I came for the lewd art, I stayed for memes and cats.

I went to the library. I asked the librarian where the books were. They led me to the section. I picked out the fantasy romance of my choice. They asked if I needed help checking it out. I said no. I checked it out. I read it.

I haven't heard anything concrete because, if I'm honest with you my friend, everyone is just guessing and using pattern recognition to justify their confirmation biases, at least when it comes to economists' predictions.

Just talking to local people though, you can get a feel for where they are losing money (I mean this as in, you can go do this yourself if you're curious about how your local businesses are doing, just talk to them cuz more often than not, they haven't had anyone to lament to).

For example, in our area, Skipthedishes takes out a flat percentage from deliveries that normally wouldn't be too arguable, but because everything local suddenly had to be funneled through a delivery system, restaurants were not prepared to make money that way (as in their main moneymaker is the restaurant presence itself) so much so that their budgets are not making enough money to serve food.

Of course they're staying open because skipthedishes is better than closing down and doing massive layoffs in the food industry, but this model will kill them because it was meant to be temporary and ofc just eat (who owns skipthedishes), a gentrified monopoly is not going to help out restaurants or reduce their costs, if it's in their benefit, what corporation would fight profit in times of instability?

frog throat muscles aren’t set up the way most other vertebrates’ are! they completely lack the powerful ring of muscles that lets other animals… swallow things. 

this means that if a frog wants to get an item from its mouth to its stomach, it has to get… creative. 

so what they do instead of contracting throat muscles is they invert their eyeballs backwards into their head, compressing the entire back of their mouth and shoving whatever was in there downwards directly into the stomach. 

Your future if they take your guns: the reality of owning a gun in The Netherlands, Europe.

As a legal and law-abiding Dutch gun owner, I thought I'd chime in and give you a realistic picture of what's in store for you if you one day lose this important political cause. Reddit is full of opinionated left-leaning Europeans who have never even touched a gun, so anything they say should be taken with a big grain of salt. It's a long read, but there's a lot to unpack here, and I promise you it's shockingly absurd enough to override any potentially short attention spans out there.

As an aside, let me point out something incredibly important that no-one ever seems to talk about when it comes to discussions of this nature: the psychology of gun control (and by extension) of self-defence. "Progressivism", almost by its very nature, is the embodiment of the slippery slope argument. Progressive generations rebel against what is considered the status quo, until they settle on something they personally consider reasonable. Sometime later, a new generation is born and grows up with the new progressive ideals being considered status quo, leading to a new wave of political rebellion that settles on yet a more progressive societal paradigm. The compromise between standing still and moving forward is always moving forward, even if only a little bit at a time. More on that later.

I've picked out a few of the more laughable or totalitarian-sounding things that are part and parcel of living in a country with strict gun control.

Joining a club

To own a gun, you must have been a member of a shooting sports club (pretty much a gun range that requires you to become a permanent member) for at least a year. During this year, you'll have to pass two club-internal "background checks" of sorts. The first one happens right after you sign up to join a club. A designated committee arranges a meeting with you, where you're seated opposite the committee and answer a lot of vague, personal questions. The meeting is aimed at determining if they consider you to be sound of mind and if they feel confident accepting your application to join the club.

The committee consists of people with no professional or otherwise relevant experience in psychology or social work. Any member of the committee may veto your membership application without having to explain their decision to you or their fellow committee members. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for discrimination on the basis of personal antipathy or prejudice with no accountability or transparency. The second meeting with the committee happens right after you apply for a private gun ownership permit (after your first year at the club is over), and is nearly identical in set-up and execution.

Government Background Checks

The first time you'll notice the truly totalitarian undertones of the whole gun control system is during your government-mandated background check, which follows if you successfully went through the aforementioned steps. The best example of this is the "e-screener": an online, fully automated psychometric test/questionnaire that the government charges a ridiculous $60 for. A few examples of questions (I'm not making this up):

"Do you always wash your hands before dinner?"

"Would you litter paper waste if there were no trash can nearby?"

"Do you have lots of friends?"

On the basis of your answers, the test passes a legally binding judgement. Remarkably, you may also fail the test by giving "too many socially acceptable answers", i.e. by being too well behaved. The common thread in the test is supposedly to test for impulse control, though it's obvious the test is an almost comical Orwellian masterpiece (make no mistake though: this ridiculous abomination can make or break your ambitions of becoming a firearm owner) whose diagnostic outcome depends purely on a subjective, government-approved template personality - and, of course, on political compliance.

One of the more sinister case-questions that stuck out to me was one where a scene was depicted in which you were going for a walk through a dark forest late at night with your wife. Your wife is then charged by a man with the intent to rape her. You carry a (legal) pocket knife on your person. What do you do? I'll get back to this question when I get to the psychology of societal restrictions on self-defence, and what that means to your country if you budge even a centimeter (or inch) when it comes to gun rights.

Spoiler: if you answered the above question with "I'd use my perfectly legal pocket knife to protect my wife against violent rape", you could have kissed your plans of owning a gun one day goodbye.

