The real solution is to figure out why so many people in America are snapping and going full psycho on everyone. This is not a possession of weapons issue, this is a mental health issue. The world is so broken that more and more people are completely breaking down mentally and going on these rampages. How about we try to fix the actual issue rather than band-aid the problem and treat all citizens like toddlers?
There are a lot of firearms in Finland. That's because around 80% of all adult men are military reservists and many are members in reservists associations that practice shooting regularly. They don't have assault rifles at home like in Switzerland but other weapons, yes. Hunting is a very popular sport and absolutely necessary to keep the highways safe. About 40,000 moose are shot every year by hunters. Gun violence is very rare. Drunks kill each other with knives in private homes. The police shoot someone dead maybe once in a decade. The population is 5.6 million.
I think the US is still a bit of a Wild West. The conquest of the West is deeply entrenched in the national mythology of the United States. Tens of millions of poor people from the old world, including many of my relatives, emigrated to the US. The Canadian West and the American West were conquered in different ways. In Canada, the government would move in first and build large-scale infrastructure and bring civilization with it. The Klondike gold rush was maybe the only exception to this. In the US, people would go first and be forced to deal with the lawlessness without as much help from the government.
Many of the political beliefs held by a lot of Americans are residual effects of America still seeing itself as a frontier despite actual reality having been very different for over a century.
I don't think the second amendment is too relevant any longer. The idea that the government, particularly the federal government - the government of a global superpower, could be held in check by a few assault rifle owning clowns playing militia on weekends, is funny.
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