The exact definition of "civilized world" is doing a lot of work here. What specific regions or poltical jurisdictions do you think count or do not count as part of the civilized world?
I am sorry I don't have the precise statement about relative rates of gun deaths and mass shootings in the US vs the rest of the OECD. Here's a data point to ponder, firearms are now the leading cause of death for children and adolescents in the US: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
I wa surprised by this, because Mexico is in the OECD. According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/public-health/articles/..., the firearm-related death rate (including suicides and accidents) in 2022 in Mexico for children and adolescents (age 1-19) is 4.9/100k, compared to 5.9/100k in the US. But the overall homicide rate is 6.5/100k for Mexico vs 4.7/100k in the US. So this is consistent with Mexico being a more violent society than the US, but using somewhat fewer guns in the process (and the numbers are still pretty similar). There's also questions about how reliable the Mexican firearm homicide data is - a lot of these are presumably happening in cartel-controlled areas where Mexican government state capacity is limited, including the capacity to properly gather statistics.
Yeah, it's obviously a gun control issue. But the US has such a deeply ingrained cultural association with owning guns, and thinking that this means "freedom" in case the government turns on the people lol, that I doubt banning them happens in our lifetime.
> There is no clear correlation whatsoever between gun ownership rate and gun homicide rate. Not within the USA. Not regionally. Not internationally. Not among peaceful societies. Not among violent ones. Gun ownership doesn’t make us safer. It doesn’t make us less safe. A bivariate correlation simply isn’t there. It is blatantly not-there. It is so tremendously not-there that the “not-there-ness” of it alone should be a huge news story.
You don't need to ban them, though. Isn't that the actual lesson at the end of _Bowling For Columbine_? That Canada has a huge number of guns and isn't so fucked up?
What you need to do is undermine the culture of machismo and trollishness around guns:
Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
(Like, if you get a Christmas card from a family with guns in their photo, why would you consider that anything other than a threatening communication? It clearly is.)
Move on to "anyone who has more usable guns than they can hold in their hands is probably a broken person and maybe you should consider keeping your distance".
Move on to "anyone who owns a bump stock is insane or compensating for a tiny penis", and "anyone who doesn't keep their guns in a gun safe is not safe to be around at all".
Move on to "open carry does not mean ostentatious carry". Start thinking about whether open carry is, in fact, a necessary conclusion of the right to bear arms.
Move on to fucking investigating NRA corruption properly. Don't just point it out.
Move on to humiliating politicians who take gun lobby money. Don't just point it out as if it's some form of conflict of interest or a sign they won't be serious about gun crime. Laugh at them. Call them spineless cowards. Humiliate them for their craven foolishness.
Aim for a process that preserves the right to bear arms but makes gun nuts seem as untrustworthy and dangerous as it turns out they so often are.
And if you are a gun owner and you believe guns should be treated with caution and respect, and you know someone who doesn't, tell them in no uncertain terms, and if you ever see them get violent, tell the police of your concerns.
You act like guns some weird anachronism, but from my perch, it seems that the need for civilized people to maintain firearms is increasing, not decreasing.
Consider that we have a documented justice system in many places that is repeatedly releasing violent criminals onto the streets, such that they are going on to set people on fire on the train, knife innocents on the subway, swinging and hitting elderly women with nail-embedded boards on the sidewalk. Note these crimes happened despite their lack of firearms. Should we not have guns to defend ourselves from these barbarians?
If the justice system were perfect, and crime rates far lower, then firearms would be less necessary, but never unnecessary, because civilization in a local phenomenon, and it only takes one barbarian to disrupt civilized order for the peaceful people of the world. It takes one civilized person with a gun to restore order.
In many places in the west, immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England, gangs that bomb in Sweden, etc. Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
"I need my guns to defend myself from the (((barbarian hordes)))" is exactly the kind of rhetoric that leads the rest of the planet treats gun nuts like the nuts they are. Unfortunately for the US, the US valorizes this particular psychosis
In my world, a civilized person is one who upholds peaceable society, and a barbarian is one who uses force to upend that society. They're not hordes, but they are barbarians.
And the gun owners desperately fantasizing about finally encountering a situation that will allow them to live out their Falling Down fantasies are..? The civilized people?
If you encounter a failing justice system and your response isn't "let's fix the causes" but instead "thankfully I believe in convenient self-service executions", you aren't upholding peaceable society, and I suspect that a peaceable society isn't what you'd prefer.
I would argue the prospect of people waiting to stop them is a good deterrent, a beneficial complement to any effective justice system. When seconds count, the police are at best minutes away. For example, concealed carry is demonstrably effective in mass shooting attempts in churches, ending the threat in 6 seconds:
https://youtu.be/LflruqEMlVU?si=Q4VeYnClxPGtrI88
Consider too that there are many documented cases of the authorities being incompetent to or unwilling to stop a threat, most recently in Bondi Beach, but also in Uvalde. Maybe they’re just not coming to save you?
Allowing US style gun proliferation creates a chicken and egg problem:
How can you prevent these rape gangs from accessing the same weapons? They are not caught, prosecuted and banned from obtaining guns? Even if they are, there will be more guns to steal and circulate in either case.
The answer is laws, but you say they are not working perfectly. So rape gangs will be armed rape gangs next.
When I visited Stockholm ~17 years ago, all shops were displaying valuable items in steel cages anyway (e.g.: TVs were "locked" in heavy-duty steel frames to prevent "removal"), so the problem runs older than the immigration policy gained momentum.
> immigration policy has given rise to rape gangs in England […] Should these peaceful people not have guns to defend themselves from these barbarians?
