[kabdib]

It is politically more feasible to ban encryption in the US than it is to ban guns (or even significantly restrict them).

Wait, I'm wrong. Even essentially insignificant changes to gun laws at the federal level are harder than banning crypto.

[samsonradu]

Can you please elaborate on why guns are so sacred in the US? Is it for cultural/historical reasons?

[sokoloff]

The country was founded after an ~8.5 year long Revolutionary War from a colonial owner with a large, well-funded, well-equipped, occupying army. The founders (aka the treasonous colonists) had a general "the people are individually and collectively supreme to the federal government" attitude (no doubt significantly in reaction to the monarchy that ruled over them immediately prior) and wrote the following text into the founding documents:

2nd amendment:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

10th amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The first 10 "amendments", which are roughly/essentially contemporaneous with the original document, are referred to as the "Bill of Rights".

[solidsnack9000]

The right to bear arms is also part of the 1689 English Bill of Rights. It is a really old right, dating back to the 900s in various forms on the British Isles.

[solidsnack9000]

Roughly 30% of the population owns guns, and has everyday experience with people owning assault rifles who aren't a harm to anyone. The gun culture is the locus of a lot of important values in the US -- service to the country, acceptance of danger, self control, precise and accountable behaviour -- and gun owners are overall more law abiding than the general population. Gun owners haven't done anything wrong and don't see why they need to be punished.

[mattio]

So gun owners feel punished when their guns are taken away, and they feel this punishment is more severe than all the lives that are taken away because of mass shootings? And all the families that are ripped apart? If my 'right' harms so many people, I would not even want that 'right' in the first place. Guns perhaps made sense in an era where you had to protect yourself agains outlaws. Now we have governments to take take care of your daily security. Now the freely available guns don't make any sense at all.

[solidsnack9000]

Guns don't need to make sense -- in a free country people don't need to justify their actions. Rather, the government needs to be able to justify its policies -- we need to be able to show that the trouble and expense we are putting people to makes a real difference.

So gun owners feel punished when their guns are taken away, and they feel this punishment is more severe than all the lives that are taken away because of mass shootings?

The underlying thinking here is a kind of collective punishment trading or social bargaining; but that's not generally how regulating dangerous stuff works. There are lots of things that kill comparable numbers of people to guns. Do I need to list them? Generally with things that most people use safely but some people use in a way that gets them or others killed, we don't try to ban them but instead we:

(a) Criminalise misuse adjacent to death based on data (not based on emotion or intuition about what seems "dangerous" to uninformed people). For example, criminalising drunk driving because although it doesn't always kill people, it certainly kills them all out of proportion to other driving.

(b) Introduce restrictions in venue that are conducive to safety.

(c) Try to educate the public and post warnings.

(d) Opportunistically encourage people to delegate responsibility to make things safer, even if we don't change their rights overall. For example, Uber seems to reduce drunk driving deaths; but that was not accomplished by either taking people's cars away or preventing them from drinking.

With regards to guns, there simply is no data to support the idea that assault rifles are more deadly than other weapons; or that other things which leftists oppose -- open carry, 30 round magazines -- lead to much change in the overall rate of gun deaths. Banning these kind of things makes about as much sense as banning liquor that's "too strong" because you tried it and "no sane person would like it".

Rifles are rarely a cause of murder, suicide or accidental death. Yes, they are used in mass shootings -- they aren't used in much else. Do you know how rare mass shootings actually are, and how small a cause of death mass shootings actually are? If we took the same approach to other small causes of death as you are proposing taking with regards to assault rifles, what are the policies we might have?

What definition of mass shootings are you actually using? How frequently are assault rifles used in them? There is a lot of variation in the way they are counted so it's hard to talk about the real impact of what you're proposing.

[samsonradu]

> The gun culture is the locus of a lot of important values in the US -- service to the country, acceptance of danger, self control, precise and accountable behaviour

I have a hard time understanding what does acceptance of danger and self-control have to do with assault rifles? Can't those be exerted with a pistol?

Also I fail to understand how people don't see guns as a liability. Just having one in the house would cause me a lot of headache. Guns can be stolen, kids might find it etc..

[solidsnack9000]

What you are trying to do here, is find some justification for guns; but that is not how a free country works. We don't need to ask the government permission to do stuff. We can still do things without having a good reason.

Not sure what policy you're proposing but whatever it is, it needs justification -- that's what limited government is about. No restrictions without reasons.

[samsonradu]

I'm not proposing any policy. Trying to assess if having assault guns causes more problems than it solves, considering it's hard to keep control of who buys/sells them in a country of 300M+ population. That would probably stand for a justification, wouldn’t it?

We’re also forbidden to keep plutonium or enriched uranium in our basement regardless of what we use it for.

Hell there’s many free countries where it’s illegal to possess weed.

[solidsnack9000]

It seems like you’re obliquely arguing for something, since you say “it’s hard to keep control of who buys/sells them” and offer this as justification, but justification for what, exactly?

I don’t think it’s reasonable to look at service pattern rifles in isolation to try to sort out whether they are a problem. They don’t seem to be a major contributor to gun deaths, overall — rifles of all descriptions contribute ~5% of gun deaths every year in the US. Their potential danger may seem great but the data does not bear that out.

[giardini]

samsonradu asks> "Can you please elaborate on why guns are so sacred in the US? Is it for cultural/historical reasons?"

FWIW use of the term "sacred" is somewhat iffy as many an atheist has picked up a gun to defend himself.

America was taken over and settled by Europeans who brought firearms for hunting and protection. There were already 20-100 million indigenous American Indians here: they covered the land. But the Europeans brought diseases that few American Indians had resistance to, and most (up to 90%) of the American Indians died of disease before they had so much as _seen_ a white man. Indian societies collapsed and re-coalesced from the fragments. Meanwhile...

https://www.cracked.com/article_19864_6-ridiculous-lies-you-...

Newly-arrived Europeans advanced into a "wilderness" that held the burnt-out remnants of multiple civilizations. Only the very earliest arrivals saw the destruction their diseases had wrought in front of their advance.

With the Europeans came ideas of real estate (ownership rights to land etc.) which the American Indian tribes previously maintained by allegiances and territorial behavior. Anyway, conflicts ensued, new allegiances formed, broke and reformed. This all involved conflicts, fighting and wars. In every step, guns were used by both sides (e.g., American-Indian Wars, Revolutionary War, Civil War).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_campaigns

Early settlers were often on their own. They often had disputes and unpleasant encounters with their own and others. The gun could be used for protection as well as an important food-gathering tool. Although the American Indians could do so easily, living in the wilderness without a firearm was difficult and rare for someone of European descent.

So the use of firearms goes back to the pre-colonial and colonial periods. Guns were always available in the New World and remain available today.

[samsonradu]

Bad wording on my behalf, didn't mean any religious connotations.

[trilila]

So the us doesn't end up like countries such as Romania, where the government can easily subdue its population with a simple good beating. It’s harder to subdue an armed population.