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Gun Rights are Civilization Rights
I believe, if you don't trust an independent adult to have a firearm you ultimately don't trust them enough to be in the same civilization or society as you.
There are three categories of people that nearly everyone agrees should not be allowed to own a firearm:
And you'll notice we generally don't trust these categories of people with much of anything. The first two categories of people we insist on them having guardians, or being wards of the state. The third category of people we imprison.
There are two major arguments against gun rights that I think hold the most salience for people.
Argument One: Guns are Dangerous and Unnecessary
They are undoubtedly dangerous. Their purpose is to be a weapon. But there are other things that are dangerous that we don't ban. Cars can be used to achieve mass casualty events. Bombs can be made with some commonly available materials. These other things are rarely labelled as "unnecessary" though. There are also plenty of "unnecessary" things that we don't ban. Plenty of purely recreational items and services exist. Jet skis, theme parks, cruises, large houses, etc (some of these things are even dangerous). Only the most hardcore socialists and communists want to take away all the fun toys.
There is an argument that gun advocates make that gun rights are necessary to keep the government in check. I generally like this argument, and think it is demonstrated by the level of free speech rights in places like Great Britain where guns have been successfully banned for most private "citizens".
But I'll grant for the sake of argument that guns are totally "unnecessary". And that it is the special combination of Dangerous+Unnecessary that leads people to want to ban it. Since other categories of things like Safe+Unnecessary or Dangerous+Necessary go largely unbanned and untouched.
I think the widespread existence of many "Dangerous+Necessary" demonstrates that we can trust most adults to handle dangerous things in a responsible way. We can't trust them 100% of the time. And we can't trust that there won't sometimes be negligence.
The "unnecessary" component of the argument is also a scary slippery slope to be on. People have different desires and wants. There are I think two steady states of being in regards to "unnecessary" things. Either you let everyone decide for themselves on every topic. Or you have a central authority that decides on everything for everyone. If you are willing to bite that bullet, keep in mind that it will not necessarily be you deciding what is necessary and what is not. I believe it is fully possible for such a bureaucracy to mercilessly strip every single joy out of life, and they'll fully believe they are making your life better. You'll eventually be sad enough that you'll come to the second main argument against gun rights:
Argument Two: Guns enable easier suicide
I don't have the data on hand, and I don't really want to get into an argument about said data. But it is my understanding that there is a noticeable and undeniable effect of guns on male suicide rates. This makes intuitive sense to me. Many methods of suicide require you to actively torture yourself for a short time period, drowning, hanging, cutting yourself, jumping from a very tall building etc. Or they present a chance of a failed suicide attempt that leaves you heavily injured, like jumping from not high enough, or getting in front of a moving vehicle, or pills. Guns make the attempt a more sure thing, and present an option that does not involve torturing yourself.
Something about this whole approach to suicide prevention feels very wrong. On an individual basis I think you should not commit suicide, and if someone can be talked out of suicide they generally should be talked out of it. But there are also some cases where I believe it is very cruel to prevent suicide. Medical cases for sure. But there are also people who have drawn a shit straw in life in too many ways. A bit too dumb, constant low level bad health, unable to figure out how to love or be loved, etc. A life of quiet misery. They should have an exit option, and they should have one that doesn't require them to torture themselves on the way out.
Civilization is one big nebulous agreement we have that helps us get along. But I think saying "you can't leave this agreement without being tortured", is just evil.
Forbidding gun ownership means forbidding exit, and it means you lack trust in others to such a degree that it breaks down many of the assumptions we already have about the rights and responsibilities of adults in society.
Some of the implications of my argument that I am already aware of and fine with:
Some areas that I left unaddressed to save space:
Edit: lots of good responses. I've read all of them but I'm unlikely to respond. Most of the responses were better thought out than my original post. I sometimes just have ideas or arguments kicking around in my head that need to be spilled onto paper. And I think better in response to what others say so this has helped me refine my thoughts on the subject a great deal. That synthesis of thought might end up in a future thread.
We should ban guns below a certain size limit for everyone except police/government agents/licensed bodyguards but otherwise legalize larger guns, including crew-served and mobile weaponry. Most crimes and accidents happen with smaller, easier-to-conceal, easier-to-misuse weapons. Most legitimate uses (hunting, home defense, overthrowing a tyrranical government) are equally or better served by larger weapons, or similarly prevented by less lethal weapons (defending against an assailant who doesn't have a gun of his own.) And of course if someone pulls a gun on you, trying to brandish your own weapon is possibly the stupidest thing you can do. The only two downside to this policy is the specific edge case where A pulls a pistol on B and good samaritan C has no choice but to pull out their concealed weapon and shoot A before A realizes that C has a gun-- but the amount of time C successfully saves A would probably be far outweighed by the amount of times where A doesn't pull out a weapon in the first place because everyone saw the guy carrying an assault rifle from a mile away and everyone already put their shotguns on the table to dissuade any funny business.
"But muh terrorism."
What did you think fighting against a tyrannical government looked like? Essays? Papers? Any measure intended to let agreeable people fight a disagreeable government will equally allow disagreeable people to fight a disagreeable government. The only way to stop a bad guy with a HIMARs is a good guy with a suicide drone.
We do that, gun misuse shifts to larger guns, someone draws a circle around some subclass (e.g. "assault weapons") and moves to ban that one, lather, rinse, repeat.
Personal defense is not.
This isn't actually an argument. If you hold "people asking to ban guns" as an intrinsic evil, then your solution is to ban every gun before they do. If your actual intrinsic evil is "banning guns" then trading a ban on large weapons for a ban on small weapons is at worst net-neutral and at best (as I argued) allows for the better fulfilment of the socially useful properties of guns.
Also, most categories of misuse are linked to specific formats of weapons. A crew served weapon is great in a civil war, but not so great for robbing a convenience store. It's much easier to commit suicide with a pistol than with an M-1 Abrahms.
An assault weapons is a better defense than a pistol against any assailant you can see coming in advance-- and banning pistols makes it much easier to notice and be wary of criminals in the first place. Meanwhile, against an assailant that gets the jump on you, a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless. Trying to pull one out is all too likely to transform a robbery into a murder-- either because the assailant will notice your suspicious motion and shoot you, or because a smaller weapon is easier to take away from you. The deterrent property of having a big, obvious weapons would result in net better outcomes than using cowboy kung fu to quickfire your pistol straight through your pants.
In sum, banning small guns and legalizing big ones would both save lives AND provide a bigger deterrent against government overreach. It's the ideal compromise between 2A advocates and gun control crusaders. I'm not being facetious here, this is my actual position.
I didn't spell it out, but it should be obvious. If it is appropriate to ban a class of weapons because they are the weapons with which "[m]ost crimes and accidents happen", then a successful ban on that class will result in another class becoming the weapons with which most crimes and accidents happen and are therefore OK to ban. Thus such a principle leads to banning all weapons.
The second part is not empirically true. As for the rest, no weapon that you don't have with you is much good for defense, and walking around with an AR-15 all the time is simply inconvenient. And even if you have it, presumably slung, the difficulty of bringing it to bear means a pistol-armed (yeah, you banned them, but they didn't listen) or even knife-armed attacker can far more easily get the drop on you.
If the slippery slope principle worked on guns, then banning military-grade weaponry would have resulted in banning all guns. But it hasn't. Because anyone who isn't a rabid partisan understands that it makes sense to ban particularly harmful types of weapons while allowing particularly useful kinds of weapons to remain in their owner's hands. My argument isn't fundamentally about banning weapons-- it's about rethinking which harms and uses are statistically greater.
Are you saying, "you lack empirical evidence" or "I have empirical evidence to the contrary." In the latter case, I want to see it. To pre-register, videos of good samaritans with guns won't convince me of anything, but some sort of statistical analysis pointing to a lower aggregate death rates for robbery + rape + murder victims would convince me. An analysis that only considers people who avoid getting murdered by having a gun wouldn't; due to the base rates of robberies + rapes vs murders, I suspect the reduced likelyhood of getting murdered in a murder would be far outweighed by an increased likelyhood to get murdered in a robbery or rape.
Yes, that's part of what would overall reduce gun crimes. Sure, some criminals would still have pistols-- but far fewer, compared to now, because so much of the demand would be absorbed by other kinds of weapons. In a country that bans guns, if you're going to buy a guy anyway, it might as well be the best fit for the job, so black market suppliers have plenty of incentive to exist and offer the right kinds of weapons. In a country that only bans small, concealable weapons, most would-be robbers still have access to larger weapons and would go for those over the hassle of finding a black market and buying a perfect pistol. That would in turn shrink the size of the black market and make pistols even harder to acquire.
They're still working on it. Maryland banned semi-automatic AR-15s, for instance, and many other states (including New Jersey of course) keep banning classes of guns.
There is no empirical evidence that "a gun-- and especially a small gun-- is worse that useless" in a any particular self-defense situation.
Or, this simply isn't true; it's a gun-banner just-so story. Or, worse, they cut down the long guns so they're concealable enough, and now you've got would-be robbers with more lethal weapons.
To clarify, I'm defining "worse than useless" as "likely to increase your net chances of death on net." I'm aware that there are situations where brandishing a weapon would de-escalate the situation, but virtually all of those situations also apply to having a visible large weapon. Meanwhile, if you get in a stickup because the robber is under the impression that you're unarmed, trying to pull out a weapon is almost guaranteed to escalate, not de-escalate, the situation. Most probably not in your favor, given who starts with a weapon in their face
just-so stories are explanations; this is a prediction based on assuming rational economic behavior. That's not a perfect assumption, but if you want to attack it, you can attack it on its merits rather than by handwaving.
Anyways, robbers can already get concealable weapons that are plenty lethal. Meanwhile, you can't exactly conceal crew-serve artillery no matter how hard you try. I think it's a very safe prediction that concealability would go down, even if weapon lethality would go up, and also that concealability is a larger factor in death rate than weapon lethality. The only exception to that is people starting a revolution or civil war, which I admit is possible, but the whole point of the second amendment is to let people fuck around and find out if they really want to. Having a world full of concealable, low-lethality weapons is just the worst of all possible worlds-- poor security, and no chance of overthrowing a corrupt government.
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There's a common argument that if you ban guns, people will just find another way to kill themselves, so why bother? And no doubt this is true of the sufficiently determined suicidals. But the convenience factor of firearms (and other methods) does appear to play a big role. The example of gas ovens in the UK is illustrative:
In other words, there was no replacement effect: people didn't immediately switch over from inhaling oven fumes to another method. There's a non-negligible chance that Sylvia Plath would have lived to a ripe old age if the UK had made the switch to natural gas a few years sooner.
Another example is here in Ireland, in which, although it's available over the counter, it's illegal to sell more than 24 tablets of paracetamol* in a single transaction. For years I thought this was silly: what's stopping you from driving or walking to three pharmacies or supermarkets to stock up on enough paracetamol (hell, even newsagents and corner shops sell it)? And obviously this is true for the sufficiently determined suicidals, about whom there's little we can do to stop them from killing themselves short of sectioning them. But adding in the trivial inconvenience of forcing people to go to multiple different shops does appear to serve as an obstacle: by the time you've walked into your third newsagent in an hour, you might well be thinking to yourself "Do I really want to do this?"
Decades of psychological evidence strongly suggest that the vast majority of suicides are impulsive, opportunistic ones (perhaps even "cries for help" that were rather more efficacious than their user strictly intended), and that these suicides would not have occurred if not for the convenience and ease of use of the method employed. If someone is so determined to kill themselves that they voluntarily choose an extraordinarily painful method of doing so like hanging, I think it's fair to say there's little we can do about them. But on the margin, there are huge savings to be made among the less-than-maximally determined suicidals. In the counterfactual world where the US had banned guns ten years ago, I don't think that all of the people who killed themselves with firearms in our world would have instead hanged or drowned themselves. In fact, I don't think that even 50 or 25% of them would have done so.
I'm not arguing that this, in itself, is a persuasive argument in favour of banning guns, and can see the merits of both sides of the debate (particularly the "guns as a check against encroaching authoritarianism" argument advanced by many, including Handwaving Freakoutery, formerly of these parts). But the causal role that guns play in suicide owing to their convenience factor is something that opponents must take seriously. "If we're going to ban guns to stop people from killing themselves, why not go the whole hog and ban ropes to stop people from hanging themselves?" is not a serious argument, for the reasons outlined above.
*A.k.a. acetaminophen, sold under the brand name Tylenol among others.
Yep. If everyone carried around a big red button that would kill them painlessly and instantly, even if they were never pressed "accidentally", I think most people wouldn't make it very long.
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It's a bit of a distraction and cjet79's willing to accept the standard story, but I'll caveat that the evidence is a lot weaker than common knowledge suggests. There's been a sizable number of countries that have either brought about new firearms regulation, or clamped down significantly harder, in the post-1980 range where we have pretty good statistics. That's part of why the Australia example always bugs me: the decrease in total suicides didn't actually stay and there were increases in non-firearms suicide.
((Is this in contradiction to the one case of gas ovens? Sure! ... but exactly how sure are we that pre-1970s 'suicides' were all intentional suicide?))
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I agree with your argument overall, but I think hanging is not as painful as you say that it is. It's just some pressure for a few seconds and then lights out for the next 20 minutes while your body kicks around and tries to free itself. The real bother for the suicidal person there is that they need a good rope, they need to find a good spot that will support them and not let them come loose, they need to be able to tie a great knot, and they need to worry not about aesthetics of such a violent death. I imagine that these constraints are themselves large barriers to depressives who have little willpower for planning in the first place.
The thought sometimes strikes me of unique ways to commit suicide. Ones I have wondered about:
You never hear about people doing either one of these. I don't know if that's because it just doesn't work or because nobody goes for them. The apple seed one would be painful, anyway, and there are probably more effective drugs out there...
Without the barrel directing it, bullets don't go anywhere. The case will split open and the bullet will not shoot out. There's no viable path to suicide based on holding a hot frying pan to the backs of rounds held against your head.
The bullet itself might not do anything, but the explosion would be enough to do something. I saw a photo of some guy's finger that got mangled after he struck a .50 cal bullet with a hammer. That should work on any part of body...
... unless it were encased in bone!
That is indeed a constraining factor, but we're talking about a whole pack exploding right next to your skull. I don't have my strength of bones calculator handy, but I mean, maybe our aspiring depressive could throw in a pack or two of tannerite, which is also legal and doesn't require a background check. I understand that does change the hypothetical significantly, and it would also explain why one would never hear of this method (because it's lumped under an Explosives death).
I agree a whole pack at once might do it, but I don't expect that the whole pack would explode at once.
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No, but coming up with a way to direct a bullet that will work for a shot to the head isn't rocket science.
Actually, come to think of it, it pretty much is rocket science. But very simple rocket science.
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I once had the same thought about eating cherries in bulk.
I vaguely recall some movie where this happens, a guy heats shells on a frying pan.
Won't work, you'd just get peppered with brass shrapnel and suffer horribly, but you won't die because the energy isn't concentrated enough to pierce your skull. The polymer coated buckshot would do even less.
Maybe you'll get lucky and hit an artery and bleed out, but at that point it's a lot cleaner to just use a blade.
You need pressure for a good powder burn. That's why we have the brass in the first place: it seals up the breech and allows the pressure to build up during combustion so the energy has nowhere to go but heat and increasing the velocity of the projectile. Blowing up cartridges without a breech lets the energy tear the cartridge and vent gas in all directions instead of speeding up the brass.
Youtube is full of videos of rednecks blowing up .50 BMG on its own and they're always amazed how underwhelming the performance is.
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I must try so very hard to not get nerd-sniped again into an argument about convenient household or pharmaceutical techniques to kill people quickly and easily.
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Re. hanging, I did a deep dive into the biomechanics of hanging on a morbid curiosity kick a while back. My conclusion was that (to not put too fine a point to it) it's possible to set things up such that only a relatively painless blood choke is applied and conciousness is lost in 8-10 seconds, but the standard method of hanging puts much more pressure on the trachea and inconsistent pressure on the carotid arteries, causing a far more painful and likely drawn-out death.
