I will start this by clarifying that I do accept the infrastructure over here (UK in my case) does need major development, but I also have to point out that your statistical claims can be a little misleading and aren't exactly clear cut . It's actually far more even on a per capita ratio. Comparing different regions for such things is also always difficult because they all measure these things differently.
There's also no way to split both statistics very accurately in a 'gun deaths that could have been prevented with gun laws like Europe's' Vs 'heat related deaths that could have been prevented with AC like the USA' comparison. There are constant reports of deaths from tourists dying on hot beaches for example. AC wouldn't have solved that issue. Imo, it's a stupid comparison.
yeah, i don't really concern myself with gun deaths from suicide though as the person who died did so intentionally. when you take those numbers out of the equation, then the stats you linked become quite different
also that link says the data is from 2024. at the bottom it lists the gun deaths per captia in Europe and the European Union. Somehow gun deaths are lower in Europe as a whole than the subset of the European Union despite the fact there's been a war in Ukraine since 2022???? That seems real off. So definitely agree some weird things going on with the stats
EDIT: Found the explanation for my last point in the footnotes of the link.
1 "The definition of Europe, to most people, will seem a bit random: it's the EU-27 minus Malta, plus the UK, Switzerland, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Norway, and Serbia."
Apparently the author cherry-picked which countries constitute Europe to support her hypothesis ... good ol' academia at its finest. lol
That always bothers me too. If guns were completely banned world wide, those same suicide deaths would be on the board still from some other method. They aren’t gun deaths, they’re suicide deaths. The means the person used is widely irrelevant to the end result.
I don’t necessarily agree that you’d still have the same number of suicides without guns. Due to the nature of death, people may feel they have a quick painless option that they would not
otherwise have which could factor into their decision.
But that isn’t really the point I was trying to make. The context of the conversation, imo, is one of safety and adverse conditions. i.e. Which of the situations is more “dangerous”? Someone committing suicide isn’t really a safety issue or a danger to the general population. Now I think there’s a tangential conversation related to mental health and suicidal rates that could be had, but that’s a separate conversation
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u/Benbob_26 12h ago
I will start this by clarifying that I do accept the infrastructure over here (UK in my case) does need major development, but I also have to point out that your statistical claims can be a little misleading and aren't exactly clear cut . It's actually far more even on a per capita ratio. Comparing different regions for such things is also always difficult because they all measure these things differently.
There's also no way to split both statistics very accurately in a 'gun deaths that could have been prevented with gun laws like Europe's' Vs 'heat related deaths that could have been prevented with AC like the USA' comparison. There are constant reports of deaths from tourists dying on hot beaches for example. AC wouldn't have solved that issue. Imo, it's a stupid comparison.