Pin number

[Seth]

Brian

The harm Seth is afraid of is not imaginary.

I'm gonna quote you constantly, thanks.

The harm comes from a person carrying a gun.

And here's the lie. No, the harm does not come from a person carrying a gun, by which you mean that any person carrying a gun creates a risk of harm, the harm comes from criminals who carry guns, and knives, and bats, and bottles, and chains, and pipes and any other kind of weapon that can be used to harm someone. No harm comes from other law abiding citizens who carry guns and do so peaceably and safely.

If those guns were not widely available (and this really only applies to hand guns) then Seth would have nothing to require him to carry his own gun to defend against.

Another lie, and totally and completely wrong. It has nothing whatever to do with how widely available guns are, it has to do with how widely CRIMINALS obtain and carry deadly and harmful weapons of every sort.

Get rid of the hand guns, and the harm to defend against will largely disappear.

Wrong.

Threats from daggers, clubs etc are much lower order threats, and can mostly be dealt with by talking or by running.

And you, of all people on earth, think you get to tell people how they might need to defend themselves and then imply that if they use your idiotic suggestions they won't get killed or hurt? Your arguments are far beyond utterly stupid these days. You really need to give it up because you look more foolish than you did before, which I didn't think was possible, but I admit I was wrong about.

You cannot run away from a bullet, though.

Sure you can. All you have to do is move perpendicular to the path of the bullet and get all parts of your body one/half inch outside its trajectory and it won't hit you at all. That's the nature of bullets, you see. James Bond does it all the time. Even he know things you don't and he's a fictional character. You just have to do it at exactly the right time. Or, you have to shoot the guy who's trying to shoot you first, and make sure he cannot shoot at anyone ever again. That's the best way to deal with such threats.

It never ceases to amaze me how movie-makers think they are upping the tension when they have the victim run directly away from the oncoming car, as if they can outrun it. Any non-idiot knows that to avoid being struck by an oncoming car, you move perpendicular to it's path and preferably behind something it can't penetrate...and the same is true of bullets.

Perhaps we need to teach bullfighting skills in schools, so people can learn to pirouette out of the way of oncoming bullets or vehicles.

[Blind groper]

Seth

To defend against a knife or club, all you need is a good pair of running legs. However, running fast will not escape a bullet. Your "need" for a gun for defence arises only because you have politicians with sawdust instead of brains, and allow hand guns to be sold widescale. Without that, the criminals would not have hand guns.

In my country, where hand guns are mostly banned, 99.9% of criminals do not have them, and the tiny percentage that have an illegal hand gun do not carry it in public, because to do so results in arrest and prison.

The end result is that murder by hand gun in NZ is almost non existent. As opposed to very common in the USA.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

I just counted. I have 1,435 pins. But I might have missed a couple.

[Brian Peacock]

The day-to-day life of the average UK citizen alone puts the lie to that.

Sooo...you're claiming that no UK citizen is ever robbed, beaten, maimed, scarred, victimized or killed in the UK? Really?

Nope, that's what you're assuming for rhetorical effect.

Again, you justified your position on the back of: "Some <imaginable harm> therefore guns obligatory." Additionally you bolster your point by implicitly assuming that the social, cultural, economic, and political setting of your home nation represents the ideal global normative - it doesn't - meaning your justification is more like: "Some <imaginable harm here> therefore guns obligatory everywhere."

No, not "guns obligatory" merely "guns optional." Your argument is premised on the specious assumption that nobody every gets victimized or killed in the UK. It's specious because you try to group everyone together using the term "average UK citizen" in order to bolster your argument by implicitly excluding all those "not-average UK citizens" who happen to be unlucky enough to actually be victimized, maimed and murdered in the UK...every day.

Nope, again you're "So what you're saying is..." is your own concoction.

