Quote:
Originally posted by Gorgo
Exactly how can you make life safer without anyone having to resort to packing heat?
|
Difficult. Very difficult, in fact. It's not like I'm saying this would be easy. I start with safety, though. For example, you have a right to own a car. It is a privilege to be able to drive it. You earn that privilege by learning and demonstrating the safety aspect, and acquiring insurance to make sure you are financially responsible for accidents that happen with your car. Same with guns. You have the right to own them, using them should be a privilege earned in much the same manner.
I think that's actually a fairly good start; some states already are moving in this direction.
Quote:
|
While this sounds really good and is quite idealistic, the stark truth of man's entire existance is: Might makes right.
|
Very true. So perhaps instead of eliminating guns altogether (something I vehemently oppose), we can try to keep the power climbing to a minimum. Sure, might makes right, but you don't need an AK-47 to be mighty.
Quote:
|
The firearm has only been around for a few hundred years, before that it was knives, swords, bows and arrows, clubs and way back when . . . rocks. The basic concept is the same.
|
Sure, but a sword isn't what you want when, to quote Samuel L. Jackson, "you absolutely, positively have to kill every motherf***er in the room." I can speak from personal experience with this; I fence (saber) and do live-steel show combat. I somehow doubt I could clear out an office filled with my "evil coworkers" with my saber; with an AK or even a legal semiautomatic pistol, it would become infintely easier. I have a bit of a problem with people acquiring the ability to pick off people they don't like, or even people at random, at 300 meters from cover - case in point, the D.C. sniper.
(Note to debaser: Malvo was military. Being in the military isn't even an automatic guarantor of gun safety.)
Quote:
|
It's not the weapon, it the wielder of that weapon.
|
In some ways yes, in some ways no. It's facile to say that "guns don't kill people, people kill people" - as often as not, or probably more, it's a person with a gun. That points directly to having perhaps more stringent background checks, the aforementioned licensing, learning, and insuring, and so on and so forth.
Quote:
|
A disarmed public is vulnerable to many situations where life will not be safer, from enemies foreign or domestic.
|
But owning a gun is not a guarantor of safety. Personal responsibility is required. Too many people ain't got it. Too many of them have guns.