I don't carry a gun. I will not say publicly whether
or not I own any, but I will say that I have never
carried a gun in public, openly or concealed. I am
a rather large fellow (6'3", 220 lbs), so I feel safe
in most public places unarmed. Petty thugs generally
prey on the weak.
> You mentioned that private ownership of a firearms reduces
> violent crime. I don't mean to jump on your case, but do you
> realize that there would probably be a drastic reduction in
> violent crime altogether if guns or any such weapon
> didn't even exist.
Argument from false premises serves no rational purpose.
Weapons /do/ exist, so quibbling about what imaginary
worlds might be like without them is a waste of time.
Perhaps the existence of these technologies gave more
opportunity for crime to some who might not otherwise
have had that choice; but even if that is true, it does
logically follow that removing the technology--if that's
possible--will remove the effect. Time moves forward,
not backward; we cannot un-ring the bell. Our job is to
create /new/ technologies and /new/ social systems that
work in the face of /real/ conditions, not to pine for
imaginary worlds we will never see.
> The problem with our society is we've slowly become so
> programmed and so desensitized over the years we don't
> even think twice on the matters.
I'll think twice when the gun banners can demonstrate to
me that they are capable of thinking even once.
> You say the fact that it was originated to "maim and kill"
> is more or less outdated. Well what is its purpose then?
What I said was that such rhetoric as "designed only to maim
and kill humans" served to perpetuate dangerous memes that
make crime-inducing laws popular. Of course guns are desinged
to kill. They are desinged to kill those animals and people
whose death is regrettably necessary to preserve our own life
and freedom. Where there exist /effective/ non-letahal means
of doing that, they are of course preferred. But I won't
hide my head in the sand and pretend that non-lethal means of
defense are always sufficient.
> You look down on those who oppose the use of personal hand guns,
> saying the laws passed to protect actually end up working against
> them. Sorry but I fail to see the logic in the statement that
> those who fight against weapons have more blood on THEIR hands
> than those who produce and use them. Logic. How can someone who
> has never touched a weapon have more blood on their hands if what
> they had been pushing for had succeded, and there were no weapons
> to spill any blood to begin with. Hello, get rid of guns all
> together and imagine just how much more blood won't be spilt.
People are to be judged by the rationally expected consequences of
their actions, not their motives or desires. To fantasize about a
world without certain technologies is frivolous; such a thing can
never happen. The actions that /can/ happen are to create laws.
The more gun-banning laws one votes for and supports, the more people
die. This is not supposition, there are decades of hard emiprical
observations--look up the numbers yourself (the Cato institue study
is one of the best recent ones). Since the rationally expected
consequence of passing a gun law /in our present state of technology/
is that more people will die, those who vote for such laws deserve
credit for those deaths, regardless of what they feel or want.
Motives don't count. Results count. To answer your last sentence,
it is not possible to "get rid of all guns". Period. To argue from
such an impossibility is irrational. What you might well be able to
do is /ban/ all guns; i.e., pass a law against ownership of all of
them. If you did that, gun violence would indeed skyrocket, if the
past experience with such laws is any indication.
> What about the tragic stories of...
Trot out all the tear-jerking anecdotes you want. Believe
that I'm an uncaring ogre if you want. I don't care what you
believe. I care what works. I care about hard proof, not
pretty stories. If you want a defense anecdote for each of
your tragedy anecdotes, I could probably come up with it, but
it would serve no purpose. It is the actual history of /all/
uses of firearms that matters, and that history is very clear
that on balance, guns have saved many lives for each one lost,
and the history of gun control laws is a bloody disgrace. If
it makes you feel better to stay in denial about that, fine--
just stay out of the voting booth, because your ignorance in
there threatens my safety as well.
> I'd hope, and I hope you would too, that we could come together
> and solve our differenecs through logic, and intelligence,
> compromise, rather than by shear force, death, and fear.
Hope all you want. But hope isn't much use against a dedicated
agressor. And neither is pretending that the agressors would
go away if we just stopped making their favorite tools.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker <lee@piclab.com> <http://www.piclab.com/lcrocker.html> "All inventions or works of authorship original to me, herein and past, are placed irrevocably in the public domain, and may be used or modified for any purpose, without permission, attribution, or notification."--LDC