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.
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.
Various types of crimes are tracked by the FBI which then publishes an awful lot of statistical data. In question for us is expanded homicide table 8- same data is available on a different page that doesn’t deep-link well up to 2021, but the result for all is the same- about 10k-12k firearm homicides per year.
Side note- rifles (including ‘assault’ rifles and other rifles like hunting rifles) are used in about 300-400 homicides/year, never more than the number of people who are punched and kicked to death. Suggests that maybe trying for ‘assault weapon bans’ is a waste of time that won’t have much effect.
But back on track. 10k-12k firearm homicides per year, the vast majority committed with handguns or ‘unknown type’ guns. A gun might be ‘unknown type’ if it’s not recovered- for example if there’s a drive-by shooting and the perpetrators are not caught, you can’t say for sure what kind of gun it was because even pistol rounds can be fired from certain rifles.
Measuring defensive gun uses (DGU) is much harder. In the vast majority of incidents (90-95%) the criminal sees the gun and runs away so there’s not much to report. That means a great many go unreported, and of those that do get reported, there’s no central tracking system the way there is for homicides. That means the only way to get any sort of number is with surveys and statistical analysis, which are of course open to the interpretation and opinions of the statistician crunching the numbers.
Wikipedia has a good page on that subject which I would encourage you to read. But to briefly summarize- anti-gun researcher Hemenway puts it at 55,000-80,000/year, pro-gun researchers Kleck and Gertz put it at 2.1 million/year, pro-gun researchers Cook and Ludwig put it at 4.7 million/year. More direct analysis of the government NCVS survey data put it between 100,000 and 370,000 DGU/year which is the area I think is probably most accurate. However the one thing just about every researcher involved seems to agree on is that the question hasn’t been answered reliably and considerable uncertainty exists.
Thus, for the sake of argument, I take the lowest number from that- 55,000 DGU, and compare it with the highest number of say 12k firearm homicides, and I say there are AT LEAST 4.58x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
With that in mind, the argument that ‘a successful DGU where your own gun isn’t used against you is one in a million’ becomes statistically impossible.
A lot of the whole ‘owning a gun makes you more likely to get shot’ bit comes from bad stat analysis and selection bias. Put simply, if you live in an unsafe area, you’re more likely to get shot, but you’re also more likely to want a gun for self-defense. That makes the connection between gun ownership and getting shot a correlation, not a causation; but many people confuse the two.
Another big misused stat is suicide. You’ve probably heard a stat like ‘35,000 people die of gun violence every year’. How does 12k become 35k? Simple answer is that the rest are suicides. But I think it’s disingenuous to count suicides as ‘gun violence’ because the term ‘gun violence’ sounds like something that will happen to you, not something you do to yourself. There is a small correlation between gun ownership and suicide rate- I believe that’s partially due to socioeconomic factors (the guy who lives in a bad neighborhood more likely has no money and thus is more likely to suicide) but it’s also causative (happens because of the gun)- a gun will kill you instantly; whereas many other methods take time during which you may change your mind or fail in your suicide attempt. I still don’t believe that self-harm is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership though, but I respect that many disagree with that.
Hope that helps! Does it give you what you were looking for?
I wish they did also. The stat would still be incomplete as many go unreported, but I’d still at least like a number of people who call and report a DGU.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
Being forced to defend yourself from a person with a gun is a thought no child should ever have.
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.
“Having a gun means you can defend yourself” is a dangerous thing to let live.
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.
You see a lot of criminals walking around with dynamite? I don’t.
Do you think that’s because explosives are hard to make or buy? They’re not. Starting with nothing but a bit of money, it’s far easier to get something that will explode than a gun.
Blowing shit up isn’t hard. It’s also not useful, and a bomb won’t usefully stop someone out to harm you. Thus criminals have little use for them.
Okay so full answer from a real keyboard. Please consider this one to supercede the last one which was written on my phone on my way to sleep.
First- addressing your argument:
I argue there ARE NOT would-be bombers out there saying ‘I really wanna blow some people up but I can’t get explosives, my reign of terror ended before it began :(, curse you explosives licensing schemes! Guess I have no choice but to get a job and therapy.’. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.
But there’s a sliding scale. The more determined someone is, the more stringent restrictions it will take to stop them from getting whatever they want. There’s a limit to what’s practical, and a higher limit to what’s possible. Look at prisons- the most secure, controlled, patrolled environment in the world, and yet prisoners still get drugs and weapons and cell phones. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil, but assholes are more likely to settle for whatever’s convenient.
