Coming from Switzerland to the US: I do not want to leave. Everything is better here… maybe not for the average person but for some individuals.
Even poor people carry phones that have the internet, news, weather, and a million useful apps. Food is available to everyone, nearly every church has a food pantry. Even cheap houses are climate controlled. Even the homeless have shelters in most places.
For garden variety household emergencies, GoFundMe is democratized charity. It seems it often comes to the rescue for people suffering terrible luck.
Healthcare is expensive, but ACA makes it more available than before. Even early retirees get it.
Cars are expensive, too, but the get great mileage, better performance, and last longer than what we used to have.
Having grown up in the 6s and 70s, I can say with confidence that even less fortunate people have better lives than almost everybody 50 years ago. ( At least as far as material things go. )
The people who are unhappy are often comparing themselves to other people as portrayed by media and social media. That’s a sure way to feel you aren’t doing very well.
The bottom 80% is also going to find it hard to move to another rich country. Countries in general want highly paid professionals, not a 50th percentile desk jockey.
Even in a hypothetical total Russian victory, Moscow wouldn’t “gain” a second army. It would inherit a hostile, traumatized population and an ungovernable territory, not a usable military force. And in any case, Europe’s combined militaries (and economies) are still far larger than Russia’s, so the claim simply doesn’t hold up.
Nobody's going to ask them. Since 2022, Russia has forcibly conscripted 300 000 men from the occupied parts of Ukraine. https://www.euronews.com/2025/11/07/moscow-inches-closer-to-...
That's one of the most "German" things that's ever been said on HN.
The domestic intelligence service can monitor or restrict anti-democratic parties, and Germany’s civil society, courts, and media are structurally hard to capture. An AfD-led government would hit legal and institutional tripwires long before it could rewrite the system.
Of course such coalition has a big number of ultra expensive and effective weapons like planes, ships and tanks. That number of weapons will last for 3 months or so. Then what? Ruzzia is not a Taliban or Hamas, you can't just bomb them with impunity. Even half a century old soviet SAMs are valid threat to anything in the air, let alone newer ones. Plus Ruzzia is not alone, they have whole Axis manufacturing power potentially behind them - Iran, China, NK etc.
I would be very concerned about Ruzzia, if I were you. Just a thought experiment, what would Germany do when Ruzzian force will appear on the Poland-Lithuanian border, annexing all Baltic states?
It actually can't, not generally at least for US labor.
One of the most important measures of quality is work-life balance. Basically, your life kinda sucks if you work all the time, and then you also get fat and sick and die young(er).
People in the US work a lot, and often the more wealthy, but not most wealthy, work A TON. In programming, it's not atypical to have "superstar" staff engineers putting in easily 60-70 hours a week. Of course, not including the commute.
But then there's the time off. Oh, where to begin. We're at a point where 10 days of PTO accrued a year is considered decent. It's work work work, and you can put in 20 years of service... and get, like, an extra couple days. Maybe.
None of this scales down. For example, I'm supposed to be working 40 hours a week. I'm not of course, the baseline is 45 because 9-5 is actually 9-6. And I haven't left at 6 in at least a year, so even that is underestimating it. But suppose I do work 40 hours a week.
Would I take a 50% pay cut to work 20 hours? Fuck. Yes. Yes. In a heart beat. But I can't, I'd actually be taking an 80% pay cut if I do that, so I couldn't live. And it's like this for literally ALL jobs. I can't just "move up", because the work-life balance doesn't get better, it actually just gets worse! And at no point can I take a "step down" and work less, because then I'm flipping burgers.
However if you are willing to go with de facto rather than de jure, plenty of places in Africa and Latam can be freer on these points, especially if you have a little coin.
Financially though, places like Dubai blow away the absolutely dystopic USA controls like FATCA and world taxation/filing, KYC, AML and other madness USA uses to keep an iron grip on traditional finance channels.
But I suspect that the people who care about these things care about them a LOT.
I take it as a given that being in America in general means you could be shot randomly, with a uniform, but low probability distribution. It doesn't really matter what the state's gun laws are. So outside of notoriously "unsafe" areas, it doesn't play into my mind at all.
Same goes for being a victim of a criminal offense.
Against what/who are your defending with those firearms in the US?
No one knew who he was until he was arrested and for the most part until he was dead. His european friends would be saying the same thing as you, "don't know anyone with guns..."
Lots of guns in Europe by people who aren't supposed to have them. Either because they are criminals thus don't care about gun laws, or if they are 'good' people then they should know not to pull out a gun unless their other option is to be dead -- at which point 'fuck the law' and better to be in a jail cell than dead.
Most guns are owned by relatively few people. Nobody from the common crowd here thinks about owning fire arms, virtually nobody does. Maybe that's a cultural gap hard to imagine from an US perspective.
The question remains, against what and who are you even defending? Maybe it's different in Europe because it's densely populated, but people generally don't consider fire arms being a net plus to the security of themselves and that of their family.
It also just doesn't seem useful to move to a state with loose fire arms laws - it's much better to move to a state/city/neighborhood with low crime rate instead.
Fire arms is the very last measure you want to rely on when a highly militarized police force is prepared to deport you and your family.
Although I'll grant you, that took place in Poland, but it happened largely due to the German government.
[] https://1943.pl/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Kobiet...
So I still wonder against what / who you are really defending.
Needing a seat belt is much more likely than needing a fire arms, at least in Europe. Focusing on fire arms means focusing on the wrog things. It's about a feeling of security, not actual security. To use your wording: You'd give the world to have focussed on something else instead of buying a fire arm.
