Just three percent of adults own half of America’s guns

[hunter]

66. So what's the gun for?

If the "bad guy" is gonna shoot you, he's gonna shoot you.

It doesn't matter if you've got a gun on your person or not.

Shooting first usually makes YOU the bad guy.

Even if you are a cop.

I can't think of anyone I'd care to shoot, therefore I don't need to trouble myself carrying a gun.

My wife and I live in a rough city with a very high gun homicide rate. Our current neighborhood is one of the best, aside from the gated fortresses, but there's still gang graffiti on our back wall that reappears almost as soon as I paint it over. All the kids at the school down the street get free lunches because it's not worth accounting for those who can pay. Our own kids got free lunches whenever they didn't bring their own. I also walk past places where kids have been shot and killed, some of these places decorated with little monuments put up by family and friends, with plastic flowers, photographs, and seasonal decorations, Halloween stuff these past few days. It's also a short walk from our home to one of our city's homeless encampments, a place of blue tarps, abandoned furniture, and very dirty tents. (I should probably volunteer for the needle exchange gig again, but my own health is a little iffy lately, I'm slowly adapting to some newly prescribed meds. A quarter of me is my bad-ass berserker crazy grandma, a half of me my bad-ass crazy mom.)

It's not the worst neighborhood my wife and I have lived in. Our previous house had bullet holes in it, our next door neighbor's oldest son was shot and killed in a drug deal gone bad, and the previous renter had run a chop-shop in the back yard. We eventually got stuff to grow in the backyard by dumping tons of compost on it. When our children were preschoolers we'd go to the back bedroom and play on the floor whenever we heard gunshots out front.

When my wife and I first met, we were big city public school science teachers, as if that explains anything. Our youngest kid is following a similar path, so it's those damned altruism genes, or something like that. My wife has another career now, but she still volunteers at a school that's pretty good at diverting kids from the gangster lifestyle. My own approach to these problems is a little more direct. In my most amusing encounter with fourteen and fifteen year old gangster kids armed with guns stolen in burglaries, they told the cops I was a Russian mobster.



My own relationship with the police has always been friendly enough, but seriously, I think all cops should serve a few years as teachers in rough public schools. Teachers are not allowed to shoot or physically assault the troublemakers.

It's also possible my attitudes arise with my mom's family's pacifism. Her ancestors ended up in the Wild West as pacifists and religious dissidents dodging wars in Europe, and the Civil War in the U.S.. My mom's dad was a conscientious objector in World War II who wouldn't take up arms. He was also a welder so they gave him a choice of prison or building and repairing war-damaged ships for the Merchant Marine. He built and repaired ships. He also got beaten by the cops once, protesting the internment of his Japanese American neighbors.

So I'll be entirely sincere and serious here: Why should I let anyone I'd care to shoot live in my head?