Wartstein wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 11:06 am
benben wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 8:02 am
I love guns, I love knives, and honestly the banner just looked normal to me. But...because of this thread I really like it a lot more now!
No offense Wartstein, I pray daily that this Country never turns into a Germany, I’m worried!
All fine, You can´t offend me here anyway, my friend! :)
I am just describing how things are here where I live, I don´t give a personal opinion at all (btw I live in Austria, not in Germany. But concerning guns Austria is pretty much the same as Germany, while we in Austria have vastly better knife laws (we can carry any knife we like, while Germany has crazy restrictions imho).
And if your country suddenly turned into Germany concerning guns, that sure would be hard for you!
BUT: If you had been growing up and lived all your life here: You´d 100% have no problem with the situation. Just since NO ONE does.
Guns are just not part of society or everyday life, you would have never seen a Civilian carrying a gun, there would be no discussions about guns at all, but a total consensus, no one would even want to carry a gun, there would be practically no gun violence and no perceived need to protect oneself with a gun. IF you saw a normal guy carrying a gun this would be almost as weird as he´d carry a two handed sword or a bikini top.
This is what I try to transport here:
For Americans the whole "gun thing" is so vastly more important than where I live, there is so much more controversy and political discussion about this in the US, a person might even be defined to some degree (politically or even generally) what they think about guns... while here it just IS NOT a thing at all. And the depth of this difference just can´t be fully grasped often times by Europeans as well as by Americans:
- If an European says he is against gun carry: An American might automatically react like he would if a fellow American says this. But it is NOT the same: In the US there is a discussion and huge controversy here, people actually
take a side when pro or anti gun. In Europe being "against" gun carry is actually not really "against". It is no "choice", no "taking a side". It is just natural and what almost everyone thinks here.
Vice versa an European might think (again, NOT ME!
)that it is really weird that so many US people do and want to carry guns. Just cause many just "learned" from child on that (in Europe!) only rather weird people DO carry guns...
I think a lot of our modern differences in attitude has to do with the last few centuries of history.
UK, Germany, France, Austria, Spain, Sweden etc. have history going back thousands of years. There were established civilizations prior to the Romans. Urban developments have been around for centuries, sometimes longer. London alone was established by the Romans about two thousand years ago, and remains of settlements up to 7,000 years old have been found along the River Thames.
In the US we basically destroyed everything that was built prior to the 16th century, and its rare to come across a building over 100 years old. There are a few token sites leftover from Native Americans, like
the cliff dwellings and
Serpent Mound, but we don't have the castles, roman ruins, and 300-1100 year old churches like Europe does.
Many countries in Europe have had large urbanized areas developed for thousands of years, while in the US many of our large cities simply did not exist 100-200 years ago.
The westward expansion into the US frontier, the conflicts with Natives, the reliance on hunting for survival in the earlier days of our country and the rebellion against English rule meant our nation had a severe reliance on arms during its formative years.
To this day we have large swathes of rural areas where hunting is still a popular past time and a means of providing for ones family, where police response times are 30-70 minutes in good weather so you're responsible for your own defense, and things like bears and mountain lions and wild boar may pose a danger to you and yours.
So even in 2021 there are still good reasons for many US citizens to own arms outside of the scope of hypothetical revolt against a tyrannical government.
Another thing that might be easy to miss is not only does my country have more guns than people in it, estimates put us at multiple guns per every human in the USA. there simply is no way you can one day decide guns are banned and it will work. Countless people will resist, or bury their guns, or to pay homage to an old meme, "lose them in a boating accident."
Imagine trying to outlaw guns if you had three guns in your country for every citizen that lived there.....excluding military and police weapons.
Do guns have a role in keeping a modern democratic state in check? Maybe, maybe not. Its interesting to me how strongly some people in my country feel the answer is yes, and how strongly some people in European countries feel the answer is no.
