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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
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.
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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