User blog comment:FanOfStuff/Shooting/@comment-1844926-20121215045021/@comment-1874924-20121216055003

Trey, listen to yourself. Your rant comes very close to hate speech.


 * Guns are only used for two things. Killing, and practicing killing.

What's your point? Sometimes killing is warranted. The garden-variety handgun, for example, is designed for close-range personal defense. Even if you're an actual pacifist who would accept the consequences of nonviolence in every conceivable situation, what gives you the right to impose that viewpoint upon others?

If you really believe that the use of force in self-defense is always wrong regardless of circumstances (and I'm betting that you don't) then you should just come right out and say so.


 * They're literally just killing machines, so, we might as well just call them that.

Again, what's your point? It sounds like you just want to exploit the emotional response to the word "killing" to promote bigotry against gun owners. It that's not your intention, then you need to make that clear, which means revising your arguments.


 * The shooter in this case didn't illegally obtain his gun. He stole his mom's (one of the victims) legally registered gun. (emphasis added)

Are you suggesting that theft isn't illegal?


 * While making guns illegal wouldn't totally solve this problem, it would at least help

Don't be so sure. Studies by respected criminologists (most notably Gary Kleck) have shown that lawful use of guns in self-defense is far more common than most people realize, so banning guns (or imposing restrictions that amount to a ban) is as likely to cost lives as to save them. In any case, there are times when the only way to serve justice is to allow the immediate opposition of one violence with another. ("Fight fire with fire", if you will.) That is partly why the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Washington DC's handgun ban and explicitly affirmed the right to keep and bear arms as a fundamental right of the individual. The right to self-defense implies the right to an effective means of defense, and it is older than our Constitution, our nation, or civilization itself.

Current gun control laws are disobeyed by millions. The outright ban that you propose would be disobeyed by tens of millions, including a huge group whose loyalty and lawfulness we now take for granted. Demanding that these people be disarmed is just asking for civil war.


 * even if people just illegally obtain guns, if guns are illegal, we can arrest them just for having one

We can already do that with most convicted criminals, the exception being those who have had their civil rights restored by a State. The thing is, our prisons are bursting at the seams as it is--mostly with criminals who did not use guns, because the vast majority of criminals don't--so people caught with illegal guns don't usually go to jail, they usually just have their illegal guns confiscated.

In any case, roughly half of all murder victims in the U.S. have felony records. In some big cities, it's over 70%. Roughly a third of all murders in the U.S. are cases of one criminal killing another--incidents the police call "public service" murders.


 * You do realize that [the Constitution] was written 200 years ago, by people who also thought that slavery was okay.

That's the "guilt by association" fallacy. An argument that includes such logical fallacies can't reach a correct conclusion except by accident. In any case, leaving aside the fact that the slavery issue was much more complex than you make it sound, those same people also wrote the rest of the Bill of Rights. Are you equally quick to dismiss freedom of speech, freedom of religion and the right of the accused to due process just because those provisions were written "200 years ago, by people who thought that slavery was okay"? If not, then you have a double standard to explain. The Bill of Rights is not an a la carte menu, and only a bigot will tell you otherwise.


 * And, for people who believe that guns are good for self-defense:

The effectiveness of guns for self-defense is well documented, so you mustn't dismiss it as a mere opinion unless you're trying to deceive people. A gun is the most effective self-defense weapon for three reasons:

Furthermore, studies have shown that, of all the ways you could defend yourself from an attacker, using a gun is the only method less likely to get you hurt or killed than if you don't resist at all. (Last I heard, the rate of "gratuitous" violence, where the victim doesn't resist but is injured or killed anyway, is about 16% if you use a gun, a little over 20% if you don't resist at all, and up to 40% for nonlethal methods of resistance.)
 * 1) It is the most likely to stop an attacker;
 * 2) It is the least likely to be taken away from you; and
 * 3) It is the least likely to be used against you if it is taken away.


 * if someone sneaks into your house in the middle of the night, just cuz you have a shotgun in the closet, you'll save the day and nothing will happen? No. They'll either just run away,

If the intruder runs away, then you have successfully used your gun in self-defense. The defensive value of guns is measured not by a body count, but by the lives and property protected.


 * or you'll become a murderer

Wrong. Murder is illegal by definition, so killing someone in lawful self-defense is NEVER murder. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either ignorant or is engaging in hate speech.


 * Because that's all that guns do. Murder.

If you've read this far, then you know that your statement is absolutely false. Guns don't "do" anything in the sense that you mean, and a killing isn't automatically a murder.