If guns are banned in a school, then the school should be legally obligated to protect those who they have made defenseless. The same is true of a church, a concert area, or a city. If people are banned from defending themselves, then those who have made that decision should be obligated to protect them. Rather than blaming the gun (which, in every case, is being used illegally anyhow), we should blame those who are not allowing people to have the means of defending themselves. As it is, however, the shooters have all the control, and the blame is placed on those who had nothing to do with it, that being the vast majority of gun owners who are not shooting up schools, churches, and concerts. When there is a school shooting, the anger should be directed at those within the school or state who chose not to protect the children who attend school there. In cities where citizens are banned from having the means of defending themselves, the police should be legally obligated to keep everyone in that city safe and held criminally responsible if they should fail to do so. Since this is impractical, then we should admit that it is also impractical and indefensible to not allow people the means to defend themselves.
America will never be "gun free," at least not in our lifetimes. There may be new regulations and laws put into place, but the number of unregistered firearms is mind boggling. (I have a couple of those myself. ) So things will rock along, and the crazy will behave badly whether with a gun or with home-made bombs, criminals will always be armed, and people like us will keep on disagreeing about cause and effect.
Well, I was born and raised in New York. My 12th birthday as was the custom in my family and much of the area, I received an .22 caliber Ithaca lever action saddle gun. I got real good with it. Myself a cousin and my brother spent many an afternoon shooting rats at the dump. I carried it every day running my trapline. When I was about 14 I took over dad.s 16Ga. Stevens pump and started hunting small game, Ruffed Grouse and Pheasant. Plenty of good meals and some subsistence meals were put on the table with the guns in our house. I don't know what state would not have an awful lot of folks that didn't teah their children about guns. Thing people forget is that we are not all that removed from the pioneer way of life. My grandfather farmed with one tractor and two teams of horses. My family home had no inside water supply,except for the hand pump. I was about ten when Dad wired the house further than the one ceiling outlet the Rural Electrification Project installed thirty years earlier. My great Aunt and Uncle did not even have a kitchen drain but instead depended on the slop bucket which was dumped into the pig trough. I have known been around,handled ,shot and owned firearms since birth and my family before since the mid 1600's. And not a "gun Nut" in the bunch. They are just a part of life, much like a toaster, a frying pan,a car or anything else we use on a regular basis. America will never be gun free as long as I am alive.
WELL-SAID, @Peter Renfro ! My family was in Idaho, so on the other side of the UNited States, but they were very much the same as your family, it sounds like. My mom and dad sold farm products, milk and cream during the depression, drove to town with the horse and wagon, and had an outhouse, too. They helped get the signatures for our original REA project in north Idaho, and even loaned people the $1 that it cost to sign up for electricity back then, when they could do that. Hunting deer and elk for food, fishing, and farming were all part of life back in those days, and children were taught how to use a firearm as a necessary part of everyday life. I can totally understand and agree that we need to stop the senseless killing that seem to be becoming more and more a part of the dangers of life now, but taking guns away from lawful people is not going to stop unlawful use of guns. The less we are able to defend ourself, the easier we become one of the victims.
Many of my family live in the rural south; ALL of them are well-armed. They know how and when to use a firearm, and often do use them to kill off animal predators and for hunting. Also, since they live in rural locations the expression "when seconds count, police are minutes away" has a very real meaning. My sister's best friend is in her 70's and was widowed a couple of years ago. She lives alone in a farmhouse on a dirt road far out of town. A while back she was wakened to the sound of a creaky board on her front porch, so she slid out of bed in the dark and reached for a shotgun. She stood near the window and racked the gun (what a great sound). Footsteps ran down the steps and away from her house.
Nope. I was born in New Jersey and raised in Pennsylvania. I have lived in many other states, but Alaska for the last 30.
The House passed a bill to allow concealed carry across state lines. To become law, it will still need to pass the Senate. -- ABC News
We had ranges at my school and our team traveled several times to other locations to shoot, schools here still do so just not much said about it. We shot small bore 22 RF and M1 Garands.
We had gun ranges in our high school, too. During hunting season, it wasn't unusual to find rifles on racks in the back of pickup trucks in both the student and faculty parking lots and, while I never checked, I strongly suspect that many of these doors were unlocked as it was a habit of a large part of the population to leave their keys in the ignition, and no one liked carrying keyrings around with them.
@Ken Anderson We found this to be true in very rural Missouri when we moved there. Big city dwellers, we were accustomed to constantly paranoic application of checking locks locked, etc. The Wal-Mart parking lot confirmed the general honesty prevalent there. Many of the parked vehicles had their keys hanging in the ignition! Frank
Not only were those who carried these guns in their trucks trusted not to bring them into the school to massacre people, but no one had reason to worry about others accessing them for that purpose, either. What is there about guns today that make them dangerous when the guns of 50-55 years ago were not dangerous? Are gun manufacturers today producing guns that turn on people for no reason? If the real problem is not with the guns themselves, then why is it that so few people are willing to discuss the things that are actually behind school shootings today?
I find that fascinating as well, @Ken Anderson. I walked downtown when I was twelve years old, bought a little .22, and bought it back home, carrying it openly all the way. When I was fifteen, I purchased a military surplus Mauser to use for hunting deer. I paid cash for it and again walked home. Guns were available everywhere prior to the assassinations in the 1960s and seldom did people find them turned on them. The political figures were the exceptions, but no one really knows what happened around them, do they?
55 years ago, kids weren't playing video games where killing is part of the game, not a reality of death, or listening to music where violence sounds cool or watching graphic movie violence. I'm not soapboxing censorship, but all these things have to be part of the problem.