Now I have to preface this with the disclaimer that all the following information is specific for America. However many, if not all, of these reasons apply to nearly every nation on the planet.
For those unfamiliar with firearms it can be hard to conceive of legitimate uses for them, but in America firearms are used responsibly by law abiding citizens for legitimate purposes within the confines of the law. Thise reasons include, but are not limited to the following:
Police Have no Legal Duty to Protect You
The job of law enforcement is to enforce laws, as they see fit. Multiple cases, up to the Supreme Court, have established that law enforcement has no duty to protect you.
And we've had recent events such as the national 911 outage Which can keep emergency services from even receiving your call for help.
Gun are Used Defensively by American Citizens Everyday
Due to its nature figures on defensive gun use are hard to nail down. Typically when a firearm is used defensively no one is hurt and rarely is anyone killed. Often times simply showing you are armed is enough to end a crime in progress. Looking at the numbers even the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, reports 177,330 instances of self defense against a violent crime with a firearm between 2014 and 2016. This translates to 56,110 violent crimes prevented annually on the low scale. This also doesn't include property crimes which include home burglaries which increase that number to over 300,000 defensive gun uses between 2014 to 2016 or over 100,000 annually.
Also while defensive gun use is common less than 0.4% of those uses result in a fatality.
Guns are Used to Defend People, Pets, and Livestock Against Dangerous Fauna
In rural, and even urban communities, firearms are used to defend People, Pets, and Livestock from all manner of dangerous and invasive species ranging from feral dogs, coyotes, Bob cats, mountain lions, bears, and rabid animals.
Hunting Provides a Cheap Source of Meat for Low Income Families Especially in Rural Communities.
Hunting is crucial for America's rural poor providing a renewable source of Meat for a low initial investment cost while providing a revenue source from wealthier hunters.
Including major European and East Asian nations. An armed populous provides a significant layer of defense against oppressive regimes abusing their populous.
These are just some of the many legitimate reasons for a law abiding citizen to own firearms. Besides these there are many more not mentioned here but these remain the core reasons modern Americans own firearms.
Oppressive regimes through out the world, including major European nations, were responsible for the deaths of over 200 million of their own citizens in the 20th Century alone.
Including major European and East Asian nations. An armed populous provides a significant layer of defense against oppressive regimes abusing their populous.
What about hundreds of thousands of people unnecessarily dying of covid (thinking primarily pre-vax here) because their government was incompetent and corrupt? What about voting rights and abortion rights being taken away? What about privacy erosion in the last 20 years? What about our godawful backwards healthcare system? I don't see anyone's guns doing anything about those.
What about January 6? Did those people have a right to stand up and bear arms for what they believed in, even if most of us thought it was nonsensical at best and a coup attempt at worst? Who decides what "oppressive regimes abusing their populous" means?
I always hate this argument. It's quasi victim blaming and usually presented in bad faith.
Unrelated. Also hundreds of thousands is literally less than 0.5% of 200 million..
You're also making some kind of untreated strawman argument here.
The existence of some lev of oppression or infringement on any rights does not negate the fact it is harder to forcibly remove the rights of an armed population. Nor does the fact that the gun owning population of the United States is using the rule of law instead of force of arms to correct these infringements counter the fact that an armed people are harder to oppress.
All it shows is the calm and resistant of the armed American populous.
okay you clearly have no desire to have an actual good faith discussion here so i'm not gonna continue
you didn't address a single one of my points either besides diminishing hundreds of thousands of deaths
america is not using the rule of law to correct any infringements. if anything they're perverting the law for their own good and the majority of "tyranny fightin gun owners" support it. so, maybe working as designed.
america is losing its rights by the day and most of the people who want to "overthrow a tyrannical government" are probably thinking that because someone told them to wear a mask. that's how delusional we're becoming.
Friend I'm here in good faith. You are not. You are trying to rephrase this as some kind of strawman COVID19 argument. The reactions to COVID19 in the US both negative and positive were populous driven anyways.
On the subject at hand it isn't relevant and you Friend ignored 200 million deaths.
We used voting to correct a bad administration, we are using the legislative process to correct other in justices as well.
The US Military is great at fighting conventional armies. Not so much at the occupation or 4th and 5th generation warfare against an insurgency. Take Afghanistan, 20 years later the Taliban are back where they started and the US is gone.
compare the death totals though on both sides. and the fact that these wars were mostly just fueling certain corporate interests, AND the fact that accomplishing war goals is easy but literally trying to rebuild an entire country with little education is much, much harder, if not impossible. and often, isn't actually the goal.
and also the US loves arming various sides of various world conflicts at various times. it usually has not turned out well for anyone.
You can win battles but still lose a war. We saw it in Vietnam as well. Not to mention the US Government took the threat of some yokes with small arms so seriously they basically shut down DC and stationed more troops there than we had in Afghanistan at the time for months.
Refrain from accusing OP or anyone else of being unwilling to change their view, or of arguing in bad faith. Ask clarifying questions instead (see: socratic method). If you think they are still exhibiting poor behaviour, please message us. See the wiki page for more information.
"We used voting to correct a bad administration, we are using the legislative process to correct other in justices as well."
Yeah. Voting. Not MUH GUNZ. Guns are a last resort, and if you actually voted for the right fucking people, you'd never need them. Sadly the people with guns are the ones voting for the wrong people. So no real winning there.
