131–140 of 178 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why wouldn't it?
Because including suicides paints a misleading picture. When you say “gun deaths” with no qualifiers people think murders involving a gun.
The key method of reducing violence to other people and reducing death by suicide is to reduce access to means.
Reducing access to guns would help both problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the police would be even more aggressive if they knew citizens were unarmed.
I think the police are more aggresssive because they know any citizen can be armed
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I also come from a near gun-less country, and think a similar system in America would work. However, there are some arguments in favor of guns that are not trivially ignored. - Simply, guns are fun. Marksmanship is a serious sport of discipline and self-control. - Hunting is also great recreation, is sometimes good for population control, and hunting is another reason for preserving and protecting nature. - Self-defe…
I'm not American - so I'm not particularly out to convince anybody. I think gun-ownership is really embedded into the deep and often weird tangle of american identity, and it's basically immune to rational argument at this point. On a purely technical level, I think the problem with the arguments you've mentioned are they don't generally stand on an even footing with the arguments against gun-ownership, except perhap…
There is a theory that democracy flourishes, when the Government is not that much better armed than its citizens. So, the idea that we need to be armed against tyranny.
There are a couple of problems with this, in present-day America. First, as citizens get better armed with greater lethal force, simultaneously, the police have militarized. So while people are better armed, authorities are too.
The other problem, requires some deeper understanding. Tyranny is always a threat, but the tyrannical government of the 21st century won’t bust in to take your guns. They don’t need to. The tyranny is more subtle, often financial, and when they control public opinion they don’t need to take the guns.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They absolutely have the advantage of putting a check on government power. The US is a very heterogeneous country (probably much more so than the country you’re referencing). Not all groups have a great relationship with the government and very sensibly feel that giving the government a monopoly on firearms is not in their best interest.
This argument is absurd. Most of the time, Americans can't organize enough to start a union, or even join one. The idea of Americans organizing an insurgency is ridiculous. The idea of Americans winning an insurgency, against the largest army in the world - an army that has more counter-insurgency experience than anybody except perhaps the IDF, is still more ridiculous. Guns will never check anything because the only…
"Defeating" the military isn't the goal, in the same way that the goal of Iraqi and Vietnam insurgents was not the goal.
The goal is to make the conflict so expensive and costly that they decide not to continue it.
For example, imagine if those hundreds of thousands of uninvolved civilians that died in Iraq were instead innocent Americans caught in the crossfire of a war.
This would be an extremely high cost to the ruling government.
Yes, even if the government is "evil", because real life entities are not comic book villains.
They are rational entities with rational motivation. And presumably one of those motivations of any government, even an evil one, is to not rule over a desolate wasteland of ashes.
Or in other words, sure the government could launch hundreds of nukes and kill all of its enemies. But it would do that, because the government is not a literal doomsday cult.
The point of an armed citizenry is to act as a DETERRENCE. It is to increase the costs to the government by saying "yes, you can win this... But only by killing millions, and since you are not a doomsday cult, this is a high cost".
It is a deterrence in order to stop the government from becoming an evil dictatorship in the first place, kinda like have a nuke pointed at your own country.
Folks, the number of shooting crimes (including school shootings) in the United States is going down. I know times like this are the worst times to mention this fact, but it's true [0]. The media frenzy makes this look like some kind of out-of-control epidemic, but that's just not the case. This does not mean we should do nothing about them...any shooting is an event that should not happen. But it's important to real…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not German, can you explain what Germany's laws are and how it makes them safer than the USA?
Storage laws are super strict, police can and do come in your house to check that you have your gun in your safe. You aren’t supposed to lose it, or let anyone else get ahold of it. Psych evaluation required for those under 25 (to cut down on school shootings), more restrictions on fuller background checks and so on. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_legislation_in_Germany
We could do better on background checks but the devil is in the details.
There is no way police checking storage at any time would pass at the federal level and I am doubtful it would have a noticeable effect on gun deaths but I could be convinced otherwise.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then we need to figure out which numbers are correct. That shouldn't be rocket science. But either way, hysteria still isn't the way forward...it never is. I won't attempt to debate any of the points made in your article, as I'm not authority on the subject myself, but thanks for linking it. However, you might find this article written by a former member of the FiveThirtyEight team interesting: https://www.washington…
Is there some minimal number of school shootings that's acceptable? My position is that we clearly have shown that this country cannot be trusted with personal possession of firearms, so let's all calmly proceed towards no longer having them around.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> That's exactly the case. Just because numbers are going down doesn't make it any less of an epidemic. 'Epidemic' is usually used to refer to the rate of spread of something. This sort of hyperbole is exactly why it's hard to have honest or productive discussions about this topic. > Suggesting people don't own assault rifles is not an "extreme reaction". I would assert that it depends on whether or not you feel alte…
One question that perhaps we should be asking is Should the right to bear arms include assault rifles or only lower power guns similar to what we’re available at the time of its writing? There seems to be general public agreement that the right to bear arms does not include RPGs or stinger missles, etc. Yet those are certainly arms. Why are assault riffles in the same category as shot guns?
So banning semi auto weapons, as you suggest, would be equivent to an almost total gun ban.
You are free to believe that, but you should realize that this is a very extensive ban.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there some minimal number of school shootings that's acceptable? My position is that we clearly have shown that this country cannot be trusted with personal possession of firearms, so let's all calmly proceed towards no longer having them around.
Is there some minimal number of fatal auto accidents that's acceptable? My position is that we clearly have shown that this country cannot be trusted with personal possession of motor vehicles, so let's all calmly proceed towards no longer having them around.
But when it comes to guns we just throw up ours hands and say whaddya gonna do.