The War On Guns

BadTux has a couple of interesting things to say about guns and people:

EBM, I think the problem is that most liberals are, well, nice people. They know that in a gun-battle between themselves and a vicious sociopath criminal, they would lose -- because they would hesitate before pulling the trigger, while the sociopath criminal would not. That is because liberals have a fundamental respect for human life and a fundamental dislike for doing harm to others that's hard to overcome even in the service of self defense, while sociopaths have no such qualms to overcome.

There is also the slight problem that no fundamentally tyrannical government has ever, in the course of modern history, been overcome by armed revolt from within, even when the population *was* well armed. Saddam Hussein's Iraq is a perfect example (google "Iraq gun culture" for an eye opener -- you're not considered to be a man in Iraq unless you have *at least* a fully automatic AK-47, preferably more), all those guns, yet it took outside force to topple Saddam. The problem is that yes, Americans are heavily armed, as were Iraqis... but as Gov. Earl K. Long of Louisiana pointed out in 1959 when state legislators were urging him to defy a Federal desegregation order, "we're talking about the U.S. government here, they got the goddamned ATOMIC BOMB!" I.e., the State has significant weaponry such as tanks, bombers, poison gas, artillery, etc., that it can take out any organized resistance, and unorganized resistance has not been capable of being sustained without outside support (see: Ukrainian Partisan Army after WW2, which was utterly destroyed by Stalin).

In other words, a) liberals by and large think they would be the killed, not the killer, if they ever got into a gun battle with vicious criminals, and b) they don't in general think guns are useful for taking on a tyrannical government. Thus c) guns would not be useful for them.

Of course, going from (c) (the notion that guns in private ownership aren't useful for the stated purposes of defense) to the notion that guns should be banned is a jump in logic that makes no sense, since vicious criminals will have guns whether they're banned or not. But logic isn't exactly a subject that Americans excel at, by and large... thus why some Americans *still* continue to insist that Saddam (a Stalinist atheist who killed Muslim religious leaders) and Osama bin Laden (a rabid Muslim religious leader) were in cahoots, even though the most basic logic says that's utter nonsense...

- Badtux the Well-armed Penguin

A comment on a post on Just An Earth Bound Misfit, I.