Here in Germany this is a quite popular Opinion. If you have an open fascination for guns, you will be looket at like a serial killer or someone who will be going amok. And wont be allowed to be a police officer (the almost only people to wield a gun in public)
this post was submitted on 07 Feb 2025
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Unpopular Opinion
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I’m gonna go out on a limb here and guess you live in the US - well, I sure hope you do.
In the US I believe that guns are like pick-up trucks: far more people own them to plug gaps in their personality than the number of people who own them because they need their utility.
My personal view - and a generally held one - is that guns are a tool and to fetishise a tool is… weird; and suggests to me a troubled mind.
God made man. Samuel Colt made him equal.
Any tool used incorrectly is a significant danger.
I already found the ideas and the people who hold those ideas that you're referencing are a minority who are scared fanatic and unreasonable and those are the type of people that should not have guns or tools of any capacity.
However, someone like you who wants one for protection and the ability to protect those around you regardless of circumstance are why it's important to protect gun rights in my opinion.
The thing is, using the gun for killing is exactly the correct one. That's the intended purpose. Then you may threat to use it correctly as a means of protection.
But there are other ways. Gun rights are almost universally revoked throughout Europe, for example, and barely anyone fears for their close ones, because of a working police and professional army, as well as, exactly, less access to guns that could be used to perpetrate violence.
As the result, banning guns normally leads to a decrease in the number of homicides and assaults.
Honestly the bigger factor is social cohesion and combating criminogenic factors. While far from perfect, European societies are doing much better here than a proudly hyper-individualist US.
I would have considered this the popular opinion, but it seems I'm the odd one out. The comments here defending it are hard to read.
Like, Farmers and Hunters: You know you are like 8% of the population at most, right? Killing animals should have maybe been mentioned as an alternative use for guns, sure, but come on: most gun nuts, as most people in general, are city folk. They buy a gun to shoot or threaten to shoot people exclusively.
Couple things.
First, firearms are used for sporting and competition of marksmanship by millions of Americans, and Europeans.
IPSC / USPSA are massively popular and all you ever do is put holes in paper or hit steel targets. The gear is purpose designed explicitly for this. So is the ammunition. Even down to the holsters and mag pouches. It’s ALL for the game of the sport.
The civilian marksmanship program is again, millions of Americans across many cities nation wide. A rifle designed to shoot a Palma match, or an F-class match, or benchrest rifles are specific to those disciplines. Nothing about a 37 lb sled riding benchrest rifle is designed to harm a person. It’s a purpose built tool for competition where mostly old people drive them with dials on a sled and put small groups on paper far away. They often don’t even get shouldered.
Sporting clays, variations of this are Olympic sports. There is no possible way to say an over under shotgun has been designed from the ground up for harming people. It’s a tool built around the rules of the sport. 2 shotgun shells. That’s all it can hold and is long as hell with a massive choke on it to control spread of small pellets precisely, pellets that are very bad at killing. Birdshot is almost never lethal past extremely short ranges and they are engaging clays at 40-80 yards.
PRS competitions are bolt action rifles with physical exercise and difficult physical stages under time pressure to shoot steel. Most have transitioned away from high energy calibers, like military chosen caliber that are for imparting energy into a target, and to small bullets you can watch trace in the scope for… you guess it, the specifics of the sport.
.22 long rifle is extremely popular in sports speaking of small cartridges. It’s what we use in Olympic competitions and bi-athalons that ski and shoot bolt action rifles. We use it in small bore pistol and rifle matches the world over. It’s terrible at killing a person, but is great for target use at 10 meters. Which is what the Olympics world over do.
I could go on and on with more examples. Firearms are just not used for killing things. They have in many countries beyond the US, a strong and friendly competition community for sport that only sees paper hole punching. The UK had a thriving and popular rifle community. France, Sweden, Finland, and Italy have thriving sporting gun competition cultures as well.
