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kashunstva 4 hours ago [-]
> we find that a socially optimal level of ownership is often greater than zero
I suppose one could model this in some way. But as a pacifist, vegan and never owner of firearms, I’m genuinely clueless as to how this could be. Is the social optimality here a function possessing weapons for hunting, which can be a social activity?
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
In the absence of firearms, the person who has the next most dangerous weapon can easily dominate everyone else. The country where I'm from was disarmed by the British to keep us from fighting them. But armed gangs still terrorize people with knives and machetes and whatnot.
Some fraction of the population in any society is antisocial. A non-zero rate of firearms ownership allows the people who aren't antisocial to suppress those who are antisocial and maintain peace.
soco 56 minutes ago [-]
Is this theory working in the US? Do we see the social people with weapons suppressing the antisocial gangs with weapons? If you see proof for this, good. But I don't see it. Also, one downside of firearms is collateral victims.
black6 27 minutes ago [-]
No, because the state owns a monopoly on violence and cracks down hard on vigilantism.
thrance 57 minutes ago [-]
> A non-zero rate of firearms ownership allows the people who aren't antisocial to suppress those who are antisocial and maintain peace.
Do you have an example of such a place? What you're describing is called vigilantism, and usually creates more issues than it solves.
JJMcJ 3 hours ago [-]
In some parts of the USA like the interior of Alaska, hunting is a big part of actually getting food to eat, not just for sport.
constantius 2 hours ago [-]
I can describe myself in the same way as you, and yet, if I lived in a country where ownership is allowed, I'd always vote to keep it so, even without having the intention of owning a weapon myself, because otherwise the balance of power shifts too much in the favour of the State/ruling class.
I disagree with the sibling comments about defending the country against an invader (if your country is facing invasion, weapons will be readily available) and defending yourself against crime (it's a non-issue in any non-failed state, and in a failed state weapons are readily available anyway and rarely make any difference).
But in a world where wealth inequality is increasing, where surveillance is ever more present, the tiny probability of the population being able to resist when it finally rises up justifies the very tangible downsides of an armed population.
I am aware that there are many arguments against this view, but I think the downsides of an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence are too dire to be brushed aside.
soco 54 minutes ago [-]
This is the first use case for firearms I can understand. I hate it, I hate even that we have to have this discussion in a so-called civilized world, but here we are, and I understand it.
archagon 34 minutes ago [-]
Except the people with guns are often aligned with regressive/authoritarian regimes. Which makes the problem much worse.
Mezzie 4 hours ago [-]
My guess would be hunting and also the possible presence of a firearm in certain situations acting as a deterrent as well as a potential social equalizer.
When you're a physically vulnerable person and there are zero firearms in a community (and it's known there are zero), then there's no physical deterrent to attacking you. Of course in theory there are social consequences, but if you're in a society that includes things like alcohol or other substances, teenagers/people with poorly developed senses of long term consequences, or mental illnesses, then the thought 'oh shit, she/he might be strapped' might do more than 'you might go to jail'.
nathan_compton 4 hours ago [-]
I don't own a gun, but I live in a very rural area. It might take police 20 minutes to reach us in an emergency, even if we managed to make a call (as we might not in a home invasion, for example). From this point of view I can see the utility of owning a gun, at least in principal.
Also, imagine a scenario where a foreign power attempted to occupy a country? There is probably an optimal number of armed citizens to deter that kind of activity. As we have seen in recent years, foreign powers often do want to capture and hold foreign territory. The chance of this is small, but clearly non-zero.
rayiner 4 hours ago [-]
We have a real-life example of the second point playing out in modern times. The relevant observation is that it's important for armed citizens to be able start a conflict in order to put other forces in play. During Bangladesh's war of independence from Pakistan, civilians captured weapons from military depots to fight against the Pakistani Army. Those civilians formed the core of a resistance movement that was then quickly joined by defectors from the Pakistani military and, eventually, India. The civilians could not possibly have won a war against the Pakistani military. But it's doubtful that India would have jumped into the war if there wasn't already an armed resistance movement for India to support.
