Weapons in USA are a legal market, and there is some fallout as a result of that since guns will be more accessible to the wrong hands.
An AR-15 in Australia costs as much as a very very fancy car. Moreover, the people who will sell it to you are deeply risk averse.
Sure, criminals will have them, but it will be an entirely different class of criminals, specifically, those that benefit from low "random violence" environments.
That sort of friction doesn't deter a would-be bank robber, but by and large the gangs here don't acquire guns. I've seen a few ugly scenes in public transport, and I'd be hesitant to use it if I thought the people who have knives today had guns.
So that's the answer to your question. It's the same as "why are shoulder-launched AA missiles illegal in the US – only criminals will use them".
The other part of an answer is that as far as I can see the deaths from accidents and suicides are vastly more important, and I believe even for crime, it's still an open question if gun-owners are safer.
Obviously all this depends on the low amount of firearms in circulation, so it doesn't directly apply to the US. There, it would require a transition period with buybacks etc. – which may or may not have worked quite well in Australia.
And there are weapons in Europe, mostly from the Balkan war and circulate easily within Schengen space (no border control).
If a market is illegal, it will be artificially limited, because only the businessmen capable of getting around the law will thrive, leading to massive profit margins.
If the market is legal, anyone can do it - which also means it's a lot simpler for wrong hands eg. a kid, to gain access to a gun. Where as in eg. Europe it would be much much harder.
While it's true that criminals, by definition, will break the law, all laws are not treated equally by individuals. Millions of people litter or speed despite the law, but I imagine not all who speed in a car also rob banks. It's my understanding that psychological, social, and legal thresholds are not the same for all people, nor are they binary (there's some really great research into ethics thresholds if someone knows of a link). Sure, adding an additional law might not deter the truly determined, but what about those who have a lower threshold for criminal activity? Why not call all manslaughter murder? Would those who commit suicide with a firearm (half of American suicides [1]) choose a more difficult and less immediate method?
So the question might be, how does changing a law affect those thresholds? Maybe we don't stop determined criminals or mass shootings, but maybe we can make a dent in the more than 20,000 Americans who choose to shoot themselves every year, or make a difference in urban gun violence.
That said, I personally believe that American society is probably too violent and too committed to gun ownership change anytime in my lifetime. We as a society value arguing about gun ownership over actually taking steps to reduce gun violence, or even gathering data on it. The folks that crack me up the most are the ones who say things like you can take my gun from my cold, dead hands because that'd somehow be a check on government power, despite the fact that the federal government possesses tanks and stealth bombers and whatnot. Bonus points if they also think net neutrality is bad, even though open information is demonstrably better for civic checks and balances.
If those are your goals (and noble goals they are), why not work on health care, notably mental health. If we fixed that, we would probably make an even more substantial dent on the number of suicides, improve the quality of life of those who aren't killing themselves, reduce the amount of urban violence, and even possibly make an impact on mass shootings.
I can certainly understand the compelling societal goal- but I'm a big fan of using the least restrictive (and most effective) means to achieving those goals.
"I'm a big fan of using the least restrictive (and most effective) means to achieving those goals."
That is perhaps the best reason to follow my recommended course. Another reason is simply opportunity cost. Society faces many challenges, and we can't pursue every possible solution to all of them, so it is best to focus first on the best options that are likely to have the greatest impact on the highest priority problems. For the problems noted above, the solution I proposed is more likely in my estimation to have a greater impact, and at a lower cost.
Criminals in contrast in most jurisdictions (except notably in Mexico) tend to want to limit violence and fly under the radar and tend to use firearms as a last resort.
Do you think it's because Americans are more homicidal by nature? Or is it perhaps because Canada, England, Japan, et al have gun control laws?
And if we compare all murder rates (not just those committed using guns), there is very little evidence that guns being available to law-abiding citizens as well as to criminals (even if that makes it easier for criminals to get guns) causes higher murder rates. There are many countries with strict gun control laws that have higher murder rates than the US.
It matters because guns are more effective at killing people. You easier kill someone with a gun than with anything else which makes criminals more likely to do it. My guess is that there is indeed a correlation between availability of weapons to criminals and murders. There are also other ways of obtaining weapons for criminals: From the military, which you see for instance in eastern europe. Or from other countries with lax weapon laws, like most of the Americas get their weapons from the US.
The USA does not even need to outlaw weapons, but it certainly needs better regulations.
> And if we compare all murder rates (not just those committed using guns), there is very little evidence that guns being available to law-abiding citizens as well as to criminals (even if that makes it easier for criminals to get guns) causes higher murder rates.
Citation needed. Every source I can find suggests that the US has more violent crime per unit population than most other developed countries in the world, and in terms of actual fatalities gun crime leads.
Can you provide some sources for this assertion?
> There are many countries with strict gun control laws that have higher murder rates than the US.
Which first world countries with strict gun control laws have a higher overall murder rate? Because it's not fair to compare underdeveloped nations to developed nations in terms of public order.
