In the first eight months of the year, 470 mass shootings occurred across the United States, and more than 25,000 Americans have died from gun violence, Gulf News, an English newspaper in the United Arab Emirates, said in a recent opinion piece.
  • redtea@lemmygrad.ml
    92·
    1 year ago

    Unfortunately for these and future victims, the US needs this kind of nonchalant disregard for life to be normalised so that it’s ordinary people don’t blush at the idea of doing the same thing to other countries through warfare.

    • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
      7·
      1 year ago

      The vast majority of these gun deaths are suicides or crime related since mass shootings just need more then one victim at once regardless of motivation. Gun deaths are something usually far outside the purview of the standard American. It just doesn’t come up in daily life for most people.

      In the minds of most Americans, you are just as likely to be killed by lightning strike then mass shooting in the US, so people just don’t care.

      • PolandIsAStateOfMind@lemmygrad.ml
        111·
        1 year ago

        You are more likely to be killed by lightning strike then mass shooting in the US

        That’s not true. For example, 11 people died from lightning stike in 2021, but 706 people died in mass shooting in that year (not including the shooters), meaning you are 64 times as likely to die in mass shooting than from lightning strike.

        Note: 2021 was below average for lightning deaths and above average for mass shooting, but i think it would still be around 30 times more considering last few years averages.

        • ComradeSalad@lemmygrad.ml
          6·
          1 year ago

          My mistake, I completely failed to open my point correctly there and that changed it’s whole meaning. I meant to say “In the minds of regular Americans, you’re just as likely to die by lightning strike then mass shooting”.

      • 🏳️‍⚧️ 新星 [she/they]@lemmygrad.mlEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        On the flip side, there is good reason — what can Americans even do about it? Organizing anything serious is off the table because the CIA will murder you… and obviously voting blue™ didn’t help

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
          41·
          1 year ago

          Indeed, there’s really no clear path towards things getting better in US. I expect that things will just keep getting steadily worse until the whole house of cards comes crashing down. I think a big factor here is that people in the decision making process are completely insulated from the general public. Most of them don’t even realize that majority of people is now suffering. So, there’s no impetus to actually improve the conditions for the masses.

          Meanwhile, the public lacks any meaningful political education and doesn’t understand the root causes of the problems they experience. They just know their lives are getting worse and they’re lashing out at the political establishment whom they blame for their problems. This creates space for opportunists like Trump to step in with promises of draining the swamp and such. Of course, once these opportunists get in, nothing improves, and contradictions continue to sharpen.

          This is the death spiral that US finds itself in now, and there’s no way out of it that I can see.