More than half (25k) of those US deaths are suicides.
It’s obvious that a society with a lot of guns will have a lot of gun related deaths and injuries. That’s why they need gun control.
That’s also probably why a majority (an absolute majority) of Americans have supported stricter gun controls for decades. I was talking about this to my very fiscally conservative Republican voting mate in Chicago last week. He despairs, he has never owned a gun and wants them managed like in U.K. (he is also pro choice on abortion).
One fundamental problem, in addition to significant numbers of people, of wildly different social backgrounds, habitually owning and using guns, is politics. 50 Republican senators paid for by the gun lobby are not prepared to sacrifice the cash by even marginal improvements to the law like background checks, controls of who can have an automatic weapon, age limits etc, and people like my mate who vote Republican feel that they have no option when confronted by the identity politics riven new Democrat party. I saw the results of this in Chicago last week, a place which has visibly declined even in the rich bits of downtown, since the radical mayor defunded the police force. It’s a noticeably edgier place, a lot of businesses, including big chain stores, have moved out because they feel unprotected. It’s much quieter in big suburban malls in the rich satellite towns.
The political problem is shared by most countries, though to a lesser extent, which have bi partisan politics - the U.K. and Australia amongst them. If you vote one way economically you are also voting for an implied social position which you might not share at all. My economic instincts are left wing, but I have no time for some of the identity politics championed by the so called left in this country, nor for the morally ‘old fashioned values’ style right. And on this point I should thank Johnson and his cronies for demonstrating, on a daily basis, that they don’t have a moral leg to stand on. And worse, from my perspective, that they have zero integrity.
Anyway, the short version is that the gun situation in the US is a social, cultural and political disaster which is avoidable. But it’s also very complicated and not helped by stereotyping.
Meanwhile, that old **** Kissinger, the bloke who has happily bombed and advocated the bombing of ‘marginal’ countries so the US could maintain its relationships with ‘strategically important’ nations, has told the Ukraine that it should give Russia territory in return for a ceasefire. A handy reminder that he isn’t dead yet, and hasn’t evolved in any measurable way since he worked for Nixon.
