If one person becomes too much of a nuisance (real trigger happy for ultra minor infractions [...] relatives, friends, or concerned citizens will correct (fill trigger happy person with lead).
Dosn't help the poor person who got shot dose it? Am I mad to beleave that getting killed is a reduction of basic civil liberties?
That's how the wild west worked anyway... outlaws didn't last that long.
Nor did the wild west.
And nor the innconent bystanders. The 'you pissed me off - bang bang you're dead' mentality was the reason for one of the largest genocides in human history.
Excuse me, but if you are referring to the Old West, you are seriously misinformed. While there certainly was violent crime, the murder rate (excluding self-defense, deaths from wars, etc.) was actually lower than it is today. I came across a doctoral thesis written several years ago that did a statistical analysis of population data and newspaper obituaries in cities like Tombstone from around 1850-1890. The conclusion of the paper was that while the drinking/gambling/red light districts were certainly violent places, in general, there was less crime than there is today. The life of criminals is hard when everyone is armed, and when the justice system actually executes convicted murderers in a timely fashion. (Capital punishment is the only treatment for criminals that has a 0% recidivism rate.) Of course, the primary flaw in your logic is that you assume anyone who wants to own a gun is deranged or unbalanced somehow, and that gun ownership causes crime. There are at least 200 million (registered) guns in the USA, (no reliable figures are available for the quantity of illegally imported, homemade, and otherwise unregistered weapons) and at least half of the households in the USA have at least one gun. Miraculously enough, most people are not murderers or violent criminals, and even the rate of accidental firearm death/injury has steadily declined despite increases in the rate of gun ownership. I had a gun in my pocket when my wife told me she was having an affair with one of her co-workers, and yet 18 months later, both she and the "other man" are both alive and healthy--no bullet holes. I have not even threatened to misuse firearms in such a manner, since that accomplishes nothing more than exchanging one set of problems for a new, and more annoying set. (Being cheated on sucks, but I am sure that being anal-rammed by a bunch of HIV+ fat guys in prison sucks even worse.) Amazingly enough, most people in America have more in common with me than Colin Ferguson. (He's the guy who did the Long Island commuter train murders.) It really isn't that hard to figure out that shooting a guy breaking through your bedroom window at 3 AM with a crowbar and a TEC-9 is a Good Thing, (at least if you value your continued existence, and that of your family) while shooting someone giving you the finger on the way in to work is a Bad Thing. In the second case, there is no threat to your life involved, so there is no reason to kill anyone. In the first case, there is. Is this brain surgery? Jonathan Wienke What part of "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" is too hard to understand? (From 2nd Amendment, U.S. Constitution) When everyone is armed, criminals fear everyone, not just the police. PGP 2.6.2 RSA Key Fingerprint: 7484 2FB7 7588 ACD1 3A8F 778A 7407 2928 DSS/D-H Key Fingerprint: 3312 6597 8258 9A9E D9FA 4878 C245 D245 EAA7 0DCC Public keys available at pgpkeys.mit.edu. PGP encrypted e-mail preferred. US/Canadian Windows 95/NT or Mac users: Get Eudora Light + PGP 5.0 for free at http://www.eudora.com/eudoralight/ Get PGP 5.0 for free at http://bs.mit.edu:8001/pgp-form.html Commercial version of PGP 5.0 and related products at http://www.pgp.com Eudora Light + PGP = Free, Convenient Communication Privacy