Why BG's cherry-picking is dishonest

[pErvinalia]

Seth, you cherry-picked an opinion piece which itself cherry-picked Russia of all countries to which the US could be compared. Well done.

It's highly likely Seth doesn't understand this.

Of course I understand it, that's why I cited the article.

It's as I suspected. You actually don't understand Brian's point.

[Brian Peacock]

I have 'strong gun-control leanings,' but then again I don't live in a society where guns are prevalent, or at least prevalent enough that one could reasonably assume someone or other might actually possess one and/or have one on them. I have strong knife-control leanings and strong explosive-control leanings too, even though I possess a good number of potentially lethal edged implements and can look up the recipe for a DIY explosive on the internet if I chose to. In the society I live in such controls don't limit my freedom nor adversely impinge on my personal security.

Of course they do. I suspect that if you start looking up explosive recipes on the Internet in the UK you're going to come to the attention of MI6 and a bunch of other 3-letter agencies.

And your inability to (legally) carry a defensive weapon of any sort, including non-lethal chemical sprays like Mace or OC spray, absolutely limits your freedom and your personal security. Just because you may never have had occasion to need a defensive weapon so far does not mean you won't need one in the next 30 minutes.

Thinking you're "safe" from crime is a very common delusion, particularly for the sheeple in Europe, who have been indoctrinated to think that they don't "need" to take care of themselves, the government will do it for them. Of course anyone with a lick of sense knows that when seconds count, the police are only minutes away.

What I was pointing towards was exactly the kind of cultural difference you outline here. I may be the victim of a crime, but the chances of it being a violent crime is small, increasingly so according to recent figures. But even that slim possibility does not necessarily justify me carrying a knife or a gun for self - defence purposes. If the possibility of a percieved threat justified whatever potential response would be needed to overcome it we'd all have tanks, attack helicopters, and EMP hardened underground bunkers. The simple fact of the matter is that, in my society, I don't have to be that fearful, and indeed, am not that fearful.

I get the feeling that you think that this kind of society is a weak society full of weak 'sheep' just doing what they're told by the powers that be. That appears as a massive projection on your part, one speaking far more eloquently about your own relationship to your own cultural circumstances than it ever speaks of mine.

[Seth]

What I was pointing towards was exactly the kind of cultural difference you outline here. I may be the victim of a crime, but the chances of it being a violent crime is small, increasingly so according to recent figures. But even that slim possibility does not necessarily justify me carrying a knife or a gun for self - defence purposes. If the possibility of a percieved threat justified whatever potential response would be needed to overcome it we'd all have tanks, attack helicopters, and EMP hardened underground bunkers. The simple fact of the matter is that, in my society, I don't have to be that fearful, and indeed, am not that fearful.

The actual question is why neither you, your compatriots, nor your government trusts that you can possess weapons for self-defense without misusing them?

It's one thing to say that you want to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but how does that translate into taking guns away from you? The "you" being the body of law-abiding people who make up the society. The level of mistrust of others in your culture is positively infantile. You say that you don't have to be fearful, but it's clearly evident that you are more fearful of your neighbors being armed than you are of criminals being armed. If you maintain that it's not fear of your fellow law-abiding citizens that drives the cultural disarmament you live under, then what is it?

MrJonno is the exemplar for the sort of cultural paranoia that I'm describing. He wants everyone disarmed because he's deathly afraid that someone will hurt him if they aren't.

The fallacy of this logic is that the people he needs to fear the most, the criminals, will always be armed, whereas the only people that gun (or other defensive arms) bans can even potentially disarm are not only the very people he does not need to fear, but they are in fact the very people who might be able to come to his aid should he be victimized by a criminal.

Take OC spray, Tear Gas or Mace for example. In the UK, it's forbidden to possess such chemical defense weapons. Why? Well, last I heard, it was because some criminals used them to disable victims. The reaction to that was not to allow the potential victims to carry non-lethal defensive weapons with which they could prevent victimization, the utterly irrational response from your government was to ban such defensive arms on the utterly asinine theory that doing so would prevent criminals from using them as disabling weapons. Of course that didn't work because criminals get weapons, or they make them, if they want them. They can get a cup full of acid that will accomplish the same thing, or a tin of lighter fluid and a butane lighter.

What your government did was nothing more than make you and every other law-abiding person in the UK easier to victimize by making it quite safe for a thug to rob you on the street without the least bit of fear he'll get his comeuppance at the hands of his victims, or their neighbors.

The reactions of your fellow citizens to the brutal beheading of a soldier in the middle of the street is an absolute travesty. Not only did no one try to stop the killing, they stood there shooting cell-phone video and gave the terrorists a perfect platform for their political message. I have never seen a more sheep-like reaction to horrific violence than that in my life.

The point of this example is to show that whereas you may feel "safe" in your country, you are not safe, and your own crime statistics prove it beyond any doubt.

The simple fact is that no one is safe from crime. Not anywhere, not ever. Your risks may be small, but they are non-zero, which means that logically you need to be prepared to provide for your own defense because it's damned clear that in your country, nobody else will do it for you, including the police. Every single crime-reduction program in the UK is after the fact. The crime occurs and the police investigate. Maybe they arrest someone, maybe they don't. But even if they do their efforts then focus on redeeming the criminal, not on preventing him from committing more crimes. The millions up on millions of video cameras in the UK that create a police state beyond the wildest imagination of George Orwell do absolutely nothing to prevent crime. They provide evidence perhaps. They might, using facial recognition, allow exclusion of known criminals, but they do not and cannot stop a crime in progress, so the victim gets victimized anyway, and the police come along and clean up later. The actions of your government in prosecuting victims who dare to defend themselves, and in giving the criminal a cause of action for injuries sustained while committing a crime boggles the mind. The notion of allowing a criminal to recover civil damages from the homeowner who thwarted his home-invasion burglary by smashing the perp's kneecaps with a cricket bat it pure, unmitigated insanity on a societal level.

The false premise that an armed citizenry increases crime by making weapons more available to criminals is not just a fallacy of composition, but it's also a fallacy of confusing cause and effect.

I've been carrying a gun every day for nearly 30 years now, and my doing so in no way causes or facilitates the criminal acquisition and/or use of firearms. To try to blame the law-abiding public for facilitating gun crime by owning guns is as irrational as blaming the car-owning public for facilitating drunken driving. I know this is a hoary old comparison, but it's a valid one that nobody has the guts to rationally challenge. The only argument ever presented in rebuttal is along the lines of "well, we need cars, and they have a legitimate purpose and use, but nobody needs a gun, which is an implement of murder."

I've heard this ridiculous assertion ten thousand times and it remains as evasive and irrational as ever.

Nobody "needs" a car...unless they need one. Nobody "needs" a gun...until they need one. We allow people to buy cars and own them on the premise that they can be trusted to own them without misusing them, but if they do misuse them, then they are punished for doing so. Using the mindless logic of hoplophobes, nobody would be allowed to own a car and everybody would have to hire "qualified professionals" to drive them on an as-needed basis...but only if some government bureaucrat decides that the "need" for you to travel is "legitimate" and is not merely a frivolous and dangerous lark.

Guns are absolutely no different. Not even a little bit. Cars are statistically and factually more dangerous than guns are, but we still trust our fellow citizens to own and operate them according to the rules of society and we wait for them to violate those rules before we strip them of their right to own a car. The same is true of guns in the US, and should, by all rational argument and logic, be the same everywhere.

You are only safe until you aren't, and in my view no one has the right or authority to deny you defensive armament against your perception of the risks you face any more than they have the right to deny you an automobile because they disagree with the necessity and appropriateness of placing others at risk by operating it on the highway because your "need" is frivolous or unimportant.

My gun and I are no more risk to the general public than my car and I are, and in point of fact are far, far less of a risk to non-criminals than my car is merely based on the physical characteristics and use of the car, which exposes thousands of times more people to harm during my operation of the car than does my holstered handgun.

