zlacker

You're misinterpreting what I said. I said that your ability to defend yourself and your family with a gun was hypothetical.

I can see that you like to think of yourself as a rational thinker about this, but you're refusing to answer the actual criticism: actual people are being killed every day due to the availability of weapons in your society. There are nearly two mass shootings per day. So far this year that has led to 250 deaths and more than a thousand injuries[1]. These are not hypothetical abstractions, which is all you seem interested in engaging with. These are real people, many of them children, who find themselves victims of gun violence. You are arguing that your feeling of safety is more important than their actual safety. All of your arguments amount to a continuation of your position that you put your own feelings ahead of the actual deaths of people in society around you. This is a very selfish way to engage in your society.

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/us/mass-shootings-fast-facts

>>KayEss+(OP)
I understand your position, it is terrible that adults and children die by the hands of others. Genocides have happened all over the world and have led to tens of millions of people dying. These events aren’t hypothetical they’re historical but happen in big chunks rather than uniformly distributed and frequent but comparatively small events. I would suggest the statistics indicate that a person is likelier to die from a genocide than from a mass shooting by a factor of >100 and that small arms ownership and competence is more helpful rather than harmful since these tools can enable individuals to defend themselves against state actors or violent groups, or by their existence prevent groups with malicious intent from acting out on their genocidal or authoritarian desires. Something I agree with is the FBI’s assessment that people don’t commit crimes if they thinks it’s likely that they’ll be caught. I think that the collective individuals in our government (these United States of America) wouldn’t want to mandate concentration camps or a genocide because of the concentration of citizens with diverse mindsets who would provide feedback through resistance. There are of course other factors like recency bias that come into play.