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this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2023
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You are already reliant on the state for defense, whether you admit it or not. The very existence of states requires a functional monopoly on violence, and private gun ownership is just a fig leaf to obscure that fact. A fig leaf that leads to massive, unnecessary loss of life. If your definition of freedom is so limited that not owning a gun makes you automatically un-free, you do not actually believe in freedom, you believe in the right to violently interject yourself into the lives of others. That is pretty much the opposite of freedom.
I'm reliant on the state for defence on a larger scale, but in our personal lives, the state can do little to defend us from other individuals in a timely manner. That is why I believe everyone that is able to should be responsible for their own personal defence.
I've no desire to injerect in others lives, but I do have a desire to protect myself and my family where the state cannot or will not.
Okay, but following that logic, getting rid of all of the guns is still the best thing we could do, because it makes it much harder for people to quickly inflict a huge amount of harm. Ensuring that your local community is free of guns would do far more to protect you and your family than bringing a gun into your home, which you have already acknowledged is a highly dangerous thing to do. It's like arguing that because your neighbor keeps a bear chained up in his yard, you ought to go out and get a bear, to protect yourself from his bear, when the clear answer is just to get the bears out of the neighborhood.
Nice in theory, impossible in practice.
We spend $30+billion/year ensuring our communities are free of drugs. How's that working out? From where I sit we may as well just put the cash in a giant pile and set it on fire, at least that way it would keep somebody warm.
Guns are easier to make than drugs. Any half-decent machine shop can make a gun, and unlike a drug lab, the machine shop has a lot of legitimate 'day shift' uses. Hobbyists make their own (legal) guns all the time in their basements. And the advent of cheap CNC machining tools makes it even easier.
Don't get me wrong- I'm all ears for any proposal that disarms criminals. I don't believe that disarming the law-abiding will help disarm criminals, at least I don't see anywhere in our nation's history where that has worked.
Australia successfully disarmed their populace. This argument does not hold water in the world we actually live in.
Australians now own more guns collectively than they did prior to Port Arthur just FYI, and their buyback only got about 1.2 million of the estimated 3.2 million guns in circulation at the time.