Well, you sure know how to unleash teh nutz...

In Heinlein's world, everyone is armed, at least all the cheiftains.  In the cases DC presents, only one side is known to be armed. Not sure that would make a difference when the assailants are clearly insane, but I think Heinlein is right that the overall level of civility would be higher, even exaggerated as in traditional Japanese culture and the Ole South.

I don't blame gun owners for violence personally.  I blame their professional activists who have lobbied our elected officials at the state and federal levels into fearing the kind of reasonable regulation of firearms that even Justice Scalia was forced to admit in the most tepid sentence he has ever written was permissible.  But Congress is frozen, and the state legislatures are in a state of suspended animation -- and it's just dumb, stupid, and yes in many cases it leads to violence.

I come from a gun-owning town (believe it or not Daggers :)).  One of my "buddies" on FB recently wrote how angry it made him that he wasn't allowed to blame all muslims for acts of terror made allegedly in the name of Islam, but that liberals like me were blaming all gun owners for the violence committed by irresponsible gun owners.  I think that reflects the feelings of lots of folks who choose to display faux or real anger about any effort to reasonably regulate guns -- and any effort to restore self defense doctrine to its legitimate common law-based and time-tested legitimate essence.

Do you feel oppressed?  Really?  The gun owner lobby has milked folks like you into an irrational frenzy that is just plain dumb and, yes, makes this nation far more dangerous.

And, yes, that same gun owner lobby or whatever it is bears full and indisputable responsibility for the emasculation of the time-honored common law concept of self defense and replaced it with this Stand Your Ground poison that has nothing at all to do with self defense.   

It is a national disgrace.

expect a number of flamers to come by now.

The difference between a Flamer and somebody who merely disagrees is that a flamer is inappropriate in their responses.

It appears your lips have done you in again,  You attack other people who were not inappropriate and your reason for attack....... is that they disagreed with doc.

How unfortunate these new people met up with your usual inappropriate remarks and insulting welcome 

To the new posters/contributors  WELCOME

The 2nd amendment practitioners played a key role in that reduction. That's a fact that has been backed by the FBI, CDC and the DOJ.

Doc made no reference to racists. There is also no reference to a society of utopia. He is challenging the concept that common courtesy and mutual respect is based purely on the threat of deadly force being used by anybody at anytime. Your reference to gang bangers and "trailer trash" provides excellent support for his thesis.

You should tell the guy with the strapped bomb, dropping ball bearings on the floor "Bombs are not allowed" 

If it comes down to a choice between having no guns at all or no guns at all, we will someday have no guns at all. That's just how it will be.

I don't know many people who would care to be the victim of a violent crime, just so we can rid the Nation of guns. 

The U.K.’s strict gun controls mean it has a lower homicide rate than the U.S. even though there’s more violent crime, …….. According to the Sydney-based Institute for Economics and Peace, the U.K. had 933 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2012, down from 1,255 in 2003. In the U.S., the figure for 2010 was 399 violent crimes per 100,000 people.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-24/u-k-gun-curbs-mean-more-violence-yet-fewer-deaths-than-in-u-s-.html

"How did we get here?"

Because the men of lawlessness are  increasing and getting more violent, with or without a gun. Our moral values have worsened. and that didn't happen because of the gun.

Without a gun, rapists, murderers and others that would do violent crimes, would find another weapon

The attackers of the "Good Samaritan"  didn't have guns probably clubs and rocks? These instruments of death have been around for years........ since the days of Cain and Able.  "How did we get here?"  People really don't to want to know.  

It would require many books discussing many facets of our past and present lives to say how we got to this place. The following is only an assortment of what I think about a lot, not a theory of the world.

The language of the Second Amendment ties the right to bear arms to the idea that our nation's defense would be based upon various combinations of units formed and organized by communities. The Revolutionary War was won by using such units combined with methods of a regimented army learned by years of working in the British system. This combination of Local and Federal elements was the structure of the Armed Forces at the beginning of the Republic and continued until the Civil War. After that, our Armed Forces became purely professional organizations that worked on a strictly top down fashion. This change in our system negated an essential role the Second Amendment was intended to play in safeguarding against an overweening central authority. The present arguments (Scalia, etcetera) that the "spirit" of the amendment refers to a right to personal self defense is weak beer compared to the ambitions of its authors. The connection "Second Amendment activists" make between the right to self-defense and the capacity to resist central authority is a sort of vestigial memory of a limb removed long ago.

Hobbes said that the natural state of Man is War. Each man is at war with all other men to get what they need to live or want. This form of life really sucks so men often agree to bind themselves to forms of authority and this agreement is what gives force to laws. Many arguments against accepting any limitations being placed upon the right to bear arms assert that this "natural state" is the reality and that the system of law is a thin fig leaf covering it. So you have a group arguing for certain legal forms in the name of something they declare is outside of it. The future they are preparing for is outside of anything we could produce as a society. They are not obligated to fix anything but are prepared for the moment when it all breaks down. It is a form of despair.

Lethal force is a commodity and there is huge market for it. The guns we kill ourselves with in our country are only a portion of what is being used by others in the world. If the capacity to kill is a market variable, killing becomes a part of the market. Not because anybody set up a body of laws to sanction that killing but because nobody set up a body of laws to forbid it.