Why you might not know that 2024 was America's safest year since the 1960s
An overwhelming majority of Americans, 64 percent, believe that crime increased across the country in 2024, according to a Gallup survey conducted late last year.
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If you really want to test your cognitive dissonance skills then consider this as well: Mass shootings are extremely rare too.
If you feel yourself getting angry and tempted to type out a long-winded reply about how awful they are, how they only happen in the US, etc. then congratulations - you now understand other people who fixate on specific types of crime (e.g. immigrant crime).
Rare as they may be, they're still by orders of magnitude more common in the US than in any other developed country. And they are entirely preventable, as said countries demonstrate.
The next question is why.
Full and semi auto weapons are over 100 years old. The AR-15, in particular, is 70 years old. However, we don't see school shootings really pop up until Columbine in 1999, and that happened while the federal assault weapons ban was still in effect.
Of their weapons, only the Hi-point carbine would be covered by the AWB. The company has manufactured a version that skirts around some state level AWBs. The rest of their weapons were pistols and shotguns, would be difficult to ban outright, plus improvised bombs made of commonly available stuff.
We have cultural problem with school shootings, and it didn't start until the late 90s. If it were just availability of certain tech, it would have started decades earlier.
A huge issue is the right wing itself. Several shooters cite conspiratorial nonsense spread by the likes of Alex Jones. At least one of the Columbine shooters was praiseworthy of Nazis in his journal, though the exact motives have been elusive. Regardless, the takeover of John Birch Society thinking on the right plays a role.
We have plenty of nutjobs in Europe too. The difference is the availability of guns so it's a reasonable assumption that this is a major factor.
We've had availability a lot longer than school shootings. We weren't feeding the nutjobs the same way.
You felt it didn't you? That uncontrollable desire to just immediately refute what I said with anything that would justify your feelings? That right there - that is the cognitive dissonance.
No it isn't, you moron. A mass shooting isn't like a robbery or single murder. You are comparing something much bigger and more devastating to something common and widespread. Nuclear bombs don't go off everyday, so when one does it is big news. Earthquakes happen everyday, but magnitude 8 ones do not and will be focused on when they do. If we start seeing nuclear bombs or magnitude 8 earthquakes going off a lot more than expected, then it isn't a fixation on a certain type of event when that gets noticed by people.
Mass shootings happen literally every day in the US. While they aren't as common as normal murders, they are far more common than anyone should expect. In other countries, you hear about a mass casualty event (mass stabbing, mass shooting, car driving through a crowd) less than once per year. It's so rare in other countries that it is huge news when it happens. In the US it happens every single day (503 events in 2024 and already 262 in the first 7 mo of 2025). So while France might get one mass stabbing a year and the US gets 500 mass shootings a year, we aren't 500 times their population. We are roughly 6 times their population but have 500 times more mass stabbing/shooting/murder events.
Contrast that with normal murder rates. In the US, the murder rate is 5.76 per 100k people, while France is 1.34 per 100k. Our murder rate is 5 times theirs, but our mass murder rate is 60 times theirs.
It's not fixation to notice that something is VERY out of whack in one specific country compared to the rest of the world.
Both are true through. They are uncommon but also they are massively more common in the US. Thousands of deaths that do not occur in other countries. It shouldn't happen.
Both are true through. They are uncommon but also they are massively more common in the US.
You need to start slicing the data to make them both true - but yes. But what if, and I haven't verified any numbers or anything, violent crimes committed by immigrants in the US were actually more common than mass shootings? Would you see it as a problem?
Do note that I'm being a devil's advocate here - I'm not proposing any sort of rightness/wrongness or making any other conclusions. I'm just curious how much you've thought this through. I fully expect to just be insulted or something regardless.
From Wikipedia:
cognitive dissonance is described as a mental phenomenon in which people unknowingly hold fundamentally conflicting cognitions.
Please explain to me what the conflicting cognitions in my comment are.
Did you learn a new term and are desperate to use it wherever you can? It's not even cognitive dissonance. I think you ultimately got it mixed up with something else.
Mass shootings are rare globally (relative to other crimes), but when they do happen it's almost always in the US.
You guys will come up with any excuses to keep your firearms.
I wouldn’t call this rare: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_United_States_in_2024
If you read that list most should be categorized as gang crime. A bigger issue is suicide by firearm being counted in the gun crime and death statistics, removal of which makes the USA still high but not by as much you would think.
