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by mpweiher·13y ago·view on hn ↗
Precisely: the attack in china wounded twenty. As of this writing none were killed. The "severity of the damage" is a highly relevant measure, not something to dismiss.

"...poor attempt at treating the symptom rather than the disease". Sorry, the symptoms (i.e. lots of people dead) are the problem here.

My data pull was primarily for the countries mentioned earlier, I added some others I find relevant because I have experience living there (never been to Finland). I did not imply the US was #1, the extract was obviously a very short one.

The Wikipedia page you cite tells essentially the same story as the Washington Post article: of the OECD countries, the US is by far the most violent, more than 4x more than Germany, for example. Take a look at the countries surrounding the US in the statistic! If you're not embarrassed, you're not paying attention.

The "would not have been possible without a gun" argument is specious, as is "anyone sufficiently determined" argument for suicides: you are assuming that anyone with a suicide attempt is sufficiently determined, as is someone wanting to kill someone. This is a fallacy, both logically and from what the data show.

Not being able to stop everyone is no excuse for not even trying to stop those that can be stopped (or reducing the damage...heck if no-one gut hurt, would the "rampage" even be a problem??)

2 comments
In 2010 a similar attack occurred in China, and over twenty were killed.
Do you mean this series of attacks? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_attacks_in_China_(2010–2...

If Wikipedia is correct, this was a whole series of attacks, sometimes with multiple assailants, with each attack having far fewer fatalities, so the point about reducing the damage stands.

Still awful.

I believe we were ignoring the severity of the damage because we were attempting to investigate what mental factors went into making people decide to go on killing sprees. How much damage they did ultimately doesn't affect the factors that led them to decided to make the attempt.