den Otter wrote:
>
> ----------
> > From: dwayne <dwayne@pobox.com>
>
> > My neighbours don't have guns. No one I know has a gun. I live in a
> > country where guns are banned. I like it here. I think anyone who wants
> > to live in a country where everyone has guns is mad.
>
> Tough restrictions on guns is one thing, but the real problem is IMO
> the general anti-personal empowerment attitude which is the driving
> force behind gun bans.
I don't see guns as in any way empowering the citizenry, rather than forcing people to confront aggressors, it strikes me as quite easy to just pull a trigger and kill them. I would argue that a country where everyone is armed is far less polite than one where people can't just blow their problems away.
And OF COURSE the government is trying to take this "empowerment" away, that is the entire idea behind police forces, we have highly trained professionals to apprehend people etc., as opposed to scared, highly agitated amateurs with powerful weaponry.
> The same people who deny citizens the
> right to defend themselves with lethal force, are also very likely to
> deny them other rights too (like the right to carry non-lethal weapons
> like mace or stun guns,
What's wrong with hands and feet?
> or even worse, the very right to defend
> yourself at all when attacked by a criminal -- this is already quite
> common where I live).
Dwayne
-- mailto:ddraig@pobox.com http://i.am/dwayne "the cricher we kno as dwayne is only the projection into our dimension of something much larger and wirder." ---clae@pa.ausom.net.au ....return....to....the....source....