Somewhere I agree, although I was brought up differently.
In Belgium there are restrictions and background checks, still Dutroux was able to get a gun legally in 1994 after coming out of prison, where since 1986 he was known as an abductor of minors.
In the US where they have in the Bill of rights: Right to keep and bear arms, they convicted Viktor Anatolyevich Bout. I even started to defend this man in groups of friends, as he is a trader and not a killer.
The issue is not the gun, but that man that uses it. If you restrict the guns, you do have a chance to restrict the usage, but is restriction worth the gain in security? On what basis do you say the person carrying a gun is going to use it wrongly? Similar for Viktor Anatolyevich Bout, who's right did infringe by trading? Should all trade be restricted? What else should people be able to restrict based on the assumption you will abuse it?
Restrictions can help, but I'm more in favour of freedom as a first rule.
The issue here is Zimmerman, provoking or not, Martin by persuit and the unclear events that happened afterwards ... leading to a deadly shot. The only one on trial is Zimmerman for shooting, not the whole world for owning a gun.
To use Obama's use of words, my views on guns have "evolved" over the years. I used to be a staunch pro-control person, but I have realized that certain aspects of gun control are just too impractical. There are numerous situations in which a gun can be used to defend oneself in dangerous situations.
But at the same time, there are other situations in which the usage of guns is just excessive. I actually talked about the Zimmerman/Martin case in the context of another case, the Goetz case in the 1990s, where a man shot four black teenagers because he thought that he was going to get mugged (this all happened in a NY subway). He was (unfairly) acquitted.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernhard_Goetz
Most opponents of gun control always refer to the old phrase: "guns don't kill people... people kill people." While this is certainly true, I think that a gun gives the user a sense of distance from the action of actually killing someone. This is a distance that other weapons, such as a brick, a club, a knife, or a pigeon (rolls eyes) don't offer people. This could be because a gun doesn't require much use of actual physical force beyond pulling the trigger--while stabbing a person requires you to plunge the damned knife into the person, with enough physical force to, well, stab the person. I remember my friend telling me he had a dream in which he was being jumped by a group of thugs. He told me that he had managed to pin one of the guys on the floor and managed to grab a pistol. He fired, but the gun was empty. He then found a knife, and just as he was going to use it, he felt something stopping him: himself. He simply couldn't use the knife. But, on contrast, he was willing to pull the trigger of a gun. In another situation, I was having a discussion with a friend on utilitarianism. I asked her if she would kill one person to save 100. She said yes. Assuming that she thought she would be using a gun, I asked her again: what if you had to kill him with a knife, or beat him to death... would you still do it? And then, there was some hesitation. In my view, a gun gives the user a sense of distance from himself/herself and the other person.
And then there's the question of crazy people. Certainly, crazy, sociopathic people exist. My question in all of this is what happens when you give a crazy person a gun? I suspect that a crazy person without a gun can attack someone else, but have a greater difficulty killing that person. If you give the crazy person a gun, however, the whole thing changes. Not only do you increase the likelihood of death, but you also increase the number of people that can be killed. Remember Columbine, Virginia Tech? Mass killings with guns. (to anticipate, yes, other things like bombs can kill people en masse, but, I suspect these things are illegal).
Yes, guns don't kill people. But crazy people with guns kill people. Crazy people without guns have a harder time.
It's in this consideration that I find a middle ground between gun control legislation and the responsible use of guns.
And to bring this discussion back to the Martin case... it's this consideration that makes Zimmerman's case such a fishy one. How can someone claim self-defense if that person is following someone else who has no weapon. Zimmerman had made no determination prior to following Martin. I think, as someone else pointed out, Zimmerman wanted to be a hero. And the fact that he had a gun made him that much emboldened. Had he been unarmed, this would have been a completely different story from the start.
So yes, the gun changes everything...
