If you’re going to tout France’s low homicide rate of 1.2, I’d invite you to observe that Japan’s homicide rate is 0.26. Does this mean that France should adopt some aspects of Japanese law, for instance, by readopting the death penalty? Or does it simply mean that France and Japan are different countries?
In fact, I would posit that the arrow of causation can point the other way. If you live in a country with higher rates of homicide and violent crime, you will be more interested in defending yourself.
> Protests and revolutions in France have done more to guide government power than anything ever that happened in the US.
This seems like a bizarre and dubious oversimplification. France had an outright military coup in 1958 when the democratically elected government didn’t want to hold onto Algeria. While both democracy and Algerian independence worked out in the long run, the mere possibility of a military coup—something that French military officers will occasionally make threats to repeat—seems to be a major distinction that is not in France’s favor here.
Meanwhile, popular protests in the US led to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and ultimately even withdrawal from Vietnam. It’s not like the American public is politically powerless compared to that of any other democracy.
In other words, if Brazil and Mexico are our points of comparison, we're... not in a situation I'd want to be in, to put it diplomatically. Reddit's running joke is that every gunfight happened in Brazil. In fact, I often wonder if most of the gunfight videos actually do come from Brazil.
If the cartels can ship large amounts of highly illegal cargo transnationally and setup infrastructure like their own private cellular networks, I think they'd be able to acquire all the guns they need even if the US had strict gun control. It's not like they're that hard to make, especially if you're not above kidnapping some machinists.
"The cartels" is not a single organisation. Yes the largest best-organised gangs could build firearms factories - or more realistically just bribe some soldiers or cops to "lose" a few truckloads of weapons, just like they do with automatic weapons right now.
But there is a huge difference in a weapon being available by the dozens to the highest tier of the top 2-3 cartels (like machine guns or rocket launchers or IFVs are right now), and a weapon being available by the hundred thousands for anyone with a few dollars to their name!
When government runs guns, women are smart to arm themselves for defense.
The US has plenty of gun ownership regulation.
Criminals choose not to follow that though.
Do you have evidence otherwise?
The entire system is a farce and I’m surprised there’s anyone who thinks it’s not. I would have though pro gun advocates would at least know enough to acknowledge the Swiss cheese nature of the systems in place around gun ownership in America.
There is an automated system behind it.
> Effectively this neuters federal background checks
That is incorrect.
https://www.thetrace.org/2015/07/gun-background-check-nics-g...
As the article mentions, there are people that slip through the cracks, but the foremost problem around keeping weapons out of the wrong hands has little to do with the FBI.
For example, there are a large number of guns owned by people of color who didn’t buy them legally, not because they couldn’t, but because they either didn’t know they needed to, or they didn’t trust the legal route.
That’s the kind of thing your 3% number applies to. The only way to ‘prosecute’ those offenses would be to lock up a lot of otherwise law abiding black men who are only criminals on paper because of racist gun control laws.
It’s important to understand this context before using words like ‘lackadaisical’.
If you mean things like actual violence or conspiracies to traffic firearms, these are prosecuted vigorously and the 3% figure is bullshit in that context.
I’m guessing you weren’t aware of the detail behind this figure.
I'd love to see your data then. My data shows a different picture.
The majority of prosecutions within that 3% are possession by a felon. The next most common are ones involving a violent crime or drug offense, and possession by a person in the United states illegally. The reason prosecution is so low and doesn't include more violent offenders is because the federal government is lackadaisical and decides not to prosecute them. They instead allow the states to prosecute under state law. Even if the states prosecute under their own laws, the feds still can prosecute under the federal law if they wanted to.
Around 10k federal prosecution out of over 400k occurrence of violent crime involving a firearm. That's a terrible percentage in my mind. Links at bottom
"there are a large number of guns owned by people of color who didn’t buy them legally, not because they couldn’t, but because they either didn’t know they needed to, or they didn’t trust the legal route."
You seem to imply that they are not prohibited since they could buy them "legally". What exactly do you mean by buying them "illegally"? Do you have any data on this "large number" of minorities that bought guns illegally and how that compares to other groups?
I'd also like to hear how you believe the federal laws are racist and which ones in particular. I know there are some state laws that have racist roots. I can even agree that the structure around loss of rights should be reexamined, but isnt wholly racist (non-violent felonies should be excluded, and some recent case law is starting to move this).
Wait, so the 3% number is a lie? It’s not the percentage prosecuted. It’s the percentage prosecuted by the federal government rather than the states?
You said: “Only 3% of federal firearm offenses are prosecuted.”
Which turns out to be false. The offenses are prosecuted, just not by the federal government. You say that is ‘lackadaisical’ as if you have some justification for that, but deferring to states is a common practice in the US and indicates no such thing.
It sure looks like you are intentionally trying to mislead people, otherwise you’d probably have mentioned this up front.
As far as racism goes, it’s pretty easy to understand if you apply Ibram Kendi’s definition - if it disproportionately affects black communities, it is a racist policy.
You don't seem to understand how the law works. The Federal offenses are not prosecuted. The State offenses are. My statement is true.
"but deferring to states is a common practice in the US and indicates no such thing."
Lack of interest in pursuing the law would fit with the definition of lackadaisical. I've given you the stats that show they are not interested in pursuing the federal crimes.
This isn't really deferring to the states. If one is not guilty under state law, the feds may subsequently prosecute under the federal law. Even if you're found guilty at the state level, they might prosecute you just to make an example of you (Chauvin, recently). It's a sloppy way for the people in power to ignore equal application of the law by picking and choosing who deserves it, which to me undermines the very principle of rule of law.
"It sure looks like you are intentionally trying to mislead people, otherwise you’d probably have mentioned this up front."
I have not tried to mislead anyone. Perhaps you were projecting your own ideas on it based on your lack of willingness to engage in a meaningful debate. After all, you're the one calling my statements total BS, yet not providing any responses to the questions posed around sources or data to support your position or refute the data I have provided.
"As far as racism goes, it’s pretty easy to understand if you apply Ibram Kendi’s definition - if it disproportionately affects black communities, it is a racist policy."
If that's the case, everything is racist and the very definition provided is racist since it only deals with "black communities" and not others. Perhaps we can use a widely accepted definition, like from a dictionary. Then you can also explain what is being disproportionately affected along with the why and how.
So, where is your response to the requests around definitions and data for "illegally" purchased guns and their impact? Conveniently ignoring this too? I'm starting to think you are a troll.
It’s only true in a narrow technical sense. You were clearly trying to give the impression that people were simply getting away with these offenses, when what is actually happening is that the federal government doesn’t see the need to prosecute people who are already being prosecuted by the states.
> It's a sloppy way for the people in power to ignore equal application of the law by picking and choosing who deserves it, which to me undermines the very principle of rule of law.
Prosecutorial discretion definitely undermines the rule of law, and is a well known people, but it’s everywhere in every justice system and has nothing to do with the government’s approach to guns.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Felonies-Day-Target-Innocent/dp...
As for the Kendi definition, I was using black in this example because most gun control laws disproportionately affect black people. Substitute other races if you like.
I don’t need to refute your position with data - that’s not what’s wrong with it.
We’ve shown that your 3% claim was misleading as presented.
Prosecutorial discretion is an incredibly great thing, and is another element of the legacy bequeathed to us from the Romans by way of the English, through English Common Law.
The old statement de minimis non curat lex (the law does not concern itself with trifles), alternatively, de minimis non curat praetor (the praetor does not concern himself with trifles) illustrates why justice must be tempered with wisdom, although not exactly the same thing as prosecutorial discretion.
The government does not have unlimited resources with which to pursue cases. When it does wield the terrible power of the justice system against a suspect, it should be in the right instances, and for the right reasons, for an example.
A good example of prosecutorial discretion is around a case where a father finds his daughter or son, actively being raped/molested. In some cases, it may go to grand jury if there is a death [1]. However, in other examples [2], a prosecutor declines to prosecute given all of the circumstances, and weighing what happened.
While there is such as thing as selective enforcement, where bias has entered the mind of some element of law enforcement and enables some to be pursued, or others not to be for some bogus reason, that is not what we are talking about here.
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/us/charges-texas-father-beat-death-da...
[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2700872/My-son-save...
Lol where did you show that? The 3% claim is only misleading because you are applying a context to it that it was not intended for. The point is that additional federal gun laws will not be enforced because the government does not enforce the current ones, and doesn't even have the resources to do so. If anything, you have been the misleading one by presenting false information and failing to back up your (trolling) claims. You can go back to the root comment to see that they are approaching this from a light that additional federal gun laws would not be effective since the current ones are not being enforced.
"I don’t need to refute your position with data - that’s not what’s wrong with it."
Then, please, get to the point and tell me what is wrong with it. Stop draffing this out with unsubstantiated claims, twisting words, and flat out lies. Not all my questions were data related, but also conceptual - yet you ignore those as well (for example, you still haven't defined the 'illegal' gun purchases).
Good bye, troll.
Not my place, but unfortunately there's no contact info in your profile, so I can't email you. I'd rather risk saying it here than watch you kick a hornet's nest. Being rate limited is no fun, but it's the inevitable consequence of such behavior; penalties only increase from there.
It's easy to get heated, so a quick edit + heading outside is often the cure, for me at least.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26637365 is a surprisingly good primer for this, if you'd like to understand where they're coming from. Notice that "name-calling" is explicitly called out.
Having full confidence in the mods is actually a dangerous thing. I too had full confidence in the mods at one point. And, like you, I wasn't aware that I was using HN in a way that HN isn't designed for. This is a friendly reminder that you may get lucky and escape notice (HN is quite big now), but it's a matter of time before you'll get a stern talking to; the penalties only increase from there.
Don't take it personally, if it happens. It's not. And if I'm mistaken about any of this, I will happily eat crow and apologize, along with hanging up my hat of "issuing friendly warnings" in general. You could email them and ask, but the inevitable outcome is a "yes, calling people trolls and liars is off topic here; HN is for intellectual curiosity, which is a delicate thing," along with attracting attention to yourself.
In other words, don't let other people get to you. It's not worth it. Even if they are lying or trolls, you can simply say "That's not true because X" and leave it at that.
Generally if you're going to own guns you're going to own several, just like you likely own more than one screwdriver. Small gauge shotguns for small birds, larger for larger birds, smooth bore for deer depending on state. Rifles there will be several, same for pistols. With rifles and pistols you generally practice with small caliber rounds like 22 as it's much much cheaper ($.02 / rnd vs $2), and really more pleasant (quiet, doesn't kick) than hunting rounds.
Everyone I know who has a gun has at least 4.
My friend's grandfather owns 73. In many areas that's an unremarkable number, especially for older shotguns where you didn't have interchangeable chokes.
Most of my experience, thanks to the US taxpayer to whom I am permanently indebted, is with an M60, an M240, and an M249.
I would like my wife, and my daughters to have skill with weapons too, so I was thinking about an HK417 for myself, and then getting an HK416 clone chambered in .22LR for practice.
It takes a healthy respect, and practiced expertise in weapons to build competency, and I think that relates to a number of rounds fired. Hopefully, small caliber for cost savings!
I'd also recommend something like a mantis-x which lets you practice smooth trigger pulls while dry firing. It's actually a pretty smart bit of tech, it's all based on the one of the solid state accelerometers like you have in your phone.
I was thinking this would be something similar to the trigger squeeze and breathing monitors I used with weapons training VR, but this actually looks like it would be really useful, and very data driven. Appreciate the info!
On average, that's entirely believable.
I think the vast majority of those people own 4-10 guns, but there are enough people who own hundreds of guns to make the mean a lot higher. In fact this is a classic example of a situation where mean can be significantly higher than median.
Numbers wise, we are doing much better than Mexico and Brazil, by about the same factor that France is doing better than we are and Japan is doing better than France. US homicide rates are a lot closer to Greenland or Argentina, and significantly less than a lot of nice LatAm countries that are popular with Western expats such as Costa Rica or Panama or Uruguay. The legality and availability of firearms cannot fully explain these differences, and it’s incomplete to simply compare the US to the EU.
What about Greenland?
> ...anybody who's visited Mexico knows not to go random places alone.
It's the same in the US, and basically every country in the world. Some places are dangerous, others aren't.
> ...if Brazil and Mexico are our points of comparison, we're... not in a situation I'd want to be in, to put it diplomatically.
Put it undiplomatically. What exactly do you mean by that? Draw me a picture with crayons, I want to understand clearly what this means.
An important point in the comment you replied to was that maybe demand for firearms is the result of the crime rate and not the cause. Care to address that?
No, it's really not. I spent a number of years living in Seoul, and you can have a 25 million people metro area with virtually no areas you wouldn't go to alone at night. They may exist, somewhere, but you really have to struggle to find them. That plus no loud and aggressive people on the streets, basically never having to feel guarded or adjusting your walking path to avoid that one sketchy person.
US cities can be such stressful, on-guard, subtly "stand your ground"/"toughen up" experiences in comparison sometimes. It's draining, really just wasted energy, and as a man, makes me behave in wasy I don't actually want to.
Culture really matters. Weapon laws really matter. And national pride in places and spaces that just simply don't shape up well is something to resist.
I have a feeling that the entire "arm the populace" mindset and everything that goes along with it (the lack of interest in consensus-building displayed by wanting to maintain an exit from it, etc.) is much more likely to generate the sort of politics and politicians that would ever require civilian I arms use.
States can certainly go bad in many ways. South Korea managed to impeach its most recent bad President through peaceful protest alone (search "Park Geun-Hye protests") with basically not even a punch thrown, however.
Oh, and SK is an oligarchy. Essentially everything is run by a handful of families (those who run the chaebol), everybody knows about it, and it's been the status quo for years. Not that that's necessarily bad, though it isn't ideal. SK has risen from destruction to dictatorship to mostly-rich-and-democratic.
I disagree that weapon laws really matter, they matter maybe a little. Most of the variance in murder rates is more productively explained by things like homogeneity, rich-poor divide, cultures of violence, etc.
Switzerland. 3-4 ethnic groups with entirely different languages as well as quite different wealth levels, managing to go without massacres and civil wars for hundreds of years. (So that their different wealth levels now look like the difference between "well-off" and "filthy rich" to their neighbours...)
edit: Maybe people thing "Good comment" was sarcastic? I genuinely meant it was a productive addition to the discussion :-) Also, I'm not just making this up. There's significant scholarship on the question.
I agree with you wholeheartedly. The cultures of SK and the US are very, very different. Particularly, south Koreans are all united by being under the constant threat of devastating war as long as almost any of them have been alive.
South Korea homicide rates are 300% higher than Czech Republic, which is a shall issue country, and most permits are for concealed carry.
I find it very interesting that race is so front and center in the US, while class hides behind it and rarely gets mentioned.
That's an interesting theory, are there sources which I can read up on around this theory and the evidence for it?
It's not a country and it has a very low population (less than 60k). Small regions make bad statistical samples.
So I answered your question, now your turn, what about Argentina?
The main difference between Canada and US (and to a great extent Australia and New Zealand) are not cultural or economical. The main differences are in access to firearms. I fully expect Canada's murder rate to rise to US levels if US gun laws were adopted here.
