431–440 of 545 posts
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Haven’t they? I thought a lot of countries had draconian anti-drug policies like that.
Yet they don't work as well as Singapore's? Hmm. Perhaps it's not as simple as "if it works here, it will work there."
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Even Switzerland. From wiki about gun laws there: In 2016, the defence ministry estimated that 2 million privately owned guns are in circulation, which given a population of 8.3 million corresponds to a gun ownership rate of around 24 guns per 100 residents. This is roughly a quarter of the rate in the United States, and lower than that in the neighbouring countries of Germany, and Austria, but about the double of It…
Switzerland has a gun homicide rate of 0.50 per 100k population. The US rate is approximately 3.53 per 100k population.[0] So this begs the question, if the per capita gun ownership in Switzerland is 1/4th what it is in the US, why is gun homicide 1/7th? Are Americans just more homicidal than the Swiss? Guns are certainly an issue but not the issue. If you cut American gun ownership by 75% you'd still have more per c…
Looking at the numbers alone is not enough. Just like looking at the US numbers alone doesn't really tell the real story. Guns are definitely part of the problem, but it's the rest of the culture and economic factors that tells the story of why the US numbers are so high.
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Both the Russians and Chinese had big civil wars in which the governments you mention eventually came into power. The question of armed resistance isn’t a hypothetical. It was tried and it failed. The notion of gun rights as essential to defending against tyranny is inherently self-defeating. If all it takes to defeat gun owners is passing some laws making them illegal, won’t a tyrant do that before they start with o…
Both the Russians and Chinese had big civil wars in which the governments you mention eventually came into power. The question of armed resistance isn’t a hypothetical. It was tried and it failed. This has nothing to do with my point, or if it does, it certainly isn't clearly elucidated. As far as I'm aware, there is no strong history of armed resistance from either of the groups that I mentioned. And I'll leave you…
So, just to be clear, if the government outlaws your guns, when they come for them, you're going out shooting?
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Haven’t they? I thought a lot of countries had draconian anti-drug policies like that.
Yet they don't work as well as Singapore's? Hmm. Perhaps it's not as simple as "if it works here, it will work there."
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> For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is But that's just a talking point. It's like saying if there are less silver cars, there are less car accidents involving silver cars. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it makes sense to ban silver cars. You can insert literally anything into that sentence and it's still true. If there is less food, less peo…
Actually, it's not "just" a talking point. Your counter examples are trite and pointless because silver cars, food, and water are all completely essential to daily life. Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
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> Indeed, but w.r.t gun restrictions, I don't see this guy thinking "Going for a spree kill today... oh wait, guns are forbidden! Guess I'll stay home and watch something on Netflix instead". My point being, someone with the intention to kill will find a way to get a gun, with or without gun ownership restrictions. I think the problem here is: what makes a person even think about the concept of a mass shooting? What…
> why doesn't this happen anywhere else I think this is a misguided perception: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/jun/... https://crimeresearch.org/2015/06/comparing-death-rates-from... But anyway, thanks for the thoughtful conversation!
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I can defend myself against a knife-wielding maniac with a gun far better than I can defend myself against a knife-wielding maniac with .. another knife. So, just keep that in mind in the equation. Knife crime is absolutely heinous in the UK - it does not get the attention it deserves. Banning guns didn't fix that. Just made it harder to defence oneself against a blade, which is part of the UK policy - the individual…
Policy shouldn't be optimized to address these outlier events. Knife wielding maniacs aren't a real problem. Spousal abuse and suicide are.
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> For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is But that's just a talking point. It's like saying if there are less silver cars, there are less car accidents involving silver cars. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it makes sense to ban silver cars. You can insert literally anything into that sentence and it's still true. If there is less food, less peo…
Actually, it's not "just" a talking point. Your counter examples are trite and pointless because silver cars, food, and water are all completely essential to daily life. Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For example, it's fairly well established that the less guns there are, the less gun crime there is But that's just a talking point. It's like saying if there are less silver cars, there are less car accidents involving silver cars. That doesn't tell you anything about whether it makes sense to ban silver cars. You can insert literally anything into that sentence and it's still true. If there is less food, less peo…
Actually, it's not "just" a talking point. Your counter examples are trite and pointless because silver cars, food, and water are all completely essential to daily life. Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
They are not. If people who like silver cars had to drive white cars instead, life would go on and there would still be less accidents involving silver cars. That there would then be more accidents involving white cars might be a relevant factor the talking point glosses over, however.
Even food could in theory be replaced with IV nutrition. But there are countervailing advantages to actual food that aren't taken into consideration by the simplistic logic of food poisoning is bad, therefore ban food.
And we can't do without water, but we can, for example, require swimming pools to have fences, which would reduce the amount of drowning without prohibiting water at all.
But the point is that they aren't even examples. You can use that "logic" against literally anything, which makes it obviously flawed. If there were less puppies then less puppies would bite people. That doesn't mean we should ban puppies.
> Also, there isn't a National Silver Car Association that is influencing Congress to block research into silver car related deaths.
There also isn't a Campaign to End Silver Car Accidents trying to get Congress to fund research into silver car accidents that only produces the raw numbers without accounting for things like the independent trend for reduction in accident fatality rates over time when measuring the effects of a silver car ban, substitution effects, the fact that there are more silver cars than red cars when comparing the accident numbers, etc.
This scenario doesn't just happen with drug policy, but with practically any divisive policy discussion. People will debate something that is done elsewhere, and ignore completely that it's done elsewhere. Gay marriage is a prime example, as it's something that has been legalised in a lot of countries now. Every time a country goes through the process of debating whether to legalise gay marriage, there's a bunch of p…
My 2 cent (classical armchair analysis): It seems to me that some of these discussions are mostly dominated by irrationality. This is particularly recognizable in the US, but also occurs in Europe to a degree that varies from topic to topic and country to country. I believe there are two major factors at play. First, certain topics concern taboos that are still strong even in secularized societies. To these belong an…
The problem with politics is that you have a status quo from where you operate and you are massively constraint in the possible directions you can go. For example, you simply can not go against social security and things like that because the way these programs have been designed ensures that they are almost immortal.
I disagree with you that these easy technocratic solutions exists. There are fundamentally different positions that people can have and actually do have, I just think that whatever these positions are, they matter little because they are not reachable anyway.