The USA can't put away their guns like Canada and New Zealand, England and Australia

American exceptionalism. The idea that the United States is inherently different from other countries. Its proponents argue that the values, political system, and historical development of the U.S. are unique in human history.

It's an extrapolation of a concept called Terminal Uniqueness, which is the false belief that your experiences are unlike those of other anyone else. And we really believe this. Ask a citizen to finish the line "America is..." and you're likely to get all the ways we're set apart from other nations. Except we aren't. All our perceived chart-toppers - education, industry, tech, freedom, healthcare - are actually buried in the middle-top of the field. We're not all that different, after all.

They say we're ocean-bound and alienated from Europe and other nations, yet we impost tariffs to the neighbor to the north and what we do southbound is just ridiculous. And lands like New Zealand and Australia are remote as well and NZ is an example on most every front. We're not the biggest nation, the most diverse, the most homogenous. We enjoy no special status, climate, geography or history. We're a fledgling nation in the history of the world; to think we somehow formed in a manner previously unseen is naïve at best and hubris at worst.

We believe gun reform won't work because we want it so much not to work. Compromise in America these days is seen as weakness, caving, giving in. And people are making money hand over fist in this industry. If we don't care about the lives lost for oil, chemicals, for alcohol and drugs, then why would we cry over the deaths of those we were never even going to meet?

This is today's America. This is how we're exceptional.