I think that, in the history of the world since guns have been invented, they have mostly been used to the advantage of the powerful, not the powerless.

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WillAdams 20 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There's a quote about that by Hillaire Belloc:

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/355429-whatever-happens-we-...

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roenxi 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That is true of, I think, literally everything. Powerful people get first pick of things and go for higher quality so everything advantages them more than others. Modern powerful people are the most powerful in history thanks to technology.

But guns are an equaliser. If powerful people let situations get too out of hand the personal risk to them is staggering. Guns make political or revenge-based assassinations relatively easy in a way knives do not. Arguably that is a bad thing, although experiments like the US suggest it is good in practice.

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ragequittah an hour ago | parent | next [-]

To a large portion of the US population things got completely out of hand in several very terrible ways a while ago. I think despite that almost all of us would consider it an absolute tragedy if someone (or a group of people) tried to use a gun to solve problems.

Luigi was an example where a group people cheered. But I suspect most people considered cold blooded murder of a man with a family pretty gross. Not to mention it solved exactly nothing.

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Joker_vD 17 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> Guns make political or revenge-based assassinations relatively easy in a way knives do not.

Yes, the US has been very well known for its politicians (instead of e.g. middle schoolers) being routinely murdered by the gunners.

Seriously. Even in the places like Brazil, or Sub-Saharan Africa, the "powerful people" rarely get killed by the lynching mob — it's almost always the hired guns sent by some other powerful people. So, no, the general populace very rarely gets to exercise its violence on the elite, historically speaking. Sometimes it happens, but that's an aberration of the normal way of things.

	▲	soon_to_be_sb 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
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