Reddit mentions of The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

His book The Better Angels of Our Nature changed my life, and my entire outlook on the world. I've given away 4-5 copies since then, and I encourage everyone to read it. I also loved The Blank Slate. About to start his new book, Enlightenment Now.

Citation provided.

Never. Violence has been observed in every human society throughout history, and the few societies still extant that live in hunter-gatherer conditions tend to be more violent than modern societies.

To turn you question on its head: we actually probably live in the safest period ever for avoiding humanity's violence against other one another. There's a really excellent book about this phenomenon: The Better Angels of Our Nature by Stephen Pinker.

The idea that before government and civilization, humanity lived in peace and harmony (Rousseau's "state of nature") is appealing, but is several eras out of date and is out step with what we now know about prehistoric history and observable primitive societies.

What helps for me is understanding why they believe what they believe. In most (but not all) cases, the religious are as much victim as perpetrator, and that's the nature of how religion as a system works.

Before I go further, I'd like to recommend a couple of books. I don't know about you, but I'm not an avid non-fiction reader so take it as granted that these books aren't your average dull non-fiction. I would recommend at least checking them out.

The first book has the benefit of being available freely online, as the retired professor that wrote it wanted it to be generally accessible. The book is "The Authoritarians" and it is possibly one of the best books for understanding a lot of the most frustrating aspects of religious behavior. If you are like me, you'll particularly enjoy his role-playing simulations of world leaders that mix authoritarian and non-authoritarian people to different degrees. There's a whole lot of parallels we can draw from those results to what is happening in the world today. Professor Altemeyer purposefully has made the book easy to read for non-psychologists, and it's not a long read.

The second book is a bit heftier but I think is valuable for putting things in perspective as it deals extensively with historical trends and I think helps people like me be hopeful for our future. The book is "Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined". The author Steven Pinker doesn't pull punches regarding religion, but he does show very convincingly that a lot of what atheists typically blame on religion in terms of violence actually rests on human nature itself. He also convincingly shows that things are so very much better than the used to be. Most of us have no idea just how horrifyingly callous the past was, and this understanding of human progression often takes a bit of the edge off the rage I do feel about modern trends. Things could be so much worse, and they were.

With that out of the way, I think it's also useful to understand how humans learn. There are multiple models for human learning, but many people that deal with this agree that the Bayesian model of learning is a large component. In the Bayesian model people evaluate new information based on how well it conforms to previously accepted information. In the Bayesian nomenclature, these previously accepted pieces of information are called "priors". Things that agree with priors are more likely to be accepted and things that contradict priors are more likely to be rejected. The upshot being that all humans are innately biased to believe things that confirm what they think they know, and disbelieve things that contradict what they know. Understanding the nature of evaluating your assumptions is in fact a large part of the training that underscores experimental research and it's necessary because of that Bayesian bias.

Where this is relevant to religion is in childhood indoctrination. Children have no priors. Thus children usually acquire their "base" priors from trusted caregivers. Often people notice that children will accept absurd claims uncritically, and we tend to think of this as gullibility. However that's not quite correct in the sense that we use the term with adults. An adult should have a world view that does recognize and reject absurd claims, however a child literally cannot know better as they have no understanding of what makes a claim absurd or not.

Thus children indoctrinated into a religion can have their entire system for accepting claims corrupted by religious systems that ensures that they will reject claims that contradict those faulty religious ones. Obviously efficacy in indoctrination depends on both the environment around that indoctrination and the individual in question, but most people that are very religious are that way because they were trained from the very start of their ability to reason to reason poorly.

Because I know this, I don't typically feel religious people I debate with are stupid, even if what they are arguing seems ridiculously stupid. I understand that they have had their ability to reason sabotaged, and that doesn't effect any innate intelligence they may have, but rather forces that intelligence to work against itself.

I still think religion is a horrible thing, and I still think many religious people should be thwarted from many religiously motivated actions that will cause harm, but I usually don't think they're a pack of morons bent on evil (even if it seems that they are acting that way). There are exceptions of course, and there are some evil motherfuckers out there that know they are evil and cover that evil with a thin veneer of religiousness to appear legitimate, but they tend to be a minority.

Man, you've called me ignorant a few times now. I've got the statisticians on my side, at least.