But it's a wholly irrelevant metric. The argument is 'we should restrict guns in the US because they're causing more people to be killed than in other countries'. But if in other countries people are being bludgeoned, then what good would restricting guns do? Hence, you need to compare murder rate, not gun murder rate. This is such an obvious point, I don't see any way someone using only gun deaths in the US isn't begin deliberately obtuse.
"Can you provide some sources for this assertion?"
Well how about an obvious one, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention... . Of course it's easy to pick a bunch of countries, like say based on GDP and then completely ignore geographic and socio-economic circumstances and say 'look at horrible the US is!' (this is the tactic most anti-gun lobbyists use - taking Western Europe and comparing the gun deaths there to the gun deaths in the US, and then go all 'tss tss look at how backwards the US is').
But if you look at the total number of homicides, the US is in the middle of the pack, with less homicides per capita than say Argentina, or Lithuania, or Turkey; and the same as, say, Iran - which I imagine (although I'll admit I haven't looked into it) has very strict gun laws. Or even Mexico - but then people say 'but but drug war!'. Sure, but so is the US; i.e. a large percentage of homicides are part of drug-related crime violence. It's easy to cherry pick a few countries that have lower homicide rates than the US and say 'it's because of stricter gun laws'.
And yet Switzerland is near the top of that list (i.e., few homicides - depends on how you sort it, obviously :) ) and the Swiss have gun ownership rates comparable to those of the US! Could it be (gasp!) that overall economic prosperity, social homogeneity and income equality are better predictors of homicide (and other crime) rates? No that can't be it, we need to take the guns away!
I'd love nothing more than to try a grand experiment of having our government sign up for the same social programs and tax rates that the Swiss enjoy. It's a pretty incredible country.
But they have so many other key components of a healthy society, as you set up. We can't have trivial access to highly lethal weapons and then go, "Mental illness, serious income inequality, the total lack of a living wage, lobbyist-driven politics that make no one happy, normalization of violence, a militarized police force... None of these are our problem!"
Gun ownership is a profound responsibility and cannot be for everyone. If we cannot begin to enforce some basic standards than we need to reevaluate the entire concept.
And that means a lot of things that people are very opposed to, like a wholly socialized public health system. If the free market was capable of delivering on this, it would have by now.
But hey, this is your lucky day, because as it so happens there are other countries where firearms are available not only to criminals so that those criminals can more easily rob and murder law-abiding citizens!
So you're saying about social programs and tax rates; OK let's take the Czech Republic. Let me copy/paste from Wikipedia to set the stage:
Income taxes in Czech Republic are levied at a flat rate of 15% on gross income with an additional 7% solidarity tax surchage for individuals making over 48 times the average wage (CZK 1,277,328 annually in 2015). The corporate tax rate in 2015 was 19%.
So how about them guns in CZ? Well you do need a permit, but you can give any reason you want, and you'll be issued a permit unless you have some priors, or failed the exams you need. If you selected 'self defense' as the reason for your permit, you get to carry concealed, too! There are about 1/2 million permits issued, out of a population of 10 million. Not quite US levels but still enough to suspect that the Czechs would be going around shooting each other left and right every day, right? Well actually their homicide rate is 0.7 compared to the 0.5 of the Swiss, and the 1.4 of Canada and 0.9 of the UK.
Sure sure you say, but them Czech are an exception, like the Swiss!
OK then how about Italy? Again, you do need a licence to own a gun, but you'll get one unless you have a criminal record or are an alcoholic or some other restrictions; and once you have your licence it's valid for common 'assault rifle' ammunition like 5.56 nato (for AR15) or 7.62 nato (for your AK74)! Man those murderous Italians with their 'assault rifles' - must be a bloodbath there every day! tabs back to Wikipedia page Uh, look at that, homicide rate of 0.8!
But but but you say - those are all - uh - either ex-commies, or they consume above-average amounts of pasta! Surely those countries are special! Well then let's look at other countries where law-abiding citizens can legally buy guns. Take Sweden, number 9 on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_guns_per_c... . Yes, with only 1/4th as many guns per capita as the US, but the question is how easy it is to get access to a gun. Well, you either take a hunting exam or join a shooting club, and you'll get a licence and can buy a gun. Homicide rate - 0.9.
But but but you say - statistical significance! Still only a handfull! OK, there are a few more countries that have loose gun laws, and they have higher homicide rates; yet there are insufficient countries to draw a conclusion one way or another. So let's look at the US again, because as it so happens the US functions almost as a continent and we have numbers per state; states that by population, GDP and many other metrics might as well be compared to countries. New Hampshire? Idaho? Utah? Vermont? Wyoming? All 'middle of the pack' homicide rates when compared to other countries, even when you cherry-pick those countries without civilian ownership (like taking 'only OECD countries', or 'only Western European countries' like so many gun control advocates like to do). And those states aren't exactly the ones with the strictest gun laws either, to put it mildly.
Look, I'm not going to convince you one way or the other anyway, my original point was that the claim that 'data shows that civilian gun ownership causes high murder rates' is wrong, and that those who do claim so only can make their point by cherry-picking or deliberate misrepresentation of the issue. That's what rubs me the wrong way about it. Either there is a point and then it can be made fair and square; or don't make it all. Don't play me for an idiot with sophistry and misrepresentation.
