As a European, American culture baffles me in this regard. Things like school shootings, police violence, traffic deaths, healthcare, alternative (public) transportation, all seem to be linked by a common thread of inaction towards things that should in principle be solved. And it seems baked into the way the system works, if not the culture itself (due to the focus on U.S. exceptionalism/defaultism, individualism and bias towards individual freedom at others’ expense). But I wonder what causes such structural cultural/political issues to just be ignored.
Think of America more like 50 countries. Now take your school shooting example. A lot of states have made changes to their gun laws in response to this. Making federal (i.e. applies to all states) gun law changes is more challenging because you have to get 75% of the states on board with any constitutional changes. Without a constitutional amendment, any gun legislation ultimately must respect the existing 2nd Amendment so it's not possible to have Japan-esque policies without a constitutional amendment. Also USA takes up an entire continent so different regions of the us have different cultures and sentiment towards guns. People living in highly rural areas like Montana probably have favorable gun ownership sentiment. People living in highly urban areas like NYC usually have negative gun sentiment.
And it's important to note that these different gun laws don't actually meaningfully affect crime, particularly something as exceedingly rare as a mass shooting.
The rate is about two mass shootings per day in the USA. I would not call that "exceedingly rare". The rate in the UK, a country with strict gun laws, is about 1-2 a year.
They do show supportive evidence of some gun laws having a meaningful effect on violent crime, so I'm not sure what they're referring to. For instance, it appears that child access prevention laws, specifically, are associated with a significant reduction in firearm homicides.[2]
RAND does complain that there is insufficient or limited evidence in a lot of areas though, like effect on mass shootings.
How does it not sound like 50 countries? There are 50 countries (states) each with their own laws and government. Hence varying degrees of gun strictness depending on the country (state). Laws that change the federal constitution must be approved by 75%.
> linked by a common thread of inaction towards things that should in principle be solved.
Yes, but this is hardly unique to the US. Various European countries and the EU as a whole often suffer similarly.
It's not like the EU took one look at the Draghi report and immediately started to fix things; often the cultural and policy issues causing the problem also make it harder to implement new fixes to the problem.
Each one of these has a knee-jerk European response that either completely ignores reality or violates a half dozen or more laws.
Two examples:
1. "Police violence." What violence? Against whom? In a year approximately 50 million people have a police interaction (not the total number of all interactions). About 75,000 people are taken to a hospital following police use of force and about 600 people (0.001%) are killed. Of course the ideal number is zero but 0.001% doesn't seem like there is an epidemic of police violence sweeping through the country.
2. "Alternative (public) transportation." Again you're not being particularly clear on what the fix is here. Most major cities have some form of transit, be it busses, subways, or above-ground rail. If you're talking about major city-to-city high speed rail an LA-to-NYC rail system would be like putting in rail from Paris to northern Kazakhstan. San Diego to Chicago would be like London to Kazan (845km east of Moscow). Iowa is a medium-sized state most in the US never visit and never think about, and it's almost twice the size of Austria. Europeans who rail (pun intended) about how it's so dumb the US doesn't have high speed rail haven't taken the requisite 5 minutes to understand the difference in scale when you're talking about connecting the east and west coasts of the US.
What's more likely? That the US with ~350 million people just decides to ignore these "issues," or that there's something the average person who doesn't live here is misunderstanding?
Your high speed rail argument is valid but it’s also a classic misdirection. I doubt you meant to say this, but it came across as “we can’t solve the hardest cases so no one should be trying to solve any of them - and everyone who wants them solved is clueless”. Saying things like that dooms big problems to stay unsolved forever.
Probably couldn’t get it done the exact way they do in Europe, but no need to give up before starting. LA to San Diego? Portland to Seattle? Or a slightly harder one, Chicago to Austin TX?
> If you're talking about major city-to-city high speed rail an LA-to-NYC rail system would be like putting in rail from Paris to northern Kazakhstan. San Diego to Chicago would be like London to Kazan (845km east of Moscow). Iowa is a medium-sized state most in the US never visit and never think about, and it's almost twice the size of Austria. Europeans who rail (pun intended) about how it's so dumb the US doesn't have high speed rail haven't taken the requisite 5 minutes to understand the difference in scale when you're talking about connecting the east and west coasts of the US.
I find these "but it's so big!" excuses really lame when the crown jewel of our rail transit network, the Acela, in a large and very dense region... still kinda sucks.
Who cares about coast-to-coast when we can't even get Boston-DC to reach the lower edge of the same category as what's considered good developed-world passenger rail? This is clearly an area we could improve on significantly, and the excuse of "it's not dense enough" doesn't apply there.
Not sure how we define violence, but I found 2 links that show that in USA there are quite some more police killings per capita than in western Europe.
Of course some killings might be reasonable (very dangerous people, etc.) and violence is more than killings, but there does seem to be some signal there.
The reality and the laws are what people ask repeatedly. Maybe if they don't think it can be different they will not ask.
My reply was directed to someone that seemed to suggest "there is not so much violence".
I think the first step to discuss a topic is to understand what is there. If the statement would have been "I am fine that police in the USA being (potentially) more violent than in Western Europe", I wouldn't have checked anything because everybody is entitled to an opinion. I did check though because I wondered "is it true that there is not much violence in the USA compared to Western Europe?". I can't say I am sure after searching 5 minutes, but it does look like there is a probability that it is the case.
There is this tone in a lot of these discussions that the police are going out and hunting young unarmed black men and it simply doesn't line up with reality.
This can be seen as backlash politics, where deeply rooted racial divisions are used to convince large groups to vote against their own interests in order to withhold any benefit to lesser groups. Two excellent books that explore this issue are The Politics of Resentment and Dying of Whiteness.
It turns out that the USA operates kind of like "twitch plays X", so your comment reads like "Twitch has great potential to beat Pokemon but as an outsider it's unclear whether that is actually a goal"
Lots of different interest groups in the US have lots of different issues they care about, including traffic safety. Said interest groups compete in various political contexts to get their issues addressed.
Many believe the priority of the US government should be to protect individual liberties before saving lives or improving quality of life, even if to do so is at their detriment.
There is no such major group. There are people who think saving lives or improving quality of life does not matter, but those are also against individual liberties. They care about lowering taxes, more or less. They care about hierarchy.
But they do not care about liberties or freedom as such, not for anyone except the top of the hierarchy. They are consistently voting for politicians that restrict those and want to return back to times when average person was considerably less free. They are good at using freedom as a slogan, as an excuse to enact anti-freedom agenda, repeatedly, again and again.
In the words of Patrick Henry spoken at the founding of the nation "Give me liberty, or give me death!"
We have great potential to save lives but we're willing and eager to exchange safety and control for individual liberty. Risk taking and individualism is also a reason why America has dominated many fields for so long. Silicon valley doesn't exist in Europe for a reason.
It's also impossible to argue with some people about safety because they're never satisfied, no risk can't be reduced, no risk is ever balanced with what you have to give up in exchange for safety. An argument about where one should set the balance is fine, but plenty of people want to set the risk to zero and that kind of extremism has no limit and runs into a paperclip problem where the only purpose of life is to preserve and extend it and as long as you're breathing it's a good life... or something like that.
