> Unfortunately, in the 21st century, "The Man" is always going to have a shitload of bigger, more lethal "muskets" than you and could swat you like a fly if he felt like it.

I think you should study how it went down in Afghanistan. This argument simply doesn't hold up to reality.

And we're talking about a civil war where using mass destruction weapons like bombardment is much more likely to be out of the question. Additionally it is much harder to differentiate friend from foe.

  >I think you should study how it went down in Afghanistan. This argument simply doesn't hold up to reality...

That's a different scenario. It's a lot easier [relatively speaking] to foment an uprising against an external enemy in the cause of "ridding your country of the invader". than it is against "the enemy within".

You've only got to look at all the unpopular laws that get passed year after year [and not just in the US]. When the possibility of <unpopular law> is first broached, there are dark mutterings that "People won't stand for it!". Then <unpopular law> comes into force, a couple of isolated people resist and get fined or imprisoned and, before you know it, <unpopular law> is an accepted part of "the system" --even if many people don't agree with it.

You've also got to bear in mind that, when <unpopular law> is implemented by your own government, they will sell it as being for the national good. No government is ever going to say 'We're doing this coz we're bastards and want to oppress you!'. It'll be for "national security" or "anti-terrorism" or "to protect the children". And it will fool enough of the people, so that the ones who do "make a stand" won't only be doing so against "The Man" but against most of the rest of the general populace too. They'll see you as being "unpatriotic", a "terrorist sympathiser" or a "defender of paedos" for taking a stand against said law.

Also, oppression is incremental. It's very rare that a country's government moves from [perceived] democracy to [perceived] tyranny over night. And, there again, even amongst the people who would conceivably rise up, everyone will have their own individual "red line" beyond which they'll feel aggrieved enough to act. And who wants to be the first to stick their head above the parapet?

Well I agree that in many cases people "standing up" to the goverment is nothing more than a LARP and that they are smart enough to slowly boil the frog instead of pushing too hard all at once.

But still, having guns puts a good guard against extreme situations where the boiling frog tactic doesn't work so much - e.g. forceful installation of a communist dictatorship. It won't guard us against slow deterioration but it can serve as a safe guard against hostile takeovers.

> But still, having guns puts a good guard against extreme situations where the boiling frog tactic doesn't work so much - e.g. forceful installation of a communist dictatorship

Again, how exactly do you see that playing out in reality?

Do you have any idea as to what would happen if you decided to take down "The Man" as the grandparent post has it, with your Walmart AR15?

Some kid in a bunker in Utah would take his hand off his dick long enough to pilot the drone right down your chimney, and blow you, your family, your gun, your dog, your truck, and about 100m radius worth of your neighbours into snotters, jam, and gravel.

Just like it played out in Afghanistan.

> some future government if it got out of hand [spoiler alert: you couldn't!]

You absolutely could if the country had any significant portion of the population against the government. The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families.

> to day in a society awash with guns, violent crime and mass shootings.

But it’s not “awash”. I’ve been in the US for >50 years now and have never seen any gun-related crime and only know one person who was robbed in the 80s in New York by a guy who just said he had a gun. I’ve have however seen violent crime involving fists, bats, clubs, brass knuckles, and knives.

This is why when it comes down to it, Americans don’t want to give up their guns. The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up.

> The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up.

In the US, there's a mass shooting on average every 22.5 hours.

You have a mass shooting more often than most people have a massive shit.

You have a problem, whether you see it or not.

"Mass shooting" (in the advocacy-numbers sense you're using it) is generally taken to mean three or more people hit by stuff that came out of a gun (framgents, ricochets count too). It is not "three people shot", much less "three people dead". When using this statistic, the average number of people killed is about one per "mass shooting".

What's more, most of these shootings are among people who are participating in organized crime in bad parts of cities. It's not random, innocent people getting shot. The random, innocent people getting shot ones are the ones that are profitable to put on news streams, though. They are exceedingly rare.

