If Chodon and Tweedy are actually correct about the fact that you need to be armed to survive a shopping trip, I'd honestly prefer not to survive.
A-Okay, if that's what you believe. Just, please, don't inflict your choice on me. Let me make my own.
Seriously? An incident like that happens once every few years. Dividing by malls, the population at large, days, and so on, your odds of getting killed like that are several billion to one. Statistically your odds of shooting yourself with the gun by accident or by suicide, or of a child or other person not trained in firearms safety shooting someone are an order of magnitude or two more likely.
Add to that that the police rushing into a situation like that don't know the shooter from you, that you could panic, or miss and hit someone else. It's a freaking mall. Even if there's no one you can see behind the shooter, a lot of those walls would barely slow down a bullet.
The other problem with your argument is that you're too tightly defined on what happens to you. Governmental policy is made with the masses in mind, and I'd have a very hard time believing that more guns == less violence when taken over the population as a whole. Actually, I don't need to, because Britain has less guns, and as more guns have entered the island, there has been more gun violence. Knives and blackjacks and samurai swords can kill as well, but a gun lets you get back from the person and feel a little disconnected with the act. Not a lot because there's recoil (which is one of the problems with tazers), but enough to make that decision a little easier and less personal than a sword. It's not like it's a new critique of guns either, as I seem to remember Paradise Lost critiquing cannon in the same manner.
I suppose my question to you, Chodon, is how is society to decide who is a "wolf", who is a "sheepdog", and who is just to short-sighted and careless to own a weapon? Is there some kind of test in your mind, or should we just let everyone arm themselves to the best of their ability and means and let the chips fall where they may?
Also, he's breaking down the population into tightly defined groups that the population doesn't like to be broken down into.
Honestly, if you think there's such a problem with gun violence here that you need a shotgun to get some milk go someplace where they don't respect the rule of law and see if you still think we do afterwards.
As to the assault weapons ban I agree that that definition wasn't the best, and that a better option would probably be the ATF rating guns on an individual basis. That said, by it's definition it's a weapon used in an assault capacity, which has no place anywhere where people are congregating.
And the ban is useful in that it controls the supply of the weapons inside of the states, driving up black market prices. While some will always get through, there will be a smaller population of guns, and their rarity and higher price will price out a lot of the lower-level shooters that form the majority of street violence.
