Yo dawg, do you think, even with guns, that the ordinary guy who learns how to use a hunting rifle or what not is going to have ANY chance against all the government army equipement, training and support?

The argument for protection against the government is just silly, this is 2013 not 1700s, even if 10, 20 or 30% of the population knew how to use a gun, less than half of that are actualy trained at actual armed combat.

The thought of thinking guys with hunting rifles can stand a chance against properly trained military is insane, but hey… that seems like a nice excuse for all the deaths so far… A hypothetical defense against a hypothetical “war” that would very very likely end in massive defeat…

I see this argument used a lot and I simply can’t understand, what do you think the 21st century US military these days isn’t just going to mop the floor with you and your hobby gun?

There are scenarios where supporting the citizen’s right to build and own guns is justified. If a totalitarian state made its way into office, we can safely say that global humanity is now at war with it. I uphold this principle against regimes such as Saddam Hussein’s.

But when it comes to democratic societies, mentalities start to vary.

The whole idea of a democratic government being afraid of citizens with guns has to depend on the following: the citizen needs to have access to buy a gun, has to afford to buy a gun, has to actually have the gun, has to keep the gun loaded, has to be able to shoot the gun more accurately than trained soldiers of the state military, and has to have the WILL to shoot the gun which is surely asking a lot from someone who has never killed anybody.

In order for you to be consistent, you would have to justify the compulsory possession of guns as well as compulsory gun training and psychological repression of guilt in relation to killing. Otherwise, what have trained governments and trained soldiers got to fear? Never mind the arsenal the military have that are much, much more powerful than the gun.

Perhaps the founding fathers could not see this on the count of the “first hand knowledge” you talked about. I’d prefer to say “first hand bias”, as they assumed the average layman would supposedly having the same degree of bravery that they had. Also, what would their answer be to the government’s self-granted permission to have missiles and bombs on planes? No gun can shoot a plane high enough that can still drop bombs. And it would be unrealistic to expect the layman to have his own plane and bombs, let alone a pilot’s licence.

The question of “who do you call against the police?” can be best understood by realising that there are other police stations to call. And if the ENTIRE police are corrupt in a fascist manner, fair enough you would be in a rouge-state scenario which probably means war. Although, the government would be in possession of too many bomb-dropping planes for any 2nd amendment law to matter. Here, you need help from abroad, not within. Just as democracies can hold each citizen interdependently accountable, so too can all democracies in the world hold each other to account. And it is here where you can call upon outside support in the form of fighter jets and the like.

The clich? is probably true that “guns don’t kill people”. However, I have a corollary: “nuclear bombs don’t kill people”. What I want to know is what is it about the 2nd amendment that permits guns but not anything else, such as flame throwers, grenades, cluster bombs, turrets in your gardens, mines, chemical weapons, biological viruses, etc. They are all “arms”, too. What makes the gun so special? I am sure if everybody possessed a nuclear bomb, no government would dare oppress its citizens, yet you would be hard pushed to see how this is justified. But what we do have is a United States where there are more guns than people, yet the government continues to trespass on freedoms for fear of bugger all.

It is often said that if somebody had a gun during the Dark Knight Rises premier, fewer people could have died since somebody would have put the killer down. But again, putting the burden on a probably youthful person to start killing halfway through a good time at the movies even in order to save the lives of others is no doubt asking too much for it to be realistically expected. And what if others in the audience who also had guns to defend themselves ended up mistaking the first defending shooter as the psycho and shot HIM instead? Cinemas are fairly dark: it is quite possible to get confused. I have never really heard Libertarians answer these kinds of questions before.

Sure, knives can be weapons too. But they can also be butter spreaders and scissors, just like a rock can be blunt enough to kill people but act as an efficient paperweight. The thing about the gun is that its only purpose seems to be killing organisms, which brings it into moral question in a different way.

Even although what would solve this issue is the uninvention of the gun, I would not want it to happen nor block anybody from knowing how to build one. It is a matter of principle that knowledge is always liberating in this way (if we know how to build nuclear bombs, we can stop malicious people getting their hands on uranium and possibly use nuclear bombs to stop incoming asteroids heading towards Earth). And that is what I would say needs to be acknowledged as the true emancipator. A government will never be oppressive enough to uninvent the gun, and as long as that is the case we can fight totalitarian regimes off in different circumstances other than continued, unnecessary proliferation of guns where it is not required.

If fascism occurs, build your own guns and buy them abroad. Oppressive states cannot monitor every inch of every border. If not, do not allow useless objects to commit harmful actions by taking them out of circulation. I highly doubt the U.K., where I live, will turn into an oppressive state any time soon with its ban on guns. We like to state the nastiness of knife crime more than gun crime to be honest. However if it does turn oppressive, I’ll know that countries who are willing to defend democracy will be willing to give me guns. And grenades.