Refuting Anti-Gun Control Arguments

© Josh Sager – January 2012

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The recent rash of mass shootings in the United States is simply part of a long-term trend of gun violence unique to our country. The Sandy Hook school shooting is tragic—it caused the death of 20 children—but the true tragedy is that such a shooting is only the tip of the iceberg of our country’s gun problem.

According to FBI statistics, 46,313 Americans were murdered with firearms during the time period of 2007 to 2011. To put this death-toll into perspective, this translates to an average of 9,263 murders per year, or 25 murders per day. When we look at this average death toll in relation to the Sandy Hook Shooting—a nationally shocking tragedy—we see that a Sandy Hook sized tragedy happens every day, yet nobody covers it.

No other developed country on earth has as lax gun laws or more weapons than the United States. The easy access to weapons and the ineffective methods of tracking weapons to make sure that they don’t fall into the wrong hands facilitate violent and unstable people in the United States getting weapons with which to kill people.

Currently, there are 88 guns for every 100 people living in the United States (not even counting the illegal weapons which our government couldn’t account for). With so many weapons and so few controls on who can own the weapons, there is simply no realistic way to keep these guns from falling into the hands of violent criminals and disturbed people.

In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting, many politicians have begun to pivot towards the idea that gun control needs to be strengthened—this effort is being led by Democrats, but even many Republicans have begun to buck their longstanding deference to the NRA and gun lobbyists. This conversation is long overdue, and will hopefully result in some sane gun regulations being enacted.

Despite the terrible death toll due to gun violence in our country and the recent mass-shootings, there is still a wide contingent within our country who oppose any form of gun control. These people use a multitude of arguments in order to attempt to fight any gun regulations. In the following section, I will name and quickly debunk 15 of the most common gun enthusiast arguments.

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1.   “The 2nd Amendment guarantees the right to bear arms, thus gun control measures are unconstitutional.”

Those who make this argument are misinformed as to the original intent of the 2nd Amendment and have either been tricked by the modern gun lobby’s marketing or are actively perverting its meaning.

First, here is the text of the 2nd Amendment:

“A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

Gun enthusiasts and gun lobbyists love to cite the 2nd amendment to the constitution as the catch-all defense to their right to carry any weapon that they can get their hands on (ex. assault rifles). In order to do this, these gun owners/sellers have hopelessly perverted the original intent of the 2nd Amendment and have expanded its guarantee of the right to “keep and bear arms” far beyond its original bounds.

From its passage and until the late 20th century, the 2nd Amendment to the constitution was interpreted to protect the rights of states to maintain militias and for militiamen to sustain arsenals. In the early years of our country, there was no standing federal army (the founders were afraid of a national standing army consolidating power) and the states were expected to sustain a state militia in order to contribute to the national defense; this expectation necessitated protections for militias that would facilitate militiamen keeping weapons for their service.

The 2nd amendment was predicated upon the maintenance of state militias—something that has become irrelevant in the face of our federal armed services—and is not something that should have allowed individuals to claim the right to own weapons. State militias had the right to bear arms, but individual, unattached Americans had no such right—this distinction in the difference between the 2ndAmendment being a collective right or an individual right.

Chief Supreme Court Justice Warren Burger—a Republican—said the following about the proposal that the 2nd Amendment is aimed at protecting every American’s right to own guns:

“…one of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word ‘fraud,’ on the American public by special interest groups that I’ve ever seen in my life time. The real purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that state armies—the militias—would be maintained for the defense of the state. The very language of the Second Amendment refutes any argument that it was intended to guarantee every citizen an unfettered right to any kind of weapon he or she desires.”

As Justice Burger said in no uncertain terms, before gun lobbyists and activists began campaigning to change the understanding of the 2nd Amendment in the late 20th century, nobody considered it to be an individual right. Unfortunately, a decades-long concerted effort by gun lobbyists and big money conservatives has successfully shifted the meaning of the 2nd Amendment so that it can be used to justify letting anybody own any weapon that they choose.

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In 2008, the right wing contingent on the most recent Supreme Court (the same people who said that corporations are people) decided to throw away centuries of juris prudence and extend the 2ndAmendment as an individual protection for gun owners’ right to bear arms. During the case, United States v. Emerson, the Supreme Court decided that the 2nd Amendment is not a collective protection for gun ownership in militias, but rather a protection for individuals to own and operate weapons. This decision flies in the face of centuries of settled law and, like Citizens United v. FEC is just another case where right wing extremist wearing robes have perverted our country’s longstanding understanding of our laws.

Despite the changed definition of the 2nd Amendment, reasonable gun control regulations are not unconstitutional on their face; the 2nd Amendment may now be interpreted as an individual right, but this does not mean that it is unlimited.

Many restriction on who can own firearms (ex. state laws barring felons from owning guns), where guns can be carried (ex. no-gun zones) and which guns are legal (ex. the assault weapons ban) have been held as constitutional. What gun control proponents (people who care more about children being killed then their ability to buy 4 assault rifles in one day) suggest is not a blanket ban on guns, but an expansion of the already constitutional limits that exist. It may not be constitutional for the government to put a blanket ban on weapons, but it is certainly proper for it to enact strong restrictions which keep dangerous weapons out of the hands of people who cannot responsibly operate them.

Even in its perverted form, the 2nd Amendment is not the perfect defense for gun ownership and is not an impediment for gun control regulation. After all, if the 2nd Amendment were absolute, imprisoned criminals would have the constitutionally protected right to carry a missile launcher with them while in the prison; using it to hurt people or damage property would be a crime, but carrying it would be a simple exercise of constitutional rights. In this direction, madness and mass killings wait for our society.

The next time a gun enthusiast proposes that the 2nd Amendment gives them the absolute right to bear any arms that they wish, pose the previous situation to them and ask them to reconcile their interpretation of the Amendment with realistic laws. What you will get as an answer will be a contorted explanation on how criminal conduct negates the 2nd Amendment rights (absolute rights don’t work like that—case in point: the 1st Amendment) and how it is not sane or safe for criminals to have access to weapons while in prison. To be fair, they are half correct that such a gun policy is neither sane nor safe in our prisons, but, then again, neither is their proposed gun control regime on general society.

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2.   “Guns are a right in our country so that we can rise up against a tyrannical government.”

A favorite among weekend warriors and doomsday “preppers”, this argument is both deluded and illustrative of a dangerous mindset..

Put plainly, if somebody believes that they are going to practice violent “self-defense” against the American government if it tries to infringe on their rights, they are simply deluded. The United States government is the most powerful entity on the planet; they don’t just have guns, but also tanks, jets, satellites, and nuclear weapons. The sheer monopoly of military force held by the government is an insurmountable obstacle to any attempt by individuals to “pursue 2nd Amendment remedies” to tyranny. Any attempt by fringe individuals to utilize their guns to beat back the federal government will fail and will only result in the deaths of those who try to rebel.

In situations like Ruby Ridge, we have seen that even well-armed private militias have no chance against the force of the federal government and any belief to the contrary is just not realistic. The most likely outcome of such an attempted rebellion would be a short-term campaign of domestic terrorism, followed by a massive federal crackdown—the militia would take down some federal forces and some civilians on the way down, but they would inevitably be killed or captured.

The only real way to prevent our government from becoming tyrannical is through the ballot box, not the scope of a rifle. Our founding fathers understood this and, as I previously explained, it is the gun enthusiasts who have perverted the 2nd Amendment to justify their fantasies of rebellion.

Those who support this argument are simply not rational and any attempt to convince them that their guns will not protect them when the black helicopters start landing will likely land on deaf ears. That said, it is important to make sure that people know that guns are not an acceptable vehicle for their dislike of certain policies of their government and that it is completely out of bounds for them to want to take up arms against their duly elected government. In the unlikely event of an autocratic regime somehow taking over our country, this may change but, barring such an extreme event, these people are simply deluded.

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3.   “Guns don’t kill people; people kill people” or “ Limiting guns will only lead to violent people simply using other methods of killing large numbers of people”

While it is true that guns are simply tools and have no ability to harm anybody on their own, the assertion that they have no part in the perpetration of violence is absurd.

If properly motivated, somebody can kill their enemy with a pair of nail-clippers, but this is irrelevant to the greater regulatory scheme. Just because there are other ways for people to kill one another, it doesn’t mean that it isn’t in the public interest to restrict the most common way people currently kill each other.

Guns give people a quick, easy, cheap, and relatively detached (compared to stabbings/beatings) method of killing people—even large numbers of people. By making killing easy, guns directly contribute to the thought process that must go into a killing and facilitate even higher body counts. Without guns, people would still kill others, but it would be far more difficult to accrue high body counts.

There is a good reason why guns have become the mass murderer’s weapon of choice; they are simply the most efficient way of getting the job done. Weapons other than guns can be used to kill large numbers of people, but none are as easy to obtain or use as guns:

  • Bombs may be lethal to large numbers of people, but they take expertise to build and are very risky for an amateur to handle (just look at the number of people who manage to mangle themselves playing with fireworks).
  • Knives are lethal in the right hands, but they can only kill one person at a time and have no ability to kill at a distance.
  • Cars can been used to kill people but they are far too large and unwieldy to replace guns (you can’t exactly put one in your backpack to sneak into a school).

A tool may simply be a shortcut to a desired result, but it isn’t fair to say that the tool has no part in achieving a result. A man with a hammer and a man with a gun could kill an identical number of people, but the gun certainly makes it more likely that the person will succeed, faster in their killing spree, and more likely to kill their specific targets.

Guns don’t kill people; people kill people. However, people with guns can easily and quickly kill a lot of people, while those who don’t have guns, cannot. In a country flooded with guns, the mass murderer (or simply the person who wishes to kill one person) is able to obtain their weapon easily and without much risk. Gun control laws may not be perfect, but they are a start on a long road towards a safer America

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 4.   “Violence isn’t due to guns; it is due to culture and violence in the media/entertainment industry.”

While it sounds like a logical argument to assert that increased violence in games and culture could lead to increased violence in real life, this relationship has simply not been borne out in reality. Numerous studies, over many years, refute the idea that video games and movies are the cause of violence in society and the assertion that this correlation exists is simply incorrect.

The idea that gun violence is caused by media/video game brainwashing is a convenient solution for society and, most of all, for the gun enthusiast crowd. Society would much rather believe that violence is caused by external factors and that, if only we can remove violent video games, movies, and song lyrics, we can solve our society’s violence problems. If violent media can be blamed for gun violence, then we don’t have to deal with the complex web of psychological and societal issues that lead us to be violent. Those who love guns are particularly willing to fall into this solution, as it absolves them of having to deal with the gun problems within society and lets them blame gun violence on things which they don’t care about.

If you would refer to the below graph, you will see that the United States remains the gun violence outlier when we look at a comparison between video game consumption and gun crime.

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Put plainly, our country consumes the very same video games which are distributed across much of the developed world—there isn’t a subset of violent “American” video games and sterilized “foreign” video games—yet it has far higher levels of gun violence than any other country. When we look at the evidence, the assertion that video games correlate with gun violence, simply is not supported by the evidence and is not a valid argument.

If you want further information about the lack of a statistical correlation between gun violence and video games, you can refer to the book “Grand Theft Childhood” by Cheryl Olsen and Lawrence Kutler—two Harvard Medical school professors.

Violent video games are a fact of life across the developed world and the idea that we will change the levels of violence within our society by altering our media consumption will only lead us to focusing on the wrong thing. If we are side-tracked in pursuing videogame and movie violence, we will likely miss the very simple solution to our real-life violence problem: our country is flooded with guns and it is very easy for violent people to gain access to weaponry.

Whenever somebody attempts to utilize this argument, the supporters of gun control should simply reject their argument on its face; direct these people to the studies that have debunked this correlation and refuse to engage in non-factual speculation. An argument not based upon the evidence will inevitably be flawed and it is not worth wasting time arguing over specious correlations.

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5.   “Instead of attacking guns, what we really need is to register the mentally ill”

Gun activists and groups have attempted to throw the mentally ill under the bus in the hope that blame can be deflected away from their precious guns. In order to do this, these people have asserted that it is the mentally ill who are responsible for violence, not the weapons, and that simply registering the mentally ill will stop gun violence.

Not only is the argument that the mentally ill should be blamed for gun violence wrong, it is highly immoral and illustrative of just how desperate gun enthusiasts are becoming. Many gun enthusiasts have begun suggesting a national registry of the mentally ill so that these people can be watched more carefully and those not on the list can remain free to awn weapons. A registry of the mentally ill violates virtually every privacy statute on the books (ex. HIPPAA) and could easily result in a “blacklist” similar to the ones that ruined people under accusations of communist sympathies.

In addition to being immoral, such a database would likely have terrible unintended consequences. The fear of being labeled as mentally ill and put on a list would lead to fewer people seeking help for mental illnesses and risking placement on the list. Such a situation would lead to more people walking around with untreated, undiagnosed, and undisclosed illnesses; these people would not be on the list and would be able to buy guns. Eventually, the untreated illnesses of these individuals could cause them to break and start utilizing the weapons that they were able to obtain while pretending to be sane.

While it is undeniable that some mentally ill individuals will always become violent and commit crimes, this does not mean that the solution is to victimize all mentally ill people for the sake of gun owners. If we can remove the ability of the seriously mentally ill to easily obtain guns (ex. requiring psychiatric testing before any gun permitting or purchase is allowed), we should do so, but this attempt cannot trample on the rights of the innocent.

It is a terrible irony that the very same gun enthusiasts—many of whom see gun registration to be in infringement on personal liberty and fear an oppressive federal government—wish to impose what they fear onto others. Mandating the registration of the mentally ill while prohibiting the registration of dangerous weapons is simply hypocritical and indicative of a person who is willing to sacrifice the freedom of others to gain a little more personal convenience. Such arguments are not serious and should not be considered a rational alternative to gun control.

If strong gun control legislation is passed, the severely mentally ill will be unable to obtain weapons with which to commit violence. By attacking gun violence from the weapons side, massacres can be prevented and the rights of the mentally ill can be maintained.

Final Note: Just because the registration of the mentally ill is a bad idea, this by no way means that our current mental health system is adequate. The mental health system in our country is woefully underfunded and often does little more than warehouse people who have been neglected to the point where their illness leads them to criminal behavior. We should look at fixing the mental health system in the United States in conjunction with implementing gun control, but we should not place the blame for the gun death epidemic in our country on those who were unfortunate enough to be born with mental problems.

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6.   “If everybody were armed, we would all be safer”

This argument promotes the micro-equivalent of mutually assured destruction (two armed and rational actors not engaging in conflict because it would destroy both) to justify higher levels of gun ownership, but it fails to work out when applied to reality.

Statistics show that guns do not make people safer, thus this pro-gun argument is demonstrably untrue on its face. Higher levels of gun ownership do not produce a safer society and often lead to a higher numbers of deaths due to gun violence.

According to the Violence Policy Center’s analysis, states with higher per capita gun ownerships have far higher levels of gun homicide—there are 3 to 5 gun deaths per 100,000 in the bottom five gun ownership states, while there are 17 to 20 gun deaths per 100,000 in the top five gun ownership states. These statistics provide a great deal of evidence that gun ownership levels in a state correlate with gun deaths, and prove that the gun lobby’s argument of universal gun ownership is simply a fantasy.

To further drive the statistics that guns don’t make us safer home, we can simply look at the research surrounding household safety and gun ownership. In houses with firearms present, the average homicide rate is 3 times higher than in houses without guns and the suicide rate is between 3 and 5 times higher. Gun accidents due to improper storage or use of firearms claim the lives of hundreds of children a year. In households with firearms, domestic violence is both more prevalent than in houses without weapons, and has a much higher likelihood of resulting in violent deaths. In all possible rubrics—self-defense, accidents and suicide—gun ownership is detrimental to the safety of those who live in a gun-owner’s household; this is not to say that there are not cases of people defending their homes with their guns, but it is undeniable that gun ownership opens people up to numerous other risks.

In addition to the statistical evidence supporting the fact that more guns don’t make us safer, we can simply look at the mechanics of a shooting. Shootings are chaotic and, if everybody has a gun, there is a very real potential for a crossfire—nobody would know who the original shooter was, thus everybody would shoot at everybody else. In this crossfire, bullets would likely hit civilians (imagine a room filled with a crowd and three people shooting at each other) and the casualty count would increase. Once the police arrive, it would be difficult to determine who the original shooter was, and it is also likely that the police may end up shooting the people who didn’t start the gunfight.

