Although this thread does not function under the same strict guidelines as the USPMT, it is still a general practice on TL to provide a source with an explanation on why it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion. Failure to do so will result in a mod action.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Also the argument on why anybody 'needs' an assault rifle.
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote:
On January 30 2013 11:56 Maesy wrote: This is my opinion in one video. I'm not sure if this channel has been brought up since there's so many pages on this subject. I was borderline on the subject and this guys logic alone made me pro-gun. Go through a lot of his videos if one doesn't convince you. I know this specific one is only about one part of the issue (Specifically, Obama's Gun Law).
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote: [quote]
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
[quote] Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
Only a few? Where do you get that idea from?
From the sentence directly following the one you seem to have actually read, would be my guess. He's got a point.
Most military and secret police and similar organizations working for rather dastardly governments tend to commit atrocities against their own populations. All you'd need is to make sure you had people working areas they didn't grow up in, and a few firing squads, you'd keep control.
Propaganda, control of information, threats, coercion. Not everybody is going to disagree, and if it's a slippery slope based on "security" stuff, well, in the end it's just following orders.
It wouldn't be particularly hard to imagine a progression like this occurring, as a hypothetical:
Organized religious groups X, Y, and Z get banned due to extremist concerns.
Existing extremists associated with those religions start causing problems, in the name of Freedom of Religion. At the same time, non-extremists protest.
Non-extremists get caught up in severe measures directed at extremists due to bad intel.
Mass protests erupt. People with connections to organizations X, Y, and Z are arrested, internment begins as a temporary measure to reduce volatility.
Violence on both sides escalates. Neither side is completely in the wrong the entire way through, but you get a violent internal conflict. Active military members get spied on by their own Intelligence units and whoever moves into the role of the Secret Police. (Probably a combination of NSA and DHS, with some SWAT and Border Patrol for specialist knowledge.)
Dissent in the ranks is weeded out and stifled with disappearing soldiers, coercion, threats. Shit continues to hit fan.
Now, that's a purely hypothetical situation, but it's also a logical progression of events. It's also not a "Oh look, we woke up and someone replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Iron Fist."
On January 30 2013 13:45 StayPhrosty wrote: [quote]
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
Only a few? Where do you get that idea from?
From the sentence directly following the one you seem to have actually read, would be my guess. He's got a point.
Most military and secret police and similar organizations working for rather dastardly governments tend to commit atrocities against their own populations. All you'd need is to make sure you had people working areas they didn't grow up in, and a few firing squads, you'd keep control.
Propaganda, control of information, threats, coercion. Not everybody is going to disagree, and if it's a slippery slope based on "security" stuff, well, in the end it's just following orders.
It wouldn't be particularly hard to imagine a progression like this occurring, as a hypothetical:
Organized religious groups X, Y, and Z get banned due to extremist concerns.
Existing extremists associated with those religions start causing problems, in the name of Freedom of Religion. At the same time, non-extremists protest.
Non-extremists get caught up in severe measures directed at extremists due to bad intel.
Mass protests erupt. People with connections to organizations X, Y, and Z are arrested, internment begins as a temporary measure to reduce volatility.
Violence on both sides escalates. Neither side is completely in the wrong the entire way through, but you get a violent internal conflict. Active military members get spied on by their own Intelligence units and whoever moves into the role of the Secret Police. (Probably a combination of NSA and DHS, with some SWAT and Border Patrol for specialist knowledge.)
Dissent in the ranks is weeded out and stifled with disappearing soldiers, coercion, threats. Shit continues to hit fan.
Now, that's a purely hypothetical situation, but it's also a logical progression of events. It's also not a "Oh look, we woke up and someone replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Iron Fist."
I'd like to know what non-military faction can stop the United States military from doing what it wants to do? Heck, I'd like to know a military faction that can stand toe to toe with the US army as it is right now.
On January 30 2013 14:15 Millitron wrote: [quote] 1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
Only a few? Where do you get that idea from?
From the sentence directly following the one you seem to have actually read, would be my guess. He's got a point.
Most military and secret police and similar organizations working for rather dastardly governments tend to commit atrocities against their own populations. All you'd need is to make sure you had people working areas they didn't grow up in, and a few firing squads, you'd keep control.
Propaganda, control of information, threats, coercion. Not everybody is going to disagree, and if it's a slippery slope based on "security" stuff, well, in the end it's just following orders.
It wouldn't be particularly hard to imagine a progression like this occurring, as a hypothetical:
Organized religious groups X, Y, and Z get banned due to extremist concerns.
Existing extremists associated with those religions start causing problems, in the name of Freedom of Religion. At the same time, non-extremists protest.
Non-extremists get caught up in severe measures directed at extremists due to bad intel.
Mass protests erupt. People with connections to organizations X, Y, and Z are arrested, internment begins as a temporary measure to reduce volatility.
Violence on both sides escalates. Neither side is completely in the wrong the entire way through, but you get a violent internal conflict. Active military members get spied on by their own Intelligence units and whoever moves into the role of the Secret Police. (Probably a combination of NSA and DHS, with some SWAT and Border Patrol for specialist knowledge.)
Dissent in the ranks is weeded out and stifled with disappearing soldiers, coercion, threats. Shit continues to hit fan.
Now, that's a purely hypothetical situation, but it's also a logical progression of events. It's also not a "Oh look, we woke up and someone replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Iron Fist."
I'd like to know what non-military faction can stop the United States military from doing what it wants to do? Heck, I'd like to know a military faction that can stand toe to toe with the US army as it is right now.
I've asked the same question. My personal opinion, either forcing a negotiating position, or gaining external support and/or recognition.
See, the military would absolutely win in a straight shooting war, and intelligence resources are powerful. I don't deny that, I've even pointed it out a few times.
However, self determination is part of the equation. Better to die a free man, to a lot. Would you agree, though, that the hypothetical I laid out sounds more reasonable than "that would never happen, the whole Army would just say 'no' to fascism!" like some people say?
You can't have the whole army turn guns on their own friends, relatives, neighbours, etc.