That you would trust your fellow citizens to own and operate automobiles but not to carry a gun is the very definition of irrationality based in paranoid fear of your fellow citizens.

I get the feeling that you think that this kind of society is a weak society full of weak 'sheep' just doing what they're told by the powers that be.

I don't "think" it, it's absolutely and demonstrably true.

[JimC]

What you don't get, and never will, is that citizens of developed countries in the civilised world couldn't give a flying fuck about the ravings of a crazed minority of American gun nutters, and are absolutely happy to live in a world where guns appear very, very rarely...

[Brian Peacock]

What I was pointing towards was exactly the kind of cultural difference you outline here. I may be the victim of a crime, but the chances of it being a violent crime is small, increasingly so according to recent figures. But even that slim possibility does not necessarily justify me carrying a knife or a gun for self - defence purposes. If the possibility of a percieved threat justified whatever potential response would be needed to overcome it we'd all have tanks, attack helicopters, and EMP hardened underground bunkers. The simple fact of the matter is that, in my society, I don't have to be that fearful, and indeed, am not that fearful.

The actual question is why neither you, your compatriots, nor your government trusts that you can possess weapons for self-defense without misusing them?

Is that the 'actual question', or is that just a question, or a shifting of the goal posts to avoid the point?

It's one thing to say that you want to keep guns out of the hands of criminals, but how does that translate into taking guns away from you? The "you" being the body of law-abiding people who make up the society. The level of mistrust of others in your culture is positively infantile. You say that you don't have to be fearful, but it's clearly evident that you are more fearful of your neighbors being armed than you are of criminals being armed. If you maintain that it's not fear of your fellow law-abiding citizens that drives the cultural disarmament you live under, then what is it?

MrJonno is the exemplar for the sort of cultural paranoia that I'm describing. He wants everyone disarmed because he's deathly afraid that someone will hurt him if they aren't.

The fallacy of this logic is that the people he needs to fear the most, the criminals, will always be armed, whereas the only people that gun (or other defensive arms) bans can even potentially disarm are not only the very people he does not need to fear, but they are in fact the very people who might be able to come to his aid should he be victimized by a criminal.

Take OC spray, Tear Gas or Mace for example. In the UK, it's forbidden to possess such chemical defense weapons. Why? Well, last I heard, it was because some criminals used them to disable victims. The reaction to that was not to allow the potential victims to carry non-lethal defensive weapons with which they could prevent victimization, the utterly irrational response from your government was to ban such defensive arms on the utterly asinine theory that doing so would prevent criminals from using them as disabling weapons. Of course that didn't work because criminals get weapons, or they make them, if they want them. They can get a cup full of acid that will accomplish the same thing, or a tin of lighter fluid and a butane lighter.

What your government did was nothing more than make you and every other law-abiding person in the UK easier to victimize by making it quite safe for a thug to rob you on the street without the least bit of fear he'll get his comeuppance at the hands of his victims, or their neighbors.

The reactions of your fellow citizens to the brutal beheading of a soldier in the middle of the street is an absolute travesty. Not only did no one try to stop the killing, they stood there shooting cell-phone video and gave the terrorists a perfect platform for their political message. I have never seen a more sheep-like reaction to horrific violence than that in my life.

The point of this example is to show that whereas you may feel "safe" in your country, you are not safe, and your own crime statistics prove it beyond any doubt.

The simple fact is that no one is safe from crime. Not anywhere, not ever. Your risks may be small, but they are non-zero, which means that logically you need to be prepared to provide for your own defense because it's damned clear that in your country, nobody else will do it for you, including the police. Every single crime-reduction program in the UK is after the fact. The crime occurs and the police investigate. Maybe they arrest someone, maybe they don't. But even if they do their efforts then focus on redeeming the criminal, not on preventing him from committing more crimes. The millions up on millions of video cameras in the UK that create a police state beyond the wildest imagination of George Orwell do absolutely nothing to prevent crime. They provide evidence perhaps. They might, using facial recognition, allow exclusion of known criminals, but they do not and cannot stop a crime in progress, so the victim gets victimized anyway, and the police come along and clean up later. The actions of your government in prosecuting victims who dare to defend themselves, and in giving the criminal a cause of action for injuries sustained while committing a crime boggles the mind. The notion of allowing a criminal to recover civil damages from the homeowner who thwarted his home-invasion burglary by smashing the perp's kneecaps with a cricket bat it pure, unmitigated insanity on a societal level.