You discount their absolute and sovereign right NOT to be victimized or harmed by crime because they are not "average UK citizens," which you implicitly define as those UK citizens who don't need defensive arms because they don't happen to get victimized or murdered. So what you are in fact saying is that every single UK citizen who is ever victimized or murdered by a criminal is not "average" and therefore can be denied their sovereign right to effective self defense merely because they have the bad luck to be "not-average" and it's more important for you to "protect" the "average UK citizen," meaning the ones who aren't harmed by crime, by denying all the "not-average UK citizens" their rights.

You clearly have no insight into your own arguments failings and, again, are concocting a narrative from fresh cloth to support your position. I'm under no obligation to argue against what I never said, nor to take your reading of it as the de facto truth of the matter.

Of course, the fallacy involved here is that you do not and cannot ever know which citizens are which, which are "average (non-victimized) UK citizens" and which are "non-average (victimized) UK citizens. This is because ANY UK citizen, in fact any person of any country anywhere on earth since Cain slew Abel, CAN BE VICTIMIZED BY CRIME, thus becoming, using your logic a "non-average citizen" who is not entitled to defensive capability.

Yes, as I said, it is an imaginable possibility that any number of bad things could happen to any person at at moment, but the rational thing to do is to assess the risks in accordance with the facts and not imagine novel exceptions to justify a less than impartial reading of the situation at large.

And so you claim that it is unnecessary for ANY UK citizen to be effectively armed for self defense merely because the tautologically-defined" average UK citizen" isn't victimized by crime. But the moment they are victimized, they are no longer "average UK citizens" they become "not-average UK citizens" who can be utterly ignored by you as you deny THEIR self-evident need for self-defense.

Take a pill, you'll give yourself a thrombosis...

Talk about your "No True Scotsman" fallacy, you've just stated it in spades: "No true Englishman needs defensive arms against criminal victimization because any Englishman who is victimized by a criminal is not a true Englishman and may therefore be ignored."

Sheesh.

Feel better now?

Civil order is not an imposition, it's a social contract. It's time for US citizens to renegotiate that contract.

Indeed. And civil order is not established and maintained by the government, it's established and maintained by the citizens of the civil society who demand that civil order be maintained and who are willing to do what is required to establish and maintain it...like arming themselves so that they can provide for the common defense.

As Sir Robert Peel, the Founder of the London (England/UK) Metropolitan Police force said in 1829:

[The police must]...maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

And the public who are the police have every bit as much of a right to be armed in order to provide for the common defense and the suppression of crime as the police do, since all just powers exercised by government flow from the people alone TO their hired agents only by their express consent. And those powers are not abdicated by the people in granting to the government the authority to act in the name of the people. The people retain those powers and may revoke that grant of authority to the government any time they choose to do so, and the government has absolutely no recourse or power to deny the people that right.

Taking the law into your own hands is one option I guess, but tell me, how's the US doing with that whole policing by consent thing Peel was advocating? The test of civil order is the absence of disorder, not the evidence of citizens' eagerness to deal with disorder personally. So the question is, can you trust the state and the police to protect you, can you trust your neighbours not to rip you off or abuse you or do you harm, can you trust the judicial system to deal effectively with those who don't respect the contract? Without these things civil order is impossible, but if you can't trust the state, the police, your neighbours, or the courts then perhaps you're right to strap a gun to your hip and slip a knife down your boot - if they are truly untrustworthy that is.

[Seth]

The day-to-day life of the average UK citizen alone puts the lie to that.

Sooo...you're claiming that no UK citizen is ever robbed, beaten, maimed, scarred, victimized or killed in the UK? Really?

Nope, that's what you're assuming for rhetorical effect.

Indeed. So you are admitting that people do get robbed, beaten, maimed, scarred, victimized or killed in the UK, right?

Again, you justified your position on the back of: "Some <imaginable harm> therefore guns obligatory." Additionally you bolster your point by implicitly assuming that the social, cultural, economic, and political setting of your home nation represents the ideal global normative - it doesn't - meaning your justification is more like: "Some <imaginable harm here> therefore guns obligatory everywhere."

