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Ok so... i'm often seriously confused about what safety people actually care about.
I understand fear of handguns a handgun is an easy to procure object in a hurry that allows someone to commit a crime suddenly and violently.
But it seems any type of premediatated or planned operation is just super legal and easy to get? (except of course using it to commit a crime is obviously very illegal)
Nitromethane is freely available for purchase, which can be easily made into very dangerous chemicals using stuff you can buy in the hardware store. From there we have other things, while you have to either break the law or DIY it for a lot of parts you can make your own drone (or just use a kids RC helicopter toy, seriously it may not work for heavy payloads but you'd be shocked at how far you can go with mediocre toys these days.) and drop an explosive on anyone. You can also make actual war crimes in your basement by mixing iron powder, and sulfur then heating it, sealing it in a glass bottle with water as it builds up H2S. Alternatively if you want to make cyanide gas, buying sodium cyanide (i'd be willing to post links but I don't want this forum to actually get in trouble with the FBI, I already got searched once) and mixing it with sulfiric acid is doable (and ok like hyper dangerous beyond belief and you would have to basically get rid of it the moment you make it but....)
Again the delivery mechanisms for this stuff isn't complicated and the main limiting factor of these does not appear to be that obtaining the means of violence is hard it's that anyone smart enough to do this is also smart enough to realize that violence is a bad idea.
The safety people are concerned about is usually downstream of their political paranoias and conspiracy theories.
Middle class fratboys are "rape culture", but afghan hill people are "diversity of consent". etc
The left-wing focus on guns is mostly a dodge to redirect public anger over black crime and liberal judges throwing violent criminals into the population at law-abiding Republicans who own guns. If only Billy Bob couldn't buy an AR, DeQuarious wouldn't be shooting LaShontrakayze with a Kel Tec.
I think this is applying conflict theory where mistake theory would be more appropriate.
Handguns are, in practice, orders of magnitude more dangerous than long guns, looking at (murder, suicide and negligent) death tolls. The difference between America and other broadly pro-gun countries like Switzerland and Canada is that America has ubiquitous legal private handgun ownership, and lots of people shooting themselves or each other with said handguns. The pro-gun movement in America largely consists of people who routinely carry a handgun for personal self defence (or would like to if it was legal in their jurisdiction). And they (you?) are winning politically.
And yet the anti-gun movement's best argument is to point at spree killings and call for bans on scary-looking and/or high-powered rifles, because blue tribe normies who are susceptible to anti-gun messaging are not actually worried about the chav-on-chav shootings going on in the rough parts of their own cities, they are worried about the spree shootings they see on TV.
If the anti-gun left were serious, committed gun-grabbers at both the elite and mass levels, I don't think they would be so stupid about guns. I think normie fear of spree killings is very real, is largely driven by media amplification (which in turn is driven by if-it-bleeds-it-leads incentives, not partisan bias), and is grossly disproportionate to any real threat. But the pro-gun right don't have a very persuasive response to it - the real argument they believe is "one classroom of dead kids in a every 4-5 years in a country of 300 million is a good tradeoff for the advantages of widespread rifle ownership for shooting sports, hunting, rural home defence, and tyranny prevention." And that is a non-starter in the public debate because most people are innumerate. [FWIW, I think the tyranny prevention argument is mostly bullshit and I still think the tradeoff points in favour of broadly legal long guns. But if I got my sense of how common spree killings actually are from the MSM, I wouldn't]
tl;dr - the reason why the debate about long guns isn't as one-sidedly pro-gun in the US as it is in Switzerland is because normies overstate the risk of spree killings, not because of a conspiracy of evil gun-grabbers.
If only this innumeracy applied to "a few dozen mauled kids every year in a country of 300 million is a good tradeoff for the advantages of widespread
dog piss, dog shit, dog slobber, dog barking, dog dander, dog odorwhatever people see in these things."I think conflict theory is apt here. At the end of the day, if most people liked guns at even 0.1% of their emotional investment in dogs, they'd overlook the tradeoffs too. Some people just really like guns and are fine with a couple classrooms paying the tradeoff ("Some of you will die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make"). Other people don't care at all about owning guns, so for them no societal cost is really worth it. But a blanket gun ban costs these people absolutely nothing. They were never going to own a gun anyways. Ask them how many babies mauled by dogs per year is acceptable before they're willing to let the government take away their precious doggos and you'll get a very different attitude.
I think dogs, like guns, are not all created equally. A pitbull is orders of magnitude more likely to maul a kid than a golden retriever.
And there is certainly a legislative push to restrict ownership of the more dangerous breeds, at least in Europe.
Personally, I would push for a license requirement to keep any kind of mammals (including kids) for animal welfare reasons alone, and ways to mitigate danger to third parties could be easily added to such a process.
At least in the US, enforcement on rules regarding dogs is basically non-existent. I doubt any amount of legislation short of an outright ban would make a significant change. It's too easy to lie about breed or claim service dog status.
But the broader point is that if my feelings on dogs range from outright disgust to begrudging tolerance, then it's easy to sit here and sneer at the societal cost of allowing them at all. I'm sure others would say some of my hobbies have too many negative externalities relative to their benefits, but my threshold for the acceptable level is higher than theirs just because I like the activity. These sorts of debates are just motivated reasoning and conflict theory all the way down.
It’s like a horror comedy how normalized it is nowadays in various countries across the world for people to bring their precious doggos into public spaces like airplanes, restaurants, supermarkets.
In an era where the “oppressed” and the disabled are usually fetishized, people with dog allergies are basically told “sucks to suck” and to suck it up. And people who merely dislike dog odor, having dog fur/slobber on them or in them, or touching surfaces where a dog’s asshole has been stand even less of a chance to have their preferences considered than those with dog allergies.
Can't forget the dogs that eagerly rub their noses into fresh piss puddles then get brought into grocery stores to shove that same nose all over various people and items.
Dog-obsession is probably one of only a handful of cultural issues where most liberals and conservatives are in complete agreement. I know plenty of vocally liberal people who will bend over backwards stressing the importance of accommodating every dietary restriction and neurodivergence under the sun except when it would cost them a chance to subject you to their dogs. Inclusivity is paramount, but not when the doggos are at stake.
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