Citizen Gun Ownership:
The Ability to Defend

Last Update: 13 October, 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:

1. Canada:

• 21 Oct 2022: Trudeau Has Officially Killed Canada’s Legal Handgun Market

• Oct. 21, 2022: Federal handgun freeze now in effect amid fears MPs will water down the measure

What the Problems with Gun Ownership Restriction (aka Gun Control) are:

1. Police/Military can't be expected to reliably defend you in time.

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:

1. In theory, Government security forces physicaly can't be there immediately, howevermuch they want to. They usually 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 a regional disaster, they would logically be too overwhelmed to respond to most people at all.

2. In practice, police and/or military have sometimes failed to arrive quickly

   including reports of waiting for an hour or more in many well-known crises where people were being shot at. 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).

• January 1, 2023: Many 911 calls deserve an ‘immediate’ police response. But in thousands of cases, officers didn’t arrive for more than an hour.

• January 9, 2023: Some Toronto residents say they're waiting up to 24 hours for police after calling 911

• October 12, 2017: Pressure Mounts for Vegas Police to Explain Response Time

3. When police do arrive, they can be reluctant to intervene immmediately, such as to wait for backup or create a perimeter before going in. Example articles:

• June 6, 2022: The tragic history of police responding too late to active shooters

• May 26, 2022: Police waited an hour for backup in the Uvalde shooting. That's an outdated tactic, experts say.

• June 21, 2022: The police response at Robb Elementary was a failure, a Texas official says

• October 30, 2022: Bodycam footage shows Uvalde police complaining about risk of getting shot during school massacre

4. 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. Example article: Can You Sue The Police For Not Coming When Called?

2. 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.

3. In theory and practice, we shouldn't have to rely only on the police to save us:

• Police expect you to cooperate with robbers, and presumably other criminals as well, presumably on the unspoken reason that they can't be there in time to help you. The basic idea is that if the criminal has a gun and you don't you're helpless so you must comply. Example article: LAPD Asks Residents To ‘Cooperate And Comply’ With Robbers

  Would it be better not to be helpless and forced to give in to any demands of any armed assailant at any time?

• 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.

• October 09, 2023: Israel Loosens Strict Gun Control Laws To Arm ‘As Many Citizens As Possible’

4. 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.

5. Gun ownership restriction favours Government and that's not always a good thing becvause Government can go insane.

   They keey 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.

   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

6. Government is evidenced to be linked to the cause of some school shootings or terrorist attacks.

• The True Evil Behind America's Mass School Shootings

7. Gun control programs are target peaceful and violent people the same without distinction. Like with cars, guns are only a tool, and it depends on which hands they are in. Our gun laws should reflect that.