@d_in_canada@mstdn.social In my personal experience living in the US, it **very** much depends on the part in question. Blue states tend to pretty tolerant overall (there's a reason I like my current area despite it being rural: it may have some light red spots but it's more moderate and laid back than, say, rural Pennsylvania). As an example the areas bordering Ontario are pretty sane in this respect.
As for mass shootings in the US: while the rates are much higher than elsewhere it's still statistically **vanishingly** unlikely to be experienced by any given person in their lives. It's colossally fucked up and a source of many preventable deaths, but being in a mass shooting is not something most people necessarily worry about in public day-to-day lives.
That being said ... stick to states near Canada that aren't red and avoid the Deep South like the plagueland it is. The latter is weird at the best of times and in the case of Texas and Florida is rapidly getting worse.
@mathlover @d_in_canada "statistically vanishingly unlikely to be experienced by any given person in their lives."
While anecdotes aren't data (and you are "mostly" correct), I lived in many areas of the US in my years there and in *every* city I lived in there was at least one mass shooting at some point during my time there. While I wasn't affected directly, it was still too close for comfort.
I used to live in Danbury, CT - 11 miles away from Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT. :(
@KingShawn @d_in_canada@mstdn.social The two metro areas I have lived that I know best (Albany and Rochester) haven't really had a mass shooting of the kind that makes the news. Those cities do have massive amounts of handgun violence and homicides in their poorer neighborhoods, though, which has gone unaddressed for decades (for reasons I could go on an angry tirade about for hours, but which involve local government corruption and decline, state government corruption and indifference, and more than a little racism) but I don't think we've had a mass shooting in my area in my memory.
I currently live where I grew up, a small town of 10,000 or so. The closest thing this area ever had to a mass shooting was a planned shooting, well over a decade ago, at the high school right outside my window here, by some would-be Columbine copycat. Fortunately for everyone else, the would be shooter chickened out and ended his own life in a bathroom stall before he could carry out his plan.
@KingShawn @d_in_canada@mstdn.social Incidentally, and as for how I think crime and violence should be addressed: I think the biggest factor is poverty and economic disparity, and building a reliable social safety net and addressing those disparities would remove the primary reason for those things in the US.
For the kind of mass shooting that makes the news, I think a combination of enforcing red flag laws and mental health access would be a major help, along with some other policies, potentially including well crafted gun restrictions. Unfortunately, our current governor here seems more intent on passing performative gun laws in defiance of legal precedent and case law that get struck down in court and blaming Discord and Twitch for the Buffalo shootings than acknowledging local and state government failures or the neglect of upstate — and the Republican that ran against her this year would of course have been *even worse*.
