@Diptchip Of course I cannot disagree that criminals will always have guns, no matter how illegal they are, no matter how hard they are to get. But it's not criminals who are shooting up schools, universities, and entire families, it's mentally ill people. Like criminals, mentally ill people also cannot be controlled with laws. But if the weapons are not in easy reach, they will not have them, therefore will not be able to use them.

@soundwave
I would argue that a majority of our population are borderline mentally ill and that restricting the rights of the innocent based on mental health is a slippery slope.

@Diptchip
Then, as I said, you are the problem. That attitude is shared by many USA citizens, and just because many of you think alike doesn't mean that you are all correct.

@soundwave
Care to elaborate? Lol I'm not trying to offend you. I told you what I believe and I'd love to cover why I believe it. If I'm upset about Biden, and I wasn't, it's because I value the rights of Americans. How does this make me part of the problem? I already own most of the guns I've really wanted, so gun contol isn't really something I worry about. If you're gunna accuse me of being part of the problem, at least tell me why you believe it.
Do you not agree that a significant percentage of Americans are mentally ill? I think we would both agree that the followers of most religions are mentally ill. Really wanna find common ground with you and discuss this rationally.

@Diptchip

I'm not offended. I am glad someone has chosen to engage with me on this, which is exactly why I posted such an inflammatory unpopular opinion where I knew it would be read. Thanks for being the one to debate with me rationally.

My main reason for wanting USA's citizens to fall out of love with guns is that citizens of civilised countries should not feel the need to be armed. With any type of weapon. Having any weapons in the house should be purely a personal choice, whether it be for martial arts skills training, hunting, or sport.

And this is what almost all civilised countries enjoy. The citizens never assume that any one particular house they walk/drive by will have a lethal weapon inside. (Of course, sharp kitchen knives do not count). The default mindset is that their neighbourhood, their city, their state and country is largely a safe place to be, because it is a reasonable assumption that the number of deadly weapons in any zone is much smaller than the number of people in that zone - no matter how big or small a zone you consider.

But in the USA, the paradigm is that everyone assumes that everyone else will have one or more deadly weapon, either on their person, or at home, or both. It is so very common, that if one finds someone who has zero weapons, that person is regarded as a rarity.

This *must* inevitably lead to a default state of being, that every single person is constantly aware, to a greater or lesser degree, that at any moment, someone might kill them.

So whether you admit it or not, you are all literally in fear for your lives every second of every day. It's always there, like a benign tumour in your insides that you know about but is inoperable, it may turn malignant and kill you at any random time.

You are jogging alone. You cannot help but have in the back of your mind, an alert signal that means be afraid ... death is near.

You are on the train or the bus. Anyone around you might suddenly open fire.

You are an 8 year old child in school. You have been drilled, trained, that any moment a terrifying monster might burst through your classroom door and kill everyone in the room.

And the monster might be your teenage brother.

This is not right.

This is sick.

A country's population should not have to live in fear.

Oh, but some will respond with a quip about how every innocent, peaceful person should ALSO have a gun, so that they can defend themselves.

To that I say - no citizen of a civilised country should have to be prepared to defend their life and loved ones by fighting to the death at a moment's notice.

This is incompatible with the basic human right - that everyone has the right to live in peace.

I know that 'Peace' is hard-won and must be defended - but that is what the armed forces are for. Their purpose for existing is to defend against outside threats. Citizens can definitely claim the right to have their country take care of them by having a strong defence force.

But citizens should not have to feel that they should also be able to personally defend themselves from enemies that could attack them from within (the country), at any time.

One's own country should be one's "safe space" where one can live in peace, and raise children who can live in innocence and wonder and joy and curiosity and play and creativity, ... instead of learn how to throw their colouring-in books at the urban Guerilla in their classroom doorway.

@soundwave
Having looked at this statistically, I can not rationalize a fear of firearms related injury.

In any country and by any means, people intentionally harm other people.
Statistically, it seems we're twice as likely to die intentionally through self harm than from harm from another. And the odds of dying at the hands of a mass shooter are about the same as the odds of dying from being struck by lightning. (~30/year)

If you're arguement is based on fear, please elaborate on how it's rational.

@Diptchip

You're right of course - fear itself is not a rational argument.

But the detrimental effects that fear has on the human body and the quality of life of the citizens of a country, are good reasons for a country to take steps to minimise the level of fear pervading a society.

Fear is literally bad for your health. It has a physiological effect on the body and it negatively affects the brain. Fear is bad for your physical health and your mental health.

