Guns as the great equalizer

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Why, you ask?
The same reason I have a fire extinguisher in my kitchen.
The same reason I wear wear my seatbelt.
I'm not paranoid about fires or vehicular accidents but I want to be at least somewhat prepared just the same. I'm not paranoid about encountering an armed aggressor but I like to be at least somewhat prepared just the same. You just don't get it. Or more accurately, you refuse to get it...


Carry permits are at an alltime high in recent years in the U.S. With that, what's your justification for this utterly paranoid little rant? Where's all the terror and blood we're causing?


Australia is a safer place from outside threats because the U.S.of A is out there walking the globe carrying a big stick. You benefit from our sociopathic presence in the world and have been at least since WW2.


Telling me stuff like this only excites the predator in me; you being the weak subject of our will.
Keep it up, please.

Personally, I don't like the idea that when I go to a grocery story, the person in front of me in line could (legally) have a concealed weapon on them. Does this make me paranoid? Unreasonably anxious? Yes, slightly, but I am entitled to my own feelings and my own opinions. Sorry if you don't like it.

Criminals will break the law but just because criminals break the law this doesn't mean that the law isn't a deterrent to at least some people.

Anyway, everybody knows that this argument is futile because nobody ever changes their mind on issues like this.

I will say that gun control laws are sometimes impractical and misguided and sometimes punish people who don't deserve it. I am generally for them though.

Well, since I don't live there I'll just accept what you say about what it is that motivates the police in your country. You make them sound both incompetent and corrupt. Maybe they are.



Wait... what? China is going to invade? Really? How? Why? Now you are just making things up. No, if they really wanted to take us over they would just buy the country instead. Why send troops when you can make an offer too good to refuse by greedy and incompetent politicians?



If I were you I wouldn't compare the U.S. to those two dysfunctional states, if only because you are basically saying here that the anarchy that resulted from the failure of the U.S. armed forces to quickly pacify Iraq and Afghanistan was actually good because they managed to preserve their freedom from a nation that sought to occupy and control them. They are not "slowly taking it back", they are losing to I.S. Iraq is a mess, and will probably disintegrate within the next five years. Afghanistan isn't much better, the government over there losing ground to the Taliban. I simply cannot understand how anyone could seriously consider this chaos to be in any way, shape or form, an endorsement of the 'right' of private individuals to own firearms, for it was the proliferation of small arms that allowed groups like I.S. and the Taliban to become as powerful as they are now in the first place.



I care because, and as I explained before, the bad ideas that you people come up with have a rather nasty tendency to end up where I am. They spread around the world like a virus, or as R. Dawkins might put it, like a 'meme'. Besides, why I happen to care isn't really relevant, now is it. What matters is whether or not I am actually right, and no one has thus far presented a convincing case for why private individuals should be allowed to 'bear arms'.

I'm a credentialed gunsmith with 15+ years of firearms experience residing in the US, the jurisdiction in question; you're a foreign national with no demonstrated knowledge of or experience with firearms trying to tell me that you know more about both my culture and my firearms than I do. See the problem yet?

Of my thousands of posts over years of posting here, probably half of them are exactly that, and that's just me; is it my fault you're unwilling to research the history of this topic on this board, which Raptor has made laughably easy?

Why is it that, despite my opinion being far more grounded in fact (concealed carriers are more law abiding than the police), I'm the one who get's called paranoid and worse?

Thank you, that's a much more succinct version of what I was going to write about why that's a fallacious (at best) argument. I doubt most dead people care all that much about the manner in which they were killed, all things considered.

I didn't call you paranoid. I called myself paranoid.

Anyway, the way you talk to people comes off as combative and defensive at times. It often seems like you're more interested in winning an argument than anything else. You pride yourself on reason but you show obvious signs of emotionality.

It goes both ways. People don't want to converse with you because you come across as condescending yourself. Nobody even wants to have a rational conversation with you since you get under people's skin so much. You provoke people into attacking you often. I'm not saying they are right to attack you but it goes both ways.

You feel defensive because so many people disagree with you. The least you could do is admit the defensiveness. That would be intellectually honest at least.

Well, by the same logic, free speech which is protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution for the United States of America is only protected when it is enjoyed using criers, parchment or hemp paper, quills and ink, and the printing press. After all, the Internet and means of communication we have today are way beyond anything that anyone could possibly have imagined back in 1791 when the First Amendment was adopted. It would clearly need to be criminalized.

