Me too. Thanks.
Reading these comments it seems like most of the anti gun crowd thinks pro gun is about machismo at the cost of tragedy. It’s mainly about protection of the people from the government. It’s the last failsafe to keeping free in the case of tyranny. We all agree there needs to be better regulation because in the past and currently the laws are designed over feelings and not facts, for example barrel length restrictions or pistol grips that mainly only effects the ergonomics.
It’s mainly about protection of the people from the government.
Lol sure there John Wayne.
I legit can’t think of another country with people that LARP more about revolution than the US. Most affluent country in the world and you’re constantly imagining youselves forming up and fighting back against tanks and helicopters (or your fellow citizens who happen to vote for the other team). It’d be funny if it wasn’t so tragic and bizarre.
Underpinning that argument is the argument that you need a good argument if you want me to respect your opinion.
Which is fucked up.
As someone who flips between the two I’ve noticed neither side seems to really get where the other side is coming from. The anti gun people don’t get that there is a certain amount of fear of government, or how guns work. The pro gun people tend to not understand that the government is already tyrannical, the cops have military weapons, and that a lot of gun enthusiasts are exactly the sort of people who we shouldn’t let have guns.
The people I want armed are the people who dread having to use a gun on another person and have a level of fear and respect for these tools and a level of trust that very few strangers have any desire to initiate violence. Meanwhile I keep hearing coworkers talk about how they have couch guns and saying how they draw when strangers approach them. Mentally unstable people with guns are a real problem and we as a country seem to insist on doing nothing that could actually help.
You’ve read too many fairy tales if you think a gun will protect you from the government … Haha
guns to me, are more about sport and the potential for them to be useful to you in rare circumstances, more than shooting at an f35 that is launching a nuclear warhead at me from three miles away.
Your government fucks you up, every single day, week after week, year after year and the only people who own guns are the ones that are too cowardly to use them.
They couldn’t protect you against a fucking duck
Prove me wrong
One problem with the anti-tyranny argument is that guns would much more easily be the means by which tyranny is implemented than the means by which it is taken down. Imagine a more well-armed Jan 6. Then of course once the dictatorship is in place, eliminating the right to bear arms - or more likely, making it exclusive to the dictator’s allies - becomes trivial.
Now in that case, conceivably a pre-existing right to bear arms could be used to stash weapons for a resistance movement that might gradually over the course of a decades-long civil war reestablish some semblance of democracy. But by that point we’ve already lost, haven’t we?
to be fair, being pro gun is typically about machismo power fantasy at the cost of that.
if youre going to fight the people who are genuinely ruining your life, guns, especially in the way Americans think of them, are not the primary tool for the job. if youre going to defend your home, also a bad tool. do not fire a gun indoors.
add to that: the people mostly advocating for chemical guns are against the proliferation of other effective weapons for the purpose (anti drone and anti armor weapons, ied’s) and against fighting the people you actually need guns to fight, and can’t just talk shit out with.
so while I do not give a shit about guns, someone saying they’re pro gun is a huge red flag, and most ‘pro gun’ rhetoric is shit.
Centre right - like Sanders
PSA: modern gun control laws enacted by Republicans to keep guns away from Blacks
I love this dumb as fuck talking point. I know your goal is to suggest “if you support gun control then you’re racist” but you’ve done so little critical thinking about it that you’ve forgotten that it’s the pro-gun community that supports keeping the current, racist laws and the gun control advocates who want to change them.
I don’t know anyone pro gun that wants to keep the current dog shit feel good laws,
Whatever the “people you know” think, it doesn’t change the fact that the current laws were written by pro-gun groups and significant changes to them have been blocked by pro-gun groups. They’ve been in control of those laws for 20 years and they’ve delivered on absolutely none of the things they promised.
But don’t worry, it’s extremely on brand for “responsible gun owners” to deny they’re in any way responsible for guns.
This just in: Most liberals want sensible gun regs, not bans.
