The right to own Guns!

Great Debates
121

Having read all the posts I’ve decided not to try and argue statistics with you guys or to make any statements about the majority of gun owners, Americans, Swedes, criminals or any other group. I’m only going to make statements about myself and let you decide if they are in any way relevent.

As I’ve stated in previous posts I am a gun owner and a big supporter of MY right to keep and bear arms. I’m not happy about anyone else being armed and dangerous, and I don’t trust anyone (especially a politician or public figure like Charlton Heston) who claims to be in any way pleased that I am armed. Why on Earth would someone who doesn’t know me be comforted by the thought that I could potentially blow their brains out? It doesn’t make any sense to me so I assume that these people support my right to bear arms only as a way to protect their own gun rights. I concede that America is too violent a place but I don’t think gun control laws would work and they might even make things worse. I think the only way I could actually decrease the number of guns in America would be to throw mine in the ocean. I am not willing to do that and here’s why:

I actually remember the instant I decided to become a gun owner. It was June of 1990, I was lying alone in bed in my apartment outside of Boston trying to fall asleep. I heard a noise, it came from down the hall in the kitchen, it sounded like the dirty pots in the sink were rattling. Why would the pots rattle? I could only think of one reason, someone was climbing in the window over the sink (which I had foolishly left open). I decided to call the police, I then realized the only phone was in the kitchen. I then thought to arm myself, the most serious weapon in the whole apartment was a 10-inch razor sharp butcher’s knife. It was in a wooden block on the kitchen counter next to the sink, someone climbing in the window would trip over it. I racked my brain to think of the best weapon I could find in my bedroom, it was a bicycle pump. I felt defenseless. After sweating in the dark for another half hour I finally realized that no one was in my apartment but me. The rattling noise was caused by a dozen empty soda cans I had placed on top of the refrigerator. They would rattle whenever the fridge kicked on or off. I hadn’t noticed the noise until the still of the night. I felt like an idiot.

The next day I installed a phone in my bedroom and went out to buy a small handgun for home protection. I found Massachusetts gun laws made buying a handgun next to impossible but buying a pistol grip 12 gauge pump was easy. In the ten years I’ve owned it I have never had to use my gun to defend myself, but I don’t consider it useless. Now when I hear a noise inside my apartment or outside my window I calmly monitor the noise to see if it grows threatening, secure in the knowledge that I could kill any man (or at least scare him off with the sound a shotgun makes when you pump it). I then wake up in the morning feeling refreshed. It seems that monitoring strange noises is better then counting sheep when you need a distraction in bed. I would not part with my gun for any reason.

I have contemplated the possibility of a tyranical government supported by a majority of Americans deciding that I and those like me are an undesireable minority (like the Jews in Nazi Germany). I concede that me and my 12 gauge would be ineffective against the might of the US Army. There is nothing I could do to stop them, but I could force them to kill me. No round ups, no concentration camps (or Japanese internment centers as they were called in our country), no slave labor, no humiliation just a short gun battle fought in my own home with my own gun. It’s a peace of mind that I value, I only hope I’ll have the guts to do it should it become necessary.

If there are any other gun owners reading this I would like to know why they acquired their first gun and what they have used it for. Have any of us actually shot someone in self defense or known someone who has? (Perhaps I should start a new thread, what do you think?)

122

SPOOFE:

Here’s the way it looked to me:

You wrote:

Then later Darkpyre repeated these statistics (which I thought was bad form but didn’t say anything). However, Darkpyre added the statement:

Which I said was dribble and irrelevant.

Then you countered:

Then I explained that I didn’t call it dribble and irrelevant because I disagreed, I called it dribble because it was clearly wrong (implying that taking away the guns precipitated all of the deaths). I implied (sarcastically) that if YOU must agree with Darkpyre since you were defending this position. I then went on to say that it was irrelevant because it doesn’t reflect why we really keep guns in America (more on that later).

