The keeping of guns in the home, even if for self-defense, makes everyone in the household less safe. Especially the kids.
http://www.slate.com/articles/healt..._show_firearms_endanger_kids_despite_nra.html
I often hear the argument that most uses of a gun for self-defense don't include actually shooting anyone; simply showing that there is a gun present calms things down.
Following links given in that article, studies have shown that self-reported uses of guns "for self-defense" that did not include anyone actually getting shot were usually, according to the testimony of those reporting, either A) a verbal dispute that escalated at least in part BECAUSE of the presence of the gun or B) a confrontation between multiple armed parties. Almost all of them were illegal, and they were greatly outnumbered by threatening exposure of a gun not intended as self-defense.
Also, recent studies have shown that "
the mere presence of weapons increases aggression."
So, what we have is a situation where the presence of a gun has been shown to increase aggression and also to bring a lethal element into what would most likely have otherwise been non-lethal encounters. By every statistical measure, having a gun in the home is more likely to hurt or kill a member of the household than an intruder. Increased prevalence of guns = increased prevalence of gun deaths, even when factors such as poverty and population density are accounted for. Completed suicide rates, as opposed to attempted, go way up when guns are present - especially among adolescents.
Guns are not cars. They are meant to kill, and in some cases, they are specifically meant to kill other human beings. Some guns are meant to kill groups of humans.
And yet, while many could not get by day-to-day without our cars, we DO regulate the ever-living hell out of automobile use. You say we don't restrict car use? On what f-ing planet?
The risks of Joe Blow owning a weapon specifically designed to kill groups of humans, and which has no purpose OTHER than killing groups of humans or practicing to do so, has been shown over and over and over again to far outweigh the chances that Joe Blow will ever need such a weapon for self-defense. Not to mention that a use of a weapon such as, say, a fully automatic Uzi, in self-defense would be likely to create a lot of bystander deaths.
The same court decision that ruled the 2nd Amendment applied to individual gun owners ruled that restrictions on gun ownership did not violate the 2nd. And there are and always have been restrictions on what types of "arms" private citizens are allowed to bear. And yet, while you may not like the way it was said, the point made earlier is true: the NRA and many gun supporters rail against ANY new restrictions on guns, regardless of how small or rational they may be.
That's not a logical stance, and IMO, nor is it helpful or respectful to the lives lost each year in needless gun violence.
ETA: Oh, and as for "An armed society is a polite society?" The same study I linked earlier that showed the mere presence of a weapon INCREASES hostility pretty much put that one to rest.
The weapons effect occurs outside of the lab too. In one field experiment,[2] a confederate driving a pickup truck purposely remained stalled at a traffic light for 12 seconds to see whether the motorists trapped behind him would honk their horns (the measure of aggression). The truck contained either a .303-calibre military rifle in a gun rack mounted to the rear window, or no rifle. The results showed that motorists were more likely to honk their horns if the confederate was driving a truck with a gun visible in the rear window than if the confederate was driving the same truck but with no gun.
[...]
Research also shows that drivers with guns in their cars more likely to drive aggressively.[3] A nationally representative sample of over 2,000 American drivers found that those who had a gun in the car were significantly more likely to make obscene gestures at other motorists (23% vs. 16%), aggressively follow another vehicle too closely (14% vs. 8%), or both (6.3% vs. 2.8%), even after controlling for many other factors related to aggressive driving (e.g., gender, age, urbanization, census region, driving frequency).
