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splorff -> RE: My kind of gun control (7/31/2010 7:00:24 AM)
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Great post
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ORIGINAL: RedStapler
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ORIGINAL: PeonForHer
Hon, it boils down to this, for me. The days of the Cold War are gone. Things have changed massively and we all need to catch up. The USA is now the hegemon - the only superpower. The rest of the world needs the USA to be very grown up and very balanced. The American gun culture is un-grown-up. It's childish, it's out of date, it's uncivilised and it's shit. Please get rid of it. Thank you in advance. [;)]
The fallacy is to believe that outlawing gun ownership would create a gun-free society. Sadly, criminals are quite good at getting firearms outside of legal channels, smuggled in from everywhere if its not available domestically. Even common street criminals can illegally obtain weapons fairly easily. Most citizens cannot purchase a TEC-9 or MAC-10 legally, but street thugs in cities all over the US get them without much difficulty.
But outside of the purely practical matter of getting millions of illegal weapons off the street, there are reasons why US gun culture is what it is. Let's look at the 4 basic reasons why people own guns.
1. Sport / Hunting / Target shooting
2. Collecting (historic / antique arms)
3. Self defense
4. Preservation of Liberty
I will not focus much on the first two, although there are certainly legitimate needs there. There are people in America who live in rural places and hunt to feed their families.
For point number 3, outlawing guns means that citizens are completely dependent upon police to protect them from violent crime. Police cannot be everywhere at once nor respond instantly. In many rural parts of the country, it could take an hour or more for any help to arrive. And Americans are loath to be reliant on anyone for anything.
Also, owning a gun is an equalizer in an otherwise unequal world. A large man may be much stronger physically than a petite woman, but he's not stronger than a bullet. There are potentially two things stopping a man from imposing his will on a woman.
1. Threat of the use of force against him by the state.
2. Threat of the use of force against him by his victim.
The man can more easily escape #1. Once the crime is done, he can sneak away in the night before the police are alerted. He may get caught or he may not. Either way, the violence against his victim is done. Only if the potential victim has a means exerting force on the perpetrator can the crime be prevented.
Now, let us examine reason #4. You may consider it an anachronism. I certainly do not. This is another very important reason that our Constitution forbids the government from outlawing guns. Doing so would give the government a monopoly on power. If a government becomes tyrannical or completely corrupt, the last recourse of the population is to overthrow that government, and this is much harder if not impossible to do if the populace is unarmed. In order to keep the government honest, the founders wanted to make sure that the people would always hold ultimate power, that the threat of revolution would ALWAYS be there. This scenario may seem unlikely today (although a small minority believes it is very likely) but all the same I would rather have a gun and never have to use it than not have one and find the gestapo knocking at my door.
There's a reason that the JFPO calls itself "America's Most Aggressive Defender of Firearms Ownership"
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