The cultures of the USA and Europe have moved apart over the last 2 or 3 decades. Europe is more or less dominated by far-left political views, almost communist, if you listen to many Americans.
While in Europe, most people find the American belief in the unalienable right of its citizens to bear guns increasingly difficult to understand, given the public massacres that have occurred there in recent years. (Not that Europe is immune from massacres, even though it has more restrictive gun laws)
The Economist has an interesting short article on the origins of “rights” and on the US attitude to gun laws:
PEOPLE’S ideas often don’t make any sense when you try to hold them together in your head simultaneously, as Richard Rorty, Daniel Kahneman or Desiderius Erasmus will be happy to tell you.
One of the areas in which people tend to have ideas that don’t make sense, when you hold them together in your head simultaneously, is that of rights. For example, many Americans believe that our rights derive from God or from the very nature of being human. As Paul Ryan put it in a discussion of Obamacare this month, folks of his political persuasion don’t believe that the people have the power to make up new rights; rights come from God and nature.
These same Americans also generally believe that our rights are those delineated in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution, including a non-infringeable individual right to bear arms. And yet, clearly, people in most law-governed democracies other than the United States, countries like Britain, Canada, France, Israel, the Netherlands and Japan, do not have an individual right to bear arms.
How, then, can the right to bear arms as enshrined in the constitution derive from God, or from the very nature of being human? …
Found this interesting because I have quite a few Facebook friends in the States. Apparently ( from reading their posts), the National Rifle Association is one of the strongest lobbying groups in Congress. Even this latest tragedy in Denver doesn’t seem to soften their view on their rights to bear arms.
Although, having said that, the Democrats seem more liberal than the Republicans and they do seem to have some doubts now about the wisdom of using firearms.
When I lived in the States (Washington State in the early 80s and Maryland in the early 90s), I did not feel the need for a gun.
Some of my coworkers told me they owned one for protection. Not being used to that, I was actually more afraid of them than running into thugs in downtown Baltimore. On the other hand, I always avoided potentially dangerous areas anyway.
It is a mind set (and a partial brain wash by the American gun lobby for profit), in my opinion. If you grow up thinking you need one, then you do.
Yes as a European, it never ceases to amaze me how much influence the NRA has in the USA. And of course, anyone who disagrees with the idea that you have a God-given right to bear weapons is a pinko liberal…
The idea that “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is plausible at first sight, but it overlooks the fact that an enraged or mad person who doesn’t have immediate access to a gun (or a hunting knife, for that matter) is a darned sight less dangerous to others than one with a weapon in their hand.
I think that there is no good argument in most of the world for having guns in private hands. (I don’t see how you can change the situation in the USA in the short term. They have somewhere around 200 million guns in private hands there.) Even if you shoot for sport, a gun should be kept locked up in the gun club and only signed out to use on the shooting range. I can accept the idea that you might need a hunting weapon to hunt moose or rabbits or whatever, but no hunting weapon needs to be a semi-automatic gun.