this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2023
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For some people the right to keep and bear arms is a good thing not a bad thing.
I think the bigger problem is not that armed people are everywhere, but that violent crime is common...
Right to self defense and reasonable means to do so is a fair enough.
The problem is that currently people think the explodey instant death pointers are somehow a defensive tool instead of just adding more offense to the problem.
Want to feel secure in your home? Invest in something actually useful like durable doors and windows, difficult to pick locks, if law enforcement is outside a safe response time range, a panic room is probably a good idea. All of those are infinitely more helpful against the one in a million shot of a home intruder event happening to you than all but handing said intruder the weapon they will soon kill you with.
And that's not exaggerating, women who purchase arms for defense against stalkers and/or abusers are more likely to be specifically killed with that weapon they bought for their own defense than they are to successfully defend themselves with it.
Also, most of these home intruder fantasizers have all the sense of avoiding escalation in a conflict of a fucking nuclear powered rocket breaking the carmen line speed record.
While I recognize your good faith argument, I don't believe it fits with the reality of how criminals operate, or the practicality of what most people can afford.
You can turn your house into a prison/fortress, which is expensive and only protects you when you're inside with everything locked up. Panic rooms are expensive as fuck, if you weren't aware.
And the odds of self-defense are MUCH better than you think. It's not a 'one in a million' shot that your gun helps you- in 90+% of defensive gun uses, the criminal sees the gun and runs away because he's not there to fight to the death, he's there to steal things he can get somewhere else from someone else without risk to his life. He wants a helpless victim, not a fight.
Click this reddit link- it goes to reddit's /r/ccw (concealed carry weapon) but filtered to show only stories of when /r/CCW members had to use their guns in self-defense.
Please just go read some of those stories and rethink your 'one in a million shot' position.
Nice selection bias, as if the many more people it turns out catastrophically for are able to speak their opinions on the matter in contrast.
"Fuck what this guy said goes directly against my worldview... maybe there's nuance to this very layered conundrum?"
...
"Nah, double down"
Ah yes, pointing out that the denizens of the building jumper survivor's club might have a skewed view of the survival rate of jumping off buildings. What a double down and rejection of nuance.
Ok you say it's selection bias... Can you show me some news stories of people who's guns were taken from them? Surely if as you say a successful defensive gun use is one in a million there are tens of not hundreds of millions of failed DGU gone wrong stories...
I doubt you will find many. Even anti gun researchers say there are minimum 4x as many DGUs as firearm homicides. I can cite stats on that when back at my desktop if you want them.
There's plenty of valid reasons to be against gun ownership. But the idea that DGU is one in a million is not one of them.
I'm one of those. An educated armed population is a formidable adversary. Now I don't agree with most American bullshitery but being armed isn't the issue, being armed, dumb and emotionally unstable is the issue which are 100% things we as a society chose not fix not something that isn't fixable.
Yes a world where crackheads can legally carry guns will definitely not lead to violence.
It won't. Do you think crackheads won't sell their gun for crack?
Do you think they will not rob people for crack? They are addicts not stupid
If they are not stupid they won't.
Worst that can happen is that nobody walks alone.
You think a crackhead gives one single fuck what they are legally allowed to do?
The crackhead is gonna have a gun whether it's legal or not (or maybe they'll sell it for more crack). The gangster that sells them the crack is DEFINITELY gonna have a gun. Laws have no effect on the lawless.
The question though is you. When you encounter the violent crackhead, do YOU want to have a gun?
Yes, they care when the gun they buy is either 50€$ or 50000€$ on the black market
Guns are cheaper in the black market though.
A gun is not difficult or complicated to make. Any decent machine shop can make them, especially if you don't care too much about quality. And unlike a drug lab, the machine shop has a legitimate daytime use so you can set it up in plain sight.
You do realize these things are directionally oriented resettable explosives right?
Every time you fire a round is a fucking explosion going off very close to your hand.
Someone not caring about quality is gonna wish they had after losing their fingers to an overpacked round.
