I'm sorry about the title but I'm so tired of pro-gun people claiming that "if he /she had had a weapon then" and you can fill in the blanks. I am not anti-gun by any means and I have owned guns in the past, both rifles and handguns.
Two recent stories has prompted my comments. The first was the woman from Michagan, a college student I believe, who was kidnapped off campus. She was raped but espcaped from her vehicle and a 14 year old boy took her in and allowed her to call the police. The suspect tried to burn down the house she had taken refuge in. After setting fire to the house the suspect fled the scene, stole a garbage truck and was shot dead by the police.
So many gun owners or gun proponents wrote in to say "if she only had a gun she could have killed her kidnapper at the point of attack."
For one, having a gun on school grounds is probably illegal and if she had had a gun with her more than likely it would have been in her vehicle. It would have been more readily available to her kidnapper than to her. I don't know the laws in Michagan but shooting an unarmed man might have been considered excessive use of force. Of course she would have been much better off threatning the man with a gun allowing herself time to escape or for the suspect to change his mind and leave.
My point is that having a gun in this situation might have been a good thing or it might have been a very bad thing. The suspect calimed he was going to kill her and she did get raped. But she is alive and had she not been his victim the next person he kidnapped might have ended up dead. This story ended well but we can't say "What is" because there was no "Ifs in this situation". We don't know how things would have played out if the circumstances had been different because they were not different.
The other story was about a may that was shot by his four year old. If that man did not have a gun he would not have ever been shot by his 4 year old. If asked he probably would have claimed he had the gun for protection.
One gun rights advocate said the FBI has concluded that 1.5 million to 2 million murders have been prevented because of gun ownership. Really? How many dead people would never have died if there had been no guns?
Most gun owners are responsible but give a badass a gun and he just might turn into a dumbass.
My father was a gun owner. The only two times that gun was ever brought to bear was near disasters. The first is when one of his children came hom e from college and arrived home very late. Not wishing to distrub his parents he used his key to let himself into the house. He was greeted by his father and his loaded pistol. The son had no idea his father had purchased a pistol.
The next time the gun came into play was many years later. My dad was asleep when two kids broke into his home. One found his pistol and held it pointed at my fathers head intending to kill my father should he wake up. The thief took the gun with him when he left opening up the possibility yhat now it would be an armed thug and not just a punk teenager.
I know there can be a lot of positive things to be said about gun ownership and I certainly don't want the government to start limiting citizens rights. What I wish I could do was get the point across to many of these hot heads who brag about what would have happened differently if they had been there with their gun.
They never have been. I've never read a story about work place violence or school shootings where a person with a gun was the hero and stopped the killer before the police arrived or before anyone was hurt. These hotheads arguments don't bare out in reality. No one will ever know what would have happened if these braggards had been there with their toys but the reality is that they weren't.
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