Generally, I think that at some point, this country will begin to scale back its fetishization of and obsession with unlimited and mostly unfettered gun ownership. While there are more guns than ever here they are in fewer hands as a percentage of the population. That is a smaller percentage of households contain guns than did in the 1950s, and that means that fewer people, as a percentage of the total population are owning more and more guns. This is a statistical fact. There are many people who support gun rights who erroneously believe that either the people of America are going to elect a reincarnated Hitler or something else equally unlikely. In fact, those who believe unequivocally that their guns will save them have only to investigate the recent history of the specific radical groups who believed this or collected stockpiles of weapons in the event that they would have to face off with the government and see how that ended for them. The Move faction in Philadelphia was firebombed and 11 people were killed including 5 children who were destroyed in the carnage that followed. The most striking example is still the government siege and firebombing of the Koresh Compound in Waco, Texas where 55 adults were killed along with 28 children when the inhabitants fired on ATF and FBI agents who had come to investigate claims of illegal weapons and to confiscate any that they found. These two incidents occurred at a time when the government actually had to engage people like this directly. That time is long past. The government does not have to do this anymore. The federal government can just send in a drone or two and destroy nearly anything with such a drone attack. And the soldiers who direct the attack could probably, like the people in the Milgram experiment, be induced to kill anyone in this manner if told to by their superiors in contradistinction to claims that American troops will not fire on or attack their fellow Americans.
The founders were concerned with keeping guns because they feared more generally the revolt of their slaves who they didn't allow to have guns or much else. But they would never have written that down anywhere. So rather than face the fears that really plagued them, the same people who had Jefferson take all references to slaves out of the Declaration of Independence also probably played a propaganda card here. In addition, their guns had just aided them in throwing off what they strongly believed to be the tyrannical rule of the British, and even a cursory read of the hundreds of pamphlets of the period shows that much of what the revolutionary colonists wrote or considered in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights was a reaction to this perceived tyranny and the kinds of things that they resented like the "quartering of troops" in peacetime. Be that as it may, it isn't 1776 or even 1789 or 1938 or any other time, it's today, and numerous countries control the numbers and ownership of rifles, shotguns, handguns, assault weapons and other military hardware. Those countries haven't been invaded and their citizens haven't lost their precious freedom and liberty and they haven't all been marched of to some concentration camp somewhere or some foreign gulag in the recent past. And the chances of that ever happening are actually decreasing rather than increasing.
I would offer that the kind of cosmopolitan world first imagined by Kant in his writings from the late 1790s may be closer to realization than the emergence of another Hitler in Europe or elsewhere. And it isn't the unfettered private ownership of guns in America that has prevented that eventuality since WWII. It's a general international belief in the rule of law and the need to respond to such a threat by international bodies designed to thwart such an eventuality. In short, we actually live in a quantitatively different world environment from that period. But old fears die hard. I understand that. It's just not what I believe. And it wouldn't serve my own sometimes nebulous mental health to profess something that I clearly did not believe just because others hold a different position or they think I am a lesser being because I feel this way or because someone has heard a rumor that I am "supposedly brilliant" from who knows where and brilliant people can't possibly think about this issue the way I do and so on. The fact is that more guns mean more people will be killed with guns. It's really that simple. Other countries have come to understand this basic fact and have taken logical and legal steps to restrict gun ownership. The statistics are generally quite clear on that too. A gun in the home is 6-8 times more likely to be used against someone in the home than against an invader or intruder, and people with guns in the home are something like 25 times more likely to be shot than homes that don't contain a gun. I don't really care too much how others feel about these statistics or about my position but it Is my position and I will not be moved. I've been in rooms where people picked up a gun and just started shooting shit. Everybody thought they were sane until they came momentarily unglued or saw a monster or reacted to some unseen stress or who knows what. But if they hadn't had a gun or access to one they wouldn't have started shooting and if someone else had a gun and had shot them then there would be more damaged psyches to deal with. So I try to stay out of houses and public places where fools have guns. The way things are it's getting more difficult to do that because more people are carrying concealed weapons but I try. Others can do whatever they want. But I won't own a goddamn gun, I know what they can do and I would rather not have to believe that I was forced to do that to anyone.
