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Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths. Well, that's in part because once you

by hga 11y ago

Other societies that have banned most gun use do not have nearly as many guns around nor do they have as many gun deaths. Well, that's in part because once you've disarmed the populace, you don't need guns to slaughter them wholesale. Well over a 100 million previously disarmed people in the 20th Century, a fate US civilians are quite determined to avoid. I agree drugs are different, but if the will exists, guns and ammo are a lot more compact.

Avshalom 11y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 ... did you just blame the ukrainian genocide under stalin on a lack of guns?
- hga 11y ago
  Yes, yes I did, in part. For some inexplicable reason, dictators first seize the guns of targeted populations before trying such things.
  - epistasis 11y ago
    Are there some instances where dictators have been stopped because of guns? Because the assertion that guns could prevent a dictator from taking overs seems, well, outlandish, if I'm being honest. I'm willing to be corrected, however.
    - hga 11y ago
      I think it's a difficult question because "guns" are a moving target along two or so dimensions. The obvious is rate of fire with an efficacy twist: Muzzle loaded smooth-bore (short range, relatively fast to load). Muzzle loaded rifle (long range, slow to load) Then the muzzle loaded rifled musket, which used the Minié ball to achieve both, and great carnage in the Crimean War and our Civil War. Now the developments are rapid: Breach loaded single shot rifles. Repeaters with relatively slow loading, with a move to smokeless powder. Clip fed repeaters, a critical Mauser innovation. With the 1898 model, the battle rifle is fully "modern". With of course effective semi-auto models to follow, plus the lower powered/lower range assault rifle (and I can't help but notice that the short ranged AK-47 is something a dictator would prefer to be issued, vs. something more able to reach out and touch him). But ammo, going back to the rifled musket, we're using corrosive primers, and black power residue attracts moisture. That is, it takes a fair amount of diligent effort to keep a rifle from rusting out. In 1911 the Swiss switched to non-corrosive primers, appropriate for their militia system. Our first weapon with 100% non-corrosive primers was the WWII M1 Carbine, a weapon for officers and rear echelon troops. So the likelihood of a less organized having a lot of functioning weapons increases with their using non-corrosive primers. Or, in the case of the Soviets, using chromed barrels. Now you have to factor in wealth. Poor people who can't afford much in the way of weapons aren't going to have a chance here. See e.g. Rwanda, where rifles didn't play a big part on either side. So ... what examples might we have? The successful resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is suggestive. You might count Hitler deciding it wasn't worth breaking 80 divisions to take (most of) Switzerland. More than a few liberals had an epiphany about gun control in the dark days of Watergate ... how many dictators/oligarchs/tyrannical whatever didn't try, or try very hard, because the cost would have been too great? I'll start looking for examples; today, all I know is case after case, USSR, PRC, Cuba, Nazi Germany, those are just the most prominent off the top of my head, where gun confiscations preceded slaughter.
      - epistasis 11y ago
        These are pretty weak correlations. Gun control has passed all sorts of other places, which looks like gun confiscation, without mass slaughter. Also, gun confiscation was not at all the defining characteristic of these other places that experienced mass slaughter. There are many more things that accompany that type of political landscape, and are more common. And without an example of where citizen gun ownership prevented a dictator from coming to power, the whole argument is extremely weak, though it definitely gets repeated quite a bit.
gohrt 11y ago
Yes, that's the fantasy reasoning, the bears no relation to how mass slaughter actually does and does not happen.
- hga 11y ago
  You are welcome to provide modern era examples of populaces armed with firearms being slaughtered by their own governments. I don't know of any.
  - krapp 11y ago
    There are, however, numerous examples of modern era populaces who aren't armed and also haven't been slaughtered by their own governments.
    - oldmanjay 11y ago
      How many of them are running roughshod over their (nominally) legally binding mission like the US government?
      - krapp 11y ago
        Probably all of them, to some degree or another, although not every culture considers the US libertarian ideal of limited government (much less the right to keep and bear arms) to be necessary, so any realistic answer to that question would probably be more complex than you're implying. But, where remedies within a political system exist, then the system can't be assumed to be tyrannical. An equivalence drawn between the US and other governments would seem to suggest that civilian gun ownership doesn't deter the violence and corruption of the state, nor does its absence elsewhere appear to have led to the inevitable slaughter of those populations for whom gun control is much more strict than in the US. Rather, it seems that when one enshrines into the culture the precept that the only free state is one cultivated by popular violence, it gives both the state and the people an excuse to justify violence as being an unavoidable cost of civilization. Political and social alternatives can't be seriously considered when, for many people, all other roads lead to slavery and death. Instead, mass shootings in the US lead to a spike in gun sales, because they're effective advertising and recruitment tools for the NRA, even as the police and the government are becoming more militarized and surveillance more aggressive, in no small part because after 9/11 the American people wanted them to be. And if it's the case that the US is a more tyrannical state now, then I believe that's due to American democracy having worked as intended, rather than that tyranny having emerged from a vacuum, or some implicit tendency of states to creep towards totalitarianism.

