Steve CoxKonto zweryfikowane

Both countries have universal healthcare. Both countries have strong welfare programs to help those who are underprivileged. Both countries lack things like heavy drug sentencing for possession. They both have a much smaller wealth/wage gap than we do, too. (It's getting worse.)

Simply put, they don't have gun homicides like we do because they have much better socioeconomic equality than we do. The poor aren't too poor, and the rich aren't too rich.

As things continue to divide there in terms of wealth inequality, my bet is gun crime/homicide rises regardless of gun-ownership levels. It may have already started. I haven't looked. My numbers are from The Guardian in 2012. But that's the answer to that one. Socioeconomics.

Here, in the US, in this regard, I already touched on our poverty level (20%, with threshold set much lower than in those countries), but add in the war on drugs and resulting social imbalance, lack of universal healthcare, and Reagan defunding our mental-health infrastructure...

And then you can look at the inequality of school funding for inner cities (because it's often based on local property taxes), which is meant to be offset by federal spending, which *both* parties have been cutting and diverting to charter schools...

Basically, our poor have consistently had options taken away from them, until they're left with "join a gang/sell drugs/guns, or starve" and then you end up with a lot of violence. Add to that lack of social support for families, lack of paid time off, etc....

And the fact that the middle class is getting squeezed harder and harder, and pressure mounts, and it results in family violence as well. Our socioeconomics are terrible compared to Europe and all of the countries Bloomberg's "Everytown" likes to compare us to.

To put gun ownership in perspective: There are 33,000 gun deaths per year here (approx), and about 2/3 are suicides and 1/3 homicides. ALL of them are tragic. All of them. But think about this: 100 million gun owners here. 1% of that is 1 million.....