That's correct. I'm reading an anthropology book about violence.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

It talks about this, only it refers to something it dubs 'the leviathan'–which is a third party of authority (i.e., the police and the government)–and how poor communities that do not trust 'the leviathan' to resolve their issues are forced to resort to 'street justice'. And, at that point, if 'street justice' isn't respected, what's left?

'Disrespecting' someone is taken as a direct affront and a challenge.

Police racism has been a pretty major part of American culture, and it's only been addressed relatively recently. So, you have a couple generations of black adults who grew up accustomed to a lifestyle where the police aren't trustworthy and are probably racist. It's not hard to see how this kind of thing can happen.

Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of our Nature writes in great detail how the world keeps getting more and more peaceful since the enlightenment.

see: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

I don't think it's real, but Steven Pinker has written two books with basically the same message:

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Enlightenment Now

I guess the bar I'm setting for not being awful is a fair bit lower. E.g. I think most people, at least in modern society, won't kill (or torture or rip off) someone just because they could probably get away with it.

Then again, I don't discount the effect of having accountability via a mostly working criminal justice system. Groups that have been mostly immune to accountability, like some bankers, CIA interrogators, cops, gang members in neighborhoods with "no snitching" codes, have been some of the worst.

Steven Pinker wrote a book on a related topic that might help you be more optimistic:
The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

"If you think the world is coming to an end, think again: people are living longer, healthier, freer, and happier lives, and while our problems are formidable, the solutions lie in the Enlightenment ideal of using reason and science.

Is the world really falling apart? Is the ideal of progress obsolete? In this elegant assessment of the human condition in the third millennium, cognitive scientist and public intellectual Steven Pinker urges us to step back from the gory headlines and prophecies of doom, which play to our psychological biases. Instead, follow the data: In seventy-five jaw-dropping graphs, Pinker shows that life, health, prosperity, safety, peace, knowledge, and happiness are on the rise, not just in the West, but worldwide. This progress is not the result of some cosmic force. It is a gift of the Enlightenment: the conviction that reason and science can enhance human flourishing.

Far from being a naïve hope, the Enlightenment, we now know, has worked. But more than ever, it needs a vigorous defense. The Enlightenment project swims against currents of human nature--tribalism, authoritarianism, demonization, magical thinking--which demagogues are all too willing to exploit. Many commentators, committed to political, religious, or romantic ideologies, fight a rearguard action against it. The result is a corrosive fatalism and a willingness to wreck the precious institutions of liberal democracy and global cooperation.

With intellectual depth and literary flair, Enlightenment Now makes the case for reason, science, and humanism: the ideals we need to confront our problems and continue our progress."

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

"Faced with the ceaseless stream of news about war, crime, and terrorism, one could easily think we live in the most violent age ever seen. Yet as New York Times bestselling author Steven Pinker shows in this startling and engaging new work, just the opposite is true: violence has been diminishing for millenia and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species's existence. For most of history, war, slavery, infanticide, child abuse, assassinations, programs, gruesom punishments, deadly quarrels, and genocide were ordinary features of life. But today, Pinker shows (with the help of more than a hundred graphs and maps) all these forms of violence have dwindled and are widely condemned. How has this happened?

This groundbreaking book continues Pinker's exploration of the esesnce of human nature, mixing psychology and history to provide a remarkable picture of an increasingly nonviolent world. The key, he explains, is to understand our intrinsic motives--the inner demons that incline us toward violence and the better angels that steer us away--and how changing circumstances have allowed our better angels to prevail. Exploding fatalist myths about humankind's inherent violence and the curse of modernity, this ambitious and provocative book is sure to be hotly debated in living rooms and the Pentagon alike, and will challenge and change the way we think about our society."

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

Most of us prefer modernity to feudalism thank you very much.

read this book...

> It wouldn't be viable contradict because we don't know when this instinct became a thing.

We actually have a reasonable idea of when social instincts evolved. Somewhat early in the evolutionary history of social mammals-- well before human-like species.

> Also I don't know there I said that was the only instinct humans care about. History shows growth and thriving because like us, early humans must have decided it was better for them to work together than to work alone.

This doesn't seem likely if you imply humans had to evolve sufficient intelligence to learn that it was better to work together than alone. We know that kind of advanced intelligence arrived very late on the primate scene. So why didn't early primates kill each other and go extinct long before homo sapiens evolved? Early social mammals had to get along without virtue of intelligence or complex governing or policing hierarchies, or no social mammals could have evolved.