The false premise that an armed citizenry increases crime by making weapons more available to criminals is not just a fallacy of composition, but it's also a fallacy of confusing cause and effect.

I've been carrying a gun every day for nearly 30 years now, and my doing so in no way causes or facilitates the criminal acquisition and/or use of firearms. To try to blame the law-abiding public for facilitating gun crime by owning guns is as irrational as blaming the car-owning public for facilitating drunken driving. I know this is a hoary old comparison, but it's a valid one that nobody has the guts to rationally challenge. The only argument ever presented in rebuttal is along the lines of "well, we need cars, and they have a legitimate purpose and use, but nobody needs a gun, which is an implement of murder."

I've heard this ridiculous assertion ten thousand times and it remains as evasive and irrational as ever.

Nobody "needs" a car...unless they need one. Nobody "needs" a gun...until they need one. We allow people to buy cars and own them on the premise that they can be trusted to own them without misusing them, but if they do misuse them, then they are punished for doing so. Using the mindless logic of hoplophobes, nobody would be allowed to own a car and everybody would have to hire "qualified professionals" to drive them on an as-needed basis...but only if some government bureaucrat decides that the "need" for you to travel is "legitimate" and is not merely a frivolous and dangerous lark.

Guns are absolutely no different. Not even a little bit. Cars are statistically and factually more dangerous than guns are, but we still trust our fellow citizens to own and operate them according to the rules of society and we wait for them to violate those rules before we strip them of their right to own a car. The same is true of guns in the US, and should, by all rational argument and logic, be the same everywhere.

You are only safe until you aren't, and in my view no one has the right or authority to deny you defensive armament against your perception of the risks you face any more than they have the right to deny you an automobile because they disagree with the necessity and appropriateness of placing others at risk by operating it on the highway because your "need" is frivolous or unimportant.

My gun and I are no more risk to the general public than my car and I are, and in point of fact are far, far less of a risk to non-criminals than my car is merely based on the physical characteristics and use of the car, which exposes thousands of times more people to harm during my operation of the car than does my holstered handgun.

That you would trust your fellow citizens to own and operate automobiles but not to carry a gun is the very definition of irrationality based in paranoid fear of your fellow citizens.

I get the feeling that you think that this kind of society is a weak society full of weak 'sheep' just doing what they're told by the powers that be.

I don't "think" it, it's absolutely and demonstrably true.

I get that you don't trust your government or compatriots not to threaten your life or use violence against you, but I just don't have those fears. You might think it's weak or sheepish to live by the assumption that other people are not going to try and kill you, but on the whole I find that they are not. You have also clearly missed my point when I said that even though I have 'strong gun-control' leanings at least I don't live in a society where firearms are so prevalent that it might be reasonable to expect that someone or other could own one or have one on them. As I said, it isn't reasonable for me to assume this, so to a great extend those kinds of fears of violence do not align with the actual risk of violence - over here that kind of fearfulness just begins to look like paranoia.

Perhaps if I was part of a criminal underworld I might feel differently about it, but even within that group lethal violence is relatively rare and mostly self-contained, and as the desperate, the dispossessed, and the drug-addled do not have easy access to firearms I don't have to worry about my friendly neighbourhood mugger or burglar shooting my face off. And so again we're mainly left with the perception of a threat, or the imaginable possibility of a threat being used, as the basis for a justification for possessing personal firearms. Frankly, I'm more concerned about cancer or dementia than about being the victim of a violent crime or being killed, and I'm not actually that concerned about those either.