[] https://1943.pl/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2020/05/Kobiet...
Where I live in Arizona you can 3d print a handgun, load it, stick it down your pants, and walk around with it around town all day doing basically whatever (as long as you don't go to a school, jail, or courthouse basically). All with zero background checks, licenses/permits, or even needing to carry an ID. Can I do that in Switzerland? I doubt they would let you do that even with a long rifle, unless you are going to/from some sort of approved activity.
The only euro-controlled place I know where you can basically do that is Greenland, as long as it is a bolt action rifle. Greenland is actually looser than USA in that regard, you can buy a bolt rifle like a hammer from a hardware store in Greenland with zero checks or license (IIRC, even as a foreigner) whereas in USA you could only do that if you bought it privately or made it yourself.
If I'm not allowed to have guns, then I am physically unsafe, because someone from government will use violence against me if they both discover it and have the ability to do something about it. I wouldn't feel safe anywhere violence is used for malum prohibitum 'crimes.' In fact I don't feel safe basically anywhere a government exists because they all do this; this is part the reason why I live in a rural area with basically no government services, no police, no public utilities or anything like that with involvement by the state beyond the bare minimum possible in the USA.
Your proposition also relies on the place itself not changing, and my and my offsprings atrophying their practice of skills of self defense and therefore not needing them when moving elsewhere. But sure if you had a magic wand and could trade 'no guns' for anyone for world peace, I'd take it.
Maybe you could be the first!
Kudos for engaging civilly and earnestly on this even though the majority here seem to disagree with you. It’s rare that I encounter someone coherently articulating a belief system so wildly divergent from my own.
And how your gun can prevent this now? If you are allowed to carry a gun police will act like you have one lane shoot you. While in other case they will just beat you with stick.
IF the government decides to use violence against you do you really have a chance with a gun? or 10?
To your specific question, probably not, but the better question is whether you have more of a chance with or without a gun? If you look at the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising for example, having a gun bought those people hours to days, which is better than nothing. Of course if you look at places like Chechnya, it bought them outright years that they were able to obtain independence from the brutality of Russia (even if not from their own brutality) as a result of militia activity in the first Chechen war.
If I understand correctly, the reasoning is a kind of long-term best-practice thinking?
And that best-practice is a high enough priority that it would prevent you from moving someplace that was otherwise better than a place that would let you have guns?
Is it only reasoning, or it there also a psychological component, like you'd also feel unsafe without guns, maybe due to past or current threatening situation (e.g., physical danger, or economic)?
If I understand correctly, you have both practical (near-term or long-term) and also philosophical objections, to the power imbalance between citizen and state, when citizens can't have guns. And it's a high priority.
FWIW, I sympathize with vigilance. Though my own priorities around guns are different. I live in a fairly safe city, with good police. Where I live, the prevalence of citizen guns seems to create more problems than it solves. The problems I have don't seem to be solvable with guns. I might feel differently, if I lived in a less-safe place or in different circumstances.
This is a statement so far removed from reality that it makes anything else you say immediately suspect.
You appear to view "government" as an entity whose primary purpose is to bring violence against anyone who cannot resist that violence with lethal force. There is no possible justification for that as a blanket definition.
If you are omitting, perhaps, the fact that you are a wanted and dangerous person, who has, for instance, committed a string of murders, and that is why the government would "use violence against you", then that would seem to make anything you say quite inapplicable to anyone else's situation.
This discussion is, very specifically, about leaving that country for other countries.
i myself am a maximalist about this and i don't feel safe unless i carry some strains of ebola with me. it would be nice if you could support my ebola open-carry efforts (dm me for details).
It's much more likely that you shoot yourself or your kid shoots you or your husband/brother/other-troubled-man has a bad day and shoots you than a criminal shooting you.
The relationship between gun deaths and guns is not correlative, it's causative. Because, surprise! Guns cause gun death.
Generally, less guns = less gun death. Which might seem like such a simple understanding that it must be naive or stupid. But no, it's actually just that simple.
On a related note, less automobiles = less automobile deaths.
>Generally, less guns = less gun death. Which might seem like such a simple understanding that it must be naive or stupid. But no, it's actually just that simple.
It's really not, in many cases it's been found anti-correlative i.e. https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/guns4.jpg
"Virtually all of this risk involved homicide by a family member or intimate acquaintance."
Even thinking this through for a second, it makes sense someone expecting to be murdered by a family member or intimate partner might be more likely to keep a gun, as it might be useful in frustrating that effort.
Look, it's just a simple matter of probability and being honest about the world. Bad things, like robberies, are very, very, very rare. Heat of the moment disagreements and accidents are not.
You're optimizing for something that you know, deep down, does not matter - and to do it, you're actively making a bunch of MUCH MORE LIKELY stuff easier. And even here I am being far too charitable to you - I'm assuming the gun would help you in the case a crime is committed. It probably won't, especially if you follow safe gun keeping guidelines.
So I'd be interested what he means too.
What is for sure better in the US: There is way more space.
if you want other landscapes, you can travel outside of switzerland... it's easy...
America has the best healthcare. Not the best value, but the best healthcare. It has low taxes, lots of world class cultural institutions, and varied beautiful geography. It is the Rome of our age. Corrupt, amoral, and exploitative? Sure, but with money you can overlook that.
Scenario 1: You fall head first from a 10th floor. US healthcare has higher chance of saving your life. Scenario 2: You are an average person that hopes to get preventive medical care. You will die in the U.S of the most basic medical condition.
Unlike the US, Switzerland has the added bonus of having a very stable democracy.