I’m an atheist and I’d agree with part of that sentiment. Not “everyone” but I truly believe that without their faith in God and fear of punishment/not getting into heaven I think that there would be a lot of people that would be a lot less nice than they are now.
Its kind of scary to think about. Some people need a reason to be good people.
Neither do they appear to be places where “advantages of youth, size, strength, aggression, and sheer numbers are almost always decisive.”
Except that strong religious belief correlates with higher homicide rates, not lower ones. Religion doesn’t make people more moral, it makes them less.
We don’t have to imagine a world without guns. There was a time in history when that was the case for real. I don’t remember reading about nonstop rapes in the streets of Athens and Rome in ancient times. Did that happen? Maybe my history book didn’t cover that part.
Do big, burly men rape whoever they want as long they know everyone else is unarmed and smaller than them? A chair to his head would be pretty effective at making him stop.
Prove it. We’ve already tried it your way for a long time. Let’s put in a 50 year ban on guns to test that theory. In 2063, it’ll expire, and we can compare crime rates. Deal? 
This statement assumes there aren’t easy places where one can go to find unarmed criminals. Every government building, and I don’t mean the ones with armed guards like courthouses, I mean ones like civic centers, most schools, community centers, have no security and everyone’s unarmed. Since there are not daily rampages by criminals in these places, that proves that without guns, people are still generally law-abiding and not many will take a ban on guns as some kind of criminal utopia. Have some pepper spray, or a stun gun. You can still defend yourself
That speaks more about those people, that they only believe because of god, and if there was no god then it is they who would go crazy.
I’m atheist and disagree with many of the morals this society has embedded. But if tomorrow all laws against murder were eliminated, I wouldn’t go murder someone as my first deed. I’d be more worried that people would murder me
Why? It’s not that bad, now, in unarmed societies like the UK or Japan.
Hide yo’ slave, hide yo’ donkey!
Rather than guessing, you could have read the article you linked, in which he makes it clear that he’s not in favor of guns as a defense against political tyranny, but for personal self defense against criminals until such time as the police can arrive:
His support for guns clearly has nothing to do with the second amendment, or with using guns to protect ones Constitutional rights.
He’s right about the purpose of the Amendment; the idea that a basic biological function like preserving the life of oneself or one’s family needed to be guaranteed by law seemed absurd until a few decades ago. You might as well ask why there’s no amendment guaranteeing the right to breathe; anyone who would possibly question it is obviously not capable of thought.
The UK has far worse crime (as distinguished from murder) than the US, and Japan has a society so repressive that suicide is a national pasttime and essentially no checks on police or prosecutor behavior. This is like the stupid thing from the day of Newtown where people were crowing about the knife attack on a Chinese school not causing any fatalities. Yeah, we can be like those places, if you want to really BE like those places. If you think gun laws are the only component of a social structure, you’re incorrect.
Put me down for another who has no idea who Sam Harris is but just from this quote he looks pretty foolish. Regardless of what tools or weapons are available someone is going to have the advantage when it comes to violence. Guns don’t lessen that advantage, they increase it. 2 guys with clubs can enter a nightclub and beat a few people to death but 2 guys with guns can kill dozens. Obviously progun people imagine armed individuals defending themselves by shooting back. But again the increased lethality of firearms works against the progun argument. Heroic defenders with their own clubs aren’t likely to mistakenly beat bystanders to death but could well shoot them by accident if they had guns.
Gun proponents would do well to avoid scenarios involving an unarmed populace. Because in a world without* guns the bad guys don’t have guns either and there goes the best justification for allowing the good guys to have such dangerous tools.
*Here the term “without” is used to mean “some are without but some are not” with the initial “some” seeming to refer to agents of the government and the latter “some” to private individuals.
Cite, please.
Likewise.
This linkhas the US leading the UK almost 2:1 for total crimes.
By intentional homicidethe US leads the UK 4:1.
Just for fun the suicide by firearm has the US barely trailing Montenegro for the lead (Go USA), but the US does lead the UK by 37:1 (and Japan at 105:1)
I understand that Robot didn’t specify crime rate, but total crimes is pretty misleading statistic.
'Cause they raping everybody out here!
It’s notoriously difficult to compare crime statistics among countries because crimes are sometimes defined differently in different places and some countries count and report more thoroughly than others. Nonetheless there are international comparisons such as this one. It shows that the United States is well above the median crime rate in all the categories listed: murder, rape, assault, homicide, and vehicle theft. If our permissive gun laws actually prevented crime, one would expected the opposite to be true. Certainly nothing justifies Condescending Robot’s claim that the the UK has far worse crime overall. In most categories the UK and the USA are pretty similar. In murder, the USA is much worse.
Sounds like this should have either been a PM or a Pit thread. Why are you boring me with your rabble?
Perhaps not, but give mrAru and myself our choice of location, a chainsaw and some tools, and a weeks lead time and nobody would survive the climb up to a cave I know of and there wouldn’t be a gun involved. Though I wouldn’t swear that I wouldn’t have my wrist rocket and a bag of ball bearings…and those deadfall traps are pretty effective.
Look, if someone wants to kill someone, it can be tricky stopping it. All gunpowder does is make it louder and from a bit further out.
Wait, so a Navy Seal stands no chance against even two opponents, but a dozen onlookers can’t stop a single rapist? I had no idea that rapists were so superhuman.