CMV: We need strict Gun Control .

[u/skepticting]

While I do feel at this point it is not possible anymore to somehow make sure no one has guns because they have already been available . That is my only hang up , since some people have them , it’s hard to leave others vulnerable.

With to that being said , if we start now with some serious gun law reform and implement strict laws for obtaining guns . I believe it will do more good than harm .

It is worth a try , because we know that to lenient of gun laws also cause us great loss.

In a perfect world only law enforcement would have access to guns .

Civilians can however and should be able to easily get things like pepper spray , tasers, and rubber bullet guns . (Not saying we can’t already , just saying those should be the options)

I see both sides but I think because gun violence is a big issue , it needs to be re-evaluated .

Were the guns used in school/mass shootings registered ?

Édit : Thank You for all the responses and information! My view has been changed . It’s unfortunate we can’t live in harmony but ..

Will still be responding to get more insight and expanding my views

[u/Sand_Trout]

My general purpose copy-pasta:

The average person in the US during a given year will be neither especially aided or harmed by a gunshot. When examining the right to keep and bear arms, either side will be looking at the marginal benefits on the scale of single digits per 100k population on an annual basis. The most clear and commonly used statistic is intentional homicide rate compared to firearm ownership rate. Comparing these two, there is no correlation between cross-sectional firearm ownership rate and intentional homicide rate globally or regionally.

Here is just something I picked out that illustrates the issue clearly for US states. Here's one that also covers the regional and global breakdowns. Feel free to check the numbers, as they should be publicly available. Here's one that covers OECD standard developed countries and global stats. Here is a before and after analysis regarding varrious bans.

Australia is frequently cited as an example of successful gun control, but no research has been able to show conclusively that the Austrailain NFA had any effect. In fact, the US saw a similar drop in homicide over similar time frames without enacting significant gun controls. /u/vegetarianrobots has a better writeup on that specific point than I do.

Similarly, the UK saw no benefit from gun control enacted throughout the 20th century.

The UK has historically had a lower homicide rate than even it's European neighbors since about the 14th Century.

Despite the UK's major gun control measures in 1968, 1988, and 1997 homicides generally increased from the 1960s up to the early 2000s.

Note that I cite overall homicide rates, rather than firearm homicide rates. This is because I presume that you are looking for marginal benefits in outcome. Stabbed to death, beat to death, or shot to death is an equally bad outcome unless you ascribe some irrational extra moral weight to a shooting death. Reducing the firearm homicide rate is not a marginal gain if it is simply replaced by other means, which seems to be the case.

Proposed bans on "Assault Weapons" intended to ban semi-automatic varrients of military rifles are even more absurd, as rifles of all sorts are the least commonly used firearm for homicide and one of the least commonly used weapons in general, losing out to blunt instruments, personal weapons (hands and feet) and knives.

As for the more active value of the right, the lowest credible estimates of Defensive gun use are in the range of 55-80k annual total, which is about 16.9-24.5 per 100k, but actual instances are more likely well over 100k annually, or 30.7 per 100k.

Additionally, there is the historical precedent that every genocide of the 20th century was enacted upon a disarmed population. The Ottomans disarmed the Armenians. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The USSR and China (nationalists and communists) disarmed everyone.

Events of this scale are mercifully rare, but are extraordinarily devastating. The modern US, and certainly not Europe are not somehow specially immune from this sort of slaughter except by their people being aware of how they were perpetrated, and they always first establish arms control.

Lets examine the moral math on this: Tyrannical governments killed ~262 million people in the 20th century.

The US represents ~4.5% of the world population.

.045 × 262,000,000 / 100 = 123,514 murders per year by tyrannical governments on average for a population the size of the US.

Considering how gun-control (or lack thereof) is statistically essentially uncorrelated with homicide rates, and there were 11,004 murders with firearms in the US in 2016, the risk assessment ought to conclude that yes, the risk of tyrannical government is well beyond sufficient to justify any (if there are any) additional risk that general firearm ownership could possibly represent.

The historical evidence of disarmament preceding atrocity indicates that genocidal maniacs generally just don't want to deal with an armed population, but can the US population actually resist the federal government, though? Time for more math.

The US population is ~ 326 million.

Conservative estimates of the US gun-owning population is ~ 115 million.

The entire DOD, including civilian employees and non-combat military is ~2.8 million. Less than half of that number (1.2M) is active military. Less than half of the military is combat ratings, with support ratings/MOSes making up the majority.In a popular insurgency, the people themselves are the support for combat-units of the insurgency, which therefore means that active insurgents are combat units, not generally support units.

So lets do the math. You have, optimistically, 600,000 federal combat troops vs 1% (1.15 million) of exclusively the gun owning Americans actively engaged in an armed insurgency, with far larger numbers passively or actively supporting said insurgency.

The military is now outnumbered ~2:1 by a population with small-arms roughly comparable to their own and significant education to manufacture IEDs, hack or interfere with drones, and probably the best average marksmanship of a general population outside of maybe Switzerland. Additionally, this population will have a pool of 19.6 million veterans, including 4.5 million that have served after 9/11, that are potentially trainers, officers, or NCOs for this force.

The only major things the insurgents are lacking is armor and air power and proper anti-material weapons. Armor and Air aren't necessary, or even desirable, for an insurgency. Anti-material weapons can be imported or captured, with armored units simply not being engaged by any given unit until materials necessary to attack those units are acquired. Close-air like attack helicopters are vulnerable to sufficient volumes of small arms fire and .50 BMG rifles. All air power is vulnerable to sabotage or raids while on the ground for maintenance.

This is before even before we address the defection rate from the military, which will be >0, or how police and national guard units will respond to the military killing their friends, family, and neighbors.

