I grew up in a town in New Hampshire where taking a gun to school was considered normal, because you might be "varminting" the crops on the way back home or joining an older family member to shoot a little extra meat for dinner. My grandfather (the one who used to hoist a few with Dick Nixon) had a recipe for Venison mincemeat pie that started, "Step 1: Shoot a deer!" Everyone got their first rifle at age 12, and gun safety was the second religion. We didn't have to worry about drive-by shootings; anyone foolish enough to try such a stunt would have been instantly dead.
The current culture of crime blossomed when people were tricked into surrendering their own self-defense and allowed themselves to become dependent on a government with questionable motives for assuming such control of our lives.
All hype aside, the numbers speak for themselves. Where the people have guns, crime is low. Where guns are banned, crime is rampant.
Great Britain enacted a total gun ban supposedly in the name of public safety. Crime went up, including home invasions and attacks on the elderly. But the government of Great Britain, obviously more concerned with keeping the subjects helpless than safe kept the gun ban on the premise that British subjects BELIEVED they were safer with it, even though they were not.
Every year in the US, lawful gun owners prevent millions of crimes. Millions! The police do not prevent any crimes. They show up afterwards, act official, clean up the mess, collect their paychecks full of tax dollars and go home. Between the low convictions rate and high recidivism, the current police force seems little more than costumed show, suited to writing tickets to extort money from traffic offenders, and certainly far removed form the mythical crime-solving abilities of TV shows.
^Not my words, but they express my feelings on the subject.
Furthermore, gun control has the opposite intended effect on crime:
Australia-wide, homicides are up 3.2 percent;
Australia-wide, assaults are up 8.6 percent;
Australia-wide, armed robberies are up 44 percent (yes, 44 percent!)
In the state of Victoria, homicides with firearms are up 300 percent.
Figures over the previous 25 years showed a steady decrease in armed robbery with firearms (but increased drastically in the past 12 months).
There has been a dramatic increase in break-ins and assaults of the elderly.
Australian politicians are on the spot and at a loss to explain how no improvement in safety has been served after such monumental effort and expense was successfully expended in "ridding society of guns."
Washington DC, which has a gun BAN, has the highest per-capita rate of murder in the country, while Vermont, which has automatic conceal carry, pretty much the lowest.
Guns in the hands of honest citizens save lives and prevent crime.
