Re: Guns [was Re: property Rights]

mark@unicorn.com
Thu, 27 May 1999 06:30:53 -0700 (PDT)

Steve Tucker [stevet@megsinet.net] wrote:
>I think we can safely assume that we all share a desire to see the
>overall level of violence decrease, whether in the schools or in society at
>large.

I strongly disagree; if Joe was interested in reducing the level of violence, then he would listen to what we have to say, rather than insulting us and calling for banning gun ownership when it's been well-proven not to reduce violence. If it did, assaults wouldn't be twice as common in Britain as in America, for example.

There's also a question as to how you measure 'violence'. European countries, for example, love to claim that they're less violent than America, yet tens of millions of Europeans have been killed in wars this century. Which is really more violent?

>(1) If there existed a
>preponderance of evidence showing that violence does in fact _decrease_ when
>guns are readily available, would the anti-gun forces actually change their
>stripes?

No. There is, and they don't care. I saw a wonderful TV show a few months ago supposedly debating whether handguns should be banned in Britain. On the one side were the reasonable, rational gun owners calmly pointing out the irrationality of the disarmers' position, then the presenter himself stated quite categorically that they didn't care, they wanted to ban guns, and ban them they were going to do. Wish I'd taped it, as it was the best example of disarmers' utter hysterical irrationality I've ever seen, at least before Joe began posting here.

Mark