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I mean, I simply disagree. Violence is always a failure, either of policy, or of personal behavior. Enabling people to escalate that failure to a deadly one with the twitch of a finger is simply not an acceptable paradigm. An armed society, contrary to the witticism, will never be a polite society, because it makes it stupendously easy for bad actors to cause disproportionate harm, relative to the ability of the community to reasonably prepare for. Removing guns entirely is the only reasonable solution if you actually want a free and peaceful society.
Regardless of whether violence is a failure of policy or personal behaviour, you need a solution for violence happening to you. What's your recommendation for Zelenskiy, for example? The violence is happening right now, whether he likes it or not. It is too late to decry that it happened; all he can do now is attempt to deal with it. And to date, no known human has pitched a nonviolent, feasible method.
Zelenskiy is the democratically elected head of state, he has as good a mandate as anyone to use force on behalf of his people. The fact that Russia was allowed to invade in the first place, despite security guarantees from both Russia and the US is the failure here. In any case, that argument is a complete non-seqitur to what I actually said. I never said violence was completely preventable, but you absolutely can make it much harder.
This is a nice idea, unfortunately it's not generally realistic. It's very ivory-tower idealistic.
Between rational people like you and I- yes I agree, violence is a failure. But not everybody is rational.
The fact is there ARE people in society who would harm their fellow humans, either for fun or for profit or because they just don't know any better. I wish that wasn't the case, but it is.
Ignoring this fact does not prevent such people from harming others, or protect those victims. And saying we should remove the means of self-defense because violence is failure is like saying we should remove airbags and seatbelts from cars because crashes are failures. Sure crashes and violence are failures, but sometimes failures happen and you are either prepared for the consequences or you're not.
The other issue is that 'remove guns entirely' is simply not possible. You can disarm the law-abiding, but that will NOT disarm the criminals and those with no respect for the law. If you feel the law will prevent them from obtaining guns, then please explain why an anti-gun law will be any more effective than anti-drug laws (which we've been trying at for 30+ years, with little or no success).
Australia successfully disarmed their populace. This argument does not hold water in the actual world we live in.
Apples to oranges. Australia doesn't have the same society as us- nowhere near the levels of drug problems and drug cartels, and they are more likely to treat addicts like patients who require treatment than criminals who should be punished by locking them up with even more violent criminals. Australia has WAY better mental and phyiscal health care and better protections for workers. It's much closer to a socialized society than the USA is.
As a result they have significantly different problems, specifically, they DON'T have anywhere near the same level of drug problems and violent crime. Their culture doesn't glorify violence as much as ours does, and we don't have that mixed in with a much more 'FU you're on your own' type socioeconomic policy.
THOSE changes are why much of AU is a safer society. I strongly advocate for making many of those changes in USA. Specifically- health care should be a human right (including mental health care), we should treat drug addicts like patients not criminals, and we should otherwise reform our society for the benefit of the people rather than the benefit of the corporations in the economy.
At this point you are arguing that gun reform can't work simply because Americans are special. You are incorrect, and your position isn't supported by anything other than propaganda.
Don't be obtuse. I'm arguing that because America is different than Australia, what worked there isn't guaranteed to work here, and that the causes of our gun issues run a lot deeper than guns. Therefore, rather than taking a simpleton answer of 'it worked for them it'll work for us!' it makes sense to actually think about what are the underlying causes of our problems and if that solution will work or not.
I am absolutely not the one being obtuse here. Nothing you have claimed here is supported by actual evidence, unlike the pro-gun control position, and I'm not prepared to base our gun policy on vibes alone. You can spend all day saying 'that's different!' but the facts are not on your side.
Okay now we're getting somewhere. I agree entirely, public policy should not be based on 'vibes' or emotions of any sort, no matter whose vibes they are. In a 'Free Country', if you're going to set a policy or restrict someone's freedoms (especially Constitutionally-enumerated freedoms), you need a damn good reason and some proof that your policy will have the desired effect. My 'vibes' are insufficient and so are yours.
So I as I see it, the answer, from real numbers, is pretty simple.
Per FBI Uniform Crime Report, there are about 10k-12k homicides by firearm per year.
I'll take a moment to point out that rifles, which include the 'assault' rifles everyone wants to ban as well as other rifles, are used in about 200-350 homicides/year, which is less than half the 600-700 people who are punched and kicked to death. Not a huge threat there.
But back on subject. 10-12k firearm homicides per year.
In comparison, there are minimum of 55k defensive gun uses per year. A DGU is when a law-abiding person uses a legal firearm to stop or prevent a crime. The vast majority end with no shots fired- the criminal sees the gun and runs away.
