Guns
Question that I haven’t really seen explored or answered (though I could just be searching the wrong thing): we’ve seen a bunch of studies arguing that a society with less guns is or isn’t safer than, for instance, contemporary US.
However, given that you are in a society where a bunch of people do have guns, is it better for you to have one too?
Seems like a good question for the rationalist(-adjacent) out there, since I feel like most normal people will own or not own pretty much in tandem with their beliefs about guns. But it seems to be at least possible to be anti-gun but still want one so long as everyone else is going to have one, or be pro-gun but choose not to have one.
?
There was quite a while when I was pro-gun but had no interest in owning one. I am now mildly against gun-legality (mostly to make overly impulsive suicide harder). But also vaguely interested in maybe getting into target shooting.
This depends a lot on the spread of gun ownership in society.
I’d probably prefer not to own a gun (in the sense of having one in my home or carrying it) everything else being equal.
But I’d want a gun to defend myself from dangerous people if I considered it necessary.
Necessary meaning in this context “how likely is any given adversary to actually be armed and assume absence of armament”
So my preferences would go:
bad guys think I have a gun, but don’t >
bad guys know I have a gun >
bad guys think I don’t have a gun, but do >
bad guys know I don’t have a gun
If I apply intuitive game theory to this set of preferences, it suggests that attacking anyone isn’t safe because if guns are considered rare, they would have one, while if guns are considered common, they might not have one but the chance is too high to risk; simultaneously it would balance the amount of guns into an equilibrium where enough people have them to outweigh the number of bad guys with guns but not everyone has so the risks of impulsive people having guns and hurting themselves aren’t as big as with universal gun ownership.
1 week ago · tagged #guns cw #tfw not sure if emotions are incredibly clever or incredibly convenient · 11 notes · source: loki-zen · .permalink