I found an interesting post on reddit:
https://np.reddit.com/r/news/comments/7 ... g/dubzm0l/
Copy past without links:
QUOTE There are is a lot of interesting debate here about gun control. Here's a TL;DR from here
Americans make up about 4.4 percent of the global population but own 42 percent of the world’s guns. From 1966 to 2012, 31 percent of the gunmen in mass shootings worldwide were American 1
Adjusted for population, only Yemen has a higher rate of mass shootings among countries with more than 10 million people. Yemen has the world’s second-highest rate of gun ownership after the United States.
If mental health made the difference, then data would show that Americans have more mental health problems than do people in other countries with fewer mass shootings. A 2015 study estimated that only 4 percent of American gun deaths could be attributed to mental health issues 2 EDIT : This was misleading - The published paper reads
Perhaps most importantly, the 1-year population attributable risk of violence associated with serious mental illness alone was found to be only 4% in the ECA surveys. Attributable risk takes into account both the magnitude of risk and the number of people in the risk category within the population.
America’s gun homicide rate was 33 per million people in 2009, far exceeding the average among developed countries. Americans sometimes see this as an expression of deeper problems with crime. But the United States is not actually more prone to crime than other developed countries. Rather, they found, in data that has since been repeatedly confirmed, that American crime is simply more lethal. 3
A New Yorker is just as likely to be robbed as a Londoner, for instance, but the New Yorker is 54 times more likely to be killed in the process.They concluded that the discrepancy, like so many other anomalies of American violence, came down to guns.
In China, about a dozen seemingly random attacks on schoolchildren killed 25 people between 2010 and 2012. Most used knives; none used a gun. By contrast, in this same window, the United States experienced five of its deadliest mass shootings, which killed 78 people. Scaled by population, the American attacks were 12 times as deadly.
The United States also has some of the weakest controls over who may buy a gun and what sorts of guns may be owned.
Switzerland has the second-highest gun ownership rate of any developed country, about half that of the United States. Its gun homicide rate in 2004 was 7.7 per million people — unusually high, in keeping with the relationship between gun ownership and murders, but still a fraction of the rate in the United States. Swiss gun laws are more stringent, setting a higher bar for securing and keeping a license, for selling guns and for the types of guns that can be owned. Such laws reflect more than just tighter restrictions. They imply a different way of thinking about guns, as something that citizens must affirmatively earn the right to own.
After Britain had a mass shooting in 1987, the country instituted strict gun control laws. So did Australia after a 1996 shooting. But the United States has repeatedly faced the same calculus and determined that relatively unregulated gun ownership is worth the cost to society.
That choice, more than any statistic or regulation, is what most sets the United States apart.[/quote]