this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
361 points (96.2% liked)
Asklemmy
43858 readers
1993 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I guess it's faster to write, so people started to say it as well.
How often do You have to use the phrase "gun shot wound" in everyday speak? Found the American.
In law enforcement? Probably every day, yeah. The average person, surprisingly not all that often. In fact, law enforcement probably uses it hundreds of times a day, and more importantly writes and reads it hundreds of times a day, thus the acronym.
Even that is a very American way of thinking. The number of gun shot wounds a police officer sees in the US is way higher than in comparable European countries.
I could not find exact data for wounds, but if you take gun fatalities as placeholder (I am sure they are connected) here:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/homicide-rates-from-firearms?tab=chart&country=AUS~USA~DEU~CAN~FRA~ESP~ITA~JPN
You can see that precovid (2019) in the US there were 63x more gun fatalities than in Germany per person. In an average 1 million person city the police in the US has to deal with about 32 gun fatalities. In Germany that city has 1 every other year, in Australia it is 1-2 every year.
While the fictional US police department has every two weeks one or more fatality, the fictional German and Australian see it once a year.
So the frequency of it occuring and it being written about is way higher in the US than in comparable countries.
(Of course the comparing the amount of firearm fatalities between countries is not an exact replacement for gun shot wounds, but it should be close)