Isn't it time you yanks grew up over your gun death epidemic?

Sad but true. People with Mental Disability are vastly over represented among firearm suicides.

 

Lives of people with mental problems are worth saving. I was never suicidal. Many people with Severe Depression are.

 

What are you saying, what are you suggesting?

 

I do not know. The loss of 572,000 lives to guns in USA in 1999-2016 is a tragedy. What can be done?

 

Address the root problems rather than scapegoating and assigning blame where it doesn't belong.

 

The nation of Japan demonstrates otherwise. Their suicide rate is far higher than the united states, despite having no firearms. Explain why that is.

The bill of rights to the united states constitution was specifically written to restrict government authority to prevent abuses of the people in the name of government.

An illegal act committed with illegally acquired weaponry.

Pray tell. Exactly which firearms on the private market are not lethal? Point them out.

 

Not if they do not actually wish to be saved. Those who make no effort of seeking treatment, even when there is nothing preventing such, are not interested in being saved, and their decision to end their own existence should be respected.

 

I will not surrender my rights due to the actions of crazy people or criminals. Bring back the asylums and hard labor.

 

Just because the Brits choose to not be able to defend themselves, does not mean that others need follow suit. You'll have to eventually learn that guns do not fire themselves, and are inanimate objects. While the loss of life is sad, it is at the hands of a mentally ill human.

Perhaps once you comprehend that if someone is wanting to end their own life, they will use whatever means are available. Slashing one's wrists is so much more elegant than a bullet, eh?

 

Gun deaths are probably at zero in North Korea. We ain't that.

Your second paragraph is slightly more persuasive, but in that case you are essentially saying only the government should have guns. Scary. Unacceptable. Unrealistic.

Your third point is meritorious. We gun owners have to be more sympathetic to this argument. I don't know what to do about it other than monitor our neighbors for signs of mental illness. It's nearly impossible though, because with video games and refrigerators, kids can grow up, but stay home into adulthood, living in their bedrooms, nourishing sick fantasies with no one to notice.

 

423,000,000 firearms in the US
~10k murders per year - 0.002364% of the guns in the US
~30k suicides per year - 0.007092% of the guns in the US
~100k defensive gun uses per year -- 10x more than the number of murders and 3.3x more than the number of suicides

Where's the problem?

 

My guess is someone was banned and this is their sock-puppet troll account.

 

Re the OP, I think he's right. There should be a nationwide program to ban guns entirely, and save all these lives.

 

Because you support restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms that do nothing to reduce gun-related crime?

 

Gun related deaths per 100,000 population.

USA 12.21
UK 0.23

France 2.83
Canada 2.00
Sweden 1.6
Italy 1.31
Germany 1.17
Australia 0.9
Japan 0.6

 

This is where we disagree. I believe every life is very important.

 

Thus repeating a common, discriminatory, and disproven fallacy.

https://mises.org/wire/mistake-only-comparing-us-murder-rates-developed-countries

The Mistake of Only Comparing US Murder Rates to "Developed" Countries

Much of the political thinking about violence in the United States comes from unfavorable comparisons between the United States and a series of cherry-picked countries with lower murder rates and with fewer guns per capita. We’ve all seen it many times. The United States, with a murder rate of approximately 5 per 100,000 is compared to a variety of Western and Central European countries (also sometimes Japan) with murder rates often below 1 per 100,000. This is, in turn, supposed to fill Americans with a sense of shame and illustrate that the United States should be regarded as some sort of pariah nation because of its murder rate.

Note, however, that these comparisons always employ a carefully selected list of countries, most of which are very unlike the United States. They are countries that were settled long ago by the dominant ethnic group, they are ethnically non-diverse today, they are frequently very small countries (such as Norway, with a population of 5 million) with very locally based democracies (again, unlike the US with an immense population and far fewer representatives in government per voter). Politically, historically, and demographically, the US has little in common with Europe or Japan.

