Are you are deliberately not understanding, Terrifel or I am explaining very badly. I’ll go with the latter.
You seem to be saying that my argument that an armed populace reduces the likelihood of police abuses of rights is false, because those abuses don’t happen in Canada and the UK. I’m saying that is a fallacious line of argument on your part. I am saying that ceteris paribus an armed populace is a deterrent against police abuse of rights.
That is why I used the crime rates example. I hear often that Italy, for example, has a lower crime rate than the US, and that the US has a higher gun ownership rate, therefore the guns must be the cause of the higher crime rate. It’s a specious argument because you aren’t comparing equals. It’s just as specious as the argument claiming the death penalty isn’t a deterrent (which I don’t believe it is) because Texas has a higher murder rate than Rhode Island.
The number of doors that gets kicked down in any one country is not relevant. All I am arguing is that fewer doors get kicked down in country X with gun ownership by private citizens than would be the case in country X without gun ownership by private citizens.
Now, of course, this works within limits. If the police are part of a regime set on genocide of a particular group, for example, I don’t think being armed will help that group much any more (though I doubt it would hurt them). And as I said, I haven’t lived in Canada. But I did find the police significantly less respectful of rights in the UK than in the US. I’ve still got a scar to prove it (to myself obviously, not claiming my personal experiences form some sort of proof in other terms).
That the kid gets kicked out of the strip club because the law says he has to be 18, and that there’s apparently no similar law for gun shows, which is silly.
You think American cops are more polite than English ones? You’re nuts. Or the cops in your area are totally not representative. I’ve dealt with police officers in six states and only one of them wasn’t a dick- and he was my roommate.
There isn’t a cite. There simply can’t be for what I am saying, because I can’t think of an experiment you could perform to demonstrate it - it’s purely talking in the abstract. And your point as to drug dealers etc is well taken. I’m assuming that those groups would be expected to be armed regardless of the legality of private weapons ownership.
My sole argument here is that private gun ownership gives the authorities a reason to be wary of private individuals. And that wariness leads, on the part of the agents of said authorities, to a lesser willingness to violate the rights of those individuals. I don’t see it as that outlandish an argument.
And I’m not American either, just a very polite Brit…
It isn’t “politeness” that keeps the police from kicking in your door. The police don’t say, “Well, I’d sure as hell kick in that guy’s door, but I’ll be polite about it and knock instead.” I’m sorry, but that’s not sound reasoning.
They kick in doors, generally, because taking people by surprise means those same people have less time to get a gun or other weapon or to escape, etc. It has nothing to do with how polite the police are; it has to do with what the police see as the risks of the encounter.
And if the homeowner starts brandishing a weapon, I guarantee you that the risks of that encounter just went through the fucking ROOF. It’s also been demonstrated quite a few times that the police are a bit trigger happy, and for good reason, just knowing that a lot of people are armed. Amadou Diallo is an excellent example.
So, no. I reject the idea that having a gun in any way protects me from the police. I don’t have the right to shoot the police or brandish my weapon at the police even if I have the right to have the gun.
I’ve dealt with police in five states, and not had any major problems. I have had major problems with British cops. I also much prefer the legal protections I receive under US law to those available under British law. Not that I am saying the UK is a police state, of course - far from it.
FWIW, I took Chinese history in college, my preofessor had spent 5+ years working in China for the State Department, he had plenty of photos of your average Chinese redneck riding around on a motorcycle with a rifle strapped to his back. So, apparently, guns aren’t completely restricted in China, and they’ve got an authoritarian government.
Well, I promise that I am not deliberately misunderstanding you. Though I do confess to posting under the influence of multiple migraine medications, which does nothing to ameliorate my natural stupidity (stare at the computer screen for minutes at at a time! That should help!) And I appreciate the attempt at explanation.
Your initial remark, that an armed population means less likelihood of police abuse, did not seem like an inarguably unambiguous relationship to me (though I can buy into it a lot more easily than the notion that guns are still protecting us from incursions by the Spanish Empire). Of course if you’ve been the victim of police abuse in the UK and not in the US, I can understand why you might see it that way.
A question, related to your mention of permanent scarring at police hands: do you reckon that your particular experience with UK police would have gone better if they thought you were armed? Or if the same events had played out with US police instead?
That looks fine in theory. In practice, however, the high incidence of armed citizens has escalated the police tactics, to make sure the officers stay on top of the situation. The pseudo-military entry methods used in no-knock warrants (which aren’t anything resembling polite) are a direct consequence of the high number of firearms in circulation and the subsequent high risk of encountering armed people. More, not fewer doors are kicked in.
Even a simple traffic stop is now has elements of a high-tension stand-off because the officer is forced to think in terms of sudden use of firearms. In Denmark, if I’m pulled over, I can safely reach for my wallet or get out of my car. Same in Germany. Not so in the US. I’d better stay in my car with my hands on the wheel.
