Guns. Should we ban them or not?

If banning guns means saving lives, then let's get to it! Here are some facts to consider.

Deaths from gun injuries

Last year, about 50,000 Americans died from gun-inflicted injuries.
About 90% of them were committing a crime at the time, so...
Last year, about 5,000 law-abiding Americans died from gun-inflicted injuries.

Gun-related deaths are way down the list of causes of death. Other causes, such as bad driving practices and bad diets kill far more people. We don't see a call for a ban on public use of automobiles or on McDonald's, do we? Why not? OK, let's look at leading cause of death and see if guns merit any attention:

Deaths from tobacco:

Last year, about 500,000 American smokers died from tobacco-inflicted illnesses.
Smokers make up about 25% of our population.
Cigarettes have no way of knowing who lit them--everyone breathes the same smoke. Only a fraction of the smoke produced goes into the smoker via puffing, and the human lung has no way of rendering smoke harmless. Thus, smoke is smoke. Given the propensity of smokers to puff away around nonsmokers, it is conservative to say another 500,000 Americans died from smoking, last year. So...
One million Americans died from tobacco, last year.

Comparing deaths

Death by gunshot is usually fairly swift and merciful
Death by cigarette follows a long erosion of quality of life, often with great financial burden, emotional misery, and physical pain.
Each year, 200 times as many Americans die from tobacco as from guns.
If you had a switch with only two positions: "kill 200 people at random" or "kill one person at random," which position would you choose? You would certainly choose to spare 199 people, would you not? Why, then, would anyone with a shred of common sense even care about gun-related deaths as long as tobacco is around? Duh!

Things we would like to ban:

From the discussion above, it's clear any decent society should ban tobacco. But doing so is futile. Let's look at other harbingers of death we'd like to ban:

Tornadoes
Hurricanes
Floods
Droughts
The IRS
Viruses
Cockroaches
Air pollution
Wild tigers and lions and bears
And, in some cases, really stinky bathrooms.

Do you see that banning any of these, other than the IRS, is simply dumb?

What a gun ban would do:

To protect 5,000 Americans, we would put 250+ million at risk. How so?

Passing laws against robbery murder has not stopped people from robbing and murdering. Thus, passing laws against guns will not stop dope dealers, organized crime families, terrorists (including the IRS), or crackpots from having them.
Passing laws against guns will prevent law-abiding citizens from having them. This means we are more distrustful of law-abiding citizens than we are fearful of people whose career goal in life is to rob and murder. Insane? Hmm.
The police are not our private 24-hour personal bodyguards. There are not enough police to go around to each home. There are more criminals than police now, and the job of the police is normally after the fact. Thus, when it comes to protecting yourself, you are on your own. Thus...
If criminals always have an extreme advantage, via exclusive use of firearms, then they will rule the land (even more so than they do now, via organizations like the IRS).
And, those 45,000 Americans killed while committing a crime would be free to kill the 45,000 people who would have stopped them!

This is not just theory. Think through the logic. And, if that doesn't convince you, read about the effects of Australia's gun ban or just look at the crime numbers for such pro-crime cities as New York, Chicago, and Boston--where gun bans are in force. Or look at the crime numbers for those anti-crime Florida cities that enacted right-to-carry laws. The facts don't lie: ban guns = crime goes up; promote responsible gun ownership = crime goes down.

This isn't Rome

Rome existed and flourished for centuries. Then, the rulers banned private ownership of weapons. This allowed tyranny and incompetence in government so bad, the nation fell in a generation (and you thought it couldn't get any worse than it is now). Gun ban proponents think their fellow citizens are raving lunatics kept in check merely by difficult access to guns, when it's really the other way around--we need guns to help us protect ourselves from raving lunatics. And from government corruption of the sort that happened in ancient Rome or in Hitler's gun-banned Germany.

To kill or not to kill?

The right of a living creature to defend itself is a right granted by nature. It is not a privilege granted by law. Personal protection is a personal responsibility, not that of a cop who makes less than the average wage in an already stressful job. Your choice is to kill the killer or let the killer kill you. If you let the killer kill you, then that killer is free to kill and kill again. And you are an accessory to each subsequent crime. All because you did not value human life enough to provide a way to defend your own. This is not theory or opinion. It just is.

To ban or not to ban

Banning guns does not save lives--it has the opposite effect. We have shown here that gun bans increase crime. Further, deaths from guns are statistically insignificant compared to other causes, many of which are preventable. Smoking, for example, serves no useful purpose.

The IRS, which destroys thousands of lives each year, is an extremely inhumane, expensive way to collect taxes--you could do the same thing civilly and far more efficiently with a national sales tax or by letting the fed collect from the states instead of individuals. There is no economic value to the IRS. Guns are a different story. You can use a gun to provide food. You can use a gun to protect your family. You can use guns to protect the other rights in the Bill of Rights. Did you know Hitler credited much of his success to a ban on guns? Do the math.