No. of Recommendations: 1
First you say
I hope that I've been very clear in emphasizing that all of these are infrequent scenarios. The "day your number comes up" is pretty durn unlikely on both sides of the ledger - it's exceptionally unlikely that you will be killed by an intruder you don't know in your home, and it's exceptionally unlikely that you will accidentally kill an innocent person. But you have to consider both possibilities in whether you choose to have a gun or not. It's not like an umbrella, where "having it but not needing it" carries no consequence - and thus there's little balancing in deciding whether to have it and not need it versus need it but not have it.
You've reduced your argument to that of relative probabilities, essentially. You're now saying that the risk of some lawful gun owner accidentally shooting someone trumps the same lawful gun owner using it in the event of an emergency. You also say it's "pretty durn unlikely" that either scenario happens.
But then you say
If you're armed with a gun, you're vastly more dangerous than not. That's the whole point, when guns are owned with the intent of using them for self-defense. You pose more danger to innocent people if you make a mistake. You're a threat - not intentionally, but you pose a much greater danger to everyone around you while you're armed. All of those people who killed innocents who came to their doors? I'm sure if you asked them ex ante, they too would have insisted they weren't a threat to anyone. But it turns out they were.
...which is back to statistics of it all. 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?
Why not ban, well, everything while we're at it?
Here's the bottom line: The left's feelings and the relevance thereof are stopped dead cold where our rights to defend ourselves begin. If I want an enhanced ability to defend myself, I can do so, and that's pretty much the end of that.
