Disregarding the argument over the punctuation, explain how owning a gun has stopped any attack on the US.
You also have to consider the possibility of a non-democratic coup, which is much arder to do if the population is armed. This is, for me, the two last lines of defence for democracy (the last being an armed revolt against the bad leader, the second to last being the threat of such a revolt discourageing the potential bad leader), and the single most important reason to allow the people to own arms.
Sometimes I think the fanatical devotion to "the founding fathers" borders on insanity.
I agree. They were not omniscient. There must be some room for "going by the spirit rather than the letter" or in this case, by the comma.
Fair enough. I am not anti guns. I have grown up using rifles on the farm for work and pleasure. I cannot, though, see the point in allowing a private citizen access to weapons that can fire 700 rounds per minute.
A handgun for home defence could be limited to 6 rounds. If you can't hit an intruder with the first 6 rounds, I pity anyone else in the house, as it is obvious that you can't shoot straight.
This site will sell you an Uzi for less than I pay for a suit. For a lazy $5500, you could purchase the Barrett 95M 50 calibre sniper rifle. That would be handy to shoot the intruder in a house in the next suburb.
As mentioned above, I don't consider home defence as important as democracy defence, and the needs are different.
The idea behind the second amendment is that an armed populace can rise up, form a militia, and, with virtually no training, defeat a tyrannous government's standing army. That's wrong. "The truth is that small, good armies have always defeated big, bad ones."
The threat of them doing so could be enough of a deterrent for the need not to arise.
One must also consider the kind of warfare we are talking about here. It's not "open battlefield with well defined battle lines", we are talking about the classical guerilla warfare, where the guerillas "move like fish in a stream" among the general populace.
A tank may be big and scary, but at some point the crew will leave it, and at that point, they can be shot. Then the tank is just a big and expensive piece of scrap metal. The same goes for helicopter gunships and aircraft. Much of the military hardware will be useless, as there is no reasonable way to use a capital ship, a cruise missile or a B-52 bomber against small groups like this. Ask the British, they never actually managed to beat the IRA, and it certainly wasn't for lack of trying.
Zombies are attracted by the sound of gunshots.
On the other hand, you don't really need a silencer once you realize that you never run out of ammo or need to reload a machete.
If you can't incapacitate the other person with 6 shots you probably should stay away from gunfights.
Well, six rounds may not be enough, but if you can't shoot yourself out of trouble with 100 rounds, chances are that you won't be able to do it with 101 rounds either.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M950
Yeah, it's a shame Finland has such liberal gun ownership laws.
(förtydligande: kommentaren rör skjutningen på en skola i Finland nyligen)
One thin one must remember is that that kind of incidents are extremely rare. Extremly rare also means that it will be extremly random where, when and why they pop up, as there is not enough basis for a statistical analysis with any certainty.
damian's question would be valid if nations like Canada and Switzerland, with similar rates of per capita gun ownership didn't have much lower incidents of gun crime.
I can explain that. I have little knowledge about Canada and Switzerland, but the same applies to Sweden.
In Sweden, you have to have training to own a gun, either a formal training as a hunter, at a club for target shooting or as part of the Swedish Home Defence (a civilian volonteer organisation that's part of the Swedish defense and expected to handle such things a guard duty and patrols in case of war). This includes handling, legal issues and attitude towards guns. Without training, no license, without license, no gun or ammo.
The attitude towards guns is very respectful. People here don't go out in the forest and shoot tin cans. We don't handle guns when drinking beer. We only use them at the firing range or when actually hunting. Even hunting is done in an ordered and calm manner, usually sitting around and waiting for the prey to show up.
I saw an american ad for a gun (some insane pistol conversion of a Barrett M-82, with a slightly reduced load) which said something along the lines of "If you catch a burglar in the garage and you are carrying this, he'll know you mean business". A company who'd run such an ad in Sweden would be without their license to sell weapons before the ink on the ad was dry. You never, ever, imply that a gun is actually possible to use against a human when selling them here. Even for hunting, the talk is more about accuracy than stopping power. When shooting at a firing range, we shoot at, depending on what kind of weapon it is, skeet, bullseye targets or moose shaped targets. You never see a human shaped target in Sweden outside the military and the police.
Even adults around here usually feel a bit nervous when handling weapons. I've done some skeet shooting on occasion, and both I and the other participants have felt that feeling of "Oh shit, I'm holding a lethal weapon!". A gun is not "ordinary" or something you handle casually, it's always treated as if you were a snake handler handling dangerous snakes, with caution and responsibility, and it's something that never becomes routine. A gun is scary and needs to be handled with extreme caution.
We keep our weapons locked in a secure and certified gun rack or safe, with a vital part stored equally secure elsewhere. The same goes for ammo. Someone who stored it in a cupboard or desk drawer would not only be considered irresponsible, they would be breaking a fairly heavy law. This means that even if we have a lot of guns, they are seldom stolen and seldom used in anger or fear.
As for types of guns, we mainly have hunting rifles and shotguns. Swedish Home Defense volonteers usually have an assault rifle or a submachinegun. Some target shooters have competition rifles or pistols, usually small caliber. There is an almost total lack of pistols or revolvers designed for shooting people, and of semiautomatic shotguns or carbines.
As I think you can see, it's a different mentality. I'm sure there are many, many responsible gun owners in USA who happily agrees that this is the way to responsibly handle guns, but sadly, the way the system works today, it's all too easy for the less mature gun owners to get (and keep) their guns.
How do you change a culture, so that people will handle their guns more responsibly? I have no idea, I don't know everything. Frankly, I think it may have gone too far for a change.
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