The solution I think can be arrived at quite simply. Consider a mother's love for her child, the earliest form of mammal caring for live young. This kind of truly altruistic love does not seem accounted for in your view of human nature. But at the same time, there can't be anything magical about a mother's love if we subscribe to a naturalistic view. It has to be, ultimately, neurotransmitters, biological hard-wiring, vast complexity fine-tuned by eons of failure. And if a mother's love can evolve, then evolution is free to build on the same neurological and biological mechanisms to create other forms of love: pair bonding, family bonding, group bonding, tribe bonding.

Human nature, in an evolutionarily informed view then, can be seen to have intrinsic capacity for love for children, love for spouse, love for family, love for group, love for tribe, love for nation hardwired in by millions of years of social mammal evolution. Love = altruism. That has to be the main reason human society has thrived and the reason why we seem to continually grow less violent over time (see Pinker).

(This shouldn't be taken to argue that humanity is not doomed by its own efforts. It can be argued convincingly that super-intelligent AI represents a significant future threat to humanity. But in that scenario, failure to understand and properly design moral behavior in AI would be at fault, not active malice.)

The bad news is that we already have a UN (and before the UN there was something called the League of Nations that existed between WWI and WWII) and such things don't guarantee that there will be no wars.

But the good news is that there are a lot fewer wars today than in any previous era in history, and both wars and the chances of being killed by violence keep going down over recent centuries. (It's hard to summarize too much in one post, but there's a good book called The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined that charts a lot of this progress and explores reasons for the shift.)

Attribution to the decline of violence isn't really strongly linked to capitalism, but it is linked to intra-national trade. There are also many, many other non-economic factors that contribute to the decline in violence. The humanitarian revolution, public education, the rights revolution, and other movements are purely social, and not economic in nature. A good book to read would be http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

Well, the second isn't, it is sourced (see left hand side of page).

Both are taken from the first chapter or two from the following book: http://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407796183&sr=8-1&keywords=better+angels+of+our+nature

Feel free to pick up a copy, check out the first 1 or 2 chapters or so. It goes into great length laying out the methodology of how the data was collected, as well as the primary sources.

I reread your question and realized my earlier response (now deleted if you hadn't already seen it) was not really suitable. Some of your questions aren't really relevant to the book, so I will try to respond.

> Does that mean we are doing well in terms of evolution? The comparison with a strain of bacteria in a petri-dish comes to mind. It will keep growing until it drowns in its own waste.

This question really is answered directly in the book, and really is the core topic of the book. Yes, we are doing very well.

> Again, does that make us a evolutionary succes?

Absolutely. We are the dominant species on the planet, so obviously we are a success.

That doesn't mean we will always remain so. The dinosaurs were also dominant before they weren't.

> I think "the world" was in a far better shape when we were still hunter-gatherers if I use above mentioned criteria.

Sure. But the hunters and gatherers had an average life expectancy of like 30 years, a substantial portion of children died in their first 5 years, etc. Did you realize that just 100 years ago, a woman had a higher probability of dying during childbirth than a woman who has breast cancer does today?

It's really easy to romanticize "the good old days", but you have to consider the bad parts, too.

And yes, "the world" was arguably better then. It would also probably be better if we never evolved at all. But that doesn't do us much good, does it?

Like I said in an earlier message, we can't really focus on what could have been. We are where we are, so we play the hand we were dealt.

> Honestly, I wasn't aware of that and, if true, was exactly does that mean for our evolution?

We have not had a major war between world powers since the Korean War. That is a huge gap in historical context. Historically, war was much closer to the norm than the exception. I posted a couple graphs and short excerpts from EN to illustrate the point.

Even the relatively small scale wars since then have been getting consistently smaller since then. That isn't to say that there aren't the occasional bad civil war, like we are seeing in Syria right now, but those used to be far more common.

I won't spoil the book, but he goes into a lot of detail on why this is the case in the book, and his earlier book, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined is a massive and also outstanding study of the topic in detail.

> I'm still not convinced that our intelligence is beneficial nor that it's detrimental.

This is a poorly conceived concept I think. Let me see if I can explain why.

Intelligence is just a tool. Like all tools, it can be used for good and bad.

Few people would argue that knives aren't good. We could not really live our modern lives without them. Yet they can be used to murder people, and indirectly be used to crash an airplane into buildings. But that doesn't mean that knives are "detrimental."