I live in a city of 2.5 million people in it and he surrounding area. I shoot every weekend for sport, as I have done since I was on a shooting team in high school, run by my high school. I won a junior olympic medal in that team. I love the engineering and competition elements of the sports and would highly encourage you to try one to see if your view might be expanded to see how kind and friendly the sports are to anyone new coming to try them.
That’s not an impopular opinion, that’s the opinion of normal people, firearms are not toys, unless you are in murica of course; then it’s like a Barbie, you buy the Barbie itself and then collect all the accessories
No, only some are and even then it's not broadly accurate, it's closer to Anthropomorphism.
Weapons are designed from the ground up to kill animals. From birdshot 10g shotgun to bolt action plastic tip single shot rifle.
Assault rifles are a category designed primarily to kill humans
Most people don't seem to realize the perfect deer rifle is the perfect human rifle.
Hahaha
Killing animals is pretty shitty as well though
I'm about as left as they come but weirdly enough I'm also a hunter, and I have to disagree, the guns I own are tools designed for specific purposes that aren't killing humans. Hunting turkey, hunting deer, hunting duck, I even have a muzzleloader for that season, and a gun for back packing and hunting out of a saddle in a tree.
Hunting IMO is way more sustainable and ethical than buying store bought meat and it connects me with nature and let's me first hand observe, appreciate, value, and want to protect ecology of my area.
How is hunting sustainable? It's currently sustainable because a small number of people do it. I can't see how it would be more sustainable than farmed, storebought meat.
It might be if all the humans not hunting their meat starved to death - orwere never born. I think it really depends on what counterfactual you want to dream up.
You could argue that modern farming techniques created the agricultural surplus and enbled population growth and urbanisation and maybe helped the human population to grow to a level that hunter gatherers woud not be likely to have reached.
I think it is the scale of human population that is challenges sustainability of any tech, either method would be sustainable at some scale. I'm not convinced that modern farming practices are very sustainable for 10+bn people , for all that long. But I guess we'll see.
Over the long term i think hunter gathering humans were around a lot longer than farmers have been, and a much much longer than modern intnsive monocultural/ pesticide / fertilizer based methods. So you'd have to wait a few thousand years to know how sustainable modern farming is.
From what I understand, it's sustainable because hunters kill overpopulated species like deer. The deer become overpopulated due to lack of predators in the area and end up damaging the ecosystem by eating all the plants
Indeed. "Hunting is more sustainable than farming" is an idiotic assertion.
Killing animals isn't ethical. Inevitably the false dilemma gets painted between killing them or overpopulation, but the overpopulation is also a human-created problem, both through overdevelopment and killing off natural predators - the actual antidote is to scale back our development and reintroduce predators. Plant-based/vegan diet is far more ethical (nonsense about "plants feel pain", "mice killed by plows", "I can't eat vegan because of my blood type" and other vegan bingo card BS aside).
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I mean... Technically they were engineered from the ground up to send a small projectile as far as possible using a chemical reaction.
It just so happens that humans are really sensitive to projectiles hitting them at high speed being made out of mostly water and mush.
Also there are many far north towns all around the world where it's almost mandatory to carry a high powered rifle with you at all times because polar bears will rip your arms off just for the hell of it.
You don't know the first thing about requirements engineering. Technically, these assault rifles are primarily designed to kill/injure people, it's 100% part of the stakeholder/requirements analysis in their systems engineering workflow.
An airliner is not designed to fly through the air. It's designed to transport people and charge from A to B within a given amount of time. Flying is just a means to achieve it.
*Technically* they were engineered from the ground up to send a small projectile as far as possible using a chemical reaction.
I'm referring to this bit: they are not technically engineered to simply shoot a projectile. They are engineered for a specific purpose, which is to kill people. Your comment sounds like you want to downplay the role of requirements in the engineering process, like a lot of people here do.
No I was being purposely pedantic as a joke you nerd.
Another one of those Schrödinger's jokes.
Not just for the hell of it. It just so happens that people are made of meat, and meat is delicious.
I..... Are you trying to imply that cannibalism was a driving force behind the invention of the gun? Lol
no
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