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People kill people, but people with guns kill more people and kill those people with ease.

This is a truth everybody calling themselves an intelligent person has to accept. If the United States had a complete ban on firearms, we would have far fewer gun deaths in this country.

In the United Kingdom and other countries which have banned firearms, you don’t see a violent rampage every year or so. In the united States, where there are more guns than people, you do see a violent rampage every year because some crazy sad sack decides his personal demons have become too much and he wants to blow some innocents away. He can legally buy guns, so he buys them, goes to a public place,  and shoots away until he gets shot, bored, or shoots himself.

Directly due to lobbying by the NRA, our background check system is not all that it should be. If you have ever been convicted of a feleny, you should find it impossible to own a gun. This is not the case. Loopholes, such as being able to make unregulated gun purchases at gun shows, mean that many people that society has decided should not be able to own guns of any kind still own them.

But as last Friday’s horrific event in Aurora illustrates, even when the system is working perfectly, some person beneath our nations contempt and sympathy is still able to buy an AR15 and walk into a public place and kill at his lejer.

This is a direct consequence of people being able to own guns. Make no mistake.  It is people who kill people, it is guns and hundred round clips that make that killing easy. The problem, technically is not guns, as proven by the millions upon millions of people who own guns and don’t go on shooting sprees. These people want to own guns for reasons of self-protection, collection, or shooting sports, and more power to them. There are towns where more than half the population owns guns and no one is being shot for no reason whatsoever.

But focusing on this part of the issue makes no sense. Because there is only so much the government, both state and federal can do, to separate accurately the good folks from the batshit insane folks meaning that if guns are sold in this country every year or so we are going to see an awful massacre. Security measures which would make impossible rampages such as the one James Holmes went on last Friday would be prohibitively expensive.

That means in this country we have a choice. We can try as hard as we can to get rid of every single privately owned firearm and see a huge drop in violent crime, or we can tighten our gun laws to stop the mentally retarded, criminally insane and convicted felons from being able to own guns and even so we will still have mass murders like columbine, Virginia tech, and Aurora. It is one or the other. Pull your head out of your ass and deal with reality.

There is of course a third choice, don’t tighten our gun laws, keep the loopholes open so that determined mentally ill folks and convicted felons can still procure guns,  and let the NRA continue to lobby against common sense, and we’ll have even more mass murder. This is probably the choice we will opt for at least for the next decade.

You may be surprised after all of this to know that my choice is not to ban  guns. I strongly believe in the second amendment. I believe that all sensible precautions must be taken, a felon caught with a gun should get life without parole, and mentally incompetent people caught owning guns similarly should be remanded to psychiatric hospitals. Perhaps we shouldn’t go that far with the retarded, but the point is that the people we want to remain without firearms in our society should be ripped apart by the might of the law if they are caught violating our will.

As I said, however, once all precautions are put into place so that only sain law abiding citizens are allowed to own guns, we are still going to see mass murder. It is a natural consequence of lethally armed humanity. For every  million sane and civilized folks, there’s one or two insane monsters and those monsters will take advantage of their ability to buy lots of guns, lots of ammo to  kill lots of people. This part is inevitable if you are a second amendment supporter. If you find this price too high, join the organizations seeking to repeal the second amendment, or live as a hypocrite.

I have two reasons for supporting gun violence.

The first is that if someone tries to shoot you, whether or not you have a loaded weapon on your person at this point in  your life is literally going to be the most important factor in your continued survival. I believe if someone draws a weapon and is going to shoot you or your loved ones or someone within your sight, you are not just allowed to try and kill that person but obligated morally to blow his brains out the back of his head.

Similarly, if someone is robbing you and you have a gun you should shoot them.

I do not advocate Batman-like vigilantism. No one should wander the streets looking for crime without a badge.  The victims of James’s Holmes violent tantrum did not deserve to die for a failure to arm themselves . All I am saying is that an armed citizenry is the best deterrent of violent crime. It is not an ideal deterrent, but it is a thousand times better than criminals with guns and victims of criminals without guns. See my post on a solution to prevent most rapes if you want to read more about this.

But this mode of self-protection is merely my secondary reason for why we as a country should leave our second amendment rights mostly unfettered. I believe in hundred round clips, assault rifles, I believe, in short, that if you are legally allowed to own guns, you should be able to own whichever guns you want.

Why?

Because of the remote possibility that our government someday turns on us and tries to create a dictatorship.

Here is where I am roundly mocked. So go ahead. Take a moment to scorn my position, and then continue reading and let me defend it.

The United States government abandoning its founding principles of democracy and becoming a dictatorship is what we call a Black Swan event.

