Are the Brits capable of embarrassment these days?

[Mark E. Hurling]

Politely ask the rapist to stop. Can't hurt his feelings, after all. He is a victim of society, poor thing.

You aren't far off from what that eminent English writer Lytton Strachey once said on the subject.

Two years later, World War I broke out. The war was a direct challenge, as Lytton saw it, to Bloomsbury pacifist principles. He managed to be a "conscientious objector" to the war. To the standard question; "If a German soldier tried to rape your sister, what would you do?" Strachey slyly replied; "I would try to interpose my own body."

[Oldandfat]

Politely ask the rapist to stop. Can't hurt his feelings, after all. He is a victim of society, poor thing.

Uhhhh...hello? You forgot to offer the rapist a “safe space”. How inconsiderate. Rapists are people too ya know?

[Kitsuma]

How would you kill him?

How would you kill him if he were bigger, stronger, meaner and more skilled than you?

None of like to think about these questions. However, when one starts disarming populations, we are forced to talk about reality.

[Mark Rippetoe]

Well, I wouldn't fucking shoot them.

And if there were 5 of them? I'm just trying to understand why you would choose inefficiency here. Just to be Un-American? Is that a thing in the UK?

[Scaldrew]

Just to be Un-American? Is that a thing in the UK?

That's a thing globally. People, especially of the young variety, believe the US to be a force of evil in the world. Not just not a force of good, but a force of evil, even going so far as to consider it more dangerous than insane religious extremist groups who torture, rape, and kill their own people. Weird timeline to live in.

[UberBabs]

Without guns:
The weak are at the mercy of the strong
The old are at the mercy of the young
The one is at the mercy of the group

I used to live in LAPD jurisdiction. Could not count on them except to write a report after the fact. Now I am still in LA county but in the jurisdiction of a small municipal police department. Much more responsive but they can’t be counted on to be everywhere they are needed all of the time.

[Eric Schexnayder]

Well, I wouldn't fucking shoot them.

Are you kidding me? If you had a gun, you wouldn’t pull it out and scream “get the fuck away from my daughter”?

What, take your chances in hand to hand combat? Or carry a knife? Is that somehow morally superior to shooting someone in this situation?

[Daniel Cavallari]

Are you kidding me? If you had a gun, you wouldn’t pull it out and scream “get the fuck away from my daughter”?

What, take your chances in hand to hand combat? Or carry a knife? Is that somehow morally superior to shooting someone in this situation?

Don't waste your time, most anti-gun people do not have a reason to be anti-gun. As in they never actually thought hard for themselves about the subject. They heard the same stupid excuses and made-up statistics over and over again and believed them. Worst of all, they don't want to do that - Rip just tried to do a little socratic dialogue here, and yet got nowhere.

This also applies to a great variety of other subjects.

[Risifrutti]

What a curious statement. Was this meant to imply that you’d rather be murdered by a knife than by a gun?

I’m inferring that because the evidence here suggests that a shift from gun to knife violence doesn’t seem to lower homicide rates (and may even increase them):

London murder rate higher than New York City for first time ever in March amid surging knife and gun crime - CBS News

What does the evidence look like if you compare homicide rates with e.g. Chicago, Detroit or St Louis?

[Espen Lund]

I think 99.99 percent of us will never be in a situation where you would never need a gun in the first place. I've never understood the US' obsession of guns for 'protection'.

I'm pretty certain the cases where people are able to murder because they have a gun far outnumbers the cases where people are able to protect themselves because they have a gun.