After my last column about advocating stricter gun laws, I got a lot of flak for doing so. One of my readers claimed I wanted to be a “disarmed slave” to my own government. Let me assure you that I hardly want anything like that. But even if I did, how would we be compared to every other nation?

Is Japan or Canada a nation of unarmed slaves? Are Australia, the U.K. and most of Europe filled with naive fools that let their governments push them around? Most European and developed nations have stricter gun laws, and their citizens are still able to have a voice in governments and protest their government over civil liberties. When British students began rioting in the streets in 2010, did they have guns? Were they slaves to their governments? No. They fought just like most disgruntled citizens would: without a coward’s gun to hide behind to make their voice heard.

But what if our government did turn on us? Stricter gun laws would make our citizens weaker against attacks from our government, but not by much. If a war started between the government and the people, we would’ve already lost. They have military-grade weapons, fighter jets, bombs, missiles, tanks, submarines, battleships and every other lethal weapon and vehicle conceivable.

If you don’t want more gun control because you’d feel like the government would have more control over you since you’d be unarmed, you should give up now. They already have us outgunned. It’s a matter of liberty and principle that they allow us not to be oppressed.

Another one of my readers showed me a statistic that “The homicide rate by guns in America is approximately 3/100,000 (most not being performed by semi-auto) which compares to ~1/100,000 in other industrialized western nations.” As small as that may look statistically, this also means that you have three times a greater chance of being killed by a gun in America as in any other industrialized nation.

That reader also told me that homicide rates increase when the government enacts prohibitions, encouraging black market activity on such items and more organized crime. I’d like to point out I’m not suggesting a complete prohibition on firearms. Imagine how the 1930s prohibition would have gone if the government only banned hard liquor instead of all alcohol, and increased funding on programs reducing alcoholism.

We are America, the nation that invented national democracy, a government that doesn’t run without its people. If a bloodthirsty dictator were running our nation (like some Americans believe is the case), I would agree with some of these points, but we are much safer from our government than some may think. The corruption our government may have is mostly within local and state governments, and the federal government keeps control over them.

It seems to me that many people fighting for less gun control are thinking centuries behind everyone else. This is an ignorant way of thinking — that having more guns makes us safer because you can defend yourself from the government. It’s a sign of poor excuses and clinically dangerous paranoia that encourages mass hysteria and anarchy.