Liberalizing gun ownership has been researched to death and everybody just ignores the research as convenient for their personal opinion. The stats repeatedly say the same several things:
* crimes in general go down as more people carry firearms legally, but by far less than most firearm advocates claim.
* though, the most dramatic of that decrease is related to violent crime as some arguments might claim.
* when firearms become more lawfully common police are slightly more likely to be victims of violent crime.
* the numbers related to crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny even for high population density large cities indicating many arguments on the subject are exaggerated to fit a narrative.
In the list you can easily see that the U.S. has the highest firearm related death rate of any OECD country. In fact it is almost 100 times higher than Germany for homicides.
Why compare the US to Europe? The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia. It has the homicide rate you would expect if you averaged the homicide rates for these continents - roughly 5 per 100,000, which is the global average.
People have this schizophrenic notion that the US should have the demographics of Brazil but the homicide rate of Sweden, and that aint gonna happen no matter what kind of gun control laws you pass. Same thing for measures of corruption, etc.
So you have nations with very low homicide rates, like Bangladesh, versus nations with high homicide rates, like Nigeria or Brazil or Jamaica. And the gun control laws don't seem to make much of a difference in comparison to ethnicity. Looking at Europe, you have wide variations in gun ownership rates but a fairly low homicide rate across the board. Looking at US states, again wide variations of gun ownership rates not well correlated to homicide rates. So stop pretending that the high homicide rates in the US, which are accounted for in urban centers are because of loose gun control laws in DC or Chicago. The US has exactly the homicide rate you'd expect just by using WHO intentional homicide rates per continent and comparing that to US demographics.
> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.
Yes. Everyone knows African Americans have more in common with Africans than Americans. Asian Americans are a monolith, and so is Asia. And Latin Americans speak Latin. Sigh.
Yeah, this reads kind of like an early-1900s scientist going on about skull shapes. There are cultural reasons why "We ain't Europe" is true, but they can't be broken down to percentages of ethnicities.
Why wouldn't we compare the US to other places with similar GDP per capita?
> The US is roughly 60% Europe, 25% Latin America, 10% Africa and 5% Asia.
I'm not sure if you're trying to claim that people commit violent crimes at different rates based on their genetic makeup, or if you're you trying to claim that multicultural societies lead to more violent crime, but both claims are preposterous.
London and Singapore are giant multicultural melting pots, and tremendously safe. Even New York City is safer than many major European cities. (Really, look it up.)
Violent crime in city is the result of poor drug policy more than anything, not the city's ethnic demographics, nor gun laws.
GDP is a bad predictor of living conditions. Consider also that most EU police will never be victims of assault, let alone with a weapon like a knife or a gun. With or without guns, there is a higher tendency for violence in some places in the US, even though it's been decreasing steadily.
I think violent crime is more a result of large economic inequality, and the US loves to breed poverty. Brazil, for example, is also a country with a lot of economic inequality. And economic inequality can be the result of having many different ethnicities, combined with racism.
The test here would be to compare the violent crime rate in cities with high ethnic diversity and high economic inequality, with cities with high diversity but low inequality. Or low diversity but high inequality.
It's an important factor to consider. Just because you copy, say, the legislative system of Switzerland isn't going to give you Swiss outcomes. There was a story about some Latin American nations trying to copy Swedish style practices and it turned out an absolute disaster. In Japan, if you leave a cell phone in a coffee shop, you can come back hours later and it will be given to you. In Russia, not so much. In the 80s there was an effort -- the early shoots of globalism -- of trying to "industrialize" west Africa by trying to import Western European-style management and business practices, and all of these projects failed, and some resulted in large debt loads being carried. One wonders what could have happened if they just let Africa be Africa and develop its own industries with its own practices at its own pace. You are not going to get English property rights or rule of law, but you will get something that actually works in the local environment, which is more important, IMO.
Because we want to compare the US to places that people find comparable and desirable and, gosh, maybe even slightly superior, rather than places that people find to be totally undesirable.
We also would like to compare the US to places that might have statisitical similarity. A good example of this is Canada: lots of people claim cause/effect in the US for laws about underage drinking, yet Canada had a similar decrease in underage drinking without changing any of their laws. This contradicts those who claim that public policy changes were responsible.
In addition, European countries help show that sometimes there are other solutions than just "more guns". And, what some of the fallout from BLM changes is showing is that disarming initial responders rather than always just sending in armed police seems to result in positive results to the system.
We look to Europe because sometimes they are exemplars and that while maybe we shouldn't blindly just do what they do, perhaps we might want to think about and emulate what they do right.
Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips firearm-related homicide or accidents).
I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between milli- and micro-.
I'm still waiting for doctors to have to wait ten days for multiparty approval on their decision to proceed with a procedure predicated on an obvious misread of the patient's chart.
Until that day, gun control advocates have the blood of 590 Americans on their hands, every day, for choosing their Cause Célèbre to be something that kills far, far fewer people than a much, much bigger problem.
Reminder that any policy advocacy position that comes from any standpoint other than holistic harm prevention has one goal, and one goal only: power and control.
edit: HN hivemind apparently believes I am factually incorrect. Approximately 24k Americans die annually via firearms[1], whereas approximately 250k Americans die annually via preventable medical errors[2].
> Completely preventable medical errors kill TEN TIMES as
> many Americans as firearms do, even including suicide-by-
> gun as a firearm death (which, incidentally, far oustrips
> firearm-related homicide or accidents).
This is quite a jump from guns to medical errors and I think this is comparing apples and oranges. It seems absurd to me only fix "burning" issues because then only mediocrity can be reached. It's better to fix root causes. That said, I wonder how many of these errors happen because both medical personal and patients are under extreme stress due to a bad financial situation, a dangerous neighborhood etc.
Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?
> Imagine you live in a neighborhood where people have guns and actually use them. Wouldn't you be a bit stressed out and thus being more prone to make errors, communicate incorrectly, both as patient but also as nurse/doctor?
> I'm still waiting for Congress to even propose, let alone pass, the bill that mandates background checks for nurses to know how to properly multiply or divide drug IV dosages by ten, or to learn the difference between mill- and micro
Nursing licensing standards already cover that skill (and a lot more.) Congress has also worked to promote things that deal with actual problems that exist, rather than things that are long solved, and which have been demonstrated to reduce preventable medical errors like meaningful use of EMRs; knowing how to multiply and divide correctly doesn't help when poor, unstructured records give you inaccurate or incomplete information to start with.
Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem. And I already addressed the charting defects.
My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle, and you are indirectly responsible for allowing more people to die than if you had made a more factually-aligned choice. Gun control advocates are, therefore, obviously driven by a desire to control others, and not by any serious intention to save lives.
A decision to advocate for gun control is a conscious decision to NOT advocate ( per limited hours/resources tradeoffs ) for cancer treatment research, dietary policy improvements, medical error prevention, traffic safety research funding, environmental policy, Alzheimer's research, or any number of things that will save more lives.
It's rational to assume that the motivation is something other than actually saving human life. Control and power, being common and time-tested motivations of humans, seems to be a reasonable first assumption.
> Drug dosage administration errors are still a not-insignificant cause of death, and are by no means a completely solved problem.
But the cause of that problem isn't even arguably “there is no required testing to verify they nurses can do the task appropriately”, since there is, in fact, required testing that includes that within it's scope.
So the idea that Congress enacting a new requirement on that would be parallel to it's initial adoption of a background check requirement for guns but for a more pressing problem is not defensible.
The fact that Congress has also repeatedly recently adopted (not merely discussed) new rules designed to address things that are actually empirically contributors to avoidable medical errors also demonstrates that the implication that that is being neglected while gun control is being discussed is also false.
> My broader point is that if you are a policy advocate, and you have N hours to dedicate to a specific policy advocacy, if you choose a cause that addresses the death of far fewer people than a more significant problem, your choice is a violation of the least-harm principle
If you assume that every advocate is equally effective in all issues, and that the targets of that advocacy are equally easily moved on all issues, and that the effect of policy change that would be acheived by the same movement of decision-makers is proportional to the scale of the problem being addressed, then this is a defensible position. But none of those are reasonable assumptions.
Speaking for myself, I downvoted not because you are factually wrong. I downvoted because your entire argument is whataboutism. It is irrelevant to the topic being discussed, and makes the entire debate worse for its presence.
Each state has different firearm availability and laws.
Some states have very liberal gun laws, including automatic or semi-automatic weapons and concealed carry. Others have very strict laws, and with limited types of guns available and a loaded gun in a car or concealing a handgun would involve jail time.
I have a strong suspicion that firearm deaths are related to crime which is related to wealth inequality. Of which US does extremely badly compared to most developed countries.
People become criminals when there's few other options
And, if it holds (cite please because I really don't believe the top parent), it probably only holds in the US in gun ownership areas that are predominantly non-minority. And probably only to certain levels of gun ownership.
Once you start getting enough gun ownership, you start getting the "Who's the bad guy?" problem when there are conflicts. And the cops won't be terribly restrained if the gun owners aren't white.
Yup. There's little overlap between legally owned guns and guns used in crime. Gun laws obviously have little effect on guns that aren't legally owned in the first place.
I don't think that is obvious at all. I would assume most illegally owned guns have been legally owned in the first place so gun laws can have a big effect.
Only if you are talking about basically totally disarming society. Note some problems with this:
1) There are something like 300-600 million firearms in the US. Attempts to disarm only get the guns from those who are law abiding, you disarm the defenders without doing much to the criminals.
2) You probably increase the death rate as you have made people less able to defend themselves, but done basically nothing to most murders because you didn't succeed in disarming the criminals.
This isn't common today, but considering ongoing the efforts to make 3d-printing Glock and Hi-Point frames easier I can't imagine it will remain uncommon forever. These aren't exactly hard to find, see [0].
And for those who think you can just ban all other gun parts and fix the problem, I present to you the FGC-9 - a pistol-caliber carbine manufacturable in your basement with a 3d printer, metal bar stock, and some high-pressure pipe. Semi-auto, rifled barrel - the works. [1] Is it a trivial process? No. Is it going to get easier and produce higher quality results with time? Yes.
Source for that Europe claim? That’s what we call a stretch. A earth-to-moon kind of stretch. In most of Western Europe gun crime is basically non-existent outside of turf wars, drug rings and bank robberies. Your odds of being killed or robbed at gunpoint are close to zero.
You know where modifying guns with 3D printed parts is common? The USA, since you can turn many of the commercially available ones into automatic weapons.
>You know where modifying guns with 3D printed parts is common? The USA, since you can turn many of the commercially available ones into automatic weapons.
People have done it, but it is not common at all.
Moreover, for the time being, 3D printed gun parts have an extremely short lifespan.
3D printed parts *using home printers* have an extremely short lifespan because of the materials used. 3D printers exist that can do a far better job but they're not down to the home market level yet. The "threat" from printed guns is not their prevalence but their ability to slip through metal detectors.
The real threat is ghost guns. It *used* to take a skilled machinist to make gun parts, but CNC machines at the home workshop level are now capable of doing it. Any reasonably competent adult can do it, you don't need to be a machinist.
>3D printed parts using home printers have an extremely short lifespan because of the materials used.