How many mass shootings?
I hate this site sometimes. I can't speak my mind or else I'll just get flagkilled. You seem so desperate to shift the blame off of US gun culture and the surrounding laws that it's bordering on absurdity.
Really, you're going to take the French, who were attacked with a heavy truck 4 months ago resulting in the death of 86 people (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Nice_attack, because you might not believe me of course), as an example of a country where no killings with other weapons than guns happen?
Or you're going to ignore the last 10 entries on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in... which are all stabbings?
But no, these all aren't 'campus shootings' so they probably don't count in your (again) cherry-picked narrative.
But sure, feel free to continue your 'arguing by eye rolling', because if only everybody else was as enlightened as you are (you don't even need to look at reality to know you're right!), the world would be a better place, right? Excuse me if it's my turn this time to roll my eyes.
Again with the straw man.
Did I say no other killings than with guns? Of course not.
You insist on putting words into my mouth so that you can attack an argument other than that which I'm making.
Meanwhile, in the real world, literally two hours after you posted this comment there was a mass stabbing on a school campus in Mountain View
It's important to recognize the relative scale. "Mass stabbings" seldom exceed 12 victims, let alone fatalities. Gun violence easily extends past that.
There is a common counter-argument here that the US is inherently a violent country and therefore limiting gun ownership wouldn't decrease violence. I'm not sure that follows, but it misses a central point: Guns enable violence at an industrial scale. They're mechanized killing devices with tens of thousands of engineering hours around making it quick and reliable to critically disable a target, often via death.
A knife is a knife. Like any sharp object, it can be dangerous. A baseball bat is similarly potentially dangerous. But the scope of the dangers of these things is smaller. It seems unfair to compare them directly to gun ownership.
It seems strange to say, "We cannot stop all murders, therefore we shouldn't try and stop the easiest kind." Every life saved is someone's mother/brother/father/sister/child. It's a human story that isn't ended in tragedy and pain. Pitting that against these rhetorical devices about "all violence" seems to me to not address the central question we're asking: "Could we save more lives if we made it harder to own guns?"
Nope.
I also don't need to look to other countries to ask whether a given law makes sense. If it makes sense (reduce the prevalence of guns to curb gun deaths), I'd vote for that no matter what other countries were doing. If the cultural mix here makes guns more deadly than in a more uniform society, well, then that's just what we're dealing with, and let's figure out what to do about guns deaths in that context instead of saying "well, can't do nothin'."
Aaaand, if we're talking about developed nations, then neither Argentina, Lithuania, nor Turkey are on that list. They're all still considered developing nations. Saying that the U.S. is in the middle of the pack of developing nations is pretty shameful for us.
- 'I don't care about no stinking facts! I feel xyz, and you haven't changed my feelings, so nanana!' (your references to what 'a lot of you find relevant' for no apparent reason, and how it 'makes sense')
- You're rather presumptuous, provincial and frankly borderline xenophobic in your assumptions about other countries. Because these countries have a lower GDP, they're some backwater shitholes that can't be compared to the US? Because for example Argentina isn't all that far behind the US in, say, the human development index (because I happened to have a tab open on that from looking it up for another comment in this thread). If that hurts your little feelings of assumed American superiority over other countries in every aspect, well then that's on you.
(PS and this is not even considering that the US is a huge country and that it makes more sense to compare per state; which makes my points all the more poignant. I mean, let's talk about homicide rates for Idaho; or New Hampshire; or Wyoming and compare those to other countries! Geez those Canadians and French are even more murderous than those New Hampshirites who don't even have to register any gun they buy!).
(edit: added newline because my list was smashed into one paragraph; replaced 'racist' with 'xenophobic')
So...show me facts? Or some sort of reasoning? I mean, throw me a bone here. You walked into a conversation where we're talking about gun deaths and said "gun deaths are irrelevant!! talk about deaths overall!" Well, no, because we're specifically talking about gun deaths. (Hey, if it makes you uncomfortable, maybe you could hit the range and blow off some steam with a little target practice!)
"You're rather presumptuous, provincial and frankly borderline racist".
We were talking about developed nations. A few different groups put together lists of developed nations, based on various criteria (income, health, whatever). Maybe you didn't actually know this, but that phrase is a, what do you call it, a term of art among economists and social scientists?
So I found one list that included Lithuania, and one that included Argentina. Didn't find one that included Turkey (and I'm not surprised, based on their economy, government, quality of life, etc). This, of course, isn't about race at all, but about the ways mainstream economists and social scientists talk about various countries.
If you think there's a racial component to "developed nations," by all means, take it up with the UN or the CIA or whoever. Hey, you can tell them it's irrelevant, too!
...
I've done nothing but that everywhere in this thread; and I'm the only one doing it, too. Maybe Wikipedia isn't serious enough for you; sorry that I didn't copy and paste the references at the bottom of the Wikipedia page as more 'authoritative'. But maybe Wikipedia is in on it, of course; it's well known to be a bastion of nut cases who are in bed with the Big Weapons lobby (/s, just to be sure). But feel free to point out any factual inaccuracies you find.
"We were talking about developed nations."
