Dark Hellion wrote:Actually, if you look at Britain which shares some cultural similarities with the U.S. but has more restrictive gun control laws you see that many of these kinds of people will commit the same crimes with knives, bats, etc. Now they are less deadly because of the effectiveness of the weapon but they still occur because the weapon does not actually cause the crime.
And I doubt you even recognize it in yourself but you have fallen into the antagonistic relationship with guns that I was talking about. Advocating disarmament when the vast, vast majority of gun owners are responsible people is like arguing we should ban all cars because drunk drivers exist. It is an overly broad and overly prohibitive solution to a problem which isn't even caused by the thing being banned. A much better way to go about it would be to take the responsibility argument of the opponents and turn it back at them, pushing for reasonable restrictions (like requiring fire arms training courses) which help to filter out guns from irresponsible owners, closing up certain private sale loopholes, and a push by groups like the FBI and ATF to better handle black market spread of weapons in high violence urban centers. I think the big key to any gun control initiative in America is to promote it in a way that makes the reasonable and responsible gun owners side with you and exposes the "cold dead hands" nutters as the insecure and paranoid losers that they are.
So removing guns from people does in fact save lives; that's what this boils down to. Lower amounts of guns seems to have caused less death related to violent crime in the UK. We can end the talk about removing guns from people at that, because unlike cars most guns don't serve much purpose so you can disarm people and save lives.
As for how to go about doing this... The joke option is that you could allow people to bear arms and then just ban the ammunition for them. Sure people can do self loading, but this would make it much hard to commit crimes on a large scale without more pre-planning. Being serious again, I have to agree making political changes on an issue like this has to happen slowly, and that weeding out the crazies is a great place to start. I just wish that you didn't have ignorant assholes who make it their goal to ensure that sensible laws don't get passed.
On the me versus guns angle, that isn't really true. I admit that I don't own a gun, but I do enjoy shooting and I can understand the desire to own a gun. I just have a more Canadian attitude towards them and don't take it personally when I can't get a handgun and a concealed carry permit from a vending machine.