The biggest one is that only the USA has a legacy of slavery. The USA has much higher population density as well. The USA is also somewhat more economically unequal than the other 3. The USA is more diverse than any of the other 3, especially Canada and Australia.
These factors might play a role in gun violence.
I have not seen many statistics linking foreign-born residents to higher crime, but locally-born oppressed minority populations (e.g. Black, Aboriginal, Native, Maori) are disproportionately represented in the criminal justice system due to ongoing legacies of systemic violence.
This is almost invariably left out of the equation when these things are reported.
Just like the so-called "gender wage gap", which is at best a "gender earnings gap", because pay is equivalent, dissipates almost entirely when you account for things like occupation and hours worked.
Somehow this turned into "solely". Why?
And I am fully aware that these facts are a "tough sell" these days, because they don't fit the prevailing narrative.
Another one: yes, the criminal justice system is biased against blacks. However, it is vastly more biased against males. By a 6:1 margin.
And yes, I agree that the question why black people who are not recent immigrants are disproportionately impoverished is important to answer. It is important to ask the right questions if you want to get a usable answer. And I doubt there is a unifactorial answer.
Why the "who are not recent immigrants"? Black people who are recent immigrants from Africa actually do better economically than whites.
It's a tough sell because statistics don't back it up; there are other significant factors at play.
There are certainly some biases against men but i think you are overestimating this one. Are you accounting for the differences between men and women?
The success of African immigrants suggests that the effect really has nothing to do with skin color, but other societal and cultural factors. Luckily society and culture are both mutable.
2. The statistics do back it up.
3. "This gender gap is about six times as large as the racial disparity that Prof. Starr found in another recent paper."
https://web.archive.org/web/20180428124536/https://www.law.u...
4. Yes, skin color certainly does not appear to be a dominant factor, and maybe not a factor at all as you write.
The gender disparity is interesting and I wasn't aware of it's severity. Thanks.
[1] https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2018/03/19/race-class-deba...
How to explain the difference? Well, the blog post doesn't control for other variables. Such as, crucially, how much crime do people commit and how severe are those crimes?
The UofM study did control for such factors.
And yeah, how much crime people commit varies and, yeah, has a pretty severe impact on how much incarceration happens. If you didn't control for these variables, the male/female disparity would be incredibly more severe, as the vast majority of inmates are male.
And if you look, you will see that the research the blog post references comes from an advocacy group.
All your metric does is demonstrate who began allowing immigration first.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045219
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Canada#Visible...
Or if you want to do the math yourself: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/pr...
The real comparison is non-Hispanic white to non-Hispanic white, where it becomes ~55% to ~75% or so. Hispanic people in the U.S. are easily visually differentiable, most often have one or more languages aside from, or instead of, English and come from cultures that are markedly different than mainstream U.S. culture.
Canada and the USA are close overall, but Canada's immigrants are much more likely to be educated professionals than those coming to the USA. And since Canada never implemented widespread slavery, there really isn't an analog to the experience of black Americans. I think that is a very big factor.
There are places in the US where you can go random places alone, and places that it would be ill-advised.
There are places in the Baltimore metro area where you can go random places alone, and places that it would be ill-advised.
Look, my grandpa took me shooting when I was young. I remember doing target practice under a bridge when I was like 7, using a freakin' magnum revolver of all things. It was next to a very small river, and someone further downstream was trying to fish. I asked gramps "Do you think he heard us?" and he laughed "I don't think anybody didn't hear us."
That's the kind of culture I come from. I suspect in this thread there are at least three factions: the pro-guns, the anti-guns, and the undecideds.
As someone who was raised from an early age to be pro-gun, I do see the merits. But it's important that we acknowledge the downsides. If, statistically, America is so screwed up that you need to compare to Brazil and Mexico before the numbers start looking sort of reasonable, there may be a correlation with gun ownership the way that smoking may be correlated with cancer.
Compared to Mexico and Brazil, the US numbers look fucking awesome.
Compared to Greenland and Argentina, the US numbers look perfectly reasonable.
Compared to France, maybe we look bad. But compared to Japan, even France looks bad.
If I was trying to convince the French to reinstate the death penalty by pointing out that their homicide rate was 4-6 times as bad as Japan, and the French said “yeah but our homicide rate is 1/4 that of the US”, they would have a point. Single factors that map onto popular political controversies aren’t as big a factor as broader social and cultural factors. If you look at those factors, Japan is not a comparable country to France and France is not a comparable country to the United States.
I guess....
But on the flip side, the USA is almost incomparably richer than those countries (in natural resources, infrastructure, human capital, ...), has a much better developed and more legitimate set of public institutions, has a tradition of settling disputes via political/legal processes instead of gang warfare, and in most ways looks much more like wealthy industrialized countries than new developing-country slums.
So, instead of giving up and patting ourselves on the back because it could always be worse, as an alternative we could, y'know, try to get the most desperate people access to basic essentials required for human flourishing, and aim to reduce the levels of violence and corruption over time, the way people have successfully done in many other countries around the world.
No, it doesn't.
Well I think Mexico is a sufficiently-large section of the world that statements like "anybody who's visited Mexico knows not to go random places alone" should be called out, don't you agree?
If you want to go and rob houses or join a gang, you'll get a gun, legally or illegally. This happens everywhere, not only where guns are legal. If you can't get a gun, you'll get a big knife or a baseball bat.
The USA is rich in GDP per capita but has patches with poor people with little to lose. In many EU countries there is far less people with little to lose, even among the poor ones. Crime in EU is, similarly, disproportionally caused by those who have little to lose, eg. illegal immigrants.
You are much more likely to get away with murder in the US (where clearance rates are 60% at best) than you are in Japan or the UK (where clearance rates are above 90%).
You'd be surprised. Historically, countries like Japan used to be much poorer than the US but still had very low murder rates.
The famous”some places you can walk alone, some you can’t” statistic??
Canadian here... isn't that true in most of the highly-populated areas in the US as well? And, to be honest, some parts of Canada as well; I definitely know a neighbourhood not to far from where I live where I'm highly unlikely to walk in the dark.
The real question is to what extent is it true? I think stumbling into such a place at night in the U.S. would be quite hard, Canada even harder. In Mexico, my feeling is you really ought to plan. You can't just drive from Point A to Point B across the country at night, whereas in the rest of North America you sure can.
Almost half of all US homicides are drug/gang related, so obviously there will be links to south american countries where these enterprises also operate.
If you want to avoid high crime, move north. Northern states have a homicide rate roughly half the national average.
It's pretty clear that gun control is not the most significant factor.
"On a par with Argentina" is still not great. The US is doing a lot worse than comparably wealthy countries.
> Does this mean that France should adopt some aspects of Japanese law
Yes.
> for instance, by readopting the death penalty?
No. Why on earth would that be what you'd jump to? The death penalty is very rarely applied in Japan and, if you look more widely, not at all correlated with low homicide rates.
We have less mobility and opportunity between the ranks of our society than some of these other countries.
That lack of equality makes our richest very well off, but our poorest live in literal third world conditions (as Alabama was designated two years ago.)
To be honest I don't see a problem with comparing us to both, but with the consideration that there is an awful lot of variance between the different subsections of our society.
What do you think?
Almost every country in the world is much poorer than the USA. Most European countries have a smaller per-capita GDP than Mississippi, the poorest US state.
I’m not sure how you mean adorable and misguided.
1) If you mean it would be ineffective against a military invasion, I have to disagree. The military has never won a guerrilla war, let alone one on their own turf. Think Afghanistan on steroids with how many guns are in the states.
2) If you mean that being politically active would be far more effective though then I 100% agree.
I know some gun owners in the states, and my impression is that for some it quickly turns into standard consumerism. Maybe their first gun was for self defence, but not the 20th. They can obsess over their guns, similar to how people obsess over other gizmos like the latest iPhone etc.
The more rational 'New World' comparisons would be Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and guess what: very low murder, very low rates of gun ownership.
"Does this mean that France should adopt some aspects of Japanese law, for instance, by readopting the death penalty? Or does it simply mean that France and Japan are different countries?"
Or more rationally, they could just completely ban firearms and make them totally inaccessible to anyone, as they are in Japan.
(And also create a super conformist, rule-following slightly authoritarian culture)
But at least the gun laws themselves in Japan are extremely rigid which hints pretty strongly that restrictions definitely work.
Wether those can be pragmatically applied is another question.
Who could have imagined that British colonies who didn’t violently overthrow the British colonial government would end up being less violent overall?
Also, who would have guessed that former British colonies that didn’t have millions of African slaves shipped in for cheap agricultural labor and treated as a perpetual underclass for centuries would be more peaceful places to live?
Nah, must be the guns.
As others have pointed out; personal firearms are pretty useless as a vehicle for resisting state oppression and tyranny. But they're useful for stopping slave revolts or, more contemporarily, guarding your McMansion.
The problem in the US isn't the right to bear arms. It's that the wrong people are bearing them. The militia types are the authoritarian aggressors that they themselves fantasize about resisting.
As to effectiveness: the Taliban just recaptured their country from a US backed military. The point of civilian gun ownership is to force citizen soldiers to decide between defecting and killing their neighbors. That’s exactly what happened in the Bangladesh independence war. The revolutionaries knocked over military depots in Dhaka to acquire firearms. Once the fighting started, Bangladeshis in the Pakistani military defected.
Also, though there is some legitimacy with the 'Guns Stop Tyranny' issue ... it's unlikely to happen.
The US will not be invaded by anyone, and the US government with all it's flaws is considerably more legitimate than most of the people with guns and has been for more than a century.
If the US falls, it will be due to crumbling from within, and given what has happened in the last few years, I'm afraid gun owners, however responsible and conscientious, are as likely to 'Rise Up' against a pack of falsehoods and populism than they are any kind of legitimate reality.
Why? What’s the evidence other than juxtaposition? Arabs are also nuts about guns. People from pastoral honor cultures (like the Scots Irish ancestors of many southerners and Appalachians: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/10/the-sco...) often are. Is that caused by racism too?
> Also, though there is some legitimacy with the 'Guns Stop Tyranny' issue ... it's unlikely to happen.
This is “end of history” bullshit. You need guns because having to kill people is a central part of the human experience. Tens of thousands of my people died at the hands of the Pakistani army because they had to fight with sticks and rocks until they knocked over some military depots to acquire firearms: https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/bangladesh-liberation-.... The Afghans have now expelled two superpowers from their country with handheld weapons. Guns work.
All of that stuff could happen in America too. Because history isn’t over, civilization is a thin veneer over nature, and there’s nothing fundamentally different about us versus them.
In much the same way you could argue US gun culture comes from being 'at the frontier' - well - slavery was another big artifact of history.
When the slaves were freed they were a huge portion of the population, and there was every reason to believe there would be retribution and revolts.
Since then, there has been ongoing efforts to suppress that community, which rationally might engender violence.
In pop culture, African Americans have been portrayed as violent, which can make people afraid, and since the 1980s there's been a huge uptick in violence within that community, which also makes people afraid (though the violence is mostly intraracial not interacial).
2) "This is “end of history” bullshit. You need guns because having to kill people is a central part of the human experience. "
Your arguments here are very poor.
First, the Army 'has guns' as a legitimate form of managed violence. Keeping the Army in check is a central part of managing the powers in a liberal democracy. If the Army gets out of hand, it's going to be very bad.
'Look what the Taliban' did is a horrendous argument, because the Taliban are totalitarian murderous overlords who murder for their own ideology and not the wellbeing of their fellow countrymen.
You're basically arguing that 'Guns Work Because Look How Well The Nazis Murdered Jews!'
That's an argument against the population having guns, because it seems to me the American Right Wing Taliban are the group the most likely to use guns and for all the wrong reasons.
"All of that stuff could happen in America too."
Yes, but it's unlikely to happen because the 'government goes bad'. It's going to happen because a demagogue like Donald Trump will rile up the gun-wading population to commit violence on the basis of a pack of lies. It won't start like that, it may just be a protest, but if starts to get out of hand, some blood is spilled and then each side uses that as justification for increasing the threshold.
The last 6 months have revealed that Trump pressured the military hard for the 82cnd Airborne to be used against BLM protesters and the Pentagon refused. Thankfully, that's the Army standing up against authoritarian leaders.
I don't think there has been in all of American history an example of where American citizens took up arms against the government in situation wherein they had some kind of moral legitimacy.
Liberal Democracy stay intact with education, transparency, oversight, a free and rational press, legitimate institutions, independent judiciary. If it delves into individual militias fighting against government units 'it's all over'. Americans can then expect the quality of life of rural Pakistan.
While there is some argument for 'Guns v. Tyranny' I can't see how it works out in practicality. One idea might be to require the government a Congressional vote to send any troops anywhere, for any reason, to further restrict US forces from being deployed in the homeland etc..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battles_of_Saratoga#French_aid
So that refines the question to: how important was the private ownership of guns in the American victory at Saratoga? Well, the Wikipedia article referenced above says that, "militiamen and supplies continued to pour into the American camp, including critical increases in ammunition, which had been severely depleted in the first battle."
"General Fraser was mortally wounded in this phase of the battle, . . . The fall of Fraser and the arrival of Ten Broeck's large militia brigade (which roughly equaled the entire British reconnaissance force in size), broke the British will, and they began a disorganized retreat toward their entrenchments."
So that got me curious about what "militia" meant exactly during this time frame. Well, General Ten Broeck's Wikipedia page says that 2 years prior to the action described in the last paragraph General Ten Broeck was colonel of the Albany County militia, which has a Wikipedia page, which starts as follows: "The Albany County militia was the colonial militia of Albany County, New York. Drawn from the general male population, by law all male inhabitants from 15 to 55 had to be enrolled in militia companies."
Washington didn't think the militia helped:
>To place any dependence on the Militia, is, assuredly, resting upon a broken staff. Men just dragged from the tender Scenes of domestic life; unaccustomed to the din of Arms; totally unacquainted with every kind of military skill, which being followed by a want of confidence in themselves, when opposed to Troops regularly trained, disciplined, and appointed, superior in knowledge and superior in Arms, makes them timid, and ready to fly from their own shadows ... if I was called upon to declare upon Oath, whether the Militia have been most serviceable or hurtful upon the whole, I should subscribe to the latter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Militia_(United_States)#Confed...
No, but some of the very earliest gun control laws were aimed at only black citizens and were enacted during lynching's heyday. Gun control in America has a very sordid history when viewed through a racial lens, and its ties to the civil rights era and the drug war are less blatant but still insidious.
The American gun fetish dates back to the earliest arrivals in the New World, in all areas of the country, both initial northern states, and later southern states, and the West. If you haven't spent enough time in the wild to encounter a grizzly, a 300 pound boar, a wolf pack, a coyote pack, or a solitary mountain lion intent upon considering you as a food source - consider yourself lucky.
> As others have pointed out; personal firearms are pretty useless as a vehicle for resisting state oppression and tyranny. But they're useful for stopping slave revolts or, more contemporarily, guarding your McMansion.
Au Contraire
The Taliban, freedom fighters, or Terrorists, perhaps both, just seized pretty much the entirety of Afghanistan with roughly ~70k light infantry, against a force roughly 4x their numbers with much heavier armament. [1] This, after having fought to a standstill one of the nations with the best fighting force in a long guerilla warfare, vs airpower, advanced weaponry, drones, armor, you name it.
