Your future if they take your guns: the reality of owning a gun in The Netherlands, Europe.

[Polishprince]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

Incrementally has always been the key. And that's why its so important to avoid the Slippery Slope and just say "no".

There is no "reasonable"gun control, and if the Democrats were to get in anything, it just whets their appetite for more.

I remember the Clintonian Era's Draconian Assault Weapon Ban enacted in the 1990's. You would have thought that it would have satisfied the Brady Bunch and other groups of control freaks. Not at all, it just pushed them further down the road to perdition.

 

[daveman]

Did not you hear about the gun confiscation by Obama? Man there are warehouses full of air all over.
I love the panicked outrage of gun confiscation idiots. If any kind of law is made it will be for military style weapons of which no one needs for legal hunting or target practice.

You don't get to dictate who needs what, especially based on your ignorance.

So my opinion, to you, makes me ignorant? Talk about ignorant.

No, your ignorance about firearms makes you ignorant.

 

[daveman]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

Look at all the strictures supposedly "law abiding" gun owners proudly proclaim to adhere to. Does the boot licking ever end..? Only in rare cases; amongst the dwindling few; when "they" get around to them...

So, leftists want to ban firearms -- and you blame gun owners.

 

[Vastator]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

Look at all the strictures supposedly "law abiding" gun owners proudly proclaim to adhere to. Does the boot licking ever end..? Only in rare cases; amongst the dwindling few; when "they" get around to them...

So, leftists want to ban firearms -- and you blame gun owners.

Some, "yes". Those who coddle up to power mongers in hopesof being the last to have theirs taken; are little more than boot licking sycophants who are every bit as dangerous as the tyrants they support. Where do you think they get their "stormtroopers" from?

 

[daveman]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

Look at all the strictures supposedly "law abiding" gun owners proudly proclaim to adhere to. Does the boot licking ever end..? Only in rare cases; amongst the dwindling few; when "they" get around to them...

So, leftists want to ban firearms -- and you blame gun owners.

Some, "yes". Those who coddle up to power mongers in hopesof being the last to have theirs taken; are little more than boot licking sycophants who are every bit as dangerous as the tyrants they support. Where do you think they get their "stormtroopers" from?

Since you put it that way, I agree.

That's why it's important pointing out the danger to freedom. The rally in VA was important and got the leftist would-be totalitarians' attention.

Those sort of public showings need to happen nationwide.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Your future if they take your guns: the reality of owning a gun in The Netherlands, Europe.

As a legal and law-abiding Dutch gun owner, I thought I'd chime in and give you a realistic picture of what's in store for you if you one day lose this important political cause. Reddit is full of opinionated left-leaning Europeans who have never even touched a gun, so anything they say should be taken with a big grain of salt. It's a long read, but there's a lot to unpack here, and I promise you it's shockingly absurd enough to override any potentially short attention spans out there.

As an aside, let me point out something incredibly important that no-one ever seems to talk about when it comes to discussions of this nature: the psychology of gun control (and by extension) of self-defence. "Progressivism", almost by its very nature, is the embodiment of the slippery slope argument. Progressive generations rebel against what is considered the status quo, until they settle on something they personally consider reasonable. Sometime later, a new generation is born and grows up with the new progressive ideals being considered status quo, leading to a new wave of political rebellion that settles on yet a more progressive societal paradigm. The compromise between standing still and moving forward is always moving forward, even if only a little bit at a time. More on that later.

I've picked out a few of the more laughable or totalitarian-sounding things that are part and parcel of living in a country with strict gun control.

Joining a club

To own a gun, you must have been a member of a shooting sports club (pretty much a gun range that requires you to become a permanent member) for at least a year. During this year, you'll have to pass two club-internal "background checks" of sorts. The first one happens right after you sign up to join a club. A designated committee arranges a meeting with you, where you're seated opposite the committee and answer a lot of vague, personal questions. The meeting is aimed at determining if they consider you to be sound of mind and if they feel confident accepting your application to join the club.

The committee consists of people with no professional or otherwise relevant experience in psychology or social work. Any member of the committee may veto your membership application without having to explain their decision to you or their fellow committee members. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for discrimination on the basis of personal antipathy or prejudice with no accountability or transparency. The second meeting with the committee happens right after you apply for a private gun ownership permit (after your first year at the club is over), and is nearly identical in set-up and execution.