The physiological effect of fear that I'm talking about is stress. Stress affects people's bodies and their minds. The business world knows this. There is a well-known Stress vs. Productivity curve which shows that people need a little bit of stress in order to maximise their productivity, but that too much or too little stress reduces productivity. Too much stress puts your mind and your body in flight-or-fight mode, which reduces the activity in the brain's temporal lobe and causes more activity in the ancient, reptilian part of the brain which deals with instinct and basic survival. This mental state means that the creative, clever, problem-solving and imaginative parts of your brain are relegated to working in low-power mode. This is why too much stress makes workers' productivity - particularly white-collar workers' productivity - sharply drop. In a nutshell, it's hard to think clearly when you are in a state of anxiety. It's extremely hard to think imaginatively, think freely, think original, new thoughts - when your brain is in "scared & nervous" mode. It's also hard to learn new things while you are stressed and/or anxious. So students' learning effectiveness is reduced when they are stressed or scared. If a company's staff are too stressed, it reduces company's overall performance. This is true for a country's economy as well. If the citizens of a country are stressed, it reduces the entire country's overall wealth. It's literally bad for a country's economy to have the population too stressed. A country's economic ups and downs follow similar cause-effect relationships as the stock market. When consumer confidence and investor confidence rises and falls, the stock market rises and falls. The market responds quickly to the smell of fear, and so do countries' economies. So, fear pervading the population of a country is literally bad for that country's economy.

My reasons for thinking that fear is a 'bad thing' are that I want people to live in peace and to be happy and I want countries to be prosperous and progressive, constantly increasing the quality of life for all citizens. In order for the overall quality of life to continually improve, the country and the individual citizens of the country need to continually invest in the future. And this, in turn, requires that society provides people with a feeling of confidence that life is safe, and will continue to be safe. People need to have a feeling of confidence that life is safe, in order to take the risks that are necessary to invest in the future. People know that to be able to look forward to a better tomorrow, they need to work hard toward *making* a better tomorrow. People will not put in the work that creates a better tomorrow unless they are very sure there will very probably be a return on that investment. A pre-requisite to have that sense of confidence, is that people firstly need to feel safe. In order to be comfortable with delayed gratification, people need to feel that patience is rewarded - which requires an underlying scaffolding of peace and safety.

So, my case is that from a social and economic point of view, I believe it is important for people to feel safe and secure in their lives, in order to be able to do the things that are required to maintain a healthy economy with the aim of constantly improving life for everyone. The more fear we have in the structure of our society, the weaker is the scaffolding of confidence that the population needs for inventiveness, investment and innovation.

The USA is ostensibly largely focussed on ongoing, continuing investment in order to improve the overall wealth and power of the country, a goal which the population supports because it will naturally result in improved quality of its citizens' lives.

But this is incongruous with the idea that people can work at their best while they have fear in their thoughts and feelings 24/7.

Fear is literally bad for your mental health. It shuts down creativity and keeps the brain and mind in survival mode. It affects all of your thoughts, all of your decisions, all of your plans, actions and reactions.

With that affecting everyone, constantly, whether you are aware of it or not, it is definitely harming your country's economy.

The question then, is, how much is USA's gun culture affecting the wealth and status of the USA on the world stage? I don't know. I don't know how anyone could estimate it. If say USA's citizens are eg. 5% more scared of their countrymen than the citizens of other civilised countries' feel, does that affect the USA's GDP by 5%, or by more or less than 5%? I don't know. But I do know that it will definitely not be zero.

The problem with paradigms is that the people who are inside them literally cannot see what's in their own paradigm because they cannot imagine what their paradigm looks like from outside of it. They cannot see the pro's and con's of their own paradigm because they can't "switch off" their paradigm in order to step outside of it for a moment, turn around and look back at it.

The rest of the civilised world looks at the USA's gun culture and sees that it is full-on, bat-shit insane. But the people who are inside the USA and inside the gun culture, can't see what the rest of the world so clearly sees - that the way you are living is literally bad for you, and we wish that you could just see for a minute that there is another way of living and it might - just might - be better than yours.

@soundwave
If fear is the "why we should have more gun control" shouldn't we discuss whether or not the fear is rational? My argument is that statistically speaking, the average American isn't likely to be harmed by firearms. I think the fear is pushed for political gain and by for-profit media to increase ratings. Everything demonized by the media will be feared by the masses. Should we ban everything demonized by the media? If the fear is irrational, wouldn't the logical thing to do be removing the fear itself?
Speaking of fear and how it's bad, is the fear of an impending civil war a rational one? I imagine that it's statistically common in cases where the rights of a countries citizens are taken by its governent.

@Diptchip Statistics can be used by both sides of a debate to help prove their point. I have seen statistics which convince me that the USA should definitely have more gun control, and you could find those too if you went looking.

I also find it curious why you think for-profit media is a bad thing. Isn't everything in the US supposed to be for-profit? Are you advocating for an independent, publicly funded broadcaster, and/or are you keen to see some "truth in media" laws to keep ALL media on track with honesty, and to keep the (unavoidable) exaggeration within reasonable degrees of tolerance?

