Just wanted to weigh in on this issue. I am for gun rights. First of all, this post is based on the premise that this issue is argued on both sides with the arguments rooted in, I don’t know if emotion is the right word or at least not based on pure logic or rationality. People that argue for guns, myself included, come at it from the emotional standpoint of liking guns at least in part. It’s not purely logical. On the gun control side, there’s a lot of emotion too. I posted a post awhile back talking about this, but logically alcohol kills much more people than guns. Do not mistake it, this is not deflecting or whatever logical fallacy you’d like to say, because I am NOT saying that we can’t have a conversation about guns because something else that is also preventable kills more people. We can talk about multiple things simultaneously. But it’s not deflection to simply state the fact that people on the gun control side do not talk with the fervor about banning alcohol that they do about banning firearms. There aren’t news stories about the deaths due to alcohol on the news when a drunk driver kills someone or about generational poverty due to alcohol or whatever. I’m not claiming the high ground here. I’m just saying that it’s not as if a person is impartial, looks at the statistics holistically, and then makes a decision to push their congressmen and tell their friends to support gun control or to support gun rights. No, we see a tragedy that’s in the grand scheme of things (even in regards to overall gun homicides) an anomaly and then argue vehemently to restrict guns. On the other side, we hear rumors that Obama’s going to take the guns or whatever and post memes all over Facebook about how you can blame misspelling on pencils if you blame guns for murders. All that to be said, at our core, we’re much more emotionally driven than logically driven.
All that being said, I’m curious as to how people for gun control feel about this from a philosophical standpoint at least. There’s a lot of blame and guilt laid out in regards to this. I’ve seen it on these posts. We’ve heard it where at the town hall in Florida, people were yelling at the NRA spokesman that they were murderers. I’ve seen it with people saying, gun rights people are at fault because they don’t have solutions to prevent killings. There’s blood on their hands. They bear at least some responsibility in the murders that are committed.
My thought is this. There’s a theme in this thread and in just the general vibe of articles and the like that, maybe we’re not banning all guns, but there is a push from multiple people that guns as a means of self-defense is not a right. It wasn’t meant to be guaranteed in the Constitution, or even if it was, let’s change it to take it away. This comes out in the specifics where examples are cited that you can have a gun, even a hand gun, but only to take to the range and shoot. Long rifles are fine, as long as they’re just for hunting. When these things are in the house, they not only need to be locked up, but they need to be locked up, and the ammo needs to be stored separately. To me, that’s pretty squarely in the frame of reference of you can have it, but you should never need to use it for defense. Plan a hunting trip, gather everything up and go or plan a trip to the range or whatnot. Just don’t have it accessible for you to potentially defend yourself. Again, this is based on the examples of requirements people want combined with the arguments that defense isn’t or shouldn’t be part of the rights to have a gun.
OK, so if that’s the case, let me give you a story. A very intoxicated/high (not sure) person attempted to break into my grandfather’s house. He was older, probably 65-70 or so. The guy was so out of it that he wrecked and thought someone in his car was hurt (no one was in the car). He was so belligerent about it that he smashed through the glass door to get in. My grandfather had a shotgun and was able to get him to leave with it. I’m not sure if he fired a warning shot or the sight of it simply got through to him. The guy fled and was eventually caught. So, would anything have happened if the gun hadn’t been there? No one could possibly know. The guy, however, was so out of it and was in his 20’s, so who knows if he would have gotten so angry about my grandfather “resisting helping” or what not that he seriously hurt or killed him. He certainly could have, as he was much younger and stronger. Again, no one could possibly know, and this story is one of the many examples of guns preventing crime that there are almost certainly no statistics about because no one was shot. All in all, this is an anecdote. I know that, but aren’t they all? The Florida shooting is ultimately an anecdote. A very tragic one, but it’s a single story that’s captured the public’s thoughts.
Protecting yourself where I live is a fact of life. The police are many minutes away when things happen. If my grandfather would not have had a loaded gun to be able to dissuade the guy from coming in, would he have been hurt or killed? I have no idea. All I know is that I got to spend 25 more years or so with him that I might not have.
My question is this, if things go down the path of restricting guns for self-defense – and again, this doesn’t mean taking up all the guns, just making it where using it for self-defense is harder/impractical, would anyone on the gun control side feel guilt? Does anyone from that side ever think about it like that? I’m a product of my perspective as much as anyone else, and I do know multiple people who may have gotten hurt or worse if their access to loaded firearms as a deterrent were removed.