I’m for disarmament. I’m also for rational thinking. If disarmament is the goal, it seems logical to begin with the most egregious weapon violence and work from there down to the lesser.

According to The Root, “Police officers killed 1,129 people in 2017.

More people died from police violence in 2017 than the total number of U.S. soldiers killed in action around the globe (21). More people died at the hands of police in 2017 than the number of black people who were lynched in the worst year of Jim Crow (161 in 1892). Cops killed more Americans in 2017 than terrorists did (four). They killed more citizens than airplanes (13 deaths worldwide), mass shooters (428 deaths) and Chicago’s “top gang thugs” (675 Chicago homicides).” (Full article at https://www.theroot.com/heres-how-many-people-police-killed-in-2017-1821706614)

And that’s just Americans killing Americans. It’s hard to get numbers on how many people the U.S. military machine killed overseas because the U.S. military works hand-in-glove with the propaganda factory (a/k/a “CNN, New York Times, Washington Post,” etc.) to conceal or obfuscate those numbers.

Perhaps the salient question should be: How many lives were saved by the inhibiting effect the widespread ownership of guns in the U.S. has had on the government killing spree? People talk about how gun deaths plummeted in other countries when they rounded up and destroyed all the privately-owned guns, but the inference that this is translatable to the U.S. is not warranted. The countries typically cited, such as Australia and the UK, do not have militarized law enforcement running amok and gunning down their citizens.

The Second Amendment wasn’t added to the Constitution to protect the rights of hunters; it was added to provide a last line of defense against runaway government violence. It may be working as planned; the only way we could find out for sure would be to take it away, but that’s a one-way street leading to a place I don’t want to go.

Let’s approach this disarmament idea sensibly: disarm the worst offenders first, and then work downward from there.