well, I live in america. I've heard that there are more guns than people here, and I can believe that. I'm pretty sure they're going to handle a gun eventually, since even if you don't own guns, you probably know someone who does
I don't know about that. I'm sure there are some people in America with no interest in guns, and that just because they might know someone who owns one, it doesn't mean they're ever going to have anything to do with it. Besides, I'd like to think by the time someone's an adult, they'll have enough common sense to adhere to the rules of gun safety anyway, so children should only really need to be taught about gun safety if they live in a household with guns. Even then though, Guns should be securely locked away where they can't get to them without adult supervision. Why do I keep ending up in serious conversations about guns? x3
Or if they're going to be over at a friend's house whose parents have guns. There's been more than one kid die because they found their buddy's dad's gun.
I direct you to my later point: I don't want to start the whole gun control debate again, but there's a reason guns legally have to be kept in secure, locked cabinets in this country.
Okay, but if somebody is breaking into your house, and your gun is securely locked away, how are you going to shoot them?
Here's the thing. You really don't know. My grandparents didn't think my dad would be into guns, so they never taught him safety. Then when he was around ten, he thought it'd be cool to play with daddy's hunting rifle, and damn near blew his foot off. Now my father, learning from that experience, taught me all about guns when I was little, including how dangerous they are. No bullet holes in this body. Based on the size of my house, I would prefer my blades for home defense in worst case scenario, but I'm still glad I knew about guns when I was a kid.
I tried to watch Star Wars episode 2. I couldn't make it. It's just boring. The guy who played Anakin can't act to save his life. And Samuel L. Jackson was BADLY miscast as Mace Windu.
The point I was trying to make is that if you keep guns in your house, there's a reasonable chance your children will end up handling them, so you should teach them to do so safely. Sorry if that wasn't clear. As a side note, I find the whole idea of using weapons of any kind to attack burglars who've broken into your home a misguided one; people who break into houses to steal things are generally not seeking to do the owners harm, they'd rather avoid conflict. They are however most likely desperate, and challenging them is as likely to result in you getting injured or killed as them. If you live in an area where break-ins are a possibility, I'd say you'd be better off investing in good home security systems like decent locks, lights, and an alarm; prevent the break-ins in the first place. Selling shotguns and the like for home defence is, in reality, fantasy fulfilment.
Oh boy! A fact sheet from Gun Owners of America!? No way that's gonna be biased! You're aware 60% of gun deaths in America are suicides, right? Just thought I'd throw that out there.
A fully-sourced fact sheet, yes. And yes, I'm aware the most of the deaths caused by the scary, scary guns are from people offing themselves.
You can fully-source anything you want, but it's entirely possible to pick the sources that support your arguement, and ignore the ones that don't. I support people's right to suicide, but I'm just trying to point out that the idea of guns "saving more lives than they take" is a fallacy. You can say guns were used in self-defence as many times as you like, but there's no real way to prove that on the occasions where they were supposedly used in that capacity, the user's life was truly at risk. Anyone using a gun as a means of self-defence is likely to give an account that justifies that use, even if it exaggerates the danger they found themselves in, and likewise gun support groups are likely to use the statistic to back their cause. I'm not saying guns are evil, I'm just saying people are stupid, and giving them essentially unlimited access to deadly weapons allows that stupidity to result in deaths.
