I'm wondering how America went so awry with gun violence. Israel and Switzerland have high rates of firearm possession, but a fraction of the violence. Better training (military)? Less inequality? More homogenous cultures?
The disparity goes back over 100 years. Even in 1914, a city such as Philadelphia had 10X the homicide rate of London. The best book I have read on the subject is Raymond Fosdick's "Crime in America and the Police" https://archive.org/details/crimeinamericapo00fosd I think the reasons he points out in the 1910's still basically are the same reasons the crime rate are higher today.
I'm not disagreeing with the general premise but stuff like "lots of rules, those who don't follow the rules are shunned and usually do not reproduce because no one in the group wants them" is interesting in what I think it makes people imagine vs reality.
As an American who hadn't lived aboard I'd read that and think "Wow, that place must be pretty boring". But, living in Tokyo for many years, while I certainly see those elements, especially in business, the reality is I feel more free here than the USA.
You can drink anywhere, parks, streets, etc unlike the "freedom USA". You can party as long as you want. There's no curfews (California has a 2am curfew on liquor so almost all clubs close before 2am. NYC has a 4am curfew, Tokyo has no curfew. Most clubs/bar are open til 5-6am and there are plenty of places to party after). On top of which there are stores/clubs/groups that cater to nearly every interest.
I'm not trying to suggest Tokyo is better. I'm only trying to clarify that "more rules" doesn't directly translate into "less freedom". It could just as easily be the rule "do whatever you want as long as you are responsible about it" where as in the USA as far as I can tell there are way more rules (ie, laws) trying to restrict what you can do. Maybe those are in response to the issues you brought up though where because of diversity people don't feel connected to each other and therefore don't feel a responsibility to be responsible about their activities so laws are added to try to reel them in.
> They have unstable family structures, little to no culture, little to no rules, and no care for education.
I wonder how that could possibly happen after 350 years of forcible familial separation, extermination of cultural practices, arbitrary rules enforced at crack of a whip and gunbarrel, and prohibition from receiving education.
● And Jews went through 2,000 years of persecution, expulsion, finally a holocaust, and didn't even have their own country again until recently when Israel was created.
● And Europeans went through thousands of years of inter-european wars, a plague that killed off 1/4 of the population, 2 world wars, muslim invasions, and mongolian invasions. Not to mention suppressing education and science and causing centuries of dark ages due to religious extremism.
● And Cambodians went through a genocide where Po Pots waged a communist war against all intellectuals, teachers, and high achievers that killed off 25% of the cambodian population.
● And Bulgarians went through 500 years of Turkish rule which included mass killings and slavery and left "its culture shattered and separated from Europe for 500 years". Followed by devastating communism.
● Those educated in more than just American History know that this list goes on and on and spans thousands of years. Everyone's been through hell. Suffering is not an excuse of one's own problems.
Blaming problems on others does not empower a group to fix problems within it's own community. Plus, the groups with the problems we discussed (lack of family structure, culture, education, etc) have them even in countries that did not "separate them for 350 years, exterminate their cultural practices, whip them or prohibit them from receiving education".
Vilifying one group and victimizing another doesn't help anyone. You just did the very thing I described in my original post "Homogenous societies [...] are more responsible for their failures and successes than diverse societies. They have no one to blame but themselves. They cannot pass off their suffering or their problems onto others. [and force themselves to improve]"
One interesting difference is that all the groups you mentioned succeeded in forming their own independent countries which they now control as the dominant group, after the period of oppression in question: modern Israel, Cambodia, Bulgaria.
I wonder what the achievement rates look like for groups for which that isn't the case, who still live in a country controlled by another group? For example, Kurds in Turkey.
If we take Israel as an example, the way post-Holocaust Jews empowered themselves to fix their own oppression was to create a new country they controlled, win a war of independence defending it, and then emigrate there en masse. A parallel philosophy has at times also been popular among Black Americans, in that case known as Black Nationalism or Afro-Nationalism (subtly different terms depending on the focus), i.e. that Black Americans should control their own destiny in their own country, which requires, as a prerequisite, declaring independence from white-controlled America. But that movement has not been successful, in part because of the lack of any agreement on where the country would be located (various locations in both North America and Africa have been proposed), and in part because the Integrationist philosophy, holding that Black Americans are Americans, not a separate nation, has eclipsed Afro-Nationalism in popularity. There have been experiments in setting up an African-American state in Africa (Liberia), and also attempts to set up Black-controlled enclaves within the United States (one of the goals of the Black Panther movement), but they have been mostly unsuccessful. Actually the viewpoints of the Black Panthers on cultural cohesion and healthy communities sound not too different from what you've been mentioning in this thread.
