# Why do you own a gun?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-own-a-gun/661138>\
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion\
**Created:** [June 16, 2013, 8:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-own-a-gun/661138 "2013-06-16T20:29:37Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 56

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**Author:** ![Bricker](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/977dab/32.png) [@Bricker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bricker)\
**Post date:** [June 17, 2013, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-do-you-own-a-gun/661138/56 "2013-06-17T14:15:52Z")

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Cross-posted with some additional thoughts:

> [@It's perfectly okay for someone to steal your belongings?](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/its-perfectly-okay-for-someone-to-steal-your-belongings/661158/34):
>
> I own many firearms.
> 
> I wouldn’t use them to kill anyone who was simply stealing my stuff; that’s why I have insurance. (And why I have a gun safe!)
> 
> But I do have an interest in my personal safety and that of my family. And I wouldn’t balk at shooting and killing an intruder who presented any threat to my wife or son or me.
> 
> I’d undoubtedly have nightmares and need therapy afterwards. I shudder even typing this at the thought of ending a human life. But I’m not naive enough to dismiss the realization that, thankfully rare though they are, some circumstances arise where the choice is between the life of an intruder and the physical safety of my family. And if, God in His mercy forbid, that should ever happen, I would act to protect my family.
> 
> I fully expect that this will remain hypothetical my entire life. But I have life insurance for me and my wife, even though I don’t expect either of us to die, because I make plans to handle the worst situations and keep praying they never come to pass.

Apart from the answer implicit in the above post – that I own firearms as a tool to protect the safety of me and my family – I enjoy shooting. It’s a physical challenge: to control a well-machined and engineered device to consistently deliver a 10 mm diameter projectile to a target 25 yards away.

And then when I get tired of that one, I put away my Ruger P944 and start trying to place a 5.7 mm diameter projectile 50 yards away. My targets are black circles on white paper.

It’s fun!

And there is no discrepancy between the the fun of target shooting and the utter seriousness of the thought of shooting a human being, any more than there’s a discrepancy between saying cooking is fun and the idea that you might defend your life by stabbing a assailant with a kitchen knife.

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