There might be SOME degree of violence going down, or bombings, or something, but you could never get the WHOLE US ARMY to start a war against average americans JUST BECAUSE the president decides so. It's silly to think that. Privates won't need to say "no", generals will get their chance to do so long before that. Do you think the whole army leadership is composed of mindless drones? "Oh, just kill everyone in the US? OK!"
Please.
And even if they did, owning guns would do nothing that create a slaughter fest. You won't stop tanks and planes with redneck rifles come on.
It's a fundamental right and it's not gonna change, but it should be severely controlled and it should require heavy psych analysis before anyone is allowed to own a gun. And prove they have safe storage for it, etc. It wouldn't completely eliminate the situations when retards take them to mow down a school, but it would probably reduce that number by a lot.
On January 30 2013 15:10 StayPhrosty wrote: [quote]
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
Only a few? Where do you get that idea from?
From the sentence directly following the one you seem to have actually read, would be my guess. He's got a point.
Most military and secret police and similar organizations working for rather dastardly governments tend to commit atrocities against their own populations. All you'd need is to make sure you had people working areas they didn't grow up in, and a few firing squads, you'd keep control.
Propaganda, control of information, threats, coercion. Not everybody is going to disagree, and if it's a slippery slope based on "security" stuff, well, in the end it's just following orders.
It wouldn't be particularly hard to imagine a progression like this occurring, as a hypothetical:
Organized religious groups X, Y, and Z get banned due to extremist concerns.
Existing extremists associated with those religions start causing problems, in the name of Freedom of Religion. At the same time, non-extremists protest.
Non-extremists get caught up in severe measures directed at extremists due to bad intel.
Mass protests erupt. People with connections to organizations X, Y, and Z are arrested, internment begins as a temporary measure to reduce volatility.
Violence on both sides escalates. Neither side is completely in the wrong the entire way through, but you get a violent internal conflict. Active military members get spied on by their own Intelligence units and whoever moves into the role of the Secret Police. (Probably a combination of NSA and DHS, with some SWAT and Border Patrol for specialist knowledge.)
Dissent in the ranks is weeded out and stifled with disappearing soldiers, coercion, threats. Shit continues to hit fan.
Now, that's a purely hypothetical situation, but it's also a logical progression of events. It's also not a "Oh look, we woke up and someone replaced the Stars and Stripes with the Iron Fist."
I'd like to know what non-military faction can stop the United States military from doing what it wants to do? Heck, I'd like to know a military faction that can stand toe to toe with the US army as it is right now.
I've asked the same question. My personal opinion, either forcing a negotiating position, or gaining external support and/or recognition.
See, the military would absolutely win in a straight shooting war, and intelligence resources are powerful. I don't deny that, I've even pointed it out a few times.
However, self determination is part of the equation. Better to die a free man, to a lot. Would you agree, though, that the hypothetical I laid out sounds more reasonable than "that would never happen, the whole Army would just say 'no' to fascism!" like some people say?
Nope, I could much more imagine the army refusing to attack US civilians than that vague progression you laid out.
"Religious groups get banned" is a hard place to start. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion..."
These groups are of an unspecified size and you set up steps with phrases like "severe measures". What groups could these possibly be? What sort of "measures" are you talking about? What would happen is the ban would be immediately overturned in court. That first step is just not a reasonable one. You jump from protests and clashes between two groups to... what exactly? Secret police that sound a lot like the FBI, which already does most of what you're talking about, spying on citizens and the like they just get warrants first. You haven't established a point at which civil liberties are lost or democratic processes fall apart, there's zero substance to your progression, huge leaps of logic that just don't work for me.
If the undefined "religious groups" were preaching revolution that's a different story but then that would be the army putting down an insurrection of religious extremists attempting to overthrow the secular and duly elected government acting in accordance with the constitution. I would fully support those actions. We have strong constitutional freedom of speech and religion in the US, I don't see anything like what you said as in any way reasonable or likely.
Edit: Respecting, not regarding religion, always need to check those constitutional quotes.
So you take half of a sentence, out of context, and decide that a vague outline of a progression (because I don't exactly plan around or expect this sort of shit) isn't specific enough?
If I'd given you specifics, you'd just call me a conspiracy theorist whackjob anyways.
Certain groups getting banned wouldn't be hard. Let's say, for a hypothetical, that gay marriage got legalized nationwide. Some radical religious group does something criminal as a response. They get labeled as a terrorist threat (the federal government's definition of terrorism follows: “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” Source).
FBI, ATF, and local police get into a jurisdictional clusterfuck. That's a total stretch, right?
Protests by well-meaning but misinformed churches, and the counter-protestors get into fights, tensions rise, violence occurs, a cop or two is injured or killed. Quite a few suspects in custody. Tensions rise.
Law enforcement hits overstretch fast as things spread out of control nationwide. The military gets called in, pointing to their "experience in a peacekeeping role" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military fails to put a quiet, calm lid on thing. (People in military towns can tell you, soldiers and civilians don't mix where there aren't guns involved.) Curfews get established, police get sidelined.
Random minor violence escalates fast; the military isn't as well-versed as police in peacekeeping operations. Rocks get thrown, eventually a shot gets fired, shit hits the fan, nobody knows who's fault it was.
Police functions cease being effective as government officials start meeting public mistrust, even threats. People continuing to work in governmental capacity must hide their faces on the way to work. Distrust rises.
From what I just outlined, no step seeming (to me) to be particularly unreasonable in this imperfect world we live in, having actually witnessed how not stellar soldiers can be in peacekeeping operations, we could easily end up with domestic political issues blowing up into a civil war, or a situation where the government tries to take excessive measures to restore order.
I'm not going further into the hypotheticals, because frankly, it's not my cup of tea. If you believe in a perfect little bunny rabbits and rainbows Equestria on Earth, I probably can't break you of that.
Also, please answer this question: If you truly believe we live in the kind of world where that sort of shit couldn't possibly happen, why do you believe we need gun control? Because that kind of shit is the same kind of shit. People not being perfect, doing fucked up shit and/or making mistakes.