Similarly, if I get annoyed or angry with a police officer, say on a demonstration or if they come to arrest a member of my family or if they simply decide to bully me in the street, I'm not going to be threatened with a firearm or run the risk of being shot in a fracas because an officer thinks it's reasonable to expect that I might posses a firearm or have one on me - guns are generally not used as a tool of domination by the police force here and an assumption from a police officer that I might have a gun is not a reasonable one. Still, I might get tasered or pepper strayed of course, but the way to avoid that is to not be physically threatening myself and to acquiesce to officers' requests not to be so. And even if a criminal were to threaten me with violence perhaps my best option would be to take the threat seriously, hand over my wallet, and sort the details out later with the insurance company and the police.

But in all this you should not assume that I am unable or unwilling to defend myself just because I don't feel the need to carry a weapon for self-defence purposes. If someone is intent on using violence then I will do whatever I can to reduce my personal risks and injuries. Three young men tried to intimidate me for money while I was at an ATM a few years ago and a smile, a steady gaze, and a "I don't think so," was all it took to put them off. Of course, they were opportunistic amateurs and in different circumstances, in a more serious situation, I would have acted differently, but I still wouldn't have felt the need to escalate the situation in fear of my immanent death. Not having those kind of fears is not a weakness as far as I'm concerned.

Now as far as political violence goes, and despite the incessant political bleating about how we're all supposed to be living in a state of perpetual terror and under constant threat from extremists, I was brought up during the height of the IRA's 20 year bombing campaign and in all reasonableness I fail to see how personal firearms could or can defend against random bombings targeting a civilian population. The murder of Lee Rigby was a tragedy and a horror but the actions of two deluded and deranged religious extremists do not constitute a threat from Islamic death squads. Also you presume that an armed citizenry would have saved that young man's life, but that assertion relies on an assumption that someone on that street at that time was both armed and had the where-with-all to clearly read the situation and act decisively. That still would not have prevented Fusilier Rigby from being run down nor guaranteed that protective action took place before he was subsequently stabbed. In this situation an armed citizenry may have just led to three corpses on the road rather than one.

Finally, your assessment and moral judgement of the UK's national character is irrelevant here. Everywhere is not the US, is not like the US, and nor should it be - the US is not a normative reference by which all societies should be measured. Which brings me back to my initial point. The 'gun-control' issue is not an issue about morals or rights, nor simply a political or legal issue about the proper scope of morality and/or the extent of liberty. Fundamentally it's a social-cultural issue and must be approached and addressed in those terms.

[JimC]

[Seth]

What you don't get, and never will, is that citizens of developed countries in the civilised world couldn't give a flying fuck about the ravings of a crazed minority of American gun nutters, and are absolutely happy to live in a world where guns appear very, very rarely...

If you spoke for every citizen of the world I might believe you, but you don't, you speak only for yourself, but by being part of the conspiracy to deny others their rights you become morally responsible for every single person who is victimized who might not have been victimized if they had been allowed to be armed.

I'm sure you're fine with that though, because Marxists are always fine sacrificing someone else's liberty and life. But when and if you're hoist on your own petard, I suspect you'll be singing another tune, but I won't listen because you will simply be getting what you richly deserve.

[Seth]

What I was pointing towards was exactly the kind of cultural difference you outline here. I may be the victim of a crime, but the chances of it being a violent crime is small, increasingly so according to recent figures. But even that slim possibility does not necessarily justify me carrying a knife or a gun for self - defence purposes. If the possibility of a percieved threat justified whatever potential response would be needed to overcome it we'd all have tanks, attack helicopters, and EMP hardened underground bunkers. The simple fact of the matter is that, in my society, I don't have to be that fearful, and indeed, am not that fearful.

The actual question is why neither you, your compatriots, nor your government trusts that you can possess weapons for self-defense without misusing them?

Is that the 'actual question', or is that just a question, or a shifting of the goal posts to avoid the point?

Yes, it is the actual question.

