Americans in the comment section are reacting about this woman being a disgruntled user, angry about perceived discrimination from Youtube, down on her luck, suicidal.
Me, a european, I'm reacting to how easily she found a gun.
I hate to bring up this very toxic debate, my comment will seem like fishing for trouble.
Yet you have to understand our perspective. Not every lunatic where I live can find a gun when they need one so to me it's clear as day that the issue is the availability of firearms.
There are always going to be disgruntled or unbalanced people but they can't be allowed to find a deadly firearm as easy as it is in the US.
If it wasn't a gun it could have been a knife. Or like the epidemic over seas, a bunch of acid thrown on peoples faces. We don't know how she got the gun, but in America, if you have no criminal background, haven't done anything crazy, and they do a background check, you can purchase a weapon. You can't ban crazy, and until we have some way of seeing into the future, you can't stop all crimes. Also, our gun ownership in America has absolutely exploded. Like doubled. And have shootings and killings doubled? Nope.
I can't comment on the acid attacks, I doubt they're common.
But the knife vs gun argument is also very clear cut to me. It takes very little effort or training to point a barrel and pull a trigger from across several meters or a courtyard.
While a knife is actually not so easy to get into an expecting person. The knife would be most effective against unsuspecting persons but once a struggle breaks out it's down to physical strength and training.
The knife vs gun thing hits close to home too because one of the very few school rampages performed here by an unbalanced student was actually performed with a sword because that's the only weapon the student was able to put their hands on. Despite being relatively far north in the country where there are more people with hunting licenses.
And sure enough I believe they did manage to murder at least one person, it was a teacher or a teacher's aide who defended the other students. But that's where it ended. It requires significant strength and training to go on a killing spree with melee weapons, compared to firearms.
Do you have examples of mass acid attacks, mass stabbing attacks in Europe? Maybe we can do a quick sanity check for the hypothesis about lunatics using knives and acids when guns are not available?
Sure, there were some jihadist attacks but these are institutional attacks, I can't really recall having any angry person going on a rampage. In Europe, the act of an angry or crazy person will probably result in a break down in tears...
I'm not anti-gun, in fact when I was a kid I loved shooting with airguns and I bet it's a great hobby to shoot real guns but the European approach seems to be working.
Anyway, can you prove that my perception is wrong and in reality, people use knives and acid when guns are not readily available?
No, it doesn't have to be "mass". The question is, is it really the case that people use knives when guns are not available?
Your hypothesis is that people just use the next available weapon, which sounds logical, but is there any data to support it? Have the eurocrazies actually found a way, in general? Maybe most crazies just go and break furniture and laptops instead of stabbing when no guns are available? Maybe they just punch the person that they are unhappy with?
I mean, Europe is around for long enough time so we should have enough data to come to a definitive answer to the question instead of repeating it every time the subject comes in, right? Do people actually use knives when guns are not available and no significant safety benefit is achieved by the European approach?
> Not every lunatic where I live can find a gun when they need one
While I agree it is more difficult to find a gun in Europe than in America, that doesn't mean that a lunatic _can't_ get a gun. Guns exist in EU countries that have very strict gun laws. If said lunatic was determined enough, they _will_ get their hands on one.
> Despite these strict laws, France seems to be awash with guns.
> In 2012, French authorities estimated that there were around 30,000 guns illegally in the country, many likely used by gangs for criminal activities.
Firearms in Europe _are_ available, they're just harder to find. But I believe that if someone is determined enough, they'll find them, and use them.
Places like England, and Whales, which have very strict gun laws in comparison with places like the US, still suffer from gun related homicides all the time.
> gun crime in England and Wales soared by 35% last year. [...] Criminals used handguns in 46% more offences, Home Office statistics revealed. [...] Firearms were used in 9,974 recorded crimes in the 12 months to last April, up from 7,362. [...] It was the fourth consecutive year to see a rise
A crime motivated by anger might not happen if a few days pass while searching for a weapon. Passion fades with time
Effort is also a factor. Most people I have worked with will completely fail at a task if it requires them to get up from their desk and talk to someone. Finding a gun on the black market seems significantly harder than a shopping trip to Walmart
Comparing your proposed 30000 guns in France with more guns than inhabitants in the US.
Yes people get guns here in Sweden. You see it on the news almost weekly sometimes how gang members shoot each other. Smuggled weapons or imported plugged weapons that have been modified into live firearm.
This argument still does not negate the fact that it's much harder to get your hands on a working firearm. And that makes all the difference in crimes of passion.
> Comparing your proposed 30000 guns in France with more guns than inhabitants in the US.
My point is, even countries with very strict gun laws have lots of guns, most of which are illegal, but they're still there, still accessible to people who want them and go through the effort to get them.
> This argument still does not negate the fact that it's much harder to get your hands on a working firearm.
I wasn't trying to negate that. In fact, I agreed: "While I agree it is more difficult to find a gun in Europe than in America..."
I'm countering this claim that you made:
>Not every lunatic where I live can find a gun when they need one
I believe that, yes, any lunatic _can_ find a gun. Yes, again, I agree, they are harder to get. However, I do believe that if said lunatic _really_ wanted one, he'd find one.
Well if you call criminals lunatics, which is a fair assessment, then yes. But not every person has contacts in the criminal underworld.
You're just going to have to trust me that I have a first hand perspective of both worlds in one european country and I can promise you that it's not easy to get a gun for any average person. Unless they are willing to jump through the legal hoops to get a licensed firearm.
One of my co-workers did this and from start to finish I think it took him a year to get a handgun. This does not count the hunting license because he was not interested in hunting, he wanted a handgun.
And once acquired he has to report to the police every route he wants to take with the handgun. For example between his home and the gun club.
