I'm not watching some anti-gun thing that the ultra left tend to push, thanks. Simple fact is, a gun is a tool. Like any other. It can be used in any way. Whether its used defensively, or offensively, is up to the user of the tool. If guns didn't exist, we'd have bow violence protest groups. If we didn't have bows, we'd have knife protest groups. If we didn't have knives, we'd have stone protest groups.

I imagine when we invent weaponized lasers, we'll have "American Laser Violence" videos. If someone breaks into my house, I shoot them. Is that gun violence? Nope, its me protecting my life. Do they need a gun for me to shoot them? No. I am not physically strong enough to defend myself against ant form of melee combat. I will use a gun. They will die. No knee shots, no foot shots, no aiming for shoulder. Hollow point to center mass. Before you start screaming hollow points are evil, they are home defense bullets, because they have a low risk of penetrating the target and hitting an innocent and have the added benefit of excruciating crippling pain that stops a target after just one shot usually.

So thank you, for posting a video about gun violence, I'm sure many ultra-left will find it good and many ultra right will laugh. Just know that, I am center aligned in politics, but I do believe in the right to defend myself by any means necessary and I'm pretty sure the Second Amendment wasn't referring to placing a bear's arms on our mantle.

I bet the video tries to mention statistical bullshit too. Like how people are killed more by guns than any other weapon. Well no shit, who the fuck wants to bring a knife around with them to try and get in close and risky? Here's an idea. If everyone were armed at all times, gun violence would be much lower because the criminals would have a hard time doing anything without getting poked full of holes. The risk of pulling a gun then becomes extreme and the chances of them coming out alive get closer and closer to zero.

Gun violence, simply isn't a problem that everyone makes it out to be. When a shooting happens, the news plays it loud and clear to everyone making a huge deal out of it, trying to make guns evil and blah blah. Getting as much possible viewers as they can. You walk around town, go into stores, go about your life, you don't see people whipping guns out constantly. Its just not a thing that happens everywhere. The average American is lucky to even witness an event in their life time of someone pulling a gun to do something violent with it. I'm not counting showing guns, target practice, hunting, or other non-violent or non-against-human related things.

If you're sole reason to be against guns, is because the news told you they are evil, and its not because you witnessed guns being used, then great, you learnt how to be an echo chamber.

It is not anti-gun video, it is almost entirely about the history of gun in the US and how we got to where we are now. In part that gun manufactures actually manufactured the demand for personal gun ownership and compares how America treats gun against other countries laws and usage.

And close to the end of the video they actually bring some statistics and one of those in cases with active shooters, 3% were stopped by a "good guy with a gone" and 11% were stopped by UNARMED civilians. But further more, having more people shooting at each other only increases the amount of confusion and makes it harder for police officers to do there job, and police officers who are far more trained than you average citizen only hit their target 44% of the time so giving guns to people in a crowded room is more likely to cause more collateral damage. But even on top of that if you look at the UK and Australian both countries that put much stricter gun control laws into effect have either 0 or next to no cases of gun violence since. So they do work. Both Australia and the UK have proved it with both statistical science and anecdotally. So the Assumption we would have more violence with bows and arrows or stones is just wrong, because they are so ineffective and slow, that it would take so much training and skill that would not be worth the bother.

the US this year alone has had 200+ mass shooting already and we are barely past the half way point. Most of these were targeted against specific groups of people, black people, women, or some other specific group.

Also consider that that even back in colonial era, the founding fathers were very much for gun control, your weapons could be seized for use in a war and you expected to keep it in working order if you wanted to continue owning it, you had to meet specific criteria to even own a gun, such as swearing loyalty to the us government, and for a long time you couldn't even keep them inside a building, even your own home in some areas of the US. And you had to have 0 criminal record of any kind.

And further more, people owning guns does nothing to deter other people from turning their gun onto other people. The US has more mass shootings than any other country, and that is just numbers, so all it would do is just increase the number of people that died by guns, because even in a case were the police responded in 27 seconds, the shooter was still able to kill 9 and injure 27 others, so yeah they might not make it out alive, but how many more people would die even if someone in the room was Jason Borne.


