First, let me say your post is very well formulated, OC4me. And now, I'll add commentary where I may:
John Lott:
If you ignore the safety issue and just argue 2A points, you will lose this debate. People in the middle of this debate may value freedom, but they are often willing to trade off freedom for safety.
In addition, we find people quite willing to trade freedom even for the
illusion of security. I prefer to use "security" as the term for the concept, due to what was really behind Benjamin Franklin's famous quote:
SIEGEL: What's the exact quotation?
WITTES: The exact quotation, which is from a letter that Franklin is believed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, reads, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.
The exact quote, every jot and tittle: "Those, who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." (Franklin, B., Franklin, W. T. and Sparks, J. (1856) The life of Benjamin Franklin, containing the autobiography, with notes and a continuation. Whittemore, Niles, ad Hall. Boston. Retrieved from: https://tinyurl.com/y55kfkzu
SIEGEL: And what was the context of this remark?
WITTES: He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it.
SIEGEL: So far from being a pro-privacy quotation, if anything, it's a pro-taxation and pro-defense spending quotation.
WITTES: It is a quotation that defends the authority of a legislature to govern in the interests of collective security. It means, in context, not quite the opposite of what it's almost always quoted as saying but much closer to the opposite than to the thing that people think it means
Thus, we find the European-based Penn family being penny-wise and pound foolish, over-controlling for a few extra bucks while depriving the Pennsylvania General Assembly of much-needed and duly-authorized income to run the state. As a result of this and similar faux pas on the part of most of the distant colony title-holders, they lost everything during the Revolutionary War.
Even though we find Franklin's contextual meaning quite different than what we take it to mean i.e. "never give up essential liberty," I still maintain there are distinct relationships between between security and freedom. However, having been all over the world, I do not find the two to be mutually exclusive. Rather, they're more of two axes on a graph, and while negatively correlated, that correlation is not strong. Thus, there are areas of the world where people's essential freedoms are strong just as their safety and security are strong.
In fact, all four corners are represented, as well as everything in between:
- weak security, weak freedom
- weak security, strong freedom
- strong security, weak freedom
- strong security, strong freedom
Where the rights of We the People to keep and bear arms remain uninfringed, and we actually exercise those rights on a daily basis, we find our freedoms being respected while our security is simultaneously enhanced, but only to a point. Lest the bad guys simply arm up and have it out with us in gang wars, the second half of that equation involves them knowing they're going bye-bye for a long time -- if not permanently -- if they run afoul of the law. Therefore, excellent law enforcement capability to track down, catch, and incarcerate the bad guys is a must. Just as important, however, is the knowledge and understanding that if they bust into someone's home or are caught trying to steal someone's car, not only are they likely to be shot dead, but the resident or car-owner won't hesitate because the laws favor the protection of self and property rather than protection of criminals.
Fortunately, from your point of view, in this case, freedom and safety appear to go together. If you only argue 2A points, you come across as not having any responses to the safety concerns raised by others and you come across as callous.
I concur. John, I feel it's essential to respond to the concerns raised by those who would infringe on our right to keep and bear arms, and the reason is two-fold.
First, some of them, perhaps many of them, are legitimately scared. But their fears are irrational, largely fanned into flame by ignorant members of the media, if not knowledgeable members of the media who nonetheless feel like they can't increase viewership i.e. ad revenue without making mountains out of molehills, creating controversy by leveraging the ignorant to rise up against the right. Imagine how useless Congress would be if they hadn't been so busy over the last thirty years pushing for more useless gun control.
Second, regardless of whether they're legitimately frightened or not, they're often using nonsensical numbers they refer to as "statistics" in order to substantiate their points. As a statistician, clearly their numbers are so biased as to have taken them out of the realm of statistics altogether. On the other hand, sometimes they get the statistics right (probably from a hired firm), but proceed to claim the numbers mean all sorts of things when in fact, they do not.
Again, these numbers are highly misleading to a scared and/or ignorant public.
What we have here, essentially, is a problem where the only long-term solution requires education. Anti-2A members of Congress cannot manipulate a properly informed general public. The media cannot misinform the general public, holding them hostage on the edge of their seats when they know with reasonable certainty otherwise. Both governmental control as well as continued media mis/dis-information campaigns are absolutely dependent upon the general public's ignorance. Educate the general public as to what's actually what, using taking the time to explain not only what's wrong, but why it's wrong, and what's right and why, and you break the chains of mental and emotional slavery -- of bondage -- in which the American people either knowingly or unknowingly find themselves.
I have a friend who's a well-known liberal newscaster. I take her to task on a regular basis, mainly because the liberal media source for whom she works routinely tasks her with creating content with a heavy liberal slant. Because we became friends and worked together in college, she doesn't boot me off her page! I also never approach an issue as if she or her publisher are fools. Instead, Instead, it's a "gentle correction." What usually happens is the string of anti-gun comments stops, sometimes cold.
For example, I while researching a response to discussion about the media's so-called and wrongly-termed "assault weapons," I did some meta-research to determine the quantity of related deaths, then compared those deaths to all other causes of morbidity. I threw the numbers into a pie chart and surprised even myself by just how minute those deaths are as compared to, say, medical errors which result in the death of a patient.
Here's that graph. The big blue arrow points to the tiny little sliver representing the deaths due to assault rifles (AR-15s and similarly styled firearms), whereas the big, honking green wedge on the right represents deaths due to medical errors. That's not medical issues. That's
only errors, mistakes made by doctors and nurses who should
never have made those mistakes. Mistakes! This isn't a "win some, lose some" situation. The green section represents people who die because a medical practitioner did something wrong, something 9 out of 10 of his colleagues would never have done.
Imagine if airline pilots crashed on every tenth landing....
We hold airline pilots to very high standards primarily because when serious accidents occur, hundreds of people die all at once. It makes the news. People demand answers. NTSB responds. The FAA responds. Congress responds, demanding airlines and aircraft builders to change their designs and operating procedures.
The problem with medical blunders is that it's only one at a time, and almost always behind closed doors. The doctor pitches it as, "We're sorry, but he didn't make it," and very, very few people have the expertise, drive, and money to contest it. But they can and do call their members of Congress, which is why hospitals are required by law to keep detailed internal records and subject themselves to external oversight, hence the source for the numbers in that big, fat, medical blunder pie wedge we see below: