There's a saying, "An armed society is a polite society."
The reason is because of perceived threat. If very few people are armed, people are more likely to act a fool because they don't fear the consequences from npcs. Risk taking along these lines increases as does the physical delta. But as the probability of random npc folks carrying approaches one, suddenly there is a very real chance that acting a fool carries permanent consequences.
And now consider other situations that tend to be heated where folks overreact: road rage, etc. Folks may be less likely to escalate things when they believe the other party has the ability to respond with deadly force.
This same hypothesis applies to mugging. While the mugger may get the drop on their victim, others nearby that are armed may be able to appropriately intervene to stop the initial assault.
Allowing the general public to not only be armed but carry the same stopping force as the baddies reduces the imbalance, leveling the playing field.
And as usual Americans fail to spot that they have one of the best armed and least polite societies in the world. I'd put the case that a polite society is unarmed.
> I'd put the case that a polite society is unarmed
The supreme irony lies in the fact that this statement is completely reversed from the real state of things: it is a pathologically impolite society that feels it necessary to arm itself, against itself. Unhealthy tolerance and passivity toward mundane, petty assholery and dominance-seeking behavior is going to destroy this country.
This is not actually true. The level of violent crime in 99% of the USA is the same or lower as most other developed countries.
For reference, more people kill themselves with guns in the USA than are killed by other people with guns. If gun violence were truly a huge problem, you'd think that suicides would be outnumbered by gun murders, but they're not.
The numbers look big because it's a country of 330 million people, but ultimately the number of people killed with guns is pretty low (and it's something that can actually safely be completely ignored if you remove gang-on-gang and drug trade related violence, which is the vast majority of firearms deaths). For example, Obama killed more children with drones in 8 years than children were killed with guns in the USA in 20 years. (In both cases we are talking about absolute figures <1000.)
The "USA has a gun violence problem" is one of those "everybody knows" memes, however, so good luck convincing anyone to the contrary.
You make it sound like suicide is totally fine and harmless. Isn't it shocking that lots of people kill themselves with guns?
Because that's the thing with guns: they make killing easy. They also make suicide trivial. I know people who have struggled with depression and survived multiple suicide attempts. If they had access to guns, I don't think they'd be alive right now.
The numbers don't just look big because the US is a large country. Corrected for population size, gun violence in the US is still at least an order of magnitude larger than in other countries. I know of no other country where schools practice shooter drills.
> For example, Obama killed more children with drones in 8 years than children were killed with guns in the USA in 20 years. (In both cases we are talking about absolute figures <1000.)
That does not seem to be even remotely true. Not for any part of that claim. Well, maybe the part about children killed by drone strikes being less than 1000, because I can't find figures about that, but the number of civilians killed by drone strikes in the last 20 years seems to be 10k-20k.
According to [0], 31780 children have been killed by guns between 2000 and 2020. According to [1], the number of children dying from firearms is rising and now larger than the number of children dying from cars or cancer.
Your entire suggestion that people killed by guns is not really a problem sounds incredibly callous about human life.
You want to talk about callous? Calling people who commit suicide "Killers" is callous (https://concealedcarrykillers.org/). Using suicides to pad statistics to push magazine capacity bans or bans on ergonomic features is callous. You pretending that children being pushed to take their own lives is the same as being killed as bystanders in gang violence or killed in school shootings just so it can be all called "gun violence" is callous.
I am not the person in this conversation who was suggesting that people killing themselves was not so bad. Are you suggesting it's callous to take suicide seriously?
Sorry, but your rhetorical trickery over people's lives is sickening.