Using reasonable definitions of "mass shooting", the number so far in 2023 is 1-3.

Okay, but that's still more than any other developed country.

I honestly still don't get the fixation on shootings in groups. But yes, the U.S. is more shoot-y than comparable countries for sure.

You don't think maybe you should fix that?

Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.

> Shootings ... are a very small problem compared to things like ... car crashes, and tiktok.

That's an interesting claim. Perhaps you didn't know that "Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24" according to [1].

I suppose that statistic might include gun suicides and gun accidents, which (under an extremely contrived definition) don't count as "shootings", but that still misses the point that sensible governments have successfully reduced car accident deaths by tightening regulations related to vehicle ownership and licensing, whereas America is notably bad at doing so for guns, and is paying the price for that failure with the blood of its children.

If you could provide a statistic for the number of annual US deaths due to TikTok, I'd be interested to compare that to shooting deaths too.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/guns-now-kill-mor...

Young people basically just don't die much. Whether something is the leading cause or the 3rd cause is irrelevant. The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.

Here's an example: Imagine you hear that the U.S. is 43rd in the world on math test scores among highschoolers, and China is 4th. ZOMG, A BIG DEAL!?!? Right? Well, that's what you'll hear in the media anyway.

Now, imagine if I told you that the mean U.S. score was 87, and the mean Chinese score was 89 out of 100. Does it still seem like a big deal?

Here's another point from another comment: This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true.

That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor.

If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.

> The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.

But you weren't talking about the absolute size, you said "a very small problem compared to things like" (my emphasis). Please at least admit you were wrong about that.

In any case, as an absolute number, even one school shooting is too many, and if the US government can devote resources and legislation to reducing traffic accidents and drug overdoses harming children, then there's no reason why it can't do the same to reduce gun deaths, like every other civilized country does.

> Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men

You may be surprised to learn[0] that "Black men and boys ages 15 to 34 ... were among 37% of gun homicides" in 2019, so most killings are not like what you describe at all.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2021/02/23/young-...

Haha, you make a bunch of good points. Again, I really appreciate the good-natured engagement.

> The absolute size of the risk is what's relevant.

If you look at the whole sentence "...compared to things like...", I'm talking (or at least meant to be clear about talking) about the risk from shootings in general, not shootings of children in particular or school shootings:

> Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.

When I say "shootings", I mean the thing people intuitively understand it to be (Person A shoots Person B), and not suicides. If we include suicides, car crashes and "shootings" in the U.S. are ~ the same size. Suicides don't respond much to "no guns" as I recall...you get a couple percent reduction, but people mostly substitute (tall buildings, etc.). I happen to think it's cruel to prevent all suicides, and that some people who want to die should be allowed to do so with dignity, instead of alone and sad, but that's a digression.

Anyway: for adults, the relative risk is important since we're making decisions about allocating public health resources. There are on the order of a few hundred thousand "unscheduled" (preventable) deaths in the U.S. in a given year, and 12,000 gun murders. Get rid of guns, and charitably that number goes from 12,000 murders to 9,600 murders. But you could've saved a lot more lives working on the boring stuff, not to mention the astronomical amount of political capital you burned to get that done.

For kids, the the absolute risk is what's important since they basically don't die. If you're thinking about where to invest resources, invest not in making them die less but rather in making them into better, healthier people. Not to say investment in preventing childhood death should be exactly zero, I'm talking on the margin here (what do we do with the next dollar/minute/effort).

>even one school shooting is too many

...yeah, but it's not! Would you pay $100B to prevent the next one? Could've saved a lot of people from diabetes / heart disease with that money, instead of 8 kids. It's tragic, sure, and we're all tempted to say stuff like that for social reasons, but when you're really deciding how to allocate resources it's so, so rare that hedging doesn't make much sense. Remember, about double the risk of being struck and killed by lightning (a lot more people are struck and survive).