No, not "guns obligatory" merely "guns optional." Your argument is premised on the specious assumption that nobody every gets victimized or killed in the UK. It's specious because you try to group everyone together using the term "average UK citizen" in order to bolster your argument by implicitly excluding all those "not-average UK citizens" who happen to be unlucky enough to actually be victimized, maimed and murdered in the UK...every day.

Nope, again you're "So what you're saying is..." is your own concoction.

No, I'm filling out the logical premises of your argument because you won't do so. You admit above that people do get harmed by crime in the UK, and yet you maintain that it is unnecessary for the "average citizen" of the UK to be armed for self defense. So, either you are saying that those who are victims of crime are not "average UK citizens" or you are simply dismissing their injuries and deaths as irrelevant and that they are acceptable casualties, given that the chances of OTHER "average citizens" of the UK are infrequently harmed by crime.

It has to be one or the other. You don't get to sit on the fence and simply ignore those people who are harmed by crime in the UK because other people aren't harmed and therefore you think that the UK's anti-crime efforts are adequate to protect the "average citizen of the UK." You must address those who ARE harmed and how your government's policies of disarming all citizens affects their rights and their ability to protect themselves.

You discount their absolute and sovereign right NOT to be victimized or harmed by crime because they are not "average UK citizens," which you implicitly define as those UK citizens who don't need defensive arms because they don't happen to get victimized or murdered. So what you are in fact saying is that every single UK citizen who is ever victimized or murdered by a criminal is not "average" and therefore can be denied their sovereign right to effective self defense merely because they have the bad luck to be "not-average" and it's more important for you to "protect" the "average UK citizen," meaning the ones who aren't harmed by crime, by denying all the "not-average UK citizens" their rights.

You clearly have no insight into your own arguments failings and, again, are concocting a narrative from fresh cloth to support your position. I'm under no obligation to argue against what I never said, nor to take your reading of it as the de facto truth of the matter.

Yes, of course you can deny the whole issue and put a sack on your head to hide the suffering of the victims of violent crime in the UK from your eyes, but that does not make your original statements true or supportable. In fact, the lives of "average citizens of the UK" are demonstrably at greater risk than are those of average citizens of the US, as shown by the comparative violent crime rate statistics for each nation and the direction in which such crime rates are going, respectively.

Of course, the fallacy involved here is that you do not and cannot ever know which citizens are which, which are "average (non-victimized) UK citizens" and which are "non-average (victimized) UK citizens. This is because ANY UK citizen, in fact any person of any country anywhere on earth since Cain slew Abel, CAN BE VICTIMIZED BY CRIME, thus becoming, using your logic a "non-average citizen" who is not entitled to defensive capability.

Yes, as I said, it is an imaginable possibility that any number of bad things could happen to any person at at moment, but the rational thing to do is to assess the risks in accordance with the facts and not imagine novel exceptions to justify a less than impartial reading of the situation at large.

Right, like the fact that the average UK citizen (particularly in big cities like London and Glasgow) are more likely to be victims of violent crime than the average UNARMED US citizen. The UK violent crime rate, as reported by the UK itself, is five times higher than the violent crime rate reported by the US.

Now, I suspect you'll parrot the "but the UK reports violent crime differently than the US does, which artificially makes it look worse than it is" line typical of UK anti-self-defense pundits, but the fact remains that according to your own government's definition of "violent crime" average UK citizens are much more likely to be victimized during a violent crime than citizens of the US. Your government chooses what crimes to define as "violent crime," so if there is a difference in definition that you think skews the actual risks of being victimized by violent crime, I suggest you discuss it with your government.

If your government is going to define "violent crime" broadly, that only increases the justification for allowing citizens to be armed for self-defense because it is YOUR government that is categorizing particular acts as "violent crime", not ours.

As to your suggestion that we "assess the risks in accordance with the facts," that's exactly what I'm doing. The indisputable facts are that people in the UK and in the US are victimized by violent criminals and each and every individual person in both countries has a fundamental right NOT to be so victimized and a companion right to provide for their own individual self-defense when and if they are threatened with violence. I would hope that you would agree that these basic rights are indeed indisputable, since I don't see how any rational person could deny them.

