Sorry.

Sharon

MEA

But 99% of the guns mostly don’t kill people – not the kids in the households, not anyone. They get used for hunting and driving off animals and occasionally someone breaking in, without all that urban stuff. I don’t know where you live, Myrto, but it can be really hard to understand (and I didn’t before I lived here) how differently guns function in rural areas from urban ones.

As you say, though, we may simply have to agree to disagree. Sure, Sophie had a horrible, horrible soul destroying choice – and novel characters only live with what they writers give them – but she also had a living child at the end of it. And that child’s life may have mattered, at least to the child, if we lived in a non-novel world. Of course means affect ends – they simply aren’t all the ends.

Sharon

The same thing applies in the US; the Brady Campaign gives its highest ratings for gun control legislation that are the worst places to live in the country in terms of violent crime. Conversely, the states with the highest rates of gun ownership tend to be safer (and more rural). When I started looking into this, I found it counterintuitive at first, but I eventually concluded that while high rates of legal gun ownership probably do deter crime, the correlation between low rates of gun ownership and high violent crime rates in cities is also partly due to social, cultural and economic factors that make cities violent places, and that the rural way of life is saner, healthier, more human, and less violent, and coincidentally frequently involves gun ownership.

Sharon, think it through (and you may continue to disagree). The means by which one accomplishes an end speak loud and clear and create the world we all inherit. It is too bad, because when horrible choices are foisted upon us (live under a tyrant or shoot the guy, for example), we feel an overwhelming sense of despair. That is why what Gandhi did was such an accomplishment. The idea is that by refusing violent tactics (and I guess losing one’s life, sometimes…) we give strength to other tactics, in the long run.

I go back to an old movie, Sophie’s Choice. In the movie, Sophie and her two children are taken to concentration camp. At some point, a Nazi officer forces her to choose life for one child, death for the other (more details on Wikipedia). This is the sort of choice that would clearly corrode your soul and leave you a shell of a human being, at best. What world you create after you survive such a situation is sad indeed. But the smaller transgressions hurt us too, in smaller ways. (Note that I refuse to judge others for their choices because I am untested).

Statistics about guns deterring crimes (they may be correct) makes me really mad when I think about all the people living in other developed countries where gun ownership is beyond rare, and how somehow they are NOT the victims of more crimes! I once had the job of making a database of unexpected child deaths in San Francisco, between 1990-1995. It made me nuts to read about all the teenagers maiming and killing each other for bogus territorial reasons, or girlfriends and such, when a fist fight would have sufficed. And that’s without giving you details of the kids I met in clinic who recounted first hand experiences watching friends be shot.

I am pretty clear that I want many, many FEWER guns around, whatever the outcome!!