Stephan: The problem with guns in America is not just the guns. In lots of other countries people can own guns. It is my view that the gun problem in America is partly saturation, but mostly culture.Here is an example of what I mean.
One of the main arguments for owning a gun is self-defense. How often do people actually do that. As this report says, "...people defended themselves with a gun in
nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011. Which is to say rarely. Guns in this culture are owned because they have a highly charged totem quality." Something else is going on.
Nations in times of stress tend to revert to their cultural meme. China has a new version of the Mandarin system, educated bureaucrats, engineers, scientists, scientists run China just as the Mandarins did for 1,300 years (605 to 1905). Russia has returned to its Tsarist roots, only this time the Tsar is surrounded by an aristocracy of wealth not one of blood and breeding. And the United States has reverted to its Frontier mythos. Then as now it is White Supremacist, violent, fearful, and hypocritically religious.
It is the task, or ought to be, of every American to grow out of this, personally. If that happens society changes. Everything else is just argument.
The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
It’s a common refrain touted by gun rights advocates, who argue that using guns in self-defense can help save lives. But what is the actual number of defensive gun uses?
According to the Pew Research Center, 48 percent of gun owners say they own a gun mainly for protection. But for years, experts have been divided over how often people actually use guns in self-defense. The numbers range from the millions to hundreds of thousands, depending on whom you ask.
The latest data show that people use guns for self-defense only rarely. According to a Harvard University analysis of figures from the National Crime Victimization Survey, people defended themselves with a gun in nearly 0.9 percent of crimes from 2007 to 2011.
David Hemenway, who led the Harvard research, argues that the risks of owning […]