Government Background Checks

The first time you'll notice the truly totalitarian undertones of the whole gun control system is during your government-mandated background check, which follows if you successfully went through the aforementioned steps. The best example of this is the "e-screener": an online, fully automated psychometric test/questionnaire that the government charges a ridiculous $60 for. A few examples of questions (I'm not making this up):

"Do you always wash your hands before dinner?"

"Would you litter paper waste if there were no trash can nearby?"

"Do you have lots of friends?"

On the basis of your answers, the test passes a legally binding judgement. Remarkably, you may also fail the test by giving "too many socially acceptable answers", i.e. by being too well behaved. The common thread in the test is supposedly to test for impulse control, though it's obvious the test is an almost comical Orwellian masterpiece (make no mistake though: this ridiculous abomination can make or break your ambitions of becoming a firearm owner) whose diagnostic outcome depends purely on a subjective, government-approved template personality - and, of course, on political compliance.

One of the more sinister case-questions that stuck out to me was one where a scene was depicted in which you were going for a walk through a dark forest late at night with your wife. Your wife is then charged by a man with the intent to rape her. You carry a (legal) pocket knife on your person. What do you do? I'll get back to this question when I get to the psychology of societal restrictions on self-defence, and what that means to your country if you budge even a centimeter (or inch) when it comes to gun rights.

Spoiler: if you answered the above question with "I'd use my perfectly legal pocket knife to protect my wife against violent rape", you could have kissed your plans of owning a gun one day goodbye.

You've got your gun: now what?

In terms of storing your gun, you've got two options. One is to store it at your club, the other is to install a gun safe at home that must be approved by the National Police (equivalent of feds). The safe must be bolted into the floor and walls, or must weigh 200 kg (about 440 pounds). Ammo and guns must at all times be stored separately.

The police have the right to show up at your door unannounced to check if you're (still) storing your firearms and ammunition properly.

Say you've been at the gun range, and want to swing by your local supermarket to pick up some groceries on the way home. Or you want to pick up your kids at the in-laws. Congratulations, you just lost your firearms license. As per law, you are required to take the most direct route home when transporting your firearm. Stopping for gas is allowed only if you can prove it was absolutely necessary, and if you can prove it's en route to your home. In addition, during transport, your firearm and your ammunition needs to be separately stored at all times.

Screw the details: the psychology and sinister reality of vilifying self-defence.

You could spend all day picking apart the absurdities of the details, but the totalitarianism inherent in this whole thing extends far beyond guns, and IMO, is more important than squabbling about things such as gun safe requirements.

Sidenote: as everyone in this sub knows, once you subtract suicides and gang-related homicides (which we don't have in The Netherlands for reasons that are entirely cultural and societal, unrelated to gun control), you'll come to find that our homicides per capita aren't significantly lower than those in the US. In any case not enough to warrant the far-reaching gun control we have.

Either way, the psychology of firearm bans is a dangerous and insatiable one. Liberals in the US, who to their credit don't discredit mainstream science nearly as much as most republicans do unfortunately, turn out to be surprisingly unscientific when it comes to this discussion. Terms are made-up on the fly (assault weapons), statistics are ignored (i.e. the efficacy of firearms bans), the cultural component of the debate is avoided completely (i.e. the issue isn't guns, it's gang violence unique to a developed country such as the US).

The same is true with my friends here in The Netherlands. They recoil at the sight of a gun. I have friends who refuse to even touch one of my completely legal and unloaded guns, or who are visibly shocked if I pull one out of my safe in preparation of going to the range later that evening. I keep it to myself mostly.

Guns, and by extension weapons, are a symbol of masculinity, of violence, of aggression to them. These people inherently don't like them because they inherently don't like the feelings they associate with them.

And, as is to be expected, they will ban anything else that evokes similar feelings. Just look at the state of knife laws in the UK, or more specifically London. Turning to my country: here is a forum run by our National Police Corps where ordinary citizens can ask questions, and where qualified policemen can answer. The OP lays out a few situations in which physical violence is imminent, and asks in which situation he's allowed to use violence for self-defence (e.g., being surrounded by guys who are clearly about to use violence, or being grabbed by someone).