So maybe, rather than writing off a video because of a thumbnail and title, you should watch it and learn a bit of history along the way. Cause no where do they say they are anti gun, but analyze how our perception of gun ownership has changed and what factors might have played into that, and that maybe we should change some of our laws and systems to curb the gun violence problem, because the US is starting to push solutions for gun related homicide that is more like Columbia and it has one of the highest homicide rates in the world.

You never post any info with your videos, all I see is an anti-gun type video title with thumbnail to make it seem like its an anti-gun thing, its click bait, and it pisses me off. I will not view a 45 minute video to see the punch line state whether guns are good or bad. Pretty simple to state your opinion. "I think guns are good, people should know how to use them."

As per untrained civilians, this is exactly why we need to teach people how to use them, standard. Most elderly people know how to use weapons because they were forcefully drafted and taught against their will during war times. Now days we don't have to worry about that because our wars are all social media based. We use words to fight. Guns are just for the few criminals who remain outside of the internet, or for hobbies.

Also, my dad bought a composite bow a week ago, he's hitting the target 100 feet away spot on, dead shot. With ease. The arrow flies relatively straight. Don't assume that bows are weak and pathetic like medieval movies show you with old wood/stone arrows. That arrow flies faster than you can move. It will go right through you and most likely do more damage than a bullet. You won't be dodging that unless you're a good distance away and dealing with an idiot who thought a bow would be easy. Just like guns, you need training, obviously, but a bow would still be a deadly tool.

I don't think mass shooting should be defined as 4 people, thats a little silly. But I guess they had to lower the number enough to make it seem extreme. It also sounds far fetch'ed, even though I was linked proof of it being a thing with 4 people as the requirement, it still makes me think of that bullshit a few years back about the school shootings "every week". They loosely called them school shootings when some weren't even related to a school. One was a drug dealer got shot by some other guy on the corner of the parking lot of a school while they were closed. They labeled it a school shooting. There are other examples, but meh, I made my point. You can make anything sound bad, if you are deliberately vague about it, or mask whats really going on. Is there a lot of people shooting right now? Probably. Trump riled up his army, and there's tons of people who are aggitated, angry, and stressed about the lock-downs and the war and the current political situation. People on the edge get more dangerous, it wouldn't matter if they didn't have a gun, they would still find a way to be violent. Just like you saying most were against specific groups, are you saying that because the criminal who did it said they hate blacks or women? Or is it because there was a black individual and/or a woman in the group that was shot? I can't tell, because I don't know what your agenda is. Your agenda, appears to be "guns are evil, we shouldn't have them".

Giving people a history lesson on guns, isn't going to stop gun violence. Telling them "People used to have to do this" isn't going to change what they do now. All you end up doing these days is sounding anti-gun. Shit happens when people are stressed, should they be trained better, and examined for signs that they could snap and shoot people, be tested to see if they are racist? Probably. Will bad people get guns anyway? Yes. The more restrictions you add, the more good people you stop from getting a gun. The bad ones will get them anyway. In fact, that guy in Japan made a home made gun to shoot Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. He didn't buy a gun, he made one. You don't think Americans could do the same? Not exactly complicated to do. I accidentally turned a pen into a gun once. Poked a hole in my wall with that tiny ball that fired out the end when I was trying to heat up the ink to make it work again.

I post the video because they are meant to be watched, it is not my fault you made an assumption about it. He doesn't say guns are good or bad, they are a tool, but a tool that is far too lethal for its own good and that there is a problem with gun violence in America because bringing a gun into a home means that it is less likely to be used in self defense and more likely to be used against others living in the home in a fit of quick reaction anger as a result of abuse that pre-existed in the relationship, plus that there have been more than 200 instances of mass shooting in the US since the start of the year and other countries like the UK and Australia which have some of the most restrictive laws around gun ownership, including a reason to own it upon application, and home self defense not being a legitimate reason, has seen 0 mass shootings or only a couple. Further more, the same math equations used by insurance companies for rare event statistical odds state that Australia should have seen 5 times as many shooting as it has in the past 2 decades than it actually saw if gun control laws were not passed. SO this gives more than enough evidence and scientific backing that gun control measures that are much stricter do work.

