- Guns don't shoot people, people use guns to shoot people. True, but also, it makes the step psychologically easier to do, and makes gun available at any moment to a crazy person since they are "everywhere". If it were casual to have bazookas, I'm sure there will be more blown up houses in the US.
True, but it won't make guns any easier to get a hold of if they are banned completely. If anything, in the US, any type of prohibition has made it easier to obtain that prohibited item, marijuana for example being easier for kids to get than cigarettes and alcohol because excluding dispensaries all of marijuana transactions are in the black market.
Still banning is not an option, one of the most important reasons for the second amendment is for the people to assemble a militia, for national security reasons, to protect from foreign invaders and to give the people a fighting hand in the case a revolution is needed in times of tyranny.
You may disagree with that all you want, but when you have police brutally murdering innocent people, and even people who are guilty of a crime but pose no threat to the officer(s), when swat teams raid people's houses on a daily basis and shoot without hesitation, killing pets, and the residence only to find that they got the wrong house or the drug bust they were making was only enough drugs for personal use and usually just a slap on a wrist just proves that we the people of THIS country do need protection from our government.
I will have to try to find a source on it but last time I heard, you have more of a chance getting randomly killed by a police officer than getting killed in a car accident, struck by lightning, a mass shooter or shot by a thug in any sort of robbery combined. That I can believe to, I have seen too many cops in person pull guns on people including my own parents without any probable cause to do so.
There are enough videos on youtube of people being punched and assaulted, even having suffered injury and damage to themselves and possessions by police officers for filming them in public and not leaving when told to do so, even though they do not charge them because they can't due to the fact there is no law they broke. Same goes for those who protest against government that are peaceful and are not impeding the flow of society around them, not disturbing anyone. UC Davis pepper spray incident anyone. Some of the events I have listed are but mere few of the constant never ending events of tyranny in our own government, not counting the violent crimes that happen by citizens.
Yes we need to protect ourselves as a whole, the risk that there might some random guy every now and then will kill innocent people with a gun is far outweighed by the ability to protect oneself.
- Also, the empirical statistics just don't go in favor of "guns are good" in the US. The number of criminal deaths is just insane, per head. I don't think the "per weapon sold" is a good way to look at it. Lot of weapon sold, or not, those kids are dead, that's the thing. If you imagine something silly, just so that I make my point : atomic bomb exploding in 30 years over a big city : "but if you count the fact we have 10 000 nuke heads, it's actually a very low percentage of nuke actually used, so it's fine". To me it doesn't matter how many you can count.
Criminal deaths will be left unaffected by any gun control, as we are talking about people with no criminal history purchasing guns legally. Atomic weapons while being a good analog, does not translate well as atomic weaponry not only immediately effects the targets, but takes immediate collateral of innocents in the vicinity and scatters fallout throughout the whole world, it is a loose loose situation for everyone. Also instead of some countries trying to ban nuclear weapons to various countries, create the environment where they are not needed. Correct diplomacy with enemy nations can settle relations enough where the stockpiles can be depleted in a safe manner.
The same cannot be said with guns though. Realistically, as long as cops military and thugs have guns, law abiding citizens deserve the right to play on an equal playing ground in the name pf self defense. Even if guns were completely banned an no longer manufactured here, other countries that manufacture guns will allow for the import of guns into the country arming them to gangs. The thought of only having criminals, police and military with guns and everyone else shit out of luck is pretty scary, not matter what country you live in.
- Tell me how making everyone have a gun is gonna help reducing the number of deaths in the first place, by the way
No one every said making sure that everyone has a gun. However, as frequent are stories of cops assaulting, injuring and killing people there are actually more stories of people successively defending themselves in both robberies, and in home invasions. Quite a few of these incidents are children successfully thwarting invaders in their homes because they were properly trained on how to use and respect guns. With robberies and home invasions, you have absolutely no clue if the robber will let you live, more increasingly they kill anyone they see so they don't have any eye witnesses to identify them, most of them get away as a result.
Of course pulling a gun on someone who was attacking you that had no intention of hurting you could escalate to something more drastic. I have heard that argument before that pulling a gun on a robber or shooter could make things worse, but like I said earlier, if you had a gun on you and you were in that situation, you have no clue if said criminal will let you live, are you going to take that chance that they have no intention on killing you? No, you don't, and while it may end in a death, that would be a risk I would be willing to make if it meant I could save my own ass indefinitely by my accord and not someone else's and even possibly bring that criminal to justice one way or another.