Sure, a criterion which you are reducing to 'GDP', because otherwise you can't end up with Western Europe only (OK, plus Australia). Which is a silly criterion, as evidenced by those economists and social scientists making different metrics, such as the human development index. And let that be exactly what I've referenced above! I seem to know much better than you what this term means, whereas you conveniently ignore half of what I'm writing.
"take it up with the UN or the CIA or whoever"
Many government organizations use 'developed nation' in a very specific, economic way; which essentially boils down to 'per capita income > some cutoff'. And as a metric for some economic behaviors or classification for regression analysis, this makes sense. But this is not the sort of 'developed' that matters in this discussion.
"If you think there's a racial component to "developed nations,""
OK, I've conceded before that that was a poor choice of words and I've replaced 'racist' with 'xenophobic'; it was not the objective to make this into a debate on how exactly to define racism in this context. That being said, I still don't see how you can explain your peculiar definition of 'developed' as anything else than 'racist'. I mean, having minimum sentences for crack (a 'black' drug) three times higher than those for cocaine (a 'white' drug) is racist; how is cherry picking a bunch of countries so that they're all conveniently predominantly white and then saying that all 'those others' are such a bunch of barbaric sub humans that they can't even be expected to not murder each other all day every day be construed as anything but 'racist'?
I know that you didn't use those words, and I don't even think you actually think that way (I mean, no sane person could think that way). That's why I said 'borderline' - because the underlying correlation there is clear, even if there any many ways to rationalize it away (because, surely, crack is more dangerous than powder cocaine, and redlining is not racist because hey our data shows that neighborhoods x, y and z have higher default rates - again, /s just to be sure).
Counterexample - Switzerland. "The Small Arms Survey of 2007 placed Swiss gun ownership per capita at between 30% and 60%", but with a much lower murder rate than the US
Name an industrialized/developed nation with strict gun control with a higher rate of gun deaths than the US.
I'll wait.
Or I can just as easily flip this around: why don't you list some countries with as high economic inequality and poverty problems, and as diverse a social make up, with strict gun control laws that has lower homicide rates?
If you're going to subset countries into comparable groups, at least do it on honest criteria - like relative poverty rates or other income inequality metrics. Then it becomes obvious quite soon that the major driver of crime is (get this!) economic in nature.
(edit: changed 'you if' to 'if you')
My point remains that in the case of the US vs a similarly-sized population drawn from other first-world countries, the US has a dramatically higher rate of gun deaths.
There's really no point in arguing this fact; you can go look it up for yourself. If you think that that is a dishonest comparison, well, I can't help you.
Your "rebukes" have been nonsensical, as if you're not actually reading what's written. You're responding to some imaginary argument that you have constructed.
I was still curious though if there are other countries with the same diversity and wealth gap. That's what prompted my original comment.
However for industrialized countries there are a few, including Mexico. Lithuania and Russia are industrialized, and have more restrictive laws than the US, but not "strict" by most standards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Factbook_list_of_dev...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
But I believe your point stands.
The problem isn't a lack of creative solutions but a lack of united will.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/23/australias-gun...
As far as I can tell, there has yet to be established a causal relationship between the buyback program and a decrease in gun related homicides. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_laws_in_Australia
The suicide argument appears to be fairly weak. Yes, the rate went down, but suicides by hanging went up at nearly the same pace. Many of the studies which look at hun related suicides ignore suicides by other measures.
When people's lives are at stake, I'll settle for the correlation, which is a matter of fact: gun ownership went down, and gun deaths went down.
QUOTE 1
"Using differences across states, we test[ed] whether the reduction in firearms availability affected homicide and suicide rates. We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, with no significant effect on non-firearm death rates. The effect on firearm homicides is of similar magnitude but is less precise [somewhere between 35% and 50%]." http://andrewleigh.org/pdf/GunBuyback_Panel.pdf
QUOTE 2
"Following enactment of gun law reforms in Australia in 1996, there were no mass firearm killings through May 2016. There was a more rapid decline in firearm deaths between 1997 and 2013 compared with before 1997 but also a decline in total nonfirearm suicide and homicide deaths_ of a greater magnitude. Because of this, it is not possible to determine whether the change in firearm deaths can be attributed to the gun law reforms." http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/253036...
I'm really not. If I could snap my fingers and get rid of them all, I would. Can't do that though, so not an option. Also, dropping more than 300M people into one bucket like that is just... stupid.
Your quote is from the study I was talking about which is referenced by wikipedia. Sure, it dropped firearm suicides, but suicides by hanging went up at nearly the same rate. So... who cares? Didn't save anyone. In fact, just led to a more brutal death for these people.
The second quote is exactly what I'm taking about. I am all for tighter gun control laws, all I'm saying is that your claim that "Australia did it" is, as usual, not as clear cut as it would seem. There are many factors which may have led to a decline. You are also ignoring that there was no decline for more than a decade after the program was instituted.
We find that the buyback led to a drop in the firearm suicide rates of almost 80%, WITH NO SIGNIFICANT EFFECT ON NON-FIREARM DEATH RATES.
