Any analysis of individual arming decisions must account for purely individual reasons to own guns (e.g., for use in hunting) and the cost of possible confrontations that are ubiquitous in society and, depending on others’ arming decisions, can involve guns (e.g., fear of a confrontation with an armed neighbor).
The non-paranoid sportsman is a shrinking demographic, I fear, mostly due to decades of propaganda within the sportsman culture (magazines, organizations).
They still exist within academic and reservationist circles, but the grand majority of gun owners I know in my rural backcountry speak pretty matter-of-factly about racist and anti-social ideas (source: friends, family, and going to bars called things like Rusty’s, Bill’s, etc.)
I got my hunter's safety card back just before covid. Prior to the actual course starting, our instructors spent a good 15 minutes "encouraging" us to join the NRA because "they're really trying to take our guns, blah blah". This was in "liberal" California. When I had last taken the course as a kid in my home state of Oregon, in a conservative majority town, there was never any kind of propaganda that I can recall of this level.
I think with younger shooters there are many people who enjoy 3 gun and other modern match style sort of tactical shooting or cowboy action without obsessively carrying or planning for defensive use. But I don't think these folks overlap with the hunter-type sportsman. And do overlap with the "tacticool" folks. Don't know if that translates to rural though.
The attempted (failed) fascist takeover of Minneapolis by ICE motivated plenty of new and existing gun owners. It is not reasonable to call that fear paranoia, and it's not about the sport. The fact that it failed doesn't mean that chapter of history is over, just that lessons will be learned and it will be a more difficult situation next time unless there are some really substantial changes we see no evidence of yet.
Isn’t there a massive body of research that indicates gun ownership is less safe on average that non-ownership? Ie the chance of accidental shooting of family/friends is high enough to offset any benefit (on average across the US)?
Teen suicide in households with a gun is a very interesting stat to bring up for this. Suicide in general is higher for gun owners, which can be handwaved away as “that’s my right”. But suicide is higher for children of gun owners? That seems like a tough risk to justify.
The thing is there's such a breadth of circumstances and behaviors involved that pigeonholing it under one giant banner is questionable. Like the people who leave loaded guns in random drawers around their houses are doing something very different with a different risk profile. Whereas once you get to teens in households that have guns and generally practice some level of safe storage it's a much more complex issue IMO. Because as a society we want teens to become responsible enough to handle things like cars, or power tools, or guns. But we also know that they're not adults yet. And we know that infantilization of teens isn't going to do anyone favors in the long run. So it's probably not as simple as ban cars and ban guns or whatever else.
There's a problem with statistics for this and many other things.
Guns attract idiots, idiots have idiot gun problems, it does not follow that if you get a gun, you'll have the same problems.
Similar statistics are easy to fool people with. Doing $expensive_thing is associated with health/wealth/success so if everybody did it everybody would be better off! But in reality there's just a selection bias and whatever the thing is just attracts rich people and the thing has no actual effect. For example: do a study of people who wear sunglasses to find the association between mortality and the price of the sunglasses you wear.
How many people are actually studying gun ownership without intentionally looking for one result or the other? It attracts a tremendous about of bias in both directions and not a lot of genuine curiousity.
Motorcycles are somewhat like this - they're both more dangerous than cars in terms of whether you might get into an accident of any sort. But however bad they are in that sense is amplified by how many people use them like utter idiots: I've lost count of the people I've seen on them in shorts and flip-flops, let alone without a helmet, not to mention people racing them and popping wheelies at racing speeds on 35mph streets.
The problem I have with "safetyism" is it comes across as something you can say about cars, knives, power tools, skis, hang gliders, and so many other things. Like do I buy that even though ski deaths are lower in non-skiing households, just like gun deaths are in non shooting ones, that it's less impactful and important than the same effect with guns? Sure. But it's also a conversation that is soooo patronizing in a ridiculous way that it really seems like a double standard. And so much of it seems disingenuous. Like do we focus on enabling safe storage and mental health safety with guns or making it harder? On making kids and families more knowledgeable and safer around guns or just amping up the anxiety and fear?
> Like do we focus on enabling safe storage and mental health safety with guns or making it harder? On making kids and families more knowledgeable and safer around guns or just amping up the anxiety and fear?
The only way to move forward is through good faith efforts of the former and stopping the lobby groups from doing the latter.
Power tools are intentionally dangerous too. A reasonable person wouldn't take anyone who talks about how a household with power tools is less safe on average seriously either. Or one who moves the goalpost to battleships.
I personally control my life by spending almost all of my income, after bills, towards expanding the elaborate tower-defense-like automated weaponry on my plot of land. If I must leave my fort, I always drive my T-34 into town (I'm saving up for a Sherman).
I'm kind of curious as to how you justify this. I personally think its ok for people to have arms, but I don't personally believe in basic human rights. Where would such things even come from? Rights are just conventions which ought to serve whatever goods you are interested in. Unless you believe in god or some other thing like that, there really is no way to justify rights except relative to some other stated goal.
I will point to two items. One, an interview I had. Two, a footnote in history.
1: I own a gun because a disarmed populace is required for genocide and should it come around again, I’m not going to be that guy. I’m not going to be standing on the side.
Any analysis of individual arming decisions must account for purely individual reasons to own guns (e.g., for use in hunting) and the cost of possible confrontations that are ubiquitous in society and, depending on others’ arming decisions, can involve guns (e.g., fear of a confrontation with an armed neighbor).