Because they had willpower.
> The problem in the US isn't the right to bear arms. It's that the wrong people are bearing them. The militia types are the authoritarian aggressors that they themselves fantasize about resisting.
Flyover country has neither the presidency, the House, or the Senate, but the US wants not for authoritarianism.
The unfortunate, and tragic fact is that the vast majority of the gun violence in the US happens in inner cities [2], typically with repressive gun laws. Sure, there will be the occasional red state nutjob too.
If you truly and deeply cared about the horrible gun violence, you might ask why, where, for what reason, who, and why don't we know more about it? [3]
You might seek to grasp a true understanding of the culture involved, the economics, education, or lack thereof, opportunities denied, the crime involved, or not, and to paint us a full picture.
But you don't.
Instead you leave us with a shallow political attack on others. Demonizing, rather the engaging in a civic manner. Pontificating, rather than questioning. Politicizing, rather than conversing.
Take a break from the keyboard and have a socially-distant coffee with others. Your others. Have two.
We're all human.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/18/world/asia/taliban-victor...
[2] https://www.thetrace.org/2020/09/mass-shootings-2020-gun-vio...
[3] https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/roseburg-attack-...
> You might seek to grasp a true understanding of the culture involved
Please do the same. Your entire post is dripping with an urban elitism and does not show any hint that you might consider someone else's point of view. Enjoy that coffee.
That is kind of ironic, since I am isolated in a deeply blue area in a deeply blue workplace that eschews the local orthodoxy
The difference is that I don't assign an urban or rural divide around this. I've lived in the sticks where first responders were an hour away, in the city, suburbia, and warzones. But, it was never locale only that divided those who wanted weapons vs those that did not. There were other divides there, mainly a cognitive and worldview one.
Many of my friends have had weapons, for both reasons of upbringing, hunting, and also, experience in the combat arms.
However, I would be remiss not to realize some of the underlying reasons for the high crime in the close-enough-to-be-concerned urban blight which made itself into so many rap songs. I am not deluded - there is a vast difference in opportunities, and good/bad influences in varying locations. Due to good fortune, I happened to be in an area that pushed people towards better choices. But, many people I knew did not have that good fortune, and so were more inclined to a different path merely because of that. They were not forced to make a series of bad decisions, but the opportune to become was definitely readily available.
> and does not show any hint that you might consider someone else's point of view.
I consider everyone's views, since, they are up front everyday. For the most part, the Uniparty is split into two dominant factions with subcliques from there on out. I am neither.
I try to balance my perspectives in both the company I keep, and the echo chambers from which I drink. I value what other perspectives bring to the table and how they think about things. While I might not share all of them, and I maintain a measure of independence, I deeply appreciate other worldviews.
> Please do the same.
I do.
> Enjoy that coffee
Oh I definitely shall. That is a bonus!
Authoritarians control institutions. What do the “wrong people” control? If the January 6 nutters had taken the capital, who would have supported them? General Milley? The national guards of DC, MD, or VA? Any of the country’s corporations or other institutions? You’re confusing the Whiskey Rebellion for the Beerhall Putsch.
Maybe give some consideration to the possibility that what’s really happening is that you’re a resident of the Capital clutching your pearls at the “threat” posed by people in District 12.
More effective and regulated gun control and less access to guns is 100% consistent with less gun crime.
That there was a revolution in 1777 doesn't change the fact both the UK and US were fairly equally involved in other kinds of political violence, I mean, you do realize the UK have been at war with others and themselves since the dawn of time? That they had their own 'revolution' and a Republic 100 years before the US?
The Japanese have quite a violent history as well and yet have zero gun crime.
Most regions in the US don't directly have a relationship with slavery and even accommodating for elevated levels of crime among those communities - gun violence is still very high.
Guns are widespread and available to almost anyone in the US, and there's a huge amount of gun crime.
Canada/Australia - more restrictions, less gun crime.
Europe - quite heavily restricted, a small amount of gun crime.
Japan - effectively totally banned, and almost 0 gun crime.
Switzerland has militia training and ownership, but it's generally not pistols, and they definitely don't carry guns for personal defence. Their rifles are locked up in the basement.
Mexico has tight gun laws, but they're not enforced.
While there are concerns about freedoms, the formation of 'tyranny' etc. to contend with, there's no doubt that effective and highly restricted gun control has a significant impact.
To anyone who's lived in Europe, Can/Aus/NZ and the US, it's just blindingly obvious, it's not a rhetorical argument at all, it boils down to trying to understand the reasoning of people who have difficulty conceding the reality of how safe it really is when there aren't that many guns floating around.
Most police in the UK don't even carry guns, that's how real the implications are ... and it's not cause 'they didn't have a revolution'.
EDIT - FYI here are the data points:
USA: 4.5/100K gun homicides, 1.2 guns per/capita
Canada: 0.5/100K gun homicides and 0.4 guns per/capita
France: 0.1/100K gun homicides and 0.2 guns per/capita
Japan: 0.0/100K (!!!) gun homicides and 0.006 guns per/capita
It's crystal clear and unambiguous: for countries that have civil infrastructure, general lawfulness and the means to affect social policy etc. - fewer guns means fewer gun crimes. Obviously, there will be variations (i.e. Scotland has a crazy amount of stabbings) but prevalence of guns is a firs order issue.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
So what? I don't care about "less gun crime"; I care about "less violent crime".
Talking about the subset of crime, violence, death, and injury that's caused by firearms is fundamentally dishonest. You could argue by the exact same logic that the lack of passenger trains in the US reduces train suicides compared to Japan. The specific tools are not the fucking issue.
> I mean, you do realize the UK have been at war with others and themselves since the dawn of time? That they had their own 'revolution' and a Republic 100 years before the US?
Sure. For instance, England and Scotland were intermittently at war for centuries, which resulted in a lot of the people living in the English/Scottish border regions developing a particularly violent way of life. These people were a huge pain in the neck after the unification of Great Britain. So a whole lot of them got shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to America.
You know who else the British shipped to America? Violent criminals. This was one of the reasons we declared independence, actually. People think of Australia as a former penal colony, but that only started because we stopped letting them ship people here.
Who else came here? The Puritans, whose other accomplishments included such things as burning witches and violently establishing that English Republic you alluded to.
The normal, peaceful, law-abiding Brit who wasn't particularly interested in violence or religious fanaticism? Those are the guys who stayed behind in Britain.
- CDC stats (2018) -
US Firearm Homicides: 14,414
US deaths caused by drunk drivers: 10,511
The problem is an underfunded systems and huge workload and a bit of funding would instantly safe more lives than restricting gun ownership.
Calling for restriction is a transparent political move or is born out of ignorance in my opinion (I am not from the US).
People that would profit the most from restrictions are policemen, which are probably underpaid in the US considering their risk.
I know that these numbers are not directly comparable, but given the deadly nature of automobiles in general, I expected drunk-driving deaths to be somewhere around 50000 per year.
(Though IMO you're focusing on the wrong half. Drink-driving deaths don't show that alcohol is dangerous, they show that cars are dangerous - you only have to look at the number of non-alcohol-related driving deaths to see that.)
> Or does it simply mean that France and Japan are different countries?
Huh? Are you implying that simply existing in the “New World” would cause the baseline expected murder rate to be higher for some reason?
That’s the pattern we empirically see with most New World countries, and if you consider the question with an open mind for a few minutes while considering the history of Western settlement of the Americas you can come up with a few decent hypotheses as far as what the reasons might be.
Also, the US homicide rate was extremely high compared to Europe long before gun laws in other countries or the drug war. It was 10x higher than the UK at the turn of the 20th century.
And that your immediate neighbors will have more of an influence on that than a country on the other side of the world, especially if there's a substantial amount of immigration.
In the case of the US, I'd say it's more-so, because so much of the violence south of our border is directly related to moving things and people over it.
What about comparing it to Australia or NZ??
For instance, did the war protests really have that much effect or was it because the war was lost?
Yeah, I'd add that France doesn't have a long, porous border with the developing world. Nor nearly as much heterogeneity in its population.
And very few people are immigrating from the rest of the EU (in fact, French immigrants are a bit of a meme everywhere else, escaping high taxation).
Romania and Bulgaria's borders seem fairly porous, and Bulgaria borders Turkey.
There is a marine border with North Africa, which is probably the closest equivalent to the US/Mexico border.
Societies with an impoverished underclass is what causes higher crime rates, regardless of whether or not the underclass is mainly comprised of ethnic minorities. France (heterogenous) and Japan (homogenous) take better care of their poor than the US (heterogenous) and Guatemala (homogenous), which is what causes the disparity in murder rates.
Why the ad hominem? It stifles conversation. I think it is entirely legitimate to make the claim that ethnic, and actually more so religious/worldview heterogeneity can cause conflict. Heterogeneity is inversely correlated with trust because trust is formed through understanding and appropriate agreement and these differences often mean misunderstanding and disagreement. You can talk about dialoging as a way to reduce conflict, but even when understanding exists, when one norm must prevail and two groups are in conflict, this will leads to problems. The more fundamental the conflict, the worse it gets.
Look at Yugoslavia. Are Croats, Serbs, and Bosnians "racially" different? No. Language? Not really. So the source of conflict is religious.
The political conflict in the US today is mostly religious in nature, where "religious" is broadly understood.
Paris, yes. France, no.
France as a whole is very homogenous.
Japan's immigrant population stands at 2.0%, and Guatamala's is 0.5%.
I'm aware that there are other measures of diversity, but many of the comments here were mentioning the United States's border with Mexico specifically as a reason for its high murder rate, which doesn't seem to hold up once you dig into the numbers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_and_d...
The border is important in my thinking mainly because corruption and organized crime are endemic to Mexico, though immigration of people from a significantly different ethnicity+culture is also important in the U.S. picture.
https://www.npr.org/2021/08/28/1031965159/mexico-sues-u-s-gu....
I fully agree with anti-gun crowd that having vast majority of guns in hands of citizens (legally or illegally) leads to more deaths. USA's comparison with Angola is actually more serious than the numbers tell you because you need to realize that USA has far better medical response and doctors trained to handle gunshot wounds. So to truly compare Angola and USA you might have to increase USA's number with those who are shot instead of dead.
Having said that I am totally for guns in the hands of citizens. Mostly because I think it acts as a bulwark against further restrictions. After 2nd ammendment you will be seeing "commons sense rules for free speech" like we have seen in UK, Canada and Australia.
Every constitutional right has its price. Anyone who fails to see this is not honest. Give police the power to search you without warrant and we almost certainly will solve more crimes. Force individual to testify against themselves and we will most certainly keep more child rapists in jail. But then as a society we need to figure out the trade-off and in my personal case I would rather keep my guns and face a 5/1000 chance of dying of gunshot wound than surrender my guns.
> Blatant corruption, lobbying, outright incompetent representatives, abuses of power, erosion of human rights, blatant disregard for human rights. If Americans didn't fight against the Patriot act, wars, torture, what will they fight for/against? Mask mandates?
In my experience USA lot less corrupt than most other countries. Lobbying overall is a net good thing for a democratic society. Representatives are incompetent everywhere. American abuse of power is nowhere close to what EU or AU does to its citizens. I am not sure wha erosion of human rights you are talking in USA.
This is extremely shaky reasoning. You've done nothing to prove that the 2nd amendment is actually protecting these rights, only mentioned the existence of two facts and asserted a causative relationship between them. Have there been attempts to introduce censorship in the US that have been defeated by armed activists? Were there violent uprisings against censorship in the UK, Canada, or Australia that failed due to a lack of access to arms? The 4th amendment was gutted into oblivion in pursuit of the War on Terror -- why didn't the armed citizenry protect our rights?
No, because there _are_ armed activists.
Were there violent uprisings against censorship in the UK, Canada, or Australia that failed due to a lack of access to arms?
See Hong Kong of late. Many banners seen during free-speech protests there lamented their lack of a "2nd Amendment".
No, because despite whatever the talkshows say, both parties and especially the judiciary are largely committed to preserving constitutional rights. There's disagreements on finer points of where the lines are drawn, but that's handled in courts and legislation, and rarely ever guns ablazing.
Compare to Hong Kong, which is not governed by consent of the governed.
Wasn't there an impeachment procedure blatantly sabotaged by one of said parties like last year? Didn't the same party blatantly say they're stacking the supreme court in their favour up to the last possible moment, in an extremely hypocritical manner after refusing to accept Obama's nominees in his last year? Didn't multiple US presidents abuse and violate human rights with illegal wars and torture, mass surveillance? Didn't a US president order the murder of a US citizen without due process? Didn't a US state create a blatantly unconstitutional law for witch hunting women ? From across the pond, it seems that most US politicians in power, mostly from one of the parties, are wiping their asses with the the US constitution.
I don't understand the pride bit.
It seems like a regrettable situation where your distrust of your fellow citizens is so strong that you are comforted by the ability to kill them with minimal effort.
(I'm in Australia, where we have some truly horrendous legislation, but I totally agree with our gun ownership laws here, and echo other people's observations that gun ownership does not seem to equate to, or ineluctably lead to, better laws / more freedoms outside the right 'to own lethal weapons' itself.)
Perhaps I could interest you in some Iain M Banks (taken from Excession) :
"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a kind of tragedy."
I can't speak to the parent, but I take pride in self-reliance, and taking responsibility for securing and defending the well-being of myself, my family, neighbors, and community.
I also am a volunteer, state-certified structure firefighter, and take pride in that for the exact same reason.
You might find it interesting that, as part of our classroom instruction, my structure firefighting class was asked how many of us owned guns — all of us raised a hand.
This mirrors my experience in the broader fire service.
> Perhaps I could interest you in some Iain M Banks (taken from Excession).
I love Iain M Banks' Culture series, but they live within a utopian, post-scarcity benevolent dictatorship managed by AIs with powers verging on that of a demigod.
We most certainly do not.
As for the quote? Any tool can only be fully appreciated within the context of its intended purpose, and the effects that it can produce in the world around us.
The value of a gun as a tool is a tragedy, but the tragedy isn't the gun, but the necessity for one, and it's a tragedy inherent in our mortal existence.
Well, they're sure not necessary here in Australia. I don't think I've ever met someone who owns one, certainly no-one has ever mentioned owning a gun to me. It's just not a thing. Seems to be just "a tragedy inherent" in the USA.
I was watching every day, and supporting, the George Floyd protests, and after a while those in Seattle and Portland.. until Raz got machine guns from his car and starting handing them out. WTF?! That was the plan?! I switched off, disgusted. That suddenly all seemed insane.
Like it does hearing people from the US on HN talking about guns. It just sounds crazy. I read on HN someone from the US saying Australians wouldn't be under lockdown if only we had guns etc. It just sounds insane, disturbing even reading that. What am I gonna do with a gun?!
But maybe, when everyone else has a gun, you feel you need for one too. Just know that it's not like that in every country.
