No. of Recommendations: 5
And this risk is...how much, exactly?
20% chance?
10%?
Or is more like...0.00002% chance?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. The only other
non-trivial outcome is that it will be stolen:
https://www.atf.gov/firearms/docs/report/nfcta-vol...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.
1. What other countries say about firearm ownership is completely irrelevant. Madison wrote Federalist 46 and noted that the US was SUPPOSED to be completely different from everyone else ESPECIALLY on the topic of firearms.
2. There is no time basis on whether or not the Supremes currently recognize it or figured it out 100 years ago. By that logic since slavery wasn't outlawed until 1865 then basic human freedom isn't fundamental either.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. Virtually no other nation has constitutional prohibitions on quartering troops; and I think you would have very little argument that our Third Amendment does
not address a natural or fundamental right, and that other nations could morally (if they chose) decide that they wanted to allow troop quartering.
The Second Amendment leans more towards the Third Amendment than the Thirteenth, IMHO. Only a bare handful of other nations provide that owning firearms is a protected right. There are several nations that prohibit civilian ownership of firearms for personal defense. These nations are generally not regarded as acting
immorally by not allowing firearm ownership. So whether firearm ownership is to be a protected right appears to be a choice that different nations can legitimately make either way, rather than something that is so fundamental to the human condition that any society that orders itself in a way that doesn't protect that right is inherently immoral.
