Please examine each statement to make sure it holds water about gun control – End Gun Violence!
I decline to offer a conclusion based on all the individual factoids mentioned – YOU can do that!
- People typically use the tools that are best suited for achieving what they want.
- Some people will take FIRST action to physically harm other people.
- These people don’t follow rules.
- Guns are one of the best tools for physically harming others.
- Knives, clubs, arrows and cars are also great tools for physically harming others, both when initiating violence and when defending oneself.
- Over 80% of people that have taken first action to physically harm other people throughout history have done so as an official part of their government military or police job.
- Average response time for police in the US is 10 minutes.
- Ponder the above, and we would all agree that the problem is those that take first action to physically harm others.
- We must not however, ignore the tools that are used.
- Perhaps it is worth considering the feasibility of making all guns, knives, clubs, arrows and cars disappear.
- As rational people, we know this cannot magically happen. If we COULD simply snap our fingers, perhaps this would be a great choice!
- Perhaps we could select just guns, because we recognize that they are the only collection of atoms under consideration that is inherently evil.
- Perhaps if we ignored individual rights with the greater good in mind, we would allow governments to remove all guns from individuals and make a rule that individuals may not own them. Of course the government would keep their own guns.
- What if they were able to accomplish as much success in this war as they have in their war on illiteracy and their war on drugs?
- For the sake of this argument, let’s pretend that their success was even better and they were able to confiscate 90% of the 300,000,000 privately owned guns in the US.
- Ah heck, let’s say they got 99% of privately owned guns, leaving only 3,000,000 guns “on the streets.”
- The NRA bumper stickers are wrong that “if guns are outlawed; only outlaws would have guns.” The government would also have guns.
- Let’s pretend that the confiscated guns were melted down and made into faster police cars, making response times only 5 minutes average. Yay!
- We have only 3,000,000 privately owned guns, none of which are in the hands of rule-following people.
- The vast majority of people are peaceful and follow rules. They do not own any guns.
- Now we have 100% of non-rule-following people still living in our great land and in possession of 100% of the guns. They likely sleep well at night knowing that as long as they don’t initiate violence against a fellow non-rule-follower, the victim’s resistance will be minimal.
Now I ask myself as you might also ask yourself; had the above scenario been accomplished several years ago, would it have prevented any, some or most of the deaths caused by non-rule-followers that took first actions to physically harm others?
