@Ken Anderson The young folk are following, apparently, the dictums preached early-on nowadays by the educators, who are driven by government demands. Such would include the philosophy instilled from the very beginning that "guns are bad". Perhaps something can be said in that respect in praise of home-schooling, though I do know of a few instances where moronic parents home-schooled their offspring to follow in their footsteps. Frank
We homeschooled six children over 22 years. All but one graduated at least from college, and the one who didn't went to diesel school and is making more money than the ones who went to college, and he didn't have to carry the debt.
Here is an interesting thing that I was just reading, and it concerns the taking away of our firearms. It appears that there is a company that has been slowly buying up the gun manufacturing companies, and then they close the company. Marlin is the last one on the list, and has announced that it will be closing. The ones that do not close, will regulate who they sell firearms to, and can choose not to sell them on the public market anymore. This will not affect the weapons that people already own, but it will certainly be an effective method of stopping people from buying more weapons, and probably the same thing will also happen with ammunition. The company that is buying up gun and ammunition manufacturers is called the Freedom Group, which is owned by a company named Cerberus, and that company is owned by George Soros.
I had watched to many Dirty Harry movies to believe that I could go to a pawn shop after getting a gun permit and buy me a 357 Magnum but once I saw how big and heavy it was I walked out thinking 'What was I thinking?' I laugh at myself now about it and my view on having a gun of any kind will never be in my home.
I heard that BEFORE the Dirty Harry movies, pawns shops were filled with .44 magnum revolvers purchased naively by (mostly) guys who were unfamiliar with firearms but wanted to be macho. Usually it is said that the guns were accompanied by a box of ammo with just a few rounds missing. Once people took them to the range and tried firing the monsters, they pawned them as they weren't as fun as they thought. AFTER the Dirty Harry movies, however, they were rare, as all those revolvers were picked up by fans. As I said before, three of my sons who live in Alaska have .44 mags as bear defense. The other son lives in Omaha and borrows should he need one when hiking here. My daughters know better....
Well Hal, yeah, I guess those wounded are definitely affected but I would say that the persons most affected are those who do the shooting. After shooting and wounding or killing another human being, things are just never really the same. And yes, I do know you were just playing around so pardon me for my input but I kinda take what comes out of the business end of a weapon fairly seriously.
When we were growing up (on a farm), my father taught us to respect and safely handle guns. I got my own little bolt-action 22 rifle when I was about 12. My father's rule was that we were to never shoot any living thing unless we planned to eat it. I remember my brother having to clean and cook a robin; that was a lesson for us all. One of our sons is a hunter but the other two couldn't care less about it.
I have a Ruger .380 that is about the size of a cellphone and weighs just a little more. It's almost too small to hold comfortably in my hand. It's so small, it ought to be pink, and they actually do market them in pink. Of course, Dirty Harry probably wouldn't carry it. I am neither a gun or a math expert, but I think it's somewhere between a .22 caliber and a 9 millimeter. I use it for target shooting. Used for such a purpose, it took some getting used to. For such a small gun, it has quite a lot of recoil; so much so that I almost dropped it the first time I shot it. I expected a recoil much as I'd get from a .22 caliber, which is pretty much none. It's also harder to aim. In part because it's too small for my hand (and I have small hands), and because it almost has no barrel, it takes a lot of practice to put the shot where I want it, but I have gotten pretty good with it when it comes to targets and I doubt that I'll ever have to shoot at anything else. The ammunition is cheap and, because it's so small, it's convenient for me to take with me when I go up north, so I've had a lot of practice shooting it. It's not a great choice as a self-defense weapon, but neither is it so big and heavy that I'd never have it with me, except for the fact that I almost never have it with me. Probably, a 9-millimeter would be a better choice if I really felt the need to defend myself. My dad used to hunt deer with a 9-millimeter German rifle that he brought home from World War 2. I expect he traded for it because he fought in the Pacific, not in Europe. If I heard someone breaking into our house at night, I think I'd reach for the 12-gauge instead of the Ruger.
I was told once that more people are killed with .22 calibers than with any of the more powerful weapons. If true, I expect that it has more to do with availability than anything else.
