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I'm a 2A guy but stabbings are a stupid example, you can stab a few folks that might die or shoot like 200 that will die in the same amount of time. America would be much "safer" if we yanked every gun. (It would mostly stop suicides and gang bangers, but statistically "safer") A better example is that we still have 1A while most of the world does not.
I'm really not convinced we'd be noticeably safer all told.
I still remember The Waukesha Christmas Parade Attack which killed 6 and injured 62. Trucks are relatively cheap, at least to rent, and can rack up a body count. If shootings get supplanted by trucks running down parades as the preferred modus operandi, I don't know that the death toll from the mass killings would be substantially less.
And I will consistently remind people that Guns can be 3D printed, so a sufficiently motivated psycho or criminal is going to be able to procure a weapon if they really want to. This will only get easier going forward.
And try estimating of the number of casualties that would be sustained in the process of confiscating firearms! If even 1% of firearms owners choose to resist, and 10% of those incidents result in at least one officer being injured or killed, we're talking somewhere on the order of 80,000 - 100,000 casualties over however many years. Compared to 21k homicides per year.
Is that reallllly worth the tradeoff, if we don't believe we can confiscate every firearm without incident?
Anyhow, I would redirect you to my recent policy proposal about banning and confiscating guns for Democrats only,, as my proposed compromise on this topic.
If I could Thanos snap every privately owned gun away in the US (and future proof so it any other gun or firearm disintegrates as soon as it is made or brought within the border) I probably would, I think it would indeed make the country safer. However given that I can't do that, and that regardless of the laws, there are so many guns, and so many ways to import guns or make them, I think banning them would be overall counter-productive for the average citizen as it stands. Which I guess makes me a theoretical gun grabber and a practical 2A supporter, give or take.
“Looks like tyranny’s back on the menu, boys!” - American politicians, bad cops, the 80,000 new armed IRS agents, etc.
Eh, I don't think the US government is likely to slip into tyranny, I'm for big government not against it. Bad cops would still be a problem of course, but overall i think the trade would be worth it. Though see the below discussion there are probably other Thanos snap interventions which would be more useful (if perhaps more immoral, depending on your POV).
Agreed it would take at least a decade of permanent citizen firearm disarmament for American politicians to turn full tyrant.
But I bet in that time, the combined rage and innovation of the new “guncels” will come up with a ranged weapon which is deadlier or safer, or both. I’m guessing phasers with stun and kill.
I’m betting on Elon’s STEM minions finding the end-run around the gun ban.
Though note, we're not talking about a ban, we're talking about Thanos snapping away every gun and every future gun in private hands, depending on how you word your "wish" that might include anything that acts like a gun. This is magic (of a sort) not law.
As long as the magical wish could also prevent any government agent from having a successful shooting of an innocent, that might work. Of course, it would also lead to police just “firing” into crowds and whoever’s not “innocent” gets shot. All sorts of dystopia come into play there.
In Northern Ireland when the British Army shot into crowds it wasn't stopped by other people with guns (in fact it was soldiers fear of that which often presaged such events), it was stopped by a largely unarmed populaces horror.
The chances of the US nation descending into tyranny in the next say 50 years is in my opinion, very close to zero, no matter which side wins elections.
Magical (or advanced tech indistinguishable from it) aside, the problem with removing guns through banning them, isn't that I think it would make the government more likely to be tyrannical, privately owned guns have a negligible impact on that in my view. Its that criminals would still have them, and that even the attempt of a ban would create (understandable!) widespread instability and violence among legal gun owners which is I think is much more of a risk than government tyranny to long term civilizational stability.
So pragmatically the 2A should remain, at least in my view.
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Rittenhouse is killed by government agents without the gun; they beat him to death with the skateboard. The problem with "gunless utopia" is that it makes mob violence a lot more difficult to resist.
For instance, if you have 30 KKK members coming to drag you off, or 30 Hutus coming to chop you into pieces for shits and giggles, a man with a gun can kill every single one of them given sufficient aim and time. The fact that a potential victim can not only resist, but resist in a way that makes him 30 times as strong on defense (but don't actually make him that much more powerful when attacking), is actually kind of a big deal.
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Air rifles are very under-developed. US federal law has never considered them to be firearms.
Creating a fully-automatic helium-powered submachine gun that can push at least one 30-round magazine of 9mm-equivalent-or-better projectiles at lethal speeds is trivial with current materials science. The last time anyone seriously tried to make a military firearm of this nature was the late 1700s, though there are a few current manufacturers that make manually-repeating hunting rifles based on this concept.
Combining that with electronic controls (and a lack of NFA- so for this application computer-based fire control, full-auto, and integrated suppressors will obviously be standard) provides even more interesting options. Want to fire a non-lethal burst at a target before the next trigger pull fires a burst that's going fast enough to penetrate? That's impossible with a traditional firearm simply due to its nature but eminently practical with an air rifle (liability issues aside).
