Unpopular Opinion

Gotta resist fascism somehow

This seems like a very urban viewpoint. There are still places in the world and in the US in particular where a firearm is tool for safety that has nothing to do with other humans.

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.

it is a tool made for specifically one thing. To pierce the skin and rip through the inner organs of a person.

This isn’t true. I live in a country with sensible gun control laws and live on a rural property with 10 acres of forest. We have a small rifle to protect the wildlife against rabies or to put down an injured animal.

The US conversation around guns is toxic.

If I can get excited for a cordless Bosch track saw, I can get excited for a nice gun. Guns have served two purposes in my life - target shooting with friends and the meat I get from hunting. I don't need to take on someone elses trauma and stop enjoying something to respect what they are.

They are engineered from the ground up to take lives ~~of other people~~.

I have no love for guns, but hunting for food is the reason humans created weapons in the first place. To your point, I’m pretty sure slaughterhouses aren’t using fully automatic rifles on the killing floor.

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.

I’ve always looked at them from a utility/engineering/sport perspective. I have no intent of ever carrying a weapon, but the training it takes to learn how to target practice, and the engineering that goes into them are incredibly fascinating.

I don’t encourage people to own guns and I don’t have any myself, but I really wish target practice didn’t have to share a platform with a killing machine.

I'm being pedantic, but many are designed to take the lives of animals rather than people. Absurdly heavy precision .22 cal target rifles are clearly only for sport.

A few are designed to launch flares high into the air for communication. A very small number are designed to trigger avalanches under controlled conditions.

It's a very American viewpoint. Many countries in Europe have high gun ownership and manage to do so without murdering eachother.

There are too many responses here to reply to all of them individually so I'm just going to post some quotes here, more in response to other comments than the OP, but perhaps also a perspective to consider for OP as well.

"That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there."

• George Orwell

And the shockingly only increasingly relevant full quote from one of the founders of the Black Panthers party:

"Any unarmed people are slaves, or are subject to slavery at any given moment. If the guns are taken out of the hands of the people and only the pigs have guns, then it's off to the concentration camps, the gas chambers, or whatever the fascists in America come up with. One of the democratic rights of the United States, the Second Amendment to the Constitution, gives the people the right to bear arms. However, there is a greater right; the right of human dignity that gives all men the right to defend themselves."

• Huey Newton

I'd really ask more people to consider their position of privilege, to be less afraid of state sanctioned or enabled violence of all forms than some crazy neighbor with guns who was likely failed many times by that very state to have come to this point. Please just consider the counterpoint, that armed minorities are harder to oppress, and that far, far more people have been killed by state sanctioned and enabled violence, than by access to firearms by "the common people".

I'm not telling anyone that they're wrong, I'm just asking that you really internalize and consider this perspective. Thank you for reading and thinking.

Love it. You can never post anything bad about guns on Reddit's unpopular opinion section. And I agree, it's to murder other humans. The 2nd amendment's present interpretation is an amazing example why I have such low respect for constitutional lawyers: The well-regulated militia part is in the same sentence to specifically set the context in which the right to bear arms is protected and people getting away without taking the militia part into consideration is total bullshit.

Also, the 2nd amendment does not absolve irresponsible gun owners for the consequences of their gun ownership. Since Americans lose 350K guns annually (!!!!!!!) and provide most of the Mexican cartels' firearms, there's a lot of bad gun ownership that people should be punished for. Generally speaking, you'll be the last to know about the gun ownership of people who actually store them responsibly.

I have worked in Accident & Emergency in England and in an ER in America. Guns are a curse.

You all need to see the deserted dead body of a 15 year old laying on the table after an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt. A baby who has been shot through, or the crowds of relatives helplessly sobbing in the streets outside the emergency room.

Every gun owner thinks they are a responsible gun owner until they arent. Its simply not possible to be 100% safe 100% of the time. That's not a thing that humans do.

And no. There are nowhere near as many knife deaths in England.

I never saw a fatal stabbing in the UK, but I've seen many in America. The numbers are insignificant when compared to gun accidents and murders.

All "tools" that kill this many people should absolutely be regulated.

Americans never shut up about freedom, but don't pay attention to the freedom taken away simply by the threat that anyone around you could be carrying a gun. You're all just used to it being your way. It's so nice not to have to consider the possibility. The american way is like spending your lives with the sword of Damocles dangling over your heads. That's your freedom.

Guns are made to make a tiny piece of metal go very fast. You don't have to use them to kill or think about using them to kill. You can, for example, use them as a remote light switch or their most popular use: remote hole punch. Healthy society shouldn't have to ban guns since they would be used for completrly non violent things, same a swords and bows.

I mean you could shoot at the sun to combat global warming even.

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)

That's not an unpopular opinion IMO.

I agree with you. You hate them, that's reasonable. They represent humanity's failure at cooperation.

You're also totally justified to hate those who fetishize them.

You are wrong about them being designed only to kill, though. The point of them is to wield deadly force, and they are designed to send a high-speed projectile in order to achieve that goal, of deadly force. It's alittle semantic, but an important distinction imo, because the point of wielding deadly force is to make opponents compliant even if you never use it.

Swords, spears, bows, atlatls, and pretty much every weapon of war was the exact same way. A key difference between them and the firearm, though, is that the firearm takes little to no training in comparison to the others, which take considerable amounts more.

Everything else, we're in agreement about. I think you hold a hate for violence as well, based on your stance. That is also healthy, but I hope you also see violence for the liberating force that it is, able to protect those that are targeted.

We are on the brink of having the US become a full-blown fascist state - as opposed to the fascistic nation it's always been. Should that happen, I fear the only way back is through violence, and I'd much prefer having a rifle in hand to the alternative of charging down gunfire armed with a lesser weapon, as the Egyptians had to during their revolution in 2011.

I hate people who treat them like some toys and fantasize about them.

Agreed.

I would still get one for safety ...

Firearms decrease your safety in any but the most dire situation. Unfortunately, those situations are nigh impossible to predict. This means that carrying a firearm incurs some additional risk right now as insurance against a future potential very large risk.

They can be used to preserve something precious but at a price to pay.

Also agreed.

You might be suffering under a variation on the toupee fallacy, and some confirmation bias. You're not going to hear a whole lot from responsible gun owners, because those people have an understanding of the risk and responsibility they are taking on, and part of taking that responsibility and mitigating that risk is not crowing like a knob about your guns.

I don't think that's an unpopular opinion, although I'd detach the violence from people.

Guns are weapons specifically designed as tools of violence. Some are for designed with animal hunting in mind, some for hurting people, and some for target sports, which are ultimately derived from the other two.

Like any tool, how people intend to use it matters, as well as how they expect to use it and how they prepare to use it.
I will easily judge people based on those factors.
Separating the tool from the use also lets us be a little more objective in our discussions about how we want to regulate the tool. "This type of weapon poses an undue risk to surrounding people in this context, so you can't have it in this context".

I think just about every gun owner I've met agrees with the sentiment if you get rid of the "against people" part.

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.

that's not the only purpose dude. you can use a machine gun to shoot a circle around a door knob to unlock any door.