It's also an interesting argument for stricter gun control - guns make it incredibly easy for suicidal people to follow through on that impulse. The amount of suicide deaths by gun in America is a testament to this.
(I don't own any guns but this screams nanny state to me)
Guns might serve some purposes in some situations. It's just an incredibly lousy tool for "defending ourselves", with negative utility on average.
If you have a source, it would help.
Gun ownership has benefits, but safety is not one of them.
Much like how most home robberies take place in the day, the perception of safety from gun ownership is at odds with reality. Hell, you are 25% more likely to be robbed in Alaska than New York State.
Another point to make is that there's an undercurrent of personal responsibility. The danger presented by having a gun in your home is something that can be managed if you are a responsible gun owner, but the risk of violence against your self is not something you can easily control. This is the important part, owning a gun for self defense is not about making you safer, it's about transferring the risk from something you have no control over to something you have some measure of control over.
Thus, arguing that owning guns increase your risk of dying from a self-inflicted gunshot wounds holds no weight with people who want to own guns, since it's a fundamental misunderstanding of why one would want to own a gun for self defense.
That said, feeling more secure is by far the most likely situation. While it’s far safer to leave your house in the event of a home invasion than to confront the robbers. Feeling like you can defend yourself is empowering.
Also, you cannot really measure how often a gun saves a life. On the other hand, you can measure the number of gun accidents and according to Wikipedia they’re less than 1% of gun related deaths which puts them at about 130 per year. IIRC staircases kill about 350 people per year (US numbers).
I would advocate some kind of mandatory safety training for gun owners, but it’s really not the big point here. Measures like banning guns altogehter, I think, miss the point as well. Some places seem to do well with high gun ownership rates, so there must be something else at play that causes the US’s high rates of gun violence. More effort should be put into examining and fixing that in place of steamroller tactics and fearmongering like in that Vox article.
It’s false to say it’s extremely rare.
Partly this is because there is little reporting and data collection that can capture situations where a gun is presented but not fired, but also because of the deterrent effect.
I do — it's a constitutional right because it is a fundamental ('essential') human right. A free citizen (i.e., not a child or prisoner) has a right to wield violence in defense of himself, others and property; to restrict that right (as opposed to restricting unjust exercises of violence) is IMHO fundamentally unjust.
https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/08/03/42901...
And here you have a more Soviet styled recipe for eggs:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2019/01/chart-of-the-day-us-g...
Someone with a >3x greater than average likelyhood of getting shot might bring it down to 3x by having a gun themselves.
Probably we should start with television. Sure, people get some enjoyment from owning a TV, but think of how much they aren't exercising. Surely owning a TV dramatically increases the probability you are going to be obese and eventually develop heart disease. You are way more likely to watch a TV if you have a TV in your own house.
We should probably allow people to buy and sell whatever they want. Who cares if hitmen murder people, the people demand more hitmen!!! Hitmen can kill people that want to kill me, which makes me feel safe!!! Who cares if my judgement is extremely arbitrary and the hitmen are 3x more likely to shoot me than the people I want killed. Awesome. You've really opened my eyes here.
For all the other laws we can evaluate them based uhhhh, not on their pros and cons.
Once upon a time, there was a wise Zen master. People traveled from far away to seek his help. In return, he would teach them and show them the way to enlightenment. On this particular day, a scholar came to visit the master for advice. “I have come to ask you to teach me about Zen,” the scholar said. Soon, it became obvious that the scholar was full of his own opinions and knowledge. He interrupted the master repeatedly with his own stories and failed to listen to what the master had to say. The master calmly suggested that they should have tea. So the master poured his guest a cup. The cup was filled, yet he kept pouring until the cup overflowed onto the table, onto the floor, and finally onto the scholar’s robes. The scholar cried “Stop! The cup is full already. Can’t you see?” “Exactly,” the Zen master replied with a smile. “You are like this cup — so full of ideas that nothing more will fit in. Come back to me with an empty cup.”
https://medium.com/the-mission/empty-your-cup-a-zen-proverb-...
