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This weekend, I visited my friendly local gun store, idly browsing for shotguns and learning about interstate purchases. Then I drove to my parents and spent the evening playing board games. It was a nice night with good food, drink and company.
Meanwhile, five minutes up the highway, some lunatic was murdering random strangers at a local shopping mall.
No one I know was killed. No one I know personally was present—though a friend of a friend was. I didn’t hear about it until the next morning. Big nothingburger, right? And yet I’ve been to that mall. I’ve been to the bar across the street with my coworkers. If I’d had an errand or three to run, instead of visiting my family, I might have been cowering in a storeroom or staring at a splatter of brains on the sidewalk.
I’m not linking to any articles. Partly for the thinnest veneer of opsec, partly because media coverage is predictably terrible. All sympathetic pictures and, as we’d say here, recruiting for a cause. Nothing good will come of this. Either we’ll force through a knee-jerk bill with symbolic limits on firearms, or we’ll (correctly) dismiss that as posturing and (incorrectly) do abso-fucking-lutely nothing.
It’s not like I can do anything about it. I don’t know what I would actually expect to work, and if I did, how could it be brought about? State, even local politics is as tribal as it gets. Enjoy your a la carte selection of two options, and one of them is out of stock.
Meanwhile, I guess the best I can do is pick up some CCW training and a good holster. Fuck.
If you had a free hand, what WOULD you do about it? Other than police state stuff (in which I include effective gun control), I don't see what you can do. Having the FBI pay special attention to Hispanic neo-Nazis probably won't work.
If we posit the world where the guns are removed, you've just made it so that physical prowess is solely determinant of success in violent encounters.
Which is to say, you're making females less able to resist male attackers, or allowing organized groups to terrorize individuals more freely, or make it harder for the old and infirm to defend themselves.
This leaves aside the generally observed tendency towards government tyranny become gradually (or suddenly) more harsh against disarmed populations.
And of course probably going to see a rise in Cars as tool of mass homicide
What if it happens that the right to keep and bear arms is a basic civil right?
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I don’t think we’d be looking at (at least in the first two generations) a low-gun USA. As a practical matter, no one knows where the guns are; they’re not registered and a fair number of states are constitutional carry states meaning that you don’t have to have a CCL. People aren’t going to simply surrender the guns, and nobody knows which houses to even check. The stuff you can find in a constitutional carry state are people who have memberships at shooting ranges and old guys who bought a state deer tag. At best you’ll get shotguns and old deer rifles, not AKs. So being fair to the argument, Australia and Japan, where nobody has guns is probably not the probable outcome. It’s going to be a country that still has a lot of guns (and even in places where guns aren’t officially allowed, it’s easy enough to get one, see Chicago or New York or DC — guns are highly restricted but you can easily get one if you need it) just not in the hands of the law abiding citizen.
My thought (and it will never happen) is a massively overwhelming show of police force. If you can reduce crime and especially violent crime by 15-20%, a lot fewer people will even want guns except for plinking beer cans (and hopefully not on a movie set) or maybe hunting. In the 1960s when crime was low, the most common form of gun was a hunting rifle. People didn’t want more than that because there wasn’t much gang violence, theft, or rape. You could walk down most city streets and be perfectly safe. You could let your kids play baseball in an empty lot without much fear. People want guns now because we no longer live in the kind of society where you can trust your neighbors to do the right thing, where the biggest fear was your kid getting a little drunk or maybe getting cigarettes at the bowling alley. If you can get crime that low, you won’t need to fight to confiscate guns because people who feel safe in their homes won’t want guns.
The rise in crime in the 1970's happened across the first world, and it didn't lead to a demand for liberalised handgun laws in any country except America.
It didn't really even lead to a demand for liberalized handgun laws in America over that time either- it would take until the mid-to-late nineties for licenses to carry concealed in public to become rubber-stamp affairs (and another 20 after that would be done away with entirely), and that was also in the midst of a ban that limited the number of permissible rounds to 10 (admittedly, the '94 AWB and its 10-round limit predate even the chunky 90s-00s subcompact handguns which barely hold that many rounds in the first place).