It's hard to find someone to talk to calmly about these things.
It is even harder to find people who will write politically incorrect opinions under their real name. Frankly, I would advise against it. The internet is written in permanent ink.
That and most gun issues in the us mostly fall into gang activity or suicide.
It isn't so simple to compare country XYZ to the USA, especially a homogenous society like Switzerland with different military requirements compared to the US with a vastly less analogous population and training.
What do other countries do in terms of mental healthcare to prevent these kind of things? Better monitoring and response to early warning signs, and then forcefully committing patients?
America had a movement to "de-institutionalize", that is, to help known mentally ill people adapt and cope with day-to-day life instead of locking them all in asylums. But the funding got cut... so now we have inadequate support and they end up in prisons because there are no asylums. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/12/w...
Israel and Switzerland have dramatically different gun ownership patterns than in the US.
I'm not familiar with the Swiss model, but in Israel:
- You must have gun license, which are strictly controlled and must be renewed every 3 years[1]
- You get a one-time supply of 50 bullets, which cannot be replenished[1]
These measures have been effective:
The 2011 attempted assassination of a US representative renewed the national gun control debate. Gun advocates claim mass-casualty events are mitigated and deterred with three policies: (a) permissive gun laws, (b) widespread gun ownership, (c) and encouragement of armed civilians who can intercept shooters. They cite Switzerland and Israel as exemplars. We evaluate these claims with analysis of International Crime Victimization Survey (ICVS) data and translation of laws and original source material. Swiss and Israeli laws limit firearm ownership and require permit renewal one to four times annually. ICVS analysis finds the United States has more firearms per capita and per household than either country. Switzerland and Israel curtail off-duty soldiers' firearm access to prevent firearm deaths. Suicide among soldiers decreased by 40 per cent after the Israeli army's 2006 reforms. Compared with the United States, Switzerland and Israel have lower gun ownership and stricter gun laws, and their policies discourage personal gun ownership.
I wonder if most "per capita" assessments in the USA take the "collector effect" into account.
That is, I've never owned a gun. I have a friend who owns something like 15 guns. I don't think it's necessarily accurate to say our gun ownership rate is 7.5. I mean, I think "per capita" almost always means "average (mean)", but I feel like the rate in my example should be 0.5, not 7.5.
There are statistics on % of the population (or households) that own guns, which might be what you're looking for? In your example that would be 50%, as one of the people owns one-or-more guns, and the other owns zero. In the U.S. the ownership rate hovers around 30%, though it varies considerably by state, from a low of 9% (Hawaii) to a high of 60% (Wyoming).
I don't know if my anecdote constitutes data, but the first time I went to the US in 1999 I landed at JFK, hired a car, was driving along slowly looking for an entrance to a freeway to Brooklyn. A guy in a convertible pulled out in front of me so close that I had to swerve into the left lane to avoid him, once I passed him I changed back into the right lane so I could use the upcoming freeway entrance, the guy roared past me, swerved back in front of me and jammed his brakes so quickly I barely was able to stop without hitting him. He then sat there in front of me yelling something for about 30 seconds whilst waving a gun in the air. He then took off and I never saw him again.
I'm not sure what that means exactly but I think it indicates a culture of aggression, bullying, anger, self importance, and when coupled with loose gun laws it means lots of guns get fired.
Well to be fair the rest of my trip was much less eventful, but there were two other incidents of note.
In Manhattan, whilst watching the cockroaches in my hotel room and perusing the brown paper bag full of porn mags I found behind the bed, I heard someone rattling my door quite loudly so I yelled out 'hey', and he replied 'sorry man, i thought it was my room'.
In Virginia I was driving on a side road that I thought should lead back to the 'blue ridge parkway'. I pulled over to take a piss in the bushes, and whilst pissing I noticed a dead deer with a bullet hole in its neck.
So I've had #1 happen before (the rattling - I have never found a paper bag of p0rn!!!) It was legit - the hotel gave the wrong room number - but in my case, the guys key worked. Startled both of us :)
There was an interesting article posted a while back showing a strong correlation between crime and the levels of lead in the environment most notably from leaded gasoline. The theory is that the reason crime has been dropping so much is because leaded gas was outlawed and it has taken the better part of the past couple decades for those bad effects to wear off.
What a ridiculous article. Yes, in the context of rapidly declining crime rates of all kinds, gun homicides are down.
