Dear gun owner,
I don’t want to take your gun away. I don’t want to take your Second Amendment rights from you. I want to ask you to willingly disarm. I want to ask you to stop buying ammo. I want to ask you to stop going to shooting ranges. I want to ask you to stop carrying your gun in public. This is why..
According to FBI data, for every 1 justifiable gun-related homicide, there are 2 accidental homicides, over 30 criminal homicides and over 70 suicides. Everyone makes mistakes. For gun owners, those mistakes cost thousands of innocent lives in the US every year. No matter how much training you have received or how good of judgement you think you may have, statistically speaking, you are overwhelmingly more likely to take an innocent life, including your own, than successfully defend one. Unlike lobbyists, corporations or politicians, numbers don’t lie.
If you own a gun, you are participating in violence. The money you spend helps grow a worldwide industry of death. The more guns and ammo you buy, the cheaper and more accessible they become to others. The same people that make and sell a gun to you have sold countless more that ended up taking innocent lives. The same people that make and sell a gun to you may one day sell it to someone who will threaten your life or the life of someone you love.
Don’t let fear dictate your morals and your future. Just because you can do something, doesn’t mean that you should. Take control over your decisions, take control over your future and your children’s future.
The threat of nuclear conflict is now arguably greater than ever in all of human history. With nearly 16,000 known nuclear weapons in the world today (enough to destroy the planet hundreds of times over), this threat may even be greater than it was during the Cold War. If we want to work towards a future free of nuclear conflicts, a future free of war, we must start on an individual level. Be the change you wish to see in the world.
Have you ever dreamed, fantasized, or even thought about a moment when every single grenade, bomb, tank, sword, and gun in the world suddenly disappears? When there are no weapons at all? We can make that happen. We have that power. But it has to start with you. You can make a change. Take the world in the direction of peace. Disarm.
Owning a gun makes you fearful, not fearless. If you own a gun, you are surrendering to the possibility that one day you may take someone’s life, including your own. You are surrendering to the possibility that someone else will threaten your life or your well being. You are surrendering to the possibility that your family may be in physical danger. If you own a gun, you have given up hope, you have lost faith. You live in that fear, in that moment of horror every day.
Please consider not owning a gun. Please consider not buying ammo. Please consider not going to shooting ranges. Be fearless, not hopeless. Let’s stop this epidemic together.
Sincerely,
Your unarmed, loving friend
Sorry, but I disagree with you. If the terrorists use just pressure cooker bombs are we going to ban pressure cookers. My fear is that the good will be unarmed and the evil will be armed regardless of the laws in place. And if we ban assault rifles and I wish we could…..the market will still be flooded by cartels across the border and they that wish to destroy will still have the weapons of mass destruction. I don’t like the way things are either…but I recently bought my first handgun, and I am scheduled to take a 2 day (10 hrs ea) safety training course. Where I live in a rural area it takes 20-30 minutes for a state cop to arrive if there is a problem. There are no local township police anymore in my area due to budget cuts. We have had issues in the past and at the sight of my father’s rifle, 4 men in a car who tried to run mother and I off of the road took off when they saw him. I have no kids to worry about getting hold of my gun, but honestly with whats out there today, I’d rather be shot and killed then go with them. We can agree to disagree, but soft target areas need to have security guards, not no gun zones. Because only law abiding citizens will obey that. If I’d been in San Bernadino, I’d have loved to have 1 or 2 people who were armed and could have stopped the shooters. They hate us, they want to kill us and common sense or laying down our guns is not going to change the way they see us…….it just makes us look foolish and sitting ducks if we do that.
The strangest thing to me is they hate gays, but why do they molest, tie young boys to the bed or whatever and repeated rape them? What does that make them. They have no respect for life, no compassion for anyone……how do we counter that? No use for women, the women must not have much use for their children, I don’t know how the San Bernadino female shooter could walk away from her child. I mean why have a child if you are playing such a thing? Germany let 1000 plus refugees and immigrants into Germany and they raped all those women. Do you want that loose in our country? I sure don’t. No respect for the people or the culture that they are moving into. We are supposed to be PC to everyone and it is not returned to us as a matter of respect……there is not respect.
I don’t want to upset you…but just try to understand the other side too.
Love your recipes…you’re doing good work opening people’s eyes to plant based eating and a diet reducing unnecessary suffering. However, no. I will NOT disarm. And I don’t suggest any man or woman that stands for justice, freedom, and individual rights to do so either. A gun owner doesn’t support violence anymore than a car owner does, or a knife owner…or an anything owner. Why don’t we turn the lens to the criminals and not your own neighbors? Let’s just make killing illegal, along with violence in general. 🙂