ShaniFaye

(I cant believe I'm actually starting a post here lol)

Ok, without posturing for a candidate or party, pretend I know absolutely nothing about gun control issues (not very far fetched lol)

I see lots of candidates are either for or against it, but Im not entirely sure just exactly what "gun control" does or doesn't entail.

I dont want tons of links to go read....I want it broken down in the simplest of terms that a political dummy like me can understand!!!

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Meditrina

Well, Shani. I will admit that I know nothing about this subject. I am more of a political dummy than you are. I am very interested in hearing the answer in layman's terms, so I can better educate myself and my children.

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Redlemon

As far as I can tell, there are two opposing positions:

1. If more people carry guns, it will be a deterrent to people using guns in a threatening manner.

2. If more people carry guns, the chances of someone using a gun in anger/passion/accident will increase.

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The_Dunedan

OK. First off, in the interests of full disclosure, I am a libertarian and believe that -any- controls on private weapons ownership are illegitimate. I say this so you'll know my biases right out of the gate.

The paradigm espoused by proponents of Victim Disarmament (a more accurate term, IMO) is that if firearms are forcibly removed from society that crime, especially violent crime committed with firearms, will be reduced. Measures espoused from this position usually include at very least the registration of weapons, licensing of owners, and the banning of certain scary-looking weapons incorrectly known as "assault weapons*." Many Victim Disarmament advocates, possibly a majority, also propose the banning of pistols, standard-capacity magazines, various types of defensive ammunition commonly carried by both police and civillians, large-calibre target rifles, and laws requiring "safe" storage. A sizeable and noisy minority (at least) call for the banning of all or nearly all civillian gun-ownership, disallowing even self-defense or sporting use as legitimate. Such advocates point to Japan as an example of a relatively crime-free society which has enacted strict Victim Disarmament measures: while true, this neglects the fact that Japanese police can search homes and buisinesses without warrant or warning, and that accusation is unofficially regarded as proof of guilt in the Japanese court system. The Pro-gun/rights counterpoint to this is that Japan is safe because police states generally are. Victim Disarmament advocates routinely advise persons who are attacked to defend themselves with less-lethal means (which routinely fail), by running away, or by calling the police (who can take half an hour to arrive.) Proponents of such measures also routinely espouse closing a "gun show loophole" which does not exist, and the banning of private, not-for-profit sales of firearms between individuals.

The paradigm espoused by pro-gun/rights proponents such as myself is that while honest people may comply with such laws, the great majority of violent criminals will not, and that the result will be that the law-abiding are left at the mercy of the lawless, and the weak at the mercy of the strong. Furthermore, we believe that the right of self-defense (and the right to acces to the means thereof) is absolute and inviolable; ie not to be mucked about with. We believe that firearms and other weapon exist and may be utilized to protect individuals and their lives, liberties, and properties from unlawful encroachment, whether by freelance criminals or an out-of-control Government entity. We also believe that "sporting purpose" is an illegitmate means of determining a weapon's suitability for civillian ownership, as many people keep weapons for non-sporting purposes such as self-defense or to maintain themselves as part of the Unorganized Militia, defined in Section 311 of the US Federal Code. Pro-gun/rights proponents point to Switzerland, Norway, and the Czech Republic as examples of nations which range from relatively gun-friendly to downright gun-enthusiastic and yet enjoy low violent crime. Contrariwise, they point to the example of the United Kingdom (most violent nation in the developed world according to the United Nations) as an example of what can happen when law-abiding citizens are disarmed by government fiat. They furthermore point out that rampage shootings such as Columbine and VA Tech have universally occurred in "Gun Free Zones" such as schools and posted workplaces; never at shooting ranges, police stations, gun-shows, etc. It is telling, IMO, that Victim Disarmament advocates have never been able to explain why, if firearms and access thereto is the problem, this is the case. The pro-gun/rights position is based upon a Rights-centred paradigm, while the Victim Disarmament position is based typically on a paradigm of poorly-understood utility. Pro-gun/rights advocates also make a utilitarian arguement, pointing out that the heavily-armed Swiss have been left alone or the better part of the last thousand years, and point to a number of instances in 1930s America wherein armed bodies of citizens stood down or removed corrupt and brutal local governments, most commonly in the coal-mining country of Appalachia.

