Death Inc

http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in-arms.html

Last December, when Adam Lanza stormed into the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, with a rifle and killed twenty children and six adult staff members, the United States found itself immersed in debates about gun control. Another flash point occurred this July, when George Zimmerman, who saw himself as a guardian of his community, was exonerated in the killing of an unarmed black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida. That time, talk turned to stand-your-ground laws and the proper use of deadly force. The gun debate was refreshed in September by the shooting deaths of twelve people at the Washington Navy Yard, apparently at the hands of an IT contractor who was mentally ill.

Such episodes remind Americans that our country as a whole is marked by staggering levels of deadly violence. Our death rate from assault is many times higher than that of highly urbanized countries like the Netherlands or Germany, sparsely populated nations with plenty of forests and game hunters like Canada, Sweden, Finland, or New Zealand, and large, populous ones like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. State-sponsored violence, too—in the form of capital punishment—sets our country apart. Last year we executed more than ten times as many prisoners as other advanced industrialized nations combined—not surprising given that Japan is the only other such country that allows the practice. Our violent streak has become almost a part of our national identity.

What’s less well appreciated is how much the incidence of violence, like so many salient issues in American life, varies by region. Beyond a vague awareness that supporters of violent retaliation and easy access to guns are concentrated in the states of the former Confederacy and, to a lesser extent, the western interior, most people cannot tell you much about regional differences on such matters. Our conventional way of defining regions—dividing the country along state boundaries into a Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, Southwest, and Northwest—masks the cultural lines along which attitudes toward violence fall. These lines don’t respect state boundaries. To understand violence or practically any other divisive issue, you need to understand historical settlement patterns and the lasting cultural fissures they established.

(http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/images/features/upinarms-map.jpg)

I dont think guns are the real problem. I think americans in general are. America has alot more violent and mentally ill people than most countries and when they have the ability to acquire a firearm easily reguardless of type it is. Its never pretty.

In New Zealand you can get an AR15 just like any american can (state dependent) yet how many horror stories have you heard that are from there regardless of differing populations?

While i dont support restriction i do support better laws and more background checks and depending on the firearm maybe a psych evaluation.

In some states if your firearm is under 30 cal it doesnt need to regestered. Which is dumb cos if someone really wanted to, they could have like 5000 ar15's (cos its .223 thus under .30) and start their own revolutuion/war.