In regards to the possibility of a civil war, and people being fearful that one is imminent: me being an outsider observing from afar (and with my BS Filter set on Maximum to see through the media's agenda) I don't see one being even remotely possible in the near future, so I would say no, I don't think the fear of one is justified ie. rational.

I would like to point back to what I said about Paradigms. You say, and you think, that it is a US citizen's "right" to own guns. I disagree. I don't think it's a Right. I think it's a Law. Yes I know the wording of the law says the word "right" in the sense of bearing arms, but it's still just a law. Laws get changed all the time and if the people don't like it they can lobby their local representative or they can break the law and bear the consequences. Still, your point is valid, if gun-loving US citizens perceive that their government is doing something grossly unfair and they attempt to undo that by using their guns, that could indeed become an insurrection and if it gets big enough it can be called a civil war. But seriously, such a thing could never succeed. The US government, armed forces, National Guard, Police etc. are far better armed and trained than the public, and most disgruntled gun-owners would realise that, would not take real action and would just comply, under protest, with the new laws. In terms of reasons to start a civil war, in terms of reasons to rise up and fight to the death against your own government, the removal of some certain rights are good enough reasons to do that, but removal of some gun-ownership laws are just not a good enough reason, so no, I genuinely don't think a civil war is even remotely possible. I think maybe a few psycho gun owners might shoot up a few shopping malls to publicly vent their frustrations but that's all.

@soundwave
I don't expect you to be passionate about rights you've never had, but I think that a significant percentage of Americans would allow themselves to become criminals if the alternative was giving up their firearms. I don't think anyone would "win" a civil war in America and I'm a huge fan of public broadcasting, but I think that's a little off topic.

Ignoring whether or not this feer you speak of actually exists, is it rational?

If you were just going to demand that I find evidence to support your narrative, you shouldn't have attempted a rational discussion on the topic.

What I want to know is whether or not this fear you speak of, is rational.
The statistics I've seen suggest I'm far more likely to eat myself to death than die of a firearm related injury. I've been around the block and I don't know a single person that's died due to a fiream related injury. If you think I'm in danger, please let me know. Most people just wanna live their boring ass lives without being told how to live or what they can own.
Is the fear rational?

I doubt you'll provide evidence supporting your argument but if you do, my next questions would be whether or not the fear actually exists and if costs of preventing firearm ownership justify the benefits.

@Diptchip
I do think that the fear is rational. I don't know many statistics and I don't want to play redcoats vs bluecoats, firing statistics at each other. But these few statistics are enough to categorically make up my mind, that if people in the US are afraid of the guns that are everywhere, then that fear is justified.
1. There are more handguns in the USA than people.
2. [This was from pre-2020. I expect the COVID lockdown has changed this:] If you count a 'mass shooting' as more than 4 people shot in a single event (but not necessarily killed), then there is more than one of those events per day.

Those statistics are horrible.

@soundwave
Statistics are the heart of sociology and are are the only logical way to rationalize a fear. Fire away.

I couldn't care less how many guns are in existence if I'm not likely to be harmed by them. Can I get a source for number 2, please? Most of the stats I've seen are for firearms related deaths but excluding suicides, the vast majority of those that are shot, survive. It's a good thing but it means that I'm far more likely to be harmed by firearms than I am to be killed by them. I imagine it's not super fun being shot, so I'll take nonfatal injury into consideration.

From what I was able to dig up, between 1993 and 1998, the average annual injuries by firearms (excluding fatal) was just under 80,000 which accounted for under .5 % of all hospitalizing injuries. Injuries by firearms are more likely to be fatal when compared to other hospitalizing injuries, but still a lot less common. For example, over 500,000 people are treated annually for ladder related injuries in the US, while only 300 are fatal. I actually know several people that were hospitalized due to ladder related injuries. I'd argue that when using a ladder, fear of injury is a rational one.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5002a1.htm

https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2017/03/13/ladder-safety-month/

I'm still not convinced that it would be rational for me to be in fear of being shot during my day to day routine.

@Diptchip

I haven't been trying to convince you.

I never hoped to change your mind.

I just wanted to state my case. Thanks for helping me crystallise it and refine it.

@soundwave
"If you are upset because Joe Biden has started taking steps toward getting the USA's gun violence under control, you are the problem."

I guess I'm just a sucker for trying to rationalize with someone not interested in rational discussion.

If your opinion aint worth backing up, why share it? Lol

@Diptchip

But, I have backed it up.

You're not a sucker for joining with someone in a discussion.

I haven't ever got the feeling that you were trying to convince me that I was wrong. Were you? I thought we were just stating each others' cases, knowing that the end result would be for us to agree to disagree, and then depart amicably.

I don't think this is the type of diametrically opposed viewpoint that can ever, ever be resolved by one person changing the other person's mind.

We are both right, from our own respective points of view.