re: #362 buzzsawmonkey

There will always be people who cannot handle responsibility. Arguably, all of us can’t handle responsibility in some aspect of our lives.

But we do not become better at handling responsibility by being given less of it, because by having less responsibility we have less practice at being responsible.

Being responsible means having more opportunities to screw up—which means more practice at dealing with frustration, failure or disappointment, and therefore more likelihood of being armored against being broken by it.

If we give away all responsibility for protection and civility to the government, we absolve ourselves of the need to practice these things. If we hand over to the government the management of our money, our career choices, our lives, we are making the choice to become Eloi handing ourselves over to Morlocks.

There will probably be an uptick of ugly incidents if gun ownership becomes less circumscribed, simply because some people will have less practice in behaving responsibly. But it is a step towards the society as a whole taking back its birthright of individual responsibility from those who now hold it but should never have been entrusted with it.

Agreed.

But their will also be a corollary pressure. More responsible people will have and carry firearms. The chances of someone who means to do harm of running into an armed citizen will go up.

John Lott has done good work in showing that the higher the number of legal firearms, crime and incidents go down.