Yes, those are even shorter, but even industrial 3D printers are ill-equipped to print anything other than the gun's frame. Even lower receivers are a problem.
The bolt carrier group on a long-gun does not fare well unless it is made of metal (or special ceramics, in some niche cases). Same goes for the gas-block on gas-operated guns (like AR-15s or AKs), or the lever on lever-delayed blowback systems (e.g. the LAI on the FAMAS), or the rollers on something like an MP5. The DIAS required to convert an AR-15 into a full rock-'n-roll model has to bear a lot of mechanical and thermal force as well, and the 3D printed ones are notoriously unreliable. They can chip, deform, or fray at the worst possible time, releasing the hammer. They can fail to retain the hammer, and neuter your weapon in a gunfight. Most importantly: they always do this. The good ones can barely get 100 rounds off.
Handguns and long-guns likewise need hard, heat-resistant materials for firing pins, ejectors, chambers and barrels. That's unlikely to change anytime soon, unless we suddenly discover new polymers with hardness and thermal properties on par with steel.
And here's the dirty secret: you can already buy plastic guns. They're called Glocks.
>The real threat is ghost guns. It used to take a skilled machinist to make gun parts, but CNC machines at the home workshop level are now capable of doing it. Any reasonably competent adult can do it, you don't need to be a machinist.
Any reasonably competent adult can buy an 80% lower receiver [0] and produce a fully-functioning AR-15 lower receiver with a hand-held file and a few hours of work. And this is legal. The rest can be legally purchased without any oversight, because the lower receiver is the only thing that qualifies as a gun.
3D-printed "ghost guns" are a myth invented by TV talking-heads to scare pearl-clutching soccer-moms in the 80's. The reason they are a myth is because it's cheaper, safer and easier to just build a real, usable gun that wont melt in your hands. And again: this is doable with polymer parts, too.
To reiterate, because it bears repeating: the world you fear has existed for at least 25 years.
There was a terrorist in Germany that built a whole arsenal of home made weapons. He tried to storm a synagogue but since he couldn't get access to real gun powder he had to get a substitute. Subsequently he failed to bust the door open and just shot a white passerby and then he went to a kebab shop to shoot the clerk. Considering his goal was to kill 30+ jews this is a pretty good example how gun control saves lives.
> he failed to bust the door open and just shot a white passerby
> a pretty good example how gun control saves lives.
It sounds like the door saved lives. He was still able to shoot people. It doesn't sound like gun control laws saved any lives; maybe the building codes did.
Personally, I'd also put that down as an example of how a fixation on guns leads to failure. A truck attack or bomb might have been far more devastating.
Especially since it sounds like his substitute gunpowder worked.
Seconded. Against these idiots I think if anything guns are a safety measure. Using a large vehicle (rent a moving truck, load it with something like concrete blocks from your local hardware) and ram is actually more deadly than most mass shootings. Guns only have an advantage if you seek specific targets rather than simply a death toll.
Those numbers are, almost certainly, all within the US (or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?). Because the data globally points the other direction. The overwhelmingly largest factor, across every nation we have data for, in determining how many people get shot is how many guns there are, period. More guns means more shootings.
Again, I don't see how an argument that "crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny" can be anything but laughable given data points like "Japan" or "Belgium".
The argument is that legal guns increase gun deaths but reduce other types of crime, either by substitution (e.g. reducing knife crime) or by deterrence (e.g. reducing home burglaries).
That claim has its own burden of proof that it needs to meet before it can be accepted, but looking at other countries and saying "More guns means more shootings" isn't addressing the actual argument.
The argument that more common access to firearms more frequently results in more gun deaths is misleading when considering many of those deaths are self inflicted injuries, such as suicide attempts. Obama correctly addressed this when he pushed for gun reform near the end of his tenure. In other words if disqualifying access to firearms on the basis of mental health concerns you simultaneously increase lawful access to firearms and reduce gun deaths related to those new purchases.
> The argument that more common access to firearms more frequently results in more gun deaths is misleading when considering many of those deaths are self inflicted injuries, such as suicide attempts.
Suicides don't count? For the record: I'm 100% in favor of public policy that results in large decreases in the suicide rate.
Gun suicides outnumber murders 2 to 1. That says nothing about what the suicide rate would be if you took guns out of the picture. Someone going the gun route isn't a cry for help and obviously they don't care if it's a mess.
What else is highly effective and messy? Jumping from someplace high. There are lots of high places. I'd much prefer they go the gun route because jumpers sometimes land on someone as most such places that are readily available are in urban areas.
Suicide is a mental health issue, not a gun issue.
There's evidence that the availability of the means of going through with suicide affects how many people do it.
> Suicide in the United Kingdom declined after coal stoves were phased out, removing a means of suicide by carbon monoxide that had been available in many homes. Tylenol (or acetaminophen) overdoses in England and Wales fell by 43 percent after legislation passed requiring that the medication be sold in “blister packs” where you have to pop out each individual pill; that simple switch from big bottles was enough to save lives. When the Israeli Defense Forces stopped letting soldiers bring their guns home over the weekend, suicides fell 40 percent, primarily due to a drop in firearm suicides committed on weekends.
And if someone does decide to try to kill themselves, guns are more likely to be fatal:
> About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back.
This isn’t true, suicide isn’t zero sum. If you remove easy ways of committing suicide, that method drops substantially, but overall suicides ALSO drop.
“ In the early 1960s, asphyxiation with domestic gas accounted for nearly half of suicides in England and Wales.3 The conversion of the British gas supply to North Sea gas, which was free of carbon monoxide, essentially eliminated domestic gas suicides in England and Wales and, moreover, was accompanied by a steep decline in the overall suicide rate (a 30% decline in England and Wales between 1960 and 1971, and a smaller decrease in Scotland), driven by the fall in gas suicides.”
Additionally, in the case specifically of guns, they’re more impactful for suicides BECAUSE they’re so effective. In the US they account for 1% of suicide attempts, but 50% of suicide deaths.
It’s not that suicides don’t count. The argument is misleading because suicides absolutely do count, but for many people the the subject of gun deaths incorrectly implies homicides.
What is the "actual argument" then? Gun deaths are... pretty bad. Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no?
The point is that perspective matters. You want to treat "crime" as a single thing because it seems like "the actual argument" to you, and when I see that same argument it looks like senseless spin because it's trying to dilute the US's outrageous homicide rate in an analysis by comparing it to burglaries in Amsterdam or whatever.
I think one part of the moral calculus that's missing here is who the "victim" is in each case. A substitution of somebody being shot for somebody being burled is obviously not a good outcome; on the other hand, a substitution of a burgler being shot for an innocent average joe being burgled is... still not great, but you must admit it shifts the scales.
Effectively zero gun violence is deployed in defense, either of person or property. No "burglers" are being shot, statistically. Guns are deployed in anger, or in escalation of existing violence.
> Lumping them in with burglaries on a 1:1 basis seems like poor moral calculus, no
Yes, and I'm not advocating for that.
My only point is that "less gun deaths in countries without legal guns" isn't addressing the original claim that other crimes have decreased as a consequence of legal guns. I'm not taking a position on whether that claim is true, or what exactly they mean by that, which are both questions I also would like to be answered.
> Because the data globally points the other direction.
Once you include multiple countries, isn't your data skewed by "countries at war import a lot of guns"?
> or spun to include things other than gun violence in "crimes", perhaps?
That's not spin. You want to minimize total deaths, not "gun violence". If banning guns meant instead of getting shot, the same number of people got stabbed instead, the ban would be pointless.
If someone wants to kill you, and has a gun, not only can they do so from a distance, but it was invented for that purpose. Stabbing someone is more of an act of opportunity I'd wager, and in a lot of circumstances you'd be less likely to die, therefore reducing deaths.
Well, not quite. You said that the same number of stabbings would be equivalent to the same number of people getting shot, but didn't specify that the stabbings would be fatal. I'm suggesting that if total violent crime stayed the same, but you removed guns, you'd have less fatalities.
more people survive stabbings than shootings, and if someone was to say start stabbing on a school campus a lot less people would be stabbed than shot in a school shooting.
Which is, as I said, exactly why counting homicides is not spin, and better than counting "stabbings" or "shootings" or "gun deaths". You look directly at the metric you care about (people killed), instead of intermediate metrics (people stabbed/shot) and trying to figure out how that translates to number of people killed.
It does not. The US has far more guns. But Canada has significantly more guns than other similar western democracies. And, in fact, Canada has an intermediate level of gun violence between the extremes of the US wild west and totalitarian Europe!
It's almost like, as I said above, the clearly obvious determining factor in gun violence is the simple number of weapons. That this obvious hypothesis is simply disbelieved by large numbers of HN posters (many of whom like to call themselves "rationalists") continues to astound me.
Yes, I was just speaking to reflections of law changes in the US. There are a couple of reasons why the data could point differently for the US compared to other locations, such as the commonality of firearms regardless of legal status and culture.
The problem is you are mixing up "being shot" with "being a victim". The prevalence of guns changes the nature of crime far more than it changes the amount of crime.
The "problem" is that you (as I mention earlier) are insisting on treating any "crime" as morally identically to any other, which seems insane to me. Would you rather be shot or mugged? I know the answer I'd give.
The prevalence of guns changes the nature of crime, on the whole, from largely survivable violence to presumptively lethal injury. And that's bad, thus the game-playing with "crime" statistics instead of shootings to try to obscure the clear truth.
Bad comparison. Few criminals seek to shoot you. The proper comparison is whether you would prefer to be mugged by a gun, a knife or a club.
And the proper answer here is gun. You're much less likely to be hurt by a mugger with a gun--the mugger is far more likely to rely purely on deterrence rather than actually use his weapon.
Exactly, it's a question of perspective. We had a rationalist essay on exactly this effect on the front page yesterday, in fact! It's a Trapped Prior.
If your prior is "gun rights are super important and any attempt to regulate guns must be resisted", then it leads you inevitably to ridiculous arguments like "AKTUALLY guns reduce crime (for some variant definition of crime that includes non-violent stuff)" or (and you fell right into this one) "[gun regulation] leads inevitably to large scale gun confiscation or prohibition"[1].
At what point will the gun folks come back to rational compromise? You know how you end up with inevitable prohibition? When it's the only option left to the majority.
[1] Which is just clearly false, look at the diversity of gun laws across the globe! CLEARLY it's true that you can regulate them better than the US without "inevitably" confiscating them. Look at Canada, for goodness sake.
It’s not clear that there is anything in your response that is relevant to my comment.
The point I see you making is to say that all people who are against gun control are irrational, but it this appears to be a bare claim unsupported by an argument.
Funny you mention people ignoring research yet you failed to mention a proper source (an arstechnica article is not (though the sources of this article might be)) for your claims.
You can trace modern firearms prohibitions to civil-rights-era California with the intent of disarming the Black Panthers, so I oppose prohibitions on the grounds that I personally view them as inherently racist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mulford_Act
You should probably oppose or support restrictions in accordance with whether or not they make sense, irrespective of the debatable motives of their inception.
