Guns

I can’t fathom how people saw police beating protesters to death in 2020, are decrying the new Trump presidency as the rise of fascism in America, and still believe that the government should be the only ones with firepower in their hands.

Now is exactly the time when the left should be rallying behind the second amendment.

I dont see a problem with owning guns. Its just taken too lightly in the states. To get a gun where im at, you need to get certified - theoretical, physical and psychological tests are done. And no one starts pissing about personal freedoms if they fail these tests. I think you also need to be member of a shooting club. Point is, you need to demonstrate your ability to handle a weapon responsibly. Im not one to confuse correlation with causation but... you dont see many stories of shootings here.

Aren't shooting clubs and the licensing prohibitively expensive? This is just to disarm the working class. If the poor can't afford equal protection they are slaves.
- I wouldn't look at it from that perspective. Similar situation with driving licenses, which require first aid training, 20+ hours of driving lessons with an instructor, theory lessons, testing, and costly things of that nature. If you want a gun and are fit to own one, you will not have a problem doing so, no matter your class.
  
  And that is where the difference between privileges and rights is. Privileges exist by definition for the privileged.
  
  At the same time, sometimes driving license requirements feel like they are too high and a racket.
  I got my scooter license by answering 48/50 questions right and doing a 4 hour practical course at the driving center to get it on the same day. I paid $50 to do it.
  This license allows me to drive a 50cc bike like an Aprilia RS50, which can hit the speed limit when I drive it on the same roads as everyone else.
  First aid is fair enough, but why do I have to pay $1500 to attend a driving school and answer 100 questions or pay $80 to take the 2% chance of passing it at the license test center (because the test is graded by cops and one of the cushy jobs for them before retirement is as advisors at driving schools) to be able to ride something that is marginally faster and heavier?
Cool, if the dumb as shit fascist down the street owns a gun and wants you to die for being different then you need to protect yourself.

Ah yes. The true red blooded American solution; the only way to solve a serious problem is to escalate it out of proportion.

Why is arming yourself in self defense escalating it out of proption when leftists do it?
- *When anyone does it.
  The solution to there being too many guns is to remove the guns. Not add more.
  
  Cool, well that's definitely not an option now that we voted in a right wing fascist.
  Maybe once leftists get in charge again we can try passing reasonable gun laws again

The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun

How would you stop a fascist with a gun that wants to put you in a camp?
If you are lgbtq, on any mental health medication, or a immigrant as a result of natrual born citizenships then you need to realistically ask yourself this question, because that's the stated policy of the new president.
- Real obvious answer, you shoot them.
- "how would you stop a fascist with a gun that wants to put you in a camp"
  If they were really a fascist, I would shoot them.
Demonstrably false.

“The actual data show that some of these kind of heroic, Hollywood moments of armed citizens taking out active shooters are just extraordinarily rare,” Mr. Lankford said.
In fact, having more than one armed person at the scene who is not a member of law enforcement can create confusion and carry dire risks. An armed bystander who shot and killed an attacker in 2021 in Arvada, Colo., was himself shot and killed by the police, who mistook him for the gunman.
It was twice as common for bystanders to physically subdue the attackers, often by tackling or striking them. At Seattle Pacific University in 2014, a student security guard pepper sprayed and tackled a gunman who was reloading his weapon during an attack that killed one and injured three others. The guard took the attacker’s gun away and held the attacker until law enforcement arrived. When a gunman entered a classroom at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 2019, a student tackled him. The student was shot and killed, but the police chief said the attack would have had a far worse death toll had the student not intervened.
https://archive.is/xQqYY
- 65% Stopped without a gun
  34% Stopped with a gun
  15ish% of Americans carry sometimes, around 7% always.
  Gotta be honest, those numbers are looking pretty good if only 7% of people always carry but 34% of shootings were stopped by one of those 7%. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that a good majority of the remaining 65% weren't stopped with a gun because nobody there had one at the time. Same for the ones that weren't stopped by any bystanders armed or otherwise.
  In at least one of those police just stood outside with theirs for two hours.
  
  I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that a good majority of the remaining 65% weren’t stopped with a gun because nobody there had one at the time.
  And yet there is no way of knowing that, so you're just making an unprovable assertion. I showed data.
  
  That 34% came from your data, feel free to search for the amount of carriers and choose your favorite estimate and use that, it's still lower than 34%. As for the motivations for "not stop with gun" think critically, it's simply more likely that if such a low percentage of people carry daily, there's a higher chance that nobody there has one at any given location/time (aside from expected locations like "gun store" or "police station" where of course the likelihood of the presence of guns jumps to 100%, but for some reason those are rarely targeted). Would you rather stop a shooter with a gun of your own or risk bare handing it?
  
  choose your favorite estimate
  See above, re: unprovable assertion.
  
