> It's a variation on "if you ban guns only criminals will have them."
Most countries have banned guns and there are way less problems with guns than those countries that haven't banned guns.
Is this an argument for or against the EU proposal?
Most countries have banned guns and there are way less problems with guns than those countries that haven't banned guns.
Is this an argument for or against the EU proposal?
First, "most countries have banned guns":
Here, from worldpopulationreview.com is a list of countries that has kind of banned guns (at least made them hard to get):
"""
Today, we’ll focus on the nations around the world where restrictive policies are in place that make it illegal or extremely difficult for ordinary citizens to own a gun. Those nations are:
China - Restricted
Eritrea – Banned
India – Restricted
Indonesia – Restricted
Iran – Restricted
Japan – Restricted
Lebanon – Restricted
Malaysia – Restricted
North Korea – Banned
Singapore – Restricted
Taiwan – Restricted
Venezuela – Restricted
Vietnam – Restricted
...and yes by the way, while some of these are OK like Japan and Taiwan you are in some interesting company if your country joins that list.
Secondly: "there are way less problems with guns than those countries that haven't banned guns."
I give you Norway, Switzerland and Austria as a start. Probably Finland and a number of others as well:
All these have and have had loads of actual assault rifles (G3-s, HK416 etc, not semiautomatic AR-15s) complete with non trivial amounts of ammo around in private homes.
Yet I'd rather live in any of those instead of any of the ones on the list above.
So clearly something else is at play.
But it is true that the low gun ownership rate nations (<5 guns per 100) (ignoring ones in desperate povery where people can't afford guns) tend to, on balance, be much more authoritarian than the high gun ownership rate nations (>20 guns per 100 people). See the wikipedia article here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
> Most countries have banned guns and there are way less problems with guns than those countries that haven't banned guns.
to:
> OK, well, I have lived in the UK, Isle of Man, Australia and Germany, all of which restrict private ownership of guns, and don't appear on that list.
and you ask me for sources.
And sure, here it is: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
it was literally just the first site that popped up when I looked for
countries were guns are banned
Now, can you provide some kind of source at all for your claims except that you lived in four of them?
> Female programmers have had to fight against a constant discouragement from pretty much everyone in their lives, while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement.
Based on that and this one it seems fair to say that you have a tendency to make up facts as you need them.
Please stop doing that. It might be a nice party trick when one is young but it soon get really annoying for anyone who argues in good faith.
I for one as a very male programmer can at least say that the idea that
> while male programmers have had nothing but encouragement.
is patently false.
Your "women are weak and need help" attitude sucks.
> Your "women are weak and need help" attitude sucks.
Well, the women I helped didn't think my attitude sucks. I even got an honourable mention on a TedX talk on the subject [0] (by a woman). So I think I'll continue listening to them and not you. Maybe you should re-examine your attitudes on the subject?
Welcome to the working class! Where things are routinely shit, if "external discouragement" stops you from things, you will never get far in life.
It not about sex or gender, its resilience what matters. And resilience is what people from privileged backgrounds rarely have, because they had it good enough to never have to learn it.
Next time i see a damsel in distress i'll come back to you. Yes, im just making fun of you.
Good luck with your ongoing struggle.
I ran a one-day workshop to teach women to code (now https://shecodes.com.au/) based on discussions with female coders about their experiences getting into the industry. These workshops are always oversubscribed, and always there are women there saying "if only I'd received this kind of encouragement when I was younger".
I've seen multiple female colleagues harassed by male management until they leave the industry. Again and again, I've heard female colleagues talk about the discouragement and difficulties they've experienced in the IT industry. I've never heard a male colleague express this. From everyone I've talked to it seems to be a universal experience from men that they have been encouraged to learn to code and join the industry.
These are facts. They may be anecdotal, but that doesn't stop them from being facts. I am not making them up.
The US has a problem with gun violence. This is a fact [0]. I think it stems from the high rate of gun ownership in the US. That is an opinion, though it is supported by correlation [1]. I think it's fairly clear that I'm expressing an opinion in my original comment, but I'll take your comment as a caution that I need to be more clear whether I'm expressing an opinion or a fact.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death... [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3828709/
In England and Wales guns are heavily restricted but aren't outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain. Effectively every adult that isn't disqualified from owning a gun (medical reasons, >3 years in prison, etc) should be able to obtain a smoothbore shotgun licence provided the security/storage requirements can be met, this may be very difficult for younger people living in shared accommodation or in very developed city centres but still. Once a shotgun licence is obtained you can effectively own as many shotguns as you can securely store.
The firearms licence in comparison is much harder to obtain, you need to demonstrate a legitimate reason to own each specific firearm (i.e., land you have permission to hunt on, sports shooting at a club), the local police issuing the licence have a lot more say on whether they issue licences or allow amendments to the licences (i.e., owning more firearms), etc, but it's in principle not much different to a shotgun licence and if you already hold a shotgun licence you very likely can obtain a firearms licence for a very limited number of firearms. In American terminology a shotgun licence is shall-issue where a firearms licence (and amendments) are may-issue.
When it comes to stats on whether a licence is granted(2), in 2019 98% of shotgun licences that were applied for were issued and 97% of firearms licences that were applied for were issued.
This is a very different story to guns being outright banned or extremely difficult to obtain, gun ownership in the UK is low partially because of these restrictions but also because there's no gun culture to speak of. In comparison to countries like Iran, China, Japan, much of Asia and Africa, etc, we're extremely liberal with gun ownership, private gun ownership in Japan is almost unheard of and it's effectively prohibited for the general population for example.
These things have to be taken into account when talking about whether a country restricts/bans guns, because otherwise there's only a handful of countries that have no restrictions on guns. Gun ownership may not be trivial in the countries you've lived in but it's at least legal for the general population.
(1) We can get into the semantics of how restricted guns are in the USA and how this changes between cities/counties/states but as private sale/transfer of guns are effectively unrestricted and the right to gun ownership is constitutionally protected we can say that the USA (and Yemen, arguably South Sudan and Greenland as well) may as well not restrict private gun ownership
(2) https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...