Are Americans too immature to handle the coolness of guns?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 5:46 pm

So. As Frank pointed out on these boards, Frank pointed out that even though that, statistically, guns have no practical purpose they're still cool enough that they can be allowed on just those grounds. That's not facetious, either, there are a lot of things that cause a finite amount of harm and can be easily restricted but are still allowed on the grounds of coolness like fried porkchops, bacon and eggs, fireworks, and fast cars.

The question is, is the United States equipped to handle such coolness? I say no. I have no problem with a society like Norway or Israel or Canada or Japan or Germany having near-unrestricted gun ownership. I mean, Canada has a huge number of guns but their gun crime is much lower. But I also think that the United States' population is just too immature and crazed to handle such cool power. I'm not picking on the United States exclusively, I think that other countries like the United Kingdom or France or China (were they to allow such a thing) cannot handle the coolness of guns either and it works better if they don't.

So the next question is, how do dumbass countries like the U.S. get to be trusted with the responsibility of guns? Well, first of all you need to do something about income inequality. Except for Israel income inequality almost has a positive correlation with violence. Second of all you need to tamper way the fuck down on intergroup strife. I think that France of the 1990s could handle guns, but the France of the 2010s could not. This of course makes the U.S. double-incompetent at gun ownership. Thirdly, there needs to be a large and sane gun advocacy group. Groups like the National Rifle Association could have been real helpful but they've gone off the deep end.

Of course this viewpoint is written from the view of an American. Not only should you feel free to critique me on any points I'm practically begging you to correct me on any inaccuracies.

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 5:58 pm

The problem with the NRA is that they're fear-mongerers. Charlton Heston, former President, genuinely believes that white conservative Christians are an oppressed majority whose rights are being taken away by liberals.

The NRA also published a comic advocating that feminists and environmentalists were a bigger threat to American safety and security than, say, far-right anti-government extremists:

http://wonkette.com/223889/nras-secret- ... l-revealed

Also, the NRA champions stuff like not giving out receipts to people who buy guns so that the "big bad government can't track gun-owners down!" Their legislation explicitly makes it easier for criminals and violent psychopaths to gain access to guns. Gun shows sell military-grade arms to citizens without ID or ones with a criminal record: no background checks, no waiting period.

So you end up getting far-right white supremacists and anti-government extremists retreating into paramilitary compounds and stockpiling machine guns and grenades for the inevitable day when the UN/Democrats/Communists/minorities lead a military coup and take over the country.

There's a big paradigm shift occurring in the United States. Anti-gay bigotry is now anathema to the younger generation; almost 1 in 4 Americans identify as a religion other than Christianity; 16% of the population is Hispanic; Fox News created a societal bubble where their devoted viewers know less about the news than people who rely mainly on word of mouth. These conservative groups are scared at the changing social demographics and political landscape, and this is how we get gun-happy nutjobs like the Oathkeepers and Hutaree.

We have higher incidents of gun violence due to lack of sensible regulation and fear. Countries with lax gun control laws but low crime rates (like the Netherlands) aren't afflicted with social turmoil, poverty, and faltering public education systems. When people suffer, they get angry, and when people get angry they need to take it out on someone. People demand safety and security when violence occurs. If the government cannot make people feel safe, then citizens will resort to stockpiling weapons and ammunition to feel safe.

As to Americans' maturity regarding the handling of guns, I'd say it varies on a case-by-case basis. There's just some people who cannot be trusted with deadly weapons. There are times when a gun would be useful, like if you're living in rural Alaska or other places with dangerous wild animals. Or maybe you operate a pawn shop, bar, or other business that has a tendency to attract angry and rowdy people.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 8:20 pm

Well, there are a number of serious philosophical arguments to be made for allowing private gun ownership. And a roughly equal number to be made for imposing various limitations on those rights.

But the realpolitik of it is that if you try to enact something as sane as a requirement to report lost or stolen guns in a timely manner at the local level, one of the most well-funded, well organized lobbying groups ever will sue your cash-strapped local government repeatedly over it. Apparently, the NRA thinks that there is a right to "lose and misplace" arms somehow implied by that comma in the Second Amendment. And sadly the only balance to that sort of insanity is for opposition groups to go just as far the other way and refuse to compromise on anything ever.

