Reply #45: Is that honestly what you think?

[Euromutt]

If so, you are so very mistaken.

Guns don't address the cause of crime; they merely enable a person to more effectively defend him- or herself from a violent assailant. Thus, they may help in preventing a crime from being completed, but they cannot be counted on to prevent it from being initiated.

There is evidence that private firearms ownership has some deterrent effect, but there are ways around that. It's practically axiomatic among American criminologists, for example, that American burglars are reluctant to break into an occupied residence, and this is largely for fear of being shot. This doesn't prevent burglaries (the American residential burglary rate is not remarkably lower than that of other wealthy industrialized nations), but it does result in American burglars greatly preferring unoccupied residences as targets.

The argument posited by the majority of pro-RKBA posters on this forum, myself included, is that increased restrictions on private firearms ownership will not do anything to reduce violent crime, while they would deprive generally "law-abiding"* citizens of the most effective means of defending themselves against violent crime. I don't think you'll find too many people claiming that increased gun ownership would be effective in deterring violent crime overall; after all, drug dealers know their competitors are armed, but that doesn't stop them from engaging in turf wars.

No, instead the argument is that gun control, by focusing on the means of violent crime, is a distraction from addressing the causes. Countries like Switzerland, Finland and Norway have lax gun laws and high levels of gun ownership compared to the rest of Europe, and yet they do not have notably high levels of violent crime. Why? Because they are--again, comparatively speaking--prosperous, socio-economically homogenous societies; they don't have urban underclasses, largely composed of ethnic minorities, living in undesirable neighborhoods with high rates of unemployment and poverty. They have no equivalent of Baltimore, Oakland, Compton, Parisian banlieues, Amsterdam Zuid-Oost, London's Lambeth, etc.

Guns aren't the solution, but they aren't the problem either. The pro-RKBA posters are well aware of the fact that guns are used for unlawful purposes, but we conclude--based on the available evidence--that the ability they grant to law-abiding citizens to protect themselves from violent crime outweighs the social cost of their misuse. Moreover, even if this were not the case, given that the government has repeatedly rejected the responsibility for providing protection to individual citizens, it has thereby abdicated the authority to deprive them of the most effective means to protect themselves, and with current technology, guns are the most effective means. That why cops continue to carry them, despite the availability of pepper spray, tasers, etc.

* - By "law-abiding," I mean people who don't commit offenses that (threaten to) inflict material harm on another person. E.g. I don't consider someone who smokes marijuana to unwind as a threat to the common weal. I don't even have an issue with casual drug dealers (I knew a few in college), or even drug dealers in general if they didn't have a tendency to engage in gunfights with competitors, murder witnesses, that sort of thing.