33 years old… and I’ve also never been in a situation that having a gun would have helped. I’ve certainly seen many situations where a gun would have made things much worse.
I’ve seen the responsible gun owner argument over and over in the SDMB… but overall I don’t feel safe with the Armed “Citizens”. Even if naturally having a gun makes these Citizens feel safer…
New Orleans showed that wide availability of guns can be a problem… especially easy acess in a disaster. Guns in private houses wouldn’t be so bad… but having Wal Mart stocked with guns was certainly bad.
I own 8 guns. One was a gift, the others where handed down to me.
As others have said, target shooting is quite a bit of fun. The level of concentration and attention to safety can be a catharsis. When I’m target shooting, I’m very, very focused.
Certainly, protection fits into this. I hope I never find out how long the Sheriff or State Patrol will take to get to my house. And I have used guns to frighten bears off the property.
A: The primary reason my family owns guns is heritage, going back as far as the american revolution. That one doesn’t fire anymore, but if you keep something around a while, you’re not going to give it up.
B: The primary reason my family uses guns is varmit control. We’ve got a decent yard, and a duckpond, and we used to have rats that’d come out and eat the ducks while they slept. Couldn’t use poison, couldn’t trap, so we shot 'em till there weren’t any more. Around here… and this is New York State, been settled since the 1600s… we get coyotes (Even in NYC, you get coyotes), bears (Sometimes they show up in the middle of major cities. Main Street, White Plains), rabid raccoons…
And there’s the bb rifle for scaring deer away from the garden. Doesn’t hurt them much, won’t even penetrate the skin, but it gets their attention really well.
C: Because shooting’s fun. It’s very zen.
D: Home defense. We’re on a cul-de-sac, we’ve got no cops for miles, and my folks are getting on in age.
It was this that made me really wonder about the idea of people spontaneously organising themselves into a responsible armed resistance force in the face of a corrupt government.
Me, too. (Well, a bit less than 52 years, but the idea is the important thing).
In fact, there are many police officers who go their entire careers without ever drawing their gun on duty (apart from training exercises).
But we don’t look at that fact and infer that police shouldn’t carry guns. I doubt that I will ever need to point a gun at another human being. I pray that I won’t.
In the same way, I pray that I will never need to file a fire insurance claim, or a life insurance claim. But I recognize that prudent planning dictates I carry insurance.
That’s part of the reason though it’s been many years since I had need of a firearm for self-protection. I live in a nice area and we don’t hear much about property crimes let alone murders, rapes, or assaults. Police activities are always reported in the weekly paper and they’re mostly made up of speeding tickets and the occasional shop lifting and someone drove off after filling their tank with gas and didn’t pay.
Even in this nice area I still insist on owning a firearm for protection. The main reason is that the police cannot protect me if I’m in immediate danger. I’m not knocking the police, but every time I’ve called for their assistance they were unable to arrive in sufficent time to assist me. In my experience they’ve dealt with the aftermath of the situation and never directly with the situation. Ultimately the responsiblity for my own well being rests within my hands and nobody else.
That’s another reason. I enjoy plinking (target shooting) and hunting the occasional deer.
I see being armed as a basic human right akin to free speech, religion, due process, etc. I’m not really interested in a pissing contest over which right is more important but it’s important enough that I don’t care to lose it.
Anarchy rarely lasts long in history. You plop a bunch of humans down on an abandoned island and someone will become the defacto leader in a few days. Whether this leads to lots of small, antagonistic tribes or a cooperative and organised force depends on several factors–but the entirety of history has had it that (even if not usually particularly benevolent) the move is always towards more police and armies and structure than away from it. So I think that organization is less of a worry than how benevolent the various groups are.
One issue with New Orleans would have been everyone waiting for the National Guard to show up. Given more time and an initial belief that there wasn’t some outside force that was going to come in and re-establish order, I would bet that the honest, majority of people would have begun setting up a chain of command, policing, jails, etc. And in the end, they’ll win against the thugs just because more people are interested in an ordered and secure future than mayhem–and the majority wins.
The manager of the Walmart who chose not to secure the guns when he/she left should be charged for allowing the guns to be stolen. At that time, Walmart was the registered owner of the guns and in some states, the failure to secure guns makes one subject to jail time if they are stolen.
Many large sporting goods stores have a vault in which they move their guns into at night. Not a safe, but a vault. What the stores in NOLA allowed to happen was borderline criminal in my opinion. And I am as strong a gun proponent as one will find on this site. With the ownership of guns comes a great responsibility. It is that level of responsibility that insures that the vast majority of guns in the US are not used for nefarious acts.
I know I can protect myself. Countless hours of training have given me the edge over a would be thug. My community is “safe”. I am not always in it however.