*"Assault Weapons" are semiautomatic (one pull of the trigger, one round fired) weapons which have an appearance similar to their fully-automatic (gun fires as long as the trigger is depressed) counterparts. Despite being used in less than 10% of firearms-violent crime, they are routinely touted by the Brady Centre and others as "the weapons of choice" for drug-dealers and gangsters, and as threats to police officers; neither of which assertions is borne out by evidence.

Jinn

And by extension,

(1) Gun control advocates seek to limit or ban the possession of guns by citizens, as they believe possession will lead to more gun-related crimes.

(2) Gun control opponents seek to allow gun possession by qualified civilians, as they believe it to be a Constitutional right, or because they believe that it will lead to less gun-related crimes.

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dc_dux

I'll start with two common misconceptions.

1. Gun control does not mean banning all guns
2. The 2nd Amendment "right to bear arms", like other constitutional rights, is not absolute.

IMO, the goal of gun control is to require registration of ownership of guns for the purpose of tracking those guns if/when they are used in the commision of a crime. to prohibit ownership of guns by certain persons through a background check so that those persons who have committed crimes with a gun or persons convicted of other violent crimes (ie spouse abuse) or persons with mental disorders (who are diaganosed as potentially threathening to themselves and others)are prevented from owning guns in the future, to provide protections to prevent accidental abuses of guns by children (child protection locks) and to prohibit certain catagories of the mosts deadly and dangerous weapons from civilian ownership.

__________________
"The perfect is the enemy of the good."
~ Voltaire

roachboy

i think alot of your relation to gun control is directly tied to where you live and whether you grew up with guns or not.

i live in chicago and have lived in cities most of my life: i also grew up in a family that had no particular interest in hunting. when my relatives would once in a while "go hunting" what it usually meant was that they would go to our cabin in northern new hampshire, drink alot of beer and play ping pong. once in a while, some intrepid soul would decide that actually going outside was a good idea, occasionally with a weapon in hand, and that it was more likely they would find something interesting to shoot at if they ventured further than the outhouse, and so they would do that. from what i understand, they mostly ended up shooting arrows into trees.
anyway i find it difficult to not support gun control in urban spaces. whaddya need a gun for in a city? to go hunting? what are you going to hunt: other people?

on the other hand, i know alot of folk who grew up in more rural areas in families that were interested in and in some cases quite devoted to hunting, for example. these folk have an entirely different understanding of guns and different positions on gun control. knowing these folk and talking to them at length about this has caused me to become more agnostic on the matter of gun control in general--that is controls that would apply equally everywhere.

there are also folk who seem to think that the only way they know they are politically free is if they have a gun. this is separate--some of these folk used to be associated with the black helecopter set--you know, the folk who thought the us was being invaded secretly by the united nations, which would whizz its troops around in black helicopters. the reportings of sightings of the mysterious black helicopters was at one point a variant of bird watching. i used to really enjoy listening to the shortwave radio talkshows they would call into to "report"...great stuff. the idea was that the united nations, an extension of the "world jewish conspiracy" at one level or another, wanted to take away "our guns" and thereby "reduce us to slavery." these folk tend to argue that any form of gun control is a blow against political freedom. i tend to see these people are crazy. they tend to see me as a commie. so we both get to use words that end in the "y" sound across pointless non-conversations.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Jinn

I'm not sure these are misconceptions. What you elaborated on is sensible gun safety, but does not correlate with political supporters of "gun control" today. I agree in concept with all of the things you detailed, but I do not support "gun control" in its contemporary meaning.

