I don’t think it’s quite an equivalence. When carrying firearms is illegal (as it effectively is in my country of Canada), you know whenever you see someone with a gun that you should run and call the police. You know they’re up to no good. In many US states, if you see someone with a gun… you kinda just have to deal with it. Maybe they’ll shoot you. Maybe they just need to overcompensate for something. You can’t really run from it because it can be so common.
A decent amount of gun crime is also spur of the moment acts. They won’t go home, get their gun, and come back. The gun violence only happens because the perpetrator happened to have a gun when they were angry. Banning carrying doesn’t guarantee people won’t be armed in public, but it sure will heavily reduce it.
Criminals don’t open carry. If you see a gun holstered on someone, they are explicitly showing you they are not a threat to you unless you become a threat to them. If they wanted to harm you, why would they show their hand before making a move.
Lethal crimes of passion are far more rare than you’re making them out. Carrying a pocket knife is legal in Canada no? Do you feel you’re in constant danger of being stab by any random angry stranger? Cars are common in Canada, do you flinch at every intersection because you aren’t sure if someone had a bad day and wants to run someone over randomly? No of course not, because the overwhelming majority of people don’t want to hurt anyone
Did you see that video of the lady open carrying in Houston who started shooting at the car that cut her off? Hilarious. Sorry, you were saying?
Did you see the article of the Saskatchewan mass stabbing that had something like 28 casualties? Anecdotes are not indicative of trends.
In a country of 300M you will have outliers. But there are hundreds if not thousands of carriers not hurting a fly for every article like this. Texas alone has 1.7M licensed carriers. So that ratio is actually probably in the hundreds of thousands to 1.
If you don’t want to hurt anyone, why carry a weapon designed for that exact purpose? There’s literally no other use for a gun.
Want and need are different. I don’t want to shoot a rabid dog that got loose, but I absolutely will before it bites me. Same with any other threats to my bodily safety that I can’t escape from.
The problem is that the things you talk about are all tools. Including guns. It’s just that the primary tool use of a gun is to kill. If I see someone openly carrying a gun they are saying, “I am ready to kill.” Carrying a knife? “I am ready to cut something.” Driving a car? “I am going somewhere”
Can those latter two things be used to kill? Of course. Anything can be used to kill, but that isn’t their primary function. The primary use of a gun, the reason why guns are made, is to kill things. And that makes all the difference.
Uh, yeah? This shouldn’t be a revolation.
A family member of mine concealed carries because she was raped (I know a couple women like this but I know my family memeber’s reasoning better since she’s family). Do you want to be the one to tell her she’s being paranoid? I sure don’t.
And if she uses the gun on a would have been rapist, blame the rapist not the person defending themselves.