No, I just know how the system works. We have checks and balances designed to prevent exactly what you’re suggesting. Let’s say we have one of these rogue Presidents and he decides to have the military do his bidding. He’s afraid of a civilian uprising so he orders the military to go and disarm the people… The only problem is that the President doesn’t have direct access to the military personnel, he has to go through the leaders at the Pentagon. These guys are trained NOT to simply follow orders, or rather, they are trained that the President can’t just make these decisions on a whim. There is a very rigid protocol that must be followed and declaring marshal law requires an act of congress, unless there is a very clear and explicit threat as defined in the constitution. You are right, “JUST FOLLOW ORDERS” is one of the guiding principles of the military, but believe me, there’s another one that takes precedence, “COVER YOUR ASS”. The military would not blindly follow the orders of a rogue President. But, let’s say you’re right and I am naive and it could happen. Civilian handguns are not the solution.

A little cowboy logic for ya: If you think there’s a hole in the fence, fix the hole, don’t post guards and order them to shoot anything that tries to get through the hole.

There’s a big difference between the ability of a single individual to break the law and steal something and the ability of our President to control the US armed forces like a bunch of mindless zombies. Also, I’d like to point out that you keep slamming me for dismissing the views of others in a rude manner, yet you do this yourself, consistently. People who live in glass houses…

The Vietnamese were a well trained and reasonably well armed fighting force. Comparing them to a bunch of Americans whose knowledge of fighting comes mostly from watching John Wayne movies is a bit… let’s see if I can find a word that won’t offend your delicate sensibilities… “unrealistic”.

There’s a big difference between insanity and extremism. OK, maybe not a big difference, but a difference, nonetheless. I have implied that I view some people as extremists and (jokingly) that some of these extremists might harbor thoughts of paranoia and conspiracy which accounts for their need to keep a gun in the house to protect themselves against one of your rogue Presidents. I don’t think my classifications are that different than most other non-extremists. Extremists themselves, of course, rarely view themselves as such and would tend to have a different set of classifications. I believe that, with the possible exception of Sneevil and the fact that I enclosed my statements with the ‘fake’ [aside] tags should have been a tipoff that I was not entirely serious…
When you first accused me of referring to people as insane, I thought you were referring to my statement to Darkpyre:

Which, in my mind, was the only time that I questioned anyone’s sanity (implicitly - not explicitly). I thought this was obvious that it was a joke and it was not without justification, considering Darkpyre’s signature:

I disagree with a lot of people about a lot of topics on this board. If they present good arguments, I treat their responses with respect and try to turn off my sarcastic mode. In other words, whether or not I agree with someone has nothing to do with the tone with which I respond. If I think someone’s arguments are outside what I perceive to be the mainstream, I sometimes use sarcasm and irony to point that out. In the future I’ll try to avoid doing this since some people on this board seem to be sarcastically challenged… Damn! There I go again!

You say I pooh-pooh arguments that I don’t agree with… It looks to me like everything you don’t understand or agree with is a lie.

Mr.Zambezi wrote:

[quote]

As for your dismissal of the “protection against tyranny” argument. You can’t dismiss something merely because a “majority of americans don’t believe it.” First of all, you have no knowledgeof what the majority thinks. Second, a majority of Americans might not understand their rights as they are delineated in the constitution, but that does not diminish their rights contained therin, nor does it change teh reasons for granting such rights.

[quote]

Well, I think we can infer what the majority thinks. If the majority of Americans felt that they needed firearms to protect themselves from tyrany, they would not be fighting specifically for handguns - they would be fighting for more serious firepower - automatic weapons and the like. We’re not talking about whether or not Americans understand their rights (it’s pretty clear most Americans don’t or the issue wouldn’t come up in the supreme court so often). What I’m talking about is necessity and benefit versus cost. I’m maintaining that handguns (specifically) have a much higher cost than benefit and that IF you must make the argument that guns are necessary to subvert tyrany, handguns are nearly the least effective weapon of choice (right behind the garden rake and those pointy sticks that were mentioned earlier). I’m also arguing that, it’s ludicrous to argue that we need guns to protect us from the tyrany of a government and it’s militia which was designed to protect us from tyranical governments in the first place. If you think there’s something wrong with the safeguards, then fight to fix those. That will be hundreds of times more effective than some kind of civilian uprising. Finally, and this is my real point, I think the real reasons that people are so emotional about the threat of giving up their guns are (1) a percieved principle of rights (2) a perceived threat of violence against them individually and (3) they payed good money for that gun and by damned, no one is going to take it away from them.

