If a criminal attacks you and demands your money or tries to rape you or whatever, the safest thing to do is to just give him what he wants. If you do that, he has every reason to just take it and leave. But if you pull a gun, now you have upped the stakes. Now the criminal's only choice is to kill or be killed. So when you are attacked by a criminal, having a gun actually makes you less safe, not more.
Furthermore, if you have a gun in your home, there is always the danger that in a family quarrel, in a moment of temper, someone will grab the gun and kill another family member.
That is, a violent criminal, who is in the very act of committing a felony, can be trusted not to use a gun unless it is abslutely necessary for his own self-defense. It is absurd to suppose that he might hurt someone in a moment of panic, or just kill someone for kicks. Criminals are very careful, responsible people.
But an ordinary law-abiding citizen who gets his hands on a gun will probably go crazy and shoot anyone in sight. Even the most loving, gentle person, who would never dream of hurting their spouse or children with other weapons you might find around a house like knives or baseball bats or rat poison, when a gun is available to them, will likely grab it and start shooting at the least provocation. Guns exert a mysterious effect on law-abiding people that turns them into violent maniacs. Law-abiding people can't be trusted to handle guns responsibly.
At least, that's what the gun-control people tell me. Um, yeah, that makes perfect sense to me.
© 2009 by Jay Johansen
Erzsi Jul 23, 2014
This absolutely itufrianes me. The cavalier attitude with which Obama is approaching this makes me ill. He has no respect for human life whatsoever. In fact, even the areas where he cites concern over lives, it is never really about lives, just politics and his agenda. Drones are good because they help him politically. If the Left goes against him on it, he'll change his tune or give them some bone to make them happy to keep his murderous new toy unchecked by any sort of scrutiny.
Shahid Nov 26, 2015
I stumbled aoscrs your blog while searching to see whether your blog title has been used already thus my reason for being here. This post caught my eye, and so I thought that, before I leave, I would comment. I would contend that the argument, as you have stated it, is in fact a straw man. In reading the two articles you linked to, I would understand the thrust of their argument(s) is not in fact that guns make us safer because law abiding citizens can use them to stop crimes, but is instead more along the lines of an armed society is a polite society (Robert A. Heinlein). In other words, what matters is not (A) that it is difficult to stop a firearm-wielding attacker with another firearm, or (B) that it took longer than was desirable to stop the attack in question (by the way I'm not sure, generally speaking, that service people on U.S. army bases have immediate access to firearms, even if they are well trained to use them). What does matter, and what I would contend the real crux of the argument to be, is that (A) when citizens of country own firearms, they acknowledge by this ownership their willingness and responsibility to respond decisively and effectively to a threat to their (family's, country's, etc.) safety, and that (B) a society that has this common understanding is more likely to be a safe society. Regards,-Brendan