I get the sense that more Europeans than I had I realized have crafted their identities around a sense of smug superiority over primitive, barbaric Americans and a handful of stock issues like “the guns.”

Which is how you end up with people who probably imagine themselves to be sensible liberals laser-focused on “gun violence” as if it is a cultural trait rather than on the guns that literal fascists are currently using to murder people on the streets.

@adamgreenfield @HeavenlyPossum

Europeans apparently prefer being stabbed or beaten to death to being able to defend themselves. Not me.

@LevZadov @adamgreenfield @HeavenlyPossum That argument would perhaps make sense in a world, where the US homicide rate was not a multiple of the EU rate.

As it is, it's more like "I'd rather not be stabbed in the EU, than being shot in the US".

@guidostevens @LevZadov @adamgreenfield

Even before the development of firearms, most adult human beings have been roughly equally capable of killing each other, at least since the development of the thrown spear.

The problem of lethal violence in the US is not because some or even many people have guns, but rather because the US as a settler-colonial garrison state has maintained an (increasingly radicalized) cadre of armed auxiliaries among the public ready to do lethal violence to maintain hierarchies of race, sex, and capital.

Alex Pretti did not murder people with his gun. He did not provoke a fascist state militia into murdering him by possessing a gun. His gun and his possession of it did not somehow transitively contribute to the US rate of gun deaths.