There are multiple valid reasons to support the Constitutional right to bear arms. The facts are that far more than 90% of all people that do own guns never use them in a crime or have an accident with them. Unfortunately the price for freedom allows the freedom to make mistakes with that freedom and the right to own guns has it's costs. Most Americans are willing to pay those cost of a slight increase the risk of coming to harm. Much of that risk can be mitigated by taking advantage of the very right that helps pose this slightly elevated risk. Armed citizens come to harm a whole lot less frequently than unarmed ones. Even the chance that someone may be armed reduces crime so people in communities where concealed carry is legal ALL benefit from the fact a criminal has no idea which potential victim might be able to defend themselves with lethal force. Criminals tend to go to other areas where that risk isn't there....the communities like WA DC or NYC or Chicago that have lots of gun laws and lots of people to victimize.

There never was a time in our history where taking away the guns from the populace was an option. We aren't England or Australia. Our culture is different and we have a different population make up. What supposedly works there isn't an option here.

Mr Jose Cuervo wrote:

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Ever hear that saying, the price for freedom is eternal vigilance? It was true a long time ago and it's true now.

There are other ways to be vigilant other than arming everyone. A good start would be holding our leaders accountable when they wipe their ass on the constitution like the current administration has. Or not supporting policies which cause financial distress to a wider percentage of the population. As poverty increases so does crime. I dunno, it seems like a more sane approach to me, but hey if tens of thousands of needless deaths a year is a reasonable price for you to feel safer for that 1 in a million occasion where you will actually need a weapon or more manly or whatever then we will just have to agree to disagree. Just keep in mind as society evolves, eventually we be a society without an armed populace.

I can see how the 2nd amendment could easily destroy this country rather than preserving it.

Ever hear of Aztlan?


Lucky for me I am Latino.

Firstly arming yourself has nothing to do with feeling manly or not. Of the two of us my wife has more time with a handgun in a concealed holster than I do. A gun is one of the few things that will help even up the odds between a 130 lb. woman and an attacker or attackers that are larger and stronger than she is.

She used to work alone, after dark, in a basically outdoor place with a lot of cash. The cash she'd gladly turn over if robbery was all they were there for but she'll be damned if she'd allow some guy or guys to rape her. I'm sure you could see her point. If not you're a fucking moron. Sorry but I don't mince words when it comes to shit like that. Imagine a scenario of a woman with one or two assailants alone on a 15 acre site with lots of places to be hidden from view. Even if she managed to get a 911 call off, which might not be so likely, any response by EMS is going to be 10 minutes out. A lot can happen in 10 minutes. Is that 10 minutes something you'd risk allowing your wife or daughter to deal with because you don't think guns are cool?

Interesting that you seem to think the rest of the Constitution is important but the very second idea the Founding Fathers put to paper on the damn thing you have no use for. Whatever.

I agree that there are more issues to address than just allowing people to bear arms. As far as I'm concerned that's a done deal. People have the right so lets move on to something that can be changed. I think shipping a bunch of jobs overseas, allowing a flood of illegal immigrants to come take the few jobs left, and a few other things aren't exactly the cure to poverty. We don't take a hard enough stance on gangs. If there was going to be a war on anything I think a real war on gangs would be a good place to start

Mr Jose Cuervo wrote:

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She used to work alone, after dark, in a basically outdoor place with a lot of cash. The cash she'd gladly turn over if robbery was all they were there for but she'll be damned if she'd allow some guy or guys to rape her. I'm sure you could see her point. If not you're a fucking moron. Sorry but I don't mince words when it comes to shit like that. Imagine a scenario of a woman with one or two assailants alone on a 15 acre site with lots of places to be hidden from view. Even if she managed to get a 911 call off, which might not be so likely, any response by EMS is going to be 10 minutes out. A lot can happen in 10 minutes. Is that 10 minutes something you'd risk allowing your wife or daughter to deal with because you don't think guns are cool?

A republican friend of John McCain once said "Rape is a lot like the weather, its inevitable so you may as well lay back and enjoy it." Your wife must not be a good republican....

But anyways, there are more effective ways to protect yourself besides firearms. You totally disregard the concept of non-lethal weapons. And Kudos to you for not needing a gun to feel more like a man, but you and I both know there is a large number of our brothers who are pathetic in that way....

I have respect for the constitution but I am not stupid enough to let an antiquated idea continue to cause the needless deaths of tens of thousand of people just for nostalgia. You are a sick fuck.

Which nonlethal methods would you trust your loved ones with? A taser? There you get one chance and if you miss you're fucked. Pepper spray or mace? I got gassed with CS in boot camp. It's a pain in the ass but as a self defense method it's pretty lame. Any serious assailant could and would get a grip on the person that sprayed them and make a mess out of them in a hurry. There are reasons cops carry guns AND tasers.

It's not about nostalgia you pinhead. Has the threat to life and limb from criminals ceased to exist in modern times? Take a look in the paper sometime. One thing you won't see is all of the potential crimes averted because someone had a gun. I stopped a robbery and assault by showing up with, and never having to draw, my handgun. As soon as I made sure the guy knew I was armed he quit fighting, sat down, and waited for the cops. That took 15 minutes, 14 for 911 to dispatch him and 1 to drive the mile to the location at high speed.

My dad used to drive a truck. In certain areas of the country there were problems with trucks being hijacked. Sometimes the drivers got beat up, sometimes they didn't survive. One day a guy started to try and open his driver's side door to hijack his truck while he was stopped in traffic. All he did to stop that crime in progress was pull up his .357 magnum from below the seat. Once the assailant saw the gun he took off at a run.

