The thing about law enforcement and protection is that it is slim at best, in the best of places. Law enforcement can help make an area safer by patrolling it and making contacts among the community and thereby enlisting help from the community. But notice it's called "law enforcement", not "personal protection enforcement".
Unless an officer actually sees a crime in progress and can get to the scene before something bad happens to the victim(s), he is not going to be able to protect. The presence (perception thereof) may (and often does) keep thieves or violent criminals looking for other places- but that's the key, they will simply go where the cops aren't and there are not enough police to be everywhere all the time. Police forces offer protection via enforcement of the laws by discouraging criminals, being the enforcement end of the law. If you do something wrong, the police will (supposedly) do everything in their power to find the perpetrator and bring him before the court system.
Whether people actually stop to think about how limited the police are in terms of real-time protection, it's a fallacy that police are there to stop crimes. Obviously they will if they see them in progress, and I'm sure they would absolutely love to stop any crime in progress. But the reality is it's an impossible task. Police enforce laws, they are not a personal protection racket.
I've never owned a gun myself, although my father does. I've learned how to handle and fire a rifle and a shotgun over the years, but have never fired a pistol. I am 100% for people being able to own a gun, if they feel that it is good for their personal protection, or if they want to hunt, or target practice, or think the slick lines of a particular weapon is a work of art. Personally, I've never lived in a place where I felt a gun was a necessity for protection, all things considered.
For the last 28 years I've had children to think about, but the presence of children in my house never kept me from purchasing a firearm. Maybe that's because as young as 10 years or so my father took me out and showed me how to use his rifle and taught me to respect it for what it is. I never felt a need to try to play with his rifle when he wasn't there, and even if I did, I didn't even know where his ammunition was stored - and didn't go looking for it because there was never any desire to cross my father on such a huge thing (and I was no perfect young kid, either).
Over the years, in Texas, I knew personally one family who had a disaster with a weapon. A brother accidentally shot and killed his younger brother while cleaning his shotgun. Maybe he was just getting the gun out and it being loaded it went off, maybe he really tried to clean the barrel with a load in it, I don't know, we didn't press our friend who had killed his brother to get answers - he was quite destroyed over it and we didn't see the need to press him on it afterward. He was 17 and it was his shotgun. But it was a horrible thing that happened to that family.
Most of the people I knew growing up had either rifles or shotguns, a few had pistols.
However, also over the years, I've known people who were killed in various stupid ways. A whole group of acquaintances killed in a car, the driver drunk. A young boy who killed his older brother (he and his parents made it out of the house) when he was playing with matches and started a fire in his room. A young lady who I didn't know very well at the University of Texas who was partying so hard with tequila at a school concert that she died of alcohol poisoning that night. A father and son who went deep sea fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and didn't come back and were never found.
I get that school shootings are a horrendous thing. But it's not the weapons that kill. It's the twisted heads that wield the weapons who do so. In my opinion it is a severe overreaction to try to limit guns for reasons solely like this, or because criminals have guns and will use them.
But it's only my opinion. I'm not trying to convince anyone otherwise. Personally, I'm sick to death of people wanting to continuously give up more and more power to the government for a false sense of security, something that the best of governments can only provide generally, not personally. And this doesn't only relate to guns or weapons of any type. It goes clear down to the level of everyday life.
It's a shame that a guy can't come on the forum and ask a question without half the posters coming down on him and telling him what a mistake he's making, particularly when he's asking about how to do something correctly and legally.
