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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 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.
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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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