Although if my country had spent most of the last 120 years invading other countries, subverting their politics, stealing their wealth, like the US has, I'd have urges to defend myself from it with a gun, too, maybe, I don't know. It's weird though. US violence has been focused outwards, on other countries, yet to hear people from the US, they never heard about that, don't feel involved or responsible, yet are obsessed with the possibility of US government violence happening to them one day.
I don't claim to understand the situation, just I'm very glad not to live in a country where everyone has a gun. OK, now I will stop reading gun stories/comments on HN. Good luck!
Some would say it’s them testing the limits of their populace. What are they gonna do? Protest? That’s illegal when in lockdown.
Maybe the remarkable low covid rates are there because of the authoritarian pressure? Authoritarian is never a good word but if people simply won't listen when it comes to matters of public health (that affect everyone - an overflowing ICU is never a good thing) and thus endanger the health of others then they have to live with the consequences. It's not a matter of politic, opinion or ideology.
The suggestion that this should be responded to with guns is just the most perfect own goal.
You do have one of the lowest Covid death rates in the world. You have a lot of states with complete freedom.
UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Article 13
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.Consider the frighteningly lengthy list of school shootings in the USA. [0]
I note that Wikipedia does not have an entry for school shootings in, say, Australia. Or in fact most other places.
I'm seeing a figure of ~ 1300 school shootings in the USA since 1970, so it doesn't appear to be an entirely modern problem.
In the USA (contemporary, again, sorry I'm not sure what era your experiences are from) there's ~30-40 (children-aged) victims of gun-related violence a day, with ~8 of those resulting in death. [1]
From outside that society, how people put up with this, living with regular active shooter drills, managing the additional anxiety, etc, is definitely going to be of interest.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... [1] https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/gun-violence/16-facts-about...
> From outside that society, how people put up with this, living with regular active shooter drills, managing the additional anxiety, etc, is definitely going to be of interest.
I was in grade school not that long ago, and quite frankly, there wasn't much to "put up with". we did active shooter drills as or less frequently than fire drills (not often). I don't remember ever feeling anxiety about being shot at school, and I am a lot more anxious than the average person.
We'd have to be one of the more free countries around.
Yep, there are some laws that you would see as draconian, but are you offended because they actually impact you, or are they just something you don't like for "reasons"? Many places have laws and conventions that are different, it's about how you live with them. We have crappy and corrupt politicians. We have criminals and we have gangs. we are not perfect. The way we treat our first nations people is frankly shameful. Unemployed are in a in a hard shake, with benefits being far too low to both live and search for a job without family assistance.
We also have a country where you can walk down most streets without concern for your safety. Most places in the city you lock your doors but can get away with not setting an alarm. My current work at home office is on our back deck, and I'm happy to leave my computers out here for a few hours if I need to go out. Most places outside the cities you don't bother locking your doors. If you break down on a country road, your biggest fear is that somebody won't turn up to help you, not that they will come and rob you. Most of us don't know of anybody who has been killed by violence. I know one, she was shot by her boy friend when I was about 8 years old, way before the current gun laws were enacted. Most of the population understand that we need to work together for the common good, be it responding to natural disasters or putting on a bloody mask to help stop the spread of covid. In a disaster your neighbour will come and check that you are ok. If I want to have my say about something, as long as I'm not stupid or violent, there are many forum. I've walked all over the big (lol) cities in the country and never felt threatened or been accosted. This would be different if I were female, but I believe that is a problem world over. I still believe that the police are there to help and look after me, and have no fear about talking to them. Of course I'm white middle class male and my experience is not that of other groups, however police violence is still rare enough that it creates an outcry.
Overall, the only place I would prefer to live than Australia would be New Zealand, and then I'd have to put up with the cold weather.
As an American, the gun discourse especially on tech forums like HN sounds insane to me too.
You might want to consider some counterfactuals where the US kept more to itself.
It's usually the opposite sentiment for gun owners- I trust my fellow citizens with arms.
Guns are seen as an integral part of self-reliance by many. They provide you with a reasonably effective defense. One way to significantly erode individual's/citizen's power, and in turn give power to government, is take away their ability to defend themselves. People worry that as government becomes more powerful and citizens more reliant there is greater likelihood of oppressive government, in other words disarming populace is step down a slippery slope
For context, can you clarify if the many you're referring to there are some fellow USA citizens?
If so, I'll note that USA is < 5% of global population, and also note a very fresh Pew paper[0] which indicated more than half of that population was keen on stricter gun controls. So 'many' has some caveats around it.
> They provide you with a reasonably effective defense.
Against what? Other people with guns, or other people with feebler weapons?
If it's the former, then we're back to a basic escalation problem, and it's what most other western nation states have avoided falling prey to by, simply, not playing that game.
If you trust your fellow citizens with arms - who is it that you don't trust and that you need a weapon for 'effective defense'?
As to:
> ... in other words disarming populace is step down a slippery slope.
I really can't speak to what it looks like from within the borders of the USA, but from outside, it feels that the USA is well down that slippery slope (of eroded freedoms, and citizenry exploitation) compared to many other democratic nations - so guns in the hands of private citizens don't appear to be a panacea.
[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-a...
I grew up rural in US and now live in the city. It may as well be two different countries with respect to views on gun ownership, so nationwide polls won't capture any of the variation (also state to state is massive difference).
> Against what? Other people with guns, or other people with feebler weapons?
Any living threat, which could be a much much larger attacker or mob of attackers. Consider the rattlesnake, it's the same thing- a great deterrent. It's peace of mind, a last resort, something that's better to have and not need than to need and not have.
> who is it that you don't trust and that you need a weapon for 'effective defense'?
Have you ever read about the terrible things people do to eachothers? Or the barbarism of human history?
> It's usually the opposite sentiment for gun owners- I trust my fellow citizens with arms.
And now:
> Have you ever read about the terrible things people do to each others? Or the barbarism of human history?
Those positions aren't precisely orthogonal, but they certainly have some conflicting sentiment behind them.
As to owning a handgun for private use for:
> Any living threat, which could be a much much larger attacker or mob of attackers.
... from a naive perspective (I've never been in that situation, thankfully) it feels like any advantage I may have, via agility, negotiation, ability to out-run, etc, would be negated if everyone involved had a handgun. Certainly if everyone in that scenario is armed, there's no clear advantage to me to be armed.
(I concur that if the other party(ies) were not armed, and I was, then that's advantageous to me. And if they were armed, and I was not, well that's also very bad for me. But that's not the likely scenario in a heavily gun-equipped scenario.)
Anyway, I'm sure you've gone through all this before, with many people smarter / more informed than me.
Precisely why many Americans are convinced gun ownership is an answer to something, despite all the statistical evidence, I'm just not likely to ever understand. Thank you for your patience with my questions.
It probably doesn't change much but Americans ask the opposite question since ownership is already legal.
We ask what you hope to solve by removing gun ownership.
From the perspective of a gun owner who is in favor of better gun control, the biggest issue with gun legislation in the US is that those proposing restrictions either have no idea what they're talking about or are just catering to those who don't.
The pro gun control crowd is too busy inventing a nonsensical category of guns to ban ("assualt weapons") to even acknowledge that the homicide rate comes from poor people killing eachother with cheap, concealable handguns.
Reasonable enough, but many people have access to information about how the world outside those borders operates - which is why free healthcare, minimum wage, and other changes, are now being a bit more actively discussed.
Anyway.
> We ask what you hope to solve by removing gun ownership.
What's on offer is a significant (order of magnitude) reduction in the number of violent gun deaths. [0]
No one's trying to sell this to the USA.
OTOH various agencies within the USA are certainly trying to sell the idea that this is a bad thing. The budget differential of the two groups is enormous - consequently it'll almost definitely never happen.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/05/7435796...
I think I wasn't totally clear about the point I was trying to make.
Very very very few politicians in the US (I can't name a prominent one but I'm hedging) are for any sort of firearm prohibition that would put us in line with any of the nations we are often compared with. So, given that, the restrictions being proposed will not and should not be expected to bring us in line with those nations. Therefore, the question I'm asking is, given the proposed restrictions, what benefits should we expect.
The point I wanted to make was that the answer to that question, "what benefits should we expect?", is basically none from the current viable proposals and that's why, while I am for more gun control, I am against most existing and proposed gun control measures as I feel they are either completely ineffective or overly burdensome for their effectiveness.
I find the oft-said quote of "If we can save even one life..." type of argument a massive red flag.
If that's roughly it, then I'd suggest:
a) the cautiousness is a political necessity - and does not preclude the option of pursuing stronger, but similarly sentiment policy changes down the road. First steps, and all that.
b) my understanding is that even very basic, not hugely contentious (almost bipartisan support for) ideas, such as removal of full automatic and ridiculously high calibre from the marketplace, stopping sales at gun shows without background checks, cooling off periods, requiring safe storage gun cabinets, etc - would result in a measurable decrease in deaths (murders, massacres, suicides, accidents).
In any case, it feels like even if (b) wasn't a highly likely, the cost of doing it is relatively low to the potential (but, really almost guaranteed) outcomes.
> I find the oft-said quote of "If we can save even one life..." type of argument a massive red flag.
I don't speak for all non-American citizens, but outside of the country looking in, it feels like (media, social groups, etc) this past year or four we've had an alarming reveal about the attitudes of a surprisingly large portion of American society -- even if something trivially inconvenient is requested of them, that demonstrably will save the lives of other citizens, there's an instinctive and violent push-back.
So, yes indeed - suggesting that some lives could be saved probably isn't a sufficient and satisfactory argument for many people there. But that's a separate problem.
> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.
I guess I should add, if you can't find a way to respond to a comment without violating the guidelines, it's better to downvote, or flag if it's called for, and move on. I've discarded quite a number of half-written responses (and hastily deleted a few freshly-posted comments) on that basis.
Aha. See, if you had phrased that as a question, there could be room for curious conversation. Instead, you took the least generous interpretation and ran with that.
If I did something similar, like ran around pointing out that children can actually consent do actually have a working theory of the world in a thread about CP you'd probably question whether or not I have a load of CP on my computer. There is something as too much benefit of the doubt.
So... maybe?
We live in a tiny window of prosperity and safety. WWII was only 76 years ago. Syria is a short plane ride away. Afghanistan is a contemporary product of our own hubris.
Yet people still assume, for reasons that I genuinely cannot fathom, that this tiny window of privilege that we're lucky enough to inhabit will last indefinitely, and never backslide.
Nearly all perpetrated by the armed against the unarmed. The lesson of "might makes right" is to be suspicious of might before it makes right.
No, they don't at all. Just the opposite actually.
I get the 'Guns to defend against Tyranny' argument, that's kind of reasonable.
But as 'personal defence' they don't work nearly as well as having strong gun regulations which keep guns out of the hands of the morons. It's much safer walking down the street in Canada where you can't legally carry a gun, because there are just so few guns the baddies have a harder time getting them, and use them much less.
I do think we ought to be more concerned about authoritarian creep ... but guns are probably not the best solution to that either, as if it gets to that level it's very, very bad. Legislative, civic reform, voting, literacy etc. would be more helpful there.
Supply and Demand applies to the Black Market as much as it does to legal markets.
Again Japan is a great example: there are pretty much no guns allowed, anywhere, and guess what? There is almost zero gun crime.
There's no doubt that anyone with basic resources and need could obtain a gun if they really put their minds to it, but that's part of Supply and Demand, it's just not worth the extended effort in most cases. But if you have them lying around, with easy access, and your whole crew has them, and your rival gang is also easily and well armed, well, then you have a problem.
The argument that guns are good for personal defence just does not add up, it's just irrational at face value that everyone running around with guns (even legal ones) creates safer conditions.
The only place they would be useful is in highly dangerous situations, ironically made dangerous at least in part because historically lax gun regulations. If I lived in Mexico, I may very well own a gun, but in Maine, it would be basically pointless for the purposes of 'self defence' there.
Switzerland has high gun ownership, but they do not really have pistols and they do not carry them for self defence.
Mexico has strict gun laws, but they are not enforced, so the laws don't have much of an effect.
USA -> Can/Aus -> UK/Europe -> Japan form a fairly straight forward examples of ever stricter gun control leading to considerably less gun crime.
Note that some of those places have elevated levels of physical assaults, and knife attacks, but that leads to considerably fewer injuries and fatalities.
The 'stand against tyranny' argument notwithstanding, I think there's some legitimacy there, but that's another can of worms.
I think the relevant counterfactual example you're looking for here is, "If Japan had much more liberal gun laws, would murder rates go up?" I don't think anyone's specifically concerned about gun murders.
Consider that Japan has so effectively kept gun violence out, that we consider their 'no gun deaths' an artifact of their culture.
Reference my comment on this thread for data on Japan, France, US, Canada.
If you add in Korea, which is similar to Japan, you see that guns are not completely restricted but very rare - and guess what - homicide by guns, though still rare - does materially exist above the levels of Japan.
So yes, if you allowed 'some guns' in Japan, there would be some gun crime.
The homocide rate in Japan is about 1/2 that of Norway, which seems about right, it's not like they don't murder people there.
My bet if that gun laws in Japan were the same as Norway, you'd see 1) that more of the homicides would be by guns and 2) the homocide rate would creep up a bit because it's just so easy to reach for a gun.
Of course, if guns were as widespread in Japan as they are in the US there would be much more homicide, but still considerably less than in the US.
Put another way: while culture is obviously an important factor - that culture is driven by gun availability.
And other things as well of course: if everyone has healthcare/welfare, well, that's going to start to limit the very negative situations people get into on the margins. I'm not making an ideological point here, rather than trying to illustrate systematic effects.
I think that's incorrect. You really need to do experiments to get at this sort of causal story, though econometricians think they can sneak their way around said experiments. It's definitely a feedback loop and the availability of guns seems like a very, very small part of what goes into a "culture".
Anyway, what I really came here to say is I think you misinterpreted my comment: I didn't mean japanese people don't really care about gun murders, I meant all of us shouldn't really care about gun murders. From a public policy perspective, the thing we care about is just plain old murders--with what tools people decide to commit them is irrelevant. The relevant counterfactual you need to consider is, "If Japan had more liberal gun laws, would the murder rate go up?" if the claim you're interested in is "Do gun laws influence the murder rate?", NOT "If Japan had more liberal gun laws, would the gun murder rate go up?". It seems likely that the gun murder rate would go up to me, but who cares? What if the overall murder rate went down? What we really care about is the # of people murdered.
Woman in Texas was killed by feral hogs.
It is other way around. People who want gun bans do not trust the fellow citizens and hence want to restrict their freedom of owning firearms. Gun lovers on other hand are some of the nicest people around, we want everyone women, lgbtq, blacks, whites, asians and everyone to own firearms and we trust them to be responsible for it.
Pride part :
1. I come from a long line of fighters. Weapons are part of our lifestyle and no government or law can stop my family from being armed. (Though we will always obey law).
2. Guns are a symbol of individual freedom. There is an inherent responsibility to protect one and their private property and community. I will not hesitate to use violence to fight a tyranny.
Australia is practically under house arrest today and we see articles like :
https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/coronavirus/nsw-covid-upda...
[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/24/rape-a... [1] https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics
0: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm... 1: http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2013/Priorities...
