


RE: Australia News
The stupidity is in you guys doubling down on "gun deaths", a nonsense statistic, instead of excess mortality after I have repeatedly provided an explanation of how the left is baking their statistics. I have used Kamala Harris' favorite form of math, Venn diagrams, to explain to you how the real excess mortality from having guns vs. not having them is around 20k deaths.
The suicide rates in England and Australia, your respective gun-free countries, is nearly as high as the US. Look it up. The delta between our suicide rate and yours is, I'll be really generous, 3 per 100,000. So I will let you blame up to 3500 of our suicides on guns. And that's the last time I want to hear any of you inflating gun violence under the term "gun deaths".
I will respond to the other stuff a bit later. I'm going to eat a banana.
RE: Australia News
I haven't spoken of 'gun deaths'. I wrote, very specifically, of crimes. I referred to the ownership of guns as a form of defence creating a vicious circle.
A far better statistical comparison than looking at suicide, which there are multiple ways of achieving, would be to look at the deaths resulting from criminal activity. Not just the obvious mass shootings, drive-bys and gang warfare.
Why would one possess a gun in a city which doesn't have a wildlife threat? If you aren't a criminal, the chances are you have got one for defence. Why do you need that defence? Because the chances are if you get robbed, your burglar will be armed. Why is he armed? Because the chances are, the homeowner will be. That's what I am talking about.
If, in America, nobody got raped, or burgled, or the like because the criminals are all cowed by the chances that their victim could be armed, it might be different. But that isn't how it works. All that really happens is the criminals, who don't have 'I am going to rob someone' tattooed on their faces, have just as easy access to guns as anyone else in the State. So they level up the playing field. The result isn't more or less burglaries, but a statistical increase in death from said burglary.
I have talked at length here, and elsewhere about circulation. Ease of access doesn't just mean for the law abiding public. When it's harder for criminals to obtain lethal weaponry, they are much less likely to possess it. Doesn't mean they won't rob your house. It just means they are less likely to kill you whilst they are doing it. Personally, I'd rather be phoning my insurance company than lying on a mortuary slab, or answering questions about the dead teenaged opportunist on my living room floor.
In every country, there are areas safer than others. All sorts of social reasons exist for that. I don't live in such a safe area these days myself. But I don't need a weapon on my person. If I knew, however, that the drunken lout falling out of Weatherspoons at closing time and shouting abuse at me in the street was likely to have a gun, then I might get one. But I know he hasn't. And the reason he hasn't got one is the same reason I haven't.
For me, it's not about suicide. The suicide cases I have had personal connection with did not use guns.
It's about the difference between a brawl outside a pub with fists and even knives, and a street brawl with guns. A burglary when they wait until they know you are out versus not giving a shit because they've got a gun. Even if they know the victim is likely to have a gun, it's 3 am and they've got a much better chance of getting a good shot before you have fumbled about on the bedside table.
It's about nobody accidentally going to the wrong door and ending up dead because of it.
Then there's accidents. Sure, lots of fatal accidents happen, but it doesn't hurt to have one less potential cause. After all, I am pretty sure even freedom living America has legislation pertaining to chemicals available for home use, etc, despite the fact that you can still have an accident in the home without a chemical being involved.
RE: Australia News
Scarbrems, you and I largely agree and I should not have included you as using that term.
What would we do? For starters, making nonlethal deterrence more legal. Pepper spray and double-shot tasers are tightly regulated in many cities. I know how to handle guns but I do not own one or carry them around. If I lived in a really bad neighborhood, I might carry SOMETHING. Not sure what.
Of course, the factory still explodes, but that's OK, we've stopped the criminals.
This was best parodied in South Park's Team America World Police in the early 2000s. Watch this for a good time:
Here is the link in case there are any issues with the embedded video above: https://youtu.be/HIPljGWGNt4
I'm not really here to argue whether guns are good or not, because like you I put some stock into "those who live by the sword die by the sword", but I am going to provide a history lesson on why we have them. I already provided the economics lesson earlier in the broader context of the world economy, namely that guns provide trade security. The same is roughly true domestically, due to resource and security scarcity in poor areas. Somalia provides a great example of that on a global scale.
Yes, we think we are special because of how our American Revolution came about. The British knew things were heating up in the mid 1770s and they kept running around looking for our hidden caches of guns. We kept robbing their caches (Fort Ticonderoga, Fort William and Mary). We didn't have enough lead, so we ripped down statues to cast bullets out of them. We lost the Battle of Bunker Hill in Boston because we ran out of ammo ("Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes!"). After that, the founding fathers said, NEVER AGAIN. So they made sure to put it right into the constitution.
