[sneak]

There have been no large scale wars since the development of nuclear weapons. The data available thus far suggests that mutually assured destruction prevents total war.

I live in a county in which most people are armed. There are very few attempts at carjacking.

[matwood]

I’m not sure talking about guns in the US is proving what you want. The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones.

When everyone has weapons, more people get shot. That’s a fact. When countries arm up there is a much higher chance of a conflict happening that can’t be rolled back.

[sneak]

> The US has a much higher gun murder rate per capita than most other high income countries. It’s in fact near the top with active war zones.

This is markedly untrue in most parts of the USA, including the most heavily armed ones. Almost all of the gun murders in the USA are in 3 or 4 extremely high crime (and high poverty) counties.

Dozens of other counties that have gun ownership rates 2-10x higher per capita have much much much less violence. It isn’t the guns unless you generalize entire USA to a single socioeconomic bucket.

The “more guns = more violence” narrative is simple and easy to understand. It’s also false. “more poverty = more violence” is actually correlated. Guns and violence are, if anything, loosely inversely correlated.

More people shoot themselves willingly and deliberately each year in the USA than are murdered by guns, to put it in perspective.

[psychoslave]

Not every phenomenon is only cause on one side and only consequence on the other side, multiplexed feedback loops are often more appropriate models.

More poverty, more fears, more will to be perceived as an unbeatable threat no one dare to attack, more actual aggression fueled by us vs them mentality, more tragedies. Rinse and repeat.

Also having bad outcomes of a social structure being geographically condensed doesn’t mean they are decoupled from causal inter-dependencies with the places where all the happy shiny outcomes is jealously isolated.