 in 370 Riding inside a car, van or truck: 1 in 536 http://www.businessinsider.de/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-2018-2?r=US&IR=T http://www.businessinsider.de/mass-shooting-gun-statistics-2... "Americans are more likely to die from gun violence than many leading causes of death combined"
  - DtnB 9y ago
    you left out: "Motor Vehicle Crash 1 in 102" http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-overview/odds-of-dying/ http://injuryfacts.nsc.org/all-injuries/preventable-death-ov...
    - mpweiher 9y ago
      Motor vehicle ≠ car.
      - DtnB 9y ago
        and passenger doesn't equal all car accidents.
  - DINKDINK 9y ago
    >Riding inside a car, van or truck: My claim was a car accident not strictly, riding as a passenger. I'll assume you weren't trying to be deceptive and provide the mortality rates from all vehicle related deaths: "Any motor vehicle incident 1 in 114" So yes, Americans are 3 times more likely to die in a car accident than by a gun. For Americans, use your own life experience: How many people do you know who have died in or by cars vs gun violence. Which one is fear mongered more? Assuming you have 400 friends/acquaintances the probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a car accident ~ 3%[1]. The probability of you not knowing anyone who's died in a gun accident is 47% [2] Center for Disease Control has more comprehensive figures: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm [1] (113/114)^400 [2] (535/536)^400
frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
The others have already gotten to the suicide point but if you'd like to know more you can read this article, which actually breaks down the numbers behind that 30,000. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-bad-way-to-understand-gun-violence/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/mass-shootings-are-a-ba...
- soperj 9y ago
  Thanks.
- ctvo 9y ago
  186 Asians (19,437,463 estimated total) die to gun violence a year according to this chart. And the majority in the US, whites (232,943,055 estimated total), 3,049 die a year due to gun violence. In a country of 327,421,076 (estimated). I used those two demographics because of their representation in tech (and thus this site). Use those numbers to draw your own conclusions while living outside of the US.
bluedino 9y ago
Maybe if you’re a 19 year old black male in Chicago, but not a 35 year old Asian software developer in Palo alto
BookmarkSaver 9y ago
You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner who isn't involved in a criminal enterprise has next to no chance of dying by gunshot. >American soldiers were typically safer in war zones than back home. This is absolutely untrue and a completely asinine thing to say, revealing your own unexamined biases.
- mpweiher 9y ago
  > You have to filter out accidents, suicides, and targeted crimes. A non-suicidal, non-gunowner A non car-owner who never leaves the house is unlikely to die in a traffic accident.

alexchamberlain 9y ago

The BBC put some numbers on this a couple of years back. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604 > The number of gun murders per capita in the US in 2012 - the most recent year for comparable statistics - was nearly 30 times that in the UK, at 2.9 per 100,000 compared with just 0.1.

kllrnohj 9y ago
That's a pretty textbook example of cherry-picked data. Why did they look at "gun murders per capita" specifically instead of just "murders per capita"? I don't know about you but I don't particularly care about how I get murdered just if I get murdered. If you look instead at murders per capita the US is still very high at 4.88 vs. the UK's 0.92 but clearly not "30 times higher" either.
BookmarkSaver 9y ago
Yes, but 30x a tiny number is still tiny. That isn't a reasonable way to determine "danger", it's a statistical fallacy. Like, the difference in traffic deaths between the US and UK is 10.6 to 2.9 per capita, which is under 4x. But the actual lethality difference is massive. It pretty much completely swamps the difference in gun murders (I'm treating this as a naive comparison to prove a point, not trying to dig into the particulars of these stats), but I don't here people making sanctimonious posts about an absolute hard-line refusal to moving to the US due exclusively to the dangerous driving culture. It's just psychological biases at play.
freedomben 9y ago
What about overall murder rate? How about murders with a different weapon like knives? Those seem like important statistics to have for a true comparison, but strangely is missing from the article you linked...
drak0n1c 9y ago
The UK and parts of Europe have suffered mass killings and terrorism with higher casualty rates per capita than mass killings in the US. Still, they are statistically tiny and do not automatically imply that it is not worth living in the UK or EU.

ljm 9y ago

It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way. In fact, I feel it's more likely to entrench his point of view because you're telling him he needs a better reason than that. And I can understand his point because it's not necessarily about the fear of getting shot up in a nightclub, at least for me it's the very prevalent attitude that guns are a natural right and they take priority over much greater humanitarian concerns that inflict the country, to the point of it being fetishistic. It's the gun culture, not the gun crime. And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it?

BookmarkSaver 9y ago
>It's an incredibly reasonable and rational feeling to have and I don't believe it's fair to the parent to completely dismiss his concerns that way How? It is literally not even close to something to worry about unless, as I posted elsewhere, you either own a gun (accidental deaths), are suicidal, or are involved in criminal activities. Similarly, the difference in deaths like traffic accidents between countries is so much more massive than the firearm homicide rate that it is absolutely insane to list that as a hard-line criteria. It is not reasonable or rational to be scared of guns in the US unless you are actually involved in sketchy situations or own one yourself. >And in all fairness, "it's not a big deal, you probably won't be a target anyway," isn't the most attractive selling point is it? Only from a psychological perspective. If you are actually concerned with your statistical likelihood of death, this is exactly what you should be interested in. Lurid stories from a country that has a third of a billion people is a completely irrational basis for such a decision.
- ljm 9y ago
  I'm not a woman so I have literally nothing to worry about as a man wanting to live in Saudi Arabia or Qatar, except that nobody would argue with me if I said I don't want to live there because I disagree with their cultural attitude towards women. What you're trying to tell me is that it's not valid for someone to consider US culture as it pertains to guns as a reason for wanting to live there or not, because I'm statistically unlikely to be involved in gun crime. The statistical likelihood of being a victim is totally irrelevant, we're talking about the compatibility of cultural values. And on that basis it is totally fair and rational to refuse to move somewhere that fundamentally opposes your own values. It's a matter of integrity and what's important to you, and nobody has the right to tell anyone whether those values are better or worse (or more/less rational) than your own. Crime is practically a given anywhere so on that basis you're absolutely correct. It's totally irrational to think that prolific reports of crime in the news is a good reason to think you're gonna get shot or stabbed when you walk down the street. Which is why I'm focusing so heavily on the cultural aspect.

billjings 9y ago

> Because most people live their whole lives without encountering this. This is getting to be less and less the case. Some anecdata: * A good friend of mine worked at the UPS in SF where a mass shooting occurred * I almost took a job at the YT San Bruno office * Luke Woodham killed two students at a high school in my hometown There are a lot of mass shooting events, and the number of people caught in their emotional orbit is only increasing. How many people were in the crowd at Las Vegas, for heaven's sake?