this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2025
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The comments here are a good example of how the gun control movement is the left-wing counterpart to the pro-life movement. It's origin lies in emotion, not reason. It's filled with fallacious arguements and when that fails to convince someone, the movement tends to move towards snarky comments and outright hostility.
Evem those that are trying to be reasonable by drawing conclusions based on data almost always are using cherry-picked statistics that was fed by those trying to manipulate them.
It's very amusing to read such things from outside the American hellscape. Well, "amusing."
Let's say eventually there comes a government overreach that a popular armed uprising puts down. Every day until that day, children die. Accidental death from firearms is one of the leading causes of death of children in your country. (Do you feel that pricking sensation in your neck and face or are you immune to shame?) If the rebellion doesn't come soon enough (or at all) then you are underwater in terms of dead children. So, how long is that runway? How long do you get to keep killing children until you have to admit, fuck, this is costing us more than it's worth?
HAVE YOU EVEN DONE THE MATH, or are you just working from feelings?
It's a good argument, but it's entirely flawed because American policy is that the children have no worth until they pay taxes.
To compare dead children to the cost of failing to check government power, we can reduce both to life-years lost:
🔫 Current Cost: Child Firearm Deaths in the U.S.
🏛️ Hypothetical Benefit: Preventing Tyranny
Assume a worst-case scenario:
Estimate risk:
In fact, high civilian armament may reduce stability:
📊 Expected Value Calculation
📉 Conclusion
Even with favorable assumptions:
Bottom line: The ongoing cost vastly outweighs the hypothetical benefit, and high armament may worsen long-term stability rather than protect it.
Tongue in cheek of course but it still makes a point. The facts-over-feelings crowd has to show that the benefit of firearms outweigh the very observable negative consequences, and they cannot. So they are arguing feelings, not facts.
In 2015 I'd agree.
In 2025? Nah, look at what's happening around the US.
Dems are losing votes because of the guns issue, drop the gun issue, along with promoting a progressive platform and that's easily winning elections.
Accidental deaths from firearms can be reduced by making people get obligatory training and requiring storage in a gun safe, when not carried.
Okay? So how many years does that push the "break even point"? Do you see how this doesn't engage with my point in the slightest?
I don't avoid guns due to a fear of crime. I avoid guns due to a fear of negligence.
Every single day, someone in my family does something negligent, but ultimately harmless. Oops. Now there's an extra dirty dish. Oops. Broke a coaster. Oops. Dirty towel. Oops. Got sprayed with water.
Putting a gun in that situation would be pretty dangerous.
I suppose some households could keep guns responsibly. Mine could not, despite my personal practices.
I don't understand how you justify in your head adding guns into any of those situations you listed.
If you own guns, you're supposed to have a secure way to store them. Especially if you have kids. While some people do leave guns sitting around the house, that is strongly discouraged.
You're supposed to keep guns inside a safe unless you're about to use it such as going to a range or hunting. And best practice is to keep ammo secured in a separate safe as an extra measure. And when you are handling a gun, you always check if it's loaded and follow the 4 rules of gun safety
Thank you for proving my point.
Given how nonsensical your first comment was, I don't think you had a point
They were talking about the dangers of negligence. You countered with how guns can be relatively safe if one follows safety guidelines.
The 'negligence' part is referring to those that don't follow guides. By listing all the guides and rules to make guns safe, they probably mean you prove their point by showing the burden of responsibility guns require (and thus the risk when irresponsible people don't meet them).
I'm not sure if you got to see their comments before they were deleted, but I recall their comment being a bit weirder than that. Things like "sometimes my family forgets to pick their wet towels off the floor. What happens if you add a gun to that?".
As the second part of your comment, yeah I see your point. That being said, the rules of gun safety aren't as huge of a hurdle as people seem to think they are. I think it's more that some people are repelled by any form of friction when starting a new activity.
I mean if someone makes death threats to someone else they should absolutely have their guns taken away.
The problem is that the system is open to abuse. Anyone who wants to get back at someone can make up allegations and have their guns taken away with no due process.
But on the other hand if you make this process too difficult you can allow someone who is actually dangerous to keep their guns.
The thing is, this isn't shown in the original post. Also, making death threats on its own is illegal, red flag laws aren't required if the person making the report has proof.
Said victim could even get a restraining order if they were worried about violence, which won't completely assure safety but will go down a process that actually uses due process and doesn't violate anyone's rights.
I never said that Anon made any death threat and the concern you are raising is covered in the rest of my comment.
Uh, there is reason in not wanting people to be shot by a culture of fear.
Look up overall crime statistics for both countries that restrict firearm access and those who don't. You'll find that overall violent crime ends up being proportional to the countries' midi coefficient (a measurement of economic inequality). Firearm availability mainly changes the proportion of violent crimes involving firearms vs overall violent crime.
Like I said, most of the statistics you see are cherry-picked to give an overly simplistic view of crime to distract from the fact that economic inequality is a huge correlating factor
While income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) is positively correlated with violent crime, firearm availability has been shown to independently influence both the rate and lethality of violence.
According to Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza (2002, The Journal of Law and Economics), there is a significant cross-national association between income inequality and homicide rates. However, firearm access is not merely a determinant of the method used in violent crime—it also affects the frequency and outcome of such incidents.
