Well your opinion on matters martial is certainly appreciated but in these days of F-16's we trashed the Iraqi army in days and in these years of civilized conduct we spent years exchanging small arms fire with insurgents. I personally found that to be quite effective. Unless someone is willing to nukes cities rather than occupy them or someone develops body armor which is effectively immune to modern small arms your point there is totally invalid.

Its also transparently and obviously invalid, which means even though you've heard it dozens of times - it a favorite of liberals - you've never bothered to actually ponder it. It's like an atheist using modern rib count as proof against Genesis without bothering to consider that not only is that absurd in terms of DNA but our ancestors were perfectly aware that chopping off a man's hand wouldn't result in his next kid being born without one.

The entire argument that small arms isn't effective is absolute nonsense, but it appeals to those who want them out of play so they don't engage in critical thinking on the subject. If the enemy, foreign or domestic, is perfectly fine with epic mass murder or genocide then you fight with everything you've got and a few million extra people with hunting rifles and handguns may not be is handy as a hundred thousand tanks and bombers but it is a major extra card in the hand and if the enemy is interested in occupation and using the existing population and infrastructure then small arms are a major advantage.

By this logic, with rights comes responsibility, the right to free speech comes with responsibility as does the right not to be a slave. Now I happen to agree in principle that freedom does come with responsibility. That the right to vote, to do as you would and not as master says, to speak your mind without fear of imprisonment, and so on all comes with a responsibility. My worry is about any way of determining what that specific responsibility is and how to enforce it. We acknowledge that a nuke is a clear exception to the 2nd amendment same as calling 'fire' in the theater is and how involuntary human sacrifice isn't a protected religious freedom. What bothers me is that the left seems to find far more room for imposed responsibilities on 2nd amendment rights then the other rights. Making it illegal to scream 'fire' in a theater is not analogous to owning a M16, it's analogous to firing the weapon. "Fire' is not an evil word, the responsibility is not to incite a panic that can lead to deaths on knowingly false grounds. Requiring training in guns seems no different then forcing people to take 'sensitivity' courses.

It's also silly, there are probably a lot more people who'd attend voluntary training or not get a gun then would refuse mandatory training and be even more inclined to want a gun. I'd prefer people attending actually wanted to learn as opposed to felt they had to and tuned it out. It also ignores that I don't want someone who never attended a gun course but suddenly felt their life was in danger to be unable to acquire a gun right then. Basic gun safety can be acquired in about ten minutes and basic marksmanship in about ten rounds. Much like a computer you don't need to spend hours and hours learning before you can switch one on ans check your email. Gun culture assumes some enthusiasm and desire for the knowledge, in which case mandatory is not just pointless but counter-productive, basic user skills require nothing more than a quick primer and encouragement to seek more. Finish up a mandatory class you didn't want to attend and you'll never take more training. That's why gardening extension courses are voluntary not mandatory, and you don't need a license to buy seeds or a watering can, and don't put the personal danger thing into it. Half-assed gardening and cooking techniques rack up a lot deaths and illness too. We don't require people take basic cooking safety we do it through more enlightened means of putting out the risks of salmonella.

And in a given year we spend hundreds of times that on defense and police protection. Accidents happen and guns are hardly the sole cause. What's missing from that is how much money was saved from crimes prevented by guns directly or by would-be criminals who have second thoughts when they realize that not all the people out there are sheep. You've got this narrative in your head that you can't vary from that makes you ignore common sense assumptions like how background checks will deter the least determined criminals but somehow concealed weapons don't do that at all. So you load up your balance scales and throw out or underweight anything you think goes on the other side and simply ignore anything that by is logically obvious but nigh impossible to get data on. Doubtless your explanation for the massively higher violence in the cities in this country with the most restrictive gun laws is, in your eyes, the reason why they need those laws and more, it couldn't possibly be because those laws seriously decrease the risk of being shot while committing a crime.

You mention being able to pull up a dozen such accidents a day, which I really doubt but ignores that 12x365 is 4380 and yet we have around 4600-4900 Emergency rooms in this country and they sure as hell have more than 0.9 patients per year each. There are roughly 6000 police stations with around 700,000 full time police officers and they sure do more 4380 cases a year involving violence or accident.

Of course 'gun accident' to the left continues to include suicide in blatant dishonesty no matter how many times it is pointed out. Probably because it really fucks up that narrative if you have to tell people just how many of those were suicides and they might ponder that banning all guns would likely have minimal effect on the suicide rate.

Almost nobody uses our suicide prevention lines and I doubt plastering '1-800-Sui-Cide' signs up will help much. The NRA's remit is gun rights, not suicide or mental illness. Expecting them to divert funds to that is as totally bullshit as expecting the Labor Unions to do it. You want them to do it because you'd view it as admission to a crime, if the NRA is funding such things its less to spend to defend our rights from anti-gun sorts and associates guns to suicide and mental illness.

It's hard to take talk of comprise seriously when you suggest garbage like that. Ya know, people who are afraid of Global Warming turning their hilltop home into an island, or people who lose their jobs to green regs, those people are probably more prone to suicide too, and we sure have had a fair number of green terrorists, they pop up as often as spree killers... maybe Green peace should divert some of its funds form lobbying congress to suicide prevention too?

I could ask them same thing.