There was a more rapid decline in firearm deaths between 1997 and 2013 compared with before 1997 but also A DECLINE IN TOTAL NONFIREARM SUICIDE AND HOMICIDE DEATHS OF A GREATER MAGNITUDE.
Perhaps you should pay more attention.
I accept your claim about your wishes, but I think your arguments are pretty typical of whackjopb gun nuts. I assume this is an example of paid NRA lobbying and blatant lying infecting a whole society and blinding it to realities that are clearly visible from outside the filter bubble.
The comparison is not as simple to make. Virtually very few other countries have metropolis/urban centers like in the US, or any culture resembling it. I know it's the best data that we have, but it's certainly not apples to apples.
It's a rhetorical device. Every shred of actual evidence we have is that making gun ownership illegal reduces the number of gun crimes that occur.
There is this strange equation of all gun violence with either extremist organizations or organized crime. In actual stats, that's only one relatively minor component.
What's more, I genuinely question the premise that we want to respond to acts of gun violence with more projectiles. As every gun owner who takes a safety course is taught: every bullet goes somewhere. Just because you miss doesn't mean the bullet dissolves into the ether.
Also, in the US, significant gun ownership is for the 2nd Amendment purpose of being a safeguard against a tyrannical government.
History suggests that your (commonly held) position is empirically untenable.
I'm shocked that you could consider invoking historical references to equate the US military skirmishing with desert tribesmen from another culture with overweight American gun-nuts. If the brown people we currently fight don't really have answers to C-130s or mortars or MARPAT, then I'm not sure that hypothetical North American insurgents would, either.
Finally: Whether you believe it or not, the purpose of the US 2nd amendment is self-defense, including from government. If you don't feel that is necessary, be inellectually honest and advocate for its repeal.
If you feel that I'm being "inellectually" dishonest, have the courage to stand up to me and tell me directly, instead of implying that I am (assuming, as you have, that my point is actually another point entirely, of course, which itself seems a bit intellectually dishonest).
>The same way I don't want to register my IP address and cell phone to be able to post online
I see what you're going for here, but to pretend that this isn't functionally what is required in order to "post online" is unrealistic. I assume that you're posting from behind seven proxies and a few Tor jumps? Otherwise, I don't really see how you haven't created a link between the things you post and the devices you post from, which the government can then exploit.
If you feel that commercially available guns would equip the US civillian populace to repel the US military, that's your opinion. But I strongly disagree that this presents any realistic impediment.
If you are talking about the US military doing aerial bombardment etc, of course these guns will not be a defense.
But if troops are going street to street, commercially available guns would enable resistance.
And the point here is not that the population would be able to win an all out war against the fully equipped army. That is a nonsensical scenario. It is that an armed population would be able to resist the Army, making all out war the only option. US army won't launch an all out war against the population, so this level of resistance is sufficient.
Yeah, that must be what my argument is. Don't bother reading any of the rest of my comment; you might become exposed to nuance. As long as you're not exposed to nuance, you will be able to go toe-to-toe with the 101st Airborne. There won't be massive casualties. You are exceptional.
Are you saying anything that isn't straw men?
And considering your question of coming from the same culture - you are assuming that the US military would be willing to go to war against their own people - a very different proposition to the wars they have been fighting.
Even the war in Iraq is considered not to be what they signed up for by many service-people.
Yeah, I can tell!
>Are you saying anything that isn't straw men?
Hey man, I'm just replying to things.
>And considering your question of coming from the same culture - you are assuming that the US military would be willing to go to war against their own people - a very different proposition to the wars they have been fighting
Hey man, I'm just replying to things! I am not assuming that the US military would be willing to go to war against their own people -- I'm just responding to that already established hypothetical. I infer that you want to yell at people who claim that, by your alleging that I called Yank citizenry fat. The clownfight you seek is upthread, where people established that we were talking about the US military going to war against their own people. I didn't establish anything.
Erm, looks like you are the one who wants to start a fight rather than have a discussion.
As for training and "better guns", the service weapon of the Army and Marines is the same weapon system family as is the most popular rifle in the United States: the AR15 (with military variants, the M16 and M4 carbine). Additionally, private owners are likely to have optics on par or better than are available to servicemen. And better-maintained weapons--you don't have to look far to get stories of infantry complaining about their gear. During the day, they'd be about equally matched individually. At night, NVGs and thermal sights would give the occupation forces an edge.
The infantry "better guns" that are out of reach of civilians in your scenario would be things like anti-material rocket launchers (AT4, SMAW) , grenades, and LMGs (M240s, M249s, etc.). With the exception of the rocket launchers, all of those are things that can be improvised or worked-around with the correct doctrine.
Rocket launchers, and more generally the air support and artillery that forms the true bulk of American land warfighting capability, are things that are vertboten when used against civilians. There's no credible armored targets requiring their use (except for perhaps captured law-enforcement surplus MRAPs) and so their deployment against a native insurgency would likely fall outside of the rules of engagement. Additionally, calling in airstrikes on insurgent positions in American cities has severely negative long-term implications for peacekeeping.
In short, fighting an urban or even exurban native insurgency the US military would possess only a slight material and technological advantage and even that would likely be severely undercut by having to follow very conservative ROE unless they wanted to rile up resistance further.
