No, they're being harmed by people misusing guns. NO law will ever stop a criminal. The only one who can stop a criminal in the act is the victim or someone very close by: that rules out the police, and since courts say it isn't the police's job anyway, that means it's up to the individual.
I say people are being harmed by lax gun laws, and you respond with 'no, they're being harmed by people misusing guns'. Well no shit sherlock. The problem is that you can't do anything to make people not misuse the guns. As such, efforts need to be focussed on where something CAN be done, tightening gun laws to prevent/minimise the misuse.
I'm treating them as responsible individuals! They know there are bad guys, they know the police can't protect them; the logical conclusion is that it's their own job to protect themselves.
Yes, you are treating 'them' as responsible individuals. But the 'them' you are treating are in many ways indiscernable from 'those', if 'those' are to be the ones who cannot be trusted. So like it or not, you are trusting the untrusting to be responsible, just as much as anybody else, and it doesn't work. This is why we create laws that apply to us all, in order to prevent those who are irresponsible from doing as much damage, more often. It is why we have road safety regulations, accreditation for electricians/gas fitters, building regulations, age limits, food safety standards, the list goes on. Guns should not be exempt. It is the pervasive nature of the 2nd amendment interpretation to the right of self defence, that enables interference of sensible gun laws.
I'm not "supposing" anything: anyone who says I can't have a gun and carry it as I please is telling me that my life is not worth defending against an attacker.
In as much as if i claim you care less about society than yourself. If you take umbrage with that, good, you'll see how distateful it is to keep hearing trashy statements that distort an opposing view.
The entire anti-gun edifice is built on emotion, not reason. Reason says that since there is danger in the world, one should take steps to protect one's self. Reason says that no one has any right to tell anyone else how to do that.
Reason says that you have a responsibility to more people than just yourself. And your approach to being unable to be in multiple places at once (to protect more than just yourself), requires giving guns to everyone else and essentially saying 'good luck'. It is utterly irresponsible. And other people do have a right, within a democracy, to lay down the standards for the greater good, even when that means limiting our own rights, especially when rights without limits lead to anarchy.
The Founding Fathers were right: a man not allowed to be armed is not a citizen, but a slave.
They all say that in unison did they? And this was the same group who if i'm not mistaken, didn't really have a great problem with people being slaves. Or could it be more realistic to state that history ran its course despite any objection to the prevailing rule. Times change. Your Founding Fathers were subject to their own time in history, with their own goals, and without foresight. It is cheap to claim they were right, when you don't have any means to tell if they'd think the same, had they lived today.
Those words on that document are meant to protect us from democracy.
Really?? Wasn't it tyranny? Seems odd that a process designed to protect the interests of the people would be considered a threat, given that these guys were all about wanting to determine their own future, rather than bow to their former masters.
You don't get the historical reference?
>lost cause alert<
No, i got the reference alright. But gun regulations are proposed for 'good' reason (albeit you don't share the methodology), not for a malicious intent, like with the comparison you tried to draw. The right to self defence compares to the right to ride a bus (to a far lesser degree obviously), and the right to bear arms for the purpose of self defence, can be compared to the right to sit down on a bus for safer transportation. In both cases, the right, for the purpose it is intended, is to defend yourself, and use transportation, respectively, not to use a weapon for defence, or to sit down on the bus. You complicated the debate by adding that extra element of prejudice, which would only be comparable if we were talking about applying regulations to only women, or hispanics, or left handed people.
The armed defender has the edge: the criminal is in it for profit; getting shot is not a way to profit. The criminal willing to die for his "job" is rare, but the armed defender willing to shoot to defend his or her own is common.
The defender never has the edge. The defender merely responds to the threat. And as for the criminal willing to die for his 'job', being rare, that's not true at all. Well, not entirely. It is fair to say that 'willing to die' is rare, but the truth is, where criminals are concerned, it is not at all rare for many of them to take that risk. It'd be rare if we were talking low single percentiles, but the pro-gun website 'Americangunfacts', despite publishing some disingenuous facts about homicide rates and gun ownership in Europe, even shows a statistic of 40% of felons who are unphased about tackling an armed civilian. Why? Probably because, despite what you like to think, guns give criminals as much of an advantage as they do to anyone else.
If personal safety were the driving force, then those who don't want to carry guns would stop bothering those who do: personal safety is a personal matter, not to be dictated by anyone but the person.
This doesn't apply when a personal choice has a detrimental effect on everyone else. Think about why the captain is supposed to stay on his sinking ship, about why commercial airlines don't provide their crew with parachutes, about why cyclists are supposed to ride on the road instead of the pavement, about why the EU for example has strict regulation for bumper guards/bulbars etc, and about why choosing not to have your children immunized is irresponsible.
Everybody has a right to personal choices, within reason....for a reason.
When the "approach is at a group level", that means no one is regarded as an individual, only as a statistic. It means the proponents don't care if anyone in particular is harmed, so long as the statistic improve. It depends on seeing individuals as the property of society, who may be dictated to ("for their own good", of course). It overthrows the entire basis of human rights, which is that each individual owns his or her own self, mind and body.