The argument that you wouldn't be able to stop a tyrannical US government in some hypothetical future is a pretty weak one. Many people would rather die than live in a horrible dictatorship no matter how unlikely. Saying "LOL IT WONT HAPPEN BRO" is just incredibly ignorant. Democracy is a rare occurance through human history. It's a blip on the timeline of humans being here. It's not a strange idea that it might one day fail.
On January 31 2013 10:43 CubEdIn wrote: You can't have the whole army turn guns on their own friends, relatives, neighbours, etc.
There might be SOME degree of violence going down, or bombings, or something, but you could never get the WHOLE US ARMY to start a war against average americans JUST BECAUSE the president decides so. It's silly to think that. Privates won't need to say "no", generals will get their chance to do so long before that. Do you think the whole army leadership is composed of mindless drones? "Oh, just kill everyone in the US? OK!"
Please.
And even if they did, owning guns would do nothing that create a slaughter fest. You won't stop tanks and planes with redneck rifles come on.
It's a fundamental right and it's not gonna change, but it should be severely controlled and it should require heavy psych analysis before anyone is allowed to own a gun. And prove they have safe storage for it, etc. It wouldn't completely eliminate the situations when retards take them to mow down a school, but it would probably reduce that number by a lot.
Strawman, it would be a gradual process involving many more individuals than just the President.
So how is a scenario where my neighbors are fighting guerilla warfare with their arsenal of weapons better than an oppressive government? This justifies guns being less regulated than automobiles, booze, and cigarettes?
On January 31 2013 12:02 mynameisgreat11 wrote: So how is a scenario where my neighbors are fighting guerilla warfare with their arsenal of weapons better than an oppressive government? This justifies guns being less regulated than automobiles, booze, and cigarettes?
Many people would argue it beats the gas chamber, or whatever other crazy things could happen. I personally don't think it should be less regulated than the things you mentioned.
On January 31 2013 12:02 mynameisgreat11 wrote: So how is a scenario where my neighbors are fighting guerilla warfare with their arsenal of weapons better than an oppressive government? This justifies guns being less regulated than automobiles, booze, and cigarettes?
Less regulated? Ex-cons can drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and drive and own cars, legally. They can't legally own a gun.
Now that your hyperbole has failed, well, frankly, one of the core facets of Democracy is building a functional societal structure on tenets of self determination and equality. So, if you believe it's a good form of government, then while the situation it would entail isn't ideal (although they almost certainly wouldn't be operating out of houses successfully, so it would depend on how you define "neighbors"), you'd at least need to consider that to be their decision to make.
On January 31 2013 12:02 mynameisgreat11 wrote: So how is a scenario where my neighbors are fighting guerilla warfare with their arsenal of weapons better than an oppressive government? This justifies guns being less regulated than automobiles, booze, and cigarettes?
Less regulated? Ex-cons can drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and drive and own cars, legally. They can't legally own a gun.
Now that your hyperbole has failed, well, frankly, one of the core facets of Democracy is building a functional societal structure on tenets of self determination and equality. So, if you believe it's a good form of government, then while the situation it would entail isn't ideal (although they almost certainly wouldn't be operating out of houses successfully, so it would depend on how you define "neighbors"), you'd at least need to consider that to be their decision to make.
Apparently you're unaware of the many people that can't buy alcohol, cigarettes, or own and drive cars. Cherry picking a single regulation that only applies to guns is not an argument.
On January 31 2013 12:02 mynameisgreat11 wrote: So how is a scenario where my neighbors are fighting guerilla warfare with their arsenal of weapons better than an oppressive government? This justifies guns being less regulated than automobiles, booze, and cigarettes?
Less regulated? Ex-cons can drink alcohol, smoke cigarettes, and drive and own cars, legally. They can't legally own a gun.
Now that your hyperbole has failed, well, frankly, one of the core facets of Democracy is building a functional societal structure on tenets of self determination and equality. So, if you believe it's a good form of government, then while the situation it would entail isn't ideal (although they almost certainly wouldn't be operating out of houses successfully, so it would depend on how you define "neighbors"), you'd at least need to consider that to be their decision to make.
Apparently you're unaware of the many people that can't buy alcohol, cigarettes, or own and drive cars. Cherry picking a single regulation that only applies to guns is not an argument.
Ah, of course. Well, then, let's discuss some more regs... to own a handgun, 21, like Alcohol, but with paperwork and a background check, minimal though they may be. (They also check your ID in there, like with alcohol, so that one's mutual.)
Cigarettes, only 18 (almost the whole country, except that weird exception, Alabama), like buying a rifle. ID for cigarettes, ID, paperwork, background check for rifle.
Really, though, with alcohol and tobacco, the ID gets kind of skipped if you look "clearly" old enough (depends on the establishment and local laws), which could make it easier for an illegal immigrant to purchase alcohol/tobacco, since they have to show one, and have an SSN that matches it, to buy the gun.
Cars, well, insurance and a drivers license to buy them from a dealership, but let's face it, you can get an insurance card that isn't worth the paper you printed it on, bringing that one even, since we can treat the credit check to being similar to a background check in paperwork.
On January 31 2013 11:29 JingleHell wrote: So you take half of a sentence, out of context, and decide that a vague outline of a progression (because I don't exactly plan around or expect this sort of shit) isn't specific enough?
If I'd given you specifics, you'd just call me a conspiracy theorist whackjob anyways.
Certain groups getting banned wouldn't be hard. Let's say, for a hypothetical, that gay marriage got legalized nationwide. Some radical religious group does something criminal as a response. They get labeled as a terrorist threat (the federal government's definition of terrorism follows: “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” Source).
FBI, ATF, and local police get into a jurisdictional clusterfuck. That's a total stretch, right?
Protests by well-meaning but misinformed churches, and the counter-protestors get into fights, tensions rise, violence occurs, a cop or two is injured or killed. Quite a few suspects in custody. Tensions rise.