The only problem here is how you're going to turn that into a handgun, but cartridge-and-captive-piston storage technology might be sufficiently promising in that regard to obviate that concern as well.
My own experimentation indicates that it's possible to get:
Such a weapon would have a number of tradeoffs, but it illustrates another corner of the possibility space. It's all a question of what you're optimizing for; right now, almost all optimization is happening in a very small area of the possibility space, focused on a very narrow cluster of factors, because the gun culture has not generally been sitting down with a piece of paper and a pencil and really thought about the nature of the problem for five minutes. There's low-hanging fruit absolutely everywhere in terms of legal frameworks, capital-intensive manufacturing, DIY, you name it. The fruit isn't being picked because people in the gun culture, generally, aren't looking at things from the correct perspective to make that fruit visible. They're thinking in terms of incremental shifts from what the current state of things, not about desired end-states and the most efficient route to them.
Even this inefficient search method is probably enough to get us where we need to go, but if the perspective shifts, we could get there a hell of a lot faster.
[EDIT] - I want to elaborate on the subject of optimization.
The gun culture has moved from the standard longarm being a shotgun or bolt-action rifle to the AR15. That was an optimization process driven in large part by political and social conflict, and the route it optimized down was capital-heavy industrial production. One of the tradeoffs it largely accepted was conforming not only to the letter but also the spirit of state and federal firearms legislation, with the goal of getting the highest-quality firearms possible under the constraints they imposed. This has worked really, really well, with the result that we now have arrived on more or less the pinnacle of industrially-produced cartridge-firing autoloading firearms. All longarm designs converge on the AR15, and all handgun designs converge on the Glock, and both designs are well into their grind to the asymptote.
Now that we're chasing the asymptote with capital-heavy industrial production of small arms, the best value comes from expanding out into optimizing other factors. One of these is erosion of existing weapons controls by dropping adherence to the spirit of the rules; we see this with bump stocks, FRT triggers, pistol braces, suppressor paperwork streamlining, all of which are a good start. One of the obvious bits of low-hanging fruit is to do for destructive devices what's been done for SBRs, full-auto and suppressors; there's some small activity visible on this front, but clear potential for much, much more. Another piece of low-hanging fruit is what we might call the Liberator angle pioneered by Defense Distributed: focus on cutting cost and complexity of manufacturing to get the simplest, cheapest, easiest-to-produce firearm possible, and then work back toward effectiveness from there.
And in this factor, it's interesting to note how the logic of crowds flows through the possibility space, and how memetic effects determine the rate and direction of flow. DD established a paradigm of 3d-printing guns, and now the DIY space is focused on optimizing the 3D-printing paradigm, so we get the FGC-9. But while the FGC-9 is a fantastic development, you can already see how people are still thinking in terms of capital-intensive high-quality manufacturing: they're trying to reproduce a commercially-produced pistol-caliber-carbine from the low-cost DIY angle. 3d printers are still relatively expensive and relatively complicated to set up and operate, and the guns they turn out vary significantly in quality. They're working toward "effectiveness", but their definition of "effectiveness" is based on a commercially-produced cartridge firearm. It seems to me that there's more opportunity in defining effectiveness in terms of lethal effect, total input costs, ease of manufacture, and ubiquity of material. The community obviously appreciates this, with their efforts to answer questions like "what about barrels" and "what about ammo", but there's a sense in which they're committing to building a pencil, when they could in fact use clay and a stylus or, indeed, a printing press. Is the goal to have a pencil, or is it to write a text? Is it to write a text, or is it to disseminate ideas as widely as possible? To what extent does commitment to specific forms and factors get in the way, especially in a contested environment where powerful interests are to a lesser or greater degree actively hunting communications infrastructure?
And there's considerably more besides, but that's at least a start.
I remember an episode of CSI where someone mounted an ammo box’s worth of rounds to a plastic printed sheet on a wood board, connected all the rounds to electric triggers, and used these ammo-board guns to turn people into goop in a single moment. Still using existing ammo but it opened my eyes to what makes a “gun”.
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Again I'd be curious as to what happens when it becomes known that nobody anywhere is in possession of a gun, whether the incentive shifts would make criminals more bold, or less bold.
If we're talking Thanos-snapping, I'd pretty much prefer to Thanos snap any person with a propensity for uncontrolled violence away, I think it'd create more immediate gains, even if there were second-order impacts.
Sure if we had that power then there are probably other interventions. Instead of snapping them away, why not just "fix" them, so they become contributing citizens. Indeed we could fix everyone to be maximally productive and happy.