I’m saying that the perceived principle of rights doesn’t hold water for many reasons, but primarily that all rights have constraints associated with them. Today the weapons laws have drawn lines in the sand to say you can own a rifle and a handgun, but not a sawed off shotgun or an automatic weapon or explosive devices. These lines in the sand weren’t always there. We moved them as weapons technology and our understanding of the public threat improved. Moving the line one more time to exclude the right to own handguns is not really any different if we decide that it’s in the publics best interest.

I’m saying that the perceived threat of violence doesn’t really hold water because if you could parse through all of the statistics that have been kicked around, I believe that if you eliminated all of the examples of organized crime related gun violence, you come down to just a couple of statistically significant threats (1) armed robbery and (2) domestic violence. I think armed robbery, while it is a threat, does not statistically justify the number of handguns in our society and the number of unnecessary deaths that are associated with them. As for domestic violence, it’s going to always be there. If not with guns then with baseball bats and kitchen knives and fists. The presence of a handgun brings nothing positive to this scenario and in fact may be more of a detriment (in other words, guns are probably used more often to instigate domestic violence than they are used for self-defense in domestic violence situations).

We can continue to argue that handguns are good because they keep the rogue Presidents at bay, and that this is why most gun owners keep handguns, but I really don’t really believe this and I suspect that you don’t really believe this, so why continue the argument?

It all comes down to risk management. There are a lot of bad things that can happen in this world and sometimes mitigating one kind of risk exposes you to another kind of risk. For example, I might decide that I think the stock market might crash and I think the banking system could get themselves in a real jam, especially if the market crashed. So to be safe, I’m going to bury all my money in mason jars in the back yard. My money is safe, right? Wrong. The safe assumption is that inflation will continue and if my money is not invested then I’m effectively losing money every day. Guarding against the extreme is a bad decision. Most Americans are not in environments that put their lives at risk such that they need to have a handgun. If they own a handgun there’s a distinct possibility that that gun will be (1) stolen and used in another crime (2) used accidentally or on purpose against a family member or (3) never used at all. Owning a handgun is another example of protecting against the extreme.

123

Oops! Some sort of editing screw up. I wrote:

What I meant to say was:

Hope this clears up the meaning of that non sequitur.

124

Interesting story. and sensible point of view.

I have never fired a gun in anger or self-defense, but I have shown it once in self-defense. The confrontation was solved merely by the knowledge of my assailants that I was able and willing to defend myself effectively. I left a video game arcade with my girlfriend at the time, to find about 10 guys sitting and leaning on my car. Naturally I was a little bent about that and I said something to the effect of “Get off my car!” They did and I started to get in, but these guys were looking for trouble, obviously (or they wouldn’t be sitting on somebody’s vehicle) and started jumping around and talking trash. One guy even ran up to my car with thumb and forefinger pointing at me like an imaginary gun, yelling “bam! bam!” saying they were going to shoot me, and his friends surrounded my car blocking me into the space.

I consider myself to be rather skillful at unarmed combat, but 10 guys threatening to shoot me? With my girlfriend there too? Not a good scene. So I reached in and got my gun from under the seat, and before I even had time to aim it the crowd dispersed and I was able to drive off without incident.

Could it have been avoided without a firearm? Possibly. But I doubt it. I tend to think I (and at least one of them. :slight_smile: )would have ended up in a hospital. So because of the presence of a gun, several injuries were prevented.

As to why I got my first gun, it was for recreation. My dad used to take me shooting all the time and I really enjoyed it. I didn’t realize the self-defense angle until I was a teenager, or the political implications until I was quite a bit older. But now that I understand all of that, I do not ever intend to give up my guns.

125

First gun: a 20 guage and a .22 as gifts on my 5th birthday.

Defensive uses: once when dropping off a night deposit a man tried to rob me. My dad was in the car and pointed a .44 mag at his head. The assailant fled.

2nd time: I was in my apartment in atlanta. someone tried to break down my door at 2 am. I was naked and had nothing between me and the bad guys except for a sawed off 20 guage. The cops never could have gotten there in time. Fortunately, the door was steel and deadbolted, so I did not have to use the gun, but I was damn glad I had it.

I was able to sto pa potential rape once with a knife, but that is a different story.

126

Point #1: In the paper a while ago there was a story about an older lady in her house one night when she heard a burgler breaking in. She went to her bedstand and retrieved a handgun given to her for her birthday by her family. Then she went to meet the burglar. When the burglar saw her gun, he fled immidiatly, without her even needing to fire a shot. Later, after the man’s capture, he said that if he had known she had a gun, he never would have broken in.

