Comment by whynotmaybe

2 days ago

I still don't know what's so important about guns and how it's a metric for freedom.

Predators are less likely to attack someone who can defend themselves, it's quite simple.

  • The empirical evidence from the US does not bear that out. Compare murder rates between the US and any peer country with more gun control.

    • Most of the murders (homicides) in the USA are committed using illegal weapons. Banning legal weapons wouldn't reduce crime, it would just make it harder for victims to defend themselves.

      Besides, USA is not a good example. According to Wikipedia [1], high murder rate statistics in the USA are skewed due to the overrepresentation of one specific part of the population, which is not that common in comparable countries. If that population were to be removed from the statistics, the murder rate in the USA would drop significantly.

      > According to the FBI 2019 Uniform Crime Report, African-Americans accounted for 55.9% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 41.1%, and "Other" 3% in cases where the race was known. Including homicide offenders where the race was unknown, African-Americans accounted for 39.6% of all homicide offenders in 2019, with whites 29.1%, "Other" 2.1%, and "Unknown" 29.3%[48]

      [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_S...

      2 replies →

  • Yes, for the US with their unique historical and cultural differences, but it doesn't make it an international metric.

    Everyone in the US agrees with the inequalities and segregation and find it acceptable that an individual has to become a predator to survive because they don't find it acceptable to help each other on a governmental scale.

    Some countries have worse inequalities than the US but they don't think they need guns to have freedom in their daily lives.

As Mao said, political power grows from the barrel of the gun. In the past decade freedom of speech and internet freedom has being dramatically curtailed in pretty much every western country where the citizen are unarmed.