I wish this were true, but it’s not.
Most liberals, or most American liberals?
I’m pro using torts to make everyone in the chain of a gun tragedy pay for their externalities. Didn’t secure your gun and got it negligently stolen and someone was killed? That’ll be bankruptcy. Marketed something you knew would kill someone unlawfully? Good luck staying in business friend.
It’d be interesting if folks had to pay for the real cost of gun ownership.
Don’t stop at money. Where are all the gun owners offering to mop up the blood after Ulvade?
In fact, fuck it. There’s people out there who want to kill children. There are pro-gun people with children. They can offer their own children up to these fucking psychopaths, rather than gambling that it’ll be other people’s kids.
actually, someone should start a biological clean up crew for pro gun people. That would be fun.
Non profit of course.
Also, how come when people argue about like, gun related shenaniganery, they always talk about like, oh, well, if the government comes and hits you with a drone strike, then, you’ll be fucked. I mean, no shit sherlock.
For one, that’d be fucking nuts, I think that’d probably make it on the nightly news and probably the president would undergo serious investigation and maybe get impeached.
For two, I think probably you are more likely to use a gun to walk around and not get fucking killed by the police when you decide to protest outside of a courthouse, or walk around your community to make sure the cops don’t harass people or shoot people without being beholden the the community which they are also supposedly serving. Especially if there’s more than one of you, if there’s only one of you and the cops come around and have no idea who you are and you’re waving a gun around, then you’re probably gonna get the police called on you, and you will probably maybe get shot. Black panthers did it, anywho, and they were cool, so that’s really all I’m saying.
For three, how does this like, insane civil war scenario come about? How come that’s the main default scenario everyone’s heads go to whenever this shit comes up? That’s insane. You’re telling me that the military, a military made up of like, a bunch of dudes who mostly just wanted free college as far as I can ascertain, you’re telling me that they’d just like go and unflinchingly steamroll the normal citizenry and become part of a fascist dictatorship? That also strikes me as kind of nuts. You might not be wrong, but it does strike me as kind of nut,s and probably like they would have a huge discipline problem considering the amount of the military which has like pretty radically different political views. You’d probably have to see the centrist liberal types, the monoculture, slide way harder to the right, by which I mean, a couple inches. I find it more likely that, as we saw with BLM, if the US was to undergo civil unrest, it would probably be confined to a couple discrete locations and probably it wouldn’t be that well organized, both in execution or opposition. Probably also you’d just see an embrace of guerilla tactics, and, I mean, we’ve seen the modern military’s track record as far as that goes.
So, I dunno. Seems like a pretty stupid conversation to me. Someone hit me with the self-defense thing too so I can argue about how that’s really stupid and self-defense is stupid and dumb
Republicans aren’t pro-gun. They’re pro-republicans-with-guns. Maybe pro-straight-white-christians-with-guns.
That just means you’re reasonable. So yeah, both parties aren’t big fans of that.
I’m so far left that I got my guns back 🙂
Okay so most people would be like, “Oh everyone but me, should not be allowed to have guns, because I’m morally righteous, and think of the power, and think of how cool I am and how cool I would be with a cool gun.”, right. That’s the only position people have, I think, there’s people who have that position, and liars who are lying. Okay, cool.
But me, no. Me, I think everyone but me should have a gun. To even the odds, for the rest of you.
I like guns too. I shot them at a range and I’m pretty good. It’s like a video game where you make you’re breathing right and all that jazz.
If someone asked me if I wanted to fire guns but also children were to die in schools due to unfettered gun access thanks to those rules. I’d say, thanks but no thanks.
No but you don’t understand – fixing the “children die in schools” part would be inconvenient for gun owners. They’d have to do things like “wait longer for a gun” or “prove they know how to handle and store firearms” and ultimately, isn’t that a bigger tragedy than the murder of someone else’s kids?
You can have one without the other - where I live the bar for getting a gun and the regulations around them are so high that essentially all guns used in crime are imported illegally from abroad.
