This is extremely shaky reasoning. You've done nothing to prove that the 2nd amendment is actually protecting these rights, only mentioned the existence of two facts and asserted a causative relationship between them. Have there been attempts to introduce censorship in the US that have been defeated by armed activists? Were there violent uprisings against censorship in the UK, Canada, or Australia that failed due to a lack of access to arms? The 4th amendment was gutted into oblivion in pursuit of the War on Terror -- why didn't the armed citizenry protect our rights?

No, because there _are_ armed activists.

Were there violent uprisings against censorship in the UK, Canada, or Australia that failed due to a lack of access to arms?

See Hong Kong of late. Many banners seen during free-speech protests there lamented their lack of a "2nd Amendment".

No, because despite whatever the talkshows say, both parties and especially the judiciary are largely committed to preserving constitutional rights. There's disagreements on finer points of where the lines are drawn, but that's handled in courts and legislation, and rarely ever guns ablazing.

Compare to Hong Kong, which is not governed by consent of the governed.

Wasn't there an impeachment procedure blatantly sabotaged by one of said parties like last year? Didn't the same party blatantly say they're stacking the supreme court in their favour up to the last possible moment, in an extremely hypocritical manner after refusing to accept Obama's nominees in his last year? Didn't multiple US presidents abuse and violate human rights with illegal wars and torture, mass surveillance? Didn't a US president order the murder of a US citizen without due process? Didn't a US state create a blatantly unconstitutional law for witch hunting women ? From across the pond, it seems that most US politicians in power, mostly from one of the parties, are wiping their asses with the the US constitution.

I don't understand the pride bit.

It seems like a regrettable situation where your distrust of your fellow citizens is so strong that you are comforted by the ability to kill them with minimal effort.

(I'm in Australia, where we have some truly horrendous legislation, but I totally agree with our gun ownership laws here, and echo other people's observations that gun ownership does not seem to equate to, or ineluctably lead to, better laws / more freedoms outside the right 'to own lethal weapons' itself.)

Perhaps I could interest you in some Iain M Banks (taken from Excession) :

"It could see that - by some criteria - a warship, just by the perfectly articulated purity of its purpose, was the most beautiful single artifact the Culture was capable of producing, and at the same time understand the paucity of moral vision such a judgement implied. To fully appreciate the beauty of a weapon was to admit to a kind of shortsightedness close to blindness, to confess to a sort of stupidity. The weapon was not itself; nothing was solely itself. The weapon, like anything else, could only finally be judged by the effect it had on others, by the consequences it produced in some outside context, by its place in the rest of the universe. By this measure the love, or just the appreciation of weapons was a kind of tragedy."

I can't speak to the parent, but I take pride in self-reliance, and taking responsibility for securing and defending the well-being of myself, my family, neighbors, and community.

I also am a volunteer, state-certified structure firefighter, and take pride in that for the exact same reason.

You might find it interesting that, as part of our classroom instruction, my structure firefighting class was asked how many of us owned guns — all of us raised a hand.

This mirrors my experience in the broader fire service.

> Perhaps I could interest you in some Iain M Banks (taken from Excession).

I love Iain M Banks' Culture series, but they live within a utopian, post-scarcity benevolent dictatorship managed by AIs with powers verging on that of a demigod.

We most certainly do not.

As for the quote? Any tool can only be fully appreciated within the context of its intended purpose, and the effects that it can produce in the world around us.

The value of a gun as a tool is a tragedy, but the tragedy isn't the gun, but the necessity for one, and it's a tragedy inherent in our mortal existence.

Well, they're sure not necessary here in Australia. I don't think I've ever met someone who owns one, certainly no-one has ever mentioned owning a gun to me. It's just not a thing. Seems to be just "a tragedy inherent" in the USA.

I was watching every day, and supporting, the George Floyd protests, and after a while those in Seattle and Portland.. until Raz got machine guns from his car and starting handing them out. WTF?! That was the plan?! I switched off, disgusted. That suddenly all seemed insane.

Like it does hearing people from the US on HN talking about guns. It just sounds crazy. I read on HN someone from the US saying Australians wouldn't be under lockdown if only we had guns etc. It just sounds insane, disturbing even reading that. What am I gonna do with a gun?!

But maybe, when everyone else has a gun, you feel you need for one too. Just know that it's not like that in every country.

Although if my country had spent most of the last 120 years invading other countries, subverting their politics, stealing their wealth, like the US has, I'd have urges to defend myself from it with a gun, too, maybe, I don't know. It's weird though. US violence has been focused outwards, on other countries, yet to hear people from the US, they never heard about that, don't feel involved or responsible, yet are obsessed with the possibility of US government violence happening to them one day.

I don't claim to understand the situation, just I'm very glad not to live in a country where everyone has a gun. OK, now I will stop reading gun stories/comments on HN. Good luck!

Some would say it’s them testing the limits of their populace. What are they gonna do? Protest? That’s illegal when in lockdown.

Maybe the remarkable low covid rates are there because of the authoritarian pressure? Authoritarian is never a good word but if people simply won't listen when it comes to matters of public health (that affect everyone - an overflowing ICU is never a good thing) and thus endanger the health of others then they have to live with the consequences. It's not a matter of politic, opinion or ideology.

The suggestion that this should be responded to with guns is just the most perfect own goal.

You do have one of the lowest Covid death rates in the world. You have a lot of states with complete freedom.

UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights:

Article 13

    Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Consider the frighteningly lengthy list of school shootings in the USA. [0]

I note that Wikipedia does not have an entry for school shootings in, say, Australia. Or in fact most other places.

I'm seeing a figure of ~ 1300 school shootings in the USA since 1970, so it doesn't appear to be an entirely modern problem.

