Gun murders in the U.S. are a very low percentage of deaths (0.39%) and preventable deaths (~1.1%, there's some disagreement about what's "preventable"). That's 0.0036% of the population per year gun-murdered. That this statistic is 3x some other country's is irrelevant because 3x a small number is still a small number. If your goal is to prevent untimely deaths, focus on boring things like falls, car accidents, and diabetes.
I said "many places" not "all places". Indeed, shootings are concentrated to a few areas with high crime rates. Doesn't mean that people living in those areas don't have to watch out. I replied to an anecdote about people living close to such a tavern having to watch out.
As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
And yes, focusing on falls, car accidents and diabetes would be awesome. But preventing gun deaths is important too.
[0]: https://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_causes_of_dea...
[1]: 6.4k murder victims in 2019 from handguns, 3.3k from unspecified firearms, 1.5k from knives or cutting instruments, all other causes below 1k. https://www.statista.com/statistics/195325/murder-victims-in...
I agree that there is some non-zero number of people in the U.S. who have to watch out for gun murder. The point I'm trying to make is that they make up a really small proportion of the population. Anecdotes are fun.
> As for gun murders being a rare death cause, indeed if you average over all age ranges they are. However, for younger people they are a major concern. CDC data [0] lists homicides in the top 4 reasons for death for age groups from 1 until 35. Which weapons are used for these homicides? A different statistic tells us most times it's guns [1].
You're right that, among untimely deaths, gun murders move up the ranking if you're looking at young people. But this misses the main thing, which is that untimely deaths of any kind are super rare among young people, even rarer than overall. Why should we care if gun murders make up 50% of untimely deaths among young people if the likelihood of untimely death is sufficiently low? Your line of reasoning seems to indicate a 10% chance of untimely death with 1 percentage point of that being gun murder is preferable to a 1% chance of untimely death with 0.5 percentage points of that being gun murder.
As an aside, thinking about this (and many other things) in terms of ordinal rankings will often lead you down the wrong path. "Top four reasons" tells us nothing at all. If there are 5,000 categories constructed and they are roughly evenly distributed, "top four" tells us nothing. If 99% of the probability mass is in #1, "top four" tells us nothing. It's like the classic "The U.S. is [embarassingly] #44 in math achievement". This means nothing if the top 80 countries are tightly clustered around 98 math achievement points.
> But preventing gun deaths is important too. My point is that it isn't important. There are much, much bigger fish to fry from a public health perspective. The marginal benefit of throwing one dollar at "gun violence" is << the marginal benefit of throwing that same buck at something like trying to get construction workers to wear proper safety harnesses.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2700237/
Unsurprisingly, the communities who most frequently endure violence are not a representative sample of the US population— they are drastically more likely to be poor and not white. Black communities are particularly subject to this violence, and considering that discrimination against them was not only legal, but legally mandated until around a decade before the first millennials were born, the dominant culture within the US has a moral obligation to address this violence because it's responsible for its creation.
https://www.ajpmonline.org/article/S0749-3797(18)31907-X/ful...
Painting the picture of violence as being visited upon e.g. Black communities by the world, or Whites, or the "dominant culture" is incorrect. The vast majority of murders in the Black population are committed by Black people. A black man is ~15x more likely to murder than an American who is not a black man. You can do some contortions to locate the causality elsewhere (like through a vague cultural legacy of slavery), but the evidence is overwhelming that violence is endemic to Black cultures in the U.S.
The sooner we all admit that to ourselves and start working on actual solutions that address the real problem, rather than pretending the problem is things like "they're poor and oppressed", the sooner we will all be able to help them build a better world for themselves. There are many poor, and possibly oppressed (if you are poor can you not be oppressed?) communities that do not have this problem of endemic violence, which is great evidence that the problem isn't one of mere poverty. And it's important to remember, too, that no U.S. populations are poor on a world scale. We're so rich our poor are too fat.
That is correct, but please note that it's still a significant component. In the 15-24 age group, the top 1 cause has 13.4k deaths, the top 2 has 5.7k, and homicide has 5.1k. That's not very far away in relative terms.
I guess my overall point is it's not important. Even if the ordinal ranking is informative in this case (your argument), the overall likelihood of any kind of death is so low that we shouldn't care very much about the ranking.
And even then they are basically concentrated around illegal parts of the economy. Drug traffickers, pimps, etc. can't use the courts and the police so when it comes to settling disputes they have to DIY their own threats of violence that other people usually outsource to the state.
There's a lot of things the US can do to massively improve the quality of life for everyone, it just means funneling some of the trillions it puts into the military and "the economy" (like the trillion that vaporized within minutes last march) elsewhere. I mean they can solve a lot of people's problems with a trillion dollars.
As in, the urban ghetto is often stated, but rural parts do come up in stats quite a lot too.
There isn't a pro-gun-rights movement to speak of in the UK. Not sure about the rest of Europe.
As JacobSuperslav said, acid attacks and beheadings are extremely rare events in Europe, and aren't at all representative of the average murder. This is why they make international news. Stabbings are of course more common.
The main point still stands though; guns don't cause violence and death, people do. It's the attitude and circumstances, not the tools.
Compare the murder rates of Detroit MI, Cheyenne WY, London, and Shanghai, and then tell me which city has a weapon problem and which city has a culture problem, or both!
Not sure where you are going with this, but I'd say the answer is Detroit??
For comparison the US national rate in 2019 was 5 and NYC (more comparable to London and Shanghai) has a rate of 2.8.
Yeah, look ... I like the 2A too and don’t think guns cause higher murder rates. But there is no data to support the narrative that Europe and other countries are more dangerous in some way because they don’t have guns.
Edit: To be clear, there is no evidence that they are more dangerous. They look safer.
The average small town will have a maximum of 1 or 2 murders per year. Cheyenne has only 60,000 people.