"Attila.Iskander" wrote:

Try making that criminal vs citizen and you would be right.

All criminals are law abiding citizens - up until they commit a crime
that is.

There is very little LAW-ABIDING citizen on citizen crime...

Technically there is no such thing as law-abiding citizen-on-citizen
crime.

See battle of Athens, Tennessee for the counter

What's sad about that story is how the Cantrell clan ruled that county
for (it appears) the better part of a decade as their own little
kingdom, and all during that time the armed citizenry just stood by and
watched:

You will note that in this case, it was not the federal or even state
gov't that was imposing tyranny upon the citizens of McMinn County.

===================
The sheriff and his deputies operated a fee system under which they
received a cut of the money for every person they booked, incarcerated,
and released; the more arrests, the more money they made. Often, buses
passing through the county were pulled over and the passengers were
randomly ticketed for drunkenness, whether guilty or not.
===================

It was actually the LACK of action on the part of the state and federal
gov't to deal with the Cantrell clan and restore effective gov't and
libery to the citizens of McMinn County.

=============
The 79th Congress had adjourned on August 2, 1946, when the Battle of
Athens ended. However, Representative John Jennings Jr. from Tennessee
decried McMinn County's sorry situation under Cantrell and Mansfield and
the Justice Department's repeated failures to help the McMinn County
residents.
=============

The wiki article points out that even though the state guard was
mobilized, they did not even go to Athens - likely because the GI's in
the Guard did not want to confront the citizen-GI's leading the
rebellion against the Cantrells. It could be argued that had the
rebellion been led or composed of non-GI's, that the Guard would have
deployed to Athens and put an end to the citizen uprising.

Ultimately, it's not clear to me that the tyranny imposed by the
Cantrell clan couldn't or wouldn't have been exposed and put to an end
by sufficient application of the federal and state court system - no
guns needed.

If given the choice between absolutely no private firearm
ownership (and hence no possibility for a domestic fire-arm
trade, products, black-market, etc) and the situation we
have now, who could argue that society wouldn't be better
off if NOBODY had guns?

When the law-abiding are disarmed it does NOTHING to disarm
the criminals

What weapons would the criminals have that the law-abiding citizens
would *not* have?

I said that the genie can't be put back in the bottle. That means you
can't wave a magic wand and make all civillian guns (guns in the hands
of all types of citizens - criminals and otherwise) disappear.

But if you could - if no guns were ever available to anyone, that also
means criminals too.

who will then subjugate and terrorize the law-abiding.

With what?

Sticks and stones? Clubs and knives? Their fists?

The citizens can have those too.

And yet, the US, compared to just about any Western and
non-Western country, is one of the few countries that has
stayed the course more than 200 years in respecting
individual rights and freedoms..

This has got nothing to do with rights and freedoms.

How can you explain that you have the right to own a gun - but not a
machine gun?

Or a rocket launcher or bazooka or high explosives or all sorts of other
deadly / destructive products?

Why aren't you crying foul that you can't buy hand grenades or land
mines?

Or that you can't grow and smoke your own marijuana?