Law enforcement hits overstretch fast as things spread out of control nationwide. The military gets called in, pointing to their "experience in a peacekeeping role" in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military fails to put a quiet, calm lid on thing. (People in military towns can tell you, soldiers and civilians don't mix where there aren't guns involved.) Curfews get established, police get sidelined.
Random minor violence escalates fast; the military isn't as well-versed as police in peacekeeping operations. Rocks get thrown, eventually a shot gets fired, shit hits the fan, nobody knows who's fault it was.
Police functions cease being effective as government officials start meeting public mistrust, even threats. People continuing to work in governmental capacity must hide their faces on the way to work. Distrust rises.
From what I just outlined, no step seeming (to me) to be particularly unreasonable in this imperfect world we live in, having actually witnessed how not stellar soldiers can be in peacekeeping operations, we could easily end up with domestic political issues blowing up into a civil war, or a situation where the government tries to take excessive measures to restore order.
I'm not going further into the hypotheticals, because frankly, it's not my cup of tea. If you believe in a perfect little bunny rabbits and rainbows Equestria on Earth, I probably can't break you of that.
Also, please answer this question: If you truly believe we live in the kind of world where that sort of shit couldn't possibly happen, why do you believe we need gun control? Because that kind of shit is the same kind of shit. People not being perfect, doing fucked up shit and/or making mistakes.
Just because I think that your "reasonable" description of the end of American democracy is not at all reasonable doesn't mean I think that people are perfect or not going to fuck up. I would just remind you that we had a civil war over a far more decisive issue than gay marriage. It turned out badly for the rebels, marked a major expansion in our freedoms from the oppressive state governments and we held on to the whole democracy thing through it all. We also managed to industrialize, rise to the status of sole superpower and get through the cold war and it's ever present threat of nuclear destruction. Besides, your scenario supports gun control, both of those groups would be heavily armed and capable of severe damage as a result of our gun control regime. It's much easier to control a mob of protesters armed with rocks than an ad-hoc militia of fundamentalists armed with a whole lot of rifles and pistols.
Personally I lean towards stronger gun control because I have almost been shot in a manner scarily similar to that high school kid murdered by a crazy old man. (article was on the last page or two) If the guy had a bat instead of a handgun, the kid would probably still be alive, or if the guy had called the cops and waited, but he had to go "protect himself". The state has never almost shot me, never came close in any way. So the risk to my personal safety and liberties (I lose those if I'm dead) is clear: crazy civilians who think they are "responsible gun owners" are, as far as i can tell, a far bigger threat to me than the government. I know a whole lot of people who call themselves responsible, that are just not in any way responsible gun owners, they do own their guns legally though, that's the only real requirement for "responsible" as far as I can tell.
I just don't think a whole lot of small arms will do the job of resisting a modern military, plus a lot of gun owners just won't fight back when the shit hits the fans. After Katrina there were gun seizures, it was illegal and a gross overreach by the police chief. The owners filed a lawsuit and got their guns back. No one shot any cops, the rule of law prevailed, the one person who resisted ended up in custody with a broken shoulder. I can only hope she got damages.
On January 31 2013 10:43 CubEdIn wrote: You can't have the whole army turn guns on their own friends, relatives, neighbours, etc.
There might be SOME degree of violence going down, or bombings, or something, but you could never get the WHOLE US ARMY to start a war against average americans JUST BECAUSE the president decides so. It's silly to think that. Privates won't need to say "no", generals will get their chance to do so long before that. Do you think the whole army leadership is composed of mindless drones? "Oh, just kill everyone in the US? OK!"
Please.
And even if they did, owning guns would do nothing that create a slaughter fest. You won't stop tanks and planes with redneck rifles come on.
It's a fundamental right and it's not gonna change, but it should be severely controlled and it should require heavy psych analysis before anyone is allowed to own a gun. And prove they have safe storage for it, etc. It wouldn't completely eliminate the situations when retards take them to mow down a school, but it would probably reduce that number by a lot.
A tyrant doesn't need the whole army. Without help, those few who stand up will get put down.
Rifles are only there so you can last long enough to make makeshift weapons. A simple molotov cocktail on the engine block will burn out most tanks. Hell, you can just get some fertilizer and blow up bridges as they drive over.
Guerrillas would not wage a traditional war. All the tanks and planes in the world can't help you if your opponents have no infrastructure to disable, and you can't even find them.
And last, school shootings aren't all that common. You act like they happen daily all over the US. They don't, at all. There are hundreds of thousands of schools in the US, and maybe 2 a year get shot up.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
On January 30 2013 12:44 StayPhrosty wrote: [quote]
Okay, so I get that the clip law is a little irrational, but I really don't agree with your conclusion. The guy's whole premise is that we should all carry as powerful of a gun as we can get our hands on. We need more bullets and better guns to 'protect' ourselves on the street. Is that really a world you want to live in? Do you want every person in wal-mart to be slinging an AK around their back? Do you want to be standing in line at a grocery store and be afraid that you will literally be shot at any moment? Do you want to live your life honestly terrified that you might bump somebody and they'll shoot you? If everyone carries around a gun then the result is that everyone shoots each other to solve their problems. I don't know about you but I see people shout at each other in traffic every day, I can't imagine what the death toll would be if these idiots had guns instead of horns. Then again, perhaps your real fear is that one day, out of the blue, you're being shot at. Somehow I think my chances would be marginal, at best. Perhaps I'm facing one attacker, and they have an equally powerful gun (or weaker), and neither of us is caught off guard, and both of us carry the same amount of ammunition and are standing in equally covered positions. Oh yeah, and then you have to assume we both have equal aim, and that we both are equally physically fit. Assuming all that, then yeah, having a gun would give you a 50/50 chance of making it out. Then again the chances are kind of low of an attacker not planning to carry a bigger/better gun, or not trying to surprise you, or not bringing a friend or two, or not carrying more ammunition, or not preparing in a firing position, and so on and so on. Oh yeah, and now it's a competition between who has better aim, well i sure hope every law-abiding citizen spends more hours a day getting in shape and practising his aim than this imaginary criminal who has decided to use a gun to make a living. Now society really is survival of the fittest - sure sounds like somewhere I want to live...