~
As for your remark on historical references, if you want something a little more contemporary and probably more reflective of what we'd expect to see in your hypothetical scenario, please consult the history of Ireland in the 20th century.
Your remark on "overweight American gun-nuts" is misinformed. I know that's a popular stereotype, but it is neither accurate nor even useful. Again, the sort of engagements we'd expect wouldn't be "Let's hump our gear ten miles to the AO", it's "So, after work tonight, let's do this mission on the local garrison". To be blunt, for that style of warfare, you can use women, children, fatties--anybody that can hold a gun.
Also, on your last point--they have developed countermeasures to things like mortars and counterbattery fire and whatnot.
~
Underscoring all of this thought experiment is something you're missing: in a supposed US insurgency, the huge non-combat advantage of the armed forces goes away. Our adventures abroad are backed by a logistics system and lift capability that boggles the mind, only made possible because we can keep all the ruckus of battle away from our airbases and factories and transportation hubs. In an insurgency, that massive advantage--one that's nearly taken for granted in the last two decades of warfare by our populous--disappears.
What I meant by "big guns" is that the equipment the theoretical occupying force would have access to that the insurgents wouldn't, like rocket launchers. The stuff like grenades and LMGs are things that can be substituted--to some degree or another--by things like Molotov cocktails or hi-capacity magazines.
"Countermeasures to things like mortars and counterbattery fire" is not some special doctrine utterly beyond the reach of American populace; instead, it's the observation that, if you shell an American position, you need to be somewhere else in a minute or two before your position gets blown up. This is something that is quite empirically learnable, and something that has been learned multiple times by untrained insurgents fighting US occupying forces.
> the assumption that the military loses its entire support system all at once.
Where are you getting that assumption from? I made no such claim.
> I think you believe in an organizational capacity that doesn't actually exist in untrained civiliian populations
I think you live in a fantasy world where civilian populations both have no trained members (false) and are unable to improvise and learn tactics of their own through trial and error (also false).
You keep coming back to the same circular "I define the civilian population as incompetent and worse than the military, therefore they are incompetent and worse than the military", despite a lot of evidence and arguments that your assumption is wrong and your conclusions incorrect.
If you want to actually pull on your big kid pants and argue why each of my points in the preceding post were wrong, please do. If you just want to continue shitting out little paragraph-long "but but but civilians populations are always going to looose" zingers lacking any critical thought, we've all got better things to do.
Yet you keep replying! You're a solid troll, though -- I especially like the way you're willing to descend into insulting me far before I insulted you, but I'm glad the gloves are off. Could you be the other guy in a sockpuppet account? It's funny -- I'm the one claiming bullshit without evidence or argumentation, but your posts are really really light on what these "correct doctrines" actually are, why the civilian population would have access to any of them, how the resistance would communicate, insisting on the primacy of various rules of war that would have presumably been rescinded if the kind of tyranny that required standing up to was running the military... It's almost like you're just bloviating about American exceptionalism, handwaving about "doctrines" that all good minutemen surely already know. Sorry, but you guys have the biggest, best-equipped military in the world. No matter how Rambo the local shooting club might consider itself, it doesn't seem up to the task. But what do I know?!
>If you want to actually pull on your big kid pants and argue why each of my points in the preceding post were wrong, please do
Oh, don't worry. I can't do that! You won't accept it. That'd require not having an untenable position you're honour-bound to defend! I think you've already decided that your exceptionalism will protect you. I'm just having a bit of fun!
>"Countermeasures to things like mortars and counterbattery fire" is not some special doctrine utterly beyond the reach of American populace; instead, it's the observation that, if you shell an American position, you need to be somewhere else in a minute or two before your position gets blown up. This is something that is quite empirically learnable, and something that has been learned multiple times by untrained insurgents fighting US occupying forces
Uh. So you're arguing against the general use of mortars? "Get out of the way" only works if the mortars didn't kill you already. This isn't a doctrine, it's common sense. Yet, something tells me mortar operators still successfully kill people. Presumably it's not so easy to just... dodge. You're the obvious military expert, though -- maybe people do dodge mortars and they're basically useless once the Correct Dodge Doctrine permeates the opfor!
>> the assumption that the military loses its entire support system all at once.
>Where are you getting that assumption from? I made no such claim
Yeah you did. Where? Right here, from this linked post [0]:
>>>Underscoring all of this thought experiment is something you're missing: in a supposed US insurgency, the huge non-combat advantage of the armed forces _goes away_. Our adventures abroad are backed by a logistics system and lift capability that boggles the mind, only made possible because we can keep all the ruckus of battle away from our airbases and factories and transportation hubs. _In an insurgency, that massive advantage--one that's nearly taken for granted in the last two decades of warfare by our populous--disappears_
Emphasis mine. Man! Wow! I thought for a brief moment that you were a genuine person and not a troll. This cinches it. Thanks for the game, gg no re
You haven't offered any counterpoints here.
The only person in this thread who has claimed superior knowledge is you, because that is the the only basis for being dismissive rather than offering alternatives.