Sadly since having my first child I have gone from being a competitive shooter, with matches every weekend to an avid collector. My guns see more closet time and dust than actual use these days.
I was taught firearms use by my martial arts teacher (he was a licensed firearms instructor, trained the police throughout the county in firearms use, etc.). The one point he emphasized, and which I never forget, is this: Make sure your gun is at least three minutes away from you at home. Why? Because it takes about that long for you to fully wake up, and you never, never want to be handling a firearm unless you’re in complete control of your senses. He knew of too many cases where parents had awoken in the middle of the night, grabbed the gun at their nightstand, and shot a would-be burglar–only to learn, upon fully awakening and properly assessing the situation, that it was in fact a family member (son coming home late, etc.).
So, I’m very much against the idea of guns for “bedroom defense”.
I have no real opinion on concealed carry. The restrictions on that in most juridictions seem high enough to ensure that those who go to all the trouble also have a reasonable degree of competence. But I, personally, would not want the responsibility of having a deadly weapon on my person at all times; my environment is not dangerous enough, so I would find the gun to be a bigger worry than any danger it might protect me from. If mys circumstances changed, though, my opinion on that might, too.
The one thing I am absolutely in favor of is having guns as a defense of last resort against the government. People say, “if the army decides to take you out, you have no chance of stopping them, so it’s pointless to have a gun to defend yourself.” This is simply not true. As the IRA showed, and as the Iraqis are showing now, it’s extremely difficult to stop an armed resistance. No, my 9MM is not going to stop an airstrike on my house, but it might dissuade that boy wearing an army uniform from wanting to shoot me and mine–especially if people like me have been slowly killing people like him for weeks or months.
How would things in the Warsaw ghetto have gone if the residents had had more weapons?
Slight point of order… last time I looked Ireland was still divided.
In fact, the IRA have had to lay down their weapons as it’s become clear that armed citizen opposition to a corrupt and tyrannical UK govt. has failed to achieve anything.
The US are somewhat hogtied in Iraq as their initial justification for the invasion was to liberate the people - carpet bombing the insurgents would lead to outcry.
But if / when the New World Order take over the USA who’s to say that AK47s will be a match for tanks and napalm?
Well, see, here’s the real problem with warfare: Warfare is good for making an army stop fighting. It’s much less effective at making a general population stop fighting. Yes, napalm and tanks will stop a man in the countryside with an AK-47. But, usually, the only way to stop EVERY man in the countryside with an AK-47 is to KILL every last man in the countryside.
It’s very hard to change a population’s mind through force–all you can usually do is hope your never-ending occupation keeps resistance at a sort of low roar or exterminate the entire offfending population. Neither solution is deemed popular nowadays.
If there’s one lesson to be learned from our involvement in Iraq, it’s that the US military is not, as has been widely presumed, omnipotent. Yes, a nuclear ICBM can kill just about anything. Yes, a single US nuclear sub can kill about 50-60 million people. Yes, in a one-on-one fight, it’s better to have an Abrams tank than an AK-47. But the fact is, military force can only do certain things–namely, kill people. Our policy makers keep expecting it to do other things–like make people agree to do whatever we want. Perhaps if we behaved as an actual global mafia, and used nuclear weapons to exterminate nations that failed to agree with us, then our military could be able to fulfill that role. But we (fortunately!) aren’t willing to go to that extreme, so victims of our agression know that resistance DOES make sense. If resistance equaled certain death, then they might acquiesce. But it doesn’t, so resistance is still worthwhile.
To rephrase, “A former incarnation of the IRA won enough to make themselves happy.” The modern ones who have been fighting since; they have lost because they already won a long time ago but didn’t have any other life to live so kept going on.
Without knowing the dictator whom we are fighting or how much he can and is willing to get away with, there’s not much to be said on fighting tanks and napalm. I don’t personally imagine a corrupt government fighting a peasant rebellion with such armament, nor nuking LA–but you never know.
The Cold War was specifically so scary just because humanity was in a position where either side could kill the grand majority of all life on the planet (particularly over an extended period of time.) So given a madman who has been entrusted with the football and who decides on a lark to destroy the entire populace (including, probably, himself)–there’s not really much to be done anyways, so the debate of whether AK47’s are best in or out of our hands becomes moot.
Ignoring that scenario though, in the grand majority of situations the general populace will be in a better starting position if they have had and been able to retain military class armament up until a fairly recent point, than if they hadn’t. After that, it’s up to tactics.
