You'll find very few people in the UK that want to be able to have weapons in the way that the USA does.

You'll find very few people understand strong encryption and why it's important to have.

They thing is the Brits had a right and gave it up for no reason at all, and will give up more, without a fight.

> gave it up for no reason at all

* UK: Gun deaths per 100,000 people - 0.20

* USA: Gun deaths per 100,000 people - 12.21

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...

How many of those were defensive?

Gun deaths include suicide and justified homicide, not just murder. More than a half of American gun deaths are non-criminal. American non-gun murder rate murder rate exceeds UK total murder rate, so I'd say the reason is not guns.

As a Brit, I'd say not having guns freely available is one of the fights we won.

A lot of people will say the same when you lose right to encryption, and both will be wrong.

Except you can't kill someone with encryption.

Your freedoms end where my freedoms begin, and guns are just a tool to change that dynamic. They serve no other purpose, unless we're talking hunting, for which you can still get guns, after some education.

I don't get how Americans seem to think it makes sense to require a license to drive a car but not to own a gun? Who is more dangerous, a guy driving a sedan or one holding an AR?

To be fair with them, cars do kill a fair bit more than guns in the USA

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-da...

A gun is self defence incarnate.

The right to effective self defence is a natural right and requires no license.

Americans use guns defensively hundreds of thousands times a year.

Encryption can very much be used to facilitate murder.

Your data is not as important as your life.

> The right to effective self defence is a natural right

I don't see how that's correct, defending oneself with something natural sounds OK though.

Does a big strong man have more of a right to self defense than a little woman? A gun makes for effective self defense.

How can self defense not be a natural right? Someone comes into your home is beating your child and you're not home. Should your wife be forced to fight a man twice her size with her natural hands or is it ok for her to shoot the guy trying to kill her kids?

Same situation. You are home. Should you be forced to engage the criminal with your bare hands knowing that if you lose the fight your kids will be murdered?

Please spare us the appeals to emotion.

The context here is owning something to provide "effective self defense" - so where do we draw the line? Can I decide that only owning a gun is not enough against the other gun owners so I need something more effective?

GP's claim is this right justifies owning a weapon that can easily kill. That's far beyond "effective" in my view.

Sorry, I think having to watch my family get killed by someone because I am unable to defend them would be pretty emotional.

I think that's the definition of effective. Someone breaks into my home high on pcp, the most effective way to stop them hurting my family is killing them. Is that not a true statement? What is a more effective way to do it, knowing that failure potentially means the death of your kids? I'm not going to engage them with a tazer, there's the chance they will walk right through it, then what?

Anthony Smith, the current #5 ranked light heavyweight in the UFC is 6'4 and probably walks around at 230lbs. A guy on drugs broke into his house and Smith fought him and could not put him down. This is a guy that could defeat 99% of people on earth in a fight. Why would a normal civilian choose to fight a home invader with their fists when a more effective option is available? What if 2 people break in?

"Can I decide that only owning a gun is not enough against the other gun owners so I need something more effective?" I don't think firing a rocket launcher at someone in your house is going to be as effective as a firearm due to the potential for collateral damage. Also tanks play hell with my new wooden floors. Claymore mines are always a risk when stumbling around in the dark. There is no other rational more effective choice than a firearm for someone defending their home.

Respondents here are missing what (I think?) is the joke here, which is that "natural rights" aren't really a thing, except as an arbitrary label. It's never been a very sturdy concept, unless some radical, new defense of them has been discovered and overcome the copious objections of critics, since I last checked.

It's fine to like and defend liberties often labeled "natural rights", but justifying them on the basis of their being "natural" doesn't tend to be a strong line of argument—while it does open up room for making jokes by intentionally confusing two senses of "natural", which one may as well since the word doesn't carry much meaning in the phrase "natural rights" anyway.

Likewise, its not the gun that kills

Because one is protected from government in the Constitution. It literally says that the government cannot infringe on one's right to keep and bear arms. It doesn't say the government allows you to have them. It says the government cannot disallow you from having them.*

*Note: the government could disallow one from having them so long as that person goes through due process, at which point Constitutional restrictions placed upon the government are relaxed in specific areas.