I believe that "gun control" means far more than mandatory registration, gun safety and gun production regulation.

To some people, "gun control" means complete or near-complete disarmament of citizens.

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ShaniFaye

ok...so far so good

JinnKai, I will ask you since you're the last one that posted....when a politician says they are in favor of/not in favor of gun control...what exactly are they saying? (the reason I put it this way is because you say "some people", and I'm interested in knowing what the government really means by it

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dc_dux

Jinnkai...I dont know to whom you refer when you imply political supporters of "gun control" want complete or near complete disarmament of citizens.

No such gun control advocacy group, including the largest, the Brady Campaign/Brady Center, that I know of espouses such a position.

The argument you make is the common response from pro-gun advocacy groups...that the specific components of gun control that I mentiond are only the first step towards banning guns... yet they have no facts to support such a position.

Can you point to any recent proposed gun control bills or policies of gun control advocacy organiztions that want to completely disarm citizens?

The only recent case I am aware of was the DC gun law, which as a DC resident, I thought was overly restrictive and was found to be unconstitutional.

__________________
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~ Voltaire

The_Dunedan

Having known a number of Militiamen, I feel I must speak here in their defense. The vast majority of these folks were not nuts. The ones that were...well, they were a real "special" breed, in the "child molesters and people who talk in the theatre" sort of way.

However overblown their rhetoric may have at times been, most were and are genuinely concerned about the loss of freedom in the US. If you want to see people who -HATE- George W. Bush, I mean hate him like a chigger-bite you can't reach, go to a militia meeting. Sure, a lot of the blowhards from the Clinton years were just nutjob Democrat-haters. And no, I don't think you'll find any sympathy for your particular brand of politics, RB. But they're not crazy, the vast majority are not racist, and they can at least be said to be -doing- something, unlike the vast majority of the sumbering American electorate. I have never once interacted with a militia group which proposed, espoused, trained for, or fantasized about a "first strike" against the US Gov't, and anyone who suggested such a thing (or who said anything about a McVeigh style attack in any case) was immidiately ejected. If they came back, the cops were called. Loudmouthed racists frequently got the same treatment. At least with the men and women I knew, a Klanboy who wanted to train with 'em had better keep his mouth shut and not let -anyone- find out about it. They weren't interested in having an asshole (and liability) like that around. I've known some of these folks for a long time; one was my High School chemistry teacher. He kept his politics to himself until he heard me in a heated discussion with a classmate on this very subect, and we conversed regularly on the topic after that. He was one of the funniest, most creative, and most level-headed teachers I've ever had, strictly in it for love of the job. He's moved to New Hampshire, last I heard.

As for measuring political freedom by firearms rights; how else do you propose it be measured? If the Gov't is not honest enough, transparent enough, and trustworthy enough to permit its' citizens weapons with which they might defend themselves against it, how free can it be? How do you propose to protect the printing press, the home, or the right not to be enslaved when the potential censor, robber, and slaver has all the guns and you are defenseless?

People should not fear their governments, governments should fear their people, if you insist upon having the damned things.

telekinetic

If someone is in favor of gun control, it means just that--they are in favor of governmentally controlling (aka restricting in some way) a citizen's ability to purchase weapons. Things that a person 'in favor of gun control' could be in favor of are any combination of the following:

• Making it illegal to buy or own certain types of guns (which could include any combination, roughly in descending order of how common it is to want to ban them: 'assault' weapons, .50 caliber 'sniper' rifles, tactical shotguns, pistols, non-hunting rifles, any rifles)
• Making it difficult or expensive to own certain types of guns
• Restricting how many bullets a gun can hold
• Restricting how powerful guns can be
• Requiring lots of traceable paperwork to purchase a firearm
• Requiring a waiting period before purchasing a firearm
• Requiring technological advancements that would allow bullets to be traced to the gun that fired them

If you are anti-gun control, you wish to eliminate many of the previous items.

