Moth_Monk said:
Yep this thread had to get posted.
Although it only occurred to me after reading some of the pro-gun Americans responses in comments sections/threads to you-know-what
The question is this: I live in the UK, where firearms are illegal, even the police do not have them, and the rate of gun crime is SIGNIFICANTLY lower than gun crime in the US. I have not even heard what a gun shot sounds like outside of TV and video games - think of that. With this being a fact, how can you people who are pro-guns; that don't like the idea of guns being made illegal, even rationalise why it would be a bad thing?
The only reason for thinking guns are needed, as far as I can tell, is if you think you need to kill somebody for some reason with them.
Captcha: hunky-dory
I <3 Captcha's irony.
Well, I'll try to ignore this question's blatantly loaded tone, since it's clear you've already decided we're wrong and you're not actually interested in hearing our side of things. However, someone with a more open mind might actually read this.
First of all, as one person already said, gun crime isn't the only sort of crime out there; a lack of the ability to defend oneself against violent attack, especially if outnumbered, can lead to a lot of non-gun-related crimes. If someone really wants to kill another one, they're gonna use whatever method is available to them. I don't like this argument, I admit, because it's similar to the "they're gonna do it anyway" one used for handing out condoms to high school kids. However, the difference here is that we're talking about taking away a personal freedom as the alternative, and to me that makes a significant difference.
This leads me to my second issue with gun control. Gun control is the notion of taking away a personal freedom based solely on the argument that something -might- happen if a given individual legally owned a gun, because statistics show it's happened a bunch of times involving other people. On that same argument, one can say that cars shouldn't be allowed to be owned by private citizens because accidents cripple and kill millions so only government transportation should be allowed (and if what I've seen on some tv shows about world's worst car accidents is true, no offense, but I think the UK must have the worst drivers in history), household chemicals should only be allowed to be used by licensed cleaning agencies, landscaping companies, etc. 'cause someone might poison themselves accidentally or deliberately, and all drugs, even currently over-the-counter ones should be prescription only and all of them should be dispensed only by government-licensed medical facilities, 'cause somebody could conceivably overdose.
My third point is a bit more difficult to relate to the UK, since I don't know what UK laws about gun ownership were before the current ones were adopted. I can say this much, however. In the United States, purchasing a firearm requires a background check or a concealed carry license, and those licenses can only be obtained with a background check. If you were convicted of a felony, have a restraining order against you involving domestic violence, have been certified by a mental institution as being mentally unstable, you can't get a concealed carry license and you can't buy a gun. Ergo, there are numerous laws already in place to prevent guns from being legally sold to criminals. This means guns used by criminals are, by and large, ones bought from illegal sources. Because of this, banning legal gun ownership's only effect is going to be taking them away from people who abide by the law anyway. If the intent of the ban is to keep guns out of the hands of known criminals or the people most likely to use them for criminal intent, then it's an empty gesture that does nothing but put on a show to placate the public while having no significant impact.
