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First off, getting apples to apples comparison of violent crime between the UK and US is difficult due to differences in standards and reporting practices. For example, it my understanding that the UK only records a death as "intentional homicide" if there is a suspect and then has separate categories for manslaughter and suspected foul-play. Whereas the US records all three under the single header homicide before breaking it down by degree. When one digs into the numbers one finds that most of soundbites and examples cited in the media about US violence relative to the UK are playing fast and loose with this distinction. IE comparing all gun deaths in the US (including accidents, suicides and those shootings ruled lawful) to the specific subset of "intentional homicides" committed with firearms in the UK.
Second off, and kind of related to the point above, the more "red adjacent" an American is the more likely they are to question the validity of "gun homicides" as a metric. Sure if you could somehow Thanos snap all the guns in civillian hands out of existence gun crime would likely be dramatically reduced, at least temporarily. but what of it? There seems to be this underlying a assumption behind a lot of these posts that a person killed with a knife, or lynched by a mob, is somehow less of victim. For my part I don't see how that can be, KIA is KIA.
The cynical bastard in me can't help but suspect that a lot of this is downstream the progressive affinity for external loci of control and the broder millue of secular post-modernist nonsense. When some strapping schitzo with a dozen prior arrests kills Granny by bashing her head in with a brick, or pushing her into the path of an oncoming train nobody panics because it's all part of the plan. The posts about focusing on mental health and how "we all live in a society" were already written before the corpse was cold.
Meanwhile if Granny pulls a revolver from her purse and plugs her would be killer center-of-mass, or some bystander intervenes and drops him. Everyone loses their minds.
The simplest and most straight forward argument in favor of "liberal" gun laws is in the old saw, God made men, but Sam Colt made them equal.
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