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I think what he may be bringing up is very often the debate is almost entirely on false terms.
America does for instance have too much gun violence. The debate is almost always over limiting white people from buying AR-15 which numerically are a very small part of the problem and nearly no risks to the activist class in red or blue tribe.
Where gun violence is an issue it’s mostly harms blue tribe people or politically tribeless people.
Where the debate on pro-gun/anti-gun happens is in area that is a trivial problem. Hence it seems like just tribal fights for status.
The optimal amount of any crime is non-zero, short of lizardman constant situations. This is true for gun violence as much as anything else.
Besides, since some gun violence is self-defense, the optimal amount of it isn't zero anyway.
This is a motte and bailey. American is way above other areas.
American gun violence is unequally distributed by race, which makes comparisons to other areas hard.
White American firearms homicides are still much higher than most other high-income countries’ total homicides.
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Or easy if the other areas feature some races but not others.
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No, America’s very high rate of firearms deaths mostly hurt red tribe people(through suicide) and black tribe(which is its own thing with its own cultural quirks) people through murder. Mass shootings are the only real way blue tribe elites are threatened by america’s gun violence problem, even if they’re factually not particularly common.
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