I don't have time right now to go in to the race thing, but I will point out that "Black" is ~14% of the U.S. population. Black people (90% men) commit more than 50% of homicides in the U.S., so they murder at ~7x the rate of non-Black Americans before correcting for things like which crimes get solved (correcting moves it to ~10x, they're better at getting away with murder since organized crime). If you're curious, this is where you should start (the UCR): https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-...

Firearms related injuries are the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the USA.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true.

That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor.

If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.

There have been 236 shootings resulting in death or injury in American schools since 2010.

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

It looks like 348 according to that data, resulting in 150 deaths over about 13 years, or 11.5 deaths per year on average.

There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year.

And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated.

For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.

  >most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids...

The fact that you have enough school shootings, happening over a long enough period, to allow people to formulate stats about what "most" of them involve is in itself an indictment of why your attitude to gun control is so incomprehensible to so many of us outside the US

In almost every other "Western" country, one solitary school shooting... ever... would be a catastrophe etched into the national consciousness. And would almost certainly have resulted in laws being changed to ensure it could never happen again.

I think you're right about it being a bigger deal elsewhere, and you're right about legislative reactions. I have several thoughts:

1) The U.S. population is really big. 333M or so. New Zealand is 5M? So, inflate the base rate by 66x. When doing "intuitive statistics" about this sort of thing, people think at the country level and don't adjust for population. That will remove some of the effect, but even doing that there's going to be more school shootings in the U.S. per capita, of course.

2) Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best. People who want to murder will just use alternative means. There are plenty of ways to kill schoolchildren if someone decides to do it. Easy availability of guns probably does increase the rate and deadliness, but not by all that much. Something else is going on in the U.S. Media contagion is part of it, imho.

3) The extent to which people pay attention to astronomically unlikely things like school shootings really doesn't make any sense. As I estimate somewhere else in these comments, the likelihood of a child in the U.S. being shot and killed at school is about double that of being struck and killed by lightning. Though it's a tragic spectacle when it happens, it's not something worth worrying about. The irony is nobody gives a shit about stuff that might actually kill your kids, like drowning, car crashes, etc. People are so, so very nonchalant about things that are actually risky...

> Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best.

Feel free to share a link to the best available work. Please also read this, though:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-science-is-cl...

I appreciate you engaging! Really, I do.

I am sorry to say it, but Scientific American has become politicized trash under current leadership. It pains me because I remember it fondly from my childhood. The article you linked to doesn't even try to meet basic scientific standards.

Here is a good overview: https://www.rand.org/research/gun-policy/key-findings/what-s...

TL;DR: evidence coming from academia (which is extremely anti-gun) only weakly supports a very small subset of gun laws as working. Taken in the light of publication bias and the file drawer problem, this is a nothing.

Thanks for the link. That does seem to be a more thorough analysis than the one in Scientific American, although the latter was good at linking through to the actual studies, so you didn't have to trust the writer or editor of the article.

The RAND analysis doesn't appear to be as equivocal as you suggest though. It says that there are 3 types of laws which have the strongest level of scientific support for their success, but other laws have weaker support, which doesn't mean they aren't effective. Let me highlight two quotes:

"Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective."

"Still, even relatively small effects of gun policies are important to the people and communities affected."

So while it's possible that there are a lot of ineffective laws being proposed, that's far from being evidence that no laws are effective, and it might even be evidence that the problem lies with the Constitution itself (which is another type of law which could be changed).

I wonder, though, what it would take for me to convince you of anything, since you could just dismiss all scientific research as "coming from academia" and therefore tainted by political views that you don't like. Perhaps if the gun lobby commissioned their own researchers to produce a report, you would find that sufficiently neutral, but I won't go looking for such a report.

One area where we might agree, though, is in disapproving of immature ad hominem arguments, so perhaps we just need to make sure that we're both extending that disapproval to mature ad hominem arguments as well. ;-)

Again, I really appreciate you engaging and I'm happy for the opportunity to talk dane-pgp. I don't have much time atm so a little rushed.

