[Lazortag]

Trimm, it's true that crazies will always go through illegal channels to acquire guns. Hell, even where guns are legal, criminals buy guns off the black market because they're harder to trace back to them and be used as evidence against them in a trial. However, it's also true that where guns are legal, normal people who would ostensibly want guns for security reasons might have lapses in judgment and use their guns stupidly (like if someone walks in on their significant other cheating on them with someone else, and has a gun, etc.) While I think it's a bit silly to attribute the ease with which someone can get a gun in the U.S. to its high violent crime rate (as some people in this thread are doing), I'm sure you'll find that more gun ownership trends towards slightly more violent crime (which means that some places where guns are illegal might still have higher rates of violent crime than places where it's legal, but in general the places where it's legal to own a gun will have higher incidences of crime).

I think that guns are very different from SUV's (or baseball bats, knives, and other examples of objects that *could* also be used to hurt people) because they're very efficient at killing people, and they serve no purpose other than that. The utility of being able to own a car outweighs the fact that some people are able/willing to do unconscionable things with one, and even if it didn't, a car is less of a threat to the state's monopoly on violence than gun ownership is (since taking out the tires of an SUV is probably way easier than pinpointing a shooter in a huge crowd of people). Also, banning cars, or knives, or lighters, or whatever, just because they *can* be dangerous is unfair for those who use them innocently, whereas there's no "innocent" way to use a gun.

So in short, you can defend yourself with a baseball bat, or a knife, or whatever, because it's not conventionally recognized as a weapon and less likely to be used in a malicious way, while also having many non-malicious uses. Guns, on the other hand, are normally perceived as weapons and are more likely to be used spontaneously, making criminals out of innocent people who just happened to not be thinking rationally at the time.