And yet it's the specter of omnipresent crime that many Americans hold up as the reason we need guns to keep us safe, ignoring all the statistics that show overall gun deaths and gun suicides are far higher in the U.S. than any other developed country.
Most gun deaths are accidents, where the person who died knew they were entering a dangerous situation. I'm pretty sure the people who die in gun accidents wouldn't want guns to be banned, or else they probably wouldn't be in that situation in the first place. Also, accidental gun death rates have been declining almost monotonically since 1903. For scale, almost 8 times as many people died of choking than of gun accidents in the US in 2011.
America's suicide rate is not bad at all. It's actually pretty low compared to many other developed countries.
So what, exactly, are you getting at? Should we ban guns to prevent accidents, presumably against the wishes of those who are the victims of such accidents? Should we ban guns to maybe prevent a few suicides, with no evidence that doing so would decrease the suicide rate and not just cause people to use other methods?
There are also considerations beyond safety. Cars are very dangerous, but we use them anyway because they have tremendous utility. Fatty meat and smoking (anything) are very dangerous, but we allow those things anyway because they are enjoyable and people deserve the right to expose themselves to dangerous things if they so desire.
Most gun deaths in the U.S. are not accidents, they are suicides. Then homicides, then accidents.
And I'm not proposing banning guns, I'm challenging the commonly-held narrative that guns "keep us safe." The statistics are unequivocal that they do not.
Sometimes I think the "keep us safe" line, though, is really just an attempt at trying to have a more respectable-sounding defense than "I think they're pretty neat!"
Gun owners are constantly on the defensive (except, of course, when their lobbying groups are being rather offensive), and constantly required to justify their existence, so of course they're going to go with something that sounds more noble than "but it's a cool hobby!"
It's probably been parroted so much that a lot of people who say it actually believe it.
Full disclosure: I've never owned a gun, but I do think they're pretty neat.
Speaking of justifying hobbies... I wonder how many people with cars that go faster than 75 mph (which I believe is the highest speed limit found in the US) have to justify why they need to go that fast. Cars are dangerous and Speed Kills after all.
Full disclosure: I've never owned a really fast car, but I do think they're pretty neat.
That's unsubstantiated. The fact is, guns keep us safe AND they are a risk. Risk because they are a favored route for suicide (not really the gun's fault) and so on. Safe because, you know, folks who own and use guns properly are victimized less. That's an important statistic, and its disingenuous to ignore it.
One thing I've tried and failed to find on this subject is a breakdown by kind of guns. The vast majority of gun crime uses handguns, so I've been interested in finding data on handgun ownership rates and seeing if there's any relationship. But all the data I can find comparing gun-ownership rates to gun-homicide rates includes both handguns and long guns (rifles, shotguns), which have very different crime characteristics. For example Sweden actually has quite a few guns, but they are almost all rifles in the rural far north, not handguns in Stockholm or Malmö, which I suspect makes a big difference.
I'm not sure the data I'm looking for would actually show anything interesting either, but it's kind of odd that I can't find it at all.
It points out a pretty well established effect that repeating the same story in the news several times is internalized by people has several different instances. So when a plane crash is covered again and again, and then you ask people if plane crashes are up they will assert that they are. Similarly with child abductions and other "high impact" stories.
Given the past year of revelations on just how corrupt and shitty the government can be, I think that many people probably support gun ownership for reasons beyond mere crime prevention.
I've always been curious what sorts of scenarios people envision where their guns can actually protect them from government.
In the vast majority of cases, the moment law enforcement becomes aware that you are armed, they will respond with overwhelming force. And if you do actually injure or kill one of them, congratulations, you are now in much deeper shit than you started with (and will indeed be lucky to get out of the situation alive to serve time in prison).
You can't win a gun battle with the United States government. What you can do is to be armed and force the government to kill you (and risk being killed). While Bundy shouldn't have been anyone's poster child for the 2nd amendment, when armed men rallied around him, the government backed down (and gave him his cattle back) rather ran risk a showdown. When the government faces a group of 30 citizens with AR-15's, the government has a choice to make: fight, and a lot of people die, or back down. That's the inherent value of the 2nd Amendment as a balance to government power.
Since you don't seem to understand much about guerilla warfare, let me pose to you a few hypothetical questions, which should also reveal to you why revolutions always end up being absurdly bloody affairs, and why I want no part in one.
Who would win, unarmed or lightly armed apache pilots at a bar, or a group of guerillas with AR-15s? Who would win, a supply convoy full of apache parts guarded by a few soldiers or a roadside bomb followed up by an ambush by guerillas with AR-15s? Who would win, the families of an apache pilot off-base for the day, or a guerilla with an AR-15?
