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Comment by nailer | Hacker News Reader

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It's not even really benefits of guns are outweighed by people doing murders. All countries pretty much have some gun availability. In the UK where I am you can get a shotgun without huge problems for example. Also all countries have restrictions - even in the US I don't think you are allowed to stock up on M777 howitzers and ammo (British gun by the way). It's about having sane regulation.

The last comprehensive study on gun usage in the United States estimated that there are up to 2.5 million defensive uses of guns in the US yearly, most of which never involve firing a shot. They also found a correlation between gun ownership and lack of injury from violent crimes. Also you can own howitzers in the US, they just require special paperwork and a $200 tax stamp.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/18319/priorities-f...

I don't really understand US politics very well but looking at Wikipedia there's stuff like

>poll in ...October 2015 found that 92% of Americans supported "universal background checks for all gun sales"

But you can't do it because the NRA owns your politicians? That's the kind of thing that could be fixed I would have thought.

We have universal (depending on what that means) background checks for everything except private sales currently, you cannot go to a store and buy a gun without submitting one. Private sales are person to person and represent a rounding error in gun sales. Guns are a hot button topic and most people are uninformed so stats like "want universal background checks" doesn't actually amount to anything actionable legislatively because according to most gun owners, we have that, but many that don't own think its the wild west.

Well, I'm glad that you volunteered to go live in Soviet Russia or Fascist Germany, or a disarmed Native American tribe.

Disarming population leads to tyranny without consequences.

Most of the free democratic western world does not have a lax gun culture like the US has and yet there's no tyranny. Weird.

This isn't as clear cut of a case as you make it out to be. Britain's recently been on a path of overregulation bordering tyranny and limiting free speech. Canada is on a similar path. German green and red party politicians recently caught flack for trying to criminalize unpleasant critique. Press freedom and press independence are actively getting worse and Europe is setting course on a path of nationalism and conservative hardliners and there's an active war being fought on its borders. Islamic nationalism is on the rise and the issue concerning unregulated migration has a real chance to cause uprisings in the continent.

I do not like powerful guns in the hands of the population and I love the idea of a peaceful civilization without the need for violence, but you're living in a relatively short peaceful historic phase, which is just now starting to take a turn for worse again.

And the US police routinely rob travellers of their cash and goods at gunpoint.

So again, what good are the lax gun laws providing the populatnon against tyranny?

As we've learned recently, American gun owners don't give a shit about tyranny so long as the tyrants don't come for their guns.

In fact, depending on whose head the boot comes down on, they'll even cheer it on.

American take:

- UK sociopolitical problems caused by lack of guns - Canada sociopolitical problems caused by lack of guns - German sociopolitical problems caused by lack of guns

I think I can complete the rest of the thinkpiece on my own, with the help of ChatGPT. My prompt starts with, "You are a gun"

I‘m German. These issues are not caused by a lack of guns but by a missing deteste for the government. We Europeans are too comfortable to rise up.

Have a nice day.

I don't think you can call the British thing tyranny, speaking as a Brit.

Ok there have been some hate speech laws, but we have elections and can vote the pols out, no armed uprising required.

And you're going to stop them with your guns? Good luck.

TIL almost every european country is in a state of tyrnanny. Also Yemen which is one of the only countries with somewhat similar gun ownership compared to usa (bit less than half as many guns per capita) must be the epitome of freedom and safety.

What about Switzerland? They have extremely liberal gun laws, on par with the USA.

Perhaps it’s not the guns that are the problem? Perhaps it’s the overall dysfunction of the US as a country?

Every swiss that is issued the military gun (which is most) get a gun. They are trained by military professionals how to use the gun and hoe to store the weapon at home. It is for example forbidden and punishable by law, if something happens with your weapon, if you stored your weapons ready to shoot. You must remove the bolt and store it in a save, secured location. Using ammunition provided by the goverment must not be used, if it is used you will be punished. If you dont handle your weapon responsibly during trainig you may go to military prison.

So probably it probably not really compareable to how most people learn to handle a weapon in the usa.

Switzerland has very high rates of fun ownership, but their laws are far from lax. They are much stricter than the US.

You need a permit to buy anything other than a hunting rifle. You can't buy a gun if you have been convicted of a crime, have an alcohol or drug addiction or express a dangerous attitude.

You generally can't carry a gun except when going to and from hunting or a shooting range and you can't have the gun loaded in transit.

It's also compulsory for most male citizens to learn to handle a gun safely, something which the US doesn't require even if you buy a gun.

> You need a permit to buy anything other than a hunting rifle. You can't buy a gun if you have been convicted of a crime, have an alcohol or drug addiction or express a dangerous attitude.

...as opposed to the US? Do you think you can just buy a machine gun over the counter without any checks in the states?

Not an actual machine gun (a weapon specifically designed for automatic high rate of fire), no.

The US Supreme Court has repeatedly struck down reasonable restrictions for hand guns and rifles though, and seems likely to conclude that modifying a weapon to in effect become fully automatic is somehow OK. This creates a convenient gap which I don't think a reasonable person can believe is a mistake.

You don't need a permit to buy a handgun (i.e. the ones used for nearly all of the crimes) in the US to my knowledge.

You don't need a permit to buy a gun, depending on the state, but you do need to pass a background check, show an ID, and if you wish to carry it outside your house, you probably need a permit, again depending on the state and whether you wish to conceal or open carry.

37 out of 50 states do not require a permit for open carry.

30 out of 50 states allow purchasing a gun from a private seller without a background check.

There is simply no basis for the claim that US and Swiss gun laws are comparable.

Although Switzerland does indeed have (by comparison to the rest of civilised countries) "Extremely liberal gun laws" and the higher deaths and injuries to match, it doesn't really compare to the US.

Or most of the EU countries as of today? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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