"Except you can't kill someone with encryption." You can damn sure wreck their lives without it though. Lets say a generally good guy is thinking about running for office. He has a encrypted chat with some old friends where they occasionally make off color jokes about whatever protected class happens to be in favor at the time, gay, trans, black, whatever.

He runs for office and the people in power simply pull up his chat logs, accuse him of being a racist and thats it for him. This is just one obvious example but there are millions. He is in an open marriage, gay, a swinger, satanist, you name it, it will be used against him.

Its a way for the government in power to stay in power.

Hacking individuals in this way is already done via targeted 0-day exploits. The targets are more likely to be journalists and activists (for their sources) though.

The noided assumption is that politicians and business leaders self-compromise in order to boost their chances of career success (and/or that they see getting compromised by Epstein et al as a career perk rather than a career mistake). It's the same principle as cops only being able to get promoted if they're known to be on the take.

This sort of law enables dragnet surveillance. Domestic Intelligence are always looking for new ways to take temperature readings on agitation before it boils over into public protest and to identify previously unknown community leaders that should be placed under more direct surveillance.

How many children accidentally kill themselves by playing around with their dad's encryption?

I’m sorry, but if that’s your idea of freedom, you can fucking keep it. Our police, though not saints, don’t shoot unarmed people. At least in Britain we are free from being shot in school.

On the other hand, Britain's obsession with banning knives/sharp objects appears to be unique - many countries have no such restrictions and yet they don't seem to have a stabbing epidemic.

>many countries have no such restrictions and yet they don't seem to have a stabbing epidemic

Are you implying there's a stabbing epidemic in Britain? (apologies if I'm misunderstanding that)

Britain doesn't have a stabbing epidemic[1]. It's a meme

Media attention made the obsession, not whatever actually happens in the real world. Ah, if only people cared as much about heart and brain diseases :(

[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/stabbing-... (click on Rate per 100k on the last table)

> Are you implying there's a stabbing epidemic in Britain?

No, my point is that the insane knife restrictions we have aren't actually necessary since many countries lack such restrictions and still don't end up with a stabbing epidemic as a result.

The fact that the police does confiscate sharp objects and arrests and prosecutes people leaves you with two possibilities:

1) There is in fact a need to curb knife crime, without these measures people would die a lot more.

2) There is no significant risk of knife crime, UK uses arbitrary law application to harass undesirable individuals and/or instill a "harmless mindset" into its subjects.

Not sure what's worse.

Americans kill more people by non-gun means than say Australians total (per year per 100k).

Whatever their problem is it's not guns.

Guns are definitely a major problem - a lot of people who shouldn't have access to guns do and use them. I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes - those will happen anyway regardless of the law.

However, easy access to guns mean that people in an unstable mental state might use one to commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do (or at the very least significantly reduce the amount of victims if they had to use a knife instead of a ranged weapon).

Only in California, where they cause cancer

Those who want to kill a lot of people just rent a truck and wait for a big public gathering.

What you describe is a definition of a nanny state.

> I'm not talking about intentional, targeted murders or settling gang disputes

Once you exclude these....

> commit (mass?) murder in an act of folly that they would otherwise not do

These become so rare that they are effectively non existent when compared to literally any other cause of death.

Guns are a problem.

Yes, America has an incredibly violent "macho" culture for a so-called first world country, in general and not just as it pertains to firearms. It's probable that the high rate of gun ownership is a symptom of this rather than a cause. But given that this is the case, proliferating the means for people to easily murder each other in such a society is obviously going to exacerbate things.

Yet there are significantly more British citizens moving to America than the reverse. So they do seek the American Freedom and Constitution. Massive brain drain (despite the predictions it would flow the other way around thanks to the 2016 election).

Always puzzled me.

It doesn't automatically follow that people moving to America means they want the American Freedom (proper noun?) and Constitution. As for the brain drain aspect, it's said that people who move from New Zealand to Australia raise the average IQ of both countries; they are very obviously moving for the higher salaries rather than freedom and constitution.

the total number of unarmed shootings by police each year in the US is in the double digits in a country of 400m. how many kids got raped in rotherham?