Black swan events are those which are low probability events, events which are outside the range of normal expectations, leaving them almost impossible to predict. The conquest of North America is the best example of such an event. Unanticipated by the natives, and deadly for them nonetheless. If you had asked the most intelligent Native Americans of 1300 the likelihood of white devils coming at first in thousands and then in millions from across the ocean, carrying lethal diseases with mortality rates for the indigenous population upwards of 90 percent, they would have mocked you like you are mocking me for my belief in the second amendment based on the remote chance that someday our own government will turn on us. The odds are low, but there is a difference between low odds and impossible odds.

Lets take another example. Alien invasion. This probably isn’t helping my case.

But if you believe in the existence of extra terrestrial life you then must concede that the possibility of alien invasion is there, however small that possibility is.

I’m not saying that we should prepare for an alien invasion because I believe the odds of such a thing happening make the odds that our own government will turn into a dictatorship look phenomenally high, I’m saying that a country prepared for a black swan event will be able to react to it better then one which is not prepared for such a thing. No country has lasted forever. Often countries transform because of internal revolution.

In the United Kingdom there is almost no gun violence. But if David Cameron had the backing of the military, he could set himself up as king. How many people do you think a platoon of British soldiers armed to the teeth could kill if those people could only arm themselves with knives from their kitchens and cricket bats and crowbars? Those soldiers would just shoot and shoot and kill and kill. In this respect, the social contract is only enforced at the mercy of those in power. It is not about intent but possibility. In countries with no armed population, what stops government from violating the social contract is forbearance, nothing more.

In the United  States, however, if president Obama tried to set himself up as king, and had the full backing of the military, what we would have would not be a massacre, but a civil war.

If free speech was abolished tomorrow, and then two days after that freedom to assemble, and so on and so fourth, America as an armed people could and would rebel.

What the second amendment does is to let the social contract mean something. Because it is maintained by all of us, although we have the means for armed insurrection at our fingertips.

And before you raise your next objection, I believe the last few years of disgusting partisan rancor proves my point for me.

There are lots of republicans who hate the shit out of Barack Obama and the democrats. Lots of gun owning republicans. But there are no revolutionary groups attacking our government because these Republicans recognize the difference between serious political disagreement and a subversion of the democratic process. We are experiencing the former, not the latter.

Now if you don’t mind I would like to present myself as an ass hole to make one final point.

What happened in Colorado last week is tragic. It turns the stomach, it makes us all reflect upon how lucky we are not to have been shot, it shows us that some of us are sick with hate and insanity. It should show us that people like James Holmes should be locked away somewhere deep and dark, and if that deep dark place cannot rehabilitate a man like Holmes, he  should stay there until he dies, for our own safety.

It shows us that it only takes one crazy man with a gun to send cracks up and down the glass of our peaceful civilization. In the shooter we see the worst of humanity, and in the reaction of the nation we see the best of humanity.

But now that our grief is muted and not as fresh as it was, lets put this in perspective.

Here’s the part where I’m an ass hole.

The murder of twelve people is horrifying because we have empathy, but it doesn’t matter statistically. Already from last Friday our population has grown, and even as a percentage of this last weeks population growth, those twelve are much less than one percent.

These types of mass shootings are ugly and we should do all we can short of taking guns from law abiding citizens to stop them, but when balanced against the price of a potential disillusion of our republic they do not matter in the slightest.

I must  reiterate that such a transmutation of our country from bastion of democracy to dictatorship is unlikely. It is more likely never to happen.

But unlikely and impossible are not at all the same thing.

England, France, all of the first world with the exception of the United States bars its citizens from owning guns. And that means the citizens are powerless to make changes to the social contract once force is a factor. If England or Germany had a civil war with the military on the wrong side, the only way it would turn into a war rather than remain a bloodbath is if the opposite side got its hands on lots of guns.

Here that is not a problem.

I am not advocating armed revolution over nothing, what I am speaking of hopefully will never happen. But if it did happen, if it did come down to war to reclaim our democracy, the single reason we could win such a war is because of the second amendment.

In this country right now I am sure there are a hundred thousand AR15’s, a hundred thousand m16’s, and hundreds of thousands of other assault rifles. We could create a large militia if our government ever turned on us.

I am not being paranoid. I believe this possibility to be so remote that in all likelihood we will never have to test if I am correct or not, with a war.

It is easy to consider this argument hogwash because of how peaceful our country currently is. George Bush and Barack Obama never did anything to make any intelligent person think either man was setting himself up as a dictator, and may this hold true for future presidents until the end of time.

But if we give up our guns and enjoy increased safety because of fewer murders, what would we do if our government ever decided it wanted to become something other than the republic it is today? If we had to try and fight our own military with swords pipes and knives, how would that go?

So only if you tell me you know for a fact that our country never has to fear such a thing will I tell you your wish to ban firearms makes sense. Otherwise gun violence is the price we are forced to pay.