Well, if I were to start from the top & respond on down it would be quite an entry, so I'll mention a few highlights & argue a little & when I next have time to get bogged in Mudcat maybe answer a bit of the firestorm resulting. :)

Preface - OP, you didn't perchance hunt up olddude and recruit him for a foil before you started? I'll believe you if you deny it, but I've sure got to wonder.

Prologue - where I'm coming from: (physically, rural Vermont, small peaceful place in New England, no concealed carry permits here because it has never been illegal to carry either concealed or openly in this state) I am "pro-gun", an NRA member, and in fact even a Libertarian party member - apparently my ilk is mainly what is mostly wrong with the U.S. these days.

1. Greg E. & the hideous jihadist Obama - You're right, there are people who believe that crap, and you may well believe we are often bedevilled with them in the Libertarians. But the great majority of Libertarianns have no use for it, and even fewer of the country at large.

2. Various posts - There seems to be an impression that the NRA is supported by the firearms industry. I have no doubt they contribute, as virtually every business in this country supports those whose lobbying is favorable to their interests, but I believe the NRA is overwhelmingly financed by the voluntary contributions of us members. (I stand correctable if you will produce reliable data contra.) We(NRA members) hardly feel our political spendings to be improper when we are faced with the same from opposing views. I saw the very conservative Koch brothers mentioned above, but no mention of the vast expenditures of Bloomberg, the anti-gun activist from NYC. I am however delighted to hear that the NRA has "unlimited" funds for lobbying, and won't have run into the kitchen and send them a big check as a result of being scared by this thread.

3. Little Amish girl - coincidentally, my first gun, which my non-hunting, non-gunning-owning dad let me buy when I was 16 was a .44 mag Ruger. Dozens of woodchucks have bitterly regretted it.

4. Bill D. et al. - The other 75% of the country "allow" us to keep on owning guns (If enough of them wanted, the constitution could be amended) because most of them, tho not believing that they personnally need a gun, do not see most of us 25% people as threats. This might also be the place to ask the statistics-citers if they could kindly post per-capita gun death statistics. I daresay the U.S. will still lead the pack, but I think some of what's posted is absolute numbers, and when there are about 400 million of us (milliards to you Brits, no?) we are likely to have very absolute impressive numbers. Also, a comparison of overall murder rates might be enlightening - 'tis no pleasure to be shot, as RK remarked, but it's not noticeably better to be hatchetted or bludgeoned or carved.

5. Advance apologies to punkfolkrocker and anyone else closely touched by gun suicide, but it's part of the discussion. A good many of us, and I, believe that a person's life is primarily his/r own, and that s/he has a right to end it if so desiring. We don't advocate suicide, we believe in trying to talk our friends out of it if possible, but in the end we think a person is not a possession of the Socialist Collective, or a Resource of the Aryan race, or a Subject of his Most Royal Majesty; s/he is a human being that has a right to dispose of him/herself. Without guns would there be fewer successful suicides? No doubt of it - guns do provide a quicker and deadlier way of killing people than a lot of other things, and there are some suicides (and murders) that would not happen without a gun available. But first, how many? And second, what right do the rest of us have to coerce determined suicides into less reliable, quite possibly painful and mutilating ways of trying to end themselves? Why do we need laws permitting physicians to "assist" suiucides (a hot topic in these our incomprehensible ex-colonies these days) rather than simply saying to them "We recognize your right to shoot yourself if you insist"?

6. Con Law lecture: When the Supreme Court rules that the 2nd amendment prohibits the Federal (National) government from "infring[ing] the right of the people to keep and bear arms" it did not "corrupt" anything. The first ten amendments were put into the constitution at the insistence of the individual states, as a condition of their adherence to the constitution, to keep the Federal government from interfering with state dispositions in various matters, and when the court rules that the Federal government therefore can't do so, they interpret it precisely as it was intended to be. Whether that idea is still a good one is another question, but nothing has been "corrupted" or distorted thereby. Next, for what it's worth, the framers did *not* say "A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of such militias to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed", they said that the right of the *people* to do so might not. They may have been crude backwoods colonial upstarts if you insist, but they understood how to say what they meant. Further, look at the thing in the light of common sense - just how much help does the well-regulated militia provide when an irritated algonquian unexpectedly arrives to torch your house, or the bear is devouring the family pig? And most particularly, what happens when the sovereign, who controls the army & administration, needs to be restrained, either by fear of the power of the general population or worse-coming-to-worst by their use of it? It was very much on the minds of those constitution-makers that the government was responsible to the people and the people were to have the means to enforce that that relation. The militia *is* the armed people, which constituted itself, elected its own officers, and responded more or less as it felt inclined to its state governors. The necessity was for a "well-regulated" one as nobody, especially a bunch of well-to-do landed gentry but also the people in general, wanted miscellaneous mobs roaming around raising hell, but it was not conceived of as being merely an arm of the government. Again, maybe or not that's pertinent to today's conditions (arguments to follow that it still is), but as far as the constitution as she stands being "corrupted" when the court construes the 2'Am. as it has - balls.

