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> some future government if it got out of hand [spoiler alert: you couldn't!] You absolutely could if the country had any significant portion of the population

> some future government if it got out of hand [spoiler alert: you couldn't!] You absolutely could if the country had any significant portion of the population against the government. The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families. > to day in a society awash with guns, violent crime and mass shootings. But it’s not “awash”. I’ve been in the US for >50 years now and have never seen any gun-related crime and only know one person who was robbed in the 80s in New York by a guy who just said he had a gun. I’ve have however seen violent crime involving fists, bats, clubs, brass knuckles, and knives. This is why when it comes down to it, Americans don’t want to give up their guns. The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up.

Gordonjcp 4y ago
> The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up. In the US, there's a mass shooting on average every 22.5 hours. You have a mass shooting more often than most people have a massive shit. You have a problem, whether you see it or not.
- NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
  "Mass shooting" (in the advocacy-numbers sense you're using it) is generally taken to mean three or more people hit by stuff that came out of a gun (framgents, ricochets count too). It is not "three people shot", much less "three people dead". When using this statistic, the average number of people killed is about one per "mass shooting". What's more, most of these shootings are among people who are participating in organized crime in bad parts of cities. It's not random, innocent people getting shot. The random, innocent people getting shot ones are the ones that are profitable to put on news streams, though. They are exceedingly rare. Using reasonable definitions of "mass shooting", the number so far in 2023 is 1-3.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    Okay, but that's still more than any other developed country.
    - NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
      I honestly still don't get the fixation on shootings in groups. But yes, the U.S. is more shoot-y than comparable countries for sure.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        You don't think maybe you should fix that?
        NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
        Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.
        dane-pgp 4y ago
        > Shootings ... are a very small problem compared to things like ... car crashes, and tiktok. That's an interesting claim. Perhaps you didn't know that "Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24" according to [1]. I suppose that statistic might include gun suicides and gun accidents, which (under an extremely contrived definition) don't count as "shootings", but that still misses the point that sensible governments have successfully reduced car accident deaths by tightening regulations related to vehicle ownership and licensing, whereas America is notably bad at doing so for guns, and is paying the price for that failure with the blood of its children. If you could provide a statistic for the number of annual US deaths due to TikTok, I'd be interested to compare that to shooting deaths too. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/guns-now-kill-more-children-and-young-adults-than-car-crashes/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/guns-now-kill-mor...
daedalus_f 4y ago
Firearms related injuries are the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the USA. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
- NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
  This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true. That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor. If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.
  - daedalus_f 4y ago
    There have been 236 shootings resulting in death or injury in American schools since 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000–present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
    - NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
      It looks like 348 according to that data, resulting in 150 deaths over about 13 years, or 11.5 deaths per year on average. There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year. And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), some don't involve any intent to shoot anyone (firing a gun in the air), some involve justified shootings (i.e., in self-defense), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated. For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.
swexbe 4y ago
> The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families. But this would still be true if the families are fighting with pots and pans. And if your enemy is a drone flying at 10000m it really makes no difference if you're fighting with an AR-15 or a pan.
joe463369 4y ago
And British people don't want to make that trade off. It's odd to use our gun laws to say we're oppressed by an undemocratic system when the vast, vast majority of people simply don't want the person standing next to them at the till in Tesco to have a pistol under their coat.
- NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
  The timescale at which a disarmed populace becomes a problem is decades to centuries. It's all fine and dandy while you like your government. How long do you think it'll stay that way? There are people alive who remember being herded into boxcars in Germany, in 2023 a well-run social-democratic beacon of progress and industry in Europe.
  - joe463369 4y ago
    I'm not sure what the point is here. We all agree in the UK that we don't want guns to be legal, so they aren't. An American's view that we'd be better off if they were is neither here nor there.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    > It's all fine and dandy while you like your government. I don't like our government. I don't think owning guns would improve the situation, though. What good do you think you owning a gun will do you?
    - NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
      Heh, I think the level of dislike we're talking about here is different. You may not like them but it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now. The point at which "power comes from the barrel of a gun" becomes relevant someplace like the U.K. is a ways off for almost everyone living there, thankfully. The worry is twofold: first, not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place. Second, if things are really bad at present, bad to the point that fighting seems reasonable, you want to be able to fight. Disarming now means you'll likely be disarmed in an uncertain future, too. Our modern social democracies seem really stable, but from the perspective of a historian there is no reason to believe they are. They're infants. There's a war in Europe right now, and there are people alive who remember the Holocaust.

