American gun use: Shouldn't the world intervene?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Governments across the world have been steadily extending their remit into our personal lives and behaviour with the introduction of the welfare state, socialised healthcare and nationalised industries, always in the name of keeping us safe/well/employed. The assumption that "someone should do something about this" is so pervasive these days that it's hard to mentally snap out of it and say, why?
I'm no fan of guns[1] but in recent months I've come to understand the thinking behind the 2nd amendment, that government has to be kept in its place and that society must not give complete power to a small group at the centre. When you look at it that way, the hot coffee and the driving regulations are the things that don't make sense.
Whichever side of the gun control debate you're on, denouncing the other for not getting gets you nowhere. This is a debate about the proper role of government, not about guns or hot coffee per say.
[1] I'm British and so have no involvement in the whole US gun control debate, but am virtually genetically predisposed to thinking guns are strange and scary!
But it does express, quite forcefully, the simple point that if the US is concerned about the safety of its citizens it might do better to focus on gun safety and ownership than on the so-called war on terrorism.
And the terrorism angle is just ridiculous. The reason it makes sense to worry about terrorism to the tune of billions of dollars is that a WMD attack on American soil would cost potentially trillions of dollars. Certainly 9/11's impact was massively expensive both financially and psychologically.
For some reason these issues always bring out the most intellectually dishonest and transparent arguments. Really smart people disagree about this topic and have much better arguments than this author's.
Nope. The truth is that it simply doesn't make sense to worry about terrorism to anywhere near the degree we do. We'd have done far better to chalk the whole thing up to "act of God" and move on.
Regarding the risk of a "WMD attack", you're making the same mistake you just accused the other guy of doing. He conflated suicide with homicide; the term "WMD" is intentionally vague so as to conflate actual nuclear weapons, "dirty bombs", and every variety of chemical weapon. The bad guys don't HAVE nukes or chemical weapons and 9/11 did nothing to suggest that sort of attack had become more likely than before. The risk of damage from a "dirty bomb" would be largely self-inflicted - we'd harm ourselves due to our own paranoia. The risk of damage from chemical weapons is pretty small even if our enemies had them, which they don't. If you correctly separate the threats you'll see each individual one is really really small.
> Certainly 9/11's impact was massively expensive both financially and psychologically.
9/ll's impact as massively expensive because we chose to LET it be massively expensive. If we had shrugged it off, it wouldn't have been.
The guardian article was right about one thing: America is in the middle of a civil war of sorts.
The 2nd Amendment however is part of a public document. The public document in the US. And many people believe in the 2nd, either because it allows them guns, or because more generally it's part of our governing document. Of course many people don't support the 2nd. But it is the law, and because it's explicitly part of the Constitution there are huge (but not impossible) barriers to changing it.
As for apathy, yes we in the US are apathetic, but it doesn't imply that we trust the NSA, it just means that we're generally apathetic. The list of issues and wrongs that we in the US ignore is long (just for starters, compare our war deaths and gun violence deaths to the deaths of innocents around the world by "collateral damage"), and the NSA is just one of many. We mostly don't give a shit about anything except hating the opposite political party, hating people who have different religious views than our own, and watching TV. And football, we like that a lot.
Ban guns, people will use knives. Ban knives, people will use sticks. Ban sticks, people will use fists. The weapons involved are not the issue. The root cause of the violence is.
The world should stay out of this problem. It's a US-only ideology issue, primarily driven by the second amendment, and the twisted interpretation of "freedom".
If I were in Government in another country (Canada, U.K., Germany, Australia, etc) I would use this in the country's favour. This U.S. gun issue is extremely scary for many, and would use it (among other points) to attract talent from the U.S. or divert quality immigrants from the U.S. to my country. It sounds harsh, but quality of life and life expectancy are top priorities for almost anyone. If you can market this the right way, these countries with less gun-death risk can really benefit.
Country Guns per 100 Total Firearm-related deaths per 100,000
US 88.8 10.2
Canada 30.8 2.44
Germany 30.3 1.1
Australia 15.0 1.04
UK 6.2 0.25 USA 4.66
Canada 1.58 (US murder rate 3.0x higher)
UK 1.13 (US murder rate 4.1x higher)
Australia 0.99 (US murder rate 4.7x higher)
Germany 0.86 (US murder rate 5.4x higher)
Mexico, most of Central America, most of South America, most of the Caribbean, some of Oceania.
What is interesting is that Washington State, Montana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine all have very similar homicide rates to their Canadian neighbors.
I was referring to comparable nations, primarily to the anglo-saxon countries on the above list really comparable to the US. The U.S. has 4x more murders than the average of the western countries above. That is 4x, food for thought.
http://www.realclearscience.com/journal_club/2013/07/22/yout...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_crime_in_the_United_St...
The first link gives an upper bound of 1.32x higher... and it'd probably be a solid bit less given that youth murder rates are higher than adult murder rates...
I'm not talking about the cause behind the murders, but just the rate. But hey, bottom line, believe whatever you want, I'm not here to make you hear what you want.
No bs.
http://www.unitednorthamerica.org/images//MurderRate2007.jpg