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Now this is still the same area I grew up in. The poll is still ongoing. But after one week 83.8% of the respondents voted, “Where you could have a gun”. Now I am not a firm believer in polls. They only reflect what the people who participate believe and not necessarily what the majority believe.Â
I don’t have the statistics so I am only speculating. During the pre 20th Century era, Nearly everyone, it would appear, owned and carried a gun. I can’t say what the percentage of crime was committed by people using a gun. To accurately compare you would have to know both the total population and the number of crimes committed. Compared to the same statistics for today. I don’t count defending oneself as a crime. Nor the defense of others. We know there were criminals, there have always been criminals. We have always had mentally and emotionally unstable people. I tend to place criminals in these 2 categories. Of course we find the other category of LAZY. But, still they must somehow fit in these 2 categories. (MAYBE)?
Now the question is how to tell if a potential gun owner falls into these two categories. You can only go by their past record. For the most part. We already filter out the ones known to be “off balance”. But what about the ones who are on the edge and could go either way? Or the person who already owns a gun and falls over the edge. We really don’t know.  Like driving our car, motorcycle, , bicycle, or even walking; it is a risk we must take to preserve our right to own personal protection.
The media, it seems, never report if the criminal is legally carrying a weapon or if it is illegally carried. I imagine some of them are. BUT, I am sure most of them are not.
I realize there are some who merely collect guns. There are those who compete in contests, and there are those who only like to target shoot. One of our fun things to do was going to the local dump and shoot rats. That was both fun and beneficial. (although the many rats we killed were probably not much more than a blip on the rat population). We can’t do that anymore.
I want to point out that at any time, any person can find a deadly weapon. PEOPLE are the real weapon, whether they use only their hands, a pillow can be a deadly weapon. According to some reports. Acid can be a weapon, poison, scissors, instruments intended for marking, (a sharp point makes a weapon), a baseball bat, even a sling shot, (David killed Goliath with one of them). Most of these are up close weapons, But one can convert a sling shot to propel arrows, for a more distant weaponry.
I am still on the fence about gun control. I think we need some constraints, but as you see from the above paragraph, we need the same constraints on all things. Can we place selective controls, on GUNS, and not the other potential weapons?
I invite you back next week for further developments, as I ponder the NEED FOR GUN CONTROL.