Or, it is possible that the Constitution's concepts of all current and future "arms" as well as all current and future modes of "speech" were anticipated and aren't reliant on specific inclusion by description to be protected. The unique fact about the Constitution is that it protects negative rights, not positive rights. This alone saves it from having to define a multitude of terms. It is a lot easier to prohibit the central government from acting in certain ways in general "negative" terms than to turn a governing document into an encyclopedic dictionary.


Like all constitutional rights, the Second Amendment to the Constitution enjoys restrictions within its contemporaneous meaning. As the U.S. Supreme Court determined in Heller and McDonald, the amendment was intended to protect the individual right of the people to keep and bear arms. As such, it protects discriminate arms (rifles, pistols, knives, swords, etc.) which rely on an individual's use against one target at a time, not indiscriminate arms (nuclear devices, explosives, grenades, cannon, etc.) which rely on one or more individuals' use against many targets simultaneously. In this way, the natural right of self defense is preserved to the individual without risk of harming the many.

Oh, take a pill.
Do you have any idea the kind of shallow, uninformed, willfully ignorant, arrogant, intellectual dishonest, and just plain nuttiness we on the pro-gun side have had to cope with here over the past several years? And it seems like it's the same people but with different usernames that we deal with because the same tired and simpleminded rhetoric is constantly repeated by all of them.
Go back and do some research on these threads whydoncha....

Americans. Ugh.

"AMERICANS UGH";

Amen. Thanks God;

I'm not 'THAT' kind

of American;

Smiles;

Life is Fun;

'Some' people
are just
plain
silly; to
make IT into
CRAP PIE..

And to be clear, and hopefully
NOT PATRONIZING, since
this is a site for
autistic folks,
who often
do not
have
a clue
what the intent
of Reciprocal Social
Communication is;
that is not directed
at you friend;
Smiles
again..

Sincerely,
Fred..

Don't be bigoted.

None of these people are ever going to hurt you.

perhaps it would help if the major agitator for change in this area(the NRA) wasn't just a puppet for the guns industry, and didn't vote against sane gun control laws.

So, true story.

I live in the woods in a very small town. I wouldn't say "rural", but close to it. My house cannot be seen from the road, nor by any neighbors.

Yesterday, a strange man showed up at my house unannounced. I thought it was a neighbor at first, which is why I went outside.

My husband was not home. This guy was 6ft tall or taller, fit (though he had a bad leg), and carried himself and spoke like an ex-Marine. He seemed mentally unstable. Not sure the cause of it (perhaps he was drunk.) His speech was clear, but his thoughts were incoherent. He was looking for my husband (a pastor) because he desperately "needed someone to talk to." He was very upset that my husband was unavailable. I did not come out directly and say he wasn't home, but it was obvious. All I could think was "WHAT AM I GOING TO DO IF THIS GUY GOES NUTS ON ME?" I would not be able to get to a phone to call for police. No neighbors would hear or see a ruckus. Physically, I would've made no match for this guy. I might be on the large size (height & weight) for a woman, but I'm not super strong or super fit and I have no fighting skills or self-defense skills whatsoever.

I am thankful the guy left without incident.

So, anti-gunners, what's the best thing to do in this situation? When a looney shows up at YOUR house deep in the woods, at least 10 minutes from the nearest police station, what do YOU do?

The large "No Trespassing" sign at the end of the driveway didn't work. Aw shucks. And, you know, this wasn't the first time someone weird showed up here. Another guy came once, but my husband was home that time. Oh, and there was that one other time when a car came down our driveway late at night and parked for a couple of minutes. Before we could figure out why they were there, they started the car and left.

We were borrowing a simple shotgun a while back to protect our chickens from foxes (and, yup, sometimes you need to defend your property against wild animals!) But, we had to return it.

We have not seriously considered getting a gun because getting the dog seems to have taken care of the fox problem... And, truthfully, I am a little ambivalent about the ethics of protecting myself against violence in the light of "turning the other cheek." But, yesterday I sure felt that a gun in hand would have helped the INTIMIDATION factor.

I took a self-defense course in college. I felt it was a waste of time. There were too many steps to remember for each different possible scenario an posture an attacker could use to come at you. It was 20 years ago. I remember nothing. It is not exactly something easily practiced. A gun is comparatively much easier to learn to use and shooting is easier to practice. There are several gun clubs around for lessons. Plus, we have enough property where we could legally set up our own target for practice.