Well, maybe people should not own guns. At all. Any gun, let alone "a collection".
Second, the legislation is very strict. You need to have a reason for owning a gun; hunting and shooting sports are valid, personal protection isn't. You need to belong to a relevant association (such as hunting clubs or shooting clubs). You need proper locked storage in your apartment. Carrying a gun in public without a reason (such as going to a shooting range) is forbidden, and even then should be minimized.
Should you violate any of these conditions, you're liable to lose your gun license and all guns will be seized. Also the police may revoke the license on suspicion of violent behaviour.
So, if you want to get a gun, you have to live squeaky-clean. Illegal guns are of course another matter.
The end result is a small minority having multiple guns per person, the majority not having any, so citing Finland as a country with high gun ownership is misleading.
About gun ownership in Finland, Wiki tells me:
> There are approximately 1.5 million registered small firearms in the country. Out of those, 226,000 are short firearms (pistols, revolvers) with the rest being long firearms (rifles, shotguns). There are approximately 650,000 people with at least one permit, which means 12% of Finns own a firearm.
In this case, while it may (temporarily) remove (if the party is willing to follow the law!) one method of domestic violence, it’s not like it’s hard to come up with alternatives. In many parts of the world, the preferred method of domestic violence is throwing acid on someone’s face.
The concern here is abuse of due process, and that it’s so trivial to take away someones rights and property using falsehoods and BS bureacracy, while also not actually solving any of the underlying problems.
Since, for instance, if that emergency order was for someone who actually was a problem, they still have a full day to go after whoever while still legally owning everything, and if they go on the run, it’s not like they care about another felony!
Guns are dangerous -- in fact they don't have any other purpose beyond inflicting harm (unlike other dangerous things such as cars or drugs, etc.) I'm aware of the 2nd amendment, but firearms don't look like a good rhetorical argument in a discussion about property.
And statistically, very very very few guns kill people. The US has well over 300 million, and it is far from the top cause of death or serious injury.
If anything, a collection of them is even less likely to be dangerous, no? Since if someone is collecting something, they tend to be familiar with it and are putting effort into keeping it safe and in good condition.
Even Germany allows gun collections, albeit with a mind blowing amount of paperwork.
And they are worth money. And prone to people trying to grab/forfeit/confiscate.
> as a European
> that people would have guns in their homes like it's the most natural thing in the world.
Denser populations are used to their biggest problem (and biggest help) being other people. So they tend to outsource more.
Less dense populations are used to their biggest problem being something they need to do themselves, because there aren’t a lot of people all up in their business/available when they have a problem. So they’re more comfortable doing DIY.
The issue in this case of course that outsourcing personal safety puts a lot of power in other people’s hands.
Typically, this results in people in dense areas being more manipulative and avoidant to compensate. You can have a good life by getting other people (readily available) to do things for you. Having certain people be mad at you can result in really bad outcomes if you can’t manage the people around you.
Folks in less dense areas being typically more direct, because they can/need to be. You can have a good life by doing things yourself, and you don’t need to worry if someone is going to be (moderately) unhappy with you. And even if they’re really mad at you, you can do something about it directly without needing someone’s help.
For exteme examples in either direction;
- less dense, say Siberia, Alaska, Sudan - ‘everyone’ is armed, ‘everyone’ knows how to jump their car and fix basic plumbing issues, how to do basic first aid, etc. (at least 50% of the population, anyway).
- more dense, say Mumbai, Tokyo, New York City - only the cops/military and extreme outliers in the population are armed (< 5%) and ‘no one’ (well under 10% of the population) knows how to jump their car, fix plumbing issues, basic first aid, etc.
This has always resulted in tension. Ghenghis Khan was on record for really hating ‘decadent city dwellers’ for instance, and made a habit of destroying any particularly decadent cities he ran across (and either slaughtering their populations or driving them out of the city) apparently out of spite. Large cities have always expended significant effort in controlling who is armed and when (including Rome, London, Paris, etc).
This is directly applicable to US politics, and shows up quite clearly in the gun control debate too, where gun control laws have a clear and nearly (but not completely) 100% correlation with population density.
It’s also something you can see as a clear trend in Europe, with West and South-West European countries being strictly controlled, and less dense Northern, Eastern, and Central European countries being looser.
South and Eastern Asia, being exceptionally population dense, has almost complete prohibition of firearms for civilians. Even air guns are strictly controlled in most countries.
Then you must be one very insulated or ignorant European. Many people in many European countries own guns and keep them in their homes. Some states, such as the Czech Republic, even have remarkably flexible gun ownership laws and others have widespread private gun ownership to a degree that's not too different from that of the U.S. In Norway and Finland for example, private possession of firearms amounts to something like a quarter of the population measured per 100 people.
I'm also a European, and i'm not sure how being one means a damn thing about categorically judging a complex thing like gun ownership in any other culture or place. This applies particularly since many other Europeans in dozens of different states with their own contexts have entirely different motives for doing something practical one way or another. It's downright absurd to claim that "as a European" you can make any kind of value statement about the tendencies in such a diverse range of countries and contexts. Never mind being able to judge the personal protection motives of people in other continents.
Owning guns has many good reasons behind it in any case. These include the obvious like general self protection, home protection, hunting and collecting, but also less obvious reasons that are specific to very particular places.
I currently live in a country where gun ownership is severely restricted, legally at least, but in which violent crime and firearm homicide rates are rampantly high. Many people here have very good reasons to keep guns, under the real world circumstances of criminal groups and gangs having them, the police being uselessly corrupt, and the practical reality of all of that being something that one can't simply wish away by magic, even if they're wishing "as a European".
It's ever more tedious to see random comments with "As a European" appear on this site, followed by some smug, morally superior little value judgement of others from the perspective of one very narrow, insular mindset.
Weird sentence. What would that be per 1000 people .. still a quarter?
To clarify, Norway has ~ 28 firearms per 100 people but only 1 in 10 people own at least one firearm.
So, like say Australia (where I'm from) it's a relatively low ownership rate but firearm owners tend to have multiple firearms.
I'm in a rural are in Australia, we have guns like we have shovels and mechanic pits in the sheds - they're funtional tools with a purpose (guns -> feral control).
Waving guns about to deter thieves isn't as useful as having actionable video evidence of theft that identifies people and vehicles .. and it runs the risk of escalation and having to deal with a wounding | murder charge.
And in other areas, the same thing, but using the bait of reproductive rights.
While those nominally ‘protecting’ those rights actually sabotage them in often subtle ways, while blaming the opposition.
Perhaps such as it ever was? It’s hard to not yell ‘wake up sheeple!’ at the end of that.