Is Carrying A Weapon Now A Necessity?

Considering the rising mass shootings in the US, is the laissez-faire gun policy the correct one to preserve liberalism and freedom of choice. Consider:

  • The more people carry weaponry the bigger the risk of an armed conflict
  • The bigger the risk of an armed conflict the bigger the pressure to carry for the sake of personal safety
  • The amount of people who carry increases, with the cycle returning to point 1

All in all, carrying is becoming a more of a necessity for personal safety than a freedom of choice, thus undermining the very basis of liberalism. Thoughts?

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Mass shootings aren’t really a big deal imo, they’re just one of the many expressions of murder (especially murder-suicide), popularized intensely by the media because people eat it up.

Once you consider it just another expression of murder, and that rate has been going down for many years now, it’s just not a huge deal. The way I see it, forensic science caught up with the general serial-killer. When someone prone to anti-social behavior has a choice of “kill slowly, get caught anyway, die or rot in jail” or “kill many, go out in blaze of glory, get televised” I think the matter is simple to make up.

Hell i’m not even a huge gun advocate, but people prone to murder very much like to follow popular trends. The trends can be affected by state law, of course, but the end result is always murder, and the focus of law should be in generalities, not specifics.

Just look at Britain. Sure, they got rid of a lot of guns in circulation, but all the criminals just went to knives, and the knife assault rate ended up matching the earlier gun assault rate. Australia is still having mass shootings (any event where 4+ people are killed or injured)…and the fact that the vast majority of mass shootings here are gang related is also a challenge.

I guess my point is, it’s not a necessity. The US, outside of gang zones, of which there aren’t many and they’re always shrinking, is a very safe place to live. The overall murder rate gets lower and lower every year.

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Even trained police officers shoot bystanders in a shootout.

Expecting the average citizen to take out an active shooter is little more than a movie script.

No doubt, it HAS happened that an armed citizen has taken out a shooter, but let’s not expect this to be the norm. In the chaos of an active shooting incident, I wouldn’t be surprised if citizen-A trying to take out Shooter-Z is mistakenly thought to be the actual shooter by citizen-B and gets killed.

No, carrying a weapon is NOT a necessity, and should not be considered so, or encouraged to be so.

Do not mistake this reply as a call for disarming everyone. That’s not my intent at all. I’m just saying that turning our society into the Wild, Wild West is not the answer.

To me the societal problem is rooted here:

“We have staked the whole future of our new nation, not upon the power of government; far from it. We have staked the future of all our political constitutions upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments of God.” (James Madison)

We have scrubbed moral principles and God from the public square. Far too many people do NOT govern themselves according to moral principles, and we have devolved into a crass, vulgar, selfish, vitriolic society. The line we used to draw for personal conduct has vanished. More and more the solution to a problem is to eliminate what gets in your way – and sometimes that means killing people for some people. (Apparently for more and more people.)

Example of one cop shooting another in a legitimate shooting of a suspect:

Extremely few people carry in public even in states where it’s allowed. Even in states that don’t require a license! If more people bit the bullet (so to speak), it’s a good thing.

Additionally, there has been no rise in mass shootings. The trend is negative over the last few decades just like murder overall. But mostly importantly most “mass shootings” are gang violence, and not representative of the level of danger a normal civilian faces from day to day.

At the end of the day, I don’t care how many dindunuffins get shot, it could be a billion of them, I’m not surrendering my firearms.

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With the ever increasing number of nuts and foreigners with evil intentions carrying is a must most of the time . Every demoRAT preaching gun control live in gated communities and have police protection by claiming their miserable lives were threaten . Today you have to jump through the thousand hoops and waited over a year to get a carry permit , some States(dem controlled) over two year just for a BS target permit . WTF

Violent crime rates are at their lowest in the US since the 1960’s.

The more law abiding citizens who carry the higher the odds that the next would be mass shooters meets armed resistance in time to stop them.

Carry is not a necessity for anyone, it is however a right and a responsibility.

You have a less than 1:3.5 million chance of ever being in the vicinity of a mass shooting.

85% of all homicides are related to drug and gang activity so if you avoid both of those your chances of becoming a victim of a violent crime are negligible.

I carry because I can, I teach shooting and self defense because I’m good at it and enjoy it but the numbers do not lie, Unless you are a criminal yourself your odds of becoming a victim of a violent crime are extremely low.

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To the bolded yes it has happened in the past but only in an extremely small percentage of shootings on the order of less than 1:10,000 police shootings.

Why the Gun is Civilization.

By Marko Kloos

Reproduced by permission of the author.

Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.

In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact through persuasion. Force has no place as a valid method of social interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the personal firearm, as paradoxical as it may sound to some.

When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force. You have to use reason and try to persuade me, because I have a way to negate your threat or employment of force. The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing with a 19-year old gangbanger, and a single gay guy on equal footing with a carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and a defender.

There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes it easier for a mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a mugger’s potential marks are armed. People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force monopoly.

Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser. People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal force easier works solely in favor of the weaker defender, not the stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level. The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weightlifter. It simply wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and easily employable.

When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I cannot be forced, only persuaded. I don’t carry it because I’m afraid, but because it enables me to be unafraid. It doesn’t limit the actions of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of those who would do so by force. It removes force from the equation … and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.

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Great find. I’m surprised I’ve never come across this before.

I’m an old guy and occasionally remember these things.

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Yeah, an occasional bystanders gets hit by a bullet fired by a police officer every now and then, but it is extremely rare. And innocent bystanders accidentally shot by armed citizens who are responding to a dangerous assailant is even more rare. You are far more likely to be the be the innocent victim of a police bullet than from one fired by a law abiding civilian. The issue is statistically insignificant.

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If you look at the numbers you are about 500x more likely to be unlawfully shot by a cop than you are a law abiding defender with a carry permit.

A “good guy with a gun” isn’t randomly shooting innocents to inflict maximum carnage. Collateral damage is thus limited.

Exactly why such events are so rare.

This is all very simple.

  • Liberals want gun control
  • Suddenly the reports of shooting become higher in number without the amount actually changing
  • People believe guns are becoming a worse problem and need to be controlled

The End.

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It is today.

If the expectation is that more people carry, and they all see themselves as John McClane, that’s the possibility I was addressing.

It’s pure supposition on my part. I make no pretense otherwise. And I don’t expect everyone to agree. I just see it as a distinct possibility.

Guv I’m thinking you don’t know many people who lawfully carry as that kind of attitude is extremely rare among those who do.

Right now about 10% of the population carries, over half of them do so daily. If that kind of attitude was prevalent in even a small fraction of those who do we’d have bodies piled up all over the country in massive numbers and our murder and ADW rates would be far above their all time highs instead of approaching the lowest we’ve seen since the mid sixties.

More people are carrying, yet the incidence of innocent people being shot by “good guys with guns” has not gone up.