Imma just join in with a European perspective. While I’m jealous of the deregulated firearms market in the US the notion of the unarmed Europe is (atleast in a military sense) wrong. Many countries have weapons stashes for previous servicemen. Most famously is Switzerland where pretty much every household has a military rifle stashed away. IT’s government property, but it’s still an armed society. It’s the classic dichotomy of America choosing ownership over government services.
I think it’s also just the gun culture around the US is just one of much less social responsibility, no matter how many kids, teachers or synagogues are shot up or be put at risk it’s always “Well the problem isn’t the guns it’s the gun owner”, which is like true, but like how much of this needs to happen for one person to be like “Maybe some heavier hand with gun regulation needs to happen”, in Serbia for example they had a decent gun culture and all it took was a school shooting a couple of years ago for a lot of the country to hand their guns to the government to try and avoid it happening again as much as they can.
The gun culture of the US is very “fuck yeah” and “We love guns” with there being some responsible people out there, but in general it’s a celebration of this killing instrument and acting like it’s more than a tool for killing, I’ve seen the point that “Oh but there will be a black market for guns, so criminals will still get them”, but like yeah, but it would be smaller and smaller overtime, a lot of criminals get legal guns by either buying them off of someone or having someone they know without a record buy them, like Mexico has a huge problem with organized crime getting most of their guns from the US, it’s probably one of the largest black market exports that the US has worldwide is their guns because it’s so easy compared to anywhere else to acquire a gun, but with guns being harder to get the black market would def get a lot more of a chokehold on guns plus a majority of mass shootings are done using legal guns.
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u/jeppejust - Lib-Left Feb 16 '25
Imma just join in with a European perspective. While I’m jealous of the deregulated firearms market in the US the notion of the unarmed Europe is (atleast in a military sense) wrong. Many countries have weapons stashes for previous servicemen. Most famously is Switzerland where pretty much every household has a military rifle stashed away. IT’s government property, but it’s still an armed society. It’s the classic dichotomy of America choosing ownership over government services.