We have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that it's very difficult even for the world's most powerful military to hold cities and countryside against people armed with handheld automatic weapons.
fasterik 4 hours ago [-]
It's interesting that your first guess is hunting, and not self-defense. As a pacifist, do you believe in letting violent people do whatever they want to you without resisting or fighting back?
Valodim 3 hours ago [-]
It's kind of amazing how many comments even here seem to implicitly or explicitly agree that the "optimal" number is more than zero.
Personally, I rather enjoy not having my kids shot at school.
bitmasher9 5 hours ago [-]
The whole concept of optimal levels of firearms ownership should have been expanded upon, as this premise is probably new to the audience and a cornerstone of their entire research.
batch12 4 hours ago [-]
Agreed, there's not a lot of substance here. I read the article more than once and still don't know if "overarming" means too many individuals own guns or too many guns per individual. I assume the former based on context. Also interesting is that they focus on the US but two out of three groups studied are not in the US.
HWR_14 4 hours ago [-]
I'm willing to bet this is defined by some base levels in their equations as a default utility. So they aren't trying to say what the optimal level for the various uses of guns are, they are using math to prove that people are being driven to purchase more guns than that level, whatever that level is.
bitmasher9 4 hours ago [-]
This is why it’s sometimes hard to take the soft sciences seriously.
HWR_14 54 minutes ago [-]
I have no idea why you be dismissive of using an unspecified variable as a baseline. People do it in every subject.
jerkstate 4 hours ago [-]
Their cohort studies are across three completely different populations. I would be willing to listen to an argument that for some specific population there’s a firearm ownership level above which there are diminishing safety returns, but I find the idea that this same level would hold across wildly different populations absurd
stronglikedan 4 hours ago [-]
people with a lot of guns aren't buying them for self defense. you only need one or two for that. any more and it's a hobby just like any other. "Overarming" is a loaded word with no real relevance to US gun culture.
alistairSH 4 hours ago [-]
Do they ever state the social optimum level of fun ownership? I can take them at their word they it’s non-zero, but I’d guess it’s orders of magnitude less than the current rate.
bob1029 4 hours ago [-]
In the US, the average gun owner has something like 3-5. An actual enthusiast will have tens or hundreds. It's the people who own exactly one that you need to watch out for the most.
4 hours ago [-]
tinfoilhatter 4 hours ago [-]
I think the optimum level changes based on whether or not citizens are being actively brutalized by an authoritarian government and their police forces en masse. When that happens, the optimum level is a lot and when it's not happening, the optimum level is probably orders of magnitude less. Unfortunately, we can't accurately predict when these things will happen.
nostrademons 4 hours ago [-]
I hear this argument repeated a lot, and I think it is legit the reason for the 2nd amendment - but it doesn't make sense with modern technology. That authoritarian government is going to come at you with Bearcats, helicopters, and drones. Firing a gun at them is just going to make you cannon fodder. If you want to actually challenge the authoritarian government, you need MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and drones of your own - which is probably why MANPADS, RPGs, cruise missiles, and soon drones are heavily regulated, with stiff penalties for just ownership, and guns themselves are free to possess.
rolph 4 hours ago [-]
what you have said, is exactly why the 2A legitimates bearing arms, not only firearms.
the origin of the US is about being able to resist unreasonable force, and thats the root of the 2A, being able to resist, due to an uninfringed right to bear arms, to the end of checking the force of a militia having strayed out of its rights.
nostrademons 3 hours ago [-]
I'd agree with that on a philosophical level, but no court has actually interpreted the 2A as legitimating the right to build a cruise missile, MANPADS, or nuke. Try it and I suspect you're looking at a very long prison term. Usually people look at me like I'm insane when I suggest that "Well logically, the right to bear arms should include the right to bear nukes, so all this stuff about 'born secret' and classified information is unconstitutional."
chasd00 4 hours ago [-]
Rounds fired per gun owner per month would be an interesting statistic. The vast majority of people who buy a gun out of fear go to the range once and then put the gun in the top of the closet never to be seen again. I don't think they contribute anything in the cost/benefit equation to gun ownership for a society.
delichon 3 hours ago [-]
> The vast majority of people who buy a gun out of fear go to the range once and then put the gun in the top of the closet never to be seen again.