Damn, how horrifying. I always thought that I would prefer not to be hanged if I had to be executed, glad I was right. Guillotine is far more humane, though my real preference is for the firing squad.
Firing squad is the way to go. That or ground zero of an explosive with enough force to instantly destroy your brain.
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Makes sense. I've done Jiu-Jitsu for a long time and whilst I've never been out-out I've spent a lot of time being choked in various guises and if somebody's got a clean bite and catches a blood choke perfectly it's blackness oncoming almost instantly. But also plenty of chokes where it's see-sawing the line the whole time and can be minutes of awkwardness
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That was what I said above. I never disputed that guns increase suicides.
Right, but I think your post contained something of an elision. If I'm reading you correctly, you're saying that people with terminal illnesses but also people who were dealt a bad hand by life should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless suicide.
While I can understand the argument that people who will never be able to live a normal life (people with severe developmental disorders such that they will never be able to support themselves, paedophiles, the constitutionally unfuckable etc.) should be afforded the dignity of a quick, painless death if they want it, the point I was making about guns is that they facilitate opportunistic suicides among people who don't meet this description who find themselves in a state of intense but temporary distress. And I don't think there's any effective means of separating wheat from chaff. When guns are widely available, you allow the unemployable and unlovable to undergo a quick, painless death - but you also enable a hard-working, decent man who just lost his job to top himself when he would have thought better of it had the gun not been right there in front of him.
The implication that the only people to kill themselves are people who cannot function in ordinary society and want to exit from an agreement they never personally assented to is, in my view, not supported by the best evidence from the social sciences. Every year, lots of people kill themselves who would not have done otherwise if not for the ease of accessibility. An obvious sign of this is the fact that three professions which consistently rank among the most suicidal in every Western country are doctors, dentists and veterinarians. Is it because these professions are uniquely depressing, or attract a particularly dysfunctional class of person? Or is it because all of the people working in these fields have easy access to morphine and other painkillers?
People are not allowed to express an interest in committing suicide without being subject to a whole of oversight and interruption to their life. This can be a good thing to prevent suicide, but it makes all survey data about suicidal willingness a little suspect.
I'd also say that every suicide that happens via someone torturing themselves to death via one of the harder methods is something that could have been prevented with more painless methods being available. At least they could have had a more peaceful death.
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Imagine you hate your life. Every day you go home from your job, stare off into space, and drink a ton of alcohol. You aren't particularly suicidal, but you have fleeting thoughts at times, you still function...with the drink anyway.
One day the thoughts are a little less fleeting...you think to yourself but shit, I don't live on a busy road and getting hit by a car sounds like a lot. How would I even hang myself? Stabbing myself? Seems hard.
The thoughts pass, as they always do.
But if there was a gun? "Well fuck it." Lights out.
I've seen a shocking number of patients who managed to shoot themselves in the head and think it was an oopsy.
So yes limiting access to lethal means is an important part of standard of care and improves outcomes.
As people have pointed out, the crime rate of people who legally carry is extremely low. Your scary scenarios do not describe reality.
He wasn’t talking about crime- making it a crime to commit suicide would be pointless. He was talking about suicide.
The standard justification for criminalizing suicide is not to punish the survivor, assuming they survive. It is, or at least I've heard it claimed, so that the police have a legal pretext to intervene or break down the door and stop them.
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To be clear I am specifically talking about the evidence based way in which increased access to firearms increases suicides. I do not support restricting gun rights in the general population on this grounds, but it is still a real problem.
You can acknowledge that guns have an impact on suicides and say this is not a reason to restrict rights.
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To be fair, the fact that Costco (et al) sell giant containers of acetaminophen is kinda scary to me. It's substantially more dangerous than naproxen (also available in that size). The 24-count restriction sounds pretty reasonable to me.
It's a piece of legislation I fully support. Some Irish legislation carries a whiff of nanny-stateism, but I really can't imagine why a household would ever need more than 24 paracetamol pills in a week. I think implementing something similar in the US would be a no-brainer, especially when you consider paracetamol poisoning is the leading cause of death by acute liver failure. I assume a significant portion of that is accidental: because it's an OTC drug, a lot of people severely underestimate how toxic it is. My dad (PhD in organic chemistry) says there's no way it would have been made available OTC if it was discovered today. I always urge people to use ibuprofen instead when possible.
Four people with headaches easily covers that. And 24 pills is still enough to kill you, painfully. Making the vast majority of people who just want to keep APAP around the house go more often to the store and pay a higher per-unit price just to slightly inconvenience those who want to die isn't reasonable. Nor is it reasonable to go full retard like with pseudoephederine and have a registry to make sure no one is buying a fatal dose by going to multiple pharmacies.
Tylenol is somewhat uniquely dangerous, it would possibly not have been approved as over the counter in the U.S. in today's regulatory environment.
This is for a couple of reasons.
-The therapeutic and toxic range are way too close (aka it's really easy to overdose accidentally, which does happen).
-It has significant interaction with some medical problems (aka liver metabolism). This is admittedly pretty minor in most situations.
And most importantly:
-Tylenol overdose is one of the worst possible ways to die. It is long, and slow, and for a while you think you are fine. This gives people lots of time to decline in misery knowing they made an irreversable choice. It's awful. Most other forms of overdose kill you quickly or rapidly alter your sensorium.
This creates agony on the part of the victim and their family, and also a significant amount of angst and distress in the healthcare team.
If you like you aren't paying for the minor inconvenience of harder to pull out of the packaging pills vs. fewer suicides, you are doing to reduce clinician burnout and doctors and nurses in the workforce longer.
It's also expensive to manage.
I'm not sure we'd have any OTC drugs in the US starting from zero in today's regulatory environment. Analgesics especially even get banned for prescription use (like the COX-2 inhibitors), because regulators refuse to consider that trading off risk of death against pain is valid in the first place.
That's a failing of today's regulatory environment, and has no bearing on whether I should be able to buy a big bottle of death.
My APAP related disgust is reserved for drug warriors who ensure that oxycodone with APAP is the most available formulation of oxycodone, because they consider people trying to abuse it dying horribly to be a feature and not a bug.
I think these days they would argue that the reason is mostly because of synergistic analgesia (which is not incorrect) but yes I agree it's a questionable cost/benefit.
But ultimately society is organized around tradeoffs in your rights to enable you to have rights and the conveniences of civilization. Having to deal with mildly annoying blister packs or smaller bottles doesn't seem like a high price to pay for the amount of pain you can prevent.
Yes, that's one reason the combinations are popular, but not the reason oxy with APAP (Percocet) is so favored over oxy with ASA (Percodan, no longer available) or oxy with ibuprofen (Combunox, no longer available). That's drug warrior pressure.
No, society is organized around what those with power want.
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In my mind, the best arguments against guns is to consider opinions on guns in other countries.
In countries where guns are legal, there are lots of people who want them banned or restricted, for obvious reasons that giving huge swathes of the population the ability to easily kill their fellow countrymen will increase the number of people killed.
In countries where guns are illegal, the number of people lobbying to legalise them is approximately zero.
Are red Americans irrationally attached to their weapons, attaching civilisation-preserving significance to them that they don't merit, or are the children wrong?
Think that it’s a bit silly to worry about what people think about guns, mostly because the people who are against gun don’t really know much about them. And furthermore, it doesn’t answer the question of whether or not guns are actually contextually good. If I lived in a place where the police and legal system were unable or unwilling to enforce the laws that keep people and their property safe I would want a gun because I need to protect myself and my family and my property. If I lived in Japan I wouldn’t want one because it’s pretty safe even at night.
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The children are wrong.
Unless, that is, you (the general you, not you personally) actually want the increasingly totalitarian future in which humans are no more than the expendable and replaceable cells of some superorganism. I mean, we've been headed there for some four thousand years now, and most likely nothing can stop it in the long run, but allowing people to defend themselves looked like a pretty good roadblock for that particular prospect.
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This is just a specific example of the general rule that, absent major disruptions, regulations become stricter and more all-encompassing over time. This tendency is not a good thing.
Major disruptions can push things either way, though usually they accelerate the trend. Revolutions which result in more freedom are rare.
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That's just not true. There's many examples of gun legalization lobbies in Europe with variable degrees of success.
And what about Brazil, or any of the other countries where people straight up run on gun legalization so you can shoot back at the criminals and win elections?
Policy waxes and wanes, but to say personal ownership of arms is directionally unpopular is patently untrue.
Just want to chime in to say that gun rights are a standard part of the Latin American populist package- usually couched as ‘you, law abiding citizen, can protect your family from crime’- thé region having extremely high crime rates.
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Appeal to popularity. America is outlier in many ways. That is not evidence that we are wrong and would benefit by emulating other countries.
It's not definitive evidence, but it's definitely evidence. The fact that no country on the planet except the UK has something like the NHS is good evidence that a single, national health service is a bad way to run things, because if such a system were good other countries would have copied it.
Similarly, the fact that the entire world has looked at US gun culture and laws and nobody has decided to copy them is evidence that they aren't worth copying.
It’s pretty common to run on, and sometimes push through, substantial easing of gun control in Latin America.
That's interesting, and it does make me reconsider my hypothesis. I suppose if you've got an obvious state failure (in this case, the government being too weak to take on the cartels, plus maybe a corrupt police force) then gun ownership would be more appealing to the common man.
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The thing is, I like America way more than I like the rest of the world. I don't want to be like them. I value American uniqueness. Am I an obviously biased American exceptionalist? Sure. But nonetheless, this argument is anti-persuasive to me. Especially when it's something so intrinsically tied to American identiy like personal gun ownership.
Holding the rest of the world up as an example only works if the Americans you're talking to like what they see. Who knows what parts of our weird little experiment are load-bearing? I'm not going to start knocking out pieces of the foundation just because a bunch of foreigners are telling me to.
Also, let us not forget, the First Amendment is practically as unique as the Second. Lack of international imitators may be evidence against something, but it's very weak evidence.
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This argument worked great some decade ago, when Europe could plausibly claim to be as free as the US. When they're canceling elections because the wrong candidate won, arresting opposition candidates, legally penalizing speech, and building government-run digital panopticons, the claims of "civilization-preserving" start looking more credible.
On the other hand, if you start breaking down homicide rates by sub-populations, the claims about the "ability to easily kill" start looking less credible.
I note, without comment, that my most downvoted posts on the Motte are those claiming, correctly, that the 2020 US Presidential election was not rigged.
Did someone on the Motte want not just a rematch, but to ban Biden from round two of the elections?
Also, funnily enough the Romanians don't really dispute the integrity of the votes themselves, they only accused the guy of TikTok voodoo.
The man who is currently President of the United States, with the support of most Motteposters, did not want a rematch - he wanted to be inaugurated despite losing the election. He also called for criminal prosecution of various election administrators who had not committed crimes.
Also, you know as well as I do that Georgescu wasn't disqualified for what he did on TikTok, he was disqualified for paying for it with illegal foreign donations. Which is something the Trump admin is also happy to spam calls for criminal prosecution over.
I don't seem to recall anyone on the Motte saying "Trump lost, but he should be inaugurated anyway". I seem to recall a lot of questioning of the integrity of the elections. The option for rematch with stricter security measures was indeed absent from the conversation. From either side.
Oh spare me. It was clear he was going to get disqualified before anyone said anything about muh illegal donations.
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Europe isn't a country. Talking about stuff that Europe is doing is like talking about how Americans love Samba dancing, mate tea and poutine.
Surely more credible? Making it easy and legal for your citizens to own guns includes making it easy and legal for sub-populations (you mean black people right? You can just say that here) to get hold of them too.
Not really. The European elites all attend the same universities, go to the same cocktail parties etc. The end result being ideas fashionable among them sweep through the continent, even when no one in their countries asked for them, and when you'd expect them to be offensive to their culture. This is without touching on the EU, and the member states' obligation to implement EU law.
When it turns out that said subgroups (black people among them, but there was quite a bit of mass immigration from strange countries lately), skew the statistics to the point that without them, the US would be as safe as any part of Europe, I find it less likely that making guns illegal would substantially change their behavior.
The U.S. of white america would not be as safe as Europe, or indeed Canada, unless by ‘Europe’ you mean the Balkans and some ex soviet countries. White Americans also have higher crime rates than all French or all Canadians- although black Americans have higher crime yet still.
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No they don't? The European elites overwhelmingly attend the universities in their own countries, like everywhere else in the world. The Anglosphere universities do suck in some of them, but I can't find a single European head of state or government outside of the UK that was educated in a UK or US university.
Socialisation is similarly within countries, for the obvious fact that Europe is a multilingual continent of dozens of countries and elites aren't all jetting to the same city every weekend. British elites socialise in London, French elites socialise in Paris (in French), Polish elites socialise in Warsaw etc.
As far as I can tell, none of the authoritarian measures you mentioned have anything to do with the EU. The cancelled election in Romania was done by the Romanian judicary. I'm not sure which arrested opposition politicians you are talking about but the ones that Google came up with (Belarus, Turkey, Armenia, Moldova and Georgia) are not in the EU. Legally penalising speech and building digital panopticons is, I assume, a reference to the UK, which is not in the EU.
Do you live in Europe? Because this reads like someone who just thinks of it as the USA plus funny accents, which is wrong.
A lot of them spend their tine in Brussels. And if it's not that, maybe you can give me a plausible explanation for gender self-ID laws sweaping a decent chunk of the continent
Aren't they literally just now discussing mandatory scanning of all chats in phone apps? Weren't they strong-arming Ireland to ramp up their hate speech laws, like yesterday.
Pretty sure I remember EU big-wigs making a lot of oise about this being what they want done. If you mean that this wasn't done with formal power, that doesn't matter, it's not hiw they work.
Was thinking of LePen. She was convicted to prevent her from running in the next elections. She got a prispn sentence, though is allowed to serve it under house arrest, at which point, I suppose we can quibble if that counts as arrest or not. My point is less about being thrown in a cell, and more about using bogus charges to get rid of political opposotion.
Yes, my entire life.
I'd say it reads like someone who lived in several European countries, and noticed that despite the cultural differences, the same dystopian program is being rammed through everywhere.
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How about Czechia? Or Switzerland?
What about them? They, like the US, have had liberal gun laws for centuries. These aren't recent innovations that have been lobbied for by activists eager to imitate the US experience.
Uh, Czechia has genuinely liberalized its gun laws recently- as has most of the rest of the former eastern block. I seem to recall Poland has liberalized its gun laws yet further recently, too.
Poland hasn't liberalised its laws, Czechia did in 2021 but then tightened them again last year after the Charles University mass shooting. Austria and Sweden have recently tightened their laws, as has Switzerland.
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I find this difficult to believe, at least in the case of Western Europe. British police are rarely armed. The idea that, if UK citizens fought back against the censorship laws, the government could bring lethal force to bear against the unarmed crowd is… I mean, I just don't think it's in the Western European Overton window. It never gets as far as asking if the citizens could fight back.
Britain is not in the EU. It was the biggest British news story of the 2010’s.
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In many European countries it is common to see police armed with rifles at every public transit station (at least it was last time I was abroad).
Britain is the exception.
You can see that, but only really around government buildings of significant importance (I've almost never seen armed cops outside London). Don't seem to recall seeing them at transit stations, the police there were chill and mostly concerned with shooing away the homeless. And believe me, I've been to a lot of stations this month.
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All of these things have happened in the US, though. Moreso in blue states where guns are more controlled, yes, but to my mind the difference isn't about guns, it's about ideological individualism and bloody-mindedness. This correlates with being anti-anti-gun-regulation and therefore with gun presence but is not caused by it.
I don't think they are the same things.
Trump got arrested, but they didn't have the balls to stop him from running. They didn't literally cancel an election. The penaltues for speech aren't legal, as far as I can tell. I suppose they have their own panopticons, but I don't think they compare to what the UK is doing, or what the EU is working on right now.