Personally I think the only improvement that might actually be possible within the US political system would be compulsory gun safety education - and you couldn't require it as a condition for gun ownership as that would be an infringement - so it would have to be part of citizenship. Thus, since we are going to be an armed society, gun safety should be taught in junior high civics and be parts of the citizenship test for immigrants - that might at least reduce the accident rates with guns.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Fri Jan 06, 2012 11:47 pm

Lesson Number One in Gun Safety Class:
"Hold my Beer and watch this!" Gets you shot in the kneecaps.

Actually, people in germany are, generally, allowed to own guns.
If i remember what my uncle from the police once told me right, it's basically like this:
You need a license for owning one.
And a license for keeping it at home.
And a license for having it with you.
And a license to get the Ammo for it.
And a license for having the ammo at home.
And a license for having the ammo with you.
And a license for having both with you.
And a license for having both at home.
And you need to really convince the state that you need one because of your job for example.
You CAN get a weapon for sport shooting, but the weapon is to be kept at the range/club and never anywhere else. And you are responsible for it, if something goes wrong with it, even if you, yourself, were not present at the time.

You can only get those licenses, if you have never ever been in conflict with the law(meaning in jail or having had to pay a fine worth more than 60 days of work)
And you need to be 18 years old.
And you can not have a psychic illness.
And you may not be addicted to drugs or alcohol.
And you need to provide SAFE keeping of the gun and prove that.

Oh, and you need to renew all those licenses every 3 years and you need to prove your being able and in need of having one every 3 years too.
And that you do not have a psychic illness, are not or were not addicted to drugs or alcohol in the mean time and have not had any troubles with the law that brought you over the 60 days in jail or fines equaling 60 days of work either. And no, this does not reset.
But then you are like TOTALY allowed to own a gun!
Provided you can actually afford one, seeing how they are really expensive.
And the gun owners are, i think, registered too. And there is a waiting time.

If all of this does apply to you and is worth the trouble, go right ahead.
Of course, you may only own certain guns at all. No automatic, no military grade.

Well, what do you know, there's actually an english wikipedia article on this, and it seems i was mostly right too, if that article is up to date:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gun_politics_in_Germany

Severian · Post by **Severian** » Sat Jan 07, 2012 1:10 am

Is your plan to change our culture, economy, and demographic makeup such that our country would naturally have lower gun crime, or are you just looking for a couple of legal measures that would reduce gun crime?

Lago PARANOIA · Post by **Lago PARANOIA** » Sat Jan 07, 2012 1:53 am

Severian wrote:Is your plan to change our culture, economy, and demographic makeup such that our country would naturally have lower gun crime, or are you just looking for a couple of legal measures that would reduce gun crime?

The first. Fortunately, changes to the makeup of the U.S. are either naturally happening anyway (reduction in racial tensions and religious insanity) or things that need to be done anyway (reducing income inequality), so it's not as insurmountable as you think.

While the second question is also one that needs to be answered as long as needle-dicked American doofuses cry about needing their exploding dildos, I think it's more interesting to contemplate what a society would need to be like to have an acceptable level of gun violence and would have access to guns be more like fireworks or fried porkchops. Considering that Japan exists at all, I don't think that it's an unanswerable or empty question.

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Sat Jan 07, 2012 1:55 am

@Lago PARANOIA

I notice how you are going around the fact that countries that can "handle guns" are ones with less diverse racial/cultural groups living next to each other.

virgil · Post by **virgil** » Sat Jan 07, 2012 1:32 pm

Gx1080 wrote:@Lago PARANOIA

I notice how you are going around the fact that countries that can "handle guns" are ones with less diverse racial/cultural groups living next to each other.

I notice how you go around the fact that one of Lago's examples, Canada, is about as diverse as America, if not moreso because of the French/English language divide in areas. Gun crime has actually gone down as diversity increased.

Kind of blows holes in your theory, no?

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Sat Jan 07, 2012 11:55 pm

virgil wrote:Kind of blows holes in your theory, no?

Actually it doesn't. You need to drill down into the actual demographic information within Canada to understand the dynamic; a lot of it is kept under the rug as it were. Generally such diversity is located in the urban centers (the French Speakers don't live next door to the English Speakers in the rural communities) like say Vancouver? I'm not sure we can trust THEM with guns.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 2:16 am

I'm curious how much education has to do with violence, as well. I'm curious if education has a greater effect than diversity.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 3:17 am

Diversity doesn't really have anything to do with violence, and Vancouver is a prime example of that. Vancouver's crime statistics have been going down for the past six years pretty steadily, and their "diversity" has been going up for 20 or 30. Crime rates have basically done whatever they felt like while diversity has been shooting straight up.