I'm close to that, but I put its potential benefits similar to that of my fire extinguishers, and with no kids around the cost/risk is low. I am happy to be part of the statistics that raise the costs for intruders, and I like being ready to defend my dogs from the local coyotes, wolves and cougars. My guns and fire extinguishers are downstream of the same kind of fear.
Glyptodon 5 hours ago [-]
Are people who are armed because they enjoy shooting or hunting supposed to exist in this research model or not?
Any analysis of individual arming decisions must account for purely individual reasons to own guns (e.g., for use in hunting) and the cost of possible confrontations that are ubiquitous in society and, depending on others’ arming decisions, can involve guns (e.g., fear of a confrontation with an armed neighbor).
datsci_est_2015 4 hours ago [-]
The non-paranoid sportsman is a shrinking demographic, I fear, mostly due to decades of propaganda within the sportsman culture (magazines, organizations).
They still exist within academic and reservationist circles, but the grand majority of gun owners I know in my rural backcountry speak pretty matter-of-factly about racist and anti-social ideas (source: friends, family, and going to bars called things like Rusty’s, Bill’s, etc.)
gcheong 4 hours ago [-]
I got my hunter's safety card back just before covid. Prior to the actual course starting, our instructors spent a good 15 minutes "encouraging" us to join the NRA because "they're really trying to take our guns, blah blah". This was in "liberal" California. When I had last taken the course as a kid in my home state of Oregon, in a conservative majority town, there was never any kind of propaganda that I can recall of this level.
Glyptodon 4 hours ago [-]
I think with younger shooters there are many people who enjoy 3 gun and other modern match style sort of tactical shooting or cowboy action without obsessively carrying or planning for defensive use. But I don't think these folks overlap with the hunter-type sportsman. And do overlap with the "tacticool" folks. Don't know if that translates to rural though.
colechristensen 4 hours ago [-]
The attempted (failed) fascist takeover of Minneapolis by ICE motivated plenty of new and existing gun owners. It is not reasonable to call that fear paranoia, and it's not about the sport. The fact that it failed doesn't mean that chapter of history is over, just that lessons will be learned and it will be a more difficult situation next time unless there are some really substantial changes we see no evidence of yet.
wood_spirit 4 hours ago [-]
The US is a country with lower hunting participation than many other western countries and yet an order of magnitude more gun owning households.
RyJones 4 hours ago [-]
Does it matter? Control of you life is your basic human right. Firearms are the great equalizer.
alistairSH 4 hours ago [-]
Isn’t there a massive body of research that indicates gun ownership is less safe on average that non-ownership? Ie the chance of accidental shooting of family/friends is high enough to offset any benefit (on average across the US)?
lazyasciiart 4 hours ago [-]
Teen suicide in households with a gun is a very interesting stat to bring up for this. Suicide in general is higher for gun owners, which can be handwaved away as “that’s my right”. But suicide is higher for children of gun owners? That seems like a tough risk to justify.
Glyptodon 3 hours ago [-]
The thing is there's such a breadth of circumstances and behaviors involved that pigeonholing it under one giant banner is questionable. Like the people who leave loaded guns in random drawers around their houses are doing something very different with a different risk profile. Whereas once you get to teens in households that have guns and generally practice some level of safe storage it's a much more complex issue IMO. Because as a society we want teens to become responsible enough to handle things like cars, or power tools, or guns. But we also know that they're not adults yet. And we know that infantilization of teens isn't going to do anyone favors in the long run. So it's probably not as simple as ban cars and ban guns or whatever else.
potsandpans 3 hours ago [-]
It's more dangerous to live in a household with a pool than with a gun.