So by ‘if 7-11 started selling dynamite’, that means drop the difficulty of acquisition to zero. And in that sense, of course there’d be more bombings- both because ‘Dynamite sale! 12 sticks for $12’ posters in the window would bring bombs closer to peoples consciousness, and because you now cover the entire scale of determination.
Second, my argument:
Bombs are a bad analogue because you can’t use a bomb defensively. If someone threatens to bomb my car, having my own bomb won’t help me much. And a bomb isn’t directed, it’s broad destruction that harms everything in its vicinity (buildings, people, vehicles, etc). So I can’t use a bomb to defend my home from an intruder as I’ll just blow up my own house & family; I can’t use a bomb to defend against street crime because I’d blow myself up too.
A gun however CAN be used defensively. It doesn’t harm everything in the vicinity, just whatever you shoot at. The gun doesn’t also harm the shooter, doesn’t also harm everybody nearby. I can shoot the intruder or street criminal without also harming myself or my family.
So consider Night City, or any similar society where you can assume everyone you meet is armed. In that society, much like in ours, you have two classes of people. There’s the criminal class- which includes the main character V. They go about their illegal actions, using violence against anyone who stands in their way. And there’s the average people. In a game like CP2077 or GTA, the average people are the NPCs that populate the city but with whom you have little or no interaction other than stealing their cars or wishing they’d get out of your way.
Obviously we’d like to disarm the criminals. But as people who don’t follow the law, that’s easier said than done.
When in the beginning of the game you hear the news report that there were 87 murders last week, notice that it’s talking about gangs and cartels, not innocent bystanders? Art imitates life.
But now consider the NPCs. Imagine if every time you had to steal a car, the owner would try and shoot you, and if you shoot back then random bystanders would shoot you. Would that impact your willingness to steal cars? I think it would, you’d go looking for parked cars to avoid firefights.
And that’s why I say having a mostly armed society is not an awful thing.
First part: ‘Laws never work because crime is magic. Okay, practical obstacles work. Actually I agree completely and making a bad thing easier makes it way more common.’
I hadn’t even brought up how capitalism can make problems worse on purpose. You went out of your way to make that a gimme. And thanks a bunch for bringing up prison, which is the best possible example of everyone wanting something (escape) and approximately zero people achieving it.
Stopping crime is not pass/fail. The existence of a crime doesn’t negate how much good was done, by forcing every asshole who wants to do a terrorism to gamble their fingers on redneck engineering contraptions intended to explode in someone’s face.
Second part: ‘Nobody gets hurt in a mass shootout over a carjacking.’ You can’t even imagine assuming everyone you meet is unarmed. Like most places.
I think you’re filling in the blanks a bit and putting words in my mouth.
I say practical obstacles work to screen out the ‘low hanging fruit’. It’s like metal detectors at the airport- screens out the random idiots, but not the dedicated terrorists. Trying to screen out the terrorists just gives you the TSA which costs billions and offers little of value above the standard metal detectors and xray machines of 1990.
There’s two things that would stop another 9/11-- locked cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know to rush a hijacker rather than cooperating. Security is a distributed decentralized problem, and centralized solutions rarely work for that.
As for prison- my analogy was pointing out the futility of trying to stop people from getting items they want. It doesn’t work for drugs, it doesn’t work for guns. You’ll disarm the good people and the bad guys will stay strapped. And smuggling drugs into prison is a LOT easier than smuggling people out.
I’m all for reducing the number of guns criminals have. I just think it’s a bad idea to reduce the number of guns good people have even more. And since a law only affects the law-abiding…
If you read this comment of mine there’s minimum of 55k defensive gun uses in the US, probably more like 300-350k. The law will directly affect those. Not every one would become a murder, but that’s a lot more victims of various types of crimes. And of the 10-12k firearm homicides per year, how many are committed by people who aren’t legal to own a gun in the first place? An awful lot.
I CAN imagine a place where everyone I meet is unarmed- I live more or less in such a place. Connecticut, USA- I only know a few people who own guns but almost none of them ever carry, and I almost never carry myself.
I was making a specific point that you’ve sidestepped- that if a criminal had significant fear that their victim would be armed, there’d be less crime. That if in GTA random NPCs shot you for stealing cars, you’d probably steal fewer cars. Do you disagree with that?
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.
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).
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.
The statistics take murders into account, you know.
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 can has stats plz? 🥺
My pleasure.
Various types of crimes are tracked by the FBI which then publishes an awful lot of statistical data. In question for us is expanded homicide table 8- same data is available on a different page that doesn’t deep-link well up to 2021, but the result for all is the same- about 10k-12k firearm homicides per year.
