Gunslingers club

[Cowboy]

I started shooting when I was about 8 years old....under great supervision. I was taught safety, care, and respect. I teach my children the same thing and have taken them hunting with me for years. I also carry a handgun quite often and would not hesitate using it if some nut job pulled a gun out and terrorized people. The whole gun debate thing gets very messy because both sides make many good points. I consider myself middle of the road and reasonable on the entire topic. It is unfortunate that a middle of the road couldn't be met on this topic with our lawmakers and lobbyists.

[PatInTheHat]

I started shooting when I was about 8 years old....under great supervision. I was taught safety, care, and respect.

Yeah what Cowboy said, that stuff hardly happens anymore, not really, and it's certainly no longer a central issue in our new, & not so much improved, artificially crazed, gun culture.
Told this story on here before, eh, maybe it's worthwhile.
Waaaayyyyyy back in them ancient times, 'round about the year of somebody's lord and coincidentally our nations bicentennial celebrating our two hundred years of pistola packin' permissions, 1976, me and maybe two dozen other pimple faced pukes would once a month walk to our high school, on public sidewalks, though some I imagine caught a city bus, at the crack of dawn and then again around supper time, with shotguns over our shoulders, but only because we had a gun club, where we were taught not only care & handling of all manner of firearms safely, but endlessly drilled in all the finest points of responsibility & respect, and often by local volunteering constabulary & military types.
This was only '76 in Cincinnati Ohio, and I can still remember the big hub-bub when the N.itwit R.ifle A.ss'ociation's big convention came to town in the early 70's, when them high & mighty big mouth gun rights 'protectors' in the organization caused quite a local stir, as well as the national level.
How great, and high school gun clubs teaching curious impressionable young men (boys school, no girly girls, sorry) all that cool stuff, they all disappeared in less than ten years, at least in my area in the parochial schools, they did...wasn't for any lack of interest neither, hmmmmmm???
See, then came the rancid nuts, and to this very minute they're still practically beggin' to be tools, and for not just another greedy industry, but one selling senseless death, and then using that same senseless death, mixed with a slop bucket load of pious-ed 'patriotism', fear mongering for nothing but pure profit....f'n tools cluckin', still muckin' it up for everybody!
All that "responsibility' and 'respect', well that stupid crap just cuts into the big green bottom line, can't be havin' none of that silly nonsense confusing our desensitized to violence youth *Cha$Ching* now can we?
There's a lotta days I think its actually worse than war profiteering, I mean it's just as dark, but I believe its muchos much more insidious, and for me anyway, that's sayin' quite a bit.

[hossenpepper]

I have been around guns my entire life. I have been shooting since I was 7 or 8. My grandpa gave me a nice .22 single shot rifle to practice. I can tell you, learning to dead eye with a .22 will teach you to be a good shot. I later learned to handle larger rifles and shotguns, then eventually pistols and "assault" style weapons. I had many friends that knew how to alter clips and mechanisms to be fully automatic (illegal of course) and as such was able to shoot some fully automatics. I hunted most of my childhood until I was about 25 or so. At that point I just got tired of it and had a more softened look on violence and things like that after some personal and professional experiences. Also for the record, I grew up in the original outlaw state; Oklahoma. So guns are a way of life there.

Here is what my experiences have lead me to take away from this subject:

1. Guns are part of American culture and aren't going away. So in some sense, the debate about whether or not they are "bad" is pointless as it doesn't matter if that's all they are... they are here to stay (see Pandora's Box for more color).
2. Guns are extremely dangerous, even in the right hands. Just as any machinery or tool can be, they are dangerous. The difference between them and cars, for instance, is guns are made specifically for killing and cars are for transportation. Failure to acknowledge how profoundly dangerous guns are is living in denial. NO GUN IS SAFE.
3. Most people don't understand how to handle guns and are afraid of them.
4. There are almost no situations, outside of pleasure shooting or killing, that require rapid firing guns and large magazines. When it comes to hunting, there is simply no need for this type of weaponry. Learn to shoot or don't hunt. Period.

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And if a certain someone is reading, that is spoken like an intelligent person that truly has REAL experience with guns.

5. There is no god given or inherent "right" to guns. They are a privilege. It's a privilege that someone figured out gunpowder, that someone figured out bullets, that someone figured out guns and how to make them. All these things are born of the collective effort of societies across human history. Only through sometimes reasonable debate have societies come to recognize the use of and need for these weapons. Only through the contract with fellow citizenry, public debate and legal recording of these agreements (laws) has the legal privilege to own and discharge (safely) guns come about in the first place. So, no, there is no inherent right to guns. It's a privilege, and a damned dangerous one to be taken quite seriously.
6. If you don't have a very good reason to have one... then don't.
7. "Because I can", "the guv'ment is coming for us", and "they're fun" aren't good reasons to have a gun. The 3rd one is a maybe and I can't judge that. The first two are dumb at best.
8. See #2 again if you have children.
9. When guns are around, things are tense and can become bad quickly. I am not just talking drug deals gone wrong in the movies here. I mean when someone gets guns out, even if it's to just show them off, people get tense. To me that says two things: they are unnatural and tense people make bad decisions sometimes. With a gun around the latter is an issue.
10. I wish guns were never invented, frankly. The harm versus the benefits is still wildly tipped towards the negative. Maybe someday this will change, but in my lifetime and what I see in history, they are bringers of death and that is about all.

Anyway this is my opinion based on what I have seen and experienced.