So I’m writing as one who’s lurked these fair boards here and there for many years now, and have recently started doing so again. There have been a few gun-related threads in recent days, and I must say I’d not have thought to find so many fervent defenders of gun rights on this board, but perhaps I’d not been paying attention in the past.
I’ve never owned a gun. I’ve fired a gun a few times. I’ve never been hunting, having grown up mainly in urban environments, though as a professional chef I’d love to as I love game birds and would like to gain the full experience.
That said, in the interest of full disclosure, I think guns are cool. Handguns in particular. I love classic Western films. And I love cop shows. When I was a kid I loved playing with toy guns, standing in front of the mirror like a miniature Travis Bickle practicing my quick draw, and that mystique has never fully disappeared for me.
I’m not particularly in favor of gun control legislation. I think most of us can agree that it doesn’t make a huge difference in terms of most violent crime. I’ve spent the majority of my adult life living in questionable neighborhoods, and barring some sort of financial miracle, I don’t see myself moving to a “safe” neighborhood anytime soon. Since this past June, when I moved into my present apartment, my neighborhood has seen at least four fatal shootings – almost certainly gang-related, and as such I doubt the perpetrators bothered registering their sidearms. In my youth was robbed at gunpoint on the street twice.
But I’m rambling, I should get to my question. In those events where I was robbed at gunpoint, well, I should say that I was carrying a knife. Also had been studying martial arts for a many years at the time and felt quite confident in my ability to defend myself physically. I feel that, had I chosen to resist, given my distance from the mugger, I’d have had a better chance than not to disarm and probably disable him. But let’s say (generously) I had maybe a 70% chance of winning that particular conflict. It wasn’t worth it for whatever meager amount of cash I had in my pocket. Had I been carrying a gun, I don’t see my assessment of the situation being any different.
But I guess I’m rambling again. I’ll stop now.
I’m really not trying to be inflammatory. But my question in a nutshell is, what’s so important about owning guns? I mean, yeah, there’s the chance that your home will be broken into by a madman who’s hell-bent on killing your family and taking all you hold dear, but how often does that sort of thing happen? There’s the chance that our government will become tyrannical and totalitarian and will try to do unspeakable things to us such that we’ll have no choice other than armed resistance, but that’s pretty unlikely and in such an instance, what difference would it make if the guns of revolution were obtained legally or not? True, the 2nd amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, but (as a nearly lifelong resident of “the ghetto”) our constitutional rights are being trampled upon all the time! I mean seriously, what’s the real benefit to legally guaranteed gun ownership? What makes it so important to so many people?
P.S. I’ve been drinking, and I apologize if this question is not as intelligent as it seems at the time. But in the light of these recent gun debates, I’d just like to try and get to the heart of the matter.
Who cares how often it can happen? I should have the right to protect myself anyway and nobopdy outside my family has the moral right to tell me myfamily is protected enough
Why bother with homeowners insurance or fire extinguishers?
Part of the big deal to me is that gun control doesn’t work, I’ve never committed a crime with mine, my background has been investigated by several agencies and they can’t find anything wrong with it, I use most of my guns fairly regularly for a variety of reasons, and as long as there are bad people out there I want the ability to protect my family. And passing laws that are ignored by the very people that we wish to restrict does nothing but harm those that do obey laws.
What I can’t understand is why people are so afraid of them. It seems a pretty irrational fear to me, and people in the crime-ridden inner city wanting laws that effect those out in the country strikes me as arrogance.
You’ve answered your own question. I see a lot of home invasions in the poorer neighborhoods and being able to legally defend yourself seems like a worthy cause. As you pointed out, criminals will use guns illegally regardless.
Beyond that, why do you want to give up any current rights? Do you have a list of them for us to consider and a reason why you want the rest of us to give them up? Personally, that’s not a road I want to go down.
I don’t think arguments about rights are all that useful in this sort of discussion - saying that you have the right to something doesn’t explain why it’s a good idea that you should have it.
