As an American, this attitude drives me nuts. "We don't kill that many people, and heck most of them are even guilty!"
Regarding "loaded guns exist, but they are not common." Again, this is the same attitude of "Even though we have a mass shooting every week, all in all it's not that much." Even if my chances of getting murdered in public are lower than, say, a car accident, the fact that we now teach preschoolers active shooter drills says something sad about our country.
Mass shootings are an incredibly small source of gun deaths. ~2/3rd are suicide and ~1/3rd are murder.
While the US does have pretty high gun related homicide rates, it is largely because proportionally more of our homicides involve guns. Our overall homicide rate is a fair bit higher than most european countries but nowhere near the top world-wide (about #90.)
However, much of this is concentrated into particular locations as the US does have many of the top 50 cities in the world by homicide rate (behind only mexico, brazil and venezuela).
Overall, US gun ownership does not present a significant practical risk unless you go to certain places. Concerns about gun policy (and the death penalty) by potential visitors to the US are thus ideologically, not practically based.
I personally think that our lack of collective support for our struggling cities/regions says much more about us as a country than our active shooter drills (of which I am also not a fan).
> While the US does have pretty high gun related homicide rates, it is largely because proportionally more of our homicides involve guns. Our overall homicide rate is a fair bit higher than most european countries but nowhere near the top world-wide (about #90.)
While not exactly wrong I would definitely argue that "a fair bit higher" is a gross mischaracterization. The US has an intentional homicide rate of 5.3 per 100,000, which is many times higher than UK (1.2), France (1.3), Germany (1.0), Spain (0.7), Italy (0.67) or any of the Nordic countries.
> Concerns about gun policy (and the death penalty) by potential visitors to the US are thus ideologically, not practically based.
Depends how you frame it. Yes, your chances of getting killed in a random shooting are lower than a lot of other more mundane things. At the same time, your chances of getting killed in a random shooting in the US are many, many times higher than getting killed in a random shooting in one of the European countries previously mentioned.
> While not exactly wrong I would definitely argue that "a fair bit higher" is a gross mischaracterization.
"A fair bit" isn't particularly precise but it does means "quite alot" or "a large amount" so think it is a gross mischaracterization to call it a gross mischaracterization. If we are being pedantic, "Several times" is more accurate than "many times" since many generally means a bit more than 4 or 5.
> Depends how you frame it
I don't think so. Practically speaking, all that matters is comparing absolute risks of different causes of death in a specific situatio. For a foreign tourist the risk of gun related homicide in the US is significantly smaller than the other risks of death (such as cars). The relative amount of that risk compared to other countries isn't practically relevant. The risk of drowning in a locked dry room is many times the risk of drowning in a bathtub with an inch of water, that doesn't mean that the risk of drowning in that bathtub is practically relevant (unless you are a baby or extremely drunk/drugged).
You are correct that such fears aren't terribly practical. Human beings in fact aren't terribly reasonable about what they are concerned about.
They bike to work, smoke a cig, and then worry about a Muslim terrorist blowing them up.
Unfortunately people aren't reasonable and our prosperity is partly based on resources and partly based on sucking in a lot of smart people from elsewhere to further enrich the nation we built with said resources and this shitty marketing could easily damage the second ultimately more important source of our prosperity.
As an American, this attitude drives me nuts. "We don't kill that many people, and heck most of them are even guilty!"
Regarding "loaded guns exist, but they are not common." Again, this is the same attitude of "Even though we have a mass shooting every week, all in all it's not that much." Even if my chances of getting murdered in public are lower than, say, a car accident, the fact that we now teach preschoolers active shooter drills says something sad about our country.