Comment Re: Disagree. (Score 1) 354
Owning a firearm has nothing to do with essential personal freedoms or rights of the individual to exist in a free state. The only justification for it is to protect oneself from infringement on said freedoms, but that can just as easily be done through strong laws and a properly functioning government.
That is completely wrong. Individually owned firearms are used between 600,000 and 2 million times per year to protect their owners from a crime in progress. Their right to life and property in those cases were only preserved by owning that firearm and not by "strong laws and a properly functioning government." Owning a firearm, in additional to protecting against government tyranny, also helps preserve people's right to life.
... and I find the concept that citizens with a few guns could hold their own against the american military-industrial complex a bit of a farce to begin with.
All the second amendment gets your country is the highest per-capita gun violence rate in the western world. It hasn't gotten you anything else.
Apparently you have never read any history of the US in armed conflicts after WWII. The second amendment has little to do with our gun violence rate. There are other countries with higher per-capita firearm ownership which have much lower rates of firearm violence. The US has a violence problem due to many factors which are too difficult for Congress to address in easy sound bites. The fact that a portion of that violence uses firearms is incidental and not caused by the existence of the firearms.