Thousand Oaks shooting

[Montmorency]

Well, it kinda goes hand in hand. The same state of mind that leads to the refusal to restrict guns could just be responsible for the high amount of crimes that need to be warded off with guns. In other words, the guns are necessary for protection because of the mindset that says violence is the problem solver.

The comparison with Honduras, El Salvador, Jamaica and the Ivory Coast is funny because three of those countries probably only have so much violence because of the US. Every drug war in South America is mostly financed from the US and probably provided with all the weapons that just disappear in the US due to the lack of proper oversight. Surely illegal weapons also exist elsewhere, but the amount of weapons "trickling down" from the US is probably magnitudes larger:
https://www.rand.org/news/press/2017/07/19.html
https://www.insightcrime.org/news/br...brazil-report/

So basically that link compares developing nations to a (supposedly) developed one and elegantly ignores that the developed nation is the root cause of many of the issues plaguing these developing nations, which are obviously less well equipped to deal with the issues due to their development status (and potentially their large dependence on and influence from said developed nation that sees them as quasi-colonies in many ways).

And as for comparisons to Britain, would it be a good idea then to give all these knife attackers guns instead?
They also note the second criticism themselves: "** Comparing violent crime between two countries can sometimes be difficult as each nation defines it differently"

But they had to put it in there for all the people who don't bother to read the fine print I guess.

As for the gun ownership rate and gun ownership preventing crimes, they should show some statistics about how many crimes are stopped by armed citizens in Germany and Switzerland. Being proud of how armed citizens kill more criminals than the police is also absurd. Germany has a lower crime rate than the US and FAR fewer criminals are killed by police (I'm guessing close to none by armed citizens). So that site is just making stuff up IMO.

It's especially great when the US makes military arms sales to countries in Latin America, and then cartels and gangs either loot the arsenals for military-grade equipment, or buy it off corrupt officials.

I like how people dying to guns is described as "criminals killed". That's what it's all about, eh, the Dirty Harry fantasy of being a "big man"?

T egregious bit of propaganda about the town in Georgia requiring all households keep a gun, therefore causing burglary rates to drop. Yeah, turns out to be BS. The law was a purely symbolic measure in reaction to gun control trends, there is no data presented on the gun ownership rate in Kennesaw, Georgia over time, and the "drop in burglaries" is an example of lying with statistics because 10 to 50 burglaries per year is a very small sample size, and crime dropped all over Georgia throughout that period and for years afterward.

There isn't even a pretense of rigor here, it's Prager University-tier.

There's a more troubling assumption here however: the rights (they believe) are afforded by the 2nd Amendment are so important, that it would be valid for the government, under force of law, to demand that private citizens keep them. Every law, as you know, being ultimately backed by the threat of state violence. IOW, 'keep guns or we'll gun you down' is legitimate and appropriate. Holy fuck, what happened to government overreach? Just the fact that gun advocates would believe such a law to be good in theory is lunacy.


EDIT: Hi Seamus, I hope you haven't found my posts this week standoffish (or more than usual, at least). I'm always interested in hearing your responses.

There is an example of an ostensibly correct application of "2nd Amendment solutions" in American history, in the extremely American Battle of Athens in 1946. Facing a level of corruption and authoritarianism from their local government that would incite riots in most of contemporary Russia if replicated there, local WW2 veterans determined that they would vote the offenders out and met guns with guns when the local machine grandees tried to stop them by fraud and threats. They stopped the fraud, pulled off the electoral landslide, and overthrew the machine. Somehow, no one was killed despite many injuries, thus preserving family-friendliness for any prospective PG film adaptation.

Ralph Duggan, who had served in the Pacific in the Navy and became a leading lawyer in the postwar period, "thought a lot more about McMinn County than he did about the Japs. If democracy was good enough to put on the Germans and the Japs, it was good enough for McMinn County, too!"

Unfortunately the progress proved ephemeral, but, well, that's America for you.

The new GI government of Athens quickly encountered challenges including the re-emergence of old party loyalties.[35] On January 4, 1947, four of the five leaders of the GI Non-Partisan League declared in an open letter: "We abolished one machine only to replace it with another and more powerful one in the making."[36] The GI government of Athens, Tennessee collapsed. Tennessee's GI political movement quickly faded and politics in the state returned to normal.[15][37] The Non-Partisan GI Political League had replied to inquires by veterans elsewhere in the United States with the advice that shooting it out was not the most desirable solution to political problems.