Wow, what an ego stroker for you. This lady is calling gun lovers alpha males. Are you sending this to me because you think that my lack of understanding of guns makes me afraid of them? You seem to forget that the reason I don't like them is BECAUSE I have used them. BECAUSE I have seen how quickly a life-taking projectile can travel through the air and into any random person in the way. You are deluding yourself if you think you're going to be able to defend your home against armed assailants who have not only the element of surprise on their side, but will also be more desperate than you. You want to flood the market with guns for everyone, and interestingly this might reduce the number of abusers somewhat. I know in Europe that by lowering the drinking age they actually decreased alcoholism, since society actually evened itself out after a little while. Now drinking is easily accessible to people, so they have a new responsibility to mind. Mutually Assured Destruction during the cold war prevented a nuclear holocaust, which was nice. So why don't we give nuclear weapons to everyone? Wouldn't it make things more stable if there was even more Mutually Assured Destruction? Why is everyone so worried about Iran and North Korea getting nuclear weapons? They're people too, and people are responsible!
I don't like the idea of nuclear proliferation for the same reason that I don't like the idea of everyone running around with CCW. It doesn't take long for a nuke to torch a country, and there is very little that an active defense network (satellite missiles, star wars, etc) can do to stop it. It takes even less time for a bullet from a random gun to kill me for no good reason. Even if I were carrying a gun, getting shot by surprise in the back of the head kinda prevents me from using it.
Mutually Assured Destruction only prevents rationally thinking, future-considerate entities from killing each other. Religious extremists think that killing people would be the work of god so that scares the crap out of us because they seem irrational. A robber scares us because he is willing to kill us for what we have in our pockets. This seems irrational. I don't want to give the tools for extremely effective killing to irrational people. I can't safely defend myself or the people I care about from that many threats.
You can't make getting a gun easier without making it easier for everyone to get one, since the black market will then have even more sources. Regulations only restrict those who obey laws. You got that right. But you say it's easy for people to get black market guns. Do you honestly think there will be less guns being sold from the backs of cars if there are more legal, easily obtained guns in the market?
It's like manufacturing ten thousand nukes, storing them each at seperate facilities and hoping none of them get stolen. The safer alternative would be to manufacture fewer nukes, make them harder to get and try to make sure only responsible people own them. That's why I'm in favor of gun regulation, not abolition. If the US had no nukes we'd be sitting ducks. Just like a rich homeowner without a bodygaurd is similarly vulnerable. He should have the means to legally defend himself, and he does. I don't agree with all gun regulations. The one about keeping your ammo seperate and keeping your gun locked in a box... pretty dumb. But I do like mandatory background checks, wait periods, no fully automatics, regular inspections of registered weapons. I feel that those regulations will keep guns in responsible hands and out of the trunks of cars. I feel like gun collecting only makes as much sense as nuke collecting, since you're putting an arsenal at risk for theft. A man only has two hands. He won't need 35 different assault rifles. That seems like common sense to me.
The article did ring with some truth since gun ownership is not a responsibility I want to deal with. I also don't want to be mayor, be a cop, or a supreme court judge. Why should we force very extreme responsibilities on people? Why should we prevent people who do want and can handle the responsibility from having it? The problem is that we can't have both. If some people make themselves mayor then all people have to be mayor. Responsibility is a scary thing when you take it seriously. I would not sleep better at night with a gun under my pillow. I would sleep worse since it would remind me of the potential intruders that I have to always defend against. Personally I'd rather just get robbed and compensated by homeowner's insurance than have to gun down some dumb kid who doesn't know better than to break into random houses. I would prefer to not have to kill people. It kinda scares me that you're so eager to kill people. It scares me more that there are so many more that would eagerly kill an intruder, armed or not, and then sleep fine afterward. I don't think many gun owners understand the magnitude of taking someone's life away from them. That doesn't mean we should take their guns away, but it does not bring me comfort about the average person being armed. Therefore I would prefer to not foist such responsibilities on everyone I've ever met.
You know, if someone was attacking me with a knife I would fight them butt naked if I had to. I don't need a gun for a dealing with a knife-armed opponent. Knives don't kill nearly as easily or as reliably. When was the last stabbing death you heard of? Guns though.... if someone was attacking me with a gun and I had a gun, there's no telling what might happen. That's what I worry about. Easily obtained guns getting into the hands of criminals who then force me to escalate and build an arsenal and spend my money on something I didn't want to have to buy or deal with. So screw that. I'm going to vote for legislation that makes guns harder to get for everyone. Legal gun owners can still eventually get them, but I'm not going to make it easy for some thug to kill me. You don't fight against nukes with satellite missiles. You build the CIA and the KGB. You use more effective tools that better reduce probability.
