Actually, I find it hard to believe that people like you actually think anything that doesn’t meet you preconceived notions of people you don’t agree with.
Yes, it’s a huge responsibility. And, frankly, I understand the desire by a lot of people to not want it on their shoulders.
About as far as I go on “pushing” the issue is to invite folks unfamiliar with guns to the range. You don’t have to shoot, really…just watch (though the shooting is pretty fun.) Most of the time, folks are able to get over their skittishness about guns. I would say “fear,” but that seems too striking a word, and its connotation implies something negative.
The only place I can think of offhand that I don’t carry is a friend’s mother’s house. Now she’s not anti-gun in any way as far as politics goes. But her nephew was shot in the face during a “game” of Russian roulette (which he wasn’t playing…wrong place, wrong time.) So, while she respects guns in the abstract, when her mind goes to a handgun, it brings those memories back.
My mom can’t see a copy of “The Runaway Jury” because of a similar thing; it was the book she was reading at the hospital the night my father died.
I’m not going to try to convince anyone to arm themselves; that’s an individual choice. Hell, I know for a fact there are people who, even when confronted with death, wouldn’t take a life. I can respect that, even though I don’t subscribe to it. It’s my hope, though, that you’re able to get acquainted enough with gun owners that you don’t see us all as Tim McVeigh types, or wreckless people on the verge of opening fire.
We tend to get a bad rep because the more vocal members of our little community tend to be…unique.
BrownEyedGirl
English as a second language?
People like me? Please elaborate.
What the hell kind of question is that? It doesn’t affect me at all so long as I’m not unexpectedly killed with that gun. Or my kid doesn’t find it and blow her own head off with it.
The head in the backpack doesn’t affect me at all so long as the guy who put the head in there isn’t looking to add mine to it either, but you think I’m going to stick around to find out?
How does carrying a weapon affect you at all if you never have to use it?
Reading comprehension problems?
I said “if you never know that gun was in the closet”. You don’t seem to be able to debate logically.
You need to reread your post. Really weak sentence structure.
That’s putting it gently.
I’m a little late to the topic but, personally I don’t see any problem with legal concealed carry (or legal carry) at all. Gun control works only if the entire nation is under gun control, and with a way of limiting firearms within the country. As long as we have some way of getting firearms into the country, the criminals will always, always have weapons. The only person that gets affected is the person who abided by the law in the first place.
Think about it this way, there’s a criminal who illegal gets himself a gun from the black market. He goes in and robs a store, or goes and starts shooting randomly. In scenario A, nobody has a gun because it’s illegal… We all sit there and duck. In scenario B, someone has a concealed carry. He can fire back, either stopping the problem or at least provide enough of a distraction for everyone else to escape and authorities to arrive.
Also, maybe my thinking is flawed on this, but the firearms expert can clarify this for me: wouldn’t revolvers and bolt-actions technically be MORE dangerous than semi-automatics? Semi-automatics have to be complex, precision machines and therefore have less of a range of reliability/adaptability, meaning they have to be maintained and have to use smaller, less powerful cartridges. A revolver or bolt action is by comparison maddingly simpler, meaning they’ll fire anything with powder jammed in there. Meaning they can fire bigger bullets, or fire smaller ones more accurately. They also won’t jam as much, fixing a jam is as simple as turning the cylinder. So technically speaking, a revolver/bolt action is much more dangerous round per round than a semi?
I’ve been doing some digging, and you can find numbers that back up either position, if you do enough poking around (not surprising, but frustrating nonetheless).
According to the CDC, in 2006, 16,883 people killed themselves with guns, and 642 people were killed accidentally with guns. You can hunt down the numbers here: WISQARS (Web-based Injury Statistics Query and Reporting System) | Injury Center | CDC. And that’s not even counting the number of people who were intentionally shot dead by a family member - I can’t find a reliable number on that one. (Bernie Mac: “I *hate *my loved ones.” Great line. 
