Just a note that a response will be forthcoming with many studies cited. I hope no one thinks I'm going quietly on this one.
The leftist view of gun culture eh? Apparently anyone who speaks out on guns as a public safety issue is automatically a leftist hippie.
To wit:
Secondly, and most importantly, cars have proportionally more SAFETY checks built into them than guns do. Many of you may have heard of the report in the magazine Mother Jones where it was reported that four federal safety standards apply to the making of teddy bears but none exist for gun manufacture (1994). Even simple things such as an indicator to show whether the gun is loaded or not is not universal.
QED, my point is proven about the leftist nature of the anti-second amendment program.
The whole problem with your argument is that you are citing so-called studies that have the agenda of denying US citizens of one of their basic constitutional rights. That only leaves the question as to what rights are next?
The next problem is that your agument expect that the government's job is to save everyone from themselves and that an elitists few have the right to dictate to everyone what is best for them. That is the seed of totalitarianism.
Up until now I have been presenting public health data, which I hope doesn't fall into the category of leftist gun culture, but I will now turn to the politics. Roman mentions a right to protect oneself in this fashion (using a gun). I'm sorry, I thought that's what police forces were for. Police forces and security guards are the means by which society is protected against violence.
Gun culture, gun-schmulture. That's a loaded chant designed to warp the facts and to elicit a bogus emotional response instead of a logical one. Face it, the police can't be everywhere all the time and I don't think that any of us would want to live in a society where police where everywhere all the time watching everyone all the time.
Let me give you an example of the specious nature of your 'that's what police are for' argument. Someone breaks into your house and is trying to kill or otherwise harm you. Do you really thing that you are going to say to the criminal, 'er, excuse me, be a good chap and stand there while I call the police?' Reality doesn't work that way. The average response time for police to show up is now in excess of one hour. To expect that criminals will wait for the police to show up, you're sorely mistaken.
What you're 'that's what police are for' argument presumes that we hand over all of our own responsibility and rights to an all-pervasive police state. That's insanity, unless you like having the KGB up your butt 24/7.
The only reason we don't live in a totalitarian soviet style regime in the US is that the government has a historically justified healthy respect for armed citizens.
Your 'militia' argument is also bogus. The phrase "The right of the People" means you, me and every other law abiding individual as individuals. It doesn't mean the state. If we were to accept your 'militia' argument which directly means that the 'People' means the government as an institution, then you, me and everyone else have no right to freedom of speech, because the 'Right of the People' to peaceably assemble belongs to the government and not individuals.
Once again, you have swallowed the gun-grabber agenda hook, line and sinker. I have a 2nd amendment right to keep and bear arms. I also have the right to not have the government dictate to me what's best for me when my ownership of firearms threatens no one other than criminals bent upon criminal activity. I resent the government or anyone else having the utter arrogance to think that they have the right to tell me what is best for me. If someone doesn't feel that they are responsible enought to possess a firearm then they shouldn't have a firearm, but I get really, really irked when morons like Senators Schmuck Schummer and Diane Fineswine, who both own firearms and carry firearms, projecting their own insecurity upon me and then wanting to take my arms away from me. A pure case of politicians prefering unarmed peasants.
GBM makes a very interesting point on this issue. Some people think that owning a gun is a bad idea in the first place. If they are making that decision for themselves, that is fine, but I don't think that people have the right to make that decision for others who think it is a perfectly good idea to own a firearm if one wants to do so.
Everyone forgets the now documented 3,000,000 times each year a privately owned firearm saves someone's life. And this is a well documentent fact. I believe that not only the NRA, but numerous other organizations have produced the same fact in independent studies.
Alone, in my county of 7,000 people, no fewer are 20 criminal intruders and assailants stopped or thwarted in their activities each month by the mere threat of being shot by their vicitims without a shot ever being fired. That's 20 people who would most likely be dead or worse had they not had the means of defending his or herself (mostly herself).
The whole 2nd Amendment issue goes beyond the 2nd Amendment - it applies to all the amendments. What if some politicos in Washington, DC decided that unregulated and unlicensed free speech was a bad idea and that free speech should be regulated with federal licensing? What if there was a ten day waiting period before anyone could speek freely in the press and only after generally arbitrary government approval?
The issue involves where we as law abiding citizens draw the line and tell the government where to get off. If the government can limit our rights, reserved or otherwise, on one point, it sets the precedent that they can limit all other rights in the same fashion. And they will. To paraphrase George Washington, government, like fire, is a wonderful servant but a dreadful master. When we allow a government to deny citizens the basic human right to selfe defense, we are only abrogating all our rights because if you have no ultimate means to preserve our freedoms, we may as well just give up and let the government decide everything for us from cradle to grave. We've see what happens historically when people do exactly that.
My personal advice to all those who are against firearms is to go and join their local gun club and learn how to operate them and see that 99.99999% of law abiding private gun owners use their firearms in perfectly legal and beneficial activites like target shooting, self defense, etc.
I took a buddy of mine who was a dyed in the wool gun-grabbing lunatic down to the range a while back. After a day of target shooting he went out and bought himself a target rifle because he enjoyed marksmanship after that. Now he owns about 20 guns. He hasn't shot anyone yet nor will he ever.
Again, I don't ever intend to be so insane as to rely on anyone other than myself for my own protection in immediate situations. I like to be above the turf instead of dead waiting an hour for cops to show up.
You can't get drugs off the street by illegalizing them, what makes anyone think that you can do the same with firearms? You keep the guns out of the hands of criminals by keeping the criminals locked up, not by denying law abiding citizens their constitutional rights. Criminals will always be able to obtain guns illegally; it makes no sense to disarm the law abiding and give the criminals free hand to attack the defensless.
If you don't own a firearm and a criminal knows it, and I do own a firearm and the criminal knows it, whose house is going to get robbed first?
My legal ownership and ability to carry a sidearm as a private citizen has saved my life more than once and has saved the lives of others more than once. I and those other people are very glad that I had the right to be armed. More than once I have assisted law enforcement personnel as a private citizen and otherwise in dangerous situations. Those police were very happy to have someone who was a great deal better at combat arms than they were to assist them in such emergencies.
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