[kortilla]

> some future government if it got out of hand [spoiler alert: you couldn't!]

You absolutely could if the country had any significant portion of the population against the government. The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families.

> to day in a society awash with guns, violent crime and mass shootings.

But it’s not “awash”. I’ve been in the US for >50 years now and have never seen any gun-related crime and only know one person who was robbed in the 80s in New York by a guy who just said he had a gun. I’ve have however seen violent crime involving fists, bats, clubs, brass knuckles, and knives.

This is why when it comes down to it, Americans don’t want to give up their guns. The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up.

[swexbe]

> The military will quickly go into a state of disarray if half of the members are being told to kill their own families.

But this would still be true if the families are fighting with pots and pans. And if your enemy is a drone flying at 10000m it really makes no difference if you're fighting with an AR-15 or a pan.

[joe463369]

And British people don't want to make that trade off. It's odd to use our gun laws to say we're oppressed by an undemocratic system when the vast, vast majority of people simply don't want the person standing next to them at the till in Tesco to have a pistol under their coat.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

The timescale at which a disarmed populace becomes a problem is decades to centuries. It's all fine and dandy while you like your government. How long do you think it'll stay that way?

There are people alive who remember being herded into boxcars in Germany, in 2023 a well-run social-democratic beacon of progress and industry in Europe.

[joe463369]

I'm not sure what the point is here. We all agree in the UK that we don't want guns to be legal, so they aren't. An American's view that we'd be better off if they were is neither here nor there.

[Gordonjcp]

> It's all fine and dandy while you like your government.

I don't like our government. I don't think owning guns would improve the situation, though.

What good do you think you owning a gun will do you?

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Heh, I think the level of dislike we're talking about here is different. You may not like them but it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now. The point at which "power comes from the barrel of a gun" becomes relevant someplace like the U.K. is a ways off for almost everyone living there, thankfully.

The worry is twofold: first, not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place. Second, if things are really bad at present, bad to the point that fighting seems reasonable, you want to be able to fight. Disarming now means you'll likely be disarmed in an uncertain future, too.

Our modern social democracies seem really stable, but from the perspective of a historian there is no reason to believe they are. They're infants. There's a war in Europe right now, and there are people alive who remember the Holocaust.

[Gordonjcp]

Okay, again, what do you think you and your supermarket own-brand assault rifle are going to do about that?

[NoImmatureAdHom]

The rifles that Americans own themselves are just fine. Average quality is better than military, though the military does get features that are illegal for civilians (like full auto).

330,000,000 potentially armed people (or about 260,000,000 armed adults) is something to be reckoned with. A bunch of goat-herding peasants in Afghanistan fended off not one but both superpowers, and at that mostly with small arms. The fact that the U.S. chooses to arm its population is definitely relevant for the direction its politics goes. Whether that's good or bad, net...well, we never get to know because we never see the counterfactual situation.

[ClapperHeid]

  >>it's nothing like being a Jew under the Third Reich or, perhaps, living in eastern Ukraine right now...

  >>not having an armed populace now might allow things to get really bad in the future, whereas in the case where everyone's reasonably well-armed, or has the option to be, it wouldn't have gotten that bad in the first place...

Again, this is a chalk & cheese comparison. People like to forget that the Third Reich was democratically elected. The German people read "Mein Kampf", listened to Hitler's "Make Germany Great Again" speeches and put their cross next to the Nazi party. And, up until the tide of war started to turn against them, most were pretty happy with the outcome.

It's also convenient to forget that, in those times, hatred of the Jews wasn't an exclusively Nazi, or even German, sentiment. In many other parts of the world, Hitler was initially seen as being a "good thing" and giving the Jews what they richly deserved.

Of course, with history being written by the winners, these facts tend to be glossed over now. So Hitler seized power and plunged an oppressed and terrified people into a war they didn't want And the rest of the world was always horrified by the Nazis' treatment of the Jews.

This is what I meant, when I said above that "Oppression is incremental". By the time you realise that you're living under fascism, it's too late to do anything. And you'll be in for a shock if you're depending on your fellow citizens to rally to your "Let's throw off our oppressors!" flag. Most of them will be quite happy to see you dragged off in the night, instead --you stinking Jew-Lover!

[replace "Jew" with "Commie", "Terrorist", "Paedo"... etc. as required by zeitgeist]

And re your point about Ukraine:

The irony is that Russia's justification for seizing areas such as the Donbass in the East is precisely because they say ethnic Russians there were being oppressed by the Ukrainian government. And that was in spite of those ethnic Russians having well-armed militias already in existence. So having an armed population didn't really help there, did it?

And, in the wider context, the Ukrainian resistance to the Russian invasion is being fought by the existing Ukrainian well-trained, professional armed forces, who are being supplied with billions of £££s worth of advanced weaponry.

And they're still taking a pounding.

