[Bright Eyes]

For my part, I don't own a gun and never have. What's more, for most of my life I held to the idea that guns were bad. That is what I was taught in school, on TV, in the media, in discussions, everywhere. We don't need guns because people will just use them to kill others, and besides, we have the police to save our bacon when we need them.

What changed my mind was the understanding that people who don't have guns can still die from them. And they do. This is because only the law-abiding obey gun-control laws; criminals still have them and use them. The only difference is that the victim can't shoot back. This makes the criminals very happy.

Ever since I started learning from alt news outlets, instead of relying on the main stream media, I have heard of many cases where law-abiding people who had self-protection were able to shoot back at a criminal, and stopped the criminal from continuing to do harm. This meant something to me.

The Main Stream Media almost never report on such events. The media has for years painted gun-owners as rednecks who are reckless with guns and that the high American gun death rate is due to them. This is not born out by the actual statistics. American law-abiding gun owners are, over all, a fairly peaceable bunch. Millions upon millions of people own guns and never do gun violence to anyone their entire lives. Most violent gun crime in America is gang related, often over drug deals or gang turf. And this is not in locations where Constitutional gun carry exists; it's mostly in Gun Control areas like Chicago, LA, Philadelphia, Detroit, where legal gun ownership is nearly impossible. So the gangsters have guns illegally. They don't care about the law, and law enforcement can't stop them having guns, so disarming the law-abiding doesn't achieve a whole lot, except make honest people more vulnerable and please those who have been conned on this subject.

People do point at the massacres that have taken place as an argument against guns, but the reverse is true. The people who were shot at were already disarmed. If any of them had the means to shoot back the situations may have turned out less destructively to human life. This, in fact, has happened a number of times when potential massacres have been less or nipped in the bud because someone was able to shoot the person starting the attack. The MSM tend not to report such things, so people are unaware of them. It is no coincidence that most of these massacres have taken place in gun-control areas, where people are unlikely to have the means to fight back.

Then there is the matter of the US Constitution, which recognizes people's natural right to own guns with a view to self-protection and even overthrowing a tyrannical government that can't be removed by legal means and is oppressing the people. The founding fathers were savvy enough to know that governments invariably attract corrupt people because it offers them power and the means to make a lot of money. So they wrote that the Second Amendment, which protects the First Amendment, ie, the human right to freedom of speech, which includes the freedom to speak against the government. The Constitution requires government to protect people's right to free speech and to bear arms, not erode them. Proto-tyrannical governments love to take away people's guns; this has happened in so many countries over the years, before they felt free to become tyrannical; the people, having been disarmed 'for the good of the people', had no means to fight back. So all of this seem like reasonable arguments to me for the owning of firearms.

I am conscious that I have probably alienated nearly everyone who still visits this forum, and I'm sorry for that to happen. But for me, in all good conscience, I do believe that the means to protect your life is a basic human right that no government has the prerogative to take away or infringe. The US government, at least, is supposed to be the servant of the sovereign people, not their master. The degree of departure from that foundational principle shows how far down the slippery slope America has gone, and in many other countries the people aren't sovereign at all, but subjects of either a monarch or the state. People are not encouraged to consider that reality, being intentionally distracted with other things.

The implied social contract that the police will save our chestnuts out of the fire is a myth; police almost never can arrive in time to save us; they usually can only arrive, at best, a few minutes later, and most attacks on people are over by then.

Over the recent years, since 9/11 in fact, I have come to realize how conditioned my thinking had become by my social environment. During this time I have been working at studying alternative views that the MSM don't acknowledge, or deride as nutter opinions. I have found many things out that have been liberating to me, but I know has put me outside what most people will accept. People generally don't like to have their world view disturbed. Most people don't want to be cast out by their friends, so they conform and fit in. That's their choice, but I prefer to value truth in all subjects, not just about self-defense.

So sorry guys; I'm in a very different camp to the one I was in at the beginning of Napsterites, all those years ago.