OK- I’m a gun nut. I love going out every Saturday afternoon and shooting with my friends. I will own guns until the day I die because they are so much fun for me. I want to ask to all y’all who weren’t raised around guns:
Is this really weird to you? Scary? Does it matter to you how many guns the guy’s dad had? I would think that one would be plenty. CNN is seemingly making it a big deal, but I guess I just don’t get it. My grandma likes to guilt. She makes great guilts, but I would estimate she has over 6 TONS OF FAVRIC in her house right now. I’m just saying, hobbies trend extreme.
So, do lots of guns in one place scare you?
(I’m not asking for the old gun control debate here, just wondering if a high concentration of arms is more alarming to the millions…,)
I’ll admit that the early stories I heard about this was that David Ludwig owned 54 guns - not just that there were present in his household. And I don’t care what your position is on the Second Amendment, there’s something wrong about an 18 year old who owns 54 guns.
Nitpick for the OP: The dad isn’t reported as the owner. If the 18-year-old was the stockpiler, even more alarming. Unless they were collector’s pieces, which the report doesn’t appear to support.
Yeah, my mom likes to guilt too. “Oh, no, that’s okay, you don’t have to have dinner with us”, and “Oh, you don’t really need to make anything for Thanksgiving, I’ll do all the cooking”, and “Oh, your dad is fine, he can take care of himself, you don’t need to feed him while I’m gone, not at all”. She makes tons of guilts.
Neither is the teenager reported as the owner, simply that 54 guns were found in the house. The report doesn’t support any point of view actually. My personal speculation would be that the bulk of them belong to the father, some belong to the 18-year-old, some might belong to the mother or siblings (if any) - hell, the report just doesn’t say anything beyond the bare fact that there were a lot of guns there.
I had more guns than that at my house growing up. Then again my father was a licenesed gun dealer and we had a rifle, pistol, and skeet shooting range on our sizable property. I hve two younger brothers and we were raised around them and could shoot any time by ourselves once we were old enough.
I wouldn’t say that it is automatically odd. We just had several examples of most common and some uncommon guns around to shoot. We also had collectors guns that we didn’t shoot and I ran a small side-business refinishing stocks for other people.
The only reason I don’t is if I spent that much money on guns and gun safes, my wife would be standing over my smoking corpse saying, “How do I reload this thing?”
But there is nothing inherently scary about 54 guns, if you’re a collector or hobbyist. I know someone with over 200 snow globes, and someone with over 300 unicorn figurines.
Yes, it is scary to me for someone to have so many guns. I see Bricker’s point about collecting, but damn! why do you need so many killing things in your house?
I’m afraid my mind immediately jumps to conclusions like the mean old solitary hermit, hoarding his guns up because the government is out to get him.
Then again, the only thing I collect is books, and they can be dangerous, too I suppose.
Well I guess a book could always fall on your foot and give you a bruise. Or a book can catch on fire and you could possibly die. But in both cases wouldn’t you think that there would have to be some before action?
As for 54 guns the same holds true. I have yet seen a gun jump out of its case, load on its own and then go off all by its lonesome.
So what is the difference on how many guns anyone has?
The U.S. military might have a lot more then 54 guns. I don’t know the exact number as “they” won’t tell me. And don’t forget all those nifty nukes the U.S. have on its own and still the world is here.
Collecting all of the guns from “potentially disturbed” persons won’t stop anybody from doing harm if they really want too.
After collecting guns, we have to collect kitchen knives, forks, spoons and tea cups. Then we have to move onto the rocks all around that someone can use as a weapon. So I guess in the end we’ll have a “Nurff” world.
Good luck on that and let me know how it works for you.
It seems a bit high for a teenager, mostly because I do wonder how he could afford all of them. If they belonged to the parents, that’s a bit different.
Does it bother me? It bothers me that the guy was unstable, but in that case, even one gun would be too many for him. One of my friends has a room full of guns, including a safe fully of (legal) automatic weapons. Didn’t bother me a bit.
Nobody’s claiming the kid hoarded the guns. It’s the father’s presumably-legitimate arsenal. I’ve got an uncle who has far more than that, and a firing range in his basement.
Sloppy reporting, nothign more. Selective use of facts is hardly anything new in the world of journalism.
Than CNN should be happy to publish such poorly-written articles is a whole different matter.
I don’t really see why. The kid may be a nutcase, but I seriously doubt he could wield more than, say, two of those guns at any given time. Honestly, there’s nothing alarming about a sane, law-abiding citizen having a lot of guns, and for a criminally-deranged person, just one is too many. In any case, he’s an adult; he could’ve just gone down to Wal-Mart and purchased a rifle anyway.
Just for fun, let’s change the impliment involved just to compare.
I stab a man today, and police find 54 knives in my house. Does this bother anyone? (More importantly, would it bother you more or less if the reporter went out of his way to mention that most of these knives were steak and butter knives in a drawer in my kitchen?)
Also, I’d be willing to bet the reaction might depend on context. If I were to own 54 cameras (I don’t, photography being an expensive hobby), would this bother you? Would it bother you if I was caught doing some traditionally camera-related crime, such as surreptiously taking pictures of people? How about if I just went out and beat someone over the head with my all-metal late-60’s Pentax SLR camera and it’s very finely crafted 50mm lens?
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How long’s it been since a mystery story had a camera as a murder weapon? Or a telephone? They just don’t make blunt instruments like they used to.
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Honestly, there’s nothing alarming about a sane, law-abiding citizen having a lot of guns, and for a criminally-deranged person, just one is too many. In any case, he’s an adult; he could’ve just gone down to Wal-Mart and purchased a rifle anyway.