#2: In Florida, as you may or may not know, there was a law passed allowing citizens to carry concealed weapons. Well, now the criminals are targeting the people who are obviously tourists, because they can’t tell which of the native Floridians are packing heat.

127

SarumanRex

Thank you for unintentionally validating my point. I don’t mean any disrespect, but here’s the way I would paraphrase this critical decision point in your life:

You’re alone and it’s dark. You hear a noise. You let your imagination get the best of you and you imagine that someone is breaking in and that they might kill you. You’re scared shitless… Don’t worry, it happens to nearly everyone sometimes. Then you decide that you don’t ever want to be scared like that again, so you buy a gun. Ironically, you never have a cause to use it.

I would say that you clearly overreacted to your fear. An alarm system would have been more effective and you would have realized the positive benefits of lower insurance. The only ‘positive’ gain you can claim is that you are “secure in the knowledge that [you] could kill any man”. In other words, your gun is a security blanket - a crutch.

I challenge your serenity, though. You think you could kill an intruder, but it might not be so easy. I’ve known police officers and soldiers who have had to kill people in self defense. These were very real threats to their lives and yet they felt a strong sense of dread and found it difficult to pull the trigger the first time. Most of the ones I talked to have lingering feelings of remorse at having ended someone else’s life. We have a responsibility to consider all of the potential consequences of our actions. I know if it were me, and I was in a situation where I felt threatened and I had access to a gun, I would exhaust every other alternative course of action before I would resort to the gun. However, in answer to the inevitable question, if all of the other choices had run out, yes, I would probably pull the trigger. The difference between me and apparently the rest of the people on this thread is that I won’t go out and purposely arm myself for this very slim threat. It’s actually the same logic that doesn’t keep me off of airplanes. It’s more likely that I would be the victim of an airplane crash than of finding myself in a situation where I need a handgun to defend myself.

In keeping with your comments, let me elaborate on one of the times I was shot at. Late one night in the boonies, a friend and I were walking across a field. I forget why we were out, but it was innocent enough. We came to a corn field and decided to walk around it rather than get our arms all cut up and get pollen all down our shirts. The edge of this corn field came close to a house in the country. We were walking and talking and laughing and unexpectedly found ourselves in someone’s back yard. Suddenly a bright spotlight was turned on our eyes. From the house a lady demanded, “What are you doing on my property?” We started to explain, but she cut us off and said “I’ve got a gun.” and we heard the tell-tale sound of the gun being cocked. We did the only thing we could think of, we ran. I guess she was pretty scared because she fired at us (not over our heads). By this time we were far enough away that the buckshot only stung - it was probably a light shot, but we definitely felt it. We heard the gun cock again and kept up the pace. In the darkness, we ran into a barbed wire fence. I hit the wire and received some deep cuts, my friend hit one of the posts and was more severely injured. The cops arrived minutes later and took my friend to the hospital. One of them took me back to the house to confront the lady with the gun. She was so scared and hysterical, she fired another shot into the air as the cop approached. She explained that she had just chased off a couple of killer-rapists. Being about 13 or 14 at the time, I can assure you that raping some 50 year old woman was the farthest thing from our minds. But she believed that she was defending her life.

My point is that fear makes people do some irrational things. Buy guns, shoot at innocent kids, or maybe even kill an unarmed burgular.

See, I guess that’s the difference. I would rather be a live puppet with some hope of a change in status than a dead martyr with no hope of a change in status…
Some people choose to live their lives in fear and they use crutches to try and alleviate the fear, but the crutches only feed the fear.
Mr.Zambezi wrote:

Am I the only one who finds THAT incredibly scary!? I didn’t even get my first water gun until I was 6…

You sound like you live in a tough neighborhood. Of the cases mentioned so far, only Zambezi’s first one sounds even remotely like a legitimate example of self defense.

That’s the problem, when you start waving a gun, the rationalization engines start running in your brain and everything SEEMS like self defense.

128

I see your point JoeyBlades, but in many cases all that needs to happen is for the person you’re defending yourself against to see that you have a gun and they will probably back off.

129

Joey…

You seem unable to grasp the concept of “preventive medicine”. You also seem unable to grasp the concept of “the big picture”. Allow me to paint this out, step by step.

You seem to think that when I say that private gun ownership would counter a military takeover that I’m referring to the here and now. You also seem to believe that I’m only referring to the current President, Mr. Clinton.

In actuality, a smart person would be able to see that if guns were abolished NOW, there’d be a period ot time where guns are slowly rounded up and destroyed (or otherwise removed from the hands of the majority of the citizenry). While you seem to think that I (and several others) are worried of troops kicking in our doors NOW and taking our firearms, I’d like to educate you and tell you that we’re worried about troops kicking in our doors twenty years from now, when laws and standard policing forces have already taken away our guns. We’re not worried about the short-term, we’re worried about the long term. We don’t want even the POSSIBILITY of a military takeover to exist.

Can you think of any other manner to ensure that?

Second, when I refer to soldiers obeying their commanding officer, I’m not referring to Bill Clinton. He’s not exactly a popular leader. However, in Nazi Germany, people allowed Adolf Hitler to do what he wanted because he was VERY popular. He had just pulled the country out of a horrible depression. Since they all adored him, he was able to get away with whatever he wanted. AND keep in mind that he didn’t go out and say “I wanna kill all the Jews.” He first required Jews to wear the Star of David on their clothes, THEN required them to live in separate areas, saying it was for their own protection. Why did people believe him? Because they liked him.

Now, keep that in mind for a second… if, twenty years from now, the country faces an economic crisis, or a horrible war, or a famine, or whatever, and a President gets elected and manages to fix the problem in a timely and easy manner, chances are the population will like HIM, too. If, by this time, guns had already been abolished, AND if this super-popular president were a little nuts, he’d be able to manipulate the system to garner more power for himself, and eventually there’d be a “point of no return” where people realize that he’s suddenly gained too much control of the country, but by then it’d be too late.

And keep in mind that military takeover needn’t necessarily be instigated by the president, but any high-ranking officer popular with the troops could instigate a military takeover.

Is this a likely scenario? Hell no. But it’s made a lot MORE likely, as history shows us, by the absence of guns. Does gun abolishment guarantee that fascism and such be perpetuated? Hell no, anyone who thinks that way is a fool.

Now, Joey, old buddy old pal, tell me how this theory is impossible and will never ever happen. And then tell it to those 56 million “dissidents” who were slaughtered over the past century.

130

Actually, I did not live in a tough neighbor hood. I lived in a nice white burb. . My dad owned a store and we had to deposit cash every day, making us targets at the deposit point. One of our employees faced an attempted robber with a colt 45 and also avoided any injury. Also, every store in our strip mall was robbed during one rash of robberies. Every one except ours. My dad wore a shoulder holster and it proved a pretty good deterrent.

{aside: my dad is a raving lunatic and I only once saw him do anything unsafe with a gun)

Did it maybe occur to you that the reason my case was legitimate was because I got a gun when I was 5? I got my first BB gun at 3 and had had two years to demonstrate gun safety.

Having a gun is a holy trust. It is a right that carries a great responsibility.

131

I vowed never to get involved in another of these circular-logic gun control debates on this message board again, and I’m gonna stick to that promise, dammit!

But before I rant on, a question was asked which I will answer.

The first gun (of many) that I ever received was a BB gun at the age of five. With it came clear guidanece and close supervision from my family in gun safety, until I was of an age and had demonstarted the self control and reliability to use it safely and responsibly.

The first time I was allowed to use it unspervised (age 7) gave me such a feeling of being “grown up” that I never abused that confidence by misusing my firearms. Ever.

I’ve used a gun maybe once (depending on what others may consider self defense), twice in the defense of others. I’ll list them in chronological order.

In 1982, my drug-addict cousin became involved with a “boyfriend” whose goal was to turn her in to whore and a “mule” for his drugs. When she wised up, and ran away from him back to her uncle [my dad]. But the “boyfriend” telephoned my aunt, saying he was going to find her [my cousin] and kill her; my aunt told him exactly where he could be found, at my dad’s place, and even gave him the street address.

When the “boyfriend” showed up at my dad’s with two of his buddies, he was confronted by my dad’s M-1 Garand (the one he humped across the S. Pacific in WWII) and my Remington 12-gauge, where they waited peacefully for the county sheriff to come and take them away. The “plain-view” search of their vehicle turned up enough guns and drugs for the state of Illinois to send them away for a good long while.

