@WiteWulf

Logically, then, fewer people owning guns should result in fewer deaths.

Is that what you think will happen in the US under Trump? People being gunned down in the streets, people being disappeared into concentration camps—would fewer guns fix that?

@HeavenlyPossum no, not immediately, but if levels of gun ownership had not been allowed to escalate to where they are now, as a consequence of the long held second amendment, there would not be a need for armed law enforcement and mentality of enforcing right through fire power.

If guns are the way, though, why are the 30% of gun owning Americans not rising up against Trump? Why are the people against ICE not gunning them down? Are they just more libs, as you call them?

@WiteWulf @HeavenlyPossum

"if levels of gun ownership had not been allowed to escalate to where they are now, as a consequence of the long held second amendment, there would not be a need for armed law enforcement and mentality of enforcing right through fire power."

If policing were actually implemented as a result of crime, your statement might be true. Unfortunately, that is not how policing came to be in the United States. Police have always had firearms in the US and were formed to catch slaves. Slaves who didn't usually have firearms.

The law enforcement has ALWAYS been armed here, and designed to be deployed against people who aren't assumed to be armed. The whole "he had a gun so I feared for my life" rhetoric is a post hoc to deflect criticism of cops shooting black people with no consequences.

I would really appreciate it if non-americans could understand that we can't copy/paste solutions from smaller countries that don't have the racial history the United States has.

I would love to be able to just remove the history and guns from the United States, but we can't.

@CorvidCrone @HeavenlyPossum oh, thanks, that’s another really interesting and well-explained angle on the problem I wasn’t aware of. Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I’m learning a lot of the History They Don’t Teach today 😬

@WiteWulf @HeavenlyPossum

It's also important to remember that the Nazis specifically disarmed Jewish Germans when starting their pogrom. Which is uncomfortably similar to how black folks were unofficially restricted from owning firearms (or guard dogs) in southern states following Reconstruction (era immediately post civil war).

So, when we have federal agents shooting us in the streets because the state politics don't please the president, and you put blame on American gun ownership rather than a literal American version of the gestapo, it feels like you're saying that ICE is justified in shooting us.

I hope that's not what you're saying, but that's how it came off. I choose to believe that's not what you meant to convey.

@CorvidCrone @HeavenlyPossum okay, I take your point, but my argument with Possum earlier was not that gun ownership is to blame. My point was that increased gun ownership would increase the problem, not make it better.

ICE, Border Patrol, the Proud Boys, Trump and all his enablers are the problem right here, right now, today. They're what's killing and oppressing citizens.