I'm going to assume arguendo that you do agree that every individual has a right to absolute safety and self defense in the following argument.

Stating that as a premise, it seems to me that what is at issue here is not whether such rights exist, but rather to what degree the individual is justified in exercising his right to prepare and equip himself against the chance that he will be the subject of a violent criminal attack of some sort. The distinction that we see between the UK and the US is that in the US, law abiding individuals have a wide range of choices for tools of personal defense, from nothing at all to martial arts training to chemical weapons to tasers to firearms, from which they can pick and choose according to their personal preferences.

It appears, however, that in the UK, law abiding individuals are largely prohibited from possessing any tools of self defense whatsoever, including non-lethal ones like OC spray. At best, it appears that citizens of the UK may be trained in martial arts and may use that training if attacked. But, and it's an important exception, I know, as I'm sure you do, that it is the deliberate policy of the Home Office and UK law enforcement to sternly dissuade anyone from resisting a criminal attack
on the premise that resistance is futile and merely leads to greater risk of injury or death. I won't bother to cite the source, you can look it up if you doubt it.

While UK citizens technically are supposed to have a right to defend themselves, this "advice" worms its way into enforcement actions when a victim chooses to take up some sort of arms against a violent crime and in doing so causes injury or death to the criminal attacker. There are a number of notorious cases where a homeowner has taken self defense actions that harmed the burglar, which has resulted in both civil and criminal prosecution of the homeowner and in at least one case, a huge civil award to the home invader for injuries he sustained during his criminal enterprise.

The upshot of the policies and realities of law enforcement and prosecution in the UK clearly demonstrate that UK citizens are MORE LIKELY to be victims of criminality, including violent criminality, precisely because they have been propagandized and effectively forbidden from defending themselves at all, and it's perfectly clear from the disparity in "hot burglaries" in the UK and the US, that criminals are both aware of this and routinely take advantage of this situation to invade homes in the UK while the homeowners are at home, pretty much with impunity. Thus, the rate of "hot burglary" in the UK is massively higher than it is in the US, as is the statistical risk of being burgled in the UK versus the US.

In the US, most of it anyway, "castle doctrine" laws permit homeowners to use any degree of physical force they think is required to prevent a home-invasion burglary, up to and including deadly physical force against an intruder. As a result, the incidence of "hot burglaries" in the US is miniscule compared to the UK, precisely because burglars know they risk getting shot dead if they attempt to burgle an occupied residence.

So, the question becomes who has the better argument vis a vis the right of a citizen to be armed for self defense?

In the UK, the laws favor the criminal and disfavor the individual to the point where the individual is all but commanded to cooperate with criminals who are victimizing them, and they are debarred the possession or effective use of ANY sort of weapon that might effectively put a stop to such an attack, by law. And the result is five times the amount of violent criminal victimization in the UK over that in the US.

To me the answer is perfectly clear. Since it is manifestly true that in the US, where law abiding citizens are permitted to carry defensive arms, there is no significant increase in either violent crime, misuse of such weapons, or accidental discharges resulting in injury, even if the carrying of concealed firearms (or other defensive weapons) does nothing to reduce the absolute number of violent criminal victimizations, permitting the carrying of defensive arms does not increase either criminality or improper/accidental use, and therefore there is no rational reason to prohibit law abiding citizens from doing so.

The argument you and others commonly make is that the number of firearms in a society determines the rate of violent crime, but this has been shown (in the US) to not be true at all. You use this false claim as justification for denying defensive arms to everyone except criminals who choose to be armed for the purposes of committing criminal victimization, who obviously don't obey such laws, and the result is that more people are violently attacked in the UK than in the US, by five to one.

