Re: bullies

When you react to a bully with violence, everybody loses.

Exactly. It spreads the losses to the bully too instead of concentrating them in the victim. Thanks for agreeing.

Sometimes it's necessary, but it should be a last resort.

When your opponent takes out a deadly weapon, you are already in your last resort.

And guns are rarely ever used for self-defense; they almost always become easy solutions in cases of reactionary violence.

Precisely because aversion to guns becomes not having one, leaving you more vulnerable to being attacked. Armed people rarely have to shoot in self-defense when they can simply show the weapon or fire a warning shot specifically planned to be non-injurious.

I understand that, but it doesn't invalidate the fact that it's far easier to kill someone with a gun than with blunt or edged weapons and there are tons of murders that never would've happened if guns weren't present.

When Britain banned firearms in the 1990s, murders immediately dropped, but violent crime immediately rised (and so remains).

Reflect on that.

That doesn't mean I believe all guns should be taken away, but our culture should see gun ownership as distasteful.

A necessary evil. No more, and no less. Not forgetting the evil, but not forgetting the necessary.

And I sure as HELL don't believe we should be handing them out to kids. I personally know of a local case where a little boy--a twin, in fact--shot and killed himself when he and his brother were playing with guns. Kids want to make everything into toys, and guns are not toys. If you think giving guns to kids will improve their lives, you've lost your freakin' mind.

No more and no less than anything else we need to teach kids to do but which is dangerous. Kitchens, for instance, are full of knives and can light up a fire. A child can seriously harm themselves or kill themselves or their partners accidentally or as part of a game in a kitchen. Does it mean banning kids from kitchens? At certain ages, perhaps; curiosity tends to beat fear or sense of responsibility many times, and though that is generally good, it is also dangerous in cases like this. But it sure doesn't mean waiting until 18 to open that secret door from where cooked food comes - or to teach them how to use a firearm.

Is it really any wonder that it leads to criminals loving and using guns?

Come on, tell me in which country criminals don't use guns. For all the spectacular fight scenes in East Asian (and East Asian inspired) movies, even in East Asia criminals use guns instead of engaging into black belt MMA fights with cops.

Maybe in some countries they are taught to have the proper respect for guns and that's why they don't have a lot of violence there. That's not true of the US.

You might be on to something there. The USA hasn't had a full scale war on home soil for 150 years. Who matches this? Switzerland, Canada... anyone else? Obviously, this might make people less sensitive to what really can happen.

I suspect that we could use a temporary ban, until we learn to stop worshiping Jesse James and view guns with the proper perspective.

That I doubt. Didn't work for Chicago.