No. of Recommendations: 9
Funny, for something that seems to not happen a lot it seems to...happen a lot. What - another scenario in which having a gun would not have helped at all, and possibly would have made things worse? That doesn't really support your position. The whole point of a smash and grab like this is to
not have any confrontation if there's someone in the house - you don't give them enough time to react before you grab what you want and scram. But there might have been enough time for the occupants to get the gun and try to shoot at them
as they were leaving - which is both a crime
and a recipe for hitting a bystander.
But if we're trading anecdotes, another instance of someone ruining their own life because they had a gun when they didn't need it - this time shooting a kid who was playing hide-and-seek on their property:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/05/09/l...Again, one of the risks
to the gun owner of owning a gun is that they'll destroy their own life by using it in a situation where it's not needed. Situations where that happens are pretty rare, thankfully. But situations where the gun would ever be needed
and available at home are also pretty rare.
One could make this same argument that poorly trained drivers are a threat to waaaaaaaaaaay more people than somebody with a racing pedigree when both are on the highway.
So why not ban cars?Exactly. We
don't ban cars - but we
do take into serious account the fact that they are very dangerous instruments that can cause serious injury or death when people make mistakes with them. So we have an
enormous regulatory regime in place to reduce the chance of that happening: licensure (with regular renewal), registration of vehicles, inspection of vehicles to make sure they're safe, entire codes of law regulating the use and storage and operation of vehicles, and entire law enforcement agencies whose primary function is to monitor and enforce those laws. The specifics vary from state to state, but cars an
enormously regulated. Yet if anyone suggests doing something analogous to even
one aspect of automobile regulations for firearms, they're labelled a gun-grabber that hates freedom.
Imagine for a moment how ridiculous you would consider a "Constitutional Driving" movement to be. If people proposed that we eliminated having driver's licenses and vehicle registration - anyone who wants a car should have the right to get a car and drive a car without government having any role in possibly telling them "no." It's pretty obvious why that's a terrible idea - cars are very dangerous and quite capable of killing or injuring people if not used properly. Yet certain voices on "the right" advocate that carrying a gun around should similarly be free from any licensing, permit, or registration requirement.
We engage in
balancing between the risks posed by dangerous items and the utility of having them. Swimming pools pose a danger to children; so when I put in a swimming pool at my home, I have to install fencing and/or a pool alarm to mitigate that risk. And sometimes that balancing leads to an outright prohibition. It's illegal for me to have
dynamite in my house, regardless of whether I might want to - because the presence of dynamite poses a significant risk to other people, and the utility of allowing me to have dynamite at my house is minimal.
Here's the bottom line: The left's feelings and the relevance thereof are stopped dead cold where our rights to defend ourselves beginHere's the bottom line: the right's "feelings" about crime and the relevance thereof are stopped dead cold where our rights to be protected against accidental gun deaths begin.
See how that doesn't work? Labelling a desire to avoid the
demonstrated negative consequences of a policy as "feelings" isn't a winning argument. It's a sign you aren't going to engage with the argument.
The truth is that having widespread civilian ownership of firearms creates an increased risk to everyone. The argument in favor of allowing such firearms is
not that such risks don't exist, or are merely "feelings" - it's that owners of firearms derive benefits from firearm ownership that are significant enough that they trump those risks, either in a consequentialist (they make us safer!) or deontological (they are our right!) way.