Shit like that happens every day all over but it never gets reported. Most people don't call the cops and if the cops are involved it's not considered news.

I'm not sick. I have a couple of psychologists as personal acquaintences. We've had some spirited debates since they tend to lean more to the liberal end of things. They might disagree with me but they've never come to the conclusion that I'm in need of treatment. You must be really brilliant or really fucked up to come to the conclusion you did from a couple of posts on the internet.

I think it's funny that you choose the tens of thousands of people that end up dead from firearms as being unacceptable when 300,000 a year die from smoking, 50,000 or so in car crashes, and who knows how many croak from eating too much. Freedom has consequences. Why does that concept bother you? It's legal to smoke. A wise person wouldn't do so in order to increase the odd they won't die young. It's legal to own guns. Having one doesn't mean you have to kill anyone with them. Some people make bad decisions with all kinds of things they have the right to. The good news is that most people DON'T make the wrong decisions

What amazes me is the arrogance of people like you that think they have the right to take over the life choices of other people, the bulk of whom don't need your idea of "help".

I see that you are unwilling to look at things with commonality with your arguments about guns. Clearly it's not deaths that you care about or lives you want to save. You just don't like guns and so you think no one else should be allowed to have them. Cars kill about the same amount of people, often those killed were doing nothing wrong so your Darwinism blurb is off the mark there.

Just like with guns we try to be as safe as we can and strive to save as many lives as possible. Like with cars there are those of us that don't think throwing the baby out with the bathwater is the way to go with guns. There are good and right uses for firearms just like we have good and right uses for cars. The lives lost are part of the risk of having either.

Mr Jose Cuervo wrote:

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People dieing of their own stupidity does not concern me. People gunned down by a nutjob, kids finding daddys gun and blowing their heads off, people hit by crossfire ect... these are innocent people.

The only thing you can remotely compare it to is drunk driving. But still, firearms are unique and I dont think you can or should compare them to other social problems or public hazards.

lets go back to your wifes job. As an employee she should of insisted that she not be left alone with large sums of money. If my employer showed that little regard for my safety I would get a new job. Hate to say it, but she put herself in a dangerous position.... Instead of getting a gun and risking the lives of innocent people (mainly your own children) by having a gun in your home. Just having a firearm in your home increases your risk of getting shot by 20%.

OK so people dead of their own stupidity doesn't bug you. Cool. What percentage of firearms deaths in the US in any given year are suicides?

I'll save you the trouble, it's about 55% or so according to FBI stats. http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm you can find them here with a few clicks.

Gun accidents are a huge deal? Really? How many people die of accidental shootings in a given year? 1000 or less and the rate has continued to fall since 1930 despite the population and numbers of firearms growing a large amount since then. The most recent year the CDC has stats for was 2005 and a whopping 789 people out of a population of 296,507,061 died from a firearms accident that year.


The piece of the pie you claim to give a shit about is getting smaller and smaller the more you look at the facts. The people you're mostly worried about owning guns already aren't legally allowed to have them yet they do and they use them to kill. 23% of all firearm homicides are committed by people engaged in another felony like robbery, rape, or whatever. 13% of them are committed by gangs. 44% are committed during arguments over money or property (mostly drug related).

So you think that restricting the rights and freedoms of the 90% of people that follow the laws and harm no one is going to do shit to correct the behavior of people that clearly don't give a damn about the many laws they're already ignoring? Damn, that's brilliant dude.

You aren't looking hard enough. Ten times that many lives are saved every year because people can defend themselves or convince a potential killer that they can do so. You just look at the harm and nothing else. Tunnel vision is never 20/20.

http://www.sovereignty.org.uk/siteinfo/newsround/gunlie.html

These life and death stories represent only a tiny fraction of defensive gun uses. A survey of 1,015 people I conducted during November 2002 indicates that about 2.3 million defensive gun uses occurred nationwide over the previous year. Larger surveys have found similar results. Guns do make it easier to commit bad deeds, but they also make it easier for people to defend themselves where few alternatives are available. That is why it is so important that people receive an accurate, balanced accounting of how guns are used. Unfortunately, the media are doing a very poor job of that today.

Though my survey indicates that simply brandishing a gun stops crimes 95 percent of the time, it is very rare to see a story of such an event reported in the media. A dead gunshot victim on the ground is highly newsworthy, while a criminal fleeing after a woman points a gun is often not considered news at all. That's not impossible to understand; after all, no shots were fired, no crime was committed, and no one is even sure what crime would have been committed had a weapon not been drawn.

Even though fewer than one out of 1,000 defensive gun uses result in the death of the attacker, the newsman's penchant for drama means that the bloodier cases are usually covered. Even in the rare cases in which guns are used to shoot someone, injuries are about six times more frequent than deaths. You wouldn't know this from the stories the media choose to report.

http://www.ajph.org/cgi/content/abstract/84/12/1982

The incidence of defensive firearm use by US crime victims, 1987 through 1990.

D McDowall and B Wiersema

Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland, College Park 20742-8235.

It is well known that many crimes in the United States are committed with firearms. Less adequately documented is the frequency with which victims use guns in self-defense. We used National Crime Victimization Survey data to examine incidents where victims employed guns against offenders. Between 1987 and 1990 there were an estimated 258,460 incidents of firearm defense, an annual mean of 64,615. Victims used firearms in 0.18% of all crimes recorded by the survey and in 0.83% of violent offenses. Firearm self-defense is rare compared with gun crimes

Note that firearms defense is basically brandishing but not shooting a weapon while firearms self-defense is actually shooting the gun to defend oneself.