It makes suicide less likely, makes right wing mobs less lethal, and gives the government less excuse to kill people.
And a minority arming themselves just makes them a target to be smashed.
How do you figure that? A mob armed with machetes is pretty damn lethal already to anyone who’s outnumbered and unarmed.
But a much smaller mob with guns is much more lethal. Guns are used for a reason; if they weren’t more effective than machetes, people wouldn’t bother with guns.
By the same token, wouldn’t a smaller number of potential victims be able to defend themselves better if they had guns? I’m still getting the impression that the unspoken presumption of the scenario is that the attackers have guns and the defenders do not. If anything, escalating the lethality of the weapons in play if used by both sides favors the besieged minority. One of me vs. six other people is hopeless for me if we’re all unarmed; bad but not hopeless if we all have knives; better for me still if we all have pistols; and substantially better for me if we all have full-auto assault rifles. At worst I can only die once, while having a chance at inflicting disproportionate retaliation. It’s why frakkin’ North Korea can face down the USA, the most powerful military on the planet: because N.K. has a handful of nukes.
No. Guns are terrible for defense, and mainly serve as a justification for killing the minority that has them. Even if the cops have to plant one on them. The lethality of guns means that the winner of a fight tends to be whomever fires first, meaning the aggressor.
Well, a lot of people would disagree with that.
Dead people, if they actually try it.
I don’t think this principle works at the level of individuals. The lethality of guns means the advantage generally goes to the person who uses his gun first. And criminals are more willing to initiate violence than law-abiding citizens are.
I’ve heard the pro-gun argument that if everyone carried a gun there would be no crime. I don’t see this as being true. If everyone carried a gun, a mugger would just choose his target, shoot them in the back, and then steal the valuables off their dead body. What’s the defense against this? Pre-emptively shoot everyone who might be a mugger?
Supposedly the argument is that the mugger would be immediately shot by all of the other armed bystanders present, rather like a mutually assured destruction (MAD) situation on an individual level.
But while I might have bought into this when I was younger, it seems pretty unworkable to me now.
For one thing, I think if this were indeed the case, it would quickly result into people joining groups (aka gangs) for protection, and society would degenerate into gang warfare.
Unworkable indeed because even a subpar mugger isn’t going to pull his gun out and shoot somebody when there are other people around. He’ll wait until he sees a potential victim who’s alone.
Yeah. I mean, we see that right now; muggers don’t walk up and rob people who are standing on the sidewalk in view of everyone. They’re criminals, not idiots.
I’ll admit most of my direct experience was with people who failed at crime.
Which raises a couple of interesting questions.
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How many crimes did Joe Inmate succeed at before the one(s) that landed him in your care?
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Of all the folks in Joe’s old zipcode who did similar sorts of crimin’, how many end up in prison?
Said another way, how does the 80/20 rule cut here? Are we catching the 20% who do 80% of the crime, or the 80% doing 20% of the crime? Or the 2% of the folks doing 2% of the crime especially ineptly / unluckily, leaving the other 98% untouched?
My gut is we catch and convict a very small percentage of perps over a very small percentage of reported criminal events, which in turn is a very small percentage of all criminal events. I also strongly suspect the reporting rate greatly varies by severity, with malicious mischief like random vandalism or graffiti reported at a very low rate, while major crimes like homicide are reported at a very high rate.
Though that’s irrelevant to the OP, in terms of the state’s ‘monopoly’ on violence in the US. How effective an armed populace is at protecting itself is irrelevant. In practice the fact the populace is armed means the state has a far more effective monopoly on violence, in America.
Your average American small town cop has the kind of military equipment and armaments that would only be available to a handful of big city anti-terrorist officers in any other country.
The main reason for that because your average American small town cop investigating a minor crime, has the same, or more, chance of a running into a heavily armed suspect as an anti-terrorism officer investigating a major terrorist incident in any other Western country
I think you’re trivializing the escalation from assault and robbery to murder and robbery. Society wouldn’t stand for it; for those who got caught and tried we’d go back to taking the convicted after the trial out to the gallows behind the courthouse and stringing them up right then and there. That’s if they survived discovery and didn’t get lynched immediately frontier-style justice.
I’m astonished at the general tone of helplessness revealed in this thread. The presumption that the cruel and the violent would always prevail, and that those who seek to live in peace can never be anything but cowering victims. And as a corollary, that the only solution is to have an all-powerful government be the uber-cruel and violent superbully keeping the lesser riffraff in line. Government as Mafia. Do you really see yourselves as that weak and passive?
So what you’re saying now is that crime can be controlled by society and the courts. (Although I don’t see why you seem to feel lynching is a necessary part of the system.)
If that’s case then why are guns needed? If society can stop crime then individuals don’t need to.
I also feel you’ve reversed the weak and helpless argument. People who feel that society generally works and will defend them aren’t the ones who feel weak and helpless. The people who feel they need to carry a gun to protect themselves are the ones who feel they can’t depend on society and would be weak and helpless without their own personal defense.
I think this is only part of the reason. I feel a bigger reason for the militarization of our police is because corporations that make military weapons push for new markets and have the money to influence legislatures.
What I’m saying is that the proposition that we must remain unarmed so that we won’t provoke predators is the most shameful, cowardly cringing sentiment I’ve ever read on this board. It’s contemptable.
Though other countries like Britain and France have equally large defense industries (larger compared to the size of the domestic defense budget) and don’t do that.
There are few high profile anti-terrorism cops that get that treatment but your average small town bobby does not have an armored vehicle and assault rifles on hand, in case the burglar they are about to collar turns out to have a stockpile of arms big enough to supply a small army.
People having money is what provokes criminals to commit robberies.
People having guns is what makes crime more lethal.