Originally posted by: Zephyr106
Answer me this: If every criminal knew for a fact that that if he was to try and rob/rape/mug/murder/steal from someone he would die at the hands of a law abiding gun owner, with a 50 cal +p through the earhole, how do you think that would impact the crime rate?
In the real world it's not that simple. Law abiding gun owners become criminals in domestic disputes, when enraged, when drunk, etc. Think of all the stuff that goes down now. Beating the wife, beating the kid, yelling at the neighbor, stumbling out of the bar and giving someone a dirty look. This is the stuff you read about in the paper- woman gets restraing order for domestic violence, DYFS removes kids, drunken brawl outside bar. If everyone were carrying a gun imagine how much more deadly it could be.
I'm no "gun grabber" but I'm certainly not a "gun pusher" either. It would be like saying the world would be safer if every nation had nukes. The threshold for their use could potentially go way down and when trouble did brew, it would be exponentially more catastrophic, i.e. the Indo-Pak wars of a few decades ago where 15,000 soldiers die on each side vs. the millions of lives held in the balance in the recent nuclear standoffs.
Zephyr