re: #39 Obdicut

There’s no reason to get upset - we agree on 99% of this but for some reason we’re having a fight over whether it’s reasonable to say that banning guns altogether would make people safer. I think it would. If I read you correctly, you think that in some cases guns make people safer, but my response to that is to say that those people would be safer yet in a society that had banned guns. Europe provides good evidence of this.

It’s also why people who don’t have an actual reason to worry about home safety shouldn’t own a gun, and should be educated as to the realities of gun ownership and the risks versus the benefits.

Other than extremely limited situations such as witness protection programs I can’t really see how you’d come up with a way of defining people who “have an actual reason to worry about home safety” and who would be any safer with a gun than without one.

I’m not “acting as if the argument is won”. Obviously there are loads of people out there who believe, in the face of all actual evidence, that owning a gun makes you safer. However, I don’t see the point in claiming that some people would be made safer by owning guns when this is manifestly not true, or at least, not in the sense that they would be safer than they would be if guns were banned.

People in different countries do lots of crazy things. In the US, one of those things is allowing people to own guns in a more or less completely unregulated way. I don’t think it’s unreasonable or bad to point out that this is stupid.