All the available evidence says you are quite wrong about the relative risk, unless you are the type who goes around breaking into the homes of random crazy-ass white people and daring them to kill you. The vast majority of white gun owners never harm anyone, that’s a simple fact.
You almost certainly interact with people carrying weapons every day. But they aren’t telling you, because there’s no reason for you to know; so you only know about the nutsos.
You have to be kidding me. That was irony, right?
Yes! I love my Avatar avatar, made for me right here on BB.
I don’t need a gun unless I’m running out of meat. Not even then unless I’m in a hurry. Guns aren’t creative.
Yes! There have been many throughout history. I gotta go, but this has actually been discussed at length on BB before, so I can recommend a search of the archives.
Data please? I’m as unhappy about the abuse of power and overuse of violence as anybody, but let’s be real.
Fixed that.
The biggest difference between the US and most other 1st world constabularies is here they’re ALL armed, and fully expecting, and reasonably so given 300m guns in the nation, a good many of the people they encounter to be armed also. Every encounter is therefore potentially lethal.
You ignore the deterrence effect of catching the lawbreakers. That is a form of protection. I can tell you that deterrence matters from experience in my city where cops have basically stopped giving traffic violations. Pedestrian and driver safety has plummeted when there is simply no expectation of enforcement. In a neighboring, wealthier town people drive completely differently, pedestrians step into a crosswalk assuming cars will stop for them not cowering there in terror. This evening I watched 3 cars ahead of me refuse to let a 13 year old kid cross, and that was at a stop sign! So my little taste of traffic anarchy does not make me itch for a complete absence of law enforcement.
Fellow white citizens scare me. Remember how much we complained earlier in this topic about US police only having a few months of training? Guess how much training other white people with guns have?
If it is a choice between “police with guns” and “random white people with guns”, I will take the former every time.
If there is a choice for nobody having guns, I will gladly take that when it is available as the preferred and best choice.
Why are you attempting to divert a debate about a very real and obvious crisis of murderous police impunity into an attack on a strawman?
You will find calls for the total abolition of policing in radical circles (often with the intention of replacing the function of police with a more voluntary, community-based system), but I have seen almost nobody suggesting such a thing on the BBS. This is not a particularly radical place.
“American police departments are so heavily infiltrated by the extreme right that they are now effectively a racist gang, and should be rebuilt from scratch” is not the same thing as “abolish police forever”.
That situation did not happen by accident. It is deliberately manufactured by the police, in order to disguise their crimes and maintain their impunity.
Note, all this evidence is despite underreporting that we know exists, that we know favors law enforcement. I’m convinced it’s actually far worse.
And yet, cops have it better than ever before, in terms of on-the-job safety!
I don’t want to scoff at your personal experience, and I won’t claim your observations are invalid - first person reports are real data - but every attempt I know of to find a significant “deterrence” effect from criminal punishment has foundered hard. Researchers usually end up postulating that murder, theft, rape, and other major crimes are not committed by people who are carefully considering the consequences of being caught.
Are you sure? Because it sounds more like you are afraid of your peers having access to weapons. That’s not a problem with your peers.
In any case, you have to conquer fear to be a brave person - so you have a significant opportunity here. I am not afraid of guns, so I can’t be courageous about their inescapable ubiquity. Courage is a very admirable and useful quality. I may be saying this badly, but I’m completely 100% serious, this is not intended to belittle or offend you.
That’s not logical; there are more guns than citizens in the USA, but the only people you see routinely shooting children and unarmed innocents and facing no punishment are police. Your fear is unreasoned, like so many human fears.
If you live in the USA, that is not a choice you can have without a massively oppressive and invasive surveillance state. Since guns are trivially easy to build from common grocery store materials… and tens of thousands of us know how to build them… who’s going to take them away? The police? They’d be outgunned by around 79 to 1 (source: Mother Jones).
All these data point of your studiously ignore the greater picture. Using similar logic I could say “more people die in cars than walking therefore cars are clearly not worth having and should be eliminated”.
You’re selecting conclusions. I conclude from this that deterrence works because crime is only committed by those who are unable to “carefully consider the consequences of being caught.” Those who are, don’t. I’d like to drive 90 on the turnpike, and even though I’d like to, I don’t because I can consider the consequences of losing my license to be not worth it because there is aggressive speed enforcement. Yet I do see people drive 90, so they are not making the same calculus as me. It will always be thus.
Living in a society where both police and civilians were held accountable for the routine shootings of children and unarmed innocents would be a step up.
Living in a society where routine shootings of children and unarmed innocents were all but unheard of would be better.
To accomplish the latter we have to reexamine gun ownership in the USA.
Again, there is significant research on this subject that I encourage you to seek out and examine. We’re not the first to consider this, by far!
But personally I feel that culture is the biggest and most effective deterrent to the kinds of crimes you’re referencing - societies that glorify sociopaths and narcissists and give those people the best economic options will have more sociopathic, narcissistic behaviors (such as those you’ve described) than those that glorify loving and unifying behaviors.
And fundamentally, the availability of gainful employment in your neighborhood is the best protection you have against serious crimes against persons and property. Cops are not anywhere near as effective as good jobs.
I very strongly and vociferously agree. As I keep saying, I personally don’t need police forces and would far rather they were disbanded, but I understand that’s unachievable and unrealistic right now - reform is a better goal, so I support it and won’t wast my time trying to lobby for eliminating cops.
Yes! Again, let’s band together and concentrate on doing something that nearly everyone can agree on!
<Sigh> No, we don’t. It’s been done to death already, and nothing increases gun sales and ownership more than self-described liberals talking about reducing guns sales and ownership.
This is independently verifiable fact, no matter how much you wish it wasn’t. People calling for restrictions on guns are a primary driver of gun ownership, bigger than hunting or sport. You have to be willfully blind to deny this.
If well meaning people could put aside the pro-gun and anti-gun memes that two-faced politicians promote in order to divide the populace just long enough to do something together maybe we’d have a chance of reforming the police.