What should we do about it?
rootusrootus 3 hours ago [-]
> What should we do about it?
Outlaw swimming pools, clearly.
Shit. I have a pool. My kids like it. And I have guns! How about instead, we do nothing. We have more than enough to worry about already just with the sentient hazards in homes.
potsandpans 3 hours ago [-]
Brother, were aligned
Glyptodon 4 hours ago [-]
The problem I have with "safetyism" is it comes across as something you can say about cars, knives, power tools, skis, hang gliders, and so many other things. Like do I buy that even though ski deaths are lower in non-skiing households, just like gun deaths are in non shooting ones, that it's less impactful and important than the same effect with guns? Sure. But it's also a conversation that is soooo patronizing in a ridiculous way that it really seems like a double standard. And so much of it seems disingenuous. Like do we focus on enabling safe storage and mental health safety with guns or making it harder? On making kids and families more knowledgeable and safer around guns or just amping up the anxiety and fear?
colechristensen 4 hours ago [-]
There's a problem with statistics for this and many other things.
Guns attract idiots, idiots have idiot gun problems, it does not follow that if you get a gun, you'll have the same problems.
Similar statistics are easy to fool people with. Doing $expensive_thing is associated with health/wealth/success so if everybody did it everybody would be better off! But in reality there's just a selection bias and whatever the thing is just attracts rich people and the thing has no actual effect. For example: do a study of people who wear sunglasses to find the association between mortality and the price of the sunglasses you wear.
How many people are actually studying gun ownership without intentionally looking for one result or the other? It attracts a tremendous about of bias in both directions and not a lot of genuine curiousity.
simbosambo 4 hours ago [-]
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baq 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is the baseline you get equalized to.
cheesefkr 4 hours ago [-]
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UtopiaPunk 4 hours ago [-]
"Might makes right," you know?
I personally control my life by spending almost all of my income, after bills, towards expanding the elaborate tower-defense-like automated weaponry on my plot of land. If I must leave my fort, I always drive my T-34 into town (I'm saving up for a Sherman).
Sure but some people own like 30 guns. There’s more going on with gun ownership than just basic self defense.
nathan_compton 4 hours ago [-]
I'm kind of curious as to how you justify this. I personally think its ok for people to have arms, but I don't personally believe in basic human rights. Where would such things even come from? Rights are just conventions which ought to serve whatever goods you are interested in. Unless you believe in god or some other thing like that, there really is no way to justify rights except relative to some other stated goal.
4 hours ago [-]
0x59 4 hours ago [-]
I own one gun. If another own guns, that's none of my business. The question, how many guns are "optimal" introduces a surface for regulation that is none of the government's business to be regulating.
mac3n 3 hours ago [-]
> "Our hope is that our model can play a role in a thoughtful data-driven conversation about one of the most societally and personally important decisions any person can make,” he says.
good luck with that!
arjie 4 hours ago [-]
Boy, the game of telephone on the way to HN is really amazing.
Paper: We make a stylized model that uses observed social networks in Honduran gangs and varies some parameters to match the US to see and it aligns with some things regarding how we exceed the socially optimal balance (based on the params).
PR release: The researchers describe in Science Advances how individual incentives to buy firearms can lead to a phenomenon they call “overarming.”
PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
Come on, guys.
john_strinlai 4 hours ago [-]
>PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
>HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S
the discrepancy between these two is because HN automatically strips "how" from the beginning of titles.
lazyasciiart 4 hours ago [-]
Which is usually reasonable, because if you are describing “how x happens” you are claiming that x happens. It doesn’t make a real difference here.
elpocko 4 hours ago [-]
It's baffling how almost no one here ever speaks out against it. Everybody just puts up with it even though we all know what a sign of arrogance and incompetence it is to attempt to alter post titles in this clumsy, embarrassingly broken way. Everyone is just silently looking at their feet in second hand embarrassment and doesn't want to speak up. And the funniest thing is: there is an official rule that says not to edit the original titles. Amazingly bizarre.
john_strinlai 4 hours ago [-]
i have mentioned that i dont like it. dang said i was wrong.
however, the submitter is able to edit the title for a short window after posting to add the 'how' back in for cases where removing it materially alters the meaning.
4 hours ago [-]
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
People have. The mods have made it clear they consider it necessary to maintain the quality of conversation and they have no intention of changing it.
elpocko 4 hours ago [-]
The mods are obviously wrong and there should be way more pushback from the users. It's embarrassing.
krapp 4 hours ago [-]
You can try, but the only thing "pushback" will likely achieve is getting your account filtered for posting "unsubstantive content."
It's worth remembering that the American founders considered an armed population an essential part of a free society capable of standing up against federal overreach. James Madison, Federalist 46:
>Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.
lazyasciiart 4 hours ago [-]
It’s worth noting that these guys also considered women and black people not to be actual people, and made no distinction between nuclear, chemical and biological weapons and a rifle, whenever we get the idea that they had great ideas that we should apply to society today.
Helloworldboy 4 hours ago [-]
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mold_aid 4 hours ago [-]
It's actually not worth remembering that, even in the context of this study.
4 hours ago [-]
jampekka 4 hours ago [-]
The US gun culture resembles nothing like "a militia officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence."
This was also before modern military with armored vehicles, aircraft, missiles and drones. I wonder what ratio of untrained handgun touting joe sixpacks would be needed against that.
If you want to get an idea what was meant with the militias at the time, look at maybe Switzerland. Or perhaps even countries with conscript armies.
kashunstva 4 hours ago [-]
However, the Second Amendment begins with a qualifying clause which many including notable national gun-rights organizations choose to ignore. In any case, I’m not sure that has worked out as well as Madison thought. A sizeable percentage of the armed populace may actually be cheering the feared Federal overreach.
cloche 4 hours ago [-]
That was a time when the latest arms technology could be obtained both by normal citizens and the government. Do you think that today an armed population could repel a determined federal government?
sofixa 4 hours ago [-]
It's also worth remembering their other views, and contrasting.
Women and non-white, non-landholders didn't get a vote. Some of them owned slaves. They believed a standing army or navy were unnecessary, because a militia could just be mobilised on a case by case basis. (Yes, even for a navy, they thought random boats would be enough). They didn't have an opinion on an air force.
So either accept that the opinions of a bunch of men from a few centuries ago aren't the words of deities to be adhered to under threat of their wrath, or start being consistent and arguing you want slavery back, women suffrage rolled back, and no voting rights for men without land. Oh, and for disbanding all armed forces
kylehotchkiss 4 hours ago [-]
I guess you don’t really get to choose how to die but the idea of dying to gun violence sounds really shitty.
lenerdenator 4 hours ago [-]
In some ways, it's just the four boxes of liberty at work.
The theory goes, there are four routes to "solving" social disputes/obtaining justice in modern societies: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. They are to be used in that order, because the consequences for society and human life get worse with each one. I put "solving" in quotes because you could argue that the last box doesn't really solve anything.
Right now, at least, you have a large number of people in American society feeling as if social conflicts/injustices are going unaddressed in meaningful ways. I'll let you fill in the blanks as to what those are, but it's not always people who want the US to be like it was in 1955 who are arming themselves. An increasing number of people who are liberal or otherwise practice left-of-center politics, and people who are of historically-oppressed groups, are also starting to arm themselves.
