Is there a such thing, ever in the course of real human history of a real country, anywhere that was without weapons truly safe and free for long? If so, why don’t you move there?
Yeah, if you don’t like America you can git out!
surely there are many countries relatively safe and free, no where is perfect. reason for not moving there is, lack of suitable passport , economy might be less attractive. or simply because of the lack of friends and family there. NZ for example, low crime rate, nice climate, stable democracy. Very few weapons so much safer. Anywhere that has restricted weapons laws will give you a much lower chance of getting shot of course. (look at any statistics)
Great username/post combo.
Costa Rica abolished its entire military back in the Forties, and it’s as safe and free as anywhere you could name. Many American ex-pats have indeed moved there.
I should add that the most serious external military threat to its independence was a filibuster led by an American.
Fantasy liberal countries?
Well, the Shire is fairly liberal in terms of political and economic systems, although its citizens tend to be social conservatives. Rivendell and Lothlorien seem to be the opposite - social liberals, like all elves, but with the the government and economy under the control of multi-thousand-year-old absolute monarchs. Gondor and Rohan probably lie somewhere in the middle.
I was going to mention Tanya Huff, Diane Duane, Martha Wells and a few others too.
Siena under the governance of The Nine might count too.
Iceland’s military consists of a three-ship Coast Guard and a 55 man special police force. No one seems to be in huge rush to conquer them.
The name of the country is “Iceland”. At least Greenland has the decency to pretend to be something other than a frozen, troll infested wasteland.
There are actually quite a few countries with no standing military. If your a small country next to a big country, there isn’t really a point. It’s not like Andorra could stop France or Spain from conquering it even if it spent 100% of its GDP on an army.
I have this sense that when the OP refers to “weapons”, he doesn’t mean in the hands of the military.
In that case, while it’s not a particularly liberal country, private gun ownership is extremely rare and very tightly regulated in Japan. Japan also has a very low rate of violent crime. I did move there after college to work as an English teacher and felt very safe.
I moved back to the US because as a foreign national who wasn’t fluent in Japanese I had limited opportunities to continue my education or advance my career. But as far as daily life goes, there are definitely things I don’t do here that I felt comfortable doing in Japan, like carrying large quantities of cash in my wallet or walking several blocks to a convenience store by myself late at night to get a snack.
Haiti and Panama also have no militaries, as does Mauritius. Though I wouldn’t recommend moving to Haiti, the other two seem reasonably good places to live.
In the UK, Ireland, and Australia, private ownership of weapons is very rare, and there’s free speech. In most of the Middle East, private ownership of weapons is common, but there’s no free speech. Given those choices, where would you prefer to live? And what does that say about what actually defends the freedom of a society?
Yes, but that’s the luxury of a low-threat environment. Imagine if Israel disarmed its military entirely. The country probably wouldn’t last a year.
The most important thing to keep in mind here is alliances. Iceland might not have much of a military, but it is part of NATO and IIRC they have a treaty involving the US providing defense for them.
There are over amillion gunsin New Zealand in private ownership (population 4.4 million). To own them one must be granted a licence, which requires a background check and an inspection of where you’re going to keep them. I don’t think that meets the OP’s requirement of being “without weapons”.
Impossible. If guns had been licensed for any length of time, the NZ government would have taken the next step and confiscated them all by now. That’s just the way it works, as any NRA member can tell you.
There are PLENTY of Conservative fantasy countries. Simply put, we’d rather you went first.
Jack Handey lends support to the OP:
We register the owners’ not the guns. That way there’s a convenient database of all god-fearing gun owners for when the NWO round-ups get under way.
Countries with functioning governments, affordable health care and decent consumer protections and labor laws are very hard to get into. Unless you are a refugee from oppression, which I am not.
Why don’t you move to a more conservative country if you don’t like the direction liberals are trying to take the US?
Costa Rica doesn’t have a military, but I wouldn’t call it a liberal paradise. They do have universal health care though.
Even if a country doesn’t have a military, it still has defense in the form of police. Every nation needs some kind of enforcement arm.