Gun homicides down dramatically, Americans unaware

In Manhattan, whilst watching the cockroaches in my hotel room and perusing the brown paper bag full of porn mags I found behind the bed, I heard someone rattling my door quite loudly so I yelled out 'hey', and he replied 'sorry man, i thought it was my room'.

In Virginia I was driving on a side road that I thought should lead back to the 'blue ridge parkway'. I pulled over to take a piss in the bushes, and whilst pissing I noticed a dead deer with a bullet hole in its neck.

It isn't so simple to compare country XYZ to the USA, especially a homogenous society like Switzerland with different military requirements compared to the US with a vastly less analogous population and training.

Gun owners are constantly on the defensive (except, of course, when their lobbying groups are being rather offensive), and constantly required to justify their existence, so of course they're going to go with something that sounds more noble than "but it's a cool hobby!"

It's probably been parroted so much that a lot of people who say it actually believe it.

Full disclosure: I've never owned a gun, but I do think they're pretty neat.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co...

It's an even simpler view of politics that ignores the dimension of the .gov having to explain to everybody else why it thought it was necessary to shoot 30 of its own citizens.

There's a very good discussion to be had about the role of government and monopoly of force and all of these things, and I respect both outcomes if argued properly; silly comparisons between gun size though are only distractions.

Who would win, unarmed or lightly armed apache pilots at a bar, or a group of guerillas with AR-15s? Who would win, a supply convoy full of apache parts guarded by a few soldiers or a roadside bomb followed up by an ambush by guerillas with AR-15s? Who would win, the families of an apache pilot off-base for the day, or a guerilla with an AR-15?

This stance, and your criticism of it, miss the mark. In my view, legitimizing private gun ownership should not be based on whose are bigger, or "who would win in a fight" arguments. Instead, private gun ownership is a simple question of property rights. I see private gun ownership having much more to do with the right for you to defend your private property. In this context, I'm in favor of private gun rights, even if taken as a symbolic gesture to the importance of private property.

The argument is that if everybody is known to be disarmed, the government (or other actors) may consider courses of action that previously would've been obviously a bad idea, and do so with impunity. It also means that it is more easy to paint and propagandize the people who have guns or who do defend themselves, because they are now an "other" and the .gov then gets to use all of the criminal language to describe them (with the same ill effects as seen with, say, potheads).

I'm not advocating for armed rebellion--there are a long and lengthy list of issues with such a thing, and honestly I'm quite certain that the quality of life we enjoy today would disappear indefinitely--and anyone who is is trying to sell you something.

The fact that people cannot seem to connect the dots between "if we are disarmed the government will do terrible things to us if it seems like a good use of their resources" and "the government actively does shitty things to us even knowing we're armed" and "the government has the largest and most capable surveillance network and information control scheme in the history of mankind" is baffling. It's almost like they want to lose all of our nice things.

I didn't interpret things as extremely as that, I just feel that I don't think the distinction really matters (as long as someone got murdered, I'm not sure it matters whether it was by gun).

What also bothers me is that numbers on gun homicides feel to me like pro- or anti-gun propaganda, which is annoying either way.