As a young liberal, I was much in favor of gun control. I also believed that most people were basically good and rational, and violence was something that could be eventually eliminated, to the improvement of society and the species. In retrospect, I find this perspective charmingly naive.
I have never handled a gun or learned how to. Frankly, the notion scares me, because I don't want that responsibility; I do not want to hold the power of death in my hand. I'm very grateful to all those in uniform (of one sort or another) who do bear arms so that I don't have to; noncombatant-by-choice is a remarkably privileged status, both historically and in the world today.
The argument that guns in private hands help protect us from the government is a bit specious, however; at the time that the Second Amendment was penned, the weapons available to the government and private citizens were essentially the same. (Heck, we didn't even HAVE a standing army back then.) Nowadays, well... I don't see a lot of people with Apache gunships in their backyards. A notional armed rebellion these days would have to rely as much upon unconventional, improvised weapons (IEDs, etc) as store-bought firearms. Gulf Wars 1 and 2 have demonstrated that you can't outfight the US Army on level ground, but you can hurt the willingness of the State to keep fighting.
On the personal scale, guns are excellent equalizers between the large and the small. Again, as a man, I'm grateful that I don't have to seriously consider carrying such a weapon for my own safety.
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momijizukamori and
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Date: 23 Jul 2006 10:05 (UTC)I have never handled a gun or learned how to. Frankly, the notion scares me, because I don't want that responsibility; I do not want to hold the power of death in my hand. I'm very grateful to all those in uniform (of one sort or another) who do bear arms so that I don't have to; noncombatant-by-choice is a remarkably privileged status, both historically and in the world today.
The argument that guns in private hands help protect us from the government is a bit specious, however; at the time that the Second Amendment was penned, the weapons available to the government and private citizens were essentially the same. (Heck, we didn't even HAVE a standing army back then.) Nowadays, well... I don't see a lot of people with Apache gunships in their backyards. A notional armed rebellion these days would have to rely as much upon unconventional, improvised weapons (IEDs, etc) as store-bought firearms. Gulf Wars 1 and 2 have demonstrated that you can't outfight the US Army on level ground, but you can hurt the willingness of the State to keep fighting.
On the personal scale, guns are excellent equalizers between the large and the small. Again, as a man, I'm grateful that I don't have to seriously consider carrying such a weapon for my own safety.