This is an interesting topic to me, but it seems that the debate here has degenerated to rock throwing...so lets get down to brass tacks..stats mean a lot but stats for or against mean nothing in that terrible instant when it is you and yours at the business end of a bad guys gun. In my earlier days when I thought owning a gun was unnecessary,I was held helpless at the business end of a bad guys gun..it was , shall we say, most unpleasant, so I am looking for real world solutions. There were a plethora of laws on the books already making the bad guys every move illegal..felon in possession of the weapon, illegal..weapon to my head, illegal...holding me against my will, illegal detention, helping himself to my property, illegal..the woman he shot prior to putting gun to my head, illegal...the car he jacked, illegal...plenty of laws which he clearly held no regard for. With that in mind..MY question is this... Since there are roughly 270 million guns in the country...
http://www.reuters.com/article/2007/08/28/us-world-firearms-idUSL2834893820070828 how will stricter gun control do anything other than hamstring the good guys? How will we stop bad guys from acquiring or constructing restricted weapon tech. Bad guys will not decide to carry a smaller capacity weapon or a different weapon altogether because their state happens to have a certain class, caliber, or capacity restricted. So now here I am Joe Citizen, and my very meager home in the hood is being invaded by armed thugs. I know that police response time is measured in minutes when seconds count...but since I am very law abiding, I decide to purchase only officially sanctioned small caliber and capacity firearms for my home defense ...unfortunately for me, the thugs dont seem to share my zeal for the law...Gun control has now put me at a terrible disadvantage. Right now in states with more open gun laws, at least we can achieve a form of parity with the bad guy...perhaps it is cold war-ish but until someone comes up with a way to make the restrictions actually apply to the bad guys who dont care about them..i prefer to at least be able to achieve a stalemate.
Aurora might be a different story if that theater werent a gun free zone. The fact that he had body armor and used gas obviously compounded the problem, but my current concealed carry handgun (yes I carry it everyday, and it is perfectly legal uh for now anyway) has a 30+1 round capacity and the rounds can penetrate 40 layers of kevlar...and
I am now a highly proficient shooter..of course adrenaline dump negatively impacts fine motor skills, so yes I wouldve still been outgunned with my shorter sight radius vs his AR15, but I could have at least given him something to think about...and I genuinely implore some of the well reasoned and erudite members of the board who argue on the side of gun control to give me something to think about ...please explain to me how we can actually leave the good guys with an advantage at the end of gun control. I know bad guys personally, and they know bad guys who sell a disappointingly stunning array of guns illegally...how do new laws stop what old laws didnt, and make it so that I dont need to have these (which I own legally)in my home to keep the playing field level
[/IMG]