So yes, our intelligence can cause us harm, but we can't call it "detrimental" unless we ignore an awful lot that makes them positive.

And really, I think the whole question is misguided. Do we really care if the earth would have been a better place if we did not have intelligence? Personally, I couldn't care less. That isn't me being a heartless anti-environmentalist, I just think that there are real problems that we face, so why worry about hypotheticals?

There are probably trillions of other planets in our universe, the vast majority of which did not have intelligent species evolve on them, so there is no shortage of untouched nature in the universe.

> But, as you said earlier, we have to play the hand we're dealt and I would add that education in the rules and strategies make a better game.

That is actually a decent analogy for what Pinker is arguing for. It's a bit of a stretch, but not too far off.

Ok I think we have a misunderstanding about what morality really is. To me having morals doesn't mean you do the right thing all the time. It means you have a code of right and wrong. When you make a decision you can pass it through this code and tell if it feels right or feels wrong. What you actually do though isn't constrained by this. There's always an interplay between doing what's right and doing what you think is best for you. So yes people will cheat to get ahead, have affairs, bully people. The important thing though is that they know it's wrong.

In fact, the majority of murders are actually done for moral reasons. What I mean is that the murderer has passed his action through his moral code and determined that they are justified in doing it. Usually this is because their moral code differs from societies moral code and they deem that since society won't punish the wrong doer they have to punish them. This usually involves people who take loyalty very seriously. Like the gangsters who say snitches get stitches. They aren't just killing in self interest, they also feel a very strong moral obligation to punish disloyal members. There's nothing strictly strange about this, group loyalty is one of our strong moral intuitions. A large part of our modern western society involves trying culture us away from this tendency so that we don't end up committing genocides and stuff.

Likewise infidelity provokes moral murder. Husbands and wives with an unusually high regard for loyalty can find the disloyalty of their partners morally unacceptable and since the government won't punish them they have to do it. This is why so many murders like this have the dumbfounding end result of the murderer turning themselves in and proudly confessing, saying things like "and I'd do it again".

This is interesting because it strikingly illustrates where our societies morals have shifted away from the built in innate morals we are inclined towards. I mean all the abrahamic religions for instance say adultery is punishable by death. Punishment for infidelity is extremely common through history and across cultures and when we remove those laws people find it hard to not take the law into their own hands.


> I don't understand your evidence that apes have anywhere near the sense of morality we have. Sure, they teach their kids how to use tools from generation to generation but they also partake in murdering each other and rape. So they aren't paragons of morality in the animal world.

So I'm not saying they have anywhere near the level of "morality" that we do. Just that they have a sense of morality. It's not an all or nothing thing. Also, it's humorous that you would point to murdering and rape and say that means they're not moral. If that's so then discussion over, we're not moral either.

So like I said a lot of bad stuff is done for moral reason but there's a lot of bad stuff done for selfish reasons. There's an interplay in evolution of social species between cooperating and benefiting everyone and not cooperating to benefit yourself. This is what's going on in apes and in us. We rape because it benefits us (the more we rape the more children we have and children is everything) but we punish rape because it's bad for the community. Or in other words it's bad when everyone does it, it's good when I do it.

> I'm curious about your hypothetical island metaphor with 200 people. You seem to believe they would all get along and form a religion out of that morality. I feel like you're ignoring the likely possibility that 100 may form one religion, and the other 100 form another. So, what happens to morality then? What if they are at war?

Yeah I think I answered this above but to be clear, of course all that will happen because they are people but they will still form a moral code that they judge everyone on. Their fights will likely be of a moral character. Arguing as to whether it's ok to marry that widow or not and who get's to decide who marries who, who raises the orphans etc.

Ok, this has been so much writing so if you've gotten this far thank you but I wouldn't blame you if you flamed out half way through I just want to end with some very very strong book recommendations:

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. - by Jonathan Haidt

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined - by Steven Pinker

If you don't want to read either of those books at least just search for videos of presentations that they did on those books. It will give you a good idea of where I'm coming from.

Leviathan by Hobbes... here's a 10min video on his life and work

I could substitute the word "State" for Leviathan, but then you wouldn't ask this question. Hobbes explores the idea that the state functions like a giant scary monster that can can enforce peace through its overwhelming power.