The second time was in 1993, when a man was physically kicking the life out of a woman and her toddler in their apartment, below mine, in Dallas, Texas. I let myself in the front door, the man came out, knife in hand, to accost me, and found himself staring down the barrel of my .357.

He too waited peacefully for the Dallas PD to come take him away, where I got a fatherly-stern lecture from the watch supervisor about the risks I had taken. I received a call the next day from the precint commander, telling me that the Asst. D.A. saw my actions as “Justifiable Use of Deadly Force”.

It turned out that the man was the woman’s “Illegal” brother, and that he had been free-loading off of her generosity for some time, but he became enraged when she cut him off from the money supply (he was an alcoholic and a habitual drug user). She was most grateful, not only for herself, but for her 3 year old son as well.

The last was just last Dec. 17, when I was driving east on Hwy. 24 out of Colorado Springs, headed for I-70 and St. Louis for the XMas holidays to see my folks. There was some construction going on, with the two-lanes going down to one.
Everyone was lining up nice and polite except for this one jerk who tried to go to the head of the line and force his way in. Well, no one was feeling particularly charitable, so the guy (in a largish 4WD pick-up) tried to bully his way in against the guy ahead of me. When that didn’t work, he decided to flash his revolver at me through the rear-cab window, to intimidate me into letting him in.

I just smiled at him and showed him my piece. He lowered his gun and let my go my way (I hope he got a good look at my NRA Life Member window decal and my “Warning! Driver Carries Only $20 Worth Of Ammunition!” sticker) while I dialed 911 on my car phone and gave his vital stats to the police.

In the first scenario, it can be argued that my cousin brought her grief upon herself with her lifestyle, and she should’ve gone straight to the police, and you would be right. But she was young (17 or so) and scared, and she turned to family first for help and guidance.

In the second scenario, several people were standing around outside the apts., watching this ugly scene play out and not even calling the apt. complex security guard, much less the police (the complex had a lot of college kids, as SMU was just up the street), and the situation was rapidly escalating. Nobody knew at the time that the assailant was a family member, but given the level of violence he was using, especially on the kid (we could see it pretty clearly through the apt.'s windows), I didn’t think it wise to wait on the police. Being that it took the police 45 minutes to respond (and this was on a slow week night!) I felt (and continue to feel!) justified in my use of force.

In the last scenario, my actions could very well have precipitated an escalation; I didn’t think so. I was certain (without any scientific evidence to back me up, just pure gut instinct) that the jerk was all show and no go, and he folded like a cheap suit when confronted with the same amount of force. I don’t know what eventually happened to him; I hope he was caught and prosecuted.

Back to my rant: I’m sick and tired of these gun-control debates cropping up every couple of weeks! I’m going to propose to the mods. that a “Gun Control Archive” be created, and that prior to anyone starting another gun control debate they first be required to read the Archive, and that if any point they wish to bring up is already covered, they not be allowed to post; and that any gun control debate that starts out as “I think…” get booted over to “In My Humble Opinion”.

After all, this is supposed to be “The Great DEBATES”; not the “I Think Thererfore It Must Be TRUE” board.

Support your local crackpot/gun-nut/disturbed vet/revolutionary/Libertarian/electronics technician in seeing this proposal brought to the mods. attention, and let’s put an end to “IS SO/IS NOT” where firearms are concerned!

Just the studied, cited, peer-reviewed FACTS!

ExTank
“Crackpot, gun-nut, disturbed vet; don’t be frightened, get yerself a gun and stop me!”

132

I’d like to say right now that my own personal opinion is that there almost is no way we can really have effective “gun control” laws passed in this country because of one simple reason. If we start to heavily regulate the gun industry, people will, no matter what, find ways to buy guns even if it is illegal. It’s almost like drugs. You can buy drugs just about anywhere if you know where to look, even though they are illegal in this country. When things are made illegal, people who are desperate enough will find ways of getting what they want.
And on another note, there is a saying which I firmly believe in this matter of guns. “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.” When somebody gets shot, it’s not because the gun decided they wanted the person shot, it’s because the person wielding the firearm wanted to shoot them. Somebody had brought up the point that almost anything can be used as a weapon if you know how to use it right and that’s very true. If you think about it that way, almost everything should be illegal.

