Now that's comical...

Okay. Serious question:

I understand the logic of armed citizenry. I even agree, to a certain extent with the wisdom of that concept. After all, a citizenry who aren't armed are potentially at the mercy of powerful armed governments. What I don't understand is the desire to walk around armed. Is life so dangerous that people feel the need to carry weaponry wherever they go? Who/what does the gun protect them from? How likely is it that someone will need to use their gun?

They opt for silly shirts.

If there were known to be a vampire in your city, would you carry garlic with you? I mean, it's just one vampire, what are the chances that you'll run into him? On the other hand, what's the harm in carrying a little garlic with you? It can't hurt, and it just might save your life.

To a responsible gun owner, there is no reason not to carry in most situations. And if it saves you or a random stranger's life from a crime just once in your entire life, wouldn't it be worth it?

I like that analogy Clodfobble!

I would carry garlic if I knew there was a vampire in my city, of course I would. But I wouldn't carry 1 crossbow, tip dipped in holy water, vampires, for the despatch of - check.

In my case I think it's solely the environment I grew up in. If you grow up with an unarmed populace, carrying guns is more likely to seem unnecessary, and people defending carrying concealed guns for a trip to the park will sound militant. I'm happy to admit YMMV however.

That's an interesting analogy Clod.

You're kidding yourself. Your "populace" is no more "unarmed" than it is "drug-free".

Much less likely than if it was known that all the law-abiding are unarmed.

How likely is it that your home will burn? Yet you still have fire drills, fire extinguishers and smoke alarms, don't you? And having them, the likelyhood that a small conflagration will grow to consume an entire building is vastly reduced.

If someone dropped a lit cigarrette in a rubbish bin, would you simply call the fire brigade and wait? After all, *they* are the trained professionals...

On the surface, that's a great analogy. But for it to be fully accurate, those things you listed would also have to sometimes cause fires as well as protect against them.

:thumb:

Ironically, having it usually means not needing it.

And nothing de-intellectualizes an argument like being one-on-one with someone who wants you to die and has the means to make it happen. I see all the chin stroking logic going on in this thread and wonder how far it would get you when you absolutely, positively need to kill someone in order to stay alive.

The shortest unit of time in the universe is the time it takes for someone staring down the barrell of a gun to realize that the feebly constructed intellectual argument they have been clinging to like a warm blanket is about to cost them their life.

Bad guys have guns. Blame whoever you want but they do. Do whatever you want and they still will. So you can be the principled recipient of a bullet in the head or you can level the playing field. I have no objection to whichever choice you make and ask why anyone thinks they have the right to make that choice for me.

How likely is it that I will need it? To address the question is to quantify my need for one. To quantify is to justify. To whom must I justify? And exactly how is it that I am accountable to them? I don't recall relinquishing that control.

All analogies have non-congruent features, or they wouldn't be analogies. But I will point out that there are many more things in the world that spontaneously cause fires (hypergolics, highly-reactive metals, strong oxidizers) than there are weapons that spontaneously cause violence. Weapons don't cause violence...and that's the flaw in *your* implcit analogy.

If you're intent on demonizing tools that can be used for defense as well as to commit crime, rather than holding responsible the people who actually commit the crime (because it causes less cognitive dissonance to your no-fault sense of relativistic humanism, perhaps?) then I'm afraid that there's not much that can repair your logic.

"If" indeed. You're saying my logic is flawed, that I think nobody is responsible for their actions, and that it all confuses me. Fuck you. You're reading an awful lot into my post.

Yes. I've stated in the past that weapons are tools. We've covered this before. Your analogy above says that weapons are tools only for preventing crime. I'm pointing out that weapons are also tools for committing crime. Pretty simple really.

Maybe I should have typed "be used to cause" instead of "cause," but I forgot that I was dealing with the queen of semantics. Sloppy of me.

I could quite easily use a smoke alarm to start a fire if that was my intent. It's the people and their intent that matter, not the tools.

Words matter too. "Semantics" is the science of meanings, not a reason to dismiss an argument.

Notice how quickly the choir chimed in with the "guns are evil" chant right behind you.

Never mind, I know better than getting into these discussions!