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Originally Posted by willravel
I recognize that I can't stop violence from fists, knives, or baseball bats. I can't stop car accedents or plane crashes. We need knives and hands and baseball (even though it's boring) and cars and planes. Guns don't really have a duplistic purpous, besides maybe hunting, and who uses assault rifles to hunt? Most of us get our meat from the store, and they get it from killing domesticated cattle and poultry and pork and lamb and fish without the use of a gun. The reason for a gun is to injure or kill another human being, and that's not a good enough reason, in my mind, for them to exist.
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The reason for a gun is to stop an offensive threat by injuring or killing another human being, and that's a good enough reason, in my mind, for them to exist. I don't expect my 57 year old, 4', 11", 98 lb mother to use martial arts and fight off one attacker, let alone more. The same goes for myself. While I'm an average size man, there are particular reasons why I choose to carry a gun, or have one in my home, that make a gun better suited to defending myself or my family, than it would to 'put up my dukes and fight like a man'.
Your pacifism is admirable, but misguided, in my opinion, because you're misunderstanding the lesson of peace that Jesus tried to spread. If I were a more critical person, I'd tell you that you're disrespecting the gift that god gave you by refusing to use the force necessary to keep it.
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Originally Posted by WillRavel
If numbers are so important, why are we fighting terrorism with such vigor when in the past 6 years we've lost 3,000 people to terrorism and 66,000 to gun violence?
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Because gun violence didn't cause those deaths, violent criminals did. Just because they used a gun is irrelevant when you consider that there are as many, or more, crimes used with other weapons AND guns that don't result in deaths. The defensive uses of guns far exceeds the number of deaths that happen by criminal use of guns.