Personally, I would find it disturbing is an 18 year old had 54 swords or cameras or unicorn figurines or toasters. Is the obsessive hoarding that I think is a bad sign not the particular product.
That said, anybody looking at the bookshelves in my house might well say I shouldn’t be pointing a finger at others.
Not particularly. I’ve trained myself to recognize and disregard media sensationalist crap.
Yeah, I’d probably feel the same way about a stockpile of swords. People that enjoy thinking that much about shooting things or stabbing things, or whatever else pleases them just aren’t my model of stable, decent people, sorry. Someone owning things for protection or for sport hunting or just general farm use is one thing. People that horde weapons, even collect them, are generally some pretty creepy people in my experience. Not to the man, but it’s generally a bad sign of an unbalanced life with the balance tipped more towards violence than snow globe collecting.
I read a book a couple of years ago in which the badguy swapped a victim’s cell phone for one with explosives inside. The badguy called him, and boom.
When an old friend of mine stabbed his estranged wife to death with a Cutco chef’s knife, the police didn’t think to count the other knives in the kitchen. They didn’t even take the other knives in the Cutco set. There was an good-sized collection of pocket knives in the house, and they didn’t even look at them. There were probably 250 knives in the house, but that never got in the paper. Knives aren’t newsworthy, I guess.
Hehe , that story is sorta backwards ,but you had the gist of it. The Israeli secret service swapped out a Terrorists cell phone with one of their own and after cloning the technical stuff, and sent him on to his afterlife with a simple phone call , that triggered a shaped charge right by the ear.
Declan
Mosin-Nagants? I’d worry. Mausers? I’d see if he had any I didn’t have! 
{QUOTE=Apos]People that horde weapons, even collect them, are generally some pretty creepy people in my experience. Not to the man, but it’s generally a bad sign of an unbalanced life with the balance tipped more towards violence than snow globe collecting.
[/QUOTE]
Thank you for the exception. I’d be more afraid of the snowglober. Sometimes you just get locked into serious collection mode.
Anybody know where I can find a Peruvian Mauser? I need one to finish off my South America section.
I own over 20 edged weapons and have never been accused of being unstable, creepy, indecent or voilent. Heck, I’ve never even been in a fight since grade school.
Owning more than one of something does not automatically count as “hoarding” by the way.
I would be very concerned that a person who filled heir house with snow-globes would be seriously disconnected with reality and possibly a depressed loner with delusional fantasies. Hey, this is a fun game.
I know a guy who had three trebuchets for a while. Does that count? I think he had six or seven muskets for a while as well.
He also makes the most beautiful knives you ever saw, and always has hundreds of those around his house. He had four motorcycles, too. This is a bike riding, knife wielding, ancient arms dealer here! Be afraid!
(I don’t want to explain the seven or eight box turtles that are loose around his house most of the time.) (I originally wrote “running loose” in that sentence, but these are turtles, after all.)
Tris
One problem with the knife analogy is that most homes have a fairly large number of knives, if you count everything in the kitchen. If the knives were seriously out of proportion of what the average home had, and way out of proportion compared to other utensils, I think it would be equally newsworthy.
I also think it’s reasonably newsworthy that Joe Schmoe’s gun collection is accessible by his mentally unstable teenage son. Apparently, we’ve still got a few folks out there who need to be reminded of that, since they are not securing their guns around the mentally unstable.
54 guns isn’t all that unbelievably many for a family. At one point, when my brother and I were young enough to still be living with our parents, there would have been 25 or so guns around the house, not counting my dad’s issue handguns. Guns can accumulate, too, if you have older relatives who owned them and you inherit them.
Right now, my personal collection (arsenal for those of you who prefer that word) is 9 long guns and 12 handguns. Many of them are guns I’ve had since I was 12.
What people collect is of no importance. What matters is what they do to their fellow man.
If it helps, I have nearly fifty different Optimus Prime and Optimus Primals alone in my Transformers collection. If you collect something… over, uh, fifteen years, say, you wind up with a lot of that something. Now, a good gun collection isn’t just your guns, it’s your father’s, and maybe his father’s, too. So, ten, fifteen rifles, and some pistols, maybe an air-gun or two, some airsoft guns, maybe even a laser tag pistol… all fits in the count. If you count the nerf, airsoft, CO2 and airguns… uhm… fifteen guns in my apartment alone. Thirtyfiveish if you count the Megatrons, Shockwaves, and cap pistols. (It’s a long story involving poker and boredom)
They’d all be stored in the same location, as they’re all guns, and they’d probably be inventoried as such. Heck, one of the Nerfs counts as a fully automatic weapon.
I said “edged weapons” so as not to count my many kitchen knives. I meant swords, axes, spears and fighting (as opposed to cooking) knives.
How many homes have swords?
No, it was a different story, with no Israelis. I guess phone-as-murder-weapon stories are not so rare after all.
Not many homes have swords, IMO. I have one. My dad vacationed in Spain, and he came back from Toledo with swords for his sons.
Apparently, it’s just you. 
Depends whether you hear the headliner or the story. In the text version the headliner refers to his place of residence as the “home of David Ludwig”, which is misleading. It’s his parent’s house. It is partially clarified in the article as follows: Listed among the firearms were rifles and handguns. Ludwig lived with his parents in Lititz. His father is a hunter. Which is again misleading because it doesn’t specify whose guns they were. It forces the reader to interpret who owns what. My assumption is that his father owns/collects guns as a hunter and that his son has started down the same road (as a hunter).
Depends on what kind of guns he owns. I know collectors of guns that have far more than 54 but they’re all antiques (never to be fired). I’m far more disturbed by an 18-year-old man dating a 14-year-old girl. If he doesn’t possess the maturity to date women his own age or the common sense to stay away from children then he’s got emotional problems.
Swords: Including LARP boffers… I dunno, four-five boffers, two real swords (One from Toledo, one I bought at a Con), and one african spear (Same uncle who went to Toledo)
I don’t know anyone who owns 54 guns, or 54 swords, and I don’t know of anyone. To me that automatically sounds pretty disturbing, though I do live in Australia where standards are different. Why the hell would you ever need so many? A collection of antique guns or something, sure, but apart from that surely you could only ever need a few hunting guns, a few target-shooting pistols, that kinda thing, right?
own any lightning bolts?
Not so, especially if you have the means and the want to accumulate any number of firearms. My shooting buddy has 3 36-gun capacity safes, and they are full. One safe holds nothing but pistols, from collector hideout guns to his latest acquisition, a S&W 500 in the hunter configuration with 8 3/4 inch barrel. I’d love to play keep up with the Jone’s with him, but I play too much golf. 
Yes, I find it alarming. The more guns you own, the more alarming it becomes. In fact, I would imagine that people who own a lot of guns and have children around and owning a lot of guns are significantly more likely to have their kids involved in violent crimes involving guns. No, I do not have a citation for that image of mine, and I don’t have a gun.
You might tell me that people with guns do not become involved in violent crimes with guns, and that my imagination is full of unfounded beliefs, but it is MY imagination and I havea right to it! You can pry it from my cold dead brain!