“An armed society is a polite society” is simply not true.
The scarring isn’t 100% at police hands. It was the result of climbing over a falling spiked fence so as to protect Mr Brain from an introduction to Mr Riot Baton.
In that situation, being armed would have not been a benefit. My experience of police in the US in crowd control situations has been significantly better than that in the US. But in the interest of full disclosure, my behavior in the US has been generally rather different to that in the UK. Not that I was a criminal there by any means. But I did attend a lot of demonstrations, and many a Saturday I would come in contact with large numbers of police (and if you ask most football fans in the UK, they tended at that time not to be over enamored with policing methods)
I’m knocking on 40 now. My formative years were spent with the politicization of the UK police forces under the witch Thatcher. I just have never got that impression from US police.
This whole huge tangent comes from a simple point I was trying to make - it isn’t sufficient to say that guns don’t protect against tyranny because individuals can’t fight back against a full scale, military backed, facist takeover. That would be tyranny for sure, but tyranny is a sliding scale. I recognize there are counter arguments to what I am saying, but I think the argument that guns protect against against police/government infringements of civil liberties is a hell of a lot stronger than the argument that private ownership of guns is the sole bulwark against Bush cancelling the election and rolling the tanks down Main Street.
Sorry about the migraine. Think, if you had a .45, you could permanently prevent them! (Side effects may include bleeding and death)
As individuals, we can choose our interactions a lot more than the police can. If I see someone with a gun, I can avoid that person, or I can be more polite if I think the person might shoot me, or I can avoid breaking into his house if I think he might shoot me. All of these might be ways in which guns make an individual safer or happier.
But the individual cop doesn’t have the same set of choices. We don’t want the individual making the decision just to avoid people with guns, for example. Instead, the police has to confront a certain number of people who may or may not be armed, and they have to try to make those confrontations as safe as possible for themselves.
Both groups, then, can try to maximize their safety, but one group is still compelled to deal with the armed citizen.
Generally speaking, I’d guess that even in citizen-to-citizen contact the presence of guns would tend to escalate violence rather than dampen it, but that’s just a guess based on the dickishness and idiocy of people in general.
Ah. Well, I suppose that would be jurisdictional, but I’ve seen kids in bars way more often than I’m comfortable with, so maybe the law isn’t so strict in that regard. I agree generally with the 18 at a gun show idea though.
Maybe we’re reading Heinlein’s quote wrong. Everyone I know that legally carries a gun on a regular basis is unfailingly polite in person (I admit to being a dick online, but it’s rare that I’m impolite face-to-face). No one wants to shoot anyone, no one wants to be responsible for escalating a simple incident, no one starts blasting away at someone that cut them off in traffic. In my experience, that is.
Maybe there are a few people out there that really think carrying (legally) makes them tough and they go around looking for trouble, but most of us don’t. Police ramp up their tactics to deal with lawbreakers. Without a magic wand to make all guns go away all at once all around the world, lawbreakers will have guns. Passing laws to ban things that aren’t used by criminals isn’t going to help, contrary to popular belief.
I would have thought that being at demonstrations might color your impression of British police just a tad. I, on the other hand, have never dealt with the police over anything more tense than a traffic stop, but I’m scared of American cops in a way that I simply don’t have to worry about with British ones.
Here in Topeka we just had a three year old kid die of a gunshot wound, under circumstances that aren’t entirely clear. Whatever was really going on a toddler is dead.
villa, if the armed populace is intended to be an impediment to the expansion of the police state, I’d say it has been shown to have failed miserably over the past 8 years.
We’ve had a dramatic expasion of the invasive powers of the government that the armed populace has not done a thing to stop. In fact, I’d venture to say that the more armed portion of the populace has in fact tended to support it. Certainly the NRA has supported those politicians most responsible for it.
The expanding police state will not involve kicking down your door until it is much, much too late to stop it. Does the armed populace only care about abusive governmental powers when it involves physical harm to front doors?
Could there be some kind of design flaw in Uzis? (Regular, Mini, or Micro) I’ve shot a full auto full size Uzi before, and I thought you had to keep the back of the grip depressed to fire the thing. If the gun rotated upwards to the point of being aimed at your head, I would think the pressure on the safety switch would stop the fire. I recall a case a couple of years back where a gun store employee was killed putting a full auto Uzi in a safe, which would be pretty hard to do with the extra grip safety, unless it was a suicide sanitized out of respect for the guy’s family.
Are the full-auto Uzi’s in the US original Israeli Military Industry equipment, or are the home builds? Might there be something in the design that causes the extra safety to fail, and the gun fire until it’s dry?
Of course, I’m not saying that children should have machineguns only if they are of good design and build, just pondering the circumstances.
Knocking on 40 now? Then you were not long into your twenties when Thatcher ceased to be PM (1991). Pardon me if I don’t weight your maturity or judgment then too highly.