I do disagree with you. What does it even mean for our positions to be 'reversed'? We are simply people who disagree with each other. What is there to 'reverse' about our positions?
As for my previous disingenuous interactions, if you are referring to me quoting you about overweight gun owners, I stand by that. You were simply being dismissive and I was pointing that out. Nothing disingenuous about that. If you didn't mean it as part of your position, you wouldn't have said it.
This is a pretty common English turn of phrase ("what does it even mean to 'turn a phrase'?"). This is what revealed your hand. Good try!
My point is that we are not in different positions, therefore there is nothing to reverse.
But it's a bogus position - if a significant portion of the country is armed, a very strong resistance can be mounted. In any such situation it wouldn't be the 101st airborne against a civilian population.
Forgive me, but lately I've run into a lot of people who talk about the importance of enabling civil resistance until they actually see civil resistance and suddenly they're the living embodiment of law and order.
What is your metric for tyranny, zepto? When, exactly, is the civil disobedience part of the founders intent? Do people need to shoot a gun to invoke the intent of the 2nd? Is having a gun with them not enough?
I think it's relevant to any discussion of the 2nd amendment to ask what it's actually for. I think the intent of the 2nd was to enable political expediency, but maybe you imagine something grander.
Soundly? A plurality, yes. Soundly seems like an exaggeration. What to you justifies the use of soundly?
Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless.
Are you saying all (or nearly) who voted against Trump are in support of faithless electors?
I agree the voting population is split and there's a lot of dissatisfaction (to put it mildly). This sounds like hyperbole to me, which makes you sound like you're misrepresenting the facts, which plays right into the narrative that those against Trump are out of touch.
It's a genuine question Americans need to ask though: if presidents can win while losing the popular vote, does the current electoral college system exist only to enable that? Or can/should it do more in exceptional cases?
I'd argue that if the only reason the current system exists is to allow the Republican party to win on a popular loss (which is what it enables, Democrats only take the presidency with huge popular vote margins) then it should be no surprise that we are seeing widespread protests and civil disobedience.
I suppose were lucky that Democrats as a whole are less likely to own a gun.
That we can have disagreement between the electoral college and the popular vote is also an issue that we need to look at very seriously. I'm not contesting that. I'm contesting your contention that Over half the voting population is begging the electoral college to be faithless. To my reading, there are two interpretations:
- "begging the electoral college to be faithless" is a colorful rephrasing of "voted for the candidate that did not win the electoral college"
- over half of those who voted are now asking electors to be faithless
Is there another interpretation that I'm just missing? I'm open to correction.
I guess it depends on what message you're trying to send and who you're trying to send the message to.
If you're addressing those who already agree or are likely to agree with you, the language doesn't matter as much, as it's clear what side you favor. Exaggeration, hyperbole, misrepresentation will generally go unnoticed or be forgiven. Your message is effectively "I'm on your side" and serves to energize those you agree with.
If you're looking for a wider audience, the language matters more, especially in a political environment as polarized as the one we're currently in, where both sides are hypersensitive to language and how it's used. Also, people respond emotionally: it takes active effort to parse messages rationally, particularly if they're messages you're not already inclined to agree with. This is why I'm paying attention to words like "soundly". Those who agree with you don't really care. Those who don't are going to respond emotionally, put off by the language and no longer listen to the content of the message.
Given the attention I've paid to this, you're not going to be surprised that it's something I think is really important. I'm not ready to accept that the divide in America is insurmountable, but to close it we need to be engaging each other across the divide.
If the Electoral College votes for Trump, there needs to be cross-party support in government to fight the efforts Trump you oppose, which means working with people who don't already agree with you.
Does this seem misdirected to you?
The counts are not in, but it appears that >2% is indeed the number we're settling at. Historically the democrats need to win by 4% to reliably take the white house. I'd say that it is relative between the average statewide absolute margins and the popular vote's margin. This election was "close" for Trump in many districts, but is not close for Trump in the popular vote.
> "voted for the candidate that did not win the electoral college"
You do not "win" EC votes in most states. EC voters are installed to reflect the will of their states, but it's an explicit feature that they can override popular votes if they feel exceptional circumstances have been enacted. Ostensibly, this is why the system is the way it is. Over the last few decades, we've seen this system cleverly modified to strongly favor very specific states in the union.
Wisconsin, for example, has enormous political power over the entire nation. Not because it has more people, provides more resources, seats government, etc. No, the system has been carefully centered around areas where voting margins are narrowest.
In a simple popular vote, Clinton soundly defeated Trump. In our system, less than a quarter million votes decided an election with a margin million_s_ of votes on the popular. The truth is that this engineering takes place because those Republican politics are not remarkably popular or competitive outside of specific regions where a sort of slanted ideological arena has been constructed. The Republicans can't really outspend the Democrats effectively over time, so they limit the field to these battleground states with clever politicking.
> I'm not ready to accept that the divide in America is insurmountable, but to close it we need to be engaging each other across the divide.
I'm not sure exactly what you'd like me to say. Several people in Trump's proposed cabinet think I am a sub-human who needs to be re-educated to be less queer. I find it very difficult to be "centrist" about fundamentally asking me to accept that.