Perhaps having fewer guns and fewer criminals would mean fewer people getting shot... Golly, what a crazy utopia that is... oh wait it's called Canada.
Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
... Really?
It should be completely obvious that the *vast* majority in the military would simply put down their weapons and give the bird to the chain of command that said "bomb Chicago" (and this chain of orders wouldn't happen in the first place because it require every single person up the chain of command to be batshit insane).
He's dead-on accurate when he says "sounds like a 14 year old". It's not an insult, it's an apt observation.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: People who argue that guns should be completely unrestricted in order to prevent a dictatorship or tyrannical US government just seem like guns are personal extensions of their deep hatred and mistrust of the federal government and almost want an apocalyptic evil government attack its own citizens just so that they can prove themselves right.
Few people argue that guns should be completely unrestricted. To use a parallel argument, even though most people believe that citizens should have the right to drive automobiles, that doesn't imply that those people believe that driving cars should be completely unrestricted.
On January 30 2013 11:15 white_horse wrote: How some people think that there is a chance that the US government is somehow going to devolve into some facist or dictatorship-type government doesn't make any logical sense. Your arguing against logic. The military is made up of citizens just like yourselves and they aren't going to start dropping bombs on US cities or go shoot up neighborhoods just because a government official tells them to.
History as well as modern events suggest otherwise. Take a look at the Arab Spring for examples of governments using military force against citizens and armed populaces acting as the only possible defense against it.
Right, because the Egyptian army is pretty much the same as the US army... oh wait...
What exactly is your point? Please spell it out, since there are a number of flawed arguments and fallacies you could be referring to with your vague statement.
Sorry, I just got sick of all the arguments with about 2 seconds of thought put into them and I stooped to their level. I suppose if you're willing to give me a serious discussion, I'll start with a few things that jump out at me.
1) Although anecdotal, I seem to see many gun advocates arguing for unrestricted access. Obviously I have the sense to understand this is not how most people feel, but the media is filled with people (e.g. the NRA) who scream and shout any time gun control is even mentioned. I would think most people would be behind 'sensible' gun control laws that are both effective at dealing with crime but do not infringe upon responsible gun owners' "rights." That being said, a lot of the arguments I see simply aim to defend the responsibility of every person to carry a gun. Perhaps you could present an argument against the common gun control position with a little more sense than I usually see and I'll try to respond as best as I can.
2) The US military is, by many standards, the most powerful military in the world. It would take a very contrived situation to try and see another military defeat them in conventional warfare.
3) Obviously guerrilla warfare would be much for effective for a US citizen militia to attempt, but this I think is quite ridiculous to speculate about. What tyrannical superpowers in the past have had is popular support, not a lack of an armed enemy. The US isn't exactly very close to civil war right now in my opinion, and so such a massive societal shift would mean a lot more people being concerned about being attacked by their government than we currently see in the US. Perhaps if this changed then there 'would' be popular support for gun ownership, but right now it simply doesn't make sense to me.
4) A civilian's ability to fight the US government would be shockingly limited if their electricity was cut off. Sure, there are many people who can survive just fine, but the vast majority, I would argue, would simply die because of lack of survival skills, not lack of a gun to shoot back with.
5) Arguing for the benefit of automatic or other weapons as integral for defeating a hypothetical US dictator and his crazy plot is tough enough, but that's far from the only flaw. There have been huge shifts in social values through movements that were pretty much non-violent. Of course there are examples like India's independence and the US civil rights movement, but there are other examples as well. People rarely smoke cigarettes anymore. The public has been educated better and there have been restrictions placed on the sale of them that don't prevent their use but do limit their negative impact.
6) Just to add more of the common arguments - carrying a gun around on the street for self defence from mugging or something is quite likely to escalate the situation.
7) Statistically the US owns more guns and has more gun crime than other so called 'developed' countries like the UK or Canada. Perhaps this is more than just a correlation...
1) I'm fine with background checks and keeping guns away from felons/psychos. Everyone else though should be allowed to have pretty much any gun they want. You can have the more powerful ones require more thorough checks, but there should be nothing outright forbidden. As for the NRA, of course they're filling the media, they're the loudest. Just like how Piers Morgan on your side is constantly yelling about guns. The media isn't about truth, it's about profit, and sensible discussion doesn't make money.
2) Totally. That's why the rebels would fight a guerrilla war. There are plenty of forests and swamps too dense for drones to find you, or you can hide in dense cities where collateral damage would be too great for them to bomb you. And you've got plenty of targets, i.e. every powerplant, factory, refinery, and bridge in the country.
3) Most dictatorships had popular indifference, with a fervently dedicated, vocal minority. The opposition was quite often disarmed before things got too out of hand. Mao did it, Stalin did it, Hitler did it.
4) Any citizen who would be deterred by simply losing electricity wouldn't have the stomach for rebellion in the first place. But I do not believe this is such a vast majority that a rebellion would be impossible. Besides, in an urban environment, they can't shut your electricity off if they don't know who or where you are.
5) I'm all for peaceful movements, when they work they're great. But why bet everything on peaceful protest? Why not at least keep the capability to fight back if push comes to shove?
6) Maybe the mugger should've thought of that.
7) First, Canada isn't as densely populated, the socioeconomic conditions don't foster crime as badly in Canada as in the US. A better comparison is between the US and the UK. Still, the US does have higher gun-crime. But the UK has much higher violent crime in general. Why is gun-crime somehow worse than regular crime?
[quote] Having a gun slung over your shoulder doesn't hurt anyone. Plenty of people ALREADY carry guns, both openly and concealed, and this whole "Bump into them and they shoot you" thing doesn't happen.
1) Okay, so at least we agree on a small part. That being said, I have ran into more drunk guys yelling 'come at me bro' than I can count. As well, plenty of people get road rage already, so I really would feel unsafe if all of them were carrying a weapon.