In regards to the motives of their inception, it seems like a bit of leap to go from "armed black militias patrolling streets" and "an organized band of men armed with loaded firearms [...] entered the Capitol on May 2, 1967" to then saying that the resulting anti-gun legislation was necessarily inherently racist. Every time a white kid shoots up a school and it leads to further gun restrictions, do you assume that this is because of legislator's anti-whiteness? Almost every school shooter/mass shooter is white, and there have been all sorts of gun restrictions imposed as a consequence of these events. In fact, wasn't there JUST a band of mostly white men who entered the Capitol, which has also led to suggestions for increased legislation against firearms? Is the resulting legislation that comes from that going to be anti-white?
There certainly is. I can point out that a world without guns would have zero deaths from guns without advocating that the world should be without guns.
Guns are most needed in African American neighborhoods. Banning them will criminalize more African Americans who need guns for their protection. If you can't provide quality public safety services, at least keep self defense legal.
"Better police" does provide more "public safety". This argument has been used to create the system that we have now, caging people you don't like or don't look like you; it can never be "reformed" in any meaningful manner. I'd rather have a 20% greater chance of being randomly shot than to continue with this push for a system that cages people for victimless crimes or creates more criminals because Karens' across the country feel that they need to control everyone and everything. Everyone should have the right to defend themselves against any threats against themselves or their neighbors; this is not negotiable.
> caging people you don't like or don't look like you
This is such a toxic, false statement. It denies reality: people are getting jailed for their actions. Due process is still in effect, you understand; and if anything, far fewer people are jailed than probably should be due to overcrowding, high costs, etc. Recidivism rates are very high.
Pretending that people are being jailed because of the color of their skin is ridiculous, especially considering that in many cities the jury, lawyers, judge, clerks, etc. are also of the same skin color. People are being jailed for committing crimes; and yes, these crimes are being disproportionately committed by some groups - as statistics have consistently shown for decades.
Statements like yours throw the entire justice system under the bus. You essentially call into question the entire appartatus that remains to protect normal folks in the burnt out husks of cities like Baltimore and Detroit.
> Karens' across the country feel that they need to control everyone and everything
Karen is an anti-white slur. "Karen" expects people to follow the rules and to be pro-social, and gets mad when they do not; this used to simply be good, mutual enforcement behaviour that everyone engaged in to keep people honest and to fight corruption. Stereotyping middleaged white women who simply want the process to be observed as written is offensive, and as sexist/racist as any other single term you could use these days.
Police need to enforce the laws in economically depressed neighborhoods where crime, gangs, and drugs are much more common. However, police are also abusive in that environment, and the criminal justice system perpetuates economic and social hardship in those neighborhoods by disrupting good home/family environments.
Both forces — neighborhood criminality and an overly harsh criminal justice system — work against true social justice. One of the worst consequences is poor psychosocial development in children growing up in that environment (constant stress and fear, broken families, etc). For a somewhat anecdotal view of this sociological phenomenon, see Alice Goffman's book _On the Run_ (she's the daughter of Erving Goffman).
>
Pretending that people are being jailed because of the color of their skin is ridiculous, especially considering that in many cities the jury, lawyers, judge, clerks, etc. are also of the same skin color.
That is not the point. People should not have to sit in a cage and then be "judged" by a system that is no longer blind and is stacked against anyone who goes through it. How long do you want to sit in a cage for "something you did not do"? It's no longer about "justice" or "reform", it's about revenge and benefiting those who make it up.
>
Statements like yours throw the entire justice system under the bus. You essentially call into question the entire [apparatus] that remains to protect normal folks in the burnt out husks of cities like Baltimore and Detroit.
The system needs to be thrown out because of how it was created and what it has become. Instead of only being used to "reform" the most reprehensible individuals in society (violent crimes, theft, fraud), it has become a weapon for use against anyone the two parties did not like. First it was the racist Democrats who used it against those who did not look like them and then the fundie Republicans pushed it even further to use it as a tool for the things the church did not like. Many people sitting in jail right now should not be in jail because their "crimes" never affected anyone else or society at large.
>
Karen is an anti-white slur. "Karen" expects people to follow the rules and to be pro-social
Being a cunt is not limited to any one group or ethnicity. "Karen" is applicable to any busybody who should mind their own business and leave people alone.
>"Karen" is applicable to any busybody who should mind their own business and leave people alone.
If there was a meme name for an angry woman would you have an issue if it was a predominantly black woman name? There is a sterotype of the angry black woman, so even if you would be fine it would immediately be called racist.
> If there was a meme name for an angry woman would you have an issue if it was a predominantly black woman name?
This is a pretty ridiculous way of talking about this. Let's be concrete about it: if the name was "Shaniqua", we'd all know that it was intended to be insulting toward Black women, right? Are you implying I'd be okay with that one? I'm not.
"Karen" has evolved into being an anti-white slur, and I'm not okay with either option, nor any other slur of this sort. It degrades the conversation and makes it impossible to discuss actual problems that have highly predictable demographic correlations.
I either wasn't clear or you didn't read my post well. I agree with you. I think Karen is anti-white just like Shaniqua would be anti-black. I am against both.
> People should not have to sit in a cage and then be "judged"
Reads like the words of someone who has never experienced life in a high-crime area. Likely, your sentiment about this is entirely created by false premises, an illusion from Hollywood about the nobility of gangsters. Life is not like that. Scary, sociopathic or even psychopathic people abound; violence is a daily fact of life; everyone has a mugging story.
The vast majority of these people sitting in cages have broken the law. Do you remember the law? The list of things you may not do, the list of things you will be punished for doing. A 2-year-old can understand this: do bad thing, sit in the corner as punishment. I'm not sure what happens in the brain of a mature adult to make them forget these basic mechanics; it really feels like you must have been sold sob stories that make your mushy heart over-empathize with a media construct. In reality, there are people out there who will stab you for $20.
> Many people sitting in jail right now should not be in jail because their "crimes" never affected anyone else or society at large.
There are certainly some such people, but have you looked at the 'revolving door' phenomenon where police arrest people who are punted back out onto the street hours or days later? They learn that there is no real lasting consequence for their actions besides an uncomfortable few nights (albeit, out of the rain and cold, and with free food). There are not that many people who end up in prison for crimes that don't affect others - and when they are in jail for a minimal offense, oftentimes that's the only thing that police and prosecutors could concretely nail them on, despite knowing or believing that they're involved in far worse actions that they haven't been caught for.
The other thing is, many actions do affect society at large. Drug use does; advocates for Legalizing Everything pretend otherwise, but opiates have a massive effect that cannot be mitigated just by making them legal. The addiction doesn't go away; the cost of the drugs doesn't disappear; and the actual impact of being a junkie doesn't stop. You don't end up all-of-a-sudden being able to hold down a job reliably just because your risk of arrest goes away. You don't remove chances for fentanyl to kill people by turning a blind eye to the problem.
> it has become a weapon for use against anyone the two parties did not like.
Guess what, Yank; these problems exist outside of your country and your two-party bubble bullshit too. Every major city in the world faces these problems, in predictably direct proportions to demographic factors that may not be politely discussed. The problem is endemic, it's not a function of the system except to the extent that the system finds ways to profit off of corruption and drug money.
> Pretending that people are being jailed because of the color of their skin is ridiculous, especially considering that in many cities the jury, lawyers, judge, clerks, etc. are also of the same skin color.
The extremely abbreviated way to make this point is to say "racism is over because Obama, and Kamala, and black faces in high places".
No, you're stuck at some kind of 2008 view on the topic.
The conclusion here is actually "these things are not caused by racism, because you can completely remove white people from the equation and yet the situation only ever gets worse".
Social policies combined with demographic realities are the proximate causes here. Continuing to paper over the latter with the former just entrenches the issue generationally.
What evidence do you have for "these things are not caused by racism, because you can completely remove white people from the equation and yet the situation only ever gets worse"?
"see what happens when white people are completely removed from the equation" is not an experiment that is possible to run.
So, no, you can't empirically do what you're saying you can do.
If you have a thought experiment or an approximation in mind, do share.
Here's a thought experiment: every judge, lawyer, jury member, and police officer is now black. If you think that is akin to white people disappearing, then we disagree. e.g. who wrote the laws? who stands to profit the most from incarceration?
The solution to homelessness is free mental health services, better safety nets (easy to get, unconditional unemployment benefits) and a public health system that doesn't bankrupt people.
In the bay area "there are no homes" is a real problem, but the systematic reasons for homelessness are even more important to solve.
Homelessness is generally not caused by a lack of homes. Providing homes works well for those who are homeless for economic reasons. It works very poorly for those who are homeless for reasons of drugs/alcohol or mental illness.
Have you looked into response times to your neighborhood? Even in a police state, police would not be so omnipresent that they could replace self-defense.
Reducing poverty would also reduce crime, and have other positive effects. A better welfare state, especially with regards to infant/child care and early childhood education, is probably a better ROI.
There are no such examples among the rich nations of the world. As such the example of Brazil is not apt. Even if you persist in it being apt you must all compare the number of such examples to the number of examples where gun ownership is illegal and where criminals rarely have guns.
Through buyback programs and legal penalties for possession, the amount of weapons in meaningful circulation would likely decrease substantially over a period of years.
As that process occurred, the value of the weapons would spike as scarcity took hold, and tactically-useful firearms (e.g. semi-auto) would become expensive on the black market. This would mean that criminals would need to be far more judicious with how they carried and used them.
It is very plausible that this scarcity effect would lead to a meaningful reduction in the possession and use of firearms by low-level street criminals, which would also by extension lead to a reduction in levels of firearms-related homicide, assault, and intimidation.
A low-level narcotics broker is less likely to carry around a Glock that costs $10,000 (which they have to dump off of a bridge or in a storm drain every time it's used in a homicide), than they are to carry around a black-market stolen Glock that cost $600.
> As that process occurred, the value of the weapons would spike as scarcity took hold
This seems implausible. The number of guns used in crime is in the tens of thousands each year.
The number of guns sold this year was more than 20,000,000.
The number in circulation is greater than 400,000,000.
Even in Australia compliance with gun buybacks wasn’t much more than 50%, and they didn’t have a second amendment.
The idea that Guns will become scarce in the US any time soon is simply unrealistic.
As for the 10,000 glock, that situation is also just a fantasy.
In London criminals can simply rent guns, fairy cheaply but with a high deposit. They only discard them if they fire them in a crime, otherwise they return them and get their deposit back.
This way, even just one gun can be used by hundreds of criminals at minimal expense, and with little risk of being caught possessing an illegal weapon.
One thing is, you have to subtract bolt guns, and bolt gun calibers from circulating firearm and ammunition totals. That should cut the number down quite significantly.
The guns wouldn't instantaneously disappear overnight in this scenario. It would take 10-20 years to see a sizeable impact.
I have an interesting quote related to the UK and gun laws:
Gun deaths remain extremely rare in Britain, and very few people, even police officers, carry firearms. But the growing presence of American weapons on the streets, which has not previously been widely reported, comes as serious violent crime, like murders and stabbings, has risen sharply.
So, hey, U.S. firearms restrictions might have some very positive outcomes for the U.K. (and Mexico as well).
I'd love if you could share an article about that firearms rental operation, how prevalent those weapons actually are, and if they're coming in from the United States.
