Gun violence, the United States is an outlier
healthdata.org
healthdata.org
Washington DC having some of the strictest (if not the most strict) gun laws in the nation, and New Hampshire being a gun rights haven smack dab in the middle of a bunch of states with harsh gun laws. With permitless carry.
Almost like the denser the population, the less regard people have for each others' lives.
Also, I will never understand the argument of "people meet unfortunate demises, thus the rest of us forfeit our right to defend ourselves with the most effective means." It's not something that's debatable to me. Death is an unfortunate reality, and it will never be fixed, no matter how many layers of authoritarian bloat you pile onto it. Let's work on fixing our moral decay instead.
The problem with this is that Louisiana, Mississippi, and other rural states follow DC on the list. New Hampshire is no more or no less densely populated than those states.
The best single way to identify a US state's placement on the list is to look at the percentage of blacks in the population <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic_d...>, then by urbanity. It's not a 1:1 correlation—nothing is—but it's pretty close.
This either means reactionary measures are ineffective, or they're being policed ineffectively, or there is some other societal/cultural issue at play that doesn't exist in NH.
> Almost like the denser the population, the less regard people have for each others' lives.
This is why as a socialist I live in the middle of (R)edneck country.
It sounds like I'm on the opposite side of the political spectrum from you. That's fine, I'm just giving context :P
I think the causal arrow goes the other way. People raised in rural areas encounter firearms far more often - and in different contexts - than people raised in urban areas. When the only times you see firearms are on the hips of law enforcement or in the hands of criminals, it's reasonable that you will develop a very different view of them.
In other words, I believe that on a statistical level support for gun control is proportional to the population density where people spend their early lives.
I also believe that the lack of firearms in the hands of everyday citizens encourages violent criminals to see them as a viable and relatively effective means of coercion.
> This is why as a socialist I live in the middle of (R)edneck country.
I spent about a decade as an Anarcho-Capitalist in socialist country. It was... an experience, that's for sure. It reinforced my belief that the people are far more apt to compromise and understand opposing views when they spend time face-to-face with people who disagree with them.
On the other hand, the fact that almost anyone can have gun encourages police brutality. Because they need to expect anyone could be armed so they act accordingly.
Also it is far easier to obtain gun illegally for violent criminals, when occurrence of guns in population is high.
In this story, who gets to play the US and who gets to play the USSR? Cause I want to be on the side that outspends the other on firearms.
Unlike those wussy nations who don't have gun violence.
1. I allowed myself, through honest reflection, to be persuaded by clear evidence of harm reduction associated with limiting access to guns. Any theoretical objection I had to that evidence was motivated by bias, however rooted in principle.
2. On similar reflection, I accepted the fact that such principle has little practical impact in the face of a modern, highly organized functioning state. Even the most heavily armed populace stands no chance at out-gunning its governing state, no matter how unjust its governance, barring other failure modes of that state which would be just as applicable regardless of how well armed the populace is.
3. Observing that my supposed fellow advocates for gun rights, by and large, are far less principled on the matter… and far more likely to defend—up to and including their own armed violence—such state injustice. These gun rights in practice are effectively a tool of oppression, rather than a bulwark against it.
And I have no idea how a Second Amendment advocate could imagine they could fight and win against a nuke-wielding government, they'd literally get vaporized by an ICBM before they could fire a shot.
They can't both be true.
All three of these things cannot be true at the same time.
Which I think the US would be an outlier in that too.
But there's no way to prevent it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%27No_Way_to_Prevent_This,%27_...