“Let us return to the days of yesteryear, the days of yore, the days of legend in the old west.”
Doesn’t work for me at all. EVERYBODY (OK, that’s an exaggeration) then, including some really bad guys and law enforcement types who were awful, carried guns. Although it’s allowed in my state, I have no desire to see every other person in my city carrying a gun on his or her hip.
“I am a great believer in the old saw of, “An armed society is a polite society”
I know that movies and old tales of the West are often exaggerated, but I see no evidence anywhere that those armed societies were polite or safe ones. Can you provide real evidence to the contrary? Even societies today that are heavily and obviously armed (many Muslim and African countries) seem without exception to be dangerous and incredibly impolite.
Notice these nuts are never crazy enough to try this crap at a gun range?
Do the math. The more guns in the hands of the citizenry the less likely an attack by a crazy.
Why, you may ask?
Think about it. If a "bad guy", even the baddest, doesn't know who is armed and ready to defend themselves, or where these types of people may be, they think twice before attempting to commit crimes.
Now this may not deter the REALLY crazy types, but, these REALLY crazy types will have less of a chance to inflict bodily harm on multitudes of people if there is someone nearby that has a firearm that can shoot back.
And yes, when I say everyone, I mean everyone that wants to carry, including ex-convicts (They have paid their debt to society), bad LEOs, soccer moms, even politicians.