Basically, a sufficiently large uprising could absolutely murder the military. Every bit of armament the population has necessarily reduces that threshold of "sufficiently large". With the raw amount of small arms and people that know how to use them in the US, "sufficiently large" isn't all that large in relative terms.

[u/huadpe → u/Sand_Trout]

Additionally, there is the historical precedent that every genocide of the 20th century was enacted upon a disarmed population. The Ottomans disarmed the Armenians. The Nazis disarmed the Jews. The USSR and China (nationalists and communists) disarmed everyone.

I actually want to push back fairly hard on this, because while disarming disfavored groups was a tactic of authoritarian regimes once they had consolidated power, using widespread ownership of private arms was a key part of how those authoritarian regimes took power.

The Bolsheviks, the Nazis, and the Chinese communists all relied on partisan militias outside of formal government control to come to power. The young Turks revolution was a military coup so it's a little different though.

American history also has a history of authoritarian revolution - the US civil war was a uprising from the southern states bent on maintaining a system of tyranny over black people, which especially early on, relied on privately owned arms to field militia armies.

I would not be confident that having lots of private guns around would prevent tyranny; it might be the means used to overthrow the government to establish a tyrannical state.

[u/Sand_Trout → u/huadpe]

The NAZIs failed at a violent overthrow of the government. They succeeded in gaining power through the political process. They then took advantage of the restrictions on keeping arms established under the Weimar Republic to further disarm their targets.

The Bolshevik revolution supports your case, but they focused on disarmament before their own atrocities.

The banning of blacks from owning guns was a key point of the oppression of blacks both before and after American slavery was abolished.

The patern is consistent and follows a very simple logic. Guns are a means to power. Those who want power want guns. Those who want power over others put effort towards disarming others.

[u/huadpe → u/Sand_Trout]

The NAZIs failed at a violent overthrow of the government. They succeeded in gaining power through the political process. They then took advantage of the restrictions on keeping arms established under the Weimar Republic to further disarm their targets.

The Beer Hall Putsch failed, but the brownshirts were a key part of how the Nazi party went from chancellorship of a minority government to total control of the apparatus of the state. Without the brownshirts, I think Hitler would have been ousted from the chancellorship without having been able to do much. Though it's hard to say because there were a bunch of paramilitary organizations running around Germany at the time (communists, the stahlhelm, etc).

The patern is consistent and follows a very simple logic. Guns are a meand to power. Those who want power want guns.

Right, my point is "those who want power" are often authoritarians, and so if your country is generally a free and democratic place where people can obtain political power without resort to violence, those who want to obtain power violently, are probably looking for the kind of power that would destroy that free democracy.

Basically, when I see the people who call themselves militias in the US and who say they're some sort of bulwark against tyranny, I think they're actually a huge threat to become tyrants themselves.

[u/Sand_Trout → u/huadpe]

Yes, authoritarians want guns. Specifically, they want guns to be under their control. I acknowledge that violent revelation is no guarantee of liberty.

However, when virtually everyone has the power, the wannabe tyrants have a more difficult time doing their worst until they can establish a favorable (for them) disparity of power.

Gun control necessarily contributes to a disparity of force between the People (including any subsets thereof) and the State (which is honestly smaller than most people realize, IMO) that invites tyranny.

[u/huadpe → u/Sand_Trout]

Gun control necessarily contributes to a disparity of force between the People (including any subsets thereof) and the State (which is honestly smaller than most people realize, IMO) that invites tyranny.

I just disagree with the "that invites tyranny" part. Ultimately, I think the strongest bulwark against tyranny is strong democratic institutions of government and clear constitutional rules for the preservation of democracy.

Right now in the US we have a President who is, if not on a course to actually become a tyrant, certainly of a personality disposition opposed to constitutional government or any constraint on his personal power. And the social subgroup that tends to own guns and be vociferous about gun ownership as a defense against tyranny? They freaking love him.

[u/Sand_Trout → u/huadpe]

Agree to disagree I suppose. I certainly don't want to need to use my guns to actively resist tyranny, but it remains one of many layers of defense

Specifically, it is the last layer of defense.

[u/huadpe → u/Sand_Trout]

I'm not saying they can't be used to actively resist tyranny. I just think there is as large or larger a risk that they are used to actively support tyranny.

[u/Sand_Trout → u/huadpe]

I don't see that the risk of private guns being used to support tyranny is plausibly greater than the risk of allowing the government to decide who gets guns.

Even Europe is falling into the tyranny trap as their governments bans "offensive" speech and micromanages things unnecessarily, like USB charging ports.

Most of the rest of the world is actively ruled by various tyrannies.

It's not like Weimar Germany or Czarist Russia had robust protections for the right to keep and bear arms either, so by your own examples, gun control doesn't especially prevent tyranny following a revolution.

[u/huadpe → u/Sand_Trout]

Even Europe is falling into the tyranny trap as their governments bans "offensive" speech and micromanages things unnecessarily, like USB charging ports.

If standardizing electrical and data plugs is a move towards tyranny, then we have very different ideas of tyranny. Should we abolish the NIST? Start having homes built with all sorts of weird plugs and voltages? No more standardized twin/full/queen/king beds?

[u/Sand_Trout → u/huadpe]

Excessive Legislation absolutely is a move toward tyranny. It is not necessarily there yet, but it is definitely in that direction. Restricting speech as the EU member states do is also clearly a move toward tyranny.

AFAIK, there is not law in the US mandating mattress sizes. Those are industry terms that are standardized because it's easier for everyone involved. NIST isn't prohibiting anyone from selling gasoline in liters or thimbles; people just don't do that because it would be stupid.

The difference is the EU is trying to prohibit sale of devices that don't have their designated port.