For me I believe it was a .22 for christmas when I was 13 and a 12 gauge when I was 14. Oddly enough I have never had an urge to shoot anyone. I did have parents that were in my life and taught me from an early age firearms safety etc. In the 80's in highschool during hunting season most of the student pickup trucks in the parking lot had rifles and shotguns hanging in the back glass where the students had been hunting that morning. It was a common everyday thing. Can you imagine the sh%tstorm that would cause in the press now?
You want to fix the violence problems we have today? Parents have to go look in the mirror...It starts at home. You have vacant parents that don't parent and let TV and video games raise their child and you end up with a society full of whackjobs.
I heard today on the radio people calling in all cheesed off that the NRA guy suggested that there should be a policeman stationed at all our schools, and what an awful traumatizing event it would be for their kids........Really??? My sons school district has had a armed sheriff deputy assigned to each school for years. That is his post and he is there everyday and his marked police car parks in a special spot at the front of the school so there is no mistaking that he is there. If Conn. had the same policy I doubt this thread would exist.
The gun laws in this nation have never been tighter than they are right now, yet as the laws have tighened up you see more mass shootings etc. We did not have this problem in the 40's 50's 60's 70's etc to the degree we are seeing today. It's not the guns its society and crap parents in my opinion.
Again I found this harvard study very interesting.
http://www.google.co...jefcrgGnZLbX1Bg
The authors set out to show one thing and the results came up the opposite.
However I am sure fear and misunderstanding of the problem will continue to dominate forum posts like this all over the country for the foreseeable future.
Other interesting facts that Bloomberg and others don't want you to know is the correlation between right to carry states/countries and the drop in crime rates in those states/countries. It is covered in the linked study above also.
Quite simply criminals in general are cowards, when they are looking for a target to rob or house to break into they will almost always go to the one they know is not armed. Pass all the gun restrictions you want, it still is not going to stop the criminal that has no intention of obeying the law anyhow. All you succeed in doing is disarming the honest law abiding citizens and making them prime targets.
I know for a large number of you that will read this, that concept is completly foreign to you. There are millions of legal concealed carry permit citizens in this country. You pass by them everyday in the wal-mart or at the gas station and probably even say "hello" or strike up a conversation with them about the weather or whatever. they got the carry permit by going to training, and sitting through several hours of classes, by getting fingerprinted and SBI and FBI background checked. Guess what, pass all the laws you want, the only ones you will disarm are the ones that did all that to carry legally. Your drug dealers, mental cases, robbers, and rapists will still be untrained, unregistered, and armed.
