A community where every household does not have guns is safer than one that does: but not for a simple reason like “because we have the police which is meant to give security to people”
A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”
People in such a community lack guns but they do have things like a working public health system, decent education, daily encounters with other people that are positive and so on.
The threat of police shootings is not what makes a safe society safe.
Constructive, open and fair trade is the equivalent at an international level. Cooperative and trusting. Not staring down the barrel of each other’s guns.
> A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”
That's also not necessarily the point I'm making. Suppose you are in a society where a small part of people are bad actors, for whatever reason. They will break and enter, murder, and rape. You want to protect the rest of the society against these bad actors. You can now equip everyone with weapons so they may defend themselves. That also enables the bad actors to use said weapons because we don't know who really know who is a bad actor (at least not the ones that didn't commit any crimes yet). Or you give weapons only to a small part of society, where you enforce strict gun laws.
The alternative is to reduce the number of bad actors and this is, in part, fulfilled by the conditions that you are describing. But how do I reduce the number of state leaders that are willing to shoot each other? I guess it's what you are saying, namely constructive, open, and fair trade. But we're not really making progress in that direction it seems.
> A community where every household does not have guns is safer than one that does
Except this isn't borne out in the data. Look at deeply conservative places where guns are literally everywhere, and you'll see very low crime rates compared to cities with strict gun control.
And why? Well, as a criminal, I'd be loathe to try something when there's a good chance the victim is armed.
In your perfect community scenario, a single armed criminal would wreak havoc, completely unopposed.
Grew up rural Alberta with rifles around the house all the time, in plain view. For shooting game. Not a word was ever uttered about "defending ourselves" with guns... From who?
Hell, we left our door unlocked when we left the house unless it was overnight.
Good grief. Nothing is sadder than people valorizing social/cultural breakdown.
AR-15 is relatively popular for hunting in the US though?
I don't lock my house or my car habitually, never had a problem, never felt the need to keep a weapon either, but I know plenty of people that live in the city that have been robbed or assaulted and do feel the need to carry though. I can't really blame them for not relying on police.
Sportsmen use long guns like 30’6 for big game hunting (elk, deer, antelope) out west. Shots over 100 yards require a large cartridge like that. AR-15 are used in the southern states for wild hogs and varmints, or coyotes. Not exactly trophy hunters. I’m just saying the popularity of the AR-15 is not driven by hunters.
I'm citation heavy, but it's also a fact I wouldn't cite as I think/thought it was fairly common knowledge. Here [1] is some random report on it. There's a huge difference in criminality rates between urban and rural, and this applies to most of everywhere in the world.
As someone with roots in a rural area, there’s a lot of crime in such places that is simply never found out (sparse population == fewer opportunities to be caught), is an “open secret” that never gets resolved, is quietly swept under the rug, etc, sometimes even involving local law enforcement. As a result, there’s plenty in the data worth questioning.
This is definitely true, and that report works to control for it. The reason there's no homicide data listed on that report is because it's based on the National Crime Victimization Survey. It surveys people on their victimization instead of relying on police reports. Police reports would make the differences appear even larger.
Although on this topic I'd also add that urban areas have a similar issue. Criminals know that the overwhelming majority of crime goes unpunished, while people have a reality deluded by shows like CSI. Homicides, for instance, have the highest clearance rate, by far. And it's 47.5%. [1] Vehicular theft has the worst at 6.6%. If you end up with your window busted out and everything that's not strapped down stolen, there's no real point reporting it to the police unless necessary for an insurance claim because you're never getting that stuff back, and the thief is never getting caught.
Washing machines created a revolution where we could now expend 1/10th of the human labour to wash the same amount of clothes as before. We now have more than 10 times as much clothes to wash.
I don’t know if it’s induced demand, revealed preference or Jevon’s paradox, maybe all 3.
I've done some 3rd world travel without washing machines for a while and my laundry was once a week dunk stuff in the sink for 5 minutes with shampoo + rinse water, wring and hang up. I don't buy the whole day being necessary thing.
Well, now we can own more clothes! And we can wash them more often! And rather than specialist washerwomen, everyone can/must use the laundry-room robots!
That's not really true. The king conceptually has a lot of power - he appoints the Prime Minister (which can be anyone he wants it to be) and can effectively dissolve Parliament whenever he wants. He is also the head of the armed forces, who all swear allegiance to the King, not to Parliament or whatever.
In practice, this power exists on the understanding that the King won't actually use it, but they are powers that he does have.
That's not true these days, the King doesn't actually have those powers themselves - even on paper.
The power actually sits with "The Crown" not the King personally. "The Crown" is a legal entity that is represented by the King but not actually wielded by them. The Prime Minister advises the King on use of those powers which is what actually creates the legal conditions where they're effected by The Crown.
A good example of this is when Boris Johnson unlawfully prorogued parliament in 2019. The Supreme Court ruled that his advice to Queen Elizabeth to prorogue parliament was unlawful, and therefore "The Crown" could not have prorogued parliament and parliament was never prorogued. This would not be the case if it were a power that the Queen exercised themselves.
If the King were to attempt to dissolve parliament without advice from the PM by generating an order in council and sending it to Parliament then the supreme court would simply rule that he hadn't dissolved parliament.
If the King — without the support of the general populace or of the parliament, but acting in his own interests, like a king of old — dissolved the Parliament, he could and very swiftly would be ousted, legally.
The line of succession would be followed until an individual was found who was willing to support the democracy. This was proven in 1685.
They swear allegiance to the King (or Queen) — but it’s understood that a new King or Queen can be swapped in. The extremely stilted and socially restrained manner in which Queen Elizabeth (for example) behaves is because they entirely know that their family does not hold the nation hostage, it’s quite the opposite.
My Google skills are failing me here — can you provide a link, and/or some more search terms, regarding these citizen councils? Is it specific to Melbourne municipal council or other Victorian LGA’s?
I spent a little time writing software for a plastic injection moulding company who supplied parts for a range of different automotive suppliers.
You could say that they were all made the same way — they were all moulded from tiny little plastic balls that are melted down — but the reality is that there was a huge difference in the products produced for each vehicle.
The vent for an A/C is one example. To produce that piece for a Ford might be one piece of plastic, which falls off the conveyor at about 1 every 20 seconds. The same piece for an Audi would take 3 different types of plastic, and some rubbery material, and would take about two minutes per unit - as well as some assembly, by a human, before it is done.
Injection molding and engineering over the last 20 years has basically been homogenized to works and doesn’t work.
I can promise you at Diamler, they’re designing the shape of the vent, and sending it to the supplier just like GM is doing. Same suppliers, and the details are being offloaded for like ten reason but among them is that it doesn’t make sense to have the mold experts in house, and every supplier knows their machines and abilities, the customer doesn’t.
