The Real Reason Americans Keep Their Guns
Americans (most of them) are not crazy. The gun control debate has been heated and serious for over a hundred years and most educated Americans are intimately familiar with the various arguments of each side. But people outside the United States tend to misunderstand the pro-gun side.
Before I get to the main argument, I'll address what I think are the three main myths that many non-Americans believe about guns in the United States:
1. Guns put innocent people, especially children, in danger of being killed by accident.
Actually, each year, very very few children are killed in gun accidents. For children aged 0-14, there are about 22 accidental gun deaths per year. For comparison, more than 800 kids drown every year.
2. Guns allow crazy people to carry out deadly, random attacks of terror.
Maybe, but even statistically, random mass shootings represent less than 0.02% of all gun homicides. The vast, vast majority of gun deaths come from criminal violence and suicide.
3. The NRA is so powerful that it prevents the government from changing the laws.
This simply isn't true. Despite the NRA and other guns-rights groups efforts, significant gun regulations have been passed on the federal- and especially the state- level.
The REAL Reasons Americans Cling to Guns
Middle-Americans keep their guns to protect themselves from a bigger threat than common criminals: governments.
Irrefutably, guns in the hands of citizens not only would be useful in the case of an invasion, they help to deter an invasion in the first place. It is said that a Japanese Admiral, when planning an attack on the remote island of Pearl Harbor, wrote, "You cannot invade the mainland United States, there would be a rifle behind every blade of grass." Decades earlier, Japan had successfully invaded Korea. Despite a spirited resistance, Korean freedom fights, armed mostly with match-lock muskets, could not make major headway against the flintlock rifles of the Japanese Army.
Similarly, the near infinite might of the United States was defeated by the armed citizens of Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Had the people of these countries had no means of fighting back, they would have gone the way of the Gauls.
But invasion is not the reason the American fathers felt that the Right to Bear Arms was vital. They saw the most likely threat to American freedom as coming from within. Governments inevitably become corrupted over time as ruling classes and families develop, who begin to see themselves as wholly separate and superior to the people they rule. Eventually, a generation of these rulers will make serfs of a nation's citizens, robbing them of their freedom.
Mao said, "Power comes from the barrel of a gun. The communist must control all the guns, that way, no guns can ever be used to control the party." With the guns confiscated, Mao began the reforms that killed 30 million of his own citizens.
The Bolsheviks of Russia outlawed private gun ownership, confiscating weapons and punishing owners with up to 10 years in prison. A few decades later, as many as sixty million Russians died in Stalin's reforms.
Adolf Hitler confiscated and restricted gun ownership of Jews in 1938. You know what happened next.
Cambodia confiscated all private firearms in 1956 and Pol Pot committed genocide just two decades later.
It's the same story around the world. The only defense against this inevitability is an armed citizenry.
Every animal on earth has the right to defend itself from an attacker or enemy. Humans' enemies have guns, so the only realistic defense against it is guns. The second amendment guarantees the people of the United States the right to self defense against what may one day be their most dangerous enemy: their own government.
Gun control has some good arguments, but without having an open and honest conversation with a cost/benefit analysis, no progress can be made in either direction.
But then, Honesty is never a big part of politics.
