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Saturday, February 19, 2011

Found this argument on gun control and felt like posting it. It's glorious


Human beings only have two ways to deal with one another: reason and
force. If you want me to do something for you, you have a choice of
either convincing me via argument, or force me to do your bidding under
threat of force. Every human interaction falls into one of those two
categories, without exception. Reason or force, that’s it.
In a truly moral and civilized society, people exclusively interact
through persuasion.  Force has no place as a valid method of social
interaction, and the only thing that removes force from the menu is the
personal firearm,  as paradoxical as it may sound to some.
When I carry a gun, you  cannot deal with me by force. You have to use
reason and try to  persuade me, because I have a way to negate your
threat or employment of force.
The gun is the only personal weapon that puts a 100-pound woman on equal
footing with a 220-pound mugger, a 75-year old retiree on equal footing
with a 19-year old gang banger, and a single guy on equal footing with a
carload of drunk guys with baseball bats. The gun removes the disparity
in physical strength, size, or numbers between a potential attacker and
a defender.
There are plenty of people who consider the gun as the source of bad
force equations. These are the people who think that we’d be more
civilized if all guns were removed from society, because a firearm makes
it easier for an armed mugger to do his job. That, of course, is only
true if the mugger’s potential victims are mostly disarmed either by
choice or by legislative fiat–it has no validity when most of a
mugger’s potential marks are armed.
People who argue for the banning of arms ask for automatic rule by the
young, the strong, and the many, and that’s the exact opposite of a
civilized society. A mugger, even an armed one, can only make a
successful living in a society where the state has granted him a force
monopoly.
Then there’s the argument that the gun makes confrontations lethal that
otherwise would only result in injury. This argument is fallacious in
several ways. Without guns involved, confrontations are won by the
physically superior party inflicting overwhelming injury on the loser.
People who think that fists, bats, sticks, or stones don’t constitute
lethal force watch too much TV, where people take beatings and come out
of it with a bloody lip at worst. The fact that the gun makes lethal
force easier works solely in  favor of the weaker defender, not the
stronger attacker. If both are armed, the field is level.
The gun is the only weapon that’s as lethal in the hands of an
octogenarian as it is in the hands of a weight lifter. It simply
wouldn’t work as well as a force equalizer if it wasn’t both lethal and
easily employable.
When I carry a gun, I don’t do so because I am looking for a fight, but
because I’m looking to be left alone. The gun at my side means that I
cannot be forced, only persuaded.  I don’t carry it because I’m afraid,
but because it enables me to be unafraid.  It doesn’t limit the actions
of those who would interact with me through reason, only the actions of
those who would do so by force.  It removes force from the equation…
and that’s why carrying a gun is a civilized act.
So the greatest civilization is one where all citizens are equally armed
and can only be persuaded, never forced.

Maj. L. Caudill USMC (Ret)

3 comments:

  1. add me to morning coffee

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  2. I just read a good deal of http://www.amazon.com/More-Guns-Less-Crime-Understanding/dp/0226493636
    and this was part of his argument as well. He cited a case where a mother was about to be robbed of her car until she shot the mugger with a .45(!) right form her purse, without even taking it out. Not everyone even needs to have a gun, there just has to be the constant threat of anyone having a gun.

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  3. That book sounds pretty interesting. I personally own guns but I only use them for target shooting. I do believe that there should be some regulation for firearms but people try and take it too far. Some of their claims and ideas are so rediculous that i just have to laugh. This video is pretty funny. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngsKzdKNAmo

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