ETA: ( and that’s what I feel the OP is trying to ask - why )
It’s not very constructive to talk in such absolute terms. Surely you understand that at some level, your right to protect your family can come in conflict with other people’s rights (safety, privacy, etc). I don’t think anybody would argue that you can kill someone who makes so much as a verbal threat against your family, or install an automated motion-activated machine gun system that shoots at anything that moves within 100 ft from your house.
So what level of self-protection should we allow? Is it a net positive for our society to specifically allow guns for self defense? It doesn’t seem like it to me, considering that it also makes guns readly available to criminals, children, depressed/suicidal people, careless and untrained people, etc.
There is a huge amount of recreational activity that uses a gun. I’ve never purchased a gun in my life. But I own 8 and I do enjoy shooting them. I own 40 acres that has a perfect natural and safe target range on.
That I have additional protection and deterrence from criminals is a bonus.
Everyone has the capacity to commit crime. Free societies are inherently more dangerous, and I’m okay with that. Giving the dog a longer leash means some people will get tripped.
“Preemptive laws” – restricting actions that might lead to a crime – demand much higher standards of evidence to convince me. Not only that, but the evidence has to show that the person who takes said action is more likely to cause damage. Drunk driving unequivocally increases the chances that the drunk driver will kill people and destroy property. I’ll grant, statistics show that societies who allow widespread gun ownership have higher rates of gun violence. There is no evidence that I am more likely to commit a crime if I own a gun. Or at least not likely enough to justify restricting what objects I can own and use peacefully. That’s the difference. I’m not cool with treating law abiding people as criminals.
Life demands a great balancing act between freedom and security. It seems like government (aided by our fellow citizens) lately is pushing us deeper into the safer/less free direction, and I’ll do everything I can to oppose it.
I think about it like this: I have a lot of tools that I don’t use. I have them for the one time in my life when I feel as though I could figure out what to do with them. I have rat poison, mouse traps, mole bait, live animal traps, insecticides, smoke detectors, and a fire extinguisher that I use, as needed, to defend my home, though no where near every day.
I also have two guns that I fire as a hobby. I enjoy the feeling of putting big holes in a piece of paper 25 feet away. Granted, I keep one of them loaded at home, but I also keep my fire extinguisher loaded and batteries in my smoke detector.
This is a meme I see repeated a lot in the gun control argument. Sometimes it’s phrased thusly: “If we outlaw guns then the only people who will have them are outlaws.” Well, duh. Talk about a tautology. Can’t we apply this same argument to any type of ban/prohibition law. Drugs, bombs, etc. Society seems to have no problem with some of these prohibition laws, so why does this not extend to gun control?
Except that there are a significant number of free countries which have more restrictive gun laws than the US, and all of them have lower rates of gun crime. Obviously this isn’t a perfectly controlled experiment, but I can’t think of any other significant difference between the US and, say, Canada, or the UK, that would lead to those latter places being safer. So apparently, keeping guns out of the hands of law-abiding individuals does also have the effect of keeping them out of the hands of criminals.
But what makes you think that you are protecting them and not endangering them ? Having guns in your home is an invitation to killing people by mistake.
Not this again. In the other voluminous threads about “castle theory” we’ve already compared the number of cites of incidents of mistaken shootings of family members/innocents with the number of cites of homeowners successfully defending their homes against intruders. It’s not even close. If the probability of someone needing to use their firearm to defend their family is like the chances of being struck by lighting, then the chances of an accidental shooting of a family member is like being struck by lightning on the same day that you win the lottery. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
The Constitution doesn’t mention a pre-existing right to pop pills. Drugs don’t protect millions of people from crime. And I also think the “War on Drugs” is a complete failure that creates criminals from people that are otherwise contributing members of society.
But the alleged point of gun laws is to protect people, correct? Gun laws don’t do this (as has been demonstrated time after time). So, since gun laws don’t stop criminals and don’t save any lives except for criminals, what is the point of them again?