[LeonB]

A community where every household does not have guns is safer than one that does: but not for a simple reason like “because we have the police which is meant to give security to people”

A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”

People in such a community lack guns but they do have things like a working public health system, decent education, daily encounters with other people that are positive and so on.

The threat of police shootings is not what makes a safe society safe.

Constructive, open and fair trade is the equivalent at an international level. Cooperative and trusting. Not staring down the barrel of each other’s guns.

[tim-kt]

> A safe community isn’t one where people are held in check by police. People are not roving around thinking “oh I’d break and enter and murder and rape but for the fact a police officer might shoot me.”

That's also not necessarily the point I'm making. Suppose you are in a society where a small part of people are bad actors, for whatever reason. They will break and enter, murder, and rape. You want to protect the rest of the society against these bad actors. You can now equip everyone with weapons so they may defend themselves. That also enables the bad actors to use said weapons because we don't know who really know who is a bad actor (at least not the ones that didn't commit any crimes yet). Or you give weapons only to a small part of society, where you enforce strict gun laws.

The alternative is to reduce the number of bad actors and this is, in part, fulfilled by the conditions that you are describing. But how do I reduce the number of state leaders that are willing to shoot each other? I guess it's what you are saying, namely constructive, open, and fair trade. But we're not really making progress in that direction it seems.

[kQq9oHeAz6wLLS]

> A community where every household does not have guns is safer than one that does

Except this isn't borne out in the data. Look at deeply conservative places where guns are literally everywhere, and you'll see very low crime rates compared to cities with strict gun control.

And why? Well, as a criminal, I'd be loathe to try something when there's a good chance the victim is armed.

In your perfect community scenario, a single armed criminal would wreak havoc, completely unopposed.

[icameron]

Speaking of data: States with shall-issue conceal carry permits see higher rates of gun violence than may-issue states.

Source: https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2017.3040...

[cmrdporcupine]

These hypothetical places have "low" crime rates because they have low population density, not because people are armed.

Why do Canada and Europe have dramatically lower violent crime rates despite having a mostly unarmed population?

[achandlerwhite]

Sounds more like urban vs rural with respect to crime rates than guns or not.

[barbazoo]

Refers to data, doesn’t reference data.