Steve CoxKonto zweryfikowane

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.....

If you assume that every gun owner who kills somebody only kills one person (either themselves or somebody else), divide 33,000 deaths per year into 1 million gun owners. You get 30 years and 4 months. That's how long it would take to get to 1% of gun owners at the present rate.

So, sincerely, I know it seems counter-intuitive to people who don't know the data, and don't consider social and economic factors, but truly, it's not the guns *causing* gun crime. They're a symptom, not a cause. Now, I'll get to the 1993 bit...

Steve - Your response is compelling and I believe in the connections between poverty and violence. The four poorest states in the US have the highest violence rates, and the 8 poorest states in US are among the 10 states with the highest gun death rates (suicide + violence).