And that's just my personal axe. People of color have a whole another thing going on. A thing that certainly has roots in the actions of the Obama administration, but that Trump's new cabinet is promising to promote.
What exactly are the centrist terms of discussion for de-militarizing a police that recklessly endangers people of color and then refuses to prosecute police officers who violate new laws?
> there needs to be cross-party support in government to fight the efforts Trump you oppose, which means working with people who don't already agree with you.
I think we should do this from a civil side. But I also think civil disobedience is entirely appropriate at this juncture. People begging for order are the people with the least to lose.
So yeah, it's misdirected insomuch as we can simultaneously agree to work to keep the country running, but if it's used as a baffle to stifle unrest and upset, it's wrong. I maintain a professional relationship with people in my organization who voted one way or another, but I am very clear that I think this is a disaster. This is not a contradictory position; it's a quintessentially American one.
And for the record, I am all for modifying the system such that the popular and district votes come back in line. I am also very much in favor of runoff voting being mandated at a national level so that idiots like Stein and Johnson can run and not risk destroying close elections.
Great! The numbers I've seen show it closer to .5%. For example:
"The most comprehensive vote-tracking analysis is published by David Wasserman of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. As of 2:30 p.m. on Nov. 14, according to Wasserman’s calculations, Clinton led Trump by 784,748 votes -- specifically, 61,422,098 for Clinton, 60,637,350 for Trump, and 6,691,311 for other candidates."
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2016/nov/...
Clinton 61,422,098 47.7%
Trump 60,637,350 47.1%
other 6,691,311
total 128,750,759
"You do not "win" EC votes in most states."
Perhaps a poor choice of words. It was only an attempt to express how a state's votes get allocated to a candidate. (Btw, do you think that choice of words was important to what I'm trying to say? Or that it's a reflection of me in general, that I'm ignorant and to cast doubt on everything else I'm saying? I don't think I'm even arguing that the EC is a good thing! Am I giving you the impression I am?)
Regarding "engaging each other across the divide", I'm not implying some kind of centrist agenda. I do think there needs to be compromise of some variety if we're trying to address the issues of the population in general. Two buckets don't describe the population, yet the presidential election is effectively a binary choice. Yet we seem to be making it such when we not only stop listening and talking to the people who voted differently than we did, but actively work against them? I'm all for fighting for issues you believe in. I also want to make sure that I'm working to make sure I'm not alienating people who agree with me on a particular issue (or may, with some constructive discussion) by refusing to listen to what they have to say. Listening doesn't mean agreement, nor does attempting to understand constitute support. I also want to make sure I'm doing what I can to make what I want to say as effective as possible at reaching the people who don't necessarily agree with me.
Am I confused here? I'm honestly asking if there's a useful distinction between engagement (which I'm trying to argue for) and centrism (which I disagree with).
But I also think civil disobedience is entirely appropriate at this juncture.
Completely agree. I also know there are people who may want to support the same issues in other ways. I also hope it's clear that I'm not trying to silence or stifle any unrest and upset. I want it to be constructive. If you have suggestions for me on how to be more effective in conveying that message, I'd appreciate it, especially as I haven't necessarily been very effective here :)
I've been trying to make clear that I'm discussing language that's useful in making change. I'm not arguing about the Electoral College, or Trump's choices for cabinet positions. I think both of those are discussions very much worth having, and ones I am having. Just not here. I also want those discussions to bring people together, not further polarize society. Something I try to keep in mind is that if Clinton had won the Electoral college, there'd be a huge segment of the population very upset right now as well. Whether or not you think one side's feelings are justified doesn't deny the fact that they're having them.
If you don't want to talk about tactics for constructive discussion, that's fine. I certainly can understand that, too. The reason I entered the discussion is that I think you can be more effective at making your case by taking into account the words you're using to do so. So it's on me for entering a discussion about the Electoral College without explicitly wanting to argue one way or the other. I also take it upon myself to have not been able to do so here, given that was my goal.
Thanks for taking the time to engage with me. I've found it useful. I've appreciated it.
We've seen beginnings of evidence of strange vote count issues in some counties in Wisconsin that gave more votes counted for Trump than ballots cast in total, and as these are corrected Trump's lead in that state lowers noticeably and even threatened to flip some districts.
I'm curious if, upon this information, you're still in favor of the EC not being faithless.
We're almost at the point where even conservative counts put us at a point where no president has ever lost the election while winning the popular vote by this much.
If we cross that threshold we need to think long and hard about how the system can structurally provide that big a bias towards a specific candidate.
The spread is now massive. One of the largest in history for a losing candidate.
The point at which the 2nd amendment becomes relevant is the point at which a sufficiently large part of the population becomes motivated to act together to overcome an oppressive regime.
Being armed and yet not acting collectively to overthrow the government is the essence of government by consent.
I'm confused. What point do you think I am making. I've been asking you questions.
You assume a great deal with that statement. Namely that more of the "101st airborne" than not would be willing to open fire on their friends, family, and neighbors. And that other elements of the armed forces wouldn't face the exact same issue on a larger scale.
And common people who bought a firegun don't protect us against real and organized criminals. The police or the army does.