Secondly I never said bows were weak or useless just that in comparison to a gun, they are not never going to be as efficient, that is why guns slowly took over for defense of a country. They are more powerful, faster to use, and take less training to be deadly.

4 is actually higher than I remember, because I am pretty sure it used to be defined as 3 or more, and that number exists as a lower boundary because 1-3 is strictly targeted homicide and 4 is the threshold by which it is no longer about a few targets/individuals, but a group of people. But at what number would you find reasonable? 10, 20, 30, 50, 100? the lower boundary has to be in a range for the most common scenario. even if you raised that to 5, the drop off is not significant, raising it 6 or 7 would start missing points of data. So 4 is a pretty reasonable number because that is the point at which things start tipping over from strictly being homicide.

And you bring up an excellent point, people are riled up, and 40-60% of cases involve people where sound of mind on a psychological level and having better mental health infrastructure may have prevented some of those, but the other 40% were found to be people with high levels of egotism and arrogance. Some even video taping themselves doing it for the attention and "fame" because they want to be seen and noticed, and that is a separate problem all together created by society, but for some reason it is far worse in the US which could indicate a separate problem, but the fact is around 80% of these mass shooting had gun which were obtained legally, so it is not even that stricter enforcement of current laws would have prevented it.

Targeting groups means that they explicitly shot and targeted people of that demographic, not that they said it, but those are the people who were explicitly injured and aimed at whether from video footage or by the specific people who were injured.

Again, the evidences doesn't show that. Other countries with stricter gun control measures have the decades of proof to show they work. Making it harder for people to get guns doesn't keep honest citizens from owning them, it keeps them out of the hands of people how shouldn't have them. And yes, he made his own gun, but outside of this one instance Japan has had next to no gun violence and they are even stricter than Australia and the UK about gun ownership. You cannot use a rare instance as justification for not taking appropriate stop people legally obtaining them when they intend to use it against someone else. And a homemade firearm planned to be used in an assassination attempt is not going to be as effective as a manufactured one. But again, look at Japans overall number of gun violence in the past decade or two and you will find that this is an extremely rare occurrence and that by letting more people have guns is not going to solve the problem. It is only going to make gun violence and crime more frequent.

Again going back to our example. Even if you had a mostly armed populace, it is not going to stop people from committing mass shooting, it just means you will have more people dead in the end from collateral damage or instead of having 0 people dead, you will still have any number of people dead + the shooter where if the shooter was never able to obtain a gun in the first place, it would have never happened. It is kind of like a vaccine, you can either prevent the disease altogether or you can get it and hope you don't have long lasting side effects as a result.

Angry folks are highly entertaining.

Like 3 countries have super restrictive gun laws and have proven gun control works at preventing gun related violence of all kinds and in some cases has dropped their crimes involving guns to near 0 or actually 0. So it is more like I am very confused how people get off saying that the solution is to be more like Columbia, a country that has one of the highest rates of homicide involving firearms even though a fuck ton of people have them.

Sweden being a weird outlier, but it is because everyone see them as a tool for national defense not sport, and their shooting ranges of super strict policies about gun safety to the point 1 infraction gets your barred from that location permanently.

i am aware of these details i simply find that the gun nuts refuse to actually listen to a reasoned discussion. so Ive learned to stop trying to engage them . it is literally like trying to tell grandpa that he cant have cake because he has diabetes..

Yeah, but at the same time, I think more and more people are finally getting fed up with constantly seeing that phrase "Was obtained legally" in the news.

You always post a video with nothing but a video, no description, no information, you wait till people comment before you start posting multi-paragraph shit about it. I'm not watching a 45 minute video for you to get to the fucking punch line to say "Guns are not good or bad, its the people who use them!", I mean really, how hard is that to add to your journal.

I hit post too soon so I have to edit fast.
I would also say that 10 is a reasonable amount to call it "Mass" shooting. Thats a "massive" amount of people involved.

