Self defense is NOT a legitimate need here in the States. Propaganda group have convinced the uneducated/poor at statistics crew that a gun is a self defense tool that can save their lives, yes; but objectively, they are wrong. Owning a gun makes it far MORE likely that you will be injured or killed, not less.
If self defense is the goal, the best thing a gun owner can do to is get rid of their guns. If the goal is to feel like a big strong man protecting his family, I can’t help, but I don’t think some macho morons getting their kicks is worth the price of admission, IE thousands of shootings a year.
But this is following the Republican narrative, in reality the Democrats remain the center. The left just votes for them to prevent the worst outcomes.
I don’t see the problem. The gun is registered to you. You sell it to someone else and fill out all the relevant paoerwork, turn in the forms, gun is now theirs. If you give them the gun without doing this, and they get caught with the gun, you both go to jail.
As a gun owner, it’s your responsibility that your gun doesn’t leave your ownership outside the law. If it does, report it stolen. Not that hard.
It’s easy to draw the wrong casual relationships with correlational data. For instance, if people live a life of crime, or they’re under threat from a stalker or they’re in more danger than average for some reason they may be more likely to buy a gun to defend themselves, but for the same reason they are more likely to be a victim of violence. In that case both the gun ownership and violence that happened to them are correlated because they both have the same cause - they have an unusually dangerous life. The ownership isn’t causing violence to happen to them.
Maybe there’s a study that makes your case here but i know previous studies that tried were deeply flawed and some (the famous Kellerman study) were bullshit made in bad faith.
Also they almost always treat suicide as gun violence that can happen to you but i think that’s a very different category that should be treated separately - making a deliberate decision to kill yourself isn’t what most people would consider being the victim of a violent crime.
I covered this earlier. Basically if the paperwork doesn’t get properly processed through no fault of the seller’s own, they’re still in the shit, and potentially seriously so. Bureaucracy is the problem there.
The Guardian article looks pretty solid to me. This struck me in particular:
In particular, the researchers found, people who lived with handgun owners had a much higher rate of being fatally shot by a spouse or intimate partner. The vast majority of such victims, 84%, were women, they said.
Internet use (and access to government websites especially) is rapidly becoming more and more critical to properly functioning in our society. For years, I’ve maintained that a “human with a smart phone” is a greatly enhanced cybernetic organism* compared to a vanilla “human”. Capable of accessing nearly unlimited resources in an instant, solving complex math problems, storing images and videos, measuring distances, finding north, and a million and one other uses…
So I agree that in the United States in 2022 internet access is basically a human right, and I would support the government ensuring that every single American (and hell, even non-American residents) should have access to a basic smart phone and internet, with the option for low income people to get a laptop at a very subsidized rate.**
Also this is by no means limited to rural areas, and here in urban Southern Calirofnia during COVID’s school shutdowns internet companies were offering families with children free internet if they applied, because many children can only access the internet when they’re at school. During the COVID shutdown, many kids couldn’t access their classes without this help.
But all of that is totally off topic. To directly answer your question - even if you’re 1500 miles from the intertubes.
*in the same way that a person wearing glasses is a cyborg. It’s a very sci-fi sounding word, but in fact it can refer to any enhancement, and does not require them to be permenant
**if they’re smart, this could be a big win for some company. Make a laptop model that these beneficiaries (many of whom will undoubtedly be children) enjoy using, and if they ever get in a position to buy their own computer, they’ll be pulled towards your brand.
This theory would make total sense, if these people who own guns were more likely to be murdered by assailants from outside the home. But that’s not what these studies show. But I guess you aren’t gonna read them because some studies in the past were deeply flawed (an assertion you’ve provided no citation for). But yeah, we’re here debating in good faith what to do about the gun problem. OK.
Again, I don’t see the problem. You structure the system so that you don’t turn the gun over until you and the new owner both get the paperwork in the mail, and then you sign each other’s papers. If you turn the gun over too soon, you broke the law.
Yeah, but of rhat 84%, 83% were women who were being stalked by a serial killer and it wasn’t REALLY their husband who killed them, the serial killer just framed the husband to make the stats look better for gun control proponents.
You see, these serial killers are part of a shadowy guild dedicated to using murder to fudge the stats so that gun control laws get passed. Then they can finally do their serial killing unopposed by their only true weakness, the Good Guy With A Gun.
We basically have something like that here in Australia (all firearms sales require a permit issued by the state police, and then the gun has to be taken to a gun dealer who brokers the sale and verifies everyone’s details and licences and forwards part of the permit back to the police to confirm the sale) and it still doesn’t work properly.
Gun details get recorded incorrectly, or the paperwork gets sent to the state police who lose it, or it sits in someone’s inbox for literally months before it gets processed, or it just doesn’t get processed at all for whatever reason, or someone gets similar rifle models/types with identical or similar serial numbers mixed up - you get the idea.
It sounds like a good idea in theory but we’ve got 25 years of practical experience here to show how it goes awry very easily.
It is quite telling that this thread isn’t just a series of “I agree. We need to do something such as X,Y,Z” But nope, there is no amount of blood that can be sacrificed on the altar of the gun gods. Sandy Hook, and now Uvalde prove it. Dead children? Yeah sure, but what if the Queen of England decides to invade, huh, huh, did you think about that?