In the USA (contemporary, again, sorry I'm not sure what era your experiences are from) there's ~30-40 (children-aged) victims of gun-related violence a day, with ~8 of those resulting in death. [1]

From outside that society, how people put up with this, living with regular active shooter drills, managing the additional anxiety, etc, is definitely going to be of interest.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th... [1] https://www.sandyhookpromise.org/gun-violence/16-facts-about...

> From outside that society, how people put up with this, living with regular active shooter drills, managing the additional anxiety, etc, is definitely going to be of interest.

I was in grade school not that long ago, and quite frankly, there wasn't much to "put up with". we did active shooter drills as or less frequently than fire drills (not often). I don't remember ever feeling anxiety about being shot at school, and I am a lot more anxious than the average person.

We'd have to be one of the more free countries around.

Yep, there are some laws that you would see as draconian, but are you offended because they actually impact you, or are they just something you don't like for "reasons"? Many places have laws and conventions that are different, it's about how you live with them. We have crappy and corrupt politicians. We have criminals and we have gangs. we are not perfect. The way we treat our first nations people is frankly shameful. Unemployed are in a in a hard shake, with benefits being far too low to both live and search for a job without family assistance.

We also have a country where you can walk down most streets without concern for your safety. Most places in the city you lock your doors but can get away with not setting an alarm. My current work at home office is on our back deck, and I'm happy to leave my computers out here for a few hours if I need to go out. Most places outside the cities you don't bother locking your doors. If you break down on a country road, your biggest fear is that somebody won't turn up to help you, not that they will come and rob you. Most of us don't know of anybody who has been killed by violence. I know one, she was shot by her boy friend when I was about 8 years old, way before the current gun laws were enacted. Most of the population understand that we need to work together for the common good, be it responding to natural disasters or putting on a bloody mask to help stop the spread of covid. In a disaster your neighbour will come and check that you are ok. If I want to have my say about something, as long as I'm not stupid or violent, there are many forum. I've walked all over the big (lol) cities in the country and never felt threatened or been accosted. This would be different if I were female, but I believe that is a problem world over. I still believe that the police are there to help and look after me, and have no fear about talking to them. Of course I'm white middle class male and my experience is not that of other groups, however police violence is still rare enough that it creates an outcry.

Overall, the only place I would prefer to live than Australia would be New Zealand, and then I'd have to put up with the cold weather.

As an American, the gun discourse especially on tech forums like HN sounds insane to me too.

You might want to consider some counterfactuals where the US kept more to itself.

It's usually the opposite sentiment for gun owners- I trust my fellow citizens with arms.

Guns are seen as an integral part of self-reliance by many. They provide you with a reasonably effective defense. One way to significantly erode individual's/citizen's power, and in turn give power to government, is take away their ability to defend themselves. People worry that as government becomes more powerful and citizens more reliant there is greater likelihood of oppressive government, in other words disarming populace is step down a slippery slope

For context, can you clarify if the many you're referring to there are some fellow USA citizens?

If so, I'll note that USA is < 5% of global population, and also note a very fresh Pew paper[0] which indicated more than half of that population was keen on stricter gun controls. So 'many' has some caveats around it.

> They provide you with a reasonably effective defense.

Against what? Other people with guns, or other people with feebler weapons?

If it's the former, then we're back to a basic escalation problem, and it's what most other western nation states have avoided falling prey to by, simply, not playing that game.

If you trust your fellow citizens with arms - who is it that you don't trust and that you need a weapon for 'effective defense'?

As to:

> ... in other words disarming populace is step down a slippery slope.

I really can't speak to what it looks like from within the borders of the USA, but from outside, it feels that the USA is well down that slippery slope (of eroded freedoms, and citizenry exploitation) compared to many other democratic nations - so guns in the hands of private citizens don't appear to be a panacea.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/09/13/key-facts-a...

I grew up rural in US and now live in the city. It may as well be two different countries with respect to views on gun ownership, so nationwide polls won't capture any of the variation (also state to state is massive difference).

> Against what? Other people with guns, or other people with feebler weapons?

Any living threat, which could be a much much larger attacker or mob of attackers. Consider the rattlesnake, it's the same thing- a great deterrent. It's peace of mind, a last resort, something that's better to have and not need than to need and not have.

> who is it that you don't trust and that you need a weapon for 'effective defense'?

Have you ever read about the terrible things people do to eachothers? Or the barbarism of human history?

> It's usually the opposite sentiment for gun owners- I trust my fellow citizens with arms.

And now:

> Have you ever read about the terrible things people do to each others? Or the barbarism of human history?

Those positions aren't precisely orthogonal, but they certainly have some conflicting sentiment behind them.

As to owning a handgun for private use for:

> Any living threat, which could be a much much larger attacker or mob of attackers.

... from a naive perspective (I've never been in that situation, thankfully) it feels like any advantage I may have, via agility, negotiation, ability to out-run, etc, would be negated if everyone involved had a handgun. Certainly if everyone in that scenario is armed, there's no clear advantage to me to be armed.

(I concur that if the other party(ies) were not armed, and I was, then that's advantageous to me. And if they were armed, and I was not, well that's also very bad for me. But that's not the likely scenario in a heavily gun-equipped scenario.)

Anyway, I'm sure you've gone through all this before, with many people smarter / more informed than me.

Precisely why many Americans are convinced gun ownership is an answer to something, despite all the statistical evidence, I'm just not likely to ever understand. Thank you for your patience with my questions.

It probably doesn't change much but Americans ask the opposite question since ownership is already legal.

We ask what you hope to solve by removing gun ownership.

From the perspective of a gun owner who is in favor of better gun control, the biggest issue with gun legislation in the US is that those proposing restrictions either have no idea what they're talking about or are just catering to those who don't.

The pro gun control crowd is too busy inventing a nonsensical category of guns to ban ("assualt weapons") to even acknowledge that the homicide rate comes from poor people killing eachother with cheap, concealable handguns.

Reasonable enough, but many people have access to information about how the world outside those borders operates - which is why free healthcare, minimum wage, and other changes, are now being a bit more actively discussed.

Anyway.

> We ask what you hope to solve by removing gun ownership.

What's on offer is a significant (order of magnitude) reduction in the number of violent gun deaths. [0]

No one's trying to sell this to the USA.

OTOH various agencies within the USA are certainly trying to sell the idea that this is a bad thing. The budget differential of the two groups is enormous - consequently it'll almost definitely never happen.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2019/08/05/7435796...

I think I wasn't totally clear about the point I was trying to make.

Very very very few politicians in the US (I can't name a prominent one but I'm hedging) are for any sort of firearm prohibition that would put us in line with any of the nations we are often compared with. So, given that, the restrictions being proposed will not and should not be expected to bring us in line with those nations. Therefore, the question I'm asking is, given the proposed restrictions, what benefits should we expect.

The point I wanted to make was that the answer to that question, "what benefits should we expect?", is basically none from the current viable proposals and that's why, while I am for more gun control, I am against most existing and proposed gun control measures as I feel they are either completely ineffective or overly burdensome for their effectiveness.

I find the oft-said quote of "If we can save even one life..." type of argument a massive red flag.

If that's roughly it, then I'd suggest:

a) the cautiousness is a political necessity - and does not preclude the option of pursuing stronger, but similarly sentiment policy changes down the road. First steps, and all that.

b) my understanding is that even very basic, not hugely contentious (almost bipartisan support for) ideas, such as removal of full automatic and ridiculously high calibre from the marketplace, stopping sales at gun shows without background checks, cooling off periods, requiring safe storage gun cabinets, etc - would result in a measurable decrease in deaths (murders, massacres, suicides, accidents).

In any case, it feels like even if (b) wasn't a highly likely, the cost of doing it is relatively low to the potential (but, really almost guaranteed) outcomes.

> I find the oft-said quote of "If we can save even one life..." type of argument a massive red flag.

I don't speak for all non-American citizens, but outside of the country looking in, it feels like (media, social groups, etc) this past year or four we've had an alarming reveal about the attitudes of a surprisingly large portion of American society -- even if something trivially inconvenient is requested of them, that demonstrably will save the lives of other citizens, there's an instinctive and violent push-back.

So, yes indeed - suggesting that some lives could be saved probably isn't a sufficient and satisfactory argument for many people there. But that's a separate problem.

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I guess I should add, if you can't find a way to respond to a comment without violating the guidelines, it's better to downvote, or flag if it's called for, and move on. I've discarded quite a number of half-written responses (and hastily deleted a few freshly-posted comments) on that basis.

Aha. See, if you had phrased that as a question, there could be room for curious conversation. Instead, you took the least generous interpretation and ran with that.

If I did something similar, like ran around pointing out that children can actually consent do actually have a working theory of the world in a thread about CP you'd probably question whether or not I have a load of CP on my computer. There is something as too much benefit of the doubt.

So... maybe?

We live in a tiny window of prosperity and safety. WWII was only 76 years ago. Syria is a short plane ride away. Afghanistan is a contemporary product of our own hubris.

Yet people still assume, for reasons that I genuinely cannot fathom, that this tiny window of privilege that we're lucky enough to inhabit will last indefinitely, and never backslide.

Nearly all perpetrated by the armed against the unarmed. The lesson of "might makes right" is to be suspicious of might before it makes right.

No, they don't at all. Just the opposite actually.

I get the 'Guns to defend against Tyranny' argument, that's kind of reasonable.

But as 'personal defence' they don't work nearly as well as having strong gun regulations which keep guns out of the hands of the morons. It's much safer walking down the street in Canada where you can't legally carry a gun, because there are just so few guns the baddies have a harder time getting them, and use them much less.

I do think we ought to be more concerned about authoritarian creep ... but guns are probably not the best solution to that either, as if it gets to that level it's very, very bad. Legislative, civic reform, voting, literacy etc. would be more helpful there.

I think the relevant counterfactual example you're looking for here is, "If Japan had much more liberal gun laws, would murder rates go up?" I don't think anyone's specifically concerned about gun murders.

Consider that Japan has so effectively kept gun violence out, that we consider their 'no gun deaths' an artifact of their culture.

Reference my comment on this thread for data on Japan, France, US, Canada.

If you add in Korea, which is similar to Japan, you see that guns are not completely restricted but very rare - and guess what - homicide by guns, though still rare - does materially exist above the levels of Japan.

So yes, if you allowed 'some guns' in Japan, there would be some gun crime.

The homocide rate in Japan is about 1/2 that of Norway, which seems about right, it's not like they don't murder people there.

My bet if that gun laws in Japan were the same as Norway, you'd see 1) that more of the homicides would be by guns and 2) the homocide rate would creep up a bit because it's just so easy to reach for a gun.

Of course, if guns were as widespread in Japan as they are in the US there would be much more homicide, but still considerably less than in the US.

Put another way: while culture is obviously an important factor - that culture is driven by gun availability.

And other things as well of course: if everyone has healthcare/welfare, well, that's going to start to limit the very negative situations people get into on the margins. I'm not making an ideological point here, rather than trying to illustrate systematic effects.

I think that's incorrect. You really need to do experiments to get at this sort of causal story, though econometricians think they can sneak their way around said experiments. It's definitely a feedback loop and the availability of guns seems like a very, very small part of what goes into a "culture".

Anyway, what I really came here to say is I think you misinterpreted my comment: I didn't mean japanese people don't really care about gun murders, I meant all of us shouldn't really care about gun murders. From a public policy perspective, the thing we care about is just plain old murders--with what tools people decide to commit them is irrelevant. The relevant counterfactual you need to consider is, "If Japan had more liberal gun laws, would the murder rate go up?" if the claim you're interested in is "Do gun laws influence the murder rate?", NOT "If Japan had more liberal gun laws, would the gun murder rate go up?". It seems likely that the gun murder rate would go up to me, but who cares? What if the overall murder rate went down? What we really care about is the # of people murdered.

Woman in Texas was killed by feral hogs.

It is other way around. People who want gun bans do not trust the fellow citizens and hence want to restrict their freedom of owning firearms. Gun lovers on other hand are some of the nicest people around, we want everyone women, lgbtq, blacks, whites, asians and everyone to own firearms and we trust them to be responsible for it.

Pride part :

1. I come from a long line of fighters. Weapons are part of our lifestyle and no government or law can stop my family from being armed. (Though we will always obey law).

2. Guns are a symbol of individual freedom. There is an inherent responsibility to protect one and their private property and community. I will not hesitate to use violence to fight a tyranny.

Australia is practically under house arrest today and we see articles like :

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/coronavirus/nsw-covid-upda...

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/05/24/rape-a... [1] https://www.nsvrc.org/statistics

0: https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.htm... 1: http://www.nationalacademies.org/hmd/Reports/2013/Priorities...

>> The lack of standardization across databases limits their comparability (NRC, 2005). The absence of clearly defined concepts complicates data collection and interpretation. For example, definitions of “selfdefense” and “deterrence” are ambiguous (NRC, 2005; Weiner et al., 2007). There is no standardized method for data collection or collation, which prevents researchers from harnessing the potential power of data across multiple datasets

If you're walking around in Condition White all the time you're unlikely to succeed. But that doesn't describe many if not most US concealed carriers.

The fact that you cast this as "fantasy" tells us it's not something you've ever seriously considered.

>> “I came out of that store, I clicked the safety off, and I was ready,” he explained on Fox and Friends. “I had my hand on my gun. I had it in my jacket pocket here. And I came around the corner like this.” Zamudio demonstrated how his shooting hand was wrapped around the weapon, poised to draw and fire. As he rounded the corner, he saw a man holding a gun. “And that’s who I at first thought was the shooter,” Zamudio recalled. “I told him to ‘Drop it, drop it!’ “

https://slate.com/technology/2011/01/joe-zamudio-and-the-gab...

>> But the man with the gun wasn’t the shooter. He had wrested the gun away from the shooter. “Had you shot that guy, it would have been a big, fat mess,” the interviewer pointed out.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_freedom_indices

Let's burn the American flag instead. How's that gonna go in rural counties of the US? Will it be safe, or will the response be armed?

It is pretty hard to organize 'Draw A Muhammad' workshop in non-muslim countries like Canada, UK or India. That tells you how less free those countries are.

Secondly, freedom is used (always) in the context of Government. In India, Canada or UK it is not the fellow muslim you have to worry about but the government jailing you. In the absence of a robust violent respons from society government will take away your freedoms one by one to simplify their own life at your expense.

> Let's burn the American flag instead.

Please do. It is an important freedom Americans have and constitutional granted free speech right. American flag is burned, insulted on regular basis in USA. Just like flag insulting national anthem is another form of protest in USA. I have not heard of anyone being punished or killed in USA for burning American flag. Most certainly the government can't punish you for the same.

Sorry, bub. I live in Canada, and you're extremely misinformed about the law here. It would not be hard to organize a "draw a Muhammad" event here. If Megan Murphy speaking at the Vancouver Public Library is any indication, you could even do it on government property, replete with security to keep you and the protesters away from eachother.

Or, change my mind. Show me the legal precedent where Canada jailed somebody for drawing Muhammad. I'm curious about the UK, India and Australia, too. But I'm calling bullshit on your claim about Canada.

The closest I've seen was a dude got fined for distributing hate speech targeting an individual. He couldn't afford to pay the fine, and that was the end of that.

If I persist, or defend myself, as people attempt to stop me, are you positive that I wouldn't get shot by some trigger-happy kid like Kyle Rittenhouse?

Here is what I said: “The US is not lacking in either press or economic freedom compared to ‘peer’ nations.”

Whether or not there are countries who have better ratings, any honest reading of the list sees that the US ratings are similar to peers.

When you consider how large and diverse the US is compared to most countries on the list, the ranking becomes more impressive.

The first list puts the US above all of Europe except Switzerland, and above all of Scandinavia, and Canada and Australia.

The second list puts the US above Sweden, Germany, and Japan for example.

The third, doesn’t have ranks, but places US in the ‘satisfactory’ category along with most of Europe, Canada, and Australia.

The fourth, is the only one in which the US does a little worse on their points scale, however *it is back in the top tier described as ‘free’ alongside all its peers, and above the UK, France and Japan in the ranking.

It’s just bullshit to claim these lists indicate that the US is lacking compared to peers.

This is a completely dishonest representation of what I have said.

Here it is again:

> The US is not lacking in either press or economic freedom compared to ‘peer’ nations. Whether or not there are countries who have better ratings, any honest reading of the list sees that the US ratings are similar to peers.

Nowhere did I say there wasn’t room for improvement or even claim the US was at the top.

If you’re going to lie about both what I said, and what the links show, what do you think we can accomplish?

>We are usually behind Canada, New Zealand, the Scandinavian countries, and a few other European countries depending on the specific criteria being evaluated.

The countries we are behind on all 4 lists and therefore unanimously behind:

    - New Zealand
    - Switzerland

    - Canada
    - Australia
    - Ireland 
    - Denmark
    - Finland
    - Netherlands

    - Germany
    - Norway  
    - Sweden 
    - Iceland
    - Belgium
    - Austria
    - Portugal
    - Czech Republic
    - Lithuania
    - Slovenia
    - Andorra
    - Liechtenstein
    - Luxembourg
    - Estonia
    - Cyprus
    - Jamaica
    - Costa Rica

> And the fact that the US is lacking in those two latter categories compared to many of our peer nations

Which is still bullshit.

