"Thomas J. Paladino Jr." wrote in message
...

"Dave" wrote in message
...

"Wdtabor" wrote in message
...

Likewise when the chances of meeting someone with a gun is remote do
we
worry about being armed? I would only worry if I was mixing with
people
who
carry guns. As I don't mix with criminals its not an issue.


Oh, you lock yourself up in your castle?

What happens if you encounter a thug with a length of pipe on the way
to
the
pub?

Which, by the way, if far more likely to happen in London than in
Norfolk,
VA.

Give him my wallet (never more than £20 in it). But its never happened
yet.


'Yet' being the operative word. And what happens when they want your car?
Or
your house? Or your girlfriend? Or your daughter? If armed rapists break
into your house and have their way with your wife or daughter, who is
going
to protect you then? Or are you going to self-rightously explain to your
loved ones how they need to just comply with the wishes of the criminals,
because you no matter how bad it will be, nothing justifys gun ownership?

And mind you, this scenario is FAR more likely to occour if the criminals
are 100% assured that the people in the house have no way to defend
themselves.

Do you see the problem with abject pascifism? No, probably not. So go
ahead
and allow criminals to have their way with you and your family, weather
it's
a $20 stickup or a gang rape. And as they rape your daughter or beat you
with baseball bats for whatever little cash you may have, you can rest
easy
knowing that your pascifist ideals are intact.

Maybe its just that people behave differently here that the risk is so small
that the chances of violent assault are so small that the solutions you
propose are out of proportion to the risk -the first rule of insurance.

Secondly if I was to be held up the aim is to not get in a fight but to
survive. Not about being a pascifist, its about being smart and knowing when
to fight and when not to fight.

I was held up at knive point in South Africa last year by two black youths.
The main aim was to get the guy with the knive as far away from me as
possible. So I let him have the camera and threw 100 rand ( $10) on the
floor. He dropped the camera, which I picked up and then fled empty handed.
No point having a fight.

FWIW Brits have more chance of being robbed and murdered on vacation in
Florida than we do in our own country. On your hypothesis we should all be
issued with guns on entry to the US to give us a fair chance.

And also FWIW Europeans dont fear guns. As was pointed out earlier they are
inanimate objects absolutely useless until a persons picks on up. The fear
is about who can and who has access to guns and their attitute to using
them.
The gun is never the problem its the person.

As for the Americans war on terrorism, they were pretty absent when we were
fighting the Irish terrorists in fact many of them were funding Irish
terrorist organisations. Not exactly a consistent policy.