Now true, guns save lives, as well as take them. But guns also play a much more important role. Let's say people in Soviet Union would have guns during Stalin era. Do you think repressions would have happened? How about Germans in Nazi Germany? Well they had guns, but first thing Hitler did was take them away. United States is considered free because of its guns. Gun rights however has deteriorated in United States steadily since 1980s, and with them freedom as well.
Guns first and foremost serve the people a grantee that their freedom and human rights will not be violated. There is 1st Amendment, freedom of speech, if that fails, as we see it failing these days, there is 2nd, right to bear arms.
Take poor Mexico, people are now allowed to have guns. Only police and drug and human traffickers are allowed to have guns. Many thousand of poor Mexicans have died in the last year, because cops don't help, and they are helpless. But give those people guns and there would be law and order within days, I grantee you.
This is the core of the firearms debate in my mind, however I rarely use it in debates since it is too direct and will cause the mind of many to shut down due to a challenge of the core of their 'it couldn't happen to me' reality.
Consider this:
While yes, the murder rate in first world nations tends to taper as a long-term effect of strict firearms control, the level of violent crime and home invasions tends to rise and stay elevated. Personally, if my politicians decide that they'd rather improve the statistical chance of a young woman being brutally and violently raped, while increasing her odds of surviving that rape, in my mind something is wrong. It isn't so much the end result as the living in fear.
One has more to fear when defenseless against one or more armed criminals, even in ones own home which in my mind is absolutely disgusting. To feel afraid even in your place of safety because you are legislated out of your right to legally defend yourself is just a moral tragedy of the highest order.
Indeed, even today I talked to a co-worker whose husband is a farmer. She was telling me out of the blue that probably 90% of farmers--peaceful hardworking law-abiding citizens for the most part--buried their firearms in PVC pipes out in the fields, as soon as the government made clear they were coming for the firearms.
Here are peaceful citizens whose property is being forcefully taken by the government whose primary job it is to protect their rights and freedoms, not remove them because of one wingnut per decade cutting loose on a crowd of already defenseless people.
Thank you runner83 for understanding even if we disagree on some points. I get most of my statistics from government census sites, CIA Factbook, and shadowstats.com (or .org, I forget).
I would rather live in a nation where I am legally allowed to defend myself with firearms, and accept a higher chance of random violence occuring, than live in a nation where I have no legal defense against somebody(s) coming at me with an axe or machete, to which the only defense is a firearm, and home invasions with those tools are becoming frequent in Sydney/Victoria. Such is the way of perpetual fear and dependence, two states of mind I loathe as a citizen in a supposed free nation.
As the icing on the cake, in a disarmed society (Washington D.C. for example), the citizens rely on the police for protection. Meanwhile, the police prove over and over in federal court that they have zero (0) obligation to protect citizens from harm. An example would be the chilling case of Warren v. District of Columbia.
But Drdeee touched on the most important issue. Regardless of murder rates as random acts of violence, more disarmed civilians have been murdered by a machine-like violence that tends to sweep nations once they've been disarmed and make bad political choices based on a rationale of "I'm afraid, protect me."
Funny how anti-firearm supporters cite mass-murderers as a reason to take firearms away from citizens. They conveniently are blind to the real mass-murderers of history, who commit their crimes exclusively against disarmed populations.
And more people have been killed in genocides (preceeded by disarmament 100% of the time) than have been murdered in random acts, at least in the past century.
More than enough reason to disagree with anti-firearms legislation, however it is not a popular opinion to hold in todays "live in a perpetual state of fear" pop-culture mindset.
Sometimes I think the terrorists have won, since apparently they are leading governments across the world to clamp down on the rights and freedoms they were commissioned to protect.
Meh, long-winded again...