Yup. If you’re “pro-gun” in the same sense as republicans then you’re pro-death-of-children-and-other-innocent-people
Pfffft just make it a law that keeping your weapons accessible for children equals death by firing squad. Your child is talented with lockpicks? Sucks to be you.
There’s hundreds of us!
I just want my gay married friends to have guns to protect their kids.
Protect them from what?
Edit: I love the downvotes trickling in from the pro-gun cultists. Usually they pretend it’s because I used rude words but there’s nothing to hide behind this time. I asked a simple question and that made gun owners salty.
Anything really, if you live rurally that be quite a number of things, hell even if you live in an urban environment. Queer people have been arming themselves as of late, given the more restrictive nature that legislation has taken against them. POC and other minority groups have been doing this regularly for decades. None of this is new.
“Anything” is a deliberate non-answer that can’t be argued against.
How are guns going to solve oppressive legislation?
If they’ve been doing it for decades, why hasn’t it worked?
How are guns going to solve oppressive legislation?
they aren’t. At a federal level, and even a state level, they won’t. As for the doing it for decades part, it’s because they’re pansies who like to dick ride on a concept that makes them feel better. For some reason.
Regardless, it’s technically a non answer, but this is also a form of a non question. “why would you need to own a gun” can range from literally anything to “i hunt” to “sport” to “self protection” to “self protection but from the wild” to “the sock pill” There are a million and one reasons someone could own a gun. And a million and one purposes for it to serve.
Okay, so you can answer it, just not without using a homophobic slur.
when did i use a homophobic slur? I’m genuinely confused.
For what it matters, which is probably none, i’m ace. And pretty fucking gay for one.
Here is the definition of “pansy”.
And nope, your sexuality doesn’t matter at all. You can claim to be absolutely anything online and the pro-gun community seems to be riddled with sock puppets who can’t keep their story straight.
Scary feelings.
Guns are overwhelmingly not used in justifiable homicides (homicides performed in self-defense).
Guns for self defense is a fantasy.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/251894/number-of-justifiable-homicides-in-the-us/
But a fantasy that most of the pro-gun community just can’t resist. The reality is likely even worse than those figures show since permissive gun laws arm criminals in the first place, making that justification more common.
Zombies, aliens, foreign armies, roving feral pigs, cosmic horrors, muggers handing you mugs. It’s about having the option if you need it. Same way I feel about going prochoice. It’s there if you need it. Besides No one wants to occupy a country with more guns than blades of grass.
the police probably
Okay, so please tell us all exactly when they should pull a gun on police and what the outcome is because otherwise, you sound like someone who is either far-right or has taken on far-right propaganda without thinking.
Guns have brought zero police reforms. Pulling a gun on police gets you shot and killed. There won’t even be an investigation. American police get away with executing minorities because they might have a gun.
Oh, no, the implication wasn’t that you would normally pull a gun on the police. That wouldn’t normally be effective. They close their ranks pretty quick and are pretty prime to kill, maim, abuse, and mud sling at cop killers, and I don’t think you’d probably get away with that with the proliferation of body cams and all the other forms of digital recording devices.
No, the implication I was trying to suggest was that you would have a gun on you to dissuade the police from killing you. I.E. The same strategy that the black panthers employed when they patrolled their neighborhoods, one most effectively done in numbers. Really a lot of forms of civil disobedience are made available with the use of guns.
I mean if you’re visibly not cis or straight then the police really don’t need a whole lot of reason to kill or harass you anyways, going by the numbers. Certainly I don’t think that mere possession of a gun would be a terrible idea, in that circumstance, though I couldn’t really encourage drawing or shooting at the police or otherwise giving them a reason to shoot you if you’re pulled over.
The same strategy that the black panthers employed when they patrolled their neighborhoods, one most effectively done in numbers
This strategy didn’t work. The BPP was painted as a dangerous group of extremists and the police used their guns as an excuse to execute multiple members of the party.
