Since the right to bear arms is enshrined in the Second Amendment, it would be more appropriate if all the hoplophobes moved to some island where guns didn't exist. I suspect the IQ of the U.S would rise by 20 points.
The Second Amendment specifically refers to a
militia. The idea was that the next time the British attacked (which turned out to be less than four decades later), the citizenry could easily be organized into a defending army because many citizens owned weapons.
There is absolutely no evidence in the writings of the Founding Fathers to indicate a desire for the average citizen to own a handgun, which in those days, and even today, is not the weapon of choice for a soldier in combat. Pistols were used in duels, an activity that by this time was not held in high regard and indeed was soon to be outlawed. Pistols were used by robbers and murderers--and that is still their primary deployment. The
militia would be armed with rifles (with their longer range) and larger weapons like cannon--weapons that are appropriate for a military battle.
The idea that a homeowner
needs a handgun in order to protect his home from burglars, and his family from hopped-up rapist junkies, is nothing more than propaganda from the National Rifle Assholes.
The cold hard statistics about privately-owned handguns tell us that every gun is
five times as likely to kill the owner, a family member, a friend, or a confused stranger than to kill a robber or other attacker. Look up the sad story of Caleb Gordley, a teenager who was killed by his neighbor because all the houses in his tract looked alike and he sneaked into the wrong one after coming home after curfew.
Perhaps you and all the other gun nuts believe that breaking curfew is an offense worthy of capital punishment, but you might want to run that past Gordley's family.
Considering the wave of shootings by various types of looney-birds that has got Americans barricaded in their homes and afraid to go to the mall (my office is a short walk from Columbia Town Center in Maryland, where the Zumiez store was shot up by a gun nut, who at least had the courtesy to kill himself too), it's amazing that there are still people who insist that
more guns will make us all
safer!
Perhaps you can just take one point from this post and try to remember it: YOUR GUN is five times as likely to kill an innocent person than to defend you from an attacker. And if you insist that you're a trained, disciplined former Army sniper who would never misuse a gun, then think about your five neighbors, who (based on statistics) probably don't even have their guns locked up so even their children can find them.
Oh hell, you'd probably enjoy shooting a child and being able to tell the cops, in all honesty, that it was self defense.