Tell that to my cousin who used the gun in her purse to stop a man trying to cuddly hug and probably murder her. That never made it onto the news or into the paper. She didn't shoot the guy, but once he saw the gun, he took off. These types of stories never make it to the media because it goes against the narrative that gun are evil. No database exists that I ever heard of to document cases where guns have saved lives, but the anecdotal stories are all over the place if you only take the time to look.
This is one I've heard before, and I dont believe it for a SECOND. Not the bit about your cousin, I mean the bit about it "happening all the time" or whatever. The general idea.
Why? Because people like to hear about anything "sensational". If a guy saves a freaking cat from a tree, it ends up on news sites. Or saves a baby from, I dunno, a freaking.... dishwasher. I dunno, whatever, I havent had my caffiene yet so baby VS dishwasher will do for now. Things like that end up on news sites.
PARTICULARLY with how derpy everyone is about guns right now, if there genuinely were alot of stories of people saving the day with the power of guns? There'd be lots of stories of these things, because people love hearing about that stuff. AND, because those that write up the stories who are also SUPPORTERS of guns wouldnt be able to bloody well shut up about it.
But you might notice.... these reports dont happen. They just dont. EVER. I can remember a couple this year. Just a couple. Wheras the gun VIOLENCE ones.... I swear, it's almost every single damn day.
(and here ends my specific response to the bit that you said, from here on is just me ranting a bit as I tend to)
And hell, people look at guns and say "but oh, I can protect my family with it", but nobody ever actually THINKS about this. I mean actually, REALLY thinking about it.
One example: a family gets a gun for their home, for the usual reason of "protection" and whatever, right? Well, one night, the mother is just home by herself, while her husband is away and the kids are... I dont remember where. It's nighttime, she's in bed. Suddenly, noises. Lots of them. Footsteps. A crash, even. More footsteps. Someone's clearly coming. She grabs the gun, and then the intruder appears in the doorway, BLAM. .....she just shot and killed her husband. (EDIT: that one taken from an actual story, mind you. I forget when exactly it happened, I *think* it was last year, and no, I'm not going to go look it up to provide "proof", I like to think that this isnt the sort of forum where I'm automatically not believed here...) This isnt an uncommon type of situation. People in this country tend to have this absolutely brain-melting assumption that guns automatically = protection and safety. They ignore the inherant and very extreme levels of danger that merely HAVING one can bring. Hell, it's not just gun VIOLENCE that's the problem. There's also suicides (by guns, that the person may not have had as easy access to otherwise), or, even worse, accidental child deaths (if I have to explain this one to any of you, imagine me throwing a chair at you in exasperation). These are ALSO very frequent.
But let's look at another example, yeah?
Again, someone gets a gun for their home. Protection. One night, they're attacked by ACTUAL criminals, not some case of mistaken identity. These guys are basically thieves, thugs. They're not murderers but they ARE hardened criminals... pretty tough guys with experience with this sort of thing. Once it's realized that these guys are there, someone in the house, probably whoever bought the thing, pulls out the gun, waves it at the main guy. Thinks this will stop him. ....it doesnt. What happened? He ESCALATED it instead. What might have ended in mere thievery and loss of some inanimate objects just took a VERY bad turn, because someone brought a weapon in that wasnt there before. The main guy is now having a gun pointed at him; his perceptions of the situation have now changed, and if this is a genuine hardened criminal.... you can bet that "fear" isnt the direction he just went in. In addition.... maybe the guy that nobody was really paying attention to (or one that nobody even NOTICED) suddenly ALSO reacts.... by drawing his own weapon. He has WAY more than enough time to do one of two things: 1, threaten one of the other family members to get the one with the gun to drop it, or 2, simply shoot the one with the gun. Again, these guys are hardened criminals. Even if they're not murderers, chances are, they know how to aim, fire, and deal with weapons. But the people that live there? Waaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too often, someone buys a gun.... and hasnt the foggiest goddamn clue how to use it, WHEN to use it, and understands NONE of the concepts that go not into weapons use, but the ideas of PROTECTING themselves or anyone at all. Protection isnt as simple as just pulling out a weapon and waving it around. There's more to it than that. Get it wrong, and you, or someone else, could die. And escalating a situation when it doesnt need to be escalated is NOT a good way to deal with it. And hell, what if one of those criminals had already come in with a gun raised and pointed? The idea, for him, would not have been "kill the people here" from the start, instead wanting to just threaten and control, but the very moment one of the family goes for the gun to save the day.... yeah. That just became the intention, because suddenly there's a threat, a target that can do some serious damage.
