I visited Abhijeet Singh's website after he commented on my blog, and found the amazing "Parable of the Sheep."
It sums up our situation.
I recommend this short Bastiat-like parable to all my readers, and especially to those who are opposed to citizens owning guns.
To access the parable, click here.
I also recommend Abhijeet's blog.
There is also, on Abhijeet's website, a spirited call for an armed citizenry by Eric S Raymond, where he says:
"We live with a recent history of massacres by governments that have dwarfed in scope and cruelty anything Barlow or Jefferson could have imagined. The Turkish massacre of the Armenians, the Nazi final solution, the Soviet purges, the killing fields of Cambodia, the Hutu-Tutsi massacres in Rwanda; each and every one of these vast and hideous slaughters was preceded by and relied upon the disarmament of the victims.
It is more important than ever, today after a century of blood, that we retain the power both to protect ourselves and to discern the cause of such oppressions. That cause has never been in civilian arms borne by free people, but in their opposite and enemy — the organized and conscienceless brutality of cancerous states."
To read the full text, click here.
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ReplyDeleteTrust yourself Anand. You won't be playing counter-strike on the streets.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, on being 'trigger happy'...
HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN...
(WHEN I FEEL MY FINGER ON YOUR TRIGGER,
I KNOW NOBODY CAN DO ME NO HARM)...
BECAUSE
HAPPINESS IS A WARM GUN, MAMA
(John Lennon)
@anand...i hope that this answer suffices...
ReplyDeletethere are always bad apples among good ones...for me it is utopian to think that there will be no violence once there is gun control...of course there is going to be...everybody who wants to get a gun will get it...further, the person who wants to kill can kill with anything other than a gun...the person can kill with an axe, a fork, knife...the question is if a person tries to attack you (with any tool) don't you want an option to protect yourself...yea it is good idea to call our superheroes, the cops, the army, the NSG, etc...but the point is response time...even if india's guards are effecient in responding...it would take atleast 15 minutes to get anywhere...it is a fact...less than a minute is required for someone to kill anyone of us...but if we had a tool to protect ourselves...then our response time could also be less than a minute...
yea...there might be "Trigger Happy" people around...and they are already around...but remember that the "Trigger Happy" person...may think twice before being "Trigger Happy" if we had guns...
Anand,
ReplyDeleteYour premise is based on the flawed assumption that gun control actually works! Basically your entire train of thought is based on the fact that since the law makes it extremely difficult to acquire a (legal) gun, it is actually successfully keeping guns out of the hands of all (good & bad) people.
This premise is can be tested in the real world and found to be untrue.
How else do you explain the fact that the same gun in the black market costs 1/4th or less than the price it commands on the legal market? For e.g. a semi-auto pistol of foreign make costs between INR 25,000 - INR 50,000 on the black market (depending on make/ condition/ supplier/ buyer etc.).
On the other hand a foreign make pistol legal market costs between INR 250,000 all the way up to INR 1,500,000/- and upwards!
Also, the black marketeer is not going to ask you to show your valid license before he will sell to you!
So, those who would misuse firearms, those who do not care for the law ALREADY have a steady supply of firearms available to them.
The only ones denied arms by gun control are the law abiding folk who do not wish to break the law!
Do you think the mafia or the terrorists apply for gun licenses for the AK-47's they use to rain mayhem and destruction?
Cheers!
Abhijeet
Anand,
ReplyDeleteYour fears are not surprising coming from someone who has grown up in a country which has gun control laws in force for almost a century and a half! I say this without any malice at all, but these fears stem from pure ignorance about gun and also self defence situations.
If I may be so forward as to ask, what is "gun culture"? At least, what does it mean to you?
Are guns a deterrent? But of course, and the beauty of it is, not everyone has to carry guns for them to be a deterrent. If the legal access to guns was simpler, and even if (say) 30% of all women could be assumed to be carrying guns (at any given time/ place), then you would see an immediate drop in the no. of cases of rape/ molestation etc. It is not merely those who carry who benefit from gun ownership, but the community as a whole. Why? Because the criminal has no way of knowing (in the above example) as to which one of these ladies has a .38 special in her handbag and which one does not. As a direct result the other 70% benefit as well.
