re: #364 Belafon

The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t stand up to evidence either. The flipside of “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens” is that lots of other industrial countries have guns and don’t have this problem.

That’s because the problem is not just the owning of guns. It is the idea of owning guns for the purpose of fighting with them. Americans keep guns for the purpose, implicit or explicit, of having to use them on other people - to ‘defend themselves’, ‘defend their property’, ‘stop criminals’, and so forth. It is a purpose ingrained into their Culture. They own and keep guns with the expectation that they will use them to fight with in civilian life - to settle disputes, to kill bad guys, to ‘save lives’.

This is why I suspect none of them would ever give up a gun, not to save any life, not to save any number of lives. The Gun, and their Guns, cannot by definition be a problem, because a problem implies a moral deficit. Guns are moral by definition because they are the bringers of life. It would be akin to asking people to give up food to cure cancer. In American Culture, there is no connection between the sacred Gun in my hand and other people shooting other people. They exist totally separate from each other, unconnected.