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SCOTUS Rules on DC Gun Law
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.Supreme Court says Americans have right to guns
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. . . unless he was dissembling about the disassembling.
I think it's pretty obvious that moreso than the quantity or variety of guns available, it is the gun culture of the society that really determines what gun-related crime will be like. In the US there is a certain fascination and glorification of guns. This is why children often play with them, and hurt themselves. Yet, kitchen knives, which are also incredibly dangerous, and are much more easily available, are vilified much less. You have a kitchen knife in a drawer, how often will a kid go in and try to play with it? You have a gun in a drawer, and the results will be quite different.
In these countries like Norway and Switzerland, guns are so common, that they are treated as everyday objects. Just about everybody understands them, gives them the proper level of respect, and does not have some romantic fascination with them. Having a proper firearms education goes a long way towards preventing gun-related crimes and accidents. When is the last time you heard about a properly trained and educated marskman shooting another person on purpose? Even in the US, at summer camps that offer riflery, where they put real guns in the hands of young children, you would expect that there would be tons of accidents and tons of stupid kids shooting each other. Yet, in all my years, I haven't heard of a single bad summer camp riflery incident. That is because the riflery hut is a place where people actually learn about, and respect, the weapons, and lose any immature fascination they may have learned from movies and television. When romanticism is replaced by realization, the weight of responsibility nearly eliminates the ability to screw up.
As long as we still have a fucked up gun culture, we do still need a system of gun control. Part of marksmanship is realizing that if the other marksmen don't trust you with a gun, you weren't going to be allowed to have one. As long as we citizens can not trust each other with guns, we can't allow each other to have them so easily. Yet, we have to trust some people to have them, otherwise we get a piece of wood with a nail in it situation. Even so, I don't think this latest change is large enough to result in any significant increased to the frequency of gun-related incidents. The biggest change I think will be that there will be increased purchasing of handguns by lawful and safe gun owners, and gun makers will have increased profits.
If someone broke into my house, I would grab said gun.
I would wait for positive ID on the perp, and then, assuming they were armed, I would shoot their ass dead.
End of story.
You can't break into someone's house with a weapon and expect everything to be cool. Retarded criminals.
No one in my family owns a firearm, and I've only shot one on rare occasions (summer camp mostly), but I know people won't be safer if guns were banned/better controlled. Besides the obvious argument that most criminals don't buy their weapons from dealers (although someone has to fix the Gun Fair issue), Americans have to realize that geographically and culturally our country is different from Japan or Albion. While those countries are mainly urban, much of the US is rural and less densely populated areas, where you won't always be able to rely on a massive police force.
So there is clearly more to this than gun laws alone. I suspect that a lot of it is cultural. If guns are respected as tools for hunting and self defense, your crime rate is going to be low. If guns are viewed as an offensive weapon, then your rates are going to be high.
Guns are also used as a way of gaining power over someone, if someone breaks into your house (assuming you are a sane, intelligent person) you would probably use the gun to force them to stay very still until the police came. If you are not then shooting their ass dead would be the assumed course of action.
There are too many variables to say that owning a gun will in any way protect you from an intruder.
I think I was in first grade when I fired my first gun. It was some sort of air pistol.
Handgun safety was very important in my dad's house. I still have the .22 rifle my dad gave me when I was ten. My brothers got the kind where you had to load all the bullets into the tube while mine had a magazine. Yeah, they were jealous!
My dad was also a competitive shooter in his younger days and won many competitions. He passed his love and respect for firearms down to his sons.
I have no problem with having firearm safety courses as a prerequisite for getting a firearms license.
That's one thing a gun can do that no other weapon can.
Did you ever hear the story about the Japanese exchange student who was shot while trick or treating on Halloween?
In fact, statistically speaking, in the USA there is a strong correlation between having a gun in your house and a murder being more likely. Most of those murders are results of domestic or romantic disputes. The logic is that when there is a dispute, but no gun present, the disputes do not end in murder. When a gun is present, the odds of the dispute resulting in a murder increase. One explanation for these findings is that when guns are not present, disputes that end in violence end with physical or knife violence, which has a much higher chance of not being murder compared to gun violence. If you live in a situation where domestic disputes are likely, a gun is probably a bad thing to purchase. If you are a senior citizen who lives in the bad part of town, it's probably a much better idea to buy one.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/L-kellermann.htm
I think it would be fascinating to see the results of a similar study taken in different countries around the world. I have a feeling that the correlations between domestic disputes, domestic violence, gun presence, and murder vary greatly around the world.