Subject: Re: Here's one for the ATHEIST board
Sorry, counselor. You've evolved your emotional argument into one of numbers and so now I'm going to hold you to producing something.

I would have thought it would be obvious to you. In any given year, the overwhelming majority of homes are not broken into. They're not invaded. They're not threatened. Fewer than 1% of homes in the U.S. are the subject of a burglary in any given year - and only a fraction of those take place when there's an occupant at home. If you buy a gun and keep it in your drawer for a few decades, the thing that's most likely to happen - by a huge margin - is nothing at all.

As noted in the BATF link above, every year more than 200K firearms are reported as stolen to law enforcement. Estimates of how many are stolen but are not reported vary - but it's certainly more than zero. You'll note that number is an order of magnitude higher than all homicides - whether at home or not.

Studies of homicide rates show that having a gun in the home basically doubles the risk of the occupants of being victims of homicide. Again, your odds of being a homicide victim are astonishingly low to begin with - but they're much higher if there's a gun in the house than not, which demonstrates that the gun is far more likely to kill an occupant than an invading stranger.

https://www.acpjournals.org/do...

By how much? BTW, every life is precious, and if I have to use a firearm to protect myself, isn't it worth it?

Not if you consider the possibility that you might use the firearm to kill an innocent person - then, whether it's "worth it" depends on whether it's more likely that the firearm will result in an innocent person dying than protecting yourself. Because if you use your firearm to kill an innocent person, your life will basically be completely destroyed as well - it's not like Kevin Monahan has anything left in their life, even though they allegedly thought (mistakenly) that he was using his gun to protect himself.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18...

Oooo, that's not what your compatriot is arguing in this very thread. According to 1pg anything that's in the Constitution can be revoked at any time.

But you're not arguing that. You're arguing the existence of natural rights. If natural rights exist, they generally will cover those things that it would be egregiously immoral for any country to deny to their citizens. Yet we have many, many countries that do not protect bearing firearms as a right - and those nations are never (to my knowledge) criticized as depriving their citizens of their basic human rights in a way we would criticize a nation that allowed slavery (for example).

I don't think you've come anywhere close to establishing that owning and bearing firearms is a natural or fundamental right, rather than a contingent one that's specific to (and peculiar to) our own Constitution like the Third Amendment.