So Navy Seals are incompetent too? Most of our police and sheriff departments are made up of retired and active military branches.

Well, if you can't walk and chew gum at the same time maybe you should just stay home, away from the big bad world.

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Try that in a first person shooter (using difficulty levels to adjust number of "criminals") and get back to us on that.

I'm pretty sure he meant the total supply would be reduced. But as I said above, you can make a zipgun pretty easily.

If you live in a first person shooter then you are much much worse off than most people. I'd worry less about getting a gun and more about the fact that every single person in the world wants to kill me. And I'd probably choose to run and hide rather than try killing many simultaneous opponents.

How do you figure that? Just the fact that there's a gun store drastically increases the options of stealing one; I can break into the store and take a gun, I can steal one in transit or in storage, I can pay off the weapon delivery guy etc. All of those options are impossible when there's no place to buy a gun.
And all of this is of course before you factor in that:

If gun sale is illegal than the number of guns in the country is around K where K is the number of armed policemen + soldiers, which means you can very easily control all of the guns in the country, and if one is stolen you'd notice quickly.

1. I doubt it is as easy as you put it, especially to pothead Bob looking for some drug money or dumbass Ivan looking for some extra power when protecting his whores and stealing from them.

2. I doubt most people would even consider the option (especially Bob and Ivan that only know about weapons what they learned from movies).

3. I doubt how effective that POS gun with shitty gunpowder and scrapmetal bullet made by Bob is. I doubt you can threaten someone at medium or long range, I doubt you'd be able to inflict more than an injury and I don't believe at all that you could make a semi-automatic/automatic improvised firearm (which is what you need if you are facing more than one person, since you'd probably get beat up while you try to handle your POS weapon)

4. I doubt anyone would go ahead and make that weapon considering that:

• Just having it is illegal and liable to cause him trouble with the law (whereas there's no law against owning a particularly nasty knife).

• He has to go through the trouble of making that weapon.

• He has to risk carrying around what is essentially a home-made explosive

• He could very easily just use a particularly nasty knife for threatening people (especially since he knows they probably don't have guns).

So even if you can easily make a homemade weapon, criminalizing firearms would still reduce the number of armed criminals (and I believe that quite drastically so).

I would probably consider legalizing the sale of guns to people to be equivalent to legalizing the sale of nuclear weapons to countries, so that my country can defend itself again some criminal country waving around its big nuclear weapon unless I give it my walletnatural resources.

I'd be fine with gun possession of any kind if the self-defence safe harbor laws were repealed. Feel free to possess your gun, but if you shoot someone and they die, you must be charged with at least manslaughter, no matter how threatened or provoked you were etc.

If the government made laws to make firearms illegal it wouldn't make a difference. Drug cartels would just start importing firearms from other countries and make a profit selling them to criminals. Look at our past. They made liquor illegal (during the prohibition era) and the mobs started underground bars to make a profit off the demand for alcohol. Same would occur with guns/drugs/etc if there is a demand for it someone will fill that demand. You can never get rid of them, but getting a weapon to feel safe after a crime is a terrible idea.

Exactly why I said that. Play an FPS while trying to be a pacifist and see what it gets you. The bully types (cops included) will come after you even faster IRL.

[EDIT]

I believe you pacifist types are unaware of any aggressive attitudes within yourself, so you think that everybody else must be that way? Let me take you to certain localities in my cab.

"You look like you want to fight!"
"No, I don't want to fight"
"You callin' me a liar?"

Games are usually deliberately written so that being a pacifist does not work - because fighting and killing is often a core part of the gameplay.

Real life simply isn't like that. And in real life, if someone pulls out a gun to threaten someone, it would be a bad thing if a bunch of bystanders decided to pull out their guns as well for 'defence'. All that does in increase that chance of people being killed. And again, let me emphasize that deaths in real-life are somewhat more important than deaths in a computer game.

Are you trying to imply that that situation would be somehow safer, or better, if both of those ordinary people were holding guns?

Look, maybe 'pacifist types' do have some internal aggression, which could burst out at any moment and cause them to rampage, or whatever. So then, isn't that a good reason to not let those people have guns? If someone is going to lose their temper from time to time, I'd rather them be unarmed. Wouldn't you?

And supposing someone does go berserk, and they somehow have a gun. If you had a gun as well, what are you going to do? Shoot them? Threaten to shoot them? Do you think that would calm them down? Do you think they would let you point your gun at them while they are pointing their gun at you? Do you think you can safely disarm / kill someone with a gun without accidentally shooting someone else (or yourself)? -- And even if you are confident of your abilities in this, are you confident in the abilities of every gun owner in the country?

--

...

I didn't actually mean to get involved in this debate. All I came here to say was that the FPS comparison was ludicrous. The issue of gun control is not simple, but I would have thought that the craziness of that FPS comparison was obvious. I thought you'd recognise your mistake right away, and then try to put forward a more reasonable position. But you didn't.

I don't think you or I are going to be able to change each other's mind. Apparently our basic understandings of the world are too different.

That is easy to do in multiplayer FPS games, so it kind of blows your argument out of the water. I've played tons of games where players would just sit around letting the other teammates do the killing and normally their k:d counts were a lot lower than those of us that charged head first into finding the other team.

I remember playing Modern Combat on PS3 one night where we had a player that didn't do anything (mainly because my team was laughing about his kill/death ratio compared to ours). We all had like 30+ kills/deaths while he had 2 kills and 5 deaths.

Being a pacifist in a game has about the same results as real life, you will find some that shoot you just to shoot you and other confrontations you will avoid because they may not even see you sitting their. Also like real life, if you run into a confrontation you will have more damage (you will either kill/injure the attacker, they will over power you and kill/injure you, or a bystander will be hurt).

Even police tell you not to fight back in those situation because they can go bad real fast. Being mugged twice and buying a gun is giving you a false sense of safety plain and simple. IRL if you are killed by a mugger, unless someone saw everything, the police will drag their feet finding the killer...even more so when the ballistics say it was your gun that killed you. On the other hand, if you do kill them, you get to have fun being roasted and potentially being tried for murder instead of self-defense. You are playing with fire, and by your remarks, not understanding the full magnitude of what could happen the next time you are mugged.

[EDIT]
Yes I know it was SonShadowCat that posted that, so I just am using that as an example. Same mentality can be applied to any situation though.

No, though, I should clarify, one of the .45s and one of the 9mm my father-in-law owns are mine. I don't get a sense of safety having them though so I never bothered with getting a permit. Though, I've been arguing the scenario of someone shooting you. We haven't even got into the issues of depression, uncontrolled rage, or accidental death by assuming it was empty and shooting yourself or someone. There are more scenarios of you being killed with your own gun than there is of you defending yourself with it successfully.

Shooting at harmless targets is a lot easier than shooting a human being. It is normal, even after years of training with it, to hesitate which could result in you being overpowered. Soldiers even say that, "no matter how much training they have, it is nothing compared to when you have a real person down the barrel from you, you know they mean you kill you, but the human part of you makes you hesitate, which could cost you your life and possibly the life of your troop members."