After that, we made damn sure that we never lost a war from lack of firepower. And we never did. The world almost ended over that when the Russians tried to do the same thing with us, and we out-Russianed the Russians with free trade and deficit spending to make enough nukes. Lately Biden got a head start on making nuclear weapons great again, and will pass the buck onto Trump, who is big on deterrence and will likely continue that. It's a Trumpism rebranding of Teddy Roosevelt: speak softly and carry a big stick => speak LOUDLY about your big stick.
I do think however that civilian ownership of big guns is one of the only ways to prevent a totalitarian government takeover. From what I hear, thousands of Britons have been locked up due to their social media posts. I have not researched this on my own. But that simply would not happen here, in big part due to our guns. People would make a way bigger stink about it. And they did, over P'nut this election.
RE: Australia News
🥝: your country is tiny. You have the same population as Louisiana. It is pointless to compare you to the US. I don't think much of Jacinda Ardern's policies, and apparently neither do a lot of New Zealanders. Having no unsolved murders is relatively easy when the population is small and income is high, but if some hypothetical person wanted to kill someone in New Zealand and get away with it, they'd start with recovering some of my lost bitcoin. They'd create false identities that all link back to a schizophrenic hobo in New York City. Under that identity, they'd charter a private boat, painted the same color as the ocean with radar diffused contours so it doesn't show up on satellites, raft into some secret harbor, and go hunting around with a McMillan TAC 50C with a custom untraceable barrel. OK that might actually take a lot of my bitcoin. So probably the reason for no unsolved murders (that you KNOW of) is because it's expensive.
I think it would be a lot cheaper to go kill someone in Louisiana.
RE: Australia News
"...speak LOUDLY about your big stick"
And there we have it.
On the subject of history lessons, one former colonial country paid for its freedom with the blood of tens of thousands of its children. Many others simply asked, and they received. So who are the smart ones?
Not going to go down the rabbit hole for the gazzionth time. It's all been said before. Keep dying in absurd numbers just to prove you've got a big stick.
RE: Australia News
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I have no idea what you are talking about with independence. The British lobsterbacks shot at our colonists first, so we sent them home in bodybags for nine years until they gave up. The reason you guys all got your independence for free is because we taught them a lesson they would never forget.
Where I live, kids don't die from guns. And I don't own a gun. Time to talk about something else.
RE: Australia News
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Spoken like a true Rambo.
My gosh, you're right. Australia's overall suicide rate is only slightly less than the US, while their murder rate is seven times less. I guess that proves that, when it all gets too much to handle, Australian are almost equally as likely to off themselves as Americans, but Americans are seven times more likely to decide the answer to their problems is to kill someone else (or many someones). All the more reason to arm them with weapons to make it so much easier to achieve their personal goals.
American history books... I believe they can be found in any good fiction collection here, along with most British and Australian ones.
I seriously don't think little tiny Australia, with a population of 3.8 million compared to the UK's 41.6 million had them exactly quaking in their boots in 1901, do you? Even less for tinier New Zealand a few years later.
But cute story.
RE: Australia News
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I'm not sure what your point is on Australia getting its independence. You didn't REALLY get independence until 1986. Sounds like it had domestic autonomy but its military was effectively controlled by the British in WW2, and thousands of Australian soldiers died in Japanese camps. And quite a few of them died from "gun violence" too. Americans and Australians were good buddies in that war though, even though a good number of your troops were conscripted. CD, you can correct me on this if I'm wrong.
Let's consider your gun deaths from this period water under the bridge, and distinct from domestic crime. I'm just pointing out that there was a cost in lives that relates to Australia not truly having independence, because they never had to actually fight for it until Britain volunteered them to fight in two world wars.
RE: Australia News
I LOVE the Aussies! Especially their outback steak houses--scrumptious dishes!
On the issue of gun ownership/use, things are...complicated. :-/
RE: Australia News
Absolutely nobody here gets locked up for a social media post unless it's 'I've got a shit load of Cocaine for sale'. Or 'I have just been looking at little girls with no knickers on'.
Where on earth did you get that gem from? I daresay you might get asked a few questions if you posted regular terrorist messages, but that is no different to the US.
What sometimes happens is social media activity prompts investigation. Hate to tell you, but that absolutely happens in the US. Wasn't it not terribly long ago that US citizens were up in arms about their emails being read by authorities?
You are surprisingly naive if you really think your government is cowed by your ownership of guns. They've got crack troops with training far exceeding anything the home gun owner has at their disposal. They will also have chemical weaponry at their disposal. I love the idea that y'all just think you could turn up en masse and overthrow them like it's 1804. Do you really think they are so wholly unprepared as that? They know you've got guns. They've got some rather more lethal stuff.
I do agree about non-lethal weapons, though. Tazers and the like. Pepper spray.