The absolute extreme pro and anti gun control stances can be simplified to :

For gun control: Make it illegal for anyone to own any guns
Against gun control: Make it legal for everyone to own any gun you want.

Those are the absolutes, but I'm not sure anyone actually holds those beliefs. I don't want to hear anyone tell me I'm wrong, those two stances are not up for debate. If you are pro gun control, you want to bring us closer to noone owning guns, if you are anti gun control, you want to bring us closer to anyone who wants them owning guns.



Full disclosure: I'm in Arizona, where it's basically legal to own and carry any gun you want without permits, if you're 21 and you're not concealing it. Concealed carry permits are easy, cheap and common, I own several guns, and go shooting with my wife regularly. I have friends who are gun smiths, and others who legally own automatic pistols and rifles, and I've shot everything up to an AK-47 and an AR-15 (the civilian M16).

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twisted no more

ShaniFaye

so lets say I'm a person that believes there should be a waiting period, that there should be background checks, but I dont really care what type of weapon it is...what does that make me?

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roachboy

(apologies for the digression, the conversation inside a conversation)

dunedan:

possession of a gun doesnt make you anything except a guy with a gun.
it provides no political orientation: it is an object.
it provides no coherent view of the world: it is an object, a commodity, like a package of oreos is except that guns will kill you faster.
to say that possession of a gun is in itself a guarantor of "freedom" then seems absurd.

the way you pitch this argument--that having a gun would make the government afraid of the citizenry--is absurd. first because you are simpy outgunned. second because once you enter into a modern state of affairs, you arrogate to the state a monopoly on legitimate violence. and the idea that you could simply make the state vaporize in 2007 is a pipedream--not if you like capitalism (which as a "libertarian" i assume that you do--correct me if i am wrong on that--but if you weren't a fan of capitalism, i would expect that you would identify as anarchist)--which would collapse in a minute without continutal state intervention to prop it up. and that, sir, is not a joke.

anyway, it matters less to me that these folk have guns than what they imagine themselves to be doing with them does. i see militia politics as entirely retrograde, predicated on a fantasy 18th century and some bizarre-o vicarious nostalgia for it. a political action by a rightwing militia group would unnerve me even more than an armed political action by a trotskyite group--and that is saying alot.

guns are just things. they have no independent political meaning. what matters is the orientation of the organizations that would use those guns. i think alot of milita folk prefer to invert logic and act as though their politics really are condensed an object because it is better pr than their actual politics could hope to be.

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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

dc_dux

Shani.....it would make you a supporter of the original 1994 Brady "Gun Control" Act, assuming by background checks you mean some people should be prevented from legally purchasing guns.

The Brady Bill prohibits the following persons from buying firearms:
* Those under indictment for, or convicted of, a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year;
* Fugitives from justice;
* Users of controlled substances;
* Persons adjudicated as "mental defective" or committed to mental institutions;
* Illegal aliens;
* Individuals dishonorably discharged from the military;
* Those who have renounced their United States citizenship;
* Persons subject to a court order restraining a person from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or the child of the intimate partner; or,
* Those convicted of a domestic violence misdemeanor.

The waiting period has been since been waived with the implementation of the computerized "insta-check system, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).

IMO,the Brady Act is sensible "gun control"

__________________
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ShaniFaye

Yes DC thats exactly what I meant.

I am confused now though....there is no waiting period anymore? I thought one of the purposes of that was to deal with "heat of the moment" purchases...or is that something different?

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dksuddeth

shani, my experience tells me one thing about gun control advocates.
Those in favor of gun control have realized that there is no such thing as 100% safety and security in a indivualized free society, therefore, they seek to try a new tact and make their government responsible for their safety and security by checking, tracking, and monitoring all of the nations citizens to ensure that nobody who is 'abnormal' is going to use guns to commit a crime against them.

gun control seeks to make crime too personal to be attempted, i.e. if there are no guns, there would be no crime

gun rights advocates believe that you alone are the best protector of your life and that of your loved ones and that a firearm is the best tool for that job.

and yet, the founding fathers of this nation felt the exact opposite of you.....does that mean you think the founders of this country were morons?

there are waiting periods in alot of states, but not all. Texas has no waiting period, just the background check.

