There are over 300 million people in the US, many with children. There are 989 billionaires in the US and roughly 23 million millionaires. There are thousands of politicians who are voted into office right now who are part of the political party you believe in, who you probably voted for, who claim they are for your best interest.

If the problem is so easily fixable, why hasn't it been fixed by literally anyone yet?

I believe it's because the problem has sources you don't see. It has issues with things like American sub-cultures, a lack of homogeneity that many other nations hold, and a structure of cardinal beliefs that simply vary too readily to be stable.

Also the data doesn't exactly show what you're saying anyway. In the US, there are roughly 1,201 police killings, whereas in Brazil it's 6,429. 6,964 in Iran, 2,739 in India, 953 in Venezuela, 670 in South Africa, and hell, Canada is 94, etc. These stats on their own aren't relevant, what matters is the per capita stat.

US: 1,201 killings at a population of 349.7 million is 0.03 per 10,000 Brazil 6,429 killings at a population of 213.9 million is 0.3 per 10,000 Canada 94 killings at a population of 41.8 million is 0.02 per 10,000. That's only 0.01 point away from the US once you calculate the population.

But why do you think that is, exactly? Racism? California, the easily argued most liberal state in the US and also one of the most diverse has the highest ranking incident level of police killings recorded in the country. Then Texas, Georgia, Florida, and Colorado & Arizona.

When calculated for per capita data, Alaska becomes number 1, then New Mexico, then District of Columbia and Rhode Island.

But I digress, you are moving the goalpost here as well. We've now moved onto a discussion about total child deaths by firearms, not police killings. Didn't you want a goal of reducing police killings? Or now is it total killings?

And what does >20x mean, exactly?

In the US, approximately 4,500 kids (all the way up to 17) are killed by firearms each year. But this doesn't paint a good story. Are we talking infants here? Or 16 year old's who join violent gangs?

Here is a breakdown by age as per the Kaiser Family Foundation data:

Ages 1-4: Roughly 0.8 per 100,000. Ages 5-14: Roughly 1.5 per 100,000. Ages 15-19: 16.2 per 100,000.

Of those, roughly 33% are from suicide and about 10% are unintentional or undetermined. Over 80% (let's say 85%) of all of those fatalities are comprised of 12-17 year old males, with black, American Indian/Alaskan Native youth experiencing a disproportionately higher rate.

So it isn't that children are being indiscriminately murdered, it's that of those 4,500, about 90% of those are in that 15-19 bracket, so 4,050 of those 4,500 are 15-19 year old's (with 19 year old's not even legally being children, but we'll laugh that away as propaganda).

And of those 4,050, 33% are from suicide and another 10% are unintentional or undetermined, so that's a total of 43% we can strip off that number, with that 43% being 1,741.5, leaving us with 2,308.5 homicides of the age range of 15-19.

So suddenly we took a number of 4,500 and dropped it to 2,308.5, and I BET you any money that 90% or more of that number are due to some level of gang violence. Mostly males? Mostly 15-19? Mostly non-white? Come now.

We have many different problems to solve now, not just this one overarching blanket problem of kids dying in the US to guns. We have the problem of how do we prevent kids from unintentionally getting a hold of guns and killing themselves or other kids? How do we stop the joining of and violent aspect of gangs? How do we reduce suicidality? This isn't one problem and there is no one solution here, and in some instances, you're simply not going to be able to come up with any solution that is actually going to vastly reduce ANY of these statistics. Maybe you reduce suicidality by 10%, OK, so you've reduced the number of kids dying by gun suicide by a few hundred at the most. And what happens when you try something to reduce gang violence and suicidality rates increase in light of those changes?

The funny thing is these things happen and people boast about how we have to take action now! Yet all the resources of the entirety of the United States hasn't been able to solve these problems. Majoritively these problems slowly solve themselves across time, while others seem to increase. The suicidality rate in the US in 2000 for example was 10.4 per 10K, then up to 14.2 in 2018, and down to 13.7 in 2024, while homicide rates were 6.35 deaths per 100K in 2020, which dipped to 5.9 per 100K in 2024. What exactly would you attribute that drop to? Trump?

And what's your solution, exactly? More gun control? Most of the individuals I talk to about this have no idea these stats but here:

Suicides account for 62% of all gun deaths in the US. 35% are attributed to homicides. 3% are law enforcement or unintentional. Hand guns account for over 50% of all gun homicides. Rifles and shotguns combined only account for 2.6% and 1.4% respectively, which is negligible. The rest of the data is attributed to unspecified/unknown firearms.

But most gun control laws want to outlaw "assault" rifles, which is a misnomer. There's no such thing as an assault rifle. It is illegal to own a fully automatic rifle in the US already, and even if we outlawed all rifles and shotguns entirely, the reduction in killings by those weapons wouldn't even drop by that reported total combined 4%, because some people would break the law.

So outlaw all rifles and shotguns and reduce the homicide rate by 2% with those weapons, whereas those individuals just buy cheaper handguns - which are still legal, and the rate doesn't even drop by that 2% anymore once you account for those who commit homicides anyway and do it with a hand gun instead? So spend billions and impose laws to prohibit two firearm types which has literally zero effect in terms of change of homicide rates?

OK.

So then what's your strategy exactly? Pray the guns away? Tell bad guys to stop being bad? Tell brainwashed kids to stop joining gangs and doing drive by shootings to prove they're part of the group? How pray tell exactly do you plan to change those minds, exactly? Politics?

This is what I find most interesting about the Internet. It gives us an avenue never before seen to hold discussions about things impacting millions on a scale beyond our comprehension and majoritive control yet we think our emotions entitle us to well-wishing for change because it makes us sad.

I wish kids weren't killed either, but humans make terrible choices and sometimes there's not much you can do but have honest conversations with people and do your part to change the lives around you.

Am I saying there's NOTHING that can be done? Of course not, but I think if this were something with an at all easy solution, it'd have been done by now. I think this is an insanely complicated situation of which no single person likely even understands wholly enough to come up with any semblance of a solution that's not going to do as much harm as good, assuming it even works at all.