And so you claim that it is unnecessary for ANY UK citizen to be effectively armed for self defense merely because the tautologically-defined" average UK citizen" isn't victimized by crime. But the moment they are victimized, they are no longer "average UK citizens" they become "not-average UK citizens" who can be utterly ignored by you as you deny THEIR self-evident need for self-defense.

Take a pill, you'll give yourself a thrombosis...

That's not a rebuttal, that's an evasion...although an unsurprising one.

Talk about your "No True Scotsman" fallacy, you've just stated it in spades: "No true Englishman needs defensive arms against criminal victimization because any Englishman who is victimized by a criminal is not a true Englishman and may therefore be ignored."

Sheesh.

Feel better now?

Not really. Your government is still allowing people to be victimized, injured and killed based on an utterly false premise, which is simply wrong and evil.

Civil order is not an imposition, it's a social contract. It's time for US citizens to renegotiate that contract.

Indeed. And civil order is not established and maintained by the government, it's established and maintained by the citizens of the civil society who demand that civil order be maintained and who are willing to do what is required to establish and maintain it...like arming themselves so that they can provide for the common defense.

As Sir Robert Peel, the Founder of the London (England/UK) Metropolitan Police force said in 1829:

[The police must]...maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.

And the public who are the police have every bit as much of a right to be armed in order to provide for the common defense and the suppression of crime as the police do, since all just powers exercised by government flow from the people alone TO their hired agents only by their express consent. And those powers are not abdicated by the people in granting to the government the authority to act in the name of the people. The people retain those powers and may revoke that grant of authority to the government any time they choose to do so, and the government has absolutely no recourse or power to deny the people that right.

Taking the law into your own hands is one option I guess, but tell me, how's the US doing with that whole policing by consent thing Peel was advocating?

Quite well, actually, and better and better each and every day as more and more citizens come to understand both their rights and their obligations to society and take it upon themselves to act in the common defense. How's it working over there? Not so well, I see.

The test of civil order is the absence of disorder, not the evidence of citizens' eagerness to deal with disorder personally.

Indeed. But citizens have to be prepared and armed to deal with civil disorder in order to maintain civil order. It's called "deterrence," you see.

So the question is, can you trust the state and the police to protect you,

Depends on the particular risk. In the broad sense, generally speaking, yes. But then again the state and the police can become organs of tyranny just as easily, which is why individual citizens need to be armed, because street crime is not the only potential risk out there, by any stretch of the imagination.

More narrowly however, the answer is a firm and obvious "no, I cannot trust the state or the police to protect me against any specific criminality." The police, you see, not only cannot be there in the instant that I need them to be there to protect me against a specific criminal, but I don't want the sort of society that would be required for the police to be close enough at all times to be effective in protecting me against any particular attack. And the legal fact is that the police have no legal obligation or burden to protect me against any particular criminal attack at all, ever! Many people have tried to sue the police for failing to protect them against a known or obvious threat (much less an unknown one) and the courts are unanimous in saying that the duty of the police to suppress crime does NOT extend to a duty to protect any particular individual against any particular crime. And this is true even if the cop is standing right next to you when the mugger sticks a gun in your ribs and shoots you! He is under NO legal compulsion to either aid or protect you. You are responsible for your own personal safety at ALL times, which is why it's prudent to carry those defensive arms you deem necessary to do so, given your personal analysis of the risks you face on a day-to-day basis.

can you trust your neighbours not to rip you off or abuse you or do you harm,

Depends on the neighbors.

can you trust the judicial system to deal effectively with those who don't respect the contract?

Depends on the judge.

Without these things civil order is impossible, but if you can't trust the state, the police, your neighbours, or the courts then perhaps you're right to strap a gun to your hip and slip a knife down your boot - if they are truly untrustworthy that is.

The problem with your argument is a temporal and geographic error. While it may be reasonable to trust the courts to effectively deal with judging and punishing a criminal who has been apprehended and convicted, and it may be reasonable to leave the investigation of a property crime (any crime really) after the fact up to the police, and it may be reasonable to trust a neighbor with whom you have a long-standing relationship that has created such trust, that's not what we're discussing here at all. When one has the leisure to assess such factors and make rational decisions, then one should do so, but again, that's not at all what's under discussion here.

