Yes, the difference in the death toll is important.
The trouble is that scratching beneath the surface might take a bit of effort, so many people don't bother.
Guns have been around for a long time. Ever since WWI there has been widespread access to guns in this country and I would think also in the US, and yet up until recently this type massacre was only perpetrated by governments via their military forces. So what changed? When I was a kid it was not unusual to see guns... farmers had them... kangaroo shooters had them... and plenty of other guys had them too without anyone asking them to justify their reasons why or considering them to be some sort of guilty till proven innocent psychopath. It was not considered to be a big deal, it was widespread, and people weren't getting shot.
So if everything was basically ok back then wouldn't it make sense to ask ourselves if we have a problem and if so to look at what has changed???
In Australia I think it's pretty clear that we don't have a problem. The statistical data that I listed in my earlier post supports what I generally consider to be true from my experience. When I try to recall actual gun homicides all of the examples I can think of are either police shootings or murders by people who have existing criminal records. Putting tighter restrictions on everyone else doesn't change these things so it would take some fairly radical new information for me to think that there's a real problem here.
We seem to get a lot of headlines from America though... something is quite different over there. Yes they have more guns, but that doesn't tell the whole story. The statistics that I listed before shows that they have about three times the rate of gun ownership but twenty one times the rate of gun homicide so something else is going on... These are the facts and they need to be addressed.
America hasn't always been like this. They have a long history of gun ownership but a relatively short history of massacres. So what has changed.
I've already mentioned psychiatric drugs. I found this information in about five seconds... It doesn't take much effort: http://www.cchrint.org/tag/columbine/
I also mentioned violence in popular culture. Think of the violence in movies in the 1950's?... 1960's? 1980's?... 2000's?... Do you notice a trend??? It is very real and it does have an effect. People do have inhibitions that stop them from killing people but exposure to killing, whether real, makes people more able to kill. This is why veterans are more effective soldiers and why kids that play violent video games are able to carry out massacres in real life. The data is all out there... all you have to do is look at it...
This is basically an American problem, but the solution to the problems of psychiatric drugs and violent popular culture can be applied all around the world... at no cost and without offending anybody.
