Also our for profit, punitive, non-rehabilitative, largest population on Earth prison system doesn't help, with more than 2 million Americans behind bars, largely for being too poor to navigate our pay to play judicial system.
You know, freedom!
this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Freedom isn’t free.
You need expensive lawyers.
If you don't pay your buck 05 who will?
$15,655.05 adjusted for inflation
It's cheaper than mcdonalds!
I once read a really great comment about the difference in how Europeans and Americans view freedom as a concept and it's always stuck with me:
Europeans are mainly concerned with "freedom from". Americans are mainly concerned with "freedom to".
In other words, Europeans focus more on freedom from tyranny, oppression, injustice, etc., while Americans focus more on freedom to do things without the government telling then they can't, like own guns and so forth.
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What greater freedom is there than the ability to buy a small army's worth of guns and ammo, to use as a backdrop to explain how you need to defend your rights from a imaginary monster, while actual monsters use those guns to kill children... nearly every single day, with school shootings nearing every other week. (About 30 of them this year!
Have you considered stopping the monsters before they're monsters by fixing poverty and jingoism, instead of just deciding you're going to babble mindlessly about taking away the human right to self defense?
Like that would even be possible in a nation with more guns than people?
Technically yes, because half of all privately owned guns in the US are owned by 3% of people according to this CNN article. So while there are more guns than people in the US, legislation to regulate them would mostly affect a minority of the population.
That being said, you're right that a lot of the problem with gun violence has to do with external factors such as poverty and extreme nationalism. An overwhelming majority of mass shooters are male and less overwhelmingly white which hints at a problem more to do with the environments they are raised or live in. If the problem was stricly gun access, we should expect more mass shootings to have been committed by women. In addition, half of all mass shootings in the US have occured since 2000, a third of which since 2010.
The rise of mass shootings seem to coincide with the rise of more general nationalist violence moreso than increased gun access, however more guns are being manufactured now than ever. I think the problem that needs addressed more is the public perception and marketing around guns and gun culture, because the past couple decades have seen people own guns more for the "tough guy" fake masculinity reasons rather than actual practicality. For further evidence to back myself up, pickup truck sales have risen in a similar way. Pickup trucks are marketed in almost the same way minus the whole potentially killing people part, not that they haven't also been used in mass violence though.
A lot of gun regulation tends to target poor people too, intentionally or not. Tax stamps, fees and mandatory wait times assume someone has the money and ability to take time off to acquire a gun, and wealthy people (the ones who already own most guns) have both. Making it harder for poor people, who are disproportionately black, to arm themselves in a time where racist violence is hitting record highs and stories about police brutality hit front pages every week at least, is unfair.
I wonder what gun ownership would look like in 20 or 30 years if right now were enacted (and not thereafter repealed) a countrywide prohibition on advertising of guns & ammo, and on showing any firearms before the watershed and at any time in G- and PG-rated media.
Putting aside the reality that this could never happen because of frozen peaches and strawmen on slippery slopes, I strongly suspect it would do a lot to curb the fetishisation of firearms.
Often see that statistic about half of all guns being owned by 3% of people
It's only used to gloss over the fact that nearly half of all households in the US own a firearm
That's fuckin insane
Freedom also means that we blame poor people on being poor. And if they have cancer, that's their fault for being poor.
Thirty to fifty wild hogs are cursing your name right now.
I don't normally get too engrossed in meme culture, but hotdamn was I all in on that one.
Lol fixing those two things in the US are even harder than controlling guns
I don't tend to consider "it's hard" to be a reason to take a lesser and more dangerous path.
I can see US passing laws restrict guns before passing any kind of law to alleviate poverty though.
I literally had somebody argue that we can't have gun laws because some people have 20+ hubs cause they're "collectors" (emphasis mine of course)
I'm sure the fact that they've stockpiled ammo for all of them is completely unrelated.
Why are you concerned with what other countries should do?
Yes my country absolutely needs to overthrow its government. No, I do not want foreign powers intervening, and their governments aren't much better.
The problem about americans sayin "you could improve on humanitarism" is that they dont just say it, they are at your door step on the next day with guns and demand you to change, then they leave with your oil, leaving you in a worse humanitarian situation than before.
I agree, I think we should make both our countries worse instead
Bring guns to Britain and make Americans pay a telly tax, an idea so crazy it just might work
US also has to import transphobia and wrecking its economy for freedum
Oh honey we grow those in our back yard
Not like they do
I can say as an American that this does make it hard to criticize other countries, especially since it's true.
Only if you all a tu quoque argument to derail you. Unfortunately, most people do because they don't understand why it's a bullshit argument. It's been used in propaganda forever and famously prior to WWII.
More like
Any American: Mentions British culture
To be fair, the US always seems to be the center of attention anywhere you go. Why that is exactly, I don't know. I mean for fuck's sake, I live all the way out in bumfuck Asia and somehow news about American pop culture makes it here better than my local news does most of the time.
I'm not belittling America's problems but sometimes I feel like people can benefit from being made aware that too much exposure to anything - like criticism of other countries - is detrimental to our world view. It's literally The Cultivation Theory at work.
How many people in your rural Asian town are talking to strangers in English on the Internet about how detrimental the English-speaking Internet is?
I'm sorry, I'm not sure if it's my lack of sleep or a reading comprehension issue on my end but I don't understand your question. Though to answer it literally, English is so influential in my country that our schools tend to speak, read, and write in English more often than our native languages. If you speak English well, it's likely that you'll be regarded as a high-class individual by a good chunk of people here.
Unfortunately, that has threatened our own identity - to our people's cultural detriment and annoyance - as you'll probably see via English public discourse on American social media interwebs... which is why I'm saying, hey, why don't we stop paying attention to what the US is doing every now and then? I mean, how's Ukraine been really? What's happening with their EU membership? Maybe if the US wasn't always on the world stage they can actually participate more authentically and we can stop defaulting to making fun of kids dying in schools as a counterpoint, you know? It's messed up wherever it happens.
Why that is exactly,
Because it has the largest GDP, largest military, and largest entertainment industry, and is home to the world's largest companies. So it's kind of an important country that affects other countries directly and indirectly all the time.
Fair, I suppose because the US tends to be belittled so often online so I never made the connection to those sizable facts. It's a bit too much still though, don't you think? News about the US somehow always taking over headlines? The world always looks at the US. There's always something about Elon Musk or the American government even on Lemmy's "non-Reddit-exodus" instances. When Apple releases a new phone, people won't stop talking about it positively and negatively. Europe does a better job with most things yet it's less common to find them in the spotlight.
Europe isn't a country, it's a continent. I see individual countries in Europe discusses frequently, but none of them are even close to the US in size and influence. Even the entire3 EU combined has a lower GDP and smaller military than the US.
The US is the world superpower, annoying as that is, and until it is no longer the dominant superpower it's going to dominate the news.
Yeah we both suck Ur point lol
Well, a lot of the time the US had a strong hand in making the other country suck. The school violence is mostly self inflicted.
Yeaaah this country has done a lot of sus things and it's honestly really frustrating
Based is right
Freedom, someone else's freedom to exploit you for profit and fund the military to spread this "freedom" across the planet.
"let he who is without sin cast the first stone" and all that
Good thing we aren't stoning anyone nowadays! But if you need to be perfect to critique, there'd be none.
Yes, so critiques by Americans of non-American countries shouldn't be invalidated by faults of America itself.
Exactly