LogFAQs > #967591207

BUMPED2002 posted...

It's the one thing that keeps America from becoming a total totalitarian state because most of the citizenry is armed to the teeth.

This is incredibly untrue, considering the trend for decades now has been fewer and fewer gun owners, but gun owners themselves owning more and more guns.

So the number of guns in the country isn't actually proportional to the number of people who actually have guns. Most of its citizenry isn't armed at all.

And most people are dumb and don't understand how statistics work.



ReturnOfFa posted...

The existence of other countries is the counter-argument to this.

To be fair, the existence of other countries isn't necessarily a counter-argument to anything, because millions of different variables exist across a wide span of categories, so direct comparison between nations can be incredibly misleading.

For instance, gun control works better in the UK because the borders of an island (or more accurately, a handful of islands) are easier to patrol and control than the massive borders of a continent-spanning nation. Social net policies and massive income taxes work better in a homogeneous nation like Sweden than they potentially would in one of the most heterogeneous nations on Earth. It's easier to push mass transit solutions over individual car ownership in smaller European nations than it is in a nation with massive sprawling landscapes and spread out populations. And so on.

There are always "The US should do X because Nation Y does it and it works", but most of those arguments are simplistic as fuck and fatally flawed to anyone who is actually paying attention.