My impression of most locks now is that they're really just to stop something from being casually broken into or even just falling open by accident.
My impression of most locks now is that they're really just to stop something from being casually broken into or even just falling open by accident.
My dad's wisdom as he cut my bike lock off when I lost the key in middle school: "locks keep honest people out."
I have a friend who says "gun control keeps law-abiding people unarmed."
Gun control gives cause for arresting any law breaking people. See how such parables go both ways?
Point is, gun control has led to a reduction in gun crime in every country I know of. Thats hard evidence against your qippy one-liner.
Crime had already been falling consistently for several hundred years throughout Europe when the first gun-licensing and gun-control laws were being passed in the Wiemar Republic. You don’t need control over weapons to reduce crime, you just reduce crime.
Incidentally, a few years later a certain political party got their candidate elected Chancellor. He more or less immediately ordered the police to use the gun-licensing records to identify Jews who owned guns and had them arrested. It’s actually pretty hilarious, in a very dark way, to read some of the arrest reports. When Jews were ordered to surrender their weapons to the police, many of them brought the weapons to a police station as instructed. They politely stood in line while the officer at the desk wrote out arrest warrants for them one after the other. The crime? Carrying an unlicensed weapon. The location? The police station in such-and-such precinct. The witness? The officer at the desk. The prisoner? Turned over to the SS.
USA has no gun control and has just had a similar political upheaval, with zero armed resistence.
lets not pretend.
There is nothing even remotely similar about it.
People who think it's a good idea to walk around with weapons should be arrested.
Yeah, but criminals do not care, law-abiding citizens do... so who ends up being the victim in such scenarios? Typically the law-abiding citizen.
Not in any civilised country. Criminals do have guns in my country but firearm use is incredibly rare and use is restricted to crim V cop and crim v crim because police response and enforcement are so harsh for gun crime it isnt worth it unless it quite literally becomes life or death.
So then non criminals, while not armed with guns, face no real gun violence because even getting access to guns requires critical thinking and intelligence at least sufficient to understand risk vs reward well enough to understand civilian pop isn't a reasonable use case for firearms. Any firearm related incident here is a multi week news item. Stuff thats everyday in the USA and doesnt even make local news.
So, our cops and our criminals are armed, and i can trust my kids wont get shot up in school, i wont get shot in a store robbery, or by a disgruntled coworker etc.
You dont quite understand how bad it is I think, USA americans who move here have an adjustment period and usually need mental health support coping with leaving a country where getting shot in a road rage incident, for example, is a real risk. I had a colleague driving break down after cutting someone off accidentally, the cut off swerved ahead of us aggressivly stopped traffic got out and started shouting. Eventually wore themsleves out, as they do, got vack in car and kept driving. Didnt stress me too bad but my coworker driving totally shut down. Why? A year earlier a coworker in the USA did something similar and the person with road rage got out and started shooting at their car.
That's not normal. Not even close.
It’s also extremely rare here, when looked at rationally. Those kinds of shootings are limited to specific areas of the country. The other 99% of the country faces nothing like that, ever.
> police response and enforcement are so harsh for gun crime it isnt worth it
That's the key right there. USA enforcement is far less than what it needs to be, especially in (dare I say it) Democrat-controlled local districts.
The number of soft-on-crime DAs elected has increased significantly in the last 30 years, and the fraction of violent crime cases that are left unsolved has also increased significantly.
It's gotten so bad that a lot of conspiracy theories are circulating, like "Davos people want to destabilize the US, so George Soros is donating millions through his Open Foundation to soft-on-crime DA local election campaigns."
I like my 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendment rights.
I don't want to live in a world where cops can stop people for speeding and use it as probable cause to search my car.
I also don't want to live in an environment where when I'm seconds away from danger, my only protection is minutes away.
Warren v. DC also clearly established that police departments cannot be held civilly liable for even gross negligence of duty.
"You can all go to hell. I'm going to Texas."
-Davy Crockett
With guns being uncontrolled police have plausible deniability on demand to gun down anyone they like. No free unrestricted gun access means gunning down people as they please isnt justifiable anymore.
so if its about safety, in a country actively descended into facism, aren't you worried about freedom of political expression given you can just be gunned down at a moments notice and it gets brushed away?
You're more worried about some hypothetical apocalyptic scenario where lawful firearm owners suddenly lose their minds and fall into mass-psychosis than you are about existing known violent criminals committing more violent crimes.
I can guarantee you that those "backwards" wheat farmers from Salina, KS with $10k worth of hunting rifles and shotguns just don't think about people like you on a daily basis. Their minds are on the wind, rain, beetles, and grain futures, not "how can we launch a successful invasion against Somerville, MA?".
Frankly, I'm a lot more worried about my Greek classmate being assaulted by a "Free Palestine" moron who can't tell the difference between the flags for Israel and Greece:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14004125/TikTok-Gre...