I get that you don't trust your government or compatriots not to threaten your life or use violence against you, but I just don't have those fears. You might think it's weak or sheepish to live by the assumption that other people are not going to try and kill you, but on the whole I find that they are not. You have also clearly missed my point when I said that even though I have 'strong gun-control' leanings at least I don't live in a society where firearms are so prevalent that it might be reasonable to expect that someone or other could own one or have one on them. As I said, it isn't reasonable for me to assume this, so to a great extend those kinds of fears of violence do not align with the actual risk of violence - over here that kind of fearfulness just begins to look like paranoia.

I trust the vast majority of my fellow citizens to behave peaceably and lawfully, just as I generally trust the government to do the same, which is why I tolerate and even encourage those law-abiding citizens and government agents to keep and bear arms. However, it's hardly paranoid to acknowledge that there are aberrant personalities both in public and in government who are perfectly willing and able to do me, or someone else, violent physical harm. To deny this is an indication of a mental illness that needs treatment. Violent crime happens everywhere. That is simply a fact.

Perhaps if I was part of a criminal underworld I might feel differently about it, but even within that group lethal violence is relatively rare and mostly self-contained, and as the desperate, the dispossessed, and the drug-addled do not have easy access to firearms I don't have to worry about my friendly neighbourhood mugger or burglar shooting my face off. And so again we're mainly left with the perception of a threat, or the imaginable possibility of a threat being used, as the basis for a justification for possessing personal firearms.

He doesn't have to shoot your face off, all he has to do is bash you in the head with a chunk of broken concrete or a cricket bat, or a hammer, or a beer mug or a pocket knife, or a kitchen knife, or his fists and feet. You are locked into the same mental prison as BG in thinking that a defensive firearm is only need for defense against someone armed with a firearm. This is evidence of a severe handicap in reasoning on your part. Worse, this isn't just about defensive handguns, it's about you being denied the right to carry any kind of defensive weapons whatsoever, even non-lethal ones like Tasers or OC spray.

Moreover, you are using your personal analysis of your personal risk of being victimized as a metric for determining public policy for every other person in the country, who may have different levels of risk, but whose right to effective self-defense against an attack, no matter how remote it might be in your opinion, must remain unabridged.

No one is compelling you to carry arms, that's your decision to make. But it's the right of each and every person to individually make that decision because only they will be in the position of needing to use defensive weapons to save their lives. If their perception of threat is inaccurate, so what? If my perception of threat is inaccurate, and I never have to pull my gun for any reason, the fact that I "pointlessly" carry it about year after year does neither you nor society any harm and puts no one at risk. Why then should I not be free to carry those arms I deem reasonable and appropriate for my personal safety, given the environment in which I operate? Why should YOU, or the government, be permitted to second-guess my risk analysis and preparation for response?

The only reason that either you or the government would even think you have the authority to judge my self-defense preparations is if you do not trust me to exercise those rights properly, which is proof positive of my claim that your country's laws are not respectful of the rights of law-abiding individuals and are in fact constructed with the clear implication and intent that your government believes that no one other than police officers have any right to be armed for the purposes of self defense. In other words, your government fears and distrusts you and every other citizen and treats you like children as a result.

Over here, we treat adults like adults and assume they will act like adults and exercise all of their rights responsibly, right up until they don't, at which point we take action to prevent them from abusing their rights in the future.

Frankly, I'm more concerned about cancer or dementia than about being the victim of a violent crime or being killed, and I'm not actually that concerned about those either.

That's great for you, but by what reason or logic to do you presume to force that belief on everybody (or anybody) else?

Similarly, if I get annoyed or angry with a police officer, say on a demonstration or if they come to arrest a member of my family or if they simply decide to bully me in the street, I'm not going to be threatened with a firearm or run the risk of being shot in a fracas because an officer thinks it's reasonable to expect that I might posses a firearm or have one on me - guns are generally not used as a tool of domination by the police force here and an assumption from a police officer that I might have a gun is not a reasonable one. Still, I might get tasered or pepper strayed of course, but the way to avoid that is to not be physically threatening myself and to acquiesce to officers' requests not to be so. And even if a criminal were to threaten me with violence perhaps my best option would be to take the threat seriously, hand over my wallet, and sort the details out later with the insurance company and the police.