I could theoretically manufacture a pistol-caliber carbine myself for under $1000, including the 3d-printer. As in, from bar stock + hydraulic pipe + DC current source + 3d printed components. Look up the FGC-9 - it's pretty impressive.
That's with current tech, and I don't think the tech of 20 years from now is going to be worse. If anything, 3d printing will be even better.
Now, that FGC-9 isn't nearly as concealable as a standard Glock. But I'm sure there's ongoing efforts to make a home-manufacturable semiauto pistol, too.
The more interesting thing to manufacture yourself is ammunition - smokeless powders are rather flammable, primers take that and scale it to 11 with a side of toxicity, and case manufacture has a lot lower tolerances than you'd think. (Bullets are comparatively easy, if you have a source of lead stock and can make a mold) But the number of guns in circulation in the US pales in comparison to the amount of ammunition stockpiled - estimates generally put annual sales at 8 to 10 BILLION rounds of ammunition. A lot of that is fired each year, but that's still a hell of a stockpile to go through first.
I think you raise a really interesting point with this, and I want to offer a counterexample that I managed to come up with.
So, yes you can make an FGC-9 in your garage. Fair enough.
But are the barriers to manufacturing one in the garage sufficient to significantly reduce proliferation?
So, my example is the widespread absence of fully-automatic weapons in U.S. crime. Any schmuck with a lathe and a milling machine in the garage can crank out fully-automatic sub guns like it's Christmas in Sarajevo in 1993. But nobody does. You only very rarely hear about full-auto being used in the commission of crimes. Why? Perhaps the illegality, expense, and manufacturing hurdles (however small they might be) are just good enough to prevent meaningful proliferation in the way we see with semi-autos today.
The ammo thing is an interesting point too. I would think one of the biggest hurdles would be to homebrew ammo that was clean-burning enough not to immediately jam something like an FGC-9 in small calibers. I looked into cartridge case manufacturing and I guess there's a brass drawing process or something. I wonder how difficult it would be to base a design around CNC machined cartridge cases instead?
There are valid reasons to believe that gun prohibition will not significantly decrease the use of guns in crimes in the U.S. Believing that gun prohibition won’t work because drug prohibition hasn’t worked is as invalid as the argument that gun prohibition will work because slavery prohibition worked. There are examples of countries that suddenly implemented strict gun control laws successfully whilst unsuccessfully prohibiting illicit drugs. Therefore it is not valid to reason that gun laws won’t work because they haven’t worked with drugs.
That, but also Swiss are rich and are an exception in the entire World.
But looking at the numbers to add more context: Switzerland is very different from USA.
First of all gun ownership in Switzerland is around 25%, it's over 40% in USA.
Secondly, 25% of Swiss own a firearm, not a gun, in USA gun ownership (meaning a gun) is at 22℅
In Italy gun ownership is at 12% and gun deaths are almost zero, as in Switzerland most of the legally owned firearms are rifles for hunting purpose, kept locked in a cabinet.
Nobody in Switzerland sleeps with their gun under the pillow and nobody thinks it's a solution to crime, that's the biggest difference.
I am sorry what? You predicate your statement by saying Switzerland is rich... I am sorry but those who are not “rich” should also be allowed to own firearms. Predicating ownership by wealth is just classist.
Secondly: Americans own too many guns and that's stupid.
third: USA is the richest country in the Worlsd and the largest owner of guns on the planet, so please don't make it a class issue, because it's really not.
Finally: Swiss are rich, they have an higher education on average so they don't end up shooting each other on the street like in the USA, were they think that owning firearms is a solution to poor education.
The only 2 places in Europe where there have been domestic mass shootings that were not terroristic attacks are Switzerland and Norway, not surprisingly the two countries that own more firearms.
africanboy says>"You really thought that an African boy couldn't possibly know? Seriously?"
It has nothing to do with "an African boy". You could be a 10-year-old South American pogo referee and I still would not believe that you have the slightest idea of how many Swiss sleep with or w/o pistols beneath their pillows! Seriously!
That's a counterfactual argument. It is by definition unprovable. I said that Europe shouldn't be considered a gun control success, not that if there were guns, WW2 would have been prevented.
During the Weimar era and the Nazi era, gun control laws were put into place. That is a historical fact.
Also, hint: saying that Hitler was voted into power as if it were an average democratic vote deeply misunderstands the situation. I suggest reading more about the era, specifically Ian Kershaw's book.
I might have miss understood your argument, but to me it reads like you wanted to imply that the implementation of gun controls ~lead to~ supported fascism and ultimately lead to WW2.
> I always find it odd how Europe is used as an example of gun control success. Especially when it comes to the issue of oppressive governments.
> World War 2 happened less than a century ago. During Weimar and the 1930s, pretty strict gun laws were put in place.
I live in Canada, we have very strict laws about who can get and how to get guns. 80% of gun crime is committed by people that don’t have a license, and got them from unauthorized places. Making something illegal doesn’t make it go away, just creates a black market. Criminals also don’t give a hoot about laws, by definition.
The relevant statistic is not the one you mentioned. One expects the outcome you cited. What is the frequency of gun involvement in crime in Canada vs. the United States? That’s the relevant comparison.
It’s easy to grow marijuana, for instance. I can do it. I can not manufacture a gun easily. In countries where legal gun ownership is hard to obtain they have much lower rates of crimes involving guns while at the same time having ready access to illegal drugs. Your counterpoint is not apt.
Not only can you make a gun easily, 3d printed or not, you can even bootstrap (I don't just mean handload) ammo now. Criminals will hella have hella guns and the cat is too far from the bag to put it back. Even individual manufacture isn't a real hindrance as long as your network contains someone who can make a gun.
The old Improvised Munitions handbook has instructions for how to make a "zip gun" with little more than pipe and a nail. Guns are easy. Safe, reliable, long-lasting guns require a bit more work.
Guns are not hard to make yourself, now, if you have a little competence with tools. In ten-twenty years, you'll be able to print off as many as you want with absolutely no technical skill.
Stopping people from killing others with guns is a cultural and social issue. Trying to fix it by blocking access to guns is an ever-more losing strategy.
There are lots of examples of countries whose ban on guns work and whose ban on drugs doesn’t work. Therefore it is a bad argument that guns can’t effectively be banned since our ban on drugs hasn’t worked.
Easy enough if you have access to the necessary power tools (usually a drill press or a router). There are a number of companies creating unfinished lower receivers and providing kits for one to finish it themselves. It's also legal in the US.
It's as easy to smuggle guns into the US as it is to smuggle in drugs that aren't grown there. It's also pretty easy to manufacture them. I suspect the latter is just your perception from never having tried.
I don’t know much about gun smuggling. Do you have sources or experience in this area to know that gun smuggling is as easy as drug smuggling? My impression, not based on experience, is that gun smuggling can’t occur at near the level that drug smuggling does. For one it’s far easier to track the manufacturing of guns as the location of factories is well known and public knowledge.
Is it your contention that any old fool like myself can produce useful guns (ones that don’t explode when I shoot it) and ammunition? Does this ability scale the same way that growing marijuana does?
You might know where the factories are, but what does that matter if manufacturing guns isn't illegal in those places? At present, guns are smuggled _out_ of the US quite effectively [1]
As for whether it's easy to produce a working gun: well, generally you can purchase the component parts of a gun on some continuum between raw materials and final product. The exact point on the continuum that you make your purchase depending on your risk level and how restrictive gun component laws are where you live. After that it's a case of following schematics and a little machining skill.
However, it seems unlikely that individual criminals would manufacture their own guns, in the same way that drug users don't typically manufacture their own drugs. It would require investment into machinery and minor expertise, but the barrier to entry is low enough that suppliers shouldn't have much problem stepping in to meet demand. I would assume that the US has the highest prevalence of gunsmithing expertise of almost any nation at this point. Those skills won't vanish overnight.
If you're really interested in making a home made gun, without involving a supplier, there are already ways to do that [2]. It seems unlikely a ban on 3D printing or other machinery and raw materials would work out.
I’m aware of 3D printing. At this time it is not ubiquitous or cheap enough for mass consumption. When it becomes so then the comparison to the drug trade will become more apt.
There are lots of examples of countries with effective illegal drug operations and effective gun control. Therefore the belief that banning guns will necessarily be as effective as banning drugs is provably false. As such it’s a poor argument. There are lots of valid reasons to believe that banning guns in the U.S. won’t work.
Your first half is somewhat valid (sans DIY culture). A portion of drug consumption is domestically produced. But you’re ignoring the international and inter-state drug trades.
I.E. Columbia accounts for 43%[1] of the global coca supply. Taking your argument at face value, Colombians would consume 43% of the worlds coca supply having no impact on your ability to purchase cocaine in, say, Miami.
Comparing other countries success on one form of prohibition doesn’t give much insight. Compare it to America’s success on current and historical prohibition. American’s don’t honor prohibition.
Comparing across generations is not valid as times and perceptions and social values change. What didn’t work in the past may work in the future.
I’m not ignoring the nature of the drug trade. I’m claiming that the drug trade and drug smuggling are not apt comparisons to illegal gun manufacturing and smuggling. I don’t have any other claims. The argument that making guns illegal can’t work because it didn’t work for drugs is a dumb one.
> Comparing across generations is not valid as times and perceptions and social values change.
No need to look across generations. There are plenty of prohibitions to choose from today. Like automatic rifles and opium.
> I’m claiming that the drug trade and drug smuggling are not apt comparisons the illegal gun manufacturing and smuggling.
I’m going to hazard a guess that you don’t come from a gun culture.
Otherwise law abiding citizens smoke weed. Likewise they source fully automatic mods for their rifles and hoard bump stocks.
And these are just hobbyists.
Add in the game theory incentives of organized crime and their already established distribution channels (the same distribution channels they’re using to move drugs). I don’t understand how it isn’t close to apples-apples.
So let me try another explanation for why I think the comparison with the drug trade is not valid. We have many examples of European countries where guns are effectively illegal to own in the sense of being hard to legally obtain. These same countries have well developed illegal drug operations. These same countries have much lower use of guns in crime. These countries are counterexamples to the argument:
Making guns illegal won’t be effective because making drugs illegal hasn’t been effective.
As such this argument is not valid. A person who wants to intelligently argue why banning gun ownership in the U.S. won’t work must use a different argument.
All criminal laws have as their aim to make prohibitions of certain behaviors. All fail at 100% efficiency but most do well in terms of regulating acceptable behavior over time. The prohibition on slavery was quite effective in the U.S. If you want to argue that banning guns in the U.S. won’t work go ahead and argue that. Just don’t use the foolish argument that since banning drugs didn’t work in the U.S. then banning guns won’t work. It is sloppy thinking.
I can think of a lot of reasons why banning guns in the U.S. won’t work. You alluded to one of the reasons why I think this. None of my arguments on why this won’t be effective in the U.S. have anything to do with the ineffectiveness of the war on drugs.
Yes. I ought to have specified that I was referring to countries with the same level of socio-economic development. I intended to compare like to like so to speak.
In countries where gun ownership is hard to obtain legally criminals have much lower rates of gun ownership. Banning legal gun ownership does not prevent all criminals from accessing guns but it does prevent most of them from accessing guns. Importantly it prevents for the most part gun involvement in crimes of passion.