When in reality, there's LOTS of other things the family could have done to protect their home and simply make it so that the guys couldnt get in there in the first place. But nobody thinks of this. They think "gun=safety" when the daily news says "good grief, what the hell is WRONG with you people? OF COURSE THEY'RE NOT SAFE, HERES SOME MORE DEAD SCHOOLKIDS FOR YOU".
Oh.... and those shootings? They happen BECAUSE of how easy guns are to get. Some of those shootings happen because unstable wackos are able to buy the things, just like anyone else. But some of them happen... and here we come to another example of why buying a gun for "protection" can be bloody stupid.... because they simply TAKE them from someone they know that did, genuinely, buy the damn thing for protection.... but didn't freaking THINK about it. Again, "gun=protection" in their mind.... never "gun=danger" along with it. So the gun itself isnt very secure. The owner knows where it is, that's all they need, right? Well, the crazed wacko ALSO knows where it is, and since the gun isnt secured and the owner is an idiot, the gun is simply stolen (no need to BUY one when it's just sitting there for you to take, eh?) and used for the shooting spree. Because yet another person believed the guns=safety myth.
I mean, really. I could, very seriously, keep this up all day, as I tend to be able to do when I latch onto something. You wouldnt try to protect your house with a freaking land-mine, would you? Sure.... it could stop a criminal. But it could also kill you, kill a family member, kill a random innocent.... and so on. Same with most other types of weapons. Yet, because OMG GUNS, people IGNORE ALL OF THESE ISSUES when dealing with this one very specific type of weapon that has a TON of potential (and very, very probable) problems that nobody ever, ever thinks of.
And above ALL of this, an overarching problem: Most people that buy the damn things are NOT professionals. They dont have *real* training. It's one thing for a member of the military or of law enforcement to have a gun. These people ARE trained. And not just at some silly shooting range, because there's more to proper use of a weapon than just aiming and firing (another misled assumption). But most people? They have the assumption that, well, of COURSE none of those bad things happen to ME. *I* will SURELY do it right. I'm not like all those IDIOTS out there!
Probably, almost every one of the people whose weapons are involved in unintended incidents, or genuine accidents (like a child dying to a gun they found) thought EXACTLY like that when buying the thing. Every one of them. They use thinking that doesnt come from real logic, but comes from what they hear from others, and what they hear from the media, and all of that. These things tell them that these weapons are okay. That they're GOOD. And then when the bad crap happens... these same idiots stand there, wondering.... where did they go wrong? As if it's hard to figure out.
Ugh.
There, that's my mini-rant on that. I dont actually follow any of this, mind you. I know nothing, nothing at all, about politics. I dont even know what "right-wing" means (no, seriouslly, I genuinely have no idea what the hell that means) and my knowledge of political ANYTHING only goes as far as being able to tell you who the current president is. Ask me ANYTHING beyond that, and you'll either get a blank stare, or maybe I'll throw a thing on your foot at you (EDIT: ...what?) Everything I say here, just like everything I say pretty much everywhere, comes to me from my own logic that hits me as I examine and read about these situations. All I do is read what happens, note what people are saying about it, note how the arguements are going and what both sides are saying, and I just come up with my own logic.
And to me, the logic is just.... so freaking simple. A weapon that does not exist cannot kill you or anyone else. A weapon NOT in the hands of an IDIOT has a dramtically lower chance of ACCIDENTALLY killing others, or being TAKEN by others for evil purposes. And preventing an altercation from happening in the FIRST place is dramatically preferrable to having it happen, and then needing to reach out for a weapon to defend yourself from those who have appeared, which may cause unintended effects (that, in fact, could include making you dead).
....but nobody thinks of these things. And it gives me a headache.
Frankly, I've often wondered just how we, here in the US, look to other countries. Must look like damn fools half the time. Sigh... I personally am happy with this country MOST of the time, but then you get stuff like THIS at times, and just... ugh. I just try not to think about it when I'm not randomly reading news articles in the morning.
Aaaaaaaaaaaaanyway, that's just my thoughts on it. As negative or snappy or unpleasant as I might sound, please dont forget who it is writing this post here. I usually sound like this. I could talk about the nearby gas station and sound 3 times as opinionated and angry (damn stupid place, that, run by damn idiots....), so I hope nobody gets too bothered.
It's really all I'll say about it anyway. Like I said, it's not something I directly follow or take all that much of an interest in. But watching the topic here at least could be interesting.