As well, with more people 'packing', you also have an attitude that follows it. Right now, I feel safe, so I don't carry a gun. Others don't fear me because as one of many in a crowd I'm probably not carrying a gun. If I'm surrounded by people with guns then the atmosphere changes. When you feel as if you need a gun for protection at all times then you are assuming that you could be in danger at all times. Perhaps you're just playing it safe, but if everybody 'plays it safe', then everybody will have something to fear - everybody else. I'm not sure about you, but I really would rather trust to military and the police to protect me, rather than pray I have a better gun than the guy trying to kill me. You see, the only situation I can imagine where I'm just dead on sight without a gun is one where someone is hunting me down. In such a case, well, then I can train hard but the bottom 50% are just fucked. Now it's survival of the fittest and somebody's got to lose those gunfights. I'm getting off topic though. My main point is that when a society has decided that there is significant enough danger to warrant shooting people for defence, then the society is in deep, deep trouble. It would be better to work towards keeping EVERYONE safe, rather than just equipping every individual and saying 'i hope you get the best of him'.
2) okay, agreement here as well. But the thing I'm getting at is that we have no contemporary example of a western democratic government turning violent and killing it's people for some tyrannical reason. That type of situation would be near impossible to predict or prepare for by carrying a handgun right now.
3) Right, but I still can't see a situation where some evil dude takes over the US government and turns it's guns on the public. I mean, tell me what the most likely situation is here? Are they killing everybody? Because in that case the electricity/survival argument holds immense weight. Are they just targeting a select few? Who? Why? Why doesn't the public stand up for them? Why isn't the leader impeached? Why isn't a new congress elected? Why don't the soldiers refuse to fight?
I'm not saying there cannot possibly exist a situation where the people need to shoot back, I'm just saying that preparing for these kinds of things in the US is about as necessary as the public preparing for an alien invasion. Statistically it's possible, but in reality there are ways for people to flee or get protection illegally rather than relying on their 'government approved handgun' to help them fight off the special forces to save their family in the middle of the night.
Wouldn't you say it's more important for the laws created by the majority to be valued more than the ability of each individual to illegally resist those laws? Because what I see here is a problem with the public influence over the government, and that IS something I agree with. And it is something I fight for by getting involved in politics, not by carrying a glock around with me.
5) I guess the thing is that is our society, right now, I feel that the benefits of an armed public are vastly outweighed by the harm it would bring. Imagine of the occupy wallstreet guys started shooting at the cops when they maced them for no reason. Obviously the police violated a LOT of rights, but nobody died en-mass. Also, as I mentioned earlier, by having guns as a 'backup' you're harming everyday life for the public.
6) Okay, let's assume the mugger brings a knife and swings at me so I shoot him. Great. What have I accomplished? A guy is dead now. In my eyes, it was self defence, but if nobody had died at all would that not be a VASTLY better alternative? Pretend I don't bring the gun, then what? At best I talk the guy down or someone calls the police real quick and I keep my wallet and everything ends okay. Maybe it ends worse though, maybe he gets mad or even for no reason at all he kills me. How is this somehow worse from society's perspective? Either way somebody dies. Sure, as an individual I don't want it to happen to me, but there are many other factors that impact if you're going to get mugged. I can change all of these other things like where I live and what dark alleys I walk down alone at night, etc. I don't NEED a gun, and I think it's far too narrow-sighted to assume that just because I want one that everybody should have one. We cannot ALL be packing more heat than every criminal on the street.
7) from wikipedia, just one example of a densely populated city not far from Detroit... "Crime in Toronto has been relatively low for a very long period of time; the low crime rate in Toronto has resulted in the city having a reputation as one of the safest large cities in North America. Recent data from Statistics Canada shows that crime has been falling steadily in Toronto's census metropolitan area since 1998, a total drop of 33% for all crimes reported between the period of 1998–2008.[1]
For comparisons to various cities in North America, in 2007 for example, the homicide rate for the city of Toronto was 3.3 per 100,000 people, yet for Detroit (33.8), Atlanta (19.7), Chicago (15.5), San Francisco (13.6), Boston (10.3) and New York City (6.3) it was higher, while it was only marginally lower in Vancouver (3.1), San Jose (2.9) and Montreal (2.6). Toronto's robbery rate also ranks low, with 207.1 robberies per 100,000 people, compared to Detroit (675.1), Chicago (588.6), Los Angeles (348.5), Vancouver (266.2), New York City (265.9), Montreal (235.3) and San Diego (158.8).[2][3][4][5][6][7]"
You quote socio-economic conditions as being the major factor. I would say the gun ownership is a major piece of those 'socio-economic factors'. I mean, the US has more guns than anyone else. "The Congressional Research Service in 2009 estimated there were 310 million firearms in the United States, not including weapons owned by the military. " I mean, when you feel more powerful than a criminal when you have a gun, you also feel more powerful than some random person you pass on the street when you have a gun, it's only natural. This power, though, comes with consequences.
My argument about AK's in walmart, while exaggerated, still stand I feel. People don;t walk around with machine guns to the grocery store, but if they did i think it would change the atmosphere of going shopping. That being said, I still don't see a mystical connection between more people carrying guns but fewer people using them...
1) That sucks. I would hope the background checks would weed out the people who will get drunk and still carry. I'm ok with CUI, Carrying Under the Influence being a crime. I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't already actually.
2) I personally do not care about handguns, mostly because they're pretty much pointless for overthrowing a tyranny. I still support them, but I am willing to compromise here. Handguns can have stricter background checks for two reasons, in my opinion. First, like I said, can't overthrow the next Hitler with a glock. Second, they actually are used in a huge majority of gun-related crimes.
3) I don't know. The exact details don't really matter too much though. Democracies in developed have fallen to to tyrants as recently as the 30's (maybe more recently, but I can't think of any at the moment). The public doesn't stand up for the oppressed because A) its not happening to them, and B) the few who do "Disappear". It happened in Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and in China in the 50's.
5) How are you harming every day life by owning guns? Will my rifle shoot someone on its own? Is it going to break its way out of its gun-safe and start killing people? You can't blame the guns, you have to blame the person holding them, or there's no accountability.