And storage of the gun unloaded in a locked safe goes without sayhing.
Another friend had an AK47 brought up from Serbia, because macho reasons, and he was only allowed to have it because he was a member of the home guard here. But he had it mounted on the wall, once the police found out they forced him to take it down, disassemble it and store it in three different pieces as it was meant to.
That's because we euro tech people keep being invited by americans we know and/or work with to "come to the usa, it's great working here". And then we see stuff like this.
> There are always going to be disgruntled or unbalanced people
Well, yes, of course. But their overall number and the number willing to pick up arms are not immutable.
And americans are even less likley to do anything about that than they are gun ownership.
We've been taught not to focus on the fact we do basically zero for people in distress beyond making sure they don't kill themselves. Or try and understanding how and why society puts people into mental states such that they think violent outbursts are their only recourse. We've been taught to focus on guns. Not for it's utility in fixing the root cause, or proximate cause. We fixate on a "but for" cause, which also happens to be an entrenched political issue that makes for clickable coverage.
And once guns are banned, will we have our European friends smugly rolling their eyes that we obviously need to institute background checks to buy fertilizer from farm supply stores? And ought to abridge another right of Americans so we can finally scrub the Anarchist's Cookbook from the internet?
I would be really interested to see statistics about this. I hypothesize that the prevalence of "violent lunatics" is a bigger factor than availability of weapons, i.e. that the US just has more of these people than other places due to something in the media and culture.
In other words, if availability of guns were really the most important factor, then wouldn't we expect Europe to have a similar number of attacks but conducted with knives, cars, etc? Do you think there are a number of europeans out there with the desire to commit these acts, and would do so if they only could get a gun more easily? I'm skeptical.
That isn't to say I think gun control would hurt, just that I see a deeper problem it wouldn't solve.
IMO it’s both - America has a lot of violent lunatics, and extremely available guns, which exacerbates the issue. If your society has few violent lunatics, you can probably handle available guns with few additional deaths, but this is clearly not the case in America, where guns are used by psychopaths to kill other Americans at an exceptionally high rate for a developed nation.
Largely removing violent lunatics from society is a way tougher problem than largely removing guns - there are good blueprints to follow re: removing guns, like Australia and the UK. The big impediment here is that guns are deeply engrained in American culture, plus an amendment to the constitution from the late 1700s that is arguably very out of date today. I do understand why America won’t ban or heavily restrict guns, but I strongly disagree with it, and find it sad that Americans are willing to let so many innocents die out of a mix of “don’t take my toys” and “anti-government paranoia.”
> In other words, if availability of guns were really the most important factor, then wouldn't we expect Europe to have a similar number of attacks but conducted with knives, cars, etc?
Depending on how you count, here's some support for this (argument against at the end):
A number of European countries has or has had large numbers of actual assault rifles (not the semi automatic ones that are legal in USA) distributed in the population.
Switzerland, Austria and Norway are three countries I know have or have had this.
Neither has had this school/church/mall shooting thing that USA has.
On the other hand these weapons weren't sold, they were distributed only after mandatory training.
There probably has a huge cultural factor that people think at first of a gun as solution to their problem. Why not a bomb? Or poison? Or car? Burn down target property? So much options, but US culture seems to strongly favor guns. There is more than just availability. Glorification of guns (and solving problems using them) in US media might play a huge influence, and as a leading cultural influence might lead to similar problems else were in the world. But yeah, I'd love to see real studies about that. But those won't be easy, including the funding part...
I haven't thought about this before, but there is something about shooting someone with a gun that's more impersonal than stabbing someone.
I am pretty sure I would never do something like this woman did, but if I was really angry at an organization I would see myself more likely to go to their headquarters and shoot everyone than go to stab everyone there.
There's certainly some arguments to be made in that vein. A stabbing is much more visceral and requires you to really commit to it, while pulling a trigger is simpler and farther removed from the violence of the act. There's also something to be said for training. Most people who own guns spend time shooting them, either through hunting or at a gun range, and so they know how to aim and shoot. And all that practice and repetition might make that action seem more "natural," they don't have to think as much about what they are doing. In contrast, very few people practice stabbing. As a caveat, though, FBI studies on the performance of their agents in the field have shown that proficiency on the shooting range is not really correlated with proficiency in (for lack of a better word) combat with firearms.
It should also be noted that while this may be the case for spree killings or maybe muggings gone wrong, it isn't necessarily the case for domestic homicide. Domestic violence incidents are characterized by great rage and aggression. Domestic homicide is often preceded by beatings and abuse. I don't really have any statistics or expertise here, but I feel like the sort of person who beats their spouse and is willing to kill their spouse with a gun isn't above killing their spouse with a knife, especially when the violence is happening in a fit of rage.
I haven't seen any of the shooter's videos. But from what I've heard, most people were characterizing them as "weird" and not a rock-solid case that the is a danger to herself or others.
Given that, it sounds like very little would be able to prevent her from obtaining a firearm. She could likely walk right into a gun shop and pass a background check. As far as I know, she hasn't had a domestic violence conviction, involuntary commitment to a mental health facility, or anything else that would disqualify her from buying a gun legally.
Now, you may think that this is an issue in and of itself. But at least in the US, the right to bear arms is a natural right of the individual. It's protected by the constitution. And, there needs to be due process if you want to deny someone of their rights.
Me, a european, I'm reacting to how easily she found a gun.
I hate to bring up this very toxic debate, my comment will seem like fishing for trouble.
Yet you have to understand our perspective. Not every lunatic where I live can find a gun when they need one so to me it's clear as day that the issue is the availability of firearms.
There are always going to be disgruntled or unbalanced people but they can't be allowed to find a deadly firearm as easy as it is in the US.