In response to the “everybody should be armed” argument, people should simply ask the gun activist whether or not they support Iran getting a nuclear weapon. By the logic that the gun activist applies, everybody is safer when everybody is armed, and this would translate to support for Iranian weapons; in reality, these people almost always say that Iran isn’t a rational actor and that giving them a nuke endangers everybody around them. When they say this, you should simply tell them that not every gun owner is rational and that unrestricted gun ownership is the micro-equivalent to letting every country have nukes.

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7.   “Gun laws don’t work because they make it so only criminals have guns.”

This argument is probably the best one in the arsenal of the gun enthusiast, but it too, is not really a good reason to obstruct gun control. If laws are irrelevant because criminals will simply ignore them, then there is no purpose for any laws and no potential for a safe society.

Ultimately, simple gun laws will not prevent all gun deaths, but they will gradually reduce gun violence. Gun laws will reduce the amount of guns to be sold and will help prevent them from being sold to criminals and the mentally ill. As guns are harder to obtain legally and illegal guns become harder to come by (when more guns are confiscated by the police or are used in murders and disposed of then are put onto the street), it will become harder for criminals to find access to clean guns.

Restricting guns may not immediately stop hardened criminals from obtaining weapons, but it would help stop insane and violent people from getting them easily. Mentally ill shooters that kill large numbers of random people are often disturbed loners who would have a difficult time obtaining a gun if not for legal channels—this isn’t to say that they wouldn’t eventually find a way, but it would make it more difficult.

We see that gun restrictions do work in the rest of the world, despite the catch 22 surrounding criminals and gun ownership (only law-abiding citizens follow gun laws). In Europe and much of Asia, the per capita murder rates are far lower than the United States and this is, in part, due to the fact that they have fewer guns. Crime still occurs, and murders still happen, but it is harder to do massive harm to large numbers of people when guns are less common.

By restricting guns, forcing gun registration, and punishing illegal guns harshly, the total number of guns on our streets will eventually decrease. As it gets more risky to buy or sell guns, people will have a harder time getting their hands on them and overall gun-homicide deaths will decrease.

It is completely unrealistic to hope that there will one day be no gun crime, but this does not mean that we should sit idle as an average of 25 fellow Americans are gunned down each day. Stronger gun laws may not prevent all shootings, but it is virtually inarguable that such laws would not reduce the number of gun crimes in the long term.

Put plainly, our current gun laws don’t just let law-abiding citizens defend themselves, but also facilitate criminals getting the weapons which are being used to justify weapon ownership—in this, the gun industry is essentially dealing to both sides of the criminal conflict. Until sane gun laws are enacted, this small-scale domestic arms race will simply continue and will fuel and ever expanding body count.

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8.   “Mass shootings only happen in places where there are no guns allowed.”

Put plainly, this argument is just not supported by the evidence; there are numerous examples of shootings happening in locations with other armed individuals.

In Columbine High School, there was an armed guard. A full tactical team was dispatched and on site during the Virginia Tech Massacre. Adam Lanza’s (the Sandy Hook shooter) mother had numerous guns in her house when she became the first victim of the Sandy Hook shooting spree. In addition to these few examples of situations where mass-shootings happened in areas with guns, we have the perfect refutation of this ideal: the Fort Hood shooting.

During the Fort Hood shooting, a disturbed army psychiatrist, Major Hasan, entered the base and opened fire on other soldiers. There were 43 people injured in this shooting, 13 of whom died, making it one of the most deadly shooting in modern years. As Fort Hood is a military base, nobody can argue that there were no guns present (eventually, the DOD police on site took the shooter down and he was captured), but the fact remains that numerous people were still shot. As he worked on the military base, Hasan clearly knew that there were armed personnel on site, yet he decided to stage his shooting anyway—his desire to kill outweighed his desire to live.

An armed guard in a potential shooting location may cause the shooter to change their plan, but it will likely not deter them from committing the crime. Most mass-shooters either “go down in a blaze of glory” or die of self-inflicted wounds, thus it is evident that they will not be deterred by the thought of somebody shooting back. If they know that they may face armed resistance, they may take out the armed guard first (via surprise attack), or may simply avoid being stopped by the guard before they start shooting (as happened in Columbine).

Logically speaking, if somebody goes to a shooting with overwhelming force and an expectation that they will die, then the potential that they will meet a guard with a pistol simply lacks a significant deterrent effect. Somebody with this level of focus on their lethal goal and lack of concern for their own future will conduct their shooting regardless of the potential risk to themselves and will simply try to kill as many people as possible before they are killed.

In the past, even the most extreme gun-enthusiasts have acknowledged this point and have supported the very gun-free zones which they now deride. The following quote was from Wayne LaPierre—the very same man who made the wildly controversial statement for the NRA after Sandy Hook—during his speech after the Columbine shooting:

“First, we believe in absolutely gun-free, zero-tolerance, totally safe schools. That means no guns in America’s schools, period … with the rare exception of law enforcement officers or trained security personnel.”

In the quote above, you hear the NRA proclaim its support for gun-free zones while, in modern quotes, you hear them deride the policy as the cause of massacres. Put plainly, those who support the new gun-enthusiast line that shootings only happen in places without guns are not even as attached to reality as previous gun extremists. Massacres happen where the targets of mass-shooters congregate (schools, government buildings, workplaces, etc.) and the potential for people in those locations to be armed is simply not a deterrent to these shooters.

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9.    “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a good guy with a gun.”

Those who utilize this argument fail to recognize that reality is not like the choreographed action sequences in movies and that a good guy with a gun is simply not the best solution. In all likelihood, a public shootout between multiple armed parties will result in their deaths, along with the potential for massive collateral.

In contradiction to the idea the only way to stop a shooter is a random citizen taking the law into their own hands, there are two critical alternatives to this paradigm:

First of all, gun control can help stop the bad guy from ever getting a gun, thus rendering the discussion about stopping the shooter moot. If gun laws prevent shooters from gaining access to weapons, there will never be any risk to the public of a shooting and there will be no need to contemplate public shootouts. Ultimately, this solution is the most efficient and reliable method of stopping gun violence.

Secondly, we already have those “good guys with guns” to protect us—these people are called police officers. Unlike random people with guns, police officers have received training and institutional support that allows them to be more efficient and safe in their handling of dangerous situations. In the worst case scenario, a tactical response team (ex. SWAT) can come in and help resolve even the most dangerous situations. Even if a “good guy with a gun” is the solution to a violent situation, then there is no reason why this person should be an untrained vigilante rather than a law enforcement professional.

To drive this point home, I will give you a real life example: Imagine a situation where a psychopath enters a school and starts shooting kids with an assault rifle. In response to this threat, a teacher pulls out his assault rifle (legally bought and licensed) and begins shooting at the school shooter. It is certainly possible that this teacher gets a lucky shot (assuming that the shooter isn’t wearing body armor) and kills the shooter quickly, but a likely result of this situation would be a mass-shootout in the school. Two shooters unloading assault weapons on each other could result in a crossfire of hundreds of bullets and would potentially result in many more deaths than the original shooter would be able to do alone.

To further compound the problems with the suggestion that a shootout is the answer, imagine the potential for harm if there are more than two shooters. In a situation where multiple shooters are attacking each other, there is a high likelihood that people will not know who the original shooter is and who the “good Samaritan” is; such a situation would result in everybody shooting at everybody else and the innocents being caught in between multiple armed parties.

In the very same school shooting situation described above, imagine that multiple teachers have guns and start using them to “defend themselves”. Three or four people shooting at each other (there is no way for them to know whether or not the other teachers were the original shooter or not; perhaps the teacher is a workplace shooter) could unleash massive damage on the school and could kill dozens of people with stray bullets alone.

Unlike in gun-enthusiasts’’ fantasies of vigilantism, the bullets that come out of a good guy’s gun cause the exact same harm as the bullets that come out of the bad guy’s gun. This fact leads the argument that “a good guy with a gun to be the best solution to a bad guy with a gun” to be simply not a viable alternative to other, less dangerous, policies.

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10.   “There are already over 20,000 gun regulations on the books and they don’t work.”

What the proponents of this argument fail to grasp is that 20,000 gun regulations are absolutely useless if those laws are either too weak, easy to circumvent, or just not enforced.

In reality, there aren’t actually 20,000 gun laws on the books in the United States federal and state codes; the true number is debatable (is a gun law a regulatory law, tax law, insurance law, etc.), but it is less than 1,000. The inflation of the gun law numbers in this talking point is due to its proponents estimating the number of local gun laws and adding that number onto the major state and federal codes. Despite the over-inflation in the number of gun laws estimated by gun-enthusiasts, the fact remains that there are numerous gun laws on the books in the United States—for the purposes of arguing this talking point on its ideals, I will stipulate to the fact that hundreds of gun laws are currently in existence.

Unfortunately, the gun laws on the books in the United States are often inadequate and are rife with enough loopholes to make them ineffective. A law with significant loopholes or work-arounds is functionally ineffective and the simple fact that it is on the books is irrelevant. When talking about laws, it is not the sheer number of laws that matter, but their strength comprehensive nature, and lack of loopholes.

For example: There are gun laws on the books in some states that pertain to mandatory background checks and that ban felons from owning firearms. Despite these laws, the “gun show loophole” allows people in these states to circumvent the gun laws by buying from unregistered sellers. It doesn’t matter if there are a million laws banning firearms sales to felons in states with the gun show loophole, as these felons can circumvent all of them by simply buying their weapons from gun shows.

When confronted by people who promote this argument, my basic response is to propose eliminating all of these gun laws in favor of one gun law that actually works. If a single strong and comprehensive gun law could be passed through the federal legislature, we could massively reduce the number of laws on the books while making gun laws stronger. The supremacy of federal laws over state and local laws would extend the extremely powerful federal gun law over all of the others and render them moot. As of yet, no gun enthusiast that I have talked to has accepted this suggestion, as they understand just how ridiculous their argument is.

Ultimately, those who promote this argument are just illustrating the need for federal action on the gun problem in the United States. A solution based in passing hundreds of state laws is ineffective, as many state political organizations will never pass any sane gun laws. The federal government needs to pass one or two piece of legislation regulating guns, thus consolidating sane gun laws into a federal regulatory regime; these new regulations can be extended across every state uniformly and would be able to close many of the legislative loopholes that currently facilitate the circumvention of gun regulations.

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11.   “Cities with gun control laws on the books sometimes have high levels of gun violence and this shows that gun control doesn’t work.”

It is certainly true that some of the cities with above-average gun laws suffer from high crime rates, but this has little bearing on the efficacy of local/state gun laws. Guns are often obtained in areas of the country where it is easy to buy large numbers of weapons without background checks (ex. southern states) and then transported to be sold in the areas where guns are restricted (ex. New York).

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Because our country’s gun laws vary based upon state politics, there is the potential for a few gun-friendly states to undercut the ability of all other states to control the flow of guns within their borders. States in the south typically have very lax gun laws and often allow individuals to purchase many weapons, quickly and without a background check. Once they obtain these guns through the lax laws of the southern states, individuals are able to transport them up north and sell them in cities with stronger gun laws. In northern cities that have strong gun laws (ex. New York city), guns are difficult to obtain legally (or without background check), thus trafficked guns from the south can be sold at a premium.

It is simple market pressure that causes guns to be bought in the south, where supply is readily available, and sold in northern states, where demand is higher than supply. There is a profit for gun traffickers when they bring guns into cities with strong gun controls, and there is no feasible way of stopping them once they have the weapons in their possession.

By arguing that violence in cities with strong gun control laws illustrates the ineffectiveness of gun control, gun enthusiasts are simply proving that strong gun control laws are necessary on a federal level. For as long as some states are allowed to undercut the ability of other states to enact sane gun control, there is little chance that gun violence will be controlled. Guns will continue to flood the northern cities and the pockets of the gun manufacturers/traffickers will continue to grow fatter.

12.   “Countries like Israel and Switzerland have high levels of gun ownership, but low levels of gun crime, so guns aren’t the real problem”

A favorite argument of some gun enthusiasts, the idea that outlier countries disprove the general trend of gun ownership leading to violence is an intentional attempt to confuse the issue. By naming the two examples of developed countries that defy the correlation between violence and gun ownership, gun enthusiasts try to disprove this well-established trend.

Israel and Switzerland are the two model examples of developed countries that have high levels of gun ownership, yet low levels of gun crime. Gun enthusiasts promote this break in the correlation between gun violence and gun ownership as proof that the causation is false, but there is a very simple alternative explanation: Both Israel and Switzerland have mandatory military service programs which lead almost every young adult in these countries to serve as part of their armed forces.

The near-universal military service of citizens in Israel and Switzerland leads large portions of the population to have significant weapons training. This training lasts long after the citizens of these countries leave the service and allows for the relatively-safe ownership of firearms into civilian life. Every citizen goes through a battery of testing in preparation for military service and those who are mentally unfit for service are not given the access to guns that those who have been prepared through the military are.

The examples of Israel and Switzerland do not prove that high levels of gun ownership are always safe, but rather that letting only those who have been heavily vetted by the state own weapons is not dangerous. In both of these countries, there are high levels of gun ownership, but there are also heavy controls on guns that prevent un-vetted people from obtaining them. As opposed to the United States, which has high levels of guns and low levels of gun control, these countries have high levels of both gun control and gun ownership.

The true purpose of gun control is not to remove weapons for the sake of removing weapons, but to prevent the violent among us from obtaining weapons with which to harm others. If gun control regimes can be enacted that prevent just the violent and unstable in society from getting weapons, then this has virtually the same effect as removing all weapons from society; in both cases, gun crimes drop because people who are dangerous to society are denied weapons.

In order to refute this anti-gun control argument, I argue that Israel and Switzerland have many weapons, but they also have very strong gun control laws. In both cases, every person to legally own a gun has received psychological testing and safe weapons training—two components of a strong gun control regulatory regime—and is forced to register their weapons. These laws are facilitated by the compulsory military service and function as a sorting mechanism to ensure that dangerous people don’t have easy access to weapons.

13.   “Since car accidents kill more people every year then guns, why don’t we ban cars?”

Put plainly, guns are tools that have only one real use: to kill things. They exist for the simple purpose of propelling a small projectile at high rates of speeds towards a target, with the direct goal of causing it physical trauma. Unlike many other things which may become lethal as they were not intended, guns have no alternative purpose and must be treated differently.

Cars kill many people during accidents and mechanical failures, but their actual purpose is to facilitate transportation. When used correctly, cars are simply a tool for transporting people or objects from point A to point B faster or cheaper than many other methods of transportation. It is only when cars are used incorrectly that they become dangerous to others.

With our current transportation infrastructure, cars are an integral part of how our society moves and it would be virtually impossible for us to change quickly. The deaths caused by cars are tragic, but they have no bearing on the need to regulate an entirely unrelated tool.

The key difference between guns and cars in this debate is the fact that cars have purposes other than causing harm, while guns have no such redeeming aspects. At the most charitable, guns can be described as existing to allow good people to defend themselves from bad people by threatening them with death. In the context of maintaining social order, guns do serve a purpose to allow the civil authorities to impose force on violent people (giving the police the ability to defend themselves on the job), but the idea that this force should be distrusted to everybody in society is just insane.

If cars were like guns and served no purpose but to facilitate violence, then I would support as strict regulations of them as I propose on guns. Guns have no social benefit and a removal of guns from society would not have the negative effects that a removal of cars would have. In fact, the reduction of gun availability in our society would help alleviate the epidemic of gun violence that we are living in and would save many lives.

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While on the subject of cars and guns, I would also point out that, in many cases, cars are far more regulated then guns. Gun enthusiasts may like to draw the comparison between guns and cars in support of their ability to own/operate guns without regulation, but they don’t appear to acknowledge the fact that car operation is far more regulated then gun operation. With guns, many states don’t require background checks, licensing, registration, or state-issue permits, yet they require all of the above for cars.

In order to drive a car, you must be registered, get training, have a license, get insurance, and submit to periodic inspections. If such strict regulations were imposed upon guns, there is little doubt that gun-enthusiasts would begin hyperventilating and gesticulating about an illegal overreach into their personal right to own weapons.

The next time somebody draws comparisons between the regulations on guns and cars, simply suggest that, since both have the potential to be dangerous, the regulations on cars should be translated to analogous restrictions on guns. Before anybody is able to buy a gun, they should be required to get firearms training, become certified through a state licensing process, get insurance for potential damages that their weapons may inflict, and register each and every one of their weapons with the state. Such a suggestion would likely result in a rapid backtracking by the gun-enthusiast as they try to make up reasons why guns don’t deserve to be as regulated as cars.

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14.   “Gun control was imposed by dictators like Hitler and Stalin, thus it is, by definition, bad and something that puts us on a path towards becoming an autocratic regime.”

This argument is both historically incorrect and a complete red herring.