Even more importantly, it discourages even habitual criminals from accessing and using guns. It is certainly possible to obtain black market handguns in the UK, but criminals know that (i) possessing them risks much more severe penalties, and convictions even if evidence of the other crimes they were involved with is inconclusive (ii) the risk of them being shot if not able to shoot someone disturbing their criminal activity first is usually negligible and (iii) more police resources are devoted to rumours of buying guns than rumours of selling drugs or other black market goods. So the average British burglar doesn't own a gun, the black market isn't a huge one and even many gangs that pride themselves on violence mostly or exclusively use less efficient weapons.
Of course, culture also plays a role: the UK never had many handguns or shootings before stricter regulations came in, and when they did gun owners generally complied.
Even if the USA banned gun ownership, which would require a constitutional amendment and given views on the issue by majorities of the populations of some states, would thus be quite impossible, even then there would be the practical issue of enforcing that ban.
Immediately after the ban, there would still be gazillions of guns floating around the US. It would take multiple decades after the ban until the positive effects can be felt. During this time, the criminals would absolutely still have guns while the law abiding citizens would not.
Furthermore, there are huge smuggling activities at the US's southern border, making it possible for guns to enter on that route. Maybe if a strong border wall is built, it can be pulled off somehow.
Also don't forget that there are wild animals in many parts of the US, like say in Alaska. Sometimes you need to have a gun.
Not to mention the country would almost certainly split if guns were banned. I have zero doubt a large chunk of the states would secede so the ban would only effect states that don't leave.
My point was that it takes decades until the point you responded to becomes invalid. Even if Biden banned all guns tomorrow, it's likely that criminals will keep having guns during the life span of everybody alive today.
Yes, it seems like the gun issue in the U.S. is cultural. You couldn't make the same arguments for gun ownership in the U.K. or Japan, because gun ownership was not as strong a part of the culture the whole period since their founding. It took two mass shootings in the span of a decade for the U.K. to ban almost all gun ownership.
I would prefer if nobody had guns (as an unrealistic utopian ideal), and if people were disincentized to obtain them illegally. But repealing the Second Amendment is both a lost cause and would do more harm than good. There is no undoing centuries of cultural propagation and convincing tens of millions of people who have already accepted the idea to cooperate.
If I wanted to minimize my chances of encountering gun violence as much as possible, I'd have to move overseas.
if guns are illegal their cost will go up. the cost of the weapon itself, plus the fee for smuggling obvious contraband. It will also be much easier to spot and arrest people carrying guns, as there will be no legal concealed carry permits. There are hundreds of millions of guns in the US, people will always be able to get them. but illegalization will make it more of a pain in the ass
The overwhelming majority of Americans, I'd guess over 90%, do not live in places where they need firearms to protect them from wild animals. Why should hundreds die from gun violence in cities every year because of the off chance that someone in Alaska will encounter a bear?
Your stat shows that (i) Myanmar's citizens were not unarmed and (ii) privately owned firearms were more widespread in 2007 when the country had been under the control of an autocratic military junta for decades than in 2017 when it appeared to be transitioning to semi-democracy. Myanmar is certainly not well functioning, but it is also certainly not an example of effective gun controls, or an example of widespread private firearm ownership preventing autocratic regimes from doing what they like.
All I said was that it is possible to enforce gun laws if the government is well-functioning, which was probably an overstatement.
All I'm trying to say is that if the government is serious about gun control and has control of it's law enforcement (which was a proxy for 'well-functioning', outlaws will not have them)
There are a number of countries that have laws on the books, but does a terrible job of enforcing those rules.
All of this is irrelevant to the discussion of whether the laws should exist or not.
For my needs, Myanmar isn't a country worth discussing in terms of gun control because it's not like the citizenry has a voice in drafting policy and owning small arms has been a way of life there for decades, and does it seem to have resolved their issues with "representation"?
Correct, the initial transaction is from a legal dealer or private seller to a legal buyer who will pass a background check. The legal buyer then turns around and illegally sells it to someone who cannot legally own a firearm. This is called a straw purchase.
Only because all criminals have guns. Because guess what. Guns are legal.
There were many stories during the "firey but mostly peaceful" demonstrations last year of people who were ordinarily liberals trying to buy guns for personal and home defence and discovering to their horror that that actually there is a background check and a waiting period, you can't just buy one on a whim. Nor can a friend legally just lend you one.
I was stunned while purchasing my most recent firearm (about 6 months ago). I watched multiple middle aged, nicely dressed ladies purchasing guns. One lady even had the new gun taken away from her because she was pointing it at others (not on purpose) while the store employee processed the transaction.
I can't blame them, this past year we've all witnessed that our society can quickly change into something that is unrecognizable.
To be honest, if there truly is 50% of the population that thinks rushing the capital to stop a new elected government from existing, it's not the end of the world to think some undesirable minorities might not be wanted.
2 blocks down, there's still a TRUMP 2020 flag with a nazi flag right under it so I'm keeping my AR-15 nearby.
In the space of last summer I was assaulted by police, a group of III%ers moved onto my block, and there were talks at high levels of the government about designating my politics as terrorism. Now I have guns. But I hope I'll never have to use them against another person.
Meanwhile, I train regularly and I've found target shooting to be a really relaxing and meditative pursuit.
Yeah there are a number of various factions across the US that vocally want to drive society in a direction actively hostile to me and my friends. Many of these have subgroups that engage in military-like training. Best fucking believe I’ve thought about fucking off to somewhere out of the way and building a fort recently.
That is true but there could be a large subset of those who voted for Trump who also support the actions of those who rushed the Capitol. I do find it terrifying to picture 74 million people rushing the Capitol
Sadly, I wish it was true, attacks against Asian Americans are already higher than the past 10 years, so certain undesirables are already being targeted.
I’d hesitate to draw a causal link without looking at the data and disproving other hypotheses, particularly when it comes to media narratives in 2021. For example, do elderly Asians tend to carry lots of cash, making them attractive targets for criminals? In other parts of the world, what does targeted racism against a suddenly vilified minority look like? Are random racially motivated street assaults a common occurrence, and how else would we expect this sort of targeted racism to manifest? Does that match what’s happening here?
I don’t know. I know we can’t get by on feelings that are stirred by others who wish to do our thinking for us.
Do I really have to explain to you how certain Nazi / Confederate methodologies consider other races lower than them? And are willing to inflict violence on these other races?
She was of course pointing it at other people on purpose, because where the firearm is pointed is a purposeful decision by the wielder. This sort of casual and incredibly dangerous treatment of firearms is why I support rigorous training and licensing requirements for firearms ownership in the US, despite being an owner myself and hunting enthusiast. Too many irresponsible people have incredibly easy access to firearms in the country.
In order to have rigorous training and licensing requirements for ownership, you have to have more government control and intervention, and potentially yet another id/card system. That's a non-starter for most people in States that care more about individual rights and privacy.
The far better solution is to have a firearms safety and target practice course as part of compulsory schooling. Use laser-dry-fire equipped, color-coded handguns and you can avoid any live fire/ammo anywhere.
Live ammo and live fire aren't necessary to learn safe handling. The instructors would still be correcting any students who handle their laser guns unsafely. And the lasers in those laser guns or snap caps aren't powerful enough to be a huge safety risk. The laserlyte snap cap ones appear to be 5 mW. Not perfectly safe, but unlikely to do significant damage without intentionally staring up the beam.
It is of limited use to practice shooting with guns that don't shoot real bullets. The student doesn't learn safety properly and picks up bad habits b/c he thinks the guns are safe. That learning transfers over to real life and how you practice is how you will react under stress.
> It is of limited use to practice shooting with guns that don't shoot real bullets. The student doesn't learn safety properly and picks up bad habits b/c he thinks the guns are safe. That learning transfers over to real life and how you practice is how you will react under stress.
I agree. A course like that would have to have a module where the students would have to fire real guns, but I'd say you could still use dummy guns to teach the basics (and fail anyone who's blase with those) before they advance.
wavefunction says> "She was of course pointing it at other people on purpose..."
Written as if she had some malevolent intent, which is absurd.
But this is what makes handguns so useful: even a hardened criminal begins to look for the exit when he sees even the most naieve person pointing a handgun randomly. Guns are indeed a great equalizer.
I don't think GP is implying malice, just trying to make a (relatively separate) point about responsibility by equivocating on the phrase "on purpose", e.g., you decide where the gun points, even if you don't specifically want to sweep someone. I wouldn't phrase it the way they did, but they do have a point.
Your point is valid and I agree. It was obvious this lady never handled a gun.
I wonder how many people get killed/injured due to lack of training?
I would argue that not having training is just as bad as not having a gun at all. If life is in danger, why would I reach for this thing (a gun) that I don't know how to use properly?
Dem_Boys says " If life is in danger, why would I reach for this thing (a gun) that I don't know how to use properly?"
Thanks largely to movies you very likely can a gun. For example a double action revolver requires merely pointing and pulling the trigger. Even a blind man can shoot a gun:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=blind+man+shoots+assailant&
Often the mere appearance of a firearm in the hands of a victim is enough to convice an attacker(s) to leave. And shooting a firearm, whether anyone is hit or not, attracts all kinds of attention from neighbors and police.
As long as the laws were carefully written, and it doesn't become a barrier to anyone any more than driver's ed is a barrier to driving, I wouldn't mind requiring people to take a short basic class on gun ownership and use in order to purchase or obtain:
These are the four basic rules of firearm safety, this is how you wear PPE, this is how you remove ammo from a gun, this is how you load a gun, and this is how you shoot, then shoot a few rounds so people can experience the noise and kick. Shouldn't be more than a 2 hour class and cost more than $50 ammo included.
(I'm an American gun owner and enjoy using the range every now and then.)
Not having training could be worse in many cases and you end up injuring yourself or loved ones in a situation thats not supposed to be dangerous, ex. Showing it off, cleaning, just having it where children are concerned, etc.
The number one reason I support the right to own firearms is protection against the state. If it was as easy to own and buy guns in Hong Kong as it is in the USA the current situation with the destruction of democracy and the imposition of authoritarian rule would have been a much fairer fight.
Beyond that, my extended family is almost entirely based in the Deep South of the US, one of my cousins is a professional firearm dealer, and another works for one of the largest sellers of hunting apparel. One of my best friends owns about 50 guns. The number of irresponsible uses of guns in my family and friends group are zero. Guns are a tool like anything else - if it’s legal to own a chainsaw, a hunting knife, or a sledgehammer then it is not ridiculous to have licensed responsible adults to own guns.
I applaud the sale of firearms and the continuing spread of the culture to all people, races, and genders. The more people learn responsible use of guns and own them, the safer they will be, the safer society will be, and the less likely some idiot group of politicians will ban them.
This is a strange fantasy that many gun supporters share with you that having a gun makes you a warrior. It is even bigger fantasy that a persistent resistance can exist in an isolated urban setting when under the control of an overwhelming well-organized, well-supplied, highly technological armed force that has no restrictions to be civilized or respect individual rights such as is the situation in Hong Kong. It is very nice that you all have this gun fetish and it keeps you happy, but guns can't substitute for sound institutions, social cohesion, and rule of law.
