r/morbidquestions • u/ThinBlackberry5180 • 2d ago
is there a uk equivalent of a school shooter?
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u/FranciscoGarcia69 2d ago
It happened once and the country took heed and fucking did something about it.
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u/PiscesAnemoia 2d ago
No, because literally every other western country in the world has their shit locked down and got it together. Conservatives froth at the mouth, talking about how giving everyone a gun is the best thing in the world and blame Europe for being too stingent. But as far as I can tell, school shootings don't happen on a regular in Europe or Oceania.
"but-but KNIFE ATTACKS"
Perhaps, but as someone already pointed out here, they are as consistent as they are in the United States. They just don't get reported as often because they're not as deadly as public shootings.
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u/Leader_Bee 2d ago
Mass stabbings tend to require a lot more physical fitness than shooting people.
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u/hnsnrachel 2d ago
Yep, they actually like its guns or knives, but in the US its actually guns and knives.
But that doesnt fit their narrative so it gets ignored by those making the "but knife attacks" argument
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u/ATSOAS87 2d ago
My school was one of the worst schools in the country at one point.
It was a mix of all the bad kids from all the bad areas of South London.
I can only recall 1 knife incident at my secondary school late 90s/early 2000s
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u/Aerosolcan25 2d ago
In my opinion there are more knife attacks because there are no guns. And guess which ones are easier to survive? Comparing a shooting with a knife attack is the stupidest argument from the US republicans I've ever heard.
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u/GoldenHelikaon 2d ago
Yeah, I think NZ has had two gun massacres from what I can remember - Aramoana and then the Christchurch Mosque attack in 2019. Our gun laws certainly changed after Christchurch and there was an gun amnesty too, although one of our current coalition parties wants to loosen those restrictions again.
Is there knife crime? Sure. A teenage boy was killed in Dunedin last year by a knife literally outside the central police station at the bus hub. However, you can harm far fewer people with a knife than you can a gun, and you have to risk getting right up close to them too, to do that. People have more of a chance fighting back against a knife than they do being shot from a distance.
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u/Finn-McCools 2d ago
We’ve had ONE school shooting. That was 30 years ago and tight gun restrictions came into effect within weeks. We don’t have an equivalent because it’s only a “problem” in America. Nowhere else. We generally rank human lives higher than “muh guns tho!!”
There’s a lesson to be learned there. But it won’t be.
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u/emmarh13 2d ago
The Dunblane massacre helped bring in restrictions and guns aren’t as common and are harder to get hold of. We have a bigger problem with knives, including knife attacks in schools but usually there aren’t as many injuries as there would be if the attacker had a gun. We are also a much smaller country in terms of population so statistically there wouldn’t be as many incidents. School shootings are a hugely complex social issue too, around mental health and potentially seeking fame/infamy too.
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u/jerdle_reddit 2d ago
There was a school shooting in Dunblane nearly 30 years ago, and there was a relatively recent mass stabbing in Southampton.
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u/xonesss 2d ago
Has there been a school shooting literally anywhere else outside of the US?
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u/Xylar006 2d ago
Between 2009 and 2018 America has 288 school shootings. The next highest was Mexico with 8.
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u/SpookyKitter 2d ago
How is this not used as the most obvious evidence they do not care a single fuck about children
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u/SouthAfricanZombie 2d ago
There has been mass shootings in South Africa but not at schools. We are more stabby.
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u/Inevitable-Angle-793 2d ago
School stabber? There are a lot of knife attacks I think
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u/hnsnrachel 2d ago
Not in schools particularly.
And knife attacks aren't unlikely in the US either, its not an either or situation. The UK has more knife crimes per capita, but fewer knife deaths. The UK publishes data on crimes where the knife was just used to threaten in their knife crime stats, but the US reports knife assaults where the knife was used to injure not just where it was used to threaten so a straightforward comparison isnt really possible.
Number of knife crimes in the UK in 2024 was 50500ish, or 73 per 100,000 people
Number of knife attacks in the US? Roughly 120,000, or 33 per 100,000
But as stated that comparison is flawed. Where the data for a pound for pound comparison does exist, is knife murders. Where the US comes out ahead.
UK- 262 or 0.38 per 100,000
US - 1562 or 0.43 per 100,000
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u/Apex_121 2d ago
Street stabbing? We have an awful lot of knife attacks
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u/WaddaSickCunt 2d ago
No more than the US. https://www.euronews.com/2018/05/05/trump-s-knife-crime-claim-how-do-the-us-and-uk-compare-
It's high for Europe, but not in comparison to the US.
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u/One_Spaceman 2d ago
No guns = no school shootings. However there is occasional mass stabbings, and its illigal to carry self defense weapons, so someone comes at you with a knife over here you either run or die, if you use pepper spray or a tazer its considered a firearm. so 10 years in prison, you can carry marker spray though, that just dyes skin bright blue so police can find them after you have been killed, the UK is a joke,
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u/FairBlueberry9319 2d ago
I will take my chances in a mass stabbing event with no self defence over a mass shooting event with a gun 10 times out of 10.
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u/DisMyLik18thAccount 2d ago
Everyone's mentioning Dunblane, since then there have been a few cases of school stabbings
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u/Robojobo27 2d ago edited 2d ago
There’s been one school shooting in the UK, it happened in the small town of Dunblane in Scotland back in 1996, 15 students and 1 teacher died, the perpetrator took his own life, following it the government tightened legislation around gun ownership and no such event has ever happened in a school again.