And how is it that you ignore the fact that if violence is called for as a last resort in a one-on-one criminal attack the only reasonable way to prepare for such an eventuality is to carry effective defensive weapons with which you can instantly render your attacker incapable of continuing the conduct that justified your shooting him in the first place?Blind groper wrote:SethSeth wrote:
However, thanks for acknowledging that there is a time when peaceful methods have failed and violence is justified. I've been saying just that all along.
I have never denied that violence, as a last resort, can sometimes be justified. My argument has been that hand guns, which are weapons purely for killing people, should not be widely available, plus that the American gun culture is a real problem.
If the victim does not have a gun, then an assailant armed with ANY sort of weapon, from a tree branch to a knife to a handgun will inevitably prevail over everyone but the most skilled martial artist.
You admit that violence is a valid defensive methodology, but you seek to disarm those who have the greatest need for effective tools of self defense on the silly premise that accidental deaths, suicides and sudden fits of homicidal rage on the part of a very small number of individuals justifies deliberately making helpless victims of the other 299 million people in this nation. You make no sense whatsoever.
By denying law-abiding citizens the single most effective tool of self defense known to man, the handgun, you are in fact denying the right to self-defense. You falsely claim that there is a right to self defense but you would render everyone on the planet helpless to effectively defend themselves merely because a very small number of people commit suicide or illegally murder others with handguns.Nor do I deny the right to self defense. Just the right to own a weapon designed for nothing more than killing people, and which is responsible for half of all murders in the USA and 60% of the suicides. Making that readily available is just idiotic.
You're the essence of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Sorry, but pointing out the illogic and unreason inherent in your arguments by examining the necessary consequences of your preferred plan is perfectly valid.So please do not imply things that I have never said. I get enough straw man arguments from other people.
You can't effectuate a "right to self defense" without the tools of self-defense that enhance the ability of a potential victim to deter or thwart a criminal attack. It's just that simple. In the UK, you can't even carry OC spray or tear gas in an tiny keychain dispenser that you might use to slow down an attacker with. Brits have been effectively utterly disarmed and their government has instructed them that they are not to resist criminal victimization, because in the government's opinion, capitulation and surrender "reduces injuries" in violent attacks. It may do so on a statistical basis, but as I have said, statistical arguments are utter bullshit when it comes to the paramount individual human rights to life, liberty, property and self defense. It's small comfort to the man that's beaten to death, or merely till his brain is mush and he becomes a vegetable, that he's a statistical anomaly in the UK's crime statistics. He'd likely prefer to have been armed with a handgun so he can shoot and kill his attackers, making THEM a statistic in the government's files rather than himself.
So saying that you acknowledge a right to self defense while simultaneously arguing against the single most effective weapon of self defense, the handgun, is empty rhetoric, hypocrisy and mendacious falsehood.
