I own one gun. If another own guns, that's none of my business. The question, how many guns are "optimal" introduces a surface for regulation that is none of the government's business to be regulating.
How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#42It's worth remembering that the American founders considered an armed population an essential part of a free society capable of standing up against federal overreach. James Madison, Federalist 46: >Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the…
The US gun culture resembles nothing like "a militia officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence."
This was also before modern military with armored vehicles, aircraft, missiles and drones. I wonder what ratio of untrained handgun touting joe sixpacks would be needed against that.
If you want to get an idea what was meant with the militias at the time, look at maybe Switzerland. Or perhaps even countries with conscript armies.
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#43Anecdotally, a lot of politically far left people I know have gone quiet on the firearms issue. It seems like the state of the country has 2A suddenly making more sense to a lot of people.
I think there's bigger fish to fry and it's hard to talk about when nothing matters to the people you're trying to convince.
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#44I guess you don’t really get to choose how to die but the idea of dying to gun violence sounds really shitty.
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S. > HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S the discrepancy between these two is because HN automatically strips "how" from the beginning of titles.
It's baffling how almost no one here ever speaks out against it. Everybody just puts up with it even though we all know what a sign of arrogance and incompetence it is to attempt to alter post titles in this clumsy, embarrassingly broken way. Everyone is just silently looking at their feet in second hand embarrassment and doesn't want to speak up. And the funniest thing is: there is an official rule that says not to…
People have. The mods have made it clear they consider it necessary to maintain the quality of conversation and they have no intention of changing it.
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S. > HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S the discrepancy between these two is because HN automatically strips "how" from the beginning of titles.
It's baffling how almost no one here ever speaks out against it. Everybody just puts up with it even though we all know what a sign of arrogance and incompetence it is to attempt to alter post titles in this clumsy, embarrassingly broken way. Everyone is just silently looking at their feet in second hand embarrassment and doesn't want to speak up. And the funniest thing is: there is an official rule that says not to…
[deleted]
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does it matter? Control of you life is your basic human right. Firearms are the great equalizer.
Isn’t there a massive body of research that indicates gun ownership is less safe on average that non-ownership? Ie the chance of accidental shooting of family/friends is high enough to offset any benefit (on average across the US)?
There's a problem with statistics for this and many other things.
Guns attract idiots, idiots have idiot gun problems, it does not follow that if you get a gun, you'll have the same problems.
Similar statistics are easy to fool people with. Doing $expensive_thing is associated with health/wealth/success so if everybody did it everybody would be better off! But in reality there's just a selection bias and whatever the thing is just attracts rich people and the thing has no actual effect. For example: do a study of people who wear sunglasses to find the association between mortality and the price of the sunglasses you wear.
How many people are actually studying gun ownership without intentionally looking for one result or the other? It attracts a tremendous about of bias in both directions and not a lot of genuine curiousity.
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#48Do they ever state the social optimum level of fun ownership? I can take them at their word they it’s non-zero, but I’d guess it’s orders of magnitude less than the current rate.
I think the optimum level changes based on whether or not citizens are being actively brutalized by an authoritarian government and their police forces en masse. When that happens, the optimum level is a lot and when it's not happening, the optimum level is probably orders of magnitude less. Unfortunately, we can't accurately predict when these things will happen.
I hear this argument repeated a lot, and I think it is legit the reason for the 2nd amendment - but it doesn't make sense with modern technology. That authoritarian government is going to come at you with Bearcats, helicopters, and drones. Firing a gun at them is just going to make you cannon fodder. If you want to actually challenge the authoritarian government, you need MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and drones of your own - which is probably why MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and soon drones are heavily regulated, with stiff penalties for just ownership, and guns themselves are free to possess.
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
> PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S. > HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S the discrepancy between these two is because HN automatically strips "how" from the beginning of titles.
It's baffling how almost no one here ever speaks out against it. Everybody just puts up with it even though we all know what a sign of arrogance and incompetence it is to attempt to alter post titles in this clumsy, embarrassingly broken way. Everyone is just silently looking at their feet in second hand embarrassment and doesn't want to speak up. And the funniest thing is: there is an official rule that says not to…
i have mentioned that i dont like it. dang said i was wrong.
however, the submitter is able to edit the title for a short window after posting to add the 'how' back in for cases where removing it materially alters the meaning.
Re: How Fear and Social Pressure Are 'Overarming' the U.S.
#50Anecdotally, a lot of politically far left people I know have gone quiet on the firearms issue. It seems like the state of the country has 2A suddenly making more sense to a lot of people.
I don't think that's it. Armed resistance is not realistic, and is probably actively counterproductive compared even to unarmed but violent resistance to occupation. This is because you're not going to "win" in a military sense, it's a battle for hearts and minds, and optically protestors firing at State forces is really really bad.
I've stopped talking about it because it's been relegated to a marginal safety issue. Reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a generational project to reduce a bad statistic. It pales in comparison with much more pressing and foundational issues that need to be resolved before anything can even be attempted to improve stats like that. We can't even manage to repair failing bridges[0], enforce basic laws meant to protect the legitimacy of our institutions (see every political scandal since Iran contra), or meaningfully oppose genocides or home grown fascism. When the "opposition" party argues against mass deportations they frame it as though their colleagues across the aisle are merely making an economic miscalculation, like submitting the fact the immigrants are disproportionately hard workers and prop up our economy might be convincing to people who respond to "they're killing and eating your pets." There's a deep rot that needs to be addressed before I can again muster the energy to care about reducing the suicide and homicide rate by 50% of an already pretty-low number (relative to car deaths or heart disease or whatever). No need to muddle the message by tagging it with correct but contentious positions.
0: https://www.permits.performance.gov/permitting-project/dot-p...
In planning for 20 years, 13 billion dollars stolen and absorbed by the construction industry and its infinitely fractal subcontracting web. at least it created jobs, I guess. No work has begun.