That's like observing that we could probably solve the issue of people saying mean things on the internet by requiring ID to access it. You have to consider any expected negative consequences as well as if you'd be violating any rights.
Youre aware that the rest of the planet have stricter gun laws and the American problems are fairly unique?
This is even after controlling for things that exacerbate crime like high economic inequality.
For instance, Brazil [1] (a much poorer and more unequal country than the USA) has lower murder rate than a lot of cities now than the USA. The murder rate of Rio seems to be about on the level of Houston (17/100k), or about a third of Detroit (47).
But Rio clearly has __a lot more crime__ than Houston. It's palpable when you're in either city. Even with the Favelas and heavily armed gangs, the murder rate is comparatively low because *normal people dont have guns at nearly the same rate*.
And it shouldn't take a leap of faith to figure out that higher gun ownership leads to more deaths. Guns are the one tool we have intentionally made to cause death.
1. I'm aware that Brazil has a higher murder rate, but comparing cities is a better pick. The northeast of Brazil is in another league than anywhere in the USA in economic conditions; it's not comparable. The only city I can think of with USA levels of economic development would be Florianopolis (murder rate 7/100k) or maybe Balneario Camboriu, or some parts of Sao Paulo like Vila Olimpia.
Murder is a byproduct of crime. Crime is, largely, downstream of economic conditions with some obvious caveats.
New Hampshire has the 2nd lowest crime rate of the USA states. You could make the same argument for, say, Switzerland (high gun ownership but no crime/murder). But no one would be surprised if you had high gun ownership in Monaco.
Similarly for the ethnic argument you're trying to make: Majority black neighbourhoods in the USA tend to be poor. They also tend to be near more affluent places. Unlike poor white neighbourhoods, which are on average more rural in the USA.
Being poor, and being next to rich people, and being excluded from legal increases of becoming rich, will increase crime.
This should be obvious. Brazil has famously Favelas right next to wealthy areas and has a persistent crime problem for example.
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In short, it's really incredible how far some Americans will go to deny the obvious truth: *gun prevalence increases deadly crime*.
Sure, some cultural factors will increase crime/violence on the margin. But the reason y'all have a bunch of shootings is that you have a bunch of guns to do shootings with. That simple.
I don't think it's good to hold a misunderstand of the statistics against someone when (as in this case) they're so easy to read in a certain way.
> the reason y'all have a bunch of shootings is that you have a bunch of guns to do shootings with
Yet by your own admission poverty and inequality appear to account for the bulk of the effect.
Actually I think you'll find that plenty of Americans will acknowledge the link you point out. Just not in a politically charged exchange where the other party appears to have an ideological axe to grind. Where they'll likely disagree is the extent or significance of it. In many cases they will object that rights should never be curtailed for the purpose of lowering petty crime (I tend to agree).
I think it's also worth mentioning the statistic that legal gun owners (which is a wildly low bar in the US) have a lower rate of violent offense than the police.
Sure poverty explains crime, and murder is the ultimate crime.
That said, my point was that a place like Rio, where you feel alertness at a physiological level by the constant lack of security, still has a murder rate around Houston, a vastly richer and safer city.
And Brazil really is a good comparison in my opinion: the economic inequality is actually worse than in the USA, and they both have the slave holding history leading to concentrated poverty areas with high ethnic segregation
I don't personally think that the upsides of the US gun laws are worth anything near the downsides being paid.
Regarding the police, American police is notoriously prone to violence compared to other developed countries.
Ah it seems you finally understand the point. Blaming the skin pigment is as silly as blaming the gun.
Murder rates in US have very little to do with gun law, and they have very little to do with skin color, even though they're heavily correlated to the latter and weakly correlated to the former.
Of course within the USA the state levels laws will do little. There's free movement between states!
Compare the USA to Canada, where you can't bring a gun easily. You'll see Canadian murder rates being very low. Even controlling for similar factors at the city or neighborhood level.
Of course I'm blaming the gun: it's pretty hard to kill someone with other weapons. Stabbings are often survived, even.
If you just want to pick an American neighbor and make a crude comparison based on that, I could just as easily point out Mexico, which has stricter gun laws than the USA and Canada and fewer guns per capita than both USA and Canada. And yet a higher murder rate than both. And I cannot 'easily' (disputable, but lets accept on face these semantics for the purpose of controlled national border) take a gun to or from Mexico.
I assert again it is not the gun laws even if you want to do a national level view. Even a national analysis of gun laws in the three major countries of North America do not yield the conclusion you assert.
