(As a general concept of how a society should run, not intended as a US-specific question.)
I sometimes see people on the internet saying that giving people easy access to guns is too risky and there should be stricter gun control, while simultaneously wanting to abolish the police? I’m just confused on what people really want?
You cant both abolish the police and then also disarm the citizens, gotta pick one. So which is it, internet? Self-policing with guns? Or reform the police?
[Please state what country you’re in]
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(Also its funny how the far-right of the US is both pro-gun and pro-police, I’m confused by that as well)
Neither this nor that. Your options are too simplistic.
Of course, police needs guns.
Some civilians need guns, too. But not many. They should be able to get them, but they have to prove their need. It needs rules set up in advance to define what kind of needs qualify for getting guns. And then it needs laws against gun abuse.
In addition, soldiers need guns. They even need weapons that are much stronger. So there must be boundaries between several kinds of weapons, and normal people cannot get all kinds. And there must be boundaries between what police can do and what soldiers can do. For example, soldiers must never go against civilians, and nobody has the right to order them so, and they can never get punished for denying such an order.
but they have to prove their need
No. They should have to prove their competency. Need is too easy to dispute. We dont get to dictate why someone needs a gun any more than why they need a car. If they want one, have the means, and demonstrate compliance with safety guidelines, then they shouldn’t be denied. Canada handles this fairly well.
School shootings demonstrate why some people should absolutely be denied access to guns.
The current US political situation demonstrates why more people should arm themselves.
Need is too easy to dispute.
Because it needs to be disputed. You want a gun, you make a case for it.
prove their competency.
That’s a good thing, but comes after the need.
current US political situation demonstrates why more people should arm themselves.
If it’s about bringing down a bad government, it can be done with pitchforks as well.
I’m strictly anti-gun, as I believe are most Europeans. Civilians shouldn’t be allowed to keep ranged weapons, period.
But it is legal to do that in all European countries though. You just need to qualify for a license. And that process seems to mostly do the job, especially compared to the US.
What about hunting?
Should be reserved to professional hunters/game keepers, who would be entitled to rifle ownership as part of their job description, just like police forces or the military.
Privateers should not kill animals for sport.
Most hunters in the US are shooting game to eat, ehoch is necessary since we killed off most of the predators that would otherwise keep the deer populations in check. Limiting it to only professionals would result in a lot of wasted kills.
We have hunting licenses for a reason.
Doesn’t mean I have to agree with the practice.
Hunting should be banned.
Civilians shouldn’t be allowed to keep ranged weapons, period.
So my bow should be illegal? What about a slingshot?
Bows/crossbows should be restricted to use in special clubs, just like guns or rifles, where they are stored on premise.
Restricting slingshots would be hard to enforce, but I’d say carrying them in public should be just as illegal as carrying guns.
Tbh I’ve never seen a use case that requires ownership of a slingshot, other than maybe feeding fishes in preparation of a long cast.
Guns should be available, but hard to get, and hard to keep.
available, but hard to get
Then only the rich can have guns.
No sure if that’s what you had in mind?
Maybe this is what they had in mind.
Don’t put that racist shit on me.
Any time something is hard to get then it is available to whoever has power and denied to minorities. While you may not have intended to mean that, it is the end result of the approach you are promoting.
How do you propose keeping guns away from people prone to violence, criminals, and the insane?
Hard to get doesn’t mean expensive. It means you can’t have it if you can’t handle it. Like a car. Nobody would give a driving license to a blind person. And nobody should have a gun permit if you are mentally unstable.
Expense is not the only way to make something hard to get, and gun laws have a long history of being made in a way that intentionally or unintentionally makes it difficult for minorities.
Many of the historical laws they found were virulently racist, restricting access to weaponry for enslaved people, Indigenous Americans and other racial minorities.
Not hard to get as in expensive, hard to get as in the amount of training and certifications you need in order to legally own a gun.
Yes, and I have understood it in the same way.
On the poor end:
Would you sponsor all these trainings and certificates for everybody who can’t afford them?On the rich end:
Don’t you think that as a rich person you could delegate most of the hassle to somebody you pay? (not saying to buy false certificates, but even that is thinkable)
Probably harder to get than a driver’s license.