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telekinetic

Shani,

As I understand it, the waiting period was just to do a complete background check. If you're going to do someone harm with the gun you can't buy right now, you'll probably still do harm in three days, or just steal a gun, buy one illegally, go find a knife or baseball bat...or a pointy rock...etc etc.

dksuddeth, I love your signature, mostly because I love the author.

The wikipedia editor in me says this thread is rife with neutral point-of-view violations

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dc_dux

Shani....the federal waiting period was a victim of politics in the original Brady Bill. The only way the NRA (and the many members of Congress it controls) had agreed to support the bill was if it included the provision to waive the waiting period once the NICS was in place....even though the NRA was on record earlier:

"A waiting period could help in reducing crimes of passion and in preventing people with criminal records or dangerous mental illness from acquiring guns."
-- NRA Fact Book on Firearms Control, 1976

BTW, the House passed a bill today to improve the background check system.
I assume Bush will sign it if it reaches his desk since he is on record for supporting the Brady Bill as well as background checks at gun shows, trigger locks and age restrictions on gun purchases:

Q: Do you support the Brady Bill?

BUSH: Law-abiding citizens ought to be allowed to protect their families. We ought to keep guns out of the hands of people who shouldn’t have them. That’s why I’m for instant background checks at gun shows. I’m for trigger locks. I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun. I also believe that the best way to make sure that we keep our society safe is to hold people accountable for breaking the law. If we catch somebody illegally selling a gun, there needs to be a consequence. The federal government can help.
http://www.ontheissues.org/celeb/Geo...un_Control.htm

Yikes....I agree with Bush on both gun control and immigration reform!

__________________
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~ Voltaire

ShaniFaye

I really really want to thank you guys for answering my questions in the way that I asked....and for not making me feel like a total idiot because I wasnt sure of things Not an easy thing to do in this forum hehehe

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FoolThemAll

Roachboy...

In your post #7 where you list reasons for gun ownership - hunting, people hunting, counter-tyranny - where's self-defense against the common criminal?

In my own experience, it's the most often cited argument against gun control. Your post seems glaringly incomplete without it.

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Plan9

Gun control is for pussies who think that God or a cell phone will protect them.

Rocks, swords, guns, laser blasters... you need to protect yourself.

(/rant)

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Whatever you can carry.

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debaser

I was going to write a long diatribe concerning gun control, but Crompsin just summed the whole thing up far more succintly than I ever could.

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Elphaba

And I want to thank you, Shani, for asking the question that many of us have about this complex issue. I'm reading your thread with great interest.

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flstf

IMHO, the right to bear arms was important to the founders because they wanted people to have the means to overthrow the government. They realized that all governments eventually fail including the one they just formed.

All other reasons, defense against crime, etc.. came later. It would be interesting to see which weapons they would want to allow ownership of in today's world. I suspect they would be against registration and would not want to make it easy for the corrupt government to identify and confiscate weapons from those who bear arms.

Plan9

That old pearl of wisdom:

"God did not make men equal. Samuel Colt did."

Anybody can use a gun. It is a neutral mechanism of social equality.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Jinn

Well, mostly neutral. I know plenty of women (and a few men) who couldn't wield a rifle or heavy shotgun effectively, nor move the slide on heavier pistols.

But in essence, sure.

And Shani: the biggest argument used by anti-gun control supporters is the slippery slope argument.

If they ban "assault" guns because they look too dangerous, how long before they ban rifles altogether? And then what's to stop them from banning shotguns? Or handguns?

If they're excluding felons, drug users and mentally handicapped individuals, that's fine. But what other requirements are they going to add? Are they eventually going to add so many requirements that I, as a law abiding citizen, can't buy a gun?

etc, etc.