>> The lack of standardization across databases limits their comparability (NRC, 2005). The absence of clearly defined concepts complicates data collection and interpretation. For example, definitions of “selfdefense” and “deterrence” are ambiguous (NRC, 2005; Weiner et al., 2007). There is no standardized method for data collection or collation, which prevents researchers from harnessing the potential power of data across multiple datasets
If you're walking around in Condition White all the time you're unlikely to succeed. But that doesn't describe many if not most US concealed carriers.
The fact that you cast this as "fantasy" tells us it's not something you've ever seriously considered.
>> “I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends. “I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. “And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!’ “
https://slate.com/technology/2011/01/joe-zamudio-and-the-gab...
>> But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. “Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess,” the interviewer pointed out.
"It became clear to them that giving women the right to vote was only way they could ban alcohol."
Let's burn the American flag instead. How's that gonna go in rural counties of the US? Will it be safe, or will the response be armed?
It is pretty hard to organize 'Draw A Muhammad' workshop in non-muslim countries like Canada, UK or India. That tells you how less free those countries are.
Secondly, freedom is used (always) in the context of Government. In India, Canada or UK it is not the fellow muslim you have to worry about but the government jailing you. In the absence of a robust violent respons from society government will take away your freedoms one by one to simplify their own life at your expense.
> Let's burn the American flag instead.
Please do. It is an important freedom Americans have and constitutional granted free speech right. American flag is burned, insulted on regular basis in USA. Just like flag insulting national anthem is another form of protest in USA. I have not heard of anyone being punished or killed in USA for burning American flag. Most certainly the government can't punish you for the same.
Sorry, bub. I live in Canada, and you're extremely misinformed about the law here. It would not be hard to organize a "draw a Muhammad" event here. If Megan Murphy speaking at the Vancouver Public Library is any indication, you could even do it on government property, replete with security to keep you and the protesters away from eachother.
Or, change my mind. Show me the legal precedent where Canada jailed somebody for drawing Muhammad. I'm curious about the UK, India and Australia, too. But I'm calling bullshit on your claim about Canada.
The closest I've seen was a dude got fined for distributing hate speech targeting an individual. He couldn't afford to pay the fine, and that was the end of that.
The response will be armed
You will not be Shot unless you tried to harm someone first
You will be yelled at, called names, and maybe at most hit across the head
They will try to stop you, put out the fire, and prevent you from burning the flag
They will not shoot you dead...
If I persist, or defend myself, as people attempt to stop me, are you positive that I wouldn't get shot by some trigger-happy kid like Kyle Rittenhouse?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_Freedom_of_the_World
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_Economic_Freedom
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Press_Freedom_Index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_the_Press_(report)
There are 2 indexes each for economic and press freedom. Our rankings on the economic freedom lists are 5th and 20th. On the press freedom ranks we are 44th, and 37th.
If you look at the heat maps and the actual indices themselves, along with the countries with comparable numbers, you’ll see that those lists precisely support my claim.
Thanks for providing this corroborating data.
Here is what I said: “The US is not lacking in either press or economic freedom compared to ‘peer’ nations.”
Whether or not there are countries who have better ratings, any honest reading of the list sees that the US ratings are similar to peers.
When you consider how large and diverse the US is compared to most countries on the list, the ranking becomes more impressive.
The first list puts the US above all of Europe except Switzerland, and above all of Scandinavia, and Canada and Australia.
The second list puts the US above Sweden, Germany, and Japan for example.
The third, doesn’t have ranks, but places US in the ‘satisfactory’ category along with most of Europe, Canada, and Australia.
The fourth, is the only one in which the US does a little worse on their points scale, however *it is back in the top tier described as ‘free’ alongside all its peers, and above the UK, France and Japan in the ranking.
It’s just bullshit to claim these lists indicate that the US is lacking compared to peers.
This is a completely dishonest representation of what I have said.
Here it is again:
> The US is not lacking in either press or economic freedom compared to ‘peer’ nations. Whether or not there are countries who have better ratings, any honest reading of the list sees that the US ratings are similar to peers.
Nowhere did I say there wasn’t room for improvement or even claim the US was at the top.
If you’re going to lie about both what I said, and what the links show, what do you think we can accomplish?
>We are usually behind Canada, New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries, and a few other European countries depending on the specific criteria being evaluated.
The countries we are behind on all 4 lists and therefore unanimously behind:
- New Zealand
- Switzerland
- Canada
- Australia
- Ireland
- Denmark
- Finland
- Netherlands
- Germany
- Norway
- Sweden
- Iceland
- Belgium
- Austria
- Portugal
- Czech Republic
- Lithuania
- Slovenia
- Andorra
- Liechtenstein
- Luxembourg
- Estonia
- Cyprus
- Jamaica
- Costa Rica
> And the fact that the US is lacking in those two latter categories compared to many of our peer nations
Which is still bullshit.
As I said before, whether or not there are countries who have better ratings, any honest reading of the list sees that the US ratings are similar to peers.
I already dealt with that in this response:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28560646
> It honestly seems like you are arguing just for the sake of argument at this point.
That doesn’t seem honest to me.
But either way, I give up. This isn't worth spending any more time on. Congrats, you win!
This is where the misunderstanding arises. You are actually incorrect. I’m not acting as if you said compared to all of our peer nations. I clearly and repeatedly accepted that we are behind some of our peer nations.
You on the other hand, are using the fact that we are not literally at the top of the list, to argue that we are behind our peers in a general sense.
If you weren’t you’d simply say “we aren’t at the top of the list - there are 8 countries ahead of us”, instead of the false, and more generic sounding “compared to many of our peers”.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/sports/running-while-blac...
It seems a lot of Black people are afraid to run because they know there's a real risk that they'll be shot by white people who will assume they've committed a crime. They're afraid people will immediately assume they're scofflaws, as you joked (?), and hurt or harass them.
So you may have seen black people running, but that may be because you live in a more progressive neighborhood with BLM signs that has made Black runners feel less like they'd be murdered in your neighborhood than in other neighborhoods (as one person explained in that article).
If we're measuring freedom, the right to exist in public without a reasonable expectation of violence and harassment seems important.
Lastly, this has nothing to do with gun ownership? You can find people expressing exactly the same sentiments all over western Europe.
>...the freedom to go for a run in public without being shot or harassed (which is not really afforded to Black Americans)".
I could quibble about that claim, or point that I've read countless tweets and anecdotes from Black people describing that they have to carefully plan their routes and wear shirts from ivy league schools because they've been assaulted or harassed by white people in the past and they just want to make whites feel safe, or look back to my upbringing in Grosse Pointe, a wealthy suburb just east of Detroit that was hardcore redlined [0] where I saw Black people routinely harassed for existing in public. But the core of this is that Black people in American don't have the freedoms white people do. Black people don't get personhood here, unlike people who look like me [1].
And as a homicide researcher, I assure you, gun ownership is extremely relevant to the denial of freedom to Black Americans.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Metro_Detroit...
[1] https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1255088329634308096?s=20
It's true that in some cases, there are disparities that seem to suggest a very small amount of racial bias. Summing up that situation by saying that as blacks are not free is about as unproductive and untrustworthy as using Jamelle Bouie as a source for anything.
[0] seriously, what is that? A description of your hobby of reading newspaper articles and downloading public datasets?
[1] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/3/testing-the-test...
Over 80% of people shot or killed in the city I've lived in for over a decade are Black, and over 80% of shootings or homicides occur in neighborhoods where 80+% of residents are Black. These observables forced me to ask "Why are Black people so disproportionately victimized by violent crime?" and "Why is housing so intensely segregated?". Looking into segregation, I found this problem isn't unique to Chicago, rather it's a feature of every US city with a significant Black population [0], so the cause likely wasn't purely local in nature.
Growing up in the Detroit suburb I mentioned previously, I was very familiar with "redlining", as the the boundary line separating Detroit and Grosse Pointe was also the boundary line separating white and Black residents as that Wikipedia image clearly shows. I am somewhat embarrassed that I had to watch hundreds of people be murdered before I thought to ask "why are we still so racially segregated, over 50 years after LBJ's administration signed so many civil rights bills into law?" but asking that question lead me to investigate, and unsurprisingly, a nation-wide effect was the consequence of a nation-wide federal policy. The Federal Housing Administration's explicitly racist mortgage underwriting guidelines [1] explicitly incentivized racially segregating Black Americans out of areas with desirable land, low pollution, good schools, or good services. Here are some excerpts from this Federal policy that provided a massive investment vehicle nearly exclusively to white Americans:
* "Natural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences. Usually the protection from adverse influences afforded by these means includes prevention of the infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups." (Section 935: "Natural Physical Protection"),
* "Areas surrounding a location are investigated to determine whether incompatible racial and social groups are present, for the purpose of making a prediction regarding the probability of the location being invaded by such groups. If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values." (Section 937: "Quality of Neighboring Development"),
* "However, if the children of people living in such an area are compelled to attend school where the majority or a considerable number of the pupils represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element, the neighborhood under consideration will prove far less stable and desirable than if this condition did not exist." (section 951: "Quality and Accessibility of Schools"),
* "Satisfaction, contentment, and comfort result from association with persons of similar social attributes. Families enjoy social relationships with other families whose education, abilities, mode of living, and racial characteristics are similar to their own." (Section 973: "Social Attractiveness"),
* "The infiltration of inharmonious racial groups will produce the same effects as those which follow the introduction of incongruous land uses, when the latter tend to lower the level of land values and lessen the desirability of residential areas." (Section 1360, "Estimation of Remaining Physical and Economic Life of Buildings",
* "Racial Occupancy Desiqnation. This will be a letter indicating predominating racial characteristics, as follows: W-White M-Mixed F-Foreign N-Negro" (Section 1850)
* etc.
The FHA is a federal agency of the US government, which extends its reach across the US. The FHA's underwriting manual provided explicitly racist rules for determining whether the FHA would insure mortgages in an area, and if the FHA wouldn't insure mortgages in an area, that drastically reduced the number of banks that would issue mortgages in an area, which reduces the supply of buyers, which reduces land value. As a consequence, these policies incentivized real estate agents, banks, and white residents to push Black people out of desirable areas and into ghettos or areas far from economic opportunity. While these policies were outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, many millions of white Americans were able to buy real estate thanks to this program thereby enabling those white Americans to generate generational wealth on those assets, while Black Americans were denied access to this class investment, or could only access it through predatory means (eg "contract buying", where the buyer gains no equity until the very last payment is made, so failure to pay the penultimate payment could result in the resident being evicted with nothing). Even with redlining being explicitly illegal, banks still do it [2].
Over the past hundred years in the US, real estate has been an incredibly well performing investment, and access to this investment class many decades ago has allowed white families to profit from (and pass down) the compounding returns, while Black families were locked out of this. The resulting racial wealth gap [3] is staggering, with the median white family net wealth being around $188k, while the median Black family's net wealth is around $24k. As a result, segregation is maintained by the massive population of white Americans who are able to afford rents or mortgages in areas with high quality services, while the population of Black Americans able to afford the same rents or mortgages is disproportionately smaller.
As a result of this intense, systemic racial bias (which is undeniably obvious, just look at these maps [0]!), average Black Americans enjoy nowhere near the freedom that average white Americans do. Last year, there were over 4000 shootings and 769 homicides in Chicago, and the overwhelming majority of them occurred in the neighborhoods where the majority of Chicago's ~780,000 Black residents live. In the Detroit suburb I grew up in, I could (and regularly did) go for walks between midnight and 3am, never once thinking "oh, this isn't safe". None of my classmates were ever murdered or shot. Few if any of my classmates had to work a job to help their family get by, and even most of the mediocre students in my grade went to college. The conditions for Black people my age who just lived 4 blocks north of me, just across the Detroit border, lived under very different conditions.
If you think this is a "very small amount of racial bias", I assume you've just never taken the time to think about this issue. When you look a maps of racial segregation in the US [0], [systemic racial segregation via federal housing policy] is the only explanation that stands up to scrutiny. If you're actually interested in the truth on this issue, you should read "The Color of Law" [4]. If you aren't interested in the truth, keep doing what you're doing.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/segreg...
[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Feder...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/eight-rec...
[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...
[4] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
You rightly mention lobbying and corruption together. But somehow you miss that they are on the same continuum. From my EU perspective lobbying in the US is corruption, as the lobbying comes with money and paid-for political promotion.
The situation around guns itself is a clear example: as I understand it, a majority of US people is in favor of more limitations to gun rights (banning automatic weapons, screening psychiatric patients and criminals) but politicians are only expanding gun rights (open carry etc).
If democracy would work as intended then "common sense" limitations would have been introduced long ago.
Note that I am not talking about corruption in the criminal sense: US politics and supreme court have fully legalized and embraced it, conflating it with lobbying.
Specifically, there are already heavy restrictions on automatic weapons, which are basically never used in criminal acts. Every automatically gun in the US has to be registered with the federal government for $200 and a lot of paperwork. In effect it means if you’re wealthy you can own automatic guns, which is a violation of the 2nd in a lot of people’s opinion.
What I think you meant when you said automatic is “assault “, which is what most of the gun debate is currently center on, so called “assault rifles”. The issue is that the term is not clearly defined, and under most proposed bans would include many rifles which were traditionally considered hunting tools. Even that is a bit of moot point, because the 2nd was not written with hunting in mind.
Another hot point recently is “ghost guns”, which like “assault rifle”, sounds scary enough on the evening news to grab eyeballs. “Ghost guns” are being used to justify government overreach by banning the sharing of gun plans for DIY construction. The issue is that again, almost no DIY guns are used in crimes. What are used are stolen handguns that have had the serial number scratched off. The stolen guns are grouped in with DIY guns as “ghost guns”.
I think you're thinking of "assault weapon" which gets thrown about a lot and for which there isn't a clear definition.
The term 'assault rifle' is used loosely by us, but in terms of law there are definitions: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1296...
"Assault rifle" has a very specific meaning: an intermediate-caliber, magazine-fed military rifle capable of both semi-automatic and automatic fire. That common meaning has been more or less fixed since WWII when it was adopted from the German word Sturmgewehr.
"Assault weapon" is a legal term that is defined by law (e.g., California's assault weapons ban or the failed federal Assault Weapons Ban of 2019 that you cited). "Assault weapon" includes not only semi-automatic rifles, but also shotguns and pistols that have certain characteristics. The definitions are long and complicated because they attempt to ban only weapons having the visual and ergonomic features of military weapons, while ignoring weapons of similar caliber that do not have those features.
As for the definition, if you read the definitions of the prohibited components, they are broad enough to ban essentially all rifles, which is likely the goal. For instance, “pistol grip” seems like a well defined thing at a glance, but it is later defined as “ 45) The term ‘pistol grip’ means a grip, a thumbhole stock or Thordsen-type grip or stock, or any other characteristic that can function as a grip.”
That last clause especially is extremely broad. Define functioning as a grip. Is that any piece that enables holding the rifle?
And you don't get to decide if $200 today plus a very intrusive application process infringes on our rights.
https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/national-firearms-...
Also, the supreme court already weighted on some rights regarding weapon registration:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Freed
>> United States v. Freed, 401 U.S. 601 (1971), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held the National Firearms Act's registration requirements do not violate the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.