It’s depressing to hear that’s not already the case.
I mean… in Non-North-American Western Countries, that’s already a thing, right?
Edit:
Australia + Many countries in Europe requires permits and that requires a “good reason”. From what I heard, the police is usally much less shitty than the US counterpart.
I might be wrong, but I believe ONE OF the reasons why American police is so shitty is because every citizen might be—and often is—carrying a gun. This causes stress in the police force, higher chances of casualties among them as compared to other countries, so it builds feelings of fear and “acting first, asking later” in most situations.
Sure, many of them are also power-tripping assholes on top of that.
Indirectly. They use the fact that people could be armed to justify their behavior, especially the overuse of ‘he’s got a gun’ when the person doesn’t. But many people interact with other people in dangerous situations while attempting to deescalate which the police tend to use the possibility as justification for escalating violence.
Mental health professional: talk down the person who is having a crisis
Police: shoot while claiming they are afraid for their life from an unarmed 12 year old
Maybe they shouldn’t become cops then.
Yep! I wasn’t justifying them.
Cool, what about a nailgun? You ever see what they can do? Better make them harder to get. /s
There are tools for nailing things and tools for killing things.
K, nail someone in the head and ask em how they feel afterwards.
We literally use a nailgun to kill cattle before slaughtering them.
I think the right to have a gun should also include the legal requirement to take and pass a tactical shoot course. No point in having a gun if one can’t hit their target in a stressful situation. Paper target shooting isn’t good enough.
I’ll go further, and say the text of the 2nd Amendment implies gun owners should be members of a well-regulated militia. I think every State Guard should accept anyone who applies, and give them basic training. In exchange for being part of the reserve, and passing firearm classes, you can keep and bear arms.
If you don’t want to be part of a well-related militia, no guns. If you can’t pass firearm training, no guns.
Should it be state funded? Or should only people who can afford it be allowed to exercise their rights?
User pay. Just like buying the gun, driving a car, a boating license, or a hunting license.
The last thing I want in an active shooter situation is someone with more money than skill waving a gun around making the situation worse.
If one has to pay for it then it isn’t a right.
Driving a car is a privilege.
In most countries, owning a gun isn’t a right, its a privilege.
I am aware of that, but this comment chain started with the context of it being a right.
OP also didn’t want this to be focused around USA gun rights.
How about en exam on morals and ethics?
That sounds good. I once had a job interview where bud was trying to piss me off to see if I had a temper. Something like that could be useful as well.
The key flaw in the logic is that American police are there to protect people. They aren’t.
https://prospect.org/justice/police-have-no-duty-to-protect-the-public/
Every man for themselves, free-for-all, no resurrections.
USA citizen here (unfortunately)
Guns are designed to kill, or at least cause harm.
I don’t think we should kill, or even cause the kind of harm that guns inflict.
∴ Guns shouldn’t exist.
I recognize this is a super idealistic approach, but this is just a “general concept of how a society should run.”
Yes, I’m taking into account hunting. We shouldn’t be killing non-human animals either. Sports is a more difficult problem to tackle for me, I recognize others like shooting for sporting events, and it’s not causing harm inherently. Might even be safer than American football, lol.
Having said that, a more realistic approach would be a gun buy back program and a slow phase out of guns for our police or at least a reduction / demilitarization of our police. I have no hope that this will happen, but wow, it’d be nice.
For the US I feel like this is a lost cause. Good luck trying to repeal the 2nd amendment.
I think that people should be able to have guns to defend themselves. I also think that, in almost all circumstances, people should not use guns to defend themselves.
If you can get a gun to protect yourself, criminals are easily going to have guns too.
Simpler all around if nobody has guns.
Or, at the very least nobody should have a handgun. A full length rifle or shotgun is a lot harder to conceal when you are using it for nefarious purposes.
Uninventing guns is not actually one of the options. The police are definitely going to have them, because if they didn’t they’d be under threat from upstarts with a 3D printer or just a lathe, and they know it.
Nobody said anything about removing them from police. I have no problem with police being armed.
It is technically possible to make every other gun illegal and force people to dispose of them. Again it’s unrealistic but its not impossible.
