Appagheny Forum

I think this is a great take down of revolutionary types on the American right. I will also add that these kinds of people never have a way of building society back up after the cannons fall silent. A great comparison is looking at some of the Canadian successionist movements that have cropped up in the past 20 years. Regardless of if it will ever happen, you have people discussing things like central banking and all the boring shit that nobody thinks about down here. These RW patriotoids are no different to communists thinking all of their woes will be fixed by "The Revolution." It makes me feel like a lot of this talk from right-wingers amounts to justifications for their tacti-cool rigs that they had to tell their wives. ("Noooo Sandra, you don't get it! Its muh right! And the guberment will come Ruby Ridge us any day now!")

I will also be the first to say that a majority of my desire to own and shoot is for the sake of the hobby. I have a rifle because it is fun, because I have a lot of friends in the military that also shoot, and because they are pretty cool. My pistol on the other hand is for self-defense. I have been the subject of two break-ins in my life and I do not wish to be unarmed if I have the misfortune of experiencing a third.

The issue is that your argument is primarily tailored for the revolutionary justification. I believe there is a distinction that should be made between the question of "Should there be guns in our society?" and "Should YOU have a gun in our society?" For the latter at least, I am very much so in the "YES" camp. Looking at a risk table, it is very rare that you will ever have to draw your weapon on another man, and even less likely that you will fire upon them (the USCCA found that 9/10 of all incidents where a gun is drawn by a civilian stop at brandishing) But in the rare case that you find yourself in that situation, you better bet your ass is able to fight back. We live in a world of bad actors and a society that slowly losing its sense of civility. The increased risk to society for me to have a gun is far lower than the increased protection I am granting myself for having one. Its a bit of a paradox where I'm forced to choose the side where everyone loses.


Now with everyone else, to put it simply, I'm not quite sure. A monopoly on violence is required for a functioning society to exist and when that does not happen a lot of people die. And I'd rather take ass government than no government. I believe that an armed society can be safe society, but I fear than an armed society is also a sensitive society. If everyone can have a force multiplier then shit can get bad really easily when society degrades and people start lashing out. My issue with banning guns in this instant is that it would be like numbing the throat when you have strep. It does make the situation better, but it isn't really fixing the underlying problem, only making the issue much less visible. Theoretically we can have a society that is healthy and armed, but to keep with the analogy, is it worth numbing the throat while you solve the underlying illness, and can we trust the government to take us off the meds once we are healed?

I spent some time reading those sources and I see no issues with them. Statistically it does seem that having a firearm invites more danger through easier suicide, family feuds, and freak accidents, than it does protect from the use of self-defense. I wonder then, is there any justification for people to have them as a hobby? When does the utility of a sport or past time get outweighed by the risk it brings to the population? A good starting point would be to compare to other hobbies that are less controversial. I tried to find some analogs, and I think I have stumbled across one.

There is a massive racial disparity among victims of gun violence*. African Americans are over 7x more likely to fall victim than whites, and 14x more than Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders: 14.6, 1.9, and 1.0 per 100,000 respectively (taken from your [3]: "Firearm Violence" (Planty & Truman, 2013).) If we were to also add the risk of non-fatal violence to each, 2.8, 1.4, 0.6** respectively, and on top of all that added the 7.8 per 100,000 for firearm related suicides to all groups [A], we would come to a risk of firearm death or violence to be 25.2 per 100,000 for African Americans, 11.1 for Whites, and 9.4 for Asians/Pacific Islanders. If we augment the data further using your SciAmerican paper [1] by increasing the risk of homicide and non-violent gun crime by their highest rate of 2.7 and suicides by 9.2 (which would assume that everyone is storing their guns loaded (and unlocked?***) we would then have a crude estimation of what the risk one is bringing to themselves by owning a gun to be around 120.3 per 100,000 for African Americans, 82.23 for Whites, and 77.64 for Asians/Pacific Islanders. Now in comparison, there were a reported 6,335 motorcycle deaths reported in 2023 [.B] with an estimated 8.8 million registered motorcycles in the US in 2022 [C] assuming everyone only owns one motorcycle (which is not the case, and therefore this figure would be lower), Being a firearm owner (if you are white, asian, or pacific) is slightly**** more dangerous than being a motorcycle owner at 72 deaths per 100,000 riders.

This is a very crude estimation and I feel that the motorcycle deaths are realistically higher, and the risk lower for gun owners since not everyone stores their arms differently. Regardless I do feel that some gun control should be in order since these are arguably more dangerous than an item that requires special classes and a license for. Whatever control methods are used, they would probably have to be something along the lines of an IQ test and a cost of licensure, which would be a "mean" but very effective way of curbing the majority of crime and probably a plurality (at least) of accidents and suicides.


Notes
*Side note about the differences in deaths by race: Whites and Asian/pacific islander males are about as likely to kill themselves as a black person (regardless of sex) is likely to be murdered with a gun . My White and Asiatic kings please take care of yourselves.

**figure is flagged in the source with the warning "Interpret with caution. Estimate based on 10 or fewer sample cases, or coefficient of variation is greater than 50%"

***the cited paper doesn't quite say and I'm not sure since I can only access the abstract of the original source :/

*****we are talking 8-10 more deaths per 100,000 and that still is a pretty large amount so slightly might not be the best wordage but fuck it I've been working on this explanation for over an hour.

Sources:
A - https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

B - https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fat ... s-and-atvs

C - https://www.statista.com/statistics/191 ... -by-state/

WetNebuchadnezzar wrote: Fri Apr 10, 2026 5:35 pm Actual violence, revolution, and insurrection is horror. It's bombs going off in the suburbs, it's the taps running dry because everyone working at the purification plant was killed, it's the lights flickering and then shutting off entirely, it's the re-emergence of atavistic, ancient, primitive human violence under the simple dim light of the stars. Revolution is hoping that book you half-read when the lights were still on and your house was still warm actually was right about its proclamations for the future, because the world you knew is too far gone now and there's no going back, and it really would be a shame to have thrown it all away fighting for a system that you might never see re-civilize the wild world you live in, not knowing if that new system will even end up being much better than what you tore dow

I have a family friend who is currently going through legal proceedings because he decided to carry a pistol while driving through the state of New York. He got pulled over, the cop saw his holster, and he got charged with possession of a firearm and is currently paying out the ass in fines. I could try to find a figure, but how much would firearm ownership increase your chances of getting a charge based off of simple negligence? (i.e. simple mistakes without ill intent that result in no death, injury, or distress - like illegally transporting a firearm or accidentally bringing your conceal carry pistol into a school)