There is also a country where pretty much everyone goes around with rifles on their backs, two girls bicycling with rifles over their shoulders, and they have an extremely low crime rate there. So your logic that "if everyone had guns, it would be chaos" falls there. Obviously its based on the country and how the people behave in it, not the free access of weapons.

And lastly, I've decided not to engage further because leftists will just use this as mocking fuel, to mock me for what I say or how I say it.

Yeah, because it is hard to sum up all the information without basically rewriting it in it's entirety. So it is faster to just watch it, get ALL the information and history and context rather than have me sit here and basically rewrite the entire video.

Okay, and the case where 9 are killed and 20+ injured that the police responded to in 27 seconds before the shooting stopped. That is how deadly guns are. Fighting fire with fire doesn't put out the fire, you just have more fire, and in this case more people dead or injured.

Yeah there is a country where almost everyone owns a gun, and it is called Sweden but there it is because it is seen as part of their military duty to the self defense of the nation, not each other. And almost everyone there is required to serve in their military for a number of years. And firing ranges there are very very very strict about gun safety to the point even one infraction can mean being banned from that range in some cases. But they also still have very strict gun control laws.

So like I said strict gun control laws do not prevent people from owning them, it keeps them out of the hands of people who might misuse them.

“ If everyone were armed at all times, gun violence would be much lower because the criminals would have a hard time doing anything without getting poked full of holes.”

This kind of society existed. It was called the Wild West, and it turns out it wasn’t that safe.

Is this the kind of society you want? Where everyone around you is packing a pistol at all times of the day nearly everywhere? Basically everyone over the age of 18 is just carrying a gun to every bar, every restaurant, every mall. You don’t think people with hair triggers at this point in time wouldn’t just let alcohol or politics or road rage just resort to stupidity and deaths? This is humanity we’re talking about.

Policing should be left to the police, and self defense guns for self defense and gun ranges. This isn’t the Middle Ages where everywhere should be packing heat. I don’t need my Karen’s and my drunks with glocks.

I didn't say everyone who is unstable and mental should be carrying a gun. Obviously people need to be sane enough and competent enough to handle a weapon without snapping and going on killing sprees.

Again, he didn't say he was worried about people with mental health problem, but your average person who is otherwise sane, but also might use it to get what they want or simply when they get angry and/or stupid.

We had someone at the pharmacy literally try to climb over the counter once to try and punch one of my coworkers, imagine if they had a gun instead and resorted to that to try and get what they want.

No sorry I don't want to live in a world where everything needs to be protected by bullet proof glass/acrylic to keep like that from being sane idiots

First of all. I do not want you to call me a Leftie for this comment. I am not a Leftist. I'm right-handed.

First of all, I think the position you've taken is incredibly naive at best. Arming more people with guns may actually cause more gun violence. Because of obvious escalation. To prevent escalation. there would have to be more government intervention. A more militarized police to deal with a more armed and lax society. Unless you prefer anarchy. Which is just a self-fulfilling prophecy of encroaching tyrannical rule.

I'm pretty sure mutually assured destruction only works for nuclear weapons. Not small weapons. Plus, I'd imagine weaponized weapons would be even worse than regular kinetic weapons if we're going with Star Trek logic and phasers. Being obliterated to the smallest atom by a single shot. I don't think any amount of jingoistic, toxic masculinity could save anyone from that kind of damage. Not even a shirt saying "Boobs, Beer, Jesus, and Guns" could save you from that power. It would be in the interest of everyone to regulate and outright ban the use of phaser technology. Also, lasers are already weaponized by the United States military, plus makeshift laser weapons are a possibility too.

Plus, guns are not easy tools to use. They don't behave like they do in Hollywood movies. And shooting a real person isn't the same as shooting a stationary target at a shooting range. And hell, I say arming everyone with guns is naive because it won't automatically lead to less gun violence. But I figured it would lead to more violence, especially in the political climate this country is already in. There are a lot of variables to account for if everyone and their dog had a gun. Accidents, misfires, etc.

I assume you have to deal with a lot of Wendigos where you live? Hence why do you need a gun to protect yourself?