Ultimately, if you start meaningfully solving social conflicts and injustices with the first three boxes, you can avoid the fourth and you'll probably see firearm ownership growth begin to drop. I don't think you'll ever see it meaningfully go away in the US without an effort that few people would consider wise to attempt.
sp527 4 hours ago [-]
Anecdotally, a lot of politically far left people I know have gone quiet on the firearms issue. It seems like the state of the country has 2A suddenly making more sense to a lot of people.
kashunstva 4 hours ago [-]
I’m a progressive voter and my waning interest in gun control is that it’s a political nonstarter. But I’m sure there are fellow progressives that are reasoning in the way you suggest.
In any case, if the majority of the “prevent Federal overreach” 2A crowd truly believed in that principle, then I would have expected thousands of armed citizens in Minnesota repelling the extrajudicial abuses taking place there.
lazyasciiart 4 hours ago [-]
Not to anyone who is hoping to avoid catastrophic civil disorder and mass murder (revolution/civil war/government crackdowns, however you want to label it), but I think some people have stopped hoping for that.
mherkender 4 hours ago [-]
I think there's bigger fish to fry and it's hard to talk about when nothing matters to the people you're trying to convince.
idle_zealot 4 hours ago [-]
I don't think that's it. Armed resistance is not realistic, and is probably actively counterproductive compared even to unarmed but violent resistance to occupation. This is because you're not going to "win" in a military sense, it's a battle for hearts and minds, and optically protestors firing at State forces is really really bad.
I've stopped talking about it because it's been relegated to a marginal safety issue. Reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a generational project to reduce a bad statistic. It pales in comparison with much more pressing and foundational issues that need to be resolved before anything can even be attempted to improve stats like that. We can't even manage to repair failing bridges[0], enforce basic laws meant to protect the legitimacy of our institutions (see every political scandal since Iran contra), or meaningfully oppose genocides or home grown fascism. When the "opposition" party argues against mass deportations they frame it as though their colleagues across the aisle are merely making an economic miscalculation, like submitting the fact the immigrants are disproportionately hard workers and prop up our economy might be convincing to people who respond to "they're killing and eating your pets." There's a deep rot that needs to be addressed before I can again muster the energy to care about reducing the suicide and homicide rate by 50% of an already pretty-low number (relative to car deaths or heart disease or whatever). No need to muddle the message by tagging it with correct but contentious positions.
In planning for 20 years, 13 billion dollars stolen and absorbed by the construction industry and its infinitely fractal subcontracting web. at least it created jobs, I guess. No work has begun.
sp527 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure why you seem to think people would need to resist the government rather than, more simply, the relatively small number of billionaires who purchase and pervert it.
idle_zealot 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know what you're suggesting. How would widespread gun ownership help with the government being subverted by oligarchs? Vigilante justice? Wouldn't change anything for the better. More paranoid billionaires would just start running things from private compounds and transit between in private jets and armored convoys. That's not a far step from what many do now, and would be extremely powerful social pretext for authoritarian crackdown.
sp527 4 hours ago [-]
> Wouldn't change anything for the better.
You need to read more history my friend
alistairSH 4 hours ago [-]
Sure, jack boot thugs killing a fee people in broad daylight with a government sanction tends to do that. But I’d rather we not have the brown shirts in the first place…
DennisP 4 hours ago [-]
Of course, and so would those same people.
Helloworldboy 4 hours ago [-]
[dead]
kg 4 hours ago [-]
YMMV but out of the people I know, the lefties are less likely to be hardcore pro-gun-control than the people who lean center-liberal, and this has been true for a long time. John Brown Gun Club, etc.
I suppose one could model this in some way. But as a pacifist, vegan and never owner of firearms, I’m genuinely clueless as to how this could be. Is the social optimality here a function possessing weapons for hunting, which can be a social activity?
Some fraction of the population in any society is antisocial. A non-zero rate of firearms ownership allows the people who aren't antisocial to suppress those who are antisocial and maintain peace.
Do you have an example of such a place? What you're describing is called vigilantism, and usually creates more issues than it solves.
