Stand Your Ground
Yeah, another political/ topical comic. Sorry. I’ll try to restrain myself in the future.
The topic of excessive force from police just seems to be everywhere these days. It’s mostly an American issue. Really, like other problems, it’s tied to gun violence and the States’ addiction to firearms. Just like one price paid for free and easy access to guns is the occasional bloody public shooting, another price is cautious police reacting quickly when confronted with potentially armed suspects. Especially when movies and television glorify cops being quick on the trigger.
But… what does this have to do with D&D and related RPGs?
Well, adventurers very much react the same way, assuming life-threatening situations from any and all encounters and reacting accordingly. Potential violence? Excessive force is required! Implied aggression? Attack first! “Heroes” very seldom get called on the validity of their reactions, and even taking prisoners is often deemed too much of a hassle. There’s no consequences for brutality or corruption, no one to hold adventurer’s accountable. Of course, this could be argued to be emulating the same itchy-trigger-finger heroes of popular media who shoot first and are never wrong about their targets.
The only thing laws do that make it illegal to own firearms do is make it harder to defend yourself. If your the kind of person who is going to shoot up a crowd your not going to not buy a gun because its not legal to do so.
This of course if proven by the fact that whenever a city has gone from practical/legal to own firearms to it being illegal it always ends up being more dangerous, not less. The reverse of course is true as well.
You might be able to change this if you really made it hard to get ahold of a firearm, but to do that you would have to have stupid high punishments for owning or selling a gun illegally, like death. and of course you would have to really secure the borders, so you could not ship them in from overseas.
And yet so many other countries in the world (i.e. the rest of the “1st World”) manages this just fine.
The US has five times as many gun deaths per capita as Canada, a nation with similar values and geography. And forty times more than the United Kingdom. 40 times! People in those countries have no problems defending themselves and you’d never hear about a British Bobby being involved in a shooting as they don’t even carry guns.
Really, situations where someone has been able to defend themselves because they had a gun are incredibly rare. Even trained shooters (aka police) often miss at close range when under fire.
More people having guns doesn’t mean more people are defended, it means more people are at risk from stray bullets.
your right other counties do manage to exist with laws that restrict guns, they also have many more unneeded deaths.
I don’t understand why you are bringing up gun deaths per capita, how does that matter? DEATHS per capita could matter, dead is dead whether it is a knifing to the heart in england or a bullet to the head in the US. and of course you would have to look at robberies, and such too.
Of course you will have more gun deaths if you have more guns, that does not mean there are more deaths, nor more of any other kind of crime.
also comparing whole countries to one another is useless, at least for the US. The laws for guns vary between states and even cities, not to mention cultural differences and such. The largest unit you could really use is the city. even then it would be hard to do at best, its the kind of thing that is easy to cook to say what you want it.
that is why the only metric that I care about, and consider valid are cities that went from it being very hard to very easy (or the other way around) to have a gun. That way you KNOW that the only thing that could have effected the number of deaths/robberies ect was the guns, not something unrelated.
The US isn’t safer than Canada or the UK though.
Homicide rates for the US are three times higher than Canada and five times higher than Great Britain. So guns do nothing to discourage death or assault and seemingly encourage it.
http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2013/mar/25/guns-protection-national-rifle-association
Even presuming your data is good that is still not useful, the US could simply be more dangerous, and while the guns make things better it is not enough to make it safer then the UK or you could be right, the data is not enough to know either way.
The US is too diverse to really compare whole hog to any other country like that, at least use a state that has constant guns laws. That MIGHT get you useful data.
How do guns encourage it? criminals can get guns just as easily either way, its only people that are law abiding that can’t get gun if they are illegal.
You said “dead is dead whether it is a knifing to the heart in england or a bullet to the head in the US”, but I’m not so sure it’s true actually…
A bullet basically anywhere on your body may prove lethal, while a knife has to hit specific points to do lasting damage or to outright kill someone, so yes, guns ARE more deadly than other weapons, and yes there ARE other ways to defend oneself, like martial arts or something like that… that way you can’t actually kill anyone unless you put excessive effort in it, and anyway, when you have a gun pointed at you, whether you have a gun or a knife or a fist won’t matter much.. but if the attacker didn’t have the gun in the first place, you’d have better odds of surviving, wouldn’t you?
sure you would have much better odds of surviving a stab shot then a gun shot, however making it illegal to carry guns will not help that.
in such cases something like 77% of the time the gun is illegal, so a law to make gun ownership illigal would do nothing to help.
It is unreasonable to require people to spend years learning marshal arts just so they can defend themselves, knowing that it will not even be enough because 6 months and a cheap pistol is better then 10 years of marshal arts training.
And of course I believe that fat people have a right to defend themselves just like everyone else does.
A large part of the the reason that guns should be legal is as a deterrent, violent crime goes down when they become legal because criminals are less willing to rob you if there is a good chance you are armed.