The exact number of such incidents is much harder to nail down, because unlike homicides, they aren't centrally tracked. Many DGUs don't get reported- the criminal runs away quickly so there's not much to report; and there's no central reporting or tracking as there is with homicide. Thus DGUs must be tracked by various statistical survey methods, leading to the a wide disparity in numbers. Anti-gun researcher Hemenway puts it at 55k-80k/year, pro-gun researcher Lott puts it in the millions. I say it's probably somewhere in the hundreds of thousands.
So I look at these two pieces of data. 10-12k firearm homicide per year, a large % of which is done by prohibited persons and/or illegal guns (which are already illegal). On the other side, 55k+ DGUs, the vast majority of it done by legal persons and legal guns.
And I conclude if we enact anti-gun policy, it will affect the people who follow the law more than those who don't; namely; it will reduce DGUs at a greater rate than firearm homicide. And that is not a good trade in my book.
Curious to hear your thoughts?
My thoughts are that you are literally pulling a conclusion that the numbers don't support out of your ass because you 'feel' the numbers are probably higher. The entire premise is flawed from the beginning anyway, because any situation where a person pulls a gun on a person without a gun is not a defensive use of a gun, and certainly doesn't make anyone involved safer. Any interaction between two gun wielding individuals is similarly not a case of a good guy preventing violence. If neither had guns, neither would get shot. It is literally that simple.
I said that given two biased partisan researchers who produce a high and a low number, I feel the reality is probably somewhere between them. That seems pretty logical to me. If you disagree, can you explain what you think the correct number of DGUs is and how you come to that conclusion?
This is easily disproven. Here's one obvious scenario.
Single mid-20s attractive female is legally armed with carry permit. She is walking home from work when she's confronted by a would-be rapist who blocks her way and insists he comes with her. She draws her weapon and orders him out of her way. He immediately surrenders and does the whole 'I'm sorry I didn't mean nothing you don't gotta overreact like that'. No shots are fired. She then leaves the area and continues home unharmed.
That woman is safer and unharmed and unraped BECAUSE she carried her gun.
"You must defend from your assailants with an attack of equal or lesser hit points or it doesn't count." Am I allowed to pepper spray someone punching me? Or do I need to know what they bench first? Where do knives rank on the chart? And how does this system scale with multiple assailants?
"You prevented nothing, sir"
A disarmed society is not a free society, its completely reliant on the state for personal defence, when that responsibility should rest with the individual.
You are already reliant on the state for defense, whether you admit it or not. The very existence of states requires a functional monopoly on violence, and private gun ownership is just a fig leaf to obscure that fact. A fig leaf that leads to massive, unnecessary loss of life. If your definition of freedom is so limited that not owning a gun makes you automatically un-free, you do not actually believe in freedom, you believe in the right to violently interject yourself into the lives of others. That is pretty much the opposite of freedom.
I'm reliant on the state for defence on a larger scale, but in our personal lives, the state can do little to defend us from other individuals in a timely manner. That is why I believe everyone that is able to should be responsible for their own personal defence.
I've no desire to injerect in others lives, but I do have a desire to protect myself and my family where the state cannot or will not.
Okay, but following that logic, getting rid of all of the guns is still the best thing we could do, because it makes it much harder for people to quickly inflict a huge amount of harm. Ensuring that your local community is free of guns would do far more to protect you and your family than bringing a gun into your home, which you have already acknowledged is a highly dangerous thing to do. It's like arguing that because your neighbor keeps a bear chained up in his yard, you ought to go out and get a bear, to protect yourself from his bear, when the clear answer is just to get the bears out of the neighborhood.
Nice in theory, impossible in practice.
We spend $30+billion/year ensuring our communities are free of drugs. How's that working out? From where I sit we may as well just put the cash in a giant pile and set it on fire, at least that way it would keep somebody warm.
Guns are easier to make than drugs. Any half-decent machine shop can make a gun, and unlike a drug lab, the machine shop has a lot of legitimate 'day shift' uses. Hobbyists make their own (legal) guns all the time in their basements. And the advent of cheap CNC machining tools makes it even easier.
Don't get me wrong- I'm all ears for any proposal that disarms criminals. I don't believe that disarming the law-abiding will help disarm criminals, at least I don't see anywhere in our nation's history where that has worked.
Australia successfully disarmed their populace. This argument does not hold water in the world we actually live in.
Australians now own more guns collectively than they did prior to Port Arthur just FYI, and their buyback only got about 1.2 million of the estimated 3.2 million guns in circulation at the time.