Stance on gun control

[MT2008]

Originally Posted by Nyles

But mostly I don't like the loud and aggressive gun culture that's becoming more and more prominent here and from what I can see in the States. Guns are my hobby, you might even say my passion, but they're not my identity. I don't like that more and more being a gun owner seems to come packaged with a whole set of unrelated conservative social and political viewpoints. I think the loud "no compromise", "from my cold dead hands" rhetoric is completely unproductive and mostly just scares people who might not care about gun control into thinking we're all a bunch of irrational aggressive rednecks who probably shouldn't have guns.

Understand your sentiments here, and as I've said previously, I've always found my own politics to be a less-than-perfect fit for the broader 2A community here in the States. Specifically: Since 2016, I hate the fact that being a gun owner seems to be synonymous with supporting Donald Trump, a man who I have always regarded as temperamentally unsuited to be President. I hate the fact that so many in the 2A community accuse the gun controllers of being liars who only appeal to emotion, yet they partake in their own forms of magical thinking and downright deception (e.g., claiming that magazine capacity has no relevance to firearm lethality, pretending that illegal guns never have legal origins, etc.)

The problem I have, though, is that the opposite also often appears true: Being a gun control supporter nowadays often seems to come pre-packaged with a set of unrelated ultra-liberal social and political views that scare me just as much as the beliefs of some pro-2A folks. I find it very scary that many young leftists in Generation Z regard freedom of speech as a bad thing, and believe that censoring views which offend them is appropriate and justified (and if you don't believe me, look at some of the polls that have been taken on this topic). Many regard anything and everything about America's history as evil, corrupt, and racist, and think that we need a Maoist-style Cultural Revolution to wipe out everything and start again. Since 2020, the left has also promoted tribalism and anti-white racism, as we've seen most recently in the Gaza War. The leftists who support gun control act as if they're objectively weighing the costs and benefits of gun ownership to society, but they never seem to apply that same mindset to their own causes. It's hard for me not to be skeptical of those sorts of people, especially given that they reflexively seem to despise anyone who meets my profile (white and male).

Originally Posted by commando552

Is there any room for common sense though? You can make the argument that machine guns cost a lot of money so legal ones are not used for crimes, but this is only because they are in very limited supply due to the NFA. With a universal lack of any gun control, there would be companies making POS machine pistols for $300 which would definitely do more harm than good.

Yeah, there's room for common sense, but this is not a good example. Especially now that (in 2023), the latest criminal gun trend is "Glock switches" that convert common handguns into machine pistols.

Originally Posted by commando552

You cant make the argument though that if one sub-set of the population can be trusted with a type of weapon then it should be available to everybody else. If you make the argument that only those people than the Government deems can be trusted with a weapon can have it, then surely this would go strongly against the universal right to keep and bear arms would it not?

Nobody's arguing that the right to bear arms has limits, just like any other right in our Constitution. But I don't buy your logic, which is the other extreme: You're saying that if a small subset of the population can't be trusted with firearms, that means that the entire population can't be. Again, those sentiments are contrary to how we operate in a liberal democracy like the United States.

Originally Posted by commando552

Maybe it is just my rather dim view on humanity, but I will freely admit that I don't trust most people. I also do not think that gun control will necessarily prevent people from intending to commit crime, but if it is possible to limit the scope or severity of a crime then I think it is something that is worth looking at.

Another big difference in our opinions is that I think it is totally reasonable that police and military forces are allowed to use weapons that civilians do not have access to. I am a British firearms officer, and in order for me to carry and use the weapons that I do I was vetted, trained, tested, and am held constantly accountable for my actions. This is not the case with the man on the street. From a more selfish point of view, I do a job that on occasion puts me in harms way, and am happier in the knowledge that 99.99% of the time I am better armed and equipped than the other guy.

To be clear: I don't trust most people, either. But again, your sentiments are contrary to the spirit of liberal democracy. If you want to live in that type of society, you have to accept that people have freedoms that some can (and will) abuse. You have to accept that protecting the interests of the individual, and the balancing of divergent groups of people, are the primary interests of society, not "public safety," or achieving a certain outcome. You have to accept that holding society together is inherently far more difficult at all levels, including enforcing law and order. And you have to accept that what holds the society together is a strong civic society and shared values, not centralized government which takes over responsibility for every aspect of people's well-being.