It depends. It's a very simple view of armed conflict that would result in such a question.
It's an even simpler view of politics that ignores the dimension of the .gov having to explain to everybody else why it thought it was necessary to shoot 30 of its own citizens.
There's a very good discussion to be had about the role of government and monopoly of force and all of these things, and I respect both outcomes if argued properly; silly comparisons between gun size though are only distractions.
The taliban were (effectively) a national government before 2003. Before that, they were part of a civil war to become the national government. They're hardly a couple of unorganized gun enthusiasts.
So? They don't have an air force, tanks, radar installations, anything really besides guns, rpgs, and improvised explosive devices.
It's at least as naive to believe that our government will always be benevolent as it is to believe that the armed civilians of the USA could rebel against the military. I would argue that the second is much more plausible.
I think a better question concerns all the gun owners vs. said military hardware. That is, if you could convince all of the gun owners to fight, which is another issue entirely.
The situation would be a lot more complicated even if it came to that. What's your point? If we're going to suggest a hostile government takeover I would rather have the gun and I don't know who wouldn't.
I'm going to go ahead and guess that you're not a member of a well-regulated militia? You know, that thing the 2nd amendment specifically mentions?
I'm totally okay with private gun ownership, but if you're going to justify it with "we're going to have to rise up against our evil government!", do you really think you're going to be able to mount a hollywood-style one-man stand against "the evil government"?
"we're going to have to rise up against our evil government!"
This stance, and your criticism of it, miss the mark. In my view, legitimizing private gun ownership should not be based on whose are bigger, or "who would win in a fight" arguments. Instead, private gun ownership is a simple question of property rights. I see private gun ownership having much more to do with the right for you to defend your private property. In this context, I'm in favor of private gun rights, even if taken as a symbolic gesture to the importance of private property.
So, the argument isn't "Hurr durr I'm gonna shoot me dem gubbament boys if'n dey come 'round the house ah tell you hwut"--as many others have pointed out they have tanks, and artillery, and drones, and what could charitably referred to as "enterprise solutions".
The argument is that if everybody is known to be disarmed, the government (or other actors) may consider courses of action that previously would've been obviously a bad idea, and do so with impunity. It also means that it is more easy to paint and propagandize the people who have guns or who do defend themselves, because they are now an "other" and the .gov then gets to use all of the criminal language to describe them (with the same ill effects as seen with, say, potheads).
I'm not advocating for armed rebellion--there are a long and lengthy list of issues with such a thing, and honestly I'm quite certain that the quality of life we enjoy today would disappear indefinitely--and anyone who is is trying to sell you something.
The fact that people cannot seem to connect the dots between "if we are disarmed the government will do terrible things to us if it seems like a good use of their resources" and "the government actively does shitty things to us even knowing we're armed" and "the government has the largest and most capable surveillance network and information control scheme in the history of mankind" is baffling. It's almost like they want to lose all of our nice things.
One, our government has robots that kill people from the sky.
Two, this sounds like some kind of libertarian fantasy that being armed makes you "freer". Government provides law enforcement which is the only reason you get to enjoy any semblance of civilization.
That's nice, but when almost every other civilized country in the world is at less than 0.25 gun-related homicides per 100,000, we have a long, long ways to go.
Why do people care about "gun-related homicides" so much? Homicide is bad regardless of how it's done, I wonder how the US stands in overall homicides versus other countries.
I was just counter-pointing what the article seems to be touting as a huge positive, specifically from the research they cite: http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2013/05/firearms_final_.... The "49% decline" is based on gun-related homicides per 100,000 people. I never intended for that to be taken as "gun homicides are the only homicides that matter". That's silly.
> I never intended for that to be taken as "gun homicides are the only homicides that matter". That's silly.
I didn't interpret things as extremely as that, I just feel that I don't think the distinction really matters (as long as someone got murdered, I'm not sure it matters whether it was by gun).
What also bothers me is that numbers on gun homicides feel to me like pro- or anti-gun propaganda, which is annoying either way.
Interesting: USA is fifth-lowest in the Western Hemisphere. If nearly all of the Americas (and Africa!) are considered high, perhaps the colonial history plays a role? This wouldn't really be a factor you could blame on current political systems.
More people are at home. Less altercations. More surfing the internet. Just as consumerism helped pacify people's urges (see Century of the Self http://vimeo.com/m/67977038) so the internet did it even better:
Sexual urges - porn
Entertainment - movies etc
Education - wikipedia etc
People are more educated, more sedentary, richer and have more to lose
