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> But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun You've just described yet another reason wh
by yellowapple 6y ago
> But they're not "meaningless", because the average person in Europe and Australia has no interest in owning a gun
You've just described yet another reason why gun control measures are meaningless. The desire to kill oneself and/or others (with or without a gun) doesn't exist in a vacuum; guns don't magically make people suicidal or homicidal. That desire happens due to a combination of socioeconomic pressures and inadequate mental healthcare - two angles that gun control proponents chronically ignore, instead pushing for band-aids like gun control because those band-aids are "easier" and don't involve confronting the painful realities of socioeconomic inequality.
Hence, my point: as home manufacturing of firearms proliferates, that band-aid loses whatever tenuous effectiveness it has. People concerned about "gun violence" are then forced to consider why people are killing themselves and each other (hint: because the average person is broke and depressed).
- notahacker 6y agoGuns don't magically make people homicidal, they just make it magically easy and efficient to kill people in the heat of the moment, or by mistake, or because they fear if they don't pull the trigger first the other person might, or when too mentally ill to know what is going on. The actual difficulty for a sufficiently motivated person to obtain a gun (legal or otherwise) under gun control in the UK is not that high, but the incentives to do so are reduced, the disincentives increased, and the average person with the potential to carry out non-premeditated shootings never considers buying one. The ability to learn all about how to 3D print a gun instead of learning how to license and modify a shotgun or how to find black markets that will sell you illegal firearms does not change that calculus very much.