Subject: Re: Here's one for the ATHEIST board
The most likely outcome for a firearm for home protection is always going to be...nothing. It will never be used - for anything. You're almost certainly wasting your money. Any other scenario is remote.

Sorry, counselor. You've evolved your emotional argument into one of numbers and so now I'm going to hold you to producing something.

If you're balancing benefits and costs, both the defense scenario and the life-destroying scenario are incredibly unlikely. You're almost certainly never going to use that gun, for good or bad. But the bad outweighs the good.

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

What if I save a whole troop of Girl Scouts because I was there? Don't their lives matter?

The prevalence of a right's recognition is significant in arguing whether it is a fundamental or natural right, vs. a right that exists because of the particular or unusual terms of a nation's constitution. Virtually every nation outlaws slavery. You would have no argument that basic human freedom from slavery is a fundamental right.

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.

And again, when it comes to the Constitution of the United States, what other countries do is entirely irrelevant. It literally DOES NOT MATTER that other nations don't trus their citizens to be armed; Madison covered that:

Notwithstanding the military establishments in the several kingdoms of Europe, which are carried as far as the public resources will bear, the governments are afraid to trust the people with arms. And it is not certain that with this aid alone, they would not be able to shake off their yokes. But were the people to possess the additional advantages of local governments chosen by themselves, who could collect the national will, and direct the national force, and of officers appointed out of the militia, by these governments and attached both to them and to the militia, it may be affirmed with the greatest assurance that the throne of every tyranny in Europe would be speedily overturned, in spite of the legions which surround it.