Has the USA gone totally crazy?

Estimated I’m reading to be 120.5 civilian firearms per 100 people in the USA.

no surprise really.

The second amendment puts the right to bear arms in their constitution,any attempt to remove it now would likely be seen by the rednecks as an attack on the country.

Bit of a self perpetuating problem in America,the more guns there are the more guns you need for protection,though they do seem to have a particular problem with mass shootings.

American Society has been in decline since the Vietnam War. The optimism is gone and communal life is no more. 9-11 Scam really affected the people badly.

Massaging the statistics to conceal the problem is not the same thing as solving it. It's pretty much the opposite, in fact.

It's always been crazy. It's a nation that was built on the slaughter of a people that was already living there by Europeans. Later it became a melting pot of some of the worst that humanity has to offer. The fact that they off each other in record numbers should come as no surprise really. There is a deep psychosis that runs through the American psyche. One which is violent through and through and one that also boasts a truly appalling political situation that's a quagmire of pettiness manufactured to appeal to most childish of minds. A situation that has only become worse even during my limited time on the Earth.

And yet, it's the one country on the planet that was (ostensibly at least) designed with the pursuit of happiness baked into its very being and it has a genuinely agreeable constitution...for the most part anyway.

Unfortunately that "happiness" comes at very costly prices. And one of those prices is people dying at the end of a gun. Talking about this earlier with real people in the real world, I mentioned that it was hard to give a shit any more and I've been feeling that way for some time. They won't make any real efforts to even minimise this issue or mitigate it. So why should the world outside waste their sympathy on a nation that would rather use gun control as a cheap political football rather than an important societal issue that should be tackled in a reasonable manner?

As for "will they ever learn", well they have learned. They've learned the hard way. The problem is there's an element over there that doesn't give a fuck, and until the day arrives where they are directly impacted by this issue they'll continue to not give a fuck.

It's been fucked for a long time now.

Trump did it no favours at all either.

Time for a big shift in their political system, bring In fresh young blood and get rid of all the old men, we could do the Same here in fact.

Republican states won't vote for anyone that supports gun control. I'd hate to see the shitfest if any Government did impose any meaningful gun control.

There will be a war there yet. Or a split. The ununited states of America.

It has always been crazy, just different kinds of crazy from time to time.

Gun control gets the headlines, but in reality the nation is extremely violent and full of very angry disenfranchised people.

Guns of course make very convenient tools if you're motivated to harm people. But I'm convinced that America would still be a very violent place even without the proliferation of guns.

There will come a time when people will be able to create cheap untraceable guns on 3D printers etc... (in fact crude examples are already possible now) so even if you could get everyone to agree on strict gun control, it would never work in the long run. People will always find a way to get what they need, just like with drugs or anything else really.

This is why the debates around gun control are a bit pointless really. It obfuscates the real root of the problem, and allows people to avoid asking the serious questions about what is going wrong in society to create so many unhappy people who want to lash out at society and harm innocent people. Without really digging deep into these questions, and figuring out how to stop people from getting to that point... good luck even attempting to stop any of this.

And as we can see in Serbia and elsewhere, trends that become big in the US very often migrate to many other places. Making everything about the tool these people are using, is a cop out... and of course it's heavily motivated by political and ideological differences. Making the whole thing into an ideological tribal conflict in the US, has done absolutely nothing to help resolve the problem. In fact, it has made it a whole lot worse.

It can’t be underestimated how great a damage it seems that Trumps presidency did to the US domestically, not just internationally.

A completely divisive, shît stirring, malevolent, childish ghoul.

he enabled and validated a lot of these crazies.

using varied questionable language to encourage violence against counter demonstrators at rallies… and varying other language of stoking the embers, fanning flames and indeed on the other hand being very silent when his own crowd could not be bothered playing by the rules…

It's absolutely beyond comprehension how much it's escalating. We were talking about Columbine for a very long time after that happened in '99, it had a huge media presence, films created, lots of deep analysis...

It's almost become part and parcel of US culture now. I always wonder do many Americans worry about it on a day to day basis? Not sure how I'd feel about living in a country where I could be blown away just going about my business. It's such a surreal concept.

Road deaths are accidents. Mass shootings are not. They're not comparable really.

Mass shootings are deliberate acts of murder and they definitely should be discussed.

I heard of some mass shooting on the radio the other day on the news, it was the last event mentioned, 10 dead in texas, 5 year old the youngest.

Even the irish media barely deems it newsworthy its such a regular occurence.

A huge proportion of old towns in the Southern states are becoming ghost towns and those folks just make their way to the cities. Some of them don't leave their screwed up attitudes behind, load up with weaponry and when it all becomes too overwhelming, mow down the people who gave them a hard time in their job or school, or are the wrong colour or religion and anybody else in the vicinity.

The equivalent in Ireland is beating the crap out of somebody because of the lack of firearms.

Is it fair to say I believe Social Media is to blame for a lot of this added to the political divide between far right and left. It's coming to a head, but I feel the worse is still to come.

The only hope of the US restricting guns is when the democrats have control of the presidency and congress, that hasn't happened in over 10 years I believe.

I had always intended to drive across the USA when I retired, taking my time , driving through small town America , stopping where the fancy took me. I retire next year and won’t be going next nor near America. Don’t want to get mown down strolling through a mall. 

When Trump was president, I fell into conversation with a young American couple on holiday in the south of France. Mid twenties from Cincinnati, if memory serves. I asked them about the latest mass shooting at the time, saying it could never happen in Ireland. They asked me why not, and when I told them there were no guns generally available in Ireland, they were amazed. He was anti Trump and anti gun. She was pro Trump and owned three guns. She said her father had bought her a gun for her fifth birthday. Her FIFTH birthday!! 

No wonder they’re fupped!!!

I didn't say they shouldn't be discussed. The amount of attention they get is disproportionate however, this is due to them being a highly politicised issue and manna from heaven for the media. Like Islamic terror attacks which have not happened as much in recent years, mass shootings are a form of disaster porn that people get great entertainment out of. They also allow boardsies to entertain themselves by arguing with each other as there is always some political, racial or gender angle.

There is one such thread in the CA forum at the moment which ironically, given my comments on road deaths, is about an incident where people were run over at a bus stop with this being alleged to be a case of racist vehicular homicide..

Anyhow, 248 killed in mass shootings this year in a country of 330 million people and the OP wonders if that means the US has gone "totally crazy" - not really.