I don't think you understand the nature of the "rape gang" problem —- what it actually refers to, how it works, and why arming a populace wouldn't do a thing to stop it.
Because the USA has this exact same problem (low-level organised crime gangs sexually exploiting naïve, broke or drug-addicted young teenagers in deprived settings) and gun ownership didn't fix it.
The "rape gangs" are not some roving crime phenomenon that turns up at your door and can be dissuaded by waving a gun.
So yes. Not only do we not extrajudicially shoot rapists because vigilante violence doesn't do anything useful, arming a whole population would not stop this problem in deprived environments in cities. It hasn't in yours.
> Start with "anyone who poses with guns in their family Christmas photo is to be treated as if they will use them on your family or their own kids without a moment's hesitation for their own gain".
That seems hyperbolic to me. I don't understand liking "tactical" Christmas decor, but I know some people who do.
In my experience, this kind of hyperbole tends to increase polarization around an idea instead of leading to any consensus.
By the time the opportunity arises to actually do anything about it, a whole load of "conservatives" will be furiously denying that they ever were. In some cases to tribunals and commissions.
Nobody should give the slightest respect or deference to those ideals if invoked by anyone who supported the Republican party after "very fine people on both sides". There is nothing "conservative" about 99% of people who claim the label, and there's nothing moral about their position.
They can either organise with the gun fetishists or take the opportunity to separate from them. But there's no reason to suggest that conservatism in its true form has anything to do with looney gun fetishists who pose with guns in Christmas cards.
All of this can be done without changing the fundamental right to bear or own guns.
I voted Trump three times. He won. America disagrees with you. Most Republicans own guns. It's time to accept that your shaming tactics deployed over the last decade don't work. Our 'side' is more than happy to have yours stop coming to Christmas. You even fittingly repeat the "fine people" hoax, lol.
“The perps” gives away a huge flaw in your thinking, that people are inherently good or inherently bad and that “bad” people are motivated to do bad things always and will always find a way to do them and “good” people don’t. This is entirely incorrect and has been proven so false for so long that any further point made without understanding this should be dismissed out of hand.
Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones? Which countries do and do not count as part of the West in any case? People hold different opinions about whether e.g. the entirety of Latin America counts as Western or not, and the choice to include or exclude those countries makes a big difference in how the US compares in terms of relative violent crime rates.
You make a good point! The US isn’t really civilised enough to compare it to countries with proper modern and safe societies, so why should it aim to those heights? If we just compare the US to other countries with issues of violent crime we don’t have to solve any problems at all to look acceptable.
> Why not compare America against all countries instead of just Western ones?
Oh indeed, but what I am referring to is the "knife crime in London" comparator that right-wing gun groups use. Knife crime in London is not as bad as knife crime in any comparable US city. It's about 40% as bad as New York and only 10% as bad as Dallas.
Prohibition has historically been proven to not work. Even so, the effectiveness of gun laws can't be measured when neighboring states don't have equivalent restrictions. Saying we have 20,000 gun laws and that they don't inherently work is somewhat misleading.
You’re spouting straight gun propaganda. It has been proven over and over and over that gun restrictions work very effectively. Anything else it’s literally just a lie.
The comment you replied to was calling out gun propaganda. When I said prohibition doesn't work, i'm talking about removing whatever the contraband is has been empirically proven to not work. Guns, drugs, and booze are too proliferated in the US to be effectively prohibited. Unless we can get every state on the same page with equivalent laws across the country, the debate is moot.
Ah no, I’m pretty certain allowing the sale of military-grade automatic weapons is the issue. That’s a tool for warfare, and you have deadly shootings every day.
Automatic weapons aren't being sold en masse and are rarely used in violent crime. The most common culprits are regular hand guns. The banning of which would require draconian laws. Laws that would need to be enforced, failing a massive culture shift resulting in the vast majority of gun owners voluntarily turning in their arsenals.
You can down vote me but bump stocks are legal. The difference seems semantic.
There are many, many steps that could be taken in the USA to reduce access to weapons before reaching outright banning. Obviously.
And also the idea that banning handguns would be draconian is hilarious. Try talking to anyone from UK, ANZ, Europe, etc. No one is crying about too much regulation.
Bump stocks are also extremely rare when it comes to violent crime. I would also say they're the tip of the ice berg when it comes to modifying AR's. I'm gonna take a guess that you aren't overly familiar with firearms, but I say bump stocks being legal are a non-issue because a much simpler and cheaper modification to 90% of AR-15's will make them automatic rifles. The modification can be accomplished with a bit of wire coat hanger, or about 15 cents worth of plastic.
And I say draconian in the context of existing American gun laws.
But real talk, I'm not a gun nut. I'm a leftist that believes the working class should be armed and as a society we need to move towards a system that does mitigate violence. Gun laws alone won't and can't do that. And unless we have a national divorce, I don't see effective gun legislation happening.
> While the FBI did break these down by weapon type, they didn’t differentiate between AR-15s or similarly patterned rifles, and grandpa’s bolt action deer rifle. All told, in 2019 there were 364 rifle murders, out of a total of 10,258 firearm murders, accounting for approximately 3.5% of total firearm murders. Nobody uses rifles to murder people because they’re big, bulky, difficult to conceal, and a handgun can do the job just as well.
My buddy saw a sign on a gun store where they had a "3 for the price of 2" promotion on M240 machine guns, like who in their right mind would need two of these, let alone three? They proudly displayed "No ID Checks" in their window lettering, too.
At least part of this is a lie. A transferable M240 is like $400k-600k. And in order to sell those, they have to run a background check as an FFL which requires some form of identification.
Same principle applies with cameras. The tool is not the issue.