  Yes yes ignore any other data, I'm gonna be honest dude I don't actually care if you believe the data or not, you can look it up if you really care but you're clearly more interested in dismissing it so, have a nice day I guess, this little subthread has reached its logical conclusion, goodbye.
  
  I can't look up data that doesn't exist.
  
  https://duckduckgo.com/?q=percent+of+americans+carry+guns&ia=web
  Since you evidentially are unaware of the existence of search engines I'll provide this helpful link.
  Now, if you just wholly reject the concept of estimates (lol but you do you) you can go with the raw "has CCW" number which is tracked, though low (due to constitutional carry/open carry), and would benefit my argument. Again IDGAF, 34% ain't that bad of a percentage for how few people carry whether you believe it or not, and you're clearly dead set on your preconceived notions that misrepresented data is good and estimates are bad (though there is the 8% of americans with verifiable CCW permits, that ain't no estimate), so again I must bid thee adeu.
  
  Sorry, that doesn't prove that there were no armed people in the majority of those situations. That's not how statistics work. It is not an even distribution and I don't think you're stupid enough to believe it is. You made an unprovable assertion.
  
  Where did you get that "65%" and "34%" from? It doesn't match the information in the graph you are responding to.
  
  Then what percent of 64 is 42 and 22?
  
  Oh, I see. You're only counting the times when a bystander successfully intervened. (And now you're being snarky about it, rather than just saying that's what you did.)
  In my interpretation, the 113 times where the attacker left the scene are also relevant.
  
  Well we could count the times where nobody intervened, but that doesn't negate that "that means there was nobody there with a gun to intervene" either. (And I was born snarky tyvm.)
  Sure they're relevant, it's just that in most of them there was no gun other than the one held by the shooter (who in many cases wasn't allowed to bring it either) and nobody stopped him with their judo.
  Of the ones that did get stopped, 34% were stopped with something that is only 8% likely to be there. That's still significant numbers whether you like it or not.
  Even still, 22 is 9% of 249, that's still at least consistent with "likelihood gun there" based on 8% of carriers. I'd say it further supports my guess that "when not, it because gun not there."
  And none of this even takes into account the propensity to choose gun free zones as targets further lessening the likelihood of armed response, but I think I'll mention that now.
  Finally, it's a bit out of the scope of mass shootings alone but as for defensive gun use per year Harvard estimates it at 100,000/yr, which is more than our gun deaths including suicide yearly. That is also worth mention as while mass shootings themselves are also rare, defense with firearms happens more than death with firearms yearly as a whole.
  
  Hmm.. If you say 8% of people carry guns, then surely there's a much higher than 9% chance that someone will have a gun at the scene. So something seems a bit off there.
  I'd suggest that instead of just imagining how the percentage of people carrying guns might effect these stats, it might be better to try to measure that effect by looking at similar stats for other countries where gun carrying is far less common.
  
  Idk sounds about right to me, 8%-8%. What do you expect, 8% of people carry so 50% of people have a gun on them at any given time? No, more like 8% of people have one at any given time, therefore 8% chance. Your figures seem off to me considering there are none, "nuh uh" isn't a rebuttal.
  Yes I'd imagine in other countries where no bystanders have guns shootings and stabbings are stopped less by bystanders with guns, because they don't have them. We can see this play out in cases like the one in the UK where the shooter was stopped with a mammoth tusk ripped from a nearby museum. Frankly this seems to support my hypothesis that you have to have a gun to be able to use a gun.
  
  Idk sounds about right to me, 8%-8%. What do you expect, 8% of people carry so 50% of people have a gun on them at any given time? No, more like 8% of people have one at any given time, therefore 8% chance. Your figures seem off to me considering there are none, “nuh uh” isn’t a rebuttal.
  I'm saying that if 8% of people carry guns and there are 20 such people at a particular location, then the probability that someone in the group has a gun would be 1-(1-0.08)^20 which is around 80%. For 1 person, it's 8%, for 2 people it's 15%, and so on.
  But whatever. I can see you are firmly in the camp of 'we need good people with guns to stop bad people with guns' - a view that basically only exists where gun-violence is endemic.
The best way to stop a good guy with a gun is to shoot first (in countries where there's a good chance you might be shot if you're committing a crime)
- Of course, if you go from serial robber to serial murderer, that brings a whole lot more heat. Probably best to just get like, a job and stuff, less people get shot painting houses.
facts.