The sole purpose of a gun is to kill or maim. Implicit in the act of carrying a gun is the general threat to everyone in range which says, “I am prepared to kill or maim you”. The same is not true of knives and bats, etc. Carrying a gun makes you an automatic threat, and makes others feel compelled to acquire guns and carry them around as well. Or it makes them resent you because of the threat you pose, which also breeds hostility. If the object is to save lives and live in a relatively peaceful society, then fewer firearms is objectively better than a society where most people carry guns, and retaining some authoritarian control over who is allowed to carry a gun and why is essential.
History shows us repeatedly that everybody being armed results in less violence than one group of people being more heavily armed than the other. If criminals and people intending violence as a rule are going to carry guns anyway, then people who have no intention to do violence carrying guns to defend themselves makes that violence less appealing to the criminal, and less likely to happen.
What you want to avoid is the criminals being better armed than their victims. There are two ways to do this- everybody has access to guns, or nobody has access to guns. Each nation could obviously decide that for themselves, but in the United States for example, the right to firearm possession is protected in the Constitution, which gives examples of reasons why an armed populace is a good thing. For example, an armed populace is more difficult to control if the government turns tyrannical. An armed person can better provide food for himself. Firearms are tied closely to American culture and history, and taking them away will be seen as an assault on that culture.
In other words, everybody with guns and nobody with guns will promote the same outcome. However, we have other reasons to prefer people having guns, therefore nobody having guns is the inferior of the two solutions. We ought to encourage upstanding citizens to own and understand firearms, not discourage it.
Fewer firearms in a society is NOT objectively better- it depends entirely on what elements of society are likely to have them.
legallyarmed.com/ccw_statistics.htm
People do not know you are carrying unless you show.
I have never concealed, it seems stupid. I don’t want confrontation so my gun is visible. As a small woman in large cities having to live in questionable areas out west. I trusted few. No one ever bothered me. I and many others show weapons in order to avoid confrontation. I am not sure about concealed.
My Dad carries concealed a lot, unless he knows he’s going to the bank, or near a school. I think he’s coming from an aspect of civic/family defense more than personal- “Some people are armed so don’t be a criminal” is a better message to put out than “That guy right there is armed” to him.
Ucci,
Why doesn’t he carry at the bank or near schools? Is it a legal thing in his area, or does he feel it would be a bad idea to bring a gun to those places?
I carry a gun almost all the time. Unless I’m going to be sitting on the beach or something, I’m probably armed. I carry in the bank, in a nightclub, in a restaurant, at the mall, everywhere. I’ve had a concealed carry permit for something like 14 years now. No one knows I have a gun except the handful of assholes who have threatened me over the years, and the occasional terrible driver who cuts me off when I’m having a shitty day. Even then, I only show them if they start doing all that jumping up and down and trying to get me to pull over. That shit isn’t uncommon around here. Crazy people swerving at you in traffic and wanting to fight you at red lights. Fucking Birmingham man. People are nuts.
What examples are you thinking of?
Maybe, but do people who carry firearms really suffer less crime?
i think it’s more important to determine who should and shouldn’t be allowed to carry guns, and when and where and why - controlling guns, and finding ways to do that which keeps them out of the hands of criminals and would be criminals. It’s not necessarily a foregone conclusion that a criminal will always be able to get his/her hands on a gun.
Neither option is really desirable. i honestly believe that more weapons breeds more violence, and arming people to protect them against criminals just contributes to the proliferation of weapons, which makes things more dangerous for everyone. But obviously guns are necessary for all sorts of things, like law enforcement, security, etc, and can be used for recreation, and then there’s the invented right to bear arms unfortunately enshrined in the Constitution, so there are always going to be guns around.
Well, it gives one example, and it’s rather ambiguous, but . . .
Those both strike me as an antiquated examples. Having a gun doesn’t really help people feed themselves, unless they’re planning to hold up a grocery store or something, and there’s really no way the general populace could achieve anything resembling weapons parity with the US government.
i understand that, but the fact is it wouldn’t actually be an assault on that culture to control gun possession and prevent people from getting certain weapons. An AR15 is not really a cornerstone of any part of American culture and history.
i disagree, for the reasons i gave above.
MYTH.
I would think that banks and schools are the most common places where people get shot in the US.
Your dad must be a moron.
God I love living in England!
Yeah, i’ve thought about this. i’m very close with someone who has a concealed carry permit (no small feat, given that we live in a city with some of the strictest gun laws around). i’m not sure what to make of it. i guess it makes him FEEL safer, but i wonder if he actually IS safer. In some ways, i think he might be making everyone else a little LESS safe, so he’s being selfish.
That’s basically the reaction i have to it as well.
You know there’s no such thing as pickpockets in the US right?
It’s because of these…
Dude, that’s so not true. And a glock isn’t going to stop a pickpocket. i’ve told you about my concealed carry friend? How he got mugged on a night he happened to not be carrying his gun, and how even HE admits the gun wouldn’t have helped him anyway, since the guys who did it came up behind him and put him in a sleeper hold. They got his wallet with a huge wad of cash, his ipod and his cellphone. Had he been carrying his gun, they would’ve gotten THAT too. Again, even HE admits that.
Anecdotal evidence.
He worries that if somebody happens to glimpse his gun, it is more likely to cause a scene in those places than in other places.
Military stand offs between more or less equally matched foes, vs. wholesale slaughters when an unarmed populace has something a potential invader wants.
I think it would probably depend on what you mean by 'suffer'. If "They broke into my house and stole all my shit" is treated as 'suffered a crime' and "They broke into my house, I shot at them, and they didn't get any of my shit" is also treated as 'suffered a crime', then I suspect not. I also suspect that most crime statistics probably treat it that way. I don't want to mix up causation and correlation, but it does seem to be a trend that the most heavily armed places in the U.S. have lower crime rates, since you asked. But of course, they tend to be rural.
I would think it's a foregone conclusion that a person who is willing to break the law to get a gun will be more likely to have a gun than somebody who is not- and that that discrepancy will widen the harder it is to get a gun without breaking the law. That said, I do agree with you that criminals, crazy people and so on shouldn't be allowed to have guns, and enforcing laws like that (which already exist) is a very good ideas.
Seems like statistics should be considered here. I think that the single greatest contributors to crime are population density and multiculturalism. The presence of lots of guns in climates that have those two factors I suspect will lead to more violent death, but I highly doubt it will lead to more violent crime. That’s what I predict statistics will show: areas with high population density and lots of different ethnic/religious groups intermingled will have assloads of crime. Guns will make that crime more likely to turn deadly, but not noticeably affect the actual number of violent crimes. Also, speaking of statistics, I don’t think you’ll find statistical evidence that there is actually an existing problem that further gun restrictions will solve.
They are certainly not urban examples, but I know plenty of people that use guns to feed themselves, and no they are not robbing grocery stores. And an armed populace doesn’t need weapons parity with the US government, because a tyrannical US government is very unlikely to bomb itself. What’s more, we have examples of armed civilian populations holding their own against tyrannical governments going on right now.
I think it’s up to the people who are going to potentially have this reaction to decide that, not up to people who would rather we didn’t have any guns whatsoever.
Had an old guy at Dairy Queen tell me a story like this just today, in fact. He was driving down the road, stopped at a red light, and some crazy fucker started waving a gun at him from inside his car. There was a lot of traffic, so the old guy couldn't leave, but the kid gets out of his car in the middle of the street, abandoning the vehicle, waves the gun around. Old guy gets out to confront him (didn't want the kid to go off somewhere and kill somebody), the kid puts his gun away, attacks the old man, they get in some kind of fist fight. Cop comes over, breaks it up, hauls off the weird guy to jail. Right in the middle of the street, huh.
That kid shoulda had more tact. See though, I’m the old man in that situation. It’s the fucking kids with the invincibility complexes that you have to point the gun at. In the times in my life where I’ve had young people point a gun at me, I usually make a crazy face and start screaming mean horrible things at them, theb I say hold on a second fuck face lemme show you mine, then they run away.
But then again, there is that other issue of carrying a gun to prevent killing. Isn’t that why the police carry guns?
Of course, the police are holy saints of the fatherland, so maybe they don’t count.
In a manner of speaking perhaps, but you know it’s not as simple as that. As i see it, police carry guns as a means of getting people to cooperate with them. Police must be threatening enough that people will do what police tell them to do. So obviously, police kill people all the time. They have to. Notice they also carry guns all the time. That’s not just coincidence. Carrying a gun increases the likelihood that you will shoot somebody, which in turn increases the likelihood that you will kill or maim someone, which in turn increases the number of people killed or maimed. i don’t care how skilled you are with your weapon, if you carry a gun you are simply more likely to shoot someone. Fewer guns means fewer people shot.
i’m no fan of cops, but they and their firearms are a necessary evil.