I'm just the messenger here, but the canned counter argument is that criminals don't obey gun laws and won't be much deterred by an arms ban.

Yet it seems to work in other western countries.

In 2015:

Killings by officers in US: 1140 Killings by officers in England: 3

Deaths of police by shootings in US: 41 Deaths of police by shootings in England: 0 (about 1 every other year)

Population of England: 54 million Population of USA: 325 million

England has 7% of the deaths per capita compared to the USA. I couldn't find data on Germany, but I suspect it's similar.

In general, I think the idea of having people being able to defend themselves against the government is a good idea, and people having the right to have guns was a way to achieve that. But with the amount of power the government has nowadays, I don't think it's a justification anymore.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc... https://www.odmp.org/search/year?year=2015 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_police_officer... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

> data on Germany

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_firearm_use_by_country#... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforc...

Overall, in Central Europe the differences in fatal police action per capita is essentially noise.

Millions of Europeans were murdered by their governments within living memory, with records of similar atrocities going back hundreds of years.

Just because there's a temporary lull doesn't mean that the problem has gone away permanently, yo.

> Millions of Europeans were murdered by their governments within living memory, with records of similar atrocities going back hundreds of years.

Once your country has been around for a bit longer, you will also have a long history with plenty of atrocities to point back at. How many native Americans were killed during the "colonization" of the American continent? Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?

> Once your country has been around for a bit longer,

With the sole exception of the U.K., our government has been around longer than every other representative democracy on the face of the earth. Note that France is on its fifth attempt at a republic. We won't even mention Germany here.

> Or do these not count because they hadn't been US citizens back then?

They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules, just like the atrocities that the European governments perpetrated on every other continent of the world.

> With the sole exception of the U.K., our government has been around longer than every other representative democracy.

I was talking about countries, not governments, these two are not the same, even tho the parent comment would like to pretend they are.

In that regard, it's still very dishonest to compare Europe, with its often centuries-old animosities between countries in a very small space, to the short history of the USA being a thing, in which it had mostly only had to deal with Mexico and Cannada in terms of "neighbor conflicts".

> They were mostly killed by European colonists operating under European rules

That's even more dishonest, it's not like all that changed and native Americans were recognized as such, as soon as the US got founded, and everything was perfect after that.

The US has the luxury of being rather isolated, thus the vast majority of conflicts can easily be externalized, usually to a completely different continent, with barely any real consequences for the US population. It's for that very same reason that the US been involved in some kind of "war" [0] pretty much constantly in its 200+ years of existence.

It's for exactly that reason that so many US Americans have been a-okay with these armed conflicts, as the vast majority of them never hit close to home. No US American alive today does know what it's like to have militarized conflict in, or at, their countries borders. Which probably also explains, in part, the massive overreaction to 9/11.

Now you can argue not all of them are "real wars" but rather "interventions" or "anti-terror missions" or whatnot, but let's be real here: That's simply schematics to keep on selling this state of affairs to a US population which is starting to be pretty fed up with sending their kids overseas to die for often very questionable reasons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

Protection from the government was justifiable before, but now that governments have gained so much power, guns in the hands of the citizenry aren't going to stop them.

So what's the point of still letting citizens keep them?

And those European governments don't exist today, do they ?Food for thought.

Well, apparently they still do summary executions in Germany:

http://www.sueddeutsche.de/bayern/polizist-erschiesst-mann-e...

https://www.innsalzach24.de/innsalzach/region-burghausen/bur...

Don't run away from German cops, they can legally shoot you!

Here's the thing: every time a questionable police shooting happens, it makes national headlines. It's something that happens every few years, not every other day. And just to be clear: that doesn't make it ok or not a problem.

Am I missing something, but do the wordings in this article not indicate that the German government considers it OK for cops to shoot a suspect that is running away?

My German isn’t very good so there’s a good chance I might be missing something.

"Defending from the Government" is a myth. As long as you don't have enough supporters you are going to lose. Remember American Civil War for example. Did the guns help South to defend their "rights"?

Now compare other restrictions on liberties those countries impose and might be causing co-linear effects. Start with immigration policies, drug trade, and bordering countries.

This is the worst argument against anything, because it only logically follows that criminals won't care about ANY laws and therefore everything should be legal.

It doesn't matter whether they care about the law or not, it's about making it harder for them to get a gun regardless, and being able to confiscate them if we catch them. It worked in Australia.

"It worked in Australia."

And it didn't work in Mexico, Honduras, or Nicaragua, all of which have more in common with the United States than Australia does, and all of which have a) strict gun control laws and b) breathtakingly high murder rates.

> And it didn't work in Mexico, Honduras, or Nicaragua, all of which have more in common with the United States than Australia does ...

...The things some people say to justify guns...

Yes but are those murders by members of crime organisations or by some random that had a mental breakdown and easy access to his or a family member's gun?

Most of those murders in the US fall under the former category, too.

Interesting admission that the US is more like a third world country there.

You really think that the US has more in common with countries where gangsters murder with impunity, and paramilitary police death squads conduct extrajudicial killings?

They can be deterred by an arms ban, just like how it's almost impossible to buy a kinder egg with toy inside the US. See China, Japan, and countless other gun-free societies.

However gun culture and the prevalence of gun manufacturers in the US may make it practically impossible in the near term, but it definitely is possible.