@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?

@dragonfrog

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.

@dragonfrog

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

@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
...

@dragonfrog @johnbrowntypeface

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 @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