The answers are the stuff of horrors.

1. You have an obligation to try to flee first. Defending yourself while you also had the opportunity to flee will always be considered excessive violence in a trial.
   
   
2. If you really, really don't have any other options but to defend yourself, be prepared for a lengthy 2-year long lawsuit that will cost you your savings.
   
   
3. This one, as explained by the last post in that thread, is the worst one: hitting someone to defend yourself after they've assaulted you is not allowed, because it is not certain the assault will continue past the first punch (hitting them would be categorized as proactive violence, which is unacceptable). The only thing you're allowed to do in case you cannot flee, is to parry the punches (i.e., become a pro-boxer and parry potentially devastating punches). Anything beyond parrying is violence, and only a judge can evaluate whether you were justified in using it (see item 2.)

As you can see, violence has been abstracted away into a process that only makes sense on paper and in judicial terms. Imagine having to flee knowing your attacker might catch up to you (men who assault or rob people usually aren't overweight 70-year olds), because that's your duty as per Dutch law. Imagine having to accept the risk that the guy who's punching you might knock you out and stomp on your head - causing lifelong brain damage (we've had a slew of such incidents happen here) - because you're not allowed to neutralize your attacker - you're only allowed to keep on parrying until you find a chance to flee, or until your attacker just gives up.

In the case of a home invasion, your guns are useless. Ammo and firearms are stored separately, so you'd have to open up two safes, load everything up, and get to the scene in time. Not to mention that, by Dutch law, you are required to allow the home intruder to flee first (with your belongings) or else any defensive violence that you use to protect yourself and your family will be deemed potentially excessive (see item 2.)

As for the question on that e-screener test? The one about your wife getting assaulted by a rapist? Yeah, forget the pocket knife. You two have an obligation to flee the scene first. At most you can try to parry the attack, but that will of course quickly end up becoming a scuffle, at which point you better suit up for court. To successfully pass the test, grit your teeth, swallow your principles, bend over, and answer the way the government wants you to answer. They're not stupid. They know what lots of people are thinking. But that's not the point. The point is to drive home that you're under their thumb, and that you'll publicly declare what they want you to declare. Swallowing your principles is exactly the intended psychological effect.

Alienating people from their right to defend themselves is the most inalienable right of all. All other rights follow from this one intrinsic capacity of humans. Don't allow anyone to take your guns. Everything else will follow. By necessity.
​

This is the left's goal -- or rather, a waypoint towards the goal of a completely disarmed American citizenry. Criminalizing self-defense.

They don't care about gun crime committed by criminals. Never have, never will. You ask gun-control advocates how they plan to disarm criminals, and you get crickets in reply, or vague promises that boil down to "criminals will start obeying the law once THIS one is passed!"

Quite simply, they want law-abiding people helpless against leftist tyranny.

Oh, and a man who will not defend his wife against a rapist with any means at his disposal is no man at all.

This fails as a false comparison fallacy as well as a post hoc fallacy.

The United States is neither the Netherlands nor Europe; and that certain legislation might be passed in Europe doesn’t mean it will be passed in the United States.

The thread premise is just another example of the right’s dishonesty and demagoguery.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

This is a lie – no one is going to ‘take’ anyone’s guns.

 

[Vastator]

Your future if they take your guns: the reality of owning a gun in The Netherlands, Europe.

As a legal and law-abiding Dutch gun owner, I thought I'd chime in and give you a realistic picture of what's in store for you if you one day lose this important political cause. Reddit is full of opinionated left-leaning Europeans who have never even touched a gun, so anything they say should be taken with a big grain of salt. It's a long read, but there's a lot to unpack here, and I promise you it's shockingly absurd enough to override any potentially short attention spans out there.

As an aside, let me point out something incredibly important that no-one ever seems to talk about when it comes to discussions of this nature: the psychology of gun control (and by extension) of self-defence. "Progressivism", almost by its very nature, is the embodiment of the slippery slope argument. Progressive generations rebel against what is considered the status quo, until they settle on something they personally consider reasonable. Sometime later, a new generation is born and grows up with the new progressive ideals being considered status quo, leading to a new wave of political rebellion that settles on yet a more progressive societal paradigm. The compromise between standing still and moving forward is always moving forward, even if only a little bit at a time. More on that later.