As I said before, whether or not there are countries who have better ratings, any honest reading of the list sees that the US ratings are similar to peers.

I already dealt with that in this response:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28560646

> It honestly seems like you are arguing just for the sake of argument at this point.

That doesn’t seem honest to me.

But either way, I give up. This isn't worth spending any more time on. Congrats, you win!

This is where the misunderstanding arises. You are actually incorrect. I’m not acting as if you said compared to all of our peer nations. I clearly and repeatedly accepted that we are behind some of our peer nations.

You on the other hand, are using the fact that we are not literally at the top of the list, to argue that we are behind our peers in a general sense.

If you weren’t you’d simply say “we aren’t at the top of the list - there are 8 countries ahead of us”, instead of the false, and more generic sounding “compared to many of our peers”.

https://apnews.com/article/803cf0e75e924afbbbe9c77f15517da5

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/18/sports/running-while-blac...

It seems a lot of Black people are afraid to run because they know there's a real risk that they'll be shot by white people who will assume they've committed a crime. They're afraid people will immediately assume they're scofflaws, as you joked (?), and hurt or harass them.

So you may have seen black people running, but that may be because you live in a more progressive neighborhood with BLM signs that has made Black runners feel less like they'd be murdered in your neighborhood than in other neighborhoods (as one person explained in that article).

If we're measuring freedom, the right to exist in public without a reasonable expectation of violence and harassment seems important.

Lastly, this has nothing to do with gun ownership? You can find people expressing exactly the same sentiments all over western Europe.

>...the freedom to go for a run in public without being shot or harassed (which is not really afforded to Black Americans)".

I could quibble about that claim, or point that I've read countless tweets and anecdotes from Black people describing that they have to carefully plan their routes and wear shirts from ivy league schools because they've been assaulted or harassed by white people in the past and they just want to make whites feel safe, or look back to my upbringing in Grosse Pointe, a wealthy suburb just east of Detroit that was hardcore redlined [0] where I saw Black people routinely harassed for existing in public. But the core of this is that Black people in American don't have the freedoms white people do. Black people don't get personhood here, unlike people who look like me [1].

And as a homicide researcher, I assure you, gun ownership is extremely relevant to the denial of freedom to Black Americans.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Metro_Detroit...

[1] https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/1255088329634308096?s=20

It's true that in some cases, there are disparities that seem to suggest a very small amount of racial bias. Summing up that situation by saying that as blacks are not free is about as unproductive and untrustworthy as using Jamelle Bouie as a source for anything.

[0] seriously, what is that? A description of your hobby of reading newspaper articles and downloading public datasets?

[1] https://www.nas.org/academic-questions/34/3/testing-the-test...

Over 80% of people shot or killed in the city I've lived in for over a decade are Black, and over 80% of shootings or homicides occur in neighborhoods where 80+% of residents are Black. These observables forced me to ask "Why are Black people so disproportionately victimized by violent crime?" and "Why is housing so intensely segregated?". Looking into segregation, I found this problem isn't unique to Chicago, rather it's a feature of every US city with a significant Black population [0], so the cause likely wasn't purely local in nature.

Growing up in the Detroit suburb I mentioned previously, I was very familiar with "redlining", as the the boundary line separating Detroit and Grosse Pointe was also the boundary line separating white and Black residents as that Wikipedia image clearly shows. I am somewhat embarrassed that I had to watch hundreds of people be murdered before I thought to ask "why are we still so racially segregated, over 50 years after LBJ's administration signed so many civil rights bills into law?" but asking that question lead me to investigate, and unsurprisingly, a nation-wide effect was the consequence of a nation-wide federal policy. The Federal Housing Administration's explicitly racist mortgage underwriting guidelines [1] explicitly incentivized racially segregating Black Americans out of areas with desirable land, low pollution, good schools, or good services. Here are some excerpts from this Federal policy that provided a massive investment vehicle nearly exclusively to white Americans:

* "Natural or artificially established barriers will prove effective in protecting a neighborhood and the locations within it from adverse influences. Usually the protection from adverse influences afforded by these means includes prevention of the infiltration of business and industrial uses, lower class occupancy, and inharmonious racial groups." (Section 935: "Natural Physical Protection"),

* "Areas surrounding a location are investigated to determine whether incompatible racial and social groups are present, for the purpose of making a prediction regarding the probability of the location being invaded by such groups. If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes. A change in social or racial occupancy generally contributes to instability and a decline in values." (Section 937: "Quality of Neighboring Development"),

* "However, if the children of people living in such an area are compelled to attend school where the majority or a considerable number of the pupils represent a far lower level of society or an incompatible racial element, the neighborhood under consideration will prove far less stable and desirable than if this condition did not exist." (section 951: "Quality and Accessibility of Schools"),

* "Satisfaction, contentment, and comfort result from association with persons of similar social attributes. Families enjoy social relationships with other families whose education, abilities, mode of living, and racial characteristics are similar to their own." (Section 973: "Social Attractiveness"),

* "The infiltration of inharmonious racial groups will produce the same effects as those which follow the introduction of incongruous land uses, when the latter tend to lower the level of land values and lessen the desirability of residential areas." (Section 1360, "Estimation of Remaining Physical and Economic Life of Buildings",

* "Racial Occupancy Desiqnation. This will be a letter indicating predominating racial characteristics, as follows: W-White M-Mixed F-Foreign N-Negro" (Section 1850)

* etc.