Perhaps, but it depends on the customer. A crackhead who wants a gat probably won't even know what ammo to load in it. (Apparently it's somewhat common for police to arrest street criminals with a gun loaded full of the wrong caliber ammunition). And unless you seriously overpack the round or make the barrel out of pot metal, more likely the quality problem that you will get is the gun failing to fire or failing to cycle. Remember though, you are talking about criminals, not people like you and me who care about safety ratings.
Therefore, we should give up and do nothing.
Therefore, we should acknowledge reality and form policy around that rather than pissing into the wind while pretending we're doing something useful.
For example- if you want to attack the lion's share of gun violence, address the causes of it, rather than the tools used in it. That means address drugs and drug gangs. Decriminalize or legalize drugs, put the gangs and cartels out of business. Treat addicts like patients who need help rather than criminals who need punishment, or at the very least stop locking up non-violent drug users with violent criminals (and thus turning them into violent drug users).
Let's also tackle poverty. Poverty is strongly correlated with drug use, so let's give people some hope and upward mobility so they don't feel desperate enough to use drugs. Doesn't work for everybody, but a good intervention that takes a young kid from the hood and gives him opportunity and resources so he has an obvious path to make something of his life will keep an awful lot of kids out of gangs and drugs.
Of course these solutions require more work and money than passing another law that criminals will ignore and getting your photo taken and saying I Did Something!.
Don't forget to also fight the culture around guns.
"Having a gun means you can defend yourself" is a dangerous thing to let live.
Being forced to defend yourself from a person with a gun is a thought no child should ever have. And yet here we are. not a week without a shooting happening.
I agree 100%. I think it's a failure of our society that ANY child has to think about defending themself from ANY sort of violence- be it a psycho with a gun, or crime on the street, or a bully who will beat them up. We should aim to do better as a society.
But the society I'd consider ideal is not the society we have. We have violent people in our society. A few go psycho and commit mass murder, most don't. And thus, we do our children a disservice by pretending otherwise.
We do a bigger disservice by doing little or nothing to identify violent people and help them become less violent.
Blaming the gun is a placebo pill we can take to make ourselves feel better about Doing Something. But it's like blaming the car for the actions of a drunk driver.
It may be dangerous, but it's also not wrong.
If 65yo grandma is approached by a 25yo male thug, she cannot defend herself whether thug is armed or not. The thug is bigger, stronger, and faster than she is.
If 65yo grandma is approached by a 25yo male thug, and she has a gun, she CAN defend herself. The worst case scenario for her is he also has a gun, in which case they are physically equal.
To be clear- I agree with you that we should not HAVE to defend ourselves. I'd love a society where nobody ever needs a gun. But pretending that society exists when it really doesn't does nobody any favors.
Excuse me what? The Grandma is shot dead before she could even pull the trigger.
And even if she defends herself then she will probably never live a happy life ever again because she just took a human life.
Why is it always Americans who do not understand that guns do kill people.
Yes, mental illness might also be an issue but you also dont do shit to solve that issue.
You dont even have healthcare. The one thing that could help is just banning guns but since every Jon Fuckwit sees himself as a one man militia we get columbine after columbine. But oh no you cannot take my guns its in my amendment that i am militia and i need my gun gun to defend myself from the bad guys. Two days later is the next shooting in a school, or a parking lot or a super market or on a highway.
No single other country that actually manages who can have a gun and who cannot has this problem.
While Germany, Canada and France together had 5 School shootings since 2009 the US had 360.
Even after Uvalde and 30 dead. Children! Dead children! You just said "oops the mental illness" and did NOTHING
And she could be stabbed from behind, or hit in the back of the head with a bat before she even saw her attacker. Yeah there's no guarantees in any sort of fight.
You are right on one thing- she'd probably never be quite as happy. I think you assume gun owners are spoiling for a fight, eagerly awaiting 'their moment to shine'. It's really not true though. Not for myself or anyone I know at least.
As a gun owner, I've spent a lot of time thinking about such things. Being shot isn't like in the movies where someone falls down and music plays and the hero rescues the girl, it's ugly and painful, it's like stabbing someone with a giant screwdriver by remote control. I hope I can live the rest of my life without ever shooting anybody or taking a life by any other means, because I'm pretty sure I'd never be quite whole ever again. I've always declined invitations to go hunting because I don't want to be the one to take the life of an animal, I don't even squish insects most of the time I capture and release them outside. So taking the life of another human is not something I ever want to do.