Has anyone tried verifying that? I say we need a Universal Basic Guns program, in order to make sure.
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Random thoughts incoming.
What I want to say is the following: The simple question of whether and in how far regular people are allowed to arm themselves determines in how far you are looking at the citizens of a republic versus the subjects of a totalitarian state. A sliding scale, of course. And a purely abstract ideal. But it appeals to my sense of aesthetics. Who would not rather be a responsible citizen among responsible citizens, together taking charge of the safety of their public places? Are we truly a domesticated species, dependant on the state to provide us with something as essential and basic as physical protection? Is it truly our lot to be slaughtered by madmen and enemies, unarmed and helpless, with only the faintest prospect of prevention or retaliation by our protector with the monopoly on violence? Or do we take pride in this, say "you may kill me, but my countrymen will avenge me"? No of course not. Instead, we acknowledge that our western societies are absolutely fucking broken, that we cannot trust our fellow man, that we'd rather have the all-powerful and utterly unlimited state oppress us all equally and close our eyes when violence does happen and just hope blindly that it passes us by.
Historically, the open carrying of weapons was usually practiced
Open carrying weapons by civilians in peacetime and without a clear threat, as a political statement, was pretty rare to my knowledge. In fact, I can't think of any examples off the top of my head (though I'm sure it did happen sometimes). Having it as the foundational principle of a society or civilization is pretty unique.
The posession but not open carrying of weapons also shows up in some scenarios. These people would keep their weapons at home or in some other secure but for them accessible location.
Arguing for the posession of guns for suicides is...weird. Even assuming that they are indeed the safest and quickest way for someone to exit. It might make sense. But it seems pretty mraginal an argument for or against allowing regular people to own guns. Suicides are, after all, actively ceasing to be members of society and civilization - in how far should the rules of that society or civilization be shaped to account for them? To some extent perhaps, but they can hardly be central to a question as important as this.
I fully agree with your opening statement that "Gun Rights are Civilization Rights". I'd like to also ask - what other rights are there, that aren't Civilization Rights? Are there rights without civilization, in any practical, enforcable and meaningful sense?
I would truly like for civilization to manifest as a republic of fellow citizens who can be trusted to arm themselves when and where they see fit. Be that to defend themselves, each other, their abstract freedom, or just to kill themselves. And I'd sure like to explore the topic of what the necessary conditions for this are, in how far we have to accept violent criminals ruining everyone's day as a price to pay, how to limit the state's ability to interfere with legal gun ownership without going full libertarian/minarchist/anarchist, what values and habits society must cultivate to arm itself safely and productively...
...but it hardly seems to matter. Gun rights are civilizational rights. Civilization is fucked in so many ways. The culture war isn't some leisurely hobby that a few terminally online PMCs engage in. It's a real large-scale conflict with real-world implications, such as mass immigration into the west without functional assimilation, western societies' inability to deal with persistent crime, superstimulus-driven brain rot, and a clear, dry, open, solid and sunny road to eternal totalitarian dystopia through technology.
And with all of those giant, open wounds eroding the foundations of free-ish, republican-ish Western civilization, we, its citizen-subjects, have utterly paralyzed ourselves by allowing the state to assume ever greater power, by limited our control over it by handing it off to distant elites, and by letting ourselves be divided by partisan conflict that neither side manages to win conclusively. Meanwhile, said state, unchecked and ever growing, does laps around us.
If there ever was such a thing as the free citizen of a western republic who went armed without ill intent as a matter of course, then his days are long over and he's exceedingly unlikely to come back.
This was your daily doompost.
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Since I haven’t seen any comments on this, I want to note how far it goes. It is a fully general argument against liberal democracy in those places. You may or may not be willing to see Los Angeles as a colony ruled by an appointed, authoritarian governor, but the principle points there.
I am extremely sympathetic here. Reintegration of former prisoners into society should involve the restoration of as many rights as possible as soon as possible, rather than keeping them second- or third-class citizens forever. I am ignorant of a lot of details, so I wouldn’t want to present an uncompromising principle. My casual take is that if you trust him to vote, you should trust him to have guns, and if you don’t trust him to have guns, you shouldn’t trust him to vote.
The common thread is one of respect and trust. Gun control is intended to be, in a very literal sense, disempowering: If you are armed you have the power to do these things; we do not trust you with that power, and so we will disarm you. I think that living in a bureaucratic society has desensitized us to this, because respect is inefficient and illegible to the bureaucracy.
Always has been:
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/748400/photo/lapd-chief-parks-talks-about-rampart-scandal.jpg?s=2048x2048&w=gi&k=20&c=EZuaK2p3GFY7PM046xYeAa9ohN2BirI0T0O0ZCQhZM0=
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I mean the fact that so many (in fact I’d argue most) urban cores have become anarchic places where the law doesn’t matter is a general argument against liberal democracy. One of the hallmarks of a good system is that life where the system has control is better than places where it doesn’t have control. When the places nearest our form of government are places that people are paying as much as they can afford to either protect themselves from or escape, the system sucks. And on that score I’d urge anyone who suggests that modern liberal democracy is the absolute best system of government to walk through the urban core of your nearest city unarmed and alone. It’s genuinely scary in many places where crime and criminal gangs are common and not pissing off the gangs is more important to survival than obeying the law.
Now if you’d go to the “bad old days” of whichever autocratic government you choose, chances are you could walk down the street at least in daylight, didn’t worry so much about crime because that government would not tolerate the kind of store-looting in broad daylight that happens today, or mugging or rape or home robbery. Try any of that in China or North Korea, you’re going to be caught and imprisoned rather quickly.
What city do you live near? One can walk through the core of New York or Philadelphia without running into any criminal gangs. Homeless people, yes. One can even walk through the core of Newark, NJ without problems. All these cities have places you wouldn't want to be, but they aren't the core. This is in contrast to the late 1960s to early 1990s, when the cores of the major cities were indeed no-go zones or something like it.
Obviously there are cities where there's almost nowhere you want to be. Detroit. Camden, NJ. Baltimore (except the touristy waterfront area, and maybe an island around Johns Hopkins if that's been maintained). But those are still the exceptions.
Yeah, downtowns are not my cup of tea, but they’re not very dangerous- and theres no shortage of city neighborhoods you don’t want to go to for crime and danger reasons.
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Yeah I'm totally lost when people talk about inner cities as anarchic wastelands... They're mostly just poor and dirty at worst.
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I do not think that UK libel laws have much if anything to do with their restrictions on gun ownership.
More broadly, I think that the idea to use guns to keep the government in check was fine in 1800 but today is just laughable. Since world war one, the wartime capabilities of states and what US citizens are allowed to own have greatly diverged. How is your semi AR15 with a ten rounds mag going to fare against a predator drone or a tank? In the very best case, you would be fighting a protracted war against the federal government. If you win, it looks like Mao winning his civil war, if you lose, it looks like Hamas in Gaza.
Of course, on the basis of "things should not be illegal if they are fun, even if they are not necessary", we can legalize further things.
For example, I imagine that hand grenades are much fun. Or landmines. Watch the stupid coyotes explode when they trespass on your property. Contact poisons are fun. Radioactive substances are fun. So is building your own nuclear reactor. And if we really want to counterbalance the federal military advantage, why not allow citizens to start their own nuclear weapons program? Provided they are not minors, mentally retarded or have demonstrated poor impulse control, of course.
In a country where most people hunt their dinner, guns are a necessity. But this is not sustainable in any but the most sparsely settled areas.
Different people naturally have different ideas about the tradeoffs between usefulness (which includes being fun) and danger. Some want to ban any knives with blades longer than 3cm. Some would be fine if you could just buy hand grenades at the hardware store.
For the most part, people agree with the level of regulation around cars, which are immensely practical in most areas but also account for a huge fraction of accidental manslaughters. So you need a driver's license, your vehicle has to be designed according to certain standards and get regular safety inspections, and you need to obey all lot of different rules while on a public road. This is all very bothersome and expensive, but it also keeps these manslaughter cases on a manageable level, compared to a counterfactual level where everyone could build their own vehicle and try to learn to drive it unsupervised.
My estimate is that in most of Europe (e.g. Germany), getting a hunting license (including the rights to own rifles and a pistol, but not the right to bear them outside your home except when on hunting trips), plus the costs of a gun safe is still somewhat cheaper than the costs of a driver's license. The costs to get licensed to own a gun for sports shooting are lower (no need to demonstrate knowledge of tracking down an injured paper target), but also might require a few years of membership in a shooting club. Few people get the license to carry loaded weapons in public, typically this is restricted to on-duty employees of security companies.
I don't think the OP was referring to libel laws, but rather to laws that make it a criminal offense to mock police officers, criticise immigration policy or dispute that trans women are women.
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You're making me break out the old /k/ copypasta (how do I make the quote one continuous block I don't know how to internet):
will yield
On the topic
I think that your model of tyranny is very different from my model of tyranny. Your model seems to be that the government will be replaced by some entity universally loathed by the civilian population. I think that this exceedingly unlikely to happen -- the ayatollah will not become the US president through some legal loophole and a bad SCOTUS ruling.
Any tyranny which will happen will have buy-in from one of the big political tribes. Probably they will have at least 10% enthusiastic supporters, 20% who still prefer it to whatever the previous status quo was, 40% who are indifferent to uncomfortable and 20-30% who are very opposed. Of course, they also need enough legitimacy so that the military will not oppose them, so all three branches of the federal government will have to back whatever tyrannical actions they are taking.
Possibly tyrannical actions could include violating freedom of speech by making all the arguments of the opposing side illegal hate speech ("mentioning Epstein/migrant crime is illegal"), de-naturalizing and deporting 5% of citizens, effectively abolishing democracy (i.e. an amendment to the effect of "like the pope appointing cardinals, the president can appoint any number of congressmen for life, who will vote alongside their elected colleagues") and so forth.
The 10% strongly in favor of whatever tyrannical acts the feds are committing can probably be recruited as brown- or rainbow-shirts -- earning a nice federal paycheck and fighting with state of the art weapons and sleeping in guarded camps while fighting for your beliefs seems appealing enough.
For the anti-tyranny side (which will still mostly be fighting for tribal object level goals rather than against tyranny per se), things look different. Neither tribe has much of a culture of shooting federal officers or servicemen. The rebels will not make much money, they will fight with civilian weapons and sleep either in the woods (and hope that they are not spotted by thermal drones) or in the houses of sympathizers (who are risking their lives for them).
Also, fighting a guerrilla / protracted war is extremely stomach-churning. Basically, it is a competition of who is better at terrorizing the civilian population into compliance. The government will have an advantage here because they can rely on the trappings of legitimate power. Their goons can afford to have nice show trials where people who provided material aid to the rebels are convicted and then executed -- or just disappear people. It is a lot easier to make a non-psychopathic man arrest a random civilian countryman and put them on a truck than it is to make them shoot them on the spot. To out-terrorize the tyrant, the outgunned rebels would have to murder civilian collaborators without any of these trappings of legitimacy.
(Then you have the problem that tyranny typically comes in thin salami slices, and there is no good Schelling point where most potential rebels would agree that shooting at feds is indicated. Especially since every dictatorship aims to make it hard to create a common knowledge that a certain fraction of the population is willing to violently oppose the government. One might argue that this kind of coordination problem has been solved with the internet, but the internet will be the first thing to go when things heat up. I do not think that most of the population being addicted to their smartphones and social media is going to be helpful for an uprising against a tech-savvy government which can turn the former into bugs and the latter into a database of political leanings. And then coordination of uprisings would have to byzantine fault tolerant, because it is in the interest of the state to lure the most gung ho rebels to start early because they are mistaken about the level of support they have and take them out.)
The US won their independence war and the Taliban won against the US because the loser was in a position where they could afford to lose. If the fall of Kabul had meant that the top 1k people in the US government were beheaded, the US would have paid whatever price required in money or brutality to keep that from happening.
A domestic rebellion is such an existential threat to the people in charge. A federal government could not decide to pull out of California or Texas the way the US pulled out of Afghanistan, especially not due to irregular warfare -- once they have established that states can get rid of them by being a pain in the ass for a few years, people in other states might try to emulate that. Better to set a precedent where they glass the cities and turn the rest of the state into Gaza before retreating.
So while I agree that small arms are ultimately essential to control a country, I also think that any likely tyranny could also field enough goons to outcompete the very small fraction of citizens who are willing to give up their creature comforts to fight ruthlessly in an uphill battle.
--
A different argument can be made that uprisings can also serve to deter unpopular measures even if they are ultimately crushed simply by imposing costs. This might be a steelman of BLM: property destruction, unlike peaceful demonstrations hit the government where it hurts them (a bit, at least -- it is not like the US would declare bankruptcy over one or two billion dollars). The convictions of the four cops involved in the Floyd killing (whatever you think of their culpability) certainly was helped along by the fact that any verdict other than guilty would have resulted in another billion dollars going down the drain.
Still, I would argue that gun ownership was not central to the George Floyd protests or their prevention. 19 people killed is an extremely small number when compared to a billion of property damage. The state was not interested in escalation because they (correctly, IMO) feared a snowball effect: shooting looters would have fanned the flames. BLM, for their part was also happy to stick looting. Mostly unopposed looting is much more lucrative than deciding to murder cops or whites and bleeding to death after a shootout.
Also active guerrilla warfare success tends to rely on pre-existing networks of ethnicity, religion, family or whatever else. Plus significant foreign support. You can red/blue tribe all you want but these are ideological causes and not literal tribes.
Americans are not for the most part built like that. Red Dawn arguments are generally a spurious circlejerk.
I don't know about that. First, there are the literal ethnic tribes in America that, while not all on the same page ideologically (to say the least), would all form independent loci of insurrection. See, e.g., roof Koreans, Sikh convenience store owners, etc.
Then you have the thousands of gun clubs, thousands of veterans groups, thousands of local police departments, and hundreds of tight-knit, rural red-kneck communities, all armed to the teeth. And that's before we get to any of the actual, honest-to-god militias and private military contractors around the country, or the sizeable proportion of the US military and national guards (or state guards like Texas's, which literally just won a standoff against the federal government over border policy just recently) that would surely defect against a tyrannical central government. Or the many thousands of veterans with first-hand experience in how to conduct an insurgency.
These may not be ethnic tribal groups, but the US has no shortage of well-armed men with deep fraternal ties to each other, often formed on literal battlefields.
Of course, many of these guys are weekend warriors who would melt into mush at the first sign of real oppression, but don't forget that America has spent most of the past 25 years at war, and it doesn't take that many people to actively resist before a territory becomes ungovernable. Look at the results when less than 1% of the Iraqi population actively participated in the insurgency against the US. Or the infamous statistic of how supposedly only 3% of Americans took up arms against the British during the American Revolution.
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Look at occupied Ukraine. A sufficiently determined police state can eradicate 99.9% of armed resistance.
Anyone who is a potential insurgent passes through a filtration camp: the sheriff, his deputies, the preacher, the judge, the chairs of every club, the PT coach, the history teacher, every member of every board, the boyscout leaders, every veteran, every hunter, the crazy prepper, etc.
The detainee is moved to a filtration camp (think Alligator Alcatraz) and forced to unlock his phone. Then, if there's even a shred of suspicion, he gets Gitmo/Abu Ghraib treatment until his wife and children cough up every gun and every cartridge they can find and he himself identifies every suspicious contact plus two extra potential insurgents and explains why.
Then he is released and limps back to his family with a rooted phone and waits for the hematomas to heal. His off-road pickup is confiscated, just in case. If he's caught doing anything suspicious, well, he had his chance.
Ukraine is a little different: I can instead choose to leave the occupied areas and walk to unoccupied Ukraine.
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The occupied parts of Ukraine are primarily ethincally Russian and speak Russian. Even if they don't support occupation, they aren't going to be the most hardcore zelensky supporters.