To be fair, it also took until the late '90s for the largest English-speaking countries to completely destroy the concept of gun ownership in general; the bans in UK and Australia (and to a point, Canada) all came after the US' AWB.
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They were still high by international standards, and there was an entire political coalition promising to enact soft anarcho-tyranny on the issue.
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Were gun trends in the 2010s driven by the recession? Or by the rather passionate response to Democratic administrations? Obama was a bogeyman on a lot of CW issues, and I think that confounds the issue.
Regardless, much as I’d like to smash crime back down to 2011 levels, I don’t think we can reduce gun culture without disentangling it from the red/blue split.
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I fully agree with your sentiment except in one part: Increasing the amount of police won't decrease the prevalence of crime long-term. Increasing the quality of police training and integrating police more tightly into communities might do some good but ultimately crime isn't a matter of a lack of crime-prevention in the narrow understanding of the term. Reducing crime effectively requires adjusting cultural, social and imo most importantly economic variables. The reason switzerland has a much lower homicide rate while having a comparable rate of gun ownership to the US isn't that switzerland is a draconian police state.
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The government knows where all the guns an "instant check" were required for are. Yes, they're supposed to destroy the records; they don't. And even if they did, the NSA would keep a backup. That accounts for a lot of them.
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Cherry-picking 2 of the most docile societies on the planet won't work here. It's pretty obvious that people become much more susceptible to knives and bats wielded by men in gun-free societies.
Women generally don't like guns, despite them being a great equalizer. They should still have the option to avoid ceding the power to effectively defend themselves because of biology.
And even then, I suspect we may have to revise Japan's "docile" rating if they keep trying to kill their Prime Ministers.
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Ehh, maybe if you think of the sort of rural bogans and bikie-types we might stereotypically associate with Australia, but as a Yank, I'm under the impression that that really isn't the case, and they have a Deep Blue Tribe there (probably helped by the fact that Australia only has like four major cities).
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I do think Australia shares quite a few similarities with the Anglo world, but almost nowhere else folded as quickly or completely to COVID restrictions, gun control, and wokeism. I don't deny that an island nation has effectively instituted gun control (even if there was, IIRC, a minor uptick in non-gun violence as a result).
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Australia is absolutely as rule-abiding a society as Japan; the rules are just different. Look at the treatment of speed limits for a trivial example.
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Japan has virtually no violence to speak of at any rate, so I don't know what you'd even expect to measure, there.
But suffice it to say, there is a reason The Yakuza can function so easily. They have the capacity for coordinated violence, and your average citizen has no means to resist them even if they wanted to.
Of course, in Mexico the Cartels also function pretty easily but engage in far, FAR more violence than the Yakuza do... despite guns also being nominally banned there.
So perhaps the problem is more that Mexican culture and Japanese Culture have different norms around the use of violence.
This gets to the REAL point at issue: the driving force of violence in any given nation is NOT the availability of weapons.
I'm going to resist my first instinct to accuse you of bad faith and just ask:
How is a nation actively choosing to separate itself from a government that it no longer wishes to participate in, and to thus secede from participation in said government "pro-tyranny?"
By this literal, exact logic the original American revolution was also 'pro-tyranny.'
Seems like a good reason to allow pro-democracy forces to keep weapons? I dunno what examples you're thinking of in particular.
North Korea, 2009:
"N. Korea enacts rules on regulating firearms"
Venezuela, 2012:
"Venezuela bans private gun ownership"
Afghanistan, 2021:
"Taliban in Afghan capital Kabul start collecting weapons from civilians"
Saudi Arabia, 2023 (timely!)
"Saudi Arabia announces new gun laws, restrictions on ownership"
Even if we don't assume that banning guns = slide into tyranny... the actual tyrants seem to think that banning guns is helpful to their ends.
Here's a fun exercise for you, can you point out any country that is heavily tyrannical and has very little democracy or protection of basic civil rights... and yet allows broad gun ownership?
