Response to a certain friend

I'm writing this entry as a response to a friend of mine. Sometimes I can't seem to think of responses fast enough, and only realize the obvious answer while taking a shower. She had particular concern for people turning into violent murderers overnight, so as long as they were allowed to buy, -specifically-, a gun.

Lets put aside complex arguments on human psychology for now, but I will use real life as an example to refute this notion. Her premise is that humans lose rational thought when they are angry, and by possessing a gun they are somehow more likely to turn to violence in such situations. Now consider the people who already possess firearms all over the country; the police and the military. Yet there are rarely any reports of them misusing their firearm and wrongfully hurting someone else, if there are any such cases at all.

Are police officers and soldiers made up of some kind of supermen, who have no such negative emotions such as anger or hate? Or does their position somehow give them a special amount of self-control that us lowly civilians do not possess? Let me remind you that the average police are not given that kind of psychological training. And that soldiers, while disciplined, are still given a weapon while they are still in boot camp training, yet recruits who may be angry at their tough trainers don't do anything rash?

My point is that these two professions are made of humans just like us, and really exactly like us. If they generally have no problems with such irresponsibility with guns, then the same will apply to the rest of the population. We are Perhaps in less educated areas there may be teething problems in introducing fully public firearms, but that is only a fraction of the people of Malaysia.

The second point she brought up was Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm not sure what the relevance to arguing against open sales of firearms is here, but I can think of two ways:

1. Any shootings perpetrated due to family honor; Again, this is a problem of culture, and has nothing to do with the availability of firearms. If they didn't exist, fathers would still be shooting their "errant" daughters with crossbows instead.
2. The insurgents fighting American forces. In this situation, I see absolutely nothing wrong. One of the uses of civilian firearms is to fight a foreign invasion. I do not care who is correct in the conflict or whose rule is better, but I recognize that it is the Arabs' right to fight back against the invaders currently occupying their countries. If this was what she meant, then I believe that this is really the right thing to be happening, and all the more a reason for a country to have a high firearm ownership rate by civilians.

I rest my cases.