133

Tank, I second the motion and would suggest that no one ** NO ONE** be allowed to post on these debates until they a) read Cecil’s column on the 2nd Amend.
b) read the Constitution in its entirety
c) Read all of th Supreme Court Cases on the 2nd Amendment and
d) look at all of the CDC’s data on gun deaths for the last 10 years.

You can argue with me and Tank, but you can’t argue with the Constitution, the Supreme court, Cecil AND the facts.

134

Max,

One of my posts apparently got lost in the ether. I’ve been in and out a lot over the last few days, mostly out and didn’t notice. Hope you don’t mind this belated followup.

You wrote (a while back):

A gun is just a tool. The reason it makes a difference is the same reason it makes a difference with any tool. A tool that is designed to kill has no business in the hands of people who are not trained to kill and have no ‘authority’ to kill.

And how many of these households have handguns as opposed to only rifles and shotguns? Of the households that have only rifles and shotguns, how many DGUs were reported. These are critical factors if we’re going to make any sense of the real statistics.
Kleck wrote:

Damn. I’m sorry I missed this earlier. In that case, I have to completely dismiss the Kleck study altogether. The use of a gun to defend yourself while you are in the process of committing a crime is hardly a valid testimony for the benefits of a gun by law abiding citizens for self defense. This says that in the case of an armed robbery where the victim pulls a gun on the theif and the theif pulls a gun on the victim, we have to count that as two DGUs. Since, Kleck says that DGUs are “typically” from people involved in criminal behavior, I would have to guess that eliminating these DGUs from the survey would cut Klecks estimate, at least, in half (probably more).

That’s not my assertion either. My assertion doesn’t have to do with gun control laws, it has to do with hand gun availabillity. One of the reasons Great Britian found it so easy to implement hand gun control was because most of the population didn’t have hand guns in the first place. They collected only around 200,000 guns in their amnesty program. I’m saying that the lower incidence of hand gun related crime is directly related to the number of hand guns available to the average criminal. I’m not saying anything about the effects of the regulation of those hand guns.

and

Sorry, my mistake. Kleck used an argument about the relative rates of gun crimes and rape crimes in one of his rebuttals. I mistakenly assumed that you agreed with his arguments.

I’ll have to get back to you with the links that I found, I’ve got them bookmarked on another computer. These showed that (1) in 1998 the number of deaths were fairly close (a few hundred) and (2) the automotive death rate was decreasing much faster than the gun death rate. I’ll try to find the exact numbers and the sites for your rebuttal.

OK, so I see no instances of improper or defensive hand gun uses evidenced in your life. What good purpose do they serve you? Is it, as SarumanRex said, the warm fuzzy feeling you get, safe and secure in the knowledge that you “could kill any man”?
So, after all of this discussion, I suppose I have to retract my first assertion in this thread:

It’s clear to me that all of the studies are flawed (Kleck’s inclusive). There are no reliable statistics. As I’ve said before, everyone has agendas and when people with agendas put pen to paper, you can’t trust any of what comes out. You’ll continue to believe what you believe because you’ve convinced yourself that your numbers are sacrosanct and unbiased… and because that’s what you want to believe. I will continue to believe what I believe for pretty much the same reasons. It’s an argument that can’t be won, because there are no “knowable” facts.

135

I don’t disagree with you, Mr. Zambezi, but how many Supreme Court cases would you say are “on” the Second Amendment? Some people (not including I) would say the only relevant case is Miller v. United States. Others site countless cases. How many cases are you talking about here? Obviously it’s better to have read most or all of them, I just wonder if you’re being realistic. (And no, I haven’t read all of them myself; Miller is the only one I know by name, but I vaguely know some better examples.)

On to the oft-cited example of Switzerland. Swiss gun laws, as far as I can tell without being a Swiss lawyer, are roughly as strict as U.S. gun laws. Yes, U.S. gun laws vary a lot from state to state, just as Swiss gun laws vary from canton to canton.

“But the Swiss can own machineguns!” Americans, too, can own machineguns, if they were made before 1986 and are properly registered (and don’t try to pin the Gun-Owner Protection Act on liberals). This site, http://www.ssanz.org.nz/articles/swiss.html : says, “semi-automatic rifles require no purchase permit and are not registered by the government. Thus, the only long guns registered by the government are full automatics.” Sounds familiar to me.

http://www.swissemb.org/legal/html/gun_ownership.html says,

Hey, joint central and local control of citizen arms! Sounds like my sig line (I don’t have a SIG line at this point).

