> But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. Civilized and peaceful society is a great goal, but

> But we need to get rid of this idiotic notion that you need a gun to protect yourself in a civil society. Civilized and peaceful society is a great goal, but how are you actually achieving that if you set about confiscating 300 million guns by force? Assuming that somehow the government could prevail in such an endeavor, you haven't made society any more civilized. You were just more successful at using violence to achieve your goals than the other side was. Make no mistake, there are plenty of people who would kill and die for the right to bear arms. Trying to take those guns by force would probably lead to civil war. If your goal is truly civilized society then you've got to work towards eliminating the roots of violent behavior. The more successful you are at that, the less people will even want to have firearms. But the more you threaten to 'civilize' by force, the more intransigent people will be about giving up their firearms. > You don't. You're not going to rise up against the government, and you're not going to need it to protect your family. If the government decided to try to confiscate firearms by force people probably would fight it tooth and nail. Luckily that kind of rhetoric is not prevalent, but it is exactly the fear of state-sponsored violence that many ardent gun owners are afraid of. Some of those people may seem irrational and paranoid, but just looking at the 20th century, somewhere around 100 million civilians were murdered in state-sponsored killings. State-sponsored mass murder is almost exclusively visited upon unarmed populaces.