First of all, the simple fact that a dictator—even one as evil as Hitler—supported something does not mean that the thing in question is evil. While such dictators may be guilty of terrible crimes, they may also have policies which are simply good governance. Using the bad acts of a dictator to attack a good policy that they happened to support is simply disingenuous and not a valid argument in debates over policy.

Policies should be judged independent of the people who support them and a good policy is not automatically bad because a bad person once supported it. For example: Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator, may have committed vicious crimes against his political enemies, but he also supports universal healthcare and a strong public health system. Using Castro’s support for universal healthcare and public education to attack the programs by association is wrong and is not a real argument against the validity of those programs.

In the case of gun policy, the assertion that Hitler and other notorious dictators always supported gun control is simply not accurate. These dictators may have disarmed those who they considered enemies, but they did not propose gun control as we know it now.

In 1919, Germany banned gun ownership by individuals to accord with the post-WWI treaty of Versailles. Contrary to the anti-gun control talking point, Hitler passed a law which reduced the gun laws in Germany in 1938. This deregulation, not increase in gun controls, is the signature gun control change which gun enthusiasts have latched onto in calling Hitler anti-gun. When compared to current American gun laws, the past German laws were much stronger, thus some see Hitler a pro-gun control, but this does nothing to mitigate the fact that Hitler actually decreased gun regulation.

Hitler banned Jews, gays, and other oppressed minorities from carrying weapons, but this was part of his campaign of dehumanization, not an expression of gun control. According to his government’s perverted view, these people were not human, thus no human laws applied to them.

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15.   “Guns are part of our national heritage and restricting them is an attack on our cultural identity.”

I only have one thing to say to those who utilize this argument: Tough Shit.

While it may be true that our country has had a long history of gun ownership, hunting, and gun sportsmanship, this heritage is getting people killed today. Even if one concedes that guns have been a large component of our country’s heritage, this is irrelevant in the face of the very real harm that guns are doing today; in order to stop this harm, our culture must be updated. Our weapons technology is so great now that guns have become able to kill dozens of people in seconds—an impossibility during much of our country’s cultural history of guns.

Cultural heritage changes and, in some cases, must be forcibly changed by the government to protect the population from itself (or the extremism of certain parts within itself). Before the civil war, slavery was a part of our cultural heritage that had led to misery among many within our population. The government enforced change over a component of our country’s culture when it abolished slavery and it must do so again in the case of guns (not to conflate slavery with gun ownership; this is simply an example of the law forcing a cultural change to protect an affected group within the population).

No relic of our cultural heritage is worth the cost of nearly ten thousand lives a year and it is far past time that we update our gun laws to sane levels. If apple pie killed as many people as guns do, I would also promote changing that tradition and I have no doubt that most other Americans would agree with me.

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16.   “Guns act as an equalizer and are necessary for women to defend themselves”

While it is true that guns make size and gender largely irrelevant in a fight, it is also true that gun ownership is not a cure for violence against women. This argument is incorrect for two basic reasons: First, not only does statistical evidence show that gun ownership does not make a women any safer, but it often shows that gun ownership makes women less safe. Second, this argument assumes an exclusivity of weapon availability to women that simply does not exist.

Statistical data about gun fatalities in the United States debunks the myth that gun ownership improves the safety of women. In every measurable rubric, gun ownership actually has a negative impact on the health and safety of women:

  1. Because of the high murder rates in the United States (a phenomena that gun availability is largely responsible for), both men and women are killed at higher rates than comparable countries.
  2. Women who live in a household with a firearm are 3.4 times more likely to be murdered then women who live in households without firearms.
  3. Domestic violence is far more likely to result in death or serious injury when guns are present in a household; abuse is likely to involve guns and it is much more likely to escalate into serious physical harm.

Any anecdotal stories aside (ex. women fending off attackers), the aggregate statistical evidence clearly shows that gun ownership does not make women safer. This argument is simply disproven by the facts and, while it may sound realistic, it is not supported by the real life data that we have available; this data is clear in that it indicates that gun ownership has detrimental effects on the safety of women in a household.

Beyond the statistical evidence, the idea that women require powerful firearms to be safe is just not logical. A lack of controls on guns may allow a woman to buy weapons for self-defense, but it also allows criminals to access said weapons—there is no exclusivity which guarantees that the women will be able to obtain a powerful weapon yet prevents the criminals from buying the very same weapons.

As gun laws are not gender-specific (that would be unconstitutional), whatever weapon that a women could obtain is also obtainable by the person who seeks to harm the women. The example of a single women with an assault rifle holding off a group of attackers that has been presented by some proponents of this argument just falls apart when one realizes that nothing prevents the attackers from coming armed with assault rifles. The lax gun laws which allow easy access to powerful weapons to women also facilitates criminals getting weapons that they would be unable to get under sane regulations.

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17.  “Background checks do not work because criminals won’t consent to them”

Criminals, by definition, don’t follow the law and tailoring the legal gun application process for the activities of those who don’t follow the law is simply foolish. People who are not allowed to buy guns certainly hate background checks, but this is because such checks limit their ability to buy guns legally.

Background checks serve to prevent those who are not allowed to buy guns—felons, the mentally ill, terrorists, etc.—from legally obtaining firearms. Without checks, there is no way to guarantee that sellers are following the law and not selling guns to people who cannot legally buy them (the sellers have a profit incentive to sell to anybody).

If criminals don’ want to consent to background checks, then they just won’t be able to buy guns legally. By closing the legal avenues that criminals have to buy guns, they will be forced to risk buying illegal weapons—a crime that the police can arrest them for.

I bet that many criminals don’t like metal detectors, theft prevention devices and the police, but this doesn’t mean that society should stop funding these things in order to appease them. Just as with other things that make criminals’ lives harder, background checks for firearm purchases should be embraced rather than rejected.

18.  “Limits on magazine size do nothing to prevent gun homicides because shooters will just bring more magazines”

Those who promote this argument are simply letting their fondness for their weapons overshadow their logical viewing of the facts.

Large ammo-feeding containers (ex. drums, clips, belts) exist because they make a weapon much more effective in a combat situation. Such containers allow large numbers of rounds to be shot, uninterrupted, and without the risk of a fumbled magazine switch. The military uses large ammo feeders for these very reasons and any assertion that the size of the magazine is irrelevant to the efficacy of the weapon is simply wrong.

It is true that many small clips can replace a larger feeding mechanism, but it is inarguable that this method of ammo supply is less efficient. Whenever a clip is empty, it must be ejected and a new one inserted before the gun is operable. This insertion usually requires two hands, necessitates a pause in shooting (even if the shooter has another loaded weapon), and has a risk of error; with every exchange, there is a possibility that the gun will jam or the shooter will fail to successfully load the clip.

Shooters are often stopped when they pause shooting in order to reload their weapon. The short pause in fire that occurs during a reload gives

If large ammo feeders are useless, then why are the gun-enthusiasts so incensed that they may no longer be allowed to own them? Gun enthusiasts understand the benefit of large ammo feeders and wish to defend them because they recognize the advantage that such feeders give.

The next time somebody argues that magazine size is irrelevant, then simply point out this logical fallacy in their argument: if the magazine is irrelevant to the weapon, then there is no reason for the gun-enthusiast to object to magazine limits. This argument’s very existence disproves its foundation. The reticence to implement such restrictions demonstrated by those who make this argument proves that their argument is not true.

19.  “It is hypocritical for politicians with children who go to schools that have armed guards to push for gun-free schools”

This argument is so absurd that even Fox News has refused to get behind it when NRA representatives have broached it during interviews. To quote Fox host Chris Wallace on this attack: “That’s ridiculous and you know it, sir.”

Wayne LaPierre and the rest of the NRA administration (not the membership, but those who control the group) have attempted to attack the “elitism” of our politicians because many politicians send their kids to schools to armed guards. Here is a link for an NRA ad containing this attack: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bKw7ZsQgtc

It is true that many politicians send their children to schools that have armed guards, but there is a very good reason for this: the children of politicians are often the target of threats intended to compel politicians to act. Threats against the children of legislators can disrupt public policy and are a very real threat—it is this very reason why the president’s family are protected by the Secret Service at all times. As the average child is not potential leverage over somebody who is responsible for the operation of the government, there is no hypocrisy when somebody supports different levels of armed protection.

If we want to protect our children from shooters, we can either implement strong gun controls that prevent shooters from getting guns, or we can attempt to get Secret Service level protections for every American child. As is immediately apparent, the first option is possible, while the second is completely unfeasible and only serves to act as a distraction for those who would attempt to stop sane gun laws from being implemented

20.  “There are already so many guns out there that any regulations on gun sales are ineffective”

This argument is actually very strong and requires a great deal of thought on the part of the gun control advocate to refute. It is undeniable that there are too many guns already on the street and that seller-centric gun control laws are somewhat limited.

A gun, when well maintained, can last for decades and can remain a deadly threat to the public in the wrong hands. Unfortunately, decades of lax gun laws have caused our society to be flooded by weapons and, even if gun seller restrictions were to implemented, there will still be a supply of guns.

The gun control advocate’s refutation of this argument is fairly simple: Despite the number of guns in our society, this is no reason to make the situation worse than it already is. Eventually, given time and good legislation, the number of guns on the street will decrease and become manageable again, but this will not happen without controls on gun sales.

In the long term, the only way to get a handle on gun violence is to stop the sale of new guns and to let attrition gradually remove them from the market. Guns which are seized by the police should be destroyed and removed from the market permanently.

A gun which has been used in a crime is somewhat dangerous to hold, simply because it can act as an evidentiary link back to a shooting (these guns are called “hot” guns). Oftentimes, criminals will dispose of their guns due to the risk that they pose and will require new weapons. Currently, guns are so plentiful that this process of replacing hot guns is easy and cheap enough that few criminals have a hard time getting new guns. By stopping the flood of guns into our society, it will become harder to replace these guns and criminals will eventually have a hard time obtaining clean weapons. Prices for new weapons will go up and criminals will be forced to hold onto their dirty weapons (risking arrest) and spending significant funds buying a new gun.

The argument that, because there are already too many guns, we should not implement any controls on new guns is fatalistic and will only perpetuate our country’s gun problems. Unless we take the first step that is limiting the number of guns to be flooding society, there is little hope that we will ever succeed in solving our county’s problems.

21.  “We cannot rely on the police to protect us because they are underfunded and often unable to get to a crime on time”

One of the arguments that gun enthusiasts keep going back to is that they desire the ability to defend themselves against potential threats—in the case of this argument, they say that the police are unable to defend them.

It is true that the police are not able to stop all violent crime; if there is a person breaking down the door, the police will often take minutes to get there. Those who support this argument claim that order can more effectively be maintained by giving the citizen a gun with which to kill the intruder in less time than it takes for the police to arrive. These people support vigilantism over order and are hopelessly misguided.

Police forces are groups of organized and trained professionals that uphold order in society—it is their job to ensure that society does not devolve into a state where every person needs a gun. If the police lack the resources to maintain order, the proper solution is not to arm everybody, but to increase funding to the police and directing them to improve.

Supporting gun ownership out of a misplaced sense that vigilantism is the proper way to maintain social order is simply wrong and only leads to terrible miscarriages of justice. As we saw during the Trayvon Martin tragedy, such attempts at vigilantism can result in innocent people (including children) being killed out of fear.

Rather than supporting a wild-west style society, where everybody is armed and there is no real force preserving social order, we should attempt to fix our damaged police forces. To free up resources, we should end the war on drugs and increase the funding for police forces.

The terrible irony of this situation is that the very policies of easy gun access and lower funding for public services (ex. police) favored by the American right are the things that cause police forces to be inadequate. In supporting cutting funding for police officers, the right wing reduces the police’s ability to protect everybody in society; response times are increased and coverage is reduced. When combined with the many, easily accessible, firearms, this reduction in police coverage creates a dangerous situation where police are unable to protect everybody. Powerful guns have flooded our streets and criminals have the ability to meet the police with armor-piercing ammo, body armor and assault rifles. This situation is unsustainable the answer is not to make things worse by weakening gun regulation further.

If people want to live in a society where they need to rely on their own guns to protect themselves, I suggest that they move to a lawless area—perhaps an area in the Sudan or Somalia—and try it for a while before they consign us to follow them. We have a problem with crime now but, if we consign ourselves to even more gun accessibility, thing will only get worse. We progressed from the old wild-west days into a civilized nation, and it is those who support this argument who would drag us back to the day where everybody must be armed and willing to kill to survive.

1,095 thoughts on “Refuting Anti-Gun Control Arguments”

    • Just how would you know what we like Paul? This girl loves the Death Wish movies. It sounds like you need to put down your dick and try to find a girlfriend. Good luck.

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      • Well there’s no accounting for taste Marie, there’s also peeps who like to strap on rifles before they hit Arby’s. Hooah!

        Put my dick down? Don’t knock my hobbies.

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      • I get the feeling that Mr. Turner isn’t interested in a GIRL friend Marie. Maybe it’s not HIS appendage that he needs to put down.

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  3. I was just stopping by again to review the minutes of my last meeting here, and saw Joe Citizen’s last comment. Nice one, Joe! I literally laughed aloud.
    But on a serious note, everyone, if you will not come to comment with logic, but rather petty insults, then please refrain from commenting at all.*
    *Note that this applies to both sides of this debate, not just the libs. Any conservatives/republicans/pro-gunners who comment childishly only provide the more intelligent liberals with ammunition and justification for gross stereotypes, despite their well-meaning intent. Just come back later after reading up on these things a little more. Or, if that’s too much of a bother, leave.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. How was y’alls weekend?

    Marie, honeybear, did you locate your sense of humor?

    Joe Average Citizen did you expand your film horizons and watch some Bergman? Dude, you posted on Friday night at 1130 pm, what an exciting social life got there. I’m just trying to help you here bro.

    Me? I had a good time, nursing my hang over. I blew people’s minds, not with a gun but with Bad Byron’s Butt Rub, best BBQ mix there is. Also watched the latest True Detective. Good stuff. Rachel Mcadams has an ass that could launch a thousand ships.

    Anyway, Marie and Joe Average Citizen, you should form a comedy team with this guy:

    Dom Raso, NRA dude wants BLIND people to carry guns:

    feelin mo’ safe

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    • Paul, has your teacher not gotten to the part where you learn that there are SEVEN days in a week? Friday night is not the only night to go out and socialize. When you get old enough to have a big boy job you will realize that sometimes, adults just get tired after working all week and may just want to relax at home on a Friday night. On June 19th, Marie correctly ascertained that you are a chronic masturbater. You confirmed it almost immediately. You admitted that it is one of your “hobbies” and then you think that I don’t have a social life?

      You better NOT have been hung over. Judging by your comments, it appears you are under 21. What did you drink? Mojito’s, appletini’s or cosmopolitans? Dude, I hope daddy doesn’t catch you raiding his liquor cabinet. I’m sure you were blowing SOMETHING, but I doubt it was anyone’s mind. Are you sure that you didn’t mean to type that you were rubbing “Bad Bryon’s” butt? I agree that Rachel McAdams can launch a thousand ships, but I would have said that about her face. You are not fooling anyone. You like comedians so here’s a quick video for you.

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  7. Hope one day you won’t find yourself in a situation in which you’ll need it and don’t have it. Living in an alk white pretty neighborhood is easy probably…

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  8. Ah man, can’t wait for American Pakistanis to start rockin the open carry party around schools EXPRESSIN their rights, wasting 911 time, police time, and scaring the shit out of people:

    Feelin mo’ safe

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  9. Blame it on liberal insane immigration policies supported by Democrats and some Rinos. You allow 3rd world backward cultures in a civilized country ..then they are going to use our own stupidity against us. Thank the Kennedy’s and they immigration act of 1965.

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  10. So..an idiot says that blind people should have guns and you label millions of gun owners, non blind and exercising their civil right (or they matter only when is convenient to liberals)…as…?

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  11. Frank, you have that stressed look, like you haven’t had a good blow job in a long time.

    Why should I have MY slaves taken off me? I’M a responsible slave owner. I AM trained in how to use MY slaves safely. Just because that guy mistreated HIS slaves doesn’t mean MY rights should be taken off me.

    I get it, it’s logical Spock. If you’re a responsible gun owner and you don’t fuck around you should be able to keep your guns. BUT THAT’S NOT HOW SOCIETY WORKS. We have to play to the 1% of fucktards that ruin it for everyone else.

    That’s the only way WE can all move forward.

    America prides itself on being able to innovate, yet we’re shackled to an amendment invented in the musket age, to protect an infant republic from the return of KING FUCKING GEORGE’S REDCOATS.

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    • Maybe you are interested in giving Frank that blowjob Paul. Is that what this is really about? Are you just trying to forget your personal problems?