That's great for you, but by what reason or logic to do you presume to force that belief on everybody (or anybody) else?

But in all this you should not assume that I am unable or unwilling to defend myself just because I don't feel the need to carry a weapon for self-defence purposes. If someone is intent on using violence then I will do whatever I can to reduce my personal risks and injuries. Three young men tried to intimidate me for money while I was at an ATM a few years ago and a smile, a steady gaze, and a "I don't think so," was all it took to put them off. Of course, they were opportunistic amateurs and in different circumstances, in a more serious situation, I would have acted differently, but I still wouldn't have felt the need to escalate the situation in fear of my immanent death. Not having those kind of fears is not a weakness as far as I'm concerned.

Lucky you. Under other different circumstances you'd be what we in the trade call a "corpse." How does any of that justify your collusion in disarming any of the people who actually do end up as corpses, or merely injured severely at the hands of violent criminals. You have no respect for the rights of others and you look only at your own particular circumstances and biases without considering the fact that your experience is hardly universal.

Now as far as political violence goes, and despite the incessant political bleating about how we're all supposed to be living in a state of perpetual terror and under constant threat from extremists, I was brought up during the height of the IRA's 20 year bombing campaign and in all reasonableness I fail to see how personal firearms could or can defend against random bombings targeting a civilian population. The murder of Lee Rigby was a tragedy and a horror but the actions of two deluded and deranged religious extremists do not constitute a threat from Islamic death squads.

It did for him, or had that fact escaped you? Just because you don't fear attacks by religious extremists doesn't mean other people don't, or that other people are not factually the victims of such people.

Also you presume that an armed citizenry would have saved that young man's life, but that assertion relies on an assumption that someone on that street at that time was both armed and had the where-with-all to clearly read the situation and act decisively. That still would not have prevented Fusilier Rigby from being run down nor guaranteed that protective action took place before he was subsequently stabbed.

There are no guarantees that self-defense actions will be effective. But what is absolutely certain is that nobody standing there did anything at all to prevent the terrorists from chopping his head off. I'm sure there are many reasons no one acted, but it's clear that one of the reasons is because nobody had any sort of weapons-parity with the killers that would give them even a moderate chance of stopping them without being injured or killed themselves.

On the other hand, had it happened here, in my presence, I would have been both equipped and prepared to act immediately with lethal force to prevent the beheading. Whether he survived the car crash is beside the point because there's no way of knowing whether he did, did not, or would or would not have survived the crash because a bunch of sheeple just stood there making cellphone videos as the killers chopped his head off to make sure he was dead.

In this situation an armed citizenry may have just led to three corpses on the road rather than one.

And what exactly would be wrong with that, pray tell?

Finally, your assessment and moral judgement of the UK's national character is irrelevant here. Everywhere is not the US, is not like the US, and nor should it be - the US is not a normative reference by which all societies should be measured. Which brings me back to my initial point. The 'gun-control' issue is not an issue about morals or rights, nor simply a political or legal issue about the proper scope of morality and/or the extent of liberty. Fundamentally it's a social-cultural issue and must be approached and addressed in those terms.

Yes, the US is a normative society against which all societies should be measured, and almost all societies fail that test. Just because the rest of the world is collectively insane doesn't make them sane.

[Brian Peacock]

I express my views from my social and cultural perpective and you call me cognitively deficient. I think we're done here.

[JimC]

To be called "cognitively deficient" by Seth is a sign that you have an astute grasp of the workings of human society, and in fact of the entire universe...

[Seth]

I express my views from my social and cultural perpective and you call me cognitively deficient. I think we're done here.

Actually I said "evidence of a severe handicap in reasoning on your part." I should have formed my thought differently, as I did not intend it as an insult, and I apologize if it was taken that way. My intent was to express dismay at your social and cultural perspective, which appears to be in denial of obvious facts.