Elementary School Shooting Leaves 27 Dead(20 children)(Shooter son of teacher)

[mrstickball]

S.Peelman said:

Kasz216 said:

It was an overly broad example... but yes.  Assaults at work happen fairly often everywhere.

More often in the US, since the US has more violent crime....

but that has less to do with guns and gun control then it does the US having a culture of being giant violent dicks.

If the USA and the Netherlands were to switch gun laws today, and be forced to hold them for 10 years.... I think you'd probably see very little change in violent crime.

Spree killings on the other hand are totally different and independent from violent crimes.  They've been seemingly more common recently. (everywhere not just the USA) despite dropping crime rates in the USA.

Point being... if this isn't a statistical anomoly (possible considering again, doesn't happen that often),  there is a big underlying issue to why the spree killings are suddenly happening.

I guess we'll never know.

I'd rather have our European gun-laws (meaning banning of firearms) stay the same just in case.

Well, you do have Czech and Swiss gun laws that are incredibly liberal for European standards, and their crime rates are significantly lower than the US.

Like Kasz said, America has a culture of violence. The over-arching theme and narrative by using actual data modeling and statistics is that its caused by an abject lack of education and economic opportunities by minorities and the lower class, which in turn have much higher murder rates than the middle and upper class.

Fixing those problems aren't nearly as easy as scapegoating guns. Guns are a simplistic way to "Fix" the argument, when they do nothing. America has been liberalizing its gun laws since the 80s with CCW, castle doctrine, and the sunsetting of the federal assault weapons ban. Yet despite the liberalization, there is less violent crime today than there has been since the 50s and early 60s.

Why? Because our culture has changed, albeit not enough. Inequalities among minorities is better than it was in the 60s which has dropped crimes significantly. If minority education statistics ever get in line with white statistics, then our crime rate will be no different than Europe's, because crime among caucasians with similar levels of education is.......The same, regardless if its in the US, UK, Germany, or Scandinavia.