Okay, in the wake of a couple of mass murder shootings and now a couple higher profile armed robberies (one last week near a mall in PA, and one today in the New Orleans area), the morons are crawling out of the wood work.
The premise of their argument is simple, though fatally flawed. They stipulate that the reason there is so much violence is because of access to weapons. In fact, they maintain that if you ban all the weaponry that private citizens own, violent crime will stop. Does anyone else see the flaw here? People who have determined to commit violent acts are already determined to break the law. Why would ANOTHER LAW stop them? By this reasoning, (that weapons are the problem)no one could possibly have committed any violent act before weapons of any kind were invented.
Look at any other country that has banned guns, knives, etc. and see if they have a violent crime rate of 0… I’m guessing that’s not the case. In fact, the European country with the least amount of violent crime arms it’s citizenry with a fully automatic “assault rifle” and demands that they keep 50 rounds of ammunition on hand to defend themselves until they can report to base. Switzerland has for years had this policy, demanding military service and arming it’s general populace.
Which brings me to my point. Wouldn’t MORE, RESPONSIBLE armed citizens curb these violent outbreaks? Who would attack a mall if they knew that their victims were armed? Look at the Colorado shootings. The perpetrator killed two people at the first location and escaped. However, once he arrived at his second location, an responsible and armed VOLUNTEER stopped his rampage through force and decisive action.
What do you guys think?
13/12/2007 at 8:59 pm Permalink
This is a tough one, dude. The problem is, in our country, I don’t think there is anyway to arm everyone so the crooks would still know that. I personally would never be able to carry a gun or use it.
13/12/2007 at 9:14 pm Permalink
You don’t have to arm everyone. 40 states allow carry of some kind. If all 50 did and there were no gun free zones (other than government buildings and other places with well-trained, armed security), and it was well known that the citizenry were armed… I guarantee we’d have less shootings.
In addition to this we need to make sure that we stop glorifying violence in our media and our society at large, and we need to make sure that said armed citizenry is well-trained and responsible.
16/12/2007 at 11:02 am Permalink
For any interested, I just found this document. It very well documented and shows a lot of the misinformation that the media keeps spewing for what it is:
http://www.kevindooley.net/files/GunFacts4-0-Screen.pdf