That's a rather hyperbolic statement. You are literally saying a gun is the only way you can defend yourself.
The presence of a gun in a home make it several times more likely that a resident of that home is killed by gun violence. The presence of a gun in a community at all increases the likelihood of gun violence.
In the USA? Good one! Hahahaha!
You could say that's not necessary for defense but plenty find themselves defended well enough without any arms at all.
You can't know if you're not suicidal. That's the whole concept of most suicides being impulsive acts.
E.g. there have been plenty of people who have bought a pack of cigarettes and then killed themselves 5 minutes later without even opening it. Any of us could be five minutes away from killing ourselves and not have even the slightest idea.
America was founded on genocide and cultured Europeans thought it was a good idea to kill entire populations who weren't Übermensch less than 100 years ago.
Remember who you're living among :)
It's low-priority because guns are much scarier on the news than their actual death counts warrant. More people die in car accidents every year than have died in the entire history of the United States in mass shootings--yet mass shootings are disproportionately used as a talking point. Yearly motor deaths are an order of magnitude more frequent than gun deaths, and that's if you count the more than half of gun deaths which are suicides--if you want to protect yourself from guns, simply not owning a gun is an effective measure. If liberals took proportional action with regard to harm on car safety to how we act on gun safety, we'd be pushing for frequent re-testing for licenses, lower speed limits, easier loss-of-licenses for repeat bad drivers, stricter drunk driving laws, etc. But that's not what's happening.
It loses us a lot of battles, because it alienates a lot of potential allies. True libertarians, for example, tend to be fairly pro-choice, but don't feel strongly about it, but very pro-gun, and feel very strongly about it. We'd have them on our side in votes relevant to abortion a lot more often if we didn't alienate them with regards to gun rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
Mass shooting != gun violence. Roughly the same order of magnitude of people die from motor vehicles & firearms in the U.S., but very few people die from mass shootings.
I think I would agree liberals may overly focus on mass shootings because handguns are killing most of the people but gun violence is a real problem.
For example, whenever the pro-choice side hears someone from the other side propose regulations about requiring permits for clinics that perform abortions (something that in principle they might agree to), they fear that the person proposing the regulations isn't really pro-choice but only says that because outright banning abortion would not be politically feasible, thus they fear (rightfully so, since it has happened) those regulations will be so onerous or badly implemented that it will result in a de-facto ban on abortion, maybe those permits will be very hard to get or maybe the organization handing them out will be understaffed and underfunded (or both). Similarly, whenever someone who is pro-guns hears someone talking about mental health checks before owning guns (also something they might agree with in principle), for example, what they fear is that this system will be abused to deprive as many individuals as possible of their rights without due process.
Thus, in this situation, neither debate will move forward because pro side does not believe that the anti side is proposing any legislation in good faith, and the reason they believe so is that in many cases that has blatantly been the case, leading to farther spreading of the divide.
Additionally, as you say, someone might be both pro-choice and pro-guns but the political situation is such that they have to choose one or the other, and thus they choose the one they hold dearer to them, usually one that affects them more personally. Unfortunately for the pro-choice crowd, gun control laws seem to personally affect more people in the US than abortion laws.
To be fair, when speaking freely, the pro-life side admits that this is their goal. That is, most pro-life advocates proudly admit that outlawing abortion is their goal. The pro-choice side is so wary of these additional regulations because (as they are currently proposed) (a) their only possible outcome is to close lots of clinics, and (b) the argument that these regulations improve patient care is laughable.
Contrast that with the gun-control debate, where the mainstream gun-control "side" is not advocating for a ban of all guns. Yes, they are in favor of banning some forms of guns (i.e. guns which were banned in the late 90s in the US) and things like mental health and better background checks, but a complete banning of guns is not something that they are arguing for.
In the abortion debate, the "reasonable regulations" are always proposed by abolitionists. The goal is never to make abortion safe and available, it's always to make it burdensome and difficult for both the provider and the patient. Newly empowered by the Trump administration and the sense that they have a new supreme court that will agree with them, they're dropping this tactic and have resumed pushing for abolition.