Fraggle Rocker
Staff member
I'm not a gun owner, I barely know how to handle one safely, and I don't even like being near them. But I'm glad some of my neighbors are gun owners.
To use the statistic that countries which restrict guns have less violent crime than the USA as a justification for restricting guns is the bonehead fallacy of "correlation implies causation." Since governments are primarily made up of boneheads who are supervised by power-hungry scoundrels, governments love to use that fallacy to manipulate us.
There are any number of plausible reasons why a people who are not prone to lethal violence would be the same people who allow their government to curtail gun ownership. Americans are cowboys, we get overly emotional, we do lots of crazy stuff, and we occasionally kill each other. It's just the way we are. We are nothing at all like the pacifist, authority-loving Japanese or the stoic, class-conscious British. We're a lot more like the feisty Arabs, which is probably why we feel so competitive with them.
You can pass any laws you want, but you will no more succeed in taking away Americans' guns than you have in taking away their drugs. We simply have no respect for authority in this country.
I'm not convinced that handguns are actually very useful for self defense on the street since most people are not quick-draw artists and are likely to be in hand-to-hand combat with a sturdy street thug before they can reach for their gun. But my opinion doesn't matter, apparently the street thugs think so and that's what counts. Last time I saw the statistics, every jurisdiction that had made it easy to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon had experienced a drop in street crime.
I think a shotgun is more practical for defense against burglars and other prowlers. You don't have to practice, just learn to load it, point it vaguely in the right direction, and pull the trigger. You don't even need to find your glasses. It's difficult to use as an offensive weapon so you don't have to lose sleep over the possibility that it will fall into the wrong hands--or that you might get cranky some day and try to kill your wife's boyfriend with it.
Personally I am far more worried about being overpowered by my own government. This is something that has happened many times in many countries during my lifetime so I think it's naive to say, "Oh that could never happen in the USA." To me the true value of the right to bear arms is the government's knowledge that there are a lot of citizens with a lot of firepower, so a despotic coup would not be as easy to pull off here as it was in Czechoslovakia and Latvia.
It's one thing to pump up the cops and the National Guard on some fascist hokum and send them out to enslave the citizens. It's quite another if they know the citizens will shoot back with fully automatic weapons and grenade launchers.
To hell with the handguns. We need more power than that.
To use the statistic that countries which restrict guns have less violent crime than the USA as a justification for restricting guns is the bonehead fallacy of "correlation implies causation." Since governments are primarily made up of boneheads who are supervised by power-hungry scoundrels, governments love to use that fallacy to manipulate us.
There are any number of plausible reasons why a people who are not prone to lethal violence would be the same people who allow their government to curtail gun ownership. Americans are cowboys, we get overly emotional, we do lots of crazy stuff, and we occasionally kill each other. It's just the way we are. We are nothing at all like the pacifist, authority-loving Japanese or the stoic, class-conscious British. We're a lot more like the feisty Arabs, which is probably why we feel so competitive with them.
You can pass any laws you want, but you will no more succeed in taking away Americans' guns than you have in taking away their drugs. We simply have no respect for authority in this country.
I'm not convinced that handguns are actually very useful for self defense on the street since most people are not quick-draw artists and are likely to be in hand-to-hand combat with a sturdy street thug before they can reach for their gun. But my opinion doesn't matter, apparently the street thugs think so and that's what counts. Last time I saw the statistics, every jurisdiction that had made it easy to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon had experienced a drop in street crime.
I think a shotgun is more practical for defense against burglars and other prowlers. You don't have to practice, just learn to load it, point it vaguely in the right direction, and pull the trigger. You don't even need to find your glasses. It's difficult to use as an offensive weapon so you don't have to lose sleep over the possibility that it will fall into the wrong hands--or that you might get cranky some day and try to kill your wife's boyfriend with it.
Personally I am far more worried about being overpowered by my own government. This is something that has happened many times in many countries during my lifetime so I think it's naive to say, "Oh that could never happen in the USA." To me the true value of the right to bear arms is the government's knowledge that there are a lot of citizens with a lot of firepower, so a despotic coup would not be as easy to pull off here as it was in Czechoslovakia and Latvia.
It's one thing to pump up the cops and the National Guard on some fascist hokum and send them out to enslave the citizens. It's quite another if they know the citizens will shoot back with fully automatic weapons and grenade launchers.
To hell with the handguns. We need more power than that.
