I think this is a pretty american centric point of view. These debates don't have anywhere near the same back and forth in other countries (thinking of canada in particular) that they do in USA.
I imagine how taboo porn is is also very much a cultural phenomenon that varries a lot place to place.
The debates in the US sound ridiculous to me.
It's like the US is a first world country full of people from a few centuries ago.
According to the 2010 census Americans over 65 make up under 15% of... well, Americans[0], but currently occupy 147 seats in the House (out of a possible 435) and 48 in the Senate (out of 100), along with executive branches in 15 states (out of 50).[1]
[0] https://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/briefs/c2010br-03.pdf
[1] https://www.quorum.us/data-driven-insights/the-115th-congres... (note that this was originally posted in 2017, but was later updated for the 116th)
This dovetails nicely with another big problem of most political systems: the cursus honorum for politicians is often very slow, meaning that, by the time a person gets to call the shots, the world has already changed significantly. This could simply be considered folklore when the world moved slowly, but we’ve effectively lost that luxury about 100 years ago. And when we go the other way, and elect mid-life people, we end up with revolving-door issues and poor selection criteria (looks over brains etc).
So yeah, age-representation is a big unsolved problem of democratic government.
And then we laugh at people like AOC, because nothing makes us feel better about our ignorance than demeaning smart people who want to fix it for us.
I don’t put those under “should be in Congress”, and constitutionally they’re not allowed to be until 25. So it is 13 percentage points out of 66 percentage points — about 20% of the population with 34% of the seats in the house.
Senators have to be 30 so the over 65 crowd would be an even greater share there.
Given that experience probably gives you _something_, it’s still out of whack but not crazy.
All of that said, personally I believe it’s far too skewed and we should have an age cap in Congress.
All these senior citizen lawmakers in the usa were pretty young when all this went down, so i dont think age is an explaining factor for the differences.
In Germany we are ruled by old people and conservatives, but they are nothing compared to the US.
The gun control debate is largely settled but I suspect it will start up quite loudly if the EU ever tries to normalize gun laws across member states. The difference between say, the Netherlands (low ownership, very hard to get a license), Austria (moderately regulated and lots of unlicensed ownership), and Finland (very high ownership rate but strictly regulated) is probably wider than any US state, because the US constitution has been interpreted to set a fairly high bar for any regulation.
Let's take major newspapers like _The Times_ or the _Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung_ as examples.
You will not find any article that mentions 2nd amendment rights while not taking side against gun ownership. Every time the American practice is mentioned, it is scoffed at. At least by implication.
Somehow, the conversation has stalled here because some people actually believe they're going to protect their freedoms with violence. You know, by fighting against a government equipped with stealth bombers and death drones and navy seals. With their hunting rifles.
I served in the army. The idea that civilians could put up anything of a fight is a fantasy more ridiculous than kung fury. What keeps you safe from "the government" is that soldiers are taught that they are there to serve and that American citizens are off-limits, not that they are somehow quivering in their boots about losing a fight with your cute little club of weekend warriors that play dress-up in the woods with walkie talkies.
B) That's exactly what I'm saying! It's the optics and the structure of political ownership that prevents such a civil war, not deterrence, as the second amendment was designed to implement.
Perhaps there is something deeply violent (deeply wrong IMO) in the USA's culture?
Society is held together by people's values and individual adherence to shared rules - aka culture. Kids, like everyone else (eg cops), are acting out cultural norms, being mostly defined by mass media.
Entertainment media mostly consists of easy-to-write fight scenes where the main characters dispose of some endless supply of nameless "bad guys". A few hits or shots, that one is gone, move on to the next one. No scenes showing henchman #17 hugging his kids goodbye that morning, or henchman #31's parents grieving. Just purely transactional force-of-will violence - sound familiar?
Furthermore, news media then glorifies shooting events when they do happen, showering the perpetrator with attention and making sure they go down in infamy - it's actually a quite precocious way to get one's 15 minutes of fame.
And of course there's that other uncomfortable issue of why school environments cause kids to want to kill their peers in the first place!
But there's no straightforward approaches to those, and they're held in place by entrenched incentives (lazy writing, clickbait advertising, ass-covering school administrators), while the people speaking up for the inanimate objects are easy to write off.
What most countries in EU has is gun ownership license, similar to a driving license, and thus the default right that people without a license has is no rights. Permission is given by the government, and thus the government set the terms.
In the US this power relationship is the other way around. People have a default right to bear arms, and so government have to take away rights in order to enforce gun control.
One could easily imagine a country where driving a car would be part of a constitution, in which case a driving license would be a hot discussion. How, when and where should the government be allowed to step in and remove peoples right to do with their car property as they wish? People from other countries would look at the debate and find it a bit odd.
As people outside the US are fond of pointing out, your right to bear arms came from the 2nd _amendment_ so you know, you could always make another amendment.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_To_Prevent_This,%27_...
A newspaper (especially a privately owned one) not agreeing with you hardly amounts to suppression.