Seems almost facially obvious to me that banning civilian-held guns is a DEFINING FEATURE of tyrannical nations, and that ONLY places with functional democracies (e.g. Switzerland) end up having permissive guns laws.
But... Saudi Arabia has been a tyranny for its entire existence. As far as I've understood, it's not likely to get more tyrannical by any standards we'd generally consider tyrannical. Nevertheless, they appear, by these laws, to have allowed (and still allow!) some form of handgun ownership.
Monarchy is not the same thing as tyranny, and if you're referring to their laws regarding social issues, consider that this is what most people living there might actually want.
Ages ago I heard a clip where a western reporter interviewed the Saudi king. He asked why doesn't he just make women equal to men under law, he's the king after all and can do whatever he wants. The response was seemingly a tangent about how much he loves his subjects, and how highly he values their opinion and values. The (Facebook, I think) commentariat couldn't make sense of it, and the reaction was an overwhelming "what the fuck is this dude on about?", while to me he was pretty clearly saying "If I pass a law like that, my people will string me up by my feet".
Now, how much does that have to do with gun control, I have no idea, but one shouldn't assume a government is a tyranny just because there's an absolute ruler.
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Nazi Germany would be the most obvious answer - Weimar-era gun laws were repeatedly relaxed by the Nazi regime (with an initially de facto but later de jure exception for Jews) as part of their remilitarization of Germany and ownership of long guns by non-Jews was entirely deregulated in 1938. A lot of the friends and relations of the Gypsies, homosexuals, socialists etc. who the Nazis persecuted would have been armed. Didn't make any difference - the Nazi regime was a paradigmatic case where the answer to "You can have my gun when you prize it from my cold dead hands" would be "Very well, let's do it your way"
And of course, if a determined population actually sticks to their guns in this way, they at least improve the casualty ratio.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising
But yeah, had they thrown down their weapons at the start, there'd probably have been less death overall.
Warsaw is notoriously not in Germany. The Polish nation-in-arms had already been defeated on the battlefield long before Hitler thought about the Holocaust - the fact that the Germans would win a violent conflict was already settled, as was the fact that they were willing to use the necessary force (including much bigger weapons than the rifles armed civilians rely on) and brutality to do so.
The claim that "civilian-owned guns are a useful tool of resistance to a foreign invader" is a very different one to "civilian-owned guns are protective against the domestic government turning tyrannical". The first claim seems like it should be answerable as a matter of military history - FWIW my uneducated view is that since about 1900 civilian guns have not been a problem for an invader able and willing to use tanks and aircraft against troublesome civilians, and that effective resistance to foreign invaders has tended to rely on "bombs" (IRA car bombs, VC claymore traps in Vietnam, IEDs in Iraq) rather than guns. I think the second claim is never going to be settled for the reasons we are seeing on this thread.
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So? It would be absurd to suggest never taking any action on one cause of an ill just because it happened not to be the most important cause. As long as it's a significant factor it's worth doing something about.
I don't think he was saying the action of secession was pro-tyranny, merely that rebellions can incidentally also be 'pro-tyranny', which is hard to dispute in the case of the U.S. Civil War, given what was being fought over.
If it's not the most significant factor, then almost by definition you shouldn't be prioritizing it.
My position is that there are at least a couple more significant factors that are studiously ignored when it comes to this issue.
I don't think there was any stated intention for the Confederate States to extend their authority over any other nations, so hard to claim they were 'tyrannical' with regards to the North, nor that they were somehow flouting the actual laws of the country at the time.
And to the extent they were tyrannizing their own people, well you're hardly going to suggest that slaves enjoyed expansive gun rights, are you?
i.e., my point, that tyrannical powers generally prefer disarmed populaces.
This circles back to our comments above on tractability.
No but the point is that an armed population, if they are ever able to resist the state, will not always be doing so to benefit of the population. As another commentor has observed, the latter and post-Reconstruction era South would have been a much freer place were the entire population disarmed.
Maybe true, but I don't think it holds any lessons for modern day America.
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If we are looking for a US example of pro-tyranny armed citizens rebelling against the government, then the first Klan and the Redeemers (my history is not good enough to know to what extent these were meaningfully different groups) are a more clear-cut example than the Confederacy.