You are cherry picking to try and find causality while damning a comment where I merely pointed out a correlation between black people and murder rates. This is hypocrisy.
When you started to look at underlying causes at crime, you were so very close to getting there, but for some reason disengaged from that and went back to our flawed basis that would suggest it's the black pigment or it's the guns causing it.
Which shows how ridiculous it is to assign that as the cause, doesn't it? It's almost as if pointing to a lot of guns or black people in one spot doesn't show that's why murders are happening, only allows you to tie statistical correlation.
We've also seen it go wrong plenty of times. They can do them and we can do us I figure; I'm quite happy with my gun rights thanks.
There are highly developed countries that tightly regulate speech and network access relative to most of the west. Does that mean adopting an ID requirement to post on Twitter coupled with anti hate speech laws would be an obviously good thing?
It was an arbitrary example. Try to see past the politically charged topic to the actual analogy that I'm attempting to make.
The point of my original reply wasn't about the position being expressed but rather the stated reasoning. If your logic amounts to "Y could solve X therefore we should be doing Y" notice that when applied to other things that line of reasoning doesn't seem to hold up very well.
If you want to have a discussion about child mortality versus tail risks such as elections being suspended or the government murdering protesters a la Iran that's fine but please realize that wasn't the point of my earlier reply.
Most importantly, Australia removed "self-defence" as a reason to own firearms. You have to be a farmer, hunter, or belong to a shooting club.
While the number of guns increased, the number of gun owners dropped. And the new regulations enacted this year drop the number of guns one can own even more.
There was a near-total ban on "military style" guns. See how the terrorists at the massacre last year were limited by the type of guns they had access to, only managing to kill 15 despite having all the time in the world. An Ar-15 or similar weapon could have been used to slaughter that 15 in under 15 seconds.
In the sense that there are more private registered guns than ever before in Australia, sure.
> Most importantly, Australia removed "self-defence" as a reason to own firearms.
More importantly, it unified gun laws - before the Port Arthur shooting, Queensland, Tasmania, the Northern Territory, probably the Australian Capital Territory were all unregulated.
Unregulated states with no border control effectively made the entire Federation of States unregulated.
Regulated states, at least the ones that I lived in prior to Port Arthur, didn't have "self defence" as a reason for owning gun - it was always about hunting, feral control, specific security (regularly carrying money) etc.
The last I checked, the emphasis was more on where you intended to use / carry a gun; shooting club (common), carry for security in street (rare), rural (property owner or have letter of authority to shoot from a property owner).
> There was a near-total ban on "military style" guns.
Sure .. they serve no real purpose, the only activity that requires high fire rates and larger magazines is pig shooting, maybe camel control, and rat shooting.
Rats can be shot with professional BB guns .. a better choice when shooting in sheds, silos, etc - no spark or risk of punching holes in tin walls.
If you're pig shooting in bulk, that's a contract shooting licence.
> they serve no real purpose, the only activity that requires high fire rates and larger magazines ...
Did the Australian ban of "military style" rifles include a blanket clause that covers all semi-automatic fire? Or is it an almost entirely aesthetic category as it tends to be whenever such measures are proposed in the US?
When it comes to automatic fire there's a rather famous US case where someone was ultimately convicted for possessing a shoelace (IIRC) attached to some fastening hardware. As to larger magazines, those probably don't even meet the bar for an introductory level highschool shop project.
From what I understand most semi-auto guns are banned in Australia, but of course they never had a ton of those to start with. But there are still plenty of pump action, lever action, bolt action, etc guns which aren't meaningfully less capable. Shooting twice as fast doesn't mean you can kill twice as fast because you can't aim twice as fast. Like the majority of guns Afgan insurgents had were 60 year old bolt-actions which were quite obviously still capable enough to be deadly even to the top military in the world.
Extrapolating from experience in the USofA to other countries in the world is generally not a good move.
The actual numbers, from the time, suggest maybe 10-15% of guns in Australia were "self loading"
( 20% of guns purchased back, not all were semi-automatic, a good many were old unwanted guns that now faced a registration fee if kept )
From a US academic type study that looked at the Australian (and other) gun buyback scheme post Port Arthur.
Between 1996 and 1997,643,726 prohibited firearms were handed in.
Prices were set to reflect "fair value" (market value). Individuals with permits could also turn in firearms that they had failed to register.