Side note- rifles (including ‘assault’ rifles and other rifles like hunting rifles) are used in about 300-400 homicides/year, never more than the number of people who are punched and kicked to death. Suggests that maybe trying for ‘assault weapon bans’ is a waste of time that won’t have much effect.
But back on track. 10k-12k firearm homicides per year, the vast majority committed with handguns or ‘unknown type’ guns. A gun might be ‘unknown type’ if it’s not recovered- for example if there’s a drive-by shooting and the perpetrators are not caught, you can’t say for sure what kind of gun it was because even pistol rounds can be fired from certain rifles.
Measuring defensive gun uses (DGU) is much harder. In the vast majority of incidents (90-95%) the criminal sees the gun and runs away so there’s not much to report. That means a great many go unreported, and of those that do get reported, there’s no central tracking system the way there is for homicides. That means the only way to get any sort of number is with surveys and statistical analysis, which are of course open to the interpretation and opinions of the statistician crunching the numbers.
Wikipedia has a good page on that subject which I would encourage you to read. But to briefly summarize- anti-gun researcher Hemenway puts it at 55,000-80,000/year, pro-gun researchers Kleck and Gertz put it at 2.1 million/year, pro-gun researchers Cook and Ludwig put it at 4.7 million/year. More direct analysis of the government NCVS survey data put it between 100,000 and 370,000 DGU/year which is the area I think is probably most accurate. However the one thing just about every researcher involved seems to agree on is that the question hasn’t been answered reliably and considerable uncertainty exists.
Thus, for the sake of argument, I take the lowest number from that- 55,000 DGU, and compare it with the highest number of say 12k firearm homicides, and I say there are AT LEAST 4.58x more DGUs as there are firearm homicides.
With that in mind, the argument that ‘a successful DGU where your own gun isn’t used against you is one in a million’ becomes statistically impossible.
A lot of the whole ‘owning a gun makes you more likely to get shot’ bit comes from bad stat analysis and selection bias. Put simply, if you live in an unsafe area, you’re more likely to get shot, but you’re also more likely to want a gun for self-defense. That makes the connection between gun ownership and getting shot a correlation, not a causation; but many people confuse the two.
Another big misused stat is suicide. You’ve probably heard a stat like ‘35,000 people die of gun violence every year’. How does 12k become 35k? Simple answer is that the rest are suicides. But I think it’s disingenuous to count suicides as ‘gun violence’ because the term ‘gun violence’ sounds like something that will happen to you, not something you do to yourself. There is a small correlation between gun ownership and suicide rate- I believe that’s partially due to socioeconomic factors (the guy who lives in a bad neighborhood more likely has no money and thus is more likely to suicide) but it’s also causative (happens because of the gun)- a gun will kill you instantly; whereas many other methods take time during which you may change your mind or fail in your suicide attempt. I still don’t believe that self-harm is a valid reason to restrict gun ownership though, but I respect that many disagree with that.
Hope that helps! Does it give you what you were looking for?
Okie, thank you
🤔 I don’t understand why the government doesn’t track defensive gun uses directly.
I wish they did also. The stat would still be incomplete as many go unreported, but I’d still at least like a number of people who call and report a DGU.
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.
Implying crackheads don’t have agency
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
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.
Guns are cheaper in the black market though.
If 7-11 started selling dynamite, do you think bombings would stay exactly as common as they are now?
You see a lot of criminals walking around with dynamite? I don’t.
Do you think that’s because explosives are hard to make or buy? They’re not. Starting with nothing but a bit of money, it’s far easier to get something that will explode than a gun.
Blowing shit up isn’t hard. It’s also not useful, and a bomb won’t usefully stop someone out to harm you. Thus criminals have little use for them.
Again:
If 7-11 started selling dynamite, do you think that would change?
Nevermind, I discount your opinion on literally everything.
Okay so full answer from a real keyboard. Please consider this one to supercede the last one which was written on my phone on my way to sleep.
First- addressing your argument:
I argue there ARE NOT would-be bombers out there saying ‘I really wanna blow some people up but I can’t get explosives, my reign of terror ended before it began :(, curse you explosives licensing schemes! Guess I have no choice but to get a job and therapy.’. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.
But there’s a sliding scale. The more determined someone is, the more stringent restrictions it will take to stop them from getting whatever they want. There’s a limit to what’s practical, and a higher limit to what’s possible. Look at prisons- the most secure, controlled, patrolled environment in the world, and yet prisoners still get drugs and weapons and cell phones. Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil, but assholes are more likely to settle for whatever’s convenient.
