Why exactly did gun culture blossom in the US and, seemingly, not in most other Western countries?

Great Debates
81

The local wolves are rare and protected, there may be 150 all told. The local ibex is Vulnerable, and rare, maybe 1200, they are not hunted legally.
The local gazelle is rare and endangered and is strongly protected.

So, no they dont hunt gazelles, ibexes, or wolves .
The rock hyrax is the size of a large guinea pig, hardly a game animal.

*
Israel’s hunting season opened this week, but there are both fewer animals to hunt and fewer places in which to hunt them this year. The Nature and Parks Authority (NPA) has, over the years, been reducing the number of hunters, the animals they can hunt and where they may be hunted, Rony Malka, the head of the NPA’s law enforcement division, told The Jerusalem Post Wednesday. At present, hunters can only shoot doves, turtledoves, pheasants, coots, ducks and, occasionally, wild boars. All other animals are prohibited. There are also many areas that are off-limits to hunters, such as parks and nature reserves. Hunters are also not allowed within 500 meters of a settlement or 100 meters of a lone house or cemetery. Malka said there were more than a dozen areas off-limits to hunters. This past off-season, she added, the Parks Authority managed to add another one to that list. “There is an endangered duck, called the white-headed duck [Oxyura leucocephala], which is endangered all over the world, and we got its habitat, Maagarei Hulda near Beit Guvrin, restricted,” Malka told the Post. The Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee agreed to the change in the hunting laws and prohibited hunting in an area bounded by Highways 1, 40 and 38, just south of Latrun and Modi’in. Two years ago, the NPA had managed to get the partridge and the hare added to the restricted list, Malka said. The porcupine had also been added in the last few years, she added, and gazelles are also off-limits. In addition, according to Malka, there has been a concerted effort to reduce the number of hunters. While hunting is legal, it is allowed only with an appropriate permit. “We haven’t issued a new hunting permit to anyone in ten years. We’ve also reduced the number of hunters from 6,600 to 2,300. If a hunter does not apply to renew his license within a year of its expiration then we revoke it,” Malka said. “Because the hunting range in Israel is not that big, we can’t have that many hunters. We estimate the habitat can handle about 2,000 hunters,” he explained. *

So there are 2000 hunters in a populations of 8 Million. So, hunting is rare in Israel, as you said.

82

You asked what there is to hunt, not what was *legal *to hunt.

But yea, hunting is very rare here. Some of it is the Israeli passion for hunting and nature preservation, and some is cultural: Jews don’t hunt. Never have. Even in the Bible, you won’t find any Jewish hunters. Game ain’t kosher.

Which means that there’s also a bit of a racial element to it - of those 2,000 hunters, my guess is that at least three quarters are Arabs. Is it surprising that the authorities don’t support their hobby, especially seeing as said hobby involves guns?

83

Well, there is Nimrod.

84

This is pretty jerkish. Knock it off.

[/moderating]

85

Not Jewish (various traditions have him King of Babylon) and not generally depicted as a positive figure, although Nimrod is a poplar name among less religious Jews.

86

Curiosity : how much wildlands or national park land does Israel have ? I’ll readily admit I’m completely ignorant about your country, but my impression or mind’s eye idea of the place is more or less one big conurbation with some intensive farming in between the bits that aren’t cities or suburbs. Of course it’s mostly based on newsreels, so it’s implicitly biased.

87

Babylonian, and probably mythical.

88

Israel national parks and nature reserves. Those are just official parks - there is also plenty of other natural areas between towns. Israel may be tightly packed, but there’s very little suburban sprawl, even by European standards, and the vast majority of Israelis live in apartments and not detached houses.

Israelis take nature very seriously. As with many things here, there’s a political element to it: it’s a way of saying, This is OUR land, our home soil, and we need to look after it; if we don’t, we’ll lose our right to live here. Love of country (the national-political entity) and love of country (the physical land) are closely intertwined concepts, and not just in Israel.

89

You may pick it up and use it, but
it would need to be within easy reach (I hope you either were about to go out carrying it or just came from having it out, because otherwise you’re breaking safe-storage rules),
you would need to think about it,
and it’s not its primary intended use.

Also, many Spanish shotgun-owners begin by never having the shotgun in their home. They keep it in the farm (which is very often not the same as their home), in the toolshed, in the garage, in the tractor’s lockable metal toolbox… not in the house.

90

Pretty much. US gun-rights culture (which I think is a more accurate description of our unique phenomenon than “gun culture”) originated in our practice of slavery (which was far more restricted and much sooner eliminated in Canada). It changed course during the gun-control movement in response to black militancy in the 1960s, and re-launched in full force in the late 1970s with the solidification of black civil rights, the spike in urban crime, and the publication of the white-supremacist/apocalyptic The Turner Diaries about heroic heavily armed white militias winning a race war.

IMO it’s quite plausible to suggest that American gun-rights culture has always been in large part about race, and white paranoia about the black “threat”:

91

You’re less likely to have the gun readily at hand than a typical US homeowner probably might, since home defense is more rarely its intended purpose, and in part for the reasons that Nava described in #89.

