birth of liberty, 800 years ago in Britain.

[pErvinalia]

Yebbut if you had a concealed tactical nuke, that would have bested any knife or gun they could have pulled.

[Brian Peacock]

Is that an IBM in your pocket, or.... ?

[Seth]

See, in societies with a quarter or a fifth the murder rate of yours, there are three quarters or four fifths fewer people guilty of the immorality of being the proximate cause of them.

Good of you to admit that it is indeed immoral, but all those who impose, advocate or support disarming the law-abiding or restricting their right to effective self-defense, which is according to recent arguments the "overwhelming majority", are guilty of complicity in the deaths and victimizations of each and every victim.

Of which we have a quarter or a fifth. To put it in other words, your advocacy of the right to bear arms makes you complicit in the murder of four to five times the number of people.

No, it doesn't. The fact that people are victimized and killed by criminals is not a matter of individual responsibility for anyone but the killers. The fact that people are victimized and killed by criminals when they could have avoided being victimized or killed had they been armed is not a matter of individual responsibility for anyone but the victim. But when people are victimized and killed by criminals because they were FORBIDDEN to arm themselves for self defense, then those who implement and those who support such rules bear all of the responsibility for those avoidable deaths.

As for balancing that against any larger incidence of injury, I'll leave it up to you to qualify and quantify. Good luck with that.

If it saves just one innocent life then it's worth it.

There's your problem: Gun control saves four to five times the number of lives compared to your advocacy of the right to bear arms.

No it doesn't. You ignore the 2.5 million times a year that guns DO save lives. But, you are still making a statistic out of the victims of crime, which is immoral. The personal safety of one individual is not something that the government has any power or authority to reduce based on the notion that doing so will hypothetically reduce the overall number of criminal victimizations. The right to effective individual self defense outweighs any generalized statistical argument that allowing law-abiding citizens to be armed might increase crime victimization. Not to mention that here in the US exactly the opposite happens when law-abiding citizens arm themselves: Crime goes down, substantially.

No evasion at all. The answer to your question "Do those who are murdered have a fundamental human right to be armed for effective self defense or not?" presumes that being armed is an effective defence. It is not, as your nation's four to fivefold murder rate in comparison to Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany and others proves.

You are wrong, of course, as the fact that as more citizens arm themselves here crime goes down proves beyond any doubt. And you still evade the question by trying to redefine it. The question "Do those who are murdered have a fundamental human right to be armed for effective self defense or not?" does not presume anything, it merely asks a fundamental civil rights question which you appear to be unwilling to answer because you know that any answer other than "yes" is quite simply indefensible.

[Seth]

The only reason why Seth can make a 'right to self defense' argument even sound good is because of the vast number of guns in the USA. In my country, if you are threatened by a person carrying a weapon, it will be a knife or club, since guns that can be concealed (hand guns) are banned to the citizenry. If I need a weapon to convince such an attacker not to attack, all I need is a knife or club. It is a case of "if you attack, one of us will get hurt, and it could well be you."

Guns are not needed for self defense when the nation has a government sane enough to prohibit guns, and especially hand guns which can be concealed.

And as I understand it you are ALSO denied the right to carry a knife or a club for self-defense purposes. Not sure about NZ, but I know that in the UK you can't even carry non-lethal chemical weapons like Mace, tear gas or pepper spray, and it's a serious crime to even possess such devices.

Whether or not one "needs" a gun depends on one's individual assessment of risk and one's physical abilities. A mixed martial arts expert might not "need" a gun to defend against a street thug. Then again he might "need" one to defend against six street thugs. And grandma definitely "needs" a gun to defend against any sort of street thuggery. That's why Samuel Colt called the Colt .45 Peacemaker "The Great Equalizer."

Because the right of the potential victim to absolute safety completely extinguishes any right to any sort of safety that an attacker might otherwise have, it is prudent that the potential victim always be better armed, and hopefully conclusively so, than any potential attacker, and that choice is up to the potential victim based on his or her personal assessment of risk.

I carry on .45 under normal circumstances. I carry a .45 and a .38 revolver when I drive for a very specific tactical reason. If I had to travel routinely through certain cities, I'd wear level IV body armor and carry a rifle. In each case, so long as my actual operation of those firearms complies with the laws regarding the use of deadly force, the fact that I choose to carry them is nobody's business but my own.

Most importantly however, the government has absolutely no authority to dictate what defensive preparations a law-abiding individual chooses to make, especially by creating a blanket law that forbids everyone from carrying anything useful for defense as is the case in the UK and, I suspect, Oz and NZ.

[Seth]

It's not as if guns are the only legitimate self-defence measure one can take either. As I've mentioned before, a few years ago I was harassed at an atm by three young men who demanded the money I'd just taken out. On that occasion I used psychology - a smile, a direct look in the eye, a "I don't think so mate" and walking away. I was confident, it was a Sunday afternoon, and there were some other people about. I challenged their assumption that I was an easy mark, and even if they had got physical then i) they would have found out that despite my appearance I am more than capable and willing to cause them pain, ii) I would have relished the opportunity to do so, and iii) even if I'd been bested they'd be unlikely to hang around long enough to do me serious harm, their focus being the money and it being the day time in view of others and cctv etc. If they'd been carrying a knife, or even a gun, I would have just given them the money. Likewise if it was a more isolated venue or at night or whatever. Capitulation is a legitimate defensive measure in some circumstances, 'specially if one ways up the cost of a measly £30 against the possibility of lethal harm to one or other party. Like alcohol, guns are not a problem-solver but a problem-enhancer, they don't make things easier for oneself or for others, just harder for everybody all round.

