Quote from: ChloëAri on April 16, 2015, 02:17:59 PM
Please tell me how citizens of the Dominion of Canada have the right to bare regulated arms.
Additionally, I really don't care for the race of the gun-holder. Anyone holding a gun is intimidating to me.
Of course I can understand your point of view. Even if I am armed, anyone holding a gun to me is intimidating too, whether they are white, black, purple or aliens. It's a lethal force weapon. But what I have learned is that armed citizens are not the ones you have to be careful of. It's criminals, gangs, addicts and people like that. If someone is desperate enough they will do grievous harm to any of us here. If someone pulls a gun on me the last thing I want is to have no way to fight back. Yes I have pepper spray but it isn't going to help in that moment. When transgender people get hurt we are not just harmed we are slaughtered in brutally sadistic acts. I don't want to be a statistic from that kind of violence. I myself marched in a TG day of remembrance, in fact one of the first ones ever.
I can't speak for Canada, I'm in the US and here I have the right to choose whether or not I want to be an armed citizen. If I tell you when I first got my concealed carry license I had little experience with guns. I had the same level of fear and apprehension of handling firearms as anyone who is new to it. When I bought my first handgun I was afraid to carry it. I kept it locked in a safe for week. One day I said get used to it, and carried it unloaded. I went for months carrying it without any ammo (unloaded). Nowadays I walk out with my handgun loaded and ready to fire. I have the skill and training needed so that *if* I ever had to protect myself from someone pointing a gun at me, I am ready. My gun is not there to intimidate anyone, in fact it's concealed. I would only pull it out under a very specific set of circumstances which I understand from my training.
One thing that people in the USA seem to forget sometimes is that police are protectors. They cannot fire their guns anymore than I can. They can go to prison just as easily. In fact if you asked a cop they will tell you that their sidearm is for their own protection. It's a self-defense lethal force weapon for the purpose of the one who carries it. It makes a bang noise, and puts holes in things, that's basically all it does.
In our lives we walk past people all the time who are armed and we don't even know it. The last thing they want to do is to pull their weapon and start shooting. That's the nature of good people. But there are some sick people in this world, drug addicts, career criminals, street gangs. They are no longer in the inner city anymore, they have fanned out across the country. That doesn't mean that no one is safe. It just means that crime has moved from gangs to individuals. An individual is more likely to be the target of a crime than a gang member is. That's just the changing nature of crime.