The confusion has a lot to do with immigration; when people see a sudden (read: one they actually notice) increase in diversity, that is because they are seeing immigration. Now, immigration comes in a lot of forms and variations, but a really common form of immigration is the impoverished variety. If you're headed somewhere new, that's probably because there was something wrong with the old and more often than not it was your financial standing. Having a bunch of poor people show up in your neighborhood is an obvious cause for increased crime rates. And when you look at the Vancouver situation, the past six years have seen decreased immigration, decreased crime, and growing diversity (don't make the mistake of thinking reduced immigration means reduced diversity; minorities do, in fact, make babies, and for the most part not yet established groups do so more quickly than the established ones).

Now, you might read this and think "so, diversity might be okay, but immigration is obviously bad then," which is an idea on par with trying to fight crime by exiling poor people. It's pretty stupid. You're a lot better off providing people with economic opportunities so they don't have to resort to crime. Work assistance programs and good ol' fashioned "in America, you can be anything you want with hard work" PR/propaganda targeted at minorities, to help counteract the culturally reinforced social roles we have where our minorities fail to succeed because we teach them they can't their entire life.

Koumei · Post by **Koumei** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 3:50 am

Low crime seems to go hand in hand with actual crime reduction policies. Let's look at Denmark, where they have no death penalty, and where the closest you get to Life Without Parole is "Every 10-20 years, we'll have a team evaluate you. If they feel you are still a threat to society, you stay in." (thus taking care of the people who are just nuts).

Furthermore, their actual prison systems include things like cooking classes and the like, teaching you skills so you can actually get a job once you leave prison - rather than learning how to fashion a shiv out of a toothbrush and to hate your fellow man. They have some of the lowest recidivism in the world.

As for diversity... look at fucking Belarus. They rate very high (that's bad) for murders per capita, indeed their murder rate tops that of the entire Soviet Union, yet they're all the same skin colour, all the same "stock", speak the same language, and according to some (ie neighbouring countries) all have the same grandparents.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 10:15 pm

Switzerland is pretty diverse - four recognized languages, three of them are official ones which all law is translated to - and has a lot of guns, many of them military grade, but not much gun crime.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 10:21 pm

Switzerland also was willing to send youths who were 'different' to work camps, as effectively slave labor.

And everyone basically knew, and everyone turned a blind eye.
Switzerland is not really a country to hold up as an example of high moral standards

Gx1080 · Post by **Gx1080** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 10:50 pm

Ok, let's go with your argument of "poor inmigrants".

Why a nation with a crisis due to lack of jobs should care about poor, illegal inmigrants being "accepted" instead of simply close the barrier? I mean, hello, part of living in a country is putting your fellow countrymen first.

EDIT: Just in case, I also don't believe on the "hurr rich people are virtuous" Repub myth. But the marxist myth that lumpenproles are virtuous is bullshit. People are "sociopaths" at all levels.

Also, a case of rich foreigners getting their way....well, more wars for Israel seem to be on their way.

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 11:33 pm

Says the guy whose family were poor immigrants in the not so distant future.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sun Jan 08, 2012 11:41 pm

sabs wrote:Says the guy whose family were poor immigrants in the not so distant future.

*several star fleet officers*
"I'm getting a headache"

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Jan 09, 2012 1:19 am

Gx1080 wrote:Why a nation with a crisis due to lack of jobs should care about poor, illegal inmigrants being "accepted" instead of simply close the barrier? I mean, hello, part of living in a country is putting your fellow countrymen first.

I really suck at ignoring you, but it's at least kept me from responding to you this long, but this is stupid enough I can't help myself.

Kicking employed people out of your economy will not cause increased economic production. That is absolutely vital to understand. It does not work. You cannot make your economy stronger by getting rid of people who have jobs. The states that have actually tried to do this have failed miserably, and it's been great. You might hope really hard that the employment will just magically get redistributed and it's like shaving off the excess, but that sort of magical redistribution doesn't happen in reality and productivity goes down and unemployment goes up.