The FHA is a federal agency of the US government, which extends its reach across the US. The FHA's underwriting manual provided explicitly racist rules for determining whether the FHA would insure mortgages in an area, and if the FHA wouldn't insure mortgages in an area, that drastically reduced the number of banks that would issue mortgages in an area, which reduces the supply of buyers, which reduces land value. As a consequence, these policies incentivized real estate agents, banks, and white residents to push Black people out of desirable areas and into ghettos or areas far from economic opportunity. While these policies were outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968, many millions of white Americans were able to buy real estate thanks to this program thereby enabling those white Americans to generate generational wealth on those assets, while Black Americans were denied access to this class investment, or could only access it through predatory means (eg "contract buying", where the buyer gains no equity until the very last payment is made, so failure to pay the penultimate payment could result in the resident being evicted with nothing). Even with redlining being explicitly illegal, banks still do it [2].

Over the past hundred years in the US, real estate has been an incredibly well performing investment, and access to this investment class many decades ago has allowed white families to profit from (and pass down) the compounding returns, while Black families were locked out of this. The resulting racial wealth gap [3] is staggering, with the median white family net wealth being around $188k, while the median Black family's net wealth is around $24k. As a result, segregation is maintained by the massive population of white Americans who are able to afford rents or mortgages in areas with high quality services, while the population of Black Americans able to afford the same rents or mortgages is disproportionately smaller.

As a result of this intense, systemic racial bias (which is undeniably obvious, just look at these maps [0]!), average Black Americans enjoy nowhere near the freedom that average white Americans do. Last year, there were over 4000 shootings and 769 homicides in Chicago, and the overwhelming majority of them occurred in the neighborhoods where the majority of Chicago's ~780,000 Black residents live. In the Detroit suburb I grew up in, I could (and regularly did) go for walks between midnight and 3am, never once thinking "oh, this isn't safe". None of my classmates were ever murdered or shot. Few if any of my classmates had to work a job to help their family get by, and even most of the mediocre students in my grade went to college. The conditions for Black people my age who just lived 4 blocks north of me, just across the Detroit border, lived under very different conditions.

If you think this is a "very small amount of racial bias", I assume you've just never taken the time to think about this issue. When you look a maps of racial segregation in the US [0], [systemic racial segregation via federal housing policy] is the only explanation that stands up to scrutiny. If you're actually interested in the truth on this issue, you should read "The Color of Law" [4]. If you aren't interested in the truth, keep doing what you're doing.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/segreg...

[1] https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Feder...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-09-28/eight-rec...

[3] https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disp...

[4] https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...

You rightly mention lobbying and corruption together. But somehow you miss that they are on the same continuum. From my EU perspective lobbying in the US is corruption, as the lobbying comes with money and paid-for political promotion.

The situation around guns itself is a clear example: as I understand it, a majority of US people is in favor of more limitations to gun rights (banning automatic weapons, screening psychiatric patients and criminals) but politicians are only expanding gun rights (open carry etc).

If democracy would work as intended then "common sense" limitations would have been introduced long ago.

Note that I am not talking about corruption in the criminal sense: US politics and supreme court have fully legalized and embraced it, conflating it with lobbying.

Specifically, there are already heavy restrictions on automatic weapons, which are basically never used in criminal acts. Every automatically gun in the US has to be registered with the federal government for $200 and a lot of paperwork. In effect it means if you’re wealthy you can own automatic guns, which is a violation of the 2nd in a lot of people’s opinion.

What I think you meant when you said automatic is “assault “, which is what most of the gun debate is currently center on, so called “assault rifles”. The issue is that the term is not clearly defined, and under most proposed bans would include many rifles which were traditionally considered hunting tools. Even that is a bit of moot point, because the 2nd was not written with hunting in mind.

Another hot point recently is “ghost guns”, which like “assault rifle”, sounds scary enough on the evening news to grab eyeballs. “Ghost guns” are being used to justify government overreach by banning the sharing of gun plans for DIY construction. The issue is that again, almost no DIY guns are used in crimes. What are used are stolen handguns that have had the serial number scratched off. The stolen guns are grouped in with DIY guns as “ghost guns”.

I think you're thinking of "assault weapon" which gets thrown about a lot and for which there isn't a clear definition.

The term 'assault rifle' is used loosely by us, but in terms of law there are definitions: https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/1296...

"Assault rifle" has a very specific meaning: an intermediate-caliber, magazine-fed military rifle capable of both semi-automatic and automatic fire. That common meaning has been more or less fixed since WWII when it was adopted from the German word Sturmgewehr.

"Assault weapon" is a legal term that is defined by law (e.g., California's assault weapons ban or the failed federal Assault Weapons Ban of 2019 that you cited). "Assault weapon" includes not only semi-automatic rifles, but also shotguns and pistols that have certain characteristics. The definitions are long and complicated because they attempt to ban only weapons having the visual and ergonomic features of military weapons, while ignoring weapons of similar caliber that do not have those features.

As for the definition, if you read the definitions of the prohibited components, they are broad enough to ban essentially all rifles, which is likely the goal. For instance, “pistol grip” seems like a well defined thing at a glance, but it is later defined as “ 45) The term ‘pistol grip’ means a grip, a thumbhole stock or Thordsen-type grip or stock, or any other characteristic that can function as a grip.”

That last clause especially is extremely broad. Define functioning as a grip. Is that any piece that enables holding the rifle?

And you don't get to decide if $200 today plus a very intrusive application process infringes on our rights.

https://www.atf.gov/rules-and-regulations/national-firearms-...

Also, the supreme court already weighted on some rights regarding weapon registration:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Freed

>> United States v. Freed, 401 U.S. 601 (1971), was a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court held the National Firearms Act's registration requirements do not violate the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution.

$600 for an automatic rifle? I will literally pay you as much just to connect me to the seller.

SKS is semi-automatic.

So don't need the $200 ATF machine gun stamp.