6) It is worse for you to die because you are innocent. If you kill your attacker, that's sad, but he knew the risks. And you don't really need to pack more heat than everyone else. A common thug is going to want something concealable, which basically means small. At the distances you're likely to face, any hand-gun will do, they're all basically the same inside 20 yards.
7) How is the War on Drugs going in Canada? Did it make your urban centers hellish wastelands like it did here? I honestly don't know. If it didn't, then the socioeconomic conditions aren't similar enough for that comparison to be valid. Anyways, of those 310 million guns, a very small percentage are used in crimes, we're talking single digit percentages.
http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/guns.cfm 5.1 million violent crimes involving guns. Even if every gun-crime was committed with a unique gun, i.e. 1 gun = 1 crime, that's only 1.6 percent of all guns in the country are used in crimes.
Okay so you kind of ignored a huge chunk of my argument but I'll try to state it a little better this time.
Guns change society. Guns change societal atmosphere and gun culture has a negative impact on the public. This is my main point. When I punch you, you punch back, when I pull a gun on you, you pull a gun on me. If we have fists then somebody gets beaten up, when we have guns then somebody gets shot. It's really as simple as that. You multiply that by millions of people and you have americans dying en-masse. If nobody has a gun then nobody gets shot.
Okay, that was simplified, but the point still stands. Fewer guns mean fewer gun crimes, more guns mean more gun crimes. Sure you can kill people with knives but it's not as easy as pulling a trigger anymore. Then again, you seem to be against the masses carrying glocks. So please elaborate because at this point I don't know if you understand the negative impact that comes with this gun culture.
Long rifles and semi-auto assault rifles though you seem to support. Well, like I said those would not be very pleasant to encounter on the street. One guy with a knife cuts a few people and gets stopped, another guy brings an AK and 100 rounds and slaughters a crowd before being stopped.
Maybe you support keeping those guns out of the hands of the irresponsible though. Well, that's going to take A LOT of government oversight to make it safe enough for a lot more people to own them safely. And then what happens when this tyrranical government turns? Now they have a list of everybody who has trained at a gun range to fight them. Now they have controls and know exactly what areas and what cities have whichever guns.
To me if you want better government control over weapons you start to lose some of this ability to 'fight back' against your own military. In my opinion though this is okay, because I really don't see how it would be beneficial to form a civilian militia to defeat the US military.
You seem to have trouble describing exactly how or when or in what conditions you might need to fight the US government, well perhaps this is part of the irrationality if you 'needing protection' from them.
the 30's elsewhere and the 50's in china seem far too disconnected from us today to be relevant in a discussion of the citizens overthrowing the government. Did they have the internet? Did they have a modern democratic government with a modern military? How successful were the citizens at overthrowing this tyranny again? Please, I would actually be interested in a case where such a contemporary violent revolution turned out great for the public.
in reference to 6) - of course its too bad that the innocent person died, but someone still died. Having a gun or not having one didn't somehow prevent anyone from dying ever. I mean, tell me how the situation is going to end peacefully when we both pull out a gun? This guy who pulls a gun on me for money is somehow now less ballsy than me? Now he's likely to put his gun down? The situation just doesn't improve for me when I have a gun. Maybe I kill him, great now I'm a murderer. I don't approve of the death penalty because I believe people can still contribute to society and there is no purpose for revenge. So on the street I don't find it any more justified that I should be able to kill him. It would be better that neither of us died - that neither of us had the ability to end the other's life so easily.
Pretend that we all start carrying bigger guns for proper self defence. Would some thug on the street really come at me with a pocket knife when he knows people generally have an assault rifle for defence? No, he's just going to bring an even bigger gun, or he'll bring friends and surround/surprise me. The criminals aren't going to obey any restrictions I have to adhere to, they're simply going to be better armed than I am. The solution is not to hope I have a bigger gun than them, the solution is to have fewer guns for fewer people causing fewer crimes.
7-right so you really don't know how socioeconomic conditions are outside of the US. Ok well here for example the war of drugs is bullshit and we have gang/crime problems in major cities just like the US, only our homicide rates are much lower. There are many things that contribute to this, and I don't see how gun ownership provides any benefits.
just some statistics on gun ownership causing harm in the US-
wikipedia on gun violence "In 2009, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 66.9% of all homicides in the United States were perpetrated using a firearm.[5]"
States in the highest quartile for gun ownership had homicide rates 114% higher than states in the lowest quartile of gun ownership.[84]
Among juveniles (minors under the age of 16, 17, or 18, depending on legal jurisdiction) serving in correctional facilities, 86% had owned a gun, with 66% acquiring their first gun by age 14.[2] There was also a tendency for juvenile offenders to have owned several firearms, with 65% owning three or more.[2] Juveniles most often acquired guns illegally from family, friends, drug dealers, and street contacts.[2] Inner-city youths cited "self-protection from enemies" as the top reason for carrying a gun.[2]
In 2005, almost 18% of U.S. households possessed handguns, compared to almost 3% of households in Canada that possessed handguns.[9] In 2011, the number was increased to 34% of adults in the United States personally owned a gun; 46% of adult men, and 23% of adult women.
"The United States has about five percent of the total world population but residents of the United States own about 42 percent of all the world's civilian-owned firearms."
and crime in the US The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. As of 2006, a record 7 million people were behind bars, on probation or on parole, of which 2.2 million were incarcerated. The People's Republic of China ranks second with 1.5 million. The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.[33][dated info]
The US homicide rate, which has declined substantially since 1991 from a rate per 100,000 persons of 9.8 to 4.8 in 2010, is still among the highest in the industrialized world. In 2004, there were 5.5 homicides for every 100,000 persons, roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany (0.9).
Your gun culture example doesn't work. Specifically because guns are more dangerous. The repercussions are much greater, so you don't just pull guns as freely as you start fist-fights. People carrying guns don't just draw for nothing. They don't get cut-off in a parking lot and start shooting people.