One possible argument is: We have too many people in this country as it is. We’re overpopulated. Eliminating that chunk of the population frees up housing and space. It staves off the YIMBY-vs.-NIMBY wars by making existing housing cheaper and more available without needing to build another wave of commie-block apartment complexes. It frees up medical resources, school spending, and all of the other financial outlays that would apply to those people even if you magically turned them into productive citizens.
Now, one counter-argument is to say that if we could turn all these people into productive citizens, those people could then go gentrify and revitalize all the myriad small towns in America - places like Springfield, OH - with a population of productive Americans instead of welfare-dependent Haitians. The danger, of course, is that if you turn all the current thugs and junkies in America into middle-class domesticated Americans, they’re going to do the same thing that most middle-class domesticated Americans are currently doing: go to college and move to a major population center to seek white-collar work. This is just going to introduce another population influx into those cities, further constricting the housing and job supply. By eliminating these people entirely, you ease population pressure instead of just turning one type of problem into another type of problem.
Right, but then we can also make them happy to stay in small towns right? We're already turning them into productive citizens, might as well make them happy where they are productive citizens. The reason why Thanos's plan in killing half the universe is stupid is because he has power over Minds, Reality, Souls , Space and Time. He can create resources, change people to not need so many resources, change people to work together better, create housing and planets, and suns.
If we can turn people into productive citizens then housing is the least of our worries. We'll turn a chunk of them into builders and contractors and miners and some into interior designers and so on. Snap loads of bricks and mortar into existence. Make New York into a TARDIS where Manhattan can have infinite housing in a finite area or whatever. Or make people happy to live 10 a room. Sky is the limit.
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I mean, El Salvador basically did a small version of that by just rounding up and locking up the most violent people they could find (as judged by gang affiliation) and it worked fabulously. Murder rates plummeting down immediately.
Didn't need to go after every citizen to see if they had guns, just find the dangerous ones. They arrested and imprisoned about 80,000 people, which is not nothing, but much more modest than forcing millions to hand over weapons.
I have many reasons to believe a similar approach would do the same in the U.S.
Sure, but that won't catch people who snap and go on a spree, or accidental deaths, or suicides etc. But it's not like there is any chance of either happening in the US.
I think those are a proportionally negligible as to the total number of deaths that occur annually, though.
Like, a couple hundred even in the worst years, in the U.S.
Stopping those would probably require a massive surveillance state which would cost billions annually and would, like with gun confiscations, oppress 'normal' citizens. To say nothing of the potential for abuses.
The other way to stop those is to arm responsible citizens who can stop them as they happen
I dunno, seems like aggressively arresting and locking up the most violent citizens would also tip the balance in favor of letting the remaining citizens remain armed, making the chances of an armed citizen being able to stop a random spree killer a bit higher.
What really chafes me is that all discussion is sucked into the gun control debate so we can't have a decent discussion about other policy approaches.
Indeed, but as we are talking Thanos snapping, we can handle the small issues and the big ones too. No additional cost. Of course there are better ways than snapping away the guns as we mentioned above, just fix the aggressive people, then nobody really has much of a need for firearms, so we can get rid of those to stop accidents and the like. We can even stop animals being aggressive to humans as well.
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Right, but as we are Thanos snapping we might as well deal with the small stuff too, there is no extra cost to it.
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I mean you can look up the stats yourself. Murder and suicide rates in any country banning guns with the same or close GDP of the USA are a tiny fraction of what ours are. Do I think the tradeoff is worth it? Yes. But it is still there and obvious. Are you really linking me to a comment recommending only your opponents be disarmed? Come on man.
Do it by state.
There's virtually no correlation within the U.S. between gun ownership rates and crime, or murder rates, on the state level.
Likewise, Switzerland has the highest gun ownership rates in Europe, and is around the lowest for crime and murder too!
Literally, there is no good evidence that guns are the driving factor in crime and death. Likewise, very little evidence that increased gun control drives decreases in crime.
I can't even understate how weak the actual case for gun control as a policy is, compared to various other policies that could be implemented with less expense, less interference with peaceful citizens, and less risk of unrest and resistance in response!
My request is to disarm those people who assert that disarmament is good! Its about the fairest possible prescription.
If Democrats don't believe in Second Amendment rights, they shouldn't raise much fuss over waiving their said rights.
Yeah we have free travel of goods and people in the USA, banning a guns in chicago etc...was never ever going to work.
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You're playing games with statistics here. Based on your hypothesis here, we'd expect Switzerland (which has incredibly liberal gun laws) to be a hotbed of murder and suicide - but it isn't. Venezuela, on the other hand, has extremely tight gun laws, despite formerly being the homicide capital of South America. It isn't the guns that make people kill each other and you're being dishonest when you imply it.
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