In a slight way you are right. It doesn't matter if anyone in particular is harmed. Nobody should be regarded as being any more important than anyone else. The 'particular' person matters to that person, and their loved ones. Nobody is more important as an individual, as other individuals are as part of a group. This is one of the reasons we have such great respect for our armed forces, placing their lives on the line to protect the masses. It is also why the idea of shooting down an airplane, that contact has been lost with, is very much on the table, should there be a greater threat to loss of life on the ground.
YOU matter, but at the same time, you don't matter much. I accept this status quo. You don't, but that's fine, because you don't matter. It will always be, as it always has, the majority that matter most. And sure, that's been as much a bad thing as a good, but it's how it is.
At root, it is irrelevant whether "society is safer", because what matters is individual rights. That's what America is about: individual rights.
And it sets you apart. But it's not in a good way. The fact that you state it is irrelevent whether society is safer, is exactly why most of the rest of the developed world (and an evergrowing number of Americans) ignore your point of view.
Responsibilities are the flip side of rights. Where rights are reduced, responsibilities are reduced.
Not so at all. If you introduce a hate speech law, people don't have to obey it, but if they don't want to fall foul of the law, they have to be more responsible about what, and how, they say things. In the US, you have a greater freedom of speech, but this allows people to take no responsibility whatsoever for the harm that their hateful speech may do. If anything, pushing rights to the limit, gives people an excuse to be more irresponsible, an example:- "officer, he was gonna break my nose cos i threw a beer can at his head, so i shot him a few times in the chest, but it was self-defence officer, and i'm allowed not to be reasonable about it, so if i killed the guy, well, he shouldn't have reacted to my provocation and defended himself" "okay, fair enough, be on your way".
Back then people not willing to be armed were considered somehow lacking.
Back then.....when the world was a much better place and nobody ever got murdered, and no powerful member of society was corrupt, and people didn't know what conflict meant...you get my drift. Screw what the ancients thought, its not all relevent anymore.
I don't have to "form a militia"; I am the militia -- the Constitution and federal law say so.
For now.
What percentage of firearms owners commit violence with them? It's so minuscule that statistically it's zero.
You ask a question, and then provide your own answer. How about showing me the source for the calculations. I'd be more convinced by seeing some math.
Most violence in the United States is government subsidized through the misnamed "War on Drugs". That actually shows if you look at the violence patterns: if you take the few most drug-distributor contested precincts out of the top twenty urban areas in the U.S., you'll find that the rest of the country, despite all the firearms, is at least as safe as any other developed country.
Wouldn't you be forgetting an important factor. The one that deducts drug/gang related violence in those similiar areas of developed nations. We know that drug/gang violence can skew the results, but the US is not unique in that respect. We also know that firearm ownership is generally higher in rural areas, which makes me very interested to know what sort of outcome will result, if the US had a similiar population density to Europe.
And the truly interesting thing about that is that those batches of precincts tend to have some of the lowest per-capita gun ownership in the country -- which means that in reality, in the U.S. we already have the evidence that reducing the number if guns in the hands of responsible citizens strongly corresponds in more violence.
As i already mentioned, gun ownership is generally higher in rural areas. You don't see many drug cartels or gangs hanging out in the sticks. You're erroneously equating high crime rates with urban areas, which have less use for guns. The decline in gun ownership since the 80s is consistent with the decline in hunting. As much as you want there to be a genuine comparison, the crime doesn't exist simply because there are less guns. It is far more to do with the prosperity and density of the locations that play a greater factor.
No American with any sense would trust the police farther than they would a Somali warlord: the police are NOT our friends (you did watch that video, right?). The job of the police isn't to protect anyone, it's to find people they can arrest -- that's what happens when you have "the rule of law"; the law gets elevated to godhood and ceases to be a tool for order, becoming instead a tool for repression, for intimidation.
The existence of a police force, especially as we have them today, is one of the better arguments for citizens organizing into militias: the police demonstrate over and over that they cannot be trusted; even those who in themselves could be trusted aren't allowed to be trusted, since they are authorized by law to lie to citizens, to deceive and manipulate, to NEVER say anything that could help a citizen demonstrate his or her innocence -- no, they are only allowed to take actions that will lead to ruin for citizens.
If our police were to be trusted, they would never accept military vehicles for their departments. If our police were to be trusted, they would never use lies or manipulation. If our police were to be trusted, they would refuse to seize property of citizens who have been convicted of no crime. If our police were to be trusted they would never engage in any action that would not be permitted a private citizen. If our police were to be trusted, they would come forward and report every corrupt action of every official.
But they do not. Taken as a whole, our police have no honor. They do not serve and protect anyone but themselves and those over them. They show no reason trust should be given them -- and anyone who trusts them is a fool.
The problem with your police force is your problem. You want them to treat you as fellow citizens, help make their job safer and maybe they wouldn't be turning militant. They can't be expected not to put their personal safety on the line for you, you of all should be respecting that philosophy, right?