)
And then there are the conclusions from some aging, but peer-reviewed studies: Kellermann, AL, Rivara, FP, Rushforth NB, et al. “Gun ownership as a risk factor for homicide in the home.” New England Journal of Medicine. 1993; 329: 1084-1091, which concluded that the risk of homicide in the home is three times greater in households with guns.
Then there’s Kellermann, AL, Rivara FP, Somes G, et al. “Suicide in the home in relation to gun ownership.” New England Journal of Medicine. 1992; 327: 467-472, which found that the risk of suicide is five times greater in households with guns.
Finding comparable stats for the self-defense use of guns is a tougher nut to crack, but the few reliable studies I can find indicate a fairly high rate - the numbers are all over the place, but most of them yield numbers that are consistently higher than the suicide/accident rate. There are some inevitable problems with the data, simply because they have to rely on the victim’s perception of what happened. He may believe that the gun saved him, even if it didn’t. But there are also some stats from creeps who are currently in stir that indicate that quite a few of them were, at one time or another, deterred by a victim who had a weapon. There are problems with those numbers, too - if the potential victim was, in fact, just the member of a rival gang, it sort of doesn’t count!
But then you get studies like this one: 'In the safety of your own home': results from a national survey on gun use at home - PubMed. It concludes that “… guns may be used at least as often by family members to frighten intimates as to thwart crime, and that other weapons are far more commonly used against intruders than are guns.”
Back and forth it goes.
I’ll have to mull it over a bit. My gut reaction, however, is that you wouldn’t *need *to defend yourself against an armed intruder if there were far fewer armed intruders. There seems to a be a vicious circle involved here - we are awash in guns, so there are more criminals with guns, so we need more guns to defend ourselves from them. I can’t quite accept that adding even more guns is the answer.
Again, no misunderstanding. You’re adding a lot of stuff I didn’t say, like “itching to shoot” and “paranoia”, etc.
If you round a corner and meet up with another guy six feet in front of you, at least one of you are going to, at a minimum, going move toward pulling your gun. Which will surely elicit an equal action from the other. Now are you both going to calmly (okay, scared shitlessly) ask each other what his intentions are? Are you both going to wait for the other to shoot first?
If you were to encounter me under the same conditions, you probably wouldn’t draw, at least not shoot, because I wouldn’t reach for a non-existant gun. I’d have my hands up in front of me with my open palms in the no-threat position.
Yeah, I missed an r at the end of a ‘you’ too, you still don’t get it?
You seem to be displaying preconceived notions about how I feel about people who own weapons. In reality, I take issue with people who are so hellbent to exercise the second amendment, they don’t really seem all that concerned about considering how other people might be impacted by those firearms, whether legally procured, kept and carried or not. How do you that? By supposing that I can’t handle other people owning weapons. Well, you’re wrong and it’s insulting that should post that when you don’t even know me.
I started this thread after having a gut reaction to legislation I felt was wrong ad misguided. Through respectful discussion, I have considered aspects that I hadn’t thought of before which make my initial outrage a lot less acute. Yet, still people come in here trying to portray me as a raving anti-gun lunatic that won’t consider an opposing argument. Well, as far as I’m concerned, if that’s what your (?) intentions are, you can piss off. (Can I say that outside the pit? If it crosses the line, I apologize.)
Your response to Blake Tyner that you think the detractors find it hard to believe that law abiding citizens would carry guns seemed like a dig at me and I didn’t appreciate it. It also sounds arrogant, in case you weren’t aware.
And as far as the gun in the closet, if I was shot in the head unexpectedly, I might not have become aware of the gun in the closet that killed me. If I was aware of the gun in the closet, then I get the decision as to whether I’m still okay with hanging out as opposed to you making the decision for me. Understand?
I know you were. I was trying to sucker you into saying that unlicensed carrying under those conditions (where any carrying is illegal) is okay and the guy doing so isn’t really a criminal. 
Isn’t there a rule against sandbagging? Lord, I hope not. 
EarlyOut, those statistics don’t address guns that are owned by licensed carriers.
Again, it would be great if guns were rare in the US as say in the UK. Then some of us wouldn’t feel compelled to carry them. I don’t think it’s fun or cool to carry a firearm. It’s very unfortunate that too many people are grossly negligent with their handling of firearms.
