Quote from: tvbcof on July 06, 2018, 12:36:33 AM

Quote from: The_Local_Flow on July 05, 2018, 07:43:09 PM

the USA is among the most violent western states with the highest homicide rate. Why? because in the US they give you weapons (not just guns) even when you are ordering an hamburger.... no other state has so many shootings in schools, cinemas and other public places. You are obsessed with violence. In Europe there are no problems with guns because only police can have them. You may have the misfortune of finding a thief in your house or someone who wants to hurt you and you may be killed. But this is life and allowing anyone to have a weapon is not the solution. Otherwise the US should no longer have problems with theft and violence, and this is not true, right?

In my area where there is only a tiny police presence and a great majority of households are armed, we see nearly no violent crime. We have a ton of meth-heads and kids running around looking for targets of opportunity to steal from (e.g., people on vacation, at church, etc) but it's unusual to have a confrontational robbery and it's usually and accident on the part of the perp when it does happen. The net impact of property crime in my area is that neighbors get to know one another and look out for one another. That makes for a more enjoyable life generally in my experience.

In my area a vast majority of the creepy murders and what-not are tweaker-on-tweaker crime (not many ethnic minorities here.) These people generally cannot legally own firearms but of course that doesn't stop them. And they do one another in with a hammer half the time anyway. The benefit of being an atheist rather than a Christian is that I don't have to feel bad when some semi-homeless addict gets high and bashes his friend's head in then stuffs his body in a dumpster around the corner. And in truth it really doesn't bother me that much.

In contrast to the Bay Area where I lived off and on for a decade and a half, and which has very strict gun control laws making a criminal feel safe that he wasn't going to get his ass shot by the would-be victim, there were a lot more problems with confrontational crime. Of course the population density was a lot higher so it's apples-n-oranges to a degree, Whatever the case, I like life vastly better in the place where law abiding citizens can protect themselves without a lot of government interference.

I'm reporting a couple of articles that give numbers of the problem of weapons in the United States. The US is in fact the first, among the economically developed states, to have a higher number of voluntary killings, gun violence and weapons owners.
Problems of this kind can not be faced based on what people think of weapons or personal safety. It is a problem that needs to be faced by looking at the whole picture, evaluating on a social level what impact it has and how other states deal with this problem. Every American observing a high rate of violence will certainly think that having a gun is a good thing. Holding a gun will deter criminals from bothering you, right? Anyone will say that is better own a gun with a thief in front of him. But what we forget is that it is much more common that even the thief owns a gun and certainly the thief who owns it has psychiatric disorders or has good reason to shoot you and steal what you have. This idea belongs very much to a world made up of cowboys, far west and slavery in which every citizen does not trust the role of the state and the police but only trusts himself. The police are highly trained to intervene, a citizen, on the other hand, is not trained (even if they have a regular license for weapons). A policeman is trained to kill a criminal only if the criminal make an attempt on people's lives, not to shoot him for trying to steal. Let us remember that stealing others' things is a crime, but killing a person is something much bigger than a crime: it is an abomination. Are there too many junkies? Resolve the drug problem with political maneuvers (have you done a good job with cigarettes why not with drugs?). Do you have a problem with racism? Solve that problem (you were born immigrants). The Europeans, unlike yours, have suffered many wars and many violence over the centuries. We have suffered invasions, genocide, destructions and we are increasingly armed until we have understood one thing: more guns did not help, there was a need for more communication and to solve problems among people. We know what the value of peace is among peoples and among nations. We know well what an entire country is armed: to violence. For decades, the US has continued to arm and arm their citizens by being ready for a war that they are not suffering but are causing.
Arming people makes the state useless, which should be the only appropriate authority to protect the lives of its citizens.

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/america-s-gun-problem-explained-1060655345
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate#United_States
http://theconversation.com/u-s-gun-violence-is-a-symptom-of-a-long-historical-problem-92322