A question of guns

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In some sort of weird theoretical sense, it almost makes sense to uninvent the gun. But things can't be uninvented, and when you try to control inventions by law, only outlaws have those inventions. Attempts to disarm the criminals ends up only disarming the victims. It just doesn't work.

Beyond that, I wouldn't want guns uninvented even if it were possible. Guns are a great force equalizer. Think about when a 25 year old male, 6'1", 250 lbs, all muscle, decides to rape a 5'4" 37 year old office worker late one night. In a traditional struggle, she has no chance, as he has an extreme power advantage over her. Guns are force equalizers in violent situations. If both persons in that situation are armed, the playing field is greatly leveled. Guns empower the weak to stand up to the strong.

The standard anti-gun responses to this are these:

1) But that's the police's job! Call 911! Doesn't work. The average violent confrontation ends, one way or another, much faster than the average police response time. In the vast majority of actual cases of violence, police show up after the fact to do the reporting and aftercare. Direct police intervention in an ongoing violent struggle between two citizens is rare. As well-intentioned as they are, it is statistically silly to rely on the police to save you from violence.

2) But... the woman will just have her gun taken and used against her! Wrong, the statistics bear this out. The number of violent crimes prevented by the defensive use of a handgun outweigh the number of actual handgun crimes committed succesfully by more than an order of magnitude.

From another source of gun data:

MYTH: Japan has strict gun control and a less violent society.

FACT: In Japan, the murder rate is about 1 per 100,000. In the U.S., there are about 3.2 murders per 100,000 each year by weapons other than firearms.

* United Nations data

The point being made here is that guns aren't the issue in the murder rate discrepancy between Japan and the US. Even if you eliminate all gun murders in the US from the equation (in reality, many of those murders would have been accomplished with other weapons, lacking a gun), the US has 3 times the murder rate of Japan. The problem isn't the guns, the problem is that we're a more murderous society to begin with.

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