[quote=Coolhand]
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Originally Posted by JayBee
The problem with that is that the bullet isn't always stopped by the criminal.
How much domestic violence is aggravated when there is a gun in the house.
How many children get hurt playing with loaded guns in a domestic environment.
Does the chance of you interfacing with a criminal stop at your front door? If not should you keep a firearm in your car? Your place of work?
If I lived in a country where owning firearms was allowed by the general public, then I would use every other possible deterrent I could before resorting to using a firearm myself.
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Your points are welltaken, CH. I understand them, having been pro-gun prohibition for many years.
The reasons for being against guns are, of course, suicides, accidents, crimes of passion, and the odd nut case who goes mental(we used to say goes "postal" since it has happened to so many postal workers).
I don't think parents with children ought to keep firearms in a house. But if a child has a parent who is an idiot, is that society's fault? Children whose parents are irresposible will always suffer, and gun accidents is just another case of that.
As for suicides, if a person wants to kill himself, there are so many ways to do it. Pills is easier. Jumping off a bridge is easier and quicker(no forms to fill out). In college, my best friend dropped out. Less than 3 months later, he was at home. His Mom said, "Breakfast will be ready soon, Mike". He said, "I'll be downstairs. Call me when it's ready." He went to the basement and put a bullet in his head with his Grandfather's antique pistol. It was sad. We all felt bad. But if it wasn't that, it probably would have been something else. I understood his problems and why he thought that "there was no way out." In a way, he was right, but you would have had to know his whole history to understand why. He was a kind soul, had a great laugh, was exceptionally handsome(the girls all loved him), fit as a fiddle, and probably tougher than any man I've ever known. He should have been a boxer! It was a great waste, but the psychological pain was just too much for him to bear. BTW, his mother blamed me and his other friends on account of we all did drugs together, but he stopped doing the drugs when he went home to his mother's house.
In January, when I was in LOS, a friend jumped off the GG Bridge. Similar story. You can't stop people from killing themselves when they feel that way.
I don't advocate that everyone should go get a gun. Some people are mentally unstable, and should not keep them. Guns shouldn't be kept around children. But if a burglar doesn't know whether the person has a gun or not, then he has to be more careful. Not every one has to have a gun to make gun ownership an effective deterrent.
And if people know that if they piss off a person for no good reason, he might just go back to his car or house, return with a gun and blow their brains out, then people tend to be a little more respectful of one another, IMHO.
JayBee