by hga 11y ago

Avshalom 11y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10352061 ... did you just blame the ukrainian genocide under stalin on a lack of guns?

hga 11y ago
Yes, yes I did, in part. For some inexplicable reason, dictators first seize the guns of targeted populations before trying such things.
- epistasis 11y ago
  Are there some instances where dictators have been stopped because of guns? Because the assertion that guns could prevent a dictator from taking overs seems, well, outlandish, if I'm being honest. I'm willing to be corrected, however.
  - hga 11y ago
    I think it's a difficult question because "guns" are a moving target along two or so dimensions. The obvious is rate of fire with an efficacy twist: Muzzle loaded smooth-bore (short range, relatively fast to load). Muzzle loaded rifle (long range, slow to load) Then the muzzle loaded rifled musket, which used the Minié ball to achieve both, and great carnage in the Crimean War and our Civil War. Now the developments are rapid: Breach loaded single shot rifles. Repeaters with relatively slow loading, with a move to smokeless powder. Clip fed repeaters, a critical Mauser innovation. With the 1898 model, the battle rifle is fully "modern". With of course effective semi-auto models to follow, plus the lower powered/lower range assault rifle (and I can't help but notice that the short ranged AK-47 is something a dictator would prefer to be issued, vs. something more able to reach out and touch him). But ammo, going back to the rifled musket, we're using corrosive primers, and black power residue attracts moisture. That is, it takes a fair amount of diligent effort to keep a rifle from rusting out. In 1911 the Swiss switched to non-corrosive primers, appropriate for their militia system. Our first weapon with 100% non-corrosive primers was the WWII M1 Carbine, a weapon for officers and rear echelon troops. So the likelihood of a less organized having a lot of functioning weapons increases with their using non-corrosive primers. Or, in the case of the Soviets, using chromed barrels. Now you have to factor in wealth. Poor people who can't afford much in the way of weapons aren't going to have a chance here. See e.g. Rwanda, where rifles didn't play a big part on either side. So ... what examples might we have? The successful resistance to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan is suggestive. You might count Hitler deciding it wasn't worth breaking 80 divisions to take (most of) Switzerland. More than a few liberals had an epiphany about gun control in the dark days of Watergate ... how many dictators/oligarchs/tyrannical whatever didn't try, or try very hard, because the cost would have been too great? I'll start looking for examples; today, all I know is case after case, USSR, PRC, Cuba, Nazi Germany, those are just the most prominent off the top of my head, where gun confiscations preceded slaughter.
    - epistasis 11y ago
      These are pretty weak correlations. Gun control has passed all sorts of other places, which looks like gun confiscation, without mass slaughter. Also, gun confiscation was not at all the defining characteristic of these other places that experienced mass slaughter. There are many more things that accompany that type of political landscape, and are more common. And without an example of where citizen gun ownership prevented a dictator from coming to power, the whole argument is extremely weak, though it definitely gets repeated quite a bit.

gohrt 11y ago

Yes, that's the fantasy reasoning, the bears no relation to how mass slaughter actually does and does not happen.

hga 11y ago
You are welcome to provide modern era examples of populaces armed with firearms being slaughtered by their own governments. I don't know of any.
- krapp 11y ago
  There are, however, numerous examples of modern era populaces who aren't armed and also haven't been slaughtered by their own governments.
  - oldmanjay 11y ago
    How many of them are running roughshod over their (nominally) legally binding mission like the US government?
    - krapp 11y ago
      Probably all of them, to some degree or another, although not every culture considers the US libertarian ideal of limited government (much less the right to keep and bear arms) to be necessary, so any realistic answer to that question would probably be more complex than you're implying. But, where remedies within a political system exist, then the system can't be assumed to be tyrannical. An equivalence drawn between the US and other governments would seem to suggest that civilian gun ownership doesn't deter the violence and corruption of the state, nor does its absence elsewhere appear to have led to the inevitable slaughter of those populations for whom gun control is much more strict than in the US. Rather, it seems that when one enshrines into the culture the precept that the only free state is one cultivated by popular violence, it gives both the state and the people an excuse to justify violence as being an unavoidable cost of civilization. Political and social alternatives can't be seriously considered when, for many people, all other roads lead to slavery and death. Instead, mass shootings in the US lead to a spike in gun sales, because they're effective advertising and recruitment tools for the NRA, even as the police and the government are becoming more militarized and surveillance more aggressive, in no small part because after 9/11 the American people wanted them to be. And if it's the case that the US is a more tyrannical state now, then I believe that's due to American democracy having worked as intended, rather than that tyranny having emerged from a vacuum, or some implicit tendency of states to creep towards totalitarianism.