Can you tell me how long is the boarder between Pakistan and Afghanistan? Do you remember that a big part of the soviet defeat in Afghanistan was the US that was able to regularly supply money and guns to the resistance, giving them even land to air missiles? Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did? Don't even try to compare Afghanistan with HK, because the two situations have nothing in common.
Do you know that the talibans had and still have bases in Pakistan that allowed them to lead the gorilla war that they did?
Yes I'll concede that fighting a guerrilla war without external support is difficult but it was always thus. Another example would be the Cuban revolution. However civil wars are often fought without any external backing being the decisive factor.
This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder. We also have a culture of loving freedom. In HK, you have a formerly free society that was brutally repressed by the authoritarian state. Saying “it will never happen” belies the fact it literally just happened!
I have family that lost everything to communism and had to restart in America. If you have never had to live under authoritarian rule, as a huge portion of civilization had to in the past and still currently do, it’s easy to think a reversion to the mean will never happen. But it can and does!
I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one. Guess why, they didn't have arm supplies, they didn't have outside power that would provide them with air cover, they didn't have safe bases for recruiting and training new fighters, for healing and planning operations. Without those basics your freedom loving people will be a sitting target. After a sufficient bloodbath, many will be killed, many will be imprisoned, many will be deported to other ends of the country, many will be broken, and the rest would prefer to forget and to return to some semblance of normality.
>> This isn’t a fantasy. It’s simply a fact when you have a huge number of people owning guns, implementing a dictatorship is harder.
> I'm from a former communist country. We had anti-communist gorilla fighters to the mid fifties. Guess what, the gorillas were hunted down and neutralized one by one.
What proportion of the population were those fighters? It's obvious that a small poorly-supplied force can't stand up to a brutal state, on the other hand "a huge number" of armed people might be able to, or at least put up a respectable fight. Furthermore, there's a deterrent effect from having an armed population that has to be taken into account.
I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded.
You imagine that a totalitarian regime will be hesitant to use excessive force against its own population. A corrupt and decaying regime might be, like the russian military coup 1990. Compare it to China 1989 or if you want to be more recent to the arab spring civil wars and you will realize that handguns matter only if the military decides to not intervene. Tunis - the president fled. Libya - the rebels were cornered until someone sent the heavy guns. Egypt - the military changed the president twice. Syria - it is a mess, but those with the heavy guns will write the history. That's why gun ownership is a fetish that gives people the illusion of having control over much more complex reality. A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.
> I'm trying to explain that no matter of your handguns, tanks are an anti-infantry platform created with the explicit goal of killing people with handguns. The difference of putting a thousand and a hundred thousand people in front of a tank is how many times the machine guns will have to be reloaded.
I don't think anyone would seriously think that someone could mount a resistance with handguns. IIRC, the US figured they're more or less useless militarily prior to WWII. You'd need to use rifles.
And IIRC, tanks haven't rendered infantry obsolete. They require infantry cover otherwise they're vulnerable, and there are environments where they just don't work well. Also, the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons to do so, since to do otherwise would be dumb.
> Compare it to China 1989...
The Tiananmen protesters were totally unarmed, and Chinese gun laws are extraordinarily restrictive, so I don't know what that's supposed to prove here. I'm not as familiar with the details of civilian gun ownership in the other countries you mentioned, but some cursory research shows that both Libya and Egypt have pretty restrictive civilian gun laws. There are also counterexamples to your thesis (e.g. Afghanistan) where poorly-equipped fighters have been able to effectively resist modern militaries.
> A single person can't stop a militarized regime. A million single persons can't do it either. Only if united in a coordinated and resourceful structures, they can oppose another organized and resourceful structure.
This is true. But arming those million single persons is a prerequisite for them to coalesce into an organized structure that could oppose a regime. Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.
> the tactics taken up by such a resistance would have to avoid head-on confrontations with tanks unless they have (captured) the right weapons
See, there it is where it breaks down. A light militia which gun enthusiasts imagine cannot succeed without the cooperation of the armed force. Capturing heavy weaponry needs the leap of faith that the owner of this heavy weaponry will be ready to part with it. If they are ready to do so, then you don't need your handguns and rifles because you have the mindshare. If the other side has the heavy weapons and the means to produce lots of them while denying this capability to the resistance, then your rifles won't make a difference.
Both Libya and Egypt have tribe social structures out of the cities. Those tribes have guns of their own no matter the laws. The proliferation of local militias after the government breakdown in Libya did not happen out of the blue.
The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup failed. Authoritarian regimes do not fail because a few people with rifles make noise in the wilderness, they fail when they run out of the conviction of their own enforcement structures that the regime must survive. The revolutions in Eastern Europe happened without a single gorilla fighter and those were some of the most policed societies in history. Have you ever asked yourself the question how did it happen?
Afghanistan is not an example of poorly armed population. Those poor fighters had Stinger missiles. Afghanistan has a porous boarder with Pakistan that allows for the movement of people, money, guns, and drugs. It is like the EU but without the human rights. What's more, the mountainous terrain makes the effectiveness of deploying heavy guns rather limited.
> Arming them doesn't mean a resistance will be successful, but disarming them would guarantee that any resistance would be a failure.
Yet, last year a big part of the executive branch of the US government tried to subvert the elections and to remain on power. Stopping it did not take mobilizing local militias. Actually, local militias were part of the problem, but their mobility was hampered in various ways, including denying them air transport. That's why I say that reality today is much more complex than waving guns around. Power and influence were exercised a few abstraction levels above that.
So, if you want to stop an authoritarian government in your country, guns are the last thing that one should invest in. Maybe one should invest just in case of some very improbable scenario, but usually, if it comes to the guns, then the fight is already lost.
> The reason I mentioned Moscow in my comment is to show that people were not armed in Russia either. However, the tanks were not ready to shoot and the coup failed. Authoritarian regimes do not fail because a few people with rifles make noise in the wilderness, they fail when they run out of the conviction of their own enforcement structures that the regime must survive. The revolutions in Eastern Europe happened without a single gorilla fighter and those were some of the most policed societies in history. Have you ever asked yourself the question how did it happen?
I'm well aware of that. I'm not disputing that an authoritarian regime can fall that way, and in fact that's the only way some can fall (e.g. a well-established one). However, your thesis seems to be that civilian arms are pretty much totally useless in every case, which I disagree with.
> Yet, last year a big part of the executive branch of the US government tried to subvert the elections and to remain on power. Stopping it did not take mobilizing local militias
That's a different problem: that American "militias" are groups of fringe wackos drawn exclusively one from one end of the political spectrum.
> So, if you want to stop an authoritarian government in your country, guns are the last thing that one should invest in. Maybe one should invest just in case of some very improbable scenario, but usually, if it comes to the guns, then the fight is already lost.
It's not like people can do one anti-authoritarian thing, and one anti-authoritarian thing only. Personally I think an armed civilian uprising would mainly be an input into a very chaotic transitional period, not some standalone effort, but those cases, I'd rather have it than not.
I agree entirely, even though I am not from the US. The US has a mental health and poverty problem, NOT a gun problem. Plenty of examples of wealthy countries with lots of guns (Sweden, Switzerland) and little to no gun violence.
The (largely theoretical) argument is asymmetric warfare where the dictator and their family/sycophants/officers need to be constantly preoccupied with a credible threat of an assassin around every corner. This asymmetric warfare is then sufficiently destabilizing that (when combined with sanctions and external pressure) it leads to a successful overthrow.
Of course, it's not realistic that the civilian populace will be capable of engaging in open-field combat with the military.
It really depends on your tactics. Hong Kong is an interesting battlefield as it has very few advantages for a traditional military. Dense population and few open areas provide many tactical advantages for an insurrection.
With these advantages and coordinating securely being generally available, I think an insurrection could create a lot of troubles for an occupying force. Lots of opportunities to document and share atrocities the occupying forces would commit as well which would at the very least ensure sympathetic governments and organizations would help continue the smuggling in of supplies and weapons.
I'm playing the chinese government. You are the HK citizenship, well-armed with handguns. You have the city, you are protesting against my actions and during a protest the local police stations are occupied, occupied are also the universities, the tv stations and the local government. Self-proclaimed leaders of the protest go on air and announce that they are seceding from the totalitarian regime and HK is independent nation. Freedom loving citizens are blocking the road with mainline China, they are taking control of the airport and the sea port.
The Chinese government in a few steps:
1. Cut off the internet, jam the radio signals and the satellite signals to blackout the entire island. Impose a sea blockade.
2. Stop the drinking water.
3. Wait 72 hours and gather the bodies. Blame local terrorists for destroying the water pipes.
And this is only the simplest way to smash the resistance. Without mobile communications and GPS, all groups will be cut off from each other, exposed from the air to drone attacks, and totally unable to retreat, because there is nowhere to go.
HK vs the CCP isn't a great case study, because the center of power is outside of the country and it isn't mixed in with the disgruntled people.
A better counterfactual case study would be North Korea, Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or present-day Myanmar; where the regime largely lives amongst (albeit in a stratified/segregated way) and selects from the populace that it controls.
I'd be especially interested in the early days of the regime, before its power is fully solidified and when it's the most unstable.
Soviet Russia was in a civil war for six years and the history there is complex because initially it was supposed to be the democratic revolution.
Nazi Germany was like present day Russia - formerly authoritarian state that lost a big conflict, had democratic transition which was shaken by a series of economic crises. A large part of the population considered the strong leadership and revanchism for embodiment of the national essence. The economic elite welcomed the predictability of a well-oiled corrupt regime.
History of North Korea is not my strong side, but the North had huge chinese and soviet backing during the war while the South part was a military dictatorship until the nineties.
Myanmar military is maybe the most interesting of all these cases because this is not a regime with an ideology. Its backing is purely economic by Japan and China who have financial interests in the country, and the army officers internally, who can profiteer from an army-owned economy. For sure, there is some jingoism used by the army's propaganda; however, I don't follow the conflict and narratives there to assess properly what's going on there. However, as far as China is ready to sell the regime weapons and the regime has access to enough money to by them, the protests are doomed. Having access to power is existential for those guys and they won't let it go. Best scenario is if Japan and maybe China broker some deal "amnesty for democracy", but I doubt that they have the motivation to do so.
Because they are enthusiasts who believe that personal weapons stop oppressive governments. They've watched Hollywood movies and they believe that they know how to make revolutions.
My mental exercise means to show that a highly nationalistic totalitarian regime which believes in itself and is faced by an existential threat will not hesitate to create a bloodbath. The communist regime can't afford to loose HK because "losing face" won't even begin to describe the situation. What's more, HK is not a defensible strong point. It can't ensure its supply lines and is dependent for its drinking water. Its enemy is a few kilometers away and has the second biggest fleet in the world.
What HK has is soft power. It is a free trading zone that has benefits granted to it by the US government, and it has its reputation. However, the chinese government proved that it is ready to throw all these advantages to enforce its control over the island and to unify its nationalistic narrative. Therefore, this soft power is good for nothing.
I think living under the steel toed boot of communist dictatorship is something worth fighting and dying for. But I’m a freedom lover from the Land of the Free, not someone who could mentally accept living under a dictator at any cost.