But what I want even less than that, is to do nothing while people I love are harmed. And so, if I have to trade my conscience and mental health for the physical wellbeing of my family or myself, then I will consider that a more than fair trade.
And I think the granny in our analogy would rather be alive and feeling guilty than dead. I know I would be.
This is one thing I HATE about my country- we have forgotten how important it is to take care of our own citizens. And I blame conservatives (the usually pro-gun ones) for this a lot more than liberals, but liberals deserve plenty of blame as well. Both parties find it effective and expedient to whip up voters with 'those other guys hate America!'.
It's not just mental health, it's everything. Look at student loans- kids take on crushing debt because they're told it's the only way to get a good job, only wages are stagnant and they can't make ends meet. Do we help them, the millions of our fellow countrymen who are in a really bad situation? Nah, fuck them, they did it to themselves.
And look at healthcare as a whole. People get cancer and go bankrupt with health insurance and it's just like oh well, like that's the way things are supposed to be.
Meanwhile the wealth of our nation is being extracted by a bunch of business interests that basically have the government in a state of regulatory capture (that video is from 2011 and it's even worse today) and the people of the nation are too busy blaming each other to work together and FIX some of our VERY REAL problems.
So yes, I support gun rights. But please don't lump me in with the loud and obnoxious lemming-conservatives who only use mental health as a way to defend against gun control then do nothing at all to actually improve mental health.
If it were up to me, we'd be spending BILLIONS on mental health, if not tens or hundreds of billions. If it were up to me, our defense budget would get a haircut (we really don't need to spend more on military than the next 10 nations, including all of our major enemies, combined) and that money would be re-invested in America's PEOPLE. Education, mental health, health care, etc. Schools should be palaces and teaching kids should be a well-paid, sought-after, competitive position that carries respect and prestige, not the current situation where teachers are basically underpaid babysitters that are expected to teach the test and then we act confused when entire generations of kids grow up with no critical thinking skills.
I believe the markets, and the corporations, and the government, do and should exist for the benefit of the populace overall, not the other way around. I think many in the US have forgotten that ideal.
Damn it's crazy that you say that despite there being dozens of countries where crackheads just don't have guns.
Violent crimes are common because armed people are everywhere.
Um, please think this through. You're basically saying that weapons cause violence.
But that's not how human nature works. Some PEOPLE are violent, and they commit acts of violence whether they have weapons or not.
I could approach you on the street and beat you up- that's a violent crime. No guns involved.
I could approach you on the street and stab you or hit you with a baseball bat- that's a violent crime. No guns involved.
Guns don't cause violence. Weapons don't cause violence. Weapons in the wrong hands can make violence worse, or in the right hands can prevent violence or stop it.
If I want to punch you in the face I think twice because I can't kill you from distance with a single blow, but having access to a gun is lowering the hurdle
And you're missing the most important part of the point here. WOULD you?
Whether you can kill me from a distance or from up close, WOULD you do so? I wouldn't. Most people wouldn't.
There's a few who would. And a few of them think it's fun.
You say you can't kill me from a distance. I think you can, even without a gun. Consider this a thought experiment. You need to kill me from say 100' away. You don't get a gun. How do you do it?
As an European, we have culture, we know about (cross)bows and spears and whatnot. The world is not black and white, its not about some people that always would and some people that always would not. Different environments will bring different behavior in different people. An environment where everyone has access to a firearm will lower the hurdle for extremely violent crimes that can easily result in death.
Please, have a "thought experiment" yourself and think this whole thing through, at least once. Its kindoff unfair debating with someone that went through an american school system, I know you don't have the mental capacity for this conversation, but for the sake of inclusion, we are still having it.
I think you do me an injustice, and needlessly so.
The US is not 'just one country' with the same ideals and attitudes everywhere. We are 50 states, and while there is an overall American culture, each state or even city area has its own local culture, ideals, politics, etc.
I live in a 'blue state' (IE Democrat-majority, Democrats are generally an anti-gun party). There's not a big gun culture here. There are not people with 10 gallon hats and a 6-shooter on their hip riding around in a giant pickup truck with a gun rack. My state has more gun control laws than most in the union.