The AR15 is the most commonly owned rifle in the US. It's an "Assault Weapon". In many jurisdictions, it is already legal to open carry it. But "Assault Weapons" are used in less than 1% of all fire-arm related crimes. Carrying a gun doesn't mean you WILL shoot someone. My point is, is that this gun culture idea, the idea that people will shoot each other over everything and nothing, has already been tested. People already carry guns, and it doesn't happen.
It doesn't take too much government oversight. All you need is background checks. As long as there's no database of gun-owners, it doesn't really matter if they know you're allowed to own a gun. A tyrant would need to know whether you actually do or not.
I'm not Nostradamus, I can't predict the future. But democracies can, and have become tyrannies, and that should be good enough. Sure, I can't say every little detail that would be necessary for armed rebellion, but neither did the founding fathers. 15 years before the revolution, no one had any desire for independence. 15 years isn't that long.
Europe in the 30's DID have a modern democracy, and they had an almost-modern military. Sure, they didn't have the internet, and things may have turned out differently if they did, but they were never given the chance for open rebellion. Any people with opposition sympathies were at least disarmed, and they often just "Disappeared". I'll be honest, I don't know enough about China to say much there, besides the fact that before Mao, they were a functional democracy, and after he took power, they weren't.
This arms race between civilians and criminals also doesn't happen. Plenty of civilians already have guns, and you don't see criminals getting bigger and better guns. Criminals need cheap, concealable guns. They need to be concealable so they can sneak up on you, and they need to be cheap so they can throw them away before the cops show up. Cheap, concealable guns are not very big or powerful.
What is worse, a civilian who did nothing wrong getting killed, or a criminal who knew the risks getting killed? And please don't give me the whole "You don't know him, maybe he just wanted to feed his family." nonsense. Soup kitchens are a thing. Foodstamps exist. And besides, you have to admit that this would be a pretty rare occurrence. Most (I'd wager almost all) thefts aren't because the person will starve otherwise, they're because the thief wants to buy a new TV or more cocaine. Last, you do not know what he plans on doing to you. You have no idea if he's just going to take your wallet, or if he's going to kill you. Sure, it might be rare, but if you want to talk about the one-in-a-million dad's who steal to feed their family, I can talk about the one-in-a-million muggers who also kill.
I didn't say I don't know socioeconomics anywhere outside the US, I said I don't know them in Canada. I'm happy for you that you seem to have solved all your problems. But look at the UK. They have almost no guns, and have one of the highest crime rates in Europe. Clearly guns are not the only factor, or even the main factor
Suggesting that the US federal government is somehow going to devolve into a dictatorship/tyranny, and then using that as an argument for more guns is bullshit. I don't know how some people always bring it up and not be able to think to themselves how stupid the entire idea is. That's just a childish fantasy gun proponents secretly want to happen just so they can tell everyone else how wrong they were. So please...stop pulling the what-if-tyranny-1776-nazi-hitler-stalin-happens-in-america because you're just telling every sensible person how stupid your logic is. If you want to actually convince people that more guns/stronger gun rights is better for the country, use another argument that actually makes some sense.
And yes, you are honest about not knowing a lot about china. They weren't a "functional democracy" before Mao (whatever that means). China never had the opportunity to become a real democracy early in the 20th century because of (1) WWII (2) their nationalism vs. communism civil war and (3) their decades-long war against Japan, which had occupied china.
What part of it is bullshit? Is it that you think democracy is somehow perfect?
Tell that to Spain, Italy, and Germany in the 30's, and France in the 1800's. Tell that to everyone who died at Waco, Ruby Ridge, and Kent State.
Is it that you feel guerrillas would be completely outmatched? They wouldn't. Sure, they'd get slaughtered in a conventional fight, but guerrilla warfare is amazingly effective. And if it happened in the US, it'd be even more effective, because the Guerrillas would have far more targets and each one would be more strategically important. All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Is it that you feel peaceful protest is a better option? Good, I do too. But it shouldn't be the only option. Skydivers wear two parachutes for a reason.
The people in the US military are people just like you and me. The people that work in federal government are american citizens just like you and me. Intelligent people not only learn, but also carry with them the knowledge that the american government is made up of checks and balances. Have you? There's a reason why we've had a peaceful transfer of government for 250 years without any problems. And I thought pro-gun supporters were the ones who knew all about the constitution. The idea that someone in the federal government or a high ranking military general would decide that he wanted to become Supreme Dictator of Facist America is batshit crazy with a daily forecast chance of 0%.
If we really wanted to be hypothetical, do you really think american soldiers would go shoot up an american neighborhood because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to so that he could start taking control of our country? Somebody down the line would say no. Somebody else in similar power in the government would say no. Someone might kill him first. Do you really think A-10s and F-16s from wright-patterson would start bombing chicago and cincinatti just because the Supreme Dictator wanted them to? Why does something like these even need an explanation?
All the guerrillas in Vietnam and Iraq could do is ambush a patrol or two here and there. Homegrown guerrillas could target every factory, bridge, and powerplant in the country.
Jesus christ, you sound like a 14 year old.
You act as if most of the people in the military wouldn't follow orders that would be bad for the American people. Sure you might have a few who refuse, but the majority of them would be more concerned about the consequences of disobeying a direct order for fear of their own life or their families life. Why do you live in this fantasy land where tyranny is impossible? Telling someone they sound like a 14 year old makes you look like the childish one. Being condescending doesn't help your argument.
... Really?
It should be completely obvious that the *vast* majority in the military would simply put down their weapons and give the bird to the chain of command that said "bomb Chicago" (and this chain of orders wouldn't happen in the first place because it require every single person up the chain of command to be batshit insane).
He's dead-on accurate when he says "sounds like a 14 year old". It's not an insult, it's an apt observation.
Do you actually think the order would be "Bomb Chicago"?
JDAM, Joint Direct Attack Munition. Precise. Take down a single warehouse or other building, minimal collateral damage.
Do you really think internment to prevent guerilla warfare wouldn't happen? I remember when Abu Ghraib was a thing. Been there? I have. That fiasco happened because the wrong people were doing the wrong job and were way overstretched. And that job was detention of a large percentage of a civilian population for fitting the wrong demographics.
EPT
