Monday, October 02, 2017

Is It True that "Nowhere but America do horrific large-scale mass shootings happen," with "this degree of regularity" or otherwise?


Fox News reports on the Las Vegas shooting, said to be the deadliest in United States history. Needless to say, gun control has reared its head.
Connecticut’s senators, who have been especially outspoken on gun control ever since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, were among the first to issue statements Monday.

“Nowhere but America do horrific large-scale mass shootings happen with this degree of regularity,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said in a statement. “This must stop. It is positively infuriating that my colleagues in Congress are so afraid of the gun industry that they pretend there aren't public policy responses to this epidemic. There are, and the thoughts and prayers of politicians are cruelly hollow if they are paired with continued legislative indifference. It's time for Congress to get off its ass and do something."
How much truth, though, is there to that declaration?

Time to brush off the principal outtake from my in-depth examination of the gun control issue, which was was published in the New York Times less than two years ago, updating it slightly in the process (and reposted in response to a Washington Post article):
It is easy for leftists, American as well as foreign, to tout the success of the gun control laws in the rest of the western world and to say that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries” when you ignore:
• the 1996 massacre of 16 children at a Scottish primary school;
• the 2000 killing of eight kids in Japan;
• the 2002 deaths of eight people in Nanterre, France;
• the 2002 killing of 16 kids in Erfurt, Germany;
• the 2007 fatal shootings of eight people in Tuusula, Finland;
• the killing of 10 people at a Finnish university less than a year later;
• the 2009 killing of 15 people in Winnenden, Germany;
• and, needless to say, Anders Breivik's 2011 mass murder of 77 Norwegians, most of them teenagers;
• not to mention the various terrorist attacks of the last few years, such as the 2015 mass shootings inside the Bataclan nightclub which killed 90 Paris revelers.
Is it unrealistic to wonder whether the tolls would have been lesser had a few of the adults in each place carried a weapon and tried to shoot back at the respective killers?
Related: What Is to Blame for Mass Shootings? Does the Blame Lie with the Right to Bear Arms Or Can It Be Found Elsewhere? (a lengthy and in-depth post that I consider one of my best in 13 years of blogging)

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