Unfortunately, we're going in the opposite direction.
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http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21599349-america...
SWAT teams were deployed about 3,000 times in 1980 but are now used around 50,000 times a year.
New Haven, Connecticut sent a SWAT team to a bar suspected of serving under-age drinkers. That same year heavily-armed police raided barber shops around Orlando, Florida; they said they were hunting for guns and drugs but ended up arresting 34 people for “barbering without a licence”. Maricopa County, Arizona sent a SWAT team into the living room of Jesus Llovera, who was suspected of organising cockfights. Police rolled a tank into Mr Llovera’s yard and killed more than 100 of his birds, as well as his dog.
Federal cash -- first to wage war on drugs, then on terror -- has paid for much of the heavy weaponry used by SWAT teams. Between 2002 and 2011 the Department of Homeland Security disbursed $35 billion in grants to state and local police.
...it is hard to see why Fargo, North Dakota—a city that averages fewer than two murders a year—needs an armoured personnel-carrier with a rotating turret. Keene, a small town in New Hampshire which had three homicides between 1999 and 2012, spent nearly $286,000 on an armoured personnel-carrier known as a BearCat. The local police chief said it would be used to patrol Keene’s “Pumpkin Festival and other dangerous situations”.
No, that's what the legal system is for. The idea of trying to have some sort of legal right to political violence (terrorism) is bonkers. Maybe it comes from the Lost Cause or something.
The AR-15 has been mentioned in a couple of places in this thread. It has rather different connotations in the UK, being one of the favoured weapons of the IRA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_A...
(The Troubles seems like the exact nightmare scenario pro-gun people talk about when they talk of armed resistance to the government firing on demonstrators, coming round to the houses of dissidents in the middle of the night, etc., and yet I've never seen it discussed)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rwandan_Genocide#Rwandan_Patri...
However, I've never understood the logic behind it. Do people really think their handgun is going to help them resist a predator drone strike? The US military is vastly more powerful than any gun owner. Do people really think they can compete? What's more, advocates of legal gun ownership often also push for more military spending (though that might be less true here on HN). Am I missing something here?
Edit: To be clear, I certainly don't mean to be dismissive of legal gun ownership - I tend to argue in favor of it. What I don't understand is the argument that gun ownership curbs government power in any meaningful way. Guns and/or shooting and/or hunting seem like great hobbies.
For a single person, or a small group? I know of no one who believes that.
> The US military is vastly more powerful than any gun owner. Do people really think they can compete?
The US military is composed predominately of gun owners :).
> What's more, advocates of legal gun ownership often also push for more military spending (though that might be less true here on HN). Am I missing something here?
From my perspective, this is almost pure cognitive dissonance. They also tend to support things like NSA spying and restrictions on effective encryption.
Fair enough. Neither do I. I meant it as a rhetorical question because it's such an absurd thing to think, but I realize that wasn't necessarily clear.
> The US military is composed predominately of gun owners :).
So is the thinking that people in the military would disobey commands and join the uprising? (Or are you being entirely facetious, like the smile might suggest?)
> From my perspective, this is almost pure cognitive dissonance.
Exactly. But there are presumably smart people who make this argument. There's got to some kind of reasoning behind it. Right?
Yes. tl;have work to do: The knowledge of the potential for large portions of the population to resist oppression by use of small arms is sufficient to deter governments from radical, direct assaults on human rights.
No it isn't; the US has massive gun ownership and direct assaults on human rights. Especially of nonwhite people. The US never really "signed up to" human rights in the modern (postwar) sense.
Various insurgencies have given the US military a run for their money, even with all the advanced weaponry at its disposal. I think that a similar insurgency of Americans on American soil would be even harder for the US military do deal with than those foreign ones.
No, but as a group the people of the US would most certainly defeat the US military. As others pointed out much less armed and smaller groups have held the military at bay, and for long periods of time. But there are two much bigger factors in US military vs US people.
1) Telling soldiers to attack their own people is not going to be as smooth as telling to attack foreigners, especially in any size.
