It's really disturbing how everyone sees this practice through the lens of trust. Can you really think of no other reasons? Absurd.

Don't forget public meetings, as grown-ass adults.

Not really a meaningful distinction. And if it were, I think it's entirely rational, as emotions go.

Tongue in cheek of course but it still makes a point. The facts-over-feelings crowd has to show that the benefit of firearms outweigh the very observable negative consequences, and they cannot. So they are arguing feelings, not facts.

To compare dead children to the cost of failing to check government power, we can reduce both to life-years lost:

🔫 Current Cost: Child Firearm Deaths in the U.S.

• ~2,000 preventable child gun deaths/year
• ~60 life-years lost per death
• 120,000 life-years lost annually
• Over 30 years: ~3.6 million life-years lost

🏛️ Hypothetical Benefit: Preventing Tyranny

Assume a worst-case scenario:

• Authoritarian collapse kills 10 million (based on 20th-century examples)
• Avg. age at death: ~40 → ~35 life-years lost
• 10M deaths × 35 = 350 million life-years lost

Estimate risk:

• Without civilian arms: 0.5% chance over 30 years
• With civilian arms: 0.4% chance
• These figures are speculative; there’s no empirical support that civilian gun ownership reduces the risk of tyranny—many stable democracies have strict gun control.

In fact, high civilian armament may reduce stability:

• Greater availability of weapons increases the lethality of civil unrest, crime, and domestic terrorism.
• Armed polarization can accelerate breakdown during political crises, as seen in failed or fragile states.
• States may respond with harsher repression, escalating rather than deterring authoritarian outcomes.

📊 Expected Value Calculation

• Without arms: 0.005 × 350M = 1.75 million life-years at risk
• With arms: 0.004 × 350M = 1.2 million life-years at risk
• Net benefit of arms: ~550,000 life-years saved (generous estimate)

📉 Conclusion

Even with favorable assumptions:

• Civilian firearms cost ~3.6M life-years (due to preventable child deaths)
• And prevent only ~550K life-years (via marginally lower tyranny risk)

Bottom line: The ongoing cost vastly outweighs the hypothetical benefit, and high armament may worsen long-term stability rather than protect it.

Okay? So how many years does that push the "break even point"? Do you see how this doesn't engage with my point in the slightest?

While income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient) is positively correlated with violent crime, firearm availability has been shown to independently influence both the rate and lethality of violence.

According to Fajnzylber, Lederman, and Loayza (2002, The Journal of Law and Economics), there is a significant cross-national association between income inequality and homicide rates. However, firearm access is not merely a determinant of the method used in violent crime—it also affects the frequency and outcome of such incidents.

Data from the Small Arms Survey and the Global Burden of Disease project indicate that countries with high rates of civilian firearm ownership (e.g., the United States) experience substantially higher rates of firearm homicide, suicide, and accidental gun death than peer nations with stricter gun regulations (e.g., the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia), despite similar or lower Gini coefficients.

For example, the U.S. firearm homicide rate was 6.1 per 100,000 in 2021 (CDC WONDER), compared to 0.5 per 100,000 in Canada and less than 0.1 in countries like Japan and the U.K. This disparity persists even when controlling for overall violent crime or economic inequality.

Moreover, studies published in The New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet have found that the presence of firearms in a home significantly increases the risk of homicide and suicide, particularly among women and children (see Kellermann et al., 1993; Anglemyer et al., 2014).

Therefore, while inequality is an important factor, firearm regulation has a demonstrable and independent effect on both the incidence and deadliness of violent crime. The distinction between type and frequency does not eliminate the public health implications of firearm prevalence.

You present yourself as rational while dismissing emotion as weakness. But emotions like shame, fear, and the impulse to protect others are not failures of reason. They are essential to moral awareness.

The need to maintain rigid rational detachment is itself emotionally driven. It often reflects a desire to avoid guilt or to preserve control. That isn’t objectivity, it’s fragility disguised as discipline.

Don't spend one more dollar on educational material. If a person had to pay for every textbook and online subscription, education would be impractical.

Kindness and empathy are very different things. It is easy to have either and not the other. Empathy is insight. Kindness is behavior and disposition. I have met many people who prioritize kindness but do not have the insight to do perform it in a meaningful way. I have known people who are emotionally insightful and even experience the feelings of others, but for whom kindness is not a priority.

There is a definite bias. Especially, ESPECIALLY when it comes to partner violence. And EVEN MORE ESPECIALLY when it comes to gun violence.

It's very amusing to read such things from outside the American hellscape. Well, "amusing."

Let's say eventually there comes a government overreach that a popular armed uprising puts down. Every day until that day, children die. Accidental death from firearms is one of the leading causes of death of children in your country. (Do you feel that pricking sensation in your neck and face or are you immune to shame?) If the rebellion doesn't come soon enough (or at all) then you are underwater in terms of dead children. So, how long is that runway? How long do you get to keep killing children until you have to admit, fuck, this is costing us more than it's worth?

HAVE YOU EVEN DONE THE MATH, or are you just working from feelings?