@Ken Anderson some of the reasons more people are killed by .22 caliber firearms, in addition to availability, are the lack of recoil and the small report. I am told that many professional assassins actually use .22 revolvers as they are relatively quiet and cheap as well as difficult to trace ownership. The .380 supposedly has developed into a suitable self-defense weapon, as it is easy to carry, easy to shoot, and recent changes in ammunition have made it deadly at short range. I don't own one, so I don't speak from experience. We had a local Catholic priest over for dinner last night, and I found that Alaska has made another "convert". He lived all his life in Ireland and had never handled a firearm or hunted since he shot grouse as a child with his father in Ireland. Since moving to Alaska a couple years ago, however, he has taken up moose and caribou and black tail deer hunting, been charged by grizzly bears three times, and carries a handgun whenever he is in the woods now.
That makes sense. They are quiet. If I were to conceal carry, which I rarely do, I would want something that wouldn't be obvious, and the Ruger would work well for that. It doesn't have the stopping power of a more powerful handgun, but if I felt the need to carry, I'd be more likely to have the Ruger with me. I think some people secretly want others to know that they're carrying, and since we can conceal carry in Maine without a permit now, I have seen people with the obvious bulge. If someone was breaking into my house, I'd reach for the 12-gauge rather than the .380, if both were within reach, but I'm not likely to have the 12-gauge with me otherwise. There are times when it creeps me out to see that a black bear shows up at my camera sites within minutes after I have been there (I leave apples), but black bears aren't likely to be a danger to anyone. Only one person is known to have ever been killed by a black bear in Maine, and that was a gas station owner who kept the bear in a cage outside of his station in the 1930s. Thinking of it as a pet, he went into the cage one day. It turned out that wasn't such a good idea. Grizzlies are a different story, I understand.
I have been around guns most all my life, owned 2 gun stores, used to hunt a lot, competitive shooter since school days, shot on Army Pistol Team and still shoot matches all the time part of my life to say the least, military then law enforcement so many years, saved my father's life when he was stabbed in his eye and lost it coming home from his doctor we were car jacked by 3 thugs. 1 survived the driver. I cant wait till Saturday as our church security team and youth groups has our monthly match, I still shoot multiple times a week. We have weekly practice and training, not just stand and shoot but real life scenarios mostly from police reports re created for training. Shooting is a huge part of my life, I have shot all over the country in matches. My favorite is low light or night shoots.
I understand all the reasons why people have guns, who doesn't. They're all good reasons. When my sons 13 year old friend got hold of a gun and ask his friends to play a game of Russian roulette a few left and he ended up killing himself. Very sad. I have heard friends shot and killed behind dumb stuff or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Very sad. I hear guns go off on New Year's Eve as a chance to blow off steam for all the negative things they encountered during the year. Very scary. I myself was held at gunpoint. Nothing but fear. So I know how someone can feel when they are standing at the wrong end of a gun and once it was over I what I felt... Nothing but anger. That's when I realized that I would use a gun if I had one in my home and decided no, no, nannette.
@Von Jones Having devoured reams of books and papers on the subject of firearms and self-defense, I can fully appreciate the fact that many folks just are not, and cannot ever be, comfortable around firearms. "Self-defense" means response to a threat from without which could cause bodily harm or death. Verbal threat, however, does not qualify for such response. Self-defense need not be initiated by use of a firearm, which is a tool no different than a shovel, club, knife, or baseball bat, when employed to stave of bodily threat. In fact, a response to the threat imposed by an intruder armed with, say, a pocket knife, threatening with it, using a baseball bat, would likely be accepted with more sympathy by authorities than if that intruder had been shot dead. However, the odds, if one is a gambler, and small in stature, or aged, lie more with the knife-wielder opposed by a club, rather than a gun. Guns are not for everyone, but they are for me. Frank
My son never knew I had a handgun until he was twenty. Southern California wasn't the best place to teach a child to shoot. It's been quite a while since I've seen or heard of anyone firing a gun into the air on the Fourth of July or New Year's Eve. Although that used to be something that some people would do, I think there are just too many people today for anyone to be firing a gun into the air, and there are severe penalties for careless accidents today. I didn't even shoot on my own land until I had built up a backstop so that I would know where the bullet was going if it should miss the target. Although I have a hundred acres of woods, I worried that someone might be walking through it. Maine has a tradition of allowing others to cross wooded land unless posted otherwise and, although people rarely do, as far as I know, I didn't feel good about just firing into the woods.