2) The biggest issue by far is that the US military needs a massive functioning economy to provide support for them to function any length of time. Look how much war costs - that represents acquisitions, salaries for civilians, replacement, etc. If they disrupted their own economic base they'd fall pretty quickly.
So comparing a handgun to a drone is shortsighted. In reality the people are a massive check on the current form of the military.
It can do some damage to the person flying the drone. Or maybe "right to bear arms" will include the right to own our own drones?
What you are actually missing is that guns are part of (some American's) tribal culture. The move to ban guns is mainly, at this point in time, a front in the culture wars. (Historically it was also about disarming blacks in order to empower terrorists.) There are many cultural artifacts and other enjoyable practices which kill people; Britain's drinking culture, gay sex (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/statistics.html), etc.
Gun control is mainly about attacking one of the cherished cultural values of our tribal enemies, in much the same way that Bush-era "faith based $X" or opposing various gay things is.
And I guess experienced combatants with surface to air missiles are "regular people with guns".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Hollywood_shootout [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_FBI_Miami_shootout
So I don't see it changing any time soon.
In the US most criminals who are armed have inexpensive, unreliable handguns. An armed criminal in the UK (while less common) would seem more likely to have something like a submachinegun or a machine pistol. If the penalty is severe and the gun is rare and expensive... why go through all that trouble and risk for a .32 revolver, when you could just as easily obtain a Skorpion?
UK armed robberies are often [citation needed] carried out with imitation or deactivated firearms, as the robbers neither need nor want to kill anyone and it's considerably cheaper, easier to get hold of, and less illegal.
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/htt... page 6 has a breakdown graph into shotguns, handguns, imitation (includes air and BB), and "other".
Someone carrying a cheap pistol is still more heavily armed than someone carrying brass knuckles.
I'm not going to go find the facts and figures, still, I'm pretty sure that the incidence of gun crime is higher in the US, pointing out that gun buying criminals in the UK probably buy nicer guns doesn't change that.
There are likely a greater portion of unarmed criminals in the UK. Since their potential victims are also unarmed, that means that are at the mercy of physically dominating criminals. I fail to see how this is an improvement.
> Someone carrying a cheap pistol is still more heavily armed than someone carrying brass knuckles.
Practically speaking, a person with a 6" knife can do far more damage to a person and have a higher likelihood of inflicting a mortal wound than someone with a .38 revolver.
> I'm not going to go find the facts and figures, still, I'm pretty sure that the incidence of gun crime is higher in the US, pointing out that gun buying criminals in the UK probably buy nicer guns doesn't change that.
Yeah, me neither, and rates don't really factor into this thread. My entire point is that more restrictions means that it's in the best interest of an armed criminal to obtain the most effective firearm possible.
Say 1 guy uses a legitimate high caliber machine gun to commit some crime, is that the only crime that gets used when describing how criminals are armed in that country?
More than half of the firearms offences in England&Wales involved the use of air weapons, a substantial number of the rest are imitation weapons, and only 12 of over 8,000 recorded violent crimes involved a machine gun (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160105160709/htt... table 3.02)
A study by the police of the gun crime market (http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20110218135832/htt...) concluded that automatic weapons were mostly used in gang warfare and as a status symbol; they're more expensive and the study noted that ammunition for all weapons was in short supply, which would make a bullet-hungry gun less attractive for other criminal usage (which is mainly to threaten).
With an imitation gun going for £20 and an automatic costing £1000, why would you choose the real gun to commit a robbery?
edit: I changed 'weaker' to 'softer', because it's a stronger claim, it's likely to stand up to scrutiny, it's almost a banality.
> There are likely a greater portion of unarmed criminals in the UK. Since their potential victims are also unarmed, that means that they are at the mercy of physically dominating criminals.
It's certainly true that most criminals in the UK are unarmed, but the "physically dominating" bit is way off the mark because most criminals are not physically dominating - anyone can be a criminal - the factors driving people towards crime have nothing to do with physical stature. This means that the majority of criminals are actually not particularly threatening, I have a friend who was mugged and simply picked up his assailant and threw him over a wall, another just laughed in the face of the teenager who threatened to mug him and walked off. Pepper spray and some knowledge of self defence will make you well prepared to handle the vast majority of criminals in the UK.
