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Dulfite on 23 March 2022
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Ka-pi96 said:
Dulfite said:

Yeah, invading another country you just have professional militaries and mercenaries, but being invaded unlocks militias and other citizens being able to contribute. The total amount of armed Ukrainians defending their country greatly outnumber that of the Russians invading them.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, armed citizenry is the greatest deterrent to someone invading you and doing so successfully. People always think it comes down to missiles, but countries like Russia or China don't invade to just wipe out entire cities and populations, they want to capture that nations economy and absorb the profits. You can't do that by blowing everything up and killing everyone, you have to do a land invasion. This is why the USA is so protected.

In 2018, a survey showed there were over 1 billion guns in the world. Of that number, 85% were in the hands of citizens, not militaries. Of that number, 46% are in the hands of the US citizens. The safest thing humans could do to deter invasions, school shootings, hostage situations, the list goes on, is to issue every legal adult a gun that passed a mental screening. This isn't the wild west, where many had guns, they could shoot someone and ride off never to be caught. We have cameras everywhere, the internet, satellites. Arming people isn't going to cause sane people to start shooting randomly at people. It will prevent those already with murder on their hearts from killing as many, if any other people because ideally any room they step in with a gun pointing at someone will have numerous people pointing a gun right back waiting for the police to show up to arrest the would-be murderer. 

There would be fewer massacres every year and a lot less international tension and ears if every legal citizen that is mentally stable had a gun. Do mental screenings annually to be safe.

There's some merit to what you're saying, with Switzerland being a golden example. Guns absolutely don't prevent school shootings/hostage situations though, they create them. You can avoid them despite having guns if the culture, education and health care services (mental health specifically) are good enough, but in the US they're absolutely not, so gun ownership just increases the amount of those things.

Moreso I was saying if mentally stable people know others in the room will have a gun, and being mentally stable they will want to live themselves, they won't attempt anything, so there will be less loss of life just because this group of would be murderers will be too scared to pull anything. The other guns would deter them from even attempting something.

For the mentally unstable people, knowing other guns won't be a deterrent to them drawing their guns, but it will be a deterrent to how much damage they can do before someone shoots them and stops the damage done.

Anyway, this kind of organically came up (in my head) as I wrote out my previous long post, when thinking about Ukraine and comparing their citizenry's preparedness to USA. I did not intend for so many to respond to it instead, whether agreeing with it or disagreeing, and I don't want to further take away from the focus on Ukraine.