An eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth….soon the whole world will be blind and toothless.-Teyve from A Fiddler on The Roof.
For the first time ever, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Second Amendment conveys an individual right to keep and bear arms.
My Father in Law was not a gun owner, but a good old fashioned law abiding citizen who believed anyone who wanted to own a gun, should be able to do so. He saw the need for firearms in our less than Civilized Society. One his favorite saying on the topic was from famed sci fi writer Robert A Heinlein –An armed society is a polite society.
Robert A Heinlein clearly never lived in a well armed society-where the average person on the street carried a handgun and used it as he saw fit. This is the stuff of fiction-Robert A Heinlein’s true field of expertise. He also created a world which followed pure Biblical Law and punished every criminal act with an exact recreation of the crime-so that a hit and run drive would be run over and left in the road for the exact period to time it for his victim to receive help. There are likely many people who would think was a swell system which should be acted upon as well.
People are weak and feeble creatures for the most part-we die in all kinds of simple and meaningless way. Lots of people die all the time without the help of handguns to speed the job along. But some people just don’t like to wait. And that is the trouble with handguns-if you are pissed off at someone and want to kill them, there are lots of ways to do it. Run them over with a car, beat them to death with a baseball bat, poison them, choke them, hang them, stab them, get them shipped off to a war zone-or shoot them.
What’s the difference between killing someone with a gun and killing them just about any other way? Time and ease of use. Any moron can use a gun. Any 98 pound weakling can kill with a handgun-a child can do, and children do kill people with handguns on a regular basis. There is no skill or strength require. No intellegence is needed. Just a willingness to pull the trigger.
The average person has no other means to produce instant death-oh the skilled person can rig a car to blow up-if they live on a TV Show or a Movie Set. Guns are also nice and safe, a perfect coward’s weapon. No risk of getting hurt yourself as with a knife, a baseball bat, a rope, or any other standard form of killing that requires getting up close and personal. Even running over someone with a car could lead to problems of running into other things beside the person you want to kill-besides, they mess up your car.
The only time you run any real danger when using a handgun is. . .when the person your shooting has a handgun as well. This is the logic behind that whole An armed socitety is a polite society bit. There is an inner logic to it, that most people would rather not get killed themselves, so they won’t start shooting first. Maybe this was the case once upon a time, before crack cocaine and The Bloods and The Crips and the countless clones there of. Now people don’t mind dying, hell, a good third of the world thinks it’s the pathway to Heaven.
I know that I get pissed off a lot, would I kill all the bastards if it was as easy as pulling a trigger? Maybe. Would this really make the world a better place? I doubt it.
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