All of which is true, but merely goes to prove that YOU are the only person who can make a rational judgment about preparation for and deployment of defensive measures. Having a gun does not mean one is automatically going to resort to using it. Good tactics are always necessary and yes, sometimes capitulation is the appropriate tactic. But if capitulation doesn't terminate the threat, if you are otherwise unarmed and the assailant chooses to escalate the violence, well...you're fucked. I'm not because I have an effective tool of self defense that I can then deploy, if necessary.

[Brian Peacock]

I'm not 'fucked', as you put it - but then again I don't live in the US so I don't have to worry about angry nutters with firearms, just angry nutters!

[Seth]

I'm not 'fucked', as you put it - but then again I don't live in the US so I don't have to worry about angry nutters with firearms, just angry nutters!

Unless you do...and your government renders you helpless against an "angry nutter" with a tire wrench or a beer bottle so yes, you're fucked.

[Hermit]

...the 2.5 million times a year that guns DO save lives...

I wonder why so few lives are lost in Australia. You know, without the unalienable right of open or concealed carry we're all sitting ducks, aren't we?

Or you're just full of shit again.

[Blind groper]

It is amazing how Seth keeps stating the same fallacies over and over, when the facts clearly show them to be fallacies.

Removing guns from the populace reduces murders. We know that because it has been done in every western nation other than the USA, and every such nation now has a murder rate less than a quarter that of the USA, and a murder rate that has been dropping steadily since guns were removed from the populace.

Seth also ignores the fact, verified by Stanford and the University of Chicago, that the number of gun owners has been dropping in the USA along with the recent fall in murder rate. The same deal, really. Fewer people trotting around carrying guns means fewer murders.

[JimC]

The US is past the point of no return in terms of guns. There is no way any government could enforce restrictions in gun ownership without massive civil unrest and violence. The gun nutters have won over there - let them stew in their juices, as long as we can stop the madness spreading to the civilised world...

[Brian Peacock]

I'm not 'fucked', as you put it - but then again I don't live in the US so I don't have to worry about angry nutters with firearms, just angry nutters!

Unless you do...and your government renders you helpless against an "angry nutter" with a tire wrench or a beer bottle so yes, you're fucked.

Now you're just going round in circles - shooting at shadows : http://www.rationalia.com/forum/viewtop ... 0#p1616152

[Hermit]

Now you're just going round in circles

He is very good at that. Basically, I have not encountered him saying anything that he has not already said before he got banned at RDF five or six years ago. So, for example, he'll place great importance on statistics when he thinks they support his view. When you shoot holes through them he'll change tack and retreat to what he calls the unalienable right to bear arms and the danger of tyranny. Once that is deposed of he'll go back to John Lotte's rubbish, and round and round we go.

[Seth]

...the 2.5 million times a year that guns DO save lives...

I wonder why so few lives are lost in Australia. You know, without the unalienable right of open or concealed carry we're all sitting ducks, aren't we?

Because you're a nation of servile convicts of course. As even BG admits, it's not about the number of guns in a society, it's about who, exactly, is in possession of them. Removing them from people who do not misuse them does absolutely nothing to reduce gun deaths, or had that fact escaped you?

Or you're just full of shit again.

Doesn't feel that way, I had a good shit this morning and I'm just now stopping for dinner.

[Seth]

It is amazing how Seth keeps stating the same fallacies over and over, when the facts clearly show them to be fallacies.

Removing guns from the populace reduces murders. We know that because it has been done in every western nation other than the USA, and every such nation now has a murder rate less than a quarter that of the USA, and a murder rate that has been dropping steadily since guns were removed from the populace.

Actually that's a lie because most of those nations never had widespread handgun ownership to begin with, and your violent crime rates are not going down because there are fewer guns, they are higher than those in the US except for some particular small areas. Then there's the fact that crime in general, including violent crime, continues its steady decline in the US despite there being hundreds of millions more guns in private hands than there were a century ago.

Seth also ignores the fact, verified by Stanford and the University of Chicago, that the number of gun owners has been dropping in the USA along with the recent fall in murder rate. The same deal, really. Fewer people trotting around carrying guns means fewer murders.

Except that Stanford didn't "verify" anything because a) their methodology was biased and flawed; and b) nobody knows how many gun owners there are because we don't keep those records precisely so that the government won't have that information and gun owners are notorious for lying to jackasses from Standford that ask them if they have a gun, just as I do whenever some nitwit asks me if I have a gun. It's none of their business so we don't tell them. Therefore their conclusions are false.

[Seth]

Now you're just going round in circles

He is very good at that. Basically, I have not encountered him saying anything that he has not already said before he got banned at RDF five or six years ago.

That's because the truth remains the truth even when liberal nitwits try to distort and manipulate the facts to try to stuff them into their own version of the "truth." Nothing has changed since RDF with respect to the truth and the anti-gun lies and propaganda so stating the truth is, as always, sufficient to the task of rebutting the lies of hoplophobes.