What we are discussing here, and have always been discussing in relation to the carrying of defensive arms, is the right of every law abiding individual to be armed for immediate self defense in the face of a violent attack where there is no time to call the police or file a complaint with the court or phone a neighbor for help...next tuesday.

The primary reason for an individual to carry defensive arms in public is to give them the capacity to act effectively in the few short seconds, or fractions thereof, in which intervention with defensive arms can effectively deter, thwart or put a stop to a violent attack. Because it is utterly impossible for anyone to predict who will be attacked or where they will be when attacked, and because every individual has a right to effectively defend themselves against sudden and unexpected violent criminal attack, the only way that the right to be armed for effective self defense can be exercised is if the individual is permitted to decided beforehand what level of risk he is willing to accept versus the various factors involved in training with and carrying defensive arms of any kind, from OC spray to a handgun.

When you say the "average citizen of the UK" doesn't need to carry a handgun for self defense you are making a patently false claim based on your own biases and perceptions of the risk of criminal attack as applied on a nationwide basis. But violent crime is not a nationwide issue, it's intensely and absolutely personal to the individual who is being attacked. General observations or policy statements are useless to the person whose skull is being shattered by a brick wielded by a thug who doesn't care that he's not allowed to possess a brick for hitting people with.

The obvious fact is that every victim of a violent crime needs, and has a right to any weapon that will effectively deter or end the attack and prevent injury or harm to the victim. Every. Single. Victim. Without exception. I doubt you would actually disagree with this statement.

But as I've said a thousand times, when you need a gun to apply lawful lethal force to an attacker you don't have time to order one on Amazon...even Amazon Prime. You need it right now, and if you don't have it on your person, and you're not trained in its use and prepared to use it for self defense right now, it's as useless as the cop who would love to help you but is six minutes away right now.

Those of you who advocate against the personal carrying of defensive arms simply do not appear to understand this one simple fact: If whatever you have available for defending yourself against a violent attack is not on your person, or better yet in your hands, at or before the instant that the attack commences, then whatever that is, be it a rock or a pint glass or a handgun, is utterly useless to you.

This is why the banning of the carrying of defensive arms is such a pernicious, ignorant and flatly evil thing for government to do; it makes helpless victims of everyone but the armed criminal, whose avocation is made much, much safer and more convenient when government ensures that their pool of potential victims will not be armed for self defense.

Not one of you has ever even attempted to rationally address this specific fact of life. Every single time I point it out, every one of you simply ignores it...well, except for BG, who just dismisses the notion of armed self-defense entirely as something that never happens and can never be effective even if attempted, which is about as ignorant a statement as it's possible to make given the thousands of times per day it happens in the US alone.

So set aside these general policy statements and address the specifics please. By what right or authority do you, or your government, presume to deny anyone their right to effective armed self-defense and the tools thereof? And how do you morally justify the deaths and injuries and other harms that occur to individuals who have been denied their rights by their government who would or even might not have been harmed or killed had they been permitted to carry effective self-defense weaponry?

I don't think you can morally justify those deaths. I think they bloody the hands of every politician, bureaucrat and individual who participates in disarming law-abiding citizens, and I think every such person is a reprehensible and evil detriment to society who should be stripped naked, have their hands tied behind their backs and be dumped in the middle of the worst slum in Glasgow as an example of how it feels to be helpless against violent criminals.

[Blind groper]

Seth

Crime is universal, and muggings, rapes, assaults and murders happen everywhere. However, they happen less often and less seriously in countries without hand guns. No other western nation, apart from the USA, has a probability for each and every citizen of 1 in 50 of being shot some time in their life.

It is a case of weighing risks. Having hand guns everywhere results in a much higher risk than having hand guns prohibited. It is just that simple.

[laklak]

I just counted. I have 1,435 pins. But I might have missed a couple.