One could just as easily say that the "other side" of such a thing is happening by making toy guns and airsoft guns look more realistic (to the point of an orange barrel tip being used to indicate that the gun isn't an actual firearm). A combination of firearm training and safely storing firearms from children are necessary. Pistol lock boxes can be opened pretty quickly (there are biometric fingerprint models with a keyed backup) if one needs to access a firearm for self-defense while keeping the gun out of a child's hands. Personally, I would like to see a "Swiss" model adopted in the US (universal militia conscription and firearm training coupled with a non-belligerent foreign policy). On the one hand, it would fatally undermine anti-gun legislation (people who don't have their own opinions on guns would actually have exposure to them). On the other hand, it would prevent soldiers from dying overseas in reactionary wars and significantly cut military costs. I can't say I am a big fan of the right-wing political stances of organizations like the NRA and GOA, but one could just as easily say the anti-gun UK media (a source of anti-gun sentiment in that country) is just as biased as you accuse those organizations of being. If a burglar breaches my bedroom door, my Glock is going to do the talking. End of story. I don't care if this person is desperate (there are cases when desperate criminals also kill, even when it comes to something as petty as getting a small amount of cash for a drug fix). Is someone who forcefully enters your home there with good intentions? The fact of the matter is at this point, there is an irreconcilable antagonism between my survival interests and the interests of the burglar. As the saying goes, when seconds matter, the police are only minutes away. Addressing issues like income inequality and a lack of access to healthcare (including mental healthcare) would do far more to alleviate crime rates than scapegoating inanimate objects that scores of millions of people in the US use for no criminal purposes. On the other hand, I would say that leaving a homeowner to the tender mercy of a criminal is a misguided approach! There wouldn't be break-ins in the first place if these methods were infallible (additionally, if you rent your home, you don't get to decide what kind of locks, alarms, etc. your home has). When the first line of defense fails, you better have another plan in place. The last sentence is fatuous in nature; it essentially ascribes some sort of desire of gun owners to actually get into an altercation (it's also hard to write it off as "fantasy fulfillment" when there are millions of defensive firearm uses per year in the United States). The shooting I am doing is hobby/sporting related, but there's nothing wrong with also having firearms for defensive use if the need arises. Burglaries and assaults may not be the most common occurrences, but neither are house/apartment fires and the like (those don't prevent people from buying insurance). Most of these people would be destroyed (and eventually convicted) by police questioning and the like if they didn't have some legitimate fear of great bodily harm or death from an altercation (threatening someone with a firearm is felony assault). I find it odd that investigators can typically root out liars in various criminal cases, yet would somehow magically be unable to do as such if someone lied about using a firearm defensively when that really wasn't the case. I like these AR-15 lower receivers: https://derpicdn.net/media/W1siZiIsIjIwMTIvMTIvMDMvMThfNDhfNTVfMzY3XzE3MTc5NF9fVU5PUFRfX3NhZmVfZGVycHl*squee!*9vdmVzX21ldGFfY3VzdG9tX211ZmZpbl9ndW5fcmVhbF9saWZlX215X2xpdHRsZV9hcnNlbmFsX2d1bmlmaWVkX3JpZmxlX2FyMTUiXV0/171794__safe_derpy-hooves_meta_custom_muffin_gun_real-life_rifle_my-little-arsenal_gunified_ar15_artist-klonoaxero.jpg
I'm sorry, but I just don't see it; we have a very low rate of gun ownership in this country, and yet the number of burglary-related deaths is so nominal I can't even find any figures. Largely speaking, the societal structure of the US and the UK are similar enough for this comparison to be valid; we have poverty-affected areas with high crime rates and drug problems too, yet the lack of firearms to defend ourselves seems to have no negative effect. Most burglars are, I imagine, still rationally minded enough to know that if they manage to wake the occupant, their best course of action is to try and escape, not to waste time fighting them and gaining more felony charges while allowing the police to respond. The highest chance of violence occurring is if you try to prevent them from leaving, essentially backing them into a corner and forcing them respond. Besides, if you really do feel you need some last line of defence, what exactly is wrong with a can of mace, or a stun gun? Those are actual defensive weapons; a gun is not. A gun is an offensive weapon, by it's very nature. I suppose if you really wanted you could load a gun with non-lethal ammo, like bean bag rounds or rubber bullets, but it's still far from an ideal solution. I wholeheartedly agree with you there, but that's not something that's realistically likely to happen any time soon. It would be naive to deny that there isn't some quadrant of gun owners who dream on some level of nobly defending their property with deadly force, otherwise how do you explain adverts like this for "Home Defence Shotguns"? That thing's designed to make the user feel like a trained operative ready for a military engagement, not to help some poor average Joe protect his home from desperate drug addicts. Can you back those figures up? As far as I can tell, the main source of the 'millions of defensive uses' figure is this; a study taken back in 1993, which involved roughly 5,000 and then up-scaled based on their answers to get a picture of the whole country. This is an incredibly unreliable way to gather data. And yes, those receivers are pretty sweet.