Even so, as far as I can tell gorilla groups are still able to operate in occupied ukraine and mount attacks.
Guess which parts of Ukraine voted for him the most. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2019_Ukrainian_presidential_election,_round_2.svg
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Yeah but you and the guy writing the above aren't the mujahideen you're Americans who enjoy creature comforts. It'd be three days of chicken tender embargos and you'd be giving your guns up
The army can't afford to guard every single Combination KFC Taco Bell in the country. The daily fast food raids are going to be hard fought but I think the insurgents can pull it off.
There really aren't that many of them left. This guy goes over their history and estimates there are less than 500 left and they are actively trying to get rid of them.
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The only meaningful difference in a protracted civil conflict is mountains.
America has a ton of motivated political irregulars of many political stripes, and loads of impractical terrain not far from farmland.
You could run a guerilla for a very long time if you wanted to and had enough civilian support. And that has actually happened many times in American history. With extremely bloody outcomes.
You are a fool to think Americans can't be driven crazy enough to be the men in black pyjamas when that shit happened many times in a small scale up and including within living memory.
Also the I-70, I-80, and I-90 freeways run through some very mountainous territory full of some of the most conservative groups of Americans. Rebels in the mountain west could literally cut the northern part of America in half. All interstate transit would have to be on the I-10 and I-40 through Arizona.
Or at least I-10 after the Navajo Nation blockaded I-40 from Gallup to Flagstaff.
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The states and nigh-rural cities where Boy Scouts (and their Evangelical Christian analogues) actually earn those camping and forestry badges. The states where lighters and pocketknives are still daily carry.
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But doesn’t that require that the population be willing to actually fire back? That might be easier with guns, but modern suburban Americans are not the same stock as Muslims in MENA. Insurgency works if you have a population willing to fight. Arabs in the Middle East sure, they’re raised to fight, to wish for tge deaths of their enemies. White suburban Americans are not made of that stuff. They’ve been tamed from birth, raised to be nice, to prize comfort and safety and peaceful living. I just find it hilarious that people expect suburban professionals who meekly obey every dictate from corporate America and schedule their two week vacations during which they do work emails are suddenly going to rebel and shoot government workers. It’s not going to happen because most of us would be under the bed afraid of the cops.
All that matters is spreading the idea that they can get away with it. Soccer mom by day, assassin by night.
Antifa is a bunch of sheltered rich kids, yet they've committed dozens of felonies each because they keep getting away with it.
Yeah but Antifa are essentially given soft handling veering on explicit carte blanche by the powers that be.
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Yes, because the government has been allowing them to get away with it. And in our fictional universe of Fascist America, those same people and their acquaintances are being beaten and thrown in jail for the first rock thrown, and thus relegated to menial labor jobs once finally released a decade later. This is what happens to rock throwers in actual police states. What middle class or upper class person is going to stick a gun in the face of an actual policeman if it means that for him and his family, their future is thrown away? What person in that situation would allow their kids to hang around the kind of people who are throwing rocks if letting it happen means the rest of the family loses their position and lives in poverty? If it meant that your other kids can no longer dream of going to college and getting a decent job afterwards?
Maybe the lower classes with little to lose would try it. But the control the modern world has is such that it’s less a fear of getting shot and more a fear of the social and economic consequences to follow of stepping out of line. They fear HR more than anything.
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Oh, I agree with you 100% that Americans don't have the temperament required to fight back against a tyrannical government. But that is a very different argument from "we can't fight tyranny because they will have tanks and fighter jets". I don't get the sense that @ChickenOverlord was trying to claim Americans are going to put up a fierce resistance, just responding to that specific argument.
The median American doesn't need to fight though, only a small percentage does. The same was true in Afghanistan, Syria, and in any other guerilla conflict you can think of. In fact the "3%ers" (who I assume are mostly glowies) are named after the supposedly only 3% of colonial Americans that fought in the Revolution.
I just looked up the numbers for Iraq and even if you take the figure of how many people aided and supported the insurgency, rather than actually took up arms, you're still at less than 1% of the population. It really doesn't take that many violent young men to make a nation effectively ungovernable.
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I think there's a further epicycle here- the blue tribe would, when facing government oppression, roll over, lawfare, and flee to Canada. The red tribe is the one that might go kinetic(still very unlikely). And they staff the security forces.
The black tribe also might go kinetic but its internal problems prevent that far harder than anyone else.
To have a brutal authoritarian regime in the US requires red tribe buy in. And you can do it through rum millet, I suppose, or cleruchic grants. But realistically red tribe ethnogenesis is more a thing that needs to be taken into account than a thing that can be really controlled so you can't get too oppressive to red interests without losing state capacity towards the uncooperative fast.
When the Feds ordered military and national guard units to desegregate the South with armed force, they did so unquestioningly, despite those units being staffed by decidedly unwoke Southerners.
This is not 1955. Both left and right wing Americans would do well to remember that.
Yes, Americans have gotten softer, weaker, fatter, and far more pacified since then.
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Could you elaborate on the difference? The armed forces personnel back then were more virulently racist and reflexively anti-Washington than probably most people alive today. And yet they didn't hesitate in turning their guns on their fellow Southerners in the name of racial equality.
You think some infantryman with a Lebron jersey in his barracks room is going to counter this trend?
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Hamas is still kicking in Gaza, the Taliban are in charge of Afghanistan. Unless the US government is willing to glass itself semiauto pistols and rifles pose a significant challenge to imposing a tyranny.
I've often seen similar arguments. It, i think, often stems from an ignorance of what actually the gun laws are. In most places in America, it is much more difficult to obtain the licenses to take a gun to the store or post office than it is to get one to drive there.
And do you want to live in Gaza? "Guns would allow us to overthrow a tyrannical government and restore a real democracy with first-world living standards once the unrest is over" is a decent pitch. "Guns would allow us to survive indefinitely outside the tyrant's control as starving guerillas in a bombed-out wasteland", not so much.
Gazan's are such an incompetent set of people that when given almost 2 decades of self rule they did absolutely no economic development, no infrastructure construction, etc etc. Instead they dedicated all that time towards scheming up new terrorist attacks.
If Red America was given a similar gift they would be on the moon and the US gov would be afraid to attack the free enclave because they might lose.
Yes Gaza sucks to live in, because it is full of Gazans.
Oh no, you are not fair to them. They built a lot of infrastructure. Every school, hospital or mosque had under it a bunker for storing arms, hiding troops and supplies for Hamas. Every schoolyard and hospital grounds double as missile launching site. Miles of tunnels have been built, and not just some rat holes, but tunnels you can live in for months, with ventilation, facilities, food storage, multiple exits in private houses and businesses all over the place. It's a lot of infrastructural work, and they have been very busy for two decades. It is true that this infrastructure has only one goal - war with Israel - and is completely useless otherwise, but I don't see the citizens of Gaza to mind too much. Surely, when they are losing the war, they don't like it, but the whole concept of being in eternal war with Israel, even if this means living in medieval conditions and spending all the money on building more war infrastructure and sacrificing all their kids to the war effort - they are completely fine with this concept. They actually want this, more than anything. Maybe not 100% of them, but about 90% for sure. Their only problem with the war is that they are currently losing badly.
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Total blockades and a lack of local ressources does tend to hamper economic growth.
I'm not about to defend Hamas, but if you were a Gazan businessman in the 90s, there really isn't a lot you could do when trade is functionally impossible.
Can't buy machines for industry, couldn't even export the production, tourism is a no go, can't even have 3G cell towers or any sort of proper internet so no weird internet business.
It's a prison. The inmates are making shanks and trading cigarettes. As you would expect.
They had tons of resources, and there never had been "total blockades". How do you think they built miles of tunnels and thousands of rockets? Where do you think all their weapons are from? Did they magic it out from sea water and sand? No, they used the materials that came for declared civilian purposes, and money sent by petro-emirates, Iran and other deep-pocketed Muslim sponsors and they used it exactly for what they wanted - preparing for war. And what they coudn't get in openly, they got clandestinely via border tunnels, which were numerous and virtually ignored by Egypt. They had all the industry they wanted - it's just the industry they wanted is making rockets, not tractors or computers. If Hamas wanted to turn Gaza into Taiwan - there would be billions of oil dollars available for them to do that. But the whole point of Gaza is to be a problem for Israel, and the whole point of Hamas is to wage war on Israel, everything else is secondary. And since the population of Gaza does not seem to have any problem with that goal - they have what they have.
It's a weird kind of prison, where offering to leave is called racist and genocide, and asking to at least stop making weapons and lobbing them over the fence is taken as crazy talk. I don't think there's another "prison" like that in the world, where the inmates have full control, regularly try (very often successfully) to murder the guards, and the guards respond with providing them free food and offering them to leave whenever they want, which is always rejected.
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There are hurdles. If Gaza was full of Americans it would be a paradise and Israel would be afraid not of terrorist attacks, but of being surpassed as the local economic power.
How'd that work for Liberia?
Sure, that sunset of Americans might also have trouble.
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Well, no, I don't want to live in Gaza, but the threat of Gaza can keep governments from turning (more) tyrannical.
Sometimes you have to be willing to punish defectors even at great cost to yourself, otherwise nobody has an incentive to play nice with you. That's why we evolved the revenge circuitry in our brains; a deterrent is a deterrent.
Or, as the meme goes, "I swear to God I'll kill us all if you fuck with me".
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The threat of turning the place into gaza is the deterrent. And the power to go nuclear is important.
The Soviets and Americans didn't want to live in a nuclear wasteland yet they still built thousands of nukes.
Is it? I mean, sure, that's the steelman. It works. But is it actually the mainstream Red Tribe belief? I feel like most gun owners who cite the "safeguard against tyranny" argument think of it in terms of the Spirit of '76, not mutually-assured destruction. And I don't think support for one necessarily implies support for the other.
Red tribers don't need to believe that Gaza is the outcome for it to be an effective deterrent. Red tribers could think that rebellion is sunshine and rainbows, and the deterrent would still work because the actual outcome of rebellion would be Gaza. And that Gaza would extend to blue territory as well.
As long as the elites in charge are smart enough to understand MAD, the dumb boomers who think rebellion is easier actually contribute more to MAD.
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Most of us refer to the relative laxity of US covid restrictions due to the heavy armament of the US anti-covid restrictions crowd. Ain't nobody gave me shit over a mask while I was open carrying.
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?? I have both, that is not so(and btw carrying a gun in the post office is illegal everywhere in America unless you happen to be an on-duty police officer). There might be places in the US where it is more difficult to get a CHL than a drivers license but it's not 'most' places in America.
It is certainly true in almost all major blue states. It is also true in many purple states like Ohio, PA, Virginia, and more. Your admission that people can't take their gun into the post office anywhere is also telling. What that means is you can't GO to the post office if you have a gun on you while you are walking around, or if you are in your car, you need a safe in which to store your gun lest it get stolen when you go into the post office. Even many red states have municipalities that ban firearm possession on public transit, meaning many people are effectively disarmed during work hours.
DLs, OTOH are basically universal and trivially easy to obtain. No one actually fails the driving test anymore, I doubt they ever did. And you get multiple screw ups before privileges are revoked. Indeed they can be re-obtained even after DUIs. OTOH, 1 fuck up with a gun typically means permanent deprivation of your gun rights, subject to rapidly ratcheting prison sentences.
I live in PA, and getting a CCL here is trivially easy, even in deep blue areas. The only minor impediment is that in some counties you have to submit the application in person, while others allow mail or online submissions, and in all counties you have to pick up the permit in person. Compare this to getting a DL, which requires a physical exam, written exam and eye test at the licensing center, ID plus Social Security Card plus two proofs of address, and then a road test to cap it all off. The procedural hurdles for driving are significantly higher.
Don't forget the requirement of two references, including at every five-year renewal.
In PA the sheriff is allowed to ask for references, and it's on the standard form, but not allowed to contact them. I can't speak of other counties, but in Allegheny County the (Democratic) sheriff doesn't require them and the form they distribute has the fields pre-filled as "Not required".
Columbia County's online application states that an applicant's references must call the sheriff's office within five days of the applicant's applying.
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The US government would be far rougher with Red Tribe than it would with the Pashtuns or the Palestinians.
Even if they are, Red Tribe Americans are smarter and better trained than those two groups plus one would need to account for military defections. Like I said, they'd have to glass everyone. You can't hold a mid sized suburb with drones and a few tanks. You need to be able to go door to door.
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That would be a devastating demonstration of the difference between "fargroup" and "outgroup", and you're probably right. But on the other hand, it's harder to profit from being rough with people when their sympathizers are a decent fraction of your soldiers and your family isn't ten thousand miles away.
To this day you can start typing "fort h" into Google and its recommendation before you get any farther will be the "fort hood shooting", with the 2009 one on top of the results. Taliban fighting other Afghans in Afghanistan had about a 1-to-1 kill ratio, and were an order of magnitude worse at killing Americans, but it just took one Taliban sympathizer in Texas to rack up 13-to-1 (well, 13-to-0 so far, but as of March 2025 it looks like he's now more likely to die of execution than old age). Like most military bases, Fort Hood has way more Red Tribe sympathizers than Taliban sympathizers, and it's a very good thing that we've never pissed off the former nearly as much.
Red tribe defection doesn't look like random acts of terror. It looks like loss of full civilian control of the military. It looks like cops saying they 'can't figure it out who did it' a lot. It looks like general refusal to cooperate with the federal government, even by people for whom that is their actual full-time day job.
Would Greg Abbott have succeeded in preventing the border patrol from holding the border open if they hadn't been Texans who strongly disagreed with the Biden admin's policies?
It demonstrably can: look at Oklahoma City. But I think you're right in the general case.
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I really never understand this argument, particularly not the way it is made with smug certainty.
Many people did not think this argument was fine in 1776. The patriot militias were very much understood to be out-gunned and under-equipped. Pragmatic loyalists argued in the continental congress that the colonists lacked artillery, a navy, a cavalry, etc. To say nothing of the divergent quality of firearms: many observers noted that the rusty muskets pulled down from over minutemen's fireplaces were no match for the cleaned and oiled Land Pattern Muskets of the redcoats. This argument has been made against every guerilla army, and while guerilla warfare isn't a win-now button, it has been proven effective.
Hamas in Gaza did not allow private firearm ownership. Gaza, under Hamas, probably had around 20,000 civilian firearms across about 2,000,000 people, a 1% ratio. The US has an estimated 30 million "modern sporting rifles" (the NRA's preferred designation for things like AR variants) for a population of 330 million. If 10% of Gazas preward population had owned an AR, Israel never would have invaded. Which is the real function: it prevents government tyranny by making it impractical to enforce through violence. Once the shooting starts, the people in the military aren't vidya game pawns that go to the directed square and do what the commander said. They're going to reconsider their options, rapidly.
What are you talking about with 10 round magazines? In most states, you can currently purchase any size you like. Just 16 restrict it.
One also imagines that the sort of person who is willing to wage asymetrical violent civil war against the government of the USA might also have something of an itchy trigger-finger for his cordless drill -- making this argument indicates that the person doing so does not have the knowledge to make any serious comment on the broader issue, either.
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IIRC at the point Israel invaded Gaza the alternative was not "abandon the campaign and go home", it was "continue bombarding it until there wasn't anything left standing large enough for a Hamasnik to hide behind".
I think Gaza is in the reference class of "A government which is willing to commit genocide and has access to tanks and bombing planes can defeat an insurgency regardless of however many small arms the insurgents have."
But where's the defeat though?
You might be able to say this once they've successfully occupied the area and destroyed Hamas. That hasn't happened yet.
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All these years of Israel genociding the Palestinians, and yet there's more of them than ever.
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The advantage in weaponry back in 1776 is like two different sized water bottles, the advantage in weaponry now is a water bottle vs a giant lake. Guerilla armies thrive nowadays for a number of reasons, but a lot of it is that the big armies don't go all out.
The stark difference between say, the US during WW2 vs the US during the Iraq War suggests we have a lot of extra capacity we could throw at any issue if we wanted to. We just don't really want to, Americans don't want to feel actual meaningful sacrifices from the nonsense going on in the Middle East, so we throw a fraction of overall power at it. Israel doesn't want to (or at least are held back from) just rounding up all the Palestinians and shooting/bombing/etc. Hamas only operates by hiding in civilian cover and even then they still don't inflict much meaningful damage back. Their fight for survival is us scratching an itch on our backs.
Even when wars are more equal, it's often because they have the support of other great powers. Look at Russia vs Ukraine rn, they're both getting equipment (and sometimes even troops) from various different sources, and according to Trump Russia still seems to be facing a 14:1 ratio against Ukraine. and this is Russia
Ukraine is getting a pittance of western firepower compared to what we could do (we're not even at Iraq levels of sacrifice) if we really wanted to go all out and they're holding on strong against the Russians.
I'm sure a bunch of rogue American militias could go around shooting up theaters or something and terrorizing government siding citizens, but as long as the military stays loyal they don't got a chance if we actually wanna go all out.
The better hope here is that the military is made up of normal Americans, many who will side with the citizens if it ever got to the point where most Americans wanted an uprising to begin with.
All the high tech weaponry in the world doesn't matter for counterinsurgency purposes. Modern combined arms warfare is optimized for defeating peer and near peer adversaries in a stand up fight, not for blowing up a bunch of goat fuckers with rifles. If the enemy doesn't have anti-tank missiles or tanks, a multi-million dollar main battle tank is no more combat effective than a pickup with armor plates welded on and a cannon in the back. If the enemy doesn't have radar, your multi-billion dollar supersonic stealth strike fighter is no better than a crop duster with bombs strapped on it. Of course having armor and air support at all is super important, but the overmatch eventually doesn't provide any additional value.
During WW2, China lost nearly all its modern equipment and trained forces in the early days of the war, leaving them to fight the remainder of the war with only obsolete or crudely made small arms, against an enemy with machine guns, trucks, tanks, artillery, and air support. An enemy that was also willing to go gloves off and genocide the as many Chinese as necessary to win. Yet even with collapsing state capacity and morale against an overwhelming enemy, the Chinese still managed to stubbornly cling on to territory and inflict serious losses to the enemy, while only taking 3:1 casualties in direct confrontation. Actual gorilla warfare which does not even attempt to meet the enemy's attach head on would achieve a much more favorable kill ratio.
In the end a lake is more powerful than a water bottle, but a bucket will do the job just as well. Yet insurgencies have succeeded in the past even against determined and far more powerful opponents.
The Allies (primarily the US) provided a total of something like 650,000 tons of materiel to China via The Hump, at the cost of nearly 600 aircraft and around 1700 crew lost. There were also notable Allied air units (and some ground units) in China during the war.
Which isn't to diminish their accomplishment, but it wasn't completely a solo effort.
The origin of the meme "Never get involved in a land war in Asia" is that various WW2-era generals (of whom Montgomery was the first to go on the record in 1962) thought that Allied assistance to China in WW2 had been a mistake - presumably because Chiang and Mao preferred to use the aid to fight each other and not the Japanese.
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I do love autocorrect sometimes.
oh no, I've gone to great lengths to make sure I always turn autocorrect off.
In that case I have no choice but to concede. Actual gorilla warfare would have the Japs on the run.
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Wait forget everything else: do those casualty numbers in Ukraine have any credibility or is this a map sharpie moment?
It's not really possible to know too well, Trump just shits out words and claims at random. But decent chance it's real and he just said it was because he was briefed quite recently. Would also explain the pivot on Russia if he thought they were losers for such a drastic ratio.
But even if he was making it up and it was lower, even half with 7:1 ratio would still be fantastic.
I'm more interested in the raw numbers of dead Russians, plus the severe life-ruining casualties on top of that. Maybe it's been a very bad year so far, but I haven't gotten that impression, across the course of the war that's gonna be something like half a million dead so far out of about 30 million Russian men between 14-45?
Ukraine is probably in even worse shape, though it says something if Trump is repeating pro Ukraine fake news these days.
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First off, as a technical point, the ARs will have a lot more than ten rounds (30 round is the standard magazine, lots of people run drums with 50 or 100 rounds).
Secondly, gestures to Afghanistan the US army is capable of losing a war to an opponent with small arms and IEDs! I've never understood the "the US military would crush an armed populace" line of arguing because it had a chance to do that in the last two decades and failed. (And of course laying the blame on Iran or Pakistan or whoever is cope – do you think China or Russia would fail to arm insurgents in the US if there was a civil war?) What I find much more questionable an assumption is that the US armed populace would act like the populace in Afghanistan (or Northern Ireland) but if they did, it seems likely from history that the US armed forces would in fact lose. Wars are political endeavors and technology does not change that.
Thirdly, in most civil wars, the military and national security apparatus is not actually monolithic. Let's say that it's true for the sake of argument that the "armed populace" is not capable of "beating the US military" (I actually agree this is a fantasy because even if the "armed populace" could beat the US military on a giant featureless plain that's...not how real wars work.) In many, perhaps most civil wars, the military fragments alongside the rest of the populace. In which circumstance, it can be really helpful to have an armed populace even if there is no irregular warfare because they are likely to be better marksmen, more likely to be able to contribute to arms stockpiles, etc. In a prolonged civil war situation, the side with the support of the armed populace will be favored to win all else being equal. Which means there's a certain incentive for ideologies to promote firearm ownership (on their own team) and to attempt to convince the other side to disarm.
(As an aside, for this reason widespread firearms ownership is actually extremely beneficial to the US state. The US military recruits disproportionately from certain areas for reasons that are not but are correlated to firearms ownership.)
All of these are, at least in the right circumstances, legal in the US, but the hand grenades and nuclear reactors at a minimum require paperwork.
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At least for Germany that seems not to be true. From my experience, the required course and the cheapest safe available equal roughly the cost of a drivers license (~4000€). The comparison lacks another crucial detail. Obtaining a hunting license requires a background check. That would be fine if it the check would only pertain criminal record and mental illness. But it doesn‘t. As things stand, being in a non-prohibted (ie legal) right wing party may be an excluding factor. In other words, having the wrong political opinion may prevent you from obtaining a hunting license in Germany, even if you have no criminal record, are not mentally ill and have passed the licensing exam. The same applies for a sport shooting license.
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I think the biggest issue with guns isn't about trusting most other legal members of society but keeping them out of the dangerous hands to begin with. Shady dealers, private market sales, straw purchasing, theft, etc. These are all much easier to prevent in a society with few guns and strict controls then a society with guns everywhere.
And there's no simple easy way to tell the difference between a fine person and a dangerous person. A guy walking around in a balaclava holding a rifle near a politically charged demonstration might be perfectly safe and only intending on self-defense, or he could be planning a mass shooting. And sure that guy with severe road rage who screams and yells at other drivers on his daily commute might have some severe anger issues, but does that mean when he gets into a fight at the bar he'll start shooting? And maybe Joe Random is perfectly fine normally but when he gets drunk he turns irresponsible and shoots at his neighbor. And Johnny Schizo in his early stages just got brainfucked by chatgpt pretending to be a god and told to kill his family.
Determining who is responsible with them can be a difficult task, and restricting the pipelines is tough. One of the biggest sources of illegal guns is parked cars. I might trust you with a gun, but I don't trust the guy who just broke your car window in the middle of the night and stole your gun.
And that's much harder to solve, because even if you require people to store guns securely at all times are we gonna start arresting people because they forgot it in their car coming home from the range?
You think psychosis is just for people like Johnny Schizo? No no no, the fun part about AI is that it doesn't need a diagnosed illness like schizophrenia to take hold. It just needs a vulnerability, and it is uniquely capable of creating or exploiting one in almost anyone - and getting better all the time. You're all in my world now.
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I'd be curious what fraction of guns left in parked cars are left their because their owners can't legally keep them on their person where they've parked --- bars (depending on state), private property that disallows carrying, etc. I'm not going to blindly use that to push for legalizing carry everywhere (honestly, probably not my preference), but the numbers would at least be interesting.
You need a carry permit to transport a gun in a car, at least in most places I'm aware of, unless the gun is unloaded and cases in the trunk or some other inaccessible area.
In Texas no you did not before constitutional carry- a car was reckoned as your personal property and the same rules for firearms applied as inside your own house.
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Yeah I would not be surprised if laws against concealed carrying helped contribute to this issue! That being said, a cursory look in cars shows a surprising amount of firearms just sitting in plain view, not even under a seat or in the glovebox so I think a fair bit of that is irresponsible owners.
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Is this actually true? I fully accept that prohibition lowers the general public's ability to access the prohibited substance (e.g., alcohol prohibition actually lowered drinking significantly and permanently changed U.S. drinking culture), but is there any evidence that it significantly impacts illicit dealing in the prohibited/regulated substance?
Well
From a common sense view, straw purchasing and theft of legal guns can't really happen if purchasing and legal guns don't exist.
No way to prevent this says only nation where this regularly happens is a joke for a reason. Most other first world nations don't seem to have nearly as much gun violence, and they also have more restrictive laws.
Maybe it's worth the freedom (I think it is for most responsible gun owners) but it certainly seems true that less guns in general helps lead to less guns for criminals. Although as 3D printed firearms and the like become easier to do, we might see this equalizing as criminals might not have to steal to begin with.
The obvious counter-examples being Canada and Switzerland, first world nations which have similar rates of gun ownership to the US but nowhere near as much gun violence, suggesting the problem is a cultural or demographic one rather than with guns in and of themselves.
Private handgun ownership in Canada and Switzerland is not high. Essentially all the excess "gun deaths" (suicides and homicides) in the US are handgun deaths.
I agree this doesn't answer the question of "Why don't other countries with large-scale private long gun ownership see more media-friendly spree killings?" But if you care about body count, the reason why US gun culture is more lethal than Canadian or Swiss gun culture is the type of gun.
I'd say it's also the legal restrictions where you can't have them in public - can't be transporting them in a vehicle unless they're unloaded/locked/stored - definitely can't carry them on your person outside of wilderness areas or a gun range.
The downstream cultural effect of these laws is that most Canadians don't see or think about firearms. They only come up in conversation related to sporting uses (hunting, range shooting). They're just not much of a cultural thing.
Eh, most gun deaths are either suicides in the privacy of a home, or lowlifes shooting each other for some gang related reason. The crime of passion of someone carrying a gun is pretty rare.
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The article from the BBC has an obvious slant, but the laws in Switzerland seem to be tight and getting tighter. Notably people don't get any bullets with their guns:
I think Swiss gun ownership is referring to privately held guns, not state militia armories.
I was under the impression that the vast majority of the guns were bought after military service, skewing the stats. Now you prompted me to re-look, I see that this is not necessarily true.
They also do sell ammo, you just can't get it from the army apparently.
https://old.reddit.com/r/EuropeGuns/comments/185bamo/swiss_gun_laws_copy_pasta_format/ is supposedly vetted by a real Swiss guy and seems somewhat interesting without being blatant political fodder:
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Fair point.
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I would naively expect it to help, if only by making charging and sentencing easier.
Oregon tried that decriminalization experiment with drug possession. But it was hideously confounded by fentanyl, and I didn’t find any studies from the recriminalization last year.
Maybe there’s something in gang violence stats? Police have a longstanding interest in disarming gangs. It should be possible to tell whether changes in general gun policy, or even in enforcement, actually reduce gang shootings.
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Someone breaking into a car to steal a gun is likely a prohibited possessor. Sending prohibited possessors caught with a firearm to prison for long stretches is one solution. It is probably one of the most straightforward solutions given the frequency that someone committing a crime with a firearm has prior criminal convictions and has been caught with a gun before. Given the general anti-firearm position of the DNC, it seems like a no-brainer policy position to support, but of course they cannot because of reasons.
Cracking down on straw purchasing is like this too, IIRC- democrats refuse to do it even if it’s doable, likely to work, and a major issue with gun crime.
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"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence" - Joe Abercrombie paraphrasing Homer.
When I cross the border to the states, there's often a moment of shock upon seeing someone with a gun on their hip going about their day in a gas station, or restaurant, or shopping mall. It is, as you say, "dangerous and unnecessary", as dangerous and unnecessary as if they had brought a leashed tiger, or a running chainsaw. My brain can't ignore it. Pay attention to that! That could KILL you! it shrieks, and won't let me forget. It's the same forced attention I get around high cliffs, or heavy machinery, or a busy highway. I might know that the leashed tiger is tame. I might be aware that the running chainsaw has a safety guard, but I can't put it out of mind.
The possibility of a gun being used weighs on me, and I think on the bearer, even if they think it doesn't. It's there, physically weighing on them, tugging at their belt or ankle, or purse, reminding them every time they move that it is an option, a choice in the dialogue tree. And because it's an option, it changes every interaction into a (potential) life or death confrontation. Yes, there are circumstances under which I am prepared to kill you. They've already had that conversation with themselves, already decided that such circumstances exist and could arise today, at this Applebee's Neighborhood Grill.
I don't want to come off as too anti-gun. I like guns well enough. They're neat. I've shot them. It's just that I think we do it better in Canada (modulo silly model bans), where you can't be carrying weapons on that side of the pomerium.
This seems like a you problem. People who legally carry have a minuscule crime rate. The reason that person has a gun at Applebees is because he had it before he got to Applebees and it is more convenient and safe for him to bring it in then to leave it in the car or have a special car gun safe that he locks it in before leaving the car. You dont really factor into said person's mind at all.
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This is a wild comparison; the gun is inert and has no volition of its own. Nor is it always in a state of active danger like the running chainsaw. Firing a gun is not something that is done by failing to pay sufficient attention to the gun - it requires volition and active intent across several particular bodily motions to draw, aim, turn off a safety, and fire a gun, just like it would to grab someone by the head and try to break their neck, or try to stab someone with a knife or pen, etc.
The sad but accurate truth is that crimes of passion are common to mankind (men especially but occasionally women too). And when talking passion and anger, it actually is quite true that even small impediments can help reduce rates. I think when talking about society-wide gun policy, it makes sense to weigh the pros and cons; the typical gun-carry argument is what, that in case a mass shooting happens you can step in? Sure, fine, but compare the number of those cases to cases where an easily accessible gun leads to a death of passion, and I think the latter case is a clear winner.
I think being around open carry guns should be in the same "nervousness" category as crossing a busy street, or driving a car through a heavy pedestrian area. So being around a carrier gives a bit of an edge of seriousness, and demands reasonable attention. Enough to be annoying and noticeable, I think, and mildly unpleasant. Chainsaw is probably a bit too far a comparison in my view because of the intentionality, but lethality is far different for guns than basically any other mundane item (pens? please. except maybe knives but in the US that's not super common knowledge) so it's not an irredeemable one.
Mind you I personally have two main opinions on guns: one, that if we want to significantly change gun laws, we probably need an actual constitutional amendment, and two that insofar as the constitution allows* getting a gun should be a medium annoyance, no more no less. Requirements that are de facto bans are stupid or illegal. I like well-written red flag laws. I'd love for there to be a minimum licensure, think learner's driving permit. An interesting idea would be to also ask for a character reference or two, essentially someone vouching for the gun owner? That could create some desirable social externalities. I love being careful about buying and selling laws, though don't think an actual permanent registry or record is needed.
* (edit) I'm not totally convinced by the argument that any gun control is proscribed Constitutionally. To me the regulated-militia bit implies a strong skepticism of loose cannons and even an outright endorsement of some loose degree of government (perhaps suitably local) control. The text more or less says because of this reason, then there is a right to bear arms, and so I think it logically follows that if the reason is not satisfied, then there is no such right. A more extreme version of this argument I haven't seen much suggests that a properly accountable municipal police force is essentially filling the militia role, thus there's not even an individual right provided the rationale holds. I don't think I quite endorse that, but on factual grounds (i.e. police don't fill the role) not rhetorical ones. Practically speaking for the idea of a militia to work, you probably need an individual right, but I think states have some decent leeway there as to how they get that done, so I wouldn't call it a requirement. Which is also worth mentioning as national gun laws should never be the primary focus. Again, if you don't like it (either because you want more or less than that)? Yep, constitutional amendment, only way. Sucks but them's the breaks.
In other words, Heller is wrong (well, right on the conclusion but partially wrong on the reasoning). Or that it's correct but the phrase in 1(b) "so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved" holds more weight than the SC gave it credit for, i.e. states as holders of responsibility for militia regulation can do any law that doesn't result in a de facto infringement on the idea of a citizen militia, and the DC handgun ban clearly was an infringement.
There has been linguistic drift; at the time of the founding, the word "regulated" meant "functioning," and in the concept of a militia - which the founders generally intended to be the primary American military force to the exclusion of standing armies - meant well-equipped, trained, and disciplined. [Edit: the militia was supposed to supply their own weapons, or draw from privately-stocked and -maintained armories. Hence why ensuring that the militia would be well-armed would require the private ownership and carrying of military arms]
As far as I'm concerned the 2nd Amendment, properly understood, requires every citizen to own, maintain, and drill with M4s and other military weapons, a la Switzerland. However, practically the champions of militia vs. a permanent, professional military establishment lost for good after WWII.
I'm going to need a citation there. I've also seen that claim but I believe that to be a modern projection/cope rather than an actual scholarly argument. 1785 dictionary says:
To RE'GULATE. v.a. [regula, Lat.]
To adjust by rule or method. Nature, in the production of things, always designs them to partake of certain, regulated, established essences, which are to be the models of all things to be produced: this, in that crude sense, would need some better explication. Locke.
To direct. Regulate the patient in his manner of living. Wiseman. Ev’n goddesses are women; and no wife Has pow’r to regulate her husband’s life. Dryden.
I agree to an extent: part of the concern with the Articles of Confederation was that they had discovered early flaws with the national army (originally it was a pure volunteer state by state basis kind of thing IIRC), and so wanted it to be stronger but not so strong that it could crush legitimate internal dissent. It's also true that at least a good chunk of the arms were assumed to be (or even encouraged to be as some states even incentivized such) produced on an individual basis. It's also true that there was often a distinction made between an organized militia that was directed, drilled, and with some kind of chain of command and unorganized militias that were more like mobs, so it's not as if the concept is all wrong.
Despite all of that being true, I want to emphasize that last bit there. The intention was never that random groups should spontaneously rise up formed from ad-hoc combinations of gun-toting individuals! The intention was that localized governance was sufficiently democratic that they could decide to take collective action and associate with ad-hoc combinations of other cities and states to overthrow an overbearing national (or international) government. The distinction is quite crucial there! While I allow some nuance as to how states decide to implement this, the state was in charge at the end of the day of regulating its militias. Drilling and organizing and making them effective yes, but also deciding the proper shape, leadership, and call to action! While an individual owning firearms is useful it's still a bit incidental, because the goal the 2nd Amendment clearly states is merely that militias are capable of protecting liberty from tyranny.
In that context, a state can be somewhat strict in its regulation if the core purpose is accomplished. The test is all about core purpose, but some people have substituted an individual right-test in its place. This is subtly wrong. A state could probably choose to implement its core militia duty via individual gun-rights, but is not compelled to do so. A more modern-left state may well decide to be more discerning provided they meet the end goal. In practice, these might end up appearing similar, but they don't have to be!
Shay's Rebellion actually illustrates this, taking place in the Confederation period. Informal and ad-hoc groups of farmers and former soldiers banded together to revolt. They were not official local militias! In fact they raised themselves up in parallel to actual state legal authority, in defiance of such. Remember that that is where a lot of the power lay - the revolutionary Congress was formed from state delegations, in almost all cases with official representation!! That's where their legitimacy came from! Many people today fail to notice that, it wasn't an "extra-legal" effort, the original Revolution proceeded directly from local democracy. This was very front of mind for Constitutional drafting and party of why Washington himself and many others opposed Shay's rebellion (to be fair Jefferson was more sympathetic but he was always a little more radical in his ideas on the topic). They were an individualized mob, not a democratic effort against tyranny. The amendment was crafted in part this way to distinguish that stuff like Shay's rebellion was not the proper method of resistance (and also because at the end of the day the issue was about the policies of debt structure, not a core liberty, which farmers had failed to get implemented by official legitimate democratic means).
So the history of the matter rejects the modern framing by gun-rights advocates that it's a purely individual right. The history suggests that local democracy is important, that local democracy should be empowered, and that gun ownership is helpful to those aims. It's not saying that individualized gun ownership is a cornerstone by itself, supreme to everything else! Merely that a local repository of legitimate resistance is a duty of states to maintain.
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The 2nd amendment as written requires a physical fitness test to own a gun.
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People seem to trip over the Constitution a fair bit, operating under the assumption that it somehow developed in a vacuum. But if you look at the political science of the time, no, there was a lot of robust discussion involving all points of the Constitution, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist papers being just a small part of a larger landscape.
Several politicians of the time make no bones about how the 2nd should be interpreted - that all the terrible implements of the soldier and warfare should belong to all the citizens, barring a few government officials.
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Come on, be charitable. It's not a perfect analogy. The point I'm trying to make is that it's a dangerous thing to be carrying around in public. It does require volition, but volition may be influenced by rage, or alcohol, or psychosis, or mental illness, or one bad day.
Humans are fallible. They can just be mistaken about whether they should use a gun in self-defense and end up killing someone anyway. The difference between justified and unjustified can be seconds.
and humans are stupid. They do incredibly dumb shit (warning, death) like shoot each other over literal garbage.
Maybe it’s because I live in rural Midwest but I just don’t get that worried about the guy with a pistol in a holster on his side. I’ve never once seen anyone pull a gun like that in public. Those guys are generally the responsible ones, the guy prone to shooting at people is not going to open carry because he wants to surprise people with the gun. Open carry doesn’t lend itself to sudden shooting or crime because as you mentioned everyone notices the gun.
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The victim was named McGlockton and was killed by a ... you know the answer. Incredibly unfortunate nominative determinism.
But that's a significant difference! You've moved the goalposts from "that's something that can kill if you don't concentrate on it sufficiently" (untrue, but would strongly favor your position a la "ultrahazardous activities") to the true argument of "but people are sometimes idiots, impaired, or negligent" which is a major shift with significant consequences!
Is there so much of a difference between a pet tiger that could maul you if you accidentally trigger its prey drive, and a volatile drugged-up gangster who thinks you were chatting up his girl?
You can be pretty sure that a legal concealed carrier is not a violent drugged up gangster. There are actual studies on CHL holders; even those conducted with hostility to the policy of legal concealed carry tend to find that license holders are model citizens.
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That's still the person, not the gun itself, and a 98th+ percentile asshole-quotient person at that. Might as well ask "is there so much difference between a pet tiger that could maul you and a drunk, sleep-deprived rice-rocket driver coming back from a sideshow?"
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But you weren't objecting to volatile drugged-up gangsters. You were objecting to guns. And of course, there is a major difference between a pet tiger and a gun in terms of whether you need to watch them carefully for danger.
And yes, I realize that part of your argument has been the inability to know whether any given gun-owner is unstable. But the unstable people are always a threat to you. The volatile gangster can quite easily stab you or beat the shit out of you, even were he to not have a gun. I don't think that him having a gun meaningfully increases the amount of danger you are in, so seeing a gun should not (imo) make you any more nervous than you would be around any crowd of people.
I have a bad habit of picking examples that muddy my point. Sub out our druggy gangster and replace him with an average Joe who just had a bad week - found out a parent was diagnosed with cancer, lost big on his sports bets, got laid off, car damaged in a hit and run, etc.
I don't want to draw a firm line between stable people and unstable people. Certainly unstable people exist, but normal people can be pushed into instability, and it doesn't take much sometimes. Worse, they can just make innocent mistakes that still end with someone dead. Argument gets heated, someone shoves someone else, someone fears for their life...
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The gun massively increases your danger, surely? Firstly because it so hugely reduces the amount of effort he needs to put into damaging you, and secondly because it makes it so hugely more likely that the damage will be lethal.
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He’s saying that someone with a gun could kill you at any moment without even trying. The same is not true of, say, a rubber duck. It’s natural to be a lot more nervous around one than the other, even if the owner has not yet demonstrated ill intent or stupidity.
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sig owners shift uncomfortably in their seats
Muppet side-eye.png
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Really? This seems… neurotic. Just don’t go on the highway, or too close to the cliffs, or stand next to the guy using a chainsaw.
Being wary around actually dangerous things isn't neurotic!
These things are reasonably safe as long as you pay extra attention, but carelessness can kill or maim very easily.
You should pay attention while using a chainsaw. You should not be extra wary when your neighbor is cutting up a fallen tree branch in his front yard while you're on the porch. Likewise if you're changing your tire on the shoulder, you should exercise extra attention- but if you're in a parking lot off the feeder road, wincing every time a car comes down the highway is uncalled for.
It's quite reasonable to pay extra attention to a gun you're using at the range, or in the hunting field. On the hip of the guy in line in front of you at the coffee shop? Doesn't affect you anymore than him wearing a hat(or not).
I just think calling him neurotic, and referencing the cliff and chainsaw bit specifically was uncharitable. It was a perfectly good analogy about how he personally perceives the threat of guns, even if he knows nothing isikely to go wrong.
It's definitely different than a hat. If for some reason you get in a heated argument, a guy with a hat can't kill you with a twitch of his finger like a guy with a gun can.
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It's interesting how open carry has changed in the US in the past 30 years. I grew up in a place with many guns and where open carry was legal, but only the most trashy of rednecks would open carry, and they were derided by other gun owners. "Whatsamatter, you think the Russians are going to invade today?" Now if I visit home, I'm probably going to see someone open carrying at the grocery store or whatnot.
I read lots of hiking journals, and Europeans, Canadians, or incredibly insulated coastal blue tribers encountering open carry among the people of MT, ID, WY, and NM on the Continental Divide Trail never ceases to entertain me. They range from "ohmygod this guy had a gun on his hip at a coffee shop, I was so close to dying, what's wrong with your country" to "I was scared at first and then we talked and he invited me to go target shooting so I took a day off hiking and went shooting (after never touching a gun before) and it was the most fun I've ever had in my life."
So actually, open carry is legal in my blue state but I specifically went out and got a CHL because I didn't want to wear it openly in the off-chance other hikers might see it since I'm sure they would think they almost died.
Of course given my luck I'd get prosecuted for concealing a handgun if I didn't bother to get the CHL, so here we are.
The real salt of the Earth guy teaching the CHL licensing class thought this was kind of gay.
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Comparing modern to founding-era and 19th century gun discourse is also fascinating; back then there were laws against concealed carry because that was viewed as covert, sneaky, and dishonorable. What do you have to hide and who are you trying to surprise? Whereas open carry was considered completely normal. Nowadays it's the sight of a gun that freaks people out, so concealed carry is much more popular; allow the gun person their hobby without scaring everyone.
Concealed carry isn’t about freaking people out.
It got popular in the 70s and 80s as part of the broader political struggle. Liberal, urban states adopted stricter policies and rural ones looked for ways to signal their opposition. Revoking old concealed-carry bans was one option.
Arguments about “not marking yourself as a target” or “strategic ambiguity” are secondary.
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It's not "I was so close to dying, what's wrong with your country". It's more "why would you bring that, HERE?".
Canada actually does allow for carrying firearms in wilderness areas. I've occasionally passed hunters carrying loaded weapons while hiking, a full half day's walk from cell reception. This is no problem. They could shoot me, but I trust them not to, and I'm not worried they will. They brought a rifle to shoot deer. The handgun at the coffee shop is different. Someone brought that to (if need be) shoot people, and it's going to constantly be in the back of their mind, evaluating whether this is a situation where they need to.
In the ancient Germanic tribes, men would go around with a sword to show that they were free men. More than just a weapon, it was a symbol of freedom and agency. Decisions were made by free men attending the thing and voting by raising their swords. Women, children, and slaves did not carry weapons, and could not vote. (And I say "ancient Germanic tribes", but parts of Switzerland kept this tradition up into the 1990s, swords and all.)
I get the feeling that in parts of the US, going around openly carrying a weapon carries the same sort of symbolism, even if it doesn't give you the right to vote.
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That makes me curious: Do armed police inspire the same reaction?
Yes, for the same reasons. They can make mistakes. Their gun is carried for the purpose of shooting people. It also must weigh on them.
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I agree, children shouldn't own firearms. As the meme goes, they should instead be trained to operate crew-served weapons. It suits their frame, and teaches cooperation and other valuable life skills.
Consider the three categories of people nearly everyone agrees should not own firearms: children, people with mental deficiencies, and people with demonstrably violent impulses they cannot control. Notice anything? We generally don't trust these categories with much of anything. The first two get guardians or become wards of the state. The third we imprison. This suggests something interesting about the nature of trust in civilization. We've already made these fundamental judgments about competence and dangerousness. The gun question isn't really creating new categories, I'd say it's revealing categories that already exist.
I like guns. They're cool. I want to own guns. I am also libertarian adjacent, and I believe that I am willing to pay the tax on my beliefs that come from the downsides of widespread firearm ownership.
The first major anti-gun argument runs: guns are dangerous and unnecessary, and this combination justifies banning them.
Dangerous? Absolutely. Their purpose is literally to be weapons. But we don't ban everything dangerous. Cars kill more Americans annually than guns, and cars can achieve horrific mass casualties (see: Nice, France, 2016). We could make bombs from commonly available materials that I won't list here because I'm not a psychopath, but the point stands.
The "unnecessary" part does more work in this argument. We don't typically ban dangerous-but-necessary things. Chainsaws are dangerous but necessary for forestry. Commercial aviation is dangerous but necessary for modern logistics. Even cars, despite their body count, serve essential transportation functions. Even prostitutes, despite their body counts, serve essential transportation functions as the town pony.
It's the dangerous-and-unnecessary combination that supposedly justifies prohibition. But this opens a philosophical can of worms that I suspect most gun control advocates haven't fully considered.
Who decides what's "necessary"? Jet skis kill people and serve no essential function beyond recreation. Theme parks occasionally kill people and exist purely for entertainment. Large houses consume resources and increase inequality while providing no survival advantage beyond a certain point of diminishing returns.
Most hardcore authoritarians - sorry, "public health experts" would indeed ban all the fun toys if they could. The UK has been steadily moving in this direction for decades, restricting everything from kitchen knives to mean tweets, apparently operating under the theory that a sufficiently bubble-wrapped society approaches optimal safety.
This reveals what I think is the true philosophical divide: either you let adults decide for themselves what risks are worth taking for what benefits, or you have a central authority make these decisions for everyone. There's no stable middle ground here, every "reasonable restriction" contains within it the seeds of total control.
And keep in mind: you might not be the one making these decisions. Bureaucracies have a nasty habit of optimizing for metrics that strip every joy out of life while genuinely believing they're making things better. Eventually you'll be sad enough that you'll find the second argument more compelling.
Of the specific alternative forms of suicide you've mentioned, I think jumping off a tall building or bridge is almost as easy as using a gun. Guns are slightly more convenient, but it isn't very hard to find a bridge and overcome your fear of heights.
Wikipedia tells me that the US has the 24th highest suicide rate per capita. It's beaten by Japan, and South Korea takes the number 2 spot. The tiny little Saint Vincent and the Grenadines takes bottom place, and its suicide rate is as low as its water content (Wikipedia says both are negligible, or perhaps the country is too poor to afford water bodies and statisticians). Firearms really aren't that big of a deal in that regard.
(Do they contribute? Of course. I just don't think it matters particularly much.)
Here's where I probably lose some readers: I think competent adults should have access to reliable methods of suicide.
Not because I want people to kill themselves. Quite the opposite. On an individual level, I think suicide is usually a terrible mistake, and anyone contemplating it should get help. In many cases, I am the help. Sometimes that isn't enough, and all the King's horses and psychiatrists combined can't put your will to live back together again.
But there are cases where continued existence involves unbearable suffering: terminal illnesses, degenerative neurological conditions, lives of such persistent misery that death genuinely seems preferable.
More controversially, I think this extends beyond medical cases. Some people draw genuinely shit hands in life: too many cognitive limitations to achieve their goals, chronic health problems, inability to form meaningful relationships, economic circumstances they can't escape. A life of quiet desperation and misery, year after year.
Civilization is fundamentally a voluntary association. We agree to follow certain rules and norms in exchange for the benefits of cooperative society. But if the implicit terms of this agreement are "you must participate forever regardless of how miserable it makes you, and if you try to leave we'll ensure the exit is as torturous as possible," then civilization starts looking less like a beneficial arrangement and more like a prison. Some places manage to be both beneficial and prison adjacent, such as the dementia care homes that I'm frankly sick of visiting, but I hope the average person can be extended more autonomy than an 82 year old with Alzheimer's.
The gun control advocate might respond: "But we can address the underlying causes of despair! Better mental health care, economic support, social programs!"
Sure, we should do those things anyway. But two problems with making them prerequisites for respecting individual autonomy:
First, it assumes we can solve all sources of human misery through policy interventions. This seems... optimistic. Some people will always be dealt rough hands by genetics, circumstance, or pure random chance.
(I am an optimist, in that I put higher than 50% credence in the claim that a Singularity within a decade or two that will solve this issue. But this is far from inevitable, and I think it's cruel to dictate how long someone needs to stomach their misery)
Second, it places the burden of proof on the individual to justify their decision to the satisfaction of others. You have to convince the authorities that your life really is sufficiently miserable to warrant an exit visa. This turns suicide from a tragic personal choice into a bureaucratic process, which seems to miss the point entirely.
This brings us back to the central thesis: forbidding gun ownership means you don't trust other adults to make fundamental decisions about their own lives.
But trust is the foundation of civilization. We trust strangers to drive two-ton vehicles at high speeds in our direction. We trust random people not to push us onto subway tracks. We trust that the person preparing our food hasn't poisoned it. We trust that pilots, surgeons, engineers, and countless others will perform their jobs competently rather than causing mass casualties through malice or incompetence.
Every functioning society is built on millions of these trust relationships. When trust breaks down, civilization breaks down. You get high-crime neighborhoods where people don't go outside after dark. You get societies where every transaction requires extensive verification and monitoring. You get authoritarian systems where the state assumes everyone is a potential threat.
(Hmm.. I write this while still in London)
The gun control position, taken to its logical conclusion, suggests that ordinary adults cannot be trusted with the power of life and death over themselves and others. But this power already exists everywhere around us. The main difference is that guns make it more obvious and immediate.
If you genuinely believe that most adults are so irresponsible, impulsive, and dangerous that they can't be trusted with firearms, then you should probably also believe they can't be trusted to drive, practice medicine, operate heavy machinery, raise children, vote, or participate in countless other activities that require judgment and self-control.
This is a logically consistent approach, but then one must contend with the fact that there's no consistency or rigor in how we approach this. Any Tom can still his dick in a
Harryhairy pussy and pop out a kid without needing to get a fucking loiscence. Cars, forklifts and doctors need licenses just about everywhere. People automagically age into the right to vote, unless they commit a crime and become felons who are stripped of it.I also doubt that even US-levels of firearm ownership are particularly strong mitigating factors against the risk of coup or government oppression. The government has drones, tanks, nigh panopticon surveillance if they cared to really use it. I am happy to acknowledge that it increases the difficulty of the government acting up, but I claim it's not that big of a difference.
That being said, I like guns, and wish I lived in a jurisdiction where I could shoot beer cans with the boys over a barbecue. And not the anemic shotguns or hunting rifles can get in the UK, those bore me to tears. Give me a minigun in Vegas, and give me the salary to fire it for more than a few milliseconds.
Red-tailed hawk painted like a Bald Eagle screeches in the background.
Yes and no. Guns don't kill people, people kill people. So in order to commit a coup, people should decide to commit a coup. Then the guns could help to make this desire to become reality, and if it happened, I think the number of civilian guns would matter. But the bar for this decision for a person in the modern world is very high. As COVID showed us, you can literally put the whole country under house arrest for months and nobody would decide that's the red line. You can force people to put chemicals into their bodies that they don't want to and that's not the red line too. I mean, for one side I am glad we didn't find the red line - living in the time of civil war is no fun whether your side wins or loses. Everybody loses in the war, some just lose more. But also, I'm not really sure what the government should do to make people decide that's the time for using those guns. I hope to never find out.
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I know you're in the UK, but if you ever swing across the pond to the US, DM me. If you're gonna be in my area I'll take you shooting. I, tragically, do not have an actual machinegun (my username can be considered more aspirational than factual) but I do have many interesting guns.
Thank you! I hope to go visit the States this winter itself (friend's wedding), but I'm not entirely sure if the visa stuff will get done in time. I should have been on that, instead of futzing about in London. If I do, I'll try to ensure I do a lap of the country, and make time to shoot the shit (semi-literally) with you.
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In principle I think I agree with assisted suicide and adjacent arguments like you propose. However, in practice I think suicide legalization in almost any form is super vulnerable to misaligned incentives all over the place, and could become a legitimate slippery slope with ever more lenient standards and criteria. Mostly I don't want to live in a society where e.g. old people are pressured by the government, their loved ones, or doctors to commit suicide for partially selfish reasons at vulnerable times, which seems like a recipe for societal decay that I'm not confident we could avoid becoming should we crack open the door too far. Those kinds of subtle and not-so-subtle pressures can be pretty strong. Depressed people, old people, and sick people already have a hard enough time without people suggesting that maybe everyone would be better off without them. In that light, the US laws that focus almost exclusively on imminent or near-certain death type cases seem like as far as is prudent to go because it doesn't tempt us down that road.
I've ended up writing such a long response that it's best submitted as it's own post. Standby, I wasn't going to get much sleep anyway haha.
Ah, spending your vacation in the best way!...? :)
You should really feel bad about nerd-sniping me at such a vulnerable time. Btw, essay's out.
I joke with love <3
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The interesting question you raise is ‘where do you draw the line on figuring who is a mentally sufficient non criminal responsible adult?’
I’m guessing you don’t argue against background checks for buying a gun(is this guy currently on probation?). But what about the more in-depth ATF background check off fingerprints? What about requiring psychiatric testing? And, of course, do we require owners to have safe storage facilities so their guns don’t get stolen- people who steal them being, almost definitionally, among the categories you’ve articulated as shouldn’t own a gun.
I broadly agree that the right to keep and bear arms is pretty core to full citizenship in the west. But I don’t agree that that right is incompatible with gun control. There’s even some euro countries which seem like they qualify based off of a quick wiki scan- and some blue states with theoretically laxer gun laws which seem like they don’t.
Having laid out a slippery slope, you now understand why I argue against background checks for buying a gun. Gun rights are like speech rights; no prior restraint is reasonable, nor are special rules which impose some sort of additional burdensome responsibility for exercising the right (the equivalent for speech here is "stochastic terrorism").
Gun control by definition vitiates the right to keep and bear arms. If I have the right to keep and bear arms I don't need to ask the government permission to do so.
I’ve said before, my solution to this slippery slope is that the gun regulatory body is elected by current gun owners with high mandatory minimums for breaking the rules- that were made by gun owners themselves- and strict penalties for localities trying to get around them.
That doesn't solve the problem, as current gun owners may well be happy to be part of an exclusive club. And of course the regulatory body is likely to be even more so.
I evaluate such proposals first by "Would I be able to lawfully get a gun under these rules?" -- this one fails that simple test.
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But you mean this in a purely legal sense, right? "shall not be infringed", etc. because it says so in the 2A and that's that.
Curious if you'd feel the same way if the amendment explicitly covered any scale of weapon, up to and including planet-ending weapons of mass destruction.
No, I mean it in a practical sense of "whether I can legally buy and carry a gun". Once you start agreeing that background checks are OK, there's no fence on that slope; the OP already got to invasive background checks and even psych exams, for crying out loud. A psych exam to exercise a right? When a lot of psychiatrists are straight-up anti-gun? That's obviously a vitiation of the right.
I mean, that's ultimately a process violation and objection though, not a fundamental one. A background check is simply a method (and the only real one?) so as to enforce an already existing, reasonable, and constitutional limit on felons or other prohibited persons owning guns.
An inability to find a pro-gun psychiatrist would of course be an objection, but one on facts and merits, not principle.
No, it is not. It is prior restraint. It is as reasonable as having the government vet political speeches beforehand to ensure they contain no calls for imminent lawless action.
I mean, it's practical for the government to police unlawful speeches after the fact insofar as they would be justified in doing so (i.e. rarely). But you only buy a gun once, and the government needs to know you bought the gun to run the check. Are you proposing letting someone buy the gun, and then doing the check? Seems obviously flawed. I'd add that of course such a check should be done in a reasonable and timely manner, or the law is invalid/illegal/wrong/not to be enforced. For similar-ish reasons, although I view the right to protest as pretty fundamental right, it's also a realm where requiring a permit is not baseline illegal to me, or trampling on any rights. There's plenty of other stuff that, while not as hallowed as a right, are still bureaucratically necessary to approve in advance instead of retrospectively, from food handler's permits to driver's licenses to becoming a schoolteacher. I will cop to supporting short (think 1-7 days) mandatory waiting periods, but wouldn't really be too sad if they weren't a thing (and wouldn't be bothered in principle by smartly implemented mandatory waiting periods for other things, either, like major medical decisions or whatnot). All of this is in a background of not being too bothered by guns themselves floating around society like they always have, and like really quite a lot of Americans (even borderline brainwashed ones if you interrogate them closely), I'm no closet abolitionist, far from it.
No, I'm proposing someone buys the gun, and if the police happen to find out the person was prohibited, they can prosecute then. No special police-state powers related to guns, any more than they get every utterance referred to them for possible prosecution (yes, the NSA wants almost that, but that's generally considered a bad thing).
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Thank you for laying out your thoughts but this feels like the majority of apologetics - only convincing to those already convinced and skating quickly and lightly over the difficult points.
In particular you seem to pass very quickly over argument one. You lay out the anti-gun argument reasonably well:
Then having clearly explained the main reason why lots of countries ban guns (they don't fall within either of the categories of object we usually tolerate), you don't refute it.
Guns and other lethal weapons are a unique confluence of incredibly dangerous and almost completely unnecessary. You seem to want to argue that banning things because they are unnecessary is a slippery slope, and that banning unnecessary things even when they are lethally dangerous weapons is excessive because most people can handle dangerous things just fine. But now you've parted ways with everyone except the people who think that you should almost never ban anything, and those people are already on your side!
This is why most gun apologists either try to make them seem less dangerous (no automatic fire, strong license checks, short-range hunting shotguns or bolt-action only) or more necessary (defend yourself, defend your liberty); those arguments don't always work but they sometimes do.
Likewise for argument two. Your response to the argument that guns cause more people to die from suicide is, essentially, YesChad.png. Where's the argument here? I know someone who's intermittently suicidal; it's genetic and it runs in the family. If he had guns he'd be dead by now.
I'm reasonably pro-gun for a Brit and these arguments are doing the opposite of what you're trying to achieve. Also, it's just that classic American thing of happily insisting that all other countries are just pits of suffering and distrust and only (part of) America has achieved true civilisation. I'm a nationalist myself but really.
It strikes me that there's some tension in this notion. To the extent that guns are incredibly dangerous, it's because others might deliberately use them on you, right? Not that accidents don't happen, but we rarely describe cars as 'incredibly dangerous,' and they're much more dangerous than guns on that score. Cars are certainly more useful, but that doesn't make them any less dangerous. If you mean they're 'inherently' more dangerous... I don't think that's true? A speeding car carries vastly more energy than any bullet, and, if used carelessly, is certain to cause injury while guns are only moderately likely to do so. They're designed to kill while cars are not... But so what? Imagine a dud artillery shell which, through some manufacturing failure, doesn't actually contain any explosive. This object was certainly designed to kill, and in fact to be far more deadly than a normal firearm, but if someone called it 'incredibly dangerous' I'd expect them to be roundly mocked.
If it is about crime: to the extent that it's reasonable to fear others might attack you with lethal weapons, aren't means of self defense necessary? It can't really be both.
Banning guns entirely in a highly criminal society might reduce the level of danger you're subjected to, but not because they're unnecessary -- in fact, you'd be much safer if you acquired a gun illegally and kept it carefully concealed -- but because being denied that necessity is balanced out by degrading the capacity of the others to hurt you. In a minimally criminal society, guns might be almost completely unnecessary, but they're also not all that dangerous.
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Yeah I'm in a similar mind as somebody from a country where there's no real norm of gun ownership. I feel like the benefits I get from general disarmament outweigh the costs I get in the rare situation where I'm being attacked violently and would have had my gun at hand and be able to use it effectively, or I am achieving intense guerilla warfare against state oppressor of my choice.
I feel though that the kind of people who will not attempt to get illegal guns because they're more trouble than they're worth are the kind of people that are peaceful enough that they could be trusted with them anyway.
In europe it's quite common even for terrorists and other hard criminals to use knifes simply bc guns are just too hard to get for them. And that's despite hunting licences being available!
At least in the case of terrorists specifically, they are demonstrably vulnerable to copycat contagions, and stabbings are the current contagion in Europe. So that particular point I would observe is a little bit faulty.
I don't think that follows. Terrorists clearly choose to copy based on a combination of lethality and availability, as seen by the proliferation of car-based attacks since the Nice truck attack. Easier gun availability would mean more initial gun-based attacks, and a higher transmission likelihood for following copycats.
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I have a hard time believing that if there was demand bringing guns into european countries would be that difficult, considering how big the external frontiers of the EU are and how open the internal ones are, and considering how drugs make it there, illegal refugees make it there, etc...
I think that for the most part, there is little demand because local hard criminals are still civilized enough to understand deadly shootouts are not worth the hassle because they bring down a lot more heat on them. North American street gangs are not civilized; they believe shootouts are cool. As for terrorists, if you distinguish mental health cases (random nutjob just starts stabbin') from organized terrorist cells, I think the latter are usually packing (and packing military equipment).
You don't even need the if here. You can already get guns provided you're sufficiently functional, patient and have the right connections. AFAIK the easiest way is generally getting your hands on old soviet stock from eastern Europe.
But these conditionals matter, because the average terrorist and hard criminal does not have these properties. People still get caught before they can do anything because they fell for obvious honeypots on silk-road equivalents. This is also why the large-scale entry of organized crimes into Europe is so dangerous; Not only do at least some of the members have these properties and so can organize guns for the rest of the members, while there at it they can also buy more stock that they can sell further locally, making it much easier to get a gun.
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by that definition nearly no terrorist attacks in Europe were done by terrorists
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I think you are neglecting what to me seems to be the main argument against legal gun ownership, which is that the telos of a gun (especially ones that are not traditional hunting guns, which are legal in many more places anyhow) is to kill people. The common European value system says that basically to a first approximation there should not be a legal way to kill people (and to more detailed approximations we can begrudgingly haggle over exceptions like self-defence against someone who tries to kill you first), and given such a principle it doesn't seem hard to argue for the prohibition of a tool whose principal purpose is just that.
I don't see this value as introducing any obvious slippery slope in itself, and moreover your line of interpretation ("strip every single joy out of life") that aims to connect it to one can only work by way of trading a sacred value (no killing) off for a profane one (fun). The profane-sacred boundary in general is pretty good at stopping slope-slipping, and the argument that the weaker form of this slippery slope ("strip every single joy that grates against a sacred value out of life") is still all that bad has not been made.
This is an argument that you will have to contend with if you want to persuade people of this value system (which I gather is no longer solely a European thing, but has spread deep into urban globalised parts of the US). Of course, from over in Germany, there is also a lower-hanging question to ask: are you for speed limits on your highways?
And defensive war, right? The vast majority of Europe maintains a military and they don't arm them with tasers. Indeed, if you listen to their rhetoric regarding, say, a potential Russian invasion, it doesn't seem like that willingness to kill is 'begrudging' in the slightest. If it's truly a matter of value systems rather than practicality (war, you might argue, is more dangerous than random attacks perpetrated by individuals, but that's not an argument from values), what set of values affords nations the right to preemptively arm themselves to facilitate lethal self defense, but denies that right to individuals?
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There are around 400 million civilian-owned guns in the US now. Over the last century US guns have been responsible for something like a million homicides and a million suicides. Were the other 99.5+% of the guns designed or made wrong?
How can you avoid exceptions? Should the enforcers of a gun ban have guns? If so, then you're making an exception before gun supporters even have to lobby you for it. If not, then it's not going to be much of a ban.
I hope that exception gets more sophisticated than "of course people Following Orders still get guns". Europeans under those rules were responsible for way more than just one million homicides over the last century, even if you only count the civilian victims.
This seems like an important one, right?
We're happy to drip literal poison into our veins in some cases, because the poisons used in chemotherapy kill cancerous cells faster than non-cancerous cells. The direct purpose of those chemicals, what you're calling the "telos", is to kill human cells: if only 0.5% of doses of a prospective chemo drug killed any human cells, then we really would conclude that it was probably designed and/or made wrong. Their direct effects are pretty lousy. Their specificity kinda sucks and they kill good cells too. But they're still worth it, so long as you realize you can't ignore the distinctions between targets or the indirect effects of the killing in a final analysis.
About a quarter of Europeans live in a country where assisted suicide is now legal.
No. They’re awaiting the opportune moment. Kind of like a SIG.
In all seriousness, the purpose of a thing can be divorced from its usage statistics. The vast majority of nuclear weapons have never killed anyone. Instead they work via the threat of fulfilling their purpose.
Guns are an effective threat against almost anyone. That makes them useful whether or not they actual kill.
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Assisted suicide is not morally analysed or perceived as the assistant killing the recipient by those who support it.
I think the answer many would give is "in an ideal world, no". Unarmed British police are admired all over the continent.
Really, no. Germany and Austria have seen a lot of lethal bladed-weapon attacks by our dear immigrants in recent years, but sentiment to the effect of "if only a victim/bystander could have killed the assailant first" was almost never voiced as far as I could see. (Fantasies took the shape of overwhelming/tacking/disarming the attacker.) The value system is really that different. Try to not typical-mind as much.
Wasn't there an instance of this?
Unarmed bystanders tackle a knife attacker. The police respond, but restrain the bystander and a policeman is then fatally wounded in the neck by the knifeman.
I recall seeing video from the incident.
Edit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_Mannheim_stabbing
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I do, but I also try to be charitable, and the idea that you want to win a knife fight with an unarmed tackle wouldn't have passed that test even if it had occurred to me.
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The principle purpose (as measured by actual use) of all civilian firearms, no matter how outlandish, is sporting.
I of course find the idea that there shouldn't be a legal way to kill people wrong, and it's against the ethos and traditions of my country's heritage (and indeed most of Europe's, arguably) but to say the primary purpose of e.g. an AR-15 is to kill people is a lot like saying that the primary purpose of alcoholic drinks is to get cirrhosis of the liver.
What makes it superior for sporting over either something like a hunting rifle, or something like a fairground gun that shoots tiny bullets of a few millimetres calibre? It's hard to believe that the knowledge that you are "sporting" with a weapon that would be a prime choice for actually killing people, and preparing/building skills for a hypothetical situation in which you would want to kill someone, is not an important factor in the choice; the circumstance that actual use of civilian firearms appears pretty strongly correlated with the belief that there should be a legal way to kill people further supports this interpretation.
If the development of alcoholic drinks were driven by people trying to find better ways to get cirrhosis of the liver, there still were large and massively funded organisations deliberately binge-drinking to the point of getting it and gatherings of alcoholic drink enjoyers regularly involved enthusiastic arguments which cocktail gets you more scar tissue faster, and the most popular fictional depictions of alcoholic drinks all involved flashy celebrations of how they induce cirrhosis, then maybe this comparison would work.
As it stands, the argument comes across as being more in the class of arguing that CP (AI-generated, to dispel the most obvious counterargument) should be legal and easily available, and its principal purpose is artistic edification (chosen for being a similarly nebulous term as "sporting", distinguished from its lower-status counterpart "sexual gratification"/"fantasizing about killing", resp., only by the speaker's attitude towards the act), but incidentally you also find the idea that there shouldn't be a legal way to have sex with minors wrong. (That's approximately an actual constellation of ideas some pre-1990 libertines over here in Europe had!)
All of those guns are for different purposes. The .223 is a cheaper, lower-performing round compared to say a .308. It's also more fun to shoot (less recoil, semi-automatic), and it is a tiny bullet (same diameter as a .22, so not dissimilar to a fairground gun most likely). But people do sporting events using all sorts of different calibers.
Personally I think the .223 is a very good varmint round, and that's how I've used it.
To be clear, when I say this, I mean "it should be legal to own deadly things" and that's about how I took your phrasing. Most pro-gun-people (including me) don't support it being legal to execute people randomly, but perhaps my phrasing was...unclear. But, to your point, at least in the US, they think that the Second Amendment is an important backstop to liberty. It's hard to tease out the correctness of this, but the US of A is doing much better than Europe in this regard. (For instance, just as a wacky example, in A/C unfriendly Europe, heat deaths kill more people than firearms in the US of A. It arguably wouldn't actually be a good swap for the US to get European gun violence levels if it also meant getting European attitudes and regulations towards air conditioning! And that's without getting into values-based stuff like free-speech rights.)
I'm not sure what the organization has to do with it. Alcoholism is much more dangerous problem in the US than firearms, but alcohol is much easier to procure (and is also glamorized in the media, much as guns are!) If all of the gun-rights orgs shifted their focus to sporting, I doubt that gun control groups would be assuaged, because at the end of the day their goals are things like "stopping school shootings" not "stop optics we don't like."
I mean - most popular fictional depictions of guns are of people, often those who are legally permitted and encouraged to have them (cops, spies, soldiers, etc.) using them to stop bad people. I don't really see why that's bad - presumably even Europeans want their military, soldiers, spies etc. to do their jobs.
The specific fantasy you seem to be upset at is "killing a bad person who is trying to do a bad thing." Most gun owners who are interested in self-defense are interested in self-defense. Movies and gun manufacturing ads and the NRA website and all of those things you're discussing aren't promoting the idea of unlawful violence or mass shootings. (It's actually imho the liberal-leaning press and gun control groups that do the worst to spread mass shooting memes, because they amplify the contagious meme of mass shootings to advance, in the case of the latter, their policy agenda). They are promoting the idea of stopping a bad guy. You can go read the NRA magazine, they (at least used to. maybe they stopped) pull accounts of robbers, rapists, mass shooters etc. getting stopped by "the good guy with a gun" which happens pretty often, honestly. If there's a fantasy here, it's specifically the same fantasy that people who join the military or police often have. I think it's fine to criticize certain aspects of this but fundamentally wanting to stop bad people from doing bad stuff is an honorable impulse.
It seems to me that you are making the vibes-based argument that "Hollywood thinks gun violence is good therefore guns are bad" but my argument here, on the whole, is that if you look at actual use cases and not vibes vast majority of use even of guns that are e.g. derived from military designs is for peaceful purposes. The same way that most drinking isn't to die of liver failure even though that's a not infrequent outcome.
Man, don't shoot the messenger here. I'm trying to explain my understanding of an ethos here, not grandstand about it being my position. Either way, the thing is that the rule against killing is, again to a first approximation, fairly absolute; and to someone who actually believes in an absolute rule, asserting that you actually want to break it in a fairly broad special case is not persuasive. Going with my previous metaphor, you may be saying something to the effect of "but they only want to have sex with minors who are really asking for it" - the difference just does not matter to those who perceive sex with minors to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details, and a lot of people in Europe also likewise perceive killing to be intrinsically wrong, no matter the details. There is really a complete disconnect of moral intuitions here, with both sides finding the other barbaric - if the story is "Texas home owner shot robber who was running away with his TV", classical Americans will be cheering, while Europeans (+Europeanised American urbanites) will be cheering to lock the home owner up. Can you muster the theory of mind to understand that some people actually believe that there are no "bad guys" who it is a good thing to kill?
It's complicated. I think a decade or so ago the answer from a narrow majority actually would have been "no", if that job involves actual killing. Now, some of them still will say "no", many more will prefer to not think about it, and many will think something to the effect of "yes for external enemies, but this is not a principle on which you can run a civilised society internally". I'd imagine that even people who are deep in pro-UA brainrot territory in countries like Germany would more often than not balk at the idea that counterintelligence should kill Russian spies inside Germany.
I'm not so convinced that they are strongly correlated at all - East Asia has ubiquitous AC but no guns and an atrocious free-speech situation compared to Europe as well, Russia flip-flops but at least intermittently had quite liberal gun laws with no relation to its AC or speech situation. Either way, the heat death figures you refer to always seemed fairly cooked to me - Eurocrats have an incentive to inflate them to support the climate change narrative, while the US figure seems pretty inappropriately small for its burgeoning homeless population.
Ha! No, like I said, that's definitely not my ethos. But I hear ya.
Sure, this makes sense. And of course Americans often don't believe in this at all (even when it comes to executions and the like).
Yes. And I think you're right, there's an incommensurability problem that plausibly is only worked out on civilizational timescales.
I am also not convinced on the correlation, but I will note that I think civilizations are very different and a causal chain that exists in some cultures may not exist in other cultures at all. Sometimes just the idea that something is true makes it so.
I also suspect Europe's free-speech situation is, at least in some respects and specifically in some places, about as bad or perhaps even worse than Russia's – it looks like England might be in some ways worse than Russia, arresting 12,000 people in 2023 while Russia detained about 20,000 people since 2022 as per this 2024 article as part of crackdowns on anti-war speech (note that these don't measure convictions, and of course note also that Russia has nearly three times the population, but also that the article I pulled was focused on the Russian anti-war crackdown and might not measure people taken in for other views.)
I think it's pretty rare for ~healthy adults to die from heat stroke (some of these numbers might be due to aging European demographics) and a lot of the American homeless are in pretty temperate places like California. I believe US cities generally have lots of places for homeless people to get out of the cold, or ways for them to travel to more temperate regions. If I had to guess, most exposure deaths among the homeless involve drugs of some kind. But that's a guess.
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Moreover, this fantasy is in large part a response to another fantasy failing to become a reality, that of police being able to keep you safe if someone intents to hurt you or your loved ones.
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The telos of a great many very useful inventions that are today essential to a civilized world was first to kill people.
Satellite navigation was invented for the explicit purpose of missile guidance during nuclear sneak attacks.
The internet was invented as a command and control loop to enable retaliation in the event of a nuclear sneak attack.
Precision measurement and machining was invented by the gun industry, to make guns, which kill people.
Pesticides that enable the feeding of 8 billion people and freedom from devastating famines are just repurposed chemical weapons.
Modern central planning and crisis response centers are organizational descendents of the Prussian General Staff, which was invented to enable the Prussian army to be a great deal more efficient at killing people.
Essentially any breed of horse not explicitly a draft animal is the result of breeding for war.
That the common European value system ignores these basic truths is not a recommendation in its favor. Rather it serves to illustrate how divorced from reality it is (just in case its current suicidal impulses weren’t obvious enough). Homo Sapiens did not evolve to sit atop this world by being pacifists. We exist because our ancestors (and some currently alive) embraced the necessity of potential violence.
A fair point, but it doesn't follow that because nuclear weapons led to the development of the internet, the average citizen should be permitted to possess nuclear weapons.
The telos of a nuclear bomb, is still death (or at least massive destruction). The telos of the internet has evolved.
Agreed only on practical grounds, and only for the moment.
It is impossible with current technology to not use a nuclear bomb and adversely affect basically everyone on Earth. Millions of people use guns every day without affecting anyone who doesnt choose to be affected (usually on the gun range wearing ear pro). When humanity spreads among the stars, if you want to make pretty flashes on airless chunks of rock utterly devoid of life, you should be able to.
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Having a purpose that in turn is mostly a means to an end that is killing is not the same as being directly, immediately, specifically only good for killing (and various activities wherein the fun is contingent on imagining them as practice for killing people under the right circumstances).
I don't think it ignores any "basic truths" that there are in what you wrote, and evidently this argument is not persuasive to those that subscribe to it. As it stands, there is a negligible amount of the older American ethos making inroads in the rest of the world, but the anti-gun value system is capturing large swathes of the US population - if you care for gun rights, it would be more reasonable to try and find new arguments rather than digging in your heels about the old apologetic tradition and dismiss competing views as "divorced from reality".
Disagree entirely. While i do not agree with them politically, many of my leftoid friends have suddenly discovered the purpose behind the second ammendment, and are wondering why our state has so many idiotic gun laws.
Guns may be fun, and they may provide a constructive outlet, but their purpose is potential violence. Thats the point. Pretending otherwise is dishonest and pointless.
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I'd say most of the same things for voting. Specifically, the only people who shouldn't be allowed to vote are people we don't trust with much of anything. Which isn't that controversial among the general public, but for some reason it is among rationalists.
Many people get very uncomfortable with frank and honest discussions about voting and voting rights (one may hearken back to SSC's Civil Rites post for more elaboration). My con law professor had a Roko's basilisk-esque response to our 1L Federalist society secretary (or maybe it was treasurer) pointing out that "voting is just pointing guns at people with more steps." I don't find something along that line uncommon.
People get upset about restricting voting rights because in the real world, doing so has a really bad record.
Voting is also used to keep other people from doing things to you. I suppose you could say that is still pointing guns, but it's the self-defense style of pointing guns. Everyone who wants to restrict the franchise on this basis talks about using the vote to take from others. Using the vote to keep bad things from being done to you usually gets handwaved away.
It has a bad record? Please elaborate. Of you are American, expanding the franchise is strongly correlated with poor governance. If you live in Russia, voting is strongly correlated with Vladimir Putin being in charge. In Gaza, Hamas. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood.
Come on. You've never heard of literacy tests and grandfather clauses used to keep black people from voting?
I heard of it. What is the bad governmental outcome that derived from literacy tests?
Mistreatment of blacks by the government.
That was going to be done regardless of blacks voting. Segregation had overwhelming majorities with or without black franchise when it began.
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Did that lead to poor governance?
With respect to how the state treated black people, yes.
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I specifically support the two being linked in some way. Dispossessing someone of firearms is a statement by society that someone is untrustworthy and unable to govern themselves, and there's no need to pretend otherwise by giving them the right to vote under the pretense that such a person can govern others.
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There's probably a defensible, if aggressive, claim that the universal suffrage has proven more dangerous (in terms of deaths per capita) than (universal) firearms ownership. Definitely some error bars on the hypothetical impact of more gun ownership, and exactly which government actions are attributable to "voters" specifically --- How many bodies sit at the feet of voters in the 1932 Weimar Germany elections? Every victim of state violence in democratic states? Do we count communist "elections"? --- but I think the Libertarian premise that "nothing is more dangerous to a people than their government" has at least some academic merit.
Not only would I not count Communist "elections", I'd point out that if Communist countries had had genuine free elections, most of them would be gone pretty fast. Which makes all the deaths caused by them attributable to not having universal suffrage.
Of course, this means that even counting Germany, the deaths from not having suffrage exceed the deaths from having it (especially if you count the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact as starting WWII and making some of the deaths the fault of lack of suffrage.)
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