The real argument is that guns enable acts that, while rare, and while they affect few people, are so egregious that we as a society will go to great lengths to ensure they never happen (school shootings).
The multiplier for all firearm-related deaths between the US and EU average for example is around 12X, more than an order of magnitude [1].
The elephant in the room however is that the main argument simply doesn't hold up. Owning a gun doesn't just make the owner slightly more likely to get shot, but also everyone around them [2]
Or, as they say: The only thing you need against a bad toddler with a gun is a good toddler with... nah, not going there. Too sad actually.
Statistic after statistic says clearly that a society with more guns is less safe for everyone (the Switzerland outlier is easily explained by banning of owning munition instead of guns in peace time).
I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like. Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Seriously, that just rocks.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r... [2] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hsph-in-the-news/do-guns-m...
I don't feel paranoia. Maybe most people are fine except people who consume too much fear-driven media?
I mean, it's not like paranoid people are only paranoid about guns. They are paranoid about everything.
And once you (start paying the Dane-geld) give into that paranoia, that paranoia never goes away (get rid of the Dane); it just gets larger and larger.
The end state for the nations that sacrifice themselves to paranoia is that other nations that have managed to control their paranoid impulses take over the ones that can't, but that takes a while and generally leaves those conquered worse off than before. That said, inactions have consequences.
For instance, Japan, per capita, has fewer firearms-related suicides than the US, but it has more suicides. I’d be willing to bet it has more train-related suicides than the US. Does this mean Japan’s suicide rate would go down if they had fewer trains and more guns? No, it just means that suicidal Japanese use the tools that are available to them, as do suicidal Americans.
Britain has very low rates of gun violence. But it has increasing rates of knife violence. Is this because Brits have too much access to knives? Or is it because violent people use the tools that are available to them? Britain is cracking down on knives, but even if they make it nigh-impossible to peacefully chop vegetables in your own kitchen, British criminals will just switch to screwdrivers or cricket bats or the Millwall Brick. But hey, at least you won’t have any more British toddlers getting hurt by playing with kitchen knives.
> I wish Americans could get a feeling of how different a society without a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia feels like. Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Americans a century ago were just as well armed as today (perhaps more so) and had none of that nonsense. It used to be that if you were an American teenager in a rural area, you could even drive to school with your hunting rifle still in your pickup and nobody would care.
my mom (born 1961) described her high school parking lot as exactly this. she described it as sort of a "clique"/social strata thing, like, guys I associate with wearing heavy Carhartt work coats to school every day and jeans with a clear indentation of a chew can (despite being under 18), would've been the kinds of guys who would proudly leave their sometimes multiple hunting firearms in gun racks in their pickup trucks in the high school parking lot, which nobody had any issue with at all.
1991, the year I was born, someone held up a class at the same high school with a sawed-off shotgun. nobody was hurt but he discharged a few shells into a wall. last I checked you could still see how rough the buckshot-riddled concrete wall still is, despite having been painted over. (interestingly, this story never made national news...)
I went on to attend the same high school and sometime around 2008 we had a complete school lockdown one Monday because a kid had left a paintball gun in his car from over the weekend... in the parking lot of the other high school across town. pretty sure he was tried for a felony.
This is what you get when everyone at every level feels compelled to "do something".
My grandmother's high school had an elective class where they would even shoot at the school.
My Silent Generation father grew up in a city, which quickly turned rural at its edges, and it was routine to keep your hunting long gun in your locker to save a trip back home for hunting before or after school. Antonin Scalia mentioned carrying his .22 target rifle on the NYC city subways to and from practice.
You must mean the others are suicides. Why not say so?
> The multiplier for all firearm-related deaths between the US and EU average for example is around 12X, more than an order of magnitude [1].
Ah, because by not saying so you can make up this 12X figure, by comparing firearm suicides in Europe where in many cases there is marginal civilian gun ownership with firearm suicide in the US where there is widespread civilian gun ownership.
Of course this is a flawed comparison, because Americans don’t commit suicide at 12x the rate of Europeans, they just happen to use guns rather than other methods.
The giveaway that your comparison is deliberately misleading is that you don’t mention suicide. You intentionally hide how you get to this 12x figure.
The Switzerland outlier is explained by a culture of safe handling.
Czech republic is shall issue, and almost everyone has concealed carry permits.
Homicide rate is 0.9.
Czechs have a half-millennia old, entrenched gun tradition, with amusingly even stronger protection on gun ownership than even Americans. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_law_in_the_Czech_Republic
The only times this was suspended was during German and Russian occupations.
Homicide rates is easily accessible public information, from various sources including world bank and the UN?
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/VC.IHR.PSRC.P5
Year by year chart: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CZE/czech-republic/cri...
Their gun culture is certainly an outlier in Europe, compared to even the Swiss. Very permissive, and yet murder rates are essentially on par with entirely gun-less Asian countries vaunted for their "safety".
If you read the distorted stories in the news media you'll get a completely unrealistic impression of how most Americans actually live.
Me too, but that will never happen. Consider America's past: armed revolution, native genocide, violent [secret] coups with foreign governments, murder of its' own citizens by "peace officers", it goes on and on... It's not a peaceful place with a peaceful history, so I don't think your wish is too realistic. That said...you did say "wish", and I wish it also.
We don't perpetually feel like we're in danger or feel paranoid.
>Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
You are describing most of the US.
Do you think having fire drills and extinguishers is "a perpetual feeling of danger and paranoia"?
> Where children just go to school without security checks, amok drills and bulletproof safe rooms.
Maybe try to do something against bullying? It might seem a bit harsh but having been on the receiving end of that, it's hard to find empathy for those people that panic once the victims start fighting back.
And I wish you could better grasp just how big and diverse America is. :) There are parts with terrible problems that make for scary headlines, but those parts are not in any way representative of very large swaths of the country. Where I live there is essentially zero violence (of any kind). We don't live with perpetual feelings of danger or paranoia - heck, we often forget to lock our doors at night.
To dig into the far past...the potential bodycount during Columbine dwarfs the actual body count because they only were able to kill victims with guns. Their explosives failed, and hundreds of lives were spared as a result.
I think there are real things that could be done short of a total ban, but the issue in the US it's a constitutional right so it's hard to restrict in any sensible way and it's politically impossible to amend.
As it is, the policy question is accepting the tradeoff of the right to bear arms vs. rare, but extremely awful death of school children. I'm not really taking a strong position, I think that's just the reality of it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PeSzc9JTBxhaYRp9b/policy-deb...
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/14/beware-isolated-demand...
Don't forget the history of the 20th Century where such "outlier events" included 100 million previously disarmed people killed by Communists running their countries, and the Left likes to remind us of the small death tolls in right wing countries, although many of those were fighting communists. See also the WWI era Armenian Genocide which was so ignored by the rest of the world it convinced Hitler he could do as he pleased.
I'd grant you Imperial Japan, but I wasn't talking about them or what they did, which you fail to notice was done to others, non-Japanese peoples. Like how I noted the Armenian (and lessor known but still significant Greek) genocides by Muslims running Turkey were also of a different nature.
Meanwhile, you might want to try a legitimate reply attacking what I said, not myself.