>so you didn't have to trust the writer or editor of the article

They're linking to a lot of their other stuff, iirc, and selectively citing things that support the position they want to disseminate.

> It says that there are 3 types of laws which have the strongest level of scientific support for their success

We have to differentiate between effect size and statistical "significance" (poorly named). The effect sizes (how much of a difference you would expect to see) are small iirc. For instance, the "assault weapons" one, which gets the strongest level coloring, is I believe a 0.9% decrease in murders if it's the study I'm thinking of. The "statistical significance" is, roughly, how much you can believe the effect size you're measuring is real, NOT how important it is. So you can have a 0.9% reduction in murders that is very "significant". I don't know what their coloring is, but my guess is they're using statistical significance, maybe with blending in some effect size.

>I wonder, though, what it would take for me to convince you of anything, since you could just dismiss all scientific research as "coming from academia" and therefore tainted by political views that you don't like.

I am from academia! I actually don't have a guns axe to grind specifically, it's a "we're going to poison the social sciences via publication bias and p-hacking" axe. Basically, people produce evidence for what's politically palatable (not even what they actually want to believe), and it's a huge problem. Another one is sex and behavior. It's abundantly clear that there are huge differences in behavior between the sexes, and that this is driven by genetics, and we've known this on the basis of good scientific evidence for 100+ years. It's not ~~socially determined~~.

>"Importantly, however, where we conclude that evidence for a policy is weak, that does not mean that the policy is ineffective; the policy itself might well be quite effective."

> "Still, even relatively small effects of gun policies are important to the people and communities affected."

Let me translate: "Guys, we know this doesn't look good, but we promise...there's a way you can talk about it such that we can still keep claiming the things we want to believe are true in spite of the avalanche of evidence coming from researchers that also want to claim the things. Also, jk jk, don't punish us we want to keep our jobs :-) :-D "

One of the key problems here (and the reason for my axe) is that it's tough or impossible to do real research on important stuff like this right now.

> extending that disapproval to mature ad hominem arguments as well. ;-) I've enjoyed this :-)

It was a good discussion, and I'm glad we've both had a chance to give our points of view clearly. :-)

Thanks for discussing respectfully, and for the work it sounds like you are doing to improve standards in academia.

> The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families.

But this would still be true if the families are fighting with pots and pans. And if your enemy is a drone flying at 10000m it really makes no difference if you're fighting with an AR-15 or a pan.

And British people don't want to make that trade off. It's odd to use our gun laws to say we're oppressed by an undemocratic system when the vast, vast majority of people simply don't want the person standing next to them at the till in Tesco to have a pistol under their coat.

The timescale at which a disarmed populace becomes a problem is decades to centuries. It's all fine and dandy while you like your government. How long do you think it'll stay that way?

There are people alive who remember being herded into boxcars in Germany, in 2023 a well-run social-democratic beacon of progress and industry in Europe.

I'm not sure what the point is here. We all agree in the UK that we don't want guns to be legal, so they aren't. An American's view that we'd be better off if they were is neither here nor there.

> It's all fine and dandy while you like your government.

I don't like our government. I don't think owning guns would improve the situation, though.

What good do you think you owning a gun will do you?

Heh, I think the level of dislike we're talking about here is different. You may not like them but it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now. The point at which "power comes from the barrel of a gun" becomes relevant someplace like the U.K. is a ways off for almost everyone living there, thankfully.

The worry is twofold: first, not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place. Second, if things are really bad at present, bad to the point that fighting seems reasonable, you want to be able to fight. Disarming now means you'll likely be disarmed in an uncertain future, too.

Our modern social democracies seem really stable, but from the perspective of a historian there is no reason to believe they are. They're infants. There's a war in Europe right now, and there are people alive who remember the Holocaust.