Gun control eventually does boil down to the cliche of "guns dont kill people, people kill people."

If you can decide whether you believe that the volume and accessibility of guns is responsible for gun related crimes, then you're probably pro gun control. If you believe that it is the persons wielding the guns (rather than the guns themselves) that are responsible for gun related crimes, then you're probably anti gun control.

__________________
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roachboy

you know, fta, you're right. i didnt say anything about "self-defense"--i didnt say anything about the gun as penis extension, as a tool the primary function of which is to allow for the illusion of control over situations to be available to any fuckwit with enough money to get a gun. i didnt talk about that not because i forgot, but because i wasnt really interested in derailing the thread into a litany of more or less sociopathic assertions about the levelling functions of guns, how "democratic" they are. i figured it was bad enough that there were already claims that having a gun means you are politically free. i didnt see the point of opening up another space for arbitrary claims. but it opened anyway, so my job is done.

i didnt talk about it because i live in a city and find nothing good or reassuring about such statements. i find them the rationale for potential shootouts in streets over some petty agression. i find them to be the rationalization for the multiplication of stray bullets. i find them to be the excuse floated up front for the accidental injury or death of people just wandering by or who live nearby. i dont find the idea that people are strapped in a city to do anything good for any sense of security. i see mostly people who are strapped using their mighty guns in a situation of panic. but i am sure that others see manly men dropping and rolling and squeezing off x rounds of precisely aimed lethal force in protection of all and sundry, mowing down Bad Guys vigilante style and ultimately being congratulated for their dodge city heroism the way charles bronson might have been in a movie, maybe even getting to say a cliche or two in the process---"go ahead make my day"----and i am sure that Proper Gun Safety and Handling Training means that you will never panic in an unexpected situation, that you would never make errors that would result in the maiming of someone walking by just because they were walking by. maybe that's the effect of being-strapped as penis extension: you are never afraid of anything, you have Control strapped to your side and are Ready to Whip It Out. but who knows, maybe out there in ruralia, land of the high plains drifters, these sort of problems of population density dont matter so much and it is less a big deal if in a panic you spray a few dozen stray bullets into the desert. maybe there is no panic is ruralia and that's why the manly men who live out there live out there.
maybe chaos is just an urban thing. when i watch television, it looks that way. maybe television is accurate in its portrayal of the world.

or maybe its cities where "pussies" live, to use the sophisticated terminology of one or another of the manly men above, i dont remember which.
ah there we have the REALLY compelling argument: cities are full of "pussies" and manly men live in ruralia.
got it.
now i understand.

__________________
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spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

dksuddeth

nice one roach, you got all the key phrases. atta boy.

__________________
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roachboy

i would direct your attention to the sociopathic posts from crompsin above, dk. i would imagine that you too would find them to be a bit problematic. but hey, maybe not. in the end, the post you respond to is really just a riff on the basic argument: your position on gun control is a function of where you live. in a city, things look one way--in the country another. my actual position is that i favor local controls. i know these are anathema to you because you make no distinction local/global, seeing everywhere only the famous "slippery slope"...and that's fine, whatever, i am not interested in having this same circular debate with you yet again.

this crompsin posts in this thread deserve very bit of ridicule they get.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

FoolThemAll

Roach...

Don't you think you might've overgeneralized and oversatirized the self-defense position just a tiny little bit there? Do you really think that all the people who invoke "self-defense" for gun ownership are itching for a firefight? Or that, even with training, panic and poor judgment are inevitable? Are police officers and other armed government employees really the only ones who can use guns well in preventing or combatting crime?

(for what it's worth, I wasn't a fan of the crompsin reply either.)

