[deno]

When we say majority of gun owners are ‘law-abididing citizens’ we mean they’re good and moral people, and not that they’re obedient subjects.

Your argument seems to be focused on semantics, which is fine, except you’re missing the point of this statement.

There’s very much a difference in disobeying a natural law like murder and an arbitrary, reactionary, and most of all, unconstitutional, law that’s designed to limit freedom and achieve nothing.

Civil disobedience is amoral. In fact, when the law in question is unjust or unconstitutional to disobey it is a virtue.

[withdavidli]

agree on the latter statements.

definition of words matter, word choice matters to avoid confusion it may cause.

if the original argument is that mostly good/moral people are the gun owners, i wouldn't know where to start on how they got that data, and came to that interpretation as both words are relative.

[deno]

How about starting with the fact that are more guns than people in United States, and yet gun violence (excluding suicides) is on similar level as other developed countries, and on constant decline?

Major sources of gun violence are no different than in any other developed country, which unfortunately is in a big part fueled by the global failed drug prohibition, and committed with very much illegal firearms.

UK, for example, despite its strictest gun control, has much of the same problems, committed with more primitive tools, only leaving you to bleed out slower, but ending up just as dead (stab wounds are often more lethal than handgun calibers).

The surplus or deficit of guns does not affect the number of people already predisposed to capital crime. The law, unsurprisingly, only affects those that are willing to abide by it. Left defenseless, suspect by default and at mercy of the King.

Clearly, by the way of deduction, legally owned guns must then be in the hands of good & responsible people, for the most part. That, btw, includes 22% of Democrat voters (to 35% Republicans).

I don’t actually think that guns magically make people good or responsible (though they make other people more polite).

It’s likely just a correlation having to do with how firearm owners autoselect, based on range of personality traits and other criteria (like gender).

The statement “401(k) owners are on average good people” is probably equally true, though we don’t collect any data to disprove it, as far as I know.

Nevertheless, there’s some comfort in the fact that of the 370 million guns in United States, all but very few will more likely be used to save lives, rather than take them.

A grand experiment in freedom & liberty, nothing alike anywhere else in the world.

[dragonwriter]

> Nevertheless, there’s some comfort in the fact that of the 370 million guns in United States, all but very few will more likely be used to save lives, rather than take them.

That's based on a false dichotomy; many won't be used at all, and many of the rest will be used for entertainment, not to save or take lives. And some will be used for multiole purposes (often simultaneously), potentially including both saving and taking lives. (A criminal who fatslly shoots a cop to make his escape from arrest on a capital offense, is, after all, both saving and taking a life, as is the cop who, being slightly faster in the same situation, fatally shoots the criminal first.)

[deno]

I’ve tried to word around it carefully with ‘will more likely to be’, but obviously that’s true.

I think the number of firearms in US is quite remarkable, considering the fact that in my home country, Poland, only a single person in hundred owns a firearm.

If gun control was in any way effective at reducing crime, it should be very easy to demonstrate, with such significant differences in saturation.