So basically a small minority of the world's population?

I guess the fact that bullying happens everywhere shouldn't be too much of a surprise to me, since we're all human after all. But how about official reaction and policies? Do other places (esp. developed nations) handle it as poorly as the US does, where victims are either ignored or worse punished by the school administrators?

Yep, as with so many things, "the truth is in the middle".

No, at the time Intel was trying to trim down as they had overextended themselves and too many unprofitable departments. I worked in that department shortly before it was sold off; right before that, the department head "resigned" on the heels of very poor performance. Around that time, they also got rid of their consumer products division which made wireless keyboards and mice and a crappy digital camera. Not long after, they went through a big downsizing called "SET" where they just got rid of people all over the company. They went from around 100k employes down to around 80k in just a couple of years.

Well yeah, your mileage may vary. I had a very good experience in a Catholic school for a while, but that school had a female principle who didn't (AFAIK) have any kids. (No, she wasn't a nun, nor were any other teachers, this was in the 80s, after those days.)

However, disproving that doesn't prove the opposite, i.e. that mass gun ownership reduces gun deaths or stops crime.

No, it doesn't, and I never said it did. I was just attacking a common talking point for the anti-gun crowd.

Their gun related suicide rate is one of the highest in Europe.

Well that's no surprise. I'm surprised actually that it isn't the highest in Europe. Maybe the good economy (versus places in Eastern Europe) makes less people suicidal. But is the rest of Europe suicide-free? What are the rates, after you add together both successful and unsuccessful suicides? Having a gun available just makes it more likely you'll succeed; other methods aren't generally as sure-fire (pardon the pun).

One common argument made for gun ownership is criminals such as burglars won't break into a house with an armed owner yet burglaries are rising in Switzerland.

Burglars, by definition, are people who avoid confrontation. They look for patterns, to see when a house is unoccupied, and break in then so they can steal loot. The people steal face-to-face are called "robbers", or possibly "home invaders". Are there a lot of home invasions in Switzerland? I suspect not. Lots of places have relatively high property crime rates (or just petty crime), with very low violent crime rates.

Citation needed on the "playing cow boy" bit. Yes, gang violence is definitely a big contributor here. They don't seem to have much of a problem with that in Switzerland either. But gang violence never hits the news; shooting sprees do, and every time one happens, there's renewed calls for gun bans, new gun restrictions, etc. Some thugs shooting at each other is generally ignored, unless someone catches it on a security camera, and even there people just laugh at it.

I recall one while I lived there where their was a shooting over a girlfriend;

"A shooting over a girlfriend" does not sound like a "shooting spree" to me, one in which dozens of people are killed. Was this a mass-murder that started as some crime of passion, or was this just someone shooting some other person or two? Murders happen everywhere; if someone used a fully-automatic rifle in an angry rage over a girlfriend, and only killed one or two people (girlfriend and her new boyfriend?), that's not exactly an indictment of automatic weapons. Anyone could easily do the same with a kitchen knife.

Anyway, yes, their rules are different, but that wasn't my point. My point was that one of the main arguments trotted out by the anti-gun crowd is that proliferation of weapons necessarily leads to huge number of gun deaths. Switzerland disproves that.

Personally, I'd be happy to adopt the Swiss model. Considering the country is at #1 or #2 for the highest standard of living in the world, they're obviously doing things right. However, there's no way we could just adopt their laws wholesale, because we don't have to right culture to make that stuff work here. The reason countries like Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries are so great is because of their cultures; their laws and policies are a byproduct of that.

The government of Syria probably thought the same thing. Their civil war doesn't show any signs of letting up.

Hellfire missiles only work if you don't mind wiping out entire cities. If you're going to do that, you might as well use nukes. If the US nukes its own cities, then what's the point of having a government any more?

And how is an aircraft carrier going to threaten someplace like North Dakota anyway? Fighter planes don't have that kind of range.

They're using artillery like that in Syria while we write this. Their civil war has been raging for how long now? With no sign of ending?

Yes, they have regulations, but they also have easily-available automatic rifles everywhere. Yes, it's illegal to actually walk around in public with a loaded rifle (unloaded is perfectly OK), and it's illegal to open your government-issued box of ammunition unless you've been authorized to, however if someone wanted to go on a shooting spree, that's not going to stop them. The anti-gun people always make the claim that easily availability of high-powered guns is what drives gun crimes. However, here in the US, we do NOT have easy access to automatic weapons; our AR-15s are all semi-automatic. In Switzerland, most houses have a fully-automatic assault rifle, plus ammunition. If you don't have one, it'd be easy to break in and steal one. Despite that, when was the last time you heard of a shooting spree in Switzerland? Never.

Yep, and this means only the military and police would be allowed to own guns. The military keeps all its guns locked away in armories unless people are actually deployed, or training, or whatever, so that leaves the police, who would still have personally-owned guns they would carry around not only while uniformed, but the rest of the time too.

And considering how prolific police abuse in the USA is these days, that's a pretty scary thought.

Sorry, but that one has fallen too. There was a case not long ago of cops in Henderson, Nevada beating and arresting a guy and killing his dog because he refused to allow them to take over his house for use in a drug bust. He sued them for Third-Amendment violation among many other things. Of course, the case doesn't seem to have gone anywhere, as is normal with police-abuse cases these days. The cops are out of control in this country, and are probably some of the worst police in the world.

You don't think the government of China has it in for the people of Tibet? Or that the government of Sudan had it in for the people of what is now South Sudan? Or that the Taliban (the legitimate government of Afghanistan at one point) had it in for many of their citizens? Or that Saddam Hussein had it in for the Kurds and Shia in Iraq?

There's countless examples throughout history of governments "having it in for" various minority groups in that country.

And of course there's the cases of outright invasions, like when Germany invaded Poland or France, or when Russia invaded Ukraine. Invasions are a lot less attractive when the entire population is armed.

You also forgot about Switzerland, where every militia-aged male is armed with an automatic rifle. There don't seem to be any problems with shooting sprees there.

Yeah, there's even another gun-rights organization for the people who think the NRA isn't extreme enough: the GOA (Gun Owners of America). If you think the NRA is too extreme, you haven't seen anything.