Gordonjcp 4y ago

> The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up. In the US, there's a mass shooting on average every 22.5 hours. You have a mass shooting more often than most people have a massive shit. You have a problem, whether you see it or not.

NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
"Mass shooting" (in the advocacy-numbers sense you're using it) is generally taken to mean three or more people hit by stuff that came out of a gun (framgents, ricochets count too). It is not "three people shot", much less "three people dead". When using this statistic, the average number of people killed is about one per "mass shooting". What's more, most of these shootings are among people who are participating in organized crime in bad parts of cities. It's not random, innocent people getting shot. The random, innocent people getting shot ones are the ones that are profitable to put on news streams, though. They are exceedingly rare. Using reasonable definitions of "mass shooting", the number so far in 2023 is 1-3.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Okay, but that's still more than any other developed country.
  - NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
    I honestly still don't get the fixation on shootings in groups. But yes, the U.S. is more shoot-y than comparable countries for sure.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      You don't think maybe you should fix that?
      - NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
        Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.
        dane-pgp 4y ago
        > Shootings ... are a very small problem compared to things like ... car crashes, and tiktok. That's an interesting claim. Perhaps you didn't know that "Firearms now exceed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of injury-related death for people ages one to 24" according to [1]. I suppose that statistic might include gun suicides and gun accidents, which (under an extremely contrived definition) don't count as "shootings", but that still misses the point that sensible governments have successfully reduced car accident deaths by tightening regulations related to vehicle ownership and licensing, whereas America is notably bad at doing so for guns, and is paying the price for that failure with the blood of its children. If you could provide a statistic for the number of annual US deaths due to TikTok, I'd be interested to compare that to shooting deaths too. [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/guns-now-kill-more-children-and-young-adults-than-car-crashes/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/guns-now-kill-mor...

daedalus_f 4y ago

Firearms related injuries are the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the USA. https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true. That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor. If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.
- daedalus_f 4y ago
  There have been 236 shootings resulting in death or injury in American schools since 2010. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_the_United_States_(2000–present) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...
  - NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
    It looks like 348 according to that data, resulting in 150 deaths over about 13 years, or 11.5 deaths per year on average. There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year. And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), some don't involve any intent to shoot anyone (firing a gun in the air), some involve justified shootings (i.e., in self-defense), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated. For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.

swexbe 4y ago

> The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families. But this would still be true if the families are fighting with pots and pans. And if your enemy is a drone flying at 10000m it really makes no difference if you're fighting with an AR-15 or a pan.

joe463369 4y ago

And British people don't want to make that trade off. It's odd to use our gun laws to say we're oppressed by an undemocratic system when the vast, vast majority of people simply don't want the person standing next to them at the till in Tesco to have a pistol under their coat.

NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
The timescale at which a disarmed populace becomes a problem is decades to centuries. It's all fine and dandy while you like your government. How long do you think it'll stay that way? There are people alive who remember being herded into boxcars in Germany, in 2023 a well-run social-democratic beacon of progress and industry in Europe.
- joe463369 4y ago
  I'm not sure what the point is here. We all agree in the UK that we don't want guns to be legal, so they aren't. An American's view that we'd be better off if they were is neither here nor there.
- Gordonjcp 4y ago
  > It's all fine and dandy while you like your government. I don't like our government. I don't think owning guns would improve the situation, though. What good do you think you owning a gun will do you?
  - NoImmatureAdHom 4y ago
    Heh, I think the level of dislike we're talking about here is different. You may not like them but it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now. The point at which "power comes from the barrel of a gun" becomes relevant someplace like the U.K. is a ways off for almost everyone living there, thankfully. The worry is twofold: first, not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place. Second, if things are really bad at present, bad to the point that fighting seems reasonable, you want to be able to fight. Disarming now means you'll likely be disarmed in an uncertain future, too. Our modern social democracies seem really stable, but from the perspective of a historian there is no reason to believe they are. They're infants. There's a war in Europe right now, and there are people alive who remember the Holocaust.