I've picked out a few of the more laughable or totalitarian-sounding things that are part and parcel of living in a country with strict gun control.

Joining a club

To own a gun, you must have been a member of a shooting sports club (pretty much a gun range that requires you to become a permanent member) for at least a year. During this year, you'll have to pass two club-internal "background checks" of sorts. The first one happens right after you sign up to join a club. A designated committee arranges a meeting with you, where you're seated opposite the committee and answer a lot of vague, personal questions. The meeting is aimed at determining if they consider you to be sound of mind and if they feel confident accepting your application to join the club.

The committee consists of people with no professional or otherwise relevant experience in psychology or social work. Any member of the committee may veto your membership application without having to explain their decision to you or their fellow committee members. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for discrimination on the basis of personal antipathy or prejudice with no accountability or transparency. The second meeting with the committee happens right after you apply for a private gun ownership permit (after your first year at the club is over), and is nearly identical in set-up and execution.

Government Background Checks

The first time you'll notice the truly totalitarian undertones of the whole gun control system is during your government-mandated background check, which follows if you successfully went through the aforementioned steps. The best example of this is the "e-screener": an online, fully automated psychometric test/questionnaire that the government charges a ridiculous $60 for. A few examples of questions (I'm not making this up):

"Do you always wash your hands before dinner?"

"Would you litter paper waste if there were no trash can nearby?"

"Do you have lots of friends?"

On the basis of your answers, the test passes a legally binding judgement. Remarkably, you may also fail the test by giving "too many socially acceptable answers", i.e. by being too well behaved. The common thread in the test is supposedly to test for impulse control, though it's obvious the test is an almost comical Orwellian masterpiece (make no mistake though: this ridiculous abomination can make or break your ambitions of becoming a firearm owner) whose diagnostic outcome depends purely on a subjective, government-approved template personality - and, of course, on political compliance.

One of the more sinister case-questions that stuck out to me was one where a scene was depicted in which you were going for a walk through a dark forest late at night with your wife. Your wife is then charged by a man with the intent to rape her. You carry a (legal) pocket knife on your person. What do you do? I'll get back to this question when I get to the psychology of societal restrictions on self-defence, and what that means to your country if you budge even a centimeter (or inch) when it comes to gun rights.

Spoiler: if you answered the above question with "I'd use my perfectly legal pocket knife to protect my wife against violent rape", you could have kissed your plans of owning a gun one day goodbye.

You've got your gun: now what?

In terms of storing your gun, you've got two options. One is to store it at your club, the other is to install a gun safe at home that must be approved by the National Police (equivalent of feds). The safe must be bolted into the floor and walls, or must weigh 200 kg (about 440 pounds). Ammo and guns must at all times be stored separately.

The police have the right to show up at your door unannounced to check if you're (still) storing your firearms and ammunition properly.

Say you've been at the gun range, and want to swing by your local supermarket to pick up some groceries on the way home. Or you want to pick up your kids at the in-laws. Congratulations, you just lost your firearms license. As per law, you are required to take the most direct route home when transporting your firearm. Stopping for gas is allowed only if you can prove it was absolutely necessary, and if you can prove it's en route to your home. In addition, during transport, your firearm and your ammunition needs to be separately stored at all times.

Screw the details: the psychology and sinister reality of vilifying self-defence.

You could spend all day picking apart the absurdities of the details, but the totalitarianism inherent in this whole thing extends far beyond guns, and IMO, is more important than squabbling about things such as gun safe requirements.

Sidenote: as everyone in this sub knows, once you subtract suicides and gang-related homicides (which we don't have in The Netherlands for reasons that are entirely cultural and societal, unrelated to gun control), you'll come to find that our homicides per capita aren't significantly lower than those in the US. In any case not enough to warrant the far-reaching gun control we have.

