I am a peace loving vegetarian who lives in a remote rural area. i grew up a country boy learning how to shoot a gun at an early age. As an adult i never owned one until recently. Here at my home a gun was pointed at me by a stranger i had never seen before. If i could have gotten to a phone it would have been at least a half of an hour before a cop could have gotten here. Fortunately, the gun holder was not totally crazy and left without harming anyone. But I will never be caught unprepared to protect my children again. i am a good shot and i will shoot to kill if the lives of my children are threatened again. It will indeed be hard to live with having killed or having tried to kill someone but to allow harm to come to my kids would be harder to live with. I still have bad dreams about what could have happened.
But even with such a event happening in my own yard, i still feel more threatened on the hiways than i do by some one owning a gun. how many times has some unthinking person in a hurry or in road rage come close to causing an accident to me or a member of my family? More times than i could count! How many people are killed in this country by guns every year? How many by vehicle accidents?
I will now own a gun to protect my family. And i will still drive a car and feel that driving is the greater risk.
and BTW most of the guns sales that i know about around here are person to person, not gun shops, not gun shows. No records, no background checks. Guns are easy to buy. Gun control laws won't change the fact that i can go to my neighbor's house and look over the hundred's of guns he has and choose my weapon of choice. I suspect that in the cities it must be somewhat like that, too. We are not in the UK It would be really hard to disarm Americans.