De-arming doesn't work as well as you might think. Once every good person is defenseless, the only people left weaponized is the police and the bad guys who then get to rape and pillage as much as they want. When the risk level goes up, they have a higher chance of picking a different target or just not doing it. My friend would steal gas out of people's cars back when gas was $6 a gallon like a decade ago. Till someone shot at him, then he tried a different target, got shot at again, he stopped doing it because people started arming themselves and watching for gas thieves.

I actually never needed a gun to defend myself. In fact, I have had guns pointed at me before, and someone shot at me because they were angry at me. My gun was a semi auto loaded up with hollow points. It would be stupidly easy to convert it to fully auto as well which is illegal. I in fact lived in an area with people who were all armed and many of them hated me for being gay or not christian or not voting for trump. In fact, the person who shot at me, murdered my dog using poison. I so wanted to burn their house down with them inside, but I didn't retaliate in any way at all. I fully had the capability of retaliating in various violent ways.

People with guns, aren't inherently violent. You don't just grab a weapon because you're angry, unless you're stupid (Which is basically only trump supporters). One more thing to add to this, I can't feel anything towards human life. Someone could drop dead right there in front of me and I wouldn't feel a thing. I'm the type of person that people should be worried if they have a gun. I however have rules I live by, and the only time I will use a weapon, is if someone's life is in danger, or my life is in danger, or someone is invading my home. Regardless of the laws, because there is no law on earth, above protecting one's own life by any means necessary.

Most people with guns are trained enough to not be a danger. You hear about gun violence a lot because bad people find a way to get guns, people who shouldn't be allowed to have them. Yes, we need better security checks, we need to be sure someone isn't crazy and might use their gun against others. Psychological testing and random checkups, who knows. The current climate is extremely volatile though, lots of good people have been pushed past their breaking point. They would have used some other weapon, if they didn't have a gun. Sure, maybe they can't cause as much damage with a knife, as they can a gun, but these people would have resorted to something more secret (breaking into homes at night with a knife) or more deadly (home made bombs), if they didn't have a gun.

You solve the problem by fixing the living situation of these people, improving everyone's happiness. I'm pretty stressed these days because of how bad the population is. These uber leftists calling me a transphobe or sexist or nazi because I don't like their fucking movie, or because I won't use the term "Autism Spectrum" when I tell people I have Aspergers Disorder. You have no idea how much damage these activists are doing to the world. They are the most evil of all the population. On top of them fucking up everything, we've got Covid which is now permanent, no thanks to China for trying to hide it originally and no thanks to Trump for treating it like it was nothing and teaching his followers to do the same. We have the Russian Ukraine war escalating things even further, people are now worried Russia may declare war on everyone and nuke everything. We have two incompetent presidents in a row fucking things up, this one less than the other but, yea. Right now, this climate is in terrible condition, and the people are riled up and dangerous. We need to educate people, and stop the hate. Activism is the definition of hate. You hate someone so you attack them. Hating haters is still hate. By attacking people, regardless of the reason, you cause people to become defensive, to stop listening, to bottle up or close their minds. Its not a good thing to do with the hugely stressful situation the nation is going through.

I firmly believe the majority of people with guns, are competent enough to have them. The media likes to portray everything in the most sensational fashion possible and make it seem worse than it is. Its the nature of media, they get more views that way, push more fear, try and win their objectives that way. I no longer watch news, or listen to social media like facebook or twitter. The world around me seems so much better now. Even though I see the occasional moron with trump flags all over his house and shit, I don't feel like I'm gonna be shot to death for leaving my house.

I think a big reason why people become mass shooters is a sense of powerlessness. Like, for a long time America has had these same gun laws and haven't had as many mass shooting problems as there are today. The difference is that the government is no longer empowering its citizens. Wages have been stagnant since the 1970's, antitrust laws are broken or ignored, healthcare is a joke, families don't have enough financial support...the list goes on. When people feel powerless they look for a way out. In desperation they may choose to seize power over the world the one way left to them...by arming themselves and taking their grievance out on their perceived enemies.

yyyyeah, saw that. 😅

Lol. It was very informative

the most "not anti gun" video that talks about the gun problem.

I also detected a slight hint of him love/hating catolicism. Which is always nice. Makes it feel more authentic. You will never find a catholic proud of being catholic unless they are the only one in a very wide radius. 🤣

Well also recently there have been ads on TV for a class action lawsuit about abuse coming from Catholic officials. E.g. the child molestation problem that some members of the church had. So....there is a good reason for it.

Ah, yes, the altar boys. In other news the water is wet. I wish this stuff did not happen with this regularity.

I wish it didn't either

"If you don't support the right to bear arms and babies being born, don't talk to me Leftie! Every baby should have the right to be shot in a school shooting when they grow up!"

Strawman aside, it's fun and yet extremely predictable to see what the comments say. Them lefties and their echo chambers! Not like those on the rational right who listen to Tucker Carlson 24/7! No sir!

EDIT: As of writing this. The ads on this page are all pro-gun T-shirts.

My stance has always been guns are fine so long as you don't make them too easy to obtain with how far technology has come since Colonial days, which arguably has stricter regulations on ownership than we do today.

As for abortion I believe in bodily autonomy such that you cannot force someone to give up their well being for that of another.

And naturally there would be a bunch of pro-gun shirts. Lol

I don't care about guns, really. I don't own any, and the only guns I've ever interacted with are in video games. There are four types of gun owners, responsible gun owners who would pretty much agree with you, criminals, the government, and weekend warrior internet tough guys who want to LARP Red Dawn. You can figure out which two of those are bad and which are fine. But, my overall opinion is that regulations on guns are fine, as long as they don't actually infringe on the constitution (like mass forced collectivization of weapons). Weapons as a means for sports or protection from wildlife or home invasion are fine. Owning a stockpile of bootleg Soviet/Vietnam-era weapons and RPGs and making memes of attacking elected officials isn't (I've seen that myself on various discord channels without any hint of irony). Plus,

I don't agree with the whole idea of "The Founding Fathers were only talking about muskets.". I think that's kind of a cheap cope. While I do believe that the Framers wouldn't want military-grade weapons in the hands of citizens for free, it would be unfair to say they wouldn't allow shotguns, handguns, or bolt-action rifles just because they're not muskets. But does anyone give a shit what the Founding Fathers wanted? You already have the very same Pro-Second Amendment people who completely disregard the First Amendment when it comes to religion. I could make the argument that the ban on abortion goes against the First Amendment because the anti-abortion side uses religion as one of their reasons. Sure, Abortion is more of a grey area, but the ban on consensual same-sex is absolutely against the First Amendment because that's the government enforcing religious beliefs on citizens.

Speaking on the positive effects of guns. I can give an example. The state of Texas has a serious wild boar problem. So the state government put bounties on them for gun owners, such as farmers and game hunters to track them down. I would say that isn't a bad thing at all. Yes, those farmers and game hunters might be gun nuts themselves. But they do protect the ecosystem from those wild boars. There are some things that the government can do better than citizens and vice versa.

I also love those "enlightened centrists" guys who will say "I dislike Trump" but will never actually criticize him and just use the exact same Fox News buzzwords as your average YouTube comment.
Sure, I'm the same, but for Leftwing talking points these days. But still. I'd like to say that the political left these days has more rational talking points to agree with, rather than just calling myself a spineless shill.

If I said something like " I don't think National Socialism is a very good ideology." you'll have those very same types of people responding with "YOU WHAT!?!?".
Last thing on abortion. It doesn't help that the anti-abortion side has the same end goal ideas as Nicolae Ceaușescu. A communist. And that end goal will lead to the same problems Romania face during his reign.

Well and that is just it, during colonial times, only about 13% of the population even owned a gun, most were in poor condition, and during the Revolutionary War most of the firearms were state owned and very highly regulated in terms of knowing exactly who, what, and how many were available to use. Also, after the war, the states saw gun ownership as a collective responsibility if the need arose to fight off an invading power and you have to swear loyalty to the government to own a gun, and if you were unable to fight in a way, your gun would be seized so it could be used in the war effort when it came to it. But during the war of 1812, so many "militia" men didn't show up to do their duty, that is kind of when it became apparent to start making a more regulated federal military rather than relying on citizen militia to fill out the ranks of a standing military during a time of war.

So by all historical records and accounts, gun control, and highly regulated gun control is more American than whatever the hell people are spouting these days about person individual rights to have firearms. Which is more ironic than anything else. So they clearly weren't referring to only gun available during that era, but laid plans for the future developments that might come along and had a plan about what they meant, we just fucked it up. They weren't know idiots when they wrote it, they wrote it using what they thought would be common sense, but you know these days, you have to draft 50 page legal documents because people can't use basic common sense any more and you have to cover all your bases. It reminds me of the signs on port-a-potties that read "Do NOT drink the blue liquid, it is hazardous for your health" just let that sink in that those have to exist to protect the companies liabilities.

So funny thing is that the more Socialist leaning, not pure socialism, a country is compared to the US, the happier people seem to be and the more freedoms they feel they have, and the safer they feel. Like Police, Firefighters, Public Schools, Public Libraries, and etc are foundations of Socialism. Also 40 hour work weeks, child labor laws, and those things are also born out of Socialist ideologies. But that is whole other ball of wax.

I wouldn't say "Government = Socialism". Since that's not really what Socialism is about.
There are a lot of different strains of Socialism, but the Marxist definition is that Socialism is a revolutionary transitional phase between Capitalism and Communism. Which is the abolishment of both Capitalism and Government.
Though the 40-hour work weeks and child labor laws were done under pressure from trade unions. But that's not really the topic.

Hell, if Socialism was about "More Government". Then the United States is already a pretty socialist country. Probably more socialist than most self-described socialist countries.
(Though, in reality, Socialism can be whatever you want it to be, so whatever, who cares.)

Well I think modern Socialism is not Communism and it is definitely not trying to upend Capitalism all together. It is more of a means to modifying Capitalism to protect citizens from the worst sides of Capitalism. Because someone pointed out that so many small businesses have a hard time offering good healthcare coverage and a few other things, but Socialism would help level the playing field by alleviating the need for small businesses to offer healthcare if everyone was automatically covered under a single government plan and make them more competitive with the large corporations running them out of business. But it would also mean that companies would be forced to pay livable wages if there was more gov't oversight in that area as well.

Hell some countries in the EU have a mandatory 5 weeks of paid vacation, and the employees are happier, more productive, and in general better off. Like it isn't perfect cause some countries are still suffering from lack of affordable living and etc. But overall the idea is to provide a sort of means to protect people from what pure capitalism would drive things to.

I personally wouldn't call that Socialism either.
In my mind, at least, Socialism is defined by either the complete absence of private enterprise or very hands-on, totalitarian capitalism. For example, most existing Communist countries today have very restricted, state-controlled Capitalism. China, Vietnam, etc. The only country that lands in the former are North Korea, which isn't officially a Marxist-Leninist state since the 90s. These countries actually aren't too far off from what Fascism was. There's a reason why so many people get the two confused. Since a lot of self-professed Socialist/Communist countries act like fascists. At least that's how it was during the Cold War.

A lot of "Socialist" countries in the EU prefer to use the word "Social Democracy" rather than Socialist. I think the only officially socialist country in Europe is Portugual? At least, I think it calls itself a socialist nation in its constitution. That was after the right-wing "Estado Novo" was overthrown in the 70s.

Like the US's form of government is a Democratic Republic, but political and economic theory can get complicated. I think of the US as a mix of Socialism and Capitalism for economics but Democratic Republic for governance. and they influence the other.

Also, if I could give you a gold star, I would, I appreciate this level of conversation.

Thanks! I try my best to give good and reasonable conversations. I used to be a troll, but I wasn’t very good at it and I took no pleasure from it.

Trolls are no fun anyway, and having earnest communication brings about more meaningful and insightful conversations prevents you from alienating everyone around you. :>

Being civil is another way to troll as well. And it's more fun.
Since you can really make people mad without even trying. That's more fun to me than trying to get people mad.

By just stating an opinion in the most civil way possible. And watch someone get really mad over nothing.

Polite Trolling, I like it, LOL