It absolutely is the guns.

[Bluesaph]

True story:

20 year old child of a relative was 4.0 student. Athlete. Scholar. Popular. Never a single sign of any issues.

Six months ago said child began exhibiting off behaviors and complete personality change. Started failing classes in university. Lost all friends. Began acting aggressive. Diagnosed with bipolar and acute manic psychosis.

Last night became very agitated and argumentative and hostile and quite scary from what was described and grabbed a knife and punctured mom’s tire. That’s a big deal right? But that’s the worst damage that was done!

Today we count our blessings that there is no gun humping culture in this family. In a gun humping family something tells me a knife and a tire would not be in the story.

Mental health is an issue. Gun humping makes it all worse.

[MichMan]

1. Why was someone who was bipolar with acute manic psychosis and agressive behavior allowed access to a knife?

[Bluesaph]

5. People cook with knives. Houses have kitchens.

And the person had never behaved this way before so there was no reason to predict.

[elias7]

2. Of course it is

Real time, real life example - the world. Control group - the rest of the world. Experimental group - United States.

Design an experiment to determine if availability of ever more mass deadly guns will lead to ever more deadly shooting sprees, controlling for other variables such as equal incidences of mental illness across the world population.

The results? Yes, gun availability does indeed lead to greater deadly violence.

The pure selfishness of gun owners’ inability to put down their arms for the good of the children (leading cause of death is gun violence) has led to a generation of terrorized children doing shooting drills in school.

[JanMichael]

3. Plenty of studies that show that guns in America kill way more people than in the rest of oecd

US 100,000 deaths per person numbers are ridiculous.

Talk about a third world shit hole.

[SlimJimmy]

4. Context is always good.

Police departments that reported the location of a firearm-related homicide, were also able to report the circumstances around that event. The single most common circumstance — around 14% of events — was an argument. Gangland or juvenile gang involvement were reported in 4% of events, combined. These trends hold true for firearm-related homicides in the US at any age.

Child and teen deaths due to poisoning and drug overdoses nearly doubled during the pandemic

Between 2019 and 2021, drug overdoses surpassed cancer as the third most-common cause of death amongst US children and teens. Every race and ethnicity had an increase in overdose deaths in 2021. It was the third most-common cause of death in all groups except for Asian and Pacific Islander people.

The CDC categorizes poisoning deaths as those where a person was accidentally over-exposed to a wide variety of chemicals including household cleaners, drugs, and alcohol. Between 2019 and 2021, deaths attributed to narcotics and hallucinogens increased more than those from any other poisoning agent, leading to nearly twice as many deaths as the next most-common substance.

https://usafacts.org/data-projects/child-death