Remember back in July 2022, when there was a mass shooting in Denmark and some Americans would say “see it happens even in a gun regulated country”?
There hasn’t been one since…
I don’t disagree that gun violence is a huge problem in the US, and we can all agree that we need to have serious discussion about realistic solutions.
But there are SO many more people in the US than in Denmark. It’s not even close. It has roughly the population as Colarado for the entire country.
That’s not to say there aren’t many, many more mass shooting instances in Colarado (I’m using the term mass shooting to mean a person shooting strangers on purpose in a planned attack in a place unlikely to have armed victims like a school, movie theater or gay night club) than Denmark, so I feel it’s a bit disingenuous to compare the whole US to Denmark.
Denmark also has a lot less poverty and better access to healthcare and mental health services as compared to the US.
So I know it feels good to try and make your point this way, but it’s not really the same at all. There’s more to this than guns and “Americans dumb”.
It’s easier to veiw these gun statistics less by a side by side comparison of total population and more by gun related deaths per every 10, 000 people. That allows an adjustment for population.
The US in 2023 had 10.89 gun deaths per every 10k people. Denmark had 1.08 per 10k. So roughly Denmark would have had to have roughly 10x the number of gun deaths to draw parallel with the US.
This metric does cover all homicides and suicides. For a better picture homicides only made up 7% of all gun related fatalities in Denmark in the US 43% of gun deaths were homicides. One interesting difference is that Denmark accidental gun deaths is a much bigger slice of their piechart than the US.
Strong social welfare programs and measures to check extreme wealth aggregation are also things the US would have money to manage. Technically speaking the ratio of Government wealth per adult in the US is greater than Denmark’s meaning Denmark is doing more with less.
Also poverty crime is still pretty high in Denmark. The social safety net means you don’t starve so much and have a place to come home to but it’s a very lean existance. A lot of people there are barely making ends meet. Technically speaking the poverty rates between the two countries are actually very comparable.
