According to this, both NY and Illinois have lower rates of gun deaths than main. Gun Violence in America: A State-by-State Analysis - Center for American Progress
That said, I feel one helluva lot safer in Maine than Chicago or NYC… At least gun-wise. Maine locals are itching to scrap with out of towners from my limited experience at dive bars there haha.
Which illustrates exactly why it is a statistic of very limited value when it comes to understanding violence.
A hoax? A virus that killed over 80k people worldwide? Good heavens, no.
I was motivated to comment on clinging to the illusion of freedom by the supposed “essential nature” of gun stores.
That was not what I would have expected. Learned something new.
Again, I can’t speak for Nick and where he was going with the “hoax” comment, but to continue the thought experiment.
If we agree that COVID is not a hoax, do we agree that the response of American gun owners has been reasonable and principled?
If not, what do you think they should have done differently?
Nothing, people are dying.
I was motivated by your apparent relief that gun stores are still open as a yardstick for “freedom” and the legal challenges in other states to keep them open.
I had a discusion a while back on PWI on guns vs. tyranny and the apparent circular nature of the argument - “we have guns so that they can’t take our guns” and pressed anyone to outline a scenario where a tyrannical government oppresses citizens - that doesn’t include direct seizure of firearms - that would push the freedom loving gun owners to take up arms.
If I remember well, no one came up with a viable scenario except having guns when “the killing starts”
This brings us to my point - if both the federal and state government can severely limit your freedoms (for a good cause in this situation) without a shot being fired - then why does anyone think that stockpiling guns will help in any future situation?
There was fairly broad consensus about the course of action here.
If we’re still in “lockdown” six months from now with a flu-like death total, I imagine that might change. As it stands right now i find it unsurprising that gun owners, generally a cautious bunch, are willingly limiting their own freedom to assemble.
As far as what constitutes an “essential” business, well, that’s a pretty hard thing to pin down. A gun is like a fire extinguisher. Seemingly inessential, until the day you need it.
That, and there’d probably be legal challenges from the NRA/GOA/etc. if gun stores were forced to close. There aren’t a whole lot of Playground Rights interest groups.
Given his proximity to Italy, I doubt he believes it’s a hoax.
I would have guessed you would crash into the robbers.
What if it’s a private school?
Damn this turned guns in a hurry.
Updates on topic that may be worthy of discussion:
NY death total high but hospitalizations down. Unsure of the exact number and unsure if those are new hospitalization figures or ones remaining in.
Looks like Boris Johnson responding to treatment from what I last read Legal.
LOL!
Use the “A” word…and see how fast a thread can turn, @H_factor…!
– The grey line shows the number of deaths in New York State in 2015-18
– The colored lines at the bottom are deaths from the flu in past years
– In red is the number of confirmed deaths from the pandemic
Data: JHU & CDC https://gis.cdc.gov/grasp/fluview/mortality.html…
I may be confused about your question, so my apologies if so.
In other countries both in the modern world (not covid related) and throughout the 20th Century, the government sent people door to door to round persecuted people up out of their homes, day and night, on a very large scale, never to return. Guns make that process a lot more tricky, which provides time to those being victimized. How many men do you need to send to the average home to take a known unarmed person away? How straightforward is the process compared to taking away people who are tooled up?
And what about when the government is not malicious but rather overwhelmed? Many people have seen throughout covid alone - and going back a little, in Katrina - that if the government decides/realizes it does not have the resources to protect everybody, it will not, and further, it will announce that it will not. Whether it’s from surprise foreign invaders or a criminal element.
That’s two examples - one of governmental malfeasance, and another of governmental negligence, where gun owners are much better off with their “stockpile” of guns than without.
I love Maine, have friends in Bar Harbor on Mt Desert Island. Beautiful, serene, peaceful. I could live there.
That being said, I’ve read enough of your dive bar stories about the locals that I literally laughed out loud when I read this. Being that we’re talking about a dive bar, it’s about the worst population sample you could have, so I’m not even disagreeing with your quote, just having fun applying “values and culture” to your stories of coked up slampigs.
There’s been plenty of shenanigans and even a few situations that were dangerously close to becoming tragic crime statistics, but the typical bar violence I would deal with is an entirely different sort of violence. Generally speaking, these sort of things fall WAY short of being deeply malicious acts with intent to cause great harm. I think just about any local dive bar in any working class area will have, for lack of a better word, area knuckleheads acting as such, with occasional out-of-towners stopping by to piss in the pot.
TBH bar violence is probably severely under-studied, given that so much of it goes unreported. When Johnny gets shit-faced, then starts beef with Billy and they both end up looking like assholes, kissing the pavement or what-not, chances are it won’t go down as an assault in the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.
You can send one man with a picture of the person’s kid with a gun to his head. That’s how you do tyranny.
I don’t know what I find more disheartening right now: the news that Trump is blaming the WHO for the gravity of the Covid-19 situation, or my suspicion, even confidence, that there are people who have already fallen for the rather amateurish deflection.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a gun owner. Hell, I’ve even briefly worked in a gun factory.
A gun is a useful tool for defending oneself in case of home invasion or as you’ve said from other types of criminal behavior.
What it’s emphatically not is a defense against government tyranny. What’s more, it’s a dangerous, feelgood self delusion that buying your third AR-15 with a better hand grip is somehow related to “protecting one’s freedom”. Newsflash - it’s not.
I guess it feels good to consider one’s expensive hobby morally superior.
The government - any government - doesn’t give a shit about your guns. It has a plethora of economic, social, technological and political measures to institute various kinds of tyranny and all those stockpiled guns are useless.
Actually, you’d be surprised. I don’t want to hijack the thread even more but experience from WW2 and later wars shows that it doesn’t matter.
After the occupation of France, the French started killing German officers, usually when they strayed somewhere alone. It quickly ended when the Germans started executing a hundred random civilians for each killed German. And that was despite the French having a bunch of guns in civilian possession that weren’t confiscated.
