I read somewhere that in most dangerous situations carrying a self-defense weapon like pepper or a firearm will go against you, because the attacker will know you're dangerous and thus want to suppress you more, and also because the weapon can be turned against you.
Honestly, I don't believe in carrying weapons. I'm not an expert but I'm almost sure the number of lives saved in emergency situations are vastly outweighed by the number of deaths because weapons are available. This doesn't concern things like pepper spray, but still. If scared and/or a little drunk, one can easily exaggerate the danger of a person and harm, kill or provoke an otherwise harmless person if they have a gun. Not to mention the fact that guns being so easily available and almost unregulated, criminals can have a huge laugh as they don't even have to smuggle to get a pistol or even automatic gun to go kill tons of innocents.
In Canada such people would either have connections with the deep criminal world or be much more poorly equipped, with a hunting rifle, for example. Not to mention we would know who had what weapon, for what reason, and what their history with it is. Well, this doesn't work right now because the Conservatives are severely lacking in the brain area and abolished the firearm register and were in a hurry to destroy all data, but provinces have stopped the descruction and are mounting the same thing again at their own level.
Here, when a drunk gets furious in a bar, he might brawl with customers, break bottles on people orother such things. In the US, he might pull out his handgun and either shoot someone, either provoke someone into shooting him.
Why Americans still support weapons is a mystery to me. Like death penalty. As far as I know, for both of these, there's strong, reliable evidence that they do much more bad than good to society.
...Sorry, I feel like I've made this a bit more political than intended.