But there’s another reason, and it underscores a broader difference in gun culture than just about guns themselves and how they’re regulated; in Canada (and I’m pretty sure in those other countries as well) it would be wise to think twice about confronting some unexpected noise by brandishing a loaded gun if you don’t want to end up with a murder charge. There is no “castle doctrine”, no “stand your ground” laws, and the standards for justifiable force are high. So part of the broader gun culture difference is the view that if some random kid breaks into your house looking to grab some valuable item and sprint out again without intending to harm anyone, a gun is really no one’s friend in that situation, because it could result in one dead kid and one homeowner with a world of life-altering legal troubles.

92

Interesting, thank you. Some really beautiful places there.

Ayup. Growing up my father had a pellet gun, and even with that staggeringly powerful war weapon, the gun was hanging on a rack in the garage under a padlock while the pellets were hidden in the parental bedroom. Now that we kids are all grown-up and the parental units own a country home with varmint fit for shootin’ he’s gotten himself a tricked out .22 which is typically hidden away in a cupboard or under furniture unloaded, with the ammo on a high shelf in an outhouse. Because accidents and tiny handsy grandnieces are more likely than home invaders.

93

Sure, but my question is; when carrying, do you feel safer or do you feel superior?

94

I don’t understand this part. Canada and the UK come from the same common law heritage as the U.S. and deadly force is (still presumably in those countries) authorized when a reasonable person would fear death or serious bodily injury. And you don’t have to retreat in your own home, do you?

In the U.S., it is generally presumed, absent contrary circumstances, that a person in your home uninvited intends such a thing. Sure, it may be some kid that just intends on grabbing an item and leaving, but how do you know that beforehand? Maybe his intention is to put a knife into your gut or rape your wife or daughter. Can you read minds in Canada?

Even if that is his intent, are you not allowed to confront the kid with non-deadly force? If you do that, maybe the kid escalates it.

It just, with respect, seems like regular citizens must be at the mercy of those who would do you harm, or at minimum, must allow intrusions into your home and possibly place yourself in great danger all to stay in compliance with the law and to protect a criminal above all else. Such a thing baffles me. Who owns your home? You, or any criminal who barges in?

95

As others pointed out, your statements are not supported by historical fact.
But the main reason the Second Amendment wasn’t an issue for most of the country’s history was that for most of the country’s history personal firearms that enabled a relatively untrained person to single handedly take out a rifle company sized group of people didn’t exist.

The first such weapon that comes to mind is the M1921 Thompson submachinegun (AKA the “Tommygun”). Its popularity with gangsters led to The National Firearms Act being passed in 1934 to restrict civilian access to automatic weapons.

I don’t recall gun control really being a major issue in my lifetime until the Colombine shootings in the 90s. It has been the rise in mass shootings over the past decades, combined with the polarizing effects of 24 hour news channels that has made the issue of gun rights so contentious.

96

In Spain a person who enters without the owner opening the door for them is not necessarily uninvited: I live alone, but the President of the “Community of Homeowners”* has the keys in case there is some sort of emergency. My mother has keys to the homes of half her neighbors; she’s not an officeholder in her Community, but she happens to be friends with those neighbors. Her own keys are held by: her three children, the cleaning lady, the President of the Community and the daughter of the neighbor directly below. Some of us are conscientious enough that if we’re entering a house we expect to be empty we’ll actually say “hi?” in case the owners happen to be in; some are not.

I recall reading about cases of people in the US getting home late (to a place where in fact he was not only invited but living), trying to be silent (yeah like that works so well when you come from a party, you can’t hear an elephant dancing) and being shot by a relative who’d thought it was an intruder. In Spain that level of imprudence+ would be unthinkable on anybody who’s generally compos mentis; people hearing about such a thing would ask whether there were drugs involved or it was a case of mental illness.

  • I’m purposefully not calling it a HOA because it’s conceptually very different. For starters, ours normally refer only to people whose apartments share the same central entrance.
  • Assuming nobody got hit, “shooting at unidentified person-sized lump whose intent is not known” would be imprudencia temeraria, “reckless imprudence”.
97

Given that you find your own conclusions baffling, what’s more likely? That this is an accurate assessment of regular UK citizens’ obligations under its laws of self-defence, or that you’ve extrapolated wildly from a minimal evidence base and consequently reached a wildly false conclusion?

If you’re interested, you can find exhaustive detail on English law and the use of reasonable force here.

98

My take is that it is due to the enormous influence of the “Borderers” – the throngs of immigrants from Scotland and northern England with a culture of no central government, endless guerilla warfare (aka raiding), and a history of centuries of oppression by the British, whose government over them was always seen as unjust and illegitimate (for good reason). Their wave started after the British elites had settled the southern colonies and the rejected religious groups (Puritans, Quakers) had settled the northern ones. The latter loathed them and their messy, wild, hyper-masculine culture and the former made them overseers of their slaves and tenant farmers but never gave them much power. They were shoved westward into Appalachia and then into the West, where they “pacified” the natives.

It is this culture that gave us the glorification of violence, reliance only on people exactly like you, and distrust of all institutions (including education, science) and government, so characteristic of those parts of the US that they ended up dominating.

They were a huge part of Australia’s history too, but the US had very different conditions.

99

Well, now that’s some revisionist history right there.

100

The Indians *shouldn’t *have fought to repel the invaders/genocidists/landgrabbers? Howzat?