When I grew up we had no guns or interest in guns. During my whole childhood the only exposure to guns I had was once at summer camp there was an activity shooting .22LR rifles (small caliber), lying down, at targets. And once on vacation we went to a shooting range that was part of a resort.
If we'd had this conversation 10 or 12 years ago, I'd have been mostly on your side. I recognized the 2nd Amendment was a thing that existed, but I saw no reason anybody needed an 'assault rifle', I thought gun free zones were a pretty good way to improve safety, and overall a lot of 'gun culture' seemed like needless penis extension.
It was actually one conversation that kicked off a change in my position. An old friend of mine and I were getting lunch together. This guy has always been very Republican (pro-gun/conservative party), owns several guns, goes hunting, etc- but we have a lot of mutual respect despite differing worldviews on many subjects. Anyway, as we finished lunch he mentions that he's going to buy an AR-15 rifle and would I like to come along? I made a dumb joke like 'damn man, I didn't realize it was that small, I'm sorry dude'. He just laughed and said 'You know my deer hunting rifle, the one you said you have no problem with civilians owning? Well it's actually a lot MORE powerful than an AR-15.' I started to argue but he said 'look, nothing I say is going to convince you. So just Google it when you get home, okay?'.
I KNEW he was wrong- a 'military weapon of war' would definitely be more powerful than a stupid wood stock hunting rifle like Elmer Fudd would carry. Surely the military wouldn't be carrying weapons inferior to those of random civilian hunters, right?
So I went home and Googled it. And I found he was right- his .30-06 hunting rifle has SIGNIFICANTLY more muzzle energy than the .223 AR-15 he was planning to buy. The hunting rifle was larger and heavier and in almost every way, more powerful.
I'm usually not wrong about technical things. So I was curious what else I was wrong about on the subject, turned out it was a lot. Not about policy or position, but about provable technical things of how guns work and how deadly they are and whatnot.
So I decided the best course of action was to basically forget everything I thought I knew, and start fresh. That kicked off a good 3-4 week deep dive on the subject, reading articles, watching YouTubes, doing research on both sides of the issue.
This brought about a few basic conclusions. The biggest is that most of the politicians who talk about guns appear to know little or nothing about guns, as many of their gun control arguments are easily disproved on basis of fact. And many of the laws they promote do nothing to regulate the actual lethality of guns, but rather try to describe 'scary looking guns' and ban those. For example, my own state's laws regulate rifles that have ergonomic features like a pistol grip or collapsible stock that have NO bearing on the rifle's lethality.
I then started doing research into use of force, defensive situations, etc. And that brought a very sobering realization- I lived in a bubble. Violence is not a part of my life (and I prefer it that way). My area is quite safe. But that doesn't mean I am immune to violent people- and there ARE people out there who ARE violent. Not many near me, but they exist.
And I'd say I've done more research than most into what happens in a fight. I've seen a lot of videos of defensive situations- robberies, fistfights, assaults, kidnapping, and straight up attempted murder. I've seen what happens when people get shot (you won't find it on YouTube). And I've seen how easy it is to seriously harm a human. We live safe lives in civilized society, but on the scale of the world, our bodies are pretty fragile and it doesn't take much to seriously damage them.
And that's why I say thought experiment for how to kill someone from 100' away. It's why I say that if someone wants to kill people, they will, gun or not. It's why I reject the logic that removing guns will save lives, because I recognize that gun regulations affect the law-abiding more than the criminals who are doing the most harm.
Point is-- I have done the thought experiment, a few different ways.
Do I want guns in vending machines? No. Is the absolute ideal to have everybody armed? No, the ideal is where nobody needs to be armed. But absent that perfect future, I think civilian armament as a deterrence to criminals works.
Guns enable more efficient violence. The US army discovered this during World War 1 when they stopped slapping people and shot them instead.
In a place like Night City i think it's pretty clear why everyone walking around armed to the gills is a bad idea.
The fact that you're pretty likely to be shot into ribbons is a big downside, even if sometimes that's survivable (and it's pretty clear that it is not for most people).
To add to this, there are literally vending machines in the game that sell loaded guns.