I suspect that one difference in our opinions is that you're a British firearms officer, and for the most part, the U.K. trusts its police forces with firearms only a little more than it trusts civilians with them (except in places like Northern Ireland which have had problems with sectarian and paramilitary violence). As you know well, only specialized units like MO19/SCO19/SO19/CO19 are issued any type of firearms for their normal job duties, and training standards are extremely rigorous for those officers who do carry. Whereas in the U.S., every police officer gets at least a Glock or Smith & Wesson M&P on their hip, and many have access to shotguns and AR-15s through their departments. Unfortunately, as Excalibur noted, there is also a much greater problem in the United States with police officers demonstrating negligence and/or incompetence in the use of firearms, because qualification standards are pretty low (there are many officers who never fire their weapons except during annual qualification). In a country like the U.S. where a third of the population is armed, it's not uncommon to find civilians who shoot more and are far better equipped to defend themselves than any police officer. Maybe that says a lot about how we need to hold our LEOs to higher standards; certainly, as much as I don't disagree with the "Defund the Police" movement that emerged in the early-2020s, I think they're at least right that LEOs have brought in far too many officers who are under-qualified and not held accountable enough in the use of their duty weapons. But as you can imagine, many gun owners are going to find it easier to trust themselves than police. For my part: I'm not a particularly great shot, but after 25+ years of experience with firearms, I know my strengths (speed) and limitations (mostly: my awful eye sight), which guns I can handle well, and (more importantly) how quickly I can make them ready for defending myself and my family. Whereas I have dealt with plenty of local cops who didn't strike me as particularly competent at anything, including shooting.

Unlike some here, I will say that it is indeed reasonable to expect that security forces have access to weapons that civilians don't. But drawing that line at almost any type of small arms doesn't make much sense to me, as opposed to drawing the line at weapons that require military units and significant infrastructure in order to be effectively used, and which require heightened levels of security to guarantee that they don't fall into the hands of nefarious actors (e.g., nuclear weapons). I accept that a monopoly on force is one of the defining characteristics of a governing entity in any sovereign state, but it's also true that in a free society, the state delegates at least some of its security to individuals. A state that can prevent any acts of violence from being inflicted upon every individual in its population is also just as capable of taking away any of their freedoms, after all.

[MT2008]

One thing that I will say in closing: I struggle at times with the thought that not all societies or all peoples deserve the right to bear arms, or indeed, to live in a free society. To cite the obvious example that Nyles mentioned earlier: Afghanistan is a very good example of a country that, frankly, is incapable of achieving a cohesive nation-state, let alone a free society (and I do not regard a failed state as synonymous with a "free" society). Individual Afghans might be worthy of such freedoms, but collectively, Afghans have demonstrated that they are not committed to the principles that are required to live in a free and open society - they value tribalism and theocracy over individual liberty and human rights. A society like that doesn't benefit from having an armed population - on the contrary, firearms only become a tool to enforce tyranny at the individual and societal level. So, I don't agree with the mentality in America's 2A community that an "armed society is a polite society" - or even a free one as we conceptualize it. In order for the right to bear arms to serve as a means to preserve a free society, a population must have a shared commitment to the values of a liberal democratic republic - without that, there's no free society to defend. Even then, the right to bear arms must be seen as a means of last resort to preserve that society.

What keeps me up at night is that I'm no longer so sure that a sizeable plurality of Americans on either the left or right are committed to the values on which this country was founded, and I think that an argument could be made that if we slide too far into radicalism, we are no longer deserving of a right to bear arms because we're no longer committed to the general concept of a free society. Sadly, I think that our federal government now feels the same way, which is why it sees its role as protecting Americans from themselves and is thus more willing to infringe on the 2nd Amendment. I don't exactly support this (quite the contrary), but I have some empathy for the notion that in a democracy, we get the government we deserve.