It’s also possible to eliminate all commercial ammo availability, and even most home production (by banning the sale of powder for reloading). Home powder products are inferior, and potentially even dangerous. Safe and functional casings are also extremely difficult to produce.
Would people try to get around these restrictions? Sure, but it would still dramatically reduce gun use.
Citizens not having guns is not going to stop criminals from having guns
The genie is out of the bottle here, but a polite society would make guns unavailable for everyone. Gina have one purpose: to kill things. Who’s to decide who the “bad guys” and “good guys” are?
Who’s to decide who the “bad guys” and “good guys” are?
Probably the person with the gun.
Let’s just hope that there’s no such thing as “mental illness”, or “emotion”, that could make a “good guy” want to do something “not good”.
A lot of guns are stolen. Also if there isn’t a big a market, manufacturers won’t make as many. Supply drops so does criminal possession.
Not that I’m advocating either way, just a counter to your point.
Not fully, no. My understanding is that the available data of countries with and without general-citizen gun ownership, all else being equal, shows that normal issues (crime, personal conflicts, …) becomes gun-involved issues a lot more frequently so apparently it does help
Japan says otherwise. Gun crime is practically non-existent, despite a population of over a hundred million people.
It’s unrealistic to apply this to the US given how many guns already exist, but it’s not actually impossible.
Yes it will. The idea thaat criminals will mass produce homemade firearms is nonsense. Even the cartels don’t do this at any scale.
I’m Toronto it’s like 13% of guns that are domestic, the other 87% are smuggled in from the unregulated shithole that is America, 0% are homemade.
Guns can now be 3d printed as we can see Luigi Mangione allegedly printed that gun
Yeah, but they’re not because no one wants to fire something that might blow up in their hand, and it’s not actually that easy to mass manufacture illegal guns, even with 3d printers and CNC machines.
Like I said, we all know you can make a homemade gun with online information. That has been the case for literally the last 2 decades. And yet, underground homemade gun manufacturing is virtually non existent, because guess what, it’s not that easy to do at scale in a way that won’t get you immediately caught and all your equipment and supplies impounded.
Literally every developers western country that bans guns has not seen any noticeable rise in homemade guns being used at any regular pace. In what world do you think Norwegian clubs are being shot up with homemade uzis?
In the US, The police don’t protect people. They don’t actually have any obligations to do so. I am kinda wondering how the “police protecting” works out when say several big dudes kick your door in and bad-stuff you and your house. The gun owner defense themselves in that scenario, but the police-reliant folks…do what? Wait for the murder investigation to catch the baddies? It’s an odd predicament, given how awful guns can be and how pad they are for a society. As proven by stats from pro and anti-gun countries. Personally, I will continue to carry a pistol…even if it has only been used against a rabid racoon that was getting too close to the house. I don’t think civilians need dozens of insane weapons though. So I don’t know where that puts me on the spectrum. Gun user, and enjoyer, that recognizes they are a huge problem.
With frequent mass school shootings I would think the only defensible position would be to be for as much gun restrictions as possible, otherwise you’d have to defend a necessary condition to allowing mass shootings to continue.
Absent that condition I think people should be allowed to do what they want without fucking up everybody else.
Long guns and hunting weapons sure. I’d ban everything else with heavy prison terms for illegal firearms.
In a functional society, gun should not be allowed to be used for personal defense by the public, the police should have a monopoly on using guns for protection.
But, guns should be allowed for hunting, sports and a general hobby.
If a member of the public used a gun for self defense, an investigation would determine if that was justified or not.
US
Q1: people don’t trust the police
Q2: people don’t know what they want, but they do know they don’t trust the police.
Q3: This is a false premise. You can do both, but I am gathering you believe that the resulting “lawlessness” would be bad.
Q4: the best take is to reform police to the point that most do not carry firearms and are basically trained social workers. Firearms should be greatly regulated by a combination of insurance, technology, and psychological testing.
Q5: The concept that good guns cancel out bad guns is fantasy.
Q6: Yes, this can be done independently of whatever US decides to do with gun control
I think the people should be allowed to have guns within reason. What I mean by ‘within reason’ is that no civilian should be able to own something ridiculous like an RPG. I don’t believe that to be an unreasonable demand. Though I must say, it would be cool to use one.