I have never pointed a pistol at another person. Nor a rifle, for that matter, although I don’t own one of them. I have never gotten out my pistol when awakened in the night by unidentified noises. I don’t carry it except to the range, and back. (I do have a concealed carry permit.) I doubt that my instincts are likely to cause me to shoot first, even at someone who came into my home with the specific intent to do me harm. I certainly would not shoot someone to protect my property. I just don’t deal with the world from an adversarial point of view.
But I know that I can put 7 out of 7 rounds into a six-inch target from twenty feet most of the time. I am willing to shoot, and shoot to kill if a life is at stake. If I already know someone is likely to die, I will choose to protect the innocent, or myself. I know that there is a loaded pistol, and a fair bit of ammunition available in case there is civil disorder in my hometown. There are no children in my home, so that risk doesn’t worry me, but I still take minimal precautions against it. I enjoy shooting for practice, although the cost of transportation to a range, and ammunition, has made me much less able to practice.
I will also support, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic. In the event that support requires armed action against a superior foe, my pistol will be the most minor of my chosen weapons. In my opinion, a stockpile of arms is unnecessary, and provides an identifying target. I don’t think that out gunning the US Army is a realistic plan.
I don’t own a gun; I have never shot a gun. I have shot Bows & BB guns.
I am not a pacifist. I don’t want tight gun control.
I do like waiting periods. You just don’t need a gun today. 7 days is reasonable.
I do not like plastic bullets in plastic guns. They should be illegal.
I do want my fellow Americans to retain their rights to their guns.
A well armed public is a small but meaningful deterrent to tyranny and invasion.
If invaded and someone said “here take this gun”, I would take it and ask for some Basic training in use and handling. I don’t own a gun because I don’t need to and I have always been a little afraid I might use it in anger.
I have served in the US Navy and I managed to miss the 30 minute session of firing 22’s.
I definitely believe convicted felons have lost the right to carry/own guns.
The OP and inteed the thread title engages in a fallacy. Namely, that if no “need” can be demonstrated, then there is no harm in doing away with that which offends some people.
Vegitarians are happy to explain to me why nobody needs to eat meat.
People repulsed by tobacco smoke, don’t see any need for people to smoke.
Advocates of public transportation explain how we don’t need nearly so many private vehicles.
Airline CEOs are pretty certain that we don’t need general aviation.
Drivers of hybrids tell me I don’t need an SUV.
All of these things, and yes guns too, provide benifits important to those who appreciate them. The fact that those who don’t can’t fathom a “need” is wholly irrelivent.
From the OP:
And that is why any debate with you and others who “can’t see” is pointless.
Same age, same philosophy here. They are fun to shoot as a hobby, and I’m a pretty good shot, but if comes to spending money on a gun or a new tool for the wood shop…
I’d like to see gun ownership as a privelege, not a right, with the ability to be revoked upon misuse. But, as long as it can be argued on Constitutional grounds that it *is * a right (and man some of those arguments torture logic), then I would rather see it stay as it is rather than go down the slippery slope of eroding Constitutional rights. That’s what amendments to the Constitution are for.
I live in a city, one with crime just like any other city. I wonder sometimes if I would be more reckless if I knew that I was carrying a gun. Instead, I stick to lighted public areas and keep my wits about me. I’d rather be safe, but if mugged I’d rather lose some cash than having a death on my hands. I know that others feel differently about this one.
As far as needing guns in case the government… what?.. wants to take away my property, my money, my rights? Look around, it’s happening now. IMHO this is the worst government during my lifetime, and I lived during the Nixon administration. We are running massive debt that we will be paying for for years. Eminent domain laws are upheld to take property from homeowners. Civil rights are eroding with the Patriot Act. I haven’t gone out and bought a gun yet and can’t see what good it would do if I did.
FWIW, virtually every gun owner I know is fully aware of the responsibility of their ownership, and they are very careful about use, storage, transportation, etc. That may or may not be a representative sample of gun owners, but may be more representative of the people that I associate with.
But you do have the right to decide whether or not the government is at a state of repugnance where revolution is in the greater good. That you have chosen that buying a gun and assassinating the president isn’t worth it just means that you have chosen not to exercise a right guaranteed you. So the question is whether you just aren’t as upset with them as you make it out to be, or whether you are copping out of your responsibility to your fellow Americans.*
VIVA LA RESISTANCE!
I am not actually advocating assassinating the president.
I think that’s an unfair reading of the OP, Kevbo. While many such debates do break out here, the OPs post seems genuinely to be a search for knowledge–specifically, info. about the attitudes of people in a different country. (Me, I’d be very interested to know what the Australian general attitude is toward gun control, esp. the differences b/w those in the cities and those out in the bush.)
I don’t think your venom (at the OP esp.) is justified in this case, and I think this has been one of the most interesting and civil gun debates I’ve ever seen here.
