Still Think This is ‘Uniquely American’?

Mass shootings are a uniquely American phenomenon.

How many times have you heard that nonsense? It’s been uttered so often that many people don’t even raise an eyebrow. If you repeat a lie enough, people accept it as the truth, and this is most definitely a lie.

Or, in the words of some out there, an “untruth.”

They want you to think it’s uniquely American because there’s something else that’s uniquely American: our right to keep and bear arms and how we value that right. By spinning things so that we think this only happens here, anti-gunners hope to trick people into giving up their guns.

But it’s not uniquely American.

Take the essentially gun-free nation of Sweden, for a moment.

Swedish police have arrested a teen suspect after three youths aged from 15 to 20 were killed in a shooting at a hair salon, authorities said Wednesday, amid rising concern over gang violence in the Scandinavian nation.

Tuesday’s shooting took place in broad daylight a day before the Valborg spring festival in the university city of Uppsala, which draws more than 100,000 people for bonfires and celebrations, many of them students.

“One person has been arrested suspected of murder,” police commander Erik Akerlund told reporters Wednesday, with prosecutors saying the suspect was 16.

Akerlund said the identities of the victims had not been “100%” confirmed, the BBC reported.

Uppsala is the home to a couple of notorious gangs, and the teen suspect, a Somali immigrant, was brought to Sweden by his mother, who worried about her son getting involved in gangs in their native country.

Clearly, that plan didn’t work.

Three people are dead in a public place. Depending on who you talk to, that qualifies as a mass shooting.

This is a teen who got a gun in a country with very restrictive gun control laws, then killed three people in a public place in broad daylight.

Maybe it’s just me, but this sounds like the kind of thing that supposedly only happens here.

It doesn’t.

But the truth is that the media doesn’t harp on these shootings like it might something like FSU. They’ll harp on a shooting where two people are killed domestically, but then largely ignore something international.

Some of that is to be expected. Their audience is US-based and cares more about what’s happening here than in Sweden. Again, understandable.

However, there’s also the fact that they like to push a narrative, and a Swedish shooting like this kind of shatters it. 

In fact, it proves our point that bad people will still do bad things, and criminals will still find ways to get guns. Sweden doesn’t boast over half a million guns in private hands by any stretch of the imagination, yet a Somali immigrant teenager got his hands on one just the same.

None of this is “uniquely American” in any way. It happens everywhere.

They just want you to think it’s a purely domestic phenomenon because they’ll you’ll be more open to giving up your guns.

Well, not you, but your neighbors will.

If you’re here, you’re like me in that you’re not giving them up for anything.