V17

Actually no. Self-defense + concealed carry is allowed in Baltic states as well and home defense (=no concealed carry) is also allowed in Italy and Austria.

It’s just guns for self-defense, isn’t a thing.

Not really, it is a thing in Switzerland and Czechia for example.

And even outside of that, not every country has laws as strict as Germany or UK.

Czechia: To get a gun for self-defense, you need to get a permit, which includes mandatory training, tests and a psychological evaluation (which, from what I’ve heard, is not hard to get). You need to have a clean criminal record and they check your misdemeanors too (you may not be allowed to get a permit if you’ve had issues with public drunkenness for example). However, after that you can not only buy a gun but also are automatically allowed to concealed carry.

There are several types of permits and getting a permit for sports or hunting is slightly easier. You need to be 21 years old to get a self-defense permit, you can get a hunting or sports permit when you’re 18 or in special situations (used under supervision) when you’re 15. The permits last 10 years, but you can lose them if you get a criminal record. The gun permit registry is managed by the state police, so it’s easy for them to check the validity of your license if they need to do so.

Gun violence is very rare, so I’m happy with this and see no reason to change it. The people that I know who have a permit (it’s quite uncommon) are very responsible with it.

There are restrictions on which weapons a civilian can buy. No automatic weapons for sure, but I think you can get some semi-automatic guns with a suppressor (cause I’ve heard a guy recommending one such gun with sub-sonic ammo for potential home-defense, stating “if I really have to use it, there’s no reason why my family should go deaf in the process”, heh).

Imo it’s the latter. It didn’t start that way, but in the last decade they gradually shifted to being simply inflammatory on purpose because that brings clicks, and on top of that they regularly did dumb shit like complain about sexualization and male gaze one week (often, though not always, legitimately, but mostly it was literally just complaining without any further insight, which I personally don’t care bout) and next week publish an article with photos of top male bulges in some sport that, apart from the gender being swapped, was literally worse than what they complained about with regards to sexualizing women.

Personally I say good riddance, but I’m biased by a deep dislike for people who use identity politics to create divisive clickbait.

You severely underestimate the support for Israel outside of your bubble.

They can use special ops.

If they could, they would have already done so.

They can appeal to the Palestinian people.

They’re doing that as well, but thinking that this would solve the situation is LOL, LMAO even.

They can revise their foreign policy to not set these situations up in the first place (see the previous 20 years of Israeli policy towards Palestine).

I see we’re getting back to “well they should have done xxxx”. Israel stopped the occupation of Gaza and let them have free elections to govern themselves. As a result Hamas with a stated goal of destroying Israel won and started doing terrorists attacks on towns around Gaza. So Israel built a wall. So maybe Palestinians can revisit their foreign policy towards Israel (see the previous 20 years of Palestinian policy towards Israel).

They arent’ targeting Hamas, they are targeting any Palestinian with a pulse.

Again, if they did that, they would have been levelling Gaza to the ground without risk to their soldiers, they have the resources to do so. They announced in advance that they will do an assault on northern Gaza to give civilians the chance to leave and go south for now, and even if they initially gave them ridiculously short 24 hours, the actual time given was days longer than that. Only, a large part of the civilians were prevented from doing so… Not by the IDF, but by Hamas, wanting to use them as human shields as usual.

Right now, you are acting as an apologist for a genocide and you should seriously reconsider your position. It will not age well.

Right now, you are acting as an apologist for a monstrous terrorist attack and you should seriously reconsider your position. It will not age well.

If Israel actually commits genocide, I will change my position. So far that does not seem to be the case.

Israel is a powerful nation with all the options they can imagine on the table. If they can’t imagine another option then that’s on them.

You say that, but I don’t see any other way to remove the Hamas threat than what they’re doing. Is your argument just “Israel is all-powerful and they should find a different way even if we don’t see any!”?

are you making the argument that the correct response to a terrorist attack is to genocide the people where the terrorists are based?

What? I’m mentioning Grozny. Have you heard about Grozny? If you haven’t, maybe I understand how you could interpret my message in that way, though I still don’t think it makes sense. In the second Chechen war, this is what Grozny looked like after Russia was finished with it, most likely on false pretenses (putin faking appartment bombings around Russia and blaming it on Chechens). They simply turned it to rubble.

Israel could do this and get away with it just like Russia did, and their reasons for attacking Hamas are more serious than reasons Russians had to attack Chechnya. Instead of doing that they chose to do a ground invasion, which will reduce the loss of civilian lives and infrastructure, despite the fact that it will dramatically increase the casualties on Israeli side.

That is not genocide, that is deciding to avoid genocide in a situation where they could likely get away with it.

I’m not sure what else they’re supposed to do. After a terrorist attack like this one, I don’t really see any other option that would realistically be accepted by the government and the population other than attempting to wipe out Hamas completely. Israel is risking many lives of Israeli soldiers in order to reduce Palestinian civilian casualties by deciding to do a terribly difficult ground invasion instead of levelling Gaza to rubble, Grozny style. I don’t blame them for trying to make the situation at least a bit easier by blocking communication of all things.

We’re again talking about what should have been done, and my point is that it’s a pointless exercise, but if you really can’t see any ways to build a functioning economy with literally billions of free money, then let’s continue the exercise: about half of Palestinians used to have permits to work in Israel before Hamas fucked them over by attacking Israel. In the recent years the number of Israeli work permits has been increasing again, unfortunately Hamas decided to fuck them over again. So even if they had a small economy of their own, there was a way to work and bring money to then spend in Gaza.

But I find it really hard to believe you couldn’t imagine a dozen things more useful for Gazans than things to wage war against Israel that ultimately only ever made their situation worse.

Another episode of “what should have been done” is that while with humanitarian aid it’s not really possible, we never should have sent Gaza any development money without any conditions based on outcomes of their usage. But as with the above, what’s done is done.

And Hamas could have built Gazans an OK place to live in if they used the literally billions of dollars of foreign money for investments instead of for weapons and tunnels. Didn’t happen either.

In my experience from lurking around Lemmy, it seems that the big instances are largely populated by stereotypically “reddit-left” people, which includes finding a lot of things offensive (whether they’re actually offended or not) and being relatively hostile to people who don’t seem to share their worldview, seemingly considering it the default that everyone should know and accept. You can see it in this thread as well.

Not being an American and being culturally outside of american partisanship, this has been quite the disappointment for me, but what can you do.