Either way, the psychology of firearm bans is a dangerous and insatiable one. Liberals in the US, who to their credit don't discredit mainstream science nearly as much as most republicans do unfortunately, turn out to be surprisingly unscientific when it comes to this discussion. Terms are made-up on the fly (assault weapons), statistics are ignored (i.e. the efficacy of firearms bans), the cultural component of the debate is avoided completely (i.e. the issue isn't guns, it's gang violence unique to a developed country such as the US).

The same is true with my friends here in The Netherlands. They recoil at the sight of a gun. I have friends who refuse to even touch one of my completely legal and unloaded guns, or who are visibly shocked if I pull one out of my safe in preparation of going to the range later that evening. I keep it to myself mostly.

Guns, and by extension weapons, are a symbol of masculinity, of violence, of aggression to them. These people inherently don't like them because they inherently don't like the feelings they associate with them.

And, as is to be expected, they will ban anything else that evokes similar feelings. Just look at the state of knife laws in the UK, or more specifically London. Turning to my country: here is a forum run by our National Police Corps where ordinary citizens can ask questions, and where qualified policemen can answer. The OP lays out a few situations in which physical violence is imminent, and asks in which situation he's allowed to use violence for self-defence (e.g., being surrounded by guys who are clearly about to use violence, or being grabbed by someone).

The answers are the stuff of horrors.

1. You have an obligation to try to flee first. Defending yourself while you also had the opportunity to flee will always be considered excessive violence in a trial.
   
   
2. If you really, really don't have any other options but to defend yourself, be prepared for a lengthy 2-year long lawsuit that will cost you your savings.
   
   
3. This one, as explained by the last post in that thread, is the worst one: hitting someone to defend yourself after they've assaulted you is not allowed, because it is not certain the assault will continue past the first punch (hitting them would be categorized as proactive violence, which is unacceptable). The only thing you're allowed to do in case you cannot flee, is to parry the punches (i.e., become a pro-boxer and parry potentially devastating punches). Anything beyond parrying is violence, and only a judge can evaluate whether you were justified in using it (see item 2.)

As you can see, violence has been abstracted away into a process that only makes sense on paper and in judicial terms. Imagine having to flee knowing your attacker might catch up to you (men who assault or rob people usually aren't overweight 70-year olds), because that's your duty as per Dutch law. Imagine having to accept the risk that the guy who's punching you might knock you out and stomp on your head - causing lifelong brain damage (we've had a slew of such incidents happen here) - because you're not allowed to neutralize your attacker - you're only allowed to keep on parrying until you find a chance to flee, or until your attacker just gives up.

In the case of a home invasion, your guns are useless. Ammo and firearms are stored separately, so you'd have to open up two safes, load everything up, and get to the scene in time. Not to mention that, by Dutch law, you are required to allow the home intruder to flee first (with your belongings) or else any defensive violence that you use to protect yourself and your family will be deemed potentially excessive (see item 2.)

As for the question on that e-screener test? The one about your wife getting assaulted by a rapist? Yeah, forget the pocket knife. You two have an obligation to flee the scene first. At most you can try to parry the attack, but that will of course quickly end up becoming a scuffle, at which point you better suit up for court. To successfully pass the test, grit your teeth, swallow your principles, bend over, and answer the way the government wants you to answer. They're not stupid. They know what lots of people are thinking. But that's not the point. The point is to drive home that you're under their thumb, and that you'll publicly declare what they want you to declare. Swallowing your principles is exactly the intended psychological effect.

Alienating people from their right to defend themselves is the most inalienable right of all. All other rights follow from this one intrinsic capacity of humans. Don't allow anyone to take your guns. Everything else will follow. By necessity.
​

This is the left's goal -- or rather, a waypoint towards the goal of a completely disarmed American citizenry. Criminalizing self-defense.

They don't care about gun crime committed by criminals. Never have, never will. You ask gun-control advocates how they plan to disarm criminals, and you get crickets in reply, or vague promises that boil down to "criminals will start obeying the law once THIS one is passed!"

Quite simply, they want law-abiding people helpless against leftist tyranny.

Oh, and a man who will not defend his wife against a rapist with any means at his disposal is no man at all.

This fails as a false comparison fallacy as well as a post hoc fallacy.

The United States is neither the Netherlands nor Europe; and that certain legislation might be passed in Europe doesn’t mean it will be passed in the United States.

