> I'm interested that you don't see this as an issue mostly with police response time.
I think this marks some confusion over exactly what constitutes 'rural'. The UK certainly has rural settings in terms of town size, small access roads, culture, etc. But having spent time in both, the UK just doesn't have anything like the US in terms of distance.
Salmon, Idaho is several hours from... anything, really. You could go from Inverness to Glasgow in about the time it takes to get to an actual city. It's down in a canyon, so there's no FM radio, much less cell phone service. The police force is eight people, with a guarantee that at least one will be on duty 24 hours a day.
If that one officer gets a call about an issue, he might well have a 20 minute drive - speeding, on empty roads - to the farm where there's a problem. And Salmon is the county seat. There are much smaller towns and farm communities out there. This isn't a problem you can realistically solve with better policing or more money, because things legitimately are that far apart.
---
Someone in my extended family spends winters snowed in - some years there's simply no access in or out of a 'town of 50 people for ~4 months straight. He keeps a rifle handy to shoot coyotes that come for his livestock. Are we really going to go with "he should wait for a police response, or insurance compensation"?
A friend of mine, with an exceedingly liberal family, grew up with a high-powered rifle at home, the sort of thing people regularly try to ban. For fear that in his town of six people, there was no other way to deal with a bear or moose that got aggressive.
A friend of a friend is disabled and chronically unemployed in the rural midwest. Hunted meat makes up a nontrivial percentage of his diet, because ammo is cheaper than food. This being America, saying "take away his gun but give him lifelong welfare" isn't going to work, and he'd hate you for it anyway - he's proud that he feeds himself just fine.
I'm not trying to be snarky here. In very rural America, this is the situation for a lot of people. These are people who don't live near any gun crime, but own and use guns for everyday purposes. It has more in common with northern Canada than any place in England or western Europe.
This is a concept that seems often overlooked. In rural parts of the country (US) a gun is simply another dangerous tool that gets a specific job done. Much like a beam saw.
I would say those situations fall under "practical purposes", and are not based in unreasonably fear, like a lot of other gun purchases.
And there is a hell of a lot of difference between living in the (very) rural countryside, and living in a city.
I fully admit that my perspective is influenced by living in small country with relatively short distances between towns and cities (hell, it's even impossible to get more than 50km from the sea, anywhere in the entire country). But I honestly still think my reasoning stands up.
Yeah - any time someone presents an absolute in a debate about gun control, they've probably gone very wrong. America is just too damn big for any one narrative to be universal, and I say that in full awareness that it applies to my example also; the bulk of gun ownership isn't about that story.
My objection, then, is that I have approximately zero faith in the people making these rules to recognize that. If a gun law is written, it will with near-perfect reliability be written by people who know little or nothing about guns, designed for comfortably suburban settings, and passed out of fear of urban violence.
So... I don't know that we disagree so much. I can support more gun regulation in theory, but almost always oppose it in practice because the things that get written are high-impact on practical use, yet totally ineffective at their goals.
I think this marks some confusion over exactly what constitutes 'rural'. The UK certainly has rural settings in terms of town size, small access roads, culture, etc. But having spent time in both, the UK just doesn't have anything like the US in terms of distance.
Salmon, Idaho is several hours from... anything, really. You could go from Inverness to Glasgow in about the time it takes to get to an actual city. It's down in a canyon, so there's no FM radio, much less cell phone service. The police force is eight people, with a guarantee that at least one will be on duty 24 hours a day.
If that one officer gets a call about an issue, he might well have a 20 minute drive - speeding, on empty roads - to the farm where there's a problem. And Salmon is the county seat. There are much smaller towns and farm communities out there. This isn't a problem you can realistically solve with better policing or more money, because things legitimately are that far apart.
---
Someone in my extended family spends winters snowed in - some years there's simply no access in or out of a 'town of 50 people for ~4 months straight. He keeps a rifle handy to shoot coyotes that come for his livestock. Are we really going to go with "he should wait for a police response, or insurance compensation"?
A friend of mine, with an exceedingly liberal family, grew up with a high-powered rifle at home, the sort of thing people regularly try to ban. For fear that in his town of six people, there was no other way to deal with a bear or moose that got aggressive.
A friend of a friend is disabled and chronically unemployed in the rural midwest. Hunted meat makes up a nontrivial percentage of his diet, because ammo is cheaper than food. This being America, saying "take away his gun but give him lifelong welfare" isn't going to work, and he'd hate you for it anyway - he's proud that he feeds himself just fine.
I'm not trying to be snarky here. In very rural America, this is the situation for a lot of people. These are people who don't live near any gun crime, but own and use guns for everyday purposes. It has more in common with northern Canada than any place in England or western Europe.