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  13. Paul,
    Thanks for telling me how i look, even though we have never met. I get regular blow jobs, if that helps getting you off. Let’s go past your stupid “slave” references. Who are you to tell me what i can or cannot have? If it is a natural right to defend yourself, then, who are you to decide for me on how to do it? That’s the problem with you liberals: coerce others into thinking that your points of view are the right ones, therefore everyone needs to conform. Those assertions of basic individual rights stated in the Constitution are just reinforcing snd codifying what are already my rights. I can have tanks if i want to..it’s written in the Constitution. If people like you believe that it is unthinkable that any democratic Nation can fall back into a tyrannical state…than you just stated what is wrong with you. Ignorance of not knowing history and repeating the same errors are usually fatal for a democracy…and we are almost at that point. Recommended the reading of Polybius….

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  15. Let me answer to this other idiotic question. Which Nation is exactly more civilized than ours and has zero Crime? Which nation is an example of morality and civility for the world to follow …

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  16. Frankie why won’t you answer a simple question? A country with zero crime? Everything is very black and white for you. You answer my questions with the most stupid shit I’ve ever read, “how does society work?”.

    Advanced countries with less mass murder is a good place to start. Do they have ZERO crime? Gee no they don’t, Japan and the UK do not have ZERO crime. Oh shit, better arm their populations to the teeth so they can protect themselves and throw some sweet open carry parties. Hooah!

    So does this “right” to own a gun or a tank (ha awesome) matter more than the fucktards murdering people on a regular basis and their victims?

    Yes or no? Can you answer this question or not?

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  17. Mutual feeling. Yours is the most stupid shit i have ever read. Mostly ignorant from an historical point of view. Btw i found the tank word, in the Constitution, next to the musket one..since you named it. Being ironic here. Now, if mass murders are for you indicative of the crime situation in our Country, you’re an idiot. Violent crime stats are much worse in gun free Britain than the US, for example. Virtually zero is not what i was asking…i was asking which civilized country can school the US about being civilized or not? Mass murders, again, are not common to the US only, do some researches. Just yesterday 33 people were massacred in CHINA with knives. Remember the massacre in gun free Norway? Plus , how do society work?..you have not expanded …i am ignorant, therefore i would like to know from you, wise guy.
    Also i would like to know how your concept of civilization will make our huge (??) mass murders numbers go down. I am curious…you seem to know it

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    • “Violent crime stats are much worse in gun free Britain than the US, for example.”

      No, they’re not. The FBI UCR reports only four criminal acts as violent: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. Violent crimes are defined in the UCR Program as those offenses which involve force or threat of force.

      The UK Home office has a much broader definition, as befits the local intolerance for criminal behavior. Property crimes, such as purse snatching and bicycle theft are reported as violent crime in the UK.

      In the most meaningful measure, the UK has far fewer attempted homicides and shootings are so rare as to be sensational.
      In the USA, they’re daily events.

      Gun control worked in the UK and their falling rate of assaults, robberies and attempted murder shows this.
      It’s more difficult to commit a violent crime, without a firearm.

      http://blog.skepticallibertarian.com/2013/01/12/fact-checking-ben-swann-is-the-uk-really-5-times-more-violent-than-the-us/

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      • WRONG Vlaclav Havel, WRONG!

        Instead of using a hastily thrown together moronic blog that was just spewed out to capitalize on the Sandy Hook tragedy to base your opinion on, try using some actual facts next time.

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    • Yeah, you really can’t call someone “ignorant” about history when you state, as you did above, that the Kennedys were responsible for the 1965 Immigration Act. Kennedy was dead in 1963, two years before the passage of the Act. The Act was passed by a bipartisan congress under the Johnson administration. Stop calling people ignorant about history until you learn a little bit of it yourself.

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  21. Unless you are firing an antique WWII rifle you are not using “clips”. They are called magazines. If you are going to write about something learn the terminology. This is the same reason the media refers to every long gun as an “assault rifle”.

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  22. After reading your shit laden article I have a few statements and questions:
    1. Have you Federalist 38? It was obvious that the framers wanted private citizens being part of the militia… To have firearms. This applies to all males 17-45.
    2. You say helicopters are superior to firearms. Well, I know you didn’t serve in the military so let me give you the skinny: In OIF/OEF the goat herders did a great job negating the U.S. / Coalition technologies. Secondly, are you ready to fight to the death with combat veterans all to ban private ownership of guns? If not, then you haven’t the slightest clue of what shall follow. Familiarize yourself with COIN. It’s a military philosophy we have used since 1965.
    3. Yes. I have a plain and clear deal for you:
    We the Southern States will voluntarily leave the Union.
    You can enact your crazy gun laws on a willing populace.
    As it stands today you would need 2/3 of the states to change the 2nd.
    Good luck with that. Lastly, we both know that liberals prefer college and know nothing of combat.
    Your compatriots would not accept the bloodshed of a second civil war just over something trivial as guns.
    All of us younger combat vets know the tricks of the trade and your bullshit doesn’t have widespread support. Republicans control the legislative branch of government. It is of no consequence that you have an electoral advantage in executive branch elections. My state will just leave the union again if you assholes get out of control. But, remeber this: lots of state houses are going red. Voters booted you assholes out in 2012. You retain control of the executive branch which only operates effectively with congressional support. Your president has no political capital left. He also has pretty substandard approval ratings as evidenced by the fact Donald Dumbass Trump is a frontrunner to be POTUS! Do you really want to focus on guns when you should focus on: how in the fuck are we (liberals) going to keep the WH? Which as a libertarian I don’t think you will.

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    • If the south were to leave the union, it would look like a Christian-flavored Somalia within two decades. Other than Texas, red states in the south are debtor states that take large amounts of federal welfare. Without this constant flood of money, your states would collapse, as education, healthcare, infrastructure, and social safety net programs would grind to a halt, while industry flees the collapse like a plague.

      While the GOP may control a significant portion of the government due to gerrymandering, voter suppression, and an incredible talent to wrangle and inflame cretins. You live in a bubble and really don’t understand how few Americans actually support gun anarchy or would support splitting from the USA.

      P.S. The fact that Trump is the front-runner tells us nothing about Obama’s approval, as Obama will not be running. You may enjoy my most recent article, as it actually explains why Trump is leading the GOP primary mob.

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      • You can call and say what you will about the South.
        But, if you ever tried confiscation of firearms you and I
        both know southern states would leave the union and at
        best you would face a well armed and dangerous insurgency.
        Both things liberals wouldn’t want to risk.
        Texas has made it just fine without you before we’d do alright again.
        North Carolina and other states would leave your ass too if it came down to it.
        That’s the problem you have a hatred and distrust of us because we are not like New Yorkers.
        Here in Texas we do not want or need your bankrupt ass money. Why take money from a financially irresponsible lender that makes no sense whatsoever. Again. You know it and I know it you can never ever confiscate or ban privately owned firearms in America. Hell, pot meet black kettle. You mention voter suppression you want a license for firearms huh? Well why not a license to vote. According to you a license is needed to exercise constitutional rights. You seem to ” forget ” that your party holds a huge electoral advantage in presidential elections by having almost 200 EV already spoken for. Your free shit and ban guns for votes works in those places. Even the John Adams types in the beginning of the country knew us southern folks would make a Yankees life hell. Why? Because we can. We don’t like big government. We fought the Indians to take this land and then fought Mexico to keep and take it back again. So in closing your angry because you know that if your ultimate goal of banning firearms like the UK utopia in EUROPE was even spoke of here… You would suffer mass casualties. Yes most southern folks would support fighting you in armed conflict over the 2nd. That really burns people up . Well in your words: Tough Shit!

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      • And I believe you may want to read up on the sheriffs and lawmakers in Texas who have said that we would leave the union. All the relevant people could convince the population that you and other Bloomberg like politicians are traitors and should not be trusted. People in the North wouldn’t support what I know would happen. Southerners sure would. Why wouldn’t you want us to leave? Then you could have a huge debt infested welfare state with no guns. Btw heller was influenced by the fact that the framers wanted every male in America armed. More pressing than that unlike in Australia or the UK the police here in America have NO duty to protect you. Only to enforce laws on the local and state level. They really can’t even enforce federal law. Hence sanctuary cities. The constitution and its intent was explained in the federalist papers and other writings. To you freedom is free health care. Wrong. Freedom to bear arms is basically a passive act of government stepping aside in regards to firearms. Whereas free health care would be an entitlement forcing health care professionals and private taxpayers ( citizens) to pay for your health care in the form of taxes. Nothing is free. Nothing. You have to buy a gun. You have to pay for your health care. No owes you shit. Nada. The government is only here to provide national defense. If you like gun free Europe move there. I love it though. Conservatives run most of the government…. Tough Shit Hombre.

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      • We know his approval ratings just as you I’m sure with absolute confidence knew GWBs in 2008. It’s in the 30s. I believe 35 percent approval ratings is the accepted number by CNN, Reuters et al. Nevertheless, thank G-D he’s almost gone. That’s surely not a huge shot of confidence in BOs leadership. Clinton had way higher numbers. I take it you hope old Bernie Sanders wins? Naw. Hillary isn’t even going to win.

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      • So everyone who lives in a southern state lives in poverty? I don’t think so. If the southern states were to secede and welfare money from the U.S government were to stop, then there would be a mass exodus of former welfare recipients from the southern states. The new southern state government would likely require all recipients to work for any government money and would tolerate absolutely no illegal aliens. The northern states would then be overwhelmed with the flood of poor people, crime would sky rocket and the U.S government debt would increase. Property values in the south would increase and so would tourism profit. You do realize that there are more states now than there were in 1860’s don’t you? If the South were to “rise again”, then it would be bigger than before. You do know that conservatives are EVERYWHERE and not just in former confederate states don’t you? You really need to get out of New England and see the real America at least once before you die.

        “The fact that Trump is a front-runner tells us nothing about Obama’s approval?” Really? Just like last year’s mid term elections told us nothing about Obama’s approval rating either. If Obama were so great, then few people would even pay attention to Trump. Trump’s popularity is a direct result of the Democrat’s failure. Although, I have to admit that I personally do not like him and I don’t see him getting the nomination.

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  23. We both know gun control will never happen anytime soon.
    Southern States will fight to the death over guns.
    We the southern states should be able to form our own republic to divorce ourselves from liberal states.
    Also, in Iraq ISI did a hell of a job against our technological advances with IEDs and AK47s. Ask yourself this question honestly no fucking lies now: am I willing to fight multiple states and even more those states have a huge amount of veterans who have lived through combat, all to ban ownership of weapons? The answer should be : I couldn’t win a battle or war against such a ideologically committed and ferocious enemy. Why? Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Google the term Coin. Counter Insurgency manual of the U.S. Army details what we did in OIF/OEF. What you should be more worried about is the following: Geopolitics. These issues are affecting your party on a local and state level. Many states with federal approval are enacting laws that nullify gun control on the federal level. This is evidenced by the fact a high amount of statehouses are now red and congress is becoming very red. As a libertarian I fear for your ability even with your parties electoral college advantage… CA and NY… Your ability to hold on to the WH. The majority of the country is becoming not more liberal as you may believe. One day soon.. Democratic presidents are going to wake up and notice every state has a republican governor. Which is terrible. But, no because you assholes have to enact legislation to try and erode the constitution and btw tough shit guns in America are here for a lonnnnngggggg time. And not to mention your innate ability to pass laws banning fucking food products instead of sensible approaches to social problems that don’t involve socialist leaning ideology. No. You focus on fucking guns and soda. This is why you assholes oppose third parties and why you’ll lose the White House and hand it to another GWB. We should have made you assholes serve with us after 9/11 because as evidenced by this shit you’ve wrote we didn’t get a good return on our investment in your liberal arts education.

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  24. I believe that this subject is so subjective that it needs to be approached like the pro-choice people do with the argument of “if you don’t like abortions, don’t get one”. If you don’t like guns, don’t buy one.

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    • That would only make sense if guns didn’t have a significant implication on everybody in society, not just those who choose to own them (this is actually a good argument for drug legalization though). Tens of thousands of Americans are killed with guns every year, approximately a third of whom are murdered. This creates a massive need for strong regulation.

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  25. Well, I would unlike the NRA and other such organizations, like to say more than what liberals can and cannot agree on
    with Republicans on is semantics. I would agree that we need to change the Firearms Act of 1934. Fully automatic weapons are not banned like most uniformed think. It is expensive to procure legally and probably almost prohibitively expensive in the black market. Fully autos should be banned. Thomas Jefferson believed the right to bear arms explicitly applied to in the words of the Virginia Constitution,” the people shall have the right to bear arms to defend their property and tenements and these rights shall not be infringed upon.” While it is clear that the 2nd Amendment is an individual right it would also seem according to heller that fully automatic weapons in the hands of civilians and truthfully only 1 percent of Americans volunteer for the Armed Forces so as a former Army Infantryman I would find it unusual for a civilian to own a fully auto. That’s just me. Semi Auto… Depends on where you live. This is why the Tenth Amendment exists. States can decide on those themselves. But, as with anything in politics I want concessions on the other side. Keep NYC out of Texas different people. We carry and conceal. Not to mention the process for getting a CCW here is stringent. More stringent than a typical instant NICS check. As a veteran we need to be careful and safe with the weapons we do own. We also need to teach non veterans the paramount importance of safety. Liberals need no ammunition to use against gun owners. Violent Felons should not have guns. Did you know… Because I didn’t until today. That under federal law: ” a lunatic shall be allowed to own only a flintlock musket. As to limit the lunatics ability to create panic and chaos.” But why don’t all lunatics own muskets? Yeah pray tell a rampage with a musket would turn out well? Of course not. The lunatic wants a fully auto. Which proves he isn’t as insane as he would like us to believe.

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    • I don’t believe fully automatic firearms should be banned. As a former infantryman, you know that sustained, fully automatic fire is difficult to control unless you have something like an M60 or a Browning 50 that is mounted to a vehicle or a bipod or tripod. I’m sure that you will agree that a three round burst is more efficient in a hand held rifle. An untrained person trying to fire a fully automatic weapon would likely exhaust their ammunition quickly and miss their intended targets. I wouldn’t mind owning a fully automatic weapon, but it is just too expensive and all the legal paper work is too much hassle. Plus, if you decided that you want to sell it, you can only sell it to a person with a class III license or SOT or else the intended buyer has to go through all the NFA process that can take up to a year or more.

      I think that the NFA rules should only apply to short barreled rifles and shotguns and handguns that have selective fire capability and to suppressors and AOW’s or weapons that can fire highly effective three round bursts. Short barreled semi-automatic rifles and shotguns or semi-automatic pistols with stocks should be treated like any other common firearm and require no additional tax or documentation. If someone has a full length rifle or shotgun, they should be allowed to convert it to a fully automatic weapon themselves as long as doing so would require taking it apart and the weapon would not be fitted with a selector switch or capable of firing a three round burst.

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      • Yes a three round burst from a M4A3 is much more efficient than any round fired from a ma duece.
        Yes NFA firearms are hard to get. ATF took around six months for my neighbor to get the go ahead to buy a Intratec. Which to me seemed like a pray and spray gangbanger hitman gun. Accuracy was horrid.

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  26. For Germany I can tell, that there is an estimated amount of 30 to 40 Million illegal guns (real GUNS, no “weapons” in general) floating around. A lot of WW2 stuff, also some hunting rifles, but also modern military equipment. There were peaks in illegal arms trade, which brought an estimated big amount of modern guns to Germany: the breakdown of GDR and the Balkan wars.

    So this means, Germany with ~80 Million people has an impressive amount of gun ownership of about 1 gun/every 2. inhabitant. Still the gun related violence is very low.

    I think, this is an example, that there is actually no correlation between the amount of guns in a country and the homicide rate. It must be something different.

    Maybe the fact, that since their year of foundation, the United States of America were engaged constantly in wars. To be accurate, about over 93% of their existence they were in a constant state of war and most time not as a victim, but as an aggressor.