The thread premise is just another example of the right’s dishonesty and demagoguery.

And your post is nothing more than fear driven obfuscation, in the face of fact driven, historically, fact driven relativism.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

ah. election times. same old shit

True.

The same idiotic lies from the right.

 

[Vastator]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

This is a lie – no one is going to ‘take’ anyone’s guns.

People are already taking others guns. And have been. Where the fuck have you been?

 

[daveman]

Your future if they take your guns: the reality of owning a gun in The Netherlands, Europe.

As a legal and law-abiding Dutch gun owner, I thought I'd chime in and give you a realistic picture of what's in store for you if you one day lose this important political cause. Reddit is full of opinionated left-leaning Europeans who have never even touched a gun, so anything they say should be taken with a big grain of salt. It's a long read, but there's a lot to unpack here, and I promise you it's shockingly absurd enough to override any potentially short attention spans out there.

As an aside, let me point out something incredibly important that no-one ever seems to talk about when it comes to discussions of this nature: the psychology of gun control (and by extension) of self-defence. "Progressivism", almost by its very nature, is the embodiment of the slippery slope argument. Progressive generations rebel against what is considered the status quo, until they settle on something they personally consider reasonable. Sometime later, a new generation is born and grows up with the new progressive ideals being considered status quo, leading to a new wave of political rebellion that settles on yet a more progressive societal paradigm. The compromise between standing still and moving forward is always moving forward, even if only a little bit at a time. More on that later.

I've picked out a few of the more laughable or totalitarian-sounding things that are part and parcel of living in a country with strict gun control.

Joining a club

To own a gun, you must have been a member of a shooting sports club (pretty much a gun range that requires you to become a permanent member) for at least a year. During this year, you'll have to pass two club-internal "background checks" of sorts. The first one happens right after you sign up to join a club. A designated committee arranges a meeting with you, where you're seated opposite the committee and answer a lot of vague, personal questions. The meeting is aimed at determining if they consider you to be sound of mind and if they feel confident accepting your application to join the club.

The committee consists of people with no professional or otherwise relevant experience in psychology or social work. Any member of the committee may veto your membership application without having to explain their decision to you or their fellow committee members. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for discrimination on the basis of personal antipathy or prejudice with no accountability or transparency. The second meeting with the committee happens right after you apply for a private gun ownership permit (after your first year at the club is over), and is nearly identical in set-up and execution.

Government Background Checks

The first time you'll notice the truly totalitarian undertones of the whole gun control system is during your government-mandated background check, which follows if you successfully went through the aforementioned steps. The best example of this is the "e-screener": an online, fully automated psychometric test/questionnaire that the government charges a ridiculous $60 for. A few examples of questions (I'm not making this up):

"Do you always wash your hands before dinner?"

"Would you litter paper waste if there were no trash can nearby?"

"Do you have lots of friends?"

On the basis of your answers, the test passes a legally binding judgement. Remarkably, you may also fail the test by giving "too many socially acceptable answers", i.e. by being too well behaved. The common thread in the test is supposedly to test for impulse control, though it's obvious the test is an almost comical Orwellian masterpiece (make no mistake though: this ridiculous abomination can make or break your ambitions of becoming a firearm owner) whose diagnostic outcome depends purely on a subjective, government-approved template personality - and, of course, on political compliance.

One of the more sinister case-questions that stuck out to me was one where a scene was depicted in which you were going for a walk through a dark forest late at night with your wife. Your wife is then charged by a man with the intent to rape her. You carry a (legal) pocket knife on your person. What do you do? I'll get back to this question when I get to the psychology of societal restrictions on self-defence, and what that means to your country if you budge even a centimeter (or inch) when it comes to gun rights.

Spoiler: if you answered the above question with "I'd use my perfectly legal pocket knife to protect my wife against violent rape", you could have kissed your plans of owning a gun one day goodbye.

You've got your gun: now what?

In terms of storing your gun, you've got two options. One is to store it at your club, the other is to install a gun safe at home that must be approved by the National Police (equivalent of feds). The safe must be bolted into the floor and walls, or must weigh 200 kg (about 440 pounds). Ammo and guns must at all times be stored separately.

