Citizen Gun Ownership:
The Ability to Defend
Last Update: 8 December, 2023
What the Issue is:
The issue is about whether or not individuals should have the right to own firearms.
Why this Matters:
With firearms being the main weapon of warfare for hundreds of years, whether you have the right to own a firearm is essentially a question of whether individuals have the right to be significantly armed or relatively defenseless.
As for defenselessness, many weapons which approach the effectiveness of firearms are typeically often prohbited in jurisdictions which prohibit or severely restrict firearm ownership.
Evidence that a Government war on private gun ownership is real:
Canada:
What the Problems with Gun Ownership Restriction (aka Gun Control) are:
Gun control favours villains over victims. It only disarms residents who abide by the Law. A determined villain has time to get a gun before a shooting, but a disarmed Public would be vulnerable. Anyone with a gun has a big advantage over even a crowd of disarmed innocent people, especially to catch them in an enclosed place like a school, theatre, or concert. This is why mass shootings are most successful when dealing with disarmed groups of people. Mass shootings generally only stop when someone with a gun arrives and shoots the villain. Until then it's like shooting fish in a barrel. Gun control makes you utterly dependent on Police/Military response to save you, which has many problems:
Government (including Police) accepts no legal obligation to defend you. Laws vary by region and time, but generally police aren't legally obligated to respond to your cry for help: not at all. Before you give up your guns, you should ask if the armed forces you are putting your trust in have any legal obligation to defend you, rather than assume that they do and will. Example article: Can You Sue The Police For Not Coming When Called? Police & Military Response Times are Often Inadequate The gun control lobby has been maintaining this usually-unspoken but strong underlying assumptiont hat you dont need a gun because police will come quickly enough when we need them. It is false because:
In theory, once you experience an immediate lethal threat, Government security forces usually can't arrive to defend you faster than the threat can arrive to kill you. They are not faster than a speeding bullet. Even under ideal conditions, they need to drive their, park, and get to you. Any wait, even a twelve minutes reasponse time, must feel like an eternity when you're being shot at, especially if you have no means to defend yourself, and is obviously enough time for a villain to pull a trigger and leave. In practice, police and/or military have sometimes failed to arrive in a time appropriate to the emergency including reports of waiting for an hour or more in many well-known crises where people were being shot at. It's not supposed to happen but it does. For example, that was the reported wait in the Las Vegas mass shooting and the 7 October, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel). It actually starts from the phone call: it's now a modern phenomenon that many people get put on hold when they call the emergency response line (eg. 911).In a regional disaster, they would logically be too overwhelmed to respond to most people at all.
When police do arrive, they are sometimes reluctant to intervene immmediately, for tactical reasons (not wanting to get into harm's way, waiting for backup or to establish a perimeter first, etc). Example articles: Police have sometimes been known to shoot the person they were called for help. Just because they were called for help, doesn't mean that they necessarily see it your way. Police expect you to cooperate with 'robbers'. From their perspective it makes more sense to have you give up your property than police risk their lives to defend it, and from any perspective it makes sense to give up your property than your life. In practice, however, no one knows if it's just a robbery until it's over. In particular, if you are told to hand over your property in the face of threat of bodily harm, that's a threat on you as well as of your property, and there is no guarantee that compliance will cancel the threat on your life. For example, even if the perpetrator is focused on robbery, they might see an incentive to shoot you after you hand the goods over, to prevent you being a witness: ultimately not a wise decision for them, but a decision they might make in the heat of the moment. Armed robbery should be ended by force based on the threat on life, but it seems that police don't care to do that. Example articles:
Gun owenership discourages mass attacks against citizens whether terrorist or military. After the 7 October, 2023 attack on civilians by Hamas, Israel relaxed gun ownership laws, as well as started distributing weapons to citizens, almost as though an admission of disarming citizens was a mistake. Private Gun ownership is a citizen defense against any violent and insane Government moves. Government keeps their own law enforcement armed and armoured. Normally this isn't a problem, but if Government ever tried to do something atrocious, as it has many times in history, the Public would have no physical way to defend ourselves if we are unarmed.
Nations where the Public is unarmed are usually the most oppressive, and it's not uncommon for such governments to kill their own people. This is, for example, what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany: first disarmed, then exterminated. Some other historical references are in this video: Comedian and genius JP Sears with important history lesson: Gun control
Gun Ownership Successes: There are numerous examples where violent crime was abruptly stopped by a legal gun owner who happened to be on the scene and carrying his or her weapon. One of them: Armed Robbery Stopped by Armed Customer. There don't seem to be any stories of individuals or communities under attack faring better for not owning guns.
Corporate Attacks on Legal Gun Ownership
Dec 09, 2022: Gun Shops And Customers Claim Credit Card Firms "Restrict" Firearm Purchases
What the Solution Is:
Adults should be permitted to own firearms until and unless their behaviour proves them unworthy: something likewe already do with licenses to drive vehicles (which are no less dangerous than firearms).
Communities Pushing Back
Petitions to Sign:
Canada: Scrap the gun ban and buy back
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