IVYSOUR- In the US, we don't tell people, "oh you need a gun so you can flash it and scare the criminals", and if you did flash it to anybody without needing it then you will be arrested for misusing a weapon. A gun is used for a last resort. If you cannot call for help or your out powered or feel like that person is about to kill you then that is when a gun come into play and you shoot. No warning shots or flashing. If you do that then it proves you did not really need it at that moment you could have done something else. That is what taught to gun owners. A gun for self defense is to be used only as a last resort if your life is threatened. So education is not the harm.
The key is that, in the US, you are taught that there are circumstances in which it's okay to fire a gun. In the non-gun countries, just the concept of using a gun against someone is uninimaginable. As a result, if you are told to never use a gun ever, you will always be more likely to call for police help or, if you somehow got one, wait until the last possible second. If, in turn, you are told it's okay to use a gun if you are threatened, you are more likely to widen the margin of what "threatened" means and take matters in your own hands- and thus you get all the perfectly innocent people being routinely murdered because they "looked scary".
Now mindsets, that all comes down to that individual. Maybe the US just have a lot more crazy people than those countries lol but take California for example, like Los Angeles and everything south, some places are gang related. In those areas you can walk all you want but you do have that risk of getting shot, stealing your stuff or car etc. If you go to a rich neighborhood, you can probably leave your keys in your car for a bit and not be stolen. Mindset varies on location as well. Gang related areas, Mindset would be you do not have much, they have family that are in gangs. Like they say some apples don't fall from the bad ones. Some people that have anger issues that cause mental unstable can cause them to get so mad and think they are going to kill that person. With these two stereotypes that are common, we have laws to restrict them from buying guns. If they have it they probably bought it from the black market and now they are in possession illegally. Also a lot of states do not have the death penalty as an option especially in California. And if they get a big sentence then it's most likely because they have multiple charges which makes things look crazy but if you look at all the charges, the sentence will make sense.
As in everywhere, there are places with more violence and places with less. But, you see: in Spain, gangs have to use knives, which are far less deadly than guns, because buying a gun here is horrendously hard. In the US, even if you can't buy the gun yourself, well, it's so easy to send someone to do it on your behalf. You don't need to go into the black market- and if you do, the black market is going to be overflowing with legally-bought guns anyway. Same goes for mentally unstable people. And, the thing is, normal people who wouldn't ever dream of shooting someone in, say, France, might end up doing so in the US just by accident- just because there are as many guns as people.
You are saying the US are over stuffing their prisons. What does that tell you? That many stupid people in the US or maybe the US prisons are smaller than other countries prisons
https://www.economist.com/news/lead...-punitive-and-more-effective-jailhouse-nation
WITH less than 5% of the world's population, the United States holds roughly a quarter of its prisoners: more than 2.3m people, including 1.6m in state and federal prisons and over 700,000 in local jails and immigration pens. Per head, the incarceration rate in the land of the free has risen seven-fold since the 1970s, and is now five times Britain's, nine times Germany's and 14 times Japan's.
If the US is full of stupid people, well, damn, it is overflowing with them. The truth is that the US justice system is all about punishment with jail sentences for small things and far longer sentences for the same crimes than anywhere else. The US Justice is not about rehabilitation- which causes so many people's lives to become ruined by the time they come out, locking them in a life of crime. That is something that can only be changed with an overhaul of their mindsets.
Now you also said every person has a gun. Yeah a lot of them do BUT not all of them have a gun for self defense reasons. Some have guns for self-defense, hunting, sport competitions, collection, and other reasons. In California, you cannot carry a gun in public without a permit. These permits in almost half the state will not be provided for self-defense reasons. You can only transport guns in a locked case in the trunk of your car to a gun store or a shooting range. Not many people carry guns in California and theres alot of shooting going on. Its the criminals of course. Texas you can carry without a permit and they have less crime than California which has the strictest gun laws.
You are right: the violent crime rate in California is 411/100,000 inhabitants, as opposed to 408 in Texas- clearly those unrestricted guns are making all the difference. Meanwhile, in Spain, a gun-less country with twice the population of Texas, you get a third of the number of violent crimes and just a tenth of murders. (Sources:
US,
Spain). Looking at this data at a first glance, I'd say that whether your legal guns can be openly carried around or not makes just a tiny difference, while simply banning them altogether slashes crime rates down to the floor.
Oh, by the way, in Spain you can still buy guns for hunting, sport competitions, collections, self-defence or if you are a law enforcement official.
According to the 2011 annual statistics of the Ministry of Interior, 2,119,942 firearms licenses had been issued in Spain as of December 31, 2011, for a total of 3,516,681 firearms. In 2011, there were 288 deaths caused by firearms. As of July 2011, Spain had a population of forty-seven million. The rate of deaths by firearms is 0.63 per 100,000 people according to a 2010 report.
https://www.loc.gov/law/help/firearms-control/spain.php
For comparison, homicide by firearm rate in the US is 4.7 per 100,000 people. Either we are amazingly pacifist, or it turns out that removing guns
does remove gun violence.
Last thing you said that people carry guns because they might be in trouble. Yeah they carry to self defend or defend others that are in trouble. Shit happens every day all the time. You never know what will happen. I bet you would be glad if someone with a gun, saved your behind in whatever scenario right?
I am much more comfortable knowing that the chance of someone near me carrying a gun of any kind is negligible, which means that the chance of highy deadly shit happening to me any given day is so tiny I can go on with my life without caring. Since most people need to be saved by guns from people with other guns, I'll be even more glad if nobody has guns to put my life in danger to begin with.
