4 ms·

Comparing the US to lawless, poor countries doesn't help make your claim. The more rational 'New World' comparisons would be Canada, Australia and New Zealand,

Comparing the US to lawless, poor countries doesn't help make your claim. The more rational 'New World' comparisons would be Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and guess what: very low murder, very low rates of gun ownership. "Does this mean that France should adopt some aspects of Japanese law, for instance, by readopting the death penalty? Or does it simply mean that France and Japan are different countries?" Or more rationally, they could just completely ban firearms and make them totally inaccessible to anyone, as they are in Japan. (And also create a super conformist, rule-following slightly authoritarian culture) But at least the gun laws themselves in Japan are extremely rigid which hints pretty strongly that restrictions definitely work. Wether those can be pragmatically applied is another question.

philwelch 5y ago
> The more rational 'New World' comparisons would be Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and guess what: very low murder, very low rates of gun ownership. Who could have imagined that British colonies who didn’t violently overthrow the British colonial government would end up being less violent overall? Also, who would have guessed that former British colonies that didn’t have millions of African slaves shipped in for cheap agricultural labor and treated as a perpetual underclass for centuries would be more peaceful places to live? Nah, must be the guns.
- cmrdporcupine 5y ago
  The US has the gun fetish because it has a perpetual racialized underclass, among other reasons. You're right the violence is tied to its history. But so are the guns. You cannot separate the two. As others have pointed out; personal firearms are pretty useless as a vehicle for resisting state oppression and tyranny. But they're useful for stopping slave revolts or, more contemporarily, guarding your McMansion. The problem in the US isn't the right to bear arms. It's that the wrong people are bearing them. The militia types are the authoritarian aggressors that they themselves fantasize about resisting.
  - rayiner 5y ago
    Yeah both of these points are revisionist bullshit. Go read the primary sources. The gun fetish comes from our origin story being successfully overthrowing the British with civilian firearms. As to effectiveness: the Taliban just recaptured their country from a US backed military. The point of civilian gun ownership is to force citizen soldiers to decide between defecting and killing their neighbors. That’s exactly what happened in the Bangladesh independence war. The revolutionaries knocked over military depots in Dhaka to acquire firearms. Once the fighting started, Bangladeshis in the Pakistani military defected.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - jollybean 5y ago
      While it's a bit much to suggest 'guns are because racism', I think it's a reasonable point to consider. Also, though there is some legitimacy with the 'Guns Stop Tyranny' issue ... it's unlikely to happen. The US will not be invaded by anyone, and the US government with all it's flaws is considerably more legitimate than most of the people with guns and has been for more than a century. If the US falls, it will be due to crumbling from within, and given what has happened in the last few years, I'm afraid gun owners, however responsible and conscientious, are as likely to 'Rise Up' against a pack of falsehoods and populism than they are any kind of legitimate reality.
      - rayiner 5y ago
        > While it's a bit much to suggest 'guns are because racism', I think it's a reasonable point to consider. Why? What’s the evidence other than juxtaposition? Arabs are also nuts about guns. People from pastoral honor cultures (like the Scots Irish ancestors of many southerners and Appalachians: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/10/the-scots-irish-vote/27853/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/10/the-sco...) often are. Is that caused by racism too? > Also, though there is some legitimacy with the 'Guns Stop Tyranny' issue ... it's unlikely to happen. This is “end of history” bullshit. You need guns because having to kill people is a central part of the human experience. Tens of thousands of my people died at the hands of the Pakistani army because they had to fight with sticks and rocks until they knocked over some military depots to acquire firearms: https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/bangladesh-liberation-war-1971-muktijuddho-guerrilla-fighter-arms-freedom-1511812 https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/bangladesh-liberation-.... The Afghans have now expelled two superpowers from their country with handheld weapons. Guns work. All of that stuff could happen in America too. Because history isn’t over, civilization is a thin veneer over nature, and there’s nothing fundamentally different about us versus them.