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I wonder if we're stuck in Rome.

dksuddeth

you might think his reply was worthy of ridicule, but he is right. You need to protect yourself, because when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

roachboy

fta: i dont think i was over-generalizing terribly much, actually.
again, i live in an urban environment. i dislike guns intensely. someone got shot next door to me a few weeks ago. despite that, i dont have a gun and have no plans of getting a gun as the Idea of self-defense with a gun serves no therapeutic function for me and the reality is that i dont have a gun and dont want a gun. period.

the question of reliance on the cops is interesting and complicated obviously--another question of your experience more than anything else. like i said from the outset of this entertainment, my fundamental position is and remains that different contexts engender basically different relations to weapons--spatial context, personal context.
maybe when dk imagines a scenario, he has a gun with him and the closest highway patrol dude is 45 minutes away.
i dont.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite

Baraka_Guru

A gun gives its wielder an efficient way of killing someone. There should be controls in place to ensure that not everyone has this power. This is especially the case if the leading cause of gun deaths is not self-defense (it's usually self-destruction).

The self-defense argument doesn't stand if you do the research. As one example, women have a much greater chance of being shot to death by their partners than they would by some stranger. Furthermore, for most people, having a gun in the home only increases the chances of accidental and intentional gun deaths (e.g. their partners).

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Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

dksuddeth

and just being in a car increases your chances of being in an MVA.
just working on the roof of your house increases your chances of a broken neck, should you fall.

there are risks in everything a person does. the chances of you coming out alive in any encounter with someone who has a gun increases exponentially if you have your own gun and know how to use it.

__________________
"no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything. You cannot conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."

Baraka_Guru

This is why we have strict laws governing the roads. Those laws are in place as to best minimize the risks of automobile travel. Are you saying this is a good comparison? I'm now thinking so. We should use gun control to best minimize the deaths by guns. Actually, I mean the Americans should. We have gun control in Canada, which is why our gun-death stats are a mere fraction of what they are in the U.S.

And if you do work on your house, you should also follow safety guidelines to minimize your risk of death or injury. Use everything as recommended by safety professionals.

Getting into an encounter with someone who has a gun increases exponentially if you don't have adequate gun control.

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Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing?
—Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön

Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
—From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot

jorgelito

Gun safety functions in a similar manner.

tecoyah

There are many dangerous aspects of a free society. We as a population intent on protecting these freedoms must do so through intelligent compromise in most cases. Absolute freedom in any large group becomes unworkable,and counter-productive to the whole, thus a certain level of limited freedom becomes justified. We call these limitations Law, and though no Law makes sense to every member of the citizenry, they are extremely important to the health of any society.
Traffic Laws and Gun control serve a similar purpose as a general rule. By forbidding people to run a red light we can minimize the inevitable accident and lower the chance of bodily injury without taking away the right to drive. Similarly, by placing limits on armament types we as a society minimize the possible damage a weapon can do within the society in question. For this reason no one can legally own an RPG for self defense, but can certainly carry a 9mm for protection if they feel so inclined.
If someone feels the need to own an assault rifle to protect themselves from perceived threat, I admit confusion as to how this weapon would be more effective for the purpose of protection unless the intent is to hold off an invasion of the home. Often the argument is one of sport shooting, and though I have no issue with the idea, I would expect the weapons involved to be regulated for the protection of society in general. You can have your High Powered Guns if you want them.....But don't expect me to trust you with my family.

mixedmedia

I think this logic holds water.

And good writing and wit aside, roachboy makes some excellent points, as well. Albeit, good medicine is sometimes hard to swallow in such liberal doses.

__________________
Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

flstf

I think the main constitutional argument for the right to bear arms is protection from our government when it fails. Of course the world is much different now and the arms are far more powerful. When our corrupt government finally totally fails it will be interesting to see just how far those in power will go to stay in power. A well armed population will make it much more difficult for them.

There are those who think our government will last forever or that resistence will be futile in any case when it does fail. I'm not so sure, and one thing seems certain, every government on this planet eventually fails. Some give up power peacefully, others fight to the bitter end to maintain power.