I tend to disagree for following reasons:
- freedom ends where someone elses freedom begins
- no one said freedom was save
- people don’t stop to murder other people without guns
Its a joke, don’t think too hard about it.
Freedom as a concept is to vague and personal to be useful any kind of real discussion; “freedom” means whatever you think it means. This is why politicians love to say it.
I would say that you’re right guns make people feel safe.
However, that the constant threat of violence in society leads to degradation of social norms, especially for children who then get less socialization and become more extreme.
You see this in like more people choosing to homeschool their kids - they then get lower quality education and poorer social skills and are less able to survive in society. In a capitalist world, this is slowly eating away the ability of americans to compete in a global economy and so there is a strong movement to isolate our economy which will only make us less competitive.
I would say that you’re right guns make people feel safe.
I just wanted to say that guns absolutely do not make me feel safe, knowing one is nearby or seeing one makes me incredibly anxious. Holding one even more so. I don’t understand how people can feel safe around them, to me it’s like having a ticking time bomb in the room but the timer was set by a rng.
That’s fine if you feel like that. And YOU should stay away from them and I fully support your desires and rights to do so. But others don’t feel the same.
Yeah no if I know there is an unsecured gun around that makes me feel anything except safe. There is only a very narrow set of circumstances in which having a gun around is non threatening and just walking around in public is not one of those.
Let’s take an example scenario: there’s someone who cut in line in front of you at the supermarket, upon confronting them they turn aggressive.
Scenario 1 (widespread gun ownership): you have to deescalate or risk potentially getting shot by a person that is very obviously not acting rational anymore. In turn this promotes less civil conduct as brashness is encouraged.
Scenario 2 (limited gun ownership): you can reasonably argue with the person since the highest threat you are facing is a pocket knife, a risk that can be mitigated by simply keeping your distance or an obstacle in between.
So yeah there is no reason to hand out guns like they are candy. They are a tool designed for war and violence and as such have no place just being carried around in public.
Empty words from someone that does not understand how countries with less guns still work and don’t have CHILDREN KILLING IN THEIR SCHOOLS ALL THE TIME
To be fair there are countries with a shitload of guns where this doesn’t happen. This is mostly US being a shithole.
At compared to the other western countries, the gun rights in the US are a huge difference to almost all others. Switzerland is the one big exception I can think of, partly because of the huge shooting history / culture (which is often still actively celebrated) and because soldiers can take a private weapon to home (which had the original sense that in case of war, they could directly have a gun).
I live in austria, we have gun rights and like 33guns/100people (if I remember correctly) and we never had a single school shooting in our history, also the terrorists involved in the shooting in vienna a few years ago illigaly imported their guns from serbia
That’s just not true / comparable. While Austria has more gun rights than in most other Western countries, it’s nothing in comparison to the US. In Austria, the only guns you can freely buy are single shot guns. And for those, you need to wait three days until you get them.
To get a very limited amount of semi-automatic weapons, you need to, similar to other western countries, have a Weapons possession card that’s subject authorization. To get it, you don’t only need a psychological report but also a justification, be 21 and need to fit other requirements. You also need to report every weapon you get so Austria knows where the weapons are.
In the US meanwhile, it depends on the state you’re living very much, but in some states, you can get semi-automatic weapons (which are completely banned in Austria) in a shop in just minutes. And that without any background checks, psychological reports, justifications, approval required, without anything like that. In many states even convicted criminals can get guns like that. And it’s often not even age restricted. In the US, guns are sometimes a presents for kids which they can just…own and use (while in Austria everything is obviously 18+).
And the biggest difference is carrying a gun. In Austria, you are not allowed to carry them in public (and getting that licence is almost impossible for normal people). While in the US (in many states), you can just carry any gun around in public whatsoever. So even if the police sees you having weapons in public, they can’t / don’t do anything about that, because it’s just legal.
I general, the gun rights in Austria are bigger than in most of other Western Europe. But even Obama’s 2012 proposal to significantly lower the freedom of guns in the US would have resulted in still much bigger gun rights than in Austria. There is just a huge difference.
Also there are around 1.332.000 guns in Austria, with around 9.2 million people, that’s around 14 guns per 100 people.
Sweden and Canada have pretty high rates of gun ownership and don’t have this problem. That said American school shootings are not as common as they are made out to be, there has been a lot of statistical fudging to make it look so much worse than it is.
What all three countries do have are problems with gangs and they’re only getting worse as poverty drives people to crime. America has it worse because it has more poverty, but we will all catch up soon enough.
Idk how you make shooting students / children out to be much worse than it is. Kinda seems like any stat greater than 0 should be unacceptable and cause for massive societal reevaluation.
Canada has ~1/4 the firearms per capita compared to the US. My guess is that doesn’t matter, as you go over 1 gun/resident the added guns probably don’t have much of an impact.
However, most shootings in the US are with handguns (restricted in Canada), and a bunch of high-profile shootings with ARs (prohibited in Canada). Concealed carry is practically never allowed, and open carry isn’t either. Safe storage is required, so you can’t carry unsecured guns in your car either. Storing loaded firearms is forbidden. Owning firearms for self defense is forbidden by law (using them as such may or may not be, depending on the circumstances).
TL;DR: it’s not just how many guns, but also what you’re allowed to do with them.
This is the real answer.
When you look at serious violent crime, defining that as robbery, battery, forcible rape, and murder, the rate of serious violent crime is similar in the US and UK (edit - and Australia!). The UK has largely removed firearms from the equation–which is easier, since they’re an island, and didn’t start with 600M firearms–and it has decreased the murder rate, but their overall violent crime rate is still quite high. Despite nominally having single payer health, the system has been intentionally broken by conservatives, and poverty is pretty significant. You see the same kind of sharp economic divides in the UK that you see in the US.
The predictable result is violence.
Murder isn’t the problem, it’s a symptom. It’s like saying that the awful cough and shortness of breath is your problem, and then thinking that cough syrup (with codeine!, since that’s the good shit that works!) is going to fix the underlying pneumonia.
As a rule of thumb people stop to mass murder other people, without guns. With extremely rare exceptions, we don’t have that shit outside of the US and our schools are not shooting ranges.
The other two things you wrote are not reasons, they are a) a slogan that you could put on a 12 years old t shirt and b) something someone who is having a heart attack might say
Outside the US sure, that was my point.
In the States there’s a mass shooting every Tuesday.
people don’t stop to murder other people without guns
I live in a red state with lax gun laws. This is probably the stupidest thing I’ve heard anyone say on the Internet. You should sit down and have a talk with Ahmaud Arbery.
