Ummm, Switzerland is 16th, Canada is 12th, Serbia is 3rd........

Check out Iceland. Albeit a small country, over a third of the population has guns and there hasn't been a gun homicide in 4 decades. They do not allow semi automatics and require everyone take training and pass a test. Note that neither of these requirements would hamper the 2nd amendment.

So very sad but true. I can't count the Times I have almost been hit by cars because I was on a bike and apparently should have been riding in the ditch. This country has lost the value of the human life.

It is an accepted fact outside the USA’s borders, that the country is the most violent and dangerous for the ordinary person than any other developed (westernized) country, wherever it may be.

This is not a good thing, nor is it something to be proud of. The strange thing is that on the whole, Americans are unfailingly the most friendly, hospitable, and welcoming people in that same world. They are devoted to the supremacy of the individual, and yet are among the most community minded and aware people in that world (with the probable exception of the French).

But, crucially for me and for many others, through experience and observation, they are the most theoretically devoted followers of the principle of individual and human rights being of the utmost importance.

And yet they are amongst the worst, on the whole, at accepting difference, specifically anyone who never succumbed to the organised cultural brainwashing practically every American is subject to from birth, and which continues through life in a more subliminal manner. They are both the champions of the individual, and the champions of social conformity.

And they can be, and too frequently are, extremely hostile to anyone who doesn’t think like them, believe like them, or live like them (‘them’ being the bulk of the population). Couple that with a corrupted reading of the 2nd amendment, and a culture of the supremacy of the individual, and it’s no wonder so many of them die at each others hands.

And I know this is an over-simplification. But I don’t have 10 years to research and write a fuller version.

And, lest anyone think otherwise, I love America and Americans. Mostly. Old, orange, corrupt, and stupid white men from NY who work in Washington, D.C., are excluded. And those who like and support those types.

They probably don't let mentally ill people have guns in Switzerland either.

I think its about the individual over the group that is so prevalent in our culture. Many of us discount the fact that everything we have in relation to public works, technology, medical science all came about due to the work of many. We enshrine the idea that one person is enough. We glorify violences role in our progress as a culture when in fact it is what people do to pick up the pieces that really matter. We love the myth of the good guy with a gun yet if you talk to anyone who is not psychotic who has killed it is not a glorious thing. It is horrific and sad and leaves real scars on the killer. A gun is an instrument of death. Sometimes one could argue such death is for a good cause, food, self defense etc. But the problems start when you pretend death is OK, banal, normal and just the price we pay and bull shit like that. When the individuals rights supersede the rights of logic, reason and the group we all lose. Guns are too me the tyranny of the few. Fat white guys strutting around suburban neighborhoods with AR15's is just stupid.