One nice thing about having such a large military budget is our civilian population contains many millions of people with formal military and combat training.
So yeah, there’s certainly Internet tough guys who just need an outlet to express their frustration. But there’s a large community of people that do in fact know which direction to point their rifle.
Comments like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26455436 aren't acceptable either. Please stop posting flamewar comments—it's not what this site is for. An experienced HN user like you ought to know and do much better.
> If it was as easy to own and buy guns in Hong Kong as it is in the USA the current situation with the destruction of democracy and the imposition of authoritarian rule would have been a much fairer fight.
Unless anti-tank munitions are also available, armed HKers would've just led to armoured fighting vehicles on the streets. The State will always have more firepower than you.
And China has also drones and an organized military. A military face to face with a nation state is always a losing bet. Which is why there are guerilla tactics but you can't expect a whole population to adopt guerilla warfare, there's not enough room in the jungle. What works is to make the economic cost of repression very costly with massive strikes and massive refusal to pay taxes, an organized military is very costly and when soldiers don't get paid they may disobey too. You also have to make the moral cost of being on the good side of the gun costly too then parts of the military may go into disobedience/mutiny. But this is generally taken into account by states and they will avoid sending batallions from a region in that region.
On a different note, how do you justify having 50 guns for personal protection?
> On a different note, how do you justify having 50 guns for personal protection?
The point is exactly that the gun debate shouldn't be just about everyday personal protection. In case of a massive conflict it's great to have enough supplies to last years and to hand out to those who need them. You may not be able to just go to a store and get more.
Political positions are almost always tribalist in nature and not based on rational analysis.
Case in point: the people arguing that drug prohibition is ineffective are often the same ones arguing for gun prohibition. If prohibition doesn't work for drugs, why will it work for guns?
It isn't a left or right thing, just a people thing. The same phenomenon exists in the opposite direction; guns good but drugs bad.
Your case is fundamentally flawed. Just because something doesn’t work in one instance, doesn’t mean that something doesn’t work at all.
But even before we get there, no one in the US is even talking about gun prohibition.
This entire comment thread is filled with straw men arguing against prohibition when at most people are demanding more regulation, the majority of which is supported by the majority of gun owners.
Also, gun regulation works in the majority of countries with functional governance. Heck, even drug prohibition “works” wherever they really want to prohibit it (such as many Muslim countries). The problem with drug prohibition in the US is not an issue with whether it works or not, but that the cost of enforcement is too high.
> no one in the US is even talking about gun prohibition
Seems pretty clear that this is just a political concession, in the same way that pro-life people are for more regulations on abortion. They’d really like to ban it entirely, but that is an unrealistic political non-starter, so the talking points are more compromising.
> countries with functional governance
Yes, well that is kind of a rare thing historically, hence the need for citizens to be able to defend themselves. Even many so called functional governments weren’t a few decades or half a century ago.
This is an outright false statement. Many legislators and many activist are in favor of an outright ban. Most know this is anon-starter. They rely on the "death of a 1000 cuts" method instead, where insignificant features are banned or restricted because "nobody cares". In my state, buying a handgun requires a 7 day waiting period. And taking an expensive and time consuming course to obtain an HQL - Handgun Qualifying License. And a background check. And the handgun has to be approved by name on a roster by the legislature.
Are you sure they’re the same people? A good number of leftists are advocates for gun ownership with training and also support legalization of drugs. Liberals generally don’t support drug legalization, but guns and drugs really aren’t the same thing and the reasons aren’t the same either.
If that were the case, then it wouldn't be absolutely verboten for Democrats to support gun ownership. Maybe some smaller groups of leftists or libertarians are different, but they have little actual political relevance.
Can you show me the evidence that Democrats do not support gun ownership?
There’s plenty of talk about restricting specific types, basically based on appearance, of weapons but haven’t seen much suggesting they’d like to ban them or make them completely unavailable as is often suggested by the right.
Libertarians are not leftists and this might surprise you but sometimes political parties do things different from what many of their voters might want. Consider that very large numbers on the left voted for Bernie Sanders and support his policies, but the party had largely avoided taking them up wholeheartedly or at all.
Does anyone actually think "just some restrictions" don't inevitably snowball into more restrictions? My read is that Democrats have an overwhelming hostile position towards guns and would ban them entirely if given the political will. At best, it's a "don't talk about it" position, akin to supporting abortion and being a Republican.
> this might surprise you
The snark is not necessary. If you can't comment about politics without being dismissive and arrogant, don't comment at all.
Bernie Sanders is for restrictions on guns. AOC is for restrictions on guns. I don't know what mainstream leftist is for widespread gun ownership. Can you suggest any?
As I said in my comment, I think it's primarily a cultural thing. Left-leaning urbanites don't interact with guns, whereas right-leaning rural residents often use them for sports and hunting. While some leftist groups are for it, this is again a fringe thing that doesn't exist in real life all that much.
It wasn’t meant to be dismissive or arrogant. You can’t handle a bit of jest?
The slippery slope argument has been used many times to avoid making any changes at all. Maybe your read is based on propaganda? Maybe mine is? I don’t believe Democrats would ban all guns in the same way that I don’t believe fuel economy standards were intended to ban trucks as was argued by some on the right. Though there is a constitutional right to own guns where the right to drive an F150 sadly does not yet exist.
Restrictions of guns does not equal banning guns and Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and many other prominent politicians on the right also favor restrictions on guns.
The entire situation would be better if reasonable discussion could be had.
It just seems clear to me that most Democrats have a hostile position to guns. Maybe they'd ban them, maybe they wouldn't, but if say, AOC would go shooting at the gun range or in any way signal that she likes guns, she'd be immediately criticized harshly and lose a ton of support. I don't think I'm basing this on propaganda, but I could be wrong.
Personally, I don't think banning guns or having restrictions will do anything at all. The sources of gun violence are cultural and social. Figure out why mass shootings or gang warfare are so common, then address the root of the problem.
> It just seems clear to me that most Democrats have a hostile position to guns.
Yeah. Not all Democrats are against guns, but if you pick an anti-gun politician at random, that person is highly likely to be a Democrat. The fact that the jurisdictions with the most restrictive gun laws a pretty much always Democratic strongholds is further proof. IIRC, some had already effectively banned private gun ownership until some Supreme Court cases a decade or so ago.
> Does Chicago have the strictest gun laws in the country? It did after Mayor Jane Byrne pushed through the ban on firearms not already registered with Chicago police in March 1982. The city's ban lasted until 2010, when the Supreme Court struck it down by a majority vote of 5-4.
I can't disagree with the personal decision to carry a weapon, but systemically it speaks ill of your country if you feel mortally threatened everywhere you walk.
Having a fundamental distrust of your fellow man is a tough way to go through life.
I don't totally agree with your assumptions. Being prepared for something doesn't mean you live in constant fear of it.
I keep a fire extinguisher in my kitchen but I don't think that means I feel "mortally threatened" every time I cook dinner. OTOH I do wear a helmet when I ride my bike due to a fundamental distrust of my fellow man, so I suppose it's not cut and dry
Why do you carry it then? To hammer nails if you see a nail in need of hammering? There're only three kinds of civilians who carry: those that carry out of fear, those that carry to spread fear and those that think it makes them cool.
There are more than three kinds, everyone's motivation is different, and claiming to know what someone else is thinking based on what you perceive, is not accurate.
I can think of at least another kind: someone who likes to be prepared, who doesn't think they'll ever need it, and hopes to never use it. - me
Do you pay for insurance that you aren't legally-required to have? A gun is not the same, but there are parallels.
If you make a conscious decision to bring lethal protection with you on a regular basis, you probably live in fear.
As you said, carrying a gun comes with huge responsibility. The chances that I would have to carry a gun to protect my life would have to be much higher than they are today before it overcame my concerns about carrying a gun.
Becoming oblivious to wearing a weapon is in itself a liability. So it comes with significant mental overhead.
My gun does require some mental overhead, but I wouldn't call it significant. My mental checklist of "phone, keys, wallet" just turns into "phone, keys, wallet, gun" and just like someone wearing a skirt might make sure they are modest when they sit down, bend over, the wind blows, etc, I just make sure my gun remains secure and unexposed.
With a good "holster" (for me, CCW Breakaways), I pretty much don't have to worry about it at all, even when doing something physical.
I'm sure I'm an outlier, but I think it goes to show that generalizing is bad.
If it's to be prepared to use it for self-defence, then that is by definition out of fear. You don't prepare to defend yourself if you don't fear you might one day need it. Just like you don't buy insurance if you don't think you might one day risk needing it, though that isn't normally out of fear.
No I'm not but I'm not surprised you won't admit it (maybe even to yourself). That you carry a gun just like someone might carry a set of paintbrushes because they might just need them some day on the road is hilarious. Of course it is fear. Okay you are correct, there's another option: that you have a hard on that you might some day get to use it. So three types: those that are afraid, those that think it makes them cool and those that want to use it.
Even if you're right (I'd at least mostly agree), pointing that out doesn't change the facts for the people who think they need to be prepared. Don't blame them. Fix the situation before you expect them to relax.
> Fix the situation before you expect them to relax.
The only way to fix the situation, in my opinion, is gun control. People are worried, admitting that's the main motive, because there are too many armed people around.
I am not going to disagree with you there. I would like it if we never needed guns. Unfortunately I don't know of any community that has erradicated crime and dangerous animals.
> . Unfortunately I don't know of any community that has erradicated crime and dangerous animals.
I agree, risk zero does not exists, but there is a lot that can be done before platoeing
To put things in perspective, these are some stats about Firearm-related death rate per 100,000 population per year
Country United States
Year 2017
Total 12.21
Homicide 4.46
Suicide 7.32
Unintentional 0.15
Undetermined 0.10
Guns per 100 inhabitants 120.5
---
Country Italy
Year 2015
Total 1.13
Homicide 0.29
Suicide 0.72
Unintentional 0.12
Undetermined 0.00
Guns per 100 inhabitants 11.9
---
Country Japan
Year 2015
Total 0.02
Homicide 0.00
Suicide 0.01
Unintentional 0.00
Undetermined 0.00
Guns per 100 inhabitants 0.60
As you can see the death rate appears to be strongly correlated to the amount of firearms circulating: USA has ten times the number of firearms of Italy (proportionally to the population) and 10 times the deaths, Japan has 1/200 of the firearms of USA and 1/600 of the deaths, Japan owns 1/20th of the firearms of Italy and has 1/60 of the deaths.
It appears as if we have different mindsets, and that's okay. It seems like we both agree there's a problem, but may differ as to the cause/solution or way to lessen the problem, and only wish the best for everyone. I'm pretty sure neither of are going to change our thoughts about guns based on this thread here.
I'm familiar with the concept and I do not want to change your mind.
I also wish the best for everybody too, I lived in the USA and still have many friends there and many of them, of course, disagree with me on this and it's ok.
I've said "appears to be strongly correlated" because I know Americans are sensitive about this topic, after all it's a Constitutional right.
But in the end when the stats of your country are the worst among "first World" countries, places like Nicaragua, Mexico and South Africa do better and Colombia is only slightly worse, maybe it's time to try something radically different, because whatever it's going on right now in the USA it's clearly not working.