But it gets worse, because employed people are the ones who are creating demand by spending money. Yes, that's right; all of those employed illegal immigrants are helping create jobs for other people by spending the money they earn. So when you take a bunch of people who have jobs and are spending money and tell them to go do that somewhere else, you are telling the market that there will be less consumers in the future and that they need to cut productivity. That is a synonym for start firing people. That means unemployment goes up.

Also, please stop trying to do the whole evolutionary psychology thing. You fucking suck at it. I'm not even kidding. Sociopathy is not actually an evolutionary advantageous trait. Sociopathy is a trait that gets you kicked out of society, where you die alone in the wilderness. There is a reason that places that teach prisoners workplace skills and help them find jobs experience less recidivism; people don't actually want to be criminals, but if their only choices are "live the life of a monk, swearing off worldly pleasures," and "steal shit," you'll get a lot of people who pick door #2. The best way to fight crime is to give people job opportunities other than crime.

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Jan 09, 2012 2:42 am

DSMatticus wrote:Also, please stop trying to do the whole evolutionary psychology thing. You fucking suck at it. I'm not even kidding. Sociopathy is not actually an evolutionary advantageous trait. Sociopathy is a trait that gets you kicked out of society, where you die alone in the wilderness.

Yeah. Once we were able to start controlling our environment so well, "natural" selection took on a new meaning for humans. And besides, if you aren't taken out of the gene pool before you successfully breed, then it doesn't really stop a bad trait from getting passed on, anyway.

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Jan 09, 2012 3:17 pm

DSMatticus wrote:Kicking employed people out of your economy will not cause increased economic production.

Remind me not to do this too often, but I completely agree.

DSMatticus wrote:There is a reason that places that teach prisoners workplace skills and help them find jobs experience less recidivism; people don't actually want to be criminals, but if their only choices are "live the life of a monk, swearing off worldly pleasures," and "steal shit," you'll get a lot of people who pick door #2. The best way to fight crime is to give people job opportunities other than crime.

I'll nit pick here because the premise is slightly flawed. It's not that a person wants or doesn't want to be a criminal. In some cases they have no other choice. (Such people also aren't good criminals and will get immediately caught trying to do it again, even after a proper education in jail.) In other cases it is because it's just really easy. So in addition to being able to get a good paying job you also need to implant the morality that getting the "easy money" the wrong way is wrong.

So you do need to give them job oooortunities other than crime, but you also need to do more things to keep old ways from comming back.

DSMatticus · Post by **DSMatticus** » Mon Jan 09, 2012 3:54 pm

tzor wrote:In other cases it is because it's just really easy. So in addition to being able to get a good paying job you also need to implant the morality that getting the "easy money" the wrong way is wrong.

That's seriously not the norm. Recidivism can be low. Really, amazingly, fantastically low. Very, very few people make a "good life" out of crime, and those are the people who are usually involved in organized crime or white collar crime, which are separate and unique problems. You really don't need to teach "morality" at all, because people are not idiots; they do not want to spend their entire life bouncing in and out of jail, whether they're a 'good' or 'bad' person, whatever that means (usually nothing).

tzor · Post by **tzor** » Mon Jan 09, 2012 5:00 pm

I probably used the wrong word there, I probably should have written "discipline."

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Mon Jan 09, 2012 5:00 pm

tzor wrote:oooortunities

Off topic, but this is the best typo ever.

Fuchs · Post by **Fuchs** » Tue Jan 10, 2012 8:13 am

sabs wrote:Switzerland also was willing to send youths who were 'different' to work camps, as effectively slave labor.

And everyone basically knew, and everyone turned a blind eye.
Switzerland is not really a country to hold up as an example of high moral standards

I assume you're talking about the "Verdingkinder". They were usually orphans or from disrupted families and sent to farmers. Some farmers abused them, some did them very well - about par for the course for parents at the time. Those were not camps for slave labor.

Sorry to say but compared to what most of the other countries did (especially in their colonies), Switzerland does come off at least on par with everyone else.

We've also got more immigrants than most other countries, over 20% are foreigners these days. And yet we've been more stable than just about everyone else, despite havoing more weapons per capita than anyone but Texas (and I am, not sure we'd not top Texas too).

sabs · Post by **sabs** » Tue Jan 10, 2012 12:22 pm

I've seen the investigative reporting on verdingkinder. It was full of abuse, and they were not usually orphans or from disrupted families. There were plenty of kids from normal families, that we 'acting out' and got sent to be slave labor, while their parents PAID for it, because they were told they were being 'rehabilitated'.