As for mob violence in general, I'm just not worried about complete strangers wanting to risk their lives in a firefight to kill me. The kind of people who are attracted to angry mobs are not the kind of people volunteering to drive the Waffen SS out of Eindhoven or chase the Japanese out of the Philippines.
Likewise, the people violently assaulting Jewish pre-med students in America are there because the IDF in Gaza scare them.
If the kind of people you most fear and hate wanted war, they could just stop growing your food and let you starve to death.
Not trying to belittle you, so much as reassure that if Trump supporters really wanted to hurt you, they would have done it already in 2015.
> Point is, gun control has led to a reduction in gun crime in every country I know of. Thats hard evidence against your qippy one-liner.
That's a tautology - of course it did. The real questions are - what percentage of violent crimes were committed with guns after after gun control, how much did overall violent crime decrease after gun control, and to what extent was gun control provably responsible for the reduction of violent crime (when statistically controlling for other factors that reduce violent crime)?
The overall slope of the violent crime curve has been negative, but the value may have been more negative if it were not for gun control.
Also, I think history will bear this out in the coming centuries -- totalitarianism and terrorism can flourish far better when citizens are unarmed.
Youre missing an important detail - how many deaths / maimings per violent offense. If violent offences dont drop but those do, worth no? How about school shooters - will people no longer crash out and attack their classmates? No. We havent solved the underlying issue, however, such a crashout sans guns seems siginificantly more preferable to me.
besides, the usa has proven that freedom to access guns doesnt protect you from dictatorships / authoritarian governments. That was the main stated constitutional reason for having that right.
So the USA hasn't seen any benefits from free gun access ans has lost uncountbaly many lives to death and trauma. How is it still justified?
> Gun control gives cause for arresting people who are armed
FTFY
Yup. I think that is a neat and internally consistent statement that doesnt omit facts. One can do with that statement what one wants, but if carrying arms becomes extremely risky, if using arms carries an burden akin to dying, you can bet that criminals who are quite good at weighing risk v reward will not be running amok.
Your friend should look at almost any other Western, developed nation for counterexamples
Your friend sounds like a good guy. Hopefully you're with him when you're out in public, and some sicko goes postal or some bum with a drug addiction starts waving a knife at you.
I definitely feel safer when I'm around him :)
He has very carefully rehearsed a lot of situations in his mind, and I'm confident he would only draw his weapon when actual lives are in imminent danger (like an active armed assailant situation).
I used to be a competitive marksman through JROTC, and the FUD around firearms is so overblown compared to the fear most people should have while driving their car or doing certain jobs.
A chem lab staffed only by trained professionals is still a lot more dangerous than an indoor range in a red state. A firearm in Cletus' hands is a lot safer than a beaker of sulfuric acid in anybody's hands, let alone piranha solution.
And all of that is nothing compared to the danger of being on a road with other cars, many of which are operated by people who simply do not give a f***.
100% agree. But - firearms (combined with training and skill) carry far more risk asymmetry compared to cars, sulfuric acid beakers, or even explosives. I think that's why there's more fear around letting people carry them. The potential damage to personal risk ratio is higher with firearms.
But the root public policy problem is the same no matter what the weapon is: violent criminals will harm people, others generally won't. So the most effective policies have to lean heavily on good police and DA behavior, to make sure violent criminals aren't able to keep harming people. Going after the weapons criminals use is effectively a red herring if known violent criminals are still generally at large. Any policy intended to reduce violent crime will fail insofar as cases continue to go unsolved, and police, DAs, and courts don't enforce the law when the identities of violent criminals are known.
I assume your friend never bothers to lock their door?
Locking doors makes legal follow-up easier: "The deceased - do you know if he broke and entered?" "Yes, your honor. I always lock my doors at night. Exhibit A is a video of him busting the door down after trying the doorknob."
That's a really well put. We are expecting a son soon and as I was reading this read and your comment, I couldn't help but asking myself will I ever say anything that my son will remember for years. And how can I be prepared.
Your dad sounds like a very wise man.
I've watched LPL videos and practiced on regular locks, I can pick something that is about 10$ or less, but these expensive locks with good tolerances (Abus) or disc detainer cores (kryptonite locks,) no amount of practice and fiddling with the correct tools has ever opened one of these. I lack the skill or touch.
I can hold a 18v grinder with a cutoff wheel just fine though, I lost the keys to one of those kryptonite locks on my bike and I was riding my bike again 30 seconds later.
Or to make it clear that if someone does break the lock, they didn't have your permission to get at whatever it was protecting.
Yep, it’s like those security screws, they’re not used to stop you opening the box, they’re used to prove that you knew you shouldn’t be opening the box.
Most of the time they’re just there to make you _think_ that you shouldn’t be opening the box. In the US the Magnusen–Moss Warranty Act of 1977 explicitly prohibits companies from voiding any warranty merely because the owner opened up the device, repaired it, or had it repaired.
you are adjacent to the concept that locks are an honest persons way of communicating to other honest people that an invitation is required.