* Own a gun and kill oneself with it. The primary risk factor being depression, not the gun.
* Own a gun and be part of a criminal organization. The primary risk factor being rival criminal organizations, not the gun.
https://www.ohchr.org/EN/UDHR/Documents/UDHR_Translations/en...
Article 4: No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.
I could continue pasting the remainder of the document, but I would argue that the ability to defend oneself (from the State, or other individuals) is the fundamental human right. Without it, all other rights are null and void. Gun ownership is the final fallback for securing our human rights.
That’s just like the militia running around in the woods training just in case they have to fight against the government. The same government that spends billions on weapons every year. If the government wants to impose martial law - like the nutcases including Chuck Norris thought they wanted to do a few years ago - the “militia” wasn’t going to be able to stop them.
No, it didn't. The guerilla forces that were successful in Afghanistan has outside state sponsorship and supply and intervention by global or regional powers on their behalf (advisers, intelligence, special ops support, etc.) That's true of the Mujahideen fighting the USSR (backed by the USA, Pakistan, and others), and true of the Taliban/al-Qaeda associated groups which were fighting the internationally-recognized government (backed by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.)
No, I think the pre-breakdown distribution of light civilian arms isn't how you win that fight.
Keep in mind the 25 million ex military in the US know how to run that gear. Any conflict in this country will be a mess.
Your SWAT example is great: how many guys are on the SWAT team kicking the door to get one guy? 4? 6? 10?
What about an actual military operation going door to door? Squad size is 10? 20?
Government violence, when directed against you is nearly impossible to resist. But that's not the same as government violence directed against an armed populace.
History is flush with examples of failures of superior military power to subdue a population that actively resists.
Individual citizens trying to fight cops with firepower is never going to work. Cops have much better equipment than you're going to have, and have the backing of the entire government.
Unless you're literally planning on staging a coup, arming yourself to fight cops is not a viable strategy.
On the other hand, if we disarm everybody, then we don't need to have such over-militarized cops either, and maybe we can finally get to a place where cops no longer automatically reach for their gun (or even carry one) and therefore stop routinely murdering citizens.
Govts should fear the citizens, not the other way around.
Tyranny is a thing you want to avoid
A great way to get a head or spine injury is to own a ladder.
A great way to maim yourself is to own a circular saw.
A lot of popular sports have a substantial risk of very predictable injuries, from CTE (caused by repeated head trauma) to joint damage.
People accept all sorts of risks from sports activities or (mis)use of all kinds of tools. When the subject turns to guns there's this uncontrollable fear reaction certain people have and want to get rid of the object. They don't want guns. They don't want their family to have guns. They don't want their friends to have guns. They don't want anyone to have guns. Guns are evil and must be eradicated. They cannot be tolerated and anyone who has one is suspicious if not a verified homicidal maniac.
There is no magical solution to the "gun problem", just like there's no magical solution that will keep everyone safe in sports or DIY home improvement. Every "solution" that would work involves some kind of extremely harsh and limiting regulation or outright ban that, if it could be enforced, would upset a lot of people.
How do you know every single one of your friendly, stable, normal, and non-violent friends doesn't own a gun? 30% of adults in the U.S. own one. 50% live in gun households. If you don't live with them, you simply don't know.[1]
[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...
The three things you can do which will reduce your odds of being killed by a gun by about 95%:
1. Don't shoot yourself. That reduces your odds by nearly 70%
2. Be Asian or Native American. This reduces your odds by another 70%. If you're not able to do that, being white or Hispanic still improves your odds substantially.
3. Be a woman (reduces your odds of dying by another 80%)
If you are able to accomplish all 3, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%
If you're able to understand basic safety rules, owning a gun is not that dangerous. Accidental deaths are incredibly rare (literally less than a one in a million occurrence), and have been trending down since gun safety has become more popular (the modern conception of trigger discipline has only existed for like 40-50 years). I think you're conflating the inherent danger of firearms with some confounding variables that lead certain people to be more likely to possess them.
You can't shoot yourself if you don't have a gun.
> Be Asian or Native American. This reduces your odds by another 70%. If you're not able to do that, being white or Hispanic still improves your odds substantially.
It doesn't matter what race you are, if you don't have a gun.
3. Be a woman (reduces your odds of dying by another 80%)
If doesn't matter what sex you are, if you don't have a gun.
> If you are able to accomplish all 3, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%
If you don't have a gun, congratulations! You've reduced your odds being killed by a gun from .01% to around 0.0005%. And you have to worry a whole lot less about dying from a gunshot depending on your mental state, accident, or whether you are "unlucky" enough to have been born male or African-American, or have occasional bouts of severe depression.
> The best way to increase your odds of getting shot is to own a gun. Owning guns is dangerous. Occasionally for some people it will turn out to be a positive, but in general, owning a gun is a negative.
I want to hone in on this particular statement you made for some clarification. Are you referring to violence here? If the state or law enforcement are involved, what's the response?
Just trying to get an idea of what "defend that right" is supposed to mean here, since I hear it an awful lot in regards to this specific topic.
Just because something is the law it doesn't mean it's a sensible law nor that law should never be changed to reflect modern cultures. Otherwise you'd still be going round drowning women in rivers to prove they're innocence of witch crimes.
There has been so much evidence to prove that America's lack of gun control is counter productive:
* higher suicide rates
* the numbers family members accidentally killed by their own guns
* mass shootings
Even when looking at the figures in isolation, it's pretty damning. Then when you compare to statistics in the rest of the world, America's statistics become nothing short of embarrassing.
What's more, the UK, Australia and some other countries went through the same process of having relaxed gun control laws and then tightening them up because they came to the same realisation that guns are not comparable to free speech, power tools, nor any other the other dumb things pro-gun lobbies compare them with.
Among other issues such as full data never being released, the specific quote you have there was derived from police reports where someone was shot in their home. No other factors were considered like drug or spouse related, not if the home owner was shot by their gun, or any one of a number of other factors that would paint a better picture.
Do you seriously think police reports where someone was shot no other questions asked is a good indicator for gun ownership in the USA?
The CDC has been able to and has studied guns since that 1996 law.
They have not been allowed to suggest policy changes.
Interestingly when the ability to weaponize them went away, a lot less direction went into gun studies compared to the millions of dollars spent in the ramp up to 1993.
Would you be okay if the CDC couldn’t suggest policy changes when it comes to nicotine?
What’s the purpose of studying something if you can’t do anything with the results?
Anyone pushing for policy is free to cite the CDC results of studies. As they have done.
But if you notice, the narrative has been CDC isn’t allowed to study guns which is a lie.
This was partially rolled back by an Obama EO (sorta, its complicated) and you know what ever CDC study since has found? No exact correlation to guns and crime. There have been some interesting results since 2013 like the fact that Assault Weapon Bans have not at all proven effective since less than 400 people have died per year in any recent time by rifles of all types let alone the subset of scary looking ones, that there are 500,000 to 3,000,000 successful defensive gun uses by citizens a year mostly where a shot isn’t needed compared to 10-15,000 homicides in the country of 330,000,000 are over 75% gang or drug related, and that rural areas of USA where the guns are have effectively the same homicide rates as rural Europe when you look at like for like causes of the violence.
Specifically the CDC was barred from having tax payer money used to remove citizens civil rights.
Last I checked there was no enumerated right to asbestos or nicotine.
It wasn't perfect, but you're talking millions of dollars that went into the 92/93/94 push. That's hard to come up with for narrative building when it's not tax payer money. Just look at the single source of gun control in the USA today, Michael Bloomberg, if he wasn't personally bankrolling it, things would look a lot different.