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But surely if it is the culture's perception of violence which has the greatest impact you should put more work into that? If we rework America into a more conservative culture like Japan we could solve the issue and keep gun owners happy, then everyone wins.
Well not really because gun control is, at least from a policy perspective, relatively tractable, and from a political perspective many good measures are well inside the Overton window. 'Reworking America into a more conservative culture' will never happen, at least not whole cloth and not in a way where the results will be easily predictable and definitely translate into a more stable society.
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It sounds like there are a bunch of post-Soviet countries with permissive handgun laws. Plus a couple like Russia which want to keep that locked down.
Also most of South America.
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Not when you pick one that just doesn't have any violence to measure, no.
How the heck to you expect to establish a correlation with ANYTHING when there's scant data to use?
Hence why Mexican Citizens should probably be allowed to own guns.
I mean, I would consider both the United Kingdom and Canada as examples of this. Canada has never had high rates of violence, and yet they have gotten continually stricter on guns. The U.K. is unironically a clown show about it, coming after Kitchen Knives now. <30 years from when they banned handguns for civilians and they're now claiming can't be trusted with a fucking bread knife.
Canada in particular is very "iron fist in velvet glove" about it.
And then they do shit like shut off your bank account if you protest.
If unilaterally seizing the private property of peaceful citizens isn't tyrannical, I don't know what is.
The whole issue is that you're asking me to demonstrate a free society that gave up guns and THEN became tyrannical, when my whole premise is that:
A) Societies which allow civilian gun ownership are less likely to ever become tyrannical (again, see Switzerland)
B) It requires a tyrannical state to actually enact and enforce gun laws in the first place.
So my examples are things like the Taliban seizing power again and immediately confiscating weapons or Venezuela banning guns then kidnapping citizens en masse and further clamping down on dissent.
Tyrants don't trust their citizens with weapons. So they inevitably end up confiscating weapons from civilians.
That's what happens in tyrannies. The get more, not less tyrannical over time. So the solution is to maintain all safeguards that prevent falling into it in the first place.
And civilian firearm ownership seems to be a reliable one.
Despite what you have been reading there is no systematic ban on ordinary domestic knives in the UK. There is a ban on swords and machetes -- as there is in many countries -- and you can be have a knife confiscated if you are carrying it outside your home under suspicious circumstances -- as you can in many countries and most US states.
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You're theory being that if the truckers were armed the Canadian government would have been... less harsh? If anything that would surely make them come down like a ton of bricks.
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Go directly to statistics jail for comparing violent crime in the US when large parts of the country were under COVID restrictions to Australia after COVID restrictions had ceased. If you use the 2019 US figures, it doesn't change the story - the US assault number was 1.7% instead of 1.4% - still well below the Australian level.
The equivalent victim-survey based crime numbers are the Crime Survey for England and Wales (I didn't bother looking for Scottish or Northern Irish numbers, but they won't materially affect the UK-wide average). The latest (almost entirely post-COVID restrictions) overall victimisation rate for violent crime is 1.35% - i.e. somewhat below the US numbers. The CSEW does not break down individual types of violent crime because the sample size isn't big enough to produce reliable numbers.
The other thing I looked at, more as a sanity check that the data was comparable than for information, was whether the contribution of domestic violence was the same. Both the US and Australia have about a 20:40:40 ratio of domestic violence/acquaintance violence/stranger violence. The UK talks about "domestic abuse" which is clearly something completely different because the rate is higher than the overall violent crime rate.
Incidentally, can any Aussies on this board let me know how you can have that level of violent crime and not end up with the kind of national freakout about it that the US and the UK go in for?
I was thinking about the national lockdown in Australia which ended in May 2020, but looking at this list of local lockdowns, it looks like Sydney and Canberra spent about 2 months of 2021 under lockdown and Melbourne about 3 months.
Looking at 2019 makes most sense until we have a full year of post-COVID data (which the UK just published, but the US and Australia don't seem to have yet)
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