5 ms·

The rest of the civilized world doesn't seem to have a problem. Their stricter gun control laws seem to work just fine.

by wffurr 10mo ago

Insanity 10mo ago
Yeah, it's obviously a gun control issue. But the US has such a deeply ingrained cultural association with owning guns, and thinking that this means "freedom" in case the government turns on the people lol, that I doubt banning them happens in our lifetime.
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up? What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns: Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". (Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.) Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance". Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all". Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms. Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out. Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness. Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are. And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns. Make gun obsession weird again.
  - sudobash1 10mo ago
    > Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do. In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
    - exasperaited 10mo ago
      Polarization is the point. It is time to reclaim the idea that gun ownership is at best an unfortunate necessity and gun fandom is creepy shit.
  - Empact 10mo ago
    You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing. Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians? If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order. In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
    - thunderfork 10mo ago
      "I need my guns to defend myself from the (((barbarian hordes)))" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads the rest of the planet treats gun nuts like the nuts they are. Unfortunately for the US, the US valorizes this particular psychosis
- JuniperMesos 10mo ago
  https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-... > There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
  - jama211 10mo ago
    A substack that tells you to “read Wikipedia” is not a valid criticism of the obvious.
stronglikedan 10mo ago
The rest of the world does indeed have a problem, but the perps just use different weapons. It's not the guns.
- exasperaited 10mo ago
  America has dramatically worse rates of knife crime than the western countries it likes to point at though. Doesn't that undermine your argument?
  - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
    Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.
    - exasperaited 10mo ago
      > Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
    - jama211 10mo ago
      You make a good point! The US isn’t really civilised enough to compare it to countries with proper modern and safe societies, so why should it aim to those heights? If we just compare the US to other countries with issues of violent crime we don’t have to solve any problems at all to look acceptable.
- jama211 10mo ago
  “The perps” gives away a huge flaw in your thinking, that people are inherently good or inherently bad and that “bad” people are motivated to do bad things always and will always find a way to do them and “good” people don’t. This is entirely incorrect and has been proven so false for so long that any further point made without understanding this should be dismissed out of hand.
JuniperMesos 10mo ago
The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. What specific regions or poltical jurisdictions do you think count or do not count as part of the civilized world?
- cwillu 10mo ago
  ‹inserts the animaniacs “countries of the world” song here›
  - jama211 10mo ago
    Hahaha nice
- CamperBob2 10mo ago
  The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. As is "doesn't seem to have a problem."
  - wffurr 10mo ago
    I am sorry I don't have the precise statement about relative rates of gun deaths and mass shootings in the US vs the rest of the OECD. Here's a data point to ponder, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 This is not true for any other OECD country.
    - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
      I wa surprised by this, because Mexico is in the OECD. According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1428691/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/..., the firearm-related death rate (including suicides and accidents) in 2022 in Mexico for children and adolescents (age 1-19) is 4.9/100k, compared to 5.9/100k in the US. But the overall homicide rate is 6.5/100k for Mexico vs 4.7/100k in the US. So this is consistent with Mexico being a more violent society than the US, but using somewhat fewer guns in the process (and the numbers are still pretty similar). There's also questions about how reliable the Mexican firearm homicide data is - a lot of these are presumably happening in cartel-controlled areas where Mexican government state capacity is limited, including the capacity to properly gather statistics.

The rest of the civilized world doesn't seem to have a problem. Their stricter gun control laws seem to work just fine.

by wffurr 10mo ago

The rest of the civilized world doesn't seem to have a problem. Their stricter gun control laws seem to work just fine.

Yeah, it's obviously a gun control issue. But the US has such a deeply ingrained cultural association with owning guns, and thinking that this means "freedom" in case the government turns on the people lol, that I doubt banning them happens in our lifetime.

exasperaited 10mo ago
You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up? What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns: Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". (Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.) Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance". Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all". Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms. Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out. Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness. Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are. And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns. Make gun obsession weird again.
- sudobash1 10mo ago
  > Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain". That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do. In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
  - exasperaited 10mo ago
    Polarization is the point. It is time to reclaim the idea that gun ownership is at best an unfortunate necessity and gun fandom is creepy shit.
- Empact 10mo ago
  You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing. Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians? If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order. In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
  - thunderfork 10mo ago
    "I need my guns to defend myself from the (((barbarian hordes)))" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads the rest of the planet treats gun nuts like the nuts they are. Unfortunately for the US, the US valorizes this particular psychosis
JuniperMesos 10mo ago
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-between https://hwfo.substack.com/p/everybodys-lying-about-the-link-... > There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
- jama211 10mo ago
  A substack that tells you to “read Wikipedia” is not a valid criticism of the obvious.

stronglikedan 10mo ago

The rest of the world does indeed have a problem, but the perps just use different weapons. It's not the guns.

exasperaited 10mo ago
America has dramatically worse rates of knife crime than the western countries it likes to point at though. Doesn't that undermine your argument?
- JuniperMesos 10mo ago
  Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.
  - exasperaited 10mo ago
    > Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
  - jama211 10mo ago
    You make a good point! The US isn’t really civilised enough to compare it to countries with proper modern and safe societies, so why should it aim to those heights? If we just compare the US to other countries with issues of violent crime we don’t have to solve any problems at all to look acceptable.
jama211 10mo ago
“The perps” gives away a huge flaw in your thinking, that people are inherently good or inherently bad and that “bad” people are motivated to do bad things always and will always find a way to do them and “good” people don’t. This is entirely incorrect and has been proven so false for so long that any further point made without understanding this should be dismissed out of hand.

JuniperMesos 10mo ago

The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. What specific regions or poltical jurisdictions do you think count or do not count as part of the civilized world?

cwillu 10mo ago
‹inserts the animaniacs “countries of the world” song here›
- jama211 10mo ago
  Hahaha nice
CamperBob2 10mo ago
The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. As is "doesn't seem to have a problem."
- wffurr 10mo ago
  I am sorry I don't have the precise statement about relative rates of gun deaths and mass shootings in the US vs the rest of the OECD. Here's a data point to ponder, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761 This is not true for any other OECD country.
  - JuniperMesos 10mo ago
    I wa surprised by this, because Mexico is in the OECD. According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2024.1428691/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/..., the firearm-related death rate (including suicides and accidents) in 2022 in Mexico for children and adolescents (age 1-19) is 4.9/100k, compared to 5.9/100k in the US. But the overall homicide rate is 6.5/100k for Mexico vs 4.7/100k in the US. So this is consistent with Mexico being a more violent society than the US, but using somewhat fewer guns in the process (and the numbers are still pretty similar). There's also questions about how reliable the Mexican firearm homicide data is - a lot of these are presumably happening in cartel-controlled areas where Mexican government state capacity is limited, including the capacity to properly gather statistics.