You commented earlier that there’s NEVER a valid reason for an individual to have an automatic weapon. Period! All I needed to do was to bring a situation, regardless of how rare, where an individual could have benefited from having an automatic weapon and your statement would have been proven false. For example- if you claimed that there’s not a single person on the planet taller than 8′ and it turns out that there are a handful- your statement would be false, even though the number is probably less that one in a billion.
What do you consider “reasonable”? In my example with the mob I specifically didn’t mention guns- I mentioned baseball bats. There have been numerous smash and grabs in the news in the past year or two with a dozen plus thugs who could have easily killed innocent employees or shoppers with their bare hands if they felt threatened. Do you think they would have raided a store if they saw the owner inside with an automatic weapon and his hand on the trigger?
There’s cases besides mobs (again these are exceeding rare as well) where one may need to protect themselves with an automatic weapon. I agree that automatic weapons are ineffective against attack planes and nuclear weapons but let’s say the country decides that there’s a certain part of the population that they want to decimate- they’re not going to use attack planes or nuclear weapons as it will kill much more than those that they want to get rid of. You mentioned earlier that a lot can change in twenty years and brought in the smoking rate as an example- I think the country is much closer to another civil war than we were twenty years ago (I hope I’m wrong about this). I don’t recall the same number of riots and protests 20 years ago and there’s no sign of it slowing down.
I keep explaining why I think the US has such a high rate of gun violence but you refuse to acknowledge it. In my opinion the US teaches people at a young age that you don’t need to take responsibility for your actions and there’s practically nothing discouraging people from committing crimes. When they commit petty crimes and they don’t suffer any consequences they up the ante until they commit murder. It’s usually not the first law that they break. Why should someone be afraid of carjacking someone if they know that if they get caught they’ll be released without even having to post bail? Now imagine the scenario if they don’t even have to worry about the driver having a gun to protect themselves.
You’re correct that if certain guns are banned and confiscated there will be less guns. The problem is that the guns will be removed from the hands of innocent people that had them legally and the remaining guns will be the ones obtained illegally. (You still didn’t mention how the illegal ones will be confiscated and how new ones will be prevented from coming across an open border.) Even if it’s only one one hundredth that are smuggled in (which I don’t believe) a crazy person with the intent on carrying out a mass shooting will be able to get one (it may take longer but they will get one).
I realize that guns are dangerous- I’m terrified of them and never held a loaded gun in my life- but I’m more terrified of the legally owned guns from responsible neighbors being taken away. Like I said earlier on- guns were always known to be dangerous (unlike cigarettes) and the people who obtained them legally considered them to be a necessary evil.
Hopefully you’re enjoying this dialogue as much as I am (and thank you for being respectful) but you seem to be ignoring some of my questions. Would you be able to specifically answer the following questions that I asked in earlier posts?
1) There are probably millions of illegal guns out there- how do you think the government can go about confiscating all of them?
2) If the innocent people have to surrender their guns- what’s going to stop the criminals (armed or not), who until now refrained from breaking into a house because the home owner may have been armed, from burglarizing the house?
3) How should the supply of dangerous weapons flowing across the open southern border be curbed?
4) Which statement of mine was near-verbatim to a statement from the NRA?
5) You seem to agree that it’ll take many years (if at all possible) to get rid of all the guns- it’ll also take a long time to get all people with mental health issues the help that they need. Do you agree that the government should try to get them the help that they need or should the rest of the population have to suffer?