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this post was submitted on 28 Oct 2026
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I dare say France has - once again - recently demonstrated that you don't necessarily need either of those things.
And once again, comparing France to America is a dumb take ignoring major differences in basically everything about the countries.
You know what? I agree. There really is no point in comparing the two.
Right. Compare something more obvious so people can stop making the same dumb comparison.
France vs Texas
I was looking it up a couple days ago - in France if you lived in the furthest large city from Paris, Nice, it would take you 8.5 hours by car or 6 hours by public transit to get to Paris. You could get off work at 4p on Friday, swing by home and be to Paris by midnight, protest for a day and half, and then be home in time for dinner on Sunday. It'll cost $100-200 USD each way, and you can buy it as a single ticket.
No let's look at Texas - The capital is Austin, which is more central North/South, and similarly offset east/west, aka it's slightly closer to the center of the landmass vs Paris. If you live in the furthest away large city, Amarillo, it is 8 hours by car or 19 hours by public transit. A city bus to the transit station, then 3 different city to city buses to get to Austin. The cost is $200-250 each way. By the time you get to Austin, you need to call your boss and let them know you won't be in on Monday, and that's if you turn around and leave immediately.
America is Fucked.
Yeah, France actually has a sense of self worth among the populace.
Or, you know, the fact that France is smaller, has less people, more social safety nets, and doesn't have a militarized trigger-happy police force.
Don't forget the US has the nasty combination of a sizeable demographic of right-wing gun owners who'd love an excuse to use them, alongside news media who'd frame the protesters as an evil force that's burning down entire cities.
It's just unfortunate that most likely most of those in the US who do have guns are also Trump supporters, or at least I imagine that to be true.
They're just the ones that like to brag about it and make it part of them.
To most a gun is a tool, nothing more. You don't see carpenters running around bragging about their Stanley Fatmaxx 20 ounce hammers.
🤷♂️ ey what do I know, I'm neither American nor do I own a gun 😅
So anyway, are there then enough armed liberals/democrats/whoever the fuck the good guys are over there, to cause a revolution with their good gun tools?
I hope nobody has to find out.
Gun ownership in the US is largely correlated with where someone lives. A lot of non-Americans forget that the United States is really just 50 very different states in a trenchcoat all pretending to be a single unified country.
Southern states have tons of gun owners, while they're much rarer in northern states outside of more rural areas. The type of gun owned also depends, with a single concealed carry pistol being far more common in cities and the north, while gun nuts tend to collect everything from rifles to shotguns and often have several boxes of ammo for each.
Unfortunately the areas with higher gun ownership tend to be the conservative ones, which doesn't bode well for any civil conflict. Not to mention police forces everywhere lean heavily conservative and are armed to the teeth with military surplus gear due to our many wars and lobbying from the Military-Industrial Complex, up to and including SWAT teams with APCs.
So large correlation with where someone lives, but also large correlation with conservatism?
Could it not also be that gun ownership is correlated with conservatism, and location is correlated with conservatism (i.e. you vote like your neighbor)?
France is not the US. The US frequently kills protestors, even peaceful ones, and has literally bombed entire city blocks in the past. That's not to mention the vast legal, demographic, and geographic differences.
The US government is depraved. It is not comparable to France.