Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

With or without the gun culture of the US?

Looking at still ongoing insurgencies where both sides are heavily armed you'd be hard pressed to find one where the dictator gave up even when the insurgents were backed by strong armies like the US.

So yeah, the assumption is great but too simplistic. It's the same when people say "if we have guns we can stop mass shooters". Very few (if any) shootings were ever really prevented by a citizen and their gun even when the shootings happened (repeatedly) inside military bases where the shooter was literally surrounded by trained and armed military personnel.

Typically military people at a US base are not armed. MP's are but not regular military.

The point I was making is that we aren't just talking about people with guns (the ones who had them) but people with guns and training.

But judging from the downvotes most people assume the only thing they need to effectively stop a mass shooter or fight a war is a gun.

No, the problem with your comment was that it is based upon a faulty assumption regarding the presence of armed and trained personnel being abundant on a military base. The comment in response to your point was correcting you on that incorrect assumption: an overwhelming majority of base personnel were not armed, because they weren't MPs.

You chose to ignore both the fact that the rest of the arguments are perfectly valid and that the clarification I made right below still stands. The aggressive tone you chose to use is both unnecessary and unwelcome.

>you'd be hard pressed to find one where the dictator gave up even when the insurgents were backed by strong armies like the US.

Here's a list of coups. Many were successful. I'm not sure why you are trying to argue that coups don't work. The Arab Spring is a recent example of this very thing, isn't it?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coups_d%27état_and_cou...

>Very few (if any) shootings were ever really prevented by a citizen and their gun even when the shootings happened (repeatedly) inside military bases where the shooter was literally surrounded by trained and armed military personnel.

The first part of your second assertion that "very few shootings were ever prevented by a citizen," is also easily invalidated by a google search.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/08/in-missouri-a-good-gu...

https://www.conservapedia.com/Mass_shootings_prevented_by_ar...

Where did you get that information from?

I hope you don't mind if I respond to your conservapedia link with a wikipedia link. This is the list of mass shootings in the US in 2019 (9 months):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

According to it 385 people were killed and 1338 injured so far. 8 of the mass shootings were in schools. Now you're saying that if faced with the choice of having fewer or no mass shootings, and being able to stop a small fraction of them (or worse, stop a large fraction but even the small one still causes thousands of victims) while the rest cause hundreds of deaths and thousands injured you'd pick the second?

As for the coups, I never said they don't work so please don't move the goalposts. I said that the dictator rarely gave up just because his opponents had guns or even the backing of the US military. When I replied to OP's comment it said dictators would back off if faced with armed population.

But if the point you're (contrivedly) trying to make is that guns are not the problem I can only strongly agree. Guns, games, etc. seem to not be a problem in the rest of the western world. So the problem must be something or somewhere else.

>The first part of your second assertion that "very few shootings were ever prevented by a citizen," is also easily invalidated by a google search.

Another contributing factor is that mass shootings themselves are rare, and the rate of citizens carrying is low compared to the firearm ownership rate.

>Now you're saying that if faced with the choice of having fewer or no mass shootings, and being able to stop a small fraction of them (or worse, stop a large fraction but even the small one still causes thousands of victims) while the rest cause hundreds of deaths and thousands injured you'd pick the second?

First, I don't believe banning guns will stop mass shootings any more than banning drugs stopped mass drug use. There are millions out there and a well kept gun can last a couple hundred of years (and still work).

Second, how will you accomplish the confiscation? You know there are people who will resist. How many police (and bystanders for that matter) will die trying to follow that order? I have no idea, but probably a lot more than zero.

Third, based on how our federal, state and local governments are treating our population, or world for that matter, I don't think removing that sort of deterrent would be advantageous to stopping it. Broken justice system, militarized police, surveillance state, corrupt politicians selling out our livelihoods. Those things aren't naturally going to get better and we can't seem to vote it away very effectively. I don't know what our options are anymore, but these things are likely going to get a lot worse for us.

Fourth, we are living in a surprisingly, unnatural time of peace and prosperity. WWI went from the assassination to full mobilization in a month, followed by depression in Germany, followed by a world depression, resulting in the Nazi's coming to power, resulting in the holocaust and 80+ million dead; all within 30 years. That's peace to holocaust to Cold War between 1989 and now. Drastic change happens fast, and the world is due. Just because a gun ban formula looks attractive now, it very well may not in the near future.

For a starting solution, I think rebuilding our mental health infrastructure would help, but I don't see our generation's politicians doing that. It was before my time, but apparently we had a much better one in the 70s. I can tell you we certainly have a under treated mental health problem today. Do you think Sandy Hook would have happened if Adam Lanza had a facility to live in and be taken care of? There is no way to know, but I think it's unlikely.

https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/trauma-and-violence/guns-vi...