Silver Supporter
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Here is how I explained things to an anti-gun friend:
Friend, you start with a number of facts not in evidence:
There are too many guns.
No need for the types we have.
Not everyone who kills with guns is mentally ill.
How many is too many guns? What bearing does the number of guns in existence have on misuse?
No need for the types we have. It depends on what the perceived use is for that gun. If I (hypothetically) wanted to own a gun in case of civil unrest, like in hurricane Katrina, what kind of a gun and what size magazines for it would be useful?
Not everyone who kills with guns is mentally ill, but everyone who kills large numbers of innocent strangers at random seems to be, and those kinds of incidents seem to be the impetus for our concern. Further, the people around these folks seem to know that they are dangerously crazy, and yet we can exercise no prior restraint against them because that would be unfair to them. But somehow it is not unfair to exercise prior restraint against the 300,000,000 plus law abiding, sane, peaceable citizens who aren't dangerously crazy and don't plan to kill anyone by denying them gun ownership.
Myths about guns are manufactured and perpetuated by professional fund raising organizations like the Brady Center to PREVENT Handgun Violence lobbying group. There's that word "prevent" in relation to sane, law abiding citizens again, as opposed to deranged and likely to ignore any laws type citizens. These groups have learned that people unfamiliar with guns and afraid of guns will support them and donate money to them on the basis of half truths, myths, and outright fabrications. I've read on the Brady web pages that AR-15 rifles fire a special high velocity bullet, much faster and more powerful than "conventional" rifles, that has the power to go right through police ballistic vests. I've demonstrated to you that the .223 caliber cartridge fired by AR-15 rifles is about 1/4 the size of the average deer rifle cartridge. It has a 55 grain bullet delivering 939 foot pounds of energy at 100 yards versus a 180 grain deer hunting bullet delivering 2468 foot pounds of energy at 100 yards. This is intentional inaccuracy on the part of the anti-gun group, better known as a bald faced lie. So should we outlaw all deer hunting rifles as too powerful?
AR-15 rifles and some military-looking pistols are semi-automatic (not full automatic) meaning that they fire one shot when the trigger is pulled and then reload themselves for the next time the trigger is pulled. My .22 caliber target pistol is semi-automatic. My rifle used for hunting rabbits and squirrels is a semi-automatic. In short, numerous perfectly benign firearms are semi-automatic and nobody uses them for mass killings. Should we outlaw all of those? What about pump action firearms which can be fired nearly as fast as a semi-automatic by a practiced user? Them too? What about my double action .38 caliber revolver that I use when hunting and backpacking? It fires each time the trigger is pulled without further intervention by the operator. The end result is that it produces the same effect as a semi-automatic. Should all revolvers be outlawed as well? One might as well outlaw all handguns and get it over with since 99% of them are either semi-autos or revolvers.
The AR-15 is capable of using larger capacity magazines holding 20 or 30 rounds. This seems at first glance to be an enabling factor in mass shootings. But wait. Mass shooters invariably choose gun free zones like malls, schools, theaters, anywhere they can expect that crowds of unarmed people will be present because ordinary, non-crazy people tend to obey the laws and posted signs. The reality is, and many of the shooters have proven it, that in a gun free zone, where there is no armed opposition, and it will be 10 to 15 minutes before any police can respond, they have plenty of time to reload every few shots.
What is appealing to most people is that we will be outlawing those black guns that can shoot rapidly, make lots of commotion, and have all those scary and lethal looking do-dads attached to them. It doesn't register that there is nothing other than appearance that differentiates these scary looking guns from the rest of the guns out there. It becomes rapidly apparent that what we want to outlaw is mostly cosmetics.
These professional fund raising and lobbying groups also declare that armed self-defense is a myth. But in the Clackamas Mall shooting the shooter killed only two people and wounded one. "How odd", I remarked to my wife at the time. "I wonder if he was stopped by an armed citizen." It turns out he was. Even though the armed citizen didn't actually fire at the shooter for fear of hitting innocent people behind him, when the shooter saw that someone was pointing a pistol at him and that he had armed opposition, his next shot was used to kill himself. This, of course, was not widely reported on national outlets like CNN. It doesn't fit the mythology of untrained and helpless at best, and bumbling and dangerous at worst, armed citizens unable to effectively and responsibly use their weapons to defend themselves and others.
