The Great Gun Debate Rages On - With The Most Important Underlying Issue Unaddressed.
Dear Friends:
I believe in a an unfettered right to self-defense under any and all potentially life-threatening circumstances (and I've lived a few of them). The problems are really that 1) criminals and gov't zealots will always be able to get arms, and will use them on anybody whom they choose if they are either desperate, depraved or simply "following orders"; 2) otherwise well-intended "defenders of their own persons and property," will make careless mistakes and cause fatalities due to ignorance or negligence in handling weapons purchased for defense or target-shooting, and 3) Human Nature involves a horribly conflictory monster mix of distrustfulness, fear, a will to dominate (i.e., to bully) and an undeniable propensity toward violence.
A person bent on an act of violence will use any available tool as a weapon. A gun merely simplifies and further de-personalizes the process. The absense of a gun is too often remedied with a box cutter, a baseball bat, a tire iron, a knife or even a stone.
The sad reality is that as long as people wish to impose power over other people, and as long as people see their own propensity toward violence mirrored in the eyes of others, they will want to either own guns (for acts of violence and acts of vigilance), or to control the rights of others (whom they distrust or wish to dominate) to own guns.
Human Nature, as always, is the larger, unaddressed issue. Perhaps this remains so because it is such a source of shame when one gazes back upon the history of our species, with its slaughter, holocausts, ethnic cleansing, rioting, massacres and consistent pattern of violence and brutality. I believe that guns are just another means for Human Beings to meet their ultimate ends -- and for Humanity to meet its ultimate end.
Faithfully,
Douglas Castle
p.s. My friend Joyce forwarded me the article which follows. Simply click on the hyperlink and you will magically be connected with a thought-provoking news article from a Pennsylvania newspaper. The "castle doctrine" is just a bizarre coincidence. I swear.
"Now, Pennsylvania gun rights advocates are aiming at their next target: giving gun owners the right to fire rather than flee when threatened in their homes or cars or, ideally, any public place where they have a right to be."
Douglas Castle
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