Do Guns Kill or Protect? People Kill People using Hammers and Guns. Part 2 in The Right Response?

Do Guns Kill - or Protect?
If guns are responsible for killing people, then spoons are responsible for making people fat, and beds are responsible for women becoming pregnant.

Such fallacious thinking may be behind fundamentalist Muslims insisting their women are covered from head to foot, so men are neither attracted nor tempted by their beauty. Although those in the western world like to think they know better, gun control fanatics nevertheless apply the same thinking to guns.

There are even control freaks who apply this erroneous thinking to cans and bottles. If large quantities of cool drinks are bad for you, then politicians must ban sales of large sizes. It seems that someone in New York who doesn't understand responsibility has proposed such a law!

The Biggest annual Killers
By far the biggest annual killer is Tobacco, responsible for half a million American deaths a year.

The second is Medical Errors causing some 200,000 deaths annually - well over ten times more people than guns. So should we ban medics? Of course not, modern medicine saves far more lives than die from medical errors by medics.

The fourth biggest is Alcohol Abuse at around a hundred thousand deaths. The USA tried banning alcohol and eventually abandoned Alcohol Prohibition as a complete failure.

The next largest killer? Many more people die from automobile accidents each year, yet no one is seriously suggesting banning automobiles. This was tried in Britain many years ago - the infamous Red Flag Act - and also abandoned as ineffective.

In 2011, hammers caused 50% more deaths than so called assault rifles. So should society ban hammers as responsible, or do we appreciate the value hammers provide?

Firearms are tenth on the annual biggest killer list. Yet guns stop much criminal mayhem and save many people's lives, as do medics. Just ask State Witness military and law enforcement master trainer, elite firearms expert Larry Correia. Or Dr. Susan Gratia, whose parents were killed in a mass shooting in front of her eyes, see the really powerful moment shortly after the five-minute mark.

But if banning medics and hammers wouldn't work, and banning alcohol and automobiles has already proved a complete failure, what makes anyone think a ban on assault rifles, or any other gun, would be a success?

Guns are Used for Defense
Many more guns are used to deter rather than to initiate an attack. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of crimes are stopped each year by people simply showing they have a gun without firing a shot.

The police carry firearms because they help deter criminals. President Obama's security guards carry guns to protect him. Why? Because guns have a proven track-record in deterring attacks from both criminals and deranged individuals.

Aren't you also entitled to use a gun to protect yourself from criminals and deranged individuals? Legal gun owners are responsible citizens who own a gun solely for this purpose. The most frequent reason for owning for a gun is deterrence, and there's overwhelming evidence proving how well guns provide protection.

The Kennesaw Gun law initiated a 89% drop in crime
In 1982, the city of Kennesaw, Georgia passed a gun law mandating all heads of households to own at least one firearm with ammunition. This doesn't mean you are compelled to have a gun, it only means you have the right to be armed if you so choose, conscientious objectors and paupers are exempt. Kennesaw's crime rate has since dropped 89 percent, compared to the modest 10 percent drop statewide.

The low crime rate resulting from widespread gun ownership has attracted both jobs and people, the population sharply increased in the nineties. "Companies have said they want to be located in conservative areas," says the Cobb Chamber of Commerce President Bill Cooper. "Kennesaw is home to more manufacturing businesses than any other Cobb city."

Defensive gun usage
Yet defensive gun usages generally don't make the news. "Some belligerent youths approached John Doe on Main Street, but they ran away when he pulled out his concealed carry gun." Hardly a newsworthy item!

Yet how many such incidents are there a year. One report found: "There are more than 2 million instances a year of the armed citizen deterring or stopping armed criminals; a number four times that of all crimes involving firearms."

© Copyright worldwide Cris Baker, www.LifeStrategies.net All rights reserved. Republishing welcomed under Creative Commons noncommercial no derivatives license preserving all links intact, so please +1 and share this widely!

Food for Thought
"You can't argue with the fact that Kennesaw has the lowest crime rate of any city our size in the country."

- Kennesaw Mayor Leonard Church, who was not in office when the 1982 law mandating gun ownership was passed unanimously.