I disagree with the sibling comments about defending the country against an invader (if your country is facing invasion, weapons will be readily available) and defending yourself against crime (it's a non-issue in any non-failed state, and in a failed state weapons are readily available anyway and rarely make any difference).
But in a world where wealth inequality is increasing, where surveillance is ever more present, the tiny probability of the population being able to resist when it finally rises up justifies the very tangible downsides of an armed population.
I am aware that there are many arguments against this view, but I think the downsides of an authoritarian state with a monopoly on violence are too dire to be brushed aside.
When you're a physically vulnerable person and there are zero firearms in a community (and it's known there are zero), then there's no physical deterrent to attacking you. Of course in theory there are social consequences, but if you're in a society that includes things like alcohol or other substances, teenagers/people with poorly developed senses of long term consequences, or mental illnesses, then the thought 'oh shit, she/he might be strapped' might do more than 'you might go to jail'.
Also, imagine a scenario where a foreign power attempted to occupy a country? There is probably an optimal number of armed citizens to deter that kind of activity. As we have seen in recent years, foreign powers often do want to capture and hold foreign territory. The chance of this is small, but clearly non-zero.
We have learned from Iraq and Afghanistan that it's very difficult even for the world's most powerful military to hold cities and countryside against people armed with handheld automatic weapons.
Personally, I rather enjoy not having my kids shot at school.
the origin of the US is about being able to resist unreasonable force, and thats the root of the 2A, being able to resist, due to an uninfringed right to bear arms, to the end of checking the force of a militia having strayed out of its rights.
I'm close to that, but I put its potential benefits similar to that of my fire extinguishers, and with no kids around the cost/risk is low. I am happy to be part of the statistics that raise the costs for intruders, and I like being ready to defend my dogs from the local coyotes, wolves and cougars. My guns and fire extinguishers are downstream of the same kind of fear.
Any analysis of individual arming decisions must account for purely individual reasons to own guns (e.g., for use in hunting) and the cost of possible confrontations that are ubiquitous in society and, depending on others’ arming decisions, can involve guns (e.g., fear of a confrontation with an armed neighbor).
They still exist within academic and reservationist circles, but the grand majority of gun owners I know in my rural backcountry speak pretty matter-of-factly about racist and anti-social ideas (source: friends, family, and going to bars called things like Rusty’s, Bill’s, etc.)
What should we do about it?
Outlaw swimming pools, clearly.
Shit. I have a pool. My kids like it. And I have guns! How about instead, we do nothing. We have more than enough to worry about already just with the sentient hazards in homes.
Guns attract idiots, idiots have idiot gun problems, it does not follow that if you get a gun, you'll have the same problems.
Similar statistics are easy to fool people with. Doing $expensive_thing is associated with health/wealth/success so if everybody did it everybody would be better off! But in reality there's just a selection bias and whatever the thing is just attracts rich people and the thing has no actual effect. For example: do a study of people who wear sunglasses to find the association between mortality and the price of the sunglasses you wear.
How many people are actually studying gun ownership without intentionally looking for one result or the other? It attracts a tremendous about of bias in both directions and not a lot of genuine curiousity.
I personally control my life by spending almost all of my income, after bills, towards expanding the elaborate tower-defense-like automated weaponry on my plot of land. If I must leave my fort, I always drive my T-34 into town (I'm saving up for a Sherman).
If anyone is interested in their own tank, this is a fun little listicle of what is possible: https://militarymachine.com/military-tanks-for-sale
good luck with that!
Paper: We make a stylized model that uses observed social networks in Honduran gangs and varies some parameters to match the US to see and it aligns with some things regarding how we exceed the socially optimal balance (based on the params).
PR release: The researchers describe in Science Advances how individual incentives to buy firearms can lead to a phenomenon they call “overarming.”
PR title: How Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S.
Come on, guys.