- jollybean 5y ago
  This speculative argument falls flat in the face of actual data. More effective and regulated gun control and less access to guns is 100% consistent with less gun crime. That there was a revolution in 1777 doesn't change the fact both the UK and US were fairly equally involved in other kinds of political violence, I mean, you do realize the UK have been at war with others and themselves since the dawn of time? That they had their own 'revolution' and a Republic 100 years before the US? The Japanese have quite a violent history as well and yet have zero gun crime. Most regions in the US don't directly have a relationship with slavery and even accommodating for elevated levels of crime among those communities - gun violence is still very high. Guns are widespread and available to almost anyone in the US, and there's a huge amount of gun crime. Canada/Australia - more restrictions, less gun crime. Europe - quite heavily restricted, a small amount of gun crime. Japan - effectively totally banned, and almost 0 gun crime. Switzerland has militia training and ownership, but it's generally not pistols, and they definitely don't carry guns for personal defence. Their rifles are locked up in the basement. Mexico has tight gun laws, but they're not enforced. While there are concerns about freedoms, the formation of 'tyranny' etc. to contend with, there's no doubt that effective and highly restricted gun control has a significant impact. To anyone who's lived in Europe, Can/Aus/NZ and the US, it's just blindingly obvious, it's not a rhetorical argument at all, it boils down to trying to understand the reasoning of people who have difficulty conceding the reality of how safe it really is when there aren't that many guns floating around. Most police in the UK don't even carry guns, that's how real the implications are ... and it's not cause 'they didn't have a revolution'. EDIT - FYI here are the data points: USA: 4.5/100K gun homicides, 1.2 guns per/capita Canada: 0.5/100K gun homicides and 0.4 guns per/capita France: 0.1/100K gun homicides and 0.2 guns per/capita Japan: 0.0/100K (!!!) gun homicides and 0.006 guns per/capita It's crystal clear and unambiguous: for countries that have civil infrastructure, general lawfulness and the means to affect social policy etc. - fewer guns means fewer gun crimes. Obviously, there will be variations (i.e. Scotland has a crazy amount of stabbings) but prevalence of guns is a firs order issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
  - philwelch 5y ago
    > More effective and regulated gun control and less access to guns is 100% consistent with less gun crime. So what? I don't care about "less gun crime"; I care about "less violent crime". Talking about the subset of crime, violence, death, and injury that's caused by firearms is fundamentally dishonest. You could argue by the exact same logic that the lack of passenger trains in the US reduces train suicides compared to Japan. The specific tools are not the fucking issue. > I mean, you do realize the UK have been at war with others and themselves since the dawn of time? That they had their own 'revolution' and a Republic 100 years before the US? Sure. For instance, England and Scotland were intermittently at war for centuries, which resulted in a lot of the people living in the English/Scottish border regions developing a particularly violent way of life. These people were a huge pain in the neck after the unification of Great Britain. So a whole lot of them got shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to America. You know who else the British shipped to America? Violent criminals. This was one of the reasons we declared independence, actually. People think of Australia as a former penal colony, but that only started because we stopped letting them ship people here. Who else came here? The Puritans, whose other accomplishments included such things as burning witches and violently establishing that English Republic you alluded to. The normal, peaceful, law-abiding Brit who wasn't particularly interested in violence or religious fanaticism? Those are the guys who stayed behind in Britain.
syntheticcorp 5y ago
New Zealand does not have a “very low” rate of gun ownership. It has ~ 26 firearms per 100 people, well short of the USAs 120 but still ranked 20th in the world.

