And the accountant who has decided to kill his wife, will just go Oh, oh well I guess I will go home and have a nice piece of pie instead?????? Seriously think that thru a bit. If he is going to kill his wife, and has made the decision to kill his wife, is she going to be any less dead if he uses a bat, poison, knife, concrete block, rope, electricity, carbon monoxide and on and on?
Guns are very regulated. It is not as simple as just walking in and walking out. Again there is a process in place that keeps guns from dangerous people. It is the law. The law is not obeyed by dangerous people. Law enforcement responds AFTER a crime has been commited. Captures the perpetrator if they can, and then the Justice system determines, guilt and punishment.
Guns are a whole different thing. In the hads of law abiding citizens they can PREVENT crime commited by the unlawful.
Lets boil it down.
You are at home. Your front door is kicked in, two masked men enter. Do you
A. Do whatever they ask and hope for a chance to call 911 and wait 10 minute if you are so lucky to be allowed a chance to phone for help.
B. Shoot them.
Would you rather your wife, daughter, girlfriend?
A. Be raped and make a police report
B. Shoot them
You have a choice to defend your own life or to farm that defense out to others.
Violence still must be commited. You are still responsible for the violence you have only farmed the act out to the police force.
Another way to put that.
When seconds count, the police are only a few minutes away.
Yes I know I am a jerk. I am asking you questions you can not win answering in any other way than I want. I know this. I want you to think about your answer and search inside yourself as to what you would really do. I know what I would do. I made the decision that I will protect my own life, and the lives of those I love.
Read this if you like.
And
that is where ethics and psychology bring us back to the bearing of arms. For causality runs both ways here; the dignity of a free man is what makes one ethically competent to bear arms, and the act of bearing arms promotes (by teaching its hard and subtle lessons) the inner qualities that compose the dignity of a free man.
It is not always so, of course. There is a 3% or so of psychotics, drug addicts, and criminal deviants who are incapable of the dignity of free men. Arms in the hands of such as these do not promote virtue, but are merely instruments of tragedy and destruction. But so, too, are cars. And kitchen knives. And bricks. The ethically incompetent readily (and effectively) find other means to destroy and terrorize when denied arms. And when civilian arms are banned, they more readily find helpless victims.
But for the other 97%, the bearing of arms functions not merely as an assertion of power but as a fierce and redemptive discipline. When sudden death hangs inches from your right hand, you become much more careful, more mindful, and much more peaceful in your heart — because you know that if you are thoughtless or sloppy in your actions or succumb to bad temper, people will
die.
Too many of us have come to believe ourselves incapable of this discipline. We fall prey to the sick belief that we are all psychopaths or incompetents under the skin. We have been taught to imagine ourselves armed only as villains, doomed to succumb to our own worst nature and kill a loved one in a moment of carelessness or rage. Or to end our days holed up in a mall listening to police bullhorns as some SWAT sniper draws a bead...
But it's not so. To believe this is to ignore the actual statistics and generative patterns of weapons crimes. Virtually never, writes criminologist Don B. Kates, are murderers the ordinary, law-abiding people against whom gun bans are aimed. Almost without exception, murderers are extreme aberrants with lifelong histories of crime, substance abuse, psychopathology, mental retardation and/or irrational violence against those around them, as well as other hazardous behavior, e.g., automobile and gun accidents.
To believe one is incompetent to bear arms is, therefore, to live in corroding and almost always needless fear of the self — in fact, to affirm oneself a moral coward. A state further from the dignity of a free man would be rather hard to imagine. It is as a way of exorcising this demon, of
reclaiming for ourselves the dignity and courage and ethical self-confidence of free (wo)men that the bearing of personal arms, is, ultimately, most important.
This is the final ethical lesson of bearing arms:
that right choices are possible, and the ordinary judgement of ordinary (wo)men is sufficient to make them
Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun