Matthew Jabour said:
If I had to cite the biggest area of friction between me and my relatives, it would be gun laws. I hold the opinion that maybe it would be nice if people stopped shooting each other for a few minutes, while they hold that they have a right and a need for guns - which is true. However, they have also convinced me of one other thing; that in America, we worship guns like nobody else does.
Now, I concede that in some situations, a small handgun is the best option for self-defense, maybe with a laser sight if you don't trust your accuracy. But for the love of god, why would you need an assault rifle? Or a shotgun? Or multiple quantities of each one? Have you pissed off any Terminators lately and need to be absolutely sure you're safe?
I can't tell you how many times I've seen a Facebook post praising the latest model assault rifle, or a comment about 'Gone to get a new pump-action shotgun!" or some new accessory like glow in the dark bullets or something else that's completely arbitrary. It's ludicrous how crazy people get over guns here.
Why do people in this country love guns so much? Because they feel threatened? No. Because there's some left-wing conspiracy to 'take our guns away'? Not that, either; if the government announced a ban on traffic cones, would everyone start hoarding those? Because they want to kill someone? Probably not (although, if your son takes one of your guns and shoots up a school, that mission is accomplished regardless.) So the only reason I can see is: because they're cool. People spend hundreds of dollars to purchase these high-performance killing machines for the sole purpose of hanging them on their wall and admiring them. Some people have gun collections, like stamps, only hundreds of times more wasteful. That is their constitutional right.
But I ask you, are we not better than that? Does it really behoove us, as a nation, to adore and worship the same devices that are being used to kill hundreds of men and women every day? (Yes, I know, guns don't kill people. When's the last time you heard of a crazed man with a machete massacre?) Couldn't we all just invest in a pastime that is just as cool, a lot more fun, and way less violence? Like videogames, for example.
Bonus: Imagine a Hoarders episode where they visited someone whose gun collection had gotten out of control. Now imagine the sheer magnitude of backlash that would come out of that.
The thing is that the right to bear arms is something most "civilized" countries won't allow. It's also a big part of Americana due to the very point that an armed populance is by definition never truly at the mercy of the government and authorities. At the end of the day you always have the right to go down shooting. The authorities can handle an armed individual, or even a small group of armed individuals, but when it comes to large scale, popular uprisings, or people becoming genuinely threatened by the laws, it's something the government can't generally handle. Sure, in theory if the government decided to unleash tanks and jet fighters on a large scale revolt, they could massacre people, but in doing so would level their own country, and the America they would wind up ruling over wouldn't be close to what they want.
It should also be noted that the right to bear arms is part of what makes the US the most free nation in the world. A lot of countries dispute this claim, but part of the problem is the people there don't even fully understand their own situation. For example the UK and Canada are countries that oftentimes have tried to dispute the whole "America is more free than anyone else" claim, but in reality not only are those populations largely disarmed in comparison, they also have far more draconian law enforcement of a sort that just wouldn't fly in the US. The UK for example has large amounts of public surveillance, and Canada has it's police in possession of "black warrants" which pretty much allow them to suspend the usual rights of Canadians at any given time (even if the use has to be justified after the fact). A point I bring up occasionally in the context of how the US can have tighter security without turning into a Nazi-like state, going by the example of some of our allies. What's more I'd actually be more comfortable with the government of the US doing a lot of this stuff as things stand now given the armament of the population, than I would be with comparatively defenseless populations.
It should also be noted that "The Right To Bear Arms" has protected people from a ton of things without them ever realizing it, especially on a state or local level. See, politicians can pass whatever laws they want, but at the end of the day the police actually have to go out and enforce those laws. While generally pro-police, one important balance in the US that I believe in is that with an armed population it means the police themselves tend to become a sort of arbiter of fairness in laws. At the end of the day some cop has to risk getting his head blown off to do his job, he doesn't have the advantage many police around the world do of being armed when the population in general is reliably vulnerable. This means at the end of the day a cop is not going to put his butt on the line to shake people down over some politician's novelty law or personal power trip. The police themselves have to believe there is some value in what they are doing. If some politician does something like ban cell phones in their town without the approval of the people who live there, at the end of the day it comes down to the cop deciding whether it's really worth trying to shake people down for their phones, knowing that some dude might just pull out a gun to protect their property, be a bit faster, and put a hole the size of a beer can through the officer's head. If you've ever looked at "strange but true laws" that have wound up on the books, some of the crazier ones never went anywhere because at the end of the day the cops can't act like a Waffen SS unit and practically go running around enforcing any law they are told to. Politicians hate it, but in the end it's always something of a negotiation with the police at the bottom of the barrel who actually have to be willing to take the risks.
When it comes to the various mass shootings and such in the US, the bottom line is that it's bad, but it's actually a small price to pay compared to the things that would happen without this level of armament. A lot of people do not realize what a powerful safeguard our armament has been over the years. What's more, while a gun makes things easier, lack of one is not going to make someone intent on mass murder any less likely to do it. Look at Asia for example where we've had people scoring massive body counts by going berserk in subway stations, or the gassings in Japan (again also in Subways, which are great areas for this kind of thing due to lots of people being penned into an area without an easy method of escape).
I'd also point out that the US's level of armament is not all that unusual, just within the first world. Throughout a lot of nations military service is part of citizenship, and most of the population is armed. One of the big concerns over dealing with The Middle East (and why I was against "winning the peace" and engaging in police actions) is simply how well armed a lot of the tribes and such out there are, to the point where you can't simply identify insurgents by them possessing assault rifles and the like. Some nations like Finland as well also have a very high level of individual armament.
What makes the US fairly unique is that we're an armed people that ironically has an internal voice calling for disarmament and regulation. This has lead to a situation where you literally have a bunch of victims of their own creation running around alongside people who are heavily armed. The irony of some anti-gun guy getting gunned down or murdered in a home invasion for their own defenselessness is not lost on a lot of people. Some nations that have done better with a fairly well armed population don't generally deal with the issue of a portion of it disarming itself and being public about it, which kind of acts as a sort of "hey we're vulnerable" symbol to the predators who will otherwise avoid the unknowns or those who are quite frank about being armed and having weapons around their house. Like it or not, an up to date NRA sticker can be a better deterrent than one for a home security system, someone breaking into that house probably realizes that if they fuck up the guy living in the NRA house probably has a gun, knows how to use it, and has been prepared for exactly this kind of thing, so if they wake him up and aren't ready they could be looking at
a firefight. In comparison some dude with "Obama 2012" on his car alongside a "Co-exist" sticker and a catchy anti-gun slogan probably isn't armed, so if you can take him down before he gets to a phone, or just put a gun in his face if he wakes up your probably golden. This means we don't exactly reap all of the benefits of having a heavily armed population as far as stability and such. Not to mention our out of control media loves to sensationalize things and air our dirty laundry globally to get viewers, when something bad happens in most countries they try and do damage control and keep it confined if they can, in the US people want to yell it from rooftops. Love it or hate it, in some countries a mass shooting might not be well known outside of the area if the police kept a lid on it well, in the US on the other hand, well... the media holds all the cards for that kind of thing, and generally speaking if they can't get the facts they will make something up and dare people to correct them by ending the information control, and the US is very bad about penalties for that kind of thing.