But these are the only countries the US shall be compared to, we are told, because the US shall only be compared to “developed” countries when analyzing its murder rate and gun ownership. And yet, no reason for this is ever given. What is the criteria for deciding that the United States shall be compared to Luxembourg but not to Mexico, which has far more in common with the US than Luxembourg in terms of size, history, ethnic diversity, and geography?

Much of this stems from outdated preconceived and evidence-free notions about the "third world." As Hans Rosling has shown, there is this idea of "we" vs. "them." "We" are the special "developed" countries where people are happy healthy, and live long lives. "Them" is the third world where people live in war-torn squalor and lives there are nasty, brutish, and short. In this mode of thinking there is a bright shiny line between the "developed" world and everyone else, who might as well be considered as a different species.

In truth, there is no dividing line between the alleged "developed" world and everyone else. There is, in fact, only gradual change that takes place as one looks at Belgium, then the US, then Chile, and Turkey, and China, and Mexico. Most countries, as Rosling illustrates here, are in the middle, and this is freely exhibited by a variety of metrics including the UN's human development index.

Once we understand these facts, and do not cling to bizarre xenophobic views about how everyone outside the "developed" world is too dysfunctional and/or subhuman (although few gun control advocates would ever admit to the thought) to bear comparison to the US, we immediately see that the mantra "worst in the developed world" offers an immensely skewed, unrealistic, and even bigoted view of the world and how countries compare to each other.

While ignorance about true global poverty, life expectancy, and family planning are no doubt a source of some of these wrong-headed comparisons, one doesn't need to be the world's biggest cynic to recognize that the US is only compared to a selective list of countries because doing so offers a biased view of the United States that makes it looks like an especially crime-ridden place.

But, we are never allowed to compare the US to middle income countries like Uruguay, Russia, or Mexico because that would show that the US is actually a remarkably safe place in global terms on top of having many more legally owned guns than those countries.

Nevertheless, we've all heard it too many times to count: gun laws in the United States are "insane" because countries like Sweden and Luxembourg have far more restrictive gun laws and are much safer because of it. The US has the highest murder rate in the "developed world" — presumably because of its lax guns laws —we are told again and again.

Few people who repeat this mantra have any standard in their heads of what exactly is the "developed" world. They just repeat the phrase because they have learned to do so. They never acknowledge that when factors beyond per capita GDP are considered, it makes little sense to claim Sweden should be compared to the US, but not Argentina. Such assertions ignore immense differences in culture, size, politics, history, demographics, or ethnic diversity. Comparisons with mono-ethnic Asian countries like Japan and Korea make even less sense.

The article is well worth reading, as it demonstrates why the comparison is flawed.

Do not present the same fallacy again.

 

And ultimately it is not your life that is being threatened with termination. Those who do not feel the same way are not going to be thankful by having some outsider essentially tell them that their decisions are flawed and can be overruled by someone else. The human mind simply does not work that way.

 

We are all citizens of the same world. If you know a genocide is taking place in another country do you not feel compelled to at least speak out!

We often hear that guns don't kill people, people do!
People with guns kill people!
Nobody ever walked into a shopping mall, school or cinema etc and killed dozens of people with their bare hands!

 

Thank G-d I have only Moderate Depression. Those with Severe Depression are always in danger of suicide.

 

Then there is ultimately no point in an effort being made to prevent them from doing such, as their efforts at ending their own existence are lifelong endeavors, and the only goal they are truly working towards.

 

Despite what has been said, the availability of guns makes it far easier to commit suicide.

 

"genocide".

 

Better that thy succeed, than fail and suffer.

 

The nation of Japan proves otherwise. Their rate of suicide greatly exceeds that of the united states, but do not involve the use of firearms.

Beyond that matter, the obvious question of "so what?" must be asked with regard to the above. What ultimate, meaningful difference is actually made, if the availability of firearms leads to instances of suicide being more successful than not? Is not such ultimately the decision of the individual to make for themselves? Or is it going to be claimed that private individuals are actually the property of government?