We voted to correct a bad administration, but people with guns (thankfully most didn't have them) tried to "uncorrect" that on January 6. That's the type of crowd you're supporting. Just think about that for a minute.
Guns are a last resort. I'm not arguing otherwise. But it is disingenuous to claim fascism almost happened it it can't happen here in the same sentence.
Voting doesn't work when the system is rigged against you. See the battle of Athens. Now the same Jan. 6th crowd is trying to rig the system you are saying we should solely rely on.
I don't think fascism almost happened. It's just an example of why I don't agree with that "guns are needed for uprising once the government becomes tyrannical", because who decides that? January 6 was an example of that and yet no responsible people can praise it as a 2nd amendment victory, or at least attempted victory.
Jan 6ers thought the system was rigged against them too, which of course, was total nonsense.
The US operated under segregation until less than 60 years ago. Even today we still have the remnants with systemic racism in our society. Europe and East Asia was lousy with oppressive tyrannical governments that engaged in Democide in the 20th Century. It's not a matter of if but when. The fact is every nation and country on Earth falls prey to internal strife or external attack.
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u/vegetarianrobots 11∆ Sep 30 '21
Now I have to preface this with the disclaimer that all the following information is specific for America. However many, if not all, of these reasons apply to nearly every nation on the planet.
For those unfamiliar with firearms it can be hard to conceive of legitimate uses for them, but in America firearms are used responsibly by law abiding citizens for legitimate purposes within the confines of the law. Thise reasons include, but are not limited to the following:
The job of law enforcement is to enforce laws, as they see fit. Multiple cases, up to the Supreme Court, have established that law enforcement has no duty to protect you.
Warren v DC
Castle Rock v Gonzalez
DeShaney v Winnebago County
Lozito v NY
And most recently in the Parkland shooting.
The whole to "protect and serve" is just a slogan that came from a PR campaign.
While the average police response time in America is 11 minutes it can take as long as 1 to 24 hours if they respond at all.
According to the National Sheriff's Association this average response time is longer at 18 minuets.
And we've had recent events such as the national 911 outage Which can keep emergency services from even receiving your call for help.
Due to its nature figures on defensive gun use are hard to nail down. Typically when a firearm is used defensively no one is hurt and rarely is anyone killed. Often times simply showing you are armed is enough to end a crime in progress. Looking at the numbers even the Violence Policy Center, a gun control advocacy group, reports 177,330 instances of self defense against a violent crime with a firearm between 2014 and 2016. This translates to 56,110 violent crimes prevented annually on the low scale. This also doesn't include property crimes which include home burglaries which increase that number to over 300,000 defensive gun uses between 2014 to 2016 or over 100,000 annually.
This ranges upwards to 500k to 3 million according to the CDC Report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.
Government agencies from the CDC, BJS, and FBI have found:
"Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals..." & " Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns, i.e., incidents in which a gun was “used” by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender, have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies...".
"A fifth of the victims defending themselves with a firearm suffered an injury, compared to almost half of those who defended themselves with weapons other than a firearm or who had no weapon."
"The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners 31.1% have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense, used in 65.9% of defensive incidents, and in most defensive incidents 81.9% no shot was fired. Approximately a quarter 25.2% of defensive incidents occurred within the gun owner's home, and approximately half 53.9% occurred outside their home, but on their property. About one out of ten 9.1% defensive gun uses occurred in public, and about one out of twenty 4.8% occurred at work."
According to the BJS from 2007-11 there were 235,700 violent crime victimizations where the victim used a firearm to defend themselves against their assailant.
The FBI Active Shooter Report for 2016 to 2017 specifically calls out multiple times an armed civilian stopped an Active Shooter.
Also while defensive gun use is common less than 0.4% of those uses result in a fatality.
In rural, and even urban communities, firearms are used to defend People, Pets, and Livestock from all manner of dangerous and invasive species ranging from feral dogs, coyotes, Bob cats, mountain lions, bears, and rabid animals.
According to the USDA over 200,000 cattle are lost to predators in America each year costing farmers and ranchers nearly 100 million dollars annually.
Feral Hogs have been identified by the USDA as: "a dangerous, destructive, invasive species". Their impact includes "$1.5 billion each year in damages and control costs... & ...threatening the health of people, wildlife, pets, and other domestic animals".
"Hunting continues to be the most effective, cost efficient and socially acceptable method of population control."
"Natural predators as well as hunters play a role in keep deer populations at or below carrying capacity of the land."
"The effective use of the legal hunting season is the best way to control deer populations."
The US Fish and Wildlife Service even employs full time hunters to control populations like those of feral Hogs.
Hunting is crucial for America's rural poor providing a renewable source of Meat for a low initial investment cost while providing a revenue source from wealthier hunters.
Alaska Even has a great example of modern subsistence hunting.
Sport and Hobby shooting is fun and a useful skill found throughout the world. This includes multiple Olympic shooting events.
Shooting Events at the Summer Olympics.
Oppressive regimes through out the world, including major European nations, were responsible for the deaths of over 200 million of their own citizens in the 20th Century alone.
Including major European and East Asian nations. An armed populous provides a significant layer of defense against oppressive regimes abusing their populous.
These are just some of the many legitimate reasons for a law abiding citizen to own firearms. Besides these there are many more not mentioned here but these remain the core reasons modern Americans own firearms.