The article is extremely short on data related to the headline, and in fact it's just a tiny blurb in the introductory paragraph. Would love to read more about these stats.
On an unrelated note, the person being interviewed really expresses a binary world view of left vs right with no in between, which is discouraging.
I think the article and this Brookings article (which has some graphs) [0] are talking about the same data. It's based on the number of background checks by NICS [1].
Out of the top ten highest weeks for background checks, nine were in 2020/2021, the other was in 2012 [2]. A month after Obama was reelected? Not sure what else was going on in December 2012.
My girlfriend wanted me to get one right in the beginning of the pandemic. Probably will never need to use it. The only scenario I see it being useful is if society completely falls apart and people start getting desperate.
One of my neighbors contacted me early on in the pandemic about buying a gun as well. I told him, if things get to that level, just bring your family to my house because you're not going to go from never-owned-a-gun to sufficient-at-self-defense fast enough anyway.
Yeah, the cop is much more likely to unload one or more high-capacity magazines than the bad guy is.
But you're wrong in this way: shot-for-shot the cop is no more likely to hit a target than is a bad guy(BG). Difference is the cop won't quit shooting until he's out of ammo (likely multiple 20-round magazines) b/c he's required to stay at the scene, whereas the BG will (sensibly) leave ASAP.
I'm an outsider, so I never understand how our American friends feel about this(the opinions divide, I guess) Because to me, guns breeds paranoia and distrust. It create the never ending vicious cycle of "That guy have one so I should have one to protect my family too, just in case."
But what if, say, having guns increase the risk of being attack from bad guy instead, because now they feel that you're a threat to them?
Hyperbole! The cycle ends quite quickly, with everyone armed.
And no evidence of that (increased risk). The 'bad guys' avoid getting shot at. Folks who are armed are at greater risk from themselves than from an intruder.
The biggest threat to humans is other humans. You can be friendly and cooperative but still wary of people you don't know.
In America, you aren't forced to have a gun. Freedom is our core ethos. You choose to have a gun. You are more than welcome to take it on faith you will never be in a situation where you need it, and thankfully most aren't.
A gun is a very visceral projection of constitutional rights. I wonder if people buying guns lately are doing so because they feel that “their rights” as a whole are under threat. For whatever reason that may be, buying a gun is a very affirmative way of exercising your rights.
Really? Because I have a guy screaming burnt into my retinas for watching that horrible video from New Jersey where a couple taunt a man who snaps, gets his guns and shoots them both.
I made the mistake of watching it about a month ago, when it leaked, and I can't get the husbands screams out of my head.
If that's a polite society then I'll take an impolite society without guns over that any day.
The subtext of “armed society is a polite society” is that you don’t taunt or start petty arguments in the first place, in case the guy turns out to be like the one in the video.
But that's exactly what happened. In a state where you can legally own automatic rifles these people relentlessly taunted a man until he got his pistol and his rifle and shot them both.
And someone else said "well now everyone in that neighborhood know better", sure, and it only took three lives and orphaned children to make it happen. Congrats.
Then it is provable wrong. I can't believe anyone who has watched news from the US could believe in such foolishness. If anything it is just the opposite. Just goggle that video.
It's disappointing to me that the person being interviewed doesn't believe or understand how she's aligned with good conservatives and libertarians on this issue, or much of 'the right' as she puts it.
Those groups fear the government roughly as much as she does now, and that's by-and-large why they own guns.
She doesn't seem to reach a second-order level of thinking and realize that common fear — she just sticks to "my marginalization makes me fear the government and own guns" without thinking of why they own guns. It's sad because there could be much more common ground, which leads to more considerate dialogue.
Because sharing a single attribute does not make multiple groups aligned with each other. There may be multiple factions that fear the government, but not for the same reasons, nor do they necessarily have the same ideas in mind for when/if it’s disposed of.
Probably because conservative groups like the NRA have (against their own propaganda) been largely silent when African American gun owners are killed by police.
The reaction of conservatives to the BLM movement has confirmed for many that conservatives don’t fear government overreach but that they fear any disruption to the social (ie including racial) status quo. I think many would object to that characterization, but it’s hard to argue that there has been pretty strong resistance from conservatives to stick their neck out to oppose police brutality. (There are exceptions to this, by Romney and some more libertarian types, but they’re much too rare).
So the question is, is an ideology like conservativism what it claims to outsiders or to what its adherents actually do and say to one another? Professed vs revealed preferences.
Because it's tribal propaganda that adds nothing to the discussion. There are a myriad of plausible reasons not to want to defund the police, but Robotbeat is parroting the party line that there are no possible legitimate reasons and that only racists can hold that opinion.
Except that wasn’t my argument. I was merely answering the question about why this factoid (Black people buying more guns) isn’t considered vindication of conservatives. There are tons of ways to support reform of police (or otherwise vindication of the fact that government/police overreach is a problem) that don’t involve “defunding” the police, and yet conservatives chose to circle the wagons and defend the government overreach instead. That denies them the moral high ground necessary to claim that vindication. And huge respect, by the way, for conservatives like Romney that stood on principle instead of fighting the culture war.
> There are tons of ways to support reform of police (or otherwise vindication of the fact that government/police overreach is a problem) that don’t involve “defunding” the police
While this is technically true, in practice support for BLM is virtually synonymous with support for defunding the police. That's why your implication: "don't support BLM -> totally discredited" is so divisive, because in the real world it means "don't support defunding police -> totally discredited". It should also be noted that the BLM corporation funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic Party through ActBlue [0], so you are actually requiring conservatives to support the Democratic Party in order not to be discredited.
Progressive politicians always frame their specific policy goals as a righteous moral crusade, and always manipulate the narrative to make it seem like the the only people who could possibly think differently are "some of the worst people in the world". It's tribal bullshit designed to shut down any real discussion about whether the policies actually address the needs they are claimed to address, or whether they do more harm than good overall. People have different opinions on policy for many reasons, some good, some bad. They shouldn't have to constantly fall in line behind the latest partisan movement to be seen as having legitimate opinions.
To clarify: I'm using the word "discredited" because the question you proposed "So the question is, is an ideology like conservativism what it claims to outsiders or to what its adherents actually do and say to one another? Professed vs revealed preferences." taken with your arguments seem to amount to seeing conservativism as basically bullshit. You've framed your comment as responding to a question, but akarma's comment doesn't actually ask any questions, and you kind of took over the framing with your response. I'm responding to your comment, not the line of questioning that you have been talking about (since I don't see any question for you to respond to, was the comment edited?)
> is an ideology like conservativism what it claims to outsiders or to what its adherents actually do and say to one another? Professed vs revealed preferences.
We could say the same about "liberalism" when we look at deadly riots, fires started at police stations with people inside, people executed on the street, ideas like "f** x" based largely on x's race or profession.
It's clear that the majority on both sides are relatively moderate. They aren't the loud minority you hear the most of. Why do both sides use this defense, but neither side believes it about the other?
Likewise, I was not talking about the minority of far-right extremists who murdered and attempted to murder protestors, who set some of those police station fires (see: https://amp.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/23/texas-boogaloo...), etc. Nor was I even pinning blame for violent police misconduct on conservatives. I was simply answering the question about why an outlet like NPR doesn’t consider this a vindication of conservatives with the answer that most conservative voices are clearly not committed to addressing clear over-reaches of the government (ie police brutality) and instead play games like “whataboutism” and doing everything possible to blame the victim of the government instead (as well as those who protest this injustice). This is the majority of conservative voices who have condemned even completely and objectively peaceful efforts to protest police brutality (like Kaepernick).
It is, I fully admit, vindication of distrust of the government. It is not, however, vindication of /conservatives/, for all the reasons given here. And that is what the question was asking.
I wasn't for this in the past but after watching the racism, bias, and impotence of American policing these past years, I'd probably buy one too if I had to live there.
There is no rational justification for private gun ownership. Owning a gun isn't the same thing as having it available and ready to stop a crime, which is why that happens so rarely. If the police can't provide adequate protection from violence then we need to change the system until they can. Anything else is horribly unfair to people who pay taxes but can't reliably use guns to protect themselves (ie the elderly or disabled)
There are very few activities which require a firearm to be owned as opposed to rented. Hunters can hunt and marksman can shoot, as long as the weapons are returned as part of a standard rental.
Guns won't stop the (American) government from asserting its will. Many people have tried that, believe me it doesn't work out. Merely owning a gun won't stop a determined adversary or provide you with a modicum of additional safety unless you've been trained in how to quickly acquire and shoot it. An assault rifle is of almost 0 value in a non-war urban setting, unless you plan to be firing at many targets at a range of 200m+
Statistically, the overwhelming majority of guns end up harming their owner or their owner's family. Actual self-defense is near the bottom of real uses for fired personal weapons.
> Owning a gun isn't the same thing as having it available and ready to stop a crime, which is why that happens so rarely
Which is why if you're serious about using a gun for self defense, you need to carry it on your person or have it at the ready.
> Anything else is horribly unfair to people who pay taxes but can't reliably use guns to protect themselves (ie the elderly or disabled)
A small subset of the population can't do something so no one should be able to?
> There are very few activities which require a firearm to be owned as opposed to rented. Hunters can hunt and marksman can shoot, as long as the weapons are returned as part of a standard rental.
Self defense.
> Guns won't stop the (American) government from asserting its will.
Tell that to Amon Bundy. Tell it to Mexico. In fact, tell it to most of the countries the US has gone to war with over the last 50 years.
> Merely owning a gun won't stop a determined adversary or provide you with a modicum of additional safety unless you've been trained in how to quickly acquire and shoot it.
Which is why you should get training and practice.
> An assault rifle is of almost 0 value in a non-war urban setting, unless you plan to be firing at many targets at a range of 200m+
This is total nonsense that you just made up.
> Statistically, the overwhelming majority of guns end up harming their owner or their owner's family.
That's data from the entire country and largely results from suicides. The need to own varies wildly by location, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, etc.
You say that self defense is near the bottom of real uses for fired personal weapons. That’s not a useful metric because a gun doesn’t need to be fired to be a deterrent.
a deterrent from what? it's true that just flashing a gun can stop crime, but that happens no more commonly than stopping a crime by firing one. And in the majority of cases where someone simply brandishes a weapon it's pointed at someone who is undesirable or different and not actually a threat
This is just made up statistics. Also, a gun doesn’t have to be shown to someone to act as a deterrent.
I’m not saying that I think guns are effective or not, but when I see arguments like this that cherry pick statistics or make up stories to appeal to emotion it makes me suspicious about the validity of the argument.
You should sub Active Self
Protection on YT. He covers a lot of self defense cases which happen more frequently than you might expect. He also doesn’t sugar coat it when people screw up.
* crimes in general go down as more people carry firearms legally, but by far less than most firearm advocates claim.
* though, the most dramatic of that decrease is related to violent crime as some arguments might claim.
* when firearms become more lawfully common police are slightly more likely to be victims of violent crime.
* the numbers related to crime change as a result of change to gun laws tend to be tiny even for high population density large cities indicating many arguments on the subject are exaggerated to fit a narrative.