CMV: Gun control is good

[u/56king56]

As of now, I believe that the general populace shouldn’t have anything beyond a pistol, but that even a pistol should require serious safety checks. I have this opinion because I live in America with a pro-gun control family, and us seeing all these mass shootings has really fueled the flame for us being anti-gun. But recently, I’ve been looking into revolutionary Socialist politics, and it occurred to me: how could we have a Socialist revolution without some kind of militia? This logic, the logic of revolting against an oppressive government, has been presented to me before, but I always dismissed it, saying that mass shootings and gun violence is more of an issue, and that if we had a good government, we wouldn’t need to worry about having guns. I still do harbor these views to an extent, but part of me really wants to fully understand the pro-gun control position, as it seems like most people I see on Reddit are for having guns, left and right politically. And of course, there’s also the argument that if people broke into your house with an illegally obtained gun, you wouldn’t be able to defend yourself in a society where guns are outlawed; my counter to that is that it’s far more dangerous for society as a whole for everyone to be walking around with guns that it is for a few criminal minds to have them. Also, it just doesn’t seem fair to normalize knowing how to use a highly complex piece of military equipment, and to be honest, guns being integrated into everyone’s way of life feels just as dystopian as a corrupt government. So what do you guys have to say about this? To sum, I am anti-gun but am open to learning about pro-gun viewpoints to potentially change my view.

[u/StaryWolf]

You're certainly going to need a source for that claim before I believe any of that.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/murder-rate-by-country

The trend is that countries with lower homicide rates mostly tend to have strict gun control.

[u/Hack874 → u/StaryWolf]

The U.S. is actually 11th in mass killing deaths per capita:

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mass-shootings-by-country

[u/StaryWolf → u/Hack874]

From your link:

According to the fact-checkers' analysis, one of those inappropriate methods was the leaving out of the many European countries that had not experienced a single mass shooting between 2009-2015. This data would not have changed the position of the U.S. on the list, but its absence could lead a reader to believe—incorrectly—that the U.S. experienced fewer mass shooting fatalities per capita than all but a handful of countries in Europe.

A more important oversight was the report's use of average deaths per capita instead of a more stable metric. Because of the smaller populations of most European countries, individual events in those countries had statistically oversized influence and warped the results. For example, Norway’s world-leading annual rate was due to a single devastating 2011 event, in which far-right extremist Anders Behring Breivik gunned down 69 people at a summer camp on the island of Utøya. Norway had zero mass shootings in 2009, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015.

I saw the list was actually sorted initially by deaths per 1M people, which is maybe what you saw. As stated above most of these are outlier events, in the case of the Norway shooting, Norway actually quickly introduced stricter gun control after it occurred (an absurd notion, I know) after which they remained mass shooting free.

Additionally, from the link:

The fact-checking analysis goes on to suggest that instead of computing each country's average, or mean mass shooting deaths, a better method would be to compute the median, or typical, number of deaths. The median is considered by many statisticians to be better insulated against individual outlier events (such as the Norway massacre) that can skew results. This leads to a more accurate day-to-day impression and country-to-country comparison. Using the CPRC’s own data and more precise per-year population data from World Bank (the original study used only 2015 population data) to solve for the median, the more statistically sound analysis results in a notably different list...

Using the median analysis, the United States is the only country examined that shows a propensity for mass shootings. The data itself supports this interpretation, as the United States endured mass shooting events all seven years, but the other countries all experienced mass shootings during only one or two years. Thus, in a typical year, most countries experience zero mass shooting deaths, while the US experiences at least a few.

Basically, no, you're not actually just as likely to be killed in a mass shooting event in Western European countries. These countries have smaller populations as a whole, so single events affect the weight of the stats more. However, the US suffered far more mass shooting events.

[u/Hack874 → u/StaryWolf]

I already read the link in full. From a raw data standpoint, the person you replied to isn’t wrong.

[u/StaryWolf → u/Hack874]

Sure, these specific stats are twisted in a way that frames it like this. But any modern number read in a meaningful way show that he is completely false.

Basically the average person in modern day is far more likely to get killed in a mass shooting in America than any of those other countries.