Does it bother anyone else that people are acting so snide and better than thou? Well, I'm sure it does, so I'm here. Yeah. Sorry.
OK, my thoughts. First off, The Constitution states that we have "The Right to Keep and Bear Arms [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Second_Amendment]" That's what it says. And that's part of what bothers me.
Let's look past the short term issues, like a slightly reduced crime rate and a sales loss for the gun lobbyists. Let's look at what it would mean to say, "This does not say you have the right to keep a gun".
Again let's look at The Constitution, and how it's worded. So far as I'm concerned, and according to most people I talk to, it works like this; the expressed right to own a gun implies the right to defend yourself from harm; they say the right to swing your fist ends where the other man's nose begins, but if someone forgets that, you have the right to fuck them up (within reason, and more than anything so they remember how far their arms are supposed to reach.) If a guy tries to mug you, you have the implied right to incapacitate him in order to preserve your well being. That's how it works. People have the right to protect themselves from harm, if only because their first instinct might very well be to protect themselves from harm. What happens if you take that away? If a guy points a gun at me in a dark alley, my first reaction is to grab his arm and break it, just like I was taught. I would hurt him so badly that he either couldn't or wouldn't be able to fight back. That's what I was taught and that's how I would react.
If you take away my right to defend myself, then what is there to stop my assalant? Even if he doesn't have a gun, what's to stop him from grabbing a butcher knife and hold me up like that? He'll get away scott free, either way; in fact, with someone like me, he may hope I defend myself, so I have to spend the rest of my life paying for his medical bills.
By taking away the ability to defend one's self, you instead increase how much crime happens (as Abako [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/18.80570?page=4#1055669] pointed out in a much more elequent way than I would, or will, bother to). This, so far as I see, is common sense. More inportiantly, though, where does it end? Do you outlaw martial artists, because they use their bodies as a weapon? Do you doctors so that they can't use their knowledge of anatomy to harm a person? Do you execute a decrepit old man because he was in the Vitetnam war and knows how to fight a gurella war? Where does it end? Will defining an aspect of one law change the meaning of The Constitution itself, like the decrepit old man feared?
That's not to say I belive gun deteirence=totolitarian state. We're a long way from that, and as long as there are people willing to fight, it won't happen. But if you're like me, you wonder, and indeed, I do wonder...sometimes...
My apologies; I rant. I just thought I'd throw that out there.
