Preach To Me
I'm getting awfully tired of not having an opinion on gun control, so I'm soliciting everybody else's opinions. For your convenience, here is a summary of my thinking up to this point on the subject.
The earliest opinion I am aware of having on the subject of gun control was that nobody should have them except maybe the police. Then I was exposed to arguments by people with differing views. Some of them seemed compelling, but I stuck by by original position.
Until I realized I was almost certainly doing that out of my emotional reaction to guns. (I hate them. They freak me out. I don't know why, since it's not like I was threatened by a crazed gunman at a tender age. I don't have the same reaction to any other weapons or forms of violence, including laser guns on science fiction TV shows or even nukes, the former of which I think are cool and the latter of which I dislike but not as viscerally. I can get around this reaction to firearms in order to enjoy some media which feature gun violence (e.g. Firefly) but in vast quantities I can't enjoy what surrounds the gun component anymore (e.g. Noir).)
I've tried to recast the debate by mentally substituting something I don't in place of the guns at issue. But swords, say, are a fundamentally different issue, because they have vastly dissimilar destructive power. And if I try to replace "gun" with "phaser" or "wand of magic missile*", well, that might give me a picture of what it's like to be a grinning NRA nut ("I love my wands! You can't take them! They're mine! They're so cool!") but it doesn't remove the emotional component, it just reverses it. I'm pretty sure that I only want everybody to be able have a wand of magic missile because I really want a wand of magic missile on the basis of thinking they are neat.
*This example is, as D&D-familiar readers will know, imperfect because magic missile never misses, among other differences. The substitution is just to get around my emotional reaction to guns, so in this example, the magic missile works pretty much like a gun, it's just a magical stick of wood instead of a manufactured projector of bullets.
So I'd like to be directed to arguments on whichever side(s) my lovely readers care to promote. Ones with hard statistics are particularly good. Thank you ^^
Edit for Clarity: I don't care about the history of the gun laws we actually have. In particular, I don't give a damn what the Constitution says about the right to bear arms; I'm concerned with ethics and what ought to be public policy, not with what would have ought to have been public policy if the framers of the Constitution were all deities. It doesn't matter where the laws we have now came from. I want to know what they ought to be and why, not why they should or should not have come about the way they have.
The earliest opinion I am aware of having on the subject of gun control was that nobody should have them except maybe the police. Then I was exposed to arguments by people with differing views. Some of them seemed compelling, but I stuck by by original position.
Until I realized I was almost certainly doing that out of my emotional reaction to guns. (I hate them. They freak me out. I don't know why, since it's not like I was threatened by a crazed gunman at a tender age. I don't have the same reaction to any other weapons or forms of violence, including laser guns on science fiction TV shows or even nukes, the former of which I think are cool and the latter of which I dislike but not as viscerally. I can get around this reaction to firearms in order to enjoy some media which feature gun violence (e.g. Firefly) but in vast quantities I can't enjoy what surrounds the gun component anymore (e.g. Noir).)
I've tried to recast the debate by mentally substituting something I don't in place of the guns at issue. But swords, say, are a fundamentally different issue, because they have vastly dissimilar destructive power. And if I try to replace "gun" with "phaser" or "wand of magic missile*", well, that might give me a picture of what it's like to be a grinning NRA nut ("I love my wands! You can't take them! They're mine! They're so cool!") but it doesn't remove the emotional component, it just reverses it. I'm pretty sure that I only want everybody to be able have a wand of magic missile because I really want a wand of magic missile on the basis of thinking they are neat.
*This example is, as D&D-familiar readers will know, imperfect because magic missile never misses, among other differences. The substitution is just to get around my emotional reaction to guns, so in this example, the magic missile works pretty much like a gun, it's just a magical stick of wood instead of a manufactured projector of bullets.
So I'd like to be directed to arguments on whichever side(s) my lovely readers care to promote. Ones with hard statistics are particularly good. Thank you ^^
Edit for Clarity: I don't care about the history of the gun laws we actually have. In particular, I don't give a damn what the Constitution says about the right to bear arms; I'm concerned with ethics and what ought to be public policy, not with what would have ought to have been public policy if the framers of the Constitution were all deities. It doesn't matter where the laws we have now came from. I want to know what they ought to be and why, not why they should or should not have come about the way they have.