Why Ban Guns?

For the joy of taste, we willingly tolerate and personally finance, through our taxes, daily episodes of pain, misery, and medical treatments that result from obesity diseases, and then we willingly further tolerate the deaths of thousands and thousands of our family members, friends, and neighbors each year for the same reason.  If we wanted to, we could ban hamburgers, donuts and the other foods that contribute to this horrible social problem – but we don’t, even though these foods are not essential to our well-being.

And, for the satisfaction of arriving earlier at the places we are going to, we routinely tolerate the misery and anxiety of traffic jams, and the many deaths that result from high-speed automobiles accidents.  We could ban high-speed highways and fast automobiles to mitigate this harmful social problem if we wanted to – but we don’t.  We lived without the highways and cars for many years during earlier times, so we know they are not really essential to us either.

And, again, for the joy of watching sports events, we gleefully encourage the blocking and tackling, elbowing and smashing, crashes, and knockouts, that result in thousands of debilitating injuries and deaths each year.  These events could also be banned if we wanted to - because these sport events are also not very important to our way of life.

These are only three examples of the things that we do for not very good reasons.  But when we talk about some people purposefully killing themselves with guns, or having accidents with guns, we are more than willing to ban the gun even though the fault is with the person – not the gun.

Even if the people, who want to ban guns, argue that the examples of misery and death that I described in the examples above, are no more than acceptable collateral damage for a perceived greater good to society, I argue that self defense and defending your home is easily a greater social good than the joy of taste, being in a hurry to get somewhere, of loving to watch train wrecks happen in sports.

I further argue that gun ownership in this country represents something much greater - it is the only true defense by a free people against a possible menacing government.  Guns represent the ultimate power to the ones who possesses them - domination of one county over another, one group over another, a state over its people when it enforces tax collection and obedience, i.e. Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot, and others.

Preservation of our freedoms is what gun ownership is all about.  So, if there really is no valid reasons for banning guns, why in the world would certain elements of our political society continuously still want to ban them anyway?