School shootings average 4 deaths per year. They are very tragic and very sad, but you should fear them about as much as you fear cows. In fact, cows kill a lot more people than school shootings do.
Every death is a tragedy. Many are avoidable. If we want to actually reduce tragedy and suffering, your time and energy is best spent on big problems.
A school age child is nearly 200x more likely to die by suicide than from a school shooting. That's a tragedy. And that's _avoidable_. Which do you hear about more?
The attention and resources of society are limited. We would be better off allocating resources to bigger problems, but we don't. That's a tragedy.
Americans have guns because we believe that individual citizens may, god forbid, need to kill people. Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that they are past that, at a point in history where only the State needs the power to kill.
Who knows who is right. But it’s ridiculously arrogant to say that the American position is not defensible. It was literally just a couple of generations ago when the US was air dropping rifles into France to support the Resistance. Even if we have now entered an age where ordinary people don’t need guns—that new age is younger than computers, supersonic flight, or television. Its far too soon to conclude that’s this is how the world will always be from here forward.
I think you're missing that Europeans also recognise that giving every dumbass, desperate person or dormant psychopath a gun, is far more likely to get people killed NOW, than the chances that when the 'end-times' you imply come, all these same people are going to someone effectively unite and overthrow the regime.
It's a crackpot idea to think that 'arming citizens' helps the whole. And the fact you think it's 'arrogant' to spell out a basic truth that the rest of the world understands is dumbfounding.
Yes, that the drills are misguided. And he is fine with the obsession with guns, suggested using palm/grip recognition to tie guns to owners with free updates paid for by govt. Reasonable.
> However, the magnitude of the bankruptcy effect is much smaller than previously thought: we estimate that hospitalizations cause only 4% of personal bankruptcies among nonelderly U.S. adults, which is an order of magnitude smaller than the previous estimates described above.
Take a look at bankruptcy due to health issues in Canada. It’s lower than the US, but still a problem. They have a single payer system, but what people tend to forget is if you’re really sick, you often can’t work, so even if health costs are minimal, you can still go bankrupt.
What I think would be helpful in the US is universal catastrophic insurance. Worst case scenario, you’re covered. If you want everyday health insurance, let people buy it or get covered if low income.
If you're already in a lot of debt, getting a medical bill is just going to add to that debt. As a result, anyone who sees a doctor and declares bankruptcy can say that healthcare is at least partially to blame.
I can't tell whether there are "too many" medical bankruptcies, but I know that pundits are exaggerating the degree of severity. This link has some statistics, so you can take what you want from it.
