Guns should be legal for home defense in the U.S.

A Fundamental Right?Liberty is valued because “over himself, over his body and mind, the individual is sovereign”. [1] Your discussion of rights is unsatisfactory. From your bee example, it can only be inferred that you think that humans have moral obligations to their families because they can survive without them. What obligation does a son have to a father who did nothing more than impregnate his mother? More germane is that you defended self-defence thus: ‘humans could not survive without it’ and ‘it is human nature’. My survival might depend on killing and eating my healthier friend, yet clearly that’s immoral. Likewise, ‘human nature’ meaning ‘typical behaviour’ is no basis for morality, as it is an appeal to nature. ‘Extreme’ examples serve to bring conflicts to attention. You contradict yourself: you say “the right of self-defense is not absolute”, and follow with “It is not a question of weighing the harm that might be dealt to the person breaking and entering against the harm the criminal might do to you and your family”. Your first statement asserts limitations, while your second claims that no matter how little harm is intended you may use any amount of force to prevent it. Ultimately, you provide neither a sound nor a coherent argument.Practical Self-DefenceSupreme Court rulings have bearing on the law, but not on morality, for what is lawful is not always moral, and vice-versa. Your assertion here is ridiculous, as you allege that human beings had no ‘realistic’ means of self-defence before Colt, and no means of speaking freely before Twitter. Putting that aside, let us consider the evidence already presented.Your evidence proves that people claim to have used guns in self-defence many times. My response was to provide evidence that the number of defensive gun uses (DGUs) was likely inflated, that the majority of the uses were probably illegal, and that more people report being intimidated by guns than using them in self-defence. You responded that the CDC is a reliable source, and that it is reasonable to think that the most reliable study on the number of rapes in America is so much less reliable than surveys on gun use that the latter can claim that more attempted rapes are prevented by guns than the former claims are both attempted and carried out. I believe an appropriate analogy is that of a man suffering hypothermia. He feels bad, so he drinks some vodka, as while this may be the only realistic way of him ‘feeling better’, it will only worsen his hypothermia, which is the cause of his misery. To respond to crime by arming civilians who appear to use their guns to break the law rather than to enforce it is similarly absurd. Notice there is nothing intrinsically wrong with owning a gun or drinking vodka, but we cannot ignore the context (that guns are used aggressively rather than defensively). Examining the FBI data used in your source ( I am not introducing new evidence) regarding Cheng / Hoekstra, I notice a few discrepancies. The author claims that “burglary increased between 2000 and 2010”[2], which is a shameful trick. The number of burglaries increased, but the burglary rate decreased from 728.8 to 699.6. [3] He also claims that the largest fall in homicide rate was -0.40, occurring in states which adopted castle doctrine; however, the national fall in homicide rate was a full -1.0 from 2006 to 2010 (according to his table, the national decrease should have been -0.23). Seeing as his data contradicts the data he supposed retrieved his data from, I see no reason to think his criticism of Cheng / Hoekstra is compelling. Finally, violent crime has been decreasing since 1991, when the FBI records shown begin. The proportion of gun-owners has been falling in the US since 1973. [4]The fact that I cannot introduce new evidence hinders my ability to respond to your Swiss example, but I can say (using your source) that in Switzerland guns are kept for target-shooting and because they are required to as part of the national militia (apparently I am not allowed to add that there are great restrictions on possessing ammunition). In America, guns are kept in large numbers by a few men who are afraid of being victimised by criminals, and by criminals. If the Swiss do not keep guns to deter criminals, then they hardly support your contention.Illegality of Guns (prepare for rhetorical questions)I provided solid evidence that in countries with strict gun control, guns are very difficult to obtain illegally. Your response was to shift the issue to drugs, which are not difficult to obtain. Despite having proven that this is comparing apples and oranges, I shall explain: have you considered that drugs are easy to manufacture (or grow), that they are easier to smuggle than guns, and that more profit can be obtained by selling drugs than guns? I do not think evidence is required, this is common sense. I can grow cannabis in my house, but I cannot manufacture guns. I can smuggle drugs in my body – I doubt I could the same with guns. You yourself say that guns are durable. Will I make more money selling a drug dealer one gun, or repeat shipments of drugs? Furthermore, if drugs are legalised, the demand for illegal weapons will drop sharply as the scale of organised crime drops.Of course, if there is a giant demand for guns by relatively wealthy groups (as there was in Ireland), there will be a greater monetary incentive to smuggle in weapons, but this is an unusual circumstance. In areas where there is a large threat from wildlife, then this should be considered when inhabitants apply for gun permits. I also feel there are surely weapons more suited to fighting off a bear and less suited to violent crime than a handgun. Your last remark there seems rather petty – are you claiming that even if you agreed that there should be strict gun control, you would not bother do anything about it? I realise there are a lot of guns in America, but I’m certain your authorities are competent enough to reduce this number over time.Suicide and Accidental DeathI ‘dropped’ these points because they do not seem to be relevant. I’m certain that trousers and staircases cause thousands of fatalities a year, yet these things don’t particularly assist with committing crime or intimidating people (although one would look a tad silly attempting to scare someone without any trousers on). Perhaps guns do not have any effect on suicide rates, but nonetheless they appear to be used for that purpose quite frequently (see Kellerman). Either this qualifies as ‘misuse’, in which case your argument is weakened, and if not then we should provide people with methods of committing suicide that do not allow you to kill people.To ConcludeRoy is lucky that I provided him with a rational basis for justifying self-defence (liberty), as he provided only contradictory intuitions and the rulings of other people. He proceeded to assert that you cannot defend yourself against crime without a gun, which he chose to base on the number of DGUs. I showed that he could not use the results of those surveys as justification, and that guns worsen the problem of crime. He relies heavily on the claim that all weapons are equal in their ability to assist crime, while saying that only guns can prevent crime. He claimed that guns will always be available illegally, but ignored that they really aren’t in places such as the UK and Japan. Roy had to defend the status quo; he failed to provide a compelling defence of any kind. I identified several problems caused by America’s lack of gun control and proposed a radical tightening of them (perhaps incrementally), and provided evidence of how this would cause improvement. I am a defender of freedom, but you demand to perpetuate an aggressive and violent culture. America does not have it right with guns. [1] http://tiny.cc... (p.18)[2] http://tiny.cc...[3] http://tiny.cc...[4] http://tiny.cc...