Letter re: Canadian gun ban.

[Blktail]

I found this letter on the web. I can't verify its authenticity, but its message is very true!

"QUESTIONS WHICH SHOULDN'T BE ASKED

George Jonas, Toronto SUN

I'm worried about guns, but I'm more worried about gun control. At the risk of repeating myself, I will outline some of my reasons once again.

I'm neither a hunter nor a gun collector, but I still have a personal stake in the matter as a free citizen. A call for banning weapons, or certain kinds of weapons is always based on a query which shouldn't be posed to anyone in a free society, namely: "What do you need it for?"

Whether or not such a question can be answered - and in the case of guns it can be answered rather easily - it should never be asked. In free societies people shouldn't be called upon to justify their need for anything they wished to own. (Unless they wished to own it for an illegitimate purpose - in which case no "need" would serve as a justification.)

There's nothing abstract about this: it ties in with everyone's daily life. If society demands to know people's "needs" for their personal choices, and then judges such needs by the tastes or standards of others, it opens the door to tyranny. (How could I judge, for instance, how much you feel a need for protecting yourself?)

If we must establish need as a justification we may not be entitled to much beyond food and shelter. Others who feel differently about our habits or tastes may pass laws to ban just about anything we own, from cars to furs. Or anything we enjoy, from alcohol to cigarettes. Not to mention music or books. This is not a hypothesis. This is precisely what happens in societies that ban books or music or beverage or activities on the basis that they're morally or physically detrimental to some users or to some social ideals.

Of course, you can't buy ground-to-air missiles in a corner store in any society - nor should you be able to. But in free countries the onus is always on those who want to restrict something to show why it must be restricted. By asking citizens: "Why do you need it?" we reverse this onus.

The minute the question "Why do we need it?" is legitimized, any response only invites further questions. For instance, the reply "I need a gun to hunt," invites the question "But why do you need to hunt?" Never mind whether these questions are valid or not. The point is that by allowing them to be asked we permit others to be the judges of our choices.

Validating the need to own a gun - any gun - is not very hard. It's certainly easier than, say, validating the need to own a vehicle that can travel faster than the legal limit. Or the need to fly to Rome for a holiday. Nor is it possible to argue that fast cars or recreational air travel threaten no lives or entail no social costs. They do. Travel or adventurous forms of recreation always raise medical and security risks. They pollute and cause non-renewable resources to go up in smoke. Far more people are hurt as a result of wanton use of vehicles than wanton use of firearms.

The utility of a vehicle that can travel at a faster rate than a prudent person needs to travel isn't greater than the utility of weapons that can shoot at a faster rate than a prudent person needs to shoot. No, I'm not about to suggest that if we ban rapid-fire guns we should also ban rapid acceleration cars. I leave such suggestions to others. All I suggest is that "need" is not a valid test for guns any more than it is for vehicles or hobbies.

Someone might say vehicles or hobbies are different from guns. Power boats or parachutes, even if they entail social costs, even if they're tragically misused at times, have an intrinsic value, whereas guns have none. Guns can only be used to kill. This is a tempting argument, except is happens to be false. Many people keep guns, including handguns or rapid fire guns, for protection. The need for protection may not arise often or, with luck, ever. But those who conclude from this that protection has no value confuse frequency with importance. Protection has quite a bit of value for those who value their lives."