Okay, again, what do you think you and your supermarket own-brand assault rifle are going to do about that?

The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).

330,000,000 potentially armed people (or about 260,000,000 armed adults) is something to be reckoned with. A bunch of goat-herding peasants in Afghanistan fended off not one but both superpowers, and at that mostly with small arms. The fact that the U.S. chooses to arm its population is definitely relevant for the direction its politics goes. Whether that's good or bad, net...well, we never get to know because we never see the counterfactual situation.

> The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).

And that's going to protect you from a drone strike how, exactly?

Why are you talking about drone strikes? Those don’t work for insurgency, which is what you’ll get in a civil war.

  >>it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now...

  >>not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place...

Again, this is a chalk & cheese comparison. People like to forget that the Third Reich was democratically elected. The German people read "Mein Kampf", listened to Hitler's "Make Germany Great Again" speeches and put their cross next to the Nazi party. And, up until the tide of war started to turn against them, most were pretty happy with the outcome.

It's also convenient to forget that, in those times, hatred of the Jews wasn't an exclusively Nazi, or even German, sentiment. In many other parts of the world, Hitler was initially seen as being a "good thing" and giving the Jews what they richly deserved.

Of course, with history being written by the winners, these facts tend to be glossed over now. So Hitler seized power and plunged an oppressed and terrified people into a war they didn't want And the rest of the world was always horrified by the Nazis' treatment of the Jews.

This is what I meant, when I said above that "Oppression is incremental". By the time you realise that you're living under fascism, it's too late to do anything. And you'll be in for a shock if you're depending on your fellow citizens to rally to your "Let's throw off our oppressors!" flag. Most of them will be quite happy to see you dragged off in the night, instead --you stinking Jew-Lover!

[replace "Jew" with "Commie", "Terrorist", "Paedo"... etc. as required by zeitgeist]

And re your point about Ukraine:

The irony is that Russia's justification for seizing areas such as the Donbass in the East is precisely because they say ethnic Russians there were being oppressed by the Ukrainian government. And that was in spite of those ethnic Russians having well-armed militias already in existence. So having an armed population didn't really help there, did it?

And, in the wider context, the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is being fought by the existing Ukrainian well-trained, professional armed forces, who are being supplied with billions of £££s worth of advanced weaponry.

And they're still taking a pounding.

So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.

> So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.

The thing about the U.S. is it's not a handful. They have more guns in civilian hands than people. It would be very easy for the U.S. to arm literally everyone.

And, I should note, the quality of the rifles people own privately is as good as or better than what the military gets. The military does, however, get full-auto.

  >The thing about the U.S. is it's not a handful. They have more guns in civilian hands than people. It would be very easy for U.S. civilians to arm literally everyone...

You're still labouring under the false assumption that, were an oppressive government to come to power everyone would rise up against it. That's simply not true. A sizeable chunk of the population would perceive said government as a "good thing" either because; it smacked down on some section of society they detested [cf. Nazi Germany and the Jews], they profited from its existence [cf. Nazi Germany and companies like Krupp, IG Farben, VW, etc], it elevated them from nonentity to a position of authority [cf. Nazi Germany and people like Heinrich Himmler, etc.].

And there would also be a sizeable chunk of the population who would just keep their heads down and hope that, if they didn't draw attention to themselves, they'd survive it all.

I mean that is pretty much what the current policing system depends on. Enough people who might be tempted to step out of line are just frightened enough of the possible consequences of getting caught, that the numbers who actually do transgress stay just about manageable.

How much more so would that be true if, instead of a "civilised" interrogation, followed by a fair trial and a justified prison term, the consequences of raising your head above the parapet were being dragged out of bed at night, whisked away somewhere to be beaten into confessing and then put up against a wall and shot?

I think you're massively under-estimating the number of people who would either support an oppressive regime, or would just knuckle under and wait for things to improve.

You could be right. I hope not!