Strange, isn't it, how polling organizations don't quite seem to capture what the people actually want and vote for.

Actually, your list of "banning automatic weapons, screening psychiatric patients and criminals" is already in place, although the first is limited to a few hundred thousand in civilian hands. Two last time I checked had been used in crimes, the first incident a murder by a policeman.

People with money and influence will always try to impact law. In EU it happens through actual bribes which is far worse. (Pretty much like India). In USA an immigrant like me can join hands with 10K immigrants and find enough support in congress openly by hiring lobbiest to advocate for the cause I care about. That is how democracy should work.

It is easy to see lobbying as bad by taking examples you don't like but in reality it is a great example of how people can convince their representatives to pass right kind of laws, legally and with enough regulation. In most countries this happens to secret middleman and nights in shady hotels.

> a majority of US people is in favor of more limitations to gun rights

It is not clear if that is the case. Of course majority of people is irrelevant because this is not a mob rule. That is why we don't allow crowd in SF determine what people in Montana want. It is all fair game.

Secondly, people like me who care about guns care about it lot more to actually form lobbies. On other hand folks who dislike guns only talk about it but will not lobby or donate for the anti-gun causes.

I recommend this excellent video about why NRA despite with a shoe string budget is so much more influenced than many other lobbying groups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pdt6Jj64TVU

> Revenue (2018) $412,233,508[0]

I don't know what shoestrings you're buying, but I suggest shopping around.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Rifle_Association

> Revenue (2018) $412,233,508[0]

That could buy a lot of machineguns, according to the ATF.

https://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/2010/01/25/shoestring-mach...

What on earth are you talking about?

I don’t know how can I prove that people think that. You just need to be in the gun community and talk to people who would never put it in writing. My own gun trainer told us the story of a man going to the doctor for getting his hand hurt while doing repairs at home, the doctor chatted with him and he mentioned that he lost his job recently that’s why he had all this free time to do his work, the doctor reported this and his guns were taken away. (Please note no more details were provided than the story).

The point is that mental health is a very tricky game, there is an immediate loss of trust due to the fundamental nature of what it is. I personally don’t think you should own guns if you’re taking antidepressants.

> I don’t know how can I prove that people think that. You just need to be in the gun community and talk to people who would never put it in writing.

I wasn't trying to challenge anything, just presenting my own anecdata that I personally have not run into gun ownership issues even with my own mental health trials. Nor has my brother, who like another commenter got put into a 72-hour involuntary hold and continues to own and purchase firearms without issue. Contrast this against your own, opposing anecdata from your trainer.

I'm well familiar with the belief and that people live with such fear, I've heard it plenty at ranges, gun stores, sporting goods stores, from colleagues and in bars. Recently, my girlfriend quit her job and her father was near frantic in his insistence that she not cite 'stress' in her resignation letter as that alone would supposedly start some rube goldberg slippery slope mechanism to her losing her right to own guns. Again, to me this feels like such an overblown fear of the evil eye of big government boogeyman and near incredible, which is why I was asking for stats or reports to try to put some numbers to the stories. I certainly won't discount that guns are, on occasion, taken away from their rightful owners without proper due process; but are there any DOJ, FBI reports, etc?

Ok, so your point is, that making laws which stigmatize mental health (which is what it is) have no impact on people seeking out mental health counseling?

If anything, my point is that maybe this pervasive (and possibly unfounded, which is why I'm wondering if there is any actual hard data) fear of having guns stolen is impacting people's mental health by disincentivizing them from seeking the help they need.

Ah, but that was not my claim. My claim is, association of mental health and guns will cause (and is causing) people to avoid seeking mental health.

I don't know how can I be any more clear, but you can read my past comments again.

Being committed by judicial order for having a mental illness/developmentally disabled, or being found not guilty by reason of insanity or incompetent to stand trial are the three disqualifiers for gun ownership in my state. It is likely different in each state, so YMMV.

The argument that you need guns for personal defense, against the government or as part of self-reliance is extremely rare. Also legally there are not many cases where their use would be considered justified self-defense by a court.

There has been some "americanization" in recent years with people copying NRA arguments but not a prevalent mindset anywhere in the country.

The reasons why there are some many guns around are simply because people often take (or had to in the past) the military service riffle home and because shooting is a fairly popular sport. Not because of a perceived need of needing it for defending oneself or family.

Why hang a sign that insinuates "I may shoot you", unless that person really means it?

I know other families who have guns are willing & able to protect my children. They've thought about such situations, and have means to protect the innocent.

You make a fundamental mistake by thinking that the sign has any effect on how much I trust my neighbors. Unless it's a NAMBLA flag, I am not going to let a bumper sticker or slogan override my personal experience of a person. Most people are like this.

An example of someone's recent true nature:

>> A Washington man was arrested after officials said he shot and killed a neighbor for revving his engine too loudly.

https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/state/washington/article...

One cherry-picked anecdote is insufficient. A million or so crimes, murders included, are deterred/stopped every year - most without firing a shot.

The data don't really suggest that this is the case. Compared to other western countries, America has the same rate of crime. The difference is, of course, that criminal activity is more likely to involve firearms and thus death.

If you have lots of personal experiences with a person, that's great. But many people don't have real relationships with their neighbors. Bumper stickers and slogans absolutely will impact such relations, they make first impressions. I certainly wouldn't trust almost-strangers with tons of flat-earth stuff to tutor my kids, would you?

Being brown myself, I promise you that your cherished pet minorities are doing fine in the suburbs. None of us are looking to urban whites as a savior, and you don't need to involve us in your feud with rural whites. Many of the people who I know that are gun owners are black -- they're very neighborly as well!