$600 for an automatic rifle? I will literally pay you as much just to connect me to the seller.
SKS is semi-automatic.
So don't need the $200 ATF machine gun stamp.
Strange, isn't it, how polling organizations don't quite seem to capture what the people actually want and vote for.
Actually, your list of "banning automatic weapons, screening psychiatric patients and criminals" is already in place, although the first is limited to a few hundred thousand in civilian hands. Two last time I checked had been used in crimes, the first incident a murder by a policeman.
People with money and influence will always try to impact law. In EU it happens through actual bribes which is far worse. (Pretty much like India). In USA an immigrant like me can join hands with 10K immigrants and find enough support in congress openly by hiring lobbiest to advocate for the cause I care about. That is how democracy should work.
It is easy to see lobbying as bad by taking examples you don't like but in reality it is a great example of how people can convince their representatives to pass right kind of laws, legally and with enough regulation. In most countries this happens to secret middleman and nights in shady hotels.
> a majority of US people is in favor of more limitations to gun rights
It is not clear if that is the case. Of course majority of people is irrelevant because this is not a mob rule. That is why we don't allow crowd in SF determine what people in Montana want. It is all fair game.
Secondly, people like me who care about guns care about it lot more to actually form lobbies. On other hand folks who dislike guns only talk about it but will not lobby or donate for the anti-gun causes.
I recommend this excellent video about why NRA despite with a shoe string budget is so much more influenced than many other lobbying groups.
> Revenue (2018) $412,233,508[0]
I don't know what shoestrings you're buying, but I suggest shopping around.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association
> Revenue (2018) $412,233,508[0]
That could buy a lot of machineguns, according to the ATF.
https://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2010/01/25/shoestring-mach...
What on earth are you talking about?
Can someone point me towards some statistics or reports of such occurrences?
I don’t know how can I prove that people think that. You just need to be in the gun community and talk to people who would never put it in writing. My own gun trainer told us the story of a man going to the doctor for getting his hand hurt while doing repairs at home, the doctor chatted with him and he mentioned that he lost his job recently that’s why he had all this free time to do his work, the doctor reported this and his guns were taken away. (Please note no more details were provided than the story).
The point is that mental health is a very tricky game, there is an immediate loss of trust due to the fundamental nature of what it is. I personally don’t think you should own guns if you’re taking antidepressants.
> I don’t know how can I prove that people think that. You just need to be in the gun community and talk to people who would never put it in writing.
I wasn't trying to challenge anything, just presenting my own anecdata that I personally have not run into gun ownership issues even with my own mental health trials. Nor has my brother, who like another commenter got put into a 72-hour involuntary hold and continues to own and purchase firearms without issue. Contrast this against your own, opposing anecdata from your trainer.
I'm well familiar with the belief and that people live with such fear, I've heard it plenty at ranges, gun stores, sporting goods stores, from colleagues and in bars. Recently, my girlfriend quit her job and her father was near frantic in his insistence that she not cite 'stress' in her resignation letter as that alone would supposedly start some rube goldberg slippery slope mechanism to her losing her right to own guns. Again, to me this feels like such an overblown fear of the evil eye of big government boogeyman and near incredible, which is why I was asking for stats or reports to try to put some numbers to the stories. I certainly won't discount that guns are, on occasion, taken away from their rightful owners without proper due process; but are there any DOJ, FBI reports, etc?
Ok, so your point is, that making laws which stigmatize mental health (which is what it is) have no impact on people seeking out mental health counseling?
If anything, my point is that maybe this pervasive (and possibly unfounded, which is why I'm wondering if there is any actual hard data) fear of having guns stolen is impacting people's mental health by disincentivizing them from seeking the help they need.
Ah, but that was not my claim. My claim is, association of mental health and guns will cause (and is causing) people to avoid seeking mental health.
I don't know how can I be any more clear, but you can read my past comments again.
Being committed by judicial order for having a mental illness/developmentally disabled, or being found not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial are the three disqualifiers for gun ownership in my state. It is likely different in each state, so YMMV.
The argument that you need guns for personal defense, against the government or as part of self-reliance is extremely rare. Also legally there are not many cases where their use would be considered justified self-defense by a court.
There has been some "americanization" in recent years with people copying NRA arguments but not a prevalent mindset anywhere in the country.
The reasons why there are some many guns around are simply because people often take (or had to in the past) the military service riffle home and because shooting is a fairly popular sport. Not because of a perceived need of needing it for defending oneself or family.
Why hang a sign that insinuates "I may shoot you", unless that person really means it?
I know other families who have guns are willing & able to protect my children. They've thought about such situations, and have means to protect the innocent.
You make a fundamental mistake by thinking that the sign has any effect on how much I trust my neighbors. Unless it's a NAMBLA flag, I am not going to let a bumper sticker or slogan override my personal experience of a person. Most people are like this.
An example of someone's recent true nature:
>> A Washington man was arrested after officials said he shot and killed a neighbor for revving his engine too loudly.
https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/state/washington/article...
One cherry-picked anecdote is insufficient. A million or so crimes, murders included, are deterred/stopped every year - most without firing a shot.
The data don't really suggest that this is the case. Compared to other western countries, America has the same rate of crime. The difference is, of course, that criminal activity is more likely to involve firearms and thus death.
If you have lots of personal experiences with a person, that's great. But many people don't have real relationships with their neighbors. Bumper stickers and slogans absolutely will impact such relations, they make first impressions. I certainly wouldn't trust almost-strangers with tons of flat-earth stuff to tutor my kids, would you?
Being brown myself, I promise you that your cherished pet minorities are doing fine in the suburbs. None of us are looking to urban whites as a savior, and you don't need to involve us in your feud with rural whites. Many of the people who I know that are gun owners are black -- they're very neighborly as well!
"It's more dangerous to be black in America[...] It's both more dangerous because of crime, which is the Chicago story. But it is more dangerous in that you're substantially more likely to end up in a situation where police don't respect you where you could easily get killed. I think sometimes for whites it's difficult to appreciate how real that is."
Does racism exist? Of course. It probably is even higher among rural and suburban individuals, on some kind of self-reported metric.
Does it have an appreciable, significantly negative impact on the lives of most non-white people in 2021? The evidence is pretty dubious on this point IMO, but of course it depends on your definition of impactful.
Is it related to gun violence? I don't see how.
"To describe the urban-rural distribution of firearm mortality, we used the county-level metropolitan/nonmetropolitan classification from the United States Department of Agriculture’s 2013 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes, which defines nonmetropolitan (rural) counties as having communities of fewer than 50,000 people with less than 25% of the workforce commuting to a metropolitan(urban)county".
Does that work?
Broadly speaking, if someone says "we should severely curtail gun ownership because at a per-county level some counties have very high firearm mortality rates," it does seem reasonable to me to object on the basis that:
1. in terms of the intersection of quality of life and foundational rights, I care more about the rate of homicide, not gun mortality (which includes accident and suicide). Rights imply responsibility, so the appropriate question is whether people are capable of being responsible with their rights. It is irresponsible if you harm others with the exercise of your freedom.
2. on the basis of individual cities and towns, high gun ownership (freedom) does not seem to correlate to higher homicide (irresponsibility). That phenomenon seems restricted to dense urban areas where gun control is already in effect, and other geographies -- mostly poorer regions where stronger gang and drug enforcement seems warranted.
If you understand that joke, you understand the objection.
Unfortunately, in 2021, dense minority-dominated districts tend to be high in gun crime. If you don't live in one of those area, it's like a European country, in terms of living standards and crimes rates.
So we get to the crux of it. It's not the signs that prevent you from socializing with your community.
On to the signs. "Posted, no trespassing" is an indication that bad things may happen if you jump a fence. Maybe all it is is getting arrested and charges pressed. Do signs like that make you feel unsafe?
Signs like that are intended to deter the wrong kind of people, that is, those who would harm you. They have the added side effect of bringing together like minded people, and deterring socialization from people with a problem with it.
No. Those suggest a normal, decent, measured response, rather than a spirit of escalation. A sign like "talk shit, get hit" would worry me though.
Ok that said, I don't understand how guns protect us from the government. I think the biggest threats area slow and mundane. Ie erosion of rights or increasing power of some portion of the government over decades. There's no one cataclysmic event that overnight would make sane people take up arms and start popping off.
Likewise, let's say the government went all evil-like. Like in a movie. And you somehow got a huge citizen resistance trying to fight the government forces, unlike in real life where apparently the country would be split and half would join the government forces. The government has armor, air support, artillery, surveillance, and logistics. This isn't the 1700s. Just access to small arms is meaningless unless the 2nd amendment is broadened to include all weapons. And even then, machine guns, manpads, tanks and heat are just tools and a tiny, inconsequential part of warfare.
You always see gun people plinking away at stationary targets. Arguing about mlok vs picatinny. Maybe practicing their tacticool speed reloads. You rarely see people practicing force on force cqb, urban fighting, how to fight as a team.
Of course this is all theorizing. I don't America is in danger of that sort of civil war just yet.
Government isn't going to attack lots of individuals via tanks/artillery/etc scattered thru innumerable suburban neighborhoods.
Every year >20,000,000 US individuals partake in live-fire live-target drills, acting practically as lone wolves, as well- and self-equipped snipers in Operation "Deer Season". Just 0.001% of those, sufficiently motivated, would paralyze an oppressive government.
Yes, most "plinking" aren't practicing for serious combat. But they are practicing, and even with a high attrition rate they would, as a diffuse group, take down and/or demoralize violent oppressors. And that's not counting the small but far-from-trivial number taking CQB training seriously.
This year's legislative freak-out over thousands of unarmed & mostly-peaceful protesters occupying the Capitol wasn't so much what they did, but that they represented an enormous number who are well armed.
The country needs a lot of change to tackle big problems like climate change and increasing wealth inequality however the government is sitting back doing nothing because many representatives are lobbied by big interests to let the big interests continue doing what they're doing.
You can see for yourself what actual Americans think the "most important problem" they're facing is:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/Most-Important-Problem.asp...
Global warming and income inequality are so low they barely register in the poll at all. Representatives follow their constituents.
Also, that poll seems flawed because it asks a superlative question (what is the "most" important problem) instead of using something like ranked choice where perhaps climate change and income inequality were everyone's second and third options.
The power exerted by 3 letter agencies is greater than any other western nation in my opinion. They are massively bloated with excess capital and power, and it has allowed them to indefinitely extend their jurisdiction until it significantly overlaps with people's right to privacy.
That said I doubt either of these issues would be much improved without guns. An armed population seems mostly incidental. One downside of focusing on armed resistance, however, is that you can easily delude yourself into thinking you're better protected from tyranny, when in actuality the war is already being lost in courtrooms and political backrooms without a shot being fired.
Isn't that a very high estimation?
That said...I'd take being shot by a bullet any day compared to being shot by a modern bow/crossbow. Definitely a better chance of surviving the bullet.
If someone is shooting to stop a threat they're probably gonna have better than 5/1000 odds of permanently stopping the threat.
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020#
So yes better than 50% but not great.
> In December, a jury in Corpus Christi, Tex., acquitted a 48-year-old man who spent 664 days in jail after being charged with attempted capital murder for wounding three SWAT officers during a no-knock raid that targeted his nephew. The jury concluded that the man, Ray Rosas, did not know whom he was firing at through a blinded window.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/18/us/forced-ent...
My point is that a society which trusted all of its civilians to be armed would be very different from the communist China of today.
The murder rate in the town (37k residents) I live in (in the south) is effectively zero. I wouldn't doubt that all of my neighbors around me (most of us are originally from a northern state) have guns and we've managed not to kill each other.
Do you think the French revolution didn't require violence?
One fact about murders that has exceptionally low variance is the likelihood of personally knowing the person that murders you. This is 90%, in almost all circumstances and areas.
Means, the gun, is only one part of the equation and has been noted generally the smallest. Motive is far more important when attempting to put murder rates into context.
I wouldn't be surprised if the murder rate of my town of 100k people is about on par with a British or German town of 100k people, since we don't have any gang presence here.
The same is true in other countries. Berlin has a murder rate vastly higher than the countryside, and let's not mention Frankfurt. However even the crime cesspool that is Berlin has a murder rate comparable to or lower than the "low crime" areas in the US.
Everytime I see this line of reasoning I'm utterly shocked at the lack of understanding.
What you said applies equally across any other country too. So France's 1.2 is an average of the entire country.
Yes, half of any country is below the average!
States in the US have significantly more difference than the regions in France (or whatever they are called). It is probably more accurate to compare the US to the EU and France to an individual state.
Czech republic, the only shall issue European country is at 0.9.
De Gaul, who had been out of power since 1946 when he resigned, understood that he could unify the country behind him, and "proposed" himself as a mr fixit. He obtained the support of the various generals he still knew from WW II, got himself elected by the French, and lead the country for another 10 years (during which he ended up getting out of Algeria)
He was always very sensitive of having the confidence of the French, and at several occasions made it clear that he would go if such-and-such vote would not work out. He resigned in 1969 after losing a referendum on some subject.
He was an extraordinary man, and must have been a serious PITA for the allies. If you want to read more, I recommend https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_(book)
If anything, rumours to the effect that Republican senators/representatives are only still publicly supporting Trump because they fear armed Trump supporters, could (iff true) be a relevant example.
Then Charles De Gaulle came out of retirement and promised to write a new constitution, and since he was widely respected by both the military and the general public, everything settled down. Of course, this technique only works if you have Charles De Gaulle.
On the one hand, things like social media make “blowing off steam in private with your mates” basically indistinguishable from what used to be “going out of your way to send a letter to someone to harass or threaten them”. I don’t think that’s a reduction, so much as the system not accounting for the changes wrought by tech (see also: Robin Hood Airport trial).
On the other: while I expect anyone known to more than 1000 people to have other people sounding off about them — and while I expect anyone known to 100k Americans to have indistinguishable-from-plausible threats from gun owners who gained those guns despite specific delusional mental states that ought to have excluded them from gun ownership — Jan 6th had more than just that: it had the extra level of demonstrating that there were a lot of people who were not merely performatively angry FirstnameBunchOfNumbers internet accounts but real people with the means and motivation to travel to DC and to force their way into the Capitol building and private offices therein, to bring Molotovs and pipe bombs with them to DC, to not merely chant “hang Mike Pence” but to do so when someone had set up a gallows (or vice versa, timeline unclear for me).
If you are selling lion repellant that makes a lion attack 80% less likely, that's not something I'd be interested in.
That being said, it's great that some countries have driven a small risk down to oblivion. Not sure that firearm laws have much to do with that, though. Probably more to do with policing structure.
I watched them smash windows and set fires with zero police response. Any doubts I may have had about my gun collection went out the window that night.
The "guns as fire extinguisher" analogy is apt. It wasn't likely that a mob would threaten my neighborhood, just as it isn't likely any particular person's house will ever catch fire. But I will remain prepared.
The average murder rate in the US is a distraction, except to point out (as I did) that obviously people aren't dropping like flies. If any significant fraction of those 300M guns were killing people, the average would be several orders of magnitude higher than it is.
Go ahead and exercise your personal rights to defend yourself and your family as you see fit based on your values and risk profile.
