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I understand how you might see the tradeoff as worth it - some safety purchased at a cost of freedom. But expanding the list of things that you're not allowed to do doesn't seem like it could possibly be interpreted as expanding freedom. Same argument for drug or alcohol prohibition, religious restrictions, etc.
I used to own several (bolt action, 5 shot internal magazine capacity) rifles because I used to competition shoot. I sold them off years ago because I stopped competing and just didn't need them lying around the house, rusting. There you go - freedom to own guns or not.
I could probably also get a handgun if I wanted, but I would need to renew my licence and pass strenuous background checks and prove to the police that I store it safely, AND I have to be a continual member of a gun club and shoot regularly with others so they can assess my gun handling skills (and I guess also my mental state) on a regular basis.
What I absolutely CANNOT do is to go and buy a semi automatic gun with a magazine capacity to slaughter an entire school room full of kids without having to reload. What the heck would _any_ civilian in a peaceful country want/need such a weapon? On the flipside, it also means I am free to enjoy the fact that my kids can go to school every day with a less than .001% chance that some maniac will walk into their classroom and mow them down.
To close off this post, and to end that illusion of "I can protect my family with a gun" hero storyline - About 3 years ago we had someone break into our house in the middle of the night. I was woken up by the sound of my son yelling at someone to get the fk out of his room so I jumped out of bed and grabbed a small wooden baton that I keep under our bed.
When I threw open our bedroom door, I saw a shadowy figure run past it in the dark corridor. To this day, I am glad I grabbed the baton instead of an (imagined, non existent) loaded gun, because my first instinct was let fly at the fleeing figure, only to realise a few seconds later that it was my own son, giving chase to the intruder who was fleeing ahead of him. I could have killed my own son if I had a gun in my hand in that split second of rage and confusion.
Later, we found out that the police nabbed the intruder, who turned out to be a 15 year old boy that lived a couple of streets away. Had I shot HIM, I would have had to live with the thought that I had killed someone's child. I cannot do that. I prefer to live with the _freedom_ of not having the guilt of taking someone else's life on my conscience.
However the more critical problem with what you wrote is that it doesn't actually attempt to disprove anything I said. You simply reiterated a bunch of arguments against gun ownership.
You didn't actually say why adding to the list of things you're not allowed to do here makes you more free. And I think that's because it's definitionally impossible to demonstrate.
Would you say that alcohol prohibition 'expands freedom' because it reduces drunk driving deaths?
The definition of freedom is being allowed to do things. It doesn't mean being allowed to do only good things, or things which are good in some particular person's opinion. It means I can do something that you would rather I did not do. That's freedom. Freedom to do what others want you to do is not freedom.
Are your neighbours free to mine the road outside your house in case insurgents should drive up some day? How about them buying some uranium and building a small detonator in their garage? Or perhaps brewing some toxic cocktail of poison gas in the local primary school science lab?
Any of the above can be classed as a weapon to deter others, never mind the unintended consequence of accidental (or deliberate) discharging of any of them killing multiple innocent people. If you cannot purchase any of the above at a local dealership, then are you really free, when your government can outgun you at any point in time?
I consider myself 'free' when I take steps to minimise the infinitesimally small probability that something bad might happen, and I know that the steps I take will not result in an even worse 'bad thing' happening.
I got rid of my guns when we had kids. The very very tiny chance that I would need to use a gun against an intruder was outweighed by the even larger chance that one of my kids may have found my rifles and thought of them as play toys. Or the even larger chance that someone could burgle our house when we were not there and take them. I was free to choose what I wanted to do, and I still do not feel any less protected or safe in my own home, or while walking down the street, or when sending my kids to school, or when visiting a bar or attending a concert... or doing pretty much anything that a 'free' American is actually dead scared to do in their own country today.
On the other hand, A whole bunch of civilians in malls would gain the freedom to live.
Freedom would expand.
First, people in America can't own guns that fire '10 rounds a second' without a class 3 firearms license, which is very rare. Such guns are basically never used in mass shootings.
Second, depending on who you need to defend your home from, you may want such a gun. For example, if government or government sanctioned groups are a threat. An example of this is the killings of white farmers in South Africa. Is not just about burglars, it's about gas chambers and political threats. Always has been.
Finally, redefining safety as freedom is a truly absurd abuse of language which wipes out a critical distinction that has been heavily discussed for a long time. If this is what it takes for you to make your point make sense, your point doesn't make sense.
Just admit it. You want more safety. You're willing to give up freedom (or rather, sacrifice the freedom of others) to get it. No need to play ridiculous semantic games to pretend there are no tradeoffs here.
Also very cool and correct of you to support the restriction of high fire rate firearms, like the assault rifles used in all of the mass shootings over the last decade.
You're correct to say safety isn't freedom. However, being alive definitely contributes to freedom. Gun safety and being alive are correlated :) Remember, trigger discipline!
America is definitely an outlier in terms of gun deaths. I don't know much about the situation in South Africa, but it's very interesting you'd consider the death of some white farmers in Africa as pertinent, when the vast majority of political violence in America in the last decade has been perpetrated by white men.
Also interesting that you'd consider government sanctioned groups as a threat. Do you feel like if the brave men and women of the American military were ordered to take your guns, they'd do so? Why do you think so little of our troops?