"It's more dangerous to be black in America[...] It's both more dangerous because of crime, which is the Chicago story. But it is more dangerous in that you're substantially more likely to end up in a situation where police don't respect you where you could easily get killed. I think sometimes for whites it's difficult to appreciate how real that is."

Does racism exist? Of course. It probably is even higher among rural and suburban individuals, on some kind of self-reported metric.

Does it have an appreciable, significantly negative impact on the lives of most non-white people in 2021? The evidence is pretty dubious on this point IMO, but of course it depends on your definition of impactful.

Is it related to gun violence? I don't see how.

"To describe the urban-rural distribution of firearm mortality, we used the county-level metropolitan/nonmetropolitan classification from the United States Department of Agriculture’s 2013 Rural-Urban Continuum Codes, which defines nonmetropolitan (rural) counties as having communities of fewer than 50,000 people with less than 25% of the workforce commuting to a metropolitan(urban)county".

Does that work?

Broadly speaking, if someone says "we should severely curtail gun ownership because at a per-county level some counties have very high firearm mortality rates," it does seem reasonable to me to object on the basis that:

1. in terms of the intersection of quality of life and foundational rights, I care more about the rate of homicide, not gun mortality (which includes accident and suicide). Rights imply responsibility, so the appropriate question is whether people are capable of being responsible with their rights. It is irresponsible if you harm others with the exercise of your freedom.

2. on the basis of individual cities and towns, high gun ownership (freedom) does not seem to correlate to higher homicide (irresponsibility). That phenomenon seems restricted to dense urban areas where gun control is already in effect, and other geographies -- mostly poorer regions where stronger gang and drug enforcement seems warranted.

If you understand that joke, you understand the objection.

Unfortunately, in 2021, dense minority-dominated districts tend to be high in gun crime. If you don't live in one of those area, it's like a European country, in terms of living standards and crimes rates.

So we get to the crux of it. It's not the signs that prevent you from socializing with your community.

On to the signs. "Posted, no trespassing" is an indication that bad things may happen if you jump a fence. Maybe all it is is getting arrested and charges pressed. Do signs like that make you feel unsafe?

Signs like that are intended to deter the wrong kind of people, that is, those who would harm you. They have the added side effect of bringing together like minded people, and deterring socialization from people with a problem with it.

No. Those suggest a normal, decent, measured response, rather than a spirit of escalation. A sign like "talk shit, get hit" would worry me though.

Ok that said, I don't understand how guns protect us from the government. I think the biggest threats area slow and mundane. Ie erosion of rights or increasing power of some portion of the government over decades. There's no one cataclysmic event that overnight would make sane people take up arms and start popping off.

Likewise, let's say the government went all evil-like. Like in a movie. And you somehow got a huge citizen resistance trying to fight the government forces, unlike in real life where apparently the country would be split and half would join the government forces. The government has armor, air support, artillery, surveillance, and logistics. This isn't the 1700s. Just access to small arms is meaningless unless the 2nd amendment is broadened to include all weapons. And even then, machine guns, manpads, tanks and heat are just tools and a tiny, inconsequential part of warfare.

You always see gun people plinking away at stationary targets. Arguing about mlok vs picatinny. Maybe practicing their tacticool speed reloads. You rarely see people practicing force on force cqb, urban fighting, how to fight as a team.

Of course this is all theorizing. I don't America is in danger of that sort of civil war just yet.

Government isn't going to attack lots of individuals via tanks/artillery/etc scattered thru innumerable suburban neighborhoods.

Every year >20,000,000 US individuals partake in live-fire live-target drills, acting practically as lone wolves, as well- and self-equipped snipers in Operation "Deer Season". Just 0.001% of those, sufficiently motivated, would paralyze an oppressive government.

Yes, most "plinking" aren't practicing for serious combat. But they are practicing, and even with a high attrition rate they would, as a diffuse group, take down and/or demoralize violent oppressors. And that's not counting the small but far-from-trivial number taking CQB training seriously.

This year's legislative freak-out over thousands of unarmed & mostly-peaceful protesters occupying the Capitol wasn't so much what they did, but that they represented an enormous number who are well armed.

The country needs a lot of change to tackle big problems like climate change and increasing wealth inequality however the government is sitting back doing nothing because many representatives are lobbied by big interests to let the big interests continue doing what they're doing.

You can see for yourself what actual Americans think the "most important problem" they're facing is:

https://news.gallup.com/poll/1675/Most-Important-Problem.asp...

Global warming and income inequality are so low they barely register in the poll at all. Representatives follow their constituents.

Also, that poll seems flawed because it asks a superlative question (what is the "most" important problem) instead of using something like ranked choice where perhaps climate change and income inequality were everyone's second and third options.

The power exerted by 3 letter agencies is greater than any other western nation in my opinion. They are massively bloated with excess capital and power, and it has allowed them to indefinitely extend their jurisdiction until it significantly overlaps with people's right to privacy.

That said I doubt either of these issues would be much improved without guns. An armed population seems mostly incidental. One downside of focusing on armed resistance, however, is that you can easily delude yourself into thinking you're better protected from tyranny, when in actuality the war is already being lost in courtrooms and political backrooms without a shot being fired.

Isn't that a very high estimation?

That said...I'd take being shot by a bullet any day compared to being shot by a modern bow/crossbow. Definitely a better chance of surviving the bullet.

If someone is shooting to stop a threat they're probably gonna have better than 5/1000 odds of permanently stopping the threat.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2020#

So yes better than 50% but not great.

> In December, a jury in Corpus Christi, Tex., acquitted a 48-year-old man who spent 664 days in jail after being charged with attempted capital murder for wounding three SWAT officers during a no-knock raid that targeted his nephew. The jury concluded that the man, Ray Rosas, did not know whom he was firing at through a blinded window.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/03/18/us/forced-ent...

My point is that a society which trusted all of its civilians to be armed would be very different from the communist China of today.