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      • Like all Eurotrash Joe Citizen, he is referring to OIF/Desert Storm
        And Iraq. A few things liberals and euros can’t understand is the following:
        We were never at war with those countries individually.
        They were harboring terrorist organizations.
        ISI in Iraq and Taliban and Al Queda in the Stan.
        It’s easy to criticize when you are so much of a damn pansy there’s no way you’d
        take up arms for a cause. This guy wouldn’t. He also doesn’t understand that we built schools and hospitals. We also along with Army Special Forces have children and all citizens vaccines and medicines.
        We helped lower the prices for medicine that the WHO considers as critical medicines needed in a modern health care system. He also knows jack squat shit about the politics of these wars. Just dumbass talking points from liberal media and colleges. He has no idea contrary to his disbelief, that I had Iraqis once they found out I was from Texas keep repeating George Bush from Texas too! He good man. These Eurotrash would roll the fuck over just like they did when Hitler rolled through Europe. He seems to forget America was neutral at the beginning of WW2. He will invariably say it was a false flag when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. They are so predictable. Just as the writer would have been in a world of hurt in my United States Army this guy lives up to the cliche: European Rifles for sale never used and only dropped once. Being a total pansy doesn’t matter too him. Liberal women don’t care either they want a submissive pansy. Ugly ass liberals show their true colors eventually and usually after someone like me says: are you willing to fight for your beliefs? No. Willing to act entitled to someone else’s shit and shit on cars? You bet. They never leave home without our tax money though. I hate the notion that we fought in some war for Bush(I hope his brother makes the 2016 election close just to see the authors face on election night) but when will they just admit they are cowards? Definitely wouldn’t come on my property and say that shit to a veterans face. No just write hateful letters and leave it on a vehicle like a few days ago in NYC. For a Pro Gun word press https://corporatespies23.wordpress.com/2015/08/02/guns-and-2nd-amendment/

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  27. @ oif0689:

    Instead of starting to insult me as “Eurotrash”, you just could have asked me like Joe did. Then I would have told you some facts, you don’t seem to know. Although I fear, that you are too much blinded by propaganda and what you believe is the “correct” version of history.

    But I will give it a try. Before I start to give you both an explanation, a few details about my person and expertise:

    I lived in the United States for one year during my school time and until today my family has good friends who are Americans and also still live there. After I came back to Germany I have studied at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, my classes were Contemporary History, Medieval History and Political Science. I have finished my studies successfully in 2014 with a Masters Degree, which is not really a “Master” (like Bachelor/Master), but better, because I was gifted to study within the traditional and more sound system called “Magister Artium” (while Magister is Latin ans means “Master”). This system encouraged students to ask more and more questions, whily todays Bacherlor/Master system just drowns the students in trash they only have to learn to get the credits, but not the knowledge. I was gifted not to be in that system, hunting for credits. I had time to read, think and build up an opinion by MYSELF, which is the best thing, that can happen to a human being.

    Although I had a broad interest in all of Contemporary History, the topic of my master’s thesis was the United Fruit Company and US-foreign policy in Central America. In my thesis I read many many books about how the United States became, what they are today, to have a better understanding, why they started to permanently intervene in other countries affairs since the end of 19th and the beginning of 20th century. It was very revealing, since I got a look deep into the political heart and soul of US-domestic and foreign policy from 1800 until our days.

    My conclusion was, that in most cases, the United States had no right, but only the one of the stronger, to intervene in other countries affaris. This counts especially for whole of Latin America, but also for the rest of the world. While the 20th century is characteristic for direct intervention by the US (with “boots on the grounds”), the 21st century reveals a new tactic, which was already practiced before, but not in such an intensity like in our days: it’s calles “superiority by destabilisation”.

    Even the United States, with a military budget as high as the combined military budgets of all (on this list) following 10 countries, are not able to finance direct military interventions anymore, since the world has changed and new economical and political blocks are forming (i.e. BRICS), challenging US-hegemony. Therefore, latest since the Afghanistan war of 2001, US-foreign policy tries to keep the current status for a little longer by the destabilisation of world regions, that already are instable enough by generations old conflicts (Middle East, Ukraine, etc.).

    Now, oif, to me you look like someone whos head was filled up with propaganda by your superiors at Army, Marines, whatever, and by US-american propaganda TV. Also you seem to have a stronger short-time memory in cost of your long-time memory.

    The wars I meant, in which the US were an aggressor, lie back much futher back, but OK, let’s start with Afghanistan and Iraq and let me help you to reconstruct your long-time memory.

    Do you remember, that the CIA was financing and equipping the Mujaheddin in Afghanistan during the Soviet military intervention from 1979-1989? One of those groups the CIA equipped and financed was lead by a guy called Osama bin Laden. There is even a picture of one of the most influential thinkers, a grey eminence of political Washington, with bin Laden. It was Zbigniew Brzeziński. By the way, he wrote a book, which I really recommend to you: The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, 1997. It paints exactly the US-foreign policy since the beginning of the 2000’s.

    So, let’s get back to the Mujaheddin. The Mujaheddin (which stands in arabic for “Holy Warrior”) were islamic fundamentalists. Already back then! They fought against the UdSSR, because they hated them for beeing atheists. And they only took the CIA’s help, because “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”.

    The problem of islamic fundamentalism, which the US and the whole world has today, is house made, mainly by the financing of such groups through dark channels by the CIA and other US intelligence agencies. This counts also for ISIS, Al-Quade and what other puppet groups cour agencies built up in past and presence.

    About Iraq: the initial reason, why the United States started the war against Iraq, were those ominous “weapons of mass destruction”, of which Saddam Hussein was accused to have or trying to produce them. It was the central argument, with which Colin Powell stood in front of the UN assembly and tried to convince the audience, that Iraq was a threat to the whole world, because of it’s WMD’s. This, and only this was the INITIAL reason! Then, when Hussein’s Iraq was beaten down and absolutely no WMD’s were found, the Bush-Administration, yes, even GWB jr. himself admitted, that there were no WMD’s. It was a lie, a little dirty lie to justify a military intervention. All other reasons, that you can list, were constructed AFTER the end of the war in Iraq.

    I could go back further and further in history and give you more examples, where “official history” lies to you, but this is really time consuming, because I never write anything, for which I do not have prooves. From experience I can tell you, that the most work, I had with my master’s thesis, was the correct citation, not the acutal writing! This counts for any other good historiographical work, too.

    You call me a Liberal, but you know nothing. Neither you know anything about politics, nor history, nor about my person. There is no need to justify myself in front of you, but I am definitely no liberal. I don’t like gun grabbers, I have many guns myself. I don’t like same sex marriage, I despite Islam and especially islamic fundamentalism, but also I despite any other religion, which tells its believers to murder other people (Judaism and Christianism are no exception!).

    I am not angry at you, I feel sorry for you. You were writing, that you are a veteran. I am sorry for you. I am sorry, because I can imagine, that you have seen much sh*t and now these pictures are in your mind and you can’t get rid of them anymore. They follow you like ghosts, for the rest of your life.

    Also I am sorry for you, that your mind was poisend so much by propaganda, that you sacrificed your life and health, not to serve your country, which is honorable, but to serve the private, egoistic financial interests of a small group of Wall Street banksters. You were told, that you fight for freedom, democracy and peacy. But answer me: those who get money by selling more and more weapons of WAR, do they want peace??? It’s the last thing, they would want! And those who destroy your own democracy within the country, could they ever want other people to live free? No, they never could.

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    • I would disagree with a few points of what you wrote:
      1. I was somewhat correct in what your rebuttal would be.
      2. History and Politics at least here in the USA I know.
      I’ve worked for various lobbying firms and have held state political office. Have had regular meetings with senators and congressmen in DC, Austin and Charleston WV. I would venture a guess I know more about how a bill really becomes law and the process more than anyone you’d meet on the street. It’s not quite house of cards obviously but I wouldn’t consider lobbying a ethical profession if you’re not in grassroots or non profits.
      3. I never claimed to fight for freedom. I was under no illusions that the war in Iraq was about freedom.
      That’s the thing I made the choice willingly and would do so again. Why? Being a part of a team. Getting to shoot people. And it’s easy to get pussy when you’re in Army Class A’s. Afghanistan is a much different war with a different mission. The war in Iraq was a debacle due to leadership. Many Sunnis felt as though they were slighted when we promised them integration into the Iraqi military and political integration. Sunnis are the source of the insurgency in that region. Shias have controlled the Baghdad Government and have been very poignant in letting the Sunnis know it isn’t Saudi Arabia. They also never did the aforementioned integration. They did it with no intention of ever doing so. Also, we used to give local vendors cash as in USD to set up food carts and other services near the IZ in Baghdad. That never came to fruition and when it did shortly after construction the place would get blown up. I lived in the Al Rasheed hotel I was promoted to SGT shortly before being deployed. Another thing I forgot: I NEVER THOUGHT I SAW YOU OVER THERE! Lo and behold you confirmed you were not there. I know what that war was all about and I know why it was mismanaged. That’s the damn problem with wars we have assholes who act like they’re smarter than the guys actually there. I have a Bachelors degree in Political Science so please spare me what you think about what happened over there . As I said your were not there. It’s easy to talk about Wall Street when contractors mostly drove trucks, provided purified water for showers and cooked in the dining facilities. All the 92Gs(Army Cooks) were babysitters and they also went outside the wire on combat patrols. So, again I would say that my assumptions while somewhat incorrect were pretty much on point. Bilderberg group and secret bankers check. All the other shit check. I am surprised you are not a gun grabber. Truth is in closing that most Americans here at home were done with that fucking war after two years. They got the Muslim blood spilled they wanted spilled and thier stomachs were sour when the insurgency started inflicting higher casualties on us. Fact is: If you or anyone else really gives a shit about veterans and soldiers then the next time you want war and can wield influence make sure you want to win at all costs. I have ran for office and have won elections. I have helped others win elections and have gotten them money to bankroll said campaign. As I said I like to win and I also love power. I have had the power to kill a bill that would for instance raise user fees throughout the state. I knew that most people hated these user fees and it was my first two year term so I killed it. I didn’t do anything anyone else wouldn’t have done to shore up support but I have no regrets. Here in the USA what matters is the ability to influence policy. You wouldn’t get elected to the office of dog catcher in the USA. When I got to the State Legislature for my first term the majority leader( I ran as a Republican)told me: if you’re not raising money for reelection starting tommorow pack your shit now. So, while I may see you in a more positive light after reading your comment to say something so fucking asinine about something that you know shit about is pretty fucking annoying.

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  28. @ oif0689:

    Well, due to the text you wrote, I fear the discussion between us is fruitless and I can tell you exactly why:

    When I wrote my first answer to you, I thought I have another misleaded guy in front of me, poisened by propaganda the US-govt. and mass media were and are spreading.

    I was wrong. You are not a victim of disinformation, you are a culprit. A henchman of the globalistic agenda. I don’t think that you are one of the upper ranks. You are more one of their errand boys, educated, even intelligent in a certain degree, but it’s a selective intelligence, not commited to the full force of reason and therefore more dangerous than all those naive kids, they send into wars, telling them about “the good cause”.
    On the other side you are as archaic and backward as man can be. Everything you write about the causes why you went to fight speaks about it.
    I had to laugh so hard when you wrote that you got into Army to “get pussy”, because it explains your behaviour and shows, that your balls are excessively overdeveloped to the disadvantage of your brain’s prefrontal cortex, where reason is mainly located. ;-P
    Honestly, you cannot impress me with your big balls war-story blabla and your Bachelor degree. Today every idiot can get a Bachelor, if he’s not dumb enough. As I told you before, they tried to implement the Bachelor/Master system in Germany , “americanize” an educational system, which was perfectly good for my country, and now it’s trash: the students are occupied with stuff they only have to lear to earn credits. There is no time to think and re-think the information you read in books and papers anymore and to build you an OWN opinion and not what govt. propaganda and big industrie wants to let them know. Greetings from Orwell’s 1984.

    All you wrote about the situation in Iraq is perfectly aware to me, without me having been there and putting my ass on risk. I know about the conflict between the Sunnis, the Shias, the Kurds, the Alevites, and what other religious sects are floating around there. But you seem to forget, that the conflicts between those groups did not start with Saddam Hussein. These conflicts are centuries old and they will not be solved within years, not even in decades. And especially they won’t be solved, if an aging selfdeclared super power heats up these conflicts by taking one side this day, another side the next day, and so on, depending on which group supports it’s own geopolitical agenda best at the moment.

    But as I wrote before, and this is something you don’t seem to understand, because you “hotshot” talk about “winning” and “having power”: all these conflicts on the world, where the US are involved directly or indirectly, don’t have an end. They shall not have an end, because this is the tactic I spoke about earlier: divide et impera, superiority by destabilisation. This is how the US try do delay their ultimate default further into the future.

    Because the US are a declining super power on all fields, political, economical, moral, military, they do not have the financial power anymore to start AND end wars as a total winner. They create and spread unrest in those parts of the world, where they have geopolitical and economic interests and where they can ride with their policy on a wave of local conflicts, older than the country USA itself by centuries or even millenia. While all around the US boys are beating up each other, US firms can perfectly exploit the countries economies and/or ressources. But since you said, you are a lobbyist, I am sure, you know all about this.

    Now, at the end of my little essay, let me tell you something: we don’t need people like you. We don’t need those who stir up other people against each other, who creat unrest among their fellow men. We don’t need perverted sociopaths like you, who wank of on the imagination of blowing a humans head off. We don’t need, nor want people who go to war to be the hotshot at home, to “get pussy”. Mankind neither needs, nor wants power addicted boasters.

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    • If you have firearms I may actually agree with a liberal on gun snatching.
      You are so far out there it isn’t even funny. Seriously. No one needs motives anymore for a war. We are a violent society get used to it. You’re just mad you made an assumption then you got called on it. In all seriousness I would consider seeking help promptly.
      My motives are none of your business. Do you have inclinations to avoid pussy? I have gay friends. Do you consider yourself more intelligent than everyone you meet? How is that logical? Anyone can get a college education this is very true. But, again by your agitated response I worry about the fact that you possess firearms. I also feel very confident in saying I need your no ones approval. I have accomplished a lot in my lifetime. I hope you feel as though what you have accomplished is satisfactory. You would be surprised at the assumptions that are made about politics. This is your problem it is obvious you have a problem with yourself. You need attention to make yourself feel better. You need to work on that.

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      • Oh man! You are such a broken personality, it’s almost funny!

        You are acting like a little child. “He was bad to me, so I want to punish him and strip him from his toys.”

        All of this in first place, because you started insulting me personally. Now I gave you a taste of how you tried to piss on my leg and all you are able to is crying like a baby, insulting me over and over again and by that giving me an all others the proof, that all you are capable of is boasting, insulting and down praying idiotic propaganda, but not leading a civilized discussion.

        Especially your lines prove, that you are not only a sociopath, but they give this whole discussion a schizophrenic touch: a guy who literally said, that he likes to shoot people and who goes into military service, because he has bigger balls than brain, is calling me mad and advises me to seek professional help. What a crazy, inverted world!

        I have no illusions about the fact, that mankind is somehow the most violent species on this planet and that it would be wise for every single human being to protect itself from such violent outbreaks. Which is, by the way, the reason, why I own guns.
        Over 10.000 years of history are example enough. But considering the technological evolution of the last 50 years, it is questionable, whether mankind will have another 10.000 years to come, if we stay on this path of self-extermination, of which people like you are the perfect representatives.

        Although my private life is not your business, I am in a wonderful relationship with a even more wonderful, beautiful and trustable woman of integral character. In contrast to you, I prefer class and quality over the quantity of easy-to-have, mentally lightweight and morally depraved women. An of those kind your “women of heart” must be, if they are impressed by a stuck in adolescence “hotshot”, dressed in a carnival costume and draped with gongs like a walking Christmas tree. And the only reason, why he is not misperceived as that is, because he’s not the brightest candle. 😛

        I do not consider myself more intelligent than anyone I meet or have met. I am absolutely sure, that there are many more smarter people than myself and I am glad about this fact, since being highly intelligent must be a heavy burden for those who are. But what concernes you, any sort of considerations from my side about superior intelligence are not necessary due to obviousness. 😀

        All in all, I am perfectly fine with myself and my whole life, since I am gifted my fate with mental, physical and material wellbeing. And I could be perfectly fine with the world, if there were not such dangerous sociopaths like you, making the world unsave, causing unrest and hatred among the people, only to satisfy their self-centered thirst for blood, power and “tools” to empty their overload of testosterone into.

        Concerning people like you I have a perfectly fitting quote from Max Liebermann, who once said about a certain kind of people “I cannot eat that much like I want to vomit!”.

        This will be, by the way, my last answer to you, since I have better things to do than leading an endless debate with someone, who wouldn’t see the truth if it jumped into his face with naked butt, or more worthy expressed, who behold “the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye.”

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      • My ancestors came to the United States from Germany in the 1800’s. Some of them served in the Civil War in the Union Army. It must be maddening being a German today. Trying to forget the shame of your past and struggling with your inferiority complex toward America. Say what you want about the U.S., it was not our armed forces that invaded Belgium and Luxembourg in 1914 and Poland in 1939. It certainly was not the U.S. that exterminated 6,000,000,000 Jews, the U.S. liberated the concentration camps. So sad to hear that today Germany has the world’s lowest birth rate. When you die, you may be one of the last few people on the planet that still speak German due to all the immigrants you are allowing in now. What would Der Fuehrer say about his Thousand Year Reich now I wonder?

