> I thought most people in the US were proud of their firearm handling professionalism which of course includes not brandishing or murdering people.
I take it you have not actually visited the United States.
I take it you have not actually visited the United States.
And those people are often irresponsible in many other ways, too.
So there are plenty of people who call themselves "responsible gun owners" but turn a complete blind eye to bad behavior.
Or they will keep a loaded gun in their bedroom for home defense, something that is outright NOT responsible gun owner behavior, yet is the primary cited reason people own guns in the US.
Why? Well bad apples and stuff, it's hard to believe perfect discipline is maintained when some of those around you have less than perfect discipline.
It seems like a question that one could probably get pretty close to answering (although not perfect).
"Everyone"?
This is significantly biasing your perspective, and I don’t think you quite realize by how much.
There are many, many gun owners who are incompetent and irresponsible. There is an entire spectrum, and it’s not a purely bimodal distribution with 95% safety-conscious owners and 5% hoodlums.
well ok, I don't know but there are stats on how many adults have guns, and there are stats on misuses of guns. I suppose a clever statistician would be able to get to some potential overview of how many people who own guns have decent discipline?
Not saying that's you but someone on this site. It is difficult to find anything with a query on Google nowadays, but the things I do find - like https://time.com/6183881/gun-ownership-risks-at-home/ implies to me that the amount of the population that maintains your level of discipline is very low.
So many people provide direct evidence that they do not respect the danger or power of firearms, and most gun owners just look the other way.
The EU has 30% more people
There are 60 times as many privately owned guns in the EU as there are in Montana.
There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.
There is a cultural problem in the US with firearms.
I think the cultural problem is everyone wants to be like Stallone or Arnie, which would suggest the US population has an inferiority complex towards the old world.
Even gun suicides are far higher in the US per capita and per gun than in the EU.
The US has a gun fetish. People sleep with them for crying out loud!
But everyone still claims they are "A responsible gun owner" because all that actually means to the gun culture in the US is that you are white or rural or conservative.
> There are 5 time as many guns in the US, but 20 times as many murders.
gonna need a fact-check on these claims, please, because initial googling reveals these are, at the very least, false or misleading
I live in the Northeast US and very few people have guns here.
Incidentally, even if it is difficult to purchase a gun, it's trivial to order a crossbow or airbow, which has just as much 1-shot stopping power (although, of course, after that 1 shot, reload can be a problem, less so with the airbow)
https://www.euronews.com/2019/08/05/which-european-country-b...
> Around 46% of all 857 million guns in civilian hands around the world belonged to people living in the United States in 2017, a survey has found.
> The European Union's 513 million inhabitants owned a collective 79.8 million firearms in 2017.
And the “20 times as many murders” is not right, but seems to be pretty close if they were just taking about firearms homicides.
https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/insights-blog/acting-....
> Age-adjusted firearm homicide rates in the US are 13 times greater than they are in France, and 22 times greater than in the European Union as a whole.
I also live in the Northeast, but that’s a point against when talking about this stuff; when you live in the only reasonably run part of the US, it is easy to misunderstand how ridiculous things are in much of the country.
I actually don’t care to argue back. I object to the argument-less fact check request and insinuation that the figures are misleading, on principle. It is annoying to give your conversation partners homework for no reason.
You are not representative, as only one-third of individuals, and 42% of US households, own a firearm:
* https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/06/22/the-dem...
* https://news.gallup.com/poll/264932/percentage-americans-own...
Gun owners are in the minority of the population.
And you might not even know; not everyone tells everyone that they own a gun.
Firearms owners may well still be in the minority, but there's probably a fair bit of error there.
I'm sure everyone says they take these things seriously, and I'm sure you're a fine upstanding citizen who mostly interacts with other fine, upstanding citizens. However, we do know, due to the number of offenses made public thanks to Florida's Sunshine law and other public sources, that we simply can't make the generalization that people take these gun safety measures seriously.
What matters is what happens when their friend does something dangerous with a gun, and they don't seem to care. My entire family is "responsible gun owner" including my brother who definitely seems to care about safety, but all that goes out the window when another family member brings out the guns at a family BBQ while absolutely drunk. You can bet your ass nobody said anything. If you aren't willing to narc on irresponsible gun behavior, you ARE NOT a responsible gun owner.
Also, Kyle Rittenhouse took a gun across several state lines, possibly stirred up shit, got shot at, and killed the person doing so. While the actual event of shooting was ruled "self defense", how is it "responsible" to take your firearm to a protest with the intent of being a counter protester. If "Anti fa" did such a thing, these people would riot, but Rittenhouse was invited to talk at fucking CPAC.
That's the kind of person these people lionize. They are envious that he was able to kill someone with a gun and get away with it. They want to be him.
That’s a shocking number of gun related incidents in the GP. Seems like accessing TV/internet must be an issue like road rage that brings out the absolute worst in people. People don’t go around popping shots at technicians or waving their weapons around in the US.
Maybe there's some selection bias: You'll tend to meet angry people, who are more dumb (couldn't fix the problem themselves?)?
Maybe in any weapon loving place, a job where you visit lots of people at their homes and help fixing something that's broken, is mildly dangerous?
However I suspect the repo company allows its employees (or they’re self-employed) to carry in retaliation - I strongly suspect that the cable companies don’t allow their repairmen to pack heat.
It’s like the thin bread line - pizza delivery is more dangerous than being a cop.
I doubt it. That'd be a huge liability.
Remember that repo companies are often incredibly small single-person "companies" contracted out.
I think that's highly dependent on where in the US, and what kind of neighborhoods and people these technicians are working in.
The idea that such places exist in the US does not surprise me in the least. But at the same time, there are certainly places in the US where the majority of gun owners do handle their firearms responsibly.
My brother is an avid gun "advocate" (nut), but he still wasn't happy being threatened with guns from yokels who don't like paying bills.
Even if you include full time criminals and suicides, that still means basically 0.001% of fire arms are used to kill someone every day year.
Most gun owners are decent people that want to protect themselves, not use it to cause hard to the innocent.
If nobody had guns, you wouldn't need to a gun to protect yourself from someone else with a gun.
The problem of course is that the genie is already out of the bottle. We can't take the guns away, they're all over the place in the USA already. Even if the Second Amendment was repealed, all that would happen is that only criminals would have guns.
We're fucked and there's no solution.
This is objectively false. You're attempting to portray a personal opinion as fact. Bad form, and definitely not appropriate for HN. Please don't do that here.