The Best Defence Is A Gun-Toting American Survivalist Offence

Gun rights advocates known as “survivalists” epitomize this American mixture optimism and paranoia. These are people who are preparing for the end of the world.

The "paranoia" evident in the US survivalist community also manifests as a deep mistrust of all things 'government'. In extreme cases this mistrust develops into outright hostility and, as was shown by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, can lead to acts of anarchistic terrorism.

Please explain the self confidence reference. How are Americans more self confident and why is this relevant in this issue? If self confidence is higher amongst Americans it is, it seems to me, due to many Americans complete ignorance about the rest of the world, believing the people from every other country, including people from other developed countries where the average standard on living is higher than the average American's, are clamouring to get to America. This produces an unwarranted belief that the U.S. is far and away the country of choice for other nationalities. However, most people from other developed countries would prefer the own toile in a country without the huge social problems that American had but is not dealing with.

I am not a survivalist, and have never owned a gun. But you need to be wearing heavily rose-tinted glasses not to see some sort of "apocalypse" in America's future.

As for the last lines, "If there is a disaster every Australian already has enough beer in the fridge. If disaster strikes, we can drink until the government gets a handle on it"...

a) I don't drink (God! How un-Australian!) and

b) you may be overly optimistic about the level of trust the average citizen has in the government.

The armed-to-the-teeth, racist, religious right,  Republican (R4),  American gun-nuts might have sensible second thoughts if they replaced  “hypothetical self-defence” with  “avoidance of death”.

Thus sensible  analysis reveals that the “annual empirical probability of an American  dying preventably from preventable causes from homicide to smoking” (P = 1 in 207) is about 500,000 times greater   than the “empirical annual probability of an American being killed by a terrorist attack in the US ” (P = 1 in 100 million) (see Gideon Polya, “One Percenter Greed & War Means Over 1.5 Million Americans Die Preventably Each Year”,  Countercurrents, 19 September, 2014: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya190914.htm ).

With respect to the  1.5 million Americans who die preventably each year, the breakdown and annual P values ( “empirical annual probability of death”) are  as follows (note gun, homicide and suicide overlaps):

1.  443,000 Americans die from smoking-related causes annually  (P = 443,000 /319,000,000 = 1.39 in 1,000 = 1 in 719) with roughly 1 in 5 of all deaths and 49,000 or about 10% dying from passive smoking (P = 1 in 6,494).

2. 440,000 Americans die from adverse events in hospitals each year (P = 1 in 725).

3. 300,000 Americans die from obesity-related causes annually (P = 1 in 1,063) .

4. 75,000 American alcohol-related deaths annually (P= 1 in 4,253) .

5. 70,000 Americans die annually from air pollution (e.g. from coal burning, vehicle exhaust, carbon burning in general) (P= 1 in 4,557).

6. 45,000 US deaths annually  from lack of medical insurance (P= 1 in 7,089).

7. 38,000 US drug-related deaths annually (P= 1 in 8,395) , this including  21,000 US opiate drug-related deaths annually from US restoration and protection of the Taliban-destroyed Afghan opium industry (P= 1 in 15,190)  .

8. 33,000Americans killed by motor vehicles each year (P= 1 in 9,667).

9. 31,000 gun-related US deaths annually (P= 1 in 10,290).

10. 30,000 Americans suicide annually (P= 1 in 10,633) with 7,000 being US veterans (P= 1 in 45,571).

11. 21,000 avoidable under-5 year old US infant deaths annually (P= 1 in 15,190).

12. 15,000 Americans are violently murdered annually (P= 1 in 21,267) but as this list shows, about 1.5 million Americans are passively murdered each year by One Percenter-subverted politician inaction and fiscal perversion  (P= 1 in 207  ).

I've been inside the house when a burglary has been taking place at least twice.  Both times, the burglars stole car keys (once my father's, once mine) and then used those to take the car they operated.  Both times, the first anyone knew of it was when the sound of the car starting up (or the garage door opening) alerted us to the fact.  

The first such incident happened in my parents' house.  In order to pinch my father's car keys, the thieves had to go into my parents' bedroom.  If there'd been a gun in the house, it probably would have been stored there.  So the burglars would have, in all likelihood, been armed and equipped with my father's car keys as well.  That particular burglary wasn't even the first one where the thieves had gone straight to the master bedroom, either - about five years before, another bunch had come in the same way as this bunch had (over our back fence, which backed onto a railway reserve, and through the laundry door) and stolen my mother's purse from the master bedroom.

As a result of this, I find myself sceptical of the notion that gun ownership will keep a household safe from burglary.  What worked far more effectively for my family as a burglary prevention device, in retrospect, was the one-dollar bolt installed on the inside of the interior door of the laundry, ensuring that anyone who could get into the laundry couldn't get any further into the house (we'd installed that years before, as a way of giving one of our neighbours access to the laundry to feed and water our pet cat while we were on holiday.  As Mum pointed out, anyone who was capable of nicking the appliances (washing machine, dryer, chest freezer) was probably also capable of taking the interior door off its hinges and getting into the rest of the house anyway).

Besides, a "disaster" in Australian terms tends to be a cyclone, a flood, a bushfire, a storm or a combination of the above; it usually comes prefixed with the term "natural".  Our culture doesn't tend toward the same level of toxic individualism that the culture of the USA extends to, because we have these regular scheduled natural disasters coming through, and reinforcing to people we're a lot better off working together (regardless of our differences) than we are going our separate ways.  Cyclones, floods, bushfires and storms don't care about your race, your religion, your skin colour, your income, or the number of guns you own - they're going to leave you without somewhere to live regardless.

"If you're paranoid, you can never have enough guns" - John Douglas.

(For those who aren't aware, Mr Douglas was one of the FBI's first full-time psychological profilers of criminals, particularly serial killers, stalkers, mass murderers, bombers, and assassin types).