Quote Originally Posted by Seamus Fermanagh View Post
This would be the statistics considered important by the gun lobby source. I admit to wondering how, in a country where 90k rapes are reported in a year, 200k other abuse attempts are warded off by guns/threat thereof.


I have always viewed the 2nd as the final guarantor of freedom in that, facing government tyranny, citizens could band together and use firearms to defend themselves from that tyrannical government. Firearms are also good tools for home defense, defense of one's person, and for hunting. In NONE of these scenarios is a handgun the best choice of firearm. Especially given the general level of firearm training and accuracy under high-stress situations, most persons defending themselves or their homes are better off with a shotgun. Hunting more or less mandates rifles or shotguns. Going up against the government might require automatic rates of fire, but would NOT be best served using a handgun.


More than half (production figures suggest 55%) of privately owned firearms in the United States are handguns(pistols and revolvers), not long-arms (shotguns, rifles, assault-style rifles). Though no more than half of the firearms present in society, handguns, not long-arms, represent roughly 90% of the deaths (suicides, accidents, and homicides) attributed to a specific type of firearm.

I am wondering if we could solve much of the problem by prohibiting weapons with a barrel length of less than 35cm, maybe by issuing shotguns or rifles to those forced to turn-in or decommission their handguns.

Just a thought.
What is the cost-benefit ratio? How many defusals vs. escalations? That's always the question both sides should be trying to answer statistically.

The "2nd Amendment" demographic are far likelier to be guarantors of tyranny than otherwise.

Resistance to a "tyrannical" government always occurs with collective and communal action, not with individuals grabbing for their guns. I still maintain the Founders understood this.

The history of guerrilla movements and partisan warfare proves just this. WW2 partisans in the east were almost entirely supplied, led, and organized by the Red Army and NKVD (when they weren't pure bandits). Look at the Taliban, it's not a few goatherders with AKs, it's a well-organized national movement and international crime syndicate with command and supply centralized to the level of regional warlords. (The Pakistani government helps too.)

I have no problem with banning handguns, but to ease people into regulation I would take the deprecation of the personal defense aspect slowly, since it's more resilient than the hobbyist motivation and more widespread than the violent-reactionary motivation. But it's tricky, like weaning an addict off the drug that keeps them in pain when they're administering ever-increasing quantities in order to escape that pain...

As always, keep in mind that the gun "problem" is not one of "getting them out of the wrong hands", it's a supply-side and ideological problem. Gun ideology is almost entirely wrapped in the greater far-right ecosystem, which needs to be defeated anyway, and the absolute number of serviceable firearms in existence on a global scale is what needs to be reduced to reduce violence everywhere.