You've got your gun: now what?

In terms of storing your gun, you've got two options. One is to store it at your club, the other is to install a gun safe at home that must be approved by the National Police (equivalent of feds). The safe must be bolted into the floor and walls, or must weigh 200 kg (about 440 pounds). Ammo and guns must at all times be stored separately.

The police have the right to show up at your door unannounced to check if you're (still) storing your firearms and ammunition properly.

Say you've been at the gun range, and want to swing by your local supermarket to pick up some groceries on the way home. Or you want to pick up your kids at the in-laws. Congratulations, you just lost your firearms license. As per law, you are required to take the most direct route home when transporting your firearm. Stopping for gas is allowed only if you can prove it was absolutely necessary, and if you can prove it's en route to your home. In addition, during transport, your firearm and your ammunition needs to be separately stored at all times.

Screw the details: the psychology and sinister reality of vilifying self-defence.

You could spend all day picking apart the absurdities of the details, but the totalitarianism inherent in this whole thing extends far beyond guns, and IMO, is more important than squabbling about things such as gun safe requirements.

Sidenote: as everyone in this sub knows, once you subtract suicides and gang-related homicides (which we don't have in The Netherlands for reasons that are entirely cultural and societal, unrelated to gun control), you'll come to find that our homicides per capita aren't significantly lower than those in the US. In any case not enough to warrant the far-reaching gun control we have.

Either way, the psychology of firearm bans is a dangerous and insatiable one. Liberals in the US, who to their credit don't discredit mainstream science nearly as much as most republicans do unfortunately, turn out to be surprisingly unscientific when it comes to this discussion. Terms are made-up on the fly (assault weapons), statistics are ignored (i.e. the efficacy of firearms bans), the cultural component of the debate is avoided completely (i.e. the issue isn't guns, it's gang violence unique to a developed country such as the US).

The same is true with my friends here in The Netherlands. They recoil at the sight of a gun. I have friends who refuse to even touch one of my completely legal and unloaded guns, or who are visibly shocked if I pull one out of my safe in preparation of going to the range later that evening. I keep it to myself mostly.

Guns, and by extension weapons, are a symbol of masculinity, of violence, of aggression to them. These people inherently don't like them because they inherently don't like the feelings they associate with them.

And, as is to be expected, they will ban anything else that evokes similar feelings. Just look at the state of knife laws in the UK, or more specifically London. Turning to my country: here is a forum run by our National Police Corps where ordinary citizens can ask questions, and where qualified policemen can answer. The OP lays out a few situations in which physical violence is imminent, and asks in which situation he's allowed to use violence for self-defence (e.g., being surrounded by guys who are clearly about to use violence, or being grabbed by someone).

The answers are the stuff of horrors.

You have an obligation to try to flee first. Defending yourself while you also had the opportunity to flee will always be considered excessive violence in a trial. If you really, really don't have any other options but to defend yourself, be prepared for a lengthy 2-year long lawsuit that will cost you your savings. This one, as explained by the last post in that thread, is the worst one: hitting someone to defend yourself after they've assaulted you is not allowed, because it is not certain the assault will continue past the first punch (hitting them would be categorized as proactive violence, which is unacceptable). The only thing you're allowed to do in case you cannot flee, is to parry the punches (i.e., become a pro-boxer and parry potentially devastating punches). Anything beyond parrying is violence, and only a judge can evaluate whether you were justified in using it (see item 2.)

As you can see, violence has been abstracted away into a process that only makes sense on paper and in judicial terms. Imagine having to flee knowing your attacker might catch up to you (men who assault or rob people usually aren't overweight 70-year olds), because that's your duty as per Dutch law. Imagine having to accept the risk that the guy who's punching you might knock you out and stomp on your head - causing lifelong brain damage (we've had a slew of such incidents happen here) - because you're not allowed to neutralize your attacker - you're only allowed to keep on parrying until you find a chance to flee, or until your attacker just gives up.

In the case of a home invasion, your guns are useless. Ammo and firearms are stored separately, so you'd have to open up two safes, load everything up, and get to the scene in time. Not to mention that, by Dutch law, you are required to allow the home intruder to flee first (with your belongings) or else any defensive violence that you use to protect yourself and your family will be deemed potentially excessive (see item 2.)

As for the question on that e-screener test? The one about your wife getting assaulted by a rapist? Yeah, forget the pocket knife. You two have an obligation to flee the scene first. At most you can try to parry the attack, but that will of course quickly end up becoming a scuffle, at which point you better suit up for court. To successfully pass the test, grit your teeth, swallow your principles, bend over, and answer the way the government wants you to answer. They're not stupid. They know what lots of people are thinking. But that's not the point. The point is to drive home that you're under their thumb, and that you'll publicly declare what they want you to declare. Swallowing your principles is exactly the intended psychological effect.

Alienating people from their right to defend themselves is the most inalienable right of all. All other rights follow from this one intrinsic capacity of humans. Don't allow anyone to take your guns. Everything else will follow. By necessity.