So again, unless your goal is to get minorities killed by police, I have no idea why you’re advocating they walk around with guns.
Certainly I don’t think that mere possession of a gun would be a terrible idea, in that circumstance, though I couldn’t really encourage drawing or shooting at the police or otherwise giving them a reason to shoot you if you’re pulled over.
Then it’s nothing more than a magic talisman that’s supposed to ward off bad things. We’re supposed to accept a homicide rate far in excess of other countries – complete with the biannual execution of a room full of children – and you can’t even tell people when they’re supposed to use their guns and what it will fix.
This strategy didn’t work. The BPP was painted as a dangerous group of extremists and the police used their guns as an excuse to execute multiple members of the party.
Yeah, cause they needed an excuse to do that, it’s not like they were doing that already/are still doing that commonly, which was the main problem they were seeking to solve. It’s not like the tactic of stealing from wealthy white neighborhoods in order to fund the free meal programs was already a pretty dangerous tactic that also was pretty likely to get them shot, but I dunno. maybe you’d advocate against that as well. Despite all of this, I can’t really find any evidence of any member of the black panther party getting shot before the Mulford act was signed, at which point that form of protest was basically no longer possible. I dunno, maybe you can prove otherwise. You also say “painted as a dangerous group of extremists”, but that kind of makes it pretty hard to take you seriously. MLK was painted as a dangerous extremist. Anyone seeking any change will be painted as a dangerous extremist, an argument against that is an argument against change, and an argument in favor of the current state of affairs in which the current violence is occuring.
Also, I’m pretty sure it’s more frequent than a biannual execution of a room full of children, at this point. That’s evidenced as a pretty high profile instance of gun crime, but if you wanted the real story on that, you’d probably look at the violent crime statistics and find out that the majority of gun crime comes about as a result of both suicides and gang violence, i.e. poor mental healthcare and drugs being overly valuable property which gangs use guns to protect. Other gun violence is a much lower fraction. Most of the time the people committing crimes like school shootings are already flagged as having serious problems and could’ve been stopped beforehand.
Nowhere here have I advocated against common sense gun laws or licensing that would stop the production or overwhelming supply of guns into this country, but I do also find it suspicious that, say, shit like the mulford act seems to be some of the only times politicians are really willing to roll out gun laws. I can explain to people how the prison industrial complex works, how the school to prison pipeline works, how the government doesn’t give a shit about moving anywhere to combat climate change, how we exploit third world countries for resources at a massive institutional level and subvert their governments constantly, even to the point where there’s currently war in the Congo ongoing as a result. People will wholeheartedly agree with all of that as the reality, but then when you turn around and start talking about gun ownership, or armed resistance, as a means to combat this, armed resistance that doesn’t even require like, actually shooting anybody, necessarily, or even having a loaded gun, and suddenly people are super trusting of the government which we’ve previously established to be pretty relentlessly villainous and despicable, super trusting to make legislation that limits this responsibility rather than functionally limiting just like. Black people, from having guns… If you look at any of that legislation, it’s always the most insane, dumb bullshit that doesn’t actually make any sense. Go look into the origins of the difference between a pistol, a short barrelled rifle, a destructive device, a shotgun. None of that shit’s even necessarily a distinction which makes things illegal, as long as you have the dosh, you can pay tax stamps and get your shit. You can still get automatic firearms, if you have the money. Alternatively, you can acquire them illegally, or use a wheel grinder from harbor freight and then spend like 20 dollars once. Felons also can’t own firearms, as an example of the idiocy. Check the difference between sentencing of felonies on the propagated crack throughout the hood vs the cocaine that the CIA was intentionally smuggling in. Even just possession of weed is a felony in some states. It can also even be the case with the illegal possession of hormone treatments, like what trans people might use, which I’m pretty sure is the case in New York.
