And yet it's the specter of omnipresent crime that many Americans hold up as the reason we need guns to keep us safe, ignoring all the statistics that show overall gun deaths and gun suicides are far higher in the U.S. than any other developed country.
Most gun deaths are accidents, where the person who died knew they were entering a dangerous situation. I'm pretty sure the people who die in gun accidents wouldn't want guns to be banned, or else they probably wouldn't be in that situation in the first place. Also, accidental gun death rates have been declining almost monotonically since 1903. For scale, almost 8 times as many people died of choking than of gun accidents in the US in 2011.
America's suicide rate is not bad at all. It's actually pretty low compared to many other developed countries.
So what, exactly, are you getting at? Should we ban guns to prevent accidents, presumably against the wishes of those who are the victims of such accidents? Should we ban guns to maybe prevent a few suicides, with no evidence that doing so would decrease the suicide rate and not just cause people to use other methods?
There are also considerations beyond safety. Cars are very dangerous, but we use them anyway because they have tremendous utility. Fatty meat and smoking (anything) are very dangerous, but we allow those things anyway because they are enjoyable and people deserve the right to expose themselves to dangerous things if they so desire.
And I'm not proposing banning guns, I'm challenging the commonly-held narrative that guns "keep us safe." The statistics are unequivocal that they do not.
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.
Full disclosure: I've never owned a really fast car, but I do think they're pretty neat.
That's pretty much an empty tautology, since any use of guns that doesn't provide this effect can be dismissed as "improper".
I'm not sure the data I'm looking for would actually show anything interesting either, but it's kind of odd that I can't find it at all.
In the vast majority of cases, the moment law enforcement becomes aware that you are armed, they will respond with overwhelming force. And if you do actually injure or kill one of them, congratulations, you are now in much deeper shit than you started with (and will indeed be lucky to get out of the situation alive to serve time in prison).
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?
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.
It's at least as naive to believe that our government will always be benevolent as it is to believe that the armed civilians of the USA could rebel against the military. I would argue that the second is much more plausible.
Revolutions don't work. America just romanticises one that gave them an illusion of freedom for a time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co...
I'm going to go ahead and guess that you're not a member of a well-regulated militia? You know, that thing the 2nd amendment specifically mentions?
I'm totally okay with private gun ownership, but if you're going to justify it with "we're going to have to rise up against our evil government!", do you really think you're going to be able to mount a hollywood-style one-man stand against "the evil government"?
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.
Two, this sounds like some kind of libertarian fantasy that being armed makes you "freer". Government provides law enforcement which is the only reason you get to enjoy any semblance of civilization.