Another site: http://www.cga.state.ct.us/ps99/rpt/olr/htm/99-r-0845.htm
This one says a 1997 law (perhaps the one above?) “bars certain categories of arms such as fully automatic guns, dangerous weapons such as stun guns, and accessories such as silencers and night vision scopes” which sounds much more radical than any other summary I’ve seen.

My favorite point in the last site was, “The applicant must also demonstrate that he is proficient in the use of the weapon and understands the gun law.” Sounds like my sig line. Please don’t address the part of the U.S. Constitution addressed in my sig line. <- reverse psychology (begging for you people to address it has not worked hitherto)

It does no good to point out that the Swiss own more guns per capita than Americans - Swiss gun owners are required to have military training. It does no good to point out that Swiss males are all required to serve in the military - Americans are not. You can provide training to all potential gun-owners through universal conscription, or you can invoke a top-secret eyes-only section of the body of the U.S. Constitution (revealed only in a certain sig line).

136

ExTank wrote:

I think I going to try and join you… in sitting out of these kinds of discussions, anyway.

Note to self: Stop trying to save the world - Just look out for number one.

By the way, for the record. My first gun was a BB gun at age 8 (or there abouts). All of the kids in the neighborhood had them. We used to have BB gun fights (yeah, I know, but we used to do a lot of stupid things). The parents in the neighborhood put a stop to the BB gun fights after one kid was shot in the eye. Fortunately, it didn’t do any permanent damage. My second gun was another BB gun - the continuous pump variety. I could pump it up high enough to push a BB right through a 1/4 inch thick pine board! It was great. I used to hunt bullfrogs and birds with it. My third gun was a pellet pistol; I used it only for target practice. My fourth gun was a .22 rifle - used only for target practice in Boy Scouts. When I was about 14, I was given an old 10 guage shotgun. The first time I fired it, it nearly ripped my shoulder out of its socket. I ended up trading it for a 12 guage about a year later. By the time I was 17, I had given away or sold all of my guns - not for any etical reasons, I just became disenchanted with them and really didn’t want to associate myself with some of the losers that I used to hunt with. Again, nothing to do with guns, these people were losers because of their attitudes and behaviors. They killed, merely for the joy of killing and would often just walk away from their kills, leaving them for the buzzards.

I’ve always viewed the GD forum as a home for ‘crackpots’ and ‘opinions’ - the name is clearly indicative of arguments that can never be answered and invites opinions and passion filled arguments. I actually try to avoid this forum myself, but for some reason was attracted to this discussion.

I also disagree with your point about ‘core knowledge’. Only a part of this debate has been about the ‘actual intent’ of the constitution - most of it has been about the validity of the statistics or the relative merits of living in a gun rich versus a gun free society.

No one held a gun to your head and made you get involved in this discussion… I’m making an assumption here. The subject line pretty clearly delineated the subject matter in this thread so if you’re on a gun-debate-free diet, just don’t click. Exercise some personal discipline… [wink]

137

orestes543

Automatic weapons don’t kill people, people kill people.
Hand grenades don’t kill people, people kill people.
Cruise missles don’t kill people, people kill people.
Atomic bombs don’t kill people, people kill people.
Man-made genetic viruses don’t kill people, people kill people.

Why am I not allowed to own any of these or hundreds of other things that can cause harm to others? It’s all a matter of wher you draw the lines… and the lines are constantly moving.
Hammers don’t drive nails, people drive nails… of course, very few people without hammers actually drive nails…

138

JoeyBlades suggests: “…exercise some personal discipline.”

Personal discipline and firearms? What a novel concept!

Oh wait…you’re talking about my mouse button.

Nah. It’ll never work.

ExTank

139

JoeyBlades suggests: “…exercise some personal discipline.”

Personal discipline and firearms? What a novel concept!

Oh wait…you’re talking about my mouse button.

Nah. It’ll never work.

ExTank

140

JoeyBlades wrote:

Yep, that’s right, potential victims of violent crimes have no business arming themselves because they don’t have the authority to kill. Women should just let themselves be raped by men bigger and stronger than they are, and not do this instead: http://www.guntruths.com/Resource/Posters/as_seen_by_a_rapist.htm