JM, no he's right: I don't live in a crime-riddled part of Vancouver. Of course, if I did, I would live in a four-block square just east of the downtown business core, Vancouver's skid row, which is probably the worst concentration of homeless poverty in Canada. I could fall asleep on the street there (many do), be robbed of whatever was in my pocket and in rare cases of my shoes (many have been), and I would wake up unmolested (for many, this is a daily occurence). But no, where I live I happen to be surrounded by well-fed people who have lots of conspicuous wealth in their ungated and frequently unalarmed homes. I took the trouble to buy household insurance, but the premiums are low because the crime rate is so low, despite the conspicuous absence of private security or of armed homeowners. NOWHERE in my country nor in the one immediately to the south of it is there any evidence of raoming bands of thugs invading homes street-to-street with their assault weapons.
HOWEVER: If the way to get the criminals to invade my home is to arm all of the poor people with assault rifles, then lo and behold, we have yet one more reason NOT to arm the poor with assault rifles. If arming them would make thugs attack ME, then why would I want that? I paid more in income tax last year than most of those people earned, so to hell with them. No free guns for them. Note my callousness at their terrible fate is mitigated by the fact that the home invasions Deucaon hopes to defend them from DO NOT EXIST.
Deuc:
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1. Having entire areas of cities engulfed in strife and warfare isn't a "minor problem". Having drugs easily available on the streets in said areas isn't a "minor problem". Having kids drop out of school in order to join gangs isn't a "minor problem". There is a reason why the Black population in the US has decreased by 1/3rd since the end of segregation.
2. So even though schools don't get enough funds to pay their teachers a decent salary, you believe they are supposed to pay for high tech security measures and security guards?
3. Comparing Dodge City and ethnic/racial enclaves of today is like comparing the War of American Independence and the Vietnam War. The guns of yesteryear aren't the guns of today. Guns back then weren't mass produced thus weren't as plentiful thus weren't as cheap as they are today. Nor was Dodge City plagued by same problems said enclaves are today. Nor is Dodge City or any contemporary city on the same societal, environmental, economical or political pedestal.
1. No it hasn't. The US black population has increased each decade since the 1960s.
1950: 15.0 million or 10.0% of the population
1960: 18.9 million or 10.6% of the population
1970: 22.6 million or 11.1% of the population
1980: 26.5 million or 11.7% of the population
1990: 30.0 million or 12.1% of the population
2000: 36.6 million or 12.3% of the population
These figures are taken from the US Census bureau's website. Your willingness to make a claim that is the complete opposite of the facts indicates that you are a liar willing to make things up in order to support a weak point. And what was your point? That violence has decreased the black population of the United States? I suppose this is in support of some general theory that violence in America is not economic, but racial, or that poverty is all racially-derived or so forth. And this argument no doubt means that we should give everyone an assault rifle, because then things would be more peaceful. I imagine in the country you live, everyone has an assault rifle, and so it is peaceful, or nobody has one, and it is chaos? Please present your made-up stats and interpretation so that I may research the actual facts and call you a liar again.
2. Like JM said, the armed police at high school entrances are paid for by the state, not by the school board. And it is in response to a scenario where easy gun availability empowered some children to kill some other children. By your solution, that would not have worked because all of the children would have hadguns or AR-15s. I suggest that in that environment, in fact more people would be killed, and it would be happening weekly; so frequrently in fact that it would start to get bumped in the news coverage. I have no idea why you believe that fear of being shot would make people LESS likely to use their guns; in my understanding, it is the fear of getting shot that makes people MORE likely to use them. I prefer the method of not forcing kids to carry guns, but rather insisting that they DON'T carry them. That way noone gets scared of getting shot, and noone uses their guns out of hysterical "self-defence."
3. In the days of Dodge City, every household owned at least one gun. Guns were, in fact, produced in great numbers, even if the technology of "mass production" didn't exist. This is post-Civil War, if you recall, so there were a lot of guns out there. It's irrelevant what sort of guns they owned; with the primitive medicine and the extremely slow response time of the law, most altercations ended in death. The solution there was to disarm the population within city limits, and it was a phenomenal sucess. Now of course we don't have the concern of banditos taking over towns, robbing banks in broad daylight, and of having shootouts in the city streets. So we don't need to arm the populace; we have a good police force. In fact, just like with Dodge City, FEWER guns in the hands of civilians will mean FEWER shootings within city limits. It's actually simple math.
As for comparisons between the US War of Independence and the Vietnam War, there are many. In the comparison the US is analogous to the British in the War of Independence: an invading force operating with little support from home, with dangerously low morale owing to a successful propaganda war run by Benjamin Franklin, facing a guerilla resistance that could appear at any time with weapons hidden by the populace. But before you think that this is an endorsement of arming the populace to prevent foreign invasion, remember that the British were not invading. They already occupied the area. And their goal was not to eradicate every possible member of a resistance. A guerilla army is very difficult to defeat without the appropriate green light, and they were not given that green light. The British had the army to hold the colonies, but its leadership ceded the land without taking the fight all the way. Just like the US did in Vietnam, so yes, the comparison is less crazy than you would like to pretend.
Bonus questions:
NAME ONE COUNTRY THAT HAS COMPLETELY ARMED ITS POPULACE AS A DEFENCE AGAINST CRIME.
DESCRIBE HOW THAT WORKED.
"I had a lot of different ideas. At one point, Luke, Leia and Ben were all going to be little people, and we did screen tests to see if we could do that." -George Lucas, in STAR WARS: the Annotated Screenplays (p197).