healthcare reform, gun control, education reform and labor reform. these are all very hard, but adding a telco service is relatively easy.
btw many is cities can barely keep their dispatch for 911 staffed.
btw many is cities can barely keep their dispatch for 911 staffed.
One of these things is not like the others.
There's no need for gun control once a society has implemented the other three; violence and suidice (with or without access to firearms) is a direct function of socioeconomic inequality - and I'm uncomfortable (to say the least) with disarming the very working class most impacted by said socioeconomic inequality at all, let alone before actually addressing that socioeconomic inequality.
Does that imply you'd support an armed insurrection? That seems pretty extreme! And if not, then why exactly do these people need guns?
It implies that I support the right to self defense - including against an oppressive regime and the enforcers thereof. Specifically, it implies that I support the exercise of that right among the class of people typically excluded from it. Violence is the last resort, but it is a resort nonetheless.
"Under no pretext should arms and ammunition be surrendered; any attempt to disarm the workers must be frustrated, by force if necessary" -- Karl Marx
"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there." -- George Orwell
"A man's rights rest in three boxes. The ballot box, jury box and the cartridge box." -- Frederick Douglass
> And if not, then why exactly do these people need guns?
Because even when a government is not actively oppressing its people, it is demonstrably (with considerable regularity) incapable of protecting each and every one of its citizens from one another. Like the saying goes: when seconds count, the police are an hour away. Every person has the right to ensure one's own safety and security, even if their government can't or won't ensure it for them.
And that's entirely ignoring things like non-combative use of firearms, like hunting or pest control or defense against predators or marksmanship or what have you. Quite frankly: the purpose for one's ownership of a firearm is the business of none but oneself.
I can potentially see this in rural areas. Not so much in urban areas, where the police are much nearer and it seems that the guns are the main conveyer of harm.
I don't think you can ignore that they are also used in offence, not just defence. I live in the UK and I don't need a gun to defend myself, because any attacker is extremely unlikely to have one either (because the penalty for even being found carrying one is so severe that it's not worth the risk for them). One of the best ways in which a government can protect its' citizens from each other is removing dangerous weapons from their possession!
I guess my question is: what are you scared of? To my mind the most likely thing to be a victim of is burglary, in which case isn't it much better to just let the robbery take place (and then claim on insurance) while being safe and unharmed than to risk being shot in an armed conflict? Seems to me you make yourself less safe not safer by bringing guns into the equation.
Unless you have a cop on every street corner (and even then), you wouldn't have enough coverage for cop intervention to be something upon which you can rely for your own safety. At best, they might catch your assailant after you're already dead.
> I live in the UK and I don't need a gun to defend myself, because any attacker is extremely unlikely to have one either
You're ignoring the vast differences in available socioeconomic safety nets between the US and the UK. The UK's still pretty shitty on those metrics (which is why there's no shortage of violent crime), but it's certainly better than here in the US.
> I guess my question is: what are you scared of?
I'm scared of my government deciding that it's time to round up everyone of $ETHNICITY or $RELIGION or $IDEOLOGY or $SEXUALITY or what have you and send them off to internment camps. I'm scared of white supremacists deciding it's time to bring lynch mobs back into fashion. I'm scared of the ownership class using the state to coerce (with increasing severity) the working class into continuing to work despite continuing to get the increasingly short end of the stick. I'm scared of theocrats deciding that "separation of church and state" is no longer necessary and therefore empowering themselves to impose their own religion (or more precisely: a very twisted and corrupted version of it) on every other American. I'm scared of GSRMs losing the rights we had just so recently won.
> isn't it much better to just let the robbery take place (and then claim on insurance)
It would be much better to deter the robbery in the first place. It would be much better than that to give people a safety net such that they don't have to resort to robbery in the first place.
Suicide is a direct function of depressive issues and circumstances that peaks on you at the same time you get that one too many "it's gonna be a bad day" piece of news. I'm a suicide survivor (I say survivor because I didn't attempt anything. I succeeded.) whose only alive because my bulldog lead my youngest brother to where I was outside as he had dropped by to see me. A lethal dose of methadone is 50mg. I took 500mg and washed it down with Jim Beam. I was legally dead three times (once in the ambulance and twice in the ICU). I'm not going to say it doesn't happen....giving someone with depression all kinds government reform will do exactly nothing to cure that depression. More affordable opportunity to seek mental health, sure...I'm with you. But even that is maybe 10% chance to prevent if they're down on a day when something happens. I had divorced as well as having my middle brother pass away within weeks of each other.
As far as violence? If you made everyone a millionaire today, there'd still be violence crime, hence violence to retaliate to that, tomorrow. Because people are never satisfied. And unless every physical asset was a cookie cutter model of every other item like it, people are going to be jealous of what someone else has. The best way to cure a lot of the violence is for people to leave each other alone and show some decency to each other.
Because people generally don't kill themselves or others for shits and giggles.
> Suicide is a direct function of depressive issues
Which largely go unnoticed, undiagnosed, and untreated until it's too late, in no small part due to the absolute shitshow that is mental healthcare access here in the US.
> and circumstances that peaks on you at the same time you get that one too many "it's gonna be a bad day" piece of news.
For large swaths of the American population, those pieces of bad news skew heavily toward socioeconomic circumstances. Job loss, debt (incl. medical debt), homelessness, being convicted of crimes because you couldn't afford any better than an already-far-overworked public defender... the list goes on. Even for the things outside that list, they become a lot easier to bear when you can actually afford some degree of treatment.
> giving someone with depression all kinds government reform will do exactly nothing to cure that depression
It will do everything to solve it in the vast majority of cases, and in the remainder of cases will at least prevent "I can't afford it" from being an excuse to get help.
> If you made everyone a millionaire today, there'd still be violence crime
There would be a hell of a lot less of it.
> The best way to cure a lot of the violence is for people to leave each other alone and show some decency to each other.
Which is a lot easier to do when you don't have to resort to crime for basic survival.