QB wrote: I actually had an acquaintance say she was more afraid of people with CHLs than criminals. I won't go into the discussion that ensured (if you can even consider it a discussion) but her thinking was that they were used to guns and only used them to rob stores and such and the CHL holders just carried guns around being macho and when they got mad they'd shoot someone. Now isn't that enough to make your stomach churn?
No.
The woman is a moron. That doesn't make my stomach churn. It simply fills me with contempt for her and others like her.
I would have told her that if her theory about people with CHL's (that when they got mad they would just shoot someone) was true we should be able to prove it real quick. There are 267,000 CHL's in TX. Surely this is a large enough number that if they were acting like she thought they were, there should be a lot of aggravated assaults and/or homicides committed by CHL's each year. Fortunately, there is no need to guess at whether CHL's were out there committing these crimes, because the DPS publishes statistics every year showing the total numbers of serious crimes committed in TX each year and the number of these crimes committed by CHL's.
A quick look at the numbers for the various catagories of homicide and aggravated assault reveals that CHL holders commit ALMOST NONE OF THESE CRIMES. So her
idiotic notion that people with CHL's go around shooting people when they get angry is just that, an
idiotic notion.
Then I would ask her where she ever got such a stupid idea into her head. (Using exactly those words, to make sure that
she knew that
I knew that it was a stupid idea.)
Just keep this in mind. The core belief of anti-gun people is that if there were no guns, no one would be killed by people wielding guns. Strictly speaking, this is a truism. So in that narrow sense they are correct.
But itheir core belief is a meaningless concept because:
1) With no guns there would be no gun-related deaths, but it does not follow that this would be a better world. There could be more deaths due to other causes - like the occassional government-sponsored killing spree which, while historically rare usually racks up numbers that make ordinary criminal homicides seem trivial by comparison.
2) It also does not follow that no guns = a better world in the more immediate sense. Looking at the UK, where self defense is virtually outlawed, robberies and muggings are common, and home invasions are rampant, we see that a) the government truly cannot protect people, b) violent criminals have little to fear from their potential victims, and so act accordingly, and c) the average person is far safer in their gun-protected home in TX than almost anyone among the subject peoples of the UK.
3) There
ARE guns, and there always will be. So the only
real question is
WHO will have them. The government? Criminals? LAC's? Some of the above? Or all of the above?
4) Even in gun-ban societies such as the UK, criminals manage to get ahold of guns. So the realistic option is that the government and criminals will have them.
How is that better for LAC's, to be the only group that
DOESN'T have access to guns?