Neither one has control over humans. Nothing else does either. Humans are responsible for their own damn actions.
So the gun, as a symbol has no effect on people? When you pick up that gun don't you feel a surge of masculinity, the fact that you're exercising your right as an American to own and shoot anyone that attacks you? Don't you feel that the gun needs to be used? The buzz that you get when a bullet tears through flesh?
There's something about guns that set them apart from any other weapon. They do have a control over people; they are impersonal, don't rely solidly on your actions (as jabbing a knife into a victim at close range does) and are involved in sports.
When you say 'Nothing else (has control over humans)' what exactly do you mean? I'd argue that very little of what we percieve as 'free will' is all that free.
No, I don't feel a surge of masculinity, and I don't feel proud or big and manly cuz I'm holding a gun... I don't have that kind of symbolic mind, at least not toward guns. When I held the M1 Carbine that my friend had, it felt kind of cool to be holding a gun from WWII(by the way, I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm fascinated by a lot of things from that time, even the boots and lighters the soldiers used. It's not just the guns. Oh, and by the way... the M1 carbine was a blast to shoot, almost no recoil whatsoever. It's a nice little gun, but I don't think I'd want one in combat, if I were to ever find myself in combat for whatever reason), but I wasn't like "YEAH!!!! LET'S GO SHOOT SOMETHING NOW!!!! AAAAAAH!!!!" and No, I don't feel like the gun needs to be used. I've never shot a gun thru any flesh, so I wouldn't know what kind of "buzz" it would give me, if any.
No, in reality, nothing really does have control over humans. If anything has any kind of "control" over you, it's an illusion, and the only reason it's there at all is because you let it exist. It's all about using your head and thinking before you act. Do you remember a while back when I was arguing that advertisements don't affect me? Like I never think something is cool because an advertisement tells me it is? This is kind of similar... I make my own decisions, and I think them thru. I don't just do what some stupid ad tells me, and I don't get testosterone/adrenaline induced impulses to do things like that. In fact, probably about 99% of the things I see for sale, I look at and say "WTF? That's retarded! What the hell could I possibly want with that?" For example... I remember seeing this stupid commercial for a printer that you can either hook up directly to your camera, or else you could put the camera's memory card directly into the printer... I forget which one... either way, one of the first things they said was "why is it easier to take pictures than it is to print them?" When I saw that, I was like "uh... because... all you have to do is point the fuckin thing and press a button. it's eaiser because it's less work, but that doesn't mean that printing pictures is hard. Oh yeah, I'm sure it's so fuckin difficult to insert a cable into your camera, drag the fuckin files, then open them, and click file/print. What a fuckin stupid commercial." Maybe I'm unusual or something, but that's the way it is, honestly. I'm no puppet. NOTHING has control over me.
"taking the guns away from everyone, including good old law-abiding citizens, would really bring down the murder rate here in the US."
Yeah, if you could take them away from EVERYBODY and KEEP them away from EVERYBODY, but that's not gonna happen. And I see no real reason to even try because people who would never even use a gun for a crime would be affected negatively the most. I've never been hunting, but I'd like to go hunting, and it has nothing to do with wanting to kill something. I just want to eat deer because it tastes good. I mean seriously... if I really felt the way Mark described about guns, I would have lost a lot of weight, and I'd probably be in the military by now. But as you can clearly see from my profile picture, I'm fat, and I play airsoft. I don't "pretend" I'm in the military. I just put on camouflage cuz I play in the woods, it's comfortable as hell, and I like the way it looks.
"About murder statistics, you can't really make a fair comparison between the U.S. and Britain. As mentioned above, there are countries that allow fully automatic guns that have lower crime rates, you can't compare between the countries because you don't have a fair control. However, i recently read about a study that was done that showed that there were lower murder rates from guns in the U.S. in the states that ALLOWED CONCEALED GUNS than those that didn't."
Ah yes... I remember hearing that too, but I forget where I heard it. I remember they specifically mentioned Vermont as being a state where you could carry concealed weapons, and the crime rate is very low there. They also said something about it being considered one of the safest places to live in America.
digitaljez, it never says anywhere in any of our laws that it's okay to just kill someone for the hell of it. In fact, there are specific laws against killing... If there weren't, people wouldn't go to jail for murder. Just becuase we have the right to carry guns doesn't mean that we also have or think we have the right to kill each other. Some farmers who have livestock depend on guns to keep wolves away from their livestock. And if nobody had guns, nobody would hunt. Then the deer population would explode, ruining forest restoration efforts(deer eat baby trees, for those of you who don't know). They'd also end up all over the place, in people's back yards, which really isn't such a bad thing, but would you rather have them shot and eaten or see them die of starvation?