So by ‘if 7-11 started selling dynamite’, that means drop the difficulty of acquisition to zero. And in that sense, of course there’d be more bombings- both because ‘Dynamite sale! 12 sticks for $12’ posters in the window would bring bombs closer to peoples consciousness, and because you now cover the entire scale of determination.
Second, my argument:
Bombs are a bad analogue because you can’t use a bomb defensively. If someone threatens to bomb my car, having my own bomb won’t help me much. And a bomb isn’t directed, it’s broad destruction that harms everything in its vicinity (buildings, people, vehicles, etc). So I can’t use a bomb to defend my home from an intruder as I’ll just blow up my own house & family; I can’t use a bomb to defend against street crime because I’d blow myself up too.
A gun however CAN be used defensively. It doesn’t harm everything in the vicinity, just whatever you shoot at. The gun doesn’t also harm the shooter, doesn’t also harm everybody nearby. I can shoot the intruder or street criminal without also harming myself or my family.
So consider Night City, or any similar society where you can assume everyone you meet is armed. In that society, much like in ours, you have two classes of people. There’s the criminal class- which includes the main character V. They go about their illegal actions, using violence against anyone who stands in their way. And there’s the average people. In a game like CP2077 or GTA, the average people are the NPCs that populate the city but with whom you have little or no interaction other than stealing their cars or wishing they’d get out of your way.
Obviously we’d like to disarm the criminals. But as people who don’t follow the law, that’s easier said than done.
When in the beginning of the game you hear the news report that there were 87 murders last week, notice that it’s talking about gangs and cartels, not innocent bystanders? Art imitates life.
But now consider the NPCs. Imagine if every time you had to steal a car, the owner would try and shoot you, and if you shoot back then random bystanders would shoot you. Would that impact your willingness to steal cars? I think it would, you’d go looking for parked cars to avoid firefights.
And that’s why I say having a mostly armed society is not an awful thing.
After you wrote it, did you read it?
First part: ‘Laws never work because crime is magic. Okay, practical obstacles work. Actually I agree completely and making a bad thing easier makes it way more common.’
I hadn’t even brought up how capitalism can make problems worse on purpose. You went out of your way to make that a gimme. And thanks a bunch for bringing up prison, which is the best possible example of everyone wanting something (escape) and approximately zero people achieving it.
Stopping crime is not pass/fail. The existence of a crime doesn’t negate how much good was done, by forcing every asshole who wants to do a terrorism to gamble their fingers on redneck engineering contraptions intended to explode in someone’s face.
Second part: ‘Nobody gets hurt in a mass shootout over a carjacking.’ You can’t even imagine assuming everyone you meet is unarmed. Like most places.
I think you’re filling in the blanks a bit and putting words in my mouth.
I say practical obstacles work to screen out the ‘low hanging fruit’. It’s like metal detectors at the airport- screens out the random idiots, but not the dedicated terrorists. Trying to screen out the terrorists just gives you the TSA which costs billions and offers little of value above the standard metal detectors and xray machines of 1990.
There’s two things that would stop another 9/11-- locked cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know to rush a hijacker rather than cooperating. Security is a distributed decentralized problem, and centralized solutions rarely work for that.
As for prison- my analogy was pointing out the futility of trying to stop people from getting items they want. It doesn’t work for drugs, it doesn’t work for guns. You’ll disarm the good people and the bad guys will stay strapped. And smuggling drugs into prison is a LOT easier than smuggling people out.
I’m all for reducing the number of guns criminals have. I just think it’s a bad idea to reduce the number of guns good people have even more. And since a law only affects the law-abiding…
If you read this comment of mine there’s minimum of 55k defensive gun uses in the US, probably more like 300-350k. The law will directly affect those. Not every one would become a murder, but that’s a lot more victims of various types of crimes. And of the 10-12k firearm homicides per year, how many are committed by people who aren’t legal to own a gun in the first place? An awful lot.
I CAN imagine a place where everyone I meet is unarmed- I live more or less in such a place. Connecticut, USA- I only know a few people who own guns but almost none of them ever carry, and I almost never carry myself.
I was making a specific point that you’ve sidestepped- that if a criminal had significant fear that their victim would be armed, there’d be less crime. That if in GTA random NPCs shot you for stealing cars, you’d probably steal fewer cars. Do you disagree with that?
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.
Because no man has ever beaten a woman with his fists or anything.
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.
Guns enable more efficient violence. The US army discovered this during World War 1 when they stopped slapping people and shot them instead.
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.
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.