Like I dunno, even at a basic level here, if you don’t trust the fucking police to protect you, the fucking, institutional mechanisms by which you are to be protected, who is to protect you then? I dunno. If Trump gets elected and project 2025 comes to pass, I would probably not trust the government, and me personally, I would probably want a gun, yeah.
I also like how you’re framing it that, because I’m just advocating for guns generally, right, as a devil’s advocate, or, advocating for the use of guns as a legitimate political tactic, you’re framing it that actually, what I’m advocating for is that minorities get shot and killed by the police, as though that’s something that doesn’t already happen in extremely large numbers. Yup, that’s definitely a good faith extrapolation there.
Yeah, cause they needed an excuse to do that, it’s not like they were doing that already/are still doing that commonly, which was the main problem they were seeking to solve
This paragraph functionally just admits that there was a problem and walking around with guns didn’t solve it. They did nothing except give the illusion of power which was no match for actual power.
look at the violent crime statistics and find out that the majority of gun crime comes about as a result of both suicides and gang violence, i.e. poor mental healthcare and drugs being overly valuable property which gangs use guns to protect
Means reduction is one of the most effective methods of suicide prevention but sure, sweep them under the rug.
Gang violence is still gun violence so I’ve got no idea why you’re trying to present it as “this doesn’t count”. Also, there is no magical gun fairy arming gang members – the current gun laws give them an infinite supply of cheap, accessible firearms (including ones that are perfect for crime).
poor mental healthcare and drugs being overly valuable property which gangs use guns to protect
Most wealthy countries have underfunded mental health services and drugs. America the only one that enthusiastically escalates these problems into homicide and mass killings.
Most of the time the people committing crimes like school shootings are already flagged as having serious problems and could’ve been stopped beforehand.
But they weren’t and one group consistently opposes anything designed to address that.
Nowhere here have I advocated against common sense gun laws or licensing that would stop the production or overwhelming supply of guns into this country
You suggested an answer and I asked you to justify that answer.
I love guns. I adore guns. Guns are great. They’re fascinating pieces of engineering, tools, and exercises of skill. I would never own one (to my great regret) due to the increased risk of suicide from gun-owners, but I think that responsible gun ownership is a great thing and a cultural cornerstone of Americana.
But no one in the US who claims to be pro-gun should be allowed anywhere near a gun.
Maybe in some frozen waste like Canada where it’s not completely piss-easy to get a gun, one can describe oneself as pro-gun. But in the US? No.
Oh it’s piss easy to get a Gun in Canada… You just have drive down to the States.
Seriously though around 70 percent of guns used in criminal activities up here are traced back to sources in the States and were never legally imported, purchased or even stolen from homes inside Canada. When people point at us and say “Gun control doesn’t work see!?” it’s in part because gun trash bleeds over boarders.
I have a sense that you know all this, but, just wanted to chime in- the system in Canada where you have to take a course and pass a screening is costly & a pain in the ass. Bottom line, legally, it’s neither fast nor easy to get a firearm in Canada, and on top of that, the RCMP can deny any application that they see fit. But ultimately, I think the existing licensing system is a reasonable management of risks, and overall a good thing.
Unfortunately, gun control here is a wedge issue, and political points are easily scored by banning / confiscating guns from legal owners, who, as you mention, were never the problem in the first place. Actually fixing the gun crime issue here would be difficult, costly, and an optics minefield.
IMO, the penalties for being found with an illegal firearm or using a firearm to commit a crime should be much more severe. Surely people of all political stripes could get behind that? But, no. We’re in a situation where, on the left, any policy that doesn’t include a sweeping ban is criticized as unacceptable and weak. It sucks, because it means that the actual problem affecting citizens goes unsolved, and nobody seems to care.
How can you be anti something another person chooses to do privately with their body blows my mind
How you can be anti able to end others lives using a tool specifically crafted, to not hinder or disable, no but end other peoples ability to continue breathing and living, is beyond me
People have such paranoid hate towards others and then treat themselves like shit and rationalise instead of just fixing their own doorstep before attacking others
