Since you own a gun...

[Spexxvet]

At least three threads and hundreds of posts, and not one pro-gunner willing to acknowledge that more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths. Wow.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

At least three threads and hundreds of posts, and not one pro-gunner willing to acknowledge that more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths. Wow.

Spexx, I've already told you where the flaw is in that idea. If you abandon that idea, you will then be on the road to wisdom, and good for you. Go, find and reread [edit: p.5 of If You Outlaw Guns Then Only...] what I told you, for it isn't sinking in. What you believe must reflect reality, not exclude it. Some deaths, say Adolf Hitler's, improve things, others, like Anne Frank's, do not. Seems about as obvious as a nearby mountain to me.

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

At least three threads and hundreds of posts, and not one pro-gunner willing to acknowledge that more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths. Wow.

Because it's not true.

And even if it were, not all deaths are bad. If I blow away someone who's trying to rape me (you really should read that law, you know), I'd consider that a good thing.

Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you think the rapist is a victim of society, and should be given a chance to reform...or try again.

Please note that the second paragraph of this post is a hypothentical...I don't even agree that more guns implies more deaths. Millions of guns in this country--the vast majority of them--never killed anyone and never will.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by Spexxvet

At least three threads and hundreds of posts, and not one pro-gunner willing to acknowledge that more people with guns in our country leads to more deaths. Wow.

There is of course more here to think on.

It's not about bloodthirstiness and it's not about playing at cops-and-robbers. It is about resisting evil; somebody robbing and murdering you is breaking a couple of Commandments, no question. There is also the fundamental concept that humans may resist evil -- without even being duly constituted or paid by other humans to do so. Evil and resistance to evil is a thing of every human heart and every human mind. When the practitioners of evil, as they do, kill either righteous or unrighteous people in pursuit -- sometimes how trivial that pursuit! -- of their aims, there is absolutely no wrongness in resisting their endeavors and no genuine reason -- though some specious ones have been offered -- to stop short of lethal force if that's all that's going to succeed.

No pro-gunner with a lick of sense -- in my experience, about 99% of them -- fails to recognize that this comes at a considerable personal, and emotional cost; uneasy lies the head that shot the guy. This is inescapable to anyone mentally normal. Even the immediate prospect is jarring, as I know from personal experience: I had a roommate who was going quietly crazy, and once I thought I would have to pull a gun on him -- in my own bedroom. It felt terrible. It requires mental conditioning to function under such a stress: it starts with deciding beforehand if you're going to take on the responsibility for ending a man's life, or if you're going to submit to him wrongfully killing you.

Far too many antigunners demand -- though they will deny it, and demonstrate a passive murderousness in the denial -- that one do precisely that. Thus is these people's sense of the allegedly rightful satisfied. None of these bozos will consider that it could as easily happen to them, rather than to the gun people. This is the huge moral chasm between the righteous progunner and the murder-loving anti.

In reading John Lott (see p.5 this thread), you will discover a pretty well-founded estimate that the lawful and righteous use of such killing tools about two and a half million times annually prevents a loss to the American economy of upwards of three billion dollars each year, totting up property loss, worktime loss, medical costs, lawyer fees, and so forth. Even in a trillion-dollar economy, that's still a good shot in the arm preserving wealth.

Spexx, you are a man who is visibly reluctant to go around killing. That in itself is a recommendation that you should own three or four guns yourself, as you would not use them wrongly and take measures to guarantee no one else would use your arms wrongly either. You've also had the grace not to accuse progunners of lacking that reluctance, which is commendable. You've not yet taken an effectual antigenocide stance, which in my view (and that of most humans) is not commendable, but you show no signs of having educated yourself on that matter yet.

Approximately every second household in the United States has at least one firearm in it. Yet crime and bloodshed do not come to every second household. There are things guns do and things guns do not do -- the man educated on the subject knows well which these are.

What do we see in men who murder schoolgirls or shoot up the neighborhood in a suicide-by-cop? A great degree of aberrancy, a viciousness that lacks sanity. The anti-self-defense lobby prevents immediate and effectual response to these monsters through its hysterical fear of killing tools, and does all humanity a terrible injustice: it is so terrible that these people ought to be locked up for lengthy prison terms for mass and chronic incitement to murder.

Do not, Spexxvet, ask moral persons to stop resisting evil, even unto death.

The plural of "anecdote" may not be "statistics" but I've long held that an analysis of all those The Armed Citizen columns that have figured in NRA magazines for decades ought to help the statistical study somehow. At the least, it is a very considerable weight of testimony in support of the moral use of arms.