Data from the Small Arms Survey and the Global Burden of Disease project indicate that countries with high rates of civilian firearm ownership (e.g., the United States) experience substantially higher rates of firearm homicide, suicide, and accidental gun death than peer nations with stricter gun regulations (e.g., the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia), despite similar or lower Gini coefficients.
For example, the U.S. firearm homicide rate was 6.1 per 100,000 in 2021 (CDC WONDER), compared to 0.5 per 100,000 in Canada and less than 0.1 in countries like Japan and the U.K. This disparity persists even when controlling for overall violent crime or economic inequality.
Moreover, studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet have found that the presence of firearms in a home significantly increases the risk of homicide and suicide, particularly among women and children (see Kellermann et al., 1993; Anglemyer et al., 2014).
Therefore, while inequality is an important factor, firearm regulation has a demonstrable and independent effect on both the incidence and deadliness of violent crime. The distinction between type and frequency does not eliminate the public health implications of firearm prevalence.
You present yourself as rational while dismissing emotion as weakness. But emotions like shame, fear, and the impulse to protect others are not failures of reason. They are essential to moral awareness.
The need to maintain rigid rational detachment is itself emotionally driven. It often reflects a desire to avoid guilt or to preserve control. That isn’t objectivity, it’s fragility disguised as discipline.
Gun suicides are a huge problem, so there is a legitimate need for interventions in the appropriate circumstances. Suicidal ideation is also usually an impulsive or fleeting idea, so removing the means of suicide only temporarily can be a solution to that temporary problem.
The Swiss saw suicide rates drop with reduced access to firearms in shrinking their military, and the Israeli military has seen weekend suicide rates drop by simply having troops check in their weapons into armories over weekends, without a corresponding change in weekday suicides.
Anti-suicide nets on bridges work very well, too, because simply making a suicide more inconvenient, or require a bit more planning, is often enough to just make it so that the suicide attempt never happens.
So yeah. I'm generally against restrictions on firearm ownership or access for people who can be responsible with them, but I'm 100% on board with interventions for taking guns away for mental health crises, and restrictions on those found by a court to have engaged in domestic violence. And, like, convicted criminals, too.
The issue with red flag laws is that they completely bypass this. When the police recieve a report, they end up seizing the guns without any due process, and the owners has to sue to get them back.
It's my understanding that every state with a red flag law imposes a procedure similar to involuntary commitment: a court weighing evidence presented to it under penalty of perjury, with a heavy presumption that these orders are only for extremely rare situations.
Florida's procedure, for example, requires a petition from the police to the court, and requires the police to show the court that the person is suffering from a serious mental illness, has committed acts of violence, or has credibly threatened acts of violence (to self or others). In ordinary cases the person whose guns are being taken away has an opportunity to be heard in court before the judge decides, but in emergency cases the court can order the guns be taken away for up to 14 days, and requires an opportunity for the person to be heard in court.
So in practice, in Florida, someone would have to convince the police they're a danger, and then provide enough evidence that the police can persuade a judge. Private citizens aren't allowed to petition the court directly, and the process requires proof of a serious enough set of facts to justify taking guns away.
The gun control movement is not left-wing. The left supports gun ownership overwhelmingly.
Pro life and pro gun control are both anti-killing positions about preserving human life.
Not true, "pro-life" is actually "anti-woman's life". Those people would rather have an adult person die from an ectopic pregnancy than have a clump of cancer removed.
This. Pro-life supporters don't care if the mother dies. Hell, corpses get more rights than pregnant women, because at least people can refuse to be organ donors
So you nazis have mind reading technologies now?
Resorting to calling me a Nazi now? Thanks for telling me that you have no actual counterargument.
The Pro-Choice argument is one of bodily autonomy. If people have the right to refuse the use of their organs to save others after they are dead, then everyone should also have the right to refuse the same while they are alive.
Not only that, bans on abortion adds red tape to many procedures necessary to keep the mother alive, incpuding in situations where the fetus isn't viable. If the fetus dies in the womb and the mother doesn't naturally expel it, she needs an abortion ot it'll rot and kill here. If the zygote never fully makes it to the uterus and starts developing inside the ovarian tubes, it needs to be aborted or it will kill both the mother and the fetus.
Making it harder for pregnant women to gain access to these procedures is needlessly and ridiculously cruel.
And let's also discuss your Nazi claims: I'm pro-workers right, pro-consumer rights, pro-privacy. I think we need to increase social welfare services to help the most vulnerable of us, including some form of universal healthcare. But I'm a Nazi simply because I support the 2nd ammendment? Yeah, that bullshit. You aren't worth wasting more of my time on.
The choice is made when she gets pregnant. A slim minority of abortions are in cases of rape. Because I know pro-aborts like to bring up rare scenarios every time
Removing a dead foetus isn't murder. Of course I'm not advocating for a ban on that
You're a nazi because you're using dogwhistles by referring to humans as "lumps of cancer". That's a classic dehumanisation tactic.
A foetus isn't a clump of cancer. No need to use a Eugenicist dog-whistle, Nazi.