If you'd like a more contemporary explanation, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined is a great book. Pinker points out that although Hobbes suppositions about primitive man might have been inaccurate his analysis as to the causes of violence and the role of government as a civilizing force are still relevant.

> The universe exploded out of foam for no "reason" at all,

Yes.

> a cluster of chemicals coagulated in a puddle,

Yes.

> billions of years of meaningless mutations

Guided toward survival in ever changing environments by natural selection.

> produce humans,

And numerous other more beautiful species. Some of these are more complex than our own. Humans aren't special. Did you know that compared to the human brain at about 3 pounds, the sperm whale brain is enormous at 17 pounds?

> and now the only Eternal Absolute Truths

There are none, so nope to the rest.

> are that thou shalt not be racist, sexist, homophobic, transgenderphobic, Islamophobic, or pro-life.

Nope. Most atheists start from a position of reason and rationality. So, most of us, but certainly not all, do agree with those. But, it's not a fucking commandment from on high as you worded it. It's more just a case of the golden rule that predates the Abrahamic religion by centuries.

> Moral Realism is established on the immutable pillars of evolution

Nope. Morality is something social species evolved long ago. Our morals are more complex, but often worse than those of other social species. It's just part of being a good member of society in any social setting where cooperation creates an advantage.

Since we happen to be quite large brained for our size, we sometimes think these things through a whole lot more than other animals. But, the result of that may be horrific. It may be the fucking bible that justified the crusades, the inquisitions, manifest destiny, the slave trade, and numerous other atrocities committed by the meanest species on the planet.

> and -- wait! This is all total bullshit.

Oh. Your strawman is bullshit? Wasn't that why you set up the strawman?

> Which scientific theory says we have rights?

None. Where in the Bible does it say we have rights? Compare the Ten horrific Commandments with the Bill of Rights. Which one gives rights and which takes them away?

The rights come from our evolution as a social species and from the ever improving moral zeitgeist of humanity that has created tremendous improvement over the crap from the sheepshaggers who wrote the Bible.

The term "God-given rights" is ludicrous. God gives nothing of the sort.

> Where does quantum mechanics or evo bio say anything about racism or social justice?

The golden rule is sure as hell not from the Abrahamic religion. As we gradually include ever more people in our "in-group" and ever fewer in the "out-group" our morality improves. That's why we don't believe in manifest destiny and regret the genocides it justified today despite it's grounding in Christianity.

So, where does this come from? Not from the Bible. If you don't stone homosexuals to death and do the same to most rape victims and force the remainder of the rape victims to marry their rapists, you're not getting your morals from Yahweh.

> Are you sure you believe that materialist gibberish?

Of course I don't believe your strawman. See my corrections above.

> If wiping out the tribe across the river benefits my tribe, what business is it of yours?

Yup. That view is strongly supported in the Torah. Deut 20:16. 1 Sam 15:3.

> It's no more or less objectively "wrong" than my preference for Chunky Monkey over Cherry Garcia.

Those both suck.

> If you don't like Nietzsche I recommend this dude. Consistency is a virtue. Nietzsche's whole mission was to demonstrate how atheism has serious implications for morality.

Atheism == no gods.

Anything else you attach to it is a strawman.

> And the new atheists ignore him. (He has single sentences more powerful and profound and beautiful than Hitchens' entire oeuvre.) When Dawkins talks about the "moral zeitgeist" it's like some absurd Civil War reenactment, like he's dressed up as someone with Objective Moral Authority.

You may not be aware of this but atheism is a non-prophet organization. None of these people speak for all atheists. There is no atheist Bible. There is no atheist code of ethics, positive or negative.

You lump us all together as if atheists share anything other than an agreement that the number of gods in the universe is zero. If you want to make points, why not ask me what I think instead of assuming I agree with the four horsemen.

> Your moral intuitions evolved for the same purposes as a giraffe's neck, mosquito's stinger, bat's echolocation, and zebra's stripes: as a means of spreading your ancestor's DNA.

Exactly so.

> If you want to maintain that your sense of "wrong" hones in on some Ultimate Reality "binding" on me, I look forward to your arguments.

I don't. I just maintain that my set of morals is a metric fuckton better than the crap in the Torah that is basically the same as Sharia law.

> You won't find them in science.

Science can tell us a lot about human morality. Neuroscience can tell us a tremendous amount about the locations of the brain that process morals but much research still needs to be done. Other scientific studies of morality can tell us about the default set of morals that humans are somewhat pre-wired for, assuming a properly functioning brain.

