[neartheplain]

>Canada is the U.S.'s neighbour and is probably closer, culturally, than any other nation.

Your point about cultural similarity holds true mainly for descendants of European immigrants. The shared culture here isn't just Marvel movies but values passed down among families from the Old Country like a Christian moral framework, Anglo-American law, the Protestant work ethic, Puritan attidues towards sex, etc. If you break America's homicides down by ethnic category, non-Hispanic whites have a murder rate per 100k of around 2.6 per annum [0]. Canada's murder rate hovers around 1.7. These numbers are roughly comparable, despite the many differences in firearm availability.

America's overall homicide rate is something like 5.7 per 100k per annum. This number is propped up by one ethnic group in particular, Afro-Americans, with a murder rate of over 20 per 100k per annum. This is not just a function of poverty. The white poverty rate is half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of 10. The Asian-American poverty rate is similarly half that of Afro-Americans, yet the murder rate differs by a factor of closer to 100 (10x less than that of white Americans).

Telling hundreds of millions of law-abiding Americans to disarm themselves because of social, cultural, and economic problems largely confined to a small & largely separate social group is a losing proposition. But asking why that group commits so many murders, even as the first step in bring that number down, is a political third rail too so here we are.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/66/wr/mm6631a9.htm

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/murder-homi...

[spicymaki]

You are dodging the issue with white nationalist talking points. The issue at hand is not the black murder rate. The discussion is should we restrict assault weapons, limit access to who can purchase firearms (via licensing, safety training, etc.), limit ammo capacity, etc in order to reduce mass shootings.

Texas has a strong gun culture, Christian culture, NRA approved and funded government, extremely lax gun control, concealed carry, and children are still dying needlessly. Texas removed firearm permit requirements last year making it easier to obtain assault weapons.

Australia undertook strict gun control measures nationwide and essentially eliminated mass shooting deaths.

[throwntoday]

Australians also got forcefully corraled into Covid-19 camps as a result of having no means to protect themselves against a tyrannical government.

You seem to misunderstand the situation here. Guns are not and will not ever be going anywhere. Mass shootings can be prevented, and the solution has nothing to do with gun control.

[neartheplain]

Dismissing what people living in Oakland, southeast D.C., and the north side of Milwaukee know from frequent painful experience to be true as "white nationalist talking points" says more about your views than it does mine. Try following crime reporters on Twitter for a few weeks, like D.C. Realtime News. It's a constant march of death in these troubled communities, almost entirely bubbled up and separate from the rest of America. You won't get it until you really dive into it. Then you'll wonder why the people who purport to care for black lives never say a word about it. The victims of this violence wonder that too, out loud and on social media, but not in places most HN users or policymakers try to see.

Backing up, there are two issues here which you're conflating, and which I didn't do a good job of separating: total gun homicides and mass shootings. They intersect but also have differences. I already went deep on total gun homicides. The weird thing about mass shootings is that 70 years ago, gun ownership was more widespread than it is now, yet mass shootings were an extremely rare occurence... until Columbine. Semiautomatic and even fully-automatic weapons were commonly available beginning in the 1920s (remember Al Capone's mob and their Thompson submachine guns? Bonny and Clyde with their BARs?), yet we didn't see this rash of mass shootings until just the last few decades. What happened in the 90s, and how to we fix it?

Side note, and I'm sure it's been covered elsewhere, but 99% of gun deaths in the US do not involve AR-15s or "assault weapons." 97% of all gun deaths are from handguns. Many mass shootings were carried out with handguns; they are deadly, concealable, and potentially also very high-capacity. Personally I support much stricter controls on handgun sales and ownership. I think that would be a reasonable starting point to approach both total gun homicides and mass shootings.

[throwntoday]

Thank you for honestly stating the issue. Often times I see people get defensive or reactionary and jump to calling racism when simply stating these facts. How on Earth do you expect to solve an issue if you can't even admit it.

[neartheplain]

Thanks for the positive comment. I sometimes wonder what it feels like to be the parent of a child murdered in these communities, like the moms I see on Twitter occasionally doing anti-violence marches and rallies, and be told that your son or daughter's death is a "white supremacist talking point."

Lots of people in America, including black people, feel uncomfortable around poorer black communities because of the high rate of gun violence. Telling those people they're just uncomfortable because of "internalized white supremacy" or "white nationalist talking points" doesn't convince most and won't make them feel safe. This discomfort is the root of so-called white flight, social distance-keeping, school self-segregation, and other problems. If we fix the problem of gun violence in these communities, tackling other race-related issues gets easier. The first step is talking about it openly and honestly.