The police have the right to show up at your door unannounced to check if you're (still) storing your firearms and ammunition properly.

Say you've been at the gun range, and want to swing by your local supermarket to pick up some groceries on the way home. Or you want to pick up your kids at the in-laws. Congratulations, you just lost your firearms license. As per law, you are required to take the most direct route home when transporting your firearm. Stopping for gas is allowed only if you can prove it was absolutely necessary, and if you can prove it's en route to your home. In addition, during transport, your firearm and your ammunition needs to be separately stored at all times.

Screw the details: the psychology and sinister reality of vilifying self-defence.

You could spend all day picking apart the absurdities of the details, but the totalitarianism inherent in this whole thing extends far beyond guns, and IMO, is more important than squabbling about things such as gun safe requirements.

Sidenote: as everyone in this sub knows, once you subtract suicides and gang-related homicides (which we don't have in The Netherlands for reasons that are entirely cultural and societal, unrelated to gun control), you'll come to find that our homicides per capita aren't significantly lower than those in the US. In any case not enough to warrant the far-reaching gun control we have.

Either way, the psychology of firearm bans is a dangerous and insatiable one. Liberals in the US, who to their credit don't discredit mainstream science nearly as much as most republicans do unfortunately, turn out to be surprisingly unscientific when it comes to this discussion. Terms are made-up on the fly (assault weapons), statistics are ignored (i.e. the efficacy of firearms bans), the cultural component of the debate is avoided completely (i.e. the issue isn't guns, it's gang violence unique to a developed country such as the US).

The same is true with my friends here in The Netherlands. They recoil at the sight of a gun. I have friends who refuse to even touch one of my completely legal and unloaded guns, or who are visibly shocked if I pull one out of my safe in preparation of going to the range later that evening. I keep it to myself mostly.

Guns, and by extension weapons, are a symbol of masculinity, of violence, of aggression to them. These people inherently don't like them because they inherently don't like the feelings they associate with them.

And, as is to be expected, they will ban anything else that evokes similar feelings. Just look at the state of knife laws in the UK, or more specifically London. Turning to my country: here is a forum run by our National Police Corps where ordinary citizens can ask questions, and where qualified policemen can answer. The OP lays out a few situations in which physical violence is imminent, and asks in which situation he's allowed to use violence for self-defence (e.g., being surrounded by guys who are clearly about to use violence, or being grabbed by someone).

The answers are the stuff of horrors.

1. You have an obligation to try to flee first. Defending yourself while you also had the opportunity to flee will always be considered excessive violence in a trial.
   
   
2. If you really, really don't have any other options but to defend yourself, be prepared for a lengthy 2-year long lawsuit that will cost you your savings.
   
   
3. This one, as explained by the last post in that thread, is the worst one: hitting someone to defend yourself after they've assaulted you is not allowed, because it is not certain the assault will continue past the first punch (hitting them would be categorized as proactive violence, which is unacceptable). The only thing you're allowed to do in case you cannot flee, is to parry the punches (i.e., become a pro-boxer and parry potentially devastating punches). Anything beyond parrying is violence, and only a judge can evaluate whether you were justified in using it (see item 2.)

As you can see, violence has been abstracted away into a process that only makes sense on paper and in judicial terms. Imagine having to flee knowing your attacker might catch up to you (men who assault or rob people usually aren't overweight 70-year olds), because that's your duty as per Dutch law. Imagine having to accept the risk that the guy who's punching you might knock you out and stomp on your head - causing lifelong brain damage (we've had a slew of such incidents happen here) - because you're not allowed to neutralize your attacker - you're only allowed to keep on parrying until you find a chance to flee, or until your attacker just gives up.

In the case of a home invasion, your guns are useless. Ammo and firearms are stored separately, so you'd have to open up two safes, load everything up, and get to the scene in time. Not to mention that, by Dutch law, you are required to allow the home intruder to flee first (with your belongings) or else any defensive violence that you use to protect yourself and your family will be deemed potentially excessive (see item 2.)