But, it can't tell us that it's good to assume we're all us. For that, we need to actually examine the fact that there are no subspecies of humans. We need to look at the fact that humans went through an evolutionary bottleneck around 70-80,000 years ago when there were only around 1,000 breeding pairs of humans on the entire planet (actually, the page to which I just linked suggests a higher number, mine was from memory, the estimates may have been updated since). This shows that we're all very closely related. There is no them. Once the out-group is removed and all people are included in the in-group, our morals get a whole lot better. Genocides stop. The tribal wars you're talking about stop.

Unfortunately, this is taking rather a long time to come about in our cultural evolution. We still have a lot of things that cause artificial divisions among humans that don't really exist at all. And, once we have these artificial made-up divisions of humans like race and sectarianism, then it becomes OK to kill Them. All such divisions are false and evil. I oppose them all.

We are all Us.

> Our moral intuitions are tools for finding mates, food, and shunning adversaries.

How so?

> A consistent skeptic would say the same thing about Reason. I rarely see consistent skeptics. I see atheists who are as puritanically fanatical about morality as any believer.

I have no idea what this means without specifics.

> Yes, the 7 Laws oppose Christianity. It's idolatry.

Minority opinion. How do you know? Is it the graven images of Catholicism? Does that apply even to subsects of Christianity that do not kneel before graven images?

> And Islam is a false religion (though not idolatrous). This is a better source than Wikipedia.

How can you tell? They say the same about Christianity and worse about Judaism. How do you tell which is right?

>> Theocracy is always always always bad.
>
> Depends on the theocracy.

No. It doesn't. Theocracy makes it illegal to think. Theocracy makes it illegal to speak one's mind. Theocracy creates prosecutable crimes with no victims. Theocracy punishes those who believe "false religions" while ignoring that the religion in charge has no more evidence than any other.

> See Plato & Nietzsche on the perils of mob rule democracy. Which scientific theory establishes any system of government?

Democracy is the worst form of government ... except for all the others. I'm not sure science says anything about forms of government. But, my personal opinion is that there is no such thing as a good totalitarian government or a good closed society.

These things are inherently opposed to thought, expression, science, and freedom.

All totalitarian governments, including Communism, are morally repugnant to me.

> I'm obligated to support candidates who understand that shedding innocent blood is wrong. Sometimes that's none of them.

And, what exactly would a Noahide do to a blasphemer? Exactly what punishment would you enact when you make blasphemy illegal?

> It's not even been a century yet and the world is already in an extremely volatile and tense state.

This just simply isn't true. The world is more peaceful today than it was in the 90's, which in turn was much more peaceful than it was in the 70's, which in turn was more peaceful than the 50's.

The two world wars are ridiculous outliers in the 20th century, but even they didn't change the overarching, centuries long trend towards less violence. It's not some accident either - I highly recommend The Better Angels of Our Nature for an exploration of the topic, if you're interested.

> Furthermore, even in the Cold War, with all deterrence in full swing, we were one single man's vote away from all out nuclear war.

Disagree.

Deterrance works and did work. Neither the US nor the USSR pursued as a matter of foreign policy an open conflict with one another. Instead what you saw during the Cold War was a lot of very indirect strategies to gain the upper hand. We came frighteningly close at times, but the kind of world where 51% votes against a war is a new one that hadn't existed prior.

To best illustrate the difference here, it's worthwhile to look back to the world before the 20th century. France and England would go to war with each other because it was Tuesday. The calculus was flipped on its head. There was significant upside for the victor and very little consequence from a national point of view. Neither really posed an existential threat to the other, so they'd fight till one of them ran out of money to pay soldiers and then surrender land or colonies... at least until they could raise money and soldiers again.

> I'm also going to assume that any nuclear war between nuclear powers essentially means the end of humanity.

A final point of disagreement. Take North Korea. They might, because they're insane, launch a nuke at South Korea and/or Japan.

It's highly unlikely that the US or China would retaliate with nuclear weapons. Why would they? North Korea, even with a handful of nuclear weapons, doesn't pose an existential threat to anyone but itself. Conventional weapons are likely enough to take out whatever remaining nuclear capability it has, and what would follow would be a disaster of untold suffering... but there's just no scenario that goes from "North Korea uses nuclear weapons" to "the world is done".

