You all need guns
Damn Bloomberg, you and Charlie want to take away our guns because of some fucked up kid in Virginia? Next can we ban cars to prevent drunk driving deaths?
The main reason our founding fathers wanted us to have guns is as a check against the power of our own government. James Madison in the Federalist Papers: the Constitution preserves “The advantage of being armed which Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation … (where) the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms.”
Disarmed people are neither free nor safe - they become the criminals’ prey and the tyrants’ playthings. When the civilians are defenseless and their government goes bad, however, thousands and millions of innocents die.
- China: In 1935 the Nationalist government prohibits the private ownership of firearms. The Communists take over in 1949 - they keep the population disarmed. During 38 years of Communist violence and economic ‘experiments’, they wipe out 35 million Chinese - and possibly as many as 100 million. During all this time Red Chinese dictator Mao Tse-Tung controls all the guns.
- Russia: The Communists took power in Russia in 1917, and immediately passed laws making it almost impossible for non-party members to own firearms. Then, in 1929 Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decrees that all livestock, produce, and farmland belong to the State. Farmers are ordered to surrender their land and livestock, and to move to government-owned collective farms. First, to terrorize the rest into submission, several million of the most prosperous farmers are sent to forced labor camps or killed outright. These ‘Kulaks’ are demonized by the Communists. Because of ten years of firearms confiscation, farmers can only fight back with farm tools.
- Germany: After Hitler disarmed the population by passing the Nuremberg Laws, pre-war Germany was a picture of domestic tranquility – unless you were a Jew.
People always snicker at the idea that little Joe Citizen with his shotgun or semi-automatic rifle can stand up to the might of the U.S. Army. And I say, the Vietnamese did a pretty damn good job of it, and the Iraqis seem to be too.
There’s also the statistical evidence that says gun violence rises when you ban guns. Why? Because criminals don’t get their guns legally anyway. A gun ban takes guns out of the victim’s hands, not the perpetrator’s. You think gangbangers in Bed Stuy buy shotguns at Wal-Mart?
And if none of this persuades you, can I just close by saying guns are fucking sexy.
Proof:
Videos, music, images, and words by 
April 18th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
[…] Here’s why. […]
April 19th, 2007 at 3:54 am
“They say, ‘Guns don’t kill people. People do.’
But you have to admit, the gun helps.”
-Eddie Izzard
“People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.”
April 19th, 2007 at 4:15 am
That’s a hell of a picture.
I’d like to be pretty much diametrically opposed to you about this, because we don’t have any guns, and we don’t have any shootings either here in the UK. And don’t think that guns guarantee freedom from oppression.
BUT, the UK government banned legally owned sports handguns 10 years ago after one of the only incidents, when a guy burst into a school with a gun. They were small calibre target shooting guns - you couldn’t buy any other kind here - which were mostly kept at the very few gun clubs. And since the ban, most of the handguns that there were (not many, not by your standards) went into the black market. And gun crime started to rise. Criminals started carrying guns for protection from other criminals, when nobody was armed before. Now there are shootings among gangs and particularly in poor black communities. 11,000 gun crimes in 2005/6 compared to 6,000 10 years before (many of which involved replicas used just to scare people in robberies). And now they’re talking about arming the police. So we’ll have police with guns. Great. All because of some crappy kneejerk legislation banning guns unnecessarily.
If America banned guns, it’d create a black market unlike anything you’ve ever seen. It’d be a disaster.
Personally, I wish you’d never had the 2nd amendment in the first place, so that you wouldn’t have the 25-30,000 gun homicides a year (10,000+ of which are not suicide, i think) compared to, um, 90 or so total gun-related homicides in the UK last year (15 in London. 15.) Your population is 5 times bigger than ours, and we are much denser, but you have 300 times the number of gun homicides. And it’s not like we’re finding other more inventive ways of killing ourselves
But anyway, it’s too late to close the box now.
On the plus side, though, the fact that you have guns means that your films are a lot more exciting than ours. As demonstrated by Raquel.
April 20th, 2007 at 6:18 pm
Yes, ban cars!
May 16th, 2007 at 7:01 pm
Guns are a great tool for facilitating natural selection. The majority of the homicides in the US are by people who know each other. Idiots killing idiots. It’s a thing of beauty.
September 19th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Listening to BBC radio documentary about guns in America. You’d like it. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/crossing_continents/6246460.stm