So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

> So the idea that a handful of untrained civilians with their Wal-Mart rifles could have prevented any of this is delusional fantasy.

The thing about the U.S. is it's not a handful. They have more guns in civilian hands than people. It would be very easy for U.S. civilians to arm literally everyone.

And, I should note, the quality of the rifles people own privately is as good as or better than what the military gets. The military does, however, get full-auto.

I take your point about the Nazis. I suppose if I had to point out a difference with respect to the U.S. today, it would be that the right to keep and bear arms is for everyone. Americans really don't discriminate (at least overtly), and that's a core tenet. The Jews in Nazi Germany obviously were or had to be disarmed before terrible things happened to them.

[daedalus_f]

Firearms related injuries are the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in the USA.

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761

[NoImmatureAdHom]

This is a bit disingenuous I think. I worry people will infer that young children are at risk from random violence. That's not true.

That stat goes from 0-19 years of age, and the vast majority of deaths are in the older segment. Like everywhere in the United states, it's young Black men killing other young Black men as part of organized crime or over matters of honor.

If you're a parent and not participating in that world, you and your children have nothing to fear.

[daedalus_f]

There have been 236 shootings resulting in death or injury in American schools since 2010.

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

[NoImmatureAdHom]

It looks like 348 according to that data, resulting in 150 deaths over about 13 years, or 11.5 deaths per year on average.

There are ~74 million people 0-18 years of age in the U.S. right now, meaning about 0.016 deaths per 100,000 children per year.

And these won't be similar across the age spectrum: most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids (either the shooter or the victims), some don't involve any intent to shoot anyone (firing a gun in the air), some involve justified shootings (i.e., in self-defense), and the wikipedia data includes universities so they would fall outside of 0-18. The basic point being the 0.016 number is inflated.

For comparison, drowning is about 1.0 per 100,000 or 64x as likely. Being struck and killed by lightning is about half as likely.

[ClapperHeid]

  >most of the kids killed in school shootings are older, some school shootings don't involve kids...

The fact that you have enough school shootings, happening over a long enough period, to allow people to formulate stats about what "most" of them involve is in itself an indictment of why your attitude to gun control is so incomprehensible to so many of us outside the US

In almost every other "Western" country, one solitary school shooting... ever... would be a catastrophe etched into the national consciousness. And would almost certainly have resulted in laws being changed to ensure it could never happen again.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I think you're right about it being a bigger deal elsewhere, and you're right about legislative reactions. I have several thoughts:

1) The U.S. population is really big. 333M or so. New Zealand is 5M? So, inflate the base rate by 66x. When doing "intuitive statistics" about this sort of thing, people think at the country level and don't adjust for population. That will remove some of the effect, but even doing that there's going to be more school shootings in the U.S. per capita, of course.

2) Gun laws don't work. The best available work on this suggests a modest decrease in murder rates at best. People who want to murder will just use alternative means. There are plenty of ways to kill schoolchildren if someone decides to do it. Easy availability of guns probably does increase the rate and deadliness, but not by all that much. Something else is going on in the U.S. Media contagion is part of it, imho.

3) The extent to which people pay attention to astronomically unlikely things like school shootings really doesn't make any sense. As I estimate somewhere else in these comments, the likelihood of a child in the U.S. being shot and killed at school is about double that of being struck and killed by lightning. Though it's a tragic spectacle when it happens, it's not something worth worrying about. The irony is nobody gives a shit about stuff that might actually kill your kids, like drowning, car crashes, etc. People are so, so very nonchalant about things that are actually risky...

[Gordonjcp]

> The mass shootings are tragic, but the probability of being impacted by one is so small that people don’t think it’s worth giving them up.

In the US, there's a mass shooting on average every 22.5 hours.

You have a mass shooting more often than most people have a massive shit.

You have a problem, whether you see it or not.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

"Mass shooting" (in the advocacy-numbers sense you're using it) is generally taken to mean three or more people hit by stuff that came out of a gun (framgents, ricochets count too). It is not "three people shot", much less "three people dead". When using this statistic, the average number of people killed is about one per "mass shooting".

What's more, most of these shootings are among people who are participating in organized crime in bad parts of cities. It's not random, innocent people getting shot. The random, innocent people getting shot ones are the ones that are profitable to put on news streams, though. They are exceedingly rare.

Using reasonable definitions of "mass shooting", the number so far in 2023 is 1-3.

[Gordonjcp]

Okay, but that's still more than any other developed country.

[NoImmatureAdHom]

I honestly still don't get the fixation on shootings in groups. But yes, the U.S. is more shoot-y than comparable countries for sure.

[Gordonjcp]

You don't think maybe you should fix that?

[NoImmatureAdHom]

Shootings, especially mass shootings, are a very small problem compared to things like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, car crashes, and tiktok. If you're taking a vaguely utilitarian approach to public health policy it makes the most sense to do things like try to make Americans less fat, by a wide margin.