Comment by yongjik
4 months ago
It's a problem entirely made up from America's insistence on guns. IMHO that's like when you have a website that serves a few requests per second, and then someone has the bright idea of using Kafka and Kubernetes because reasons, and now you have a horrible mess that requires multiple developers to support and, instead of questioning the original technical decision, everybody instead piles up technical "solutions."
At least nobody actually says "The founding engineers knew everything, our job is protect their original technical decisions, because otherwise our great company will fall."
Regulate guns and all these problems go away. As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
> Regulate guns and all these problems go away.
Firearms are regulated in the United States. Quite heavily, in fact. This goes back to the National Firearm Act of 1934, carries through the Gun Control Act of 1968, then loops in the Firearm Owners' Protection Act (FOPA) of 1986 (which included the famous Volkmer-McClure amendment that all but outlawed fully automatic weapons for civilians) and runs through at least the Brady Act of 1993. And that's without getting into the smorgasbord of state, county, and municipal laws that also apply.
The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
> As a bonus, you'll find out they were neither necessary nor useful for defending your rights.
That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally. As the old saying goes "I'd rather have my guns and not need them, than need them and not have them."
>The idea that the US is still living in the Wild West era with regards to firearms is a complete myth.
Compared to every other country in the world, including those with private firearm ownership, the US very much is still in the Wild West.
>That's not an experiment I'm willing to indulge in personally.
You're indulging in it now. Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails. How are your guns helping?
> You're indulging in it now.
I meant the experiment of further restricting firearms ownership.
> Your rights are being eroded and nullified daily by an increasingly militarized police force, an ever more pervasive surveillance state and an authoritarian government going off the rails.
On that we can agree, at least.
> How are your guns helping?
There's really no way to answer that, except in retrospective. I'll leave the final word on that to the historians who will come along well after I'm gone.
That said, I will note that it's very possible (but probably impossible to prove one way or the other) that the knowledge of how heavily armed the US populace is has in fact at least slowed the erosion of our rights, as the leaders (the ones who aren't brain dead stupid) fear the prospect of an outright shooting civil war.
And even short of a full fledged war, we have already seen cases where armed civilians confronted the government, and the government eventually backed down - even though they could have easily squashed the resisters in terms of absolute power. That is presumably again because they knew that doing that squashing would just lead to further escalation and Bad Things happening. I'm referring here to the "Bundy Cattle Standoff" or whatever they dubbed it, back in 2014.[1]
[1]: It's not my intent here to say that Bundy and his crew were in the right. Merely pointing out that being armed and willing to point guns at agents of the government ultimately led to a outcome other than them all being slaughtered. And I think they got their cattle back, or whatever it was they were trying to accomplish.
It really isn't though. Sure I can't go and buy a full auto AR15/AK47 without a special license. However it's pretty easy for me to go buy semi-auto version of that which can also do a lot of damage. There are a few red flag laws like in Texas but they are easily gotten around by private trade, and that's true for most "Red" states. Often no waiting period either if you go to an actual store. It really varies a lot state to state.
The 2019 Dayton shooter used a semi-automatic AR-15 and killed 9 people and wounded 17 others in the 30 seconds it took from his first shot fired to his death at the hands of police. 30 seconds to respond and kill the shooter. You cannot really ask for a more ideal response time than that. But 26 lives are directly impacted by those bullets, never mind the number of folks impacted because it was their loved ones being killed. All so conservatives can cosplay as freedom fighters at the shooting range.
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There are more civilian guns than civilians in the US.
There are more guns than people in this country yet only around 1/3rd of the population owns guns. About 14% of gun owners or roughly 3% of the US population owns between 8 and 170 guns. These "super" gun owners account for the majority of "extra" weapons floating around in society. And largely these people aren't the problem. I don't think we need to enable their obvious obsession, but they aren't the cause of mass shootings. It's the proliferation of weapons in the suburbs for "home defense" that leads to more senseless deaths.
And gun owners do a really shit job of defending their fetish. Because honestly that's all it is. None of these clowns are "defending democracy" or whatever other bullshit they spew about why gun ownership is "sO nEcEsSaRy"! And they lie constantly about what gun control is. They always frame it as "they are taking all of our guns away from us!" yet even in the most gun controlled countries there are paths to gun ownership for hunting and sport. It a group of very disingenuous and whiny people who do a lot of damage to our country.
Guns aren't the cause of America's crime problems. Guns existing don't make people walk out of homedepot with a cart full of tools or out of a walmart with a TV. Guns don't make people drive recklessly or commit DUIs. Guns don't burglarize peoples houses or make people sell or use drugs.
We're not going to regulate guns this way, so this point, valid or not, isn't meaningful to US policy.
Dangerous freedom > peaceful slavery
The non-American mind simply can't comprehend, and that's okay.
But the argument doesn’t make any sense. History isn’t full of examples where handguns prevented tyranny. It’s America that is running the experiment, not the rest of the world. And the conclusion is lots of people die as a result, and right now it looks very much like you’re headed toward tyranny anyway.