        You are so naïve that you don’t even know that you are a liberal. Do you know why you are German and not Russian? Didn’t Mutter und Vater ever teach you about the Cold War or the USSR? You should do a little research about the Berlin Wall. Were you even alive when East Germany opened the wall in 1989? Did you not know that there once was an East Germany? While you’re at it, you should also read about the 31 Americans who lost their lives during the Berlin Airlift. Since you can’t say it, I will. Danke sehr America!

        The quality of the education you received at Ludwig-Maximilian’s University must be pretty poor if they actually teach that the United States has ever been the aggressor. With the exception of Pontiac’s War which occurred before the American Revolution, the United States has only gone to war after having been attacked first or to come to the aid of another nation that is being attacked or to remove a tyrannical government. Even during the Civil War, it was the Confederacy that fired first. Never before in the history of the world has there ever been a nation so powerful that did not demand the vanquished to kneel before it.

        Even though you lack the ability to admit it, oif0689 scares you. I suggest that you stay in Germany where you belong. We have millions of loyal and patriotic Americans just like him here ready to throw lead and crack skulls when our country is threatened and I sleep good at night knowing that we have them. Don’t make the mistake of under estimating them like your great grandparents did 75 years ago.

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      • I appreciate your comment Blake. You know I have to tell you that the heroes are the ones buried in Arlington.
        Our German friend doesn’t understand loyalty to his country and a cause.
        My Grandfather is a Full Blooded Cherokee. We have family that still lives on the Cherokee reservation in Oklahoma.
        He fought in WW2 in the Battle of the Bulge. I like you have relatives who fought for the union and confederacy. My father fought in Vietnam(he was drafted). My grandpa did not think Vietnam was a smart war. When my fathers number was called he simply said right or wrong you answer the call when America needs you. After 9/11 I felt terrible for those involved and I wanted to kill those involved. Innocent civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan were helped by U.S. Troops. We provided security women and children had peace of mind that we would help them if they needed it. I used to hang out with a kid whose parents were killed by a car bomb in Baghdad. We eventually through the embassy in the green zone got him adopted and permission to come and stay in America. I will always put my friends and family first. You as an American are my family even the progressive cynic I would fight for. I respect him for his convictions and writing on a website. We just disagree on some things in regards to our vision to America. My oath of enlistment that I took at 17 when my step brother became my legal guardian and signed my enlistment papers, that oath never expires. I grew up in foster care and my prospects were not great. I got my GED at 16 and worked out to prepare for military service. My step brother served in Panama and Desert Storm. He earned a CIB in Panama and a Purple Heart in Desert Storm. He shed blood for his country. I had three knee scopes and three fluid drainings on my knee. They wanted to repair my ACL and PCL they threatened me with a med seperation. I took the med board and got an honorable discharge. Iraq does live with me. Guns were our original topic but the more I think of it the more I believe Americans have a urge to be free. They have an inalienable right to be free. But, I’m not a hypocrite I want same sex couples to not worry about government laws, I want legal marijuana to help stop the drug war and stop gun violence. Not to mention we will gain tax dollars to pay down the debt. I believe Grover Cleveland was right when he said,” the government if functioning as prescribed by the constitution should only be providing security from foreign invasions and insurrections. In this case the bare minimum of money should be needed by the taxpayer to fund this function and anything more is government sanctioned extortion.” He should be afraid of me. I am a free man who will do anything to ensure all men and women no matter the race or religion or sexual orientation is free from government intrusion via laws legislating morality or nanny state paternalism. I will fight in foreign lands to ensure we don’t have to fight the enemy here. God Bless all of our veterans and our troops currently serving. My brother in laws son is serving in Germany I pray for him as I write this. Our country must turn away from socialist inclinations at a rapid rate or we shall be in danger of losing our glorious constitutional republic. Too much blood of good and brave men has been spilled for it.

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      • Hello Sir,

        Congretulation to your ancestry. Actually the US Americans of german origin are a proud number of ~ 49 million. Look here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762137.html

        I do not understand, about which shame of “my” past and which inferiority complex towards the US you mean. I have been born decades after the incidents you are referring to. I did not participate personally in any of these events. So what should I be ashamed off?
        Also you are misguided in another point: my critizism is not based on an inferiority complex towards the US, but what I try is to pull you and your brothers in spirit down from your high horse. Because the US are not special nation, especially not “God’s chosen country”. If you look at the raw data, there is absolutely no reason to further cultivate a hybris like this.
        And as I stated before, most of their existing time they spent in war or in a war-like status, of which they often were the creator.

        Of course you are right: German forces invaded Belgium and Luxembourg in 1914 and in 1939 Poland. But it’s short-sighted from you to think, that war only start with the first shot. It was, I believe, a former Prime Minister of the state of Israel, who said, that it does not matter from which side the first shot came, but only what happend BEFORE the first shot.
        As you seem to be unfamiliar with the circumstances in Europa and on the world in the two decades before the outbreak of WW I, I do recommend you to read Christopher Clarks book “The sleepwalkers”. Additionally there is an american Judge who wrote a book about the true causes of the American Civil War, the First World War and the Second World War, his name is John V. Denson and his book is called “A century of war”. Understanding the outbreak of WW II then is not possible without the knowledge of what led to WW I. Therefore I strongly recommend you to teach yourself, before you try to confront me with your false picture of history.

        Also people like you and oif are even more predictable to me, than I am to you: I already knew, when the whole discussion started, that any moment the “Nazi”-argument would pop out. But you cannot frighten me with the reference to the holocaust, since the US has it’s own package of genozide to carry. I talk about the near-to-extermination of the nativ american population.
        For my part, regarding all facts that I have collected over the last 7 years, I do not believe in the cruelty propaganda of the murder of 6 mio. Jews. Neither do many Americans. Also the main concentraion camps were not liberated by US military, but by the Red Arms, since the biggest camps were all located in the east. Inform yourself, before you try to tell me something about history.
        You call me naive and a liberal. Read again the lines above and tell me, if am still fit in that pigeonholing, you like to apply on other people.

        About Russia: I am perfectly aware of the fact, that Bolshewism was a zionist conspiracy. Many, almost everyone in the closer circle of the Bolshewik, were jewish. If you like to read: http://reformed-theology.org/html/books/bolshevik_revolution/appendix_02.htm. There is much much MUCH more material on this topic than this single website.

        Regarding the Berlin Airlift: you really ask Germans to be thankfull to US Airforce, because they dropped some packages of raisins on Berlin for about a year, while US and Royal Airforce committed a genozide on Germanys civilian population for the period of 3-4 years before by bombing and killing millions of innocen civilians, laying most of Germanys cities into rubble? Go to a doctor and let your brain be checked, please! And inform yourself please, befor you talk more nonsense: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMCOKNCwHmQ.
        Non of the actions the US undertook during the Cold War was in first place for the sake of the German people, who in fact were hated by Generals like Eisenhower and his jewish cronies like Morgenthau and Kaufman.

        Dude, I know about the concentration camps, the US and British errected on the Rheinwiesen, were between 750.000 and 1 million german soldiers and civilians died from starvation, mistreatment by US soldiers and thirst. This was a systematic killing, because the food was there and the Red Cross wanted to hand it out, but it was prohibited by the US Military Government in Germany. You think this is a conspiracy theory? Until today, officials in Germany deny researchers to make excavations on the Rheinwiesen, because then the evidence for one of the biggest war crimes, committed AFTER the end of the war by US Military, would be covered up. Explain this.

        Also you are wrong about the quality of education at the LMU: do a research and you will find, that the LMU’s Historic Institure and especially it’s Institute of Contemporary History are among the most respected scientific institutions on the world.
        Of course I did not receive the information and knowledge I have today by the help of the professors, because most of them are political correct. All the information I have today, I gathered by own work and research. The professors are depending on their salary, which is payed to them by the FDR government, which is a US-Zionist puppet regime, errected in 1948 on the soil of a defeated Germany.

        Last point, you are also wrong about me, if you say, that I am afraid of oif. I am neither afraid of that oif guy, nor am I afraid of you. I will definitely stay out of the US, since there is nothing, which could be of interest to me:
        – a national debt of meanwhile 18 billion, rising every day.
        – a rotting infrastructure with apocalyptic seeming ghost cities.
        – around 46 million people on food stamps.
        – a widening gap between rich and poor.
        – ethnic riots.
        – an out-of-controll police state, spying on everyone and everything.
        – still running concentration camps in Guantanamo Bay and new concentration camps errected by FEMA.

        In one point you are right: in Germany things are getting worse every day too. Our both countries are f*cked up and actually they are f*cked up by the same people. Which is why I am so perplexed, that we sit here and argue against each other, while our common enemies are not in Iraq, not in Syria, not in Afghanistan, but RIGHT AT OUR DOORSTEPS!

        You said, Germany’s population is going down, because of it’s lower birth rate. Well, situation is not better in the US: negros and especially Hispanics are the strongest growing populations in the US to the disadvantage of the WASPs. In many south-western states and cities you are better off with speeking spanish than with speeking english and this tendendy is accelerating. Soon the whole southwest of the US will be flooded by Mexicans and by the population weapon, the Mexicans will get back the territories, which the US took from them in the 1840’s war.

        Since the US society is ethnically and culturally very inhomogeneous and since the different ethnic groups are only hold together by “the flag” and consumerism, ethnic conflicts and riots will follow this population shift. The US are on the break of a new civil war with ethnic cleansing in its following.

        I have no problem with it, if you cultivate your brain sh*t in your own country, but stay out of the business of other nations and especially STFO of my country! Ami go home!

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      • MoPhil, my best friend’s grandfather lost his right ear during the Battle of the Bulge. He wrote this down and wanted me to tell you “In der Holle Brennen.” I have no idea what that means, but I’ll bet it isn’t a compliment.

        Like Blake said, this debate is about the rights of Americans to own firearms so I will try to keep this brief.

        I’m relieved to hear that it wasn’t your professors at LMU that planted this skewed and laughable revision of history in your head. Good luck getting a job. Like you said, you need to consider what happened BEFORE the first shot. If you would just take your own advice, you would see that the United States has NEVER been the primary aggressor in ANY armed conflict nor is there ANY evidence to indicate otherwise. Your comments seem to be nothing more than just the ranting of a frustrated person. As it would appear that you were either absent or asleep during history class, please allow me to educate you.

        Sorry, but the stigma of Nazism and the shame of the Holocaust will be your burden until the day you die. Maybe it is for the best that Germany as we know it is on the Autobahn to extinction. It is true that the United States has a history of slave ownership and violence toward its indigenous population during the 1800’s as did other countries. However, no foreign power had to invade and intervene to free the slaves or the American Indian. The U.S. government and the people made those corrections themselves.

        Regarding your misconception about the Rheinwiesenlager, it was a group of 19 camps created by the Allies to hold PRISONERS OF WAR. The camps were in operation for a period of only 6 months from April until September of 1945. It is true that many died due to lack of water, food, medical care and shelter. However, all available supplies and troops were needed to support the war effort. Exactly what “officials in Germany” are allegedly preventing the excavation of the former camps? The United States does not occupy Germany anymore, get your shovel and go ahead and dig all the holes you want. The bombings of German cities that you refer to occurred during WAR. Unfortunately, civilian casualties are often unavoidable. Hitler could have prevented or at least minimized the death toll by simply surrendering.

        As for your hilarious blathering about the Berlin Airlift (or Berlin Blockade as some call it), let me educate you further. After the Soviets ordered the blockade, necessary supplies could only be flown in. During its operation from June 25, 1948 to September 30, 1949, a total 278,228 flights were made which delivered a total of 2,326,406 TONS of supplies (mostly coal) to the people of Berlin. I’m not saying that all German citizens should have an American flag on the west wall of their homes and bow down to it every day. I am simply saying that you should remember your place and be a little more grateful. You truly are an imbecile.

        I’m so glad to hear that you don’t plan on coming to my country. I certainly have no plans on going to yours. I would also strongly advise you to avoid Israel. Your opinion about the “cruelty propaganda” regarding the murder of 6 million Jews would not be received well there. You would be well advised to just shut your sausage hole and focus on what you do best, brewing beer and making cars.

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      • Good one Joe. By the way, “in der Holle Brennen” means “burn in hell.”

        I like the way MoPhil says that he has no shame from World War I or II since he was born decades afterwards and did not participate in those events, but then tries to insinuate that U.S. citizens today carry the shame of what happened to the American Indians over a century ago.

        I also find it curious how he does not believe the “cruelty propaganda in the murder of 6 million Jews”, but then goes on to talk about how the biggest concentration camps were located in the east. So he started that paragraph denying the holocaust but started believing in it by the end of the paragraph? Also to be specific, the Soviets did liberate Auschwitz which was the biggest camp. However, the United States liberated the most. Three camps had already been closed and dismantled the year before the Soviets arrived.

        http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005131

        It is very clear that MoPhil definitely has an inferiority complex towards the U.S.A., but perhaps it may have something to do with the fact that our Olympic teams have won more gold medals than any other country in the world.

        http://www.olympic.it/english/medal

        It sure is nice living in a country that has the Atlantic Ocean on one side, the Pacific on the other and is bordered by only two countries one of which is Canada. Oh, did I forget to mention that we have the world’s largest navy patrolling those oceans? We do have a problem with illegal aliens here I must admit. However, our citizens are becoming less and less sympathetic and this problem will likely be addressed soon. It could be worse, at least the Hispanics practice Christianity.

        P.S. I am now convinced that MoPhil lied about his education. He doesn’t really have any Masters Degree, he just has a lot of time on his hands to read liberal propaganda blogs and then regurgitate it here.

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  29. Hmm, strange. It seems my last comment was deleted. Was this your intervention, Mr. Sager?

    Anyways, I am done with you, oif and Blake, and all of those who are of the same mind like you. It is not my job making you read books and essays, that could widen your view and lead to a correction of your distorted view on history. It is not my job to do the thinking-for-youself for you. And let the Gods decide, who will be right.

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    • Yet another dummkopf thought that he could lock horns with an American and ends up kaput. It has now been 70 years since VE Day and America still has to intervene. There’s a history lesson for you. “Let the Gods decide?” So are you polytheistic?

      Just for the hell of it, I decided to find some information on Ludwig Maximilian University. Quite impressive. I just can’t figure out how you could be so ignorant if you studied at such a prestigious school. You weren’t lying were you?

      I’m getting bored with you. This debate is supposed to be about the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Guten tag Herr MoPhil.

      P.S. Feel free to keep David Hasselhoff.

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      • Oh he’s just mad his fuhrer didn’t realize his dreams of extermination.
        Yeah, I do think he’s high or mentally ill. Who the hell goes totally off script on a conversation like the one that was going on.
        In my opinion eithef a troll or lunatic. No humility either. Still he comes back with such a weak response that my two year old niece would laugh at him. Anyway, after a day of hunting squirrel with my Daisy 880, I am making some squirrel stew. Maybe we should send some to mophil. At any rate, ive enjoyed reading progressive cynic’s opinions. I disagree but… its a free country.

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  30. Well this guy appears to hate Jews. Kinda funny actually. My mother is a non religious ethnic Jew.
    She was raised Reform. I actually have went back to Israel under the law of return.
    Saying anything that he said in Israel would get him thrown in jail for inciting hatred.
    I’m a minority on both sides of my family. The military treated me very well and all Christians have treated me with respect and as a Believer of Christianity I’m equally respectful of all people. But, you seem to be an anti Semitic person. Your Fuhrer killed himself like a pansy and is burning in hell. Your shit German nation…. I spent three weeks in Landstuhl Germany. And from what I’ve seen of Berlin, Mannhiem and other places just a bloated welfare state. Never come to the USA nor Israel. G-D gave us our land and culture back so fuck you Nazi.

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  32. Regarding #21: You start your argument off by posing the situation of an intruder breaking down the door, but then transition into a discussion on why vigilantism is bad…. but you never finish the thought about the home intrusion. As a firearms owner, my primary concern is the safety of my family. We have had an intruder and he was stopped by the mere presence of my firearm. No shots fired. Had I not have had that weapon, this man could have easily overpowered me. In the weeks following that event, we learned that the intruder was a known rapist and pedophile.

    I am not here to argue, but rather to hear your thoughts on the argument of “police cannot get to you on time”. If it is not a valid argument, then what is? Should the average civilian be allowed to own a firearm for home defense? Should they be allowed to kill an intruder?

