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.
It matters if you care about being accurate, and having a reasonable definition. It's the same reason you don't include suicides in figures about gun violence if you're actually interested combating gun violence and not just scoring political points.
Half the definitions at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_... don't even exclude gang violence, drug violence, or organized crime. Statistically if you're not involved with gangs or drugs, you're not going to be involved in a gang or drug related shooting. The majority of those killed or injured are at least peripherally involved. So you should immediately question to credibility and motived of any organization that wants to talk about "mass shootings" which by definition are scary because they're random and unprovoked but then want to include a huge number of incidents are driven by crime, drugs, and gangs, none of which is random or unprovoked.
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.
A lot of these state laws have also been rolled back because the Supreme Court declared them against the 2nd amendment.
The US being "50 countries" was sort of the original idea, but over time things changed significantly. Many aspects of life are controlled federally and have been for almost a 100 years. Yes, there is also state government but there is nothing special about that: many countries have some type of sub-national government with varying degrees of power. In the US state governments tend to have more power than average, but that does not make it "50 countries".
Everything is stuck in a weird dysfunctional limbo where none of the major institutions work as was intended at all. Endless discussion and navel-gazing over what some comma could perhaps have meant 250 years ago is not a serious way to govern a country.
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%.
Sounds like a dysfunctional country where states seem like they have a lot of power but they really don’t because they don’t control their borders. And a few holdouts can ruin everything for the large majority.
If your states were like real countries, they could just ban guns, set up border controls, and turn away anyone bringing guns in. But they can’t, so they’re not countries.
I didn't say they are countries, I said they are like countries. Finding all the ways they are not like countries to prove they aren't countries just ignores all of the similarities.
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?
> 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.
Because the millions upon millions of traffic stops water down the fact that the police go guns blazing into petty BS way too often.
>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.
Worse, they're hunting us all. Anyone who isn't a cop is at best a mark to be shaken down to them.
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?
Just to take the low hanging fruit that I'm directly familiar with, there _is_ rail service from LA to San Diego. Just keeping the existing service operating is a massive challenge costing millions of dollars per year to keep the existing train lines operational in the face of coastal erosion. Meanwhile, there are literally dozens of proposals ranging from hundreds of millions to billions of dollars to implement a long-term fix by relocating the rails and realigning them to support HSR. Cost aside, _all_ of these proposals are being met with strong NIMBY and/or environmentalist resistance. Do NIMBYs and environmental protection laws not exist in Europe?
> 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.
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's my pet theory that many Americans are unable to reason in positive freedoms. They don't often think about the freedom to not die in a car crash, or from a preventable disease.