Permit holders are trained to be responsible and safe.
And burglars don’t have to be armed with a gun to be dangerous.
Why in the world would just meeting up with someone result in one of them reaching for a gun? That’s the part where I’m saying the misunderstanding occurs. The movement for the gun only occurs after the person has decided to shoot. And, as I said, that decision requires certain factors to come into play. Proximity is only one factor. Absent the others, we’d be startled and keep on walking.
I mean, if everyone went for a gun in those circumstances (around here, I mean) then there’d be LOTS of shootings, because LOTS of people are legally carrying. But it just doesn’t work like that.
Early Out:
I’m relieved that you’re at least looking at the statistics from an honest perspective. That’s why it’s so hard to draw from them–you can make your case either way.
The only thing I can add is that, with respect to defensive shootings, I’m willing to bet that there’s a severe underrepresentation of them…there are bound to be quite a few circumstances where a victim pulls a gun and the aggressor goes away and the whole incident doesn’t get reported to any agency. Me personally, I’d call 911 immediately from a safe location, but I’m not so sure about people like my father-in-law, a trucker.
At the end of the day, you’re going to believe what you believe, and that’s okay. I, in a lot of ways, wish we’d never have let the genie out of the bottle (same thing for nukes.) It’s impossible to put it back in. But, in the grand scheme of things, I see people like me carrying guns as a good thing.
Brown Eyed Girl:
As to your question about how carrying a weapon affects you if you never use it, I’d say this:
Hopefully, the weapon doesn’t affect you at all. It’s my earnest desire to, when it comes time to die, lament the fact that I carried the somewhat bulky, sometimes uncomfortable gun on my hip for all those years. I hate to go back to the same analogy, but I also hope that I never have to use my kitchen fire extinguisher. I’m paraphrasing here, but someone once said “a gun is one of the few things in life that, when you need it, only it will do. If you need one and don’t have one, it’s very likely that you will never have cause to ever need one again.”
I can’t take credit for the phrasing, but that does sum up how I feel. I don’t think any of us take out our car insurance thinking “damn, I really hope I get to use this!”
As to how it feels (subjectively, I know…) I can only say that it makes me feel more secure. Not safer. I really want to point that part out; carrying a gun doesn’t make one safer. Just better prepared. My way of thinking is this: if someone desires to hurt me or my family, I know, at the very least, that I can match force. Fights are never won by defense; enemies are only defeated offensively (Sun Tzu, I think.)
BrownEyedGirl
Hardly. This where you started to rub me wrong. In at least one instance you called someone arrogant. And you added a smiley after it so you could get away with it. Slipped that one by the mods.
Well, the problem with that is that licensing bureaus (supported by the NRA) moves to have to those records sealed from the public. So, it’s harder to compile data when half that data is suppressed. And why should that be the case? Drivers’ license information is public, so why not concealed carry permits?
Still negative. You’ve surely observed that quite a number of people just aren’t interested. I have. They don’t care and find the whole thing boring and would rather play a video game or something else.
Which is cool 
with me, a happy paper puncher*.
For those who don’t know, a non-competative (in my case) target shooter.
Eh, I gotta go with the NRA on this one. I’m working from memory here, but…
IIRC, a newspaper in Florida published the names (and possibly addresses) of all the CHL people in a certain town/county. Now, though I’m willing to discuss my CHL on a message board, it’s not something that I announce to the public–it really should be a private thing.
What’s dangerous about circumstances like the above is that you’ve done a couple of things: you’ve exposed people for, essentially, doing what they’re Constitutionally guaranteed to do. It would be sort of like a right-wing paper releasing the names of all the people that had an abortion at the clinic (well, that’s medically private, I know, but do you see what I’m trying to get at?)
If, say, I worked for a very liberal, anti-gun boss, and he saw my name in that list, I might lose my job, no?
But, most importantly, that list gave potential burglars an itemized list of people who were practically guaranteed to have guns in their homes.