7. I admit the opposition to what seem reasonable measures to curb the worst of the gun killings. But at least a significant part of this is indeed a fear of the "slippery slope", and the circumstance that most of the people in favor of "gun control" do not sound, when you study their ideas, as if they want to make & enforce only reasonable limits and restrictions, but wish to essentially disarm the people as a whole. I see very little in this thread to contradict that impression. If the "gun-controllers" stood up and said something like "I believe we must put significantly enhanced machinery in place to ensure that only sane persons of mature understanding and with basic safety-&-firearms-handling training are permitted access to firearms or ammunition, but **I firmly and adamantly support the right of such persons to own, carry & as legally permitted use them in self-defense, and in the militia**", and could still be believed when they did, they would find at least somewhat more of a willingness to compromise. I don't know anybody, even the idiotfringers, who don't support some "gun control". I don't know anybody who thinks a 5-year-old should be able to walk into a gun shop and buy a .45 and and ammo; I don't know of anybody who thinks convicted arsonists, murderers, rapists, aggravated assaulters should be allowed to possess guns; nobody thinks the evidently mentally unhinged should. So we all favor "gun control", and the debate is over what is a reasonable degree; and we "gun-people" say that a general disarming of the people is too much, and that much of the "anti-gun" legislation appears headed in that direction. Lord knows, not much of it seems to be consistent with other stated objectives.

8. Which leads on to what to me, and a good many others, is the fundamental reason for having an armed people: The need to restrain our own government. This is *not* an outdated notion, quite the contrary. The ability of the modern state, especially a high-tech one like the U.S., to become crushingly tyrannical is a hell of a lot greater than was Napoleon's, or Alexander II's, or ... you name them. Right, how could I forget George III? ;) It can't happen, people wouldn't let it, the Hitler stuff, and the Stalin stuff, Pol Pot, Rwanda, Darfur, that's all past, we're not like that anymore? Plenty of people still walking around who can tell you we haven't grown out of it. But the internet, underground publishing, modern telecommunications, it couldn't happen in any advanced country? Most countries have military & security planners who sit around working out responses to more or less far-fetched attack scenarios, and surely there are contingency plans for shutting that stuff down in a hurry if it comes to that. And those plans are to be carried out by the sort of people who are trained to carry out orders without a debate. Are these plans and capabilities aimed at their own countrymen by those who devise them? Rubbish. But if the capacity is there, the system is in place, sooner or later someone will come along who will pervert it if he believes he can make it work. So in the absolutely worst case, far-fetched but possible, the people have to be able to restrain the government & military by force. In the still remote but much more likely case, they restrain the would-be power-grabbers simply by their presence & numbers making a successful putsch look a very long shot. Do the people need howitzers and bombers, and tanks? No, they couldn't fight a conventional war against a conventional army anyway, and the government isn't going to be taking over the country by destroying it. What the people do need is to be a force of maybe 200,000,000 people who are, or at least might be, armed not too less effectively than a government soldier, facing a government military of perhaps 2 or 3 million. And those civilians will never need to fire a shot, because any administration will know that a putsch would be nothing but a huge messy disaster, and the attempt will never be made.