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  33. Regarding #21: You start your argument off by posing the situation of an intruder breaking down the door, but then transition into a discussion on why vigilantism is bad…. but you never finish the thought about the home intrusion. As a firearms owner, my primary concern is the safety of my family. We have had an intruder and he was stopped by the mere presence of my firearm. No shots fired. Had I not have had that weapon, this man could have easily overpowered me. In the weeks following that event, we learned that the intruder was a known rapist and pedophile.

    I am not here to argue, but rather to hear your thoughts on the argument of “police cannot get to you on time”. If it is not a valid argument, then what is? Should the average civilian be allowed to own a firearm for home defense? Should they be allowed to kill an intruder?

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    • While I see your point that there are some cases where the police will not get to a house in time and where guns could, theoretically, help, a simple look at the statistics gives us a very grim calculus in regard to risk/reward. Put simply, the number of people who die in the USA (both due to accident and murder) due to the easy accessibility of guns is just significantly large than the number of people who stop an intruder with a firearm.

      Here is a counter-case. Given the weakness of the current US gun laws, it was simply your luck that the criminal who broke into your house was not armed (perhaps with a gun bought online from a straw seller who bought an assault rifle through the gun show loophole). I promote regulations that make it difficult for criminals to access weapons, but legal (if inconvenient) for law abiding citizens to get them. We saw the success of this type of program in Australia after the Port Arthur Massacre and, while it would be far harder to achieve in the USA, it is still the best way to reduce overall deaths.

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      • “We saw the success of this type of program in Australia?”

        You call this success?

        At least you admitted that you saw Dave / Southern Watchman’s point about how his gun helped. It was not theoretical, his gun actually did help. The one thing that many people don’t realize about firearms is that in some cases, they don’t have to be fired in order to be effective. An attacker may rethink their intentions or flee when they see that their intended prey is capable of deadly force. This is true about the Second Amendment in general as well. There are witless liberals out there who think it is ridiculous when Second Amendment supporters remind them that the purpose of the Second Amendment was and still is to provide protection for the citizens from a tyrannical government. Gun control fanatics may say “That’s silly. When has the U.S. government ever threatened to attack U.S. citizens on American soil?” If that is what you think, just simply examine the question. Clearly, this has never happened because the government knows that it will face armed resistance. Firearms are a deterrent, Cliven Bundy can attest to that fact. I also promote regulations that make it difficult for criminals to get access to weapons. I call it prison.

        Would you be able to tell the family of this young girl that the potential risk outweighs the reward?

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  35. I would like to leave a statement about how guns are our culture and you replied tough shit, well I’m guessing you are for gay marriage but Texas priest have the right to refuse the marriage of gays, you bitch about it to the press. I say: Tough shit.

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    • Actually, if a priest wants to refuse to marry a gay couple, the state has no right to interfere. Religious entities have the power to conduct their rituals free from most government regulation. That said, gay couples must have equal civil marriage rights with straight couples, thus that same couple has the right to go to any city hall, ask for a marriage license, and get married the same day.

      This was an extremely poor comparison. Try again.

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  36. Failure of people like Sager to understand the difference between Australia and the United States. Failure to understand the differences in definition of what a violent crime is in the US and in the UK as well. The UK, gun free Country, is the most “violent” Nation in Western Europe, Our gun culture is the right of free people to defend themselves. the word “free” is totally out any meaning for people like Sager. The Sagers of the world are ready for mother Government to take care of them from cradle to grave!! If you and the Government can free this Nation from Gangs and street crime and guarantee that we the citizens will be defended from any criminal or violent act..then probably we could ban guns. Since for you cannot guarantee that…hands off our rights. None of you liberal dip shits said anything when the Scotus ruled on gay marriage!1 Its’ a “right” liberal retards said! Well..hat right s nowhere written in the Constitution WHILE gun ownership is!. And we will defend that right tooth and nails. I guess not all the rights are equal….just he ones that appease the left!! You don’t want a weapon? Don’t fucking buy one, but don’t tell ME how can i defend myself and my family. You liberals understand one language only..and it’s a violent response to your fascist attacks on people’s freedom. Keep pushing it and another civil war is most likely to happen..and guess who’s got the weapons….

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  37. Wow i just spent 3 hours reading all of these comments and I know y’all are onto the whole Kim Davis subject BUT hear me out. I’m 17 and trying to find the “right” side to stand with. What I noticed in this is that y’all talk a lot about the constitution and what our founding fathers said regarding gun control. What i’m wondering is why no one is talking about what gun control means in 2015. The founding fathers didn’t know many of the things we do today, and they were in a completely different situation, I think if you asked anyone about the 2nd amendment pertaining to 1776 they would be completely for it. In 2015 i’m not so sure, anyway, any thoughts on this would be appreciated

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    • Very simple young man. Sager didn’t debunk absolutely anything with his article. Countries with a total ban on guns like England are not seeing a decrease of violent crime. Criminals are just not using guns..but other tools. The problem is not gun violence, but violent criminals which commit heinous acts with or without guns. The US has a problem with crime and specifically blacks and Latino gangs and street crime. Without those two factors, we would be virtually crime free. As you can see…guns have nothing to do with it. The founding fathers argument: that could apply to freedom of speech and religion as well!! Does not matter WHEN they were written..it matters that those principles are UNIVERSAL.

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    • Thank you for reading.

      The simple answer to your question is that they don’t even try to rationalize this disparity away. They love their guns and will contort the Constitution into any form that serves their narrative. This is a nearly unconscious response, as studies have shown that people who own more than one gun tend to (correlation not causation) have larger amygdalas, which is the fear center of the brain. They also are more likely to hold xenophobic views and be less accepting of social change. In short, their gun is their security blanket and trying to take it away has results as predictable as trying to take a blanket from a toddler–fear, anger, and an irrational temper tantrum.

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      • Do you really believe in this stupid shit you write Sager? WE contort the Constitution? Let’s read it together” “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State ,(COMMA) the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed”. A COMMA separates two different phrases, and to me seems pretty clear the meaning of the second part. What is that “we larger amygdaleans” are contorting? If you explain this to me and to the young fellow i would be very grateful.I think the language is simple, plain English and the only ones that have hard time to understand are the Sagers of the world. Let’s go to the utterly stupid argument that gun owners have “large amygdalas”. So you are saying that there is a study that actually studied gun owners and non-gun owners and measured the amygdalas. Well. please give us the link to that study. beside that, who are you to determine what is a good amygdala or not? That’s the most ridiculous argument i ever heard, beside being without evidence obviously. And you are a journalist? They actually pay you to write this stupid stuff? Just making up shit..like the one about gun owners having more chances to be shot with their own guns or other stupidities in your main article. On the xenophobic issue…omg, shall i even comment on that? Many gun owners are also liberals, just saying. Ok…xenophobe? Well if you mean that we have enough unemployed and poor in America today and i don’t see the need to add more, which i call it LOGIC, then you can say that! That means that common sense has gone away from your mind for good. How many Syrian refugees do you have at home Sager? To be a non “xenophobe” shall i say yes to how many non needed immigrants from the 3r world? 1 million, 2, 10, a billion? You tell me the number you want to be taken into America, since we have almost 4 billion of people that live with less than 1 dollar a day. You argument, like most of the European leaders and this administration makes NO sense at all. A simple question: shall we empty all the poor countries of the world? See Mr. sager..name calling is not a rational explanation, is just a “fear”. Fear of the truth….must be a liberal amygdala thing…

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  38. Sager: so what you are saying is the reason why they don’t want to think about gun control in 2015 is because they love their guns too much and they can’t seem to see the big picture. So now I ask what is the percentage of gun owners in America because I feel like non gun owners but gun advocates would listen to this argument and think rationally. Also Frank is kinda right about you seemed kinda irrational and just taking punches when you started talking about the brain.

    Frank: Regarding about the stats for or against gun control. It seems to me that both sides can have a stat war, its not hard to manipulate numbers. Personally I’m not concerned with the amount of violent acts in a society. Obviously that will never go away people will always hurt and kill people and gun control won’t stop that. I want gun control to prevent or make it harder for kids and for the mentally unstable to get there hands on guns. Do you have any stats on the amount of mass shootings or children accidentally shooting themselves in the UK? I agree with you that without gangs we would be virtually crime free and that gun control won’t do anything to lessen crime in gang areas, but come on they do kill people with guns most of the time so saying that guns don’t have anything to do it doesn’t make sense to me. Finally you address my question lol, and I do see where you are coming from and I completely agree that freedom of speech and religion is very important. but I think that is because nothing has changed in our society that would render it even some what questionable, presidents have challenged and basically broke the 1st amendment during war times limiting our freedom of speech (because the situation made it necessary). Are the Amendments always right or interpreted right? The fore founders did not ban slavery when they wrote the first 10, we repealed Prohibition and we weren’t right on that. We’ve added amendments to our Constitution as our society has evolved and changed, why is it that the second amendment is unchangeable?

    I’m not trying to throw insults and get into some big shouting match here. Is it really necessary to talk about the size of republicans brains or spend a paragraph addressing such a trivial matter. I posted here to avoid the irrational and angry arguments of my friends lol. Once again….I’m honestly just trying to find my stance on this issue and question my thinking and y’all’s thinking.

    Thanks for acknowledging and addressing my thoughts on the issue, I’ll check back for a response later.

    Like

    • Will, Will. You started off well and then you fell right into the liberal trap. I promise, no insults or shouting match. Just common sense. The firs part, your reply to sager it’s obviously a common sense reply to the absurdity that this dude dared to publish. Sounds like a Nazi part trying to justify why the Jews are bad to the German people. Just switch he word Jews with the amigdala bullshit (not data or link yet). That only should discourage any human being with common sense to even consider his fallacious article on “gun control”. Let’s go to the second part, the one addressed to me. First mistake: you talk about “gun control”. THAT is not the issue or the problem. thousands of people get killed with knives, or other striking objects…do we talk about knife control, bat control or whatever control? Car crashes causes more deaths than guns and WE do blame the drivers… taking a selfie, talking on the phone etc. WHY we don’t do the same for guns? The problem is CRIME control. That’s what liberals can’t get into their heads. They keep pushing for laws that over and over again, year after year, have failed to keep the guns off the streets and the off the hands of criminals and ONLY accomplished to keep guns off the hands of the law abiding GOOD GUYS/CITIZENS. That is not much to be disputed there. It’s a FACT. We have some like 20K + laws on guns in this Country and CRIMINALS just don’t give a rodent’s rear end of each and single one of them. Mental illness is not the problem and mass shootings is not the problem. They make news, yes. They are horrific, yes. But for 1 mass shooting that we have, hundreds of people are killed by street crime and gang violence EVERY DAY. So let’s talk about what we CAN fix and not about what we CANNOT fix (the cucoos). Deciding on WHO or WHO IS NOT a mental ill person makes us step in dangerous terrain here: who’s going to decide, how, why? Your argument about the UK..is ridiculous. How many kids shoot themselves in the US every year? How many die because of domestic accidents that nothing have to do with guns? Are we suppose to ban appliances, pools, kitchen utensils? NO. The same common sense that works for those items works for guns!! Parents PAY ATTENTION to your kids and keep hazards away from them! WHY do you focus ONLY on guns? Let me make a quick example to you and Sager so we can understand each other. You walk in the streets at night/day..whatever time you want..turn the corner on X street and there is a gun on the ground! What do you do? Run in fear, get on your knees and give the gun your wallet, your watch and your expensive Iphone? I am sure you don’t..right? It’s an object, a gun, you found it, you’re curious..you probably call the police. No fear, no harm done. Do you see where am i getting here? Now PUT someone behind that gun and pointing it at you? Do I need to be more clear than that? It’s the PERSON/Criminal that we shall focus on not the OBJECT. This is common sense, besides all of the stats!!
      CONSTITUTION: we have amended the Constitution and ADDED amendments not revoked the fundamental civil liberties! and for a reason. Once you start touching the 1st and the 2nd..we’ll go down quickly. Besides, the 2nd is already not observed by many State and City administration (NY City is an awful example) and citizens had over and over again recur to courts to reestablish a principle that a 3 yr old can understand simply reading the plain English word of the text. Our society has evolved, yes, but the 1st and 2nd and other amendments are written in such a broad language that can be applied to any age or time. Again, once we touch those…America is over. We will fall in the same “fake”freedom that Europeans think to have, where governments control speech and cradle to grave lives of their servants.
      This document it;s unique and needs to be preserved intact. We can add but not subtract.

      Like

    • Will. Did you really spend three hours reading ALL of the 929 comments that were posted regarding this topic before your first comment? If you did, then you would have had the truly enlightening experience of being educated to the wonder and wisdom that is our beloved Second Amendment and you would have no doubt that our side is the “right” side. In addition to this article, I recommend that you read Mr. Sager’s other articles concerning gun control and the Second Amendment. Certainly not because the articles are well written, but because over 95 percent of the responses have been critical of them. There were MANY extensive counter arguments that provided links to actual, credible research and videos showing real life events that support the right of law abiding citizens to keep and bear arms. Second Amendment supporters do not “contort” the Constitution, we CLARIFY it.

      You must realize that the author of this article hastily threw it together immediately after the Sandy Hook tragedy in an effort to simply just hop on the “band wagon” that the liberal media attempted to jump start. He conducted no serious research and relied on debunked alleged “studies” such as the Kellerman study and basic fear mongering. However, this back fired and created a spectacular outcome that we never could have dreamed of. All that the efforts of Mr. Sager and those like him accomplished was to galvanize Second Amendment supporters and cause them to unite and multiply. Gun rights have been expanded and unpatriotic, short sighted politicians have been ousted. The ones that survived have learned that our gun rights are not to be taken lightly and now know to stay in their place and keep their mouths shut about certain things. Oh, did I mention that Piers Morgan was also fired by CNN?

      A security blanket is also known as a comfort object. It is meant to provide only psychological security. A firearm on the other hand is a deadly weapon. A weapon which provides very real security. Just ask any would be burglar or rapist that has been shot and lived. It is only normal to desire to have as much security as possible in order to preserve one’s own life. I seriously doubt that if Mr. Sager were to take a wrong turn and find himself suddenly surrounded by gang members in a bad neighborhood that he would feel that it would be childish and immature to yell for assistance by armed police carrying guns. It is an undeniable fact that those who exhibit liberal tendencies do have textbook mental disorders.

      http://newsbusters.org/blogs/rusty-weiss/2012/01/22/yes-liberalism-mental-disorder

      You need to remember that in regards to the UK and Australia, those countries have always had fewer shootings than the US BEFORE either of those countries enacted any radical seizures of firearms. There is a very simple explanation for this. The gun control measures that they took did nothing to decrease their murder or crime rate which actually increased in some years afterward. This video has been posted before, but the time has come to post it again.

      PS. What do you think that the founding fathers would think of our black president or the supreme court allowing homosexuals to legally get married?

      Like

  39. Frank: I see where you are coming from and completely agree, crime is a problem and the people who are behind the guns do kill people. Crime is a serious problem in this country, I’m curious as to your ideas on solving the gang mentality and crime ridden streets of poor neighborhoods Personally I think that education can solve the crime issue yet due to the crime its incredibly hard for students to stay in school and better themselves, any thoughts? Tell me what you think of this idea. We do not ban guns because clearly from what I have read that won’t do anything, but we model it on something like a drivers licences. The owner must take a course and pass a test before he can get a gun licences. If anyone is caught with a gun and are not in the data base for gun licences they are fined and they have their gun confiscated. Wouldn’t this approach let the good guys keep their guns and punish the bad guys?

    Joe: Regarding your “P.S.” this question really bothered me as I’m not sure why that matters or what you are trying to say here. Personally I think that the founding fathers who were pro-slavery would have been appalled. I would also like to think that since they advocated very much for the separation of church and sate that while they may not have thought gay marriage was right, since the government is not forcing the churches to marry gays and the gays are simply trying to be treated as equal, they would not have had that big of an issue with it.

    P.S. I did read all the comments.