Man, that's one fuck of a lot of angels.

[JimC]

I noticed another one; on the side of an armoured car carrying cash, it mentioned both camera surveillance and tracking by GPS satellite...

They need a name; possibly Acronym Redundancy, or AR...

I can easily imagine AR redundancy...

[Seth]

Seth

Crime is universal, and muggings, rapes, assaults and murders happen everywhere.

Indeed, and therefore the need to be effectively armed for self defense against crime is universal.

However, they happen less often and less seriously in countries without hand guns.

Not relevant. Each individual who is at risk has a fundamental right to keep and bear arms for their individual defense against crime. To say that a person must be disarmed because you think that will make crime happen less often and/or less seriously is idiotic and it completely disregards and disrespects each individual's rights and turns them into nothing more than an acceptable casualty of your moronic, ignorant and flatly evil agenda of making everyone into a helpless victim so that you can bloviate about "statistics," something which you clearly have not even the slightest understanding of.

No other western nation, apart from the USA, has a probability for each and every citizen of 1 in 50 of being shot some time in their life.

Neither does the USA because your fabricated claim is just so much complete ignorant bullshit that has absolutely no basis whatsoever in fact...or statistics.

It is a case of weighing risks.

That's why your agenda is so utterly fucking evil and reprehensible. You anoint yourself the arbiter of other people's rights and lives and safety because you believe, in a very religiously blindered fashion, that the mere existence of guns in a society determines how much crime there is. Of course, this is a blatant denial of your own admissions to the contrary in the past where you have admitted that it's not how many guns there are in a society, but who possesses them.

Having hand guns everywhere results in a much higher risk than having hand guns prohibited. It is just that simple.

No, it's not nearly that simple, as even simpletons understand. Of course you even forget to state a higher risk of WHAT. Yes, banning guns creates a higher risk of innocent people being victimized by crime. On the other hand, one gun in the right place at the right time can prevent a crime. And since neither you nor anyone else can predict where crime will happen, everyone has a right to choose to keep and bear arms for self defense in case it happens to them. Whether you think this increases some "risk" to someone else is utterly irrelevant because the right of the individual to effective self defense absolutely trumps any bullshit statistical argument you might make about "weighing risks." The law abiding individual is the ONLY one who gets to "weigh risks" and decide what, if any, defensive arms to carry.

[rainbow]

Yes, banning guns creates a higher risk of innocent people being victimized by crime.

That is drivel and you know it.


Repeating a lie will never make it the truth.

[Rum]

Yes, banning guns creates a higher risk of innocent people being victimized by crime.

That is drivel and you know it.


Repeating a lie will never make it the truth.

..but surely that explains the incredibly low crime rate in so much of America??

[rainbow]

Yes, banning guns creates a higher risk of innocent people being victimized by crime.

That is drivel and you know it.


Repeating a lie will never make it the truth.

..but surely that explains the incredibly low crime rate in so much of America??

And the incredibly high rates in OZ.

[Brian Peacock]

You can't move for crime round here. It's a good day when I don't lose a half-gross of throwing stars on the way back from the golf course.

[laklak]

There's your problem - golf.

[Seth]

Yes, banning guns creates a higher risk of innocent people being victimized by crime.

That is drivel and you know it.

No, it's a stone-cold fact, as proven repeatedly by US crime rates. When you compare crime rates in "gun free" cities and states to crime rates in "shall issue" concealed carry states you find that where guns are banned more innocent people get victimized by crime. Massively so. Places like Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, LA and other "gun free" gun-banner paradises have astronomical crime rates and some of them have murder rates that have skyrocketed in just the last year or so.

Repeating a lie will never make it the truth.

I wish the useful idiots of socialism would come to understand that...but they appear to be too bone-stupid to do so, and so Marxists keep on repeating Big Lies like "more guns, more crime" even in the face of overwhelming factual evidence of the falsity of the claim anyway, because they know their useful idiots are too stupid to do more than make cow-eyes and murmur Marxist propaganda in herds.