Blind groper wrote:Admittedly my argument carries little weight with those people who do not care about other people being hurt and dying. It carries weight only with people who actually care.
This is the most disgusting fallacy and false claim that you have made, implying that because we support the proper use of handguns in self defense we "do not care about other people being hurt and dying." This is flatly a lie and a strawman fallacy.
I care deeply about other people being hurt and dying
at the hands of criminals and despots,because they have been deliberately disarmed by their own government at the behest of paranoid hoplophobes.
You repeat your ridiculous canard again and again only because you refuse to acknowledge that handguns are frequently used by law-abiding citizens to prevent or thwart crimes. You use bogus statistical arguments from debunked anti-gun researchers while refusing to acknowledge that this is not a statistical argument and never has been. It is YOU who doesn't care about other people being hurt and dying
at the hands of criminals and despots. You cruelly and knowingly reduce every individual who has been or might be victimized by a criminal to nothing more than a statistic, a faceless number in your evil calculus. You portray a false concern about suicidal persons and people who are actually murdered by handguns as a part of your mindless and paranoid fear of handguns while simultaneously ignoring and denying the actual documented incidents to which this thread is dedicated (and I've not posted a millionth of the yearly instances of lawful defensive gun uses) as if they never occurred. You don't even discuss or challenge the examples posted here, you just mendaciously ignore them so you can spout your propaganda.
But each and every person on this planet has an unalienable right to effective self-defense, and the modern handgun is the best and most flexible tool of self defense that exists. It's not for you or your ilk to say to ANYONE that because some mentally unhinged person might misuse a handgun to commit suicide (your favorite red herring canard) it is necessary that everyone else give up their right to effective self-defense. Sorry, but the small number of suicides who happen to use handguns to kill themselves can never justify making the other 300 million people in the US, or the other umpty-billion people in the rest of the world, into unarmed, helpless victims for criminals to prey upon.
In fact, there is no supportable moral or ethical argument to be made that
even one person, including someone who might be depressed and contemplating suicide, should be disarmed and left helpless to defend himself against criminal victimization because he MIGHT decide (or might NOT decide) to eventually turn his gun on himself. It's his sovereign right to be armed for self-defense OR suicide, because it is ALSO his unalienable right to end his life at the time of his choosing.
Respecting the suicide's right to end his life, and respecting each individual's right to decide for themselves whether it is necessary for them to carry a handgun for self-defense
is in no way an indication of disrespect or callous disregard for anyone's life, it is in fact a deep and abiding respect and concern for those who might be victims of violent crime who could protect themselves and others should they choose to exercise their individual right to effective self-defense.
When I say "fuck 'em" in regard to suicidal people, it is
in the context of your fallacious argument that the risk to the suicidal person posed by the existence of handguns in our society somehow justifies depriving the vast majority of people who properly and lawfully possess and use handguns for self-defense. It doesn't. My, or any other individual's right to exercise effective self-defense CANNOT rationally, morally or ethically be conditioned upon the needs of mentally deranged persons who might choose to end their lives with a handgun. There is simply no argument to be made that supports this ridiculous premise.
Everyone BUT the suicide has a superior unalienable right to effective self-defense that cannot vitiated by the suicide's potential deadly derangement.
This is not an indication of unconcern or lack of sympathy or empathy for the suicide, it's a rational and logical expression of the understanding that in any balancing of rights, the individual who is placed in peril by criminal action is more entitled to possess and use effective tools of self-defense (as you yourself have quixotically admitted) than the potential suicide is entitled to be protected against his own deliberate acts and intentions by prohibiting handguns.
"Seth is Grandmaster Zen Troll who trains his victims to troll themselves every time they think of him" Robert_S
"All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
"Those who support denying anyone the right to keep and bear arms for personal defense are fully complicit in every crime that might have been prevented had the victim been effectively armed." Seth
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