>HN title: Fear and Social Pressure Are ‘Overarming’ the U.S
the discrepancy between these two is because HN automatically strips "how" from the beginning of titles.
however, the submitter is able to edit the title for a short window after posting to add the 'how' back in for cases where removing it materially alters the meaning.
https://phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174
>Let a regular army, fully equal to the resources of the country, be formed; and let it be entirely at the devotion of the federal government; still it would not be going too far to say, that the State governments, with the people on their side, would be able to repel the danger. The highest number to which, according to the best computation, a standing army can be carried in any country, does not exceed one hundredth part of the whole number of souls; or one twenty-fifth part of the number able to bear arms. This proportion would not yield, in the United States, an army of more than twenty-five or thirty thousand men. To these would be opposed a militia amounting to near half a million of citizens with arms in their hands, officered by men chosen from among themselves, fighting for their common liberties, and united and conducted by governments possessing their affections and confidence.
This was also before modern military with armored vehicles, aircraft, missiles and drones. I wonder what ratio of untrained handgun touting joe sixpacks would be needed against that.
If you want to get an idea what was meant with the militias at the time, look at maybe Switzerland. Or perhaps even countries with conscript armies.
Women and non-white, non-landholders didn't get a vote. Some of them owned slaves. They believed a standing army or navy were unnecessary, because a militia could just be mobilised on a case by case basis. (Yes, even for a navy, they thought random boats would be enough). They didn't have an opinion on an air force.
So either accept that the opinions of a bunch of men from a few centuries ago aren't the words of deities to be adhered to under threat of their wrath, or start being consistent and arguing you want slavery back, women suffrage rolled back, and no voting rights for men without land. Oh, and for disbanding all armed forces
The theory goes, there are four routes to "solving" social disputes/obtaining justice in modern societies: the soap box, the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box. They are to be used in that order, because the consequences for society and human life get worse with each one. I put "solving" in quotes because you could argue that the last box doesn't really solve anything.
Right now, at least, you have a large number of people in American society feeling as if social conflicts/injustices are going unaddressed in meaningful ways. I'll let you fill in the blanks as to what those are, but it's not always people who want the US to be like it was in 1955 who are arming themselves. An increasing number of people who are liberal or otherwise practice left-of-center politics, and people who are of historically-oppressed groups, are also starting to arm themselves.
Ultimately, if you start meaningfully solving social conflicts and injustices with the first three boxes, you can avoid the fourth and you'll probably see firearm ownership growth begin to drop. I don't think you'll ever see it meaningfully go away in the US without an effort that few people would consider wise to attempt.
In any case, if the majority of the “prevent Federal overreach” 2A crowd truly believed in that principle, then I would have expected thousands of armed citizens in Minnesota repelling the extrajudicial abuses taking place there.
I've stopped talking about it because it's been relegated to a marginal safety issue. Reducing the number of firearms in circulation is a generational project to reduce a bad statistic. It pales in comparison with much more pressing and foundational issues that need to be resolved before anything can even be attempted to improve stats like that. We can't even manage to repair failing bridges[0], enforce basic laws meant to protect the legitimacy of our institutions (see every political scandal since Iran contra), or meaningfully oppose genocides or home grown fascism. When the "opposition" party argues against mass deportations they frame it as though their colleagues across the aisle are merely making an economic miscalculation, like submitting the fact the immigrants are disproportionately hard workers and prop up our economy might be convincing to people who respond to "they're killing and eating your pets." There's a deep rot that needs to be addressed before I can again muster the energy to care about reducing the suicide and homicide rate by 50% of an already pretty-low number (relative to car deaths or heart disease or whatever). No need to muddle the message by tagging it with correct but contentious positions.
0: https://www.permits.performance.gov/permitting-project/dot-p...
In planning for 20 years, 13 billion dollars stolen and absorbed by the construction industry and its infinitely fractal subcontracting web. at least it created jobs, I guess. No work has begun.
You need to read more history my friend