The averages neither support the idea that we should ban guns, nor that we should all get one. Because, again, averages are pretty useless -- but that's the context of the current thread of discussion, so I felt a need to respond.
EDIT: major rewording for clarity.
And culture.
An irrational person uses irrelevant data as justification to ignore preventable deaths. We're not talking about how many car wrecks, or heart attacks, or rabid vending machines are out there, we're talking about gun-related homicide and suicide. Preventable deaths that we can prevent just like every other first world country does, but we just choose not to.
Your odds of being murdered in the U.S. are very low compared to many other ways of dying (see e.g. https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/databriefs/db395.htm), so yeah, it'd be great to see the murder rate lowered (that's always good, right?), but even if you did something drastic that managed to cut the odds in half, it would not have any discernible impact on most people's day to day lives nor on their ultimate cause of death because so few people end up dying that way.
There are many ex-militaries from volunteers who go to volunteer battalions. And many of them return with guns. But even with a state like that, you probably won't hear any gunshots in cities in your life. The first time I heard one was where I took a trip to the USA, random "gang" shooting in NY, as I remember.
From my perspective, as someone who is culturally not so integrated with the USA, I think the roots of this are how you see guns and feel around firearms at all. In my country, people are cautious about the idea of using a firearm against other people. Even if they have one, they probably do drunk shit with a knife, not with a gun.
Anyway, I also can't understand how any gangs are still alive in the USA in our time. Even my shittiest country eliminated all of them in the 90s, so are Russia and other CIS countries. You can find many documentation films about that on youtube. There is almost nothing left except massive graveyards of dead criminals with funny grave tomb pictures like "sitting in my first Mercedes Benz with a gun, cool guy."
I may be wrong somewhere. That's just my perspective as an outsider.
The question is: why are murders so out of control in certain areas? And the answer is: local policing and local politics. DAs don't prosecute, and so police won't risk their life to bring people in. They show up 30 minutes later as the clean up crew.
So it's actually fairly normal for repeat offenses here because someone is never arrested, never charged, out on bail, plead down to a slap on the wrist, or out on parole where supervision is a joke.
Why are local politics so screwed up? That's an interesting question. One aspect is one-party rule: the Democrats are such an overwhelming majority in a lot of these inner cities that all the politics happen before the ballot is ever printed. Within the Democratic party, there's a dangerous contingent that simply doesn't want to imprison criminals for reasons I don't entirely understand.
Why do the people in such cities put up with such a bad system? Because even within those cities, the problem areas are contained, and can be safely ignored (sadly). "Root causes" sounds nicer than "lock 'em up", so most of the people in the city nod along and go about their business, and avoid the bad parts of town.
My guess is that Ukrainians just don't have time for that kind of nonsense. If someone is violent, they are put away quickly. The idea of making a deal with a violent criminal is probably not fashionable there. There are lots of poor people in Ukraine, and mostly the same skin color, so nobody puts up with the "violence is just a symptom of poverty and capitalism and racism and ten other problems that must be solved first". A few civil liberties probably get stomped along the way, which also helps bring crime down to low levels; but I don't think giving up civil liberties is a prerequisite of law and order.
Cant the "roots" be also in segregation problems before? If I remember correctly what I learned early, it was called something like "red lining" created "bad neighborhoods" in cities.
>My guess is that Ukrainians just don't have time for that kind of nonsense. If someone is violent, they are put away quickly.
It is mostly true for Ukraine. But the real curse, as I said, is not organized crime, gangs, or someone with a firearm. The biggest problem in Ukraine is domestic violence. Most police officers don't have any weapon here except pepper sprays, stun guns, and other non-lethal tools. They usually fight with a drunk 40-something man who will get drunk and try to kill his family after that.
Domestic violence is a curse for CIS countries. And even if Ukraine changed government and how everything works with new and young politicians, you can't change people. In the end, 40%+ of the population suffers violence, and most of them, of course, are women. Great inheritance from the Soviet era, where "no violence, no sex, no drugs, only happy people." https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Violence_against_women_in_Ukrain...
>According to the estimation of OSCE the violence towards women is widespread in Ukraine and it is associated with three times more deaths than the ongoing War in Donbas in the Donbas region of Ukraine
Fragment from the Wiki article. More women get killed by their husbands than people die in the ongoing war with artillery, tanks, aviation, etc. This is as bad as you can imagine when you read it.
Want to know how Russia fights domestic violence? They just decriminalized it, that's all. They don't even try anymore, so the only help you can get is from non-profit organizations.
Maybe, but it's not relevant. Let's all fix the root problems, but let's not create a dependency on it. If we want to solve a problem, we have to solve the problem in the reality we have (flawed as it is), not the reality we want.
"The biggest problem in Ukraine is domestic violence."
Sad to hear. Going back to the main topic, it seems like you might be suggesting that women owning guns might be a solution to that problem?
I totally agree here. It's not better than typical procrastination with waiting for "ideal env" to do anything. It won't happen. The "magic monday" when it's will be the best time to solve a problem won't happen. You try to solve it, or you don't.
>it seems like you might be suggesting that women owning guns might be a solution to that problem?
I'm not sure about that one. Would it actually help women in that situation? I'm not even sure if that won't just create additional problems without any help for the original case.
The U.S. has the rule of law, due process, innocent until proven guilty, etc.
It's the same here, and we use roman law, so there won't be any precedents what someone gets to the court. All cases are the exception and go through all the processes without looking back on the same cases.
Why would you think that the USA is the only country that has it? We even got incredible labor laws. They are so good that we don't even need unions for protection against companies. And just a reminder, that USA is #1 by prisoners in the world. https://www.statista.com/statistics/262961/countries-with-th...
Not so innocent, huh?
I know, most people in the USA think that other countries are like poor villages without tech and law there.
But even poor Ukraine is much more digitalized and advanced in tech. Still, even in the case of transparency of how the law works, where the budget goes (you can even vote with your mobile app where you want to spend budget money in your city), court cases, it's all digitalized, transparent, and easy to check by anyone.
To be more precise, here are some links on typical bankings[1][2], government open source big data on all information that happened in the country[3], digitalized id and passport, with all the documents and request for any data or papers[4], transparent government tenders[5] and one of big media project that does all the corruption investigations with big politicians in it[6]. And no one from journalists even got arrested for that.
With these links and information, I want to say that it's funny that people think that other countries got some shady government, there is no power of law, and all people are struggling without real freedom.
Do you have LGBT raves to block entrance to the White House and annoy the president? Because we do[7]
1. https://www.monobank.ua/?lang=en
3. https://opendata.gov.ua/en/
7. https://strana.news/news/346451-muzykalnyj-prajd-na-bankovoj...
What is it about Vermont, where you can walk around with concealed assault weapons, that makes it safer than "Europe"?
Czech Republic is an exception, it's a shall issue European country. The majority of gun owners also have concealed carry permits. Homicide rate is very low, only 0.9.
Why?
"the homicide rate in Europe was 3.0 per 100,000 population." - https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/gsh/Bookle...
https://vermontbiz.com/news/2019/october/23/vermont-has-3rd-...
"Vermont Business Magazine Vermont reported the 3rd lowest murder rate (1.8) compared to other states. This was 3.1 points below the national average of 4.9 homicides per 100,000 individuals, according to a new report from safewise.com(link is external). In fact, the three states from Northern New England had the lowest murder rates."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Vermont#Summary_ta...
The real argument is that guns enable acts that, while rare, and while they affect few people, are so egregious that we as a society will go to great lengths to ensure they never happen (school shootings).
The multiplier for all firearm-related deaths between the US and EU average for example is around 12X, more than an order of magnitude [1].
The elephant in the room however is that the main argument simply doesn't hold up. Owning a gun doesn't just make the owner slightly more likely to get shot, but also everyone around them [2]
Or, as they say: The only thing you need against a bad toddler with a gun is a good toddler with... nah, not going there. Too sad actually.
Statistic after statistic says clearly that a society with more guns is less safe for everyone (the Switzerland outlier is easily explained by banning of owning munition instead of guns in peace time).
I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like. Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Seriously, that just rocks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... [2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/do-guns-m...
For instance, Japan, per capita, has fewer firearms-related suicides than the US, but it has more suicides. I’d be willing to bet it has more train-related suicides than the US. Does this mean Japan’s suicide rate would go down if they had fewer trains and more guns? No, it just means that suicidal Japanese use the tools that are available to them, as do suicidal Americans.
Britain has very low rates of gun violence. But it has increasing rates of knife violence. Is this because Brits have too much access to knives? Or is it because violent people use the tools that are available to them? Britain is cracking down on knives, but even if they make it nigh-impossible to peacefully chop vegetables in your own kitchen, British criminals will just switch to screwdrivers or cricket bats or the Millwall Brick. But hey, at least you won’t have any more British toddlers getting hurt by playing with kitchen knives.
> I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like. Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Americans a century ago were just as well armed as today (perhaps more so) and had none of that nonsense. It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.
my mom (born 1961) described her high school parking lot as exactly this. she described it as sort of a "clique"/social strata thing, like, guys I associate with wearing heavy Carhartt work coats to school every day and jeans with a clear indentation of a chew can (despite being under 18), would've been the kinds of guys who would proudly leave their sometimes multiple hunting firearms in gun racks in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot, which nobody had any issue with at all.
1991, the year I was born, someone held up a class at the same high school with a sawed-off shotgun. nobody was hurt but he discharged a few shells into a wall. last I checked you could still see how rough the buckshot-riddled concrete wall still is, despite having been painted over. (interestingly, this story never made national news...)
I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.
This is what you get when everyone at every level feels compelled to "do something".
My Silent Generation father grew up in a city, which quickly turned rural at its edges, and it was routine to keep your hunting long gun in your locker to save a trip back home for hunting before or after school. Antonin Scalia mentioned carrying his .22 target rifle on the NYC city subways to and from practice.
My grandmother's high school had an elective class where they would even shoot at the school.
If you read the distorted stories in the news media you'll get a completely unrealistic impression of how most Americans actually live.
I don't feel paranoia. Maybe most people are fine except people who consume too much fear-driven media?
I mean, it's not like paranoid people are only paranoid about guns. They are paranoid about everything.
And once you (start paying the Dane-geld) give into that paranoia, that paranoia never goes away (get rid of the Dane); it just gets larger and larger.
The end state for the nations that sacrifice themselves to paranoia is that other nations that have managed to control their paranoid impulses take over the ones that can't, but that takes a while and generally leaves those conquered worse off than before. That said, inactions have consequences.
You must mean the others are suicides. Why not say so?
> The multiplier for all firearm-related deaths between the US and EU average for example is around 12X, more than an order of magnitude [1].
Ah, because by not saying so you can make up this 12X figure, by comparing firearm suicides in Europe where in many cases there is marginal civilian gun ownership with firearm suicide in the US where there is widespread civilian gun ownership.
Of course this is a flawed comparison, because Americans don’t commit suicide at 12x the rate of Europeans, they just happen to use guns rather than other methods.
The giveaway that your comparison is deliberately misleading is that you don’t mention suicide. You intentionally hide how you get to this 12x figure.
The Switzerland outlier is explained by a culture of safe handling.
Czech republic is shall issue, and almost everyone has concealed carry permits.
Homicide rate is 0.9.
Czechs have a half-millennia old, entrenched gun tradition, with amusingly even stronger protection on gun ownership than even Americans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic
The only times this was suspended was during German and Russian occupations.
Homicide rates is easily accessible public information, from various sources including world bank and the UN?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5
Year by year chart: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CZE/czech-republic/cri...
Their gun culture is certainly an outlier in Europe, compared to even the Swiss. Very permissive, and yet murder rates are essentially on par with entirely gun-less Asian countries vaunted for their "safety".
We don't perpetually feel like we're in danger or feel paranoid.
>Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
You are describing most of the US.
And I wish you could better grasp just how big and diverse America is. :) There are parts with terrible problems that make for scary headlines, but those parts are not in any way representative of very large swaths of the country. Where I live there is essentially zero violence (of any kind). We don't live with perpetual feelings of danger or paranoia - heck, we often forget to lock our doors at night.
Do you think having fire drills and extinguishers is "a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia"?
> Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Maybe try to do something against bullying? It might seem a bit harsh but having been on the receiving end of that, it's hard to find empathy for those people that panic once the victims start fighting back.
Me too, but that will never happen. Consider America's past: armed revolution, native genocide, violent [secret] coups with foreign governments, murder of its' own citizens by "peace officers", it goes on and on... It's not a peaceful place with a peaceful history, so I don't think your wish is too realistic. That said...you did say "wish", and I wish it also.
To dig into the far past...the potential bodycount during Columbine dwarfs the actual body count because they only were able to kill victims with guns. Their explosives failed, and hundreds of lives were spared as a result.
I think there are real things that could be done short of a total ban, but the issue in the US it's a constitutional right so it's hard to restrict in any sensible way and it's politically impossible to amend.
As it is, the policy question is accepting the tradeoff of the right to bear arms vs. rare, but extremely awful death of school children. I'm not really taking a strong position, I think that's just the reality of it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
Don't forget the history of the 20th Century where such "outlier events" included 100 million previously disarmed people killed by Communists running their countries, and the Left likes to remind us of the small death tolls in right wing countries, although many of those were fighting communists. See also the WWI era Armenian Genocide which was so ignored by the rest of the world it convinced Hitler he could do as he pleased.
I'd grant you Imperial Japan, but I wasn't talking about them or what they did, which you fail to notice was done to others, non-Japanese peoples. Like how I noted the Armenian (and lessor known but still significant Greek) genocides by Muslims running Turkey were also of a different nature.
Meanwhile, you might want to try a legitimate reply attacking what I said, not myself.
So did our Deep State as they lost a twenty year fight against the Taliban. Who immediately started seizing the people's guns upon capturing Kabul.
not even counting accidents and suicides which are also made worse by the high availability of guns for everyone
The suicide statistics from some countries with effective total bans on civilian gun ownership do not support your claim for those, and for accidents we're at 500/year out of a population of 330 million people. There were years when more very young kids were accidentally drowning themselves by getting stuck upside down in 5 gallon (19 L) plastic buckets that are are ubiquitous here.
If Americans didn't fight against the Patriot act, wars, torture, what will they fight for? Mask mandates?
Are any of these, the middle ones not directly affecting us, worth starting a civil war that would take hundreds of thousands to millions of lives?
(I might argue yes for the wars, but it's not the sort of thing I suspect has ever happened in human history.)
I sincerely doubt the average first world person has what it takes to sacrifice their comfortable life and go live in caves to resist a tyrannical occupation. And there's no need for them to do that, realistically.
Why are you talking about the "average first world person"? IIRC, Afghanistan is a country of ~30 million people, and the most recent estimates I saw said the Taliban only had ~75 thousand fighters. That's 0.25%. So not even the average Afghan did that.
Also, guerilla warfare isn't so much about living in caves as melting into the population.
Or, as in Afghanistan, actively supported by the population who hated both the occupiers and the VICE (Vertically Integrated Criminal Enterprise) known as the government.
In a dictatorship, yes.