As for the question on that e-screener test? The one about your wife getting assaulted by a rapist? Yeah, forget the pocket knife. You two have an obligation to flee the scene first. At most you can try to parry the attack, but that will of course quickly end up becoming a scuffle, at which point you better suit up for court. To successfully pass the test, grit your teeth, swallow your principles, bend over, and answer the way the government wants you to answer. They're not stupid. They know what lots of people are thinking. But that's not the point. The point is to drive home that you're under their thumb, and that you'll publicly declare what they want you to declare. Swallowing your principles is exactly the intended psychological effect.

Alienating people from their right to defend themselves is the most inalienable right of all. All other rights follow from this one intrinsic capacity of humans. Don't allow anyone to take your guns. Everything else will follow. By necessity.
​

This is the left's goal -- or rather, a waypoint towards the goal of a completely disarmed American citizenry. Criminalizing self-defense.

They don't care about gun crime committed by criminals. Never have, never will. You ask gun-control advocates how they plan to disarm criminals, and you get crickets in reply, or vague promises that boil down to "criminals will start obeying the law once THIS one is passed!"

Quite simply, they want law-abiding people helpless against leftist tyranny.

Oh, and a man who will not defend his wife against a rapist with any means at his disposal is no man at all.

This fails as a false comparison fallacy as well as a post hoc fallacy.

The United States is neither the Netherlands nor Europe; and that certain legislation might be passed in Europe doesn’t mean it will be passed in the United States.

The thread premise is just another example of the right’s dishonesty and demagoguery.

So we'll just put you down as pretending NUH UH is a rational rebuttal.

 

[harmonica]

Netherlands murder rate is 5 times lower than the US
US violent crime rate 23 times MORE than the Netherlands
Netherlands vs United States: Crime Facts and Stats

 

[Vastator]

Netherlands murder rate is 5 times lower than the US

What is their diversity rate?

 

[Polishprince]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

This is a lie – no one is going to ‘take’ anyone’s guns.

They aren't going to do it tomorrow, maybe not the day after that.

But it is the goal of the left, and they've done it in other liberal countries.

 

[harmonica]

Netherlands murder rate is 5 times lower than the US

What is their diversity rate?

diversity is not an indicator
......Chicago is in the same country as St Louis, Mo--comparable diversity....very pro-gun StL has a much higher murder rate.....NYC and LA same country as StL...NYC a very, very much lower murder rate than StL....LA has a much lower murder rate

 

[Vastator]

Netherlands murder rate is 5 times lower than the US

What is their diversity rate?

diversity is not an indicator
......Chicago is in the same country as St Louis, Mo--comparable diversity....very pro-gun StL has a much higher murder rate.....NYC and LA same country as StL...NYC a very, very much lower murder rate than StL....LA has a much lower murder rate

How cute... You still under the impression that so diverse a nation as ours can assume parity ,city,to city; when compared to a nation smaller than many of our states..? How cute...

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Hey buddy one election and look at what was once a pro-gun Virginia
1 election and within 2 months it went to California of the east.
All it takes it democrats winning elections either Federal or statewide.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Did not you hear about the gun confiscation by Obama? Man there are warehouses full of air all over.
I love the panicked outrage of gun confiscation idiots. If any kind of law is made it will be for military style weapons of which no one needs for legal hunting or target practice.

As I recall, the 2A doesn't permit the government to decide the question of need, nor are hunting and target practice considered.

You are correct but!!! There is a possibility that military style weapons, fully automatic like the illegal Thompson 45 auto, could be made illegal.

The NFA According to shall not be infringed is illegal
And according to U.S. vs Miller Military-style weapons are most assuredly is protected by the second amendment.

 

[daveman]

Guns will not be taken in this lifetime.

Oh, not all at once. It's done incrementally. An AWB ban here, a magazine size limit there...it all adds up.

And leftists are working for it, there can be no doubt.

This is a lie – no one is going to ‘take’ anyone’s guns.

That itself is a lie.

Over a Third of Democrats Would Repeal Second Amendment

Dem congressman: Force gun owners to get rid of assault weapons

Beto O'Rourke: 'Hell, yes, we're going to take your AR-15, your AK-47'

If all you're going to do is lie, I suggest you shut the fuck up.

 

[harmonica]

Netherlands murder rate is 5 times lower than the US

What is their diversity rate?

GODAMN people--take away black murders and the US rate is still many times higher