I realize that to most of you this sounds like the kind of paranoia people get from calling their crisps "chips" and their chips "Fries", but this stuff happens, it never has happened until it does, and it is most likely to happen to those who are not in a position to resist it. I have a copy of Conrad's novel *The Secret Agent*, with an introduction to the translation by a prominent author. He goes on (after mostly explaining various literary things about Conrad)
to tell the readers how it will be difficult for them to understand the mindset of the characters, because they (the readers) live in a country where authoritanism and czarist-style repression are so far behind them, where their degree of civilization will make the whole atmosphere of the story seem bizarrely improbable. I can't say how much difficulty those readers did experience, but I can say that within ten years of his introduction Thomas Mann had left the country where his works were being thrown on bonfires. The land of Goethe & Schiller & Rilke, of study & science & modernity, the last place anyone would have nominated for it, had been subjected to National Socialism. Would a true armed German people have prevented it? Maybe not, a lot of them embraced it, at least for a while, but by the time most of them were disenchanted with it, they *couldn't* realistically do much about it. Did the army rebel against what much of its leadership considered to be simplistic, ill-advised, ruinous policy? OK, was that because Germans are particularly prone to blind obediance to orders & constituted authority? That's what soldiers of any country are trained to do, follow their orders, and mostly they do. Anybody taking over a country is going to make it look to as many people as possible as if it's the only reasonable thing to be done under pressing circumstances, and he'll probably do it with utmost sincerity.

Ahem. Sorry about the long rant, but there's been plenty of wondering what can possibly be the matter with our Americans' minds on here, so some evening-up can't hurt you. One further pargr. and I will leave w/o addressing the entire rest of the thread.

9. Crime & self-defense: The victim is the first responder. As it is said, when seconds count the police are just minutes away. The police are a response force, not an on-the-spot deterent. A general deterent, yes, but most criminals attempt to operate when the police aren't present. What is an on-the-spot deterent is a suspicion that the victim is present, armed, & incalculably likely to resist lethally. Most people don't want to fight it out with somebody who's shooting at them, even if they suspect that person might not be too much of a marksman. (Tho that is one reason why what seem to be absurd amounts of firepower are not necessarily so. If the housebreaker/assaulter/&c. is confronted with a shaky, nervous victim who doesn't look like shooting straight, he might decide to risk one or two shots taken at him (the bad guy). If he sees 3 inches of clip sticking out of the bottom of the gun confronting him, it's going to cross his mind that *some* of those shots are going to hit him, just on random odds, and maybe it's time to call it a day. And if he doesn't, I hope some of them do.) Where I live, up in the hills, there is no cell phone service, no local cops (township of <700)and the state troopers minimum 10-15 minutes away - if we're lucky. And places do occasionally get burgled hereabouts, tho Vermont being a fairly high gun ownership place, most burglars are at considerable pains to be sure nobody's home when they set to work. Now, to actually have enough police to "protect" people, how many would you have to have? How much would it cost if you actually wanted that? The thing is impossible, even if it weren't horrible, and that would apply as well in the city as out here in the sticks. I doubt if there are a dozen houses in Vermont where you can't perfectly safely walk up to the door and knock like a civilized person, but there are quite a few where opening the door with a crowbar would be a very poor idea, and whatever statistics may claim, I can't believe that doesn't have a substantial deterent effect. An added bonus of our system vs. the Brits' is that you can credibly indulge in a little propaganda. ;) Shoot yourself a couple nice groups in paper targets, at a distance of 2 yards if necessary, or have a friend do so if you don't have a gun, and leave them lying carelessly on the porch, maybe with the widest shot circled and marked with appropriate vernacular. In merrie olde England they'll know your lying thru your teeth, but here it should give 'em pause. The idea, in re crime as in re tyranny, is to prevent the worst right from the beginning by a credible threat of resistance, but to be able to deliver on it if necessary.

One further advantage of on-the-spot crime-fighting: Say the convenience store/gas station gets held up, let's say at night. Bad guy[s] get nervous, one clerk gets shot/head-bashed with handy fire extinguisher/squashed with getaway car. After due investigation cops give the prosecutor their best suspect, other clerk is pretty sure it was him, B. S. can't clear himself, off he goes to clink for a nice long sit (specially, in all too many places still, if he's black). Eventually, after he's lost multiple years of his life behind bars, turns out it wasn't him. Very sorry Sir, but do have a nice life from now on. Now if, on the other hand, the perp is shot by the clerk right in the midst of his red-handed perpetrating, there will be no such confusion. Come on then, Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense, eh what? Seems fair to a lot of us.

Speaking of black men, let us close this overgrown post with a quote from Frederick Douglas, approximate, like most of the quotes I can't lay my eyes on at the moment, but guaranteed close:

"American freedom depends on three things: The ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box." He was right when he said it, and he's still right.