philwelch 5y ago

> The more rational 'New World' comparisons would be Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and guess what: very low murder, very low rates of gun ownership. Who could have imagined that British colonies who didn’t violently overthrow the British colonial government would end up being less violent overall? Also, who would have guessed that former British colonies that didn’t have millions of African slaves shipped in for cheap agricultural labor and treated as a perpetual underclass for centuries would be more peaceful places to live? Nah, must be the guns.

cmrdporcupine 5y ago
The US has the gun fetish because it has a perpetual racialized underclass, among other reasons. You're right the violence is tied to its history. But so are the guns. You cannot separate the two. As others have pointed out; personal firearms are pretty useless as a vehicle for resisting state oppression and tyranny. But they're useful for stopping slave revolts or, more contemporarily, guarding your McMansion. The problem in the US isn't the right to bear arms. It's that the wrong people are bearing them. The militia types are the authoritarian aggressors that they themselves fantasize about resisting.
- rayiner 5y ago
  Yeah both of these points are revisionist bullshit. Go read the primary sources. The gun fetish comes from our origin story being successfully overthrowing the British with civilian firearms. As to effectiveness: the Taliban just recaptured their country from a US backed military. The point of civilian gun ownership is to force citizen soldiers to decide between defecting and killing their neighbors. That’s exactly what happened in the Bangladesh independence war. The revolutionaries knocked over military depots in Dhaka to acquire firearms. Once the fighting started, Bangladeshis in the Pakistani military defected.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - jollybean 5y ago
    While it's a bit much to suggest 'guns are because racism', I think it's a reasonable point to consider. Also, though there is some legitimacy with the 'Guns Stop Tyranny' issue ... it's unlikely to happen. The US will not be invaded by anyone, and the US government with all it's flaws is considerably more legitimate than most of the people with guns and has been for more than a century. If the US falls, it will be due to crumbling from within, and given what has happened in the last few years, I'm afraid gun owners, however responsible and conscientious, are as likely to 'Rise Up' against a pack of falsehoods and populism than they are any kind of legitimate reality.
    - rayiner 5y ago
      > While it's a bit much to suggest 'guns are because racism', I think it's a reasonable point to consider. Why? What’s the evidence other than juxtaposition? Arabs are also nuts about guns. People from pastoral honor cultures (like the Scots Irish ancestors of many southerners and Appalachians: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/10/the-scots-irish-vote/27853/ https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2009/10/the-sco...) often are. Is that caused by racism too? > Also, though there is some legitimacy with the 'Guns Stop Tyranny' issue ... it's unlikely to happen. This is “end of history” bullshit. You need guns because having to kill people is a central part of the human experience. Tens of thousands of my people died at the hands of the Pakistani army because they had to fight with sticks and rocks until they knocked over some military depots to acquire firearms: https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/bangladesh-liberation-war-1971-muktijuddho-guerrilla-fighter-arms-freedom-1511812 https://www.thedailystar.net/backpage/bangladesh-liberation-.... The Afghans have now expelled two superpowers from their country with handheld weapons. Guns work. All of that stuff could happen in America too. Because history isn’t over, civilization is a thin veneer over nature, and there’s nothing fundamentally different about us versus them.
jollybean 5y ago
This speculative argument falls flat in the face of actual data. More effective and regulated gun control and less access to guns is 100% consistent with less gun crime. That there was a revolution in 1777 doesn't change the fact both the UK and US were fairly equally involved in other kinds of political violence, I mean, you do realize the UK have been at war with others and themselves since the dawn of time? That they had their own 'revolution' and a Republic 100 years before the US? The Japanese have quite a violent history as well and yet have zero gun crime. Most regions in the US don't directly have a relationship with slavery and even accommodating for elevated levels of crime among those communities - gun violence is still very high. Guns are widespread and available to almost anyone in the US, and there's a huge amount of gun crime. Canada/Australia - more restrictions, less gun crime. Europe - quite heavily restricted, a small amount of gun crime. Japan - effectively totally banned, and almost 0 gun crime. Switzerland has militia training and ownership, but it's generally not pistols, and they definitely don't carry guns for personal defence. Their rifles are locked up in the basement. Mexico has tight gun laws, but they're not enforced. While there are concerns about freedoms, the formation of 'tyranny' etc. to contend with, there's no doubt that effective and highly restricted gun control has a significant impact. To anyone who's lived in Europe, Can/Aus/NZ and the US, it's just blindingly obvious, it's not a rhetorical argument at all, it boils down to trying to understand the reasoning of people who have difficulty conceding the reality of how safe it really is when there aren't that many guns floating around. Most police in the UK don't even carry guns, that's how real the implications are ... and it's not cause 'they didn't have a revolution'. EDIT - FYI here are the data points: USA: 4.5/100K gun homicides, 1.2 guns per/capita Canada: 0.5/100K gun homicides and 0.4 guns per/capita France: 0.1/100K gun homicides and 0.2 guns per/capita Japan: 0.0/100K (!!!) gun homicides and 0.006 guns per/capita It's crystal clear and unambiguous: for countries that have civil infrastructure, general lawfulness and the means to affect social policy etc. - fewer guns means fewer gun crimes. Obviously, there will be variations (i.e. Scotland has a crazy amount of stabbings) but prevalence of guns is a firs order issue. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
- philwelch 5y ago
  > More effective and regulated gun control and less access to guns is 100% consistent with less gun crime. So what? I don't care about "less gun crime"; I care about "less violent crime". Talking about the subset of crime, violence, death, and injury that's caused by firearms is fundamentally dishonest. You could argue by the exact same logic that the lack of passenger trains in the US reduces train suicides compared to Japan. The specific tools are not the fucking issue. > I mean, you do realize the UK have been at war with others and themselves since the dawn of time? That they had their own 'revolution' and a Republic 100 years before the US? Sure. For instance, England and Scotland were intermittently at war for centuries, which resulted in a lot of the people living in the English/Scottish border regions developing a particularly violent way of life. These people were a huge pain in the neck after the unification of Great Britain. So a whole lot of them got shipped across the Atlantic Ocean to America. You know who else the British shipped to America? Violent criminals. This was one of the reasons we declared independence, actually. People think of Australia as a former penal colony, but that only started because we stopped letting them ship people here. Who else came here? The Puritans, whose other accomplishments included such things as burning witches and violently establishing that English Republic you alluded to. The normal, peaceful, law-abiding Brit who wasn't particularly interested in violence or religious fanaticism? Those are the guys who stayed behind in Britain.

syntheticcorp 5y ago

New Zealand does not have a “very low” rate of gun ownership. It has ~ 26 firearms per 100 people, well short of the USAs 120 but still ranked 20th in the world.