Total public expenditures were about $A320 million ($U.S. 230 million33), approximately $A500 ($U.S. 359) per gun. The buyback program was financed by an additional 0.2 percent levy on national health insurance.
Estimates of the total stock of guns were few and drew on limited survey data.
Estimates ranged as high as 11 million, but the high figures had no known provenance. Gun Control Australia cited a figure of about 4.25 million, building on the only academic estimate, then roughly twenty years old.
The most targeted population survey of gun ownership was conducted by Newspoll; the resulting estimate was approximately 2.5 million firearms in 1997, after the gun buyback.
If that is approximately correct, it suggests that there were about 3.2 million firearms in 1996 and that the buyback led to the removal of approximately 20 percent of the total stock.
In U.S. terms that would be equivalent to the removal of 40 million firearms
> We’ve seen other highly developed countries operate just fine without arming their citizenry to the teeth.
Good for them. As an American, I'm quite happy with our Second Amendment rights, I'm not looking to roll that back in the slightest. And if anything, with the recent rise of the fascist authoritarian regime that we've seen, I'd think that maybe a whole lot of "anti gun" people here would be well on their way to becoming "formerly anti gun" people.
All my life I've heard that an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government. Now that we have creeping authoritarians running the country, where are all of those "second amendment solution" people? What trigger are they waiting for, exactly?
Recall that this authoritarian won the popular vote ~18 months ago.
The protection is against a minority authoritarian government. If half the populace supports the guy in charge then taking up arms is effectively a declaration of civil war. That's a case of the cure being worse than the affliction.
Fast forward a year or so, suppose popularity has hit single or low double digits, imagine a blatant attempt at subverting the election process, that's where an armed populace comes in.
Look, I could pick up a rifle tomorrow, and march on DC by myself with the intention of toppling the fascist regime. And what would result? I'd be quickly arrested or killed and nothing would change. So what's the point?
But if I was part of a group of 1,000,000 like-minded people, then I might still be arrested or killed, but at least there's a much higher likelihood that some actual change would take place.
Now, as a lifelong believer in the "an armed populace is to protect us from authoritarian government" mindset myself, I have to say, I am extremely disappointed in a lot of people right now. People that I grew up with, that I've always trusted, respected, and maybe even admired. Because while fascism metastasizes and spreads through our country nearly completely unchecked, they all seem unwilling to even speak up against what's going on. And I can't defend their choices, but I can say that I still believe that there is a tipping point, some event, or sequence of events, that would kick things into into gear if needed[1].
[1]: I say "if needed" because it's not 100% clear to me that the only possible way out of this mess is an armed uprising. We might still be able to "vote our way out of this" and the optimistic take is that many Americans are sitting on their hands as long as they hold a shred of hope that that is still possible.
The more pessimistic take is that a majority of the "second amendment to protect us from authoritarianism" crowd are hypocritical ass-clowns, who are actually OK with authoritarianism as long as "their guy" is the one in power. :-(
But you won't get that critical mass without a spark.
People need to see action and see it work without repercussions to the actor.
People will take notice when someone like Thiel, Bannon, or Miller are taken down with a drone and the drone operator escapes arrest.
They'll think to themselves "Wait a minute, if someone can take out a billionaire I can take out that cop who raped my cousin and got a paid vacation as punishment for it."
What comes after that is anybody's guess but I predict an impending moment where individual citizens realize that they're not as helpless as they have been lead to believe and that technology can help them eliminate long-standing criminals operating in positions of power with immunity in theiry local communities.
As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime. What scenarios relating to authoritarian regimes (be specific) do you find having a gun at home would help with?
> As an individual person, having right to bear guns doesn't seem to have any impact or saving powers against the authoritarian regime.
See my reply above. But loosely speaking, you are correct when looking at things from a purely individual point of view. No one of us is going to topple an authoritarian regime by ourselves. But I don't think that was ever the point. It's an assemblage of large numbers of like-minded armed individuals who can effect change.
And just to be clear... I'm a peaceful person at heart (but not a pacifist). I don't want blood-shed, and I don't want to see an armed uprising or a civil war on many levels. But I'd at least like to see many of my fellow #2A advocates being more vocal and visible about stating our displeasure with the current environment, and our willingness in principle to take action if/when it becomes clear that it is necessary. That, ideally, in and of itself reduces the need for actual violence, by acting as a strong deterrent.
Aside from the obvious (being ready and able to form an armed resistance) there's the deterrent. When you know that your populace has certain options available to them that will inform your actions.