On the other hand, quite a few authoritarian tyrannical movements started by arming themselves and taking it on themselves to get power. Both nazi and communists started as private citizens arming themselves and causing fights in the streets or robbing people.
"On Nov. 11, 1938, the German minister of the interior issued "Regulations Against Jews Possession of Weapons." Not only were Jews forbidden to own guns and ammunition, they couldn’t own "truncheons or stabbing weapons."
In addition to the restrictions, Ellerbrock said the Nazis had already been raiding Jewish homes and seizing weapons.
"The gun policy of the Nazis can hardly be compared to the democratic procedures of gun regulations by law," Ellerbrock told us. "It was a kind of special administrative practice (Sonderrecht), which treated people in different ways according to their political opinion or according to ‘racial identity’ in Nazi terms.""[0].
[0] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2015/oct/26/ben-carson...
I think the people seizing those weapons should be less concerned about "average" gun owners, and more worried about fringe citizens willing to die to detonate a high yield explosive in the centers of power.
That’s why federal legislators freaked out when a few thousand pissed off voters simply walked into the Capitol without permission - and without weapons. Every one of those mostly peaceful demonstrators represented a thousand equally angry, and well-armed, citizens not visible on security cameras.
It takes a lot more than a Glock and a few boxes of ammunition from the sporting goods store to befuddle the US military. It takes fuel, food, medicine, training camps, and other infrastructure necessary to survive and fight back. You’re not going to get that in appreciable quantities in the middle of the US without Uncle Sam and several three letter agencies noticing. You would need the help of a foreign power and/or seizing land to tax... at which point the Second Amendment is moot. Might save you a few bucks to have all these small arms laying around, but it’s only a small piece of the puzzle.
Which is exactly why we resist laws that ban rifles.
> You’re not going to get that in appreciable quantities in the middle of the US without Uncle Sam and several three letter agencies noticing.
I don't think you fully grasp the extent to which the US population is armed.
s/Glock/AR-15/, point still stands regardless of what common legal firearm you want to replace Glock with.
> I don't think you fully grasp the extent to which the US population is armed.
You have entirely missed the point. The existence of small arms is not what lead the Taliban to success against the US. They had billions of dollars from the opium trade, donations, and foreign aid. This money was not just spent to purchase weapons; it was used to fund training camps, fund recruiting operations, buy off politicians and local warlords, maintain supply lines, and the other infrastructure you need to wage war. These are the things the three letter agencies would take note of.
tl;dr: Small arms (in any quantity) are a small piece of what you would need to wage an effective insurgency against ol' Uncle Sam.
No it doesn't. The rhetoric of "remove weapons of war from America's streets" does not jive with the "small arms are not good enough weapons of war" argument.
> The existence of small arms is not what lead the Taliban to success against the US.
Okay, but Americans have more than that, they have everything you mentioned. They have the largest economy in the world from which to draw the wealth needed for those things. They have militias, they have state governments with treasuries, a significant portion of the population is trained by way of service in the military.
But even beyond all that, I think you're underestimating the importance of small arms in waging an insurgency. All of those other things exist only to ensure that bullets can be fired.
I never mentioned removing or outlawing firearms. But by all means, continue to strawman.
> Okay, but Americans have more than that, they have everything you mentioned. They have the largest economy in the world from which to draw the wealth needed for those things. They have militias, they have state governments with treasuries, a significant portion of the population is trained by way of service in the military.
The functioning society of America has that, but a ragtag insurgency within the country does not. Do you think those state treasuries are physical things you can raid? Do you think corporate America isn't going to help keep the status quo? Do you think all of the anti-crime monitoring (especially in the realm of finance) won't notice any of this before it gets too big? Government gets a whiff of this and it's all too easy to paint the group as a bunch of right-wing nutjobs and sick the ATF on them.
The initiating event would have to be so catastrophic that a large percentage of the population "defects" in a very short timespan. And at that point things are so cataclysmic that the Second Amendment isn't even a factor any more.
> I think you're underestimating the importance of small arms in waging an insurgency.
And I think you're underestimating everything else. The successful insurgencies in history generally did not start out with a well armed population. Small arms are easy to smuggle in once everything else is going--especially when you have a foreign benefactor.
They are trained, funded disciplined. They are also local guys and local guys join them often. But then become part of something bigger.
>> So did our Deep State as they lost a twenty year fight against the Taliban. Who immediately started seizing the people's guns upon capturing Kabul.
> Blaming the Afghanistan War on the "Deep State" is a very odd choice to me. Does the Deep State ratify authorizations for the use of military force and approve military spending budgets?
You missed the point, which was the kind of thinking that says armed civilians stand no chance against a modern military also says the US should have prevailed in Afghanistan.
I believe "deep state" here is a tendentious term that refers to the permanent, unelected parts of the executive branch. Their expert analysis said the US was just about to "turn the corner" for 20 years. It's not about the decision to go in the first place.
Exactly. See but the most recent controversy about Gen. Mark Milley, a complete abrogation of the principle of civilian control over the military, something that goes back to George Washington and one of the reasons we have so many places named after Cincinnatus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus
I don't only fear for my life; I fear for my limb and safety and all the other good stuff too :)
(mind you, FWIW, and hopefully lateral to above questions, I'm not necessarily in the full "prohibit guns" camp, more of a "regulate&license", with thinking that since we regulate cars and airplanes and other potentially dangerous stuff that's even not explicitly made to harm we should regulate & license guns. But again, my questions above are from a more abstract perspective)
Because other countries use different definitions for those things. The definition of a "firearm death" is consistent, someone was shot they're now deceased.
The definition of "gun violence" could be a gun that wasn't even loaded or fired in some countries (e.g. pointing it menacingly), bullet-injury in others, pistol-whipping in yet others, for one example.
Crime statistics are a complex topic, with politics, collection methods, and definitions playing a major part. For one example, richer countries often have higher "crime" because they're better at collecting and recording crime statistics, not because crime doesn't occur in poorer countries. Even richer countries like the US have a "crime gap" if you compare recorded crime with victim crime surveys (e.g. NCVS).
There's also politicization of reporting, at least in the U.S. I recall some states (Maryland?) have laws that mandate reporting of any injury related to a gun (could be a minor burn or a cut finger web that needed stitches) as a firearm-related injury. The intent, of course, being that people wrongly infer that these were injuries inflicted by bullets traveling at high rates of speed.
Dead's dead, though. We don't lose track many of bodies in the developed world.
Generally, you do find this:
. Include suicide in stats...is against guns
. Block suicide from stats...is for guns
>Furthermore, i find US fascination with their theoretical ability to fight their government with small arms adorable and misguided.
Afghanistan, a fractious nation mostly comprised of illiterate peasants, has been able to fight off not one but two superpowers using mostly small arms.
> Two superpowers found that Afghanistan, a fractious nation mostly comprised of illiterate peasants and devoid of exploitable industrial or natural resources, wasn't worth the price of occupying indefinitely.
Isn't there massive amounts of lithium there?
Taliban? Vietcong?
This is totally speculation on my part, but it could be important to have a armed civilian resistance to create a "permission structure" for military defection. My understanding is that military strongly inculcates loyalty and obedience to the organization. Those seem like they'd be hard feelings to overcome, especially in isolation when the defection would be solitary and likely pointless. I'd think that in a lot of cases people would just muddle along for lack of options. Having a group to join and take your equipment to seems like it would make the decision much easier.
I hear this a lot from the right, and I think it's hogwash. The Biden administration has already begun ideological screening of military personnel. If the government is forced to go to war against its own people, it will be mostly aging, out-of-shape fanatics on one side and highly-trained, highly-motivated, younger loyalists to the legitimate government on the other. It'll be a rout.
The Taliban is "backed" by external powers to about the same extent the IRA was.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/remember-...
Any intervention with the serious and actual goal of reducing gun deaths must take this into account.
The news is national though, so you wind up in this weird situation with suburbanites buying guns and worried about urban Chicago a thousand miles away.
Neither are the murder rates in other countries.
> It's highly concentrated in a few hotspots
Same here.
> with most of the country living in areas with European murder rates.
Nope. You need to compare the non-hotspot areas of the US with the non-hotspot areas of Europe. And you'll see the same difference as before.
Another thing to keep in mind is that murders are not random, whereas the other ways people die early often are pretty random (like car accidents). Regular Americans living regular lives have an effectively zero change of being murdered. Just ignore it.
Small arms appear to have served Vietnam and Afghanistan well in repelling a much larger and stronger force.
I don't know about Angola, but in most european countries it's really easy to buy guns (for hunting, sharp-shooting, etc.). When my dad retired he joined a shooting club with his friends, the gun permit being slightly harder to obtain than a fishing permit. There are gun shops everywhere where you can buy guns and ammunition if you show your permit. There are of course regulations for carrying your gun, I don't remember exactly, but you have to carry ammunition and gun separately or something like that.
I guess the problem is not about the easy availability of guns, but that the american society is more violent.
So...
5 * 20 years = 100
So living in the US for 20 year means that the people murdered by guns are very roughly estimated at 1 person per 1000.
That's about as twice as high of a chance as dying from the flu [1].
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1127799/influenza-us-mor...
So I guess Covid is twice to 4 times as deadly? I mean it's a very rough estimation and clearly I haven't considered everything. But ballparking it like this, I'd be inclined to say so.
Do you really think Angola's homicide rate is under 5 per 100k? Half the worldwide average? This is a pretty wild claim, knowing Angolan society.
OSAC notes that "A large percentage of street crime goes unreported and does not appear in official police statistics" -- it seems much more likely that this low number is a function of limited police reporting and data collection, rather than actual safety.
https://www.osac.gov/Country/Angola/Content/Detail/Report/d5...
Homicide rate is low in Romania because we don't have violent criminal gangs, almost at all. It is a small country with different policing system. But there are plenty of guns in the hands of criminals, having a very restrictive gun policy does not help the ordinary citizens, just the criminals. Opening up would be leveling the conditions.
On the contrary, we have plenty of violent crime clans (mostly gypsy), they just don't use firearms but have no issue threatening you and your family or beating you into submission with melee weapons or bare hands/feet if you stand in the way of their (mostly) illegal activities while the local police, even when they're not on their payroll, are toothless thanks to the poorly defined laws and they can't, or simply can't be bothered to take much action against them unless they commit some extremely violent acts that get lots of media coverage for which higher levels of government are called for accountability.
My $0.02
Didn't a couple of unarmed protestors take the capitol building on January 6th?
Yes, you are correct.
If the government does not stand up to terrorists attacking the US Capitol, then yes, they can take the building quite easily.
The gun charges were dropped.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/stun-guns-stinger-whips...
If you pop their names into a search engine you can see the DOJ indictments with more info.
Getting a permit to carry in DC is extremely difficult to the point where there's no chance any of the protestors had one. That makes possession illegal. Also, a lack of proper licensing is mentioned several times in the article.
Are you seriously comparing what happened on January 6th to 9/11? How about the Oklahoma City bombing? Lockerbie bombing? Get some perspective dude.
A coup is not as simple as getting a bunch of armed people into a building, you need widespread support from powerful agents to have any chance at all and I frankly find it funny that anyone in the US loses his head over this since the US has promoted coups through the world as if it was a sport, you would expect for people to at least understand how it works.
It provided an excellent opportunity to display Trump supporters as awful and it was used as such, but to call it an act of terrorism is absurd.
I remember during the tsarnaev brother's attacks the crazy amount of APCs and armored vehicles that were in the arsenal of just the police. What the fuck is 5.56 in the hands of some regular Joe going to do against even the lightest armor.
Not to mention the fact that it's not the fairytale tyrannical government vs the righteous citizenry. Turns out it can be subversive citizenry going up against other citizens.
I think your ideas are adorable. An armed populace is extremely effective in curbing government crackdown on people and yes, that is even true for small arms weapons aside from the fact that US soldiers would probably defect en masse. You think they would roll out the tanks? Even if they did, that is a fight no army could ever win. The Taliban started with sticks and stones and ended with attack helicopters.
I am not from the US and I don't think there is a more successful democracy or nation for that matter, so maybe other can learn a bit. The French Revolution was armed and an armed populace is a classical fear of rulers and the motivation for weapon laws.
There are advantages for policing of course. Policemen in Europe can be relatively sure they aren't fired upon in many cases and that results in completely different form of conduct with state executive forces. But there are other arguments for the US to allow arms, for topological and geographical reasons alone.
I find the historical and military ignorance of people who imply this even more adorable. Especially given the timing of the recent example, where the Taliban defeated a massive military force that was equipped with modern U.S. weaponry including tanks, helicopters, and armored vehicles.
Not to mention the countless other examples of uprisings using small arms successfully against superior military forces. Add in the fact that the U.S. citizenry is made up of tens of millions of military veterans and is more well armed than any civilian population in the history of the planet. It would not take long for a revolutionary force to take control of many military bases and armories within the U.S.
The idea that 50 or 100 million armed U.S. citizens couldn't defeat a few hundred thousand armed U.S. soldiers (most of whom would defect) is adorable in its child-like ignorance.
There's a difference between "fight" and "defeat". Anyone who thinks that a motley band of citizens with small arms is going to force the government to surrender is delusional. What they can do is make martial law very costly, by turning the country into a war zone (see also: Afghanistan).
The government really does get its power from consent of the governed. It may not seem that way, but most people are happy enough just to have stability, that they're going to stand by and keep their head down. But with a sufficiently armed populace, maintaining stability becomes simply impossible, which makes maintaining political favor an impossibility. The idea of a military coup is that you take control of a nation, not that you inherit a war zone.
Small arms aren't about winning, they're about making certain actions too politically costly. I have a tough time imagining the CCP's recent actions in Hong Kong, or the Uighur genocide, working so well if they were armed like the US. Arms necessitate boiling the frog.
You’d love reading about the US Revolution then! Big plot twist for ya. Can’t recommend enough!
Sorry are you saying that the French Revolutionary Wars were not fought with guns?
As far as I can tell, most "right wing" individuals mostly want liberty from government interfering in their lives.
That's hilarious. Sure, there's the Republican party, but also a massive Libertarian sentiment here, and Libertarians love guns.
No, it isn't.
> They are mostly right wing, and the right wing in the US increasingly leans authoritarian.
No, it doesn't.
As an American, so do I. A citizen revolution vs US Military under the thumb of a dictator would be hilariously asymmetrical. There are no consumer predator drones.
The various terrorist organizations in the Middle East fared ok against predator drones.
The US is at 4.96/100,000 for 2012. For reference, Angola is better at 4.85. Bulgaria and Romania, the poorest countries in the EU, are at 1.3. France is at 1.2.
If by not remarkable you mean 3 as bad as other developed countries, sure. The numbers are only for intentional homicide, not even counting accidents and suicides which are also made worse by the high availability of guns for everyone. Not all that remarkable is a weird way of putting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
Furthermore, i find US fascination with their theoretical ability to fight their government with small arms adorable and misguided. Protests and revolutions in France have done more to guide government power than anything ever that happened in the US. Blatant corruption, lobbying, outright incompetent representatives, abuses of power, erosion of human rights, blatant disregard for human rights. If Americans didn't fight against the Patriot act, wars, torture, what will they fight for/against? Mask mandates?