- The "but at least I can defend my children" argument is invalid, since if every single person has a gun, any single argument can end up in a shooting. Wouldn't it be better if no one got one, and people just argued with their fists instead ? Caricatural yes, but also true. Tell me how this guy would have killed 30 people if he didn't have a gun. Don't say "he could have got one anywhere anyway". Yes but fact is that it doesn't happen so often and so easily, truth is in the examples of other countries. If today I became psychotic and wanted to get a gun, I don't know where I could buy one, unless I had to build up a whole plan for it, and I would certainly go with something else, less efficient. Even with a good sword I would certainly get my ass kicked before I score 30. Those who shoot kids aren't necessary established criminals either, those usually just do their business, drugs, whatever, but those who kill innocents in schools are usually "casual" unstable people. So to me it's better if it just doesn't take an ID and a few bucks to have a simple shotgun.
The assumption that if everyone had a gun arguments would escalate into shootouts is absolutely absurd. In states where open carry is religiously practiced, 99.9% of fights never go beyond fists. Law abiding citizens only carry guns on them to level the playing field only when they have to. You make the assumption that just because someone owns a gun, means they are willing to risk killing someone just because of a depute. This almost never true.
Like I said before, prohibition has actually made those band items easier to get a hold of. If you really wanted to get a gun in your country, its easier than you think, just because at this very moment you don't know the networks to go through, does not mean it isn't an easy thing to do.
Also just because a murderer doesn't have a gun doesn't mean that it is any more difficult to take out as many people, IEDs in the middle east, well trained psychos with knives in China injure and kill almost as many people as the average US shooting. A few months practice with a homemade bow and arrow, martial arts, knives can all do equal damage if you know what you are doing.
See another assumption being made is that guns are easier than any other weapon to operate. Honestly though, for most that have never shot a gun before, you are more likely to kill more people in a given amount of time with a knife than you are with a .45 handgun.
- Empirical again : almost no guns here, and no bloodbath every 6 months. Last one in france was a year and a half ago and was far from being such a bloodbath, and I don't remember the previous one tbh
The fact that there are less violent crimes in France has nothing to do with availability of guns. The social construct over there is not do decomposed over the years were it has bred a mentally stable demographic. One thing that was brought up some time ago was how Sweden generally has softer gun control laws than the US, however there is less violent crime per capita, again overall violence and availability of guns never correlates. Was has correlated though is how in the US, when stricter gun laws are imposed, violent crime goes up, when the laws are reverse many years later, violence goes down. This actually happened with Washington DC, where murder rates went up 300% the year they completely banned gun ownership to all citizens. This ban was in the 70s, a few years ago they reversed this law and violent crimes have been slowly going down back to what they were before the ban. This has happened to more or less extremes everywhere else stricter laws have been put into place.
- "If a little part of the population has guns, then it's better for me to be on the side of those who have one, just in case". That makes sense of course, but it's just the vicious circle IMO, and doesn't solve the problem in the first place. To me, it's totally not an argument in favor of "it's better to legalize guns". It's only an argument in favor of "for me INDIVIDUALLY right now in this place it's better to have a gun than not, to protect my own family". That's the fact guns are popular that created the problem in the first place.
You are right it is a vicious cycle, that is just life, it sucks sure. The best thing we can do, at least here in this country is to reconstruct our environmental, our social platform where this is less common. We have a lot of disassociated, frustrated and mentally ill in this country, especially with younger generations and minorities. If we can do something to stop and reverse the trend, we reverse the the commonality of ALL violent crimes in general.
- The thing as well is the bigger the medias make an event out of every shooting, the more it's gonna inspire new crazy young people. They are crazy enough to find it admirable in their way. Total vicious circle here.
I don't necessarily thing that media coverage inspires others to copy, but I do think that they make a big deal nationally, especially lately about every shooting that does happen and all its doing is giving people on the fence about guns or dislike them, only more disdainful about them. You could say that it is politicians way to get the people to rally against guns to ban them as they are concerned about a revolution, obviously the american people are sick and tired of our government, and we have been taught from an early age that we can violently overthrow our government if we are not happy with it, it is in our constitution. The amendments are there and the original ten are to not be infringed upon, since media get most of its support from politicians and lobbyists, they are going to skew the view to the interest of their supporters.
Our government has been pushing the limit as to how far they can infringe the constitution and getting the people to readily hand over an amendment is a real easy way of ensuring they keep their power. They can't take the 2nd away becuase if they do, what stops them from taking the others away in the name of security. It is already bad enough that they can detain you to an enemy of the state facility and charge you of crimes with no trial because they suspect you a terrorist from spying on your phone lines, internet usage etc.
You can't take away any of the amendments, and if you don't have the 2nd, you have no way of defending the other nine.