There's only two countries with enough nuclear weapons to end the world: the US and Russia. Despite the latest tensions, I don't think there's a real threat they'll lob nukes at each other, or that one of them would use hundreds of them against another adversary, even should North Korea or Iran or whoever detonate some.

IIRC, your original points were something to the effect that it’s easier to ban guns than gas, and that the Kyoto attack wasn’t covered intensely because it wasn’t in America. I think other people pretty well addressed the ‘not in America’ part, referring to the wall to wall coverage Christchurch got because it served the Democrats’ gun ban agenda.

Anything can be banned. The question is how effective a ban could be. Alcohol, gambling, prostitution, recreational drugs and gay relationships have all been banned. How well did those work? By the way, gasoline is a lot harder to make and requires far more complex and expensive capital equipment to make than guns do. While gas might be practical to ban, at least for a while, most things that run on gas can be converted to run on alcohol, which is easy to make at home.

https://homemadeguns.wordpress.com/

Are you seriously arguing that Europe is an example of why mass slaughter is unlikely? Ever heard of Hitler? Stalin? The Armenian genocide? More recently, the wars in the Balkans?

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.TAB16A.1.GIF

You certainly can run a country with an unarmed population, and if you’re in charge, that’s way easier than having peasants who can tell you to f*ck off.

The argument that the population can’t defeat the government has been addressed by a number of writers. The short version is:
The military is the people. In a rebellion, it would split like the population. In a rightist rebellion against a leftist government, two thirds of the predominantly conservative military will side with the rebels. In a left rebellion against a rightist government, about one military person in six would support the rebels. Defection or sabotage by one in six is more than enough to paralyze any military unit.

The military, in total, is about 1.3 million, including the Navy, Coast Guard, Air Force, and so on. About ten percent of the military can actually engage in combat, and nearly all of those are overseas. More than 100 million Americans have guns. Good luck suppressing even three million rebels spread over 3.8 million square miles, striking when they please and fading back into the population when they feel like it. There isn’t the remotest chance the military could suppress a rebellion of five percent of the population.

I get the feeling you’re fairly young. The political world hasn’t changed much at all for a very long time. It is, and always will be about power. The very recent experiments in democracy are only possible because power is diffused... in the form of privately owned guns.

A century is a very, very short piece of human history, and oppression and murder of people has been a constant for at least the past few thousand years of recorded history, and almost certainly much longer. Read this book:

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

Anthropologists think 15% of people died violently through most of human existence. An American with no criminal record is very unlikely to be murdered.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in-the-us-by-race-ethnicity-and-gender/

Five hundred years ago, anyone who could afford to buy horses and armor for half a dozen thugs could take anything you had, your wife, your kids, your property, your life, and those people routinely did. Freedom and safety have only existed for common people since the invention of portable firearms, because when the Lord of the fiefdom comes into your village to exercise his right of prima nocta now, you shoot him off his horse.

https://www.dictionary.com/e/historical-current-events/prima-nocta/

The problem with rules about who has guns is that the rich and powerful always make the rules.

As to a need for military grade guns for killing people... yes, that’s the point. America can’t have a Rwanda-style massacre because everyone is armed. A balance of arms is stability insurance.

You’re doing a decent job of presenting the standard anti-gun arguments, but I hope you think it through. If you’re a conservative or libertarian, would you be comfortable trusting your life to a leftist government, given how that’s played out around the world? If you’re a lefty, are you okay with Hitler’s cousin and best friend Trump having the power to wipe out leftists?
Armed commoners are your insurance against the truly massive violence governments can do, and that hostile groups can do to each other.

Solid proof is hard to come by for a question this large and sociological, of course. Human interactions are more complex than physics can ever hope to be.

But there are actually a fair amount of explanations for the larger question of the overall drop in crime on a larger level - the consistent drop in the percentage of violent crimes for the human species.

"The Better Angels of Our Nature" - Stephen Pinker

Citation needed.

The world is actually the best it has ever been. Lower violence, higher quality of life, less war and conflict, more time to focus towards self fulfillment instead of needing to worry about survival.

You should check out Better Angels of Our Nature.

https://www.amazon.com/Better-Angels-Our-Nature-Violence-ebook/dp/B0052REUW0

You guys get suckered into the news too much. violent crime has decreased since 1994, but the reporting of violent crime has increased 1600%. If you are sheep you think crime is getting worse. Read a book Become educated.