Knives have the purpose to cut food.

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What purpose does a gun have?

Shoot clay pigeons.

Dammit! http://www.nerdnirvana.org/2010/05/08/b ... 137084000/

Last edited by Seabass on 23 Dec 2012, 4:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Depends. Especially if you combine the two and have a bayonet.

But seriously, what's your point? That the only purpose of guns is to kill? Maybe knives have more practical uses than guns, but that doesn't mean we should ban guns. We don't see people wanting to ban deadly forms of knives, like katanas. But to answer your question, guns are a very efficient tool for hunting. If the dollar crashes anytime soon, that will be a very valuable skill.

Don't we?

Defense, hunting, sport.

We still have a majority of our country that supports liberty.

In Long Beach, CA, a person can carry a katana in public provided that the blade is plainly visible ... kinda hard to conceal over a meter of tempered steel, though.

Because katanas are an antiquity. In a hundred years, we'll have railguns or laser rifles or what have you, and people will look at an AK-47 and be like "Ah, the weapons of war of our forefathers" and you could be a liberal hippy and have one hanging up in your living room and be all artsy about it. A musket will still kill the hell out of you, but people look at it in rose tinted glasses and go "aww, look at that antique..." It just doesn't translate into "weapon" to people.

Liberty until it infringes on the safety of individuals or society. I don't know how familiar you are with the works of John Stuart Mill, but he made it very clear that liberty is not "being able to do whatever you want".

Responsible citizens carring weapons improve the safety of society.

I'm sure he was alluding to the non-aggression principle when he stated that. Not the justification for banning a type of weapon. From the looks of it, he was ardently against forms of government that violated this principle. I would also argue that a government that bans a certain type of weapon is violating this principle.

This section of his Wiki backs that up:

Mill believed that "the struggle between Liberty and Authority is the most conspicuous feature in the portions of history." For him, liberty in antiquity was a "contest... between subjects, or some classes of subjects, and the government." Mill defined "social liberty" as protection from "the tyranny of political rulers." He introduced a number of different tyrannies, including social tyranny, and also the tyranny of the majority.

Social liberty for Mill meant putting limits on the ruler's power so that he would not be able to use his power on his own wishes and make decisions which could harm society; in other words, people should have the right to have a say in the government's decisions. He said that social liberty was "the nature and limits of the power which can be legitimately exercised by society over the individual". It was attempted in two ways: first, by obtaining recognition of certain immunities, called political liberties or rights; second, by establishment of a system of "constitutional checks".

However, in Mill's view, limiting the power of government was not enough. He stated, "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."[18][b]

Then why does the developed Western democracy with the highest weapon carrying have the highest gun homicide rate?

I believe that "nobody carrying weapons" is a better option than "responsible people carrying weapons".

This article is worth a read, though the "500" number is unsubstantiated- a better number is 120: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 30231.html

That's more due to the despicable "War on Drugs" that has brought a flood of crime in from the south, just to name one thing.

In combination with this, we share a 2000 mile long border with a 3rd world country, which because of our War on Drugs have a war against and between powerful drug cartels. Mexico by the way has very strict gun control and it doesn't hurt the drug cartels, it hurts the poor civilians caught in the middle of this gang war.