dilletante

In the wake of the most recent horrific school shooting, I'm seeing a lot of "only in America..." "The US is the only country where this regularly happens/where access to guns is so easy/etc..." tweets.

Is that really true? I'd've thought, even if you only counted just countries where schools were regularly shot up by the American military...

Eh, maybe I'm thinking of weddings and funerals.

But my point is, I used to always see these sorts of comments with a nod towards the set they were quantifying over: "the only first-world country," "the only major industrialized nation," etc.

And I get the idea: you want to compare against countries the US believes itself to be like. (Or, hell, countries where you can get reliable data.)

Isn't the implicit "the only country that matters where..." kind of colonialist bullshit though?