    Honestly though, I would be really interested in hearing yalls ideas on how to fix the high crime and murder rate in this country. Have a great day

    Like

    • Will,

      The reason I posed that question of what the founding fathers might have thought was in response to your 09-22-15 comment regarding how you were not sure that the original founders of our great nation (I assume you are a US citizen, am I correct?) would still approve of the Second Amendment if they were alive today. The answer would of course be a resounding YES! I took it upon myself to nip that in the bud right away. All to often, gun control fanatics attempt to validate their stupidity by spewing nonsense about how the Second Amendment is no longer valid because it was written at a time when the only firearms available were muzzle loading flintlocks and that semi automatic rifles should not fall under the protection of the Second Amendment. If you believe that, then freedom of speech and the press should only refer to public meetings, newspapers, posters and books and the government should be able to intercept and monitor all telephone calls and have total control over radio, television and the Internet just like China or North Korea. At the time the Constitution was created, Christianity was pretty much the only religion in the new United States. Asian immigrants had not began to travel here and there were possibly only a few slaves that were Muslims. By the way, the US was not the only country to own slaves at that time and was not the last to either. Mauritania was the last to abolish slavery in 1981, but did not make it a crime until 2007. Therefore, freedom of religion should only apply to Christians and not Buddhists, Muslims Wiccans or American Indians right? I have NOTHING against black people or homosexuals. However, if you think that the founding fathers would have not had “an issue” with the US government allowing gays to get married, then you are very much mistaken. At that time, homosexuality was considered an offense against public decency. It wasn’t until 2003 that the last sodomy laws were repealed in the US in regards to homosexuals.

      Keep in mind that they had just fought and won a war with a major world power for their independence. This major power had once governed them with an iron fist of tyranny. More than anyone Americans since, the original founders knew the value of freedom. They knew that any government if not kept in check could get out of control and knew that only an adequately armed citizenry could prevent this. The major difference between Second Amendment supporters and gun control fanatics is that Second Amendment supporters actually are right and gun control fanatics actually are wrong. This is not a matter of opinion. Gun control fanatics have the delusion that they are intellectual, yet lack the basic common sense to understand that firearms are inanimate objects that must be operated by human beings and that there are more good human beings in this world than bad ones. Second Amendment supporters study history and make educated choices based on established and undeniable fact. Gun control fanatics speak only from fear of firearms and frustration that they are outnumbered and have no facts to support their claims.

      P.S. You started off sounding neutral. However, I sense that you are leaning to the left. I suggest that you find and visit a shooting range in your area and get your head straight.

      Like

    • Did you watch the video that Joe posted Will? It explains a lot. Have you watched any of the other videos? Maybe you should go back and read all the comments again. You should have found the answers to all of your questions. It is also interesting to read all of the posts by the pro gun control crowd. You can literally feel their fear and you will quickly see that they are just being emotional and the only data that they can produce is questionable at best and quickly refuted. I’m guessing you are quite young.

      Like

  40. Negative Will. Can’t treat the 2nd like driving licenses! Driving is a privilege…keep and bear arms is a RIGHT! If you pass your background check you shouldn’t be needing anything else. For safety reasons, local governments could issue a “constitutional right to carry acknowledgement”, which basically you can use in case of a traffic stop etc. I wouldn’t call it “permit” because NO institution, local or not gives a citizen ANY permit to exercise his/her right. Just like no authority gives you the permit to speak etc. The database you are talking about is gun registration and i am opposed to that. When a citizen is cleared through a thorough background check…that is it! How a safety class and a test can prevent criminals from committing gun crimes escapes me Will.Same for the data base…are you saying the criminals will submit themselves into the database? That’s why they call them criminals: they do NOT obey ANY LAW!!! Come on Will..some common sense here, don’t be a Sager. How to solve the problem of gangs and street crime? Certainty of punishment. ZERO tolerance and leniency. Do this for quite a bit of time and you’ll see crime reduced drastically. The concept is simple: get the criminal off the street and keep HIM/HER in jail/prison. Parole my ass!! No time to play around. I am tired of these social experiments trying to re-educate, re-assimilate and so on. What the results have been for he past 30-40 years? Recidivism. Punishment should be commensurate to the crime obviously. Don’t throw for 20 yr in jail someone that steals an apple. See where am I going?
    Another way to solve the problem is to recognize WHERE the problem is. the problem is black crime and Latino crime, without the two..we would be virtually crime free. We will not solve it until we STOP excusing minorities ..because of whatever stupid reason: white privilege, pink privilege or bs like that. WE are all equal and there is no excuses for behaviors like in the Baltimore riots, the Michael Brown case. We are giving up the rule of law at the cost of the “fake racism” accusations. people need to move forward culturally and these parents in minority neighborhoods need to get a hold of their shit. The left is throwing this Nation into chaos and soon we will become another Brazil. Watch.

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  42. Joe:
    I think it is important to remember that there are government regulations on the Radio and the NSA does monitor our phone calls and internet data, while that is not total control the government has a hand in almost all new ways of communication and free speech. Have you forgot about The Espionage Act? Our government literally took away our freedom of speech. Also more countries than China and North Korea regulate and control vessels of free speech, look at Britain they have tried to regulate porn on the internet. I am in no way advocating for the government to take away our right of free speech, I am a huge advocate for Net Neutrality and i’m incredibly thankful the government has not been able to strangle the web. What you are saying about the freedom of religion is a stretch. Yes, our founding fathers were Christian (not counting the anti-clerics such as Jefferson), but they were deeply separated along denominational lines (Catholics, Protestants, Episcopalian). None of them wanted the other to infringe on their religious beliefs if elected into office, which is one of the reasons why they believed so strongly in the separation of church and state. Your claim that freedom of religion should only apply to Christians because that was/is the major religion of our country is ridiculous, are you forgetting the part that reads “all men are created equal” or do you think that means “only Christians have rights in this society”? Also how does the fact that Mauritania did not outlaw slavery until 2007 have anything to do with freedom of religion or separation of church and state? First off I did not say the founding fathers “would not have had an issue” I said and i quote “they would not have had that big of an issue”, obviously gay marriage would make them incredibly uncomfortable, but if the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same sex marriage they would have got over it because the Supreme Court did nothing unconstitutional.
    Finally back to gun control, I completely agree with you on why the founding fathers created the 2nd Amendment, they wanted to insure the American people will always be able to fight back against tyranny. Now I don’t know what types of guns or how many guns you own, but do you honestly believe that a third of gun owning Americans will be able to successfully defeat the most powerful military in the world? What is your gun going to do against a drone shooting missiles at your house?
    Regarding this statement “The major difference between Second Amendment supporters and gun control fanatics is that Second Amendment supporters actually are right and gun control fanatics actually are wrong. This is not a matter of opinion” I hate to break it you on this one, but you did not support your claim with any evidence, so it is definitely a mater of opinion.
    I’m actually not delusional and I completely recognize that a firearm is in fact an inanimate object and It requires a man or women to use it. I am not denying that. Your claim that there are more good people than bad people is completely subjective, but I will leave you with a revolutionary thought. One bad guy with a gun is still a bad guy with a gun it doesn’t matter how many good people are on this planet
    You clearly do study history and do make educated decisions when it comes to the 2nd amendment and I , but i have stated my opinion on this before. I don’t believe that we really know how our founding fathers would view gun control in this day and age. It is easy to manipulate the meaning of words written more than 200 years ago, we’ve seen both the Democrats and Republicans do it to support their arguments.

    P.S. So far I am starting to lean to the left because although I agree with your views on crime and guns your argument seems to have a lot of holes and fallacies in it, not to mention the fact that you are lacking key evidence.

    Marie:
    Hi Marie, I was taking your post seriously until you attacked my age. You know how old I am for I mentioned it in my September 22nd post. Believe it or not at 17 I do actually have a brain and know how to think for myself. I’m not sure why you even tried to talk to me because i’m too young and don’t know anything. Have a good day Mrs.

    Frank:
    Thanks for explaining this to me now I understand why we do not have such a system. Personally I think we need to come to a compromise in our government our society is too polarized and split down the middle to function. So would you accept this proposal as a compromise? You get to keep your guns and the democrats get at least peace of mind, If not why? Do you not think that our government needs to cooperate and find some common ground on issues? Personally I think our government has thrown the word compromise out of the window, as we can see with the resignation of Boehner.

    Side note: At the time I’m finishing writing this there was a mass shooting at a community college in Oregon. As of an hour ago 10 are dead and 20 are injured.

    Like

    • Will:

      You have this coming.

      Are you trying to send texts to your friends and watch TV at the same time while you are responding to these comments? Please pay attention. It was YOU who first mentioned the topics of free speech, religion and slavery on 09-24-15. I didn’t start replying to you until 09-25-15. The reason why I mentioned them was in response to your statement “What I’m wondering is why no one is talking about what gun control means in 2015.” EVERYONE is talking about it! It means the exact same thing. For years, short sighted, naive liberals have blathered on about how the Second Amendment is no longer needed because it was written just after the Revolutionary War and was only meant to repel a future British invasion. Some have even tried to babble nonsense about how it was actually meant only to appease slave owners in the South so that they could shoot slaves that were trying to escape. You indicated you were “not so sure” about what the authors of our Constitution would say about the Second Amendment today. It has been 27 years since I graduated from high school. Is American history no longer a required course?

      Yes, I realize that the government can monitor telephone calls, radio and television for national security purposes. However, when was the last time you tried to call someone or watch your favorite television show and received only a recorded message stating the transmission was blocked under authority of the U.S. government? As long as you are not breaking any laws or planning criminal acts, then you have nothing to fear. I did not say that China and North Korea are the ONLY countries that regulate free speech, I was just merely using them as examples and didn’t believe that it was necessary to list any more. Why on earth would you use the UK and their attempt to regulate pornographic material as an example? What exactly are your priorities I wonder? Remember, you’re still only 17.

      I do not have a problem with anyone else’s religion as long as they are respecting mine, not attempting to force theirs upon me and not stoning women to death for looking at a man who is not her husband or hijacking airplanes and crashing them into buildings. In case you were not aware, Catholics, Protestants and Episcopalians are still Christians. I made absolutely no claim that freedom of religion should only apply to Christians. If you would read it again, I was merely just comparing that type of thinking to the belief that some may have regarding the true intention of the Second Amendment as it applies today.

      It is not uncommon for some young people to feel the need to rebel against what they determine to be “the establishment” to some degree. I understand. I have been your age, but you’ll have to live another 28 years to be mine. Your earlier comments seem to show at least some negativity towards the founders of our nation. You liked to mention that many of them owned slaves. This is of course true. If you would conduct a little research, you would know that slave ownership was very common before the United States was founded and that the US was only one of many countries where it was allowed.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery

      If you seriously believe that if the Supreme Court would have allowed homosexuals to get married in 1789 and the founding fathers would “not have had that big of an issue with it”, then you seriously need to study your history a little more. People back then were a lot more religious and homosexuality was considered a sin and was an illegal act. The Supreme Court at that time would have never approved of it.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodomy_laws_in_the_United_States

      Since you have never served in the military as I did before you were born, let me inform you of a few facts. The armed forces of the United States are comprised of men and women that are from the United States and maybe some of the US territories. That is why it is the world’s most powerful military. In case you were unaware, drones are not robots. They are machines that are controlled by members of our armed forces. These men and women would never attack other US citizens and would refuse to follow any such order unless the citizens they were ordered to attack posed a clear threat to innocent civilians. The Second Amendment is meant to serve as the free citizens last line of defense against tyranny. I wonder if any of your teachers (you are not home schooled by any chance are you?) ever mentioned the Battle of Athens. No, not Athens in Greece. I mean Athens, Tennessee. No, this did not occur during the Civil War. It occurred in 1946.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Athens_(1946)

      I hate to break it to you on this one, but my statements in fact are backed up by evidence that you would have been able to see for yourself if you really had read all of the previous posts as you have claimed. My observation after having lived over 40 years regarding how there are more good people in this world then there are bad people is absolutely true. Otherwise, we would not have freedom or democracy, only anarchy, barbarism and starvation. Now that is a revolutionary thought. It seems that you have forgotten your own comments from 09-24-15 when you stated, ” Personally, I am not concerned with the amount of violent acts in a society. Obviously that will never go away people will always hurt and kill people and gun control will not stop that.”


      How did you like that little piece of key evidence?

      Side note: Deranged people that want to commit mass murder normally choose places like public schools or college campuses because they want victims that are unarmed. When was the last time you heard of a mass shooting at an NRA convention?

      Like

      • Ironically, the NRA often bans attendees to its conventions from carrying guns. For example, the last annual NRA convention allowed “open carry” but only of unloaded guns that have had their firing pins removed: http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/04/07/1376216/-Gun-Control-at-NRA-Convention

        Unlike many gun nuts, the NRA knows how dangerous large gatherings with guns can be and take sane steps to protect themselves–they can tolerate large numbers of children being killed if it generates higher profits, but are unwilling to put their own skin in the game.

        Like

    • I must have overlooked your post on Sept. 22nd Will. But I correctly ascertained that you were only a baby just from reading your posts on the 24th and the 29th. I was not attacking your age. You seem a little sensitive about that. Have others attacked your age in the past? Maybe you should take the hint and stick to talking to other teenagers for now and not try to wiggle into adult conversations. There, you just had a learning experience. I have to go now, I have my own teenagers to raise. Good day kiddo.

      Like

  43. ..Who is more dangerous the “gun nuts” or the leftist communist/nazi like you that doesn’t verify the information before publishing. Frankly being a “nut” i better than approving and funding the killing of babies and sale of their body parts or attempt gun confiscation at every “mass murder” while ignoring the holocaust happening in major cities like Baltimore, Chicago and so on. Better be a “gun nut” than someone that approves hundreds of thousands of refugees with dubious or no background check done while pushing for background checks for law abiding citizens that want to exercise their RIGHT (makes sense, right?).
    You progressive morons are a bunch of sneaky weasels and despicable liars. Obviously you didn’t check the facts before publishing because the objective of lefty commy/nazi (same shit) like yourself and the Islamic terrorist friendly Obama is to take people’s RIGHTS away, not the truth. But guess what…it will not work, one way or another.
    On the merit: NRA DIDN’T forbid anyone from LEGALLY carrying at their conventions. They have to OBEY local laws for concealed carry and the ONLY guns that had heir firing pin removed were the ones on display.
    Making a fool of yourself, moron.

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  44. Pingback: Refuting Anti-Gun Control Arguments | The Progressive Cynic | Athe1stP0werBlog

  45. Pingback: RANT #1: GUN CONTROL | zachellisrants

  46. I commend you Mr Sager on a very well researched and closely argued essay.

    The proof of the pudding-as they say-is in the eatin!. And no one has yet managed to eat your lunch!

    First of all I commend your patience. You’ve attracted many braying, hostile and uninformed-not to say rude and personally mean- comments on these pages. Of course that immediately indicates the likely wit- or lack thereof- of the poster and is easily dismissed. Buy you would be less than normal if you didn’t find mere rehearsal of what is essentially”you’re wrong!! Because I say so” annoying or the frequent digressions on your possible sexual, political or social preferences well beyond ill-mannered. You have my sympathies, and admiration for your patient tolerance.

    But more than that, your arguments have “stood up”. I’ve reviewed the “arguments” of those who protest you several times now and for the most part there is really nothing by way of refutation. (Protesting your opinions is clearly NOT the same as refutation. Neither is the -either disingenuous or stupid- recital of the several widely discredited and widely rebutted memes that comprise the few attempts to actually engage on the substance, the data or the logic of your arguments.) I see little that definitively rebuts you.

    So well done you!

    I am sure by now you realize-if you didn’t before- that so many of the God, guns ‘n liberty crowd have an almost religious (and frequently hysterical) approach to this subject). You will never convince then, (as Galileo could not convince the fundamentalists of the medeival church) that any form of gun control is needed. And-to paraphrase- “yet it is”. For most of these people, gun culture is truly a religion and “no controls” are a dogma that is fundamental.

    And yet there are those of us-surprisingly perhaps- who are gun owners and enthusiasts , sports shooters and hunters who feel little affinity with the hoot and holler crowd, As one of those, the idea of unfettered access to powerful weaponry for one and all irrespective of mental health or stated purpose, is simply insane. In the long run, stupidity cannot persist, and so I think we face the choice of being responsible citizens now, or possibly loosing our pastimes and outlets. In this regard, I would say that the NRA and the gun fundamentalists are doing us a great disservice, ironically shooting the rest of the “gun enthusiast” community in the foot!

    And this, by the way, is an important point. Its often not understood that there is a large community of responsible gun enthusiasts out there. We are happy to have our weapons registered and access regulated, and in general to comply with regulations that most folk see as reasonable. But our quiet voices are drowned out by the loud and strident voices of the angry, reactive and politically charged. Please remember the rest of us. We are not them!

    Thanks again and good luck in your efforts. Good luck to all those who believe in responsible and safe gun control. Don’t let others speak for you and poison the discussion !

    Like

  47. ANY article that references “assault rifles” in a context that they are by definition more dangerous than a handgun pretty much establishes itself as an exercise in fear-mongering and ignorance.

    “…get their hands on (ex. assault rifles).”

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  48. Pingback: How to argue with your NRA-loving drunk uncle about gun control - Pasawai.com

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  50. Pingback: Things That Matter: Rescuing the “Right” | Home is Where the Heart Is

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