Mastodawn

@johnbrowntypeface You really don't understand the issue folks have?

If firearms were only usable for suicide and didn't work to kill or maim anyone but the owner, then yeah totally "it should be the choice of the individual" would be sound. But the reason people buy guns is almost always to kill someone else (usually someone else TBD, but occasionally an already determined someone else).

You can't see why people other than the one buying the guns have concerns?

i never said i don't see why anyone would have issues with firearms in general. what i'm talking about is folks telling other people what to do and think according to their own biases, beliefs, & experiences

sure, guns are used to injure and kill. which includes State/fascist violence, revolution, hunting, and community defense.

my concerns are not a reason to make other people's decisions for them. do we think that they've never considered that guns are dangerous?

@johnbrowntypeface I mean, we live in a society and that means we (collectively) do sometimes make people's decisions for them.

I can't actually keep enough explosives in my apartment to level the building. "Do you think I've never considered that ammonium nitrate is dangerous?" doesn't cut it as a counter-argument.

And while we've societally decided vehicles with bad sightlines are road-legal, we've decided other vehicles aren't, making some of people's car-buying decisions for them.

@johnbrowntypeface In that framework, if a thing is straight illegal - that's "making people's decisions for them" IMO.

If a thing is legal, arguing that someone should do one legal thing and not another legal thing, is not "making their decisions for them", it's just advocacy. We do that all the time.

Yeah, I'll encourage people to buy vehicles with good sightlines, because it makes us all safer, even if it's legal for them to buy the more dangerous vehicle.

yes, prohibition is making people's decisions for them. it's not a common leftist position and especially not an anti-authoritarian one

advocacy can happen simply through discourse. but advocating for what you want versus against what someone else should be able to do is more constructive and respectful to others' agency

dragonfrog

@johnbrowntypeface So where does what I do land for you?

If I decide to wade in with someone I think might listen to me, who is proposing to get a gun for self defence, I'll point to the stats on gun deaths in the US:
58% suicide
38% murder (which doesn't include murder by cops)
4% "other"
where "other" includes all of
- murder by cops
- negligent and accidental discharge
- self defence by cops and non-cops
...

@johnbrowntypeface
... and I'll argue that no matter how different they think they are from the American average, those are some hard odds to beat, and that the suicide risks go up not just for the owner but everyone in a household with even one gun.

So, is that, for you, disprespectful advocacy against what someone else should be able to do? Or is it respectfully pointing out information that the person may not be very aware of given US culture and media landscape?

@johnbrowntypeface And, for that matter, same with arguing that someone shouldn't buy an F-150 or such with unsafe sight lines - which you may think they should be able to do - because, selfishly, I don't want them to avoidably kill my child, and altruistically I don't want them avoidably killing some other child either.

Am I violating anarchist principles there? (if I am, I guess I'm fine with that because I don't think of myself as an anarchist, despite agreeing with some anarchist theory)

i don't think this tangent about vehicle sight lines has much relevance to this discussion

it involves a personal consumption choice that relates to collective safety. it does not involve anything directly relating to a tactic used by liberatory movements.

i'm not so sure the argument will be useful. i'm talking about a general idea of allowing people autonomy, especially with tactics for organizing/activism

i don't believe that arguing is particularly fruitful in general

personally i think using statistics to convince people of how they should act is the legacy of liberalism. i don't think stats have no place at all but reliance on them as determinative for individuals denies their autonomy and agency

i also don't think people tend to change their opinions by hearing statistics

we are not all the same

i don't really argue with people about the specific personal choices they should make tactically. whether that's guns or anything else

my take is it makes more sense to advocate for what you support instead. discourse will never stop gun violence or the use of guns. it also won't remove them from the history of liberatory movements

we have structural problems to deal with that require a diversity of tactics.

@dragonfrog @johnbrowntypeface

Daniel Lakeland Feb 20

Also useful in the question of whether you should be a gun owner is the stats on gun ownership, it's hard to get precise numbers, but they're around the region of:

99.98% not involved in sucide/homicide in any given year
0.02% involved in some suicide or crime or other related incident.

(estimated 150-200M gun owners in US, estimated ~30,000 suicide+homicides typically in a given year)

@dlakelan @dragonfrog
yeah, that's getting at what i mean about stats not determining individual behavior

guns are not sentient and humans are not identical. there are particularities that lead to gun violence that have nothing to do with the tool itself

@johnbrowntypeface @dlakelan @dragonfrog

John Feb 20

Capitalism, for example, is simply a tool for distributing resources.

I don't necessarily disagree with you, but eliding the moral and social outcomes of "tools", or the material conditions of the society in which those tools are made available, strips consideration of that tool of context.

By that logic, the negative externalities of "AI" - the destruction of civilization, certainly - are not relevant to the discussion of making it available.

@johnbrowntypeface @dragonfrog

Daniel Lakeland Feb 20

@johnzajac
context is important for sure.

for example, independent of guns per capita, across all countries, homicide goes like H_0*exp(k*income_gini)

so, when discussing violence in society we should always be discussing the income inequality context because its the largest factor available in predicting violence

@dlakelan @johnbrowntypeface
Sure, your "self defence" gun is overwhelmingly likely to not be used in any way your whole life and the only effect is you're out $300.

But if it does ever end up being used, there's maybe a 3% chance it's for the self defence you intended when you bought it, vs a 97% chance it will be a suicide, murder, or unintentional killing, probably of someone in your own household.

@dragonfrog @dlakelan

a lot of your argument against gun ownership seems to be against self-defense. whether someone decides to defend themselves with a firearm isn't down to stats, but to the specifics of their life

i focus on gun ownership re: community defense. it relates to self defense but is a political tactic vs simply a potentiality

for the real people who engaged in liberatory community defense (whether or not they fired guns) any citing of statistics is going to be null and void

Daniel Lakeland Feb 20

@johnbrowntypeface
agree. the impression is often that a gun hasn't been used because it wasnt involved in a killing. thats a complete and utter misreading of the purpose of guns. one big purpose is to increase the cost of oppression (both at a personal scale and at a societal scale). a gun that always remains in a safe but some other people have to consider might be used against them, has been used every day it was owned.
@dragonfrog

@dlakelan @dragonfrog
yeah, and with community defense the firearms aren't carried under a pretense that they will be used with certainty, only that those who carry would be capable and willing to do so if needed

if we look at historical examples, be that the Black Panther Party, Brown Berets, Robert F. Williams, Redneck Revolt, etc. there are not many cases of guns being fired. And where they were fired there weren't necessarily injuries or deaths.

@johnbrowntypeface @dlakelan
Yeah I had not caught that context.

Personally I would not find it liberating to have some guy who never asked my opinion wandering around my community packing heat, just because he says "don't worry, I'm armed to liberate you and our whole community". I would feel imprisoned in my own home by the armed lunatic outside.

So I'd argue liberatory community defence has some heavy duties to consult with the community first, being ready to hear "no thank you".