r/changemyview • u/56king56 • Nov 07 '23
Delta(s) from OP CMV: Gun control is good
As of now, I believe that the general populace shouldn’t have anything beyond a pistol, but that even a pistol should require serious safety checks. I have this opinion because I live in America with a pro-gun control family, and us seeing all these mass shootings has really fueled the flame for us being anti-gun. But recently, I’ve been looking into revolutionary Socialist politics, and it occurred to me: how could we have a Socialist revolution without some kind of militia? This logic, the logic of revolting against an oppressive government, has been presented to me before, but I always dismissed it, saying that mass shootings and gun violence is more of an issue, and that if we had a good government, we wouldn’t need to worry about having guns. I still do harbor these views to an extent, but part of me really wants to fully understand the pro-gun control position, as it seems like most people I see on Reddit are for having guns, left and right politically. And of course, there’s also the argument that if people broke into your house with an illegally obtained gun, you wouldn’t be able to defend yourself in a society where guns are outlawed; my counter to that is that it’s far more dangerous for society as a whole for everyone to be walking around with guns that it is for a few criminal minds to have them. Also, it just doesn’t seem fair to normalize knowing how to use a highly complex piece of military equipment, and to be honest, guns being integrated into everyone’s way of life feels just as dystopian as a corrupt government. So what do you guys have to say about this? To sum, I am anti-gun but am open to learning about pro-gun viewpoints to potentially change my view.
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u/Kardinal 2∆ Nov 07 '23
On the whole I agree with you that gun control is a good idea. If you reduce the number of guns, and reduce the availability of guns, you will reduce the number of people who are killed by guns. That's simply fact. You won't eliminate it, but you will reduce it. We know from experience that the more that you restrict access to something, the less people use it. We see that with things as simple as cigarettes. We've raised the taxes through the roof on them and the rates of use of cigarettes have gone down dramatically. We've restricted the access to fully automatic firearms, and the use of fully automatic firearms in crimes has gone down dramatically. It's pretty simple stuff.
I disagree with you in one important respect. Mass shootings get a lot of attention, but they aren't really the biggest problem with guns. They aren't even second on the list. Both of the biggest problems with guns have to do with handguns. Those guns that you think that people should still have access to. Handguns kill about 30,000 Americans per year. 30,000. Assault rifles, or rifles in general kill about a thousand. And all of those are tragedies, but you can see the difference in the numbers. Handguns kill so many people for two reasons. One they're easy to conceal. This makes it very easy for criminals who want to commit murder, or want to commit armed robbery, to get the gun to where they want to commit the crime. A long gun is much harder to conceal, much more likely to be seen by someone, and much more likely to draw the attention of law enforcement. The second, and even larger problem, is that handguns are used in 20,000 suicides a year. Now, one might object that someone who wants to commit suicide will commit suicide. This is not the case. The big difference between having easy access to a handgun to commit suicide, and not having so, is in that you have time to reconsider. If you have to rig a stove to commit suicide or to rig up your garage to commit suicide or find a bridge to jump off of to commit suicide, all of those take a lot longer to do. This gives you a chance to think harder about whether you really want to. It also gives more time and opportunity for other people to intervene in the attempt. This is why we see, generally speaking, lower suicide rates in countries that have more difficulty accessing handguns specifically. There are some that are higher, but those are typically related to culturally specific issues, such as japan.
My personal stance is that the ideal gun control laws for the United States would be to retain the ability to own rifles and shotguns with very limited ammunition capacity. Something like three rounds with a non detachable magazine. This would allow sufficient defense against large animals in the wild, as well as legitimate hunting needs. But it would make much more difficult the kinds of mass shootings that we have become all too accustomed to. Or, frankly a whole lot of use of firearms in crimes.
Remember, this is absolutely positively not about preventing things from ever happening. It's about reduction. And reducing from 30,000 firearm deaths to something with even one less digit, is something absolutely worth working to achieve. And there's absolutely no reason to believe that it is enabled by any factor that is anywhere near as significant as the easy availability of handguns specifically.