Shooting in San Bernadino
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@scottalanmiller said:
This was the second mass shooting in the US today and the 355th so far this year. Mass shootings in the US are truly routine at this point.
You know Europe, here is very difficult to get a gun, I've never understand why is so easy buy a gun in USA.
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@iroal said:
@scottalanmiller said:
This was the second mass shooting in the US today and the 355th so far this year. Mass shootings in the US are truly routine at this point.
You know Europe, here is very difficult to get a gun, I've never understand why is so easy buy a gun in USA.
Lots of reasons. Big ones are a difference in priorities. We had a long discussion about gun control in this forum and while no one came to agreement, one of the most important things that we learned was that most people on one side felt that safety was the priority but just as many people felt that being safe wasn't worth not being allowed the freedom to own guns. To Europeans this would be very hard to understand, but a great many Americans, I think, truly feel that gun ownership is simply more important than the potential safety that would come from removing it. I've also heard it said, literally in these terms, that the illusion of being in control (by owning a gun in this case) for some people is worth more than actual safety including the safety of their family. This is important because they were not saying that they felt that being in control would protect them but that they felt that the feeling of losing that control was so awful that they would be willing to increase the risk to their family's safety to maintain the illusion.
It is easy to argue that gun control wouldn't promote safety. It is difficult to argue for it when safety isn't the priority and gun freedom or illusion of control are considered more valuable (not that safety isn't valuable, just less valuable.) It's a different fundamental value system than Europeans would understand. And a key reason why I choose to raise my children in Europe.
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Also, the US has long existed (forever, in fact) with little to no gun control. Europe already has few guns, it's not an existing issue. In the US, guns are literally everywhere. You stumble on them, you find them. Look in a drawer, a purse, a glove box and there they are. There are just everywhere. So introducing gun control, even incredibly strict gun control, could take decades or even generations to begin to have a good effect. The amount of guns just floating around, often with no controls, is so high that getting the existing guns out of the system would take potentially forever, more or less.
For an extremely long time, you'd be asking good, honest people to turn in their guns while criminals would still have essentially unlimited access to them. You would not get positive results within a single political term and the US lives and dies by short term gains and is designed from the ground up to not have a political system capable of "investing in the future." So there is little to no possible means of enacting the kinds of gun control in the US that makes much of the world with gun control so much safer without first overthrowing the government.
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@scottalanmiller said:
So there is little to no possible means of enacting the kinds of gun control in the US that makes much of the world with gun control so much safer without first overthrowing the government.
Assuming that the current government is overthrown... how do we know the new government would be any better than our current one? We, The People decide we don't like the new government either... How do we fight back? They have all the guns.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
So there is little to no possible means of enacting the kinds of gun control in the US that makes much of the world with gun control so much safer without first overthrowing the government.
Assuming that the current government is overthrown... how do we know the new government would be any better than our current one? We, The People decide we don't like the new government either... How do we fight back? They have all the guns.
No one said assurance - only that the current government does not allow for changes to the status quo by design. So a new government is the first step, but it might not be the only one.
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@dafyre said:
We, The People decide we don't like the new government either... How do we fight back? They have all the guns.
How many governments have been overthrown in the developed world with guns? How many without guns?
I don't believe that there is any precedence that guns allow for overthrowing governments. That's an assumption that has not held up in the real world.
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Is there any case where guns have been used to put in a new government of the people? Or only for dictators?
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And is there any case where the people having guns were able to overthrow the government?
Considering we are talking about the people vs. the military - the logic that we need guns to stop the military would suggest that we need bombers, fighter jets, machine guns, mortars, howitzers, tanks and more, too. Guns won't do it, we need an opposing irregular military force equal to or greater than the actual regular military.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And is there any case where the people having guns were able to overthrow the government?
Considering we are talking about the people vs. the military - the logic that we need guns to stop the military would suggest that we need bombers, fighter jets, machine guns, mortars, howitzers, tanks and more, too. Guns won't do it, we need an opposing irregular military force equal to or greater than the actual regular military.
That is assuming the US military would decide to fight and kill their own people. Although, I am sure there are more drones in service then we could even fathom.
In April 2006, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessed the F-22's cost to be $361 million per aircraft, with $28 billion invested in development and testing; the Unit Procurement Cost was estimated at $178 million in 2006, based on a production run of 181 aircraft.
How many drones could the government buy with just $361 million? It's a scary high number when you think about it.
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@scottalanmiller said:
And is there any case where the people having guns were able to overthrow the government?
Considering we are talking about the people vs. the military - the logic that we need guns to stop the military would suggest that we need bombers, fighter jets, machine guns, mortars, howitzers, tanks and more, too. Guns won't do it, we need an opposing irregular military force equal to or greater than the actual regular military.
The Iraqi and Syrian Army have aircraft and tanks. ISIS is doing a pretty good job against them with guns.
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I'm not saying that the idea of having guns to protect us from the government is a bad one, that's why we have guns in the first place. Only that in the real world, it does not hold up or apply in a country where there is a military. In the 1700s when muskets were all that people had, farmers with guns were reasonably able to stop soldiers with guns because the farmers outnumbered them by such a huge degree and the presumption was that lots of military would turn on their government to support any farmer uprising.
But in the real world of the 21st century, a popular militant uprising of the people would have a few problems:
- The group that has the guns is also the same group that supports the military. It would be about power by force, not a government of the people.
- The country is heavily divided and any uprising would be neighbour against neighbour, not the people against the government. For 250 years, the nation has been divided in such a way that a popular uprising is impossible. At best it would be a communist style overthrow of the people with the government consolidating power moreso that it is.
- The military would simply take over. The people would have no ability to slow them down from mowing the country down.
- Best case scenario we would end up like Syria today.
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@IRJ said:
The Iraqi and Syrian Army have aircraft and tanks. ISIS is doing a pretty good job against them with guns.
Right, if the goal is torture and destruction of human life and not a new government of the people, you can do it. If the goal is to set up a new, functional government of the people you cannot.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Is there any case where guns have been used to put in a new government of the people? Or only for dictators?
New governments, yes...New people in power, absolutely! New governments of the people, yea, not so much. One half trying to overthrow the other half just makes for a long and bloody fight... and then when that fight is over, the losers are resentful and the cycle begins again (especially over in the Middle east)...
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Guns don't kill people, People kill people.
When a drunk kills someone, do you blame the car?
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So if we assume that people want to keep guns because they want to tear the country apart and inflict fear in the populace and don't care about having a functional country at the end and that the goal is not for the people but for a new government to "own" the people through the use of guns, yes, we should let people keep their guns.
And in Syria keep in mind that they only took over once the government had collapsed, not while it was functional.
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@anonymous said:
Guns don't kill people, People kill people.
When a drunk kills someone, do you blame the car?
No one blamed guns.
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@anonymous said:
Guns don't kill people, People kill people.
When a drunk kills someone, do you blame the car?
The government tried to take away Alcohol too... see how well that worked out? lol. Some of you would be most unhappy if Uncle Sam shut down the breweries spread across the US.
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@scottalanmiller @iroal made it seems like the issue was that guns are easy to get in the USA. Guns are the issue, people are the issue.
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@dafyre said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Is there any case where guns have been used to put in a new government of the people? Or only for dictators?
New governments, yes...New people in power, absolutely! New governments of the people, yea, not so much. One half trying to overthrow the other half just makes for a long and bloody fight... and then when that fight is over, the losers are resentful and the cycle begins again (especially over in the Middle east)...
That's the problem. Not that guns can't shake things up, they just don't shake things up with a positive outcome. The freedom to have guns increases the risk of losing all freedoms entirely.
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