A vast majority of criminals are basically cowards (ask any psychiatrist) and they always look for easy/ easier targets. If the chances of their getting hurt/ killed go up they shift their area of operation and try to find a safer line of work.
As to your comment about rubber bullets/ less than lethal arms. Well, I have this to say - when a criminal targets you with a weapon he chooses the most effective means of offence he can lay his hands on, why then should you limit yourself in choice when defending yourself? You did not ask/ encourage him to attack you, you did not go out looking for a confrontation, you were going about your life before this criminal attacked you. He will come at you with a full auto assault rifle and you want to shoot him with rubber bullets?!
Do you realise that in a real life self-defence situation you get 2 or 3 shots max to put down your attacker? If you cannot do so, you lose! Loosely translated, you end up in hospital or the morgue.
The first rule of self-defence is to avoid confrontation. So if you can leave the situation (read run away) you should do so. But when you are cornered, with no route of escape and are faced with one/ more determined attacker(s), what do you do? You shoot back, is what you do and you try and make sure that your attackers stay shot - so that they cannot cause you harm.
You talk about an appointed armed guard carrying guns. In a county of 1 billion plus, do you think the government can provide everyone (or even half of the people) with armed guards? Lets be a little realist here, shall we?
Whether you decide to carry a gun to defend yourself or not is your choice, but it should BE A CHOICE, not something that is forced on you. The citizens who feel they are ready for the responsibility of arming themselves should be able to do so. Currently this choice exists only on paper...
The problem currently is that more than 80% of guns in India are in the hands of criminals (as per some Indian police estimates), it's time we began to even out the odds a bit in favour of the good guys - don't you think?
Even Gandhi had this to say:
"I believe that non-violence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment. Forgiveness adorns a soldier...But abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish; it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature.... "
And in case you did not know, he protested in favour of gun rights during the British raj at time when gun ownership in India was in many ways less restricted than it is now!
Cheers!
Abhijeet
I have been reading the arugments against gun control, but still cant seem to agree. The main issue for me, is where do we draw the line.
ReplyDeleteIf I can buy a gun from market, can I buy an AK47 also, and if so how about a few grenades or a bit of rdx? and If I happen to believe in a cult - for example, say - aum shinrikyo and use the above tools to carry out what I think is right?
This all becomes too out of control here.
Hi Abhijeet
ReplyDeleteI'd like to address your concerns by pointing out something you've mentioned on your own website:
Legal guns would be trackable. The gun and ammo would all be trackable to the legal owner. That makes it incredibly dumb to use legally obtained weapons for criminal actions.
Anybody who wanted to use guns to commit crimes would either know that it's in his own best interest to use an illegally obtained weapon, in which case legal availability of guns doesn't affect anything, or he'd go ahead and do it anyway with a legally obtained weapon, in which case bringing him to justice would be straightforward - and such people need to be found and put away. They will likely cause harm with or without legal gun availability.
A third option was brought up by a friend I was having this exact discussion with a few days ago.
She said: what if legally obtained weapons are used only to threaten in the commission of a crime, but not actually fired. In this case, she argued, the legal availability of guns would aid armed crime without any negative impact on the criminal.
But this is again a flawed argument, as it is equally possible to threaten armed crime with a realistic replica of a gun, which are already easily available, as well as with knives and other weapons, also already easily available.
In sum, the legal availability of weapons is not a net benefit for criminals or "hotheads" but only for would-be victims, as gun rights activists correctly argue.
One doesn't even need to 'believe' the logic of these arguments to see factual evidence that gun ownership prevents armed crime - one needs only to look at the historical data of armed crime before and after gun control was introduced or lifted in various places for historical evidence of the dramatic effect of civilian gun ownership in reducing armed crime.
Oops.. I just read the top of the page again and realized that the comments I am responding to were not those of Abhijeet, but of Anand Rao.
ReplyDeleteApologies for the confusion. My comment above addresses Anand Rao's comment at the top of the page, and not Abhijeet's.