USA violence: don't blame mental illness. Blame hatred, corruption, and lies.

Last Tuesday I wrote a blog post asking, Are Americans 10 times more deranged than Norwegians? I was suggesting that the United States' appalling homicide rate--10 times that of Norway, more than 5 times that of Western European countries as a whole--must be due to something more than mental illness.

Three and a half days later, someone murdered 20 people and wounded 26 others in an El Paso, Texas, Walmart. Fifteen hours after that, someone murdered 9 people and wounded at least 26 others in a Dayton, Ohio, nightlife district.

There is no agreed-upon definition of a mass shooting. If you use the FBI's definition of 4 or more killed, not including the shooter, we have had 22 mass shootings in the nearly 31 weeks (so far) this year. If you use the Gun Violence Archive's definition of 4 or more killed or wounded, not including the shooter, we've had 251 mass shootings in 216 days.

Are mass shooters mentally ill, or are they just reeking with hatred? Are legislators who refuse to even consider approaches that have reduced gun violence in other countries mentally ill, or just incredibly corrupt? Are people who keep voting for NRA shills and fomenters of hate mentally ill, or just dangerously deceived? Are people who are genuinely mentally ill getting a bad rap by association with these other people?

Jesus wept.

Are Americans really 10 times more deranged than Norwegians?

In the past 72 hours, 104 people in the United States were murdered by guns.

On an average day in 2017 in the United States, 47 people were murdered. About 2/3 of them were killed by firearms.

On an average day in 2017 in Western Europe--an area whose population is greater than that of the U.S.--11 people were murdered. Most of them were not killed by firearms.

The United States homicide rate (number of people killed for every 100,000 residents) is nearly 5 1/2 times greater than the Western European homicide rate.

You're 10 times more likely to be murdered in the U.S. than in Norway.

If, as some argue, the problem is not access to guns but rather violent mental illness or just plain badness, are we Americans really 10 times sicker than Norwegians?

Maybe. Every one of the Western European countries has better access to health care than the United States. Every one of them pays a lot less for it, too. (But save us from socialism, right?)

Though maybe America's flood of firearms does have something to do with our homicide rate. Every one of the Western European countries regulates gun ownership more strictly than does the U.S. (But golly, we need a well-regulated militia, right?)

I don't know if Americans are more than 5 times more deranged than Western Europeans. It's easy to think, though, that we're more than 5 times more ignorant. There are proven ways to save a lot of American lives. We could study how other countries reduce violence. Our corrupt leaders, however, don't want us to do that. After all, there's a lot of money to be made in guns and overpriced healthcare. 

P.S. I wrote this several days before the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton. Here's a link to what I posted the day after those horrific events.

In case you'd like to see how the U.S. homicide rate compares with the homicide rates of 17 European countries, I made this chart.

All data is from 2017. Follow these links if you want to check the figures on homicides, 

European population, and U.S. population.