> Practically speaking, a person with a 6" knife can do far more damage to a person and have a higher likelihood of inflicting a mortal wound than someone with a .38 revolver.
First of all, knifes are also tightly controlled in the UK, though obviously smaller knifes are not particularly hard to come by. No doubt a skilful knife wielder can do a lot of damage to a person, but most criminals also are not skilful. At all. An inept gun wielder of any physical stature can effortlessly kill someone from yards away, in an instant. It's so easy, a toddler can do it. Also it's a lot harder to accidentally stab someone than to accidentally shoot them. Furthermore, those so inclined can (and do) learn how to fendoff a knife attack - you can't do that with a gun attack.
> my entire point is that more restrictions means that it's in the best interest of an armed criminal to obtain the most effective firearm possible.
That's completely backwards. You could hold up pretty much anywhere in the UK using a fake gun or an air rifle. There's absolutely no need for criminals to have actual weapons when their victims and the police too, are unarmed, because they pose no threat. Contrast this with the non-restrictive environment in the US where an unarmed or poorly armed criminal risks being shot by their victim, a responder, or the police. I live in the US now and my local ATM has an armed guard for crying out loud. That's an incredible incentive for criminals to turn up very well armed.
> rates don't really factor in to this thread
Oh but they do, because criminals with guns don't just wave them around for show: they use them. The per-capita homicide rate in the US is 5x higher than the UK and that difference is almost entirely composed of gun crime [1]. Take a moment to think about that.
So in conclusion, the U.K. is much, much safer because criminals don't have access to lethal weapons that are effortlessly easy to use and the statistics spell this out as clear as day.
Is this because of the accessibility of firearms or other factors (specifically inequality and poverty)? While it's true that the US has a higher per capita rate of homicide, the impacts are not evenly distributed across society. Most Americans live in safe communities with crimes rates similar to other OECD countries. Even within cities with high rates of crime, homicide is usually restricted to a small geographic area.
What complete crap.
The vast majority of deaths from firearms result from handguns not AR15s. You dont have criminals in Level 4 hard plates roaming around down town LA with shoulder fired rockets.
The majority of US gun murder is one guy with a handgun shooting another person, which won't ever make national headlines
Your comment about chemical safety and tools bring up a very good point - a gun is just a tool, like a woodchipper, and while I wouldn't let my kid play with a woodchipper, I've never asked if there's one available at her friends house.
I'll freely admit that I'm inconsistent on this, and my attitude is based in part on my general anti-gun stance, and the easy moral superiority I feel when asking the question.
But seriously, my 12 year old self and friends never treated guns with the respect that we would a woodchipper. Possibly too many TV shows where guns were just bang bang bang, or that _Fargo_ hadn't come out yet.
The whole point of the 2nd Amendment was that the country was founded by taking up arms against tyranny, and the framers knew that the new government they were forming could just as easily lean towards tyranny.
Well, we're here. The police are no longer community organizations, rather they're full military units charged with waging war against the citizens they purport to protect.
Personally, I lean towards the side of always needing guns available, as a check. Quote nukes and F-16s all you like, civil uprisings are much more likely in a country where people are armed, no matter how poorly in comparison to the military.
That said, as I see tyranny increasing and police militarization increasing there is no part of me willing to now part with the rights I have left.
All that said, guns are not safe, they are for killing. The woman quoted in the article got lax in a place that requires constant vigilance (gun safety). One of the biggest problems with our gun culture is that the divide runs along the "don't take our guns!" line, and rational discussion, where we can admit the truth about the dangers ownership presents aren't heard.
Yes - but this is not a good thing! It's a bug not a feature!
I started this thread mentioning Dunblane, but perhaps I should have mentioned the Easter Risings and the Good Friday Agreement instead. The UK had an armed uprising for decades in Northern Ireland and it was terrible. I can't seem to get any of the guns-are-important-for-fighting-the-government advocates to engage with this and look at what actually happened when people responded to civil and human rights violations with AR-15s and Semtex.
From the point of view of many Americans, not only is it a feature, but the defining feature of a free state.
Then again, many Americans take to heart Jefferson's line about the 'Tree of Liberty needing to be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants' without realizing what he actually meant by referring to both patriots and tyrants as 'its natural manure.'
Now one might argue that the "primary purpose" for them is their safety and not killing, but no, it's not. That is assuming safety by creating a 'threat of getting killed' to the opponent.
I know this punishment is little harsh (and should be decided on per case basis based on the level of negligence) - but we should also agree that if there's no punishment whatsoever - this will continue happening. Mass killings is a real problem that needs to be solved, and most of them get access to guns in their mom's drawers or something like that.
A significant number of guns used in crimes are stolen, so its too bad that more gun owners don't believe in secure storage like you do. I don't get your "slippery slope" comment, could you expand on this more?
edit: if you were a business that works with poisons and you did not provide adequate security measures, you would be so fined if someone steals the poisons. Then why you as individual wouldn't be responsible for the same thing.
And yet when I've been in Europe I've seen plenty of police and/or paramilitary units carrying submachine guns, something I never saw here in the U.S. even after 11 September.
They were there, mainly at the airport. Not in recent years, and probably not very long after 2001, but I certainly saw armed military at the U. S. airports for six months or more after 09/11/01.
Conversely if you want to see the use of the AR-15 in public artwork, you should go to Northern Ireland.
In Switzerland I once saw a conscript get on a train and put his rifle in the luggage rack exactly as if it were an umbrella. But Switzerland is different (guns are mandatory, ammunition heavily controlled, the people are the "militia" and support the government, and the whole country is a mountain fortress).
Let's talk about basic human needs. Food, water, Air, and to a lesser extent clothing and shelter. You don't need a gun for any of those things. Sure a gun can help with food, but guess what, you don't even need to eat meat, there are so many other sources of food.
So no, you don't need a gun, and you sure as hell don't need a "semi-automatic pistol".
From a more practical perspective, what are you going to do about it? Are you proposing to take arms from the American people by force? How many deaths are acceptable to make that happen?
To be clear, I don't mean the above as a threat or anything of the sort. I'm merely pointing out the certain result of a policy of disarmament, and the hypocrisy of using force to render a population defenseless.
There are negative rights and positive rights. We all could learn a little more about them. See 2.1.8 @ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/rights/#2.1
To the extent that libertarians believe that taxes are extracted by force (I usually see this written as "violence") then yes. If each gun carried a tax sufficient to mitigate it's societal cost, and if each cartridge were an order of magnitude more expensive, we would be done with this issue in 100 years.
It will take a long time, but it won't get done if we don't start.
(Preventively - yes, you can 3D print yourself a handgun, and likely blow your hand off, and reload your own bullets. At that point your personal time doing that work is a proxy for the taxes you would have payed.)
But it looks just as feasible from an ideological point of view as ending white supremacism in the US.
Tell that to the president and secret service.
EDIT: The purpose of the comment above is to point out the prescription above isn't a black and white issue. At least not if you are thinking about the real world we live in.
"nobody needs a gun"
This is a statement that for anyone to take seriously requires you to say your age and approx geographic location as it clearly is informing your belief.
For example, 1911 Turkey, 1929 Soviet Russia, 1938 Germany, 1964 Guatemala, and 1970 Uganda.
I'm sure plenty of citizens would have preferred to have had a gun in the years shortly after the bans.
I'm a gun owner and this is the key point for me. No politician is in a position to tell me I don't need my semi-automatic pistol if every day I see a patrol car go by my house with 2 fully automatic AR-15s locked between the front seats and my local police department owns an armoured vehicle. If you really think you have a plan for getting rid of guns for bad guys as well as me, prove it. Demilitarize the police at the same time.
edit: To be fair, I think such a plan is possible, but it requires fixing other problems that too many politicians are afraid to touch. It's obviously